Thanks Thomas, great site. I do realize there's a lot of crap around on the Internet. I already apologized for putting the number of people killed by these persons in the poll. I do have the feeling the website I used was a little bit pro-socialist: one of their heroes is Ho Chi Minh. You can argue that one.
One thing: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing. Does that one refer to the Polish Germans?
Rick d'Israeli wrote:One thing: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing. Does that one refer to the Polish Germans?
It refers to the Germans in Silesia, Pommerania, and East Prussia -- German provinces that came under Polish rule after the World War II. Germans in these territories were either killed, or they fled to the rest of Germany. I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "the Polish Germans".
PS: Note that the web page has links to each entry where the situation and the data sources are explained.
Rick d'Israeli wrote:
Setanta wrote:Have you met Lusatian?
Insult!
Not an insult. Lusatian is my brother and for nearly every problem in the world his proposed solution is genocide.
I kid you not, he is just a really passionate fan of people dying and if there are none to kill he'll need to create dragons.
It's not an insult to him, he really thinks genocide is the way to go.
I continue to advise counseling.
This is why i am both mystified and disgusted by the fascination with state-sponsored mass murder. Who cares what the numbers are, the motivations are scurrilous. Attila and Temujin simply killed because they could, and because their authority over the savage hordes depended upon slaking the blood lust of those hordes.
Hitler was a military idiot, and the slaughter was predicated upon a contention of pursuing eugenics initially (killing the "mentally defective," the physically handicapped and homosexuals), and for racist reasons thereafter--Jews, Gypsies, Slavs. Hitler was pathological, as very likely were Eichmann and his ilk.
Stalin has no such excuse, and neither does Mao. Both were furthering their personal interpretations of Marxist doctrine, and were willing to murder or at the least countenance murder in furtherance of ideological goals. In the example of the "kalmuks," Stalin knew fully well that the base of peasant support which the pre-Bolsehvik soviets had exploited would evaporate as soon as there was any distribution of land to the peasants. Those who had gotten land were branded Kalmuks, and transported to starvation and death. Those who had not yet benefitted from land re-distribution during the revolution were "collectivized." Prior to 1914, the Russian empire had been the world's largest exporter of grain (largely from the Ukraine, which suffered most from Stalin's policy), surpassing both the United States and Canada. After Stalin's "reforms," the Soviet Union struggled to feed its population throughout its history.
The purges of the 1930's were simply the bloody climax of Stalin's program to eliminate all political opposition. The Soldiers and Sailors Soviet and the Petrograd Soviet had made the revolution, and the authority of their members remained high with the Russian people. Stalin, with the aid of Beria, moved methodically to remove every member of those soviets, and all who had associated with them, or were accused of associating by political enemies. I consider that Stalin was about as sane as the rest of us, and that this makes his crimes the more heinous.
Whereas i don't necessarily consider Mao to have been pathologically defective, i do think that from the period of the "Cultural Revolution" onward, his policies were most informed by the confusion of senility. I don't offer this as excuse, simply as explanation.
I rate Stalin the worst, because Josef Dugashvili was a sane, rational man who applied his considerable and well-educated intellect to the destruction of all who stood in his way, opposed him, or even looked like perhaps someday opposing him.
By the way, i realize i've made a gross error. Stalin branded the new land-owning peasants as "Kulaks," not Kalmuks. I've been reading the history of Tsarist dynasties lately, and so got the two terms confused in my mind. Where i've written Kalmuk above, substitute the word Kulak.
Thomas wrote:1) Soviet Communists (60 million)
2) Chinese Communists (35 million)
3) German Nazis. (20 million)
That sounds more like the numbers I've heard before.
To put
all WW2 casualties in Hitler's column like your source apparently did, Rick, is a bit ... I mean, he started it, obviously. But in the end there were a bunch of people killing a bunch of people - Italian fascists did their share, Croat and Serb fascists and partisans killed each other, Ukrainians and Russians killed each other and Stalin killed a bunch of his own for the occasion too - like the Soviet POWs who, after they were freed in Germany, were collectively deported to the Gulag ... and hell, Stalin had 80% of his army's top brass executed the year before the war started, for that alone he should be made responsible for at least part of the Russian dead that fell when the Germans initially walked all over the Red Army, all the way to Stalingrad ...
What about Lenin and Trotsky? They were responsible for a bunch of killing, executing and deporting in and after the Russian Civil War, plus some accompanying famine ... also talking millions there, I'd say.
