Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/MKUCR Quotes from Sources
Midlarsky 2005, pp. 22, 309, 310:
[edit]"I distinguish between genocide as the systematic mass murder of people based on ethnoreligious identity, and politicide as the large-scale killing of designated enemies of the state based on socioeconomic or political criteria. Although genocide can be understood to be a species of politicide (but not the converse), in practice, genocidal (i.e., ethnoreligious) killings tap into much deeper historical roots of the human condition. In this distinction, I follow Harff and Gurr 1988, 360. ... Turning to Cambodia, the mass killings in that country during Pol Pot's murderous regime are often characterized with other seemingly identical circumstances. Cambodia and Rwanda, for example, are typically treated as genocides that differ little from each other in essential characteristics. However, the victimization rates for the two countries are similar only when treated as proportions of the total country population systematically murdered. Although the mass murders in Cambodia are frequently characterized as genocide, I argue that in fact genocidal activity was only a small proportion of the killing and that the vast majority of Cambodians died in a politicide, substantially different in origin from the genocides we have been examining. The matter of etiology lies at the root of my distinction here, not definitional semantics. If we lump the Cambodian case other instances of systematized mass murder, then the sources of all of them become hopelessly muddled. ... Essentially, I argue that genocides stem from a primitive identification of the 'collective enemy' in Carl Schmitt's sense, whereas politicides, at least of the Cambodian variety, are attributable to more detailed ideological considerations. Further, the Cambodian case falls under the rubric of state killings, having a particular affinity with earlier practices in the Soviet Union and China. 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. Because an element of Cambodian state insecurity existed in this period, especially vis-à-vis Vietnam, a genocidal element is found in the killing of non-Khmer peoples such as the Vietnamese, who comprised a small proportion of the total."
Rosefielde 2010, p. 3:
[edit]"The Red Holocaust could be defined to include all murders (judicially sanctioned terror-executions), criminal manslaughter (lethal forced labor and ethnic cleansing) and felonious negligent homicide (terror-starvation) incurred from insurrectionary actions and civil wars prior to state seizure, and all subsequent felonious state killings. This treatise, however, limits the Red Holocaust death toll to peacetime state killings, even if communists were responsible for political assassinations, insurrections and civil wars before achieving power, in order to highlight the causal significance of communist economic systems. It also excludes deaths attributable to wartime hostilities after states were founded. As a matter of accounting, the convention excludes Soviet killings before 1929, during World War II (1940-45) and in Germany, occupied Europe, North Korea, Manchuria and the Kuril Islands (1946-53). Killings in China before October 1949 are similarly excluded, as are those in Indochina before 1954. Soviet slaughter of nobles, kulaks, capitalist and the bourgeoisie during War Communism are part of the excluded wartime group, but killings of similar social categories in China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia after their civil wars in the process of Communist consolidation are included. The summary casualty statistics reported in Table 11.1 conform with this definition and in principle only reflect excess deaths, excluding natural mortality. It provides a comprehensive picture of discretionary communist killings unobscured by wartime exigencies. Others desiring a broader body count to assess the fullest extent of communist carnage can easily supplement the estimates provided here from standard sources."
"First, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets."
Staub 2011, p. 100:
[edit]"In contrast to genocide, I see mass killing as 'killing (or in other ways destroying) members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group, or killing large numbers of people' without a focus on group membership."
In the Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999), Israel Charny defined generic genocide as "the mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims."; Easterly, Gatti & Kurlat 2006, pp. 129–156: In the 2006 article "Development, Democracy, and Mass Killings", William Easterly, Roberta Gatti, and Sergio Kurlat adopted Charny's definition of generic genocide for their use of mass killing and massacre to avoid the politics of the term genocide altogether.
Ulfelder & Valentino 2008, p. 2:
[edit]"The research described here sprang from an interest in observing and assessing the risk of extreme human-rights violations in the form of large-scale violence perpetrated by states against noncombatant civilians. Researchers working in this area usually use the terms 'genocide' or 'mass killing' to label their subject of interest, but the definitions of those terms remain a source of heated debate among scholars, international lawyers, and policy-makers.
Cognizant of these debates, we considered numerous strategies for defining and observing our phenomenon of interest. Unfortunately, none captured the range of events that we wished to explore as completely and objectively as does a simple numerical threshold of civilian fatalities. For purposes of this research, then, we defined a mass killing as any event in which the actions of state agents result in the intentional death of at least 1,000 noncombatants from a discrete group in a period of sustained violence."
Bellamy 2010, p. 102:
[edit]"If we look at mass killing since 1945 perpetrated by non-democratic states outside the context of war, we find two basic types of case. The first involved revolutionary communist governments implementing their plans for radical transformation. Over one-third of all the relevant cases (14 of the 38 episodes) were perpetrated by communist governments. According to Benjamin Valentino, communist governments were so exceptionally violent because the social transformations they attempted to engineer required the material dispossession of vast numbers of people. The most radical of these regimes, in China, Cambodia, and North Korea, attempted to completely reorient society, eradicating traditional patterns of life and forcibly imposing a new and alien way of life. Communist objectives, Valentino points out, could only be achieved with violence and the scale of the transformation dictated a massive amount of violence. Of course, communist revolutions also elicited resistance, prompting the state into massive and bloody crackdowns and generating a culture of paranoia which led many regimes to periodically purge their own ranks (China's 'cultural revolution' being a good example). In communist ideology, the good of the party was associated with the national interest, individuals were divested of rights and subordinated to the will of the party leadership, and entire groups (e.g. kulaks in the Soviet Union, merchants and intellectuals in Cambodia) were deemed 'class enemies' that could be eradicated en masse to protect the revolution."
Wayman & Tago 2010, pp. 4, 11, 12–13:
[edit]"Our term, 'mass killing', is used by Valentino (2004: 10), who aptly defines it as 'the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants'. The word 'noncombatants' distinguishes mass killing from battle-deaths in war, which occur as combatants fight against each other. The 'massive number' he selects as the threshold to mass killing is 'at least fifty thousand intentional deaths over the course of five or fewer years' (Valentino, 2004: 11-12), which of course averages to at least 10,000 killed per year. ... One reason for selecting these thresholds of 10,000 and 1,000 deaths per year is that we find that in the Harff data on geno-politicide, which are one of our key datasets, there are many cases of over 10,000 killed per year, but also some in which between 1,000 and 10,000 are killed per year. Therefore, analyzing at a 1,000-death threshold (as well as the 10,000 threshold) insures the inclusion of all the Harff cases. Valentino chooses 50,000 over five years as 'to some extent arbitrary', but a 'relatively high threshold' to create high confidence that mass killing did occur and was deliberate, 'given the generally poor quality of the data available on civilian fatalities' (Valentino, 2004: 12). We believe that our similar results, when we lower the threshold to 1,000 killed per year, are an indication that the data in Harff and in Rummel remain reliable down even one power of ten below Valentino's 'relatively high' selected threshold, and we hope that, in that sense, our results can be seen as a friendly amendment to his work, and that they basically lend confidence, based on empirical statistical backing, for the conceptual direction which he elected to take. ... Within that constant research design, we then showed that the differences were not due to threshold either (over 10,000 killed per year; over 1,000; or over 1). The only remaining difference is the measure of mass killing itself — democide vs. geno-politicide. We have further shown that (although the onset years vary from Harff to Rummel), when one looks at which sovereign states were involved (and the approximate onset year), the geno politicide data is basically a proper subset of the democide data (as one would expect by the addition of the need to show specific intent in geno-politicide). It would therefore appear (assuming for the moment that there are not any big measurement biases) that autocratic regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killing generically, but not so strongly inclined (i.e. not statistically significantly inclined) toward geno-politicide."
