Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes/Archive 33

Archive 30

Archive 31

Archive 32

Archive 33

Archive 34

Archive 35

→

Archive 40

Proposal on writing a new section

The proposal below was moved here from the most recent "edit request" section:

Let's first try to negotiate a compromise. It's fine to have non-negotiable demands as long as it's possible to come up with an edit that satisfies everyone's non-negotiable demands. So, Smallbones, are you opposed to moving that statement from the lede under any circumstances, or would you be willing to support such a move if an appropriate estimates section were written? In the latter case, would you be willing to help me (and whoever else wants to participate) to write this section?

I think it's a perfectly good idea to do the following:
1. Write an estimates section, with participation from both sides of the argument. Both sides, please. Smallbones, I believe the reason no one has written the proposed section yet is because no one has any desire to work alone on a section that may then be rejected by others with a single word. No one wants to take the risk of wasting all that work. So we should all work on it.
2. Keep editing the section until everyone is happy with it, under the principle that everyone gets to add the sources they like (including critiques of the sources added by others), but no one gets to remove another editor's sources. To solve any dispute about what counts as "reliable", if you think that a source is not reliable then you get to add the sources that criticize it - but you don't get to remove it. Thus, for example, Smallbones gets to add information from the Black Book, and Paul gets to add information from the sources that criticize the Black Book (in separate paragraphs). Likewise, Paul gets to add the estimates he considers to be better and Smallbones gets to add sources criticizing those.
3. Collectively propose the addition of the estimates section and the removal of the contentious parts of the lede in the same edit proposal.
As I said, I'd be happy to help write this section. But before we start doing that: Is there agreement from everyone that this course of action would be acceptable? -- Amerul (talk) 06:19, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I point your attention at the fact that I was the only person who proposed concrete text (based on Courtois and Aronson). This text is properly sources, complies with our NPOV and NOR policy, and is ready to be added to the article. We can expand it later. However, for some reason, our opponents seems to totally ignore this my proposal, which is a good demonstration of their willingness to collaborate.--Paul Siebert (talk) 06:41, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

This is fine with me. Amerul, you might want to move this part of the discussion to a new talk page section to keep things from becoming confusing. AmateurEditor (talk) 17:17, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

I seem to have been singled out here, so I'll respond directly.

• This proposed edit request - which was very nonspecific and poorly formed - was properly turned down earlier.
• I don't see any need to comment on poorly formed and nonspecific edit requests - so please don't ask me to.
• You are free to propose concrete edits here
• After all this time, I'd like to see the folks who seem to deny that there were any mass-killings give the estimates that they have some confidence in.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 00:59, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Smallbones wants the article to say, "The Communists killed 100 million people, more than the Nazis." That is non-negotiable, because that is the only thing that interests him. TFD (talk) 01:12, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

This looks like a personal attack, please remove it. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:12, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Say that the Communists did not kill 100 million people and they did not kill more people than the Nazis, and I will retract it. TFD (talk) 03:23, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Please, this is off-topic and it may well ruin our ability to reach an agreement. If you wish to continue, then please at least move this discussion to another section. -- Amerul (talk) 03:33, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

You and Smallbones will not reach an agreement. You have posted a notice on his talk page and can persue it there where it will fail. TFD (talk) 03:39, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, I invited him to participate in writing the "Estimates" section, but he has declined. I also asked him what he would like to see in such a section, but, unfortunately, he has only explained what he doesn't want to see. Still, I hope progress was made in explaining my intention to reach a compromise, and hopefully Smallbones will participate later. For now, I will try to get other editors to help. -- Amerul (talk) 04:10, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Smallbones, you were not "singled out." This proposal was initially posted within the debate on the pp-protected template, and it was in response to comments made by you and Paul Siebert. Thus it mentions the two of you. I was asked to move the proposal to a new section, so I did.

Also, it is not an edit request. It is a collaboration request. The only purpose of this proposal is to set some ground rules for such collaboration. I repeat, this is not the edit request that you rejected earlier, but a proposal to work together on future edits. Please assume good faith. Will you collaborate with me and others in writing an "Estimates" section? -- Amerul (talk) 02:17, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

TFD and Paul, please refrain from attacking Smallbones and others on the grounds of what they do or do not want for this article. I've looked through the archives and I know how bitter the dispute has become, but we will not get anywhere unless we are willing to work together. -- Amerul (talk) 02:23, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

That is a fair appraisal of how Smallbones has approached the article. He will not budge. I suppose he does not agree that the best way to discredit Communism is to explain it, rather than exaggerate. TFD (talk) 02:33, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Please don't continue these off-topic attacks on Smallbones when Amerul has asked you to stop, it is disruptive to Amerul's good faith attempt to reach a compromise. I fully support Amerul in drafting an "Estimates" section, if you do not want to participate, fine, but then don't be disruptive to others. --Nug (talk) 03:41, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your constructive criticism. Could you please explain why you defend a discredited estimate in the lead that pretends it represents a consensus view when it has been discredited and is only cited in extreme websites? TFD (talk) 04:15, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Nug, thank you for your statement of support. As I told Smallbones, we do have disagreements about the content of the article, but I believe we must make an attempt to reach a compromise. The "Estimates" section should be drafted by people from both sides of the argument, and I'm trying to get everyone I can to contribute. Based on your statement, I conclude that you wish to participate in writing the section, yes? -- Amerul (talk) 04:24, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Read through the discussions. Nug (who previously called himself Martin and various other names) and Smallbones have only argued about one thing - how many people the Communists killed. TFD (talk) 04:48, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Thank you Amerul for your good faith efforts to achieve consensus. Before we continue, I would like Smallbones and Nug to answer the following questions. That would help us to clarify their position, and would give us an impression of a possibility to achieve consensus.

• Can you provide any proof that Aronson (the article I cited above) is a primary, unreliable or fringe source?
• Can you provide a proof that Courtois' statement we discuss has not been seriously challenged by Aronson?

If at least one of your answers is "yes", provide your evidences. If you have no evidences, please, answer the next question:

• Can you provide a good reason why seriously challenged opinion about the range of estimates is presented as a fact, not just as an opinion of one author, and why the opinion of another author has been ignored?

I insist on concrete and detailed answer on these questions, because, before I'll start to collect sources and prepare the text, I would like to be sure my work will not be a waste of time.--Paul Siebert (talk) 06:28, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

Paul, let's not start with preconditions. If you find that answer inadequate and do not want to participate as a result, that's okay. As you already are the second highest contributor to this article[1], a decision by you not to participate would quite understandable, I'm sure we can manage without you. --Nug (talk) 19:32, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

I found this your statement deeply offensive. Do you really want to collaborate, or you simply prefer to resort to filibustering in an attempt to freeze the article in the current state? You refused to participate in mediation, you refused to comment on the text proposed by me, you refuse to discuss the source provided by me. Is it an indication of your willingness to collaborate?

I didn't start with preconditions. I proposed to discuss two sources, which belong to the new section, and you immediately refused to do so. If you don't want to participate, we can't force you to do so. We can start this work without you. However, if you will try to veto this new text, I am afraid, we will have to ask arbcom about the most appropriate way to deal with such a situation.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:33, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

When you state "Before we continue, I would like Smallbones and Nug to answer the following questions." and insisting "on concrete and detailed answer" seems like a pre-condition to me. The point of an "Estimates" section is to bring in additional sourced estimates, not a discussion of specifically Courtois and his critics. --Nug (talk) 18:15, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, it is a pre-condition. I would like to make sure that my work will not be a waste of time. Since you already refused to participate in mediation, and have blocked our good faith attempts to improve the article, I believe I have a right to request for the proof that you will approach the work on this section seriously. By "seriously" I mean your readiness to hear the arguments from others, to comment on the sources provided by others, and to be ready to accept other's point of view if you run out of arguments. --Paul Siebert (talk) 20:04, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Re "The point of an "Estimates" section is to bring in additional sourced estimates, not a discussion of specifically Courtois and his critics." Of course, no. The point of this section is to discuss what various authors see under "Communist mass killings", to discuss the term "Dispossessive mass killings", to discuss why some authors believe such a common phenomenon as "Communist mass killings" existed, and which concrete deaths fall into this category, and to discuss why many authors disagree with this approach, which equates Nazi and Communist crimes (which, according to those authors, is totally unacceptable).

In connection to that, your refusal to discuss Courtois (you still haven't provided any arguments why his seriously challenged assertion can be presented a fact) is an indication that you hardly approach this work seriously (at least, I have serious reasons to think so).--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:31, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a collaborative effort so I cannot even guarantee my effort will not be a waste of time, so don't ask me to guarantees your effort too. We already have a "Terminology" an "Proposed causes" section, so much of what you propose is already discussed. We need to start with a survey of the estimates, so let's start with Aronson, what number did he suggest? --Nug (talk) 17:55, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia is a collaborative project, and noone can guarantee the outcome of joint efforts will satisfy everyone. However, every opinion must be properly supported by source and arguments, and every participant of the dispute must be prepared to either properly address correctly formulated question, or to agree with the arguments from others. In connection to that, as soon as you agreed to discuss Aronson and Courtois, I have to return to my old question: do you have any proof that Aronson is a primary, fringe or unreliable source?--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:29, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Aronson as a source is applicable only to Aronson. There are plenty of examples throughout scholarship of reliable sources which disagree vehemently on pick-a-topic. Any content you propose which favors one source over another based on your personal contentions will not fly. I suggest figuring out a way to make it all fit together. To prior discussions, Aronson's contentions that Courtois' math is faulty is based on his interpretation of the sources in BBoC, not on mathematical inaccuracy. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 19:16, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Well, in other words, you claim Aronson is a primary source? Could you please explain, why this article, published in the History and Theory journal is just a primary source?

My second question is, if you claim that Aronson's article express just his own views, why do you insist that Courtois expresses anything but his own views in his introduction? The fact that Courtois was (re)published by Harvard University, and Aronson by Wesleyan University/Wiley is not an argument: both institutions are equally reputable.

For the beginning, please, answer these two questions, and then we will continue.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:32, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Re "Any content you propose which favors one source over another based on your personal contentions will not fly." I refuse to believe this has been written in good faith: it is quite clear from my posts that the major thing I object to is the text (currently in the article), which favours one source (Courtois) over another (Aronson). Taking into account that you are among the users who vehemently resist to any attempt to fix this intolerable situation, your attempt to blame me in your own sins is a blatant demagogy.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:40, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Why is Aronson only applicable to Aronson, while Courtois is fact? TFD (talk) 19:55, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Let's dispense with this strawman. An estimate is not a fact, it is "a tentative evaluation or rough calculation; a judgment based on one's impressions; an opinion", and the sentence makes clear it is an estimate. As with any tentative evaluation or rough calculation there will be opinions as to the accuracy of someone else's estimate in comparison to one's own superior estimate, that is just the nature of it. So let's collate these evaluations, so what number does Aronson give. --Nug (talk) 20:37, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

(EC)I was just trying to look it up. Could somebody give the reference again? Is this Ronald Aronson we're talking about? Does he give an estimate? I don't think we should waste much time with folks who say "I don't like that estimate" but don't give any estimates of their own. Which is one reason I don't want to waste much time here. Until folks actually give an estimate, then there isn't any room for discussion. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 20:46, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The words "I don't think we should waste much time with folks who say "I don't like that estimate"" can be applied to Wikipedians, not to the sources themselves: if some author seriously challenges the opinion of another author, our policy requires us to discuss both of them. If you disagree with that, you are probably in a wrong place.