I'd include Trotsky, perhaps, but certainly not Vladimir Ulyanov--Lenin. I am not an admirer, but i do consider that he sincerely worked for a more just and equitable society, and consider that he was misguided. I would not assign to him any responsibility for the deportations and famine; i lay that squarely at the feet of Stalin.
All terrible, but my choice, in terms of both relative numbers, the insanity and sadistic cruelty of the genocide, is Pol Pot... who counted with the support of the Maoist "Band of Four".
We've left out Idi Amin . . . he wasn't one of the biggies, but he deserves an "A" for effort.
Perhaps we can turn this thread in to a venue to justifiably condemn the homocidal who have attained public office.
On the NPR program Fresh Air, Terry Gross is now interviewing a gentleman named Montefiori, who has written a book entitled The Court of the Red Tsar, about Stalin and his inner circle, and based upon documents released in Russia. He states that Stalin issued orders for killings by quota, as in "you must kill 20,000 enemies of the state," "you must kill 15,000 enemies of the state," and that he had apparently no interest in the names or details. He further states these papers state that Stalin determined to eliminate (in the author's phrase) "the entire strata of the Bolshevik officials." Fascinating . . . and horrifying.
He now further states that Stalin would send out "albums" which contained the names and photographs of 40,000 people who were to be murdered by gunshot to the back of the head. This is really creeping me out.
Thomas wrote:I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "the Polish Germans".
Yes I mean those. I should have explained that one.
nimh wrote:To put all WW2 casualties in Hitler's column like your source apparently did, Rick, is a bit ... I mean, he started it, obviously.
Again, my sincere apologies.
Setanta wrote:I would not assign to him any responsibility for the deportations and famine; i lay that squarely at the feet of Stalin.
Quote:The Famine of 1921
The famine of 1921 began with a drought that caused massive crop failures, including total crop failure on about 20 percent of Soviet farmland. Although certainly a disaster of large proportions, such periodic drastic crop failures were not unknown in Russia. A similar drought struck in 1892, for example, which led to the worst crop failure of late tsarist Russia.
The comparisons between the droughts ends, and the tragedy begins, when the Bolsheviks reacted markedly different to the natural disaster. Tsarist officials arranged for the delivery of food supplies to the affected regions which, in combination with private relief efforts, kept deaths down to 375,000 to 400,000.
The Bolsheviks, by contrast, simply ignored the famine until it was largely too late. Unable or unwilling to admit natural disasters could strike in the worker's paradise, Lenin took actions to protect himself politically but did nothing to prevent the starvation. In May and June 1921, Lenin ordered food purchases abroad, but earmarked them for the politically important cities rather than for starving peasants. Bolshevik leaders avoided visiting the areas suffering from famine.
Even when finally requesting famine aid, the Bolsheviks relied on the nominally private All-Russian Public Committee to Aid the Hungry (Pomgol). Pomgol requested the assistance of the American Relief Association founded by Herbert Hoover, then-U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The ARA responded by spending over $61.6 million to relieve the Russian famine. The ARA fed up to 11 million people a day at the height of relief efforts. The ARA suspended relief operations in June 1923 when it was revealed the Soviet Union was offering foodstuffs for sale abroad -- specifically millions of tons of cereals which it preferred to sell for hard currency rather than feed its starving people.
With the worst of the famine over, though, this posed little political risk. For helping relieve the famine, Pomgol's members were liquidated; all but two of its members were arrested by the Soviet secret police and imprisoned.
Although exact casualty figures don't exist, a Soviet estimate put the death toll at 5.1 million.
Quote:Famine of 1921-22
Food shortages were a critical source of social unrest and political instability during the first year of Soviet power. Through the course of the civil war, efforts by the Soviet government to acquire sufficient foodstuffs to support the Red Army and the urban population assumed massive proportions. Food detachments sent out from the cities were a regular feature of the "food dictatorship" that was imposed on the peasantry. Even after the civil war wound down, requisitioning of grain and other food supplies provoked violent confrontations between Soviet authorities and peasant producers. One consequence of these encounters was the reduction of sown area which left little margin for crop failures. The situation was "ripe" for famine. The New Economic Policy, which permitted peasants to sell their surpluses after meeting tax obligations, was a bold attempt on the part of the state to break the cycle of violence that characterized its relations with the peasantry. But no sooner was it introduced in the spring of 1921 then the entire Volga basin was hit by a devastating crop failure, actually the second in as many years.
