r/librandu • u/_Menstrual_milkshake • 48m ago
Yapping Debunking the “100 million deaths under communism” myth
Communism killed 100–600 million
The claim usually comes in part from a shitpiece called The Black Book of Communism, a work of sensationalist and apparently profascist tripe originally slapped together by professing ‘leftists’ to promote the status quo. The statistic was made using loose qualifications, such as millions of nonexistent Chinese babies being considered ‘victims’, relinquished households probably being considered ‘deaths’ (partially due to bureaucratic technicalities, most likely), and some automobile accidents being considered the fault of socialism. Many of the subtotals are not widely accepted by historians. The statistic also includes many socialists, such as Soviet soldiers and civilians who, of course, learnt about socialism in either schools or on their own. Add this to the fact that most of the victims weren’t straight white cismen either, and normally the statistic would become almost worthless for white anticommunists, which is why they don’t care about millions of Africans, Asians, indigenous Americans, or aboriginal Australians dying. Here is what two of the authors said of the work:
Margolin and Werth furthermore rebuked Courtois in an article published in Le Monde, stating that they disagreed with his vitriolic introduction and its obvious political agenda. Margolin and Werth both rightfully disavowed the book, recognizing that Courtois was obsessed with reaching a body count of a hundred million and consequently leading to careless and biased ‘scholarship’. Courtois also composed the book’s introduction in secret, refusing to regurgitate it for his other contributors. They both rejected Courtois’s equivalence of German Fascism with Communism, with Werth correctly telling Le Monde that ‘death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union.’
Maybe somebody should arrest them for ‘genocide denial’. Indeed, the book itself technically listed 94 million rather than 100 million as popularly claimed. In addition, a group of people’s warriors have refuted Black Book to the point where Harvard University Press’ Mark Kramer in particular had to admit that it contained remedial mathematic errors. (Note though that they are needlessly sectarian and overly skeptical of some famines.)
Morgan Visser’s own take on the book. Peter’s own take on the matter (who has since become a rightist). One response from the Soviet Union critic Noam Chomsky:
A very common variation of this claim is that Stalin or Máo killed more people than Adolf Shitler. Independent investigation indicates otherwise. For example, an Attorney General’s 1954 report to the Stalin critic Nikita Khrushchev indicated that the Soviets had by that time imprisoned only 2.5 million people, and sentenced only about 600,000 to death. Similarly, Dr. Victor Zemskov had studied activities of the state security bodies from 1921 to 1954, and discovered that during this period only about 650,000 people had received death sentences (not all of which were enacted) and only 2.3 million suffered prison terms. Worrisome numbers indeed, but clearly not anywhere nearly as high as antisocialists would like (and only 12–33% suffered imprisonment for unambiguously political reasons). The University of Melbourne analysed the excess mortality under the U.S.S.R. and the Reich, finding that only about three million ‘repression deaths’ (either executions or deaths in prison) occurred in the Soviet Union from 1930–1945 (far lower than the common claims of 20–50 million). They concluded that these ‘are clearly much lower figures than those for [which the Reich] was responsible.’ (The author of this paper, Professor Stephen Wheatcroft, also wrote two other excellent articles describing the exaggeration of the Soviet death toll.) In comparison, the Mouvement contre le Racisme, l’Antisemitisme, et pour la Paix attributed at least fifty million deaths to German Fascism alone (Morgan Visser argued that it’s much higher). As for the infamous Khmer Rouge, there has been debate over whether they were communist at all, and few socialists of any type have any praise for them, but regardless the loss of life that they inflicted was probably closer to 90,000–300,000 than anything over one million; most of the other deaths in the region were far more due to the U.S.’s incessant bombings and other imperialist activity than anything that the Khmer Rouge committed.
A more accurate number is difficult to ascertain, in no small part due to the subjectivity of what constitutes a ‘victim of communism’. Nevertheless, using updated statistics on many of the tragedies discussed, the actual number is probably far closer to something under forty million than anything over ninety million. If that is an accurate estimate then obviously it’s still nothing to boast about, but neither would the death toll of anticommunism, which is in the range of 66–111 million lives.
