Jump to content

Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes/Archive 50

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archive 45←Archive 48Archive 49Archive 50Archive 51Archive 52→Archive 55

Moving forward and real attempts at improving the article

This comment by Paul Siebert, or more correctly the source provided by Siebert ("The Political Science of Genocide: Outlines of an Emerging Research Agenda"), is why the article as currently structured must be deal with. Unless things have changed, and it should be easy to provide a proper source that summarize it, genocide studies, the relevant field for this article, are a minority school of thought that does not enjoy yet support from mainstream political science; this means the current article, as it is, is unacceptable and contrary to sources. What we need to look at are sources like "Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide", and you will see that they support the topic as understood by Siebert et al. vis-à-vis AmateurEditor et al. They do not limit themselves to Communist states, as we currently do by violating several of our policies and guidelines in doing so. Yet, the lead treats it as a done thing, as a clear consensus among relevant scholars when that is not the case at all, and the reverse is true.

This is a case of undue weight given to a minority, unsupported view, and treat it as fact or consensus, as in the lead. Again, the lead state it as fact that mass killings happened under Communist states (they did not happen in most Communist states, and the high body count mainly comes from three out of many Communist states that at one point covered one third of the global population), when the fact is that mass deaths (excess deaths, excess mortality, etc.) indeed occurred but there is no consensus that communism was the link (I would argue the opposite is true, that most scholars and experts do not make the link, but a significant, and popular among the population, minority seemingly does), and there is no consensus on terminology, only attempts (but this is not reflected in the lead).

More importantly, Mass killing, like Democide, is a proposed concept, not a fact, and they are not as widely accepted as Genocide, and even then there are debates about its definition, legal or not; this means we need to restructure the article to better clarify and reflect this, as argued by The Four Deuces and Siebert. Both concepts have been applied to many, widely different regime-types, yet only for Communist states do we do this; this can be done but not the way it is currently done.

Davide King (talk) 13:55, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

What Is to Be Done?

What I propose, as discussions are not leading nowhere (even though I always appreciate Siebert's comments), is to do something about it.

1. If no source is provided that say genocide studies enjoys mainstream status, this needs to be fixed. This is a lead that better respects our policies and guidelines by actually outlining the topic (mass deaths indeed took place under several nominally Communist states, scholars have attempted to find a terminology to define them, some engaged in body counting and proposed the narrative that those are victims of Communism, others completely reject the latter, or simply discuss the events individually or through specific phases, such as Stalinist repression, reject the lumping, or highlight differences between them, etc.) and not treating it as a fact, majority view, or worse as consensus, as we currently do directly or indirectly.

2. At the same time, the body will also be worked on to reflect the new lead, and vice versa. This will include the following:

  • Removal of tagged primary sources. I will give you a month to fix this and find secondary sources that supports the paraphrasing work done by AmateurEditor.
  • Removal of non-notable, clearly unreliable estimates and undue opinions not sourced to secondary sources, plus fringe views and clear non-experts (Stephen Hicks, George Watson, etc.).
    • You have nothing to worry about it because I have already saved or moved the content to more relevant articles, so nothing will actually be lost.
  • Addition of criticism of the lumping process, as was done in The Black Book of Communism, which popularizing both the body counting and the narrative.

3. Name change

  • I like Siebert's proposals here, and they would surely be an improvement. I just think all of that can easily be done at Mass killing, and apart from their proponents, most scholars do not treat it as a sperate subject worthy of a main article, they discuss it within mass killing, so we should do the same.
    • I would avoid any wording that mention communism or Communist states et similia because for that we need a clear link that sources do not make or do not agree with, and it would give unwarranted weight to those who lump Communist states together or treat them as monolithic. Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin is neutral because it is limited to a single period (very specific) of a single Communist state.
    • An alternative, as proposed by TFD, would be Victims of Communism. It is the name used by memory studies, and it is what Courtois and Rosefielde consider the dead to be, i.e. victims of Communism. It could be argued that the aforementioned criticism above equally applies here, as it can be seen as giving unwarranted weight to those who support the narrative, but this mainly rests on what to prioritize: scholarly analysis or the narrative?
      • This seems to be the only significant difference between TFD/Siebert's proposal. The former proposal priorities the narrative, while the latter prioritize the scholarly analysis but essentially the topic is the same and the only main disagreement is about the name. This should be discussed once all the other issues are fixed.
      • Another alternative is to greatly expand the Mass killing article, which should be done anyway, and make it a broad scholarly analysis of mass killing, as scholars do not make any clear separation between regime-types, so why should we do it? We should only do it if there are spacing issues, which is not the case, as Mass killing is very short and concise. If following this, this article will be mainly about TFD's proposal of narrative ("Some writers have connected mass killings in Stalin's USSR, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The thinking is that Stalin influenced Mao, who influenced Pol Pot. In all cases, mass killings were carried out as part of a policy of rapid industrialization. (ii) The other version is that mass killings were dictated in otherwise forgotten works of Karl Marx. Under this view, COVID-19 can be seen as the latest attempt by the Communists to wipe out the world population.")
        • It would be written in a way to address Siebert's concerns (NPOV, treating Courtois et al. as minority rather than majority view as the article currently implies, etc.), as it would still have to include scholarly analysis and criticism (the narrative is a minority or at worse fringe view but very popular at that and legitimized in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and by the European Union through the double genocide theory and comparison and equiparation of Communism and Nazism, both of which are revisionist, controversial views among scholars), and AmateurEditor's (it will not be outright deleted but it will be structured neutrally at Mass killing, where we can easily discuss Courtois and Valentino's theories as a section in the same article).

4. Expand the Mass killing article

  • That article needs to be expanded to summarize scholarly views, as is done in "Second-Generation Comparative Research on Genocide"; this is the kind of secondary sources we need in support of author's interpretations, as sources like this summarize for what authors actually say (establishing weight in what relevant they said and what was not) and do the interpretation for us, thus avoiding any issue of original research and synthesis, as is the case for this talk page's article.

5. Merge or rewrite Crimes against humanity under communist regimes into Mass killing, as it is the same topic just under a different name because, guess what, scholars disagree on the terminology, there is no consensus, and we should not treat it as fact. Davide King (talk) 13:56, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Summary

In short, Mass killing would become the scholarly analysis and debates (Siebert's proposal) of genocide and mass killing in general; it will include discussion of Communist states but it will not be limited to that because scholars do not divide or make such categorisations as this article implies, and it will become its own article only when there are space issues. Victims of Communism* (or whatever the name of this article) would incorporate both TFD/Siebert's proposal, and be an expansion from Mass killing more specifically focused on Communism, and the neutral, not-policies violating AmateurEditor's proposal.

To repeat, you have time to provide sources that establish genocide studies as mainstream, rather than the minority school of thought it seems to be, and secondary sources for the authors' interpretations. If you cannot do that, I and others will attempt to do something about it by removing currently-tagged content and start the restructuring process. Davide King (talk) 14:00, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