"Following Valentino (1998), I define mass killing in this paper as 'the intentional killing of a significant number of the members of any group (as group and its membership are defined by the perpetrator) of non-combatants' (1998:4). A few elements of this definition are worth further discussion. First, identification of the victim is based on 'membership,' as opposed to one that is based on immediate threat. In the case of Cultural Revolution, the membership is based on political standards as opposed to ascriptive traces such as race and ethnicity.4 Second, the intent to kill is imputable in the perpetrator. This separates mass killing from other causes of deaths in the Cultural Revolution such as death resulting from on-stage beating or off-stage beating. In on-stage beating the intention was not to kill but to convey a symbolic message and to humiliate the victims, and the main purpose of off-stage torture for confession was clearly to force a confession. Mass killing also differs from casualties of armed battles, a widespread phenomenon occurring in the earlier stage of the Cultural Revolution. Finally, the criterion of 'a significant number' indicates some concentration in terms of time and space of the killing. To use a hypothetical example, we should not judge that mass killings occur if 180 villages of a county kill one person in each village, but we should do so if one of the villages kills more than ten people within one day."
"In another conceptual departure from standard scholarship, I use the term collective killing as opposed to genocide or mass killing. This concept shares three basic premises with genocide or mass killing. First, the criteria for becoming a victim are not about deeds but rather with membership in a group. Second, the killing must be intentional, which is distinct from acts of endangerment that carry no goal of killing in the first place. Using torture to elicit confessions, for example, may cause significant numbers of deaths. Third, the number of victims must reach a certain level. This aspect is very much related to the first premise regarding membership: Individuals are rounded up because they are members of a particular group, which by definition results in a collective of victims. I replace the word mass with collective for analysis of units smaller than a country as a whole, for example, county. Collective killings may occur in smaller areas without meeting the criteria suggested by Valentino of 'at least fifty thousand intentional deaths over the course of five or fewer years.' With this more fine-grained conceptual approach, it is also possible to compare collective killings across counties, townships, and villages."
Semelin 2009, p. 37:
[edit]"Mann thus establishes a sort of parallel between racial enemies and class enemies, thereby contributing to the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism. This theory has also been developed by some French historians such as Stéphane Courtois and Jean-Louis Margolin in The Black Book of Communism: they view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide. Mann however refuses to use the term 'genocide' to describe the crimes committed under communism. He prefers the terms 'fratricide' and 'classicide', a word he coined to refer to intentional mass killings of entire social classes."
"Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range."
Bradley 2017, pp. 151–153:
[edit]"The relationship between human rights and communism in both theory and practice has often been in tension. In the ideational realm, Karl Marx famously dismissed the rights of man as a bourgeois fantasy that masked the systemic inequality of the capitalist system. 'None of the supposed rights of man,' Marx wrote, 'go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society ... withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.' Rights and liberties in bourgeois society, he argued, provided only an illusory unity behind which social conflict and inequalities deepened. Rhetorically, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and most of the rest of the communist world followed Marx's lead. As the Chinese argued in 1961, 'the 'human rights' referred to by bourgeois international law and the 'human rights' it intends to protect are the rights of the bourgeoisie to enslave and to oppress the labouring people ... [and] provide pretexts for imperialist opposition to socialist and nationalist countries. They are reactionary from head to toe.' Rejecting Enlightenment-era inalienable individual political and civil rights, communist states instead championed collective economic and social rights. The Soviets grew fond of annually celebrating International Human Rights Day, to mark the anniversary of the 1948 adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by offering lectures to its citizens that contrasted the promotion of socialist rights in the Soviet Union with their violations in the capitalist world.
And yet state-orchestrated mass killings and what have come to be called gross violations of human rights were at times almost commonplace in communist-led states. Between 1933 and 1945, more than a million people died in the Soviet Gulag system and likely at least 6 million more in politically induced Soviet famines, Stalin's mass executions in the great terror and in what Timothy Snyder has termed the 'bloodlands' of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and the western edges of Russia. In Mao's China, as many as 45 million Chinese died of famine during the Great Leap Forward, while some 2.5 million were killed or tortured to death. During the Cultural Revolution, between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed. In Pol Pot's Cambodia, 200,000 were executed and between 1.4 million and 2.2 million of the country's 7 million people died of disease and starvation. If the precise numbers have always been, and continue to be, in dispute, their order of magnitude is not.
In fact the entanglements between human rights and communism in the twentieth century were more ambiguous than the chasm between ideology and these staggering numbers would suggest. The meanings of human rights themselves remained unstable over much of the second half of the century, as did the actors in the communist world who engaged with them. What promises of global human rights like those contained in the Universal Declaration might portend and the very claims about what constituted human rights were not fixed. Nor was the significance of human rights for the making of international politics or local lives as they were lived on the ground at all clear. The relationship between human rights and international communism after 1945 became fluid. In the immediate postwar period, the Soviet Union played an active role in the creation of a global human rights order in the drafting of the Universal Declaration and the Genocide Convention and participating in the Nuremberg Trials. With the coming of decolonization, the Soviets and the Chinese would also help to open out the meanings of international human rights toward the rights of postcolonial self-determination and development. But human rights in the communist world largely became a polemical state posture within the broader Cold War ideological struggle. Indeed, the international project of human rights itself became a muted practice by the 1950s."
Valentino 2005, p. 275:
[edit]"Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 15. A team of six French historians coordinated by Stéphane Courtois estimates that communist regimes are responsible for between 85 and 100 million deaths. See Martin Malia, 'Foreword: The Uses of Atrocity,' in Stéphane Courtois et.al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. x. Zbigniew Brzezinski estimates that 'the failed effort to build communism' cost the lives of almost sixty million people. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1993), p. 16. Matthew White estimates eighty-one million deaths from communist 'genocide and tyranny' and 'man-made famine.' See Matthew White, 'Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century,' http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat8.htm [June 2002]. Todd Culbertson estimates that communist regimes killed 'perhaps 100 million' people. See Todd Culbertson, 'The Human Cost of World Communism,' Human Events, August 19, 1978, pp. 10-11. These estimates should be considered at the highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributable to communist regimes."
Culbertson 1978, pp. 10–11:
[edit]"Available evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of the Iron and Bamboo curtains prevents a more definitive figure. The Communist system of forced starvation, concentration camps, and slave labor is remarkably similar to that of the Nazis, whose policies claimed approximately six million Jewish victims. ... This is an incomplete accounting of Communist genocide. Since the Russian Revolution 61 years ago communism has been responsible for the death of 100 million innocent persons - not including the terrorism inspired by Communists in free countries. The total cost of human suffering and grief is beyond comprehension."
"The human cost of communism exceeds most Americans' expectations. The number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship. The greatest tide of refugees in world history flows from communist states to noncommunist ones: Today it comes from Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Indochina, East Europe, and Nicaragua. (During the entire Vietnam war there was nary a refugee fleeing from Indochina. It was not until communism triumphed that life became so unbearable that people who could withstand decades of war fled to the seas.) Communism invented the concentration camp. Millions have been imprisoned and executed, have worked and starved to death, in these camps. Communist regimes will not permit enterprising Western reporters near these camps, so you don't hear about them on the news. Communist regimes recognize no restraint on their absolute power. From this they establish ideological falsehoods as the standards of right and wrong and the standards by which deviationism is measured; from this stems the systematic denial of all individual human rights. The quality of life always deteriorates under communism: the militarization of society; the destruction of the consumer economy; the rationing of food; the deterioration of housing and insufficient new construction to meet population growth; the destruction of medical care through lack of medicine and medical supplies; the destruction of religion; the destruction and political control of education and culture; the rewriting of history and destruction of monuments to the national heritage; and the assault on family life and parental jurisdiction over children."
Malia 1999, p. x:
[edit]"The Black Book offers us the first attempt to determine, overall, the actual magnitude of what occurred, by systematically detailing Leninism's 'crimes, terror, and repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989. This factual approach puts Communism in what is, after all, its basic human perspective. For it was in truth a 'tragedy of planetary dimensions' (in the French publisher's characterization), with a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million. Either way, the Communist record offers the most colossal case of political carnage in history. And when this fact began to sink in with the French public, an apparently dry academic work became a publishing sensation, the focus of impassioned political and intellectual debate. The shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardly news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, at least when the different Leninist regimes are taken individually. The real news is that at this late date the truth should come as such a shock to the public at large."
Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, pp. 53–54:
[edit]"Bearing in mind the charged nature of the subject, it is polemically effective to make such comparisons, but it does not seem particularly fruitful, neither morally nor scientifically, to judge the regimes on the basis of their 'dangerousness' or to assess the relationship between communism and Nazism on the basis of what the international academic community calls their 'atrocities toll' or 'body count'. In that case, should the crimes of all communist regimes, in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other countries where communism is or has been the dominant party, be compared to the Nazi regime's massacre of six million Jews? Should the Nazi death toll also include the tens of millions of people who the German Nazi armies and their supporting troops killed during the Second World War? Not even Courtois' analytical qualification, that ranking the two regimes the same is based on the idea that the 'weapon of hunger' was used systematically by both the Nazi regime and a number of communist regimes, makes this more reasonable, since this 'weapon' on the whole played a very limited role in the Nazi genocide in relation to other types of methods of mass destruction, and in relation to how it was used by communist regimes."
Valentino 2005, p. 91:
[edit]"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."
Valentino 2005, p. 75:
[edit]Table 2:
Communist Mass Killings in the Twentieth Century
- Soviet Union (1917-23) ... 250,000-2,500,000
- Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1927-45) ... 10,000,000-20,000,000
- China (including Tibet) (1949-72) ... 10,000,000-46,000,000
- Cambodia (1975-79) ... 1,000,000-2,000,000
- Possible cases:
- Bulgaria (1944-?) ... 50,000-100,000
- East Germany (1945-?) ... 80,000-100,000
- Romania (1945-?) ... 60,000-300,000
- North Korea (1945-?) ... 400,000-1,500,000
- North and South Vietnam (1953-?) ... 80,000-200,000
"Note: All figures in this and subsequent tables are author's estimates based on numerous sources. Episodes are listed under the heading 'possible cases' in this and subsequent tables when the available evidence suggests a mass killing may have occurred, but documentation is insufficient to make a definitive judgement regarding the number of people killed, the intentionality of the killing, or the motives of the perpetrators."
Bellamy 2012, p. 949:
[edit]"Between 1945 and 1989, communist regimes massacred literally millions of civilians. A conservative estimate puts the total number of civilians deliberately killed by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million people, with the true figure probably much higher. Communist governments in China and Cambodia embarked on programs of radical social transformation and killed, tortured or allowed to starve whole groups that were thought hostile to change or simply unworthy of life. In the Soviet Union, Albania, North Korea, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia and China, communist governments used sometimes massive levels of indiscriminate violence against civilians to deter and defeat actual and imagined opponents and/or exact revenge for the Second World War. Where communist governments were violently challenged, they exhibited little concern for civilian immunity, as evidenced by the Soviet assaults on Hungary and Afghanistan and North Korea’s conduct in the Korean War. Finally, communism spawned violent non-state actors, such as the Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhoffer gang in Europe, Shining Path in Peru, and FARC in Colombia, all of which deliberately targeted non-combatants."
Strauss 2014, pp. 360–361:
[edit]"For some areas, there is now a beginning of scholarly convergence on raw numbers. Most are now willing to accept a rough number of around 20 million including famine victims for the Soviet Union, and provisionally somewhere between 2 and 3 million for Cambodia, of whom roughly half were executed outright. In other environments such as China, there is still little consensus on numbers of total victims of Maoist revolutionary policies; for the Great Leap Forward alone, estimates of excess deaths range from 15 to 40 million."
Jahanbegloo 2014, pp. 117–118:
[edit]"Most interesting, however, is Finlay's argument that Marxist thought, beyond justifying and excusing the use of violence, also legitimates it. Finlay (ibid. p. 378) argues that this is done by 'undermining existing moral norms and suggesting that new ones will be created to suit a new proletarian order.' Marx argues that norms and ethics are determined by the dominating class of the time, as can be illustrated in Lenin's statement that 'Honesty is a bourgeoisie virtue', meaning that honesty is crucial to the existence of bourgeoisie, as other virtues such as loyalty and obedience were necessary virtues during the reign of the feudal aristocracy. This impacts the concept of justice in war dramatically.
As there is the assumption that a new social order is to be created, along with a new set of moral and ethical codes, then the current ones may be discarded. Therefore, Finley (ibid.) states that it would be conceivable for revolutionaries to commit atrocious crimes in bringing about a socialist system, with the belief that their crimes will be retroactively absolved by the new system of ethics put in place by the proletariat. Finley also addresses an alternative opinion, that of Shlomo Avineri, who believes that this may be a non-issue when one takes into account the universality of the proletariat. This universality means that it has no active class-based or sectarian interest, or, rather, that its interests represent those of all society. Its major interest is simply to 'eliminate all other special interests on the basis of which it suffers oppression' and is an entirely negative entirely (ibid., p. 379). Therefore, our conception of ethics and morality - the product of a capitalist society - is inaccurate. Being based on the interest of the bourgeoisie rather than a true and authentic reflection of the ethics of a universal class, its contravention is not something to be lamented. Finley understands Avineri as drawing two conclusions. First, that:
- whatever the bourgeoisie with its individualistic and legalistic conception of political ethics and legality has to say about the morality of violence is likely to be invalid since it reflects the particular class interests and therefore the perverted humanism of its proponents. (Ibid., p. 370)
and, moreover, that only ethical claims of the proletariat are valid, insofar as they are the true reflections of 'the perspective of the last social class, at its final revolutionary stage of oppression' (ibid.). It is only then that morals and ethics can be created authentically, and all other systems ought to be considered as arbitrary. However, this creates a major difficulty for Finlay and, as Marx has inspired many other theorists (Žižek, Fanon, Sorel, etc.) this is a difficulty which he identifies in each of their works as well.
Understanding that revolutionary violence is carried out in the hope of future absolution based on a hypothetical social order able to craft a universal system of ethics, Finlay sees this as carte blanche for revolutionists to carry out any action, however atrocious, so long as it helps bring about this imminent revolution. Finlay's 'permissive doctrine' is a 'philosophical framework within which the possibility of using violence is validated but without setting any clear limits to how much violence can be used and against whom'. Finlay also argue that there is a tendency for excess, as Fanon, Sorel and Žižek all see the use of violence as beneficial, since it may act as a spark for the revolution. Finlay sees the total legitimation of violence in revolution, with no principle of restriction, to be both dangerous and unethical."
====Jahanbegloo 2014, pp. 120–121:==== "Singh makes a principled argument: that Marx saw the use of violence, even when it is avoidable, as required insofar as that it has a purging quality, believing that only by using violence can all elements of the previous regime be eradicated. Moreover, Singh (ibid., p. 14) considers Marx's references to the use of bourgeoisie democratic institutions to bring about social change only as 'hinting to the possibility of the working class coming into power, in England, through universal suffrage'. Furthermore, he quotes Engels in a letter addressed to the Communist Committee in Brussels in October 1846. In this letter, Engels states that there cannot be any means of carrying out the communist agenda 'other than a democratic revolution by force' (ibid. p. 10). Singh, however, does acknowledge the desire in Marx to avoid a bloody revolution.
Singh (ibid. p. 11) notes that most Marxist writing that alluded to the possibility of this transition being carried out peacefully took place before the events of 1844-48, which 'showed that a peaceful change was not even remotely possible'. After 1848, Singh notes a return to advocating a violent revolution due to what Singh identifies as the 'practical considerations' of being unable to overcome the existing obstacles to a peaceful transition. Singh (ibid. p. 13) writes that, in 1848, Marx published an article titled The Victory of Counter-Revolution in Vienna, where he states 'there is only one means by which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated - and that is by revolutionary terror'."
Revel 2009, pp. 94–95:
[edit]"Already among the most authentic sources of socialist thought, among the earliest doctrinarians, are found justifications for ethnic cleansing and genocide, along with the totalitarian state, all of which were held up as legitimate and even necessary weapons for the success and preservation of the revolution. Socialism's canonical principles were not at all violated by Stalin or Mao when they implemented their murderous policies; on the contrary, Stalin and Mao were scrupulous in applying these principles with perfect fidelity to the letter and the spirit of the doctrine - as has been rigorously established by the Cambridge scholar George Watson in his treatise on The Lost Literature of Socialism.
