Our Profound Ignorance of the Crimes of Communism

[JimG]

"According to a stunning new report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, one-third of Millennials (32%) “believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.” And it isn’t just those silly Millennials that we like to view as clueless. One in four Americans generally (26%) believe more people were killed under Bush than Stalin.

That is breathtaking. Truly incredible.

That rather sickening finding was just one by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has the noble objective of trying to correct America’s ignoble ignorance of the crimes of communism."

I was astonished to read of the vast ignorance of Communism in the 20th century. Is it that history is not taught or that Communist history is whitewashed?

catholicworldreport.com/Blog/5273/our_profound_ignorance_of_the_crimes_of_communism.aspx

 

[Regular_Atheist]

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is a politically motivated organisation established by the United States Congress to degrade any movement that might criticise capitalism or the USA. I have complete sympathy for those who suffered under the “communist” regimes of the 20th century, but the fact is that the VOCMF has no solid definition of communism and no understanding of any communist political theory.

 

[tamedlion]

How could any information be helpful to some one who does not want to know the truth? Only one more thing. Does communism allows information to be revealed the way it actually happens? The answer should come from some one who has lived under that system and still has some sense left on himself, because even that, communism takes away from the individual.

 

[edwest2]

"According to a stunning new report by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, one-third of Millennials (32%) “believe more people were killed under George W. Bush than under Joseph Stalin.” And it isn’t just those silly Millennials that we like to view as clueless. One in four Americans generally (26%) believe more people were killed under Bush than Stalin.

That is breathtaking. Truly incredible.

That rather sickening finding was just one by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has the noble objective of trying to correct America’s ignoble ignorance of the crimes of communism."

I was astonished to read of the vast ignorance of Communism in the 20th century. Is it that history is not taught or that Communist history is whitewashed?

catholicworldreport.com/Blog/5273/our_profound_ignorance_of_the_crimes_of_communism.aspx

Right at the end of World War II, the crimes committed under Stalin were hidden. The Soviet Union was our new enemy but no one could know what was really going on except for the Intelligence Agencies. It has not been until relatively recently that new documents have surfaced about the lies and deceptions that had to be told to cover up the global chess game being played by the Allies and the Russians, After the Soviet Union detonated their first atomic bomb in in 1949, they managed to buy examples of the Nene jet engine from the British and copy it, Strangely, it was a perfect fit for the MiG-15, and the Korean War began in 1950. The West was told plenty of lies so that the Russians were kept in the dark regarding what we knew about their plans and the codes we had broken. It is a large tapestry spanning decades. And the public - those interested - only know a few details.

It’s not “our” fault. It was planned that way.

Ed

 

[JimG]

Communist body count

 

[Latias]

There are many Chileans bitter about Pinochet. There are many Argentinians bitter about the junta. Now, if tens of millions of people were killed by Stalin. How come there wouldn’t be mass resentment towards him instead of half the Russians saying that he had a positive influence. How come the Soviets won against the Wehrmacht despite the bitterness of having their comrades killed by the regime? Killing 20 million people would cause mass resentment. The thesis that Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of people doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of human psychology.

Some may argue that some benefited from the mass murders so they like Stalin. Now tell, how most people from a nation of >~150 million during the 1930s could benefit from mass murder of its own people?

The gas chambers were part of an industrialized system of mass murder. There is no parallel in the Soviet Union. There are, however, mass graves of NKVD executions during 1937-38 where 681,000 were executed, but that doesn’t give you tens of millions.

· Nearly 7 in 10 (68%) of all Americans and nearly 6 in 10 (59%) of Generation Z (ages 16-20) falsely believe that more people were killed under Hitler than Stalin;

More people were killed under Hitler than Stalin. Where is the evidence of industrialized mass murder in the Soviet Union? There were no extermination camps in the Soviet Union. In some years, the gulag had conditions that were similar to Andersonville. That caused an overall death toll of about 1.2 million from the Gulag system in its decades of existence. Those are deaths the Soviet Union is culpable of, but it not gratuitous mass murder (so it should be counted towards whatever total).

It gets worse: 64% of Americans agree with Karl Marx’s classic credo that underpins communist philosophy: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

Why is that bad? Why does a belief in a that means one endorses the things that Stalin allegedly did?

Many millennials are unfamiliar with communist leaders – Mao: 42%; Guevara: 40%; Stalin: 18%; Lenin: 33%; Putin 18%

Putin is not a communist leader. Sounds like the report is actually interested in how people are indoctrinated in anti-communist propaganda, not in the truth.

