Hacker News Reader

Comment by selestify | Hacker News Reader

The Soviet Union did pretty well in its early years, with GDP growth faster than that of the US for a time. Cuba is still doing pretty well compared to similar Latin American countries at the time of the Cuban revolution. Don't know too much about the others.

View on HN

What are you calling the "early years"? Major famines in 1921-2 and 1932-3 killed tens of millions.

Look at real GDP growth from Chile and Cuba over the past 50 years. Chile is far outpacing Cuba. I bet adding venezuela would also be illuminating.

It's easy to do "pretty well" in the early years, the books can be cooked, the standards changed, etc. But over time you can't hide failure.

Soviet Union: 7-20 million deliberately starved to death. [1] 1.5 million people executed during The Great Purge. [2] "Did pretty well".

Cuba: thousands executed for the ideas they held; forced labor camps; and more than 1.2m fled 1959-1993 (about 10% of the current population). "Doing pretty well". Cuba was one of the wealthiest countries in the Americas, before Marxists took over.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Purge

USA: Extermination of natives, slavery, company towns and child labor, Jim crow etc.

England: English colonialism from Drogheda to Amristar, plus the domestic Peterloo, child labor etc. Also, how many millions did England deliberately starve to death in the 1840s?

Germany: I can list off what the Krupp/Voegler/Thyssen financed Nazi party did for a while, then go back to before that

Please stop, both of you. HN is not a site for frothing ideological rants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com