In the modern historiography of socialism, an essential part of the theory has been quite effectively suppressed. The true believers, while claiming socialism's founding fathers as their mentors, very early on dispensed with any thorough study of them, even of Marx himself. And today, the key texts seem to enjoy the rare privilege of being understood by everyone, without having been read in their entirety by anyone - not even by socialism's adversaries, who for fear of reprisal are likely to quell their own curiosity. (History for the most part is a selective rearrangement of the facts, and the history of ideas does not escape this general law.)
Study of the unexpurgated texts, writes Watson, shows us that "Genocide was an idea unique to socialism." Friedrich Engels, in an article penned in 1849 for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, a periodical edited by his friend Karl Marx, called for the extermination of the Hungarians, who had risen up against Austria. He had a low opinion also of Serbs and other Slavic peoples, and of the Basques, the Bretons and the Scottish Highlanders - all problems that needed to be eliminated. Three-quarters of a century later, in his On Lenin and Leninism (1924), Stalin would recommend study of Engels' influential piece. Marx himself, in "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany," published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1852, asked how "those moribund peoples, the Bohemians, the Carinthians, the Dalmatians etc.," might be disposed of."
Bellamy 2012, p. 950:
[edit]"But it is not simply the number of victims that distinguishes communist from non-communist mass killing in the Cold War—though that in itself is important to acknowledge. The most important difference for our purposes lies in the fact that amongst the perpetrators and their supporters there was very little recognition that the deliberate extermination of large numbers of civilians might be morally problematic, let alone prohibited. Where there was criticism of this litany of mass murder, it almost always came from outside the communist world. The principal reason for the failure of civilian immunity to moderate the behavior of communist governments during the Cold War was the persistence and spread of communism’s ideology of selective extermination, and its general acceptance within the communist world as a legitimator of mass killing. As I argued earlier, this 'anti-civilian ideology' identifies whole groups as being outside the protection of noncombatant immunity and therefore liable for legitimate extermination. The basic communist variant of this ideology was first developed and applied by Stalin and held that certain socioeconomic or national groups or political attitudes were anti-communist and that group members were 'enemies of the people' who could be legitimately destroyed. Although each of the communist regimes that massacred large numbers of civilians during the Cold War developed their own distinctive account of selective extermination, they all shared the basic idea that their targets—identified as whole groups—had by their identity, actions, or thoughts, placed themselves outside legal or moral protection.85 Thus, in contrast to most Western or anti-communist perpetrators of mass atrocities during the Cold War, communist perpetrators tended to argue that their victims were 'criminals' or 'enemies of the people' and therefore beyond the protection of civilian immunity."
Shaw 2015a, p. 115:
[edit]"In these contexts, democratic impulses were snuffed out, and foundations were made for the centralization of power in the hands of Stalin, who in turn proclaimed the new nationalist doctrine of 'socialism in one country'.
Thereafter, nationalist ideas were at the heart of many mass killings by Communist states, both in genocide and in war. As Stalinist parties seized power in Asia and the Balkans after 1945, they each proclaimed their own national ideology. Each 'great leader' claimed to represent his fatherland, and many were prepared to kill extensively in the leader's name. After this, nationalist militarism became the model for revolutionary movements across the Third World. Whatever other ideological elements and alliances the insurgent forces claimed, their killing was invariably in the name of national liberation.
The 'killing fields' of Cambodia (episode VII) represented the nadir of this kind of nationalist Communism. In the former Soviet and Yugoslav areas after 1989, many former Communist elites reinvented themselves as ethnic nationalists. In some cases, they launched genocidal wars in the name of their new creed, to renew the foundations of their power. Nationalism made democratization a sick joke in war zones - the incentive to manufacture ethnically homogenous electorates became one of the driving forces of expulsion and slaughter (episode VIII)."
====Chirot & McCauley 2010, p. 42:==== "The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The revolutionary thinkers who formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported, or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999)."
"All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of the differences. ... Ordinary party members were also ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, the rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas. The pervasive role of the party inside the state also meant that authority structures were not fully institutionalized but factionalized, even chaotic, as revisionists studying the Soviet Union have argued. Both centralized control and mass party factionalism were involved in the killings."
"Mass death is not a new reality. Over the centuries this tragic phenomenon has manifest itself in many times and places. An integral feature of this history of large-scale violence is what I call, 'otherness.' That is, the victimizer stigmatizes and stereotypes the victim in various ways in order to legitimate the violence that is then unleashed.
What is worthy of note is that this distancing process takes many forms. The historical record reveals cases where the 'Other' is created on the grounds of class, sex, color, race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. So, for example, the majority of Stalin's victims were identified as 'class enemies.' The most notorious example of such class war was directed at the Kulaks, though his entire massive campaign against the peasantry as represented by his forced drive to collectivize agriculture, was based on the notion of class (and his desire for national modernization). Likewise, the extraordinary event that was Kampuchea was defined by the application of a radical communist ideology in which class was everything. Nationalism — connected usually to other factors such as religion, ethnicity, race, or color — has also played its part in justifying oppression and death — as a decisive ingredient in Stalin's exile of the minority nationalities during World War II and in his assault on the Ukraine in the early 1930s."
"But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers. Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror—a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated. Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."
Tismăneanu 2012, p. 14:
[edit]"However, a nuance emphasized by Snyder offers a caveat to the comparison between these two extremisms. In fact, Stalinism did not transform mass murder into political history, as happened in Nazi Germany. For Stalin, 'mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism.' But, to take Snyder's point further, Communism, like Fascism, undoubtedly founded its alternative, illiberal modernity upon extermination. The Communist project, in such countries as the USSR, China, Cuba, Romania, or Albania, was based precisely on the conviction that certain social groups were irretrievably alien and deservedly murdered."
Semelin 2009, p. 331:
[edit]"Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole, i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implememted in order to transform a society completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire."
Rosefielde 2010, p. xvi:
[edit]"The story that emerges from the exercise is edifying. It reveals that the conditions for the Red Holocaust were rooted in Stalin's, Kim's, Mao's, Ho's and Pol Pot's siege-mobilized terror-command economic systems, not in Marx's utopian vision or other pragmatic communist transition mechanisms. Terror-command was chosen among other reasons because of legitimate fears about the long-term viability of terror-free command, and the ideological risks of market communism. The internal contradictions of communism confronted leaders with a predicament that could only have been efficiently resolved by acknowledging communism's inferiority and changing course. Denial offered two unhappy options: one bloody, the other dreary, and history records that more often than not, communist rulers chose the worst option. Tens of millions were killed in vain; a testament to the triumph of ruthless hope over dispassionate reason that proved more durable than Hitler's and Hirohito's racism. These findings are likely to withstand the test of time, but are only a beginning, opening up a vast new field for scientific inquiry as scholars gradually gain access to archives in North Korea, China, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia."
Jones 2010, p. 126:
[edit]"This civil war, one of the most destructive of the twentieth century, lasted until 1921 and claimed an estimated nine million lives on all sides. Its 'influence . . . on the whole course of subsequent history, and on Stalinism, cannot possibly be overestimated. It was in the civil war that Stalin and men like Stalin emerged as leaders, while others became accustomed to harshness, cruelty, terror.' Red forces imposed "War Communism,' an economic policy that repealed peasants' land seizures, forcibly stripped the countryside of grain to feed city dwellers, and suppressed private commerce. All who opposed these policies were 'enemies of the people.' 'This is the hour of truth,' Lenin wrote in a letter to a comrade in mid-1918. 'It is of supreme importance that we encourage and make use of the energy of mass terror directed against the counterrevolutionaries.' The Cheka, the first incarnation of the Soviet secret police (later the NKVD and finally the KGB), responded with gusto. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders may have viewed mass terror as a short-term measure but its widespread use belies claims that it was Stalin's invention."
