(Black Book of Communism = BBC for this Round of debate and remainder, if I refer to British Broadcasting Corporation I'll let you know)
Irony, bias, quality of arguments and sources
In order to discredit the quality of the BBC, Pro uses a biased personal column in the Guardian website that shows a clearly loaded take on the book. It presumes that the book is equating Communism to Nazism, then goes for another logical fallacy when it essentially says you can't compare things that are different. There are indeed many parallels between Nazism and Communism as it was practised, for a start both facaded as valid variants of Socialism. Nazis called it National Socialism while Communists named their Socialism-type after their nation and/or leader. They both did so to justify the government unfairly and unwisely controlling the economy to suit the needs of the elite. So, to say that the group of scholars who contributed to the BBC were wrong to try to show that the "Black Book" (
a book about Nazi horrors) had a narrative and bias that could be even better (or equally) applied to Communism, is not at all unfair or unwise, especially as both regimes were birthed in World War II.
Rather than try to show that Communism was equal to Nazism, the BBC tried to show what is wrong is to glorify Lenin or think the cause was hijacked, instead it tries to display how Communism was from conception to death (or staggering on in terms of NK, China, Cuba and Venezuela) Tyrannical, unfair to those who wanted freedom or fair reward for their hard work and tries to accurately document any objective 'horrors' (deaths, camps, etc) of the regime(s) that claimed to be Communist at the time (or previously). The aim was never to discredit the horrors of the Nazi Regime, it was instead to prevent anyone discrediting the horrors of Communist regimes.
When you try to disregard the validity of BBC doing this to Communist regimes, only to then say you see the Nazi regime as completely deserving of the bad wrap it got and depiction(s) of it in the Black Book and such works, you are being ironic and biased in every sense of both terms.
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There is one statistic in the entire 864 page of thorough scholarly works that Pro is fixated upon.
This absolute obsession over the 94 million statistic is absurd. It would be like looking at one number or sentence in the entire works of a Harry Potter book to then call it a bad story. The worst part of it, for Pro, is that the number is completely explained in the book to be what Pro said it to be. The book never ever denies that war-deaths were part of the counted statistic and it tries to explain that Communism inherently demands war whenever it is brought about, thus justifying why the war-deaths are not nullified. The deaths are well-researched and consist of the following:
According to the chapter, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million. The statistics of victims include deaths through executions, man-made hunger, famine, war, deportations and forced labor. The breakdown of the number of deaths is given as follows:
- 65 million in the People's Republic of China
- 20 million in the Soviet Union
- 2 million in Cambodia
- 2 million in North Korea
- 1.7 million in Ethiopia
- 1.5 million in Afghanistan
- 1 million in the Eastern Bloc
- 1 million in Vietnam
- 150,000 in Latin America
- 10,000 deaths "resulting from actions of the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power"
-
Werth, Nicolas;
Panné, Jean-Louis;
Paczkowski, Andrzej;
Bartosek, Karel;
Margolin, Jean-Louis (October 1999),
Courtois, Stéphane (ed.),
The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression,
Harvard University Press, pp. 92–97, 116–21,
ISBN 978-0-674-07608-2
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The entire works had much more than just state-sanctioned murder, non-state-sanctioned vicious killigs and such. The '94 million' statistic is only relevant to one of many parts of the works.
According to Courtois, the crimes by the Soviet Union included the following:
- The execution of tens of thousands of hostages and prisoners
- The murder of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants from 1918 to 1922
- The Russian famine of 1921, which caused the death of 5 million people
- The Decossackization, a policy of systematic repression against the Don Cossacks between 1917 and 1933
- The murder of tens of thousands in concentration camps in the period between 1918 and 1930
- The Great Purge which killed almost 690,000 people
- The deportation of 2 million so-called "kulaks" from 1930 to 1932
- The death of 4 million Ukrainians (Holodomor) and 2 million others during the famine of 1932 and 1933
- The deportations of Poles, Ukrainians, Moldovans and people from the Baltic states from 1939 to 1941 and from 1944 to 1945
- The deportation of the Volga Germans in 1941
- The deportation of the Crimean Tatars in 1943
- Operation Lentil and deportation of the Ingush in 1944
- See source for last Quote.
Additional sources to see, if interested on the matter.
