Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "Why North Korea Starves" video.

  1. Central planned economies and socialism leads to famines. For example, famines occurred in the Soviet Union in the 1930s with forced collectivization and Stalin's war against the Kulaks (well-off peasant farmers in the Soviet Union who resisted the central collectivization and seizure of private property), leading to the Holodomor in the Ukraine. Mao Zedong caused famines in the 1950s (infamously the Great Leap Forward) via a similar forced collectivization scheme of mainland Chinese farmers coupled with falsified or exaggerated crop yeilds on the farm communes, with the added burden of the insane mania of making backyard steel, which took away further agricultural labour and deforested the hills as the people hacked down trees to feed the backyard furnaces. Sparrows were also hunted in the tens of thousands with another erronoeus proclimation by Mao that sparrows were eating grain, whose presence actually was controlling insect pests in grain crops, such as locusts. The combined result was catastrophe. Similar collectivization and autarky schemes in Cambodia in the 1970s under the Khmer Rouge lead to famine and starvation there. While famines did occur elsewhere (notably Ethiopia in the 1980s), which could not be attributed to collectivization (instead due to overpopulation and severe doughts there), the majority of severe famines in the 20th century occurred due to socialist (mainly Communist) centralized governments deploying forced agricultural collectivization.
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