How does a man who starves 50 million (almost half the amount of Jews who died in the holocaust) of his own people...

What a load of apologetic bullshit. A political power that leads the National defence would inevitably win the hearts and minds of the people (Case in point, Russian Revolution, during which the foreign anticommunist invasions only empowered the Bolshevik discipline and recruitment of both the soldiers and former Imperial officers). It it would be as you say, the Red army own troops and dignitaries would desert en masse (Just like it actually happened the other way around)

If Chiangs son was in charge they very well might have won, but they had Chiang and all the baggage bullshit favours he owed that came with it

In respect to point 1, Great Leap Forward was probably the biggest fuck up in all of 20th century socialism. It's one of the most absurd stories to read.

This

...

>remember 50 gorillian!
You're looking at things in a propaganda filter. Famines were cyclical in Chinese history before Mao and the Communists. He can just as easily be seen as ending China's history of hunger if you want to like him instead of hate him. As was pointed out in the first post, in the actual numbers he was at the helm when millions of lives were saved due to modernization. See that bump in pic related? That's Mao. People don't have sky rocking life expectancy and birth rates when there isn't new abundance.

The famous famine was also mostly localized (as far as I know) to one region and has a distinct start and end point. People are going to remember life before the Maoist era was backward medieval shit for nearly EVERYONE. In contrast only select people 1959-1961 in select regions MIGHT hold him personally responsible.

>and highhandedly destroys one of the longest lasting cultures in the world
More cold war propaganda meme. The cultural revolution didn't actually do much other than shake up the political world and make very stressful.

Look at Taiwan or Hong Kong to compare to modern China. They aren't notably different culturally other than traditional vs simplified characters (which has nothing to do with the cultural revolution).

>It seems like he achieved literally nothing
Note how everyone who is not China is scared of China's rise? Once again the propagandized world view would have you think it's mere coincidence and China rose in spite of Mao. Yet what other nation has done the same? Not India next door.

>How does a man who starves 50 million (almost half the amount of Jews who died in the holocaust)
great, another denialist

No one actually worships him, it's a sham.

See, the CCP's Mandate of Heaven comes from Mao having setup Communism. Everyone knows Communism doesn't work, which is why everyone actually considers Deng Xiaoping to be the founder of the country and the man whose ideology actually runs the show.

The problem is, if the CCP drops Mao like the hot garbage he was and everyone knows he was, then they have no Mandate of Heaven; there's no reason for them to be in charge. So the CCP keeps up this facade of Mao worship because it's easy to do (putting up posters and sucking Mao's dick is easy compared to actually reordering society as he wanted) in order to make a simple contract with the Chinese people: The people don't start asking "why aren't you doing what Mao wanted", and the CCP doesn't start doing what Mao wanted; everyone's happy, and everyone is richer than they would if if what Mao wanted were to occur.

Chiang initiated the Civil War and worsened the fragmentation of China as he came to power (by overthrowing the government in a military coup and attacking Communist organ) to begin with. There is no point to imagine what would happen without him, as it's too much of an althistory fagfest to begin with.

Great Leap forward was itself a reaction to the crisis. It is highly debatable as to how much it occurred due to the legacy of China, and what options and possibilities existed under such conditions.

A load of bullshit, again. This time pretentious.

Better back up your assertions their.

Are you fucking retarded? Read the op. He said that 50 million people is almost half of the jews killed in the holocaust.

Do you think putting commas in random parts of your butt hurt retort makes you feel smarter?

Well, he was a brilliant commander and general, shite politician tho
>why is he venerated
Oh idk maybe the fact he had a cult following of millions upon millions of ideological fanatics and the ruthlessness to remove all detractors
And being buttbuddies with Stalin

I mean, I almost certainly won't go to any effort, but which one? The picture is probably the most major assertion and it's right there.

You realize that you don’t gain millions of fanatical followers without accomplishing anything right? Nicholas II had a huge cult of personality, secret police, repression of dissidents, etc. None of that stopped him from being put against the wall.