Again, please, answer, if Aronson is a reliable non-fringe secondary source or not, and if not, why?--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:23, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Don't bother addressing me on this page or on my user talk. I was addressing Nug, not you. I asked for a reference so I can find Aronson, and you demand to know what I think of the article, without supplying a reference. You misquote me, leaving off "but don't give any estimates of their own," and then attack me with some non-existant policy. You've been threatening to take me to the arb committee. I simply can not believe that you repeat the same argument 1000 times - that policy requires us to remove a reliably sourced estimate simply because it has been criticized - when your argument gets turned down time after time by RfCs, noticeboards, admins, etc. Even you don't believe that argument, as you stated above. "In actuality, the very fact of criticism means nothing. - Paul Siebert" I believe that it would be best if I do not discuss this page with folks who are not discussing it in good faith. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 21:42, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, but that is not true. I did provide a full reference during this discussion, and that is your problem that you did not bother to read it. You also may find the full reference on the WP:RS/N.

I didn't misquote you. It is possible to challenge some source without providing alternative numbers. --Paul Siebert (talk) 21:48, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Re your quote from me, don't misinterpret my words. What I meant is the quality of criticism, and the types of arguments. Interestingly, you seem to remember everything what I wrote in past, but you pretend you don't remember the I provided a full references to Aronson, and the quotes from him....--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:54, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think we need to finish with Aronson first. I am waiting for a short, clear and concrete answer: is his article a reliable non-fringe secondary source or not, in your opinion, and, if not, then why?--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:43, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think you are putting the cart before the horse. Does Aronson give a number, yes or no. If not then is he really relevant at this stage? --Nug (talk) 21:07, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

I think you are putting the cart before the horse: before starting to discuss sources, we need to agree, which sources are reliable, and which are not, which are primary, and which are secondary. Therefore, I am asking again: is Aronson a reliable non-fringe secondary source or not, and if not, why? Why it is so difficult to give such a simple answer?--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:17, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

My proposed compromise, as described at the top of this section, involves that idea that all editors should be able to add the sources they deem appropriate (as long as they are scholarly). The whole point is that we need to stop arguing about which sources to include and simply include them all. Thus, I assume that we would include both Courtois and Aronson.

The "Estimates" section should not and cannot be limited to sources that give precise numbers for a total estimate. It must also include sources which only estimate part of the death toll (e.g. estimates for the death toll of the Gulag alone, or Stalin in particular, not communist regimes in general), sources that give more vague estimates (e.g. "between 10 and 20 million"), sources which criticize the numbers given by others, as well as sources which claim that we don't have enough data to make reliable estimates.

We should not present anything as fact, but rather as the opinion of the given source. "Courtois argues ........ .", "Aronson says ....... ." That is how it should look like, with each source given approximately equal weight. -- Amerul (talk) 16:40, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Also, this unproductive back-and-forth arguing about preconditions is precisely the reason I kept insisting that we should all work together on the estimates section, rather than have some editors write the section and have others judge it after it is written. The best way to make sure that the section properly represents your preferred sources is to write about them yourself. So, again I ask, who else is willing to work together on this section, besides Paul and me? We need to get people from both sides of the debate. Nug, Vecrumba, are you interested in participating? -- Amerul (talk) 16:51, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Amerul, I asked Nug and Smallbones a simple question: do they think the source provided by me is reliable or not? They refused to give a clear answer. Note, that is the first source provided by me. If the first source causes such problems, how can we move further? I see our the work as follows: (i) we propose sources; (ii) we all agree which sources are relevant, and, if they are not, then we provide an explanation why they should be rejected; (iii) we write a piece of text based on the sources we selected. If the resulted text needs in further modification based on additional sources, we repeat steps i - iii. However, as I see, even the step (i) caused a problem. Everyone knows my opinion of Courtois (it is a reliable, but seriously contested source), however, we still don't know Nug's and Smallbones' opinia on Aronson. They repeatedly avoid to answer on my quite legitimate question, for no reason. There is no need for Smallbones to read Aronson before expressing his opinion, because decision about reliability is made based on quite formal criteria.

In addition, I recall, Nug proposed earlier to write an estimate section as a pre-condition for removal of seriously contested statement from the lede. By joining this discussion, everyone de facto supported this proposal. I believe, in responce, Nug should provide a demonstration of his own good faith, otherwise we may conclude he is simply filibustering in the attempt to preserve the policy-violating statement in the lede.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:11, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Since I got no answer from Nug and Smallbones, I asked the same question on WP:RSN. The discussion convincingly demonstrated that not only Aronson is a good source, it is among the best sources for this purpose. Collect's attempts to convince anybody that "Aronson as a source is applicable to Aronson only" appeared to be totally unconvincing. In connection to that, I believe, the issue with Aronson/Courtois is closed: the latter connot be discussed in the article separate from the former. Courtois must be removed from the lede and discussed in the article's body.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Amazing - you cite your own position here <g> even though policy is clear that opinions must be cited as opinions in the case at hand. And Courtois, properly cited, also meets the same requirements as well. And the "quote" you attribute to me is a false quote, a palpably false quote - and you damn well should know better than to ascribe words to a person they did not write. When you do things like that, one questions whther any of your "quotes" is real. Cheers. Collect (talk) 18:25, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I did not attribute the quote to you specifically. However, you must agree that that quote adequately summarises what you, Vecrumba and few other users think on that account.

Re policy, the RSN discussion clearly demonstrates that you simply do not understand it.

Re Courtois, you perfectly know my viewpoint, his opinion is quite notable, and it must be mentioned in the article along with its criticism. As the RSN discussion demonstrated, Aronson is among the best sources for such criticism, so Courtois should be discussed in the article as follows:

"According to Courtois, Communism killed up to XX million victims. This views has been seriously criticised by Aronson, who points at serious mistakes in calculations, as well as at intrinsic flaws and omission in the Courtois' concept as whole".

In connection to that, again, can anybody provide a reason to keep the seriously contested Courtois' statement in the lede?--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:42, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

(ec, to Collect) At least, in that section of RSN, there is no-one other than yourself who thinks the book had editorial review, even though by a generally respected publisher. If it doesn't, Wikipedia policies and guidelines essentially mean that the material is considered self-published. Some of it is by recognized experts; some, perhaps not. And Collect's interpretation of the consensus at RSN is absolutely wrong; although it doesn't discuss whether the book is reliable, consensus is clearly that the Aronson review is as reliable as anything not peer-reviewed can be.

(to Paul) Agree, except that the lockdown means that "we" require consensus for any change which is not the reversal of clear vandalism or removal of clear WP:BLP or copyright violations, whether or not any reasons are presented in support of the status quo. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:47, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Arthur, the problem is that the lockdown you are talking about seems to contradict to our policy: if local consensus is needed even for fixing obvious violation of the core content policy, that means that local consensus has precedence over the policy, which is obviously not the case. I think we need to ask arbitrators about explanations of this issue.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:12, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Fautuousness incarnate ---

Collect's attempts to convince anybody that "Aronson as a source is applicable to Aronson only"

Sure the hell looks like you say that is my position -- it ain't, and has never been,

and you do not even offer a lukewarm apology for that fake, false, misleading, incorrect, inapt, wrongful "quote." And my "interpretation" is not based on fake quotes and denigration of anyone - but on what the discussion actually stated, and what Wikipedia policies require. Honesty is among them. Aronson is usable for his opinions stated as his opinions. Cheers -- and try to give some sort of real apology instead of avoiding the issue. Collect (talk) 20:49, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the quote provided by me is from Vecrumba. He wrote:

""Aronson as a source is applicable only to Aronson".

I took this quote, because it, in my opinion, accurately and concisely reflects the viewpoint shared by Collect, Vecrumba, Nug, and few other users. Indeen, if we compare it with

""Book review in essence. Usable for the author's own opinions about the reliable sources reviewed, and properly noted as his opinions."

you hardly will see any difference. Sorry, Collect, I do not see any difference between your and Vecrumba's positions, so I frequently mix them. However, if you will explain me what the difference consists in, it would be easier for me to discriminate them.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:06, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Meanwhile, Collect, do you have anything to comment on the essence of my post? --Paul Siebert (talk) 21:06, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Bullshit, Paul. You said it was my position and gave it as a quote. It was not my position then or ever. Then you said it represented my position. It did not represent my position then or ever. They you say my position which I have used on may discussions about sources (that is - opinions should be cited as opinions) is the same as Vecrumba's position, and since Vecrumba was the one you quoted, that therefore it is fair to ascribe the quote to me. Bullshit. You can not put words into the mouths of others and then not issue an apology when it is found out. Instead, your system is to say "well you musta meant something sorta like that or whatever" (not a quote) and that fails the laugh test. Ascribing a quote to a person who not only did not write those words but specifically does not hold that opinion is what most civil editors would apologize for instead of piling the fake quote "higher and deeper." And since the "essence of your post" is what is piled "higher and deeper" I need add nothing more. Cheers. Collect (talk) 21:17, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I've stricken through the quotation marks, and that, I believe, will resolve the incident. Again,

• since I do not understand what is the difference between your position that the thought expressed by Vecrumba in the quote provided by me, I do not see what else should be modified in my post;
• the quote provided by me was not the fake quote, but the quote from the different person (whose position is quite close to yours). However, since you still haven't explained what is the difference between your and Vecrumba's positions, I simply do not understand what else can I do: to the best of my knowledge, I didn't misinterpret your thesis, and, if you believe I did, please explain what my misinterpretation consisted in.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:30, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Convenience break

I don't understand the issue in dispute here. Does anyone object to writing something along the lines of: "In the introduction to the Black Book of Communism, Courtois says....... . In a review of the Black Book, Aronson says ....... ." ? I don't see anyone objecting to that kind of format, so what's the problem? Collect insists that we identify Aronson's opinions as Aronson's opinions, but that's perfectly fine - we should identify everything as the statement of a specific author, anyway.

This argument is becoming far too abstract, and it is not at all clear (to me) how it has any relevance for the content of the proposed "Estimates" section. No one seems to be saying that any source should be excluded. The argument seems to be entirely focused on which sources are somehow better or more reliable than others. I don't see why that matters. It's not like we're going to tell the readers "source X is superior to source Y", anyway.