Krain 1997, p. 334:
[edit]"In addition, many studies have documented the effects of wars and civil wars on general preconditions for genocides and politicides. For example, Melson (1992) argues that revolutions create the conditions that allow genocidal movements and permit their leaders to come to power in the first place and impose their radical ideology, thereby legitimizing mass murder in the eyes of the populace by making it state sponsored. Following the work done by Laswell (1962) on the 'garrison state,' Gurr (1988) documents the establishment and expansion of the secret police and other institutions of the 'coercive state' as a direct result of wars and civil wars. Eisenstadt (1978) argues that hostile international pressures lead to greater isolation of the elites, which in turn leads to an increased probability that these elites will use repression. Some preliminary quantitative work has verified this hypothesis."
Montagnes & Wolton 2019, p. 27:
[edit]"Mass purges further seem to have occurred during, arguably, the most personalist phase, to borrow Geddes’s (2003) terminology, of the communist regimes in the USSR and China. We see two possible complementary reasons for this. According to Geddes (2003), personalist leaders control appointments, potentially raising the congruence of new agents, and the security apparatus, potentially reducing the cost of carrying out the purge. Purges may then have almost disappeared in China and the USSR following the deaths of Stalin and Mao because of the subsequent return to a form of collective leadership to avoid a repeat of past excesses (Levytsky, 1972; Teiwes, 2017).
Obviously, much more needs to be learned about why autocrats decide to start a mass purge. However, our framework can be seen as a possible starting point for a more general theory of coercive instruments in autocracy."
Montefiore 2005, p. 649:
[edit]"Perhaps 20 million had been killed; 28 million deported, of whom 18 million had slaved in the Gulags."
Volkogonov 1999, p. 139:
[edit]"Between 1929 and 1953 the state created by Lenin and set in motion by Stalin deprived 21.5 million Soviet citizens of their lives."
Yakovlev 2002, p. 234:
[edit]"My own many years and experience in the rehabilitation of victims of political terror allow me to assert that the number of people in the USSR who were killed for political motives or who died in prisons and camps during the entire period of Soviet power totaled 20 to 25 million. And unquestionably one must add those who died of famine—more than 5.5 million during the civil war and more than 5 million during the 1930s."
Gellately 2007, p. 584:
[edit]"More recent estimations of the Soviet-on-Soviet killing have been more 'modest' and range between ten and twenty million."
"Estimations on the number of Stalin's victims over his twenty-five year reign, from 1928 to 1953, vary widely, but 20 million is now considered the minimum."
Rosefielde 2010, p. 17:
[edit]"We now know as well beyond a reasonable doubt that there were more than 13 million Red Holocaust victims 1929–53, and this figure could rise above 20 million."
"This 'cosmic perspective' is for Mao not just an irrelevant philosophical caveat; it has precise ethico-political consequences. When Mao high-handedly dismisses the threat of the atomic bomb, he is not down-playing the scope of the danger — he is fully aware that nuclear war may led to the extinction of humanity as such, so, to justify his defiance, he has to adopt the 'cosmic perspective' from which the end of life on Earth 'would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole':
- The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.
This 'cosmic perspective' also grounds Mao's dismissive attitude towards the human costs of economic and political endeavors. If one is to believe Mao's latest biography, he caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: 'half of China may well have to die.' This is instrumental attitude at its most radical: killing as part of a ruthless attempt to realize goal, reducing people to disposable means - and what one should bear in mind is that the Nazi holocaust was NOT the same: the killing of the Jews not part of a rational strategy, but a self-goal, a meticulously planned 'irrational' excess (recall the deportation of the last Jews from Greek islands in 1944, just before the German retreat, or the massive use of trains for transporting Jews instead of war materials in 1944). This is why Heidegger is wrong when he reduces holocaust to the industrial production of corpses: it was NOT that, Stalinist Communism was that."
Conquest 2007, p. xvi:
[edit]"Exact numbers may never be known with complete certainty, but the total of deaths caused by the whole range of Soviet regime's terrors can hardly be lower than some fifteen million."
"All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million."
Wheatcroft 1999, pp. 315‒345:
[edit]"During 1921–53, the number of sentences was (political convictions): sentences, 4,060,306; death penalties, 799,473; camps and prisons, 2,634,397; exile, 413,512; other, 215,942. In addition, during 1937‒52 there were 14,269,753 non-political sentences, among them 34,228 death penalties, 2,066,637 sentences for 0–1 year, 4,362,973 for 2–5 years, 1,611,293 for 6–10 years, and 286,795 for more than 10 years. Other sentences were non-custodial."
Healey 2018, p. 1049:
[edit]"New studies using declassified Gulag archives have provisionally established a consensus on mortality and 'inhumanity.' The tentative consensus says that once secret records of the Gulag administration in Moscow show a lower death toll than expected from memoir sources, generally between 1.5 and 1.7 million (out of 18 million who passed through) for the years from 1930 to 1953. Moreover, as Alexopoulos summarizes, we have found no 'plan of destruction' of prisoners (7), no statement of official intent to kill them in these records. Instead, historians have found that prisoner releases significantly predominated over deaths in the Gulag, with Alexopoulos's own earlier work on amnesty a leading statement of this view. Yet her encounter with the Gulag medical-sanitary service's Moscow archive 'surprised' Alexopoulos (1), and she now attempts to challenge the emergent scholarly consensus, with uneven success."
"Латвія стала 19-ю країною світу, яка визнала Голодомор ґеноцидом українського народу. Литва й Естонія ухвалили такі декларації раніше." (translation: 'Latvia became the 19th country in the world that recognized the Holodomor as the genocide of the Ukrainian people. Lithuania and Estonia have adopted such declarations earlier.'); Korrespondent 2008a: "Латвия присоеденилась к еще 15 странам, уже признавшим Голодомор в Украине геноцидом украинского народа. Декларация подготовлена в ответ на призыв Украины к международному сообществу признать и осудить Голодомор - голод на Украине 1930-х годов прошлого века. Как сообщалось, в феврале Мексика и Парагвай признали Голодомор 1932-1933 годов актом геноцида украинского народа." (translation: 'Latvia has joined 15 more countries that have already recognized the Holodomor in Ukraine as the genocide of the Ukrainian people. The declaration was prepared in response to Ukraine's appeal to the international community to recognize and condemn the Holodomor — the famine in Ukraine of the 1930s of the last century. As reported, in February, Mexico and Paraguay recognized the Holodomor of 1932–1933 as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.'); Korrespondent 2008b: "Сусідні з Латвією Литва та Естонія визнали Голодомор в Україні геноцидом проти українського народу ще на початку 1990-х років. Загалом, Голодомор 1932-33 рр. геноцидом українців визнали понад 10 держав світу. Серед них США, Канада, Естонія, Аргентина, Австралія, Італія, Угорщина, Литва, Грузія, Польща, Еквадор і відтепер Латвія." (translation: 'Neighboring Latvia Lithuania and Estonia recognized the Holodomor in Ukraine as a genocide against the Ukrainian people in the early 1990s. In general, the Holodomor of 1932-33 has been identified by more than 10 states of the world as a genocide of Ukrainians. Among them are the USA, Canada, Estonia, Argentina, Australia, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Georgia, Poland, Ecuador and now Latvia.')."
Ellman 2002, pp. 1151–1172:
[edit]"The best estimate that can currently be made of the number of repression deaths in 1937–38 is the range 950,000–1.2 million, i.e., about a million. This estimate should be used by historians, teachers, and journalists concerned with twentieth century Russian—and world—history."
In one estimate, based on a report by Lavrenti Beria to Stalin, 150,000 of 478,479 deported Ingush and Chechen people (or 31.3 percent) died within the first four years of the resettlement.; Naimark 2001: Another scholar puts the number of deaths at 22.7 percent: Extrapolating from NKVD records, 113,000 Ingush and Chechens died (3,000 before deportation, 10,000 during deportation, and 100,000 after resettlement) in the first three years of the resettlement out of 496,460 total deportees.; Mawdsley 2003: A third source says a quarter of the 650,000 deported Chechens, Ingush, Karachais and Kalmyks died within four years of resettlement.; Fischer & Leggett 2006: However, estimates of the number of deportees sometimes varies widely. Two scholars estimated the number of Chechen and Ingush deportees at 700,000, which would halve the percentage estimates of deaths.