· Roughly half of millennials (55%) believe Communism was and still is a problem – compared with 80% of Baby Boomers and 91% of elderly Americans.

Didn’t Reagan win the Cold War, and therefore communism isn’t a problem? Sounds like the authors of the survey want people to believe in imaginary enemies.

· A majority of millennials (53%) believe America’s economic system works against them;

Perhaps it works against them. I don’t see how offshoring works for them.

· Younger Americans were far less likely to agree with ideas of capitalist Milton Friedman (Gen Z: 55%; millennials: 58%) than they were Bernie Sanders (Gen Z: 71%; millennials: 71%).

I suppose one should recommend that Pinochet and Videla should deal with those people as they did against the people who sympathized with socialism. No one has any evidence that Sanders or Allende had any plans to commit mass murder.

Thus, it’s not surprising that close to half (45 percent) of Americans aged 16 to 20 (first-time voters in this presidential election) said they would vote for a socialist, and 21 percent would vote for a communist. Of course, that’s reflected in what happened in 2016, as Bernie Sanders, a lifelong self-professed “socialist,” received 13 million votes in the Democratic primary. To give you a sense of that number’s significance, Donald Trump got 14 million votes in the Republican primary, and that was a record for a Republican primary.

Maybe we should Pinochet a fraction of those 13 million.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

Communist body count

This is a pretty insidious attempt at misinformation. The People’s Republic of Kampuchea was the anti-Khmer Rouge pro-Vietnam and pro-USSR Marxist-Leninist (well, sort of, since it was the 1980s) government established by the Vietnamese after they took Phnom Penh. It seems odd to try and conflate the Khmer Rouge’s nation-state with another which was established in opposition to the Khmer Rouge and continued to fight them after being established.

Also, there is really nothing about the Khmer Rouge that bears any resemblance to any kind of normal communist/Marxist thought. They were pretty crazy, and wanted to depopulate urban areas and force everyone onto agrarian communes, along with lots of other weird stuff.

 

[Latias]

East Germany killed 70,000 and Cuba killed 72,000. Give me a break!

There is no evidence for either.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

Some may argue that some benefited from the mass murders so they like Stalin. Now tell, how most people from a nation of >~150 million during the 1930s could benefit from mass murder of its own people?

Well there were examples of large famines in the USSR which were essentially ignored. The Ukrainian famine of 1932 was acknowledged by Stalin in letters but essentially entirely ignored, and no effort was made to prevent it from happening. I don’t believe it was an act of genocide or ethnically motivated, but it was definitely an incredibly callous and cruel act from the Stalinist bureaucracy. Of course there was famine after the Civil War, but in that case international aid was sought and some attempt was made to relieve the suffering of those starving.

More people were killed under Hitler than Stalin. Where is the evidence of industrialized mass murder in the Soviet Union? There were no extermination camps in the Soviet Union. In some years, the gulag had conditions that were similar to Andersonville. That caused an overall death toll of about 1.2 million from the Gulag system in its decades of existence. Those are deaths the Soviet Union is culpable of, but it not gratuitous mass murder (so it should be counted towards whatever total).

This is a fair point, and something that people seem to ignore. I’m not sure it is fair to equate deaths that were the result of bureaucratic incompetence to attempts at genocide. Some figures add deaths during the Great Patriotic War to Stalin’s death toll, which is silly for a variety of reasons, but if we’re doing that we may as well add all deaths from World War Two to Hitler’s death toll.

Having said that, there were examples of ethnic deportations in the USSR, along with Antisemitism in the late 1940s. I don’t really see why any socialist should bother defending Stalin’s USSR. It was a bureaucratic mess that only seemed to betray the ideals of the 1917 revolution more the further in time you go. If you’re a socialist, you don’t need to measure the failure of the USSR by the number of people killed.

Why is that bad? Why does a belief in a that means one endorses the things that Stalin allegedly did?

Equating Karl Marx with Joseph Stalin is one of the most insidious things anti-communist propaganda does. Marx was very much concerned with liberating man from man and from the alienation of capitalism, and creating a society that was more truly individualist than anything Ayn Rand could even dream of. Communism is essentially a society where everyone can do whatever they want without worrying about being coerced into living a certain way, whether that’s through physical force/threat of violence or material want. The development of Stalinist society marked the beginning of the deviation of the 1917 revolution from socialism, and wasn’t any kind of fulfillment of Marx’s ideas.