You mean why was he venerated in the beginning?
As I said he was a very good military leader who allied himself with a nearby superpower

The isn't sourced and is dated real bad

He had an extensive cult of personality when he was alive, and after he died the ccp decided against doing something similar to the Soviet destalinization. So people weren't allowed to talk about the shit he did wrong even when all of his policies were being reversed by Deng.

Also OP, I'd appreciate it if you didn't make jokes about the Holocaust in unrelated threads.

Wrong. Most of unsuccessful policies of his were admitted unsuccessful as they happened, and they are obviously presented as such by the Chinese government.

Well can you prove it wasn't?
Go back pol

Just google Chinese life expectancy. I chose that one because it was labeled while the first results are not.

Modern mainland China starts in 1949 after the Communists win the Chinese civil war. Mao dies in 1976 and Deng manages to rise soon after. So we're looking at 1950-1980 of hardcore purestrain Maoist rule.

>people died so Mao is bad

Everytime, you do realize George Washington killed 90,000 people right? Yet people worship him like a god.

This. Mao is as a leader who expelled the foreign humiliation, something more important than the Great Leap growing pains. If the KMT had retained power, or if China had eased into a liberal democracy like India, this could not happen. Freedom is not good for everyone. The mainland would never retain its culture and autonomy because yielding to "freedom", or the parasites of the West. Look at Taiwan today! All freedom, all foreign thumbs in their pies.

Did he have large purges of the people who helped him achieve power like old Stally boy?

No they didn't. The Sichuan Clique did far more fighting than the KMT.

>order people to kill millions of birds causing millions to die
Wow, such leadersihp

>Mao is as a leader who expelled the foreign humiliation,
How? The jews had a lot of power and influence during his reign, the Chinese got the nuclear bomb from Israeli jews during his reign. This is not something Israel would give away for free

>his own people
The problem here is, its not "his own people". China was controlled by different warlords and Mao just happened to lead one of the bigger warlord faction.

Because that is common in China.

You think Mao was bad for China?

An Lushan says hello.

Wrong.

The CCP lost proportionally more soldiers than the KMT.

Mainly because the Japanese raped/burned/killed all their villages.
Yes, this was an explicit Japanese strategy.

You want to know why the CCP is so brutal? Well, they went through hell, saw tens of millions of Chinese slaughtered, and did not forget it.

Taiwan is an infinitely better place to live than the mainland.

it wont be in a decade

Ah that justifies why they killed academics now.

Mao was pretty much out of politics by 1956. He only returned in force in 1966 and left again in 1973.

Blaming Mao for all the CCP fuckups is stupid. Most of this was China simply applying the retarded theories that Stalinist Russia advocated.

Notice that these same policies caused starvations in Somalia, Ethiopia, Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, Mynamar, Vietnam, etc.

Basically, Mao simply shilled what his advisors recommended. This is what people don’t get. Mao himself understood how the GLF fucked up according to his own memoirs.

Mao is definitely a conflicted character. Him and Chiang defeated the Japanese, he then defeated the KMT, unified China, reconquered old Chinese territories, beat back the USA in Korea and Vietnam, somehow allied with the USA, and then appointed Deng to a position of power.
At the same time, he believed the batshit insane Stalinist policies that his Soviet and Chinese advisors came up with in the 1950s.

The CCP maintains that Mao was 70/30 good/bad. I’d put it at 45/55 to be honest, but that’s all debatable.

You simply cannot have a black-or-white view of Mao. People too often assume everything that happened in China was his doing.

>and Vietnam,
nigger what? china invaded vietnam and got absolutely destroyed before claiming victory in a 'tacticle retreat' during which they massacred all the civilians in the land they managed to take (who were coincidentally ethnic Chinese living just past the border..)