The resulting famine affected at least twenty million people, one and a quarter million of whom trekked from the stricken region to other parts of the country. In July 1921, the Soviet government gave authority to local authorities to exempt from the tax-in-kind peasants suffering from crop failures. The famine forced the Bolsheviks to re-establish ties with capitalist nations in the west, from which food aid poured in. It appointed an All-Russian Committee to Aid the Hungry, consisting of prominent intellectuals including Maksim Gorky. Gorky's appeal for foreign assistance bore fruit in the agreement concluded between the Soviet government and the American Relief Administration directed by Herbert Hoover. Over the next two years, the ARA supplied food and medical assistance to a reported ten million people. Nevertheless, an estimated five million people died as a result of the famine, succumbing to outbreaks of cholera and typhus that proved fatal owing to weakened resistance.
Setanta wrote:I'd include Trotsky, perhaps, but certainly not Vladimir Ulyanov--Lenin. I am not an admirer, but i do consider that he sincerely worked for a more just and equitable society, and consider that he was misguided. I would not assign to him any responsibility for the deportations and famine; i lay that squarely at the feet of Stalin.
The deportations and famine of the thirties may lay squarely at the feet of Stalin, but those of 1918-1922 had little to do with him.
I do not share your opinion on Lenin being merely "misguided" and I consider him as responsible as anyone for the mass murders of 1918-1922, whether it be the arrest, deportation and execution of Menshevik, Socialist-Revolutionary and Kadet politicians and rank-and-file members, that of local priests or land-owning farmers (not on as massive a scale as in 1931-33 perhaps, but of a large enough scale anyway) or the violent suppression of the "Green" peasants' revolt in Central Russia after the Whites were already defeated.
I've read decrees in which Lenin ordered local commanders to make sure to kill a certain percentage of every village in which they expected any trouble to arise, as a kind of pre-emptive intimidation measure - and to take out clergy, farmers and intellectuals/teachers especially, since the resulting "beheading" of the community would render it incapable of organised resistance. Though he was not afflicted of the kind of burning paranoia that made Stalin such a relentless killer of anyone with a personality, Lenin did pioneer and develop all the "scorched earth" tactics that would make Stalin such an effective mass murderer. The Gulag was "founded" in those first years after the coup d'etat/revolution, not in the thirties, and it was Lenin's head Chekist Dzherzhinsky who created and shaped the feared Soviet security apparatus and the ways in which it held sway.
For sure, under Lenin there was a much greater degree of pluralism within the Party, and the Party in turn still more or less exercised control over the security apparatus, rather than the other way round; furthermore, unlike Stalin, Lenin knew how and when to retreat and compromise (NEP) as well. But Stalin invented little - Lenin had already created and test-driven his tools and strategies of slaughter.
Anyway, thats my take on it.
Ah, I see I'm late to the debate
Setanta wrote:On the NPR program Fresh Air, Terry Gross is now interviewing a gentleman named Montefiori, who has written a book entitled The Court of the Red Tsar, about Stalin and his inner circle, and based upon documents released in Russia. He states that Stalin issued orders for killings by quota, as in "you must kill 20,000 enemies of the state," "you must kill 15,000 enemies of the state," and that he had apparently no interest in the names or details. He further states these papers state that Stalin determined to eliminate (in the author's phrase) "the entire strata of the Bolshevik officials." Fascinating . . . and horrifying.
Yes, this is interesting. Interesting because it highlights both
- something that came directly from Lenin's toolbox (the quota-killings, uncoupled entirely from the notion of individual guilt, devised purely as a merciless strategy of suppression) and
- something in which Stalin was very different from Lenin (how the terror turned inwards, against the Bolsheviks themselves - under Stalin, party members ran a greater risk than non-members to die, and the higher up the party ladder you were, the more chance you had ending up dead in the Gulag.)
Well, Habibi, i admit to being unaware that Lenin personally issued such decrees. I have always considered Derzhinski, Trotsky and Stalin to have been personally responsible for their own portfolios. I have also always been willing to admit my error when someone provides evidence of reliable source material. I bow to your superior knowledge here.
My take has always been that after he was shot by Dora Kaplan (1918, i believe), Lenin was less and less responsible for the actions of the state. Obviously, also, his stroke (1921? 1922?) rendered him far less than capable of controlling the state apparatus. I would genuinely be interested in your thoughts on those subjects.
Setanta wrote:This is why i am both mystified and disgusted by the fascination with state-sponsored mass murder. Who cares what the numbers are, the motivations are scurrilous.
