Probably the most true post in this entire community.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Trofim Lysenko killed the most people under Communism, through famine. Most of the deaths under communism have been due to famines and misconceptions about farming.
...and more were killed by Capitalism in the Belgian Congo and by The British East India company alone. Both of which were run as Capitalist ventures.
"Misconceptions about farming" isn't really accurate though. The farmers knew how to make food, but in both Russia and China, at least, the central government decided bullshit was as good as science and fucked around with a working system.
That being said, America also fucked up their soil so bad that they created a dustbowl with a non-zero deathtoll, and modern western farming practices are also fucking up the climate via algae blooms, pollinator killing pesticides and just straight up spewing diesel exhaust.
The problem was that they thought Lysenkoism was science. Obviously, plants would grow according to Marxist ideology because why wouldn't they?
Reactionary plants
It didn't help that Lysenko started off being right. It turns out that planting some seeds deeper does increase yields!
Clearly we should double the depth!
Capitalism brought us Brawndo, which will kill all the crops eventually.
It's what patriotic plants crave!
I’ve been listening to The Fall of Civilizations podcast (it’s really good, especially if you enjoy history). I just finished an ep yesterday on the Norse colonies on Greenland and it talked about the destructive farming that occurred before they were abandoned. This was ~13th-14th centuries when they went dark. It’s not an uncommon problem, though centuries of progress make it harder to excuse / understand in the 20th.
Anyway, fascinating stuff. I wonder how we’ll be talked about in the next millennium (assuming a miracle and humanity lasts that long).
"Even when they saw the plastics in their own blood, they continued making plastics."