Ahh yes an island of 20 million with US economic aid is better off than a continent-sized nation of 1.4 billion illiterate farmers

1949 Taiwan:
No civil war destruction, no Japanese invasion, no warlords, no American bombings. KMT brought Central Bank treasury with them. Vast majority of educated academics and businessmen moved to Taiwan. Most Chinese national treasures were also brought to Taiwan. Recieves American economic aid, US defense support, and US preferential trade status. An island near Japan. 50% literacy.

1949 Mainland China:
Civil war, WW2, Warlords, 98% rural farmers, destroyed cities, no national treasury, surrounded by hostile enemies, Soviets control Manchuria, Tibet and Xinjiang broken off, worldwide economic sanctions, no UN recognition, no alliances, limited Soviet aid until 1958. Oh, and 70% of the people do not live near the coasts. 95% are illiterate. Massive starvation in the countryside and aftereffects of Japanese chemical/biological warfare.

How similar!

alphahistory.com/vietnamwar/chinese-and-soviet-involvement/

usefulhistorian.com/2014/03/06/dont-forget-chinas-role-in-the-vietnam-war/

600,000 Chinese soldiers and advisors, $5 billion in military aid, and the transportation network to get Soviet aid through the US blockade.

>china invaded vietnam and got absolutely destroyed

Source?

Does conquering 20,000sqkm of a nation = getting absolutely destroyed?

Can you really be so fucking brazen to dismiss the deaths of 40 million people (minimum estimate) as just "bad publicity"?

Literacy, calorie consumption, etc... are EXPECTED to increase, this is not some big achievement or something worth celebrating. In fact the problem with communism is that these things increase at a much lower rate than they do in capitalist countries, discounting failed states and those in civil war.

>Just google Chinese life expectancy. I chose that one because it was labeled while the first results are not.
The absolute state of communists. Can they be any more retarded?

> People don't have sky rocking life expectancy and birth rates when there isn't new abundance.
Couldn't that abundance have been caused by mass death?
Look at how the black plague positively affected Europe. Increased social mobility because so many of the old guard were dead, more resources to go around because they'd been freed up by death, lower population density, the list goes on. All because loads of people just up and died.
I don't know anything though, and that's just my shot in the dark guess.

>People who live in socialist countries enjoy a higher level of health, education and overall physical quality of life than do residents of capitalist countries with similar economic development, according to a study co-authored by UC Irvine and and Cal State Long Beach professors.

>Socialist countries out-performed capitalist countries in nearly every area, according to the study by Howard Waitzkin, UCI professor of medicine and social sciences, and Shirley Cereseto, professor emeritus of sociology at Cal State Long Beach. The study, which looked at infant and child death rates, life expectancy, the availability of doctors and nurses, nutrition, literacy and other educational factors, is in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health.

>The study did not include the United States or other high-income capitalist countries in the comparisons because there were no equivalent socialist countries, the researchers said.

>While the quality of life appeared to increase with the wealth of the country, socialist or capitalist, the differences between the two categories were most "profound" in comparing the low-income countries, according to the report.

>Public health and education provided in the low-income socialist system "seem to overcome some of the grueling deprivations of poverty," according to the report. While wealthier capitalist countries have "enjoyed the fruits of public health and educational improvements," the poorer capitalist countries provide inadequate health and educational services, the report said.

>"Our findings indicate that countries with socialist political-economic systems can make great strides toward meeting basic human needs, even without extensive economic resources. When much of the world's population suffers from disease, early death, malnutrition and illiteracy, these observations take on a meaning that goes beyond statistics."

articles.latimes.com/1986-06-07/local/me-10010_1_socialist-countries

In order to justify the claim that capitalism leads to faster development you basically have to compare countries that have industrialized 150 years ago to ones that are in the process of it. The fact is that countries like Cuba, China, Burkina Faso, etc failed to develop after decades under capitalism. It’s only with socialism that they start to show real progress. Saying that these things would have happened anyway is disproven by the fact that they didn’t happen under capitalism, even after having decades to do so.

>The study did not include the United States or other high-income capitalist countries in the comparisons because there were no equivalent socialist countries, the researchers said.
YOU CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP

>I must unite the chinese people under a single tombstone.

