Playing the famine card

[DarkPast]

*sorry if this is the wrong sub-forum*

Hello comrades,

One of the most common arguments non-Marxists use is that communism leads to food shortages and famine. In fact, this seems to be deeply ingrained into the common consciousness of people and backed by "scientific" data. For example, the "list of famines" on Wikipedia attributes the majority of famine victims from 1920-2000 to communist regimes.

On the other hand, I've read somewhere that 6 million children die each year as a consequence of famine.

Now what I'm interested in is:

a) How do you respond when someone used the communism equals famine argument?

and

b) If famine kills so many people each year, why is there so little coverage on these disastrous famines? Those 6+ million have to come from somewhere, right?

[Sensible Socialist]

Tell people to look around the world. No communist nations, and yet, 17,000 children die every single day due to hunger, and famine ravages the corners of the Earth. You might as well blame it on the Easter Bunny if you blame it on communism.

The press doesn't cover it because the press is only interesting in making a profit. People don't tend to like having the realities of the world thrown in their faces. They prefer sensationalism and pointless drivel. The deaths of millions of people are too much to handle, in their minds.

[ArrowLance]

A great deal of this can be explained by saying that the nations that became communist were also the nations that already had huge problems with famine. It isn't hard to argue that the Chinese revolution helped put an end to famine or that in general communist control has helped put an end to famine.

However there is some truth to it, revolution is a tricky business and besides outside antagonisms it requires such a huge recreation of both culture and industry/agriculture that some problems are going to arise. There is even some truth to the idea that communist nations have used famine as a tool to silence rebellion although it has never really been a direct tactic and more a result of other policies (encouraging crop destruction, farmer rebellions, and forced requisitions of foodstuffs). But these are all part of their revolutions even if they would be undesirable in any revolution you imagine.

[Luisrah]

Well, never forget that 10 million people die each year of hunger. And if I'm not mistaken 1 billion are malnourished.

Even if ''communism'' ''killed'' 100 million people, capitalism has killed many more, and is still killing.

[Apoi_Viitor]

A quote from Noam Chomsky (http://www.spectrezine.org/global/chomsky.htm):

He (Amartya Sen) estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame," 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).

This section below is taken from here this (http://www.historum.com/asian-history/20376-peoples-opinion-mao-zeodong-5.html):

In fact the GLF excess deaths are calculated relative to the low levels of mortality that the communists had achieved in the first decade of the PRC. The actual mortality rates during the GLF were not much different from the mortality rates prevailing over the first half of the 20th Century. And not too much different from the mortality rates of India at the same time. In fact anti-communists unwittingly give huge credit to the communists for reducing mortality up to the GLF, in order to max out the excess deaths calculations. So they use this to label Mao a mass murderer. It’s ridiculous.
Look at the mortality rate trend here:

http://www.bikealpine.com/p_10.gif

Great Leap Forward
The maximum death rate is abotu 25/1000 in 1960. This compares to 21/1000 in 1949, not that much of a difference.
But here is the kicker. Look at the death rates in India over the same time (1951 to 1960). They averaged at 22.8/1000 over the entire decade.
So India was more or less at GLF conditions for the entire 1950s. Whereas China for one year only had death rates slightly exceeding the Indian average for the decade.
It can be said that the century leading up to 1949, the Chinese people suffered more or less GLF conditions continually. I repeat the GLF tragic as it was, was more or less the norm for China before the revolution. And the Indians underwent continual GLF conditions over the entire 1950s.
Look at these horrific pictures of a typical Chinese scenes in Nationalist China 1946 (and this period was never even described as a famine period).
LIFE - Google Books (http://books.google.com/books?id=81QEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=1946,+china,+famine,+child&source=bl&ots=PipWY2aPx-&sig=EaQQV01IVdN85DLlZ2yLdbGYQc0&hl=en&ei=HiyhTPq-BcvFswaM6p3wAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&sqi=2&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=1946%2C%20china%2C%20famine%2C%20child&f=false)
Note the children dying of hunger in the streets while people walk around them, the dying child in front of a fat well fed smiling rice merchant. This was the norm in pre-revolutionary China!
(by the way you will also note there is a picture of a starving boy with a begging bowl at the same link. Dated 1946. Yet Dikotter incredibly dishonestly misrepresents this image as from ‘Mao’s’ Great famine on his book cover).
The huge tragedy of the GLF is it bucked the trend in post 1949 China, and the millions of ‘excess’ deaths arise from calculating against the low mortality that the communists had achieved in the decade leading up to the GLF, and brought New China back, for a while, to pre-revolutionary conditions.

And for reference, here's India
http://envfor.nic.in/divisions/ic/wssd/doc2/Image12.gif

[DarkPast]

Thank you comrades, especially Apoi_Viitor for the statistics - that's very useful when debating capitalists.

I've searched around a bit and found that India "contributes to about 5.6 million child deaths every year, more than half the world's total" (sorry can't post link). I guess that's just "natural causes". It's sickening how many "scholars" just ignore this sort of thing when writing about death tolls.

I'd be very grateful if anyone can find any more similar data.