‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024

The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

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Joined 6 years ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2019

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  • These are some of the reasons why I would argue that it is wrong to place the People’s Rep. of China in the category of a generic capitalist country. I actually consider the Chinese economy to be presocialist, but the evidence that I have seen suggests that capital, the law of value, and generalised commodity production are all steadily shrinking in terms of prominence and importance, which is the opposite of what we would expect to find under a typical capitalist régime (id est a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie).




  • What are you talking about? Every single information source in the United States is always constantly talking about how great the PRC is, whether it’s in schools, on television, on websites (especially Reddit), on the radio, from think tanks, and so on. A perspective like ‘China also invests in genocide and mass detention, torture, surveillance and rape’ should blow your mind away: nobody has ever said that before! How can you read that and remain unpersuaded‽




  • Yeah, when you make easily falsifiable claims like ‘memorials or to draw attention to the deeds, not to honor it’, it is pretty clear that you did not read a damn thing that I linked to you, proving that you don’t care about Fascism after all. Thanks for the confirmation.

    Feel free to keep goofing around here but I’m done with you.




  • Máo was particularly annoyed by the Eurasian Tree Sparrow (Passer montanus, 树麻雀) part of the diet of which was grain. Chinese scientists had calculated that each sparrow consumed 4.5kg of grain each year — and that for every million sparrows killed, there would be food for 60,000 people. Armed with these statistics, Máo launched the Great Sparrow Campaign to address the problem.

    […]

    The campaign against the sparrows was finally terminated in late 1959 when the Academy of Sciences leaders highlighted the findings of scientists such as Zhu Xi and Zheng Zuoxin. Zhu and Zheng had autopsied the digestive systems of sparrows and found that three-quarters of the contents were harmful insects and only one-quarter was human food. This showed that sparrows were beneficial for humans.

    On this advice from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Máo declared a complete halt to the Great Sparrow Campaign, replacing sparrows with “bed bugs” in the “Four Pests” campaign. Suddenly sparrows were not just protected but the domestic population was supplemented by imports of sparrows from [Soviet] Russia!

    Eventually, after several years of poor crop yields, the situation began to improve. The number of people who starved in the 1958–1961 famine is disputed — and it’s impossible to say how much of the disaster was caused by the extermination of sparrows — but there can be no doubt that this episode is a stark lesson about the unintended consequences of human interference into natural ecosystems.

    (Source.)