Mao isn't venerated that much, substantially less than Stalin whose country and communist party no longer exist.

Generally speaking most Chinese think that Mao was stupid and paranoid and very destructive, but ultimately helped China become the industrialized and comfortable country it is today. It helps that everybody alive during the famine was also alive in the decades AFTER the famine, when less headass Maoist policies led to greater food ability than had been thought possible in China.

Mao and Deng are considered two sides of the same coin, dangerous and ambitious men whose policies drastically changed China but ultimately for the better.

All of the progress came about due to technological and medical advances created by capitalist societies. The best comparisons to make is between cultures that are as close to identical as possible, like East and West Germany or Best Korea and South Korea.

Do you seriously think comparing Angola to the US is good methodology? It was a study of who does better with what they had, which is why they compared countries with similar levels of GDP per capita.

That’s because capitalist society evolved first, so they established the basics of industrialization and important technologies like antibiotics and engineering. You might as well say that feudalism is the best system because they established agricultural practices that made capitalism possible.

>east vs west Germany

Did you know that Ostalgie (the opinion that life was better in the GDR than today) is now the majority position among eastern Germans?

m.spiegel.de/international/germany/homesick-for-a-dictatorship-majority-of-eastern-germans-feel-life-better-under-communism-a-634122.html

Nope, a better country for comparison would be Botswana, which has one of the fastest growing economies in the world and one of the freest economies in Africa. Just couldn't believe you thought a study that said there aren't any high income socialist countries would help your case.

There weren’t any high income socialist countries because socialism consistently took root in poor/underdeveloped parts of the world, nor did they rely on extraction of cheap resources and labour from the third world.

>China
Started to develop under capitalism which has lifted 1 billion Chinese from extreme poverty in the past three decades.

>Cuba, Burkina Faso
Irrelevant shithokes

>you basically have to compare countries that have industrialized 150 years ago to ones that are in the process of it.
Or I could just compare both Koreas. Same culture, similar size. The North actually has more natural resources and
was more industrialized until the 1950s.

Guess what happened when commies took over? Now South Korea is excluded from your study because it is high income and successful. Literal confirmation bias built into that analysis.

Retard.

Also using GDP per capita as a measure of economic development is grug tier.

If you woke up one day and found a million sandniggers in your country you'd be pretty annoyed too.

China had major boosts in population, life expectancy, and industrial output under Mao, although it’s true that Deng’s policies did wonders. Meanwhile outside of China the proportion of people living at or subsistence level has increased.

>Irrelevant shithokes
>examples that prove me wrong don’t count

>Or I could just compare both Koreas. Same culture, similar size. The North actually has more natural resources and
was more industrialized until the 1950s.

Guess which one is under massive sanctions and lost one of its most important trading partners in 1991? It’s also worth noting that the North was actually more prosperous and developed until the 70s, when the US and Japan provided them with billions in aid due to reparations claims and in exchange for Vietnam war support.

Cool, and now 40 fucking years later South Korea is a G20 country while North Korea immediately had one of the worst famines in modern history when they stopped getting Soviet aid.

Yeah and they also get US bailouts whenever they need it, aren’t under an international trade embargo, and didn’t lose their second biggest trading partner. Do you think the US economy would be just fine if China collapsed? The North imported almost all of their farm fertilizer from the Soviet Union, so when it collapsed they had an agricultural crisis.

>China had major boosts in population, life expectancy, and industrial output under Mao
After they collapsed and killed 40 million people.

>although it’s true that Deng’s policies did wonders.
Deng is 100% responsible for China's economic boom.

>Meanwhile outside of China the proportion of people living at or subsistence level has increased.
Factually incorrect. The number of people in extreme poverty worldwide has dropped precipitously since GATT trade liberalization in the 1970s.

>examples that prove me wrong don’t count
They don't prove me wrong you tankie retard. Burkina Faso is a literal failed state shithole that always lurks around the bottom of every index that measures living standards, life expectancy, health, wealth, literacy, and every other social metric you can think of.

