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Comment by throwaway6734 | Hacker News Reader

Of course there were mal actors but there's a clear difference between the level of support and involvement. Stalin and Maos policies lead to the deaths of tens of millions of people.

My main point with all of this is to put into context how horrifying the threat of the spread of Communism was. I think the actions taken at the time by the CIA need to be viewed through this lens.

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Mao and Stalin both managed to elevate the standard of living of their respective nations significantly during their lives. If you had engaged with history instead of VCF propaganda, you would have realised this.

And their policies resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people

It is easy to talk about this over 100 years. But that also conveniently lets us ignore that the US was founded on the backs of chattel slavery. Turns out lots of forms of governments can hurt people. But at least the communists/socialists raised all ships, whereas the racist policies of our 'democratic' government only raised a few.

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There isn't a meaningful consensus on how many people died on their watch, but this claim usually targets the famines of '59-61 (China) and '32-33 (USSR), and casts the blame on the choice each country made to collectivize agriculture. The Chinese famine was the last one it has experienced to date. The only subsequent famine that the USSR underwent were in the 40s, which historians tend to agree was the result of infrastructural damage underwent during WWII. So I mean, yeah, people died on their watch. Probably not as many as you think, though, and certainly fewer than would have died if they continued on as semi-feudal agrarian backwaters.

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