Fenby 2008, p. 351:
[edit]"Mao's responsibility for the extinction of anywhere from 40 to 70 million lives brands him as a mass killer greater than Hitler or Stalin, his indifference to the suffering and the loss of humans breathtaking."
"In this study I have documented the patterns of mass killings in three Chinese provinces in the demobilization period of the Cultural Revolution. I also have also sought explanations for this historical tragedy by examining the role of the state. I have presented the findings from a few different angles. Now it is time to take a look at these findings together to formulate my central argument: The mass killings were rooted in the paradox of state sponsorship and state failure. ...
Mass killings occurred in the three provinces; in two provinces they were a widespread phenomenon. That this finding is from a published source sanctioned by the Chinese government unequivocally supports similar claims made by previous case studies. By examining the mass killings across more than 180 counties, with information from the previous case studies, I am able to uncover the following patterns.
First, the mass killings varied greatly across three provinces, while within one province, there appears to be a great degree of uniformity. This pattern indicates that the occurrence of mass killings was more germane to province-specific political conditions rather than national politics as a whole. I tentatively attribute the provincial difference to the different patterns of mass factional alignment vis-à-vis the governmental authorities in the province. In Hubei, the Rebel Faction, having had prevailed in the previous conflict, was incorporated into the new government. In contrast, in Guangxi and Guangdong, the Rebel Factions continued to be the outsider, and the two provinces were more prone to use violence as a weapon against the Rebel Factions. An alternative explanation for the difference is that Hubei was geographically, and by inference, politically closer to Beijing, hence the province tended to have more restraint against violence.
Second, the mass killings concentrate in the months after most counties established revolutionary committees, but in the time when the provincial capitals were still entangled in mass factionalism. The peaks of mass killings coincided with two announcements from the party center in July 1968 banning factional armed battles and disbanding mass organizations. The finding that historical timing was crucial factor helps us understand the nature and source of mass killings. The fact that most of them occurred after the new governments were put in place indicates that mass killings were the result of the repression by the local state rather than the result of conflicts between independent mass groups. The fact that they coincided with the crackdown of the oppositional mass organizations in the provincial capital indicates that the provincial authorities promoted the rhetoric of violence, although extreme violence in local communes and villages may not be what they intended.
Third, mass killings were primarily a rural phenomenon. In other words, they occurred not in provincial capitals or county seats, but in communes and villages. This is in stark contrast to earlier mass movements of the Cultural Revolution such as campaigns against intellectuals and government officials and the factional street battles which mostly occurred in urban settings. The imagery of top-down diffusion does not apply to the mass killings. This suggests that the class struggle rhetoric disseminated from urban centers found an expression in extreme violence in rural townships and villages, possibly due to the failure of the state to hold the action of the lowest bureaucrats accountable. This explanation is supported by another piece of evidence—the poorer and remoter counties were more likely to have mass killings.
Fourth, the perpetrators were the local leaders and their mass followers (e.g., militia members). The more party members in the local community, the more likely there were mass killings, likely because the local government in these communities enjoyed a stronger organizational base to mobilize the extreme violence.
Fifth, other things being equal (i.e., controlling for distance, county revenue, and party membership) counties with a significant presence of ethnic minority were not more likely to have mass killings. Similarly, population density, prior armed battle conflict, and the compositions of the county leadership have no association to the likelihood of mass killings. These findings to some extent eliminate alternative explanations to the argument fashioned here that stresses the role of the state."
"The so-called class enemy as a category of the rural population had been in place for about two decades after 1949, but not until the Cultural Revolution did it become a victim group for eliminationist killing. This development cannot be explained by the communist doctrine of a classless society because the doctrine as previously practiced in China, for the most part, was not to create this society by physical elimination. Neither can it be explained by the notion that previously propertied classes posed an objective threat, hence that their elimination was imperative. This review of the origin of class enemy demonstrates that its creation, maintenance, and treatment all served the politics of the time. Mass-killing scholars who draw on political violence in communist societies for comparison, however, often take a realist view of the concept of class enemy (or 'people's enemy' in the case of the Soviet Union). That is, they write as though the opposition to the new communist system was real, with class enemy identifying a broad category of individuals who represent plausible or incipient opposition or resistance to the state. ... After the Land Reform movement, China was transformed into a classless society, if defined only in terms of property. From this classless society, the state created an artificial divide between 'the people' and the 'class enemy.' The toothless enemy class was never designed to be eliminated, either by murder or other means. In the first place, the numbers of class enemies were inflated. Quotas were established and sanctions were applied to local leadership if localities did not have a certain percentage of landlords and rich peasants; the numbers were always greater than their initial landed status would warrant. To underscore the artificiality and arbitrariness of this designation, a few years after Mao's death, class enemies were eliminated as a political class - not by murder but rather by declaration - once the new leadership decided that the categories and campaigns had become counterproductive.
Therefore, the class divides were imposed and maintained by the state and perpetuated through state-sponsored mass campaigns. What purpose, then, did the existence of a constructed enemy class serve? The answer links this artificial class divide to two main political tasks: mobilizing mass compliance and resolving elite conflict. These linkages are the key to understanding why the system deepened the politically constructed divide in times of political crisis. Its elastic nature, then, is the key to understanding why the class categorization could take on a genocidal dimension under extraordinary circumstances."
Etcheson 2005, p. 78:
[edit]"Were the Cambodian people somehow Pol Pot's 'willing executioners,' with the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime reflecting an underlying trait of the Cambodian people, historically unique to the time and place it occurred? Or did the violence of the Khmer Rouge regime emanate from some more broadly distributed ideological origin, therefore rendering it amenable to comparison? Perhaps the Khmer Rouge mass killing arose from the same tenets of communism that brought about the mass killing of Stalin's Russia and Mao's China but that was, by absolute numbers, much less evil. Or perhaps the killing in Cambodia can be understood as a response to the perceived threat from Vietnam, as the Khmer Rouge themselves have argued at some length. These same themes and issues lay at the heart of the Historikerstreit, and they are also part and parcel of genocide studies.
In the scholarly literature on the Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea, there have been two principal schools of thought regarding the nature of the violence that took so many lives in such a short period of time. One school of thought holds that the primary locus of the violence was local and that it was largely the result of the spontaneous excesses of a vengeful, undisciplined peasant army. A prominent proponent of this school of thought is Michael Vickery. A second school of thought holds that the locus of the violence was centralized and that it was largely the result of a carefully planned and centrally controlled security apparatus. Several observers have proposed this explanation of the violence in the Democratic Kampuchea regime, including, for example, the recently retired U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Kenneth Quinn. It can be argued, however, that until recently there was an inadequate amount of data to make an unambiguous determination of the question.
A wide range of new evidence uncovered by the Documentation Center of Cambodia over the course of the last ten years has done much to resolve this controversy. In particular, data on the frequency, distribution, and origin of mass graves, combined with data gleaned from newly discovered Khmer Rouge internal security documents, have given us new insight into the question of the economy of violence within Democratic Kampuchea. The data lead inexorably to the conclusion that most of the violence was carried out pursuant to orders from the highest political authorities of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. In this chapter, I briefly review some of the new evidence that so strongly suggests this new and well-documented conclusion."
Harff & Gurr 1988, p. 369:
[edit]"Revolutionary mass murder: the most common type of politicide (following repressive politicide), with ten examples in our data set. In all these instances new regimes have come to power committed to bringing about fundamental social, economic, and political change. Their enemies usually are defined by variants of Marxist-Leninist ideology: initially their victims include the officials and most prominent supporters of the old regime and landowners and wealthy peasants. Later they may include-as they did in Kampuchea and in China during the Cultural Revolution-cadres who lack revolutionary zeal. In Laos and Ethiopia they have included ordinary peasants in regions which actively or passively resisted revolutionary policies. Most Marxist-Leninist regimes which came to power through protracted armed struggle in the postwar period perpetrated one or more politicides, though of vastly different magnitudes. The worst offender was the Pol Pot regime in Kampuchea; the second worst, the Chinese Communist regime."