Cuba is better, but the way you commie shitheads talk about it you make it sound like the second coming of Christ. It's actually very poor, even for Caribbean standards. Capitalist Caribbean countries like Costa Rica, Panama, Barbados, Bahamas... blow it out of the water. Cuba is a third world shithole compared to them.

And you love to forget that in 1950 Cuba was as wealthy as Spain and the third wealthiest Latin American country after Argentina and Uruguay.

So communism in Cuba actually started from a very high point and stagnated the country, while its then-poorer Caribbean neighbours have overtaken it.

>Guess which one is under massive sanctions and lost one of its most important trading partners in 1991?
Not a fucking excuse, the Soviet Union also stagnated and collapsed, that's why they lost their trade partner. So you are using a communist failure to try and justify another communist failure.

>It’s also worth noting that the North was actually more prosperous and developed until the 70s
So South Korea already was better than the North before communism collapsed.
Aid is not an argument, North got plenty of Soviet aid.
I rest my case.

Don't even bother, he's just as delusional as any other Nork apologiest. Trying to fucking paint South Korea like it's a welfare recipient instead of a globally respected economy, I'm fucking typing this post on an LG phone. I'm sure all those South Koreans born under roofs made of grass would love to hear someone tell them the economy they built from absolutely nothing is just an American pet project.

>They aren't notably different culturally
Holy shit you are ignorant.

>almost all the countries in red were a genocidal battlefield in WW2 and their industries were moved to nazi germany, while the others either weren't devastated or got billions of marshall plan aid to prevent them from becoming communist
really makes you think.

>this is not some big achievement or something worth celebrating.
It disproves the myth of muh gajillions starving conjured up by cold war propaganda.

Woah, almost like "their" governments refused the Marshall Plan.

>Italy
WW2 battlefield
>Germany
WW2 battlefield
France
>WW2 battlefield
Spain
>Devastated by the Spanish Civil War
Greece
>Devastated by the post-war Greek Civil War
Finland
>Invaded and devastated by Russia then became a WW2 battlefield

Of all the countries in the list only Portugal was not affected by war, you literal retard.

I assume this will eventually dawn on the Chinese masses. They can erase and rewrite history within China, but the real history survives in the West and will re-emerge whenever the communist party is overthrown.

Mao built the industrialized base that made the whole "economic miracle" possible. See the absolutely free economies in subsaharan africa and southeast asia like Thailand to see what happens when you have a free market in a nonindustrialized nation.

>Burkina Faso is a literal failed state shithole that always lurks around the bottom of every index that measures living standards, life expectancy, health, wealth, literacy, and every other social metric you can think of. Also the vast majority of profitable industry in the PRC is state controlled.

Because the French capitalists assasinated Sankara.

>It disproves the myth of muh gajillions starving conjured up by cold war propaganda.
It absolutely does not you complete retard, would you like to take a swing at denying the Cambodian genocide while you're at it?

>Italy
Pales in comparison to eastern europe. North Italy didnt see combat action.

>Devastated by the Spanish Civil War
Pales in comparison to eastern europe.

That's why it was a complete shithole until the 70s.

>France
Pales in comparison to eastern europe. Vichy france wasnt devastated.
>Finland
Pales in comparison to eastern europe. Only forests there were a battlefield.
>Greece
Pales in comparison to eastern europe.
>Germany
Pales in comparison to eastern europe.

>pic
what happens when you focus only on muh GEE DEE PEE

The vast majority of the cambodian casaulties died of US bombing.

They would've had to become capitalist in exchange. Also the US wouldn't've given a lot of aid to eastern europe instead of western europe since the western european countries had a far more developed industrial base.