 

[PseuTonym]

Also, there is really nothing about the Khmer Rouge that bears any resemblance to any kind of normal communist/Marxist thought. They were pretty crazy, and wanted to depopulate urban areas and force everyone onto agrarian communes, along with lots of other weird stuff.

The Khmer Rouge might have taken the core of written Marxism seriously and ignored popular opinion among Marxists.

Do Marxists write about hunter-gatherers who were capitalists? Do Marxists write about Old Kingdom Egyptian farmers accumulating too much capital and creating a crisis for the entire economic system? My impression is that the focus is on the early stages of the industrial revolution and on factories. If exploitation is associated with factories, then why not abolish factories, export some food, and import manufactured goods from foreign countries?

 

[Latias]

Equating Karl Marx with Joseph Stalin is one of the most insidious things anti-communist propaganda does. Marx was very much concerned with liberating man from man and from the alienation of capitalism, and creating a society that was more truly individualist than anything Ayn Rand could even dream of. Communism is essentially a society where everyone can do whatever they want without worrying about being coerced into living a certain way, whether that’s through physical force/threat of violence or material want. The development of Stalinist society marked the beginning of the deviation of the 1917 revolution from socialism, and wasn’t any kind of fulfillment of Marx’s ideas.

There are some Marxist-Leninists who think it is important to salvage the name of Stalin. I really don’t feel inclined to defend his domestic policies, but he certainly go some things right since the Soviet Union won World War II. I most certainly do not believe that Joseph Stalin killed tens of millions of people, since there is no evidence for it (even if we believe he was personally responsible for every death in the Gulag and Yezhovshchina), but I do see these bogus death tolls as particularly insidious. Many people wield these death tolls in order to portray people such as Pinochet as enlightened rulers who were justified in torturing and murdering people.

The death toll is propaganda. People could dislike Stalin because he had an authoritarian system and was very repressive.

I don’t see Marxism-Leninism as particularly bad. I see that in some cases it could provide for the people’s material welfare, engender social solidarity, and resist the depredations of imperialism. That would still be true regardless of how many people Stalin killed. It is more important to appreciate that while states like East Germany were politically repressive, many people thrived and appreciated life there. People lived dignified lives there without fear of privation or insecurity. You could not say that about any of the South American dictatorships.

Heck, Jaruzelski was a military dictator for a Marxist-Leninist regime, and there is no credible evidence that he tortured or engaged in mass murder. He also gave up power voluntarily.

The Soviets tried to help Ukraine, but there simply wasn’t enough grain, and the Soviets were not willing to use the grain of the army to feed them, due to a fear of an invasion from the East.

 

[PseuTonym]

The development of Stalinist society marked the beginning of the deviation of the 1917 revolution from socialism, and wasn’t any kind of fulfillment of Marx’s ideas.

Are you claiming that Stalin created the secret police, or are you saying that secret police, no right to a trial before punishment, etc. are things that people should expect as part of the plan if they support Marxist ideals?

 

[PseuTonym]

he certainly go some things right since the Soviet Union won World War II.

That’s the feeling of Winston Smith at the end of 1984. Upon hearing of a military victory by Airstrip One (the UK) and its allies, Winston Smith finally won the victory over himself and genuinely loved Big Brother.

 

[Latias]

Are you claiming that Stalin created the secret police, or are you saying that secret police, no right to a trial before punishment, etc. are things that people should expect as part of the plan if they support Marxist ideals?

The Yezhovshchina did not have trials but NKVD troikas. That is a major reason why 681,000 people died as a result of political repression from 1937-38.

I don’t know the political climate then.I do not think the Yezhovshchina was planned by Stalin to eliminate people, but it was more like a madness with a will of its own. Stalin was a participant in it and did things to aggregate it.

I think the best explanation for the terror was the it resembled a man-in-the-middle computer attack like the Stuxnet worm. The NKVD gave the politburo and Stalin false information, and this false information fueled a perception of non-existent conspiracies and brutal political repression.

Neither the beginning of, the course of, nor the end of the Terror show the hand of a master planner.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 135

This book argues that Stalin was not guilty of mass first-degree murder from 1934 to 1941 and did not plan or carry out a systematic campaign to crush the nation. This view is not one of absolution, however: his policies did help to engender real plots, lies, and threats to his position.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 227

Several conclusions follow: Stalin becomes more human than others have portrayed him. And his regime becomes less malevolent but possessed of greater popular support than is usually argued.
Thurston, Robert. Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934-1941. New Haven: Yale University Press, c1996, p. 228

I don’t have the book, but I do think Thuston’s assessment is credible.

