It’s striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1][2])
The dichotomy betwen “socialist” and “capitalist” countries makes about as much sense as a dichotomy between e.g. “Mormons” and “non-Mormons”. That is, it probably sounds very important and profound to a Mormon, but it puts many different kinds of stuff in one basket.
Unless your point was that British colonialism was evil, in which case I agree. There is enough place for more than one evil regime in history.
But “capitalism” in the sense of “a country not governed by a Communist party” is a non-apple.
If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.
For the sake of thought experiment, suppose that there are three highly murderous religions, e.g. Mormons, Moonists, Mohists; and everyone else is relatively peaceful.
If you say, in such situation, that Mormons are highly murderous, it doesn’t mean you want to take credit from the remaining two, unless you use words like “most murderous” or “the only murderous”.
There are two things I have an issue with:
One-sided “whataboutism”. Like, in every discussion about Mormons, someone inevitably mentions Moonists and Mohists… but in discussions about Moonists or Mohists, Mormons are typically not mentioned. That makes me suspect that the real reason of the objection is simply to move the discussion away from the Mormons.
(For example, if you wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ireland, it would be pretty inappropriate for me to try derailing it into a debate about communism.)
Creating an almost-all-encompassing basket of “non-Mormons” which includes the murderous Moonists and Mohists, along with the rest of humanity, me and you and Gandhi included; pointing out a few examples of Moonist and Mohist atrocities, and concluding “as you can see, the non-Mormons are just as evil”.
(The basket is “capitalist country” which is pretty much a synonym of “a country not ruled by a communist party”. Yes, a few of them are pretty evil. Are they representative of non-communists to the same degree Stalin + Mao + Pol Pot are representatives of communist regimes?)
I agree, such whataboutism is not necessary. But my point remains. The 100 million killed by communism is an incorrect figure created by anticommunists with an agenda.
Well, I am not qualified to judge historical research. As a personal heuristic, I assume things were more likely towards the worse end of the scale. Not only because of Soviet official propaganda, but also because many “experts” in the West publishing about Soviet Union were shamelessly bribed. Thus I believe that the consensus of experts will be biased towards denying atrocities.
To explain why I consider the Western “experts” unreliable, remember that Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and only people approved by the regime were allowed to enter the country. So, as a first step of selection, only those Western journalists and historians who already demonstrated pro-communist sympathies were allowed to enter the country. As a second step, those who afterwards wrote anything negative, were not allowed to return. (So if you wanted to build a career as an “expert on Soviet Union”, you had a strong incentive to only write what they wanted you to write. If you didn’t, you lost access, and then your colleagues attacked you as “he writes as if he has reliable and up-to-date information about Soviet Union, but he didn’t visit the country for the last X years, and all his research is only based on guesses and rumors and outdated information—but we all know the bad things only happened in the past, and it is completely different now”.) Lastly, foreigners visiting Soviet Union were only allow to visit specified places, and the important ones were often accompanied by police all the time. So they only saw the Potemkin villages the regime wanted to show them, and they only heard good news from local people, because the local people knew that if they something improper, they will be shot along with their families afterwards. This makes me view Western left-wing intellectuals writing positively about life in Soviet Union with deep suspicion.
There is a story in The Gulag Archipelago when Solzhenitsyn was in a death camp where inmates survived 6 months on average… and one day the guards told them that an important American journalist will visit them, so they have to behave nicely. The prisoners were taken to a place outside the camp, where the journalist interviewed them. That is, the journalist spent 99% of time talking to the guards who explained him the enlightened principles of Soviet government that wants to give the second chance even to the hardest criminals (note: many inmates got their sentences for made-up crimes, because the police had to fill the quota of criminals sent to death camps), and then he just asked the prisoners: “so, is it true that you are treated nicely here?”… and the prisoners, with the guards standing right behind them, said “yeah”, not being suicidal. Returning to the camp, Solzhenitsyn thought that the journalist of course cannot be stupid enough to take this all at face value. But a few years later, he had an opportunity to read the article, and… yes, the journalist accepted the story hook, line, and sinker, and wrote a passionate article about how the Russian penal system is so much better and more humane than American.
So, of course there is a chance the survivors would exaggerate, but I still trust their estimates more. To discuss the expert opinion, I would need to know more about the background of these experts (as a rule of thumb, anyone who personally visited Soviet Union before the fall of communism is absolutely untrustworthy in my eyes—they wouldn’t be allowed in otherwise).
I agree. Some intellectuals in the West could not even condemn the execution of Lenin’s comrades by Stalin on trumped up charges. I will trust no Sovietologist who tries to show that Stalin was a good person.
A comparison with USA will be enlightening. I shall note that the methodology includes systematically choosing high estimates. Some of these high estimates like the prison population of USSR, the death toll of the famine stand discredited.
USA itself is responsible for mass murder, by bombing, in Japan, Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. US-backed regimes are implicated in mass murder in Indonesia, East Pakistan, Somalia, and Guatemala. USA also backed Pol Pot, the Cambodian genocidal dictator, during and after his ouster by the Vietnamese army.
And we must not forget that USA backed military juntas in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. These governments also killed thousands of opponents.
It’s striking that these numbers are always stated alone, and never compared to the number killed by capitalist governments using a similar methodology. (Which is clearly not zero, just two examples off the top of my head put it well into the millions [1] [2])
Of course.
