Commies Killed More Than Hitler Redux

We went over this quite a few times on the old blog, but since this crap keeps recrudescing on the Right, we may as well continue to hammer away at it. From an interesting, but disgusting, article by Steve Sailer, effectively ruined, as are most of his posts, by his inability to turn off the rightwing talking points no matter what he is writing about. Sailer is like the Christian kooks, who, no matter what the conversation is about, always manage to return the conversation to their evangelical bullshit within 10 minutes. Steve just can’t shut the rightwing trap. Here is the poop:

Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has pointed out, the doctrine of “class origins” transformed “egalitarian” mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.

Boy, rightwingers just can’t shut up about this, can they? Never mind that he’s quoting the fascist Solzhenitsyn (and he spelled his name wrong), but this whole line has a particularly nasty genesis. After the war, in trying to prove that Hitler was no big deal and Stalin was way worse, Ukrainian Nazis (Excuse me! Ukrainian nationalists! Wait. Is there a difference?) developed a lie called The Holodomor, a lie that was originally started by the Nazi Randolf Hearst and his Nazi buddies in Germany in the early 1930’s. The lie stated that Stalin deliberately killed 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, no wait, 7, 8, oh forget it, God knows how many Ukrainians by deliberate starvation. It’s not true. Nobody was deliberately starved to death. There was indeed a famine in all of the USSR, especially the Ukraine, in 1932 and 1933. The number of dead is not known. The state made many errors, including initially denying that it was happening, to a chaotic response to the tragedy. The Ukrainians were rebelling against the state. They destroyed 5 The USSR did seize the grain crop, because the country needed to eat and the Ukrainians were destroying everything in sight. Ukrainians were mass deported to Siberia, and 390,000 died. It was a bad time. The people were weakened by hunger and there were disease epidemics due to primitive sanitation and lack of effective drugs. This is what killed most of the people, not starvation. Most of the pictures of “starving Ukrainians” were faked, and those photos were actually from a famine in 1921. Mark Tauger has also presented good forensic evidence of a wheat rust epidemic. There was also a terrible famine in China during the Great Leap Forward that may have killed 15 million people, mostly due to disease once again. Once again, this was not intentional, unless idiocy is intentionality. The primary cause of the famine was overprocurement by the state. Capitalism kills 14 million people ever year by direct starvation and attendant illnesses all over the globe. Shall we tally up these body piles and compare them to Hitler, Stain, Mao and whatnot? The chips are down, capitalist punks. That means you, Sailer. Leaving aside famines, we really need to look at direct killings.

Leader         Deaths     Period      Years
Hitler          52M*      1933-1945   12
Lenin/Stalin    2.5M**    1921-1953   32
Mao             2.4M?***  1949-1976   27

*Figure from here. Hitler also started a war for no reason that ended up killing ~45 million people. Whether you want to count that or not is up to you. I count 12 million dead in camps and 40 million dead in a war that he started. **See Getty 1993 for the most accurate estimate to date of deaths under Stalin. In 1990, the USSR archives were opened up. The Soviets had kept track of everyone who died due to executions, population transfers and in the camps, year by year. The deaths in the camps include 900,000 common criminals, but I guess the anti-Communists want to throw those in too. There is no academic consensus whatsoever for 20, 30, 40, 43, or 110 million deaths under Stalin. Furthermore, these figures usually include “10 million” for the fake “Ukraine intentional famine” that never happened. As noted below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. If we can’t tally these against the capitalists, we can’t tally them against Stalin. The Sovietologists are currently fighting it out in the academic journals. Those arguing for a higher figure are basically saying, “Commies lie.” There never was any rational basis for the figures of tens of millions killed under Stalin. Those figures were produced by Nazis and Nazi sympathizers, the CIA and the MI6. They were just pulling figures out of thin air. By the way, that wonderful 110 million figure comes from the fascist Solzhenitsyn, a man lionized by the West. Peacetime figures for political deaths in the USSR 1921-1953 are:

Executions:                 900,000
Deaths in the gulag:        1.2M
Dekulakization Ukraine:     390,000
Totals:                     2.5M

