White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(03-15-2019, 06:17 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: I'm not sure that being anti-communist is necessary, Although why anyone wouldn't be anti-communist is beyond me as it has a horrifying track record.  I could find other sources but I'm at work and am using this as a momentary steam release as I'm under the gun on a rather large task

https://historyofrussia.org/stalin-killed-how-many-people/

Mao is estimated to have killed ~40 million with Stalin in the ~20 million range.

Ok, then.  In any event Stalin, Hitler and Mao were all mass murderers who caused the deaths of millions.  Just to be clear I'm talking about deaths not related to the prosecution of a war, i.e. soldiers killed, civilians killed in combat, by bombing etc. 

Anti-communism is an ideology, a kind of filter through which some groups view history onesidedly to support pre-established views of communism. It has a horrifying track record as well.

One of the first things I noticed in your source was that attribution of some 12 million deaths to "the Gulag." One finds such estimation in the work of writers like Solzhenitsyn and pre-1991 historians like Robert Conquest (The Great Terror: Stalin's Purges of the 1930s (1968)). So right away that is way off the range currently given by professional historians, which runs from 850,000 to 2 million.

Stephen Wheatcroft has a good discussion on this, sifting through the work of historians pre- and post-1991, when Soviet archives were made available to Western historians for a brief time.  If you don't like that sort of thing, scroll down to the conclusion on p. 1348.  (in "The Scale and Nature of German and Soviet Mass Killings, 1930-45."  Europe-Asia Studies Vol. 48, No. 8 1996 1319-53.)  http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/WCR-German_Soviet.pdf

There is a definitional issue here as well, as all people sent to Gulags were not "political" prisoners. One must allow that the Soviet Union had at least SOME garden variety murderers and thieves and the like.  According to historian Michael Ellman, about 34.4% of Gulag prisoners in 1939 were "counter revolutionaries," while another 21.7% were ambiguously classified as "socially dangerous" elements."  Also muddying the waters is that Gulag commandants often freed people who were unable to work or near death, to drive down death statistics.  Even so, we are probably still 10 million short of your 12 million figure. (See Ellman's "Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments," p. 1156, EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES,Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172. http://sovietinfo.tripod.com/ELM-Repression_Statistics.pdf)
 
More on definitions, this time of "mass murderer." Two notes, at least:

1) there is a kind of double standard here. Anti-communists don't distinguish people who die by execution and in gas showers from people who die in famines and other negative results of policies.   Some one who starves because Mao sent peasants to dig a canal rather than plant rice therefore becomes a "murder victim," even though Mao would have preferred he not die.

2) On the other side of the standard, people doing this sort of accounting never have time to add up the deaths amassed under, say, British colonialism (at least two mass starvations in India, each resulting in millions of deaths), or the U.S. conquest of native Americans and or their enslavement of Africans. Doing so would make Queen Victoria and Andrew Jackson "mass murderers" too.

This is not a digression if, armed with an awareness of how ideology can drive definition, we can bring the question of (double)standards to bear on current assessments of terrorism--its origins and threat level.