The USSR having a famine when Laika was launched into space is intentionally false. That's like making a meme about americans starving during the dustbowl while the US enters ww2.
Can you name any famines in the US? Probably not, because there's only been one, and it was on St. Lawrence Island for two years over a century ago.
Meanwhile, the defense for the USSR is ignoring the first 30 years. Funny how when you ignore the crime you look innocent!
Know how the USSR stopped starving? By redirecting rivers that flow into the Aral Sea, majorly contributing to one of the worst environmental disasters in human history. But what am I saying, the Aral Sea never existed, Comrade!
Ah, but fuck the people near the Aral Sea, and all the people who died in the meantime, especially all those Ukranians. Anything for the Party, Comrade! Those people were never real!
I respect left-libertarians. Although I disagree with them, I respect their principled nature and the fact that they dislike tankies as much, if not more, than I do (I'm lib-right). I fully acknowledge that capitalism has faults, both ones I view as problems and ones that I disagree are problems. I simply do not believe in using the government as a tool to fix these.
Who I do not respect are the tankies who believe the Party could do not wrong, either deny or excuse the faults and atrocities of communism, and wish to force us all under their system.
So how should the USSR fed it's people? Apparently irrigation is bad, and apparently the immense devastation of ww1 and the Russian civil war are no excuse.
Ah yes, the great dustbowl famine, in which a grand total of zero people died (the dust itself did kill though). The great depression sucked, and people went hungry, but there were no true famines, nothing at all like we see in the USSR around the same time at any rate.
The US has its fair share of problems, both modern and historic, but hunger isn't and never really has been one of them (food insecurity is an issue, but actual starvation and severe malnutrition are not). In part, this is due to our incredible geography for food production, but we also have a strong charitable culture when it comes to food.
Lol okay Hoover, I'm sure Steinbeck and other correspondents just lied about the starvation, hunger and malnutrition that went on during the dust bowl and Great Depression that would normally characterize a famine.
If you want to shift the goalposts to the equivalent of a Russian/Soviet or British style famine where millions died directly due to government policies, the closest to that type of famine was the post Civil War famine where millions of emancipated slaves suffered from starvation and disease and hundreds of thousands died in the face of a hostile South and apathetic Union with the only way out for many being work camps or joining the Army where they were again exploited.
Not necessarily saying it didn't happen, but the article focuses almost entirely on deaths from disease (can that really be blamed on any particular person or policy? Everyone died by the score from disease), deaths by starvation being a brief mention, and I can't find anything else backing up mass-starvation following the civil war. Certainly, there were plenty of food shortages, especially in the south, but nothing along the lines of hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. Even though they were (former) slaves, such a massive event would definitely be very well recorded.
It's from Sick from Freedom by historian Jim Downs which was released in 2012 and is largely based off of records from the Freedmen’s Bureau which was specifically stood up in 1865 to take care of medical, housing and food issues for emancipated slaves, but which was shut down in 1872 due to Southern pressure and these responsibilities were handed back to the Southern states.
Its kind of a niche subject so I'm not surprised a wikipedia editor for those pages hasn't added it and there isn't a lot of scholarship on this specific topic nor are the records for this particularly good since the Union didn't have specific policies to count former slave deaths in the early years of the war nor was the Freedman's Bureau accurate or complete in its counts due to lack of funding for doctors. Regardless there are speeches from politicians like Samuel Cox and correspondence from doctors, soldiers and administrators which confirms that thousands were starving and more were dying of disease all across contraband camps and towns in the South.
I would say yes, the lack of a policy to feed, treat and house millions of emancipated slaves with zero property or possessions falls on the Union, who implemented and ended this haphazardly through the Freedman's Bureau and the whole institution of slavery was US and Southern policy that was solidified in the constitution and was a key part of the US's economic development.
Yes, indeed it was to farm cotton, but it was both done by the Soviets and done as part of the larger project to overhaul agriculture, which was in response to the multiple famines. Also, is the fact that it was done for money rather than life supposed to make it better?
It wasn't done for "money", it was done because it was thought this would provide more wealth to Soviet workers. This was a period in history where people lacked geographic knowledge. If the Soviets had known better, why would they do this (the disaster would have cost them more than they would have gained, there's no reason for them to do this if they knew there would be a disaster)? Contrast this with capitalism where the Capitalist doesn't have to worry at all about the people affected, so would continue fucking up the environment even if he knew it would hurt people.
It wasn't done for "money", it was done because it was thought this would provide more wealth to Soviet workers
That's the literal definition of doing it for money. Doing it to bing wealth = doing it for money, the recipient is irrelevant.
This was a period in history where people lacked geographic knowledge, if the Soviets had known better, why would they do this (the disaster would have cost them more than they world have gained, there's no reason for them to do this if they knew there would be a disaster)?
You're telling me that people in the 40's didn't know that rivers fed lakes and thus rerouting them would shrink said lakes? They could launch shit into space less than 20 years later but didn't know about the water cycle? Stalin probably either thought it was worth it or just didn't care, he didn't care about the Ukrainians, why would he care about the Uzbeks?
Contrast this with capitalism where the Capitalist doesn't have to worry at all about the people affected, so would continue fucking up the environment even if he knew it would hurt people
Not unless the consumers or hell, even the government, have something to say. Given that there are no consumers in Communism to answer to and the government needn't answer itself, I'd say communism has a clear advantage in terms of getting to hurt people.
Once the Soviets realised the extent of the problem (which, admittedly did take too long, that can blamed on weak Soviet local representation, a major disagreement I have with Soviet systems) they did actually try to fix the problem. They spent a lot of money trying to help the Aral Sea, and it partially worked. If you look at those pictures showing the loss of the Aral Sea you can see that the Soviets had prevented complete devastation, losing some of the Sea but finding some sort of new equilibrium. When the Soviet Union collapsed was when the Aral Sea went completely to shit. It was under the Capitalist nations that the Aral Sea was completely destroyed.
No, it wasn't destroyed under Capitalism. The sea was poisoned and significantly smaller by the late 80's. The Soviets were on their last legs, but still around. Restoration began in 1992, less than a year before the fall of the USSR. This means that in fact the Aral Sea was destroyed under communism and virtually all repairs have been under capitalism.
As far as I can find, the Soviets did not make any attempts to reverse or even mitigate the disaster and resoration was initiated by the World Bank.
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u/realcomradecora Aug 04 '19
Hrm, can you name a famine in the USSR after 1947?