03-18-2019, 06:29 PM
(03-18-2019, 03:54 PM)Dill Wrote: "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.
You're arguing against a point I haven't made. I'm saying "X" number of people were called under Stalin. I'm not making a "X" number of people were killed by communism. While I have no doubt that some prisoners of the Czar were still alive when Stalin took power I don't know that they existed in numbers significant enough to alter the numbers killed by Stalin in a statistically significant way.
Quote: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.
We aren't just talking about Gulag-related deaths though. You also have to account for the Holodomor, which at even its lowest estimates killed millions. Stalin also had people killed at whim and brutally crushed any opposition to Soviet rule in Eastern Europe. Part of the reason for the poor showing of the Soviet military in the early stages of the Eastern Front was Stalin's brutal purge of thousands of officers from the Red Army done to consolidate Stalin's power base.
Quote: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."
This I don't disagree with at all.
Quote: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?
When I made the arguments in previous posts about why some have defended, minimized or mitigated the actions of Stalin I was not referring to you, but to the general practice and the reasons for it. As I stated before Stalin, Mao and Hitler were all monsters of the highest order. Personally I see no need to rank one of them above the others, they are all equally worthy of contempt.