The dichotomy betwen “socialist” and “capitalist” countries makes about as much sense as a dichotomy between e.g. “Mormons” and “non-Mormons”. That is, it probably sounds very important and profound to a Mormon, but it puts many different kinds of stuff in one basket.
Unless your point was that British colonialism was evil, in which case I agree. There is enough place for more than one evil regime in history.
But “capitalism” in the sense of “a country not governed by a Communist party” is a non-apple.
If the goal is to figure out how murderous the Mormons are, comparing their murder rate to the murder rate of non-Mormons, or some other reasonable base rate, is exactly what you would do. Surely this would be obvious in any other context.
For the sake of thought experiment, suppose that there are three highly murderous religions, e.g. Mormons, Moonists, Mohists; and everyone else is relatively peaceful.
If you say, in such situation, that Mormons are highly murderous, it doesn’t mean you want to take credit from the remaining two, unless you use words like “most murderous” or “the only murderous”.
There are two things I have an issue with:
One-sided “whataboutism”. Like, in every discussion about Mormons, someone inevitably mentions Moonists and Mohists… but in discussions about Moonists or Mohists, Mormons are typically not mentioned. That makes me suspect that the real reason of the objection is simply to move the discussion away from the Mormons.
(For example, if you wrote an article about the Great Famine in Ireland, it would be pretty inappropriate for me to try derailing it into a debate about communism.)
Creating an almost-all-encompassing basket of “non-Mormons” which includes the murderous Moonists and Mohists, along with the rest of humanity, me and you and Gandhi included; pointing out a few examples of Moonist and Mohist atrocities, and concluding “as you can see, the non-Mormons are just as evil”.
(The basket is “capitalist country” which is pretty much a synonym of “a country not ruled by a communist party”. Yes, a few of them are pretty evil. Are they representative of non-communists to the same degree Stalin + Mao + Pol Pot are representatives of communist regimes?)
I agree, such whataboutism is not necessary. But my point remains. The 100 million killed by communism is an incorrect figure created by anticommunists with an agenda.
Well, I am not qualified to judge historical research. As a personal heuristic, I assume things were more likely towards the worse end of the scale. Not only because of Soviet official propaganda, but also because many “experts” in the West publishing about Soviet Union were shamelessly bribed. Thus I believe that the consensus of experts will be biased towards denying atrocities.
To explain why I consider the Western “experts” unreliable, remember that Soviet Union was a totalitarian state, and only people approved by the regime were allowed to enter the country. So, as a first step of selection, only those Western journalists and historians who already demonstrated pro-communist sympathies were allowed to enter the country. As a second step, those who afterwards wrote anything negative, were not allowed to return. (So if you wanted to build a career as an “expert on Soviet Union”, you had a strong incentive to only write what they wanted you to write. If you didn’t, you lost access, and then your colleagues attacked you as “he writes as if he has reliable and up-to-date information about Soviet Union, but he didn’t visit the country for the last X years, and all his research is only based on guesses and rumors and outdated information—but we all know the bad things only happened in the past, and it is completely different now”.) Lastly, foreigners visiting Soviet Union were only allow to visit specified places, and the important ones were often accompanied by police all the time. So they only saw the Potemkin villages the regime wanted to show them, and they only heard good news from local people, because the local people knew that if they something improper, they will be shot along with their families afterwards. This makes me view Western left-wing intellectuals writing positively about life in Soviet Union with deep suspicion.
There is a story in The Gulag Archipelago when Solzhenitsyn was in a death camp where inmates survived 6 months on average… and one day the guards told them that an important American journalist will visit them, so they have to behave nicely. The prisoners were taken to a place outside the camp, where the journalist interviewed them. That is, the journalist spent 99% of time talking to the guards who explained him the enlightened principles of Soviet government that wants to give the second chance even to the hardest criminals (note: many inmates got their sentences for made-up crimes, because the police had to fill the quota of criminals sent to death camps), and then he just asked the prisoners: “so, is it true that you are treated nicely here?”… and the prisoners, with the guards standing right behind them, said “yeah”, not being suicidal. Returning to the camp, Solzhenitsyn thought that the journalist of course cannot be stupid enough to take this all at face value. But a few years later, he had an opportunity to read the article, and… yes, the journalist accepted the story hook, line, and sinker, and wrote a passionate article about how the Russian penal system is so much better and more humane than American.
So, of course there is a chance the survivors would exaggerate, but I still trust their estimates more. To discuss the expert opinion, I would need to know more about the background of these experts (as a rule of thumb, anyone who personally visited Soviet Union before the fall of communism is absolutely untrustworthy in my eyes—they wouldn’t be allowed in otherwise).
I agree. Some intellectuals in the West could not even condemn the execution of Lenin’s comrades by Stalin on trumped up charges. I will trust no Sovietologist who tries to show that Stalin was a good person.
A comparison with USA will be enlightening. I shall note that the methodology includes systematically choosing high estimates. Some of these high estimates like the prison population of USSR, the death toll of the famine stand discredited.
USA itself is responsible for mass murder, by bombing, in Japan, Germany, North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. US-backed regimes are implicated in mass murder in Indonesia, East Pakistan, Somalia, and Guatemala. USA also backed Pol Pot, the Cambodian genocidal dictator, during and after his ouster by the Vietnamese army. And we must not forget that USA backed military juntas in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Uruguay. These governments also killed thousands of opponents.