What I see here is yet another example of the tendency towards paralysis on this talk page. There is far too much debate about content that may be written, and not enough content actually being written. It's easy to fall into disagreement and misinterpretation of the other side's position when the argument is about text that hasn't been written yet (with each side imagining a different text in their mind, no doubt).

So, once again I ask: Who else is willing to help write the "Estimates" section? Please respond. So far, Paul and I seem to be the only volunteers, and I would really like to get Collect, Nug or Vecrumba on board. If we get no more volunteers in the next week or so, I guess I'll go ahead and create a project page in my userspace, hoping to get contributions from more people later. -- Amerul (talk) 19:08, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

@Amerul - nobody has ever tried to stop you from creating an estimates section. You do not need to have help from anybody else to write an estimates section, but if you want to have other folks help you that's fine too. I'd love to see you or anybody else write an estimates section. Ultimately, the only thing to say is just do it!

The reason I do not want to help is that I've seen too many other folks say "We can't trust any estimates. We don't have any estimates. All estimates are garbage." That would just be nonsense as far as I'm concerned. If it appears that that is not going to happen, I may very well join in. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 02:28, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Why not to start to write the text directly on this talk page? For the beginning, I suggest to outline some major theses (with sources). Try to start, and then I'll continue. I think AmateurEditor and TFD will be interested to participate too. With regard to some other users... Let's see.--Paul Siebert (talk) 01:31, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

(...could you please not to break the chronological order of posts).

Regarding "We can't trust any estimates", that is a misinterpretation of my position. As I already wrote, the overall population losses under Communists are known, and these figures (probably, except for Chinese famine) are more or less accurate. Therefore, the estimates can be trusted. The question is, what do those figures mean. We have an authoritative source that says that, at least for the USSR, the amount of victims is a matter of political judgement, and, therefore, we cannot separate the figures from the judgement. If Wheatcroft thinks that Stalin killed about 1.5 million, we need to explain that under "mass killing" he meant executions and camp deaths. If Valentino believes that 20 million were killed in the USSR, we need to explain that under "mass killings" he means primarily dispossessive mass killings, i.e., famine deportation deaths, etc, in other words, the deaths that are not considered as mass killings by most historians. As a result, if we will write:

"In the USSR the estimates of scale of mass killings range from 1.5 million (Wheatcroft) to 20 million (Valentino)"

that would be misleading and incorrect, because these two different authors mean absolutely different things. Valentino does not claim that all those people were executed, and Wheatcroft does not deny the fact of famine deaths. They simply interpret the term "mass killings" absolutely differently.

Obviously, that is necessary to explain (of course, if our goal is to inform a reader, not to mislead him).--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:46, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

PS. In addition, since the authors who discuss "Communist killings" as a common phenomenon usually do that in a context of comparison between Nazism and Communism, the "Estimates" section should be combined with the section devoted to such a comparison (including the discussion of validity of such a comparison).--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:57, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

PPS. Smallbones, before we started, I expect you to devote few minutes and read this. If you disagree with that, please, post your opinion there before it went to archives. However, I hope, the result of that discussion is quite convincing, and we can safely conclude that Aronson and similar sources are reliable and they are among the best possible sources. I believe, there will be no similar problems with the sources of that type on this talk page, because to go to RSN regarding every source I present would be just a waste of other users' time (because the result is totally predictable).--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:09, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

• Smallbones, I find this (especially, the edit summary) totally unacceptable: not only you wedged your post between mine and Amerul's posts, thereby breaking chronology, you re-inserted it back after I tried to fix this your mistake. And after that, you dare to accuse me of non-civil behaviour? In addition, your edit summary is simply false: I never edited your post, just moved it to the proper place. I think you should self-revert and apologise.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:35, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Request for an admin to make a couple consensus changes

Can an admin please make the following 2 changes to the article:

1) In the section Democratic Republic of Vietnam, change "launched a land reform" to "launched a land reform program". (see the unopposed proposal here)

2) In the section Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, remove the wikilink from the word "Soviet" in the last sentence of the section. (see the unopposed proposal here)

Thanks in advance. AmateurEditor (talk) 04:53, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The last use of "Soviet" is clearly apt in the Afghanistan section - so consider it "opposed" - one should note that Paul "proposed" a number of changes - that this one is misleading is a major problem. The prior wikilink in the section is not to "Soviet" but to ethe war/invasion article. Collect (talk) 08:16, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

• Partly done: I've implemented the "launched a land reform program" change. The "Soviet" wikilink change no longer has a clear consensus after Collect's edit above. — Mr. Stradivarius ^{(have a chat)} 10:39, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Collect, I think you mis-read the proposal section at the link. The rationale was that the word "Soviet" is wikilinked already earlier in the article (not earlier in that section). And Paul did not propose this edit, Nyttend did. Do you still oppose this? AmateurEditor (talk) 22:18, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The term is not wikilinked in the lede or anywhere else but in the very small "Red Terror" section - readers thus benefit from the second link where the first link is not used for the first occurence of the term in the article at all. Collect (talk) 04:24, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Seems like a crazy place to put the link - at the end of a section that already uses the term Soviet several times. It is unlikely that many readers of this section would need the link anyway, if they have got this far anyway. TFD (talk) 07:32, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

We link where the word is used and this is the only place not linked to other articles and not to Soviet. Would you expect us to give the "Soviet" link for (say) "The" so we could have it earlier in the section? If it were wikilinked in the lede, you might have a case, but it ain't. Cheers. Collect (talk) 12:46, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

There is a link for "Soviet Union" in the lead. Are you saying that we need to link "Soviet" because it is the first time in the section it is used as an adjective? TFD (talk) 13:39, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

Creating a workpage for the Estimates section

Amerul proposed creating a project page in his userspace for writing the estimates section earlier, but I do not see that it has been done. The advantage of using an editor's userspace is that userspace rules would allow that editor to effectively act as a moderator and revert disruption. On the other hand, it may also subtly discourage participation. This option would be fine by me.

However, another option is to create a subpage of this talk page as a workspace, per Wikipedia:Workpages. This is suggested at Wikipedia:Subpages in the "Disallowed uses" section for article collaboration in cases where the article itself has been locked (creating subpages of the article itself, rather than the article's talk page, has been disallowed). We could call it Talk:Mass killings under Communist regimes/estimates or Talk:Mass killings under Communist regimes/dumping-ground. AmateurEditor (talk) 22:57, 27 November 2012 (UTC)

Please, choose the variant convenient for you. You also may use my talk page, my sandbox, you can invite us to use your talk page - all of that is acceptable, nothing of that is prohibited by our policy, and, frankly speaking, is hardly important. Let's start to work.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:29, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I started a page at Talk:Mass killings under Communist regimes/dumping-ground because we may want to use it later for other things as well. If anyone wants to also begin their own section in their userspace that's fine too. I added sourced sentences for Courtois and Valentino. I think we shouldn't worry so much about the prose or organization of the section until we have all our raw material together. That is, I think it would work best if we added sourced sentences from as many sources as possible and arranged them in a list without making paragraphs, then worry about weight and arrangement later. AmateurEditor (talk) 03:07, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:11, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

• Yes, this is good idea. Just do not forget to include numbers by Rummel. We are talking about democide here, and he is author of the concept. Please correct me if I am wrong, but he is probably the most highly cited researcher on the democide. Here are some his numbers:

20th century democides causing more than one million deaths. From Death by Government, Rummel, 1987:

Location	Dates	Est. Deaths
Cambodia	1975–1979	2,035,000
China (PRC)	1949–1987	77,277,000
Poland	1945–1948	1,585,000
North Korea	1948–1987	1,563,000
Vietnam	1945–1987	1,670,000
Yugoslavia (Tito)	1944–1987	1,072,000
U.S.S.R.	1917–1987	61,911,000

from this book. My very best wishes (talk) 03:32, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Rummel said that the Soviets killed as many as 126 million people, including 12 million foreigners. Nazi Germany killed at least 170 million, excluding combat deaths. If we take these figures seriously, together the two regimes killed most of the people in Europe. His estimates of Jewish and Gypsie victims seem lower than other estimates though. TFD (talk) 12:15, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

The statistics that Hwang Jang-yop obtained before he escaped support a 3 million–plus death toll. Various other North Korean defectors also believe this is likely. The writer Choi Jin-I was told that 300,000 people had died by 1996 in Kangwon province, which borders South Korea. from [2] Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea ... A death toll of 3 million would mean more victims than in Pol Pot’s Cambodia, where 1 out of 8 million perished, and more deaths from starvation than in Ethiopia during the 1980s or Somalia, both of which provoked a huge international response. By Jasper Becker, 325 pages, Oxford University Press, New York 2005. On page 266: Between them, Kim Il Sung and his son are responsible for the deaths of over seven million Koreans—three million civilians in the Korean War, and, by some estimates, three million in the famine and at least a million deaths of political prisoners during the last 50 years.

The Soviet Union, the Communist Movement, and the World: Prelude to the Cold War, 1917-1941 Alan J. Levine, 200 pages, Praeger, NY, 1990:

This episode and the intensification of the Civil War led to an outright policy of terror in which all possible enemies of the regime were hunted down. This "Red Terror" cost an estimated 140,000 lives. An equal number of people are estimated to have been killed in the process of crushing the peasant insurrections that became a common occurrence in 1918. The peasant uprisings were generally not "political" in nature. They were caused by the economic policies of the regime. page 39

Terminating the New Economic Policy in 1928, Stalin launched a veritable second revolution. He began a ruthless program of forced collectivization of the peasantry, forced settlement of nomadic peoples, and a crash program of industrialization. Collectivization led to the slaughter of kulaks (rich peasants) and to a gigantic artificial famine in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and the Volga region. page 92

Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation Serhy Yekelchyk, OUP New York 2007 [3]

such prominent Western journalists as Walter Duranty, then a Moscow-based reporter for the New York Times, willingly assisted in the cover-up while asserting privately that Famine victims numbered in the millions.18 According to Stanislav Kulchytsky, the leading economic historian of twentieth-century Ukraine, between 3 and 3.5 million people in the republic died of starvation and malnutrition-related diseases, and the total demographic losses, including a Famine-related reduction in the number of children born, can be estimated at between 4.5 and 4.8 million people.19 In present-day Ukraine, the Famine of 1932 and 1933 (usually referred to in Ukrainian as Holodomor, or terror-famine) is mourned officially as the greatest national tragedy, an act of ideologically motivated mass murder similar to the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide.20 page 112

Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century Bruce F. Pauley 338 pages , Harlan Davidson, Wheeling, 2003 [4]

. Stalin actually managed to outdo Hitler to become by far the biggest mass murderer in history by slaughtering at least 20 million people. All of them, unlike Hitler’s victims, were citizens of his own country and killed in peacetime; often they were his nation’s most productive inhabitants.