>Factually incorrect. The number of people in extreme poverty worldwide has dropped precipitously since GATT trade liberalization in the 1970s

Actually this is the product of statistical manipulation by the world bank. They purposely established an international poverty rate according to the lowest costs of living in the poorest countries, meaning that people living below subsistence levels in other countries are still considered to not be in extreme poverty even if they aren’t making ends meat. There’s also the fact that they only use monetary income as a measure, meaning that if somebody has part of their income from subsistence agriculture they will be counted as living in extreme poverty, even if they are living better than people whose income is 100% monetary. When you take these factors into account, you find that besides China, the proportion and absolute numbers of people living in extreme poverty has increased.

aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/08/exposing-great-poverty-reductio-201481211590729809.html

>Burkina Faso is a literal failed state shithole

Yeah after it’s socialist government was toppled in a military coup. Under the government of Sankara the country achieved food independence for the first time in its history.

>Cuba is better, but the way you commie shitheads talk about it you make it sound like the second coming of Christ. It's actually very poor, even for Caribbean standards.

It ranks number 9 in North America for HDI (0.775) and is almost on par with its neighbours like Costa Rica (0.776) Trinidad (0.780) and Panama (0.788). It also surpasss even the US in some areas like infant mortality.

>And you love to forget that in 1950 Cuba was as wealthy as Spain and the third wealthiest Latin American country after Argentina and Uruguay.

And yet it suffered from chronic illiteracy, poverty, and lack of access to basic goods.

>Not an excuse
>not having access to the tools needed to grow food isn’t an excuse

At least Mao didn't kill 90,000 people or support slavery like George Washington did. Why do you hate China and yet love George Washington who killed 90,000 people and kept slaves?

All of the communist countries spent around 10-30% of their GDP on military expenditure which stunted their development. If they had invested that money on more infrastructure or civilian industry they would've grown a lot more. There are several other factors in this GDP difference, not capitalism good socialism bad.

Literally this

Ok so that's yes, wanna deny the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact now?

Don’t forget that Patriot militias literally rolled around the countryside terrorizing anybody who wasn’t pro independence and destroyed entire villages because the population were loyalists.

>North Italy didnt see combat action.
With that criteria neither did most of Bulgaria see action, there was an internal coup and they switched sides. Nice double standard you got there.

>Spain
>Pales in comparison to eastern europe.
No it fucking doesn't. There was nothing like the devastation of Guernica in Eastern Europe, aside from Poland. Spain was left relying on foreign food aid for a decade.

>France
>Pales in comparison to eastern europe.
Again it depends which country.

>Greece
>Pales in comparison to eastern europe.
No, it really doesn't. They were coming off fighting a devastating war with Turkey which created a massive wave of millions of Turkish Greek refugees into Greece proper, creating all sorts of economic problems. On top of that they got invaded by Italy and Germany, devastating the country again, and they topped it off with a massive civil war as the Germans withdrew. Greece had it worse than any East European country except Yugoslavia and Poland.

>Germany
>Pales in comparison to eastern europe.
Haha oh wow. What was Dresden? What was terror bombing? What was the displacement of East Prussian Germans? Germany was utterly buttfucked by WW2.
Whether they deserved it is another matter. But stop fucking rewriting history.

>what happens when you focus only on muh GEE DEE PEE
That pic is from North Korea. You download it and renamed it to "Seoul slums". You didn't think I was going to use google image search, you LYING SCUMBAG COMMUNIST RAT?

Neck yourself.

>when a retarded shitpost is spammed for a month and estrogen taking tankies agree with it

>That pic is from North Korea

No it isn’t.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guryong_Village

Here are some other nice tidbits about the wonderful capitalist utopia of South Korea.

independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/the-islands-of-abuse-inside-south-koreas-slave-farms-for-the-disabled-9954527.html

m.dw.com/en/north-korea-defector-returns-home-calling-south-capitalist-hell/a-39745918?xtref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.ca%2F

rfa.org/english/news/korea/defectors-12082017105529.html

>Literacy, calorie consumption, etc... are EXPECTED to increase
Completely false. In capitalist countries, these things very rarely increase. In the US for example, real wages have been stagnant since the '70s.