Since there is a body of literature that connects mass killings by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, it would be a section in a proposed mass killings article and would probably be large enough to spin into its own article, leading back to what we have now. TFD (talk) 22:38, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
The Four Deuces, problem is that needed to be done first; both this and the other article were created as content forks, when they should have been first added in their main articles. Either way, the spin to its own article would result in a much different article that would not have such problems because it would be treated as the theory you correctly outlined below and not as fact. Davide King (talk) 14:52, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
  • The problem has always been that the topic does not exist in reliable sources. There are sources that connect killings under Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. There's also considerable literature about the anti-Communist theory that tries to prove that Communism is a greater threat than Fascism. This article argues in favor of the second, thereby treating a fringe theory as a consensus view. TFD (talk) 00:33, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
    I am not really seeing that though. I am seeing a fairly neutral and balanced assessment of extremely reliable sources about mass killings under communist regimes. PackMecEng (talk) 00:36, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Notability says, "if no reliable, independent sources can be found on a topic, then it should not have a separate article." In this case while reliable sources exist for the two topics I mentioned, none exist for this article. Without reliable sources for the topic, we cannot write a balanced article. It would be like writing an article called "American conservative sexual perverts." No doubt we could find many reliably sourced examples, but the article would promote an implicit thesis that there was a connection between being a conservative and being a sexual pervert. The article could only be neutral if we said who made the connection and how accepted the connection was. TFD (talk) 01:02, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
Sources have been provided, repeatedly, throughout the years this article has been debated. For the past decade they have been provided and given in the article itself. Your assessment is not accurate. Looking through the FAQs here it looks like you have been repeatedly making the same argument and repeatedly it has been shutdown by the community at large.[1] PackMecEng (talk) 01:10, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
In fact few if any sources have been provided. Could you please name one? TFD (talk) 01:22, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
PackMecEng, at 19:25, 23 August 2021 (UTC), I provided the example that demonstrates that an overwhelming majority of sources describe the Great Chinese famine (which, along with the Great Leap forward, is responsible for lion's share of "Communist death toll", aka "Communist mass killing", aka, "Communist democide") using a totally different terminology. That means, the sources you are talking about represent a minority view. The same can be said about almost all mass mortality events under Communist regimes, except the Great Purge, Cambodian genocide, Red Terror, and several others.
The logic of those sources is faulty: by combining two indisputable facts, namely, that mass killings did occur under some communist regimes, and that the total population losses amounted to nearly 100 million, they imply all those deaths should be considered as mass killings. However, this viewpoint is not shared my the majority of country experts. Thus, it is broadly recognized that Red terror did take place during the Russian civil war, however, it is also well known that majority of deaths were a result of typhus, hunger, military deaths, and, in addition, White terror also took place to some extent. If we combine these number together, we obtain a very impressive figure. However, only few sources claim all those deaths were a result of Communist mass killings.
Therefore, I would like to ask these questions:
  • Do we agree that mass mortality events took place under Communist regimes, and the total number of deaths was nearly 80-90 million?
  • Do we agree that some sources combine those death together under such categories as "Communist democide", "Communist mass killings" etc?
  • Do we agree that majority of country experts describe a majority of those events using totally different terms, separately, in a different historical context, and do not see any common cause in them?
I personally cannot see how an educated and good faith user can answer "no" to any of those questions. If you agree with that, let's think how to fix the article. I have a solution, and I can discuss it when the answer to these three questions will be obtained from all participants of that discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:56, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
Yeah but your logic on a lot of the sources you provided is basically original research and synth. The sources in the article support the premise of the article. Full stop. The fact that you found some sources you think disproves or challenge some of the content of the article does not change that. That is the problem I keep seeing in this talk page. It's a few editors that over and over, for years now, push the fringe view that this topic as a whole is not real. Even in the face of overwhelming and continued rebukes by the community at large. That is the reason we have that FAQ at the top. PackMecEng (talk) 11:55, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
You did not answer the questions, you are diverging. "It's a few editors that over and over, for years now, push the fringe view that this topic as a whole is not real. Even in the face of overwhelming and continued rebukes by the community at large." I find it funny because the reverse is actually true; you are the one pushing the fringe, or minority, but widely popular view that "tries to prove that Communism is a greater threat than Fascism" because it killed "100 million", and state it as fact or consensus among scholars; you are also misrepresenting us because this article should not be about the events but about the theories and interpretations. I have provided sources that prove it is yours that is the minority, if not fringe, view among sources, not ours. You are the perfect example of what TFD said, namely that "Anyone who argues for A probably believes B." Davide King (talk) 14:26, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
See my responce to AmateurEditor few minutes ago.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:01, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
Until reliable sources are found that discuss a topic of something like "mass mortality events took place under Communist regimes", it is original research to argue for such an article. In my response to Paul Siebert's response I also argue that, if such sources are found, a mass mortality topic is different enough that it should probably be a separate article anyway. AmateurEditor (talk) 21:00, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
No. The article discusses events, not interpretations. These events include the Great Chinese famine, Soviet famine, and several less deadly events like Cambodian genocide or the Great Purge. And that dictates the choice of sources. Majority of sources do NOT call GCF "mass killing" or "democide", or some other "-cide", and these views are dramatically underrepresented in this article. You are persistently advocating violation of NPOV with the reference to NOR. That is unacceptable.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:37, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
"Until reliable sources are found that discuss a topic of something like 'mass mortality events took place under Communist regimes', it is original research to argue for such an article." I am baffled, is not that exactly what you support? At least mass mortality events are a fact. The difference is that you treat mass killing as a fact and agreement among scholars, rather than as a popular but controversial minority theory and categorization within a minority itself (genocide studies), which does not appear in mainstream political science journals. This is exactly our point. You are the one supporting this, while Siebert only support it through a rewrite and restructuring that makes it neutral and not-policies violating, and their proposed topic is fine because mass mortality events are a fact (we do not need source for this, we do not need "reliable sources ... that discuss a topic of something like 'mass mortality events took place under Communist regimes'" because it is a fact, and is what reliable sources actually support at best), what is not a fact is their whole categorization as mass killing, as this article clearly implies. Does not this contradict the whole article and your support for it? That is precisely the point, there are no such sources, only theories and interpretations. Which is why I support the interpretations/narrative, not the events. What you propose may done but it needs to be limited only to Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia (only three very specific periods of three different Communist states out of dozens and dozens), as noted by TFD (those are the only events where mass killing can be applied), and it also needs to discuss all relevant sources, as noted by Siebert. If you want to discuss Communist states, that can only be done under the narrative, and as a popular but controversial theory not accepted by most scholars. No matter how this is spinned, the article should be rewritten. Davide King (talk) 21:58, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
  • We have a dedicated sandbox for this article - any rewrite should start there. I, and others, would take massive exception if the article becomes a laboratory experiment for repeatedly failed proposals. schetm (talk) 01:57, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
    That is a fair point but we are going to respect our policies and guidelines. You need to do something about it, too. You have plenty of time to substitute tagged primary sources with secondary sources that support the paraphrase. If you cannot do that, it could mean our analysis is actually correct and it needs to be rewritten. Davide King (talk) 14:21, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
    It could mean that. But it does not. And, before demanding my time, you should familiarize yourself with WP:NOTCOMPULSORY. Again, the sandbox is the place to start. schetm (talk) 21:59, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
I am not aware of any rule that requires us to use a sandbox for rewriting articles. If you know such a rule, kindly drop a link.
In contrast, a talk page discussion is considered a universal and highly desirable tool for achievement of consensus. Here, we are discussing a new concept of the article, and you are welcome to join this discussion. Of course, Wikipedia is not compulsory, and we cannot demand you to do so, if you have no time for that, or just don't want to participate. However, if you remove yourself from the consensus building process, the attempts to invent some artificial rule (such as usage of a sandbox) does not look productive.--Paul Siebert (talk) 22:48, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
As you'll be aware, this article has been indefinitely locked in the recent past. I should know - I got the thing unlocked, and it could very well be locked again if edit warring persists. If a small group of editors wishes to make changes against longstanding consensus, it would be helpful if they would actually demonstrate in concrete fashion what those changes are, to allow for specific line by line discussion and input from other editors. To prevent edit warring and page disruption, that's best done in the sandbox. I was on vacation for the past two weeks, hence my absence from the process. Indeed, I've participated in the consensus building process for three years, and have provided line by line critiques when new leads have been proposed, among other things. That's the best way to not only build consensus, but to build an article, and that's best done in the sandbox. schetm (talk) 23:17, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
As you probably know, I am trying to avoid editing the article unless a talk page consensus is achieved about some concrete change. That is why my approach is 100% consistent with our policy, and if someone will try to request for a full article protection, my voice will be heard by admins. I am perfectly aware of your request to unlock the article, and I agree that was a highly commendable step. I doubt, however, that the article, which was locked for several years, and after that is under a strict 1RR is a long standing consensus version. IMO, "frozen accident" is much more appropriate term. Many, many users are dramatically dissatisfied with the current version, so it is by no means reflects consensus.
By saying that, I by no means imply I am going to make significant changes to the article before some consensus has been achieved. My approach is as follows:
1. Start a discussion about a new article's concept.
2. Come to some consensus.
3. Start rewriting, section by section, on the talk page.
4. After the draft is ready, put it into the article space.
The main difference between my and your proposal is that you de facto ghettoize those who are dissatisfied with the article in some sandbox, and propose to spend a significant time and efforts for writing a text, and implicitly reserve a right to approve/reject the results of that work. That is somewhat disrespectful. You respect your own time and efforts, but show much less respect to others. It would be much more respectful if you expressed your opinion on the new concept in advance, thereby allowing us to include your opinion into the draft.
In connection to that, I propose to come to an agreement about a new concept, and, after the agreement is achieved, to start writing a draft.
You must agree that my approach is more respectful to all participants of the discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:30, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
Viz the new article concept, I've in the past described the dueling concepts as events vs. narrative. I oppose any rewrite that shifts the focus from events to narrative. I have not yet seen a proposal of that nature that shifts the focus to the narrative that satisfies my NPOV, GNG, WP:UNDUE, and WP:V concerns. Those concerns may be satisfied if there's actually some text to scrutinize, but, as I think the article is fine as is, I have little incentive to initiate a rewrite myself.
If, however, I was motivated to work on a rewrite, I'd switch 2 and 3 in your outline above. The fact is that significant time and effort (11 years worth!) has been spent on discussion, and to what end? Time and effort would be saved if those who want to see the article changed actually draft something concrete to be scrutinized. And, as to ghettoizing to a sandbox, I could care less whether there's a new draft in the sandbox or on the talk page - just not in the mainspace before consensus is reached! schetm (talk) 00:51, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Schetm, I actually agree that it would be better to start a draft because clearly discussions are not leading us nowhere but I would need some help from The Four Deuces and Paul Siebert. Or a RfC about the main topic but we need to be very careful about it because it needs to be neutral and correctly represent both sides' views, and we can not fuck that up too.
P.S. "I have not yet seen a proposal of that nature that shifts the focus to the narrative that satisfies my NPOV, GNG, WP:UNDUE, and WP:V concerns." I have yet to seen scholarly sources that satisfies my NPOV, GNG, WP:UNDUE, WP:V, etc. concerns. It goes both ways. About the topic and sources, let me quote TFD. The article title implies a causal connection between Communist regimes and mass killings. Unless we can show that reliable sources have made that connection, it is synthesis or the topic lacks WP:Notablity. ... If there is no connection, then what is the point of an article? Sources given in support provide "little that connects them" and only discuss "Stalinist USSR, Maoist China and Kampuchea." If we actually follow the literature, the article's scope needs to be reduced, and it still needs to be restructured. Davide King (talk) 01:32, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
If there is no connection, then what is the point of an article? - The connection is that these mass killings/mortality events occurred under communist regimes. I am less interested in presenting ideological motivations behind the mass mortality events. However, the proposed causes section is well written and well sourced. schetm (talk) 15:11, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Then you ought to support mass killings/mortality events occurred under any other type of regimes. I would not support such articles because we need a clear connection, not just that they are all Christian, capitalist, Communist, or whatever regimes, otherwise it is clear original research and synthesis. See Dallin's review of The Black Book of Communism. "Whether all these cases, from Hungary to Afghanistan, have a single essence and thus deserve to be lumped together—just because they are labeled Marxist or communist—is a question the authors scarcely discuss." See also A 'Red Holocaust'? A Critique of the Black Book of Communism by Jens Mecklenburg and Wolfgang Wippermann, and "On the Primacy of Ideology: Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia)" by Michael David-Fox. It was even mentioned in Malia's foreword ("... commentators in the liberal Le Monde argue that it is illegitimate to speak of a single Communist movement from Phnom Penh to Paris. Rather, the rampage of the Khmer Rouge is like the ethnic massacres of third-world Rwanda, or the 'rural' Communism of Asia is radically different from the 'urban' Communism of Europe; or Asian Communism is really only anticolonial nationalism. ... conflating sociologically diverse movements is merely a stratagem to obtain a higher body count against Communism, and thus against all the left.") The lumping itself is clearly disputed, and you have to prove Courtois, Rummel, Valentino, and the like are the majority; Courtois is actually a revisionist in positing the equivalence between Communism and Nazism, which goes back to the Historikerstreit. You are acting like those authors are the majority or that their views are the scholarly consensus! So no, "[t]he connection is that these mass killings/mortality events occurred under communist regimes" is not good enough and is actually disputed, as shown by such sources, something that you never provided to reply to any of our arguments; you just assume that your sources are the majority and consensus; you assume that all the events are and can be categorized as mass killings just because they were mass deaths events, when mass killing is a proposed concept and the mass killing categorization for Communism is a theory, not a fact (the fact is that mass deaths occurred), and is not actually applied to Communist states, only to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot's. I am not parroting my opinion, I am just summarizing what sources actually say. Davide King (talk) 22:43, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Alas, your claim that "the proposed causes section is well written and well sourced" just demonstrates you unfamiliarity with the subject.
Thus, per Scott Straus, (World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Apr., 2007), pp. 476-501) Valentino claims that ideology is insufficient as an explanation, although he conceded it may shape the choice of some leaders (in his theory, leader's personality plays a key role). This is an example of usage of Valentino asa primary source, whereas it could be much more appropriate to use Straus' interpretation of Valentinio's view.
Second, the "Proposed causes" should be actually re-named to "Proposed common causes", for each of the event had its own cause/causes. To demonstrate that, just read what such experts as O'Grada or Sen writes about teh causes of the Great Chinese famine.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:31, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
In my opinion, the proposed causes section is extremely well sourced and I thank schetm for saying well written, since I wrote much of it. Every sentence can be traced to a high quality source and often to an excerpt from that source. About using Strauss on Valentino, rather than Valentino: there can be no more reliable source for Valentino's analysis than Valentino himself (and likewise for the other authors' views), so we should not be using Strauss to write about Valentino's analysis of communist mass killing when we have access to Valentino's analysis itself. This is not an example of Valentino being a primary source for the topic of mass killings under communist regimes, it is just Valentino being a primary source for Strauss' 2007 analysis of what he calls "Second-generation comparative research on genocide". The Straus book reviews can be a helpful source for this article to the extent he mentions the topic (he only does so in passing), but it seems to include at least two major errors:
1) he says on page 484 that "Weitz also includes communist cases, whereas Semelin does not." However, Semelin certainly does include communist cases in his book (at least the 2007 English translation found here): Semelin has a sub-chapter called "Destroying to Subjugate: Communist regimes: Reshaping the social body". There is even an excerpt cited in the "Proposed causes" section of the article right now (excerpt "at").
2) he says on page 496 "Some authors, such as Weitz, Valentino, Mann, and Levene, incorporate communist cases, which generally involve targeting class groups (not ethnic or racial ones). Other authors exclude communist cases." The authors whose works he is discussing are those four that he acknowledges discuss communist cases plus two others: Midlarsky and Semelin. Both of them do discuss communist cases. Semelin I just mentioned above. The Midlarsky book discusses communist cases on page 310 here (which is also currently excerpted in the article as excerpt "x"): "Indeed, an arc of Communist politicide can be traced from the western portions of the Soviet Union to China and on to Cambodia. Not all Communist states participated in extensive politicide, but the particular circumstances of Cambodia in 1975 lent themselves to the commission of systematic mass murder." AmateurEditor (talk) 22:27, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
Since you are perfectly aware of my editorial style, I cannot understand why you decided I could made/advocate any significant change until a consensus has been achieved on the talk page
Regarding events vs narrative, both approaches are ok. The problem is, however, that the description of events is strongly biased towards a small group of sources that describe this huge topic as a single event, whereas more specialized sources, which are more recent, more accurate and more professional, are placed in a subordinated position. One of the most blatant example is Rummel, who claimed 70+ million of Soviet citizens perished in "Communist democide", despite the fact that this claim is based on very rough estimated made according to a criticized algorithm, which uses Cold War era outdated figures, and which are ignored by all country experts. Meanwhile, more recent and broadly recognised works, including Erlikhman, Wheatcroft, Ellman etc are ghettoized into the country-specific section, which attenuates a dramatic conflict between obsolete and incorrect Rummel's data and them.
If we want to discuss events, let's stick with what majority sources say about each separate event. I already provided the example that demonstrates that the Great Leap Forward famine (which is responsible for up to 50% all excess deaths under Communist rule) is NOT described as "mass killing", "democide", "genocide" or other "cides" in an overwhelming majority of sources. Therefore, if we want to discuss events, the story should be as follows:
"A large number of mass mortality events occurred under Communist rule. They occurred as a result of (... various explanations are provided ...), the scale of each separate event was (... figures are provided ...). Some authors (author's list is provided) call that "mass killing", "democide" etc, whereas others describe them otherwise (description is presented). Some authors (author's list is presented) link those events together under a category "Communist mass killings", "Global communist death toll" etc, whereas others (a long list follows) see no direct linkage between them, or group them with other mass killing/mass mortality events (e.g. Cambodia, Indonesia, and China are grouped in a category "Genocides in East Asia, which has little in common with the events in the USSR).
If you want to move in that direction, I will totally support the focus on events, not the narrative. However, to do that neutrally, a focus must be shifted from the general sources that describe the whole topic (although they provide one sided interpretations and present very inaccurate facts) to modern country specific sources. For example, if you want give more weight to Rummel than to Ellman just because the former wrote about totalitarian regimes as whole (although was doing that very inaccurately and superficially), whereas the latter provided more reliable figures for the USSR only, I will strongly oppose to that, because that would be a dramatic violation of neutrality. --Paul Siebert (talk) 02:24, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
more recent and broadly recognised works...are ghettoized into the country-specific section - Can those sources be included in the general discussion of communist regimes and mass killings without violating WP:SYNTH? And good, some text to critique. I very much like the language of "some authors" vs "other authors." Previous lead proposals have presented those who draw a harder connection between communist regimes and mass killings as a minority opinion - something that I think we absolutely must avoid, unless we get sources saying specifically that x-opinion is the minority opinion. And, I agree with you that, when it comes to calculating a death toll, we should go by the most hyper-accurate sources we can find, while writing something like "Sources estimate a death toll between x and y, with z being the most widely-accepted toll." schetm (talk) 15:11, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Re "Can those sources be included in the general discussion of communist regimes and mass killings without violating WP:SYNTH?" They can, but only if the structure of this article will be modified as I propose. The primary reason is that country-specific sources we are talking about and the sources this article are based upon exist in two different domains: the former do not cite the latter, and there is no direct dispute between them. For example, Rummel says the death toll of Soviet democide amounted to 70+ million, including 10+ million in 1960s-70s, whereas Erlichman provides the total number of population losses that directly contradict to Rummel, and Ellman says that the number of victims cannot be reliably calculated because the very term "victim of Stalinism" is vague, and it strongly depends on political views of a concrete author. In other words, we have an obvious conflict between Rummel and other two authors. However, we cannot adequately reflect that conflict in that article, because both Ellman and Erlikhman do not cite Rummel, they ignore him as an obsolete source authored by a non-expert, so it is hardly possible to find a source that says "Rummel contradicts to Ellman".
That situation is not resolvable until theh structure of the article is modified, because the very fact that the section "(Global) Number of victims" goes first, and country-specific sections go after it, a false hierarchy is created that gives more weight to the authors like Rummel and less weight to the experts like Ellman or Erlikhman.
However, we can solve this problem if change the article's structure by providing a neutral description of events, which will be based on the work of country experts, and, at the end of the article, put the sections like, "attempts to propose a common terminology", attempts to calculate the global death toll", "attempts to propose the common mechanism/causes".
And, taking into account that the overwhelming majority of sources do not apply the term "mass killing" to the majority of those events, especially to the Great Chinese famine, Volga Famine, Great Soviet famine, which are responsible for lion's share of Communist death toll, the article should be renamed accordingly, for example, to Mass mortality and mass killings under Communist regimes.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:38, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
The current article's structure is suitable for description of such events as the Holocaust of Cambodian genocide, which were relatively simple and uniform, and about which there is a consensus among scholars. In contrast, when you try try to apply that scheme to wide range of events, from the Great chinese famine to Russian Civil war, you inevitably face serious problems with neutrality and/or synthesis.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:21, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
I agree with what Siebert has written above. I too can accept the focus on the events, but only if we provide the whole background, scholarly analysis without limiting ourselves to killings (we should mention, for example, the lives saved by the Soviet Union for helping the Allies in defeating fascism, and by other Communist states by simply modernizing, that it was Communist Vietnam to put an end to the Cambodian genocide, etc.) and give weight to all those scholars (majority) who disagree with Rummel and Valentino (minority). Either way, in which way you spin it, it ought to be rewritten anyway. Davide King (talk) 14:29, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Why should we be mentioning, in this article, the USSR's involvement in WWII? That is massively out of scope. In fact, all of that is almost entirely out of scope. Further, I am not convinced that Rummel and Valention hold the minority viewpoint, apart from that of death toll. I need specific sourcing that says they hold the minority opinion. Barring that, any rewrite must not imply that they hold the minority viewpoint. schetm (talk) 15:11, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Yes, WWII is out of scope. However, since we are discussing "global Communist death toll", which includes mass mortality due to war, famine and disease (and which is considered, by a small fraction of authors as Communist mass killing), lets present a complete picture. As Ellman noted, Communist rule lead not only to a large number of excess deaths (a.k.a "Communist mass killings"), but to large number of "excess lives" (the life expectancy in the USSR was arount 35 years in the beginning of Stalin's rule, but it increased to nearly 60 by the end). If excess deaths (actually the death of 40 old man due to harsh living conditions, which was likely to occur in 1925, but which was far less likely to occur in 1955) are attributed to Coummunists, shouldn't the prevention of those death be attribited (and mentioned) to them? We can easily do that under the topic "Population dynamics".
Similarly, as O'Grada writes, Great Chinese famine was the most deadly (although only in absolute figures) famine in China, but it was the last famine in the centuries long chain of deadly famine that routinely and regularly hit China. I think it would be fair to explain that in the article.
Regarding Rummel, I already explained that on this talk page, but I can repeat my explanations in a hope that you will take it seriously, and will join the work on the new article's structure. Rummel's expertise, and his main contribution is application of Factor analysis to social sciences. That is the field where he is a real expert. He also was an author of the "democratic piece" theory, which demonstrated that democratic countries are much less likely to wage a war against each other than non-democratic ones. To use his factor analysis tools, Rummel needed to have a world wide statistics of all wars, genocides, and other deadly events, and he obtained that statistics by collecting all numerical data without any Source criticism (which is a necessary part of teh work of any professional historian), and, based on those data, estimated lower and higher boundary of mortality in each event. Dulic pointed at fundamental problems with this approach, which inevitably leads to inflated figures, and Rummel failed to defend his point in the subsequent discussion. Other authors just ignore Rummel's views. Moreover, as I already pointed out, Rummel is arguably the only author who never reconsidered his views after 1990s, when tons of new archival sources about USSR became available, and all his data are based on obsolete figures.
Finally, if Rummel is a renown expert, he is supposed to be cited by country experts. Meanwhile virtually no expert in Soviet history cite him (he is cited by specialists in Cambodia, but mostly because his figures are pretty close to the commonly accepted ones, and because there is no significant difference between his "democide" and commonly accepted "genocide" when we discuss such a relatively simple case as Cambodia.
Similarly, Valentino may be a good source for a discussion of the causes of mass killings, but, being a "genocide scholar", not a historian, he cannot be considered a good source for facts and events. You yourself prefer to make a stress on events, so I am surprised you consider Valentino, who is not too much concerned about accuracy in description of events, and who is more interested in general theorising, a good core source for description of events.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:03, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
In addition, schetm, your assertion that Rummel and/or Valentino not necessarily represent minority views is not completely accurate. It seems Valentino is a very influential representative of the "second generation genocide scholars", and Rummel is very respected by the genocide scholars. The problem is that "genocide studies" is a separate discipline, which exists in parallel with historical schools that discuss facts and events. "Genocide scholars" are more interested in finding commonalities and general rules, whereas historians are more focused on events in their historical context. It is not surprise that the former see mire commonalities and less specifics that the latter. It also worth mentioning that this article selectively uses the work of "genocide scholars" when they support the "Communist mass killings" idea and its linkage with Communism, but ignore their opinia when they say about the absence of such a linkage.
The thesis about two "parallel universes" (historians (country experts) and "genocide scholars") can be easily confirmed by looking at mutual citations. How frequently Rummel and "democide" is used by historians writing about Volga famine, Great Purge or Great Chinese famine"?
Let's check:
The first three articles in the first list ("Great Purge" Stalin -democide) were cited 142, 37 and 9 times, accordingly, and they do not mention Rummel at all. The first article in the second list ("Great Purge" Stalin democide) was cited 0 times (which implies poor notability), and other two were authored by Rummel himself (self-citation). I think no further comments are needed.
If I were a naive Wikipedian with zero preliminary knowledge of the topic, and if I had to start writing the article that combines such topics as Volga famine, Great Purge, Great Chinese famine etc together, it seems the logical conclusion from my totally neutral and unbiased search results would be: Rummel is definitely not a source that represents a majority viewpoint. If you disagree, please provide a neutral and unbiased procedure that could allow us to come to a different conclusion. If you disagree with my approach, please, point at errors and omissions in my logic and my search procedure. Please, keep in mind that I am actively using search engines in my professional work, and, per this reliable source, authored by a scholar who studies Wikipedia, the approach used by me, a user Paul Siebert (yes, that article explicitly discusses me), is quite adequate, and it allows identification of pretty decent sources. You must agree that only few Wikipedians are explicitly mentioned in academic sources, and a small fraction of them are mentioned in that context.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:19, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, correct me if I am wrong, but the key paragraph from that source that mentions you is this one on page 449: "This debate is an extended illustration of Pfister’s argument that Wikipedia “destabilizes familiar information routines”, that is, changes the criteria we use to judge expertise, albeit, I would argue, without replacing them with much that could be construed as progressive. Paul Siebert constructs himself as a model information searcher (according to his user page he has a PhD so this is perhaps not so surprising). He claims no biases, uses the information technology of choice for Wikipedia editors (Google Scholar) and applies the criteria of peer-review as a means to filter potential information sources. And the sources he finds I think would be viewed by the majority of librarians or scholars as decent enough: Pacific Affairs is a scholarly journal with a long history of publishing the work of illustrious scholars. Cold War History is a more recent journal, but is also seen as publishing quality work while Porter’s work appeared in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars which is seen as a leftist journal, but one which adheres to standards of rigour in scholarship." The part bolded is faint praise. Using google scholar to find reliable source is perfectly normal and something we probably all do. I certainly do. There is a big difference between that, which is allowed by wikipedia policies, and using search results to define topics for articles or determine weight for sources, which is not allowed by wikipedia policies. AmateurEditor (talk) 22:51, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
Yes, you are wrong. The question is not that I use google scholar (many users do that), the question is how I am doing that. In addition, since you love to literally follow our policy, let me remind you, again, that the policy requires us [[WP:WEIGHT| that mainspace articles and pages fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by reliable sources, in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources.]] The policy does not explain how that proportion can be identified, which means that question is either described elsewhere, or that each user may use their own approach to define that proportion. However, it is absolutely clear from the policy that it requires us to find that proportion. In contrast, you claim that the relative weight of different sources or different viewpoints can be found only in some reliable source, and if no such source exist, we cannot speak about any proportion, and all views should be treated as significant minority view. That idea does not follow from our policy, the policy never said that, and that is your own invention. In contrast, I am using the procedure that is close to what every scientist of scholar is doing in their routine job, which means the procedure is neutral, unbiased and reliable.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:25, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
But listing all deaths under Communist regimes, even though Mann, Valentino, and others limit themselves to the Big Three (Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot) is not? It is not up to us to prove that they are the minority, it is up to you to prove that they are the majority; you are asking us to prove a negative. Anyway, while Wikipedia is not a reliable sources in itself, the sources used in those two articles I am going to mention certainly are. Actually read Genocide studies and Mass killing; only a POV pusher would not realize how little consensus there is and that Siebert's proposal is the only one that does not violates our policies and guidelines, which is something you care about only when it suits you. A Perspectives on Politics (mainstream political science) article summarizing the problems of genocide studies and their minority status, courtesy of Siebert:

This new generation of scholarship has crystallized into the interdisciplinary field of "genocide studies," a community of scholars and practitioners dedicated to researching and preventing genocide. However, genocide studies has emerged as its own research field, developing in parallel rather than in conversation with work on other areas of political violence. Aside from a few important exceptions, mainstream political scientists rarely engage with the most recent work on comparative genocide. Some of the newest genocide research appears in topic-specific conferences and journals like "Genocide Studies and Prevention" and the "Journal of Genocide Research", but not in political science venues. The reasons for this separation are complex, but partly stem from the field's roots in the humanities (especially history) and reliance on methodological approaches that have had little resonance in mainstream political science, as well as the field's explicit commitment to humanitarian activism and praxis. Earlier generations of political scientists and sociologists who studied genocide often found little interest for their work among dominant political science journals and book publishers; they instead opted to establish their own journals and professional organizations. Although the field has grown enormously over the past decade and a half, genocide scholarship still rarely appears in mainstream disciplinary journals.

Davide King (talk) 16:36, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
"Can those sources be included in the general discussion of communist regimes and mass killings without violating WP:SYNTH?" The article is in itself SYNTH by making a link or connection that most scholars do not make, including proponents like Valentino. See this.
[Main point]

While noting that mass killings have occurred under Communist regimes, Valentino provides no theory about the connection. It would be the same as if he said that there have been mass killings in Asia and we created an article called "Mass killings under Asian regimes." Valentino identifies mass killings as over 50,000 people intentionally killed in a 5 year period, which is not the definition used here, and concluded that most Communist regimes did not carry out mass killings and only three definitely did (Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia), and only in specific periods (Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot). ...

Valentino provides little that connects them and only discusses Stalinist USSR, Maoist China, and Kampuchea; it only discusses specific instances where over 50,000 people were killed and excludes "counter-insurgency" mass killings, which he groups in his book with similar killings by capitalist regimes. In other words, they were not ideologically driven according to him but resulted from the same motivations as non-Communist states. So if we were to use his article as a model, it would restrict the scope of the article. Yet, we act like Valentino is talking about all Communist states and that communism is the main culprit, hence original research and synthesis, and why we desperately need secondary sources explaining for us what those authors actually wrote.

Davide King (talk) 16:45, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
Yes. Actually, Valentino's theory of "strategic mass killings" says that, under some circumstances, some leaders of some regimes may resort to mass killings as a tool for implementing certain social transformations. That happens when they feel that may be the most suitable way to achieve their goals. Valentino never provided any significant link between Communism and mass killings, and between mass killings and any ideology. He also openly says that most Communist regimes were not engaged in mass killings, the idea that is significantly attenuated in the article.
In conection to that, I recall I saw the article (can find it if somebody wants to see it), where Valentino's approach was applied for camparative study of the Great Purge and Rwandian genocide, which means "strategic mass killings" is not a concept that describes Communist mass killings only. Again, the role of ideology, and Communism in particular, is minimal (if not zero) in Valentino's theory. That fact is carefully attenuated in the article, which is an example of original research.
Moreover, "Communist mass killings" is just a chapter in the Valentinio's book, he never wrote specifically about Communism and mass killings.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:21, 26 August 2021 (UTC)
"Moreover, "Communist mass killings" is just a chapter in the Valentinio's book, he never wrote specifically about Communism and mass killings." No, a chapter on communist mass killings in his book is in fact Valentino writing specifically about communism and mass killings. This is becoming absurd. AmateurEditor (talk) 22:55, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
What is really absurd is the attempt to defend a blatant NPOV violation by reference to NOR, and, simultaneously, making event worse NOR violations. Valentino never wrote about "Mass killings under Communist regimes". His theory is totally different. The concept is " ... [continues here].--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:21, 26 August 2021 (UTC)

PackMecEng, you may have missed my question above: "In fact few if any sources have been provided. Could you please name one? [01:22, 25 August 2021] TFD (talk) 14:31, 25 August 2021 (UTC)

Just a quick comment about AmateurEditor's comment (please, do not reply me back, at least until Paul Siebert replied to you back, because I think it is better if you discuss this and anything else with him, since I feel like he is better at doing that than me) to which I hope.

  1. "there can be no more reliable source for Valentino's analysis than Valentino himself." This clearly contradicts our policies and guidelines, which I believe Siebert can agree with and better explain to you why. We need a secondary/tertiary source for all this, which is why all the tags I put in (and I could have added many more, since the whole article is like this, which just highlights the whole issue) are justified and correct. This is precisely what can avoid forms of original research and synthesis, using a reliable source that comments on what someone said and do the analysis and paraphrase for us.
  2. "The Straus book reviews can be a helpful source for this article to the extent he mentions the topic (he only does so in passing), but it seems to include at least two major errors." Pretty much everything else is your personal opinion not backed by secondary reliable sources, which is the whole point; neither you nor me have the expertise to point out what the academic Straus 2007 article got wrong. If you could provide a secondary source that supports this, or that criticizes Strauss 2007 on those grounds, it would be helpful. Note that your own quotes show the main topic is Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, not all Communist states, which means the scope should be much narrow only to those three and their comparative analysis, rather than cherry pick any author, even if not an expert, who wrote about Communist states and killings.

P.S. With all due respect but I think this just highlights that you are the cause of such original research and synthesis, as you wrote most of this article, and apparently believe that primary sources are better than secondary sources about what someone meant, which is contrary to our policies and guidelines. Davide King (talk) 22:44, 29 August 2021 (UTC)

Response to AmateurEditor

It will be somewhat long, so, for sake of readability, I put it into a separate subsection.

Yes, you are right, it is becoming absurd. Under "absurd" I mean persistent attempts to defend a blatant NPOV violation under pretext of NOR, and, simultaneously, making event worse NOR violations. Below, I am explaining that.

First, the claim that Valentino can be used as a core source because this source defines the topic is WRONG. Valentino never wrote about "Mass killings under Communist regimes". His theory is totally different. To demonstrate that, I propose to stop providing quotes from Valentino, because we may misinterpret him (which, actually, already takes place, as I'll demonstrate below). Instead, let's take a look at the description of Valentino's ideas in reliable secondary sources. I took all reviews on his book that I was able to find in google.scholar or jstor using keywords: "valentino final solutions mass killings", and read most of them. After I found many of them repeat each other, I stopped reading, because I believe I got a full impression on how scholars interpret Valentino's ideas. If someone finds a review or another source that provides a different interpretation, please, feel free to present it here.

  • Gregory H. Stanton. Source: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Autumn, 2004, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 116-117
"...That's traditional perspective on it, but Valentino believes otherwise. In his view, mass killing represents a rational choice of elites to achieve or stay in political power in the face of perceived threats to their dominance. Valentino develops his argument through eight case studies. Three fit the legal definition of genocide (the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a "national, ethnical, racial, or religious group"): Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda. The remaining five amount to what political scientist Barbara Harff calls "politicide," mass killing for political reasons: Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, the Khmer Rouge's Cambodia, Guatemala, and Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. By emphasizing cases of politicide over those of genocide, Valentino stacks the deck in favor of his politics-centered argument from the start."
  • Jessica Priselac. Source: The SAIS Review of International Affairs, Winter-Spring 2005, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter-Spring 2005), pp. 207-209
"After defining mass killing as the intentional killing of noncombatants resulting in 50,000 or more deaths within a five-year period, Valentino examines a number of specific cases to explain his theory. In this “strategic approach” to assessing mass killing, Valentino divides his case studies into three types: Communist, ethnic and counter-guerrilla. He examines the communist regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; mass killing based on ethnicity in Rwanda, Nazi Germany, and Turkey; and mass killings during counter-guerrilla operations in the Guatemalan civil war and under the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. One of Valentino’s central arguments is that “characteristics of society at large, such as pre-existing cleaves, hatred and discrimination between groups and non-democratic forms of government, are of limited utility in distinguishing societies at high risk for mass killing.” Valentino’s strongest arguments in support of this statement are his comparative studies of regimes that committed mass killing with similar regimes that did not."
  • Matthew Krain. Source: Perspectives on Politics, Mar., 2006, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Mar., 2006), pp. 233-235
" Valentino lays out the strategic logic of mass killing at length and proceeds to examine in separate chapters three different types of cases-communist, ethnic, and counter-guerrilla mass killings - each with its own unique and deadly logic. In each chapter, relevant cases of mass killings are subjected to thorough historical process tracing in order to highlight the role of the elite decision-making calculus. In each chapter, the author also briefly discusses cases in which mass killings did not occur."
  • Gerard Alexander. Source: The Virginia Quarterly Review, FALL 2004, Vol. 80, No. 4 (FALL 2004), p. 280
"Valentino sets out to diminish the role that ethnicist ideologies and other social dysfunctions play in explanations of genocides. He instead traces these terrible outcomes to small sets of committed rulers, for whom mass murder is an instrumental means to such ends as regime security from suspect or threatening minority groups. As such, his thesis touches directly on the question of whether such regimes require the active support of at least important segments of the general population in order to carry out genocides. In arguing they do not, he categorizes most citizens of afflicted societies as bystanders and frontally challenges Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's claim that a committed regime and an "eliminationist" culture are both necessary conditions for a genocidal outcome. Valentino tests his thesis against an array of evidence that is admirable in two ways. First, including Maoist China and military-ruled Guatemala retrieves often-overlooked cases for our consideration. Second, adding China, the USSR, and Soviet occupied Afghanistan may remind readers— too many of whom need reminding—just how many innocents were slaughtered by Communist regimes. For its many virtues, the analysis disappoints in two key ways. First, the study does not really identify the origins of rulers' beliefs about the threats they face. This matters because if he cannot explain in rationalist terms why Nazis believed they had to kill Jewish grandmothers in Poland, then Valentino risks inviting ideational explanations for genocides in through the back door, preserving the form of an instrumentalist account but not its content. Second, he ultimately does not explain why rulers resorted to genocide to deal with threats as opposed to other option."
  • G. John Ikenberry. Source: Foreign Affairs, Sep. - Oct., 2004, Vol. 83, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 2004), pp. 164-165
"In this astute and provocative study, Valentino argues instead that leaders, not societies, are to blame. In most cases, he finds that power fuil leaders use mass killing to advance their own interests or indulge their own hatreds, rather than to carry out the desires of their constituencies. This "strategic" view emerges from a review of mass killing in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia; ethnic killing in Turkish Armenia, Nazi Germany, and Rwanda; and counter-guerrilla killing in Guatemala and Afghanistan."
  • Otis L. Scott. Source: The International History Review, Dec., 2005, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 909-912
" Valentino argues for a 'strategic approach' to understand the etiology of mass killing that 'seeks to identify the specific situations, goals, and conditions that give leaders incentives to consider this kind of violence' (p. 67). He tells us that this approach is more productive because it focuses the observers' attention on mass killing as a strategy to a larger end and not necessarily an end in itself. We are reminded that mass public support is unnecessary for mass killings to occur. All that is needed is a group of people - large or small - having the requisite resources: political power, the ability to employ force, and opportunity to work their murderous mayhem.
Valentino's typology of mass killings is well supported by persuasive examples of episodes of violence against civilians. These cover a wide historical sweep, from the former Soviet Union, Turkish Armenia, and Nazi Germany, to the more recent examples from Cambodia, Guatemala, Afghanistan and Rwanda."
  • Aysegul Aydin. Source: Journal of Peace Research, Jul., 2006, Vol. 43, No. 4, Special Issue on Alliances (Jul., 2006), p. 499
"In Final Solutions, Valentino investigates the roots of this human tragedy and finds the answers - not in broad political and social structures within a society frequently modeled in human security studies, but in the goals and perceptions of small and powerful groups carrying out these policies. Valentino's rationalist approach to the study of mass killings is novel and insightful. He presents historical evidence that shows that leaders resorting to 'final solutions' are highly influenced by radical goals that touch the social fabric of society and their perception of effective strategies to best suppress the popular dissent that usually follows the implementation of these goals. Most importantly, Valentino's analysis is far reaching. Its emphasis on the rationality of killers and the instrumentality of mass killings shows that the scientific study of mass killings is possible and desirable, despite the ethical dimension of the issue."
  • Frank W. Wayman and Atsushi Tago. Source: Journal of Peace Research, january 2010, Vol. 47, No. 1 (january 2010), pp. 3-13
" Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter; to Valentino the crucial thing is the motive For mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70). He divides motive into the two categories of dispossessive mass killing (as in ethnic cleansing, colonial enlargement, or collectivization of agriculture) and coercive mass killing (as in counter-guerrilla, terrorist, and Axis imperialist conquests)." It worth noting that Wayman & Tago concede that Valentino partially sees some ideological component in mass killing committed by Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, so their general conclusion is close to that of Strauss (quoted by me in one previous post)
"He claims that almost all cases are initiated by small groups of leaders, not by mass hatred or intolerance nor by poverty and suffering. Those deplorable conditions are very widespread, yet mass political murder on a genocidal scale is much less frequent. Not only is it beyond our capacity to end human nastiness and misery, but in any case, leaders not structural conditions or the wrong cultural values are responsible for mass slaughter. Perhaps even more important is the clear evidence that genocidal acts are ordered by those leaders for instrumental purposes, to gain very specific political ends. They are neither irrational outbursts of emotion nor driven by mass hatred. They are calculated strategies by powerful elites, sometimes even by single dictators who feel that they and their cherished programs are gravely endangered by the existence of hostile enemies who must be either terrorized into submission or eliminated entirely. Not trading with them, or threatening them with justice, is unlikely to stop them because by the time the decision to engage in mass killing has been taken, they view the situation as desperate.
Looking only at the 20th-century cases and focusing on eight specific cases, Valentino is able to provide a reasonable amount of detail about each one to support his strong conclusions. He divides the kinds of “final solutions” into three types. First, he looks at Stalin’s mass murders, at those in Mao’s China, and at the Khmer Rouge genocide. In all three cases, a small cadre of leaders led by a dedicated revolutionary chief was driven by utopian fantasies and ideological certitude that made it see enemies everywhere and kill millions. The fact that the leaders’ people did not conform to revolutionary ideals could not mean that these ideals were wrong but that, instead, there were many traitors and saboteurs who had to be eliminated. Their revolutionary paranoia was much more than the personal monstrosity of each of these leaders but a fundamental part of their worldview and that of those immediately around them."
Again, Chirot's interpretation of Valentino's concept is that personal utopian fantasies of a handful of crazy fanatics explain onset of mass killings in each case, and each case has very specific features that strongly depend of each leader's personality and depends on them. Again there is not much ground for a claim that Valentino proposes any serious generalizations, quite the opposite, according to him, each case is unique.