***2.4 million is my estimate for Mao, and those are just known deaths. The Chinese have not yet opened up their archives, and unfortunately it is possible that deaths under Mao were a lot higher. Mao himself admitted that 700,000 landlords were killed in the early years. The Party allowed the local peasants to put them on trial and the people sentenced many of them to death. Many were horrible criminals who had been abusing the peasants for many years, but one can argue whether they needed to die. There were 1 million excess deaths in the Cultural Revolution. We have no accurate figures for deaths under Mao from 1953-1966, although 700,000 is a good minimum. We also have no accurate figures for deaths in the Chinese gulags. We will have to wait until the Chinese open their books in order to find out the real number who died under Mao. The 77 million figure tossed around lately, the product of a lunatic new book, has absolutely no basis in reality whatsoever. Furthermore, it includes famine deaths in the Great Leap Forward, listed as an incredible 39 million. As I note below, capitalism starves 14 million people to death every year. Shall we count these deaths against the capitalists? Ok, as you can see, the evil Commies absolutely did not kill tens of millions of people. Who did? No one, unless you count the European War that Hitler started that killed ~45 million or so. Hitler killed 42 million in 12 years or 3.5 million/year. Mao, Lenin and Stalin combined killed 4.9 million over 59 years, or 83,000/yr. Ok, now who is the worse killer? Who killed more? Hitler. Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined were not able to exceed Hitler’s totals, and they had 10 times more years to do it again. Hitler was 42 times worse of a killer than Mao, Stalin and Lenin combined. The crap like Steve’s above is usually followed by some jibe about “more being killed in the name of equality than were killed in the name of inequality.” Of course, rightwingers, lovable and cuddly folks that they are, just can’t get enough inequality. They consume inequality for breakfast, lunch and dinner and they’re still hungry. What they hate more than anything else is anyone trying to even the score just a tiny bit. Making the world a little more fair than the cruel hand of fate fetishized by the Right supposedly “goes against human nature.” That’s dubious right there, and Adam Smith himself disagreed. In his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith noted that capitalism was incapable of providing for essential aspects of human society, such as compassion towards one’s fellow man, sympathy, mutual sympathy , and any type of fairness or justice in society. Since the market could not provide these things, their provision was left up to politics, or the state. Politics is only unnatural; it’s deadly, genocidally deadly. Any attempts to create a little justice or fairness in the human jungle are apparently doomed to end up in mass murder. So don’t you dare mess with that invisible hand of the market. If it’s market versus politics, the market wins hands down. The same market that starves 14 million people every year. The same market that kills 10 million kids a year. The same market that blew up the US economy and is threatening to take the world economy down with it. The blind faith of the Right boggles the mind.

References

Coplon, Jeff. January 12, 1988. In Search of a Soviet Holocaust. The Village Voice. Grover Furr’s website. Coplon, Jeff. March 1988. Rewriting History – How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on High School Students CAPITAL Region. Douglas Furr’s website. Davies, R. W. and Wheatcroft, Steven G. 2004. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Getty, J. Arch, Ritterspoon, Gabor T. and Zemskov, Viktor N. 1993. Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-war Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence American Historical Review 98:4, 1048-49. Souza, Mario. Lies Concerning the History of the Soviet Union. North Star Compass website. Tauger, Mark B. 1991. The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933. Slavic Review 50:1, pp. 70-89. Tottle, Douglas. 1987. Fraud, Famine, and Fascism: the Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books.
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17 thoughts on “Commies Killed More Than Hitler Redux”

  1. The holodomor was payback for the Khmelnytsky uprising. Consider that during the famine the Soviet Union was exporting food to pay for it’s industrialization plan. You’re an interesting guy, but nevertheless I think you are wrong about the underlying reasons for, as well as the severity of the Ukrainian famine

  2. I think they had to export some food, otherwise they would have been even more fucked economically. Not too many mainstream historians anymore argue that there was an intentional famine, or Holodomor.
    They have uncovered the entire USSR archives, and the Holodomor crowd has been going over them with a fine toothcomb, and they have not found one single document saying that the USSR leadership planned this famine deliberately or intentionally. It was a tragedy all right, and it was a consequence of too-rapid collectivization, but there was no intentional famine. The famine hit all over the USSR, not just in the Ukraine. People were dying all over the country, even in the cities, and even in Moscow. Obviously, the army had to be fed first.