 

[Peter_Plato]

Cuba killed 72,000. Give me a break!

There is no evidence for either.

“No evidence” is a bit of an exaggeration.

cubanexilequarter.blogspot.ca/2012/04/the-rising-body-count-in-cuba.html

A conservative estimate gives the range, according to Matthew White in his website Necrometrics, at between 5,000-12,000 Cubans killed by the Castro regime compared with Chileans killed by the Pinochet regime which number 3,197. Rudolph Joseph Rummel, a political science professor at the University of Hawaii and an expert in Democide (murder by government) also takes into account the Cuban boat people who have died fleeing the dictatorship and estimates 73,000 dead Cubans between 1959 and 1987. In The Black Book of Communism in chapter 25 “Communism in Latin America” by Pascal Fontaine states that in Cuba between 1959 through the late 1990s “between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot.” All these are conservative numbers. The Cuban Archives place the number at 100,000.

You haven’t provided any evidence, as yet, that you can substantiate a more accurate number.

Mere disbelief on your part doesn’t suffice.

 

[Peter_Plato]

The development of Stalinist society marked the beginning of the deviation of the 1917 revolution from socialism, and wasn’t any kind of fulfillment of Marx’s ideas.

Oh, I don’t know. Some have made a pretty strong case that socialism leads, in practice and by necessity, to the kind of totalitarianism embodied in Stalinist society.

youtube.com/watch?v=WrRGotEu_Zw

 

[Latias]

“No evidence” is a bit of an exaggeration.

cubanexilequarter.blogspot.ca/2012/04/the-rising-body-count-in-cuba.html

A conservative estimate gives the range, according to Matthew White in his website Necrometrics, at between 5,000-12,000 Cubans killed by the Castro regime compared with Chileans killed by the Pinochet regime which number 3,197. Rudolph Joseph Rummel, a political science professor at the University of Hawaii and an expert in Democide (murder by government) also takes into account the Cuban boat people who have died fleeing the dictatorship and estimates 73,000 dead Cubans between 1959 and 1987. In The Black Book of Communism in chapter 25 “Communism in Latin America” by Pascal Fontaine states that in Cuba between 1959 through the late 1990s “between 15,000 and 17,000 people were shot.” All these are conservative numbers. The Cuban Archives place the number at 100,000.

You haven’t provided any evidence, as yet, that you can substantiate a more accurate number.

Mere disbelief on your part doesn’t suffice.

So your evidence is someone citing the Black Book of Communism and Rudolph Rummel.

This is a nice critique of RJ Rummel. Look at the analysis below for the number of deaths that the US caused which is in the tens of millions:

The United States

5 years of drone strikes used to maintain US military dominance in the Middle East for the purpose of securing trade routes and oil reserves – 2,400 dead [11][12]

Syrian Civil War caused by the US’ funding of Syrian rebels as well as the terrorist organization Al Nusra in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government [13][14][15][16] – at least 146,000 dead [17][18]

US Funded and NATO Intervention in Libya for the sake of overthrowing the government and getting oil [19][20][21] – estimates range from 10,000 by the deniers, to 50,000 by the rebels. The commonly accepted number by the US is 30,000 dead [22][23]

United States backed government of Sri Lanka for the sake of maintaining trade routes and neo-liberal foothold in southern Asia – 100,000 dead (some sources say 40,000 not including the huge numbers of civilians) [24][25]

The War in Iraq which was for the sake of gaining oil controlling petroleum exports [26][27] and with the interest of advancing US imperialism [28] – most recent study indicates 500,000 dead Iraqis and 4,500 dead US soldiers [29][30][31]

The War in Afghanistan – 2,000 dead US soldiers and 20,000 civilians [32][33]

US bombing of Pakistan for the War on Terror and to maintain our imperial dominance abroad – 50,000 dead [34]

US and Mexican War on Drugs to maintain a monopoly and to support military spending as well as drug cartel violence for profit – 47,000 dead [35]

Operation Desert Storm (First Gulf War) which was for the sake of maintaining dominance in the Middle East as well as for imperialistic reasons [36][37][38][39] – 158,000 Iraqis [40] – 75,000 US Soldiers dead from the War and Gulf War Syndrome [41]

US Sanctions against Iraq from 1990-2012 – 3,300,000 [42]

Iran-Iraq War where the United States funded both sides in an attempt to have each wipe the other out – about 1,500,000 [43][44][45]

The War in Vietnam to “beat Communism” and maintain an Asian sphere of influence – 3,800,000 Vietnamese between 1955-1984 [46] about 58,000 US soldiers [47] about 200,000 in Laos [48] about 300,000 in Cambodia [49] it’s hard to calculate Agent Orange deaths but up to 4,800,000 people were exposed [50] and 100,000 US soldiers killed themselves [51]

Korean War to “beat Communism” and maintain dominance in Asia – 54,000 US soldiers [52] and about 5,000,000 Koreans died [53]

petersaysstuff.com/2014/05/attempting-the-impossible-calculating-capitalisms-death-toll/

It also has a critique of Rummel’s methods.