At that moment, I decided to stop, because further reading did not add fresh information. What is the summary? It seems all sources agree that:

1. Valentino's main idea is that mass killings were the results of leader's personality, not in some particular ideology, socioeconomic , ethnic or similar factors.
2. Valentino analyzed eight separate cases divided on three subgroups. For each case (or a subgroup) he analyzes similar societies (with similar ideology, socioeconomics etc), which were NOT engaged in mass killings.
3. He analyzed NOT all mass killings committed in/by the USSR, but mass killings perpetrated by Stalin's regime only. Never in his book he states that other cases belong to the same category.
4. He considers mass killings in Afghanistan as a category that is different from Stalin's mass killings. That additionally demonstrates that the chapter "Communist mass killings" (the chapter 4) contains no generalizations: it just describes the three concrete cases, i.e. Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, and contrasts it with another case (Afghanistan), which is not "Communist mass killing", according to Valentino.
  • Therefore, Valentino NEVER wrote about Communist mass killings in general, he analyzed just THREE cases, and explicitly noted that majority of Communist regimes were NOT engaged in mass killings. If we add more cases, besides Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, we are engaged in SYNTHESIS, and the very claim that Valentino defines a new category "Mass killings under Communist regime" is a piece of original research.
  • Valentino CAN be used as an aggregator source for the article Mass killings under Stalin, Mao, and Khmer Rouge regimes, but ... why do we need to have such an article if each of those topics already has their own articles?
  • Valentino explicitly wrote that ideology is not an important factor. By adding more and more sources saying that it is, we directly distort Valentino's concept, and perform SYNTHESIS.
  • Valentino wrote that leader's personality is the key factor that explains almost all. By ignoring that and replacing it with theorizing of other authors, we engage in blatant SYNTHESIS.

I argued, for many times, that the article is blatantly non-neutral, but the responce was: that is the only way to write the article without engaging in original research. Here I demonstrated, with sources, that that argument is totally false: not only this article is blatantly non-neutral, it is a blatant WP:SYN.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:36, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, I am busy for the next two weeks, but I will have time to respond this weekend (and next weekend, if needed). AmateurEditor (talk) 04:26, 1 September 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, you say: "First, the claim that Valentino can be used as a core source because this source defines the topic is WRONG. Valentino never wrote about "Mass killings under Communist regimes". His theory is totally different." You misunderstand me: Valentino does not define this topic and the topic is not his theory. I have said that the Valentino book is one of the sources that justifies the existence of this article because that source contains substantial material on the topic of large scale killing of civilians by communist states generally in the chapter "Communist Mass Killing: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia". Other sources that include material only on the closely related topics but isolated topics of such killing by individual communist states cannot justify an article about mass killing in communist states generally because that is forbidden OR/synthesis. Valentino's book is one of the clearest examples of a source that includes the topic of civilian killing by communist regimes generally and, because it is such a high quality academic source, it is convenient to point to it (along with other such sources) when the charge of OR/synthesis is raised. Regardless of the details of Valentino's "Mass killing" definition and specifics of his theories, he definitely wrote on the topic of the killing of non-combatants by "communist regimes", and denying that is what I find absurd. You say "stop providing quotes from Valentino, because we may misinterpret him", but you then make statements about what Valentino did and did not say, so quoting him is the best way to demonstrate that your numbered points and bullets are incorrect.
1) You say "Valentino's main idea is that mass killings were the results of leader's personality, not in some particular ideology, socioeconomic , ethnic or similar factors." Arguing about the details of what he wrote doesn't change that he did write on this topic and he meets Wikipedia's reliable source criteria. Valentino is the one who chose to group communist regimes into their own chapter. Even if he concluded that leader's personality was the only significant factor and ideology or regime type played no role (which is not what he concluded), it would still support having this article. Even if every reliable source on this topic were entirely filled with explanations of why the killing by communist regimes had no commonalities that set it apart from non-communist mass killings, it would still justify having this article (although the content of the article would need to reflect that content, of course).
2) You say "Valentino analyzed eight separate cases divided on three subgroups. For each case (or a subgroup) he analyzes similar societies (with similar ideology, socioeconomics etc), which were NOT engaged in mass killings." There is material in the book that touches on lots of different topics and could be used to contribute to lots of different wikipedia articles. Again the article is about the topic of mass killings under communist regimes, not Valentino's theory per se. Valentino does discuss the topic and his views should be accurately reflected in the article where he is referenced (I think they are currently).
3) You say "He analyzed NOT all mass killings committed in/by the USSR, but mass killings perpetrated by Stalin's regime only. Never in his book he states that other cases belong to the same category." He doesn't have to analyze all communist mass killing to write about the topic of communist mass killing. His introduction to the Communist mass killing chapter begins by citing other sources that do analyze all such killings (in the USSR and globally), such as Courtois and Rummel. The material can be read in excerpts "ag" and "ab".
4) You say "He considers mass killings in Afghanistan as a category that is different from Stalin's mass killings. That additionally demonstrates that the chapter "Communist mass killings" (the chapter 4) contains no generalizations: it just describes the three concrete cases, i.e. Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, and contrasts it with another case (Afghanistan), which is not "Communist mass killing", according to Valentino." Here are some generalizations from that chapter: "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million. In this chapter I focus primarily on mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia - history's most murderous communist states. Communist violence in these three states alone may account for between 21 million and 70 million deaths. Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa." Note that the sources he cites are reproduced in excerpt "ab". You are right that he includes the Soviet killing in Afghanistan in a different chapter, but even there he includes "Communist" as a secondary motive for the killing.
  • You say "Valentino NEVER wrote about Communist mass killings in general" and "If we add more cases, besides Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, we are engaged in SYNTHESIS, and the very claim that Valentino defines a new category "Mass killings under Communist regime" is a piece of original research." He begins his Communist Mass Killing chapter by writing about communist mass killings in general: "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million.
  • You say "Valentino CAN be used as an aggregator source for the article Mass killings under Stalin, Mao, and Khmer Rouge regimes, but ... why do we need to have such an article if each of those topics already has their own articles?" Valentino focuses on those three in his chapter, but also makes it clear in that chapter that more killing than that occurred under communist regimes. "Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa."
  • You say "Valentino explicitly wrote that ideology is not an important factor. By adding more and more sources saying that it is, we directly distort Valentino's concept, and perform SYNTHESIS." Again, this article is not about Valentino's chapter or theory. It is about the topic of communist mass killing and his chapter is an example of that topic in a reliable secondary source.
  • You say "Valentino wrote that leader's personality is the key factor that explains almost all. By ignoring that and replacing it with theorizing of other authors, we engage in blatant SYNTHESIS." Again, this article is not about Valentino's chapter or theory. It is about the topic of communist mass killing and his chapter is an example of that topic in a reliable secondary source. AmateurEditor (talk) 06:26, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
Outside comments

Just wanted to leave a quick comment. How can this article still be defended after such work is beyond me. Honestly, if even after this they are not convinced that Valentino is totally misrepresented, this may amount to ownership; they have authored almost 70% so they have little incentive to be convinced by your rational arguments and secondary/tertiary sources. Could you please also analyze those other three sources? Because apparently it was those sources that changed the result from no consensus to keep in the first place.

At first glance, I would say that those sources only support Mass killings under Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot but as Siebert noted, "why do we need to have such an article if each of those topics already has their own articles?" Even if we make a comparative analysis article, it needs to be rewritten anyway because the scope will be limited to those three very specific periods of three different Communist states out of dozens and dozens. I think the only way to show that this article is synthesis, etc., and it needs to be rewritten and restructured, is to take down as you did here, one by one, each author and source allegedly supporting the article and topic as currently written and structured.

Davide King (talk) 18:20, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

A quick answer is as follows: many people really were killed or died prematurely, and many authors write about each separate event, of about some group of the events. Some of them see commonalities, some of them describe each event in separation from other, some authors see common cause for a certain group of events, others group the same events in a different way, and so on, and so forth. We just need to present an unbiased story without attempting to put our own words in the author's mouth, and maintain a balance based on prominence of each view.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:32, 30 August 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, here it appears that there is a disagreement and misunderstanding about the topic. It looks like supporters of this article, as it currently is, essentially want it to be a (List of) Mass killings under Communist regimes, where any mass death events is categorized as mass killing (original research/synthesis in my view; for such an article, we would need a clear link between communism and mass killing that is not there). Critics of the article either want it to be about Communist mass killing as a subtopic of Mass killing (theory) but limited to the Big Three, or essentially the same AmateurEditor's topic but understood to be about mass mortality events, not all of which are categorized as mass killing; like Communist mass killing, it is a theory proposed by some authors.

Again, what matters is what reliable sources say about Valentino; if they did not pick up what AmateurEditor quoted, and do not say he supports or proposes MKuCR but rather he proposes Communist mass killing as a subcategory of dispossessive mass killing vs. coercive mass killing, which is a very different thing, it means that it is either original research or undue, and Paul Siebert is right and AmateurEditor is wrong. I am curious about Siebert's reply, especially what they will comment and respond about the topic and the misunderstanding of it.

If Valentino does not define this topic, then who does? It would still be original research to cherry pick sources that discuss some killings under Communist regimes and then synthetize them together, as if they support MKuCR, which is what the article currently does. it would still support having this article But we are not even arguing about deletion, we are arguing, to quote Siebert, about presenting "an unbiased story without attempting to put our own words in the author's mouth, and maintain a balance based on prominence of each view." What, in my view, AmateurEditor still do is cherry pick Valentino's quotes, without any secondary analysis that do it for us, as Siebert did. In my view, Cloud200 did the same thing below; no secondary/tertiary sources are provided in support of their arguments and interpretation, Siebert is the only one who is doing that, they are not basing their arguments on their own analysis of Valentino and the like, they are summarizing what secondary/tertiary sources said about them, that do the interpretation for us, and thus avoid any form of original research and synthesis.

When we do not rely on such secondary/tertiary sources, we have statements like the article is about the topic of mass killings under communist regimes, not Valentino's theory per se. Valentino does discuss the topic (but he writes about Communist mass killing, not MKuCR) and doesn't have to analyze all communist mass killing to write about the topic of communist mass killing. So which is which? It is either Communist mass killing or MKuCR. The former is supported by Valentino and sources, the latter is not; they are mass mortality events, and only Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot's can be considered mass killing events.

When Valentino is discussing the estimates, he is not writing about MKuCR but rather about the Communist death toll, another notable yet controversial topic, i.e. the Victims of Communism narrative, and Valentino is mainly summarizing the estimates, though he seems to rely mainly on those on the high-end, which are not supported by most scholars. You see? I can interpret Valentino differently, so who is right? The secondary/tertiary reliable sources, of course, which overwhelmingly say that Valentino is writing about Communist mass killing as a theory to explain excess deaths and mass mortality events under Communist states (only Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot's are certain, in his view, to be categorized as mass killings), not MKuCR, and mass killing is itself a concept proposed by some genocide studies (not mainstream political science) scholars to categorize killings that do not fit the category of genocide. Davide King (talk) 07:46, 4 September 2021 (UTC)

RfC: Change "communist" to "totalitarian" in title?

