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this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
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What else would it be? I don't see how one could blame WW1 on a single person. Though I would say most of WW2 could be blamed on a single person, if you really feel like it.
The sequel was completely inevitable. You could argue it was all because of one person, but that person appearing was basically predetermined.
I agree, but if you ignore all historical context, you could blame one person if you really wanted to, was what I meant.
And Mao personally executed 40 million people, huh? There wasn't an entire ecosystem of officials fabricating reports at every level? His head of state security gets no credit for making everyone afraid to tell the truth?
Hell, the obnoxious thing about it is all it really does it blame the wrong single communist, people go on about the sparrows but Lysenkoism had destroyed crop yields before they got exterminated.
So, yes, it is as absurd to blame Mao entirely for The Great Leap Forward as it is to blame a Serbian assassin for WW1. There were cultural considerations, treaties, idiot officials, an agricultural policy built almost entirely on fraud, etc etc.
The most devastating thing about the Great Leap Forward is that the famine was entirely preventable if people weren't afraid to tell the truth, and that simply isn't a situation that can be built by one person.
Hell, there were good crops left to rot because the workers had left for the industrialization projects in the cities. Do you think Mao personally said "fuck that rice, go build some tractors?"
You can't compare these two situations at all. Princip was not the head of a country.
Everything is contextual. Hell the plan the assassins had was exactly to provoke a war. They might not have thought it would get as big as it did, they just wanted a civil war for independence, but if intentions don't matter, and they must not for this discussion because the intention of The Great Leap Forward wasn't to starve people.
The funny thing with The Black Hand's plan is, it worked. Serbia didn't just get independence, it became the primary power of Yugoslavia when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved.
The common narrative of WW1 is that it indeed was started by a single person. Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand which most people agree was the inciting incident that caused WW1.
I think it would be quite reductive to just blame the assassin. Sure, he was the one that created the spark that ignited the conflict, but it had been brewing for years, and we can't ignore the roles the heads of states were playing in starting the war.
Even high school history talks about how it was all building up to that event and the event alone wasn’t the cause