Stalin's Genocides Norman M. Naimark, Princeton 2010. 176 pages [5]:

(Hitler and Stalin) Both— in the end—were genocidaires.

We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History John Lewis Gaddis, 448 pages , Oxford 1998 [6]

Mao's experiment in economics did surpass the record of everyone else in the world, although not in the manner he had intended: the Great Leap Forward, it is now clear, produced the most devastating famine in modern history. We will never know how many people died, but estimates of the toll range from 16 to 27 million, with the higher figure probably the more accurate one. pge 216

The number of deaths resulting from Stalin's policies before World War II, it is now agreed in both Russia and the West, was between 17 and 22 million--substantially more than twice the number of Hitler's victims in the Holocaust. page 8

And even hitting the current news [7] How Stalin's Terrible Famine in Ukraine Was Exposed by a Western Mail Writer; WEDNESDAY ESSAY This Weekend Sees the Anniversary of the Famine Stalin Engineered to Kill Millions in Ukraine. Here Mick Antoniw AM, the Son of Ukrainian Emigres, Gives a Personal Account of Holodomor, as It Is Known Western Mail (Cardiff, Wales) November 21, 2012:

This weekend in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities and homes across the world people will be commemorating the 79th anniversary of the "Holodomor", the artificial famine created by Stalin which led to the deaths over an 18 month period during 1932-33 of more than seven million Ukrainian men, women and children. The precise figures will never be known but estimates range between six and ten million dead.

And I avoid the "high estimates" found in some sources -- I think we should include a wide range of sources -- from the Soviet historians who assert only a few million in the USSR, on up to the higher ones as well, and noting which sources say what, as needed. BTW, TFD, a substantial part of the USSR population was not European (even if we ascribe the entire Russian area as "Europe") , thus those deaths would not affect the total European population as much as you seem to imply. Collect (talk) 14:01, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree that estimates should be inclusive and attributed. Anyone advocating that "X has discredited Y" or creates slanted content which posits particular estimates as more worthy than others is POV pushing, plain and simple. I categorically oppose any content which censors applicable sources. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 14:19, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

@TFD. I have no idea where your numbers are coming from. Please provide reference with exact pages. But if there are any numbers published in RS by notable researchers, they should be included per policy, with appropriate attribution. My very best wishes (talk) 16:49, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

p. 82 and p. 112 of the source you presented. TFD (talk) 17:24, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

TFD, you have mischaracterized what is written there in both of your examples. According to you, "Rummel said that the Soviets killed as many as 126 million people, including 12 million foreigners." According to Rummel, on pages 81-82, "In sum, the Soviets committed a democide of almost 62 million people, over 7 million of them foreigners. This staggering total is beyond belief. But, as shown elsewhere¹², it is only the prudent, most probable tally in a range from a highly unlikely low figure of around 28,000,000 (almost 4,300,000 foreigners); and an equally unlikely high of nearly 126,900,000 (including about 12,100,000 foreigners)."

Likewise, according to you, Rummel said "Nazi Germany killed at least 170 million, excluding combat deaths". But according to Rummel on page 111, "Overall, by genocide, the killing of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, euthanasia, starvation, exposure, medical experiments, terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from about 15,000,000 to over 31,600,000 people, most likely closer to 21 million men, women...". At the bottom of Rummel's chart on page 112, where you appear to have added together the numbers in the chart on your own to arrive at your 170 million, it says, "The subclassifications of democide are incomplete and overlap and therefore will not sum to the total democide." AmateurEditor (talk) 01:58, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

No it is not mischaracterizing Rummel to report what he says. Yes these are his highest possible estimates, and yes they are unbelievable. TFD (talk) 04:05, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

When Rummel says that the Soviets probably killed almost 62 million and then you report that Rummel said they killed as many as 126 million, a figure that he actually dismisses, you are mischaracterizing him. Likewise with the Nazis killing 170 million. Rummel actually said no such thing; you are again mischaracterizing him. AmateurEditor (talk) 05:16, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm missing something here, but if we cite Rummel's figures for 'democide', wouldn't the article have to be renamed? Rummel's 'civil definition of murder' clearly differs from what would normally be understood by 'mass killing', and it would be entirely misleading to conflate the two. Then again, how much credibility is given to Rummel's broad definition anyway? Is it accepted by other historians as valid? To be clear, I'm not (at this point) disputing Rummel's numbers, but asking whether the definition he uses to merit inclusion is accepted as legitimate. AndyTheGrump (talk) 17:45, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps you could explain how Rummel's 'civil definition of murder' and 'mass killing' are incompatible? VєсrumЬа ►TALK 17:50, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

"[I]ntentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life" - a rather vague and weasel-worded definition, well-suited to slanting whichever way one wishes. I'm sure that tobacco companies could be included under that - or at least, the actions of states that 'knowingly' 'disregarded' the self-evident consequences of allowing the promotion of products for profit that have killed millions. "[U]nattended disease"? Presumably under that definition, any state not providing free healthcare can be charged with 'democide'? Rummel's definition is useless as an objective measure of anything - it depends entirely on the perspective of the individual doing the 'calculation'. The British government is currently debating minimum-price-per-unit legislation for alcohol, and doing it while well aware that there is a statistical correlation between alcohol price and mortality (if for no other reason than the tendency of drunken Brits to beat the crap out of each other). If they fail to set the price at the maximum, are they "knowingly reckless" and demonstrating a "depraved disregard for life"? Will Rummel be accusing them of 'democide'? I somehow doubt it, but where does it fail to fit within his definition? AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:09, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

I think you will find similar ambiguity in the definitions of murder itself. In wikipedia's murder article, one of the criteria is "Reckless indifference to an unjustifiably high risk to human life (sometimes described as an "abandoned and malignant heart")".

Rummel gives an exhaustively detailed explanation of his definition here. An excerpt: "Democide is meant to define the killing by government as the concept of murder does individual killing in domestic society. Here intentionality (premeditation) is critical. This also includes practical intentionality. If a government causes deaths through a reckless and depraved indifference to human life, the deaths were as though intended. If through neglect a mother lets her baby die of malnutrition, this is murder. If we imprison a girl in our home, force her to do exhausting work throughout the day, not even minimally feed and clothe her, and watch her gradually die a little each day without helping her, then her inevitable death is not only our fault, but our practical intention. It is murder. Similarly, for example, as the Soviet government forcibly transported political prisoners to labor camps hundreds of thousands of them died at the hands of criminals or guards, or from heat, cold, and inadequate food and water. Although not intended (indeed, this deprived the regime of their labor), the deaths were still public murder. It was democide." AmateurEditor (talk) 01:58, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Don't you think all of that belongs to the Democide article, not to this one? This article is about mass killings, and I found no universally accepted viewpoint about relation between the terms "mass killings" and "democide".--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:35, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Both "mass killing" and "democide" are attempts to replace the difficult and amorphous "genocide" with something more useful to work with. This is stated explicitly by Valentino and by Rummel when they explain their definitions (and the context of the casual use of "mass killing" by other authors makes it clear they are using that as a synomym of their own "-cide" term. AmateurEditor (talk) 02:43, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

"Genocide" is not amorphous, it is too strict, which makes it inapplicable to many instances of mass killings. Regarding Rummel, the problem is that his concept of democide is strictly connected with his obsolete and inflated figures, so it makes sense just to mention him here, but to discuss these figures in the article about his theory. No serious modern author (especially single society scholars) takes seriously his estimates of deaths in the USSR or China, and, importantly, many (if not majority) authors disagree with the thesis it was geno/democide. --Paul Siebert (talk) 03:51, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

There is not just one definition of genocide, as the wikipedia pages for Genocide definitions and even Genocide under municipal laws show. This is part of the problem. Valentino lists difficulties with the UN's "genocide" that include it being too narrow due to the exclusion of political and economic class groups, but also that its applicability depends a great deal on how one chooses to interpret its criteria. If interpreted very strictly, then "by this standard genocide actually may never have been committed."(page 12) But the "Genocide Convention introduces additional ambiguity by defining genocide as 'the intent to destroy, in whole or in part' the group 'as such,' and by including not only killing but acts ranging from 'causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,' to 'imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,' to 'forcibly transferring children of the group to another group'." He also describes problems with genocide being unclear as to how many must be killed or intended to be killed to qualify and, depending on how groups are defined, genocide could be argued in the case of trying to kill a single individual.(page 12, 13)

Rummel likewise explains why "genocide" is not strict enough here: "The linking of all such diverse acts or deaths together under one label has created an acute conceptual problem that begs for the invention of new concepts to cover and be limited to intentional government murder. Thus, both Barbara Harff5 and I have independently developed the concept of politicide for a government's premeditated killing of people because of their politics or for political reasons. But this new concept is still not sufficient,...".

As for Rummel's figures not being taken seriously by serious modern authors, that may or may not be. Adding accurately cited criticism of the estimates added to the workpage would help us all get on the same page for these kinds of things. AmateurEditor (talk) 05:16, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Re genocide, you are perfectly aware of the fate of the text created by you and me. However, during our previous discussion you had a chance to realise that I am aware of all of that. I don't think we have to return to this issue in this section.

Re Rummel's figures, I already cited Harff's opinion. In addition, I suggest you to read my post below: Rummel never worked with primary sources or archival documents, he just summarised (earlier) secondary sources. Why should we pay significant attention to his estimates (which he refused to adjust in light of new evidences) is established experts in the field ignore his works? Just give me an example of usage of Rummel's figures in recent peer-reviewed works authored by Conquest, Wheatcroft or Ellman.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:29, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Citing Harff on the workpage would be best for everyone, I think (but there's no rush). You say that Rummel refused to adjust his figures in light of new evidence, but I added a sentence to the workpage showing him doing just that (adjusting China upward) in 2005. AmateurEditor (talk) 05:48, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Of course, I meant his peer-reviewed publications, not some blog. I suggest you to remove this reference, because a blog is not a reliable source.

