frame

Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!

DebateIsland.com is the largest online debate website globally where anyone can anonymously and easily debate online, casually or formally, while connecting with their friends and others. Users, regardless of debating skill level, can civilly debate just about anything online in a text-based online debate website that supports five easy-to-use and fun debating formats ranging from Casual, to Formalish, to Lincoln-Douglas Formal. In addition, people can improve their debating skills with the help of revolutionary artificial intelligence-powered technology on our debate website. DebateIsland is totally free and provides the best online debate experience of any debate website.





100 million killed by communist regimes - these numbers are pulled out of a hat.

Debate Information

Is the Black Book of Communism an accurate source?  In short, not really. 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.

1: Death tolls in Maoist china: The death tolls associated with maoist china are considered by most sinologists to be inaccurate. The book lists Mao's china as being responsible for 65 million deaths, particularly in regards to the Great Chinese Famine. this number is considered by most sinologists to be not-accurate. According to Leslie Holmes, the number is closer to 15 million excess deaths, which is substantiated by Chinese statistics. Similarly, the deaths attributed to the cultural revolution is assumed to be overstated, as the cited figure of 5 million is most likely closer to 400,000

2:In regards to the soviet union, the pattern of inflation remains consistant. No better is this illustrated then the Holodomor. The Holodomor, or the soviet famine of 1932-1933 was, according to most experts, both much less devastating then Courtois makes it out to be. In the book he cites a figure of 7 million famine deaths, while modern analysis estimates the death toll to be ranging from 1.8-2.5 million deaths. This is supported by soviet archival evidence, which shows a death toll of 2.4 million deaths. Furthermore, academics ranging from Robert Conquest to J Arch Getty would agree that the famine at the very least did not arise from malicious intent, but rather as a combination of environmental conditions and damage from Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture(although the importance of the two factors in regards to one-another is highly disputed) In regards to gulag deaths, which the book pins at about three million, an analysis by J Arch Getty, Gabor T Rittersporn and Viktor N Zemskov shows a death toll of slightly over a third of that amount. In regards to NKVD executions, Getty estimates slightly under 800,000 executions (however, this number also fails to account for commuted sentences and according to Austin Murphy, this number can be reduced even further to just above 100,000)

I am unqualified to comment on the death tolls given for latin america and africa, so I will refrain from doing so.

Lastly, there is some evidence to doubt the intentions of the author. Courtois defines any person who died unnaturally under communism as being "a victim of it", which most would consider disingenuous. Two of the books contributors 


have rennounced their association with the book, and a formal criticism was written about it by historian Peter Kenez. According to historian Peter Kenez,, the book should simply be considered an "anti-communist polemic", and on a separate occasion asserted it contains historical inaccuracies. Harvard university press even retracted its edition of the book, claiming it had remedial math errors. Werth and Margolin specifically felt that Courtois was obsessed at arriving at the 100 million death toll, and in the process drastically overestimated many figures. Overall, no matter your position on communism, most academics would agree that one would be better off avoiding the black book. If you absolutely insist on continuing its use as a source, it could only really be called an inflated count of people who died concurrently to communism, not because of it


much of what we think we know is wrong meaing we dont really know what is real https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is_the_black_book_of_communism_an_accurate_source/

The passion for destruction is also a creative passion. Mikhail Bakunin




Debra AI Prediction

Predicted To Win
Predicted To Win
Tie

Details +




Post Argument Now Debate Details +

    Arguments


  • MayCaesarMayCaesar 5967 Pts   -   edited March 2019
    I do not know what the "Black Book of Communism" is, but if you think that one book making some inaccurate statements means that all of its claims are pulled out of a hat, then you are strongly mistaken.

    There have been countless independent estimations of the numbers of people killed by communist regimes. Those that use actual historical sources and mathematical statistical methods all put the number in dozens millions, although the exact estimates fluctuate a lot, given the scarcity of historical evidence due to communist regimes loving to eliminate compromising evidence.

    These estimates also strongly depend on the exact definitions. One could argue that millions dying to starvation in China does not constitute killing, since killing implies a deliberate act, while failed economical policies merely indicate extreme incompetence, not a purposeful elimination of people. Holodomor is strongly believed to have been a semi-deliberate act, as the officials willingly let the situation develop naturally without addressing it, so that is a more grey area in this regard.

    After Soviet collapse, multiple groups, the most prominent one being led by a former dissident Bukovsky, uncovered a lot of solid documents from the KGB archives and were shocked by the numbers they found there. Unfortunately, the access to the archives was quickly cut off by the new government, but it does seem that Stalin's regime has killed, at least, 10-15 million people. I am not so intimately familiar with the sources on other regimes. We all know about Hitler's regime (although, same as here, the numbers with reference to that are often exaggerated), and we have fairly solid information on several African communist regimes - but in most cases evidence gathering is either actively blocked by the current government, or was cleaned out by the regime in the past.

