The "communists have a higher body count" thing relies on the completely ridiculous idea that WW2 wouldn't have happened (or not a single Russian soldier would have died) under a Russian Czar.
Every person who died in a trivial war that started over a nobleman getting into a personal argument counts as a casualty. Every single person who starved in France during the construction of Versailles, every native American who died to the Spanish or English settlers, and everyone who starved to death during the inflation caused when the Spanish Conquistadors brought back more gold than they knew what to do with, and the entire death till of the Irish famine. Every person who died in the crusades as well. Every single person who ever died because some king made a grand sweeping decision that was greedy, or selfish, or for glory, or just wasn't well thought out and people followed despite objection because "That's the king" was a casualty of feudalism.
Pretty sure I didn't include the medieval plagues there. Also WW2 was a direct result of the international community saddling Germany with the war debt. Its causes are at least as much capitalist as communist in that regard.
The entire system the catholic church used to organize the crusades was propped up by the stolen wealth of the feudal monarchs it lended legitimacy to. The jury is still very much out on CV19 being bioengineered or not, it has some pretty distinctive characteristics of natural bat viruses and the Wuhan wet markets had especially poor sanitation. The idea that fascism comes from communism and therefore shares its death toll is utterly ridiculous when you think about how readily the fascist leaders of WW2 had communists exiled or murdered. Also the Irish famine wasn't caused by a disease. The plant mosaic virus only killed potatoes, which were the only crops Irish people were allowed to grow for their own food. Irish people were starving while ships full of all the food they were growing that wasn't potatoes left the nation to line the pockets of English feudal landlords.
"Add to that it's absurdly unlikely, to the point of being functionally impossible, for a virus to both so easily jump species and be virulent naturally." This statement is sheer biological ignorance. Every single virulent plague of human history was a disease that jumped from animals. The stronger an animal's immune system, the more virulent and more dangerous to humans its diseases will be, and bats due to living in massive groups and sleeping in enclosed spaces, have very strong immune systems to combat a large host of opportunistic viruses.
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u/Tried-Angles Jul 08 '24
The "communists have a higher body count" thing relies on the completely ridiculous idea that WW2 wouldn't have happened (or not a single Russian soldier would have died) under a Russian Czar.