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: Consensus against the (de-facto) move proposal Seems to be consensus that the current title fits the article. Whether the scope of the article should be expanded is another issue which would warrant a more explicit discussion of the subject (instead of being bluntly implied via a move request). RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:14, 6 September 2021 (UTC)

Should "communist" be changed to "totalitarian" in the title? soibangla (talk) 18:38, 10 July 2021 (UTC)

  • Support: A good argument can be made that some/most/all of the regimes discussed in this article were totalitarian rather than communist. If some believe communism is synonymous with totalitarianism, they should have no objection to this proposed change. By contrast, others might argue communism and totalitarianism are not necessarily synonymous, or are even diametrical opposites, though the regimes were indisputably totalitarian, as they had omnipotent central governments whereas Marxism called for elimination of central government, notwithstanding how 20th century totalitarians may have misappropriated what Marx actually wrote in 1848 and branded themselves "communists." soibangla (talk) 18:38, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Per WP:COMMONNAME. The regimes were all generally known as "Communist". If we want a separate article about "Mass killings under totalitarian regimes", it could include Nazi Germany too, and that would be fine. Adoring nanny (talk) 19:07, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Support. This is plainly a descriptive title and not a common name (since no one descriptor directly unites all the diverse underlying viewpoints covered here), and as such WP:NDESC applies. Totalitarianism is a more precise and neutral summary in that respect, and is broadly a more useful main topic, since most of the academic discourse on the subject focuses on totalitarianism as the unifying factor. --Aquillion (talk) 19:35, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose Brought here by the bot [2]. This seems like an unnecessarily narrow article, however, based on the content of the article -- a list of peoples republics -- the current name is most appropriate per WP:NDESC. Renaming it "totalitarian" uses Wikipedia's voice to indict or castigate the governments of the states listed. "Totalitarian" is a loaded term that is implicitly negative, while "communist" is a descriptive term that is not values-laden. The fact that its use may be imperfect in this case would be better addressed through careful wording in the lead rather than retitling. Chetsford (talk) 20:20, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose It would make the article to broad. Right now the current title fits the content very well and is by far the most WP:COMMONNAME. If we expand it to totalitarian we would also have to include other groups such as Nazi's or Italian regime during WW2, plus a multitude of others. Which would start to get a little out of hand in scope and fail WP:NDESC. PackMecEng (talk) 20:28, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose Sure, the regimes might not be "true" communists, but are commonly described as such. While totalitarianism was what ultimately made most or all of these killings possible, it is seen by most academics in the Proposed Causes section as mediating variable between communism and mass killings. 15 (talk) 20:37, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose: As the effect of the proposed renaming would be to completely change the content/scope of the article, which has survived numerous previous attempts at deletion based on arguments very similar to those presented by the supporters above. (As an aside, the suggestion that "totalitarianism" is a more narrow or better-understood concept, in the academic literature or otherwise, than 20th-century self-described communist regimes is laughable.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 20:40, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose: There's overlap between communism & totalitarianism but they are not synonymous. The ideology section specifically and exclusively talks about communism and its variants. Likewise, the entire 'States where mass killings have occurred' section includes only communist regimes. There's a reason why totalitarian regimes like Italy under Mussolini or Haiti under Duvalier are not mentioned at all in this article (i.e., they weren't communist). COMMONNAME applies, but so does WP:PRECISION. Dr. Swag Lord (talk) 20:47, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose The current title fits the content of the article. If we're to change the name, we'd have to broaden the same. BristolTreeHouse (talk) 05:19, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
  • @Soibangla: This is not an RfC matter. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 06:51, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose per the arguments above that changing the title would result in changing the scope of the article. 07:03, 11 July 2021 (UTC) TOA The owner of all ☑️
  • Oppose Communism and Totalitarianism are not synonymous, the regimes are mostly referred to as Communist. Sea Ane (talk) 09:49, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose COMMONNAMEאברהסה בו (talk) 17:03, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose - to change it to totalitarian would then require the inclusion of a litany of other regimes which have nothing to do with Marxism-Leninism, or any other attempt towards communism. --Cdjp1 (talk) 08:39, 22 July 2021 (UTC)
  • Support per Aquillion and Adoring nanny's proposal that we make an article about totalitarian regimes in general (I only disagree with Adoring nanny that it should be another article; I propose it to be this article, while another article is created about Communist death tolls and the narrative). This article should be expanded to be about totalitarian regimes in general, and not limited to Communist regimes. There is no scholarly literature that treats the topic as we do, and many of sources are misrepresented, even The Black Book of Communism (per historian Andrzej Paczkowski, who positively reviewed the work, the book is not "about communism as an ideology or even about communism as a state-building phenomenon") and Valentino, who is heavily relied on ("Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing"). On the other hand, there is plenty of literature about totalitarian regimes and genocide/mass killings, see Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, Resisting Genocide: The Multiple Forms of Rescue, and Final Solutions. Neither of those works limit themselves to Communist regimes, so why should we, too? Another article, focused on Communist states and about death tolls and the victims of Communism narrative, can be written based on this lead. Davide King (talk) 21:59, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for speedy deletion:

You can see the reason for deletion at the file description page linked above. —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:25, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion

The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:

Participate in the deletion discussion at the nomination page. —Community Tech bot (talk) 06:55, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Responsibility for Katyn massacre

I umderstand the text becomes a bit clumsier, but IMO it is important no notice that Russian Duma explicitly put responsibility on the whole state. As you may know, a popular excuse (by an example of Khruschef) for Soviet bad things has been to put all blame on Stalin, just like "Führerprinzip": "it is the leader who was bad, we just followed the orders; we didnt know". Lembit Staan (talk) 05:03, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Actually, the core idea of the Valentino's book (which is one of the cornerstones this article rests upon) is that mass killings (as he defiens them) are a result of strategic decisions made by a very small group of leaders. His analysis of eight cases (three of then were "Communist mass killings", whereas others were not) fully confirms this point. So, unless this source is removed from the article, we must follow what it says.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:46, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
The Russian government is not a reliable source, while The New York Times is. We should follow reliable sources. 'Totalitarian state' is also weasely, as (1) totalitarianism as a theory is no longer accepted by scholars and mainly remains a useful word; (2) scholars only agree on Stalin era (and not since 1917 or 1924) as 'totalitarian.' Anyway, that is another section that should likely go (we should only use scholarly sources, not news sources, much less government sources), and Siebert is right again. As things stand, the long-standing version is better, as it least reflects The New York Times, which is a reliable source, and did not find due to mention that part or 'totalitarian.' I was not even the one to write that but your edit made things already bad even worse, or was no improvement. Davide King (talk) 05:23, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

BTW, this and [3] is an example of selective usage of sources by both parties. The full quote is
"В начале 1990-х годов наша страна совершила важные шаги на пути к установлению истины в Катынской трагедии. Было признано, что массовое уничтожение польских граждан на территории СССР во время Второй мировой войны стало актом произвола тоталитарного государства, подвергшего репрессиям также сотни тысяч советских людей за политические и религиозные убеждения, по социальным и иным признакам. Опубликованные материалы, многие годы хранившиеся в секретных архивах, не только раскрывают масштабы этой страшной трагедии, но и свидетельствуют, что Катынское преступление было совершено по прямому указанию Сталина и других советских руководителей."
Using google translator, it is easy to see that (i) a responsibility of Soviet totalitarian state was acknowledged, and (ii) Stalin was named as a person personally responsible for the massacre. In other words, you both decided to push a part of truth. I suggest you both to discuss that matter on a talk page and to come to an agreement. --Paul Siebert (talk) 05:07, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
No I didnt decide to pus the poart of the truth. I dont "push" anything. In my ext both state and stalin are present. Somebody else decided to push the idea that stalin was the only villain in sovjet union.
"sorry but that is pretentious, the Russian government is not a reliable source, while The New York Times is; we report what reliable sources do; you have been reverted twice now, please establish consensus for your edit before re-adding this; see also Siebert's comments"
you must be out of your mind. My reference was directly to the statement of Duma. russian govt it the best possible source for its own statemnts.
Sorry, I am no longer willing to cooperate in work on this article, where the page owners are ridiulous combination of russuophobic and pro-Soviet expressions. Lembit Staan (talk) 16:02, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Lembit Staan, your edit says that Duma acknowledged responsibility of the totalitarian Soviet state. DK's edit says Duma blamed Stalin personaly. In reality, Duma adopted the document saying this:
"In the early 1990s, our country took important steps towards establishing the truth in the Katyn tragedy. It was recognized that the mass extermination of Polish citizens on the territory of the USSR during World War II was an act of arbitrariness by the totalitarian state, which also repressed hundreds of thousands of Soviet people for their political and religious beliefs, on social and other grounds. The published materials, kept in secret archives for many years, not only reveal the scale of this terrible tragedy, but also testify that the Katyn crime was committed on the direct orders of Stalin and other Soviet leaders. " (the above quote translated by Google)
In other words, Duma doesn't say just about Stalinist regime. It blamed the regime and then specifies the massacre was committed on direct order of Stalin (personally). Both your and DK's edit tell the part of truth, so you guys BOTH may be accused of cherry-picking at the same extent. Instead of acknowledging that fact and proposing some hybrid version like:
a declaration acknowledging responsibility of the Soviet totalitarian state and Stalin personally for the Katyn massacre, the execution of over 21,000 Polish POW's and intellectual leaders.
you decided to resort to personal insults (imo, totally unjustified). Do your really believe that is normal?
By the way, DK's edit summary was partially correct: Duma's official document is a primary source, and per our policy, secondary sources are preferable.
Please, take a break and, after that, join the discussion. Your participation may be very instrumental.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:46, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
I own this article in such a big way that not a single issue of NPOV, original research, synthesis, and weight, which I and others have repeatedly and convincingly raised, has been fixed ... This article really does have its own policies and guidelines, in contrast to any other article. Like any other thing, I really want all of our articles to actually reflect Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, does that make me pro-Soviet and Russophobic, or just neutral? You do not even understand the topic; as noted by Siebert, it is indeed the leaders, not ideology or regime-type, that may justify and explain mass killings, so using two bad sources (Russian government primary source and op-ed The Moscow Times) to push the resolution's point that it was the totalitarian state, even though scholarly sources disagree, The New York Times found it undue to mention, and Valentino, one of the core of this article, also disagrees because it is indeed, to quote you, those bad leaders, not ideology or regime type, that can cause, justify, or explain mass killings ... it is absurd and ridiculous. Even then, as noted by Siebert, Stalinism was intrinsically non-genocidal (I recall I saw one source that explicitly said Marxist ideology was a restraining factor that didn't allow Stalin to unleash a true genocide, and as noted by the Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945, such a perspective, in reality a recapitulation of the long-discredited totalitarian perspective equating Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's National Socialist Germany, is not tenable. It betrays a profound misunderstanding of the distinct natures of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which made them mortal enemies. Stalin's primary objective was to forge an autarkic, industrialized, multinational state, under the rubric of 'socialism in one country.' Nationalism and nation-building were on Stalin's agenda, not genocide; nor was it inherent in the construction of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state—however draconian (pp. 377–378). I know, this may sound surprising and even crazy, right? Because the popular press bombards us with Communist genocide and Nazism and Stalinism as equals, which is legitimized by European Union resolutions and reflected in most articles about it, including this one, and I thought this too ... until I actually went deeper into academic books. Davide King (talk) 21:44, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Eagerly waiting when we start quoting Walter Duranty reports in The New York Times on the subject of Holodomor as a WP:RS... Cloud200 (talk) 16:30, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Deflecting. Go try changing the consensus that The New York Times is a generally reliable source. Scholarly sources interpretation, which is all that matters, is closer to the original wording, so I suggest that you self-revert. I already self-reverted here but the point I made is correct; you have not gained consensus, so it should be reverted back to the status quo. Davide King (talk) 20:24, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
In addition, as noted by Siebert here, your source is an opinion piece, which just makes things even worse. You need to self-revert. Davide King (talk) 21:15, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Lembit Staan, Davide King & Cloud200. I would like to show you how that kind disputes should be resolved. Instead of throwing accusations and/or edit warring, I did the following:

  • Typed the words Katyn massacre Duma in google scholar.
  • Selected top sources that were cited by others.
The first source in that list that have been cited (18 times) says:
In November 2010, the Russian Parliament (Duma) voted a declaration blaming Stalin and other Soviet officials for having personally ordered and approved the Katyn massacre
The next source that have been cited (5 times) says:
On November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation made its first public statement noting the personal responsibility of Stalin and his associates as the main perpetrators of Katyn Massacre.
Note, that I was using a totally neutral search procedure, and I didn't know the results in advance, so nobody can blame me of pushing of some concrete point of view. I just tried to figure out what reliable secondary peer-reviewed sources say about that matter. I believe we all must agree that Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law publishes the views of established experts, and their interpretation of Duma's documents is more trustworthy than the opinion of Wikipedians.
I suggest you to edit the article based on these two sources, or to find equally trustworthy secondary sources that you will find according to some neutral and transparent procedure (that rules out a possibility of cherry-picking).
Happy editing :)--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:19, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Answering to ping. Sorry, in order my editing to be happy my policy is not to communicate with entrenched self-righteous page owners who first revert then talk. Your insistence on exclusively secondary sources is ridiculous. Just as wikipedians, secondary sources have a propensity to summarize primary sources to match their worldview. If a secondary source is in a direct, unambiguous contradiction with the primary source then the natural conclusion is that the secondary source is not as reliableas it may seem. Of course such conclusion must not be done lightly, but thinking otherwise is a huge trouble for reliability of Wikipedia. It is especially troublesome that you remover the reference to the original text of the declaration, where readers may see for themselves what was written, not just a hearsay. Anyway, I have enough trouble fighting polish wikipedians and polish "reliable" sources and I am not going to fight here as well. Lembit Staan (talk) 17:38, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Lembit Staan, you have a very unusual vision of our policy.
First, a revert is quite ok, see WP:BRD.
Second, per our policy, secondary sources are always preferable over primary ones, and our own interpretation of primary sources can be wrong. If some secondary source seemingly contradicts to what the primary source says, the most probable explanation is that your interpretation of that primary source is incorrect.
Third, if you doubt in reliability of some secondary source, read this. Publications in peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals are among the top quality sources. If you disagree, you may discuss reliability of the sources found by me at WP:RSN, but that would be a waste of your time, because the answer will be "Reliable".
By the way, my approach when applied to Polish "reliable" sources allows elimination of 90% of them. Try it.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:59, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
P.S. I was disappointed by this edit. The cited source literally says:
The State Duma on Friday issued a declaration condemning the Katyn massacre and for the first time directly blamed Soviet leader Josef Stalin for the 1940 execution of more than 20,000 Polish officers
The main point this secondary source (The Moscow Times) makes is Stalin was personally responsible, and Duma acknowledged that. Why is that fact being attenuated, and our own vision of what is important is introduced instead? Sorry, but I am going to re-write this statement in accordance with what CWRJIL articles say.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:33, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Can you elaborate what exactly disappoints you in the quoted phrase "crime by the Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state"? The phrases you found in the Scholar articles do not in any way contradict The Moscow Time quote, as they all originate from the same primary source - Duma declaration. What I am disappointed is your attitude where Russian Duma issues an apologetic statement for mass executions performed by the state of Soviet Union, and you seem to be trying to argue with them and claiming "oh no, you can't apologize for Soviet Union, you can only apologize for Stalin". This particular statement "the Russian government is not a reliable source, while The New York Times is" is simply outrageous. Russian Duma (even in Russia it's law making body, not "government") is certainly the ultimate source on what Russian Duma said especially as it's quoted by WP:RS. If tomorrow Russian Duma declares that 2+2=5 it's not your job to come up and argue "hey, they couldn't have said that, it's incorrect". Cloud200 (talk) 18:09, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
Regarding this statement "Stalin was personally responsible, and Duma acknowledged that", I'm not sure what you're trying to prove here? Did anyone here argue otherwise? Did anyone reject the responsibility of Stalin? Of course not - your only problem seems to be, exactly as Lembit Staan pointed out, your preference to keep the state of Soviet Union out of the picture. Just to reiterate, this is precisely what Duma said, as quoted by WP:RS secondary source: "crime by the Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state". The articles from Scholar you linked do not in any way disprove that, as they base on exactly the same source document. I'm not even sure why I need to explain such basics to an apparently experienced Wikipedia editor, but I share Lembit Staan frustration. Cloud200 (talk) 18:20, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
First of all, I don't recall I edited this part of the text yet, so you can judge about my position only based on my (tentative) version, which I proposed in my 16:46, 7 September 2021 post. Please, re-read it and compare my view with your own (wrong) interpretation of it.
Second, instead of arguing how can we (Wikipedians) interpret the Duma's statement (a primary source), I did the following:
1. Using a totally neutral and unbiased procedure, I identified high quality reliable sources, where the authors (one source was authored by Alexandr Gurianov, PhD, the chief coordinator of the Polish Program of the Memorial Society and the official representative thereof in the Russian courts; another source was authored by Milena Sterio, Associate Professor of Law, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law) summarised and professionally interpreted that primary source. I believe noone can claim I picked those sources to support my view (if I had any), and noone can claim the sources found by me are not the best quality secondary sources.
2. In those sources, which were cited by other RS (that rules out a possibility they were fringe), I found how exactly the authors summarize the Duma's document.
3. Per WP:NOR, I proposed to use those two interpretation of the Duma's document (a primary source) instead of providing our own interpretation.
Now I am asking a simple question: is there anything in ##1-3 that is non-verifiable that is not 100% consistent with our core content policies? If the answer is "no" (and any good faith person familiar with our policy cannot give another answer), what is wrong with all what I say, and what is a reason for any disagreement?
Regarding yours "The articles from Scholar you linked do not in any way disprove that...". Correct. The main point is, however, that they more support the previous version, so if we follow them, the original text must be restored. They make a stress on acknowledgement of Stalin's personal responsibility by Duma, which is consistent with the original version. In connection to that, I am wondering why you decided your own interpretation of the Duma's document is more valid that the interpretation made by two renown scholars? If you take a look at the original text (which existed before the edit war started), it is closer to what these two RSs say. --Paul Siebert (talk) 19:08, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
To avoid misunderstanding, let me re-iterate. Your "This particular statement "the Russian government is not a reliable source, while The New York Times is" is simply outrageous" is outrageous, because our policy says secondary sources are preferable over primary ones.
Second. You write about my ostensible "preference to keep the state of Soviet Union out of the picture", however, upon having read the Duma's document, my proposal was to combine DK's and LS's versions, which I proposed to do as follows:
a declaration acknowledging responsibility of the Soviet totalitarian state and Stalin personally for the Katyn massacre, the execution of over 21,000 Polish POW's and intellectual leaders. (I am quoting my 16:46 post)
However, later I decided to check what RSs say about that, and, using a neutral and transparent procedure (which you may repeat with the same results) I found two top-quality sources that provide their own interpretation, which is closer to the initial version of the text.
That is not a question of what is my or your POV, that is a question of what RS say. My recent (amended) position is in agreement with RS, whereas yours contradicts to them, and it is based on your own interpretation of the primary source.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:41, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
That quoted part is only referenced in The Moscow Times, and not The New York Times. Why should we favour The Moscow Times over The New York Times, when scholarly sources give an interpretation which is closer to The New York Times and the original wording? Davide King (talk) 20:16, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
That is an interesting question. I recall we had a discussion on the WP:V talk page, where I asked a question what "mainstream newspapers" mean (according to the policy, only mainstream newspapers are RS. The opinia spectrum was very wide (starting from "all non-marginal newspapers" to "newspapers of record only"). In addition, op-ed materials are reliable for the author's opinion only, and should be used with attribution.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:45, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
This is why we should always use and favour scholarly sources, whenever possible, and only use the best news sources if scholarly sources are lacking, e.g. if the topic is recent, etc. If Valentino or any other relevant scholar have not mentioned the resolution within the context of this topic, then it is likely undue anyway. I also agree with the 2018 peer-review that the whole section can be reduced to a few sentences, and we should only use scholarly sources like Harff and not news sources which do not really address or discuss the topic. Relevant passage:

Legal prosecution for genocide and genocide denial

  • Needs a bloody topic sentence.
  1. "Former members of government have been convicted for their responsibility in mass killings. States have also sought to conceptually define Communist genocide. Cambodia and Ethiopia have tried and convicted former members of government for genocide, and Estonia's attempt to try Arnold Meri for genocide was halted by his death. The Czech Republic has made Communist genocide denial a criminal offence. The Polish government has sought the aid of Russia in defining a massacre of Poles by communists as genocide." 80 words versus 404. We've got hyperlinking, we can conceal the less relevant material behind them.
  2. "However, no communist country or governing body has ever been convicted of genocide." I strongly suggest this is unlikely to be found in the source. See our article State crime for why. If it is found in the source, I suspect for similar reasons that its a quote taken badly out of context of a discussion of the possibility of criminal states.
Davide King (talk) 20:54, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
I find all this absurd, when there are much bigger problems in the article to focus on this, which is just a distraction. By the way, I did not say that the Duma only blamed Stalin personally, I was simply saying that The New York Times only reported that fact, and there was no mention of totalitarian state or totalitarianism. How is wanting to reflect what the given source (The New York Times) actually said... pro-Soviet? Lembit Staan literally referenced pravo.gov.ru, and I am not Russophobic either, but Siebert is simply right that we should use secondary sources and that was an example of a primary source, and I do not see why we should favour The Moscow Times over The New York Times just because the former mentions 'totalitarian' while the latter did not (neither are really about the topic, they are mainly about the Katyn massacre). We must follow what secondary sources say, not what we think they say, and this is the problem of this article, which misinterprets primary sources about the authors' interpretation, like Valentino. That whole section is mainly referenced to news sources, and we should not use them, for such a controversial article we should only rely on scholarly section. As noted by Siebert, "the core idea of the Valentino's book ... is that mass killings ... are a result of strategic decisions made by a very small group of leaders." If we are to report the Duma's statement, and I am not sure why we should, unless it is found due by Valentino or other scholars when, and if, they discuss the massacre within the context of this topic, we should not reference this to pravo.gov.ru or The Moscow Times but to the scholarly sources provided by Siebert, who is correct on this. I am curious about what AmateurEditor think, since they thanked me for my first revert, and perhaps we may finally agree on something. Davide King (talk) 19:44, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
That is NOT absurd, we are actually trying to elaborate some common approach to source selection and their interpretation. That may save a lot of time in future.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:52, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
To be fair, I was mainly referring to the other two users, who do not seem to understand our policies in relation to sources, and the fact they blew this up in a much bigger problem than it actually is, and to the whole pro-Soviet, Russophobic accusations. As you noted, you found "two top-quality sources that provide their own interpretation, which is closer to the initial version of the text." I think it is hard to find some common approach when one can not even understand when a source is primary, or one dismisses secondary sources just because they like that the primary source said 'totalitarian' and want the Soviet Union to be described as 'totalitarian', even though that is mainly referred only to the Stalin era (by the late 1920s and not 1917 or 1924), not the whole state's history, and that totalitarianism, as the 1950s theory, is defunct among scholars. While you and I are arguing to reflect what sources say, they just want to add the 'totalitarian' part because that is what primary source said, and they like it, but is not how it was interpreted by scholarly secondary sources, which, again as you correctly noted, gave an interpretation closer to the original wording. Davide King (talk) 20:06, 7 September 2021 (UTC)
By the way, this may be similar to Valentino. AmateurEditor cherry picked quotes to show that Valentino supports MKuCR, while secondary sources did not find such quotes to be due or interpreted them differently and came to the conclusion that Valentino supports Communist mass killing and sees leaders, not ideology, as more important in explaining mass killings. Similarly, the Duma may have said 'totalitarian' but The New York Times did not find it due to mention, and the two scholarly sources are closer to the original wording. The Moscow Times was cherry picked because it contained the relevant quote, even though it was not mentioned in other sources, and thus is undue and the original wording better reflected sources. Davide King (talk) 20:30, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

Lembit Staan, Davide King & Cloud200, upon reflection, I realise we need to restore the original version, which makes a stress on acknowledgement of Satlin's personal responsibility, because high-quality secondary sources identified by me using a neutral and transparent procedure say so. If you disagree with that, provide your own secondary sources of comparable quality, and prove that they represent majority view (and that you obtained them not via cherry-picking). I am going to replace themoscowtimes with the two sources found by me, because, irrespective to how reliable that newspaper is, the cited material is an op-ed, which represents the opinion of its author only, and should be used with attribution. Since the author is just a [Berlin based freelancer, I doubt his opinion to have a significant weight. I am not going to implement these changes right how. Take your time, find counter-arguments and sources if you disagree. If there will be no response from you in 3 days, I'll make the change. Ok?

Regards --Paul Siebert (talk) 21:03, 7 September 2021 (UTC)

You are misreading WP:PRIMARY which explicitly states "a primary source may be used on Wikipedia only to make straightforward, descriptive statements of facts that can be verified by any educated person with access to the primary source but without further, specialized knowledge". You are insisting on using a selection of secondary sources only as they apparently quote those parts of Duma statement you like and don't quote those you don't like. I say allegedly, because the references you talking about being "selected neutrally" have been linked as Google Scholar search results, which show differently depending on who's looking. For me the first result for the first link[4] is "A Critical Introduction to International Criminal Law" which barely mentions Katyń and doesn't mention Duma at all. For the second of your links[5] the first result is "Katyń: The Kremlin’s Double Game"[6] which is closed access and unverifiable in terms of whether it even mentions Duma statement and how. Therefore your insistence on using these secondary sources and them only, but no any direct quotes from Duma statement mentioning Soviet Union, can be seen only as WP:NPOV pushing. Cloud200 (talk) 08:32, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

One more word of explanation about coverage of that Duma statement: the only reason why most sources focus on the fact that Stalin was mentioned by name is the previous denialism that was historically widespread even in post-1991 Russia and some Western leftist circles, where they either deny Soviet responsibility for the massacre at all, or attribute it to lower-ranks officers of NKVD such as Beria while claiming Stalin "knew nothing about it". Even this Duma statement attracted a heated debate in Duma itself where Communist Party of course argued against it, sticking to the old Soviet version that it was "a Nazi crime". What you are doing here is to swing to the other extreme on the denialist scale, where you attribute 100% of responsibility to Stalin, and Stalin only, as if he was the only person actually pulling the trigger, which is nonsense. This is precisely why Duma statement lays responsibility equally on Stalin, Central Committee members and the Soviet Union they represented as internationally recognized leadership of the country. Cloud200 (talk) 08:32, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

In terms of sourcing, you can actually find traces of the same kind of argument as you are pushing in the article "The conflict about the 1940 Katyn'massacre and the 2010 declaration of the Russian State Duma" published in "Political Discourse in Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe" [7] (found through Google Scholar as well) that discusses the Duma debate preceding the statement in great detail. Google only provides non-copy excerpts from the text but then I was able to find the full text on Academia[8] and here you go: "Two amendments provided attempts to remove the terms "(Soviet) regime” and “totalitarian state” from the draft". These were amendments to the Duma draft proposed by Communisty Party, and that's exactly the same kind of changes you have proposed above. Meanwhile, the responsibility of the Soviet Union as a whole is not even a slightest doubt for the autor of the article: "the investigation conducted by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Offce (1991–2004) already confirmed Soviet responsibility for the crime" and the authors of the Duma declaration: "condemning the regime that defied the rights and lives of [these] people", "Soviet Union started an undeclared war against Poland", "about 500,000 Polish citizens were seized by the Soviet troops", "the Soviet NKVD executed 21,857 Polish prisoners", "crime by the Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state" etc etc. The responsibility of the Soviet Union state for the mass executions has been known since 1941 and that is obvious for anyone involved - which is precisely why your unexpected return to petty denialisms and word-twisting of sources was so shocking for @Lembit Staan:. Cloud200 (talk) 09:11, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Cloud200, first of all, I apologize for initiating this long discussion about a not too significant topic. However, in my opinion, it is important to come to some logical end, because that will help us to elaborate a common approach to solution of other future disputes. Thank you for your patiemce and for your responces.
I find your statement "You are misreading WP:PRIMARY which explicitly states..." etc totally incorrect, because the quote provided by you supports my position, and it directly contradicts to yours. A descriptive statement (without cherry-picking) would be "responsibility of the Soviet totalitarian state and Stalin personally", and that is what I proposed initially, whereas you supported a selective quotation, where the stress was made on the state solely.
I also find your words "You are insisting on using a selection of secondary sources only as they apparently quote those parts of Duma statement you like and don't quote those you don't like" highly inappropriate. You de facto accuse me of POV-pushing, and that accusation, which lacks evidences, is a personal attack. In future, please, refrain from such statements. This personal attack was totally unprovoked, because I explained that (i) I found sources using a totally neutral, transparent and unbiased procedure (i.e. I didn't select sources that I like, or that ostensibly support my POV); (ii) i found what those sources say about the Duma statement without selective quotation (if you want, I can provide extended quotes from those sources, which fully confirm my words: they do not say anything about the state as whole, only about Stalin. ); (iii) I proposed to find a flaw in my arguments and prove my possible non-neutrality. That means not only my approach is neutral, it is more neutral than WP:NPOV requires. That is really important, and I beg you to understand that: my procedure it totally neutral, for if some naive Wikipedian with NO preliminary knowledge of the subjec wanted to find information about the interpretation of that Duma's declaration, this Wikipedian would find the very same sources and come to the very same conclusions.
In contrast, your arguments and your rationale is totally non-neutral: you assume that it is correct to stress the role of the Soviet totalitarian state (although it is unclear what your opinion is based upon), and you assume that I am driven by some hidden agenda because I do not share your view (although you have absolutely no reason for doing that: as I already explained, and that can be easily verified, my initial position was to include the mention of both the regime and Stalin personally, but this position has changed after I found good secondary sources).
That demonstrates a profound difference between our approaches: it seems you know the truth, and you are looking for sources that support your POV, whereas I follow what good sources say, and my position may change when I find fresh information and/or arguments. Please, refactor your previous statement and provide GOOD arguments. I am open to rational arguments, but I got nothing so far but baseless accusations.
Regards, --Paul Siebert (talk) 14:58, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
BTW, I started to dig deeper to find more details (I believe you must agree and that this search procedure is quite neutral too), and that is what I found (Mark Kramer, What Was Distinctive about Katyn: The Massacres in Context, 44 Case W. Res. J. Int'l L. 569 (2012)).
"For some forty-seven years after German forces discovered mass graves in Katyn Forest in 1943, the Soviet authorities stuck to the lie that German troops were responsible for the massacres. But we now know from declassified archival materials that Soviet Communist Party leaders from Nikita Khrushchev through Mikhail Gorbachev reviewed documents and, in some cases, considered whether the Soviet government should accept at least partial responsibility for the massacres.19 Not until April 1990, however, did Gorbachev (who had recently taken up the new post of Soviet president) finally acknowledge that Soviet NKVD forces had committed the murders. The official TASS statement, issued on April 13, 1990, stopped short of a fully candid disclosure insofar as it assigned blame for the massacres solely to Beria, Merkulov, and other senior NKVD officials, without any mention of Stalin and the Soviet Politburo. Not until October 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, did the Russian government under Boris Yeltsin release documents from the Russian Presidential Archive showing that Stalin and other Politburo members had expressly authorized the massacres in 1940. Gorbachev and earlier Soviet leaders had seen these documents—and therefore were aware that Stalin and his Communist Party comrades ordered the massacres—but had declined to release them." (I know this source does not discuss the Duma's declaration, I provided the source to demonstrate how the topic is covered in mainstream scholarly sources).
That means that is a correct and neutral way to describe the events. And I can explain why. We should make a stress on the responsibility of the state if execution of POWs were a standard policy. Similarly, Nazi state as whole can be blamed for the Holocaust, because deprivation of Jews of any civil right and subsequent elimination of them was the official policy of Nazi Germany. In contrast, Katyn is arguably the only case when the Soviet state executed a large number of foreign POWs. As I figures out, that was done after Berya addressed to Stalin (Beria to Stalin, no. 794/B, early March 1940; Extract from the minutes of the Politburo of the CC of VKP(b), 5 March 1940, docs. no 216–7), and Stalin personally authorized their extrajudicial execution, which was which was " a mass murder excessive even by his standards" (Kimmo Rentola (2013) Intelligence and Stalin's Two Crucial Decisions in the Winter War, 1939–40, The International History Review, 35:5). Therefore, although we can and should speak about responsibility of Stalin's totalitarian system for many brutal things, in this concrete case most sources speak about Stalin's personal responsibility.
Your POV implies execution of POWs was a standard policy of the Soviet totalitarian state, whereas all sources available for me say it was rather an exception. Therefore, I expect you to amend your position.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:35, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
@Paul Siebert: Sorry, but you're just provoking me to take part in yet another long and completely pointless discussion, where I will be expected to provide peer-reviewed answers to your out-of-the-blue statements. You say: "We should make a stress on the responsibility of the state if execution of POWs were a standard policy." Who gave you right to determine when "we should make a stress on the responsibility of the state" and when not, especially in case of state that lied on everything and had one policy on display and another, drastically different, it actually implemented? Which exactly policy do you have in mind in this case? And why are you suddenly want specifically "POW massacres"? Katyń was the single largest operation of such kind, but not the only one. There were dozens of NKVD prisoner massacres, there's a large list of Soviet war crimes. Some of them involved POWs, some civilians, some both. You have Mass operations of the NKVD and List of massacres in the Soviet Union, many of which happened well after Stalin (e.g. Novocherkassk massacre). Why POWs are suddenly a scope-limiting factor for your analysis of Soviet policies? Cloud200 (talk) 16:28, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
I am NOT provoking you, I am presenting logical arguments. My goal is to draw you into a rational discussion where we will come co some consensus. I do not want to win the dispute by any means (and this is a proof), I want you to show (logically and calmly) that I am wrong, or, if you unable to do so, to concede you were not right.
Re "Who gave you right ..." I have a natural right to make any statement, and you have a right to point at any flaw in my arguments if you see them. I will consider all your logical arguments seriously, and I do have a right to expect that you will do the same with my arguments.
I provided a quite logical distinction between the mass killings that were the result of deliberate state policy and the killings committed due to personal decisions of some concrete leaders. By the way, if you read Valentino (one of the major sources this article is based upon), you may find that my position (in that aspect) fully coincides with his theory.
Your arguments about NKVD prisoner massacres or other crimes are irrelevant, because those Polish officers were foreign POWs, and I see no other examples of massive execution of POWs by Soviet regime. Note, I never claimed that Stalinism never killed people, I claim that this particular crime was not a characteristic of the regime. POWs are scope limiting because there were no other mass POW shooting in the USSR. Other executions were kind of legal (they were in accordance with some, although very questionable legal procedure), which means those victims were the victims of the political system created by Stalin. In contrast, execution of Poles required some specific extrajudicial steps, i.e., it was against the Soviet laws, and all sources available to me consider it as such.
Regarding Novocherkassk, I would like to see a proof that there were "many" massacres after Stalin. In reality, I am not aware of other examples (except, probably, repressions against stalinists is Georgia and later events during Gorbachev's era). And, frankly speaking, shooting into a peaceful crowd is not something that happened in the USSR only, just remember Kent massacre. Those were very occasional and separate accidents, mostly because there were no special police forces in late USSR to counteract peaceful rallies, so they had to use military troops. Don't mix a pretty vegetarian (although antidemocratic) regimes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev with a murderous Stalinist regime: those were totally different societies.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:53, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
I am still waiting for your apology. Remember, the article is under RS, and we must strictly observe all behavioural rules. I sincerely want to avoid any escalation of the conflict, but that requires that you abandoned your approach and apologized for your personal attack.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:04, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
Cloud200, I've just noticed your words about my "denialisms and word-twisting of sources". Frankly, I am shocked. That is an unexplained and unprovoked personal attack. Please, explain which concrete words I twisted (with diffs and verbatim examples) and what exactly I am denying. If you cannot do that, I expect you to apologize and return to a normal, rational discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:44, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:25, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Cloud200, upon reflection, I realised I don't request for explicit apology from you if you sincerely answer the following question:

If the results of the gscholar search yielded different RSs, and those sources stressed the responsibility of the Soviet totalitarian state (not Stalin), and if my conclusion were: "Yes, I have to support your edit", would you describe my analysis as "neutral and adequate", not "denialism and word-twisting"? --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:43, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
For what is worth it, here I believe to have found a nice compromise. Let us use the grammatically correct but add the relevant quote, as provided by Paul Siebert, in a note. I do not think that this is not going to make it in a rewrite, as it is much more relevant for the event's main article than MKuCR or Communist mass killing, but at least it is better and hopefully this makes everyone happy. Davide King (talk) 10:21, 11 September 2021 (UTC)

Accusations

Your answer will be regarded as an apology, otherwise I expect you to apologize for your personal attack and withdraw your accusations.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:43, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Happy to provide you with examples: even the latest paragraph - the one above about POW - is not an impartial discussion on article statements or sources. You are actively engaging in defence of Soviet Union policies, as long as they are outside narrowly defined Stalinist period, which you kind of consider singular and 100% attributed to one leader's personality. It's actually fascinating to observe how you invent excuses for literally every single atrocity committed through the whole period of Soviet Union existence, and this is precisely what I mean by "denialism and word-twisting". The following is my subjective paraphrase of our discussion from the very beginning of my engagement here:
  • Explicit calls for violence in Marxism? Oh, nothing unusual here, everyone was violent back then, and also irrelevant as "majority of the events that article is discussing took place long after socialist revolutions"
  • Red Terror happened right after, and it was literally prescribed in S&R? Oh, it's fine - it was civil war (against civilians?), and both sides were bad (civilians? farmers?), and every revolution is violent, but that's completely unrelated to Marxism (even though Marx and Engles literally mention that, and Bolshevik leaders are literally quoting them)
  • Kronstadt rebellion? Oh, that's fine - everybody was brutal these times (false - both Kronstadt rebels and most Bolshevik opposition proposed peaceful solutions and didn't unroll violence first).
  • Bolshevik killing Anarchists before any of the assassination attempts? No response, apparently didn't happen.
  • Marxist vs SPD row over violence? Oh, but SPD were Marxists, therefore there were non-violent Marxists, therefore Marxism was non-violent.
  • But Marx explicitly rejected SPD as "reactionary" over the row over "violence"? No response, didn't happen.
  • Marx postulates liquidation of bourgeois as a class and Bolshevik take that literally? Oh, but that's contrary to the "spirit of Marxism" as Paul and David feel it in their hearts.
  • Marx postulates violence and Bolshevik enjoy it as "panegyric of violence" it in their key program documents? Oh, "that is not sufficient for drawing a linkage between Marxism and mass killings" because Paul has other feeling about it.
  • Marx insists on violent revolution? Oh, but you "blame it all on the revolutionaries, and ignore the role of counter-revolutionaries" - after all they could have all emigrated, or surrender, they would be just peacefully executed afterwards. You see, if you don't oppose revolutionaries, they don't become violent!
  • Bolshevism literally raised the dictatorship and class war to the levels of state ideology? Oh, irrelevant because there was this tiny Marxist fraction somewhere in Europe in 50's... Why don't you discuss the good things Marx has written?
  • Scholars like Valentino directly attribute violence to ideology? Oh no, based on Paul's reading we believe it was rather due to cult of personality.
  • But here are quotes from Valentino? that show that clearly (extensively presented by AmateurEditor)? Doesn't matter, "I present its interpretations made by professionals"
  • Bolsheviks unrolled Red Terror, concentration camps and dictatorship of the proletariat straight after the revolution? Oh, doesn't count because "that Soviet Union was totalitarian since the beginning is not a view supported by all scholars"
  • Millions of people were killed and executed during whole USSR period? Oh, no bother because "mass killing, totalitarianism is a proposed concept, not a fact"
  • Hundreds of people wrote and testified about the atrocities in the whole USSR period? Oh, irrelevant because "mass killings" as not "mass killings"
  • National socialism and Soviet communism both killed millions of people? "Too primitive", and hey, Third Reich could potentially kill more.
  • Millions of people were killed, starved to death or executed in USSR? Wait, but "Stalinism was intrinsically non-genocidal" because Paul has read it somewhere, and we can't call it "killing", let's talk about "slightly increased mortality", shall we?
  • Katyń massacre? Irrelevant, Stalin pulled he trigger, and also no other POW massacres of such size (so what?)
  • NKVD prison massacres? Irrelevant because from now on only POW executions are in scope.
  • Russian Duma apologised for "totalitarian" past? Oh, doesn't count, "totalitarianism is a proposed concept" and Russians can't be trusted
  • Numerous other mass killings and executions during and outside the Stalinist period? There weren't enough (to suit your taste, apparently) and didn't happen in USSR only (whataboutism) and USSR didn't have special police force (so what?) and "they had to use military troops" (that's literally a masterpiece of Soviet apologetism). But hey, we're just "contextualizing"!
To be honest, this attitude is very similar to what Soviet fellow travellers in the West (like Sartre) were doing when the news of Soviet atrocities occasionally leaked to the West - deny, and when facts were undeniable, come up with excuses, cast doubt, engage in whataboutism, twist facts, and in many ways they were more much more creative than the Soviet official propaganda. Except it's now 2021, not 1921 and your attitude is a bit out of place these days. To you I dedicate the following quote:

Next morning we knew it: Humanité, official organ of the French Communist Party, explained to us that the new treaty was a supreme effort of Stalin to prevent the threatening imperialist war. Oh, they had an explanation ready for every occasion, from the extension of capital punishment to the twelve-year-old to the abolition of the Soviet workers’ right to strike and to the one-party-election-system; they called it ‘revolutionary dialectics’ and reminded one of those conjurers on the stage who can produce an egg from every pocket of their frockcoats and even out of the harmless onlooker’s nose. They explained everything so well that, during a committee meeting, old Heinrich Mann, at one time a great ‘sympathiser,’ shouted to Dahlem, leader of the German Communists: ‘If you go on asking me to realise that this table here is a fishpond, then I am afraid my dialectical capacities are at an end.’

— Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth

My closing note is that both Davide King and Paul Siebert do not, contrary to what they are claiming, editing the article from neutral and academic point of view. Quite the opposite, you are frequently writing from politically engaged positions and fiercely oppose any attempts to build consensus based on diversified historical sources if it only contains statements that oppose your personal views. Your use of academic sources is biased, and you frequently and flexibly switch from a pose of an "impartial scholar" to an engaged Soviet agitator. You cannot at the same time both propose to rely on academic sources, and then, when confronted with an academic source you don't like, come up with a tirade of patronizing excuses for why possibly Soviets might have committed that specific atrocity. This attitude is precisely why this debate has been so fruitless so far, and until it changes I'm categorically opposed to any changes in the existing version of the article. Cloud200 (talk) 09:50, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Those are serious personal attacks and unsubstantiated accusations, which are obviously false. If you truly think Siebert and I, or even The Four Deuces, are presenting Soviet historiography, you either have no idea about actual Soviet historiography, or you have no idea about historiography of Communism in general; you also showed that you had no idea about mass killing or genocide studies. The quotes cherry-picked by AmateurEditor came from a primary source (I can cherry pick too, and Valentino also clearly stated that most Communist regimes did not engage in mass killings and only Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes likely did), while Siebert and I proposed secondary academic sources that specifically review Valentino's work. Now what is more reliable? The interpretation of a random Wikipedian or those of academics in peer-review journals? Wow, this is such a big challenge to answer. Our policies are clear; secondary sources are favoured and preferred. "... there can be no more reliable source for Valentino's analysis than Valentino himself", except Valentino's analysis is interpreted through the lens of AmateurEditor. There can be no more reliable sources for Valentino's analysis than peer-reviewed academic articles that discuss Valentino's book, theories, and works. The latter is respecting our policies and guidelines, and Siebert clearly has a way for a neutral search which has even been positively reviewed in an academic journal. WP:PRIMARY says: "Do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so." This is precisely what you three guys did! You two for the Duma's resolution, and AmateurEditor for Valentino and other authors.

You are the one who is violating NPOV by writing form a broadly totalitarian perspective for both Communism and Marxism, and treating this as the only true interpretation and as undisputed fact, even though the old 1950s theory is defunct among scholars and it is mainly useful as a word (Connelly 2010). Are Getty, Fitzpatrick, Evans, Kershaw all Soviet apologists? Getty et al. were not the ones who inflated numbers and were proven wrong by the archives. As for sources, what did you provide? Main Currents of Marxism, which is not even about the topic but of Marxism in general. We provided far more recent and better sources that discuss or address the topic. Is the Oxford Handbook work I provided just a bunch of Soviet propaganda? Clearly, there is one side who is perfectly fine with any possible violation of our policies as long as it fits their preconceived views on the topic, on which they completely lack knowledge, as clearly demonstrated by their comments and fixed totalitarian perspective, but it ain't us. This goes both ways:

My closing note is that both AmateurEditor and Cloud200 do not, contrary to what they are claiming, edit the article from neutral and academic point of view. Quite the opposite, they are frequently writing from politically engaged positions and fiercely oppose any attempts to build consensus based on diversified historical sources if it only contains statements that oppose their personal views. Their use of ... sources is biased, and misrepresent sources. This attitude is precisely why this debate has been so fruitless so far, and until it changes I'm categorically opposed to any further debates with users who clearly have no idea about the topic, or how our policies and guidelines work.