I saw no references to Rummel in recent works on the demographic consequences of Chinese famine, so I do not think Rummel represents mainstream opinion on that account. I even don't know if he is a minority views. Regarding other deaths, I have no idea where the figures of 100+ million of PRC death came from. --Paul Siebert (talk) 06:20, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

The blog citation is in accordance with WP:BLOGS, since it was Rummel giving his own position. The 100+ million figure was not for the PRC alone, it is for Communism as a whole in the twentieth century. Including a sentence and citation for a source on the workpage does not mean that it will be transferred to the article at some point, as we are trying to piece together the entire range of sources, good and bad, and how they relate to one another. So I think it should stay until we have everything and can begin our evaluation as a group. AmateurEditor (talk) 06:51, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

The WP:BLOGS policy says: "Take care when using such sources: if the information in question is really worth reporting, someone else will probably have done so." Had Rummel published those figures in peer-reviewed journals? If no, then what is the reason for that? We have a huge number of good quality sources on that account, so I propose not to use blogs.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:36, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Re Rummel, I've already provided an evidence that his figures are dramatic exaggeration. Obviously, they have just historic interest, because serious authors do not use them currently. Therefore, they can and should be used, however, only as early estimates, and they must be supplemented with commentaries of modern authors. We have sources that directly debunk Rummel's figures, as well as good recent sources (for example, Werth's "State against its citizens") that dramatically contradict to Rummel. Therefore, I see no need in providing detailed table containing obsolete and unreliable data.--Paul Siebert (talk) 01:24, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I suggest to stop discussing Rummel, because his estimates hardly deserve serious attention. Don't forget that Rummel never did his own research, he just analyzed secondary sources available to him during the time when he was actively working (in 1960s-80s), and never attempted to adjust his estimates based on the information that become available later. As a result, his books and articles are not used by contemporary authors who are doing their own research. For example, if you look at the recent works of such reputable authors as Wheatcroft, Conquest, Ellman, Rosefielde, Werth, Maksudov (I list just those who study Soviet history), they do not use Rummel's data, and very rarely cite him (most of them prefer to totally ignore Rummel).
Vecrumba says that "Anyone advocating that "X has discredited Y" or creates slanted content which posits particular estimates as more worthy than others is POV pushing, plain and simple." I would say, that point of view is against our NPOV policy. If some statement has been seriously challenged, this fact must be reflected in the article. In addition, the idea "that estimates should be inclusive and attributed" carefully avoids the question of relative weight. Consider the following situation (a real one)

1. In 1940, Eddington estimated the mass on our Universe to be 2.59 10E55 grams (NATURE Volume: 145 Pages: 549-549), and concluded that there are 1.575 10E79 protons in our Universe.
2. In 2004, Wesson estimated the mass of the Universe to be 10E56 (Mod.Phys. Lett. A19, 1995 (2004))
3. It is known that the the mass of observable Universe (10E56 g) corresponds to 10E80 baryons (neutrons and protons), however, only small part of this mass is constituted by baryons, so the amount of baryons is much smaller (C.G. Bohmer, Found. Phys. (2008) 38: 216-227)

In connection to that, how Vecrumba propose to present the facts 1-3? Following his concept, we would have to write:

"According to Eddington, our Universe has a mass of 2.59 10E55 grams and contains 1.575 10E79 protons, whereas according to Wesson the mass of the Universe is 10E56. According to Bohmer, baryonic matter constitutes just a small part of the mass of the observable Universe."

However, that would be ridiculous, because Eddington is the obsolete source, and Bohmer does not express his own opinion, but summarises the current state of our knowledge about the Universe. In addition, under "mass of the Universe" these authors see quite different things: old authors believed mass of the Universe is equal to the mass of the baryonic matter, whereas contemporary authors speak about "dark matter" and "dark energy".

Similarly, we have some authors who describe all mass deaths under Communists as "mass killings", and many authors who think otherwise. Some of them are new, some of them are obsolete. Obviously, following Vecrumba's approach we would have to create a weird mixture of different figures (which are interpreted differently by different authors), that would force us to forget about due weight and elementary logic. That is in stark contradiction with our policy. To write a good text we must:

1. Rely on recent works (desirably, peer-reviewed one), and mention old sources just to describe the development of our knowledge of the subject.
2. Present seriously contested statements as opinia, and supplement them with needed criticism.
3. Avoid presenting well established facts just as an opinion of some author.
4. Explain what different authors see under each term (to avoid confusion similar to the confusion with the mass of the Universe).--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:35, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

PS. And, last but not list, since reliable sources exist that discuss the figures of death toll in a context of comparison of MKuCR with Nazism, this issue must be discussed in this section, and both pro et contra must be presented.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:00, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Instead of asserting what various sources say about Rummel or his figures, why don't you just add the specific criticisms to the workpage with citations? That way no one has to take anything on faith. AmateurEditor (talk) 05:28, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think we need to pay serious attention to Rummel, and I explained why. We should mention his opinion, and explain that his estimates were made based on Cold war era sources, and are biased towards highest possible figures. To devote much attention to him would be UNDUE. Re workpage, I already started to add sources there, however, I will be busy next week, so I'll continue later.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:32, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I think weight issues will be easiest to discuss after we have assembled all our sourced sentences on the workpage. I'm sure none of this will be resolved before you have time again...AmateurEditor (talk) 05:48, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but I would like you to know my opinion in advance.--Paul Siebert (talk) 06:23, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Just to finish with Rummel and China. I found following estimates of Cultural revolution deaths (the most violent period of Communist China):

1. Rummel (1991): 7.73 million (Rummel, R. J. 1991, China's Bloody Century. Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. p. 253)
2. Fairbank (1992): 1 million (Fairbank, John K. 1992, China: A New History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 402)
3. Cheng-Min (1996): ~2 million. (Cheng Min Monthly Reporter, 1996, 1984 nian 5 yue de zhong gong nei bu diao cha cai liao. [The internal statistics about the Cultural Revolution of May 1984], Hong Kong: Cheng Min Monthly, 10:21-22.)
4. Ding Shu (1999): 2-3- million (specifically disagreed with Rummel based on his own diverse analysis) (Ding, Shu, 1999, Wen ge shi ren shu tong ji. [The total abnormal death toll in the Cultural Revolution] in JIN, Zhong (ed.) Fei guang fang ji lu de li shi zhen xiang: Gong chan Zhongguo wu shi nian [The Unofficially Recorded Historical Truth: Fifty Years of the Communist China], Hong Kong: Open Magazine

Press, 1999, p.214.)

1. Andrew Walder and Su Yang (2003): 0.75-1.5 million (the data obtained based on detailed analysis of annals, with assumption that the cases were significantly underreported) (Walder, Andrew G. and SU, Yang, 2003, The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact, The China Quarterly, 173: 74-99.)
2. Chang and Halliday (2003): >3million (Chang and Halliday, 2005, MAO: The Unknown Story, London: Globalflair Ltd. 2005: 547)

As we can see, no recent data confirm Rummel's estimates. Whereas the average figure based on the sources 2-6 is 1.95 ±0.84 million, Rummel's figures are far greater. In connection to that, I am wondering from where he obtained the astronomical figures he cites in his blog? And do we need to cite it? Is our goal to undermine credibility of Wikipedia?--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:43, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

• We are not here in the business of deciding who was right or wrong. The numbers for any particular country are different because they include different categories of people and counted using different sources and during different periods of time. Obviously, if there is a range of number from various sources, one of them will always be the largest and can be an overestimation. However, this is not a reason dismiss any numbers as "fringe" if they were compiled by a well known academic researcher who explained how exactly he derived the numbers and published them in RS. Yes, books by Rummel are secondary RS. No, "democide" and the "mass killings" (as describe in this article) are the same. This article could be even renamed to something like "Democide under Communist regimes". That would be more neutral by the way. My very best wishes (talk) 15:40, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

We are here to identify good sources and to give due weight to them. If you don't understand it, read our policy.

Regarding "the numbers for any particular country are different because they include different categories of people and counted using different sources and during different periods of time," I partially agree. That is true for good sources, and that is why the figures cannot be presented separately from the description of categories that one or another author included in his estimates. However, there is one more reason for discrepancy: bad or obsolete data used by some authors, and flawed methodology of estimates. If we have reliable sources that point at flaws in one or another estimate, we cannot give much weight to such an estimate.

If you believe Rummel is reliable, feel free to ask at RSN.

If democide and mass killings are the same terms, why such scholars as Valentino do separate it? By the way, could you please provide a source that confirms that majority authors believe "democide" and "mass killings" are the same?--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:48, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Sources on "democide": [8] Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions By George J. Andreopoulos, 284 pages , University of Pennsylvania 1994:

Unfortunately, many comparisons of state victimization are solely quantitative comparisons that ignore how and why victims were chosen and the percent of the population at risk victimized. When we compare victims of totalitarian states, the Soviet Union's "democide" from 1917 to 1987, estimated by Rummel at about 61,911,000 victims, exceeds that of Nazi Germany during this century.13 However, Rummel devises this concept ("democide") because he does not discriminate victims of terror from victims of genocide: his total comprises people killed by execution, deportations, labor camps, and famine, some of whom were selected individually and some as members of a collectivity. Later work by Rummel shows that Nazi democide rates in occupied Europe and in Germany exceeded the rate of the Soviet Union on an annual basis; Nazi genocide rates for Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs are many times higher than democide rates, especially for Jews. and Although the borderlines between genocide and "democide" in the Soviet Union are unclear, we do have case studies of the destruction of nations that fit the Convention definition of genocide: the Ukrainians in 1932-33 decimated by man-made famine,19 and the deportations of suspect people during and after World War II in conditions that caused almost half to die c;ear;y showing acceptance by mainline historians of the term "democide", and definitely not making the separation you seem to assert.

Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences By Peter Baehr 245 pages, Stanford 2010

The specific “motivation” for Nazi democide within the camps “arose from the combination of negative eugenics with power politics showing the acceptance of "democide" generally by mainline historians.

The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy By Daniele Archibugi, 321 pages, Princeton 2008

A certain congruency is expected between input and output in the democratic process and historical experience tends to confirm this expectation. This does not mean that a government that carries out democides cannot be an elected one. The case of Adolf Hitler is an example of this. However, by the time the democide occurred, Nazi Germany had long ceased to satisfy the criteria of a democracy showing a use of "democide" congruent with Rummel and accepting it as a term.

International Peacekeeping: The Yearbook of International Peace Operations - Vol. 9 Langholtz et al, Martinus Nijhoff 2005

Recognizing that sovereignty protected rulers and their agents from accountability for crimes ranging from aggressive war to democide,82 the ICC provides a permanent forum for prosecution when state courts cannot or will not act. showing leal acceptance of the term "democide" and not separating the term from "mass killing."

How to Prevent Genocide: A Guide for Policymakers, Scholars, and the Concerned Citizen John G. Heidenrich, Praeger 2001

Today, in deference to the Convention's limited definition of genocide, some scholars prefer to use the term politicide to describe political mass murder, or democide to describe mass deaths caused by any deliberate means, including willful neglect, avoidable famine, forced labor, or direct massacre. showing acceptance of the term, and making no distinction between it an "mass killing" (trusting that "mass deaths" is pretty close to "mass killing" even for the most minor caviller.)

