this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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It matter for the same reason a tribunal need to know the motive of a crime to give it appropriate punishment. It's not about the morality of the action, it's about a logically sound and coherent picture of the event.
Peoples doing something bad for terribly bad reasons is coherent, peoples doing something bad for no reason at all isn't. The fact that you don't have any explanation as to why an entire government composed of thousand of peoples would do such a thing -like it or not- is a very big hole in your narrative, and rise some serious questions about it's consistency and therefore about it's likelihood (because an incoherent statement can never be true no matter what).
Insisting that the event happened the way you say it did without providing any rational or cause-effect relationship and becoming defensive when explicitly asked to provide one puts both your narrative and your argumentation in it's favor in the same category as those of conspiracy theorists who insists that "they" lie to us and immediately gets mad when asked to explain why "they" would.
You're talking about narrative, spin a story about tribunal, and then spin a story that I'm defensive. I'm not.
Literally what the first commenter gave - there was a widespread famine in China, it's caused by Mao agricultural policies.
What are you contesting here? There was no famine? Famine is the narrative? Or that it wasn't caused by policies but by... What? Weather? Weather was good.
I don't understand your point, please clarify it, in a way that isn't just calling your interlocutors stupid or defensive.
Maybe it's my autism but dismissing a relevant question by implying that the person who asked it is immoral/unempathetic for even asking it seems pretty defensive to me, and is a non-argument regardless.
Now that one is on me, I could have worded that better. By cause-effect relationship in this context I meant the cause who's effect was that the government chose to take whatever course of action you believe is responsible for the famine. Peoples take decisions for reasons, bad reasons sometimes, yes, but reasons nonetheless.
It's not about agreeing with the reasons, it's about coherency. That an entire government, a group formed of thousands of peoples, would act all in concert with no motive, especially for a project on such a large scale and which would take so many resources, is nonsense. If you can't present either proof that they really took the conscious decision to manufacture a famine or a motive to explain why they would want to do that, the claim that the famine was intentional is extremely dubious at best.
Also, speaking of a government's actions as if only the one person at the top was to blame is something peoples trying to speak about politics and history seriously should avoid.
There was a famine. But it was not man made with the purpose of killing a large portion of the population, again, as the other commenter pointed out, why would they do such a thing? And why did they stop doing it? It makes no sense.
The famine was the produce of a great number of different factors, inefficient and backward agricultural methods, bad weather, compound effects of WW2 + the Chinese civil war, mismanagement, trade embargoes, etc... But others could explain it better than I can.
An other point we disagree on is the number of deaths from the famine. Numerous western academics intentionally inflate the death tolls of countries ruled by communist parties, most infamously "the black book of communism" and the "victims of communism foundation" who literally count Nazi invaders killed by the red army and peoples who could potentially have been born but weren't as victims of communism.
I called you defensive but I did not call you stupid, nor did I imply it.
I'm splitting this to a separate comment because it's a different topic.
Who said that it was intentionally made famine with the goal of killing people? And where?
Are you hung on the original commenter calling it "mass murder" and your point is that it wasn't premeditated?
That's the "mainstream" narrative so I assumed it was what you were arguing, sorry if it wasn't.
Essentially. Yes.
Would the governing body of PRC in 1962 attributing the famine to government errors convince you otherwise? Would the Chinese government 20 years later confirming the same and reiterating it was the Mao policy that was faulty at the core convince you?
If not, can you imagine a fact that would convince you, that the responsibility for that famine is on the then Chinese government? What is it?
I'm not sure where you're going with this. That the famine was accidental and (in part) caused by bad policies and mismanagement is what I'm saying happened. You're agreeing with me there.
If you think the famine was accidental but the government's bad policies caused it/made it worse, I already agree.
If you think that the famine was intentional and the government was trying to kill peoples by starvation, I would need proof that they at least discussed it internally in order to be convinced. Leaked internal documents, testimony from peoples who were there (and can prove that they were), recording of meetings between party officials, that kind of things.