- Ronald Aronso.n Review: Communism's Posthumous Trial Reviewed Work(s): The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois; The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century by François Furet; The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century by Tony Judt; Le Siècle des communismes by Michel Dreyfus. History and Theory, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May 2003), pp. 222-245
- Friling, Tuvia; Ioanid, Radu; Ionescu, Mihail E.; Benjamin, Lya (2004). Distortion, negationism and minimization of the Holocaust in postwar Romania (PDF). International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania. p. 47; 59.
- ^ Pekacz, Jolanta T. (2001). "Twentieth-Century Communism—The Rise and Fall of an Illusion". Canadian Journal of History. 36 (2): 311–316. doi:10.3138/cjh.36.2.311.
All three are linked to via the Wikipedia article, the latter-2 relevant to the second quote and first, to the former one.
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Pro's Irreparable Backstep-Agreement With the Book's Bias/Narrative
I 'm NOT saying there were no crimes or that people lots of people did not suffer in significant ways.. they did obviously it was not a good system and definitely not a preferable to system to the flaw capitalism we now practice...
- Pro, R2
This is 100% what the BBC was trying to justify, prove and research in depth. It was a non-mocking parody of the Black Book (which referred to the Nazi Party's atrocities) and instead sought to take a similar approach and style to researching, conveying and explaining the horrors of the Communist regimes up until the book's writing (primarily during and shortly following the WWII era).
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Baseless assertions by Pro
I refer to Pro as male, here, because his profile says so at the time of writing this.
Pro made a few baseless assertions in his Round (but since the entire first half was not his original works and was a copy+paste from the source he linked. That is why he put it in quotation marks and why all of it is to be discredited as not his own arguments nor something I should reply to until he gives the quote context regarding his other arguments. Nonetheless, I did reply to the first sentence in it in this Round and hope it's fully disregarded by the reader.
What I am saying is for purely propaganda purposes these misdeeds were magnified to such absurd levels to frighten future generations from challenging the ruling plutocratic caste that bleeds us
- Pro, R2
Everything in this, from 'purely progaganda purposes' to the conclusion that the levels of expressed atrocities were 'absurd' in the levels to which they were 'magnified' from the itty bitty misdeeds that they originally were, is all baseless assertion. There is no evidence justifying it, nor is there even an unsourced expansion on why Pro has concluded it to be true. Pro is simply saying it is so, while I stand here telling you that it categorically is not. The motive of the book and representation of the atrocities are all accurate, peer-reviewed works that Harvard University Press approved and published. Those are facts, not opinions.
we will try again, they say insanity is doing the same things over and over and expecting different results, we must learn from our mistakes.. next time? will be different it may take 5000 years it may never come to pass, but things are always changing.. change is inevitable in some star trek roboty communist form
Depending on how you interpret what he means by 'try again' and 'differently' you could take this to be an actual violent manifesto designed to incite violent protest, much like the original rebels like Castro+Guevara and the Lenin 'crew' were to their respective nations. Perhaps this is the flaw of Communism that the book tries so vehemently to explain; it always has a facade of being so different to past overthrows, that the end result will definitely be better this time and yet every time it's violent from its birth to its death, with almost everyone in it brutally held under the tyrannical rule of its overlord(s).
RationalMadman 5of the 6 authors of the black book of communism left writing because one of them wanted to get to 100,000,000 million deaths.
I overslept, sorry.
The Black Book of Communism, written by Stephane Courtois has been called into question on multiple different grounds.Some critics have objected to the book's depiction of communism and nazism as being similar, others have criticized the approach the book takes to assigning blame of deaths, and still others, most notably J.Arch Getty, for its lack of distinction between famine deaths and intentional deaths. But in terms of factual accuracy, the book is, according to most experts, off the mark. The Black Book of Communism, written by Stephane Courtois has been called into question on multiple different grounds.Some critics have objected to the book's depiction of communism and nazism as being similar, others have criticized the approach the book takes to assigning blame of deaths, and still others, most notably J.Arch Getty, for its lack of distinction between famine deaths and intentional deaths. But in terms of factual accuracy, the book is, according to most experts, off the mark.https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is_the_black_book_of_communism_an_accurate_source/
How many people have been victims of communism?
Courtois considers Communism and Nazism to be distinct, but comparable totalitarian systems. He says that Communist regimes have killed "approximately 100 million people in contrast to the approximately 25 million victims of the Nazis".
The Black Book of Communism - Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki › The_Black_Book_of_Communism