Speaking as someone who has frequently been accused of such 'fascination' -- not by you, and not in this community -- I care about the numbers because they refute an especially silly outgrowth of post-Nazi political correctness here in Germany. When I went to high school, we were told in about five different classes that Hitler was, without question, by far the worst mass murderer history has ever seen. When I confronted them with evidence that Soviet Russia, at least, has a comparably evil track record, my teachers would answer not that my comparison was mistaken or pointless, but that Hitler was so obviously the worst that it was immoral of me to even make the comparison. Of course, this raises the interesting question how my teachers found out he was the worst in the first place, but this irony was somewhat lost on them.
This incomparability doctrine is used to justify all kinds of exceptions to the rules of law and debate. For example, it is illegal in Germany to deny the Holocaust, but it is legal to deny the Gulag. For another example, Günter Grass, a Nobel-Prize winning novelist and the most reasonable Social Democrat you can imagine, repeatedly got accused of anti-semitism for stating his opinion that Israel has to withdraw not just its troops but also its settlers from the territories it occupies.
The people making the accusations weren't some random Zionist pinheads -- they were officials from the Central Committee of the Jews in Germany, and included their president, Paul Spiegel. Arguing against a public opinion this charged is reputational suicide unless I have reasonably good numbers to back up my point. It is self-damaging enough even so, and I couldn't do it if I didn't get some masochistic pleasure from saying things that are unpopular but correct.
For me, paying attention to the numbers on international mass murders is a way of staying sane when thinking about a topic that is extremely fraught with emotions and hysteria.
Thomas, just a reaction to one of your previous posts: Rummelt is a respected scholar, he is also one of the few savvy enough (somehow they are usually incapable of this) to run a webpage. Demicide refers to extermination of one tenth of a population by a state - he invented the term after Cambodia, I believe, when there were many squabbles about the term genocide and whether it applies.
The ethnic cleansing of Poland, and of Czechoslovakia, and to a much lesser degree also Hungary and other countries, resulted in transfers of 10 million Germans, and some 120,000 Hungarians, 40, 000 (probably more - not sure. In any case at least 20,000 from Slovakia) of Ukrainians. Yet, even though a despicable act of vengeance, these policies did not seek to exterminate the Germans and Hungarians and Ukrainians - but to oust them out and send them 'home' (with which they had nothing to do for centuries). Many thousands died of cold and diseases on the way, many were abused and shot. But not in a proportion that would compare to any genocide of 20th century. Not sure if that's what you were referring to, just rambling here...
I see your point, Thomas. I have the attitude of many, while certainly not all Americans, that free speech actually exists. I'd be in trouble pretty damned quick in Germany, because i agree that Israel is in the grip of right-wing fanatics, thath they have used U.S. support to bolster and solidify their positions, that they have exploited middle eastern and eastern European Jewish immigrant communitities to the same purpose, and that the final result is as they desire, a continuing program to exclude, and if possible to expell, and if seen as necessary, to destroy the Palestinians. While certainly not illegal here, that is an extremely unpopular position to take here, but more because of fundamentalist christian attitudes where i live, than because of the Jewish community.
I don't know you, and therefore cannot judge. However, from what you have written here, i would characterize you not as fascinated, so much as driven, to "get the numbers." You'll know best if that is true. In my childhood, when television was still new, a great deal of the programming concerned the second world war. It began to seem to me as early as the age of eight that there was an unhealthy fascination in this country with Hitler and the Nazis. I believe this reached its height, and nearly a frenzy, in the late 1960's, before the Viet Nam War distracted everyone's attention. When i returned from the army in 1973, i was saddened and disgusted to see that Hitler biographies still proliferated and still sold well.
The older i've gotten, and the more i've read, the more disgusted i've become. Attila and his Huns, Temujin and the Mongols, Batu Kahn and the Tatars, the Moguls--these were all no more than bloodthirsty savages, who operated on thereto unknown scales of slaughter and terror. But the likes of Hitler and Stalin demonstrate that the "veneer" of civilization in the west is a thin patina indeed, and one easily "rubbed off" a society. I fear for my own nation with it's now more than century long march toward christian fundamentalism, and its current tendancy to demonizing muslims.
I have never cared about the numbers on that basis i elucidated above. A son-of-a-bitch is a son-of-a-bitch, and all morality taken aside, no society should tolerate a son-of-a-bitch in a position to exercise murderous power.