"Blood and Homeland": Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940 Marius Turda, Paul J. Weindling; Central European University Press 2007

The term [eliminationism] is borrowed from Daniel Goldhagen. See Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Vintage, 1997). The broader applicability of the term, comprising different forms of physical extermination of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups (democide), crimes perpetrated by the state against its citizens (democide, politicide), as well as indirect forms of persecution with a view to eliminating [deviant] behaviour (segregation, expulsion, forced assimilation), was not intended by Goldhagen, who used it in the context of anti-Semitism in modern Germany. However, such a broad scope is more suited to biomedical totalitarianism, in its attempt to medicalize an array of racial-hygienic and racial-anthropological [deviances,] and to prescribe their elimination on a holistic basis. shows acceptance and use by mainline historians.

I trust these are sufficient? Collect (talk) 16:13, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Collect, no walls of text, please ;-). The sources provided by you (except Langholtz) do not explain the linkage between the terms "mass killings" and "democide". Meanwhile, Yang Su [9] defines "mass killings" as follows:

"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 (For this reason, I choose the term “mass killing” over “genocide.”). 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."

You can see that this definition is much narrower then Rummel's "democide" (and it is closer to what an ordinary reader sees under "mass killing").

In addition, if we accept Heidenrich's definition of "democide" as "mass deaths caused by any deliberate means", the question of intentionality becomes quite important. Scholars disagree about Stalin's and Mao's intent during Soviet and Chinese famines. Moreover, since during both Volga famine and post-war famine international help was accepted, and other measures to mitigate famines were taken, they do not fit the definition of democide. Similarly, they do not fit Valentino's definition of "dispossessive mass killing", because no social transformations were supposed to be achieved as a result of these famines. -Paul Siebert (talk) 16:25, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

• Interestingly, my opponents either ignore my major arguments as if I wrote nothing or focus on some minor point. Again, since I demonstrated that Rummel provided highly inflated figures, which contradict to later estimates, the equal weight should not be given to him and to more recent works of single society scholars. Does anyone have any objections to that, and if yes, what is the ground for such objections?--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:11, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Paul - you have asked for sources. I gave you sources. SCalling what you asked for as "walls of text" is silly. The material is separated by source with a quote showing the significance of the sourse. As was requested. Cheers. Collect (talk) 22:18, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

(Paul, it is too early to conclude weight issues when we haven't assembled all our sentences on the workpage. We are supposed to be approaching this in a spirit of humility here.) The two terms are similar (intentionality is also required for "democide"), but there is some difference between Valentino's definition of "mass killing" and Rummel's definition of "democide", and Valentino mentions this in his book while also repeatedly describing Rummel's democide work as about mass killing (on pages 27-28 Valentino describes and critiques Rummel as working on the same issue of "genocide and mass killing" as Valentino is; and he is mentioned in the notes on pages 255 and 256 where he says "Rummel's estimates tend to be considerably higher than those of most other scholars" and he describes Rummel's "democide" as "similar in some respects [to Valentino's "mass killing" definition]. Rummel's definition, however, includes the killing of any number of civilians, no matter how small. In addition, Rummel specifies that democide must be carried out by government groups, while the perpetrators of mass killing can belong to any kind of group."). So Rummel is not exactly ignored here. In fact, it seems to me that much of the differences in the higher totals by Rummel can be attributed to the much smaller measurement scale he uses. I am unaware of anyone other than Valentino specifying the 50,000 within 5 years cutoff for inclusion. And Valentino acknowledges that it is "to some extent arbitrary" (p. 12). AmateurEditor (talk) 18:21, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, intentionality is required for democide, however, many authors do not see intentionality (strictly speaking, an intention to cause death) in most cases. Therefore, if Rummel claims that ca 70 million were killed during Communist democide, he makes an assertion that is wrong for three reasons. Firstly, he provides an inflated estimates of the amount of deaths; secondly, he claims that all those death were intentional killings in terms that it was government's initial intent to cause deaths; and, thirdly, he ascribes all deaths to the results of Communist's activity (although, for example, in civil wars both sides are responsible for deaths). Therefore, even if some authors accept the term "democide", that does not necessarily means they agree regarding its scope.

Rummel is ignored by the modern authors who is doing their own studies of mass death in Soviet Union or China. They cite him only occasionally, and they do not use his figures. Remember, the authors I am talking about work with archival documents and other primary sources, and they really do original research (in contrast to Rummel). The fact that they ignore him is a demonstration that he is hardly trustworthy.

Re "I am unaware of anyone other than Valentino specifying the 50,000 within 5 years" See, e.g. Wayman and Tago, Journal of Peace Research 47(1) 3–13. In addition, you may find there a discussion of the difference between geno/politicide and democide, which is seen by the author and a much broader term. And, also, don't forget that Valentino is an author of the term "mass killing". However, if you look at Yang Su's definition, his definition is even stricter.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:01, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are referring me to in the Wayman and Tago article. It repeatedly describes Rummel's democide as "mass killing" and calls his democide data set one of two "'gold standard' data sets (i.e. the ones used most widely as dependant variables in this field)", along with Gurr and Harff's "politicide" data set (they also call politicide "mass killing"). In their "Definition of Mass killing" section, they make no mention at all of Valentino's 50,000 within 5 years cutoff. Yang Su's definition of "mass killing", according to your excerpt above, would include the killing of ten people in one day, which Valentino certainly would not do, so it seems less strict than Valentino in numerical terms. We are really getting off on a tangent here. We are supposed to be building a list of sentences on the workpage and holding off on the evaluations until later, arent't we? AmateurEditor (talk) 19:50, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Wayman and Tago found that the Rummel's and Harff's figures and conclusions are quite different, and partially attribute that to the difference in the terms "democide" and "geno/politicide".

Re Su's definition, his point is that killings must be concentrated in time and space to be considered as "mass". Accordingly, whereas killing of 100 people in one village during few days is mass killing, uniform increase of mortality by 0.1% (which corresponds to 100,000 for the country with billion population per year) is not mass killing.--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:04, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Then I think we (and these sources) can all agree that terminology is important to this topic and the precise definitions of terms cannot be separated from the estimates made for them, because those estimates are fundamentally affected by the definitions used to make them. AmateurEditor (talk) 23:26, 1 December 2012 (UTC)r

Totally agreed. Not only it is important to this topic, it is vital for its correct understanding. In contrast to, for example the Holocaust, estimates are unseparable from the description of the procedure of estimation, and from the explanation of what concretely has been estimated. That is a good intermediate result of our discussion. I believe, all major participants of the discussion should clearly voice their opinia about that, to avoid returning to the same dispute in future.--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:56, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

However we choose to define "mass killings", it refers to episodes and cannot include all killings, even if there are disagreements about the numbers of victims and periods of time necessary to fit the criteria. If we want this article to be about all people killed by all Communists, then we need a more accurate title. TFD (talk) 19:34, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Let's just go with what our sources say, noting where they disagree. Speaking of which, let's all add some accurately sourced sentences to the workpage. AmateurEditor (talk) 20:42, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Say about what? TFD (talk) 23:29, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Everything, TFD. Including how they define their terms. AmateurEditor (talk) 01:54, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

"Mass killings" is simply an ambiguous term. For example, was Great Terror "mass killing"? Looking at the discussion above, I would not be surprised if someone argued that victims who were shot individually do not belong there. Something like democide would probably be better. My very best wishes (talk) 02:07, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

If we've gotten the title wrong, then let us be very cautious before making another mistake. The best way to proceed, in my opinion, is to first gather together all the sources and all their terms (on a workpage, say) and then determine what our consensus of their consensus is. I think "mass killing" is more than fine for now. AmateurEditor (talk) 02:16, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

When is this article going to be unprotected?

I would like to edit, but it's protected. I read it but I still don't know why it's protected? Anyway, can I nominate this article for deletion? --Hinata talk 02:14, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Um -- there have been a lot of AfDs on this - not one of them succeeded, and sometimes beating a dead horse does not work. Cheers. Collect (talk) 04:10, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

If you are really intended to seriously work on this article, I can briefly explain you the story of its protection. --Paul Siebert (talk) 04:24, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Wasn't this article not deleted because there were some sources that were supposed to be found and added to improve it? Which hasn't happened? Correct me if I'm wrong-- it's been awhile since I glanced at the discussions. AnieHall (talk) 08:47, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Be sure to include your own edits saying that only a few million people actually were killed, Paul. Cheers. Collect (talk) 08:50, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Of course, if we are talking about mass killings of the same kind as mass executions perpetrated by Nazi, yes, the amount of people killed under Communist regimes was few million: ca 3 million in Kampuchea (although the linkage to Communism is not obvious here for many authors), 1.5 million in the USSR (excluding Civil war deaths), Cultural revolution victims in China, and much smaller incidents in some other countries. You are perfectly aware of that.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:15, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

AnieHall, the article was not deleted because mass killings did occur under Communist regimes, the topic is notable, and some reliable sources exist that discuss it. However, the fact that the article was not and should not be deleted does not mean an endorsement to the present text.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:15, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Well said. AmateurEditor (talk) 22:12, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Well I would like to know the story on why it got protected. Anyway, the article is Negative POV and should be rename to a lesser POV. --Hinata talk 03:24, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Paul, Yes mass killings have occurred under communist regimes, but scholarship generally focuses on authoritarianism v. democracy. Rain also has occurred in communist regimes, but that doesn't mean that communism itself is necessarily to blame for that rain, and accepted scholarship on the cause of the mass killings being communism is not extensive, and is questionable. And, I did not say in my previous comment that mass killings have not occurred under communist governments. And, 2 articles on mass killings under capitalist regimes have been deleted, despite the fact that deaths also have occurred in, or "under", capitalist states, so the fact that mass killings/deaths have occurred in in communist states does not mean, necessarily, that this article should exist.

Anyways, the previous article deletion results do say: "The result was keep. Although there are likely many areas where the article could use improvement, rough consensus is that the concerns brought up do not make grounds for deletion. However, further discussion on the article's future (including the name choice, sythesis identification, rewriting, and/or merging) is strongly encouraged on the article's talk page" -- and I question how much has been improved. I imagine, some of you veterans here could fill us in on that, too. AnieHall (talk) 05:37, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

So all we need to do is agree on the topic and name of the article, then re-write it. The only thing stopping us is that since it is protected, the protest of any one editor can veto any changes. Incidentally the decision "keep" was perverse, because all the other decisions were "no consensus". TFD (talk) 07:28, 25 November 2012 (UTC)

Dear Hinata, the story of article's protection is as follows (I reproduce it from memory, so if someone believes I missed something, feel free to correct me). The article became a subject of the edit war between two groups of editors. The first group wanted to write the article based on such sources as the Black Book of Communism. This type sources tend to combine all population losses under Communists into a category of "Mass killings". In my opinion, the ultimate goal of those users is to convey the idea that Communism was more deadly then Nazism. Another group of users argued that most BB type sources are very controversial, that most single society studies describe those events quite differently, and therefore by devoting undue weight to the BB type sources is against our NPOV policy. As a result of the edit war (where some currently banned users participated on the side of "the BB party"), the article was placed under the edit restrictions described on the top of the talk page. The article had already been under those restrictions when some user added the statement from the introduction of the Black Book into the first sentence of the lede, which was against NPOV ("avoid presenting seriously contested assertions as facts"). The conflict around this statement lead to AE request, which lead to full and indefinite article's protection, and the newly added statement remains in the article because several users exist who block any attempt to remove it. That is a brief description of the conflict as I see it.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:27, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Does anyone know how long the article has been locked? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 22:37, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Since 9th of November 2011.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Anti-communism pure and simple

While I'm not denying many of the facts here are true, this should not be treated as the German-led holocaust... This is a much more controversial topic... Secondly, why is North Korea even listed here?? It has removed all references to communism, Marxism, and Marxism-Leninism, and the official, and only guiding of the party, according to the 4th Conference of the Workers Party of Korea (held in 2012) is Kimilsungism-Kimjongilism. --TIAYN (talk) 18:31, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Re Holocaust, not only you are right, we have numerous reliable sources that support this thesis.