Jambrek 2008, p. 156:
[edit]"Most of the mass killings were carried out from May to July 1945; among the victims were mostly the 'returned' (or 'home-captured') Home guards and prisoners from other Yugoslav provinces. In the following months, up to January 1946 when the Constitution of the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia was passed and OZNA had to hand the camps over to the organs of the Ministry of the Interior, those killings were followed by mass killing of Germans, Italians and Slovenes suspected of collaborationism and anti-communism. Individual secret killings were carried out at later dates as well. The decision to 'annihilate' opponents must had been adopted in the closest circles of Yugoslav state leadership, and the order was certainly issued by the Supreme Commander of the Yugoslav Army Josip Broz — Tito, although it is not known when or in what form."
"Clearly Vietnamese socialism followed a moderate path relative to China. ... Yet the Vietnamese 'land reform' campaign ... testified that Vietnamese communists could be as radical and murderous as their comrades elsewhere. In May 1953, on the eve of the campaign, the VWP Politburo chaired by Ho authorized the execution of landlords by a ratio of one person for every thousand people, or 0.1 percent of the population.5 ...
5. 'Chi thi cua Bo Chinh Tri' (Politburo's Decree), May 4, 1953 (Dang Cong San Viet Nam, hereafter DCSVN, 2001, 14: 201). Based on other sources, Edwin Moise (2001, 7-9) accepts an estimate close to 15,000 executions. This was about 0.1 percent of the total population of 13.5 million in North Vietnam in 1955."
Courtois 1999, p. 9:
[edit]"As for the great famine in Ukraine in 1932-33, which resulted from the rural population's resistance to forced collectivization, 6 million died in a period of several months.
Here, the genocide of a 'class' may well be tantamount to the genocide of a 'race' — the deliberate starvation of a child of a Ukrainian kulak as a result of the famine causes by Stalin's regime 'is equal to' the starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto as a result of the famine caused by the Nazi regime. Such arguments in no way detract from the unique nature of Auschwitz — the mobilization of leading-edge technological resources and their use in an 'industrial process' involving the construction of an 'extermination factory,' the use of gas, and cremation. However, this argument highlights one particular feature of many Communist regimes — their systematic use of famine as a weapon. The regime aimed to control the total available food supply and, with immense ingenuity, to distribute food purely on the basis of 'merits' and 'demerits' earned by individuals. This policy was a recipe for creating famine on a massive scale. Remember that in the period after 1918, only Communist countries experienced such famines, which led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people. And again in the 1980s, two African countries that claimed to be Marxist-Leninist, Ethiopia and Mozambique, were the only such countries to suffer these deadly famines."
Shaw 2015b, Structural contexts and unintended consequences:
[edit]"Many famines, for example, are originally the product of natural conditions (e.g. in nineteenth-century colonial India) or of anti-peasant policies not originally intended to cause mass death (Stalin's 'terror-famine' and Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'). However, if regimes, whether colonial or Stalinist, fail to take action to alleviate or end starvation, then that outcome may come to be, in part, intended. The understanding of this issue in the laws of war is enlightening: 'If the destruction [of civilian populations] is avoidable ... through better weapon selection, tactics, etc., then the commander could still be held liable under Article 2 of the 1907 Hague Conventions,' even if he did not intend to kill civilians. If leaders, in the knowledge of hunger, actively pursue policies that exacerbate it, as Stalin and Mao did by selling grain overseas and using violence to prevent peasants from accessing it, then their intention is clear."
Bevins 2020, p. 240:
[edit]"... we do not live in a world directly constructed by Stalin's purges or mass starvation under Pol Pot. Those states are gone. Even Mao's Great Leap Forward was quickly abandoned and rejected by the Chinese Communist Party, though the party is still very much around. We do, however, live in a world built partly by US-backed Cold War violence ... Washington's anticommunist crusade, with Indonesia as the apex of its murderous violence against civilians, deeply shaped the world we live in now ..."
Williams 2008, p. 190:
[edit]“A vital element of the evolution of genocide studies is the increased attention devoted to the mass killing of groups not primarily defined by ethnic or religious identities. Most vulnerable minorities around the world had been so defined when Lemkin was crafting his genocide framework, and when UN member states were drafting the Genocide Convention. Such groups continued to be targeted in the post-Second World War period, as in East Pakistan/ Bangladesh in 1971, or Guatemala between 1978 and 1984. But it became increasingly apparent that political groups were on the receiving end of some of the worst campaigns of mass killing, such as the devastating assault on the Indonesian Communist Party in 1965—1966 (with half a million to one million killed), and the brutal campaigns by Latin American and Asian military regimes against perceived dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.
One result of this re-evaluation was that the mass killing by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978, previously ruled out as genocide or designated an 'auto-genocide' because most victims belonged to the same ethnic-Khmer group as their killers, came to be accepted as a classic instance of twentieth-century genocide. Detailed investigations were also launched into the hecatombs of casualties inflicted under Leninism and Stalinism in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, and by Mao Zedong's communists in China. In both of these cases—and to some degree in Cambodia as well—the majority of deaths resulted not from direct execution, but from the infliction of 'conditions of life calculated to bring about [the] physical destruction' of a group, in the language of Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention. In particular, the devastating famines that struck the Ukraine and other minority regions of the USSR in the early 1930s, and the even greater death-toll—numbering tens of millions—caused by famine during Mao's 'Great Leap Forward' (1958—1962), were increasingly, though not uncontroversially, depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent."
Wayman & Tago 2010, p. 4:
[edit]“The two important scholars who have created datasets related to this are Rummel (1995) and Harff (2003). Harff (sometimes with Gurr) has studied what she terms 'genocide and politicide', defined to be genocide by killing as understood by the Genocide Convention plus the killing of a political or economic group (Harff & Gurr, 1988); the combined list of genocides is sometimes labeled 'geno-politicide' for short. Rummel (1994, 1995) has a very similar concept, 'democide', which includes such genocide and geno-politicide done by the government forces, plus other killing by government forces, such as random killing not targeted at a particular group. As Rummel (1995: 3-4) says, 'Cold-blooded government killing ... extends beyond genocide'; For example, 'shooting political opponents; or murdering by quota'. Hence, 'to cover all such murder as well as genocide and politicide, I use the concept democide. This is the intentional killing of people by government' (Rummel, 1995: 4). So Rummel has a broader concept than geno-politicide, but one that seems to include geno-politicide as a proper subset."
Brzezinski 2010, pp. 12–16:
[edit]“Because of Lenin - through mass executions during and after civil war, through massive deaths in the Gulag initiated under Lenin's direction (and powerfully documented in Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago), and through mass famines induced by ruthless indifference (with Lenin callously dismissing as unimportant the deaths of 'the half-savage, stupid, difficult people of the Russian villages') - it can be estimated that between 6-8,000,000 people perished.
That number subsequently was more or less tripled by Stalin, who caused, it has been conservatively estimated, the deaths of no less than 20,000,000 people, and perhaps even upward of 25,000,000. ... Though the precise figures for Stalin's toll will never be available, it is unlikely that the range of 20-25,000,000 victims is an exaggeration. Census statistics also indicate that additionally the biological depletion of the Soviet population during Stalin's reign was even higher. The estimated number of killings cited above, in any case, accounts for Stalin's direct genocide. Demographic depletion - because of reduced birthrates, loss of offspring because of higher infant mortality, births that did not take place because of imprisonment of a would-be parent, etc. - certainly had to be in excess of even the enormous toll directly attributable to Stalin personally. ... Accounting for the human losses in China during the most violent phases of the communist experiment is an even more difficult task. Unlike the exposure of Stalin's crimes in the Soviet Union (and the much delayed and the still somewhat reticent exposure of Lenin's crimes), the Chinese regime persists in regarding the Maoist phase as relatively sacrosanct, with its killings justified but with their scale kept secret. The only exception is the cultural revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, from which the current Chinese rulers suffered directly. For this phase of internal violence some estimates have surfaced, and they suggest deaths on the scale of 1-2,000,000.
