03-18-2019, 11:45 AM
(03-15-2019, 09:29 PM)Dill Wrote: 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.
Anti-Communism is an ideology? This is literally the first time I've ever heard someone make this assertion. As I stated previously, communism has such an abysmal track record that I'd question the sanity of anyone who wasn't anti-communist.
Quote: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)
This is a fair point, however, it's not as decisive as you seem to think. Do you really think that everyone categorized as a criminal was an actual criminal? One of the best ways to discredit a person and the ideology they represent by showing them to be a reprehensible person, i.e. a murderer or a pedophile. Your own source acknowledges the category as nebulous.
Quote: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.
Nor should they. Stalin imposed forced famines. Mao didn't give a damn about people dying of starvation either. A point can be made the accidental deaths caused by imposing the failed tenants of communism are not the same as a direct decision to cause the death of a group of people. However, when these "accidental" deaths are caused by horrible decisions and you make little to no effort to save these "accidental" causalities they should no longer be categorized as accidental.
Quote: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.
They absolutely both where. The numbers don't come close to Hitler Stalin or Mao, but they absolutely are mass murderers. It is a sad truth that every great civilization was built on the backs of someone else.
Quote: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.
Except I'm not engaging in double standards. Acknowledging the deaths caused by the imperialism of the UK and the founding and growth of the USA in no way lessons the deaths caused by Hitler, Stalin and Mao. If you were to build a Mt. Rushmore of mass murderers those three are shoo-ins. Hopefully we never have a viable fourth candidate to add.