Re North Korea, it is also correct. There is no mention of Communism in Korean official documents, and many authors agree that it drifts towards a purely Confucian society. I believe it is necessary to clarify in the article.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:05, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

@TIAYN. It does not matter what Korean Workers Party tells. It only matters what reliable sources tell. My very best wishes (talk) 02:11, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

It does matter... Secondly, reliable sources call them fascists, xenophobic and extremely nationalistic.. --TIAYN (talk) 08:47, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

What "fascists, xenophobic and extremely nationalistic" are you talking about? This article is not about Nazi. My very best wishes (talk) 18:14, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

If credible analysts are describing North Korea as fascist, it is hardly appropriate to include the misdeeds of the NK state in "Mass killings under Communist regimes", self-evidently... AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:21, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Most sources still use "communist" -- the "fascist" is generally used in the common pejorative sense, it appears, and not due to any connection with historical fascism. One can find sources referring to the US as "fascist" but that does not make it a widely-held view. [10] os the NYT (RS) view. Collect (talk) 18:38, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Collect, have you read what Chrisopher Hitchens wrote regarding North Korea: [11]. 'The whole idea of communism is dead in North Korea, and its most recent "Constitution," "ratified" last April, has dropped all mention of the word. The analogies to Confucianism are glib, and such parallels with it as can be drawn are intended by the regime only for the consumption of outsiders. Myers makes a persuasive case that we should instead regard the Kim Jong-il system as a phenomenon of the very extreme and pathological right. It is based on totalitarian "military first" mobilization, is maintained by slave labor, and instills an ideology of the most unapologetic racism and xenophobia'. AndyTheGrump (talk) 18:49, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

That North Korea was never Communist is a credible theory. See for example Michael Breen's Kim Jong-Il, p. 95.[12] Even if most sources claim it was Communist, we cannot state that as a fact unless there is consensus in reliable sources. TFD (talk) 19:12, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

That's probably wrong, as there is no appropriate meaning of "consensus". And North Korea should be listed here if (and only if) some of the reliable sources used in the article include deaths they caused as "killings under Communist regimes". It's likely that none of the sources that refer to North Korea as not being Communist talk about "killings under Communist regimes". — Arthur Rubin (talk) 21:57, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Iterating from above, a source which seems to meet the criteria insisted upon: Rogue Regime: Kim Jong Il and the Looming Threat of North Korea By Jasper Becker, 325 pages, Oxford University Press, New York 2005. On page 266: Between them, Kim Il Sung and his son are responsible for the deaths of over seven million Koreans—three million civilians in the Korean War, and, by some estimates, three million in the famine and at least a million deaths of political prisoners during the last 50 years. North Korea viewed itself as more "communist" than China was - page 122 As the country feigned compliance with Deng’s wishes, North Korea’s internal propaganda reported that he had succumbed to the sugarcoated bullets of Capitalism and betrayed Communism. Indignant North Koreans spat at Chinese students and teachers and even assaulted them.. Kim Jong-Il presented himself as a communist (page 150) As Kim Jong Il pandered to his father’s vanity, he began to run afoul of both Moscow and Beijing, both of which looked askance at Kim Il Sung’s claims. The effort to project Kim as a world statesman who could replace Chairman Mao as the standard bearer of Asian Communism was provocative. Page 66 The activities of Kim Il Sung’s partisan followers became the only legitimate Korean Communist movement. Page 204 Kim can be heard threatening to deploy the military to smash any opposition.15 “Socialism failed in many countries because their parties degenerated and failed to control the army. For the Party to control the army, the Party’s leadership over the army should be guaranteed,” One can not read that particular reliable source and view it in any way as syaing North Korea is not "communist." It can not be dismissed as "cold war propaganda" as it was published in 2005 by Oxford University Press, which is generally considered a reliable source publisher. Proof enough? Collect (talk) 22:30, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

He also says Kim banned books by Marx and other Communists, and that his ideology was really a return to the third century (pp. 66, 74) and compares Juche with Moon's cult (p. 80). We do not choose one source over another because it reflects our belief system but follow neutrality. Arthur Rubin, "consensus" means that there are no significant disagreements in reliable sources. Unfortunately in social sciences, there are significant disagreements over a great number of issues, which is why for example when we write articles about economics we do not presume that any particular school was right or wrong. Also we do not have any sources that talk about "mass killings under Communists regimes" rather we have individual and comparitive studies and it is up to us to determine what is a Communist regime or a mass killing and synthesize the two. TFD (talk) 23:09, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

And synthesis is exactly what we are not supposed to do, but everything this article does is synthesis. One source says x killed a lot of people. Another source says that x is a communist. Therefor, a communist killed a lot of people. In the same way, we could construct Mass Killings by Vegetarians, Mass Killings by White People, and so on, a potentially infinite number of new articles. Rick Norwood (talk) 23:34, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Yup. The article is synthesis. It always has been, and it always will be... AndyTheGrump (talk) 23:37, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Concur with Rick. Unless our sources refer to "mass killings under Communist regimes", this article violates WP:SYNTH. One of our sources, namely the Black Book, does refer to "killings under Communist regimes", but it's reliability is uncertain. Other sources disagree with specific claims in that source, but few (if any) other sources talk about the subject of this article. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 00:45, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

And just how many of the sources have you looked at? AmateurEditor (talk) 01:21, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Every book on history of communist repressions and almost any book on history of communist countries tells about unlawful executions and other killings. There is no synthesis. The problem comes only with terminology: what is mass killing? Hence, my best suggestion would be to use more well defined term democide instead of "killings" (thanks to R.J. Rummel who introduced this term to describe the subject!). My very best wishes (talk) 01:43, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

No, the sources are mostly about specific countries while a few combine studies of a few time periods in different countries, for example, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia. Even then they are mostly about repression in general, rather than mass killings in particular. There are no sources for example that combine killing of non-combatants in Chechnya, shooting demonstrators in 1989 Romania, killing Nazi POWs in Yugoslavia, lethal terrorist attacks by the Shining Path and famine in Ukraine as a specific subject of study. TFD (talk) 02:07, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Partially concur with Rick, Andy and Arthur. If Nicolas Werth writes that 15 million were killed, or died prematurely under Communists, his works cannot be used as a support of the thesis about "Communist mass killings" (and he himself disagreed with such interpretation of his work). However, we have several scholars who write about "mass killings" under Communist regimes. They are Valentino, Rummel, Courtois, Goldhagen, and, probably, Rosefielde. Therefore, the article is not synthesis (i.e. it does not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any of the sources). Therefore, a solution would be:

1. Present the thesis about MKuCR as an opinion of several authors (see above).
2. Discuss their concepts (both support and criticism)
3. Put the described events in historical perspective (e.g. the role of land reform and WWI in the outbreak of violence in Communist Russia, as Werth did; the role of Confucian ideology and centuries long authoritarion traditions in China, the role of nationalism and socio-economic factors in Cambodia, etc).

--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

@Arthur. The Black Book does not refer to mass killings. Only its introduction does, and this introduction is a very disputable source (in contrast to many other parts of the BB). The BB is highly commended due to Werth's contribution (I saw no serious criticism of him), and it is severely criticised for its introduction. Therefore, when some users claim the BB is reliable, they forget (intentionally or unintentionally) that it is reliable due to Werth&Margolin, not due to Courtois. --Paul Siebert (talk) 02:43, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)@Biophys. "Democide" has its own article. If you have sources that discuss "Democide under Communist regimes", you may create such an article. However, keep in mind that modern authors that study Stalinist repressions (Conquest, Wheatcroft, Ellman, Werth, Maksudov, Graziosi, Davies, Getty, and, probably, Rosefielde) do not use the term "democide", so you cannot use them as a source in that your article.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:50, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict) @TFD: "mostly about specific countries" you say. So you do concede that some are broader in scope. I am familiar with several. It is only the existence of those larger scope sources that is relevant to any discussion about whether this topic is a synthesis, rather than a notable topic in its own right. As for your specific examples of content items not found in the "combining" sources, they are irrelevant because "notability guidelines do not limit content within an article". AmateurEditor (talk) 02:45, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Delete the article and move what is salvageable of the contents to the article The Black Book of Communism. This needs a historiographical treatment which is more appropriate to a consideration of the book and its claims. FiachraByrne (talk) 02:52, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

(edit conflict)AE, when Valentino writes about "dispossessive mass killings", we, of course, can use him as a source. However, we cannot use, e.g. Ellman's data to support Valentino's views, because Ellman's position is different.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:55, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Not all of Valentino's communist mass killings are "dispossessive". AmateurEditor (talk) 03:09, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that, according to Wayman and Tago (Op.cit), Valentino divides motive into the two categories of dispossessive mass killing (as in ethnic cleansing, colonial enlargement, or collectivization of agriculture) and coercive mass killing (as in counter-guerrilla, terrorist, and Axis imperialist conquests). "Communist mass killings" belong to the first category, according to him. If you read his book, you probably noticed that he discusses Afghanistan not in the "Communist mass killings" chapter.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:27, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, but these are not hard and fast categories, just general classes. For example, some cases occur in both dispossessive and coercive classes. Afghanistan is one such example, as can be seen in Table 5 on page 83, where "Communist" is listed as an additional motive for several counterguerrilla mass killings. AmateurEditor (talk) 04:00, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

We face the same dilemma here: are we talking about "Communist mass killings" as about a separate category, or just as mass killings perpetrated by Communists? One can agree or disagree with Valentino's concept, but it is impossible to deny some logic behind it: "Communist mass killings", according to him, were a separate type of killings, both by tools used by perpetrators (dispossession), and by the aims (to achieve some social transformations). This is a logically consistent concept, and it should be presented as such. However, if we add all examples of mass killings to here, including the mass killings that were typical for all regimes, we will distort author's idea, which is hardly acceptable.

