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Remembering the Victims of Communism.
Monday, November 9th, 2009The historian R.J. Rummel estimates 110 million dead by communism.
24 Responses to “Remembering the Victims of Communism.”
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Wouldn’t they be victims of totalitarian police states?
It wasn’t the ideology that killed them.
What Oatwhore said.
Uh-oh…
http://web.archive.org/web/20070608215540/http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/02/censor-media.html
Not a big supporter of freedom of the press.
i think the point is that you can’t really have communism as a gov’t ideology without it being part of the state … and once you get there, well shoot, you HAVE to have police.
the ideology itself is contrary to personal liberty. so i don’t like it.
I’m wondering how people make these estimates? We have a good idea what the Nazi’s did because they kept such detailed records of their atrocities. But the Russians and Chinese haven’t been known for honest record keeping. How do we estimate with such faulty information floating around?
I guess it doesn’t really matter. Even if his estimates are off by half, 50 million is still the equivilant 10,000 or 12,000 Iraqi Wars.
It all depends how you look at it.
Drawing a line from Tsarist Russia forwards without the revolution doesn’t lead to a world without death or suffering. Communism, and Stalin in particular, undoubtedly made things worse by taking serfdom one step further and turning people into an industrial input to be used until they broke down but, as someone has pointed out above, the totalitarian police state that came before the totalitarian police state was different in the inefficiency with which it corralled and broke people rather than in any substantial difference in ethics.
On the other hand the fear of communism was a key tool that Hitler used to get into power so in some alternate universe where the Russian revolution was averted the twentieth century might have been substantially less bloody in general (though one can always draw these lines of thought out ad infinitum and find an alternate universe where nuclear weapons were developed for longer before being used and a lot more people died).
Overall, though, communism is a silly idea but it’s not the sole factor in those 110 million deaths.
If we’re talking 20th century, then don’t forget the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the various European countries, and the USA. Oh wait, Team USA is always right, so I must be anti-American an unpatriotic.
Sometimes I feel like just banging my face against the desk.
“An appendix provides an incomplete list of 20th century death tolls which Perrault attributes to the capitalist system. The list, which includes both combatant and noncombatant dead, includes an estimated 58 million dead from the First and Second World Wars, plus death tolls from various colonial wars, anticommunist wars and repressions, ethnic conflicts, and some victims of famines or malnutrition,which brings the incomplete list to a combined total of about 100 million deaths attributed to capitalism in the 20th century.”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_black_book_of_capitalism
The 20 million or so chinese peasants who died during the “Great Leap Forward”? Nothing at all to do with communism, was lack of an appropriate ammount of hoe’s that did them in. Obviously a capitalist plot. Same with the aforementioned 3 million N. Koreans starved to death earlier this decade, it wasn’t the fault of communism it had more to do with the police state in general.
I could go on, but I think I’d rather just do the bashing my head into my desk thing I mentioned earlier.
The state kills regardless of ideology. States have a monopoly on the use of force. Can anyone really be surprised when the state takes advantage of their unique position? Why aren’t more ‘libertarians’ anarchists?
Do you understand that both of those were proxy wars where we were fighting the communists of Russia and China through a third country?
In Cambodia, Pol Pot was able to destroy 2 million of 9 million people with his vision of Communist Utopia – this was something to fight against.
Look at North and South Korea today to see the difference in a single country between Communism and Capitalism.
cleavingspace,
Are you even trying? Attributing these deaths to capitalism is so weak. So WWI and WWII were the results of capitalism? Really? It had nothing to do with facism in Italy and Gernamy? Nothing to do with a theocratic state in Japan?
And none of the famines were the results of communist governments huh? None of them? And I’m sure colonialism is the result of capitalism and only capitalism. The Soviets and PRC weren’t essentially colonizing N. Korea and N. Vietnam in the same way the French colonized Indochina? Obviously colonial wars were only fought by capitalists and that whole Soviet-Afghanastan thing never happened.
Well, at least you aren’t biased.
#10,
I hope you cited that quote so we could all see what a load of shit that book is. All casualties in both world wars were the direct result of capitalism?
The trouble with critiques of capitalism like that book is that it assumes that capitalism is a system which is imposed on people just like communism, monarchism, fascism or whatever. Capitalism, or more precisely the free market is not a system in the same way these other ‘isms are. It is simply people doing what people do, voluntarily engaging in exchange. No one had to come up with the market economy; it is not an ideology, it just happens. It is part of human nature.
Yes I understand that. It doesn’t change the fact that some Vietnamese and Koreans were all for communism. To be clear, not all Russians and Chinese were pro-communism, nor does any evils perpetrated by Country X represent the views of all of its citizens. It was good for you to raise this point.
communism *can’t* be held responsible for those 100 million deaths, because **real** communism has never been tried. at least, that’s what the profs said back in college. really SUPER bad luck, actually: just when a utopian communist state was finally getting up and running and the streets were turning to gold and the mountains to rock candy – in *each and every* instance, a dictator popped up who started killing (his own) people by the millions. what’re the freakin’ ODDS?!?
anyway, so they said, if it weren’t for that long series of unfortunate dictatorial coincidences, communism would certainly have shown itself to be everything they (still) tell us it would be. then too, we must be careful to balance communism’s alleged 100,000,000 people killed with the fact the survivors got free healthcare: “all the placebos you can eat!” so basically, it’s no worse than capitalism.
“cleavingspace,
Are you even trying? ”
Yes, I’m trying to show that contributing the deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward to Communism is as silly as blaming WW2 on anti-communist Nazi’s.
“Yes, I’m trying to show that contributing the deaths caused by the Great Leap Forward to Communism is as silly as blaming WW2 on anti-communist Nazi’s.”
So not silly at all then. I’m pretty sure that the Nazis who started WWII were anti-communist.
And remember that when discussing “Communism” in this context, we mean the real world political system that developed in the 20th century, not some fantasy Utopian idea.
Of course there were, they fall into two categories:
1. people who see it as a great way to acquire power in a totalitarian government
2. idiots who think that they will reach their maximum prosperity by living in a communist system where we’ll all share our incredible wealth
We see the same thing playing out all over the world even today.
As someone else said, capitalism is the default condition of people – it’s communism that must be forced upon them.
Here’s some more evil communists suppressing free speech:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/181765/apple_rejects_app_because_of_politician_caricatures.html?tk=rss_news
Okay, you’re a moron.
Do you really think Apple rejecting an iPhone ap is in any way equivalent to communists jailing or killing people for criticizing the government?
Anyone who supports the existence of a government is in the same league as the Communists. It’s a matter of degree, but there’s no solid ideological boundary between the two.
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