[two characters are talking]
Vaccines have saved millions of lives you know
[a blue character points at them proudly]
Heh, look at those idiots over there, they believe in the most obvious propaganda
[the blue character is shown doing various faces]
Anyway, did you know communism killed 100 million people?
I’ve seen that 20% of the people commit 80% of the crime
Our military keeps the world a safer place
Everyone starts with opportunities, you have to earn your place in society, work harder
[sixteen variations of the blue character are shown on a multicolored grid]
Crime is out of control and keeps getting worse
Men are natural leaders, women’s nature is to nurture
Billionaires create jobs
Poor people just keep making bad decisions in life
Migrants are taking our jobs
Socialism is when we all share the same paycheck
If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear
If minimum wages go up, everyone will get fired, it’s math
We brought modernity to the countries we colonized
The wage gap is a myth you’re just looking at it wrong
Immigration mathematically causes crime
Developing countries are poor because of corruption
We are the good guys
If workers were worth more, they would be paid more
Universal healthcare is communism
Patriotism means supporting the troops
[a large drawing of a serious Garfield is surrounded by the infinitely repeating phrase]
YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO PROPAGANDA
Well, true. In the case of the great Chinese famine, and arguably the famine in Ukraine & Western Russia, this is a basically accurate description.
But what I’m saying is that this isn’t a useful discussion because it can easily be spun different ways. For example someone might point out that a huge number of famine and malnution deaths have also occurred under capitalism, and they may even find a source saying it’s higher per capita. It’s an incredibly nebulous thing to quantify, but a suitably motivated person can make statistics say anything they want. Are the people dying now in Sudan being killed by ‘capitalism’ because they’re caught in a tug-of-war between capitalist blocs? How many other deaths in all the pointless wars do we add to the total?
You can also easily get lost in the numbers of what deaths count as being caused by the ideology; people are currently dying in Cuba as a more-or-less direct result of Trump’s fuel and trade blockade, but many would (quite disingenuously) argue that this is the fault of the Cuban government. If even a small number of deaths are included in the count which have a dubious claim to be caused by ideology, these can be seized upon to delegitimise the claim of all of them. The 100M figure including the deaths of Nazi soldiers on the eastern front is an example of this.
All of this distracts from why these people died. As you said, famines are not natural and are almost always caused by human activity, whether that’s poor agricultural policy, social conflict, mismanagement of natural resources, poor trade policy, or deliberate starvation. Usually, this is combined with natural events such as drought, floods, earthquakes etc. which push things to breaking point.
Famines that occured in communist and capitalist systems had a range of causes, and blanketing political attempts to attribute them to leftwing or rightwing ideas are unhelpful and will not help prevent them from happening again. It’s just a big unproductive pissing match with no conclusion and no respect for the people who died.