For the earlier phases, notably the 1950s, there have been broad estimates of as many as several million executed as 'enemies of the people' - mostly landlords and richer bourgeoisie as well as former Kuomintang officials and officers. In addition, the figure of up to 27,000,000 peasants who perished as a consequence of the forcible collectivization has often been cited. Given the size of the Chinese population, and the indifference to human life of the current regime, the estimate of about 29,000,000 as the human cost of the communist era is in all probability on the low side, especially as it does not take into account the net loss to China's population because of the demographic impact of such mass killings.
This ghastly ledger would not be complete without some accounting of the price in human lives paid for the attempts to construct communist utopias in Eastern Europe, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba. It is a safe estimate that these consumed at least 3,000,000 victims, with Cambodia under Pol Pot alone accounting for one-third. Thus the total might actually be higher. In brief, the failed effort to build communism in the twentieth century consumed the lives of almost 60,000,000 human beings, making communism the most costly human failure in all of history."
Krain 1997, pp. 331–332:
[edit]“1. The literatures on state-sponsored mass murder and state terrorism have been plagued by definitional problems. Terms such as state-sponsored mass murder and state terrorism can be (and often are) easily confused and therefore need elaboration. The main difference between state-sponsored mass murder and state terrorism, for instance, is one of intentionality. The purpose behind policies of state-sponsored mass murder such as genocide or politicide is to eliminate an entire group (Gurr 1986, 67). The purpose behind policies of state terrorism is to 'induce sharp fear and through that agency to effect a desired outcome in a conflict situation' (Gurr 1986, 46). The former requires mass killings to accomplish its goal. The latter's success is dependent on the persuasiveness of the fear tactics used. Mass killings may not be necessary to accomplish the particular goal. ... 2. Genocides are mass killings in which the victim group is defined by association with a particular communal group. Politicides are mass killings in which 'victim groups are defined primarily in terms of their hierarchical position or political opposition to the regime and dominant groups' (Harff and Gurr 1988, 360). Interestingly, many of the instances coded by Harff and Gurr as 'politicide' are considered by much of the literature to be instances of state terrorism (e.g., Argentina, Chile, El Salvador) (Lopez 1984, 63). Evidently there is some overlap between state terrorism and some kinds of state-sponsored mass murder."
Semelin 2009, p. 318:
[edit]“’Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' - a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia. However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of 'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again, the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann."
"Killing civilians in large numbers is an age-old phenomenon. Since World War II, its conceptualization has been shaped by the enormity of the Holocaust, in which Hitler and the Nazi regime killed more than six million Jews. In 1948, the United Nations (UN) passed the 'Convention of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.' Lemkin and other framers clearly had the Holocaust in mind when they defined genocide as an act of a nation-state to eliminate an ethnic or national group. Other conceptions of genocide are also preoccupied by central state politics, state-led exterminations, and institutionalized state killers. Later scholars expanded the concept to include cases in which victims are defined other than by ethnic, national, or religious characteristics. Valentino uses the term mass killing instead, and defines it as 'the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants.' Other concepts such as politicide, democide, and classicide were developed to address killings in communist countries."
“As is customary in the literature on mass killing of civilians there is a need to restate here what mass killing is about. Although many definitions have been used — 'genocide', 'politicide' and 'democide' — there has emerged a sort of consensus that the term 'mass killing' is much more straightforward than either genocide or politicide. Harff (2003) makes a clear distinction from genocide, often used interchangeably with mass killing, by emphasizing the intention of the perpetrator. He [sic] posits: 'genocide as an authority group's sustained purposeful implementation or facilitation of policies designed to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group' (Harff, 2003, p. 58). Although this definition encompasses the ethnic population, the emphasis here is on the objective function of the authority, which is the destruction in whole or part of the intended group. The second definition, politicide, limits the annihilation to a specific group. Politicide pertains when the victimized group is identified by its political opposition to the dominant party, rather than other communal characteristics (Harff, 2003, p. 58). Rummel (1995) advanced the democide label. It is defined as the 'murder of any person or people by a government including genocide, politicide and mass murder' (p. 3)."
Weiss-Wendt 2008, p. 42:
[edit]“The field of comparative genocide studies has grown beyond recognition over the past two decades, though more quantitatively than qualitatively. On the surface, everything looks good: the number of books on genocide has tripled within less than a decade; the field of comparative genocide studies has its own professional association and journals; more and more colleges and universities offer courses on genocide; several research institutions dedicated to the study of genocide have been established. If we are talking numbers, comparative genocide studies are indeed a success. Upon closer examination, however, genocide scholarship is ridden with contradictions. There is barely any other field of study that enjoys so little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe. Considering that scholars have always put stress on prevention of genocide, comparative genocide studies have been a failure. Paradoxically, nobody has attempted so far to assess the field of comparative genocide studies as a whole. This is one of the reasons why those who define themselves as genocide scholars have not been able to detect the situation of crisis."
Harff 2003b, p. 58:
[edit]“First, the Convention does not include groups of victims defined by their political position or actions. Raphael Lemkin (1944) coined the term genocide and later sought the support of as many states as possible for a legal document that would outlaw mass killings and prescribe sanctions against potential perpetrators. Because the first draft of the Convention, which included political groups, was rejected by the USSR and its allies, the final draft omitted any reference to political mass murder (Le Blanc 1988). The concept of politicide is used here to encompass cases with politically defined victims, consistent with Fein’s (1993b, 12) line of reasoning that 'mass killings of political groups show similarities in their causes, organization and motives.'"
Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, p. 6:
[edit]"'Crimes against humanity' is a linguistically and logically cumbersome term when the aim is to analyse physical violence perpetrated by individual groups, institutions and states against specific victim groups in their own country, which is essentially the case in the context of communist regimes' crimes against humanity. In addition, it is not in keeping with the terms that have long been used by the academic community. Naturally, the work of creating an inventory includes examining the terms used in practice by researchers in their analyses, and it is reasonable to assume that every time, every society and every paradigm has its own terms to refer to the crimes of communist regimes. Nonetheless, it is possible to establish at this early stage that researchers have long used the word terror to describe the crimes of the Soviet communist regime, regardless of the framework of interpretation to which they adhere. Although the extent to which the mass operations and forced deportations of specific ethnic groups ordered by Stalin before and during the Second World War can be defined as genocide is debated, there is agreement among researchers that the term 'terror' is the best reflection of the development of violence in Bolshevik Russia and in the communist Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. As a result, terror will be the term most frequently used here in analysing the Soviet communist criminal history. On the other hand, the term terror is seldom used to describe the mass killings in Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, which may be because it is less clear that the actual intention and stated motive of the Khmer Rouge was to terrorise people into submission. The term genocide, however, is relatively widely accepted and established in describing the systematic and selective crimes of the communist regime in Cambodia, although the use of this term is not entirely uncontroversial. Therefore, in analysing the criminal history of Cambodia, this term will be used in precise contexts dealing with the killing of a category of people, whereas more neutral terms such as mass killing and massacre are used to refer to the general use of violence. The terminology used in the Chinese criminal history is dealt with in detail as part of the section on China. ... In the Soviet case, as Klas-Göran Karlsson so rightly notes, there is an 'established term' for the crimes of the regime, namely 'terror' – and this is used almost regardless of the general frameworks of interpretation employed by individual researchers. In the same way, he notes that 'the term genocide is established and accepted as a description of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge'. In the case of the People's Republic of China, however, there are no equivalent terms that are accepted or generally established in the academic community and that can be made use of in a research inventory. Bibliographies and search engines all speak their own clear language: those who carried out research on Maoism in its day made very limited use of words such as terror and genocide, and neither do these terms appear among the key terms that carry implicit clear explanations and are therefore regularly used by current foreign and Chinese historians."
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