White Supremecists Slay 49 in NZ Mosques

[Dill]

(03-18-2019, 11:45 AM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote:

Quote: Wrote: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,

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.

"Decisive"? 

There is nothing in anything I have so far written which supports an assumption that I think "everyone categorized as a criminal was an actual criminal."  I clearly acknowledge how "muddy" these NVKD categories are, adding that people were also freed to drive down death statistics.  Recognizing that, among a population of 170+ million, there may have been some 4-5,000,000 non-political murderers and thieves, does not ignore that people might be defined as such whether they really were or not. 

But back to the question of double standards, I have to ask why ordinary criminals who would have been imprisoned and executed under the Czar or any other regime have to be counted as "victims of Communism."  No one trying to accurately assess the Soviet Union's record will do that after 1991.

What is clear, from the record we have, is that the total number of Gulag-related deaths is way below that often bandied about on the internet. We are speaking here of an error on the order 9-10 million off, not a few thousand, or even 10s of thousands mislabeled for political purposes.

I should add (and this is not directed at you SSF, as you actually take the trouble to read some history, but to fans of internet memedom) the notion of comparing how "bad" dictators are primarily via body counts is objectionable on a number of grounds. It tends to drive historical distortion, fostering double standards and very elastic categories. (Think of how the U.S. military used politically defined body counts to measure success in Vietnam.)

Were someone to decisively show that Hitler had only killed 3 million Jews rather than 6, I would not immediately think--"Aha, so he is not as bad as they say."

Abandoning the old, no longer supported numbers in favor of newer, more accurate ones, should then be viewed as a vote for greater historical accuracy ("truth" this is sometimes called), not defending a dictators.   Said another way, a belief that we should keep the old numbers because a lesser body count defends Stalin (somehow) abandons this evidence-based standard in favor of--what?