Davide King (talk) 11:10, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
P.S. You are also clearly writing from the double-genocide perspective and equation of Communism and Nazism, which is a revisionist view going back to Nolte; again, it is very popular in Eastern Europe and is legitimized by political institutions like the European Union but academic views and consensus are much more nuanced and very different from that. You are writing from a revisionist perspective and we are the ones who are Soviet apologists? It appears you just do not like academic consensus; unlike you, I actually respect it, even if I may personally disagree, which is rare. Davide King (talk) 11:37, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Cloud200, that is NOT an answer to my question. I can easily respond (and debunk) each example provided by you, however, I would like to see your answer to my question first. I find it inappropriate when, instead of answering a single and a relatively simple question you provided tons of new accusations. That may be interpreted as an attempt to avoid an inconvenient question.
For your convenience, I ask the same question in a slightly different form:
Imagine a situation when some new user with no POV and ZERO preliminary knowledge of the subject decided to join our dispute about the Duma's declaration. Keeping in mind that WP:PRIMARY says "Do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so", this user decided to find good secondary sources to find a correct interpretation of the declaration. That user found the very same sources found by me (which is not a surprise, because the procedure is totally transparent and neutral), and found the very same words that I found (which, again, is quite understandable, for those sources say what they say). In your opinion, which wording should this user propose: "responsibility of totalitarian regime", or "personal Stalin's responsibility"?
I am still waiting for your answer, or for your apologies.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:07, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Obviously, both: "responsibility of totalitarian regime", and "personal Stalin's responsibility". The sentence from TMT is actually the best secondary-source sumary of the Duma declaration as it captures all participating parties: "Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state", which is why I added it eventually. You happened to find two non-verifiable (without academic access) articles using your "totally neutral method" that seem to focus on Stalin, but even that you have twisted to suit your views — from what you describe as "the next source"[9] (I assume it comes from "Katyń: The Kremlin’s Double Game", and I can only rely on you quoting it reliably) you quoted this sentence: "On November 26, 2010, the State Duma of the Russian Federation made its first public statement noting the personal responsibility of Stalin" as if it has proved only Stalin's responsibility. This short excerpt demonstrates my point - the fragment "made its first public statement noting the personal" clearly indicates what was notable in Duma statement was the explicit admission of Stalin's responsibility for the first time, because it was never clearly admitted before. So yes, in 2010 admission of Stalin's guild was quite notable, but responsibility of the state of Soviet Union was quite obvious for everyone from 1941 and officially admitted from 1991. That particular source might discuss other parts of Duma statement, or not - I have no way to check without academic access. This example clearly indicates the practice of "word twisting" and selective citations from sources only to prove a point. The whole discussion about mass killings "not being a standard policy" that followed was quite sickening to be honest and only confirms that rather than behaving like an impartial editor, you're actively engaging in the role of Soviet apologist here. Cloud200 (talk) 18:29, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
As the discussion has been largely unproductive, due to your practices described in detail above, and the fact that at least two actively contributing editors have apparently abandoned it as result of frustration, I can only request that you propose small and very specific changes to the body of the article and only introduce changes where consensus has been agreed in discussion here. I can commit to discussing the changes based on the presented sources, but the burden of proof is yours as after seeing what I have seen I simply don't trust your selection of quotes and their interpretations. Cloud200 (talk) 18:29, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
I left a message on your talk page. It seems this dispute may elevate to a personal conflict, which I would like to avoid. Let's wait until passions settle.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:29, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
I do not personally dispute that "the fragment 'made its first public statement noting the personal' clearly indicates what was notable in Duma statement was the explicit admission of Stalin's responsibility for the first time, because it was never clearly admitted before." The problem is that we need reliable secondary sources to do that for us, we cannot use the Duma's statement itself (primary source), or an opinion piece by a freelancer in The Moscow Times, while The New York Times and other scholarly sources support the previous wording; it violates NPOV and weight. And you are damn wrong about the onus; it lays on you, not on me, who is merely supporting the status quo, while you are the one changing the long-standing text. By the way, do you really think that whoever wrote this — spoiler alert, it was not me unless I got some amnesia — did not think anything you wrote in consideration? The bottom line is that The New York Times, and other scholarly sources, mainly highlight Stalin's personal responsibility, hence why that wording. You should be mad at whoever wrote that years ago but I do not think you should because, assuming good faith, they noticed what the Duma's resolution said but The New York Times and other sources emphasized Stalin's personal responsibility, so that wording was chosen. You may take it to a noticeboard about what to do when secondary sources contradict primary sources but I do not think you will be proven correct; this is more a matter of weight.
Do you know what you should do? Self-revert, go to the noticeboard of reliable sources, and ask whether a primary source and an opinion piece in The Moscow Times have more weight than The New York Times and other scholarly sources which support the previous long-standing wording, as noted by Siebert. I also expect you to apologize to us, for you literally called us Soviet apologists and compared us to very real people who denied awful things, when it is simply you who appear to not be knowledgeable enough about the consensus of scholars of Communism and how our policies and guidelines works. Seriously, read WP:PRIMARY; even if you are right, and I actually agree on you on this (of course, it was not just Stalin, it was the state too), I put my personal views aside in favour of respecting our policies and guidelines. You need to show that Siebert's search was wrong and that the scholarly consensus and reliable sources support your favourite wording, which by the way is also grammatically incorrect, but you will not be able to do that, because scholarly and reliable sources mainly highlight the fact that the Duma recognized the massacre as Stalin's personal responsibility. Can you at least understand this and realize that I am not some Soviet agent provocateur? I personally agree with you, but our policies support the previous wording, and I firmly believe they should be respected and followed. Davide King (talk) 20:42, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Missing the point

While I think several interesting points have been raised on sides, and I am looking forward to Siebert's response, the bigger point is missing, namely that the whole phrasing, sentence, statement ... belongs to Katyn massacre, not here, as none of given sources write within the context of MKuCR, and the whole section needs a topic sentence, and should be shortened and summarized, as was succinctly suggested in the June 2018 peer-review by Fifelfoo:

Needs a bloody topic sentence

Former members of government have been convicted for their responsibility in mass killings. States have also sought to conceptually define Communist genocide. Cambodia and Ethiopia have tried and convicted former members of government for genocide, and Estonia's attempt to try Arnold Meri for genocide was halted by his death. The Czech Republic has made Communist genocide denial a criminal offence. The Polish government has sought the aid of Russia in defining a massacre of Poles by communists as genocide.

[Further comment, brakets are my additions]

"However, no communist country or governing body has ever been convicted of genocide." I strongly suggest this is unlikely to be found in the source. See our article State crime for why. If it is found in the source, I suspect for similar reasons that its a quote taken badly out of context of a discussion of the possibility of criminal states [which is not the topic of this article].

This is just an example. It still has problems, in that only Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes are considered to likely fit the category of mass killing, and we would need secondary sources that connect the other countries to the topic (generic Communism is a controversial grouping), but that is a better way to paraphrase it and at least tries to remain on, rather than diverging from, the topic. The Duma's resolution is relevant to Katyn massacre, not here, or at beast it can be moved earlier in the body when discussing the event, as we already for the mass deportations of ethnic minorities, which in my view should go, as they do not discuss the topic but just a precise event, and thus are more relevant there.

Davide King (talk) 11:08, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

If such statements stay, even though they are about individual events and are not discussed at all within the context of the topic of this article, then AmateurEditor's view that we should not be relying on, or using single-country experts and specialists at all to show how the article is in violation of our policies and guidelines, is null, and should be promptly added; once they are added, you will see all the problem with the topic as currently structured and the lack of consensus on. Because as repeatedly noted by Siebert, "Majority (actually, absolute majority) of authors study each event separately. For example, many historians study only the Great Chinese famine, without any connection to any other mass mortality event under Communists, or, for example, discuss it in a context of Irish and Bengal famine. These authors work totally separately from the group 1&2 authors (and do not cite them)." So either we discuss the topic as scholars do, i.e. separating each event and without any grouping such as generic Communism, or we should remove all the news sources, which only write about a single event, resolutions, and do not discuss it within the scholarly discourse topic, as the current article's structure explicitily forbids us from relying on them. Paul Siebert, could you please confirm if this is correct, or did I misrepresent yours and AmateurEditor's positions? Thank you. Davide King (talk)

Paul Siebert, in regard to this. I do not get it. It is a gentleman's rule to keep the previous version while discussion is ongoing; your edit essentially gave consensus for the other version, when there is not any, and is the reason why we are discussing. I simply reverted back to the status quo ante and the latest long-standing consensus. In addition, that edit messed up references' style, as all refs are in sfn. Davide King (talk) 16:52, 8 September 2021 (UTC)

Please, do me a favour: keep this change for a while. I do not want an escalation of an edit war.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:56, 8 September 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, I understand this but I think you could have waited and been correct if I was reverted back by the other two; if they do accept to keep the status quo version as we discuss this, there would be no edit war until consensus is reached, so it makes more sense to keep the more logical, policies-respecting, long-standing sentence. In addition, the current sentence is grammatically incorrect and does not follow logical flow. On 26 November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued a declaration acknowledging responsibility for the Katyn massacre and describing it as "crime by the Stalinist regime and the Soviet Union, a totalitarian state", the execution of over 21,000 Polish POW's and intellectual leaders by Stalin's NKVD. The declaration stated that archival material "not only unveils the scale of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders." Either it is rewritten to follow logical flow, or the bolded part should be moved in the second sentence when discussing what the resolution stated. By the way, could you please express your thoughts on what I wrote in this section, especially if I got right AmateurEditor's and your position on using country experts and specialists? Because the Duma resolution has pretty much nothing to do with MKuCR and everything to do with the Katyn massacre, where it belongs to. And if we can insert resolutions from parliaments, which have nothing to do with MKuCR, I do not see why we should not be using country experts and specialists for each event to better reflect NPOV. Davide King (talk) 07:38, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
P.S. Also the two users may no longer respond because, by reverting my edit, itself a gentleman's rule's revert back to the status quo, as we discuss this, you essentially gave them what they want, as if they achieved consensus, because their proposed edit is already in the body, and so they may have no incentive to (further) discuss this neutrally and rationally. Davide King (talk) 07:41, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
As shown by their personal attacks and absurd false accusations here, there can be no good-faith or rational discussion with them. Please, self-revert and restore the long-standing version, which is also grammatically correct. Davide King (talk) 11:13, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

Communist Manifesto

Cloud200 says that what distinguishes communists from non-communists is that the Communist Manifesto advocated violent revolution. However, the manifesto was written for the Revolutions of 1848 which was a series of violent revolutions mostly led by pro-capitalists and supported by socialists including Marx. TFD (talk) 11:52, 9 September 2021 (UTC)

It also looks like they are taking the view from Fidesz. In May 2018, the President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker attended and spoke at a celebration of the deceased Karl Marx's 200th birthday, where he defended Marx's legacy. In response, MEPs from Fidesz wrote: "Marxist ideology led to the death of tens of millions and ruined the lives of hundreds of millions. The celebration of its founder is a mockery of their memory." I guess the centre-right Juncker is a secret Marxist, or maybe, just maybe, he respects the academic consensus of a much more nuanced position on Marx and Marxism than the extreme, one-sided, full-on totalitarian position that users like Cloud200 believe in? Or is this Soviet apologism, too? Davide King (talk) 13:41, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
TFD, leaving beyond the scope the difference between communists and non-communists, Cloud200 makes one obvious mistake. She believes that if the author A says "Marx was advocating violence", and the author B says "Communists perpetrated mass killing that lead to 85+ million deaths", it is quite ok to write something like this:
Marx was advocating violence (ref A), and Communists killed 85+ million (ref B).
She believes that is quite ok, although that is a direct violation of WP:NOR. To write that, it is absolutely necessary that the author A, or the author B explicitly linked the death of 85+ people with Marx's advocacy of violence.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:00, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
I can tell even more terrible thing: Marx and Engels supported slavery. More concretely, they believed slavery in Southern American States is a very important factor that accelerate economic development and capitalist transformation, which, as they expected, leads to proletarian revolution. However, can we seriously use this concrete M&E statement to support the claim that M&E wanted to enslave Soviet peasantry in Stalin's kolkhozes?--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:15, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Believing that "slavery in Southern American States is a very important factor that accelerate economic development and capitalist transformation, which, as they expected, leads to proletarian revolution" is way different than saying Marx and Engels supported slavery, so I am surprised by you to make such oversimplification. As far as I am aware, both Marx and Engels supported the Union, not the Confederates. Apart from this, your reasoning is correct that "it is absolutely necessary that the author A, or the author B explicitly linked the death of 85+ people with Marx's advocacy of violence", or else it is synthesis. Davide King (talk) 20:24, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
I meant the conclusion about M&E's support of slavery could be made by taking their words out of context, similar to what is being done with their other words. You definitely have to have a minimal sense of humour, otherwise you will not be able to survive on this talk page. :)--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:27, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
There's a field of belief that sees modern events as being part of a plan of a cabal launched perhaps as early as biblical times to take control of the world and destroy humanity. Adherents of this view see the French Revolution, Communism, the civil rights movement and political correctness (aka cultural Marxism) as part of the plan. The Great Replacement theory is one of the latest versions. They look for coded messages in revolutionary literature as directions from the cabal to their servants.
Dr. Watson saw the theory slightly differently. In his view, the conspirators were the historical elites who were challenged by the French Revolution. They then invented conservatism, socialism and fascism as attempts to return mankind to slavery.
BTW, I don't think M&E supported slavery. While they saw it as part of early capitalism, they saw all previous economic systems as stages to eventual communism. Marx of course supported Lincoln because he saw the end of slavery as a development in capitalism that would bring communism closer.
TFD (talk) 21:34, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Well, as I explained, they actually believed slavery in the US, during some part of their history, in some concrete historical context could accelerate social transformations that eventually would lead to a proletarian revolution. That means, their opinion on that matter, as well as on other issues should not be taken out of historical context. However, I thought that was so obvious that requires no separate explanations.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:49, 9 September 2021 (UTC)
Unfortunately, considering the lack of understanding and knowledge on the topic, I would not be surprised at all if some users really believe that Marx and Engels supported slavery. By the way, it looks like such users indeed cherry pick stuff but mainly do to make them appear extreme in a bad way. I can do the same in the opposite way, how Marx spoke about the workers empowering themselves, how the communist party was supposed to be more like the "invisible 'dictatorship'" of their rival Bakunin and not like any other party getting in power while maintaining the same class society, how Marx's 'dictatorship' of the proletariat was the Paris Commune in which there was direct democracy, no standing army, recallable delegates, and workers actually having power rather than just nominally have it in so-called socialist countries, how Marx wanted to avoid what happened to the French Revolution in which the state just changed authoritarian rulers and ultimately thought the working class must break up, smash the ready-made state machinery and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it (The Civil War in France), his critical comments on barrack communism, how Marx wrote that the mir, alongside free soviets, which was a view shared by the Nardnicks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, could be a way to develop socialism without having to undergone the rapid and brutal process of industrialization (White 2010) as the Bolsheviks did, so which faction better reflected their thoughts? It is not as easily as it may appear. How Marx and Engels specifically called out against the cult of personality, which was actually referenced by Khrushchev against Stalin.

How Engels specifically wrote in a letter against economic determinism and reductionism, translated from Italian to English that "according to the materialistic conception of history the production and reproduction of real life is in history the decisive moment of last resort. Neither Marx nor I have ever said more. If now someone distorts that statement so that the economic moment turns out to be the only determinant, it transforms that principle into a sentence made meaningless, abstract, and absurd." How Engels argued that it was necessary to present a program that foresees the development of agricultural cooperatives because, again translating from Italian to English, "when we will conquer the power of the State, we will not be able to think of expropriating small owners by violence, with or without compensation, as will instead be done with the great owners. Our task will be to direct their individual production and their private property into a cooperative regime, without using force, but with example and help", thus clearly showing to be against the forced collectivization that happened in the Soviet Union. And I could go on and on. It is then clear that had they been alive, both Marx and Engels would have chastized so-called Marxists and socialist states just like they had done at their time in life. After all, it is not like so many anarchists and Marxists criticized these states, right? To be fair to them, some of these work were not published (especially The German Ideology and the Grundrisse) and some of these were letters, but reading Marx and Engels' letters and correspondences is of vital importance to understand what they actually thought, and as correctly noted by Siebert, they need to be contextualized and analyzed, not cherry picked or taken completely out of context.

It is simply taken for granted that just because the Bolsheviks proclaimed to be Marxists and followers of Marx and Engels (we all know what Marx and Engels thought about several individuals and groups making such claims). I think it is very likely they would have supported the October Revolution but keep in mind that the aftermath was a coalition government between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. Anything after that is up for grabs but I very much doubt that they would have supported Stalin, all his actions, and be Soviet apologists, and it is far more likely they would have been critics and end up in Gulags like other Marxists and socialist critics. This is just as likely, and I would argue it is more likely, than they being Soviet apologists and supporters of Stalin because obviously they were faithfully following them to the letter, as if the Bolsheviks were only inspired by Marx, or how Marx's revolutionary politics, rather than Sergey Nechayev's, must have been the cause of revolutionary terrorism and mass killing. Since we are talking about The Communist Manifesto and the 1840s, there is this interesting quote from Lipow 1991, published by the University of California Press, i.e. it is academic press.

"We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider it a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced ... that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal property." Thus wrote the editors of the Journal of the Communist League in 1847, under the direct influence of the founders of modern revolutionary DEMOCRATIC [full caps emphasis mine] socialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Davide King (talk) 11:02, 11 September 2021 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes/Archive_50&oldid=1047901794"