Currently in an argument with a chud on Reddit that pulled the 100 million dead figure, and he doesn’t believe that they’re including dead Nazis and unborn descendants of dead people in that figure. I want to show him how ridiculous the figures are in that book is by calculating the victims of capitalism using the same flimsy logic.

He doesn’t appear to be one of those “capitalism didn’t kill anyone because how can two people exchanging goods be deadly” types that you sometimes see, as he’s willing to attribute the Nazis to capitalism’s death toll. He sent me this:

"You should check the democide concept developed by Prof. R. J. Rummel:

Rummel coined the term democide, defined as

“the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.”

Obviously the definition excludes natural causes as you suggest. Democides were mostly exerted by communist regimes:

128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS

61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State

35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist China

20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State

10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS

5,964,000 Murdered: Japan’s Savage Military

2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State

1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey’s Genocidal Purges

1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State

1,585,000 Murdered: Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing

1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State

1,072,000 Murdered: Tito’s Slaughterhouse"

Actually looking it up, even the black book of communism has the Soviets at 20 million murdered so I have no idea where he’s getting 62 million dead.

  • MarxMadness [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Criticism

    [T]wo of the book’s main contributors (Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth) as well as Karel Bartosek publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois’ statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was “obsessed” with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in “sloppy and biased scholarship”, faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism…

    Margolin likened Courtois’s effort to “militant political activity, indeed, that of a prosecutor amassing charges in the service of a cause, that of a global condemnation of the Communist phenomenon as an essentially criminal phenomenon.” Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty criticized Courtois for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of “intentional murder”…

    Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen’s research on hunger. While India’s democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter’s more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Chomsky argued that “supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book” to India, “the democratic capitalist ‘experiment’ has caused more deaths than in the entire history of […] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone.”

    Chapter 5 of Blackshirts and Reds is another great debunking (although it’s focused on the USSR), but it’s much harder for people to write off Wikipedia as a source.