1 Again Valentino does not consider Afghanistan in the Communist mass killings chapter that means he discriminates between Communist mass killings and mass killings under Communists If we exclude such episodes as GLF or Great Soviet famine and Rummel s mythical 40 million Gulag deaths which is not taken seriously by any specialist in Russian history the figure of 110 million will dramatically collapse Lion s share of the episodes considered by Valentino were not mass killings in commonsensual understanding of that term And do not forget that Valentino didn t work with primary sources to determine the scale of mass killings he simply compiled the results of others so he is a tertiary source for the figures 2 3 Great 4 Sorry I simply misread you If you meant morality you seem to misread Courtois As Hiroaki Kuromiya Journal of Contemporary History Vol 36 No 1 Jan 2001 pp 191 201 says What is implied in The Black Book is that distinctions between direct and indirect killings are fine points of no consequence and that the crimes of communism are far graver at least numerically than those of another totalitarian regime in the twentieth century nazism whose casualties were a quarter those of communism in other words Courtois conclusion contrary to your assertion is based exactly on the figures and his playing with figures Kuromiya s words is aimed to confirm his point that Communism was much more horrible then Nazism Therefore all of that i combining indirect and direct deaths ii obtaining the figure of 70 million killings iii coming to conclusion that Communism was more horrible than Nazism iv criticism of this idea must be presented in the article in the same place and in a context of each other 5 For example whereas Courtois writes about Communist genocide in Cambodia many authors prefer to speak about national specifics and historical background of the genocide perpetrated by the adepts of weird agrarian Maoist ideology with strong smell of racism and fascism and to show a dramatic difference between Khmer Gouge and e g European or Soviet Communists The problem is that such authors never tried to come out with any combined estimate of Communist death toll simply because they see no much reason for that no significant commonality between those events 6 We have many sources that discuss motivation of the authors of the BB and of Courtois in particular My conclusion is based on that Similarly motivation of Rummel is dictated by his libertarian views I don t remember where I read that but I can try to find