World History
Chinese Famine of 1958-1961 - An account of the genesis and the course of the disastrous induced famine of the late 1950's, as part of the Great Leap Forward. Or, as many have called this horrible social movement, the Great Leap Backwards.
Communism doesn't really work. All the governments that have tried it either are now gone or have introduced liberal amounts of capitalism into their economies. I would hope that the example of the Chinese famine and other communist blunders would discourage future attempts at communist style state control of national economies but it probably won't.
From the site:
To understand the cause of the Chinese famine, first the reader must look back to the Soviet famine of 1931-3. Under Stalin, peasants and others were forced into large collective farms where the state dictated farming methods and production quotas ? any and all private farming efforts were strictly forbidden. To make matters worse, Stalin placed Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko in charge of agricultural science in the Soviet Union.
To put matters bluntly, Lysenko was a quack. He rejected modern genetics theory, for example, as "fascist" and instead adopted a modified form of Lamarckism that incorporated some Marxist ideas. In keeping with these ideas, Lysenko argued that seeds could be dramatically altered by merely altering their environment. For example, Lysenko believed that if seeds were soaked in extremely cold water, they would then grow in cold environments. The Soviets wasted valuable time and money instituting Lysenko's harebrained schemes, and Lysenko used his position to promote the careers of other pseudo-scientists with similarly bizarre ideas (2).
Although the result of instituting Lysenko's pseudoscience and Stalin's collectivization techniques caused a famine that killed millions in the USSR, Mao and other Chinese Communists were enamored of Stalin and insisted on replicating the Soviet experience in China (apparently against the advice of the Kruschev and other Soviet officials).
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World History
Chinese Famine of 1958-1961
Chinese Famine of 1958-1961 - An account of the genesis and the course of the disastrous induced famine of the late 1950's, as part of the Great Leap Forward. Or, as many have called this horrible social movement, the Great Leap Backwards.
Communism doesn't really work. All the governments that have tried it either are now gone or have introduced liberal amounts of capitalism into their economies. I would hope that the example of the Chinese famine and other communist blunders would discourage future attempts at communist style state control of national economies but it probably won't.
From the site:
To understand the cause of the Chinese famine, first the reader must look back to the Soviet famine of 1931-3. Under Stalin, peasants and others were forced into large collective farms where the state dictated farming methods and production quotas ? any and all private farming efforts were strictly forbidden. To make matters worse, Stalin placed Trofim Denisovitch Lysenko in charge of agricultural science in the Soviet Union.
To put matters bluntly, Lysenko was a quack. He rejected modern genetics theory, for example, as "fascist" and instead adopted a modified form of Lamarckism that incorporated some Marxist ideas. In keeping with these ideas, Lysenko argued that seeds could be dramatically altered by merely altering their environment. For example, Lysenko believed that if seeds were soaked in extremely cold water, they would then grow in cold environments. The Soviets wasted valuable time and money instituting Lysenko's harebrained schemes, and Lysenko used his position to promote the careers of other pseudo-scientists with similarly bizarre ideas (2).
Although the result of instituting Lysenko's pseudoscience and Stalin's collectivization techniques caused a famine that killed millions in the USSR, Mao and other Chinese Communists were enamored of Stalin and insisted on replicating the Soviet experience in China (apparently against the advice of the Kruschev and other Soviet officials).
- Russian Communists Upset With Indiana Jones
Some Russian Communists are unhappy with the new Indiana Jones film. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opened in Russia on Thursday. The communist distaste for the film can be seen at a CNN article titled Indiana Jones movie upsets communists....
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- The Famine Of 1770 In Bengal
The Famine of 1770 in Bengal. This is a chapter from the book, The Unseen World, and Other Essays. It was written by John Fiske and published in 1869. In this chapter, Fiske provides his explanations for the catastrophic famine resulting from British...
- The Russo-finnish War
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