authoritarianism mandates a lack of critical thinking in order to function, because the whole point is that you must listen to The Authority, The Authority is always right and The Other is always wrong in order to defend The Community
i’m not here to defend tankie bullshit but to attribute the death of millions through famine to communism is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the regimes under which those deaths occurred
under the ussr intellectuals and scientists were suspect as a consequence of having been born to privilege (in much the same way that intellectuals and scientists in nazi germany were suspect as a consequence of being Jewish [and in much the same way intellectuals and scientists under any authoritarian regime will be made part of The Other because knowledge really is power and The Authority doesn’t want to share])
consequently any goddamn moron is able to establish themselves as an expert by just spouting horseshit that sounds like it agrees with what The Authority is already saying
trofim lyshenko was referred to as “the barefoot scientist” because that was good marketing at the time for a guy who didn’t know jack shit, but happened to have grown up poor and liked to run his mouth about how the concept of genes was fascist
Wheat, rye, potatoes, beets—most everything grown according to Lysenko’s methods died or rotted, says Hungry Ghosts.
Stalin still deserves the bulk of the blame for the famines, which
killed at least 7 million people, but Lysenko’s practices prolonged and
exacerbated the food shortages. (Deaths from the famines peaked around
1932 to 1933, but four years later, after a 163-fold increase in
farmland cultivated using Lysenko’s methods, food production was
actually lower than before.) The Soviet Union’s allies suffered under
Lysenkoism, too. Communist China adopted his methods in the late 1950s
and endured even bigger famines.
Peasants were reduced to eating tree bark and bird droppings and the
occasional family member. At least 30 million died of starvation.
authoritarianism and the anti-intellectualism that necessarily accompanies it has a death count that transcends ideology
whether or not an authoritarian agrees with you on the matter of resource distribution is deeply irrelevant, unless your primary concern is to ‘prove’ that only people who disagree with your ideology are capable of being wrong
in retrospect i can see how posting this right after the thing about clown eggs could be a bit of a rollercoaster
