u/RockEater67

Many people nowadays compare China to Oceania from 1984, and while there's some truth to it, I can't help but find it ironic that it's coming from Americans.

Many Americans think that 1984's warning was just "surveillance bad" Or "big government bad"; the shallow, surface level themes of the book are seen as the main point by them. They don't seek to understand the deeper meaning behind it, and it's not their fault. Their media, their government, their society push this line of thinking and they're the products of it.

What 1984 is really about is a fragile and evil government, ruled by wealthy elites, somehow having complete and total control over it's population. It's proletariat(the prols) are the key to it's downfall, they outnumber the government and IngSoc has bare minimum surveillance on them....

But they never overthrew IngSoc, and they never will. Why? IngSoc has supplied them with cheap entertainment, and drowned them in Hedonism, to the point they don't care what their government does. Their vocabulary also got dumbed down to the point that the very thought of true freedom is impossible. Words have lost their meanings, two opposites are seen as the same, slavery is simply freedom and vice versa.

If you're observant enough, you could see the similarities between this fictional dystopia and America. It's no secret how evil the American government and it's elites are, but Americans in the past few decades have never put serious pressure on them to make change. Americans are constantly supplied with propaganda, entertainment, and pleasure to the point that most of them barely care what their government does. For an American, complex logic is stupid, they value simple and satisfying answers more; debates, online or otherwise, are structured to be as simple as possible and value simple comebacks, so that no one would speak about freedom. Policies which take away their power and freedom are labeled as patriotic and liberating; whatever evil the US government commits is simply the greater good.

Demand grows the economy and keeps it healthy, and demand grows when people have more to spend. A father's wage getting raised by a mere dollar, is far more beneficial for the economy than the rich getting billions of dollars from tax cuts. They don't spend most of the trillions they have, it's effectively dead weight for the economy, and that dead weight only grows like a tumor.

For capitalism to remain alive, the market has to grow without break, and letting the rich drag the market down is not in the best interest of a capitalist nation.

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The actual cause of the famine was forced industrialization, which Stalin correctly assessed was necessary for their survival. Any other leader would've came to the same conclusion; Russia lost against Germany and Japan because it lacked industry, and it's largely agrarian economy was not catching up at all. Any white faction in charge of Russia would've still tried it and it would've caused the famine all the same.

Forced industrialization wasn't exclusive to the Soviets, Japan tried it years prior with moderate success. In Japan's case, a famine did not happen. Why? Japan did experience some food shortages, but they had access to international credit and markets, which allowed them to import the food they needed to prevent disaster.

The Soviets could not do that. And it wasn't because of ideology. The Western powers severely limited trade with the USSR and forced it out of international credit because they refused to pay back the massive debt the Tsar created during the great war. No white government would've agreed to repay the debt either, accepting the debt while Russia's economy was thrown back into being an agrarian mess would've turned it into another ottoman empire. Which means the hypothetical white government wouldn't have been able to import food to prevent the disaster.

We already had a similar scenario play out in real history. Iraq, under a nationalistic anti-socialist regime, came out of a long static war with a massive debt which they couldn't repay. Saddam tried his best to convince his lenders to forgive his debt with no success. He turned aggressive when no solution was available, which led to his regime's isolation and a famine which killed about a million of his citizens.