  3. It’s not just the right wing racial nationalists that still trot this out. I encounter it regularly, slipped in in passing, all over the place – liberal op-eds, left and labour op-eds and periodicals, tv of course, Trot blogs of course, zionist propaganda pieces, even occasionally in otherwise worthy pieces in Counterpunch. In the zionist case, I think it fits neatly with their insistence that there was no reason for the holocaust but irrational European antisemitism – they want to downplay their previous substantial contribution to communism. The ‘irrational European antisemitism’ and ‘Stalin killed more than Hitler’ are, notwithstanding that not even Robert Conquest believes this, like the nonexistence of jewish power, some factoids to which pundits feel they have to pay obeysance to show that they’re ‘sensible’, not ‘extremists’ or even CONSPIRACY THEORISTS!!!!
    Does Mark Tauger not say that there is now strong forensic evidence that, in the famine years, there was a fungal wheat blight which affected large parts of Russia ( including but also outside Ukraine)and also Romania and Bulgaria? Not that he claims that this is the whole story, but it’s a big contributing factor.
    Hitler killed 15 million ( by executions, I take it). However did they find the time, and fight massive wars on two fronts?

  4. I am sorry Robert but you are just not right (pardon the pun).
    You have let your political persuasion interfere with the facts, and you represent a far-off fringe viewpoint on this issue and academic historians have made a consensus regarding which dictators have been the bloodiest. It seems to me you have talking about academic consensuses before as it related to non-academics…
    Check to see where your beloved Mao and Stalin are at.
    Qing Dynasty,
    mainly Empress Dowager Cixi 1859-64,
    Tai Ping Rebellion 12,000,000
    Genghis Khan 1215–1233 4,000,000
    Adolf Hitler 1933–1945 21,000,000
    Chiang Kai-shek 1921–1948 10,000,000
    Kublai Khan 1252–1279 19,000,000
    Vladimir Lenin 1917–1924 4,000,000
    Leopold II of Belgium 1885–1908 10,000,000
    Pol Pot 1968–1987 2,000,000
    Joseph Stalin 1929–1953 43,000,000
    Hideki Tojo 1941–1945 4,000,000
    Mao Zedong 1923–1976 77,000,000

  5. 15 million dead are considered to be direct homicides. That includes deaths in the camps, in transit to the camps, in the ghettos, and whatnot.
    They were into industrialized mass murder. They even calculated the cheapest way to kill the most people with the least expenditure.

  6. Scott, that crap is so wrong.
    There is no consensus about Stalin killing 43 million. The USSR archives have been unsealed, and the new figure for deaths 1921-1953 is 2.3 million. The Sovietologists are arguing away about this in the history journals as we speak. I guess the argument against the 2.3 million figure is “Commies lie.” There never was any good basis for the notion that Stalin killed 10, 20, 30, 40 or whatever million. Solzhenitsyn says he killed 110 million. No one had any idea. They were just pulling figures out of thin air.
    The Soviets wrote it all down to the last man and documented everything, including deaths in the gulags. Why have you not heard about this? The Western media is controlled by fanatical anti-Communists who will never let the truth see the light of day.
    The figures for Mao are much more controversial, but 77 million comes from an insane recent book. No one knows. 1 million died in the Cultural Revolution and 3 million died in the early days of the revolution. From 1953-1966, we have no good figures. We also have no figures for the Chinese gulag system. No one has any idea how many died under Mao, but it’s at least 4 million. You really need to subtract the famines under Stalin and Mao too, because they were not intentional deaths.

  7. Right, it doesn’t work at all in the comments. What a joke. WordPress is still pretty lame in a lot of ways I guess. There’s all these overrides in the
    CSS that prevent you from doing stuff, like opening links in new windows.

