Newsgroup: it.politica
Titolo: THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

8,427,000 Victims: The Totalization Period
7,474,000 Victims: Collectivization and "The Great Leap Forward"
10,729,000 Victims: The Great Famine and Retrenchment Period
7,731,000 Victims: The "Cultural Revolution"
874,000 Victims: Liberalization
With the passing of communism into history as an ideological alternative to 
democracy it is time to do some accounting of its human costs.
Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its 
variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags 
and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial 
executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a 
result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet 
there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total 
might be.
For about eight years I have been sifting through thousands of sources 
trying to determine the extent of democide (genocide and mass murder) in 
this century. As a result of that effort** I am able to give some 
conservative figures on what is an unrivaled communist hecatomb, and to 
compare this to overall world totals.
First, however, I should clarify the term democide.
It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal 
law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing 
the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life.
Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly 
conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as 
would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. 
So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a 
couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are 
ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who 
starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, 
government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial 
executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital 
offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these 
are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist 
show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy 
soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of 
military action against military targets.
Of course, even though systematically determined and calculated, all these 
figures and their graph are only rough approximations. Even were we to have 
total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to 
calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in 
spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best 
experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed 
by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of 
communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative 
approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. And that is what 
the figures in Table 1 are meant to be. Their apparent precision is only due 
to the total for most communist governments being the summation of dozens of 
subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in 
extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres).
With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of 
all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is 
responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps 
around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit 
thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the 
cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is 
the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such 
as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia.
Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big 
difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of 
democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries 
and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer 
Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from 
April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. 
This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds 
of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 
2 to 1.
In sum the communist probably have murdered something like 110,000,000, or 
near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, 
and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself it 
shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been 
killed in all this century's international and domestic wars. Yet the 
probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone--one communist 
country-- well surpasses this cost of war. And those murders of communist 
China almost equal it.
Deaths through government terrorism means the killing of specific 
individuals by assassination, extrajudicial executions, torture, beatings, 
and such.
Massacre, on the other hand, means the indiscriminate mass killing of 
people, as in soldiers machine gunning demonstrators, or entering a village 
and killing all of its inhabitants. As used here, genocide is the killing of 
people because of their ethnicity, race, religion, or language. And democide 
through deportation is the killing of people during their forced mass 
transportation to distant regions and their death as a direct result, such 
as through starvation or exposure. Democidal famine is that which is 
purposely caused or aggravated by government or which is knowingly ignored 
and aid to its victims is withheld.
Communist forced labor was particularly deadly. It not only accounts for 
most deaths under communism, but is close to the world total, which also 
includes colonial forced labor deaths (as in German, Portuguese, and Spanish 
colonies).
Communists also committed genocide, to be sure, but only near half of the 
world total.
Communists are much less disposed to massacre then were many other 
noncommunist governments (such as the Japanese military during World War II, 
or the Nationalist Chinese government from 1928 to 1949).
Communists were much more discriminating in their killing overall, even to 
the extent in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Vietnam, at least, of 
using a quota system. Top officials would order local officials to kill a 
certain number of "enemies of the people," "rightists", or "tyrants".
How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of 
an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that 
they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through 
Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And 
they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used 
to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and 
culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its 
achievement. Government--the Communist Party--was thus above any law. All 
institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. 
And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the 
new world.
Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, 
imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, 
people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its 
necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, 
counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and 
noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions 
may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and 
an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist 
utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that 
communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve 
the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions 
worse than before the revolution.
It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the 
Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) 
and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 
55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, 
a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though 
the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped 
out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as 
refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally 
emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian 
pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.
But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was 
scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the 
dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus 
realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been 
and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a 
communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and 
delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this 
world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and 
Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or 
Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a 
fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had 
its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a 
heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And 
it had its crusade against nonbelievers.
What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the 
state's instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy 
or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the 
professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family.
But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more 
unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and 
society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill 
its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian 
power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when 
totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do 
whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue 
what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. 
In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite 
have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the 
immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels 
is warranted.
Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme 
of democide.
Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most 
absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin's reign or 
the height of Mao's power) has taken place when they have been in their own 
history most totalitarian.
As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a 
loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of 
killing dropped off sharply.
Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever 
seen.
It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and 
children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in 
its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a 
larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. 
That is that no one can be trusted with power.
The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or 
religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human 
lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most 
important one, for fostering liberal democracy.
-- 
The Punisher®
Una voce scomoda contro il neofascismo rosso
http://snipurl.com/nqw1
http://snipurl.com/o36m
 

 874,000 Victims: Liberalization
menzogne degli anticomunisti,
vergogna a inventarvi queste cose!