>Now South Korea is excluded from your study because it is high income and successful.
If South Korea is doing so great, why did they elect a far leftist who wants better relations with the DPRK?

>And highhandedly destroys one of the longest lasting cultures in the world
Mao didn't do that. The Qing period encounter with the industrialized west did.

Anti-traditionalism has been a thing since the failure of the Self-Strengthening Movement. Even the ROC had anti-traditionalist elements in it.

Didn't China export grain during the starvation?

>They purposely established an international poverty rate according to the lowest costs of living in the poorest countries, meaning that people living below subsistence levels in other countries are still considered to not be in extreme poverty even if they aren’t making ends meat.
OK, that was an interesting article, but it provides no sources or proof to back its claims. Extreme poverty is defined by $1 dollar a day at PPP. It takes in account cost of living in each country, that's what PPP means.

You can argue the bar is too low, but to suggest that there is some grand conspiracy to hide poverty is ridiculous, because the World Bank calculations are publically available. And world poverty is still outrageous anyway, nobody is clapping for 100 million less or more people.

The fact is that it has gone down, and it has done so the fastest in countries like China and Vietnam which have embraced an export-led capitalist economic model.

>Yeah after it’s socialist government was toppled in a military coup.
Sankara's literacy campaign also failed spectacularly after teachers went on strike and the government replaced them by amateur nobodies. It also was an authoritarian government plagued by torture, politicial trials, and "Committees for the Defense of the Revolution" which were used to intimidate the opposition or simply for personal benefit.

I have read Burkina Faso's history. It is not impressive nor remarkable. Sankara was just another Marxist thug.

>It ranks number 9 in North America
Not very impressive

>almost on par with its neighbours
So they are "almost on par" with countries that were much poorer than Cuba some decades ago. What a success!!

>And yet it suffered from chronic illiteracy, poverty, and lack of access to basic goods.
So did Spain. The US largest Hoovervilles were only erradicated in the 1960s. You might be surprised but the world was actually a shitty place to live in the 1950s.

Cuba was close to the top of the pack.

Real wages are not the same as caloric consumption, infant mortality or life expectancy. US material living standards have improved.

Not him but only 4000 people live in that shanty town. It's the last in the country and in the process of being erradicated.

To compare that with North Korea where 1.5 million starved to death just two decades ago is very scummy.

>Extreme poverty is defined by $1 dollar a day at PPP. It takes in account cost of living in each country, that's what PPP means.

No it isn’t, as they said the IPL was set based on the poverty lines in the poorest countries where the cost of living is the lowest, totally ignoring that what is enough to live on in the Congo will leave you starving in India.

>The fact is that it has gone down, and it has done so the fastest in countries like China and Vietnam which have embraced an export-led capitalist economic model.

Are these countries capitalist? Sure, but the state is still the single largest economic actor, so they are definitely not the western model of capitalism.

>You can argue the bar is too low, but to suggest that there is some grand conspiracy to hide poverty is ridiculous

Not so much a grand conspiracy as an effort for an inherently political institution like the world bank trying to make its policies seem like they work. No different than a Wall Street funded think tank producing a study that says more tax cuts are the answer.

>Sankara's literacy campaign also failed spectacularly after teachers went on strike and the government replaced them by amateur nobodies.

And literacy campaigns from Cuba to Albania succeeded spectacularly under socialist governments. In that sense Burkina Faso was an outlier.

>I have read Burkina Faso's history. It is not impressive nor remarkable.
>Making a country food self sufficient for the first time in its history in just a few years isn’t remarkable because it contradicts my worldview

>Not very impressive

But wait, I thought Cuba was such a poor shithole? Now that I point out that by regional standards it is doing quite well suddenly it’s just “unimpressive”?

>So they are "almost on par" with countries that were much poorer than Cuba some decades ago.

Wtf are you talking about? Maybe if you only include GDP like a retard and go back to when half of Cuba was owned by the mafia.

>Cuba was close to the top of the pack.

Yeah it was so happy and prosperous that people overthrew their government.

>taking da bantz seriously