  8. The simple truth is that America was and is controlled by communist jews. The ONLY way that Jew run Soviet did survive was that the stupid americans send food, ammo and weapon to the jews in Soviet under Leand-Lease.
    Officially America was anti-communism, but behind the scene America policy promoted the jew communism world takeover. There are abundant evidence that this was the case.
    Books by Freda Utley
    THE CHINA STORY  — About how Washington’s policies led to communist victories, details and dates,
    http://www.fredautley.com/
    http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/wars/
    America today 2oo9 is still promoting the jew communist worldtake over plan, now hidden under the bogus “War on Terror”.
    What the GLOBAL jew mafia wants is a global police state – executed and paid for by the stupid americans.
    Communism is a jewish fraud. Communist manifesto is a quick version of jewish Talmud-Torha, OT world conquest.
    The jews have been telling us for 3500 years that they want to take all non-jews as slaves, and most non-jews still dont get it.
    The jews have 22 secret weapons and one of this weapons are stupidity and ignorance among the non-jews. My estimat is that 50% are plain stupid and 49,99 percent are ignorant. I have been thinking a lot about this issue.
    Soooo … if you have 99,999999999 percent stupid and ignorant and ONE jew who knows exacly what he wants – who do you think has the headstart?
    The 99,999999999999 stupid and ignorant?
    Once you realise what and how so few jews do what they do, its stunning how easy so few can control so many.
    Mind you, until now I have only told you about ONE of the 22 secret weapons.
    The next secret weapon of the jews is: How many can write and get published?
    I can write, I can explain a very complex issue in a very few words. Im damn good at it – but I cant get published.
    Any jew in the whole world that can write, can get published in Jew York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post, but I cant get ten sentences published in my local paper. Okay, I can – as long as I write about braindead nonsense.
    This is another of the jews secret weapons. Many more jews can write then non-jews, but the secret weapon is that they can be published, as can any selfhating non-jew idiot and that is because they all promot the jews agenda.
    Here is a jew that explain how the jews really thinks. Short video.
    http://www.wntube.net/play.php?vid=1262

  9. They have uncovered the entire USSR archives, and the Holodomor crowd has been going over them with a fine toothcomb, and they have not found one single document saying that the USSR leadership planned this famine deliberately or intentionally. It was a tragedy all right, and it was a consequence of too-rapid collectivization, but there was no intentional famine. The famine hit all over the USSR, not just in the Ukraine. People were dying all over the country, even in the cities, and even in Moscow. Obviously, the army had to be fed first.
    They have uncovered the entire Nazi archives, and the Holocaust crowd has been going over them with a fine tooth comb, and they have not found one single document saying that the Nazi leadership planned to kill large numbers of Jews in camps deliberately or intentionally. The deaths that did occur were a tragedy all right, and it was a consequence of the Allied bombings destroying the German infrastructure, leading to an inability to provide food or treat disease, but there was no plan to exterminate Jews. The problems hit all over Germany, not just in the camps. People were dying all over the country, even in the cities, and even in Berlin. Obviously, the army had to be fed first.

  10. You are a complete nut job.
    You will believe phony communist statistics but you will not believe documented German records. What a mind.
    And where does this urtter nonsense about big, bad capitalism starving 14 million people a year come from? Out of one of your LSD trips, perhaps? Your claim that people were only dying of disease in Ukraine, not deliberate starvation, is straight out of Walter Duranty.

  11. You will believe phony communist statistics but you will not believe documented German records.
    The records of the USSR are regarded as correct by many historians. They wrote it all down. So did the Nazis, BTW. They documented the whole Holocaust, the idiots.
    Anyway, you are welcome to join the debate in the historical journals over the Soviet records. On your side are CIA and MI5 agents like Robert Conquest. On our side are lots of other fine historians.
    And where does this utter nonsense about big, bad capitalism starving 14 million people a year come from?
    That figure comes from 1986. Most of those deaths are in South Asia. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and India. I don’t think many public health figures dispute that. Everyone knows that capitalism is such a worthless system that it can’t even provide enough food for the humans of the Earth to survive. But according to you, that’s what is so great about. It forces folks to become their very own modern hunter-gatherers and not rely on that nanny state to fill their greedy bellies!
    our claim that people were only dying of disease in Ukraine, not deliberate starvation, is straight out of Walter Duranty.
    There were starvation deaths, but most deaths were due to disease. People traveling through the region unescorted saw few obviously starving and emaciated people.

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