Meet the #1 serial killer : memes

[–] Count042@lemmy.ml 25 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That needs to be the British empire.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 12 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Arguably the US is an offshoot of that cancer

[–] ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Fuck that we broke away centuries ago.

[–] OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago

We metastasized centuries ago.

[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml -5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I mean looking at your post history this ridiculous comment makes sense.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

stay mad wasp

[–] allywilson@lemmy.ml -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Ok, puppet

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago

Ah yes, anybody who disagrees with you is a puppet without independent thought. 🤡

[–] Anamana@feddit.de 19 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Well how many people did the US kill? Any data on it?

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago

It's hard to quantify, but the US instigated or had a hand in causing most of the largest mass-killing events of the twentieth century.

To give just a single example, the CIA was the main driver behind the anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965. 500k-1M people killed.

Or operation Condor, another anti-communist CIA-led program in several latin american countries: about 60-80k people killed, and 400k imprisoned.

A larger list of US atrocities is here.

[–] JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Some numbers I found for reference to compare.

More info on WWII

Sorry that's unreadable in dark mode, I can't find that one without a transparent background. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet_Union_under_Joseph_Stalin#Modern_estimates

Wars death toll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history

Meanwhile in the real world https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25495509/

Inability to consider context must be a quintessentially American mental characteristic.

conservative estimates, Stalin was responsible for the deaths of at least 7 million people, or about 4.2% of USSRs total population.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1478210316676002

Meanwhile, American settlers massacred so many native inhabitants that it cooled down the climate https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-47063973

Then of course, capitalism also brought us such wonders as the African slave trade.

And then we have all the atrocities US regime has been committing around the globe, killing countless millions in the name of capitalism

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/the-indonesia-documents-and-the-us-agenda/543534/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jakarta_Method

https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/walrus_cambodiabombing_oct06.pdf

This is what happens when people get all their education from wikipedia instead of having any actual understanding of the subject.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

All those sources you posted don’t refute what you quoted from the other comment. Seems like a “not as bad as” logical fallacy at play. The other poster didn’t say the US was without fault; even though the US has killed many people doesn’t make the actions of those other regimes any less bad.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The sources I posted are meant to provide context. And what they show is that when you consider what things were like before, communism actually improved lives in a tangible way. While bad things certainly have happened in communist societies, as they do in every human society, overall trajectory is positive. Meanwhile, the atrocities committed in the name of capitalism, and by US in particular, eclipse anything that has happened under communism. US is a blight upon humanity and has brutally repressed progress in every corner of the world.

[+] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It's literally about the question of what types of outcomes each system produces in the long run. And yes, the lives of Ukrainians were massively improved after the revolution.

USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:

USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:

Meanwhile, let's look at the whole holodomor narrative of yours from a perspective of an actual historian who studied it. During the 1932 famine, the USSR sent aid to affected regions in an attempt to alleviate the famine. According to Mark Tauger in his article, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933:

While the leadership did not stop exports, they did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus. Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul'chyts'kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food

Some bring up massive grain exports during the famine to show that the Soviet Union exported food while Ukraine starved. This is fallacious for a number of reasons, but most importantly of all the amount of aid that was sent to Ukraine alone actually exceeded the amount that was exported at the time.

Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.

According to Tauger, the reason why more aid was not provided was because of the low harvest

It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.

Tauger is not a communist, and ultimately this specific article takes the view that the low harvest was caused by collectivization (he factors in the natural causes of the famine in later articles, based on how he completely neglects to mention weather in this article at all its clear that his position shifted over the years). However, its interesting to see that the Soviets really did try to alleviate the famine as best as they could.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2500600

On top of that, the famine was exacerbated by the fact that kulaks slaughtered livestock rather letting it be collectivized https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulak#Dekulakization

The reality is that famines were common in Tsarist times, and they were a major drive for the revolution in the first place. After the revolution, lives improved dramatically and famines stopped.

[–] deranger@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It’s really not about that, but seeing as mods are deleting my posts I’ll see myself out. Real nice being censored for the first time.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Enjoy having a new experience in life.

[–] Doom@ttrpg.network 2 points 3 months ago

His sources are always bad

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

List of US atrocities.

[+] retrospectology@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

[removed by mod]

[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

More than the US? The country that maintained slaves for many generations, on land taken from slaughteted and genocided indigenous peoples? The country that is to this day actively supporting genocide purely to protect its economic interests via Imperialism?

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago

The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”.

However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let's just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.

This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City's biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.

According to Wikipedia, "The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000." Let's assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?

Let's do some math:

Rikers Size	Rikers Prisoners	One Million Uyghurs Size
413.2 acres (0.645 square miles)	10,000 to 15,000	43 to 64 square miles

In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.

For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You'd literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It'd be like looking at a map of California. There's Los Angeles. There's San Diego. And look, there's San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.

Literally visible to the naked eye from space.

CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn't even make sense from logistics perspective.

Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he's the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I'm talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.

Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”

Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.

Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.

The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it's clear that the methodology of his "research" doesn't pass any kind of muster when examined closely.

It's also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here's George Bush's chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here's an excerpt:

US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they've been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/

Here's an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html

Here's an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on "atrocities" are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/

It's also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.

Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they're unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9

There's a further list of debunking here if you're interested https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.

[–] crazyCat@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Where Stalin and Mao?

[–] BachenBenno@feddit.de 12 points 3 months ago

Stalin's 20 million and Mao's 70 million both come from a book called 'The Black Book of Communism' where th authors tried to inflate all the numbers as much as possible to arrive at 100 million deaths under communism in the end. The really high numbers come from taking the difference between the population decades later and what the population would have been if the borth rate hadn't dropped (even though lower birth rates are an indication of better living standards).

Also, if you leave out the USSR's purges (Soviet archives revealed around 800k), almost all of the deaths come from 'man made famines'. Completely disregarding that in both China and Russia there have been famines all the time before their revolutions. Both countries were among the poorest and most backward in the world. No government on earth could have prevented all famines immediately. After some years after Mao's and Stalin's reorganizations of agriculture, famines were eliminated (except for during WW2). Life expectancy doubled within 30 years under communist China. Very quickly in the Soviet Union as well.

Of course you can argue about the governments having been able to do it better in hindsight, but even then the deaths certainly weren't cold blooded murder.

Considering this, you certainly won't arrive at the tens of millions of people killed just by the US military. Many, many more if you factor in indirect deaths (by embargoes, sanctions, refusing to allow other countries to produce their vaccines, etc.).

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago

in your deranged fantasies

[–] Facebones@reddthat.com 2 points 3 months ago

I'm a cereal killer Its a bad habit I killed Tony, Lucky Charms, and that silly rabbit

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