Re: SV: Victims of Communism

[Gary Kern <gkern@alumni.Princeton.EDU>]

Bertil Häggman wrote:
> 
> Yes it has, but the matter of figures is not undisputed.  I read that the 60 millions
> figure came up by unscrupulously adding figures relating to different groups of
> victims, one of them being the Russian victims of W.W.II.  Some historians (and
> me) found this rather questionable.
> 
> Umberto,
> 
> That assumption will stand for you. In a few weeks a new
> book based on population statistics of the former
> Soviet Union will be published here in Sweden.
> The figures there are much higher than 60 million.
> Ant the total for the global class murder of communism
> is set at 150 million.
**************************
There are many difficulties involved in estimating the number of victims
of Bolshevism.  Remember that Stalin shot the census-takers of 1939 for
estimating 16 million victims of the collectivization-famine program,
after which new census-takers made up figures to conform to his notion
that state socialism was promoting a healthy growth in population.  In
1945 he said that 7 million had died in the war.  Later Khrushchev said
that 20 million had died.  It is believed that his expert, whose name I
have forgotten but could recover, simply added Stalin's 7 million and
the 13 million victims of Gulag.  But then Gorbachev said 25 (or 26
million) died in the war in order to magnify Soviet losses and in a
sense exact a feeling of guilt from the West for not having lost so
much.  The Bolsheviks saved Europe and America, you see.  Similar
problems arise in estimating the total number of victims. For me, once
you have millions of people executed or worked to death by the
government, as a matter of state policy, then that state is no good.
******************************

> As for the collapse of the Chinese regime, which resembles more and more the
> State mafia Communism had turned into after Khrushev, yes, it's probably time it
> collapses--but until Western powers will keep making business with China as if
> everyting was normal there, I think Collapse-day will be delayed.  But you know,
> embargoes are only for small countries with no H-bombs.
> 
> Well, I am sorry to see that you are not condemning
> the mass murderer Mao. Maybe he is still regarded
> as a revolutionary hero in Italy.
> 
> Best wishes from an anti-communist
> 
> Bertil Haggman
*****************************
What I don't understand in the above is the phrase, "State mafia
Communism turned into under Khrushchev."  What was it before Kh?  Wasn't
it one-man dictatorship?  So Communism in the USSR moved from one-man
dictatorship to state mafia.  And under Brezhnev?  Aha, neo-Stalinism,
or mixed dictatorship/mafia.  Even in this context, Kh comes out a
winner.  He actually was the most enlightened of the Soviet despots,
though he upset many foreign Communists and fellow-travellers by telling
a portion of the truth about Stalin.  And Gorby?  Well, that's another
story.

About Mao, his manservant wrote a memoir telling what a bloated bag of
concupiscence he was, forcing himself on poor women picked up in the
city or from the theater and brought to him as they were once brought to
Beria.  He was an addle-brained, vicious, cranky ego-maniac whose mood
swings could cause countless deaths, as in the idiotic "Great Leap
Forward," not to mention the sparrow war.

It is important to try to total up the victims, but a million more or
less here or there neither adds to the essential enormity of the evil
nor lessens it.  Both Bolshevism and Maoism were bloodthirsty regimes
that slaughtered millions in the extended present for the sake of
millions in the never to come future, while in Europe and America
"progressives" clucked their praise, hissed abuse at critics and
defended tooth and nail every murderous turn of policy, just as Orwell
described in ANIMAL FARM.  It is painful that this truth has not been
thoroughly instilled in the public consciousness, so that moral monsters
like Bertold Brecht, Paul Robeson and Bernard Shaw can still be
considered great men.

GK