That is my evidence the US killed tens of millions of people. You should take it seriously, since it is of similar quality to the evidence presented in the Black Book of Communism.

Turning to executions and custodial deaths in the entire Stalin period, we know that, between 1934 and 1953, 1,053,829 persons died in the camps of the GULAG. We have data to the effect that some 86,582 people perished in prisons between 1939 and 1951. (We do not yet know exactly how many died in labor colonies.) We also know that, between 1930 and 1952-1953, 786,098 “counter-revolutionaries” were executed (or, according to another source, more than 775,866 persons “on cases of the police” and for “political crimes”). Finally, we know that, from 1932 through 1940, 389,521 peasants died in places of “kulak” resettlement. Adding these figures together would produce a total of a little more than 2.3 million, but this can in no way be taken as an exact number. First of all, there is a possible overlap between the numbers given for GULAG camp deaths and “political” executions as well as between the latter and other victims of the 1937-1938 mass purges and perhaps also other categories falling under police jurisdiction. Double-counting would deflate the 2.3 million figure. On the other hand, the 2.3 million does not include several suspected categories of death in custody. It does not include, for example, deaths among deportees during and after the war as well as among categories of exiles other than “kulaks.” Still, we have some reason to believe that the new numbers for GULAG and prison deaths, executions as well as deaths in peasant exile, are likely to bring us within a much narrower range of error than the estimates proposed by the majority of authors who have written on the subject.

web.archive.org/web/20080611064213/http:/www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/AHR/AHR.html

 

[Latias]

I do not trust Rummel and the Black Book of Communism, but superficially, it would appear that some of the resources in your link are credible.

translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cidh.org%2Fcountryrep%2FCuba63sp%2Findice.htm

 

[Peter_Plato]

So your evidence is someone citing the Black Book of Communism and Rudolph Rummel.

Except that the “someone” didn’t just give the Black Book or Rummel’s numbers but a range of estimates.

Now if you have problems with a few, don’t attack me for you having issues.

The difficulty, it would seem, is that hard numbers are difficult to arrive at and whether the low or high ones are cited, there are good reasons to critique all the estimates for one reason or other.

 

[Latias]

Except that the “someone” didn’t just give the Black Book or Rummel’s numbers but a range of estimates.

Now if you have problems with a few, don’t attack me for you having issues.

The difficulty, it would seem, is that hard numbers are difficult to arrive at and whether the low or high ones are cited, there are good reasons to critique all the estimates for one reason or other.

I don’t see where I “attack you.” Don’t start using hostile attribution.

How do you know that these ranges for Cuba are fairly accurate? I doubt there is much evidence to support them since they are not based on demographic considerations or the archives. Again, one could come up with an enormous number of people killed by the US if one uses the same methods.

So where is the evidence that Cuba under Castro tortured tens of thousands of people? There are authoritarian institutions within Cuba that impose conformity with the policies and positions of the regime, but there doesn’t seem to be forced disappearances, torture, and murder to achieve that.

There are documented executions (likely totaling in the high hundreds) in Cuba during the immediate aftermath of the Revolution and a few years afterwards. The Inter-American Association of Human Rights reports seem to be a reliable source for some accounts of particular executions.

The Soviet archives in the paper that I cited does not support the very high estimates. It doesn’t even make sense from the standpoint of evidence, as there were no extermination camps in Soviet Union or mobilized campaign to eliminate people in Rwanda (after a crisis when Habyarimana’s plane was shot done). The only evidence of a period of mass killing is the Yezhovshchina during 1937-38 where 681,000 people were executed. There were mass grave discovered in Russia and Ukraine that contains the remains of people executed during that period.

It also doesn’t make sense from the standpoint of human psychology. Killing tens of millions of people would affect the consciousness of everyone in a country and lead to widespread resentment against the regime. Yet, the Soviets won World War II, and many Russians have a positive impression of Stalin even though they acknowledge he was a harsh authoritarian ruler.