    Quantitative research of totalitarian states is always extremely difficult. Funny enough, we know more about Ancient Greece as it was 2,500 years ago, than we do about Eritrea that is around right now.
    PlaffelvohfenZombieguy1987
  • AmpersandAmpersand 858 Pts   -  
    @billbatard

    Absolutely correct.

    This is a relevant point to make because the claim seems to have seeped into popular consciousness from people but isn't actually true. You can see for instance an example here of a poster on this forum throwing out the 100 million deaths figure, which I then pointed out was false based on it being a claim thrown out there (but ultimately unsupported) by the Black Book of Communism. If people are going to argue against Communism then they should do so based on facts and real evidence, not claims that they're heard mentioned on facebook which originate from a poorly written book they've never read.

    I also see the "b-b-but communism!" posts have already started, so I'll just point out that Capitalism kills far more than Communism and that while Communism's problems are temporal and fixable Capitalism's problems are structural and irremovable.

    1) The never-ending annual and needless deaths of millions of people. We produce enough good to feed the world. We have medicine and equipment that protects people from a variety of diseases in impoverished countries. Capitalist is the global economic system in use for distributing goods - and it distributes these commodities in a way which causes millions of needless deaths each year. For instance about 3.1 million children die from hunger every year. Not people, that's just specifically children.

    It's an abominable death toll and what makes it worse is that it seems intrinsic to Capitalism. You can point the finger at Stalin and Mao, but the thing is their successors didn't have their own versions of the Holodomor or the Great Leap Forward - they were issues with the leaders rather than the economic system and Capitalism is just as capable of having despotic killers in charge.

    The deaths caused by Capitalism however seem intrinsic. There is not a single day that goes by where people aren't dying because the issue isn't caused by a single cackling villain or mad dictator that has found his way into power but could potentially be removed, it's the market forces which define the capitalist system causing an array of different actors to make decisions which personally benefit themselves but cause mass death in combination. For instance people want to use food produce to create expensive manufactured foods that can be sold at higher prices in the west, not staple foods for sale in poor countries, so even though we could feed everyone in the world we instead let them die. There's no one decision which results in that, just lots of people taking actions which are "rational" according to the logic of the market and inhuman by the standards of pretty much every religion and mainstream moral system.

    2) Communist nations have tended to see massive gains in areas like health, life expectancy and industrialisation. If you look at the work of nobel prize winner in economics Amartya Sen, it's worth taking note of his comparison of China and India. There are a lot of different factors which make direct country by country comparisons hard; for instance comparing the USSR and USA is meaningless because the USA had so many advantages at the point USSR switched to Communism (massive advantage in technology, educated populace, relationships with other trading partners, infrastructure, etc) that it would have been expected to come ahead regardless of ideology. However Amartya found a way around this by comparing India and China. In the 1950s India and China they were remarkable similar in terms of development (large, poor, rural, geographically neighbours, high populations, poor industry, etc) and are thus valid countries for comparison. They developed incredibly differently in terms of the economics they applied though and while China went Socialist, India went Capitalist

    As Sen explained in Hunger and Public Action, this example where the countries were directly comparable and thus we could be allowed to see the difference ideology caused. In fact it showed that Capitalism was far more harmful and resulted in far more unnecessary deaths. To quote:

    " Comparing India's death rate of 12 per thousand with China's of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year"

    Essentially because India focuses on people making private profit rather than social benefit, millions of people needlessly die each year in India alone from starvation, malnutrition, lack of healthcare, the long-term health effects of poverty, etc.

    I'll also point out that this at 3.9 million needless deaths per year since independence, more deaths have been caused by the inequality of India's economic system alone, not even taking into account other Capitalist countries, than by all the deaths attributed to every Communist state in the entire history of the world according.

    Even with the massive amount of deaths in China during the "Great Leap Forward", India still is responsible for more needless death overall because other than that 3 year period China's socialist focus on improving the lives of the poor and providing adequate health care to all as a social necessity - rather than a profit making business - helped vast amount of people who would have died in India. This results in India, the capitalist example in our comparison of two different countries going down two different routes, being responsible for a greater net loss of lives.
  • mickygmickyg 349 Pts   -  
    I grew up with the lies about communism.They were supposed to be godless.Turns out Russia is more stupidly christian then America.So now the evil boogeyman is Islam.Meanwhile the poor are getting poorer because christians will believe anything.
Sign In or Register to comment.

Back To Top

DebateIsland.com

| The Best Online Debate Experience!
© 2023 DebateIsland.com, all rights reserved. DebateIsland.com | The Best Online Debate Experience! Debate topics you care about in a friendly and fun way. Come try us out now. We are totally free!

Contact us

customerservice@debateisland.com
Terms of Service

Get In Touch