Similarly, if we take Courtois' concept, it is also quite clear: according to him, Communists killed more peoples then Nazi (he implicitly assume the nature of killings was the same), therefore, Communism was a greater evil then Nazism. We cannot and should not separate Courtois' estimates from the conclusion he draws.

Regarding Rummel, his concept is also crystal clear: the number of killed strongly correlates with the concentration of power in hands on the state leader: the more power the more killings. All his play with figures is devoted to demonstrate this idea.

Again, not only all these authors come out with some estimates, they draw some conclusions with such estimates, and we cannot separate the estimates from the conclusions, and from their criticism. We also need to clearly attribute these estimates and theories.

However, if we convert the article into a collection of various instances of mass killings under Communists, we thereby create a soup of figures which will be totally confusing, and where the theories of the authors will be separated from their data. That is a manipulation with sources, which is totally unacceptable.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think I quite understand this distinction between "Communist mass killings " and "mass killings perpetuated by Communists", and I don't think it is made in any of our sources. Mass killings by Communists are discussed in these sources separately not because only Communists killed large numbers of people, but because the authors hold that these killings are best understood related to one another (and we cannot assume that authors which focus on a single country do so because they reject the idea that these can be grouped together). I am not in favor of distorting any author's idea. Neither do I think that this article must be restricted to those cases found in the most narrow source (due weight and the simple practicalities of a readable article, must, of course, be respected). I think it will work to incorporate the estimates into the terminology section , so that the particular definitions or approaches used will be linked to those numbers. I don't think the conclusions (or conclusions about causes. etc.) are so closely linked to the particular estimates given under particular terms/definitions. I don't think Coutois' conclusion about the morality of Communism or it's comparison to Nazism would change if his estimate was 70 million, rather than 100 million, for example. There is a lot of commonality between these sources and all their estimates are in the same order of magnitude (yes, the variances between the estimates is also large, but it seems to me that this is only partly due to their particular terms and mostly because of the quality of documentation - or lack thereof). I think all our sources agree that the numbers killed were in the tens of millions (rather than single millions or hundreds of millions). Editors' disagreement with the phrase "tens of millions" in the lead, as I recall, was simply an issue of some thinking that readers would be misled that "tens of millions" meant something like "10 or 20 million", which none of these sources claim as the global estimate, rather than a literal objection to the number. AmateurEditor (talk) 23:19, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Re "I don't think I quite understand..." Look as the Valentino's view of "dispossessive" and "coercive" mass killings.

Re "but because the authors hold that these killings are best understood related to one another" Correct. The authors you are talking about see significant commonality between those events and all of them (except Valentino) they insist that Communism was more deadly then Nazism. This point of view has been extensively criticized, so in we present this viewpoint we must duly present its criticism.

Re "I think it will work to incorporate the estimates into the terminology section " ABSOLUTELY correct!

Re "I don't think Coutois' conclusion about the morality of Communism or it's comparison to Nazism would change if his estimate was 70 million..." "Mortality of Communism" and "mass killings under Communist regimes" are two different categories. For example, to claim that Communists committed mass killings of 30+ million people during the GLF famine would be ridiculous, because China was always on a brink of major famine. It is misleading to claim that Communist policy caused all those deaths, simply because the GLF famine affected exactly the same provinces where famine was a usual event (btw, that is the difference with Ukraine, which had no famines before 1932). Similarly, inclusion of all Vietnam war deaths or Angola civil war death into the category of "mass killings" is ridiculous. And so on.

Re "There is a lot of commonality between these sources and all their estimates are in the same order of magnitude" All sources you are talking about are trying to convey the idea that some commonality exist between the events in the USSR, China, Cambodia, Africa etc. In contrast, good quality single society studies that do not try to draw any parallelisms emphasize uniqueness of each case. Since the authors of those studies seem to ignore the writings of Rummel, Courtois &Co, there is no direct dispute between them, so they exist in "parallel Universes". Nevertheless, some authors note that the idea to combine direct killings with indirect deaths (famine etc) is intrinsically flawed.

Re "Editors' disagreement with the phrase "tens of millions" in the lead, as I recall, was simply an issue of..." Again, the major implicit goal of those estimates is to convey the idea that Communists killed more people then Nazi. However, even if you look at Rummel's estimates of Nazi democide, you will see that they roughly correspond to the number of direct killings (execution, anti-partisan warfare, death camp victims an so on). If we take into account only similar killings under Communists, the number of the victims of such mass killings was 2-3 million in the USSR (collectivization, Great Purge, camp deaths); Cultural revolution mass killings - 2-3 million; Cambodian genocide 2-3 million. Africa, Vietnam etc hardly add much, because civil wars, or wars against foreign invasion can hardly be considered as communist mass killings. Of course, I take the recent results of the estimates made by reputable single society scholars. Totally, we get about 10 million.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:54, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

1.What do you want me to see there? I already demonstrated that, even though Valentino lists "Communist mass killing" as dispossessive, he is flexible about his classes. And Valentino doesn't make the distinction between "Communist mass killings" and "mass killings perpetuated by Communists" that you have. His Communist mass killings chapter begins, "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.¹ In this chapter I focus primarily on..." (By the way, if you look at his first endnote there, he is citing Courtois' and Rummel's democide estimates, among others', as "at the highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributable to communist regimes." and he doesn't let the differences in methodology concern him too much.)

2. I have no problem with also presenting the criticism.

3. We agree here.

4. (I hope you didn't think I meant to write "mortality", rather than "morality". There was no typo.) They can be differenct categories, if the sources want them to be. I think the mortality/excess death category is used for convenience, as there is no way to verify exactly how culpable the regime was for individual deaths when the numbers are in the millions and the influence is often indirect. But when estimates use one or the other, it should be made clear which is which.

5. Of course studies of individual events or countries emphasize the uniqueness of their case. Otherwise, what would be the point of the study? The authors who "note that the idea to combine direct killings with indirect deaths (famine etc) is intrinsically flawed" should be cited in the article.

6. Let's not assume motivations for the sources. If there are sources which only count "direct" deaths and arrive at 10 million for those three countries (or whatever the particulars are), then they should be included and explained as well. AmateurEditor (talk) 02:31, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

1. Again, Valentino does not consider Afghanistan in the "Communist mass killings" chapter, that means he discriminates between "Communist mass killings" and "mass killings under Communists". If we exclude such "episodes" as GLF or Great Soviet famine, and Rummel's mythical 40 million Gulag deaths (which is not taken seriously by any specialist in Russian history), the figure of 110 million will dramatically collapse. Lion's share of the "episodes" considered by Valentino were not mass killings in commonsensual understanding of that term. And, do not forget that Valentino didn't work with primary sources to determine the scale of mass killings, he simply compiled the results of others, so he is a tertiary source for the figures.

2, 3. Great.

4. Sorry, I simply misread you. If you meant morality, you seem to misread Courtois. As Hiroaki Kuromiya (Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 2001), pp. 191-201) says

"What is implied in The Black Book is that distinctions between direct and indirect killings are fine points of no consequence and that the crimes of communism are far graver at least numerically than those of another totalitarian regime in the twentieth century, nazism, whose casualties were a quarter those of communism. "

in other words, Courtois' conclusion, contrary to your assertion, is based exactly on the figures, and his "playing with figures" (Kuromiya's words) is aimed to confirm his point that Communism was much more horrible then Nazism. Therefore, all of that - (i)combining indirect and direct deaths; (ii) obtaining the figure of 70+ million killings; (iii) coming to conclusion that Communism was more horrible than Nazism; (iv) criticism of this idea - must be presented in the article in the same place and in a context of each other.

5. For example, whereas Courtois writes about "Communist genocide in Cambodia", many authors prefer to speak about national specifics and historical background of the genocide perpetrated by the adepts of weird agrarian Maoist ideology with strong smell of racism and fascism, and to show a dramatic difference between Khmer Gouge and, e.g. European or Soviet Communists. The problem is that such authors never tried to come out with any combined estimate of Communist death toll, simply because they see no much reason for that (no significant commonality between those events).

6. We have many sources that discuss motivation of the authors of the BB, and of Courtois in particular. My conclusion is based on that. Similarly, motivation of Rummel is dictated by his libertarian views (I don't remember where I read that, but I can try to find). BTW, the source that compare Nazi and Stalinist mass killings is Wheatcroft (Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Dec., 1996), pp. 1319-1353). His conclusion is that "Hitler caused the murder of at least 5 million innocent people largely, it would appear, because he did not like Jews and communists. Stalin by contrast can be charged with causing the purposive death of something in the order of a million people. Furthermoret he purposive deaths caused by Hitler fit more closely into the category of 'murder', while those caused by Stalin fit more closely the category of 'execution'." --Paul Siebert (talk) 03:52, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

1. You still have not explained the difference between "Communist mass killing" and "mass killing by communists", a distinction that Valentino does not make because he cites others, such as Rummel, for the upper bound estimates on this topic and we know that Rummel does not make that distinction. Valentino does not consider Afghanistan in that dedicated chapter because he does not discuss most of the smaller cases, despite acknowledging their existence. He says that he "focuses" on the USSR, China, and Cambodia because they are the largest and best documented cases. It is a practical distinction, not an exclusion of Afghanistan or other cases from the topic. And we know this because he says so in his charts, which summarize his categorization and include "Communist" as an "Additional motive" for Afghanistan. You have yet to acknowledge this point. The chart is on page 83.

4. You had said that we cannot separate Courtois' conlusions from his numerical estimates. You have previously said that Courtois is unreliable for his numbers but that the other authors were high quality. Martin Malia, in his foreword, said that the range of estimates from all the authors in the book was 85 to 100 million. I was trying to make the point that Courtois' moral conclusions about communism would have stayed the same whether he had used 100 million or 85 million (or even 70 million). As I have already said, I have no problem also including criticism of the sources in the article.

5. If there are sources saying this, they can be included.

6. You don't need to convince me of Rummel's libertarian views. I would prefer we focus our efforts at finding sources critical of the substance of other sources, rather than speculating on their motivations, but if that is what we have, that is what we should reflect in the article (within reason). We have a lot of sourced sentences to be adding to the workpage, no? AmateurEditor (talk) 05:13, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

4. When I wrote that other contributors are reliable, I meant mostly two major contributors, Werth and Margolin. Malia's views are close to Courtois' one, and he was criticized equally. As I already wrote, I see more problem not with figures, but with interpretations. It is probably correct that ca 60-70 million died prematurely as a direct or indirect result of Communist activity, but it is incorrect to equate those deaths with Nazi killings. To demonstrate my thought, let me remind you that life expectancy in China in 1950s was about 30-35, and, taking into account its huge population, even small variations of live expectancy could produce astronomical figures of "mass killings". Similarly, Werth correctly concludes about 15 million population losses in Stalin's USSR, however, to characterise all of them as Communist killings is Courtois's own invention (with which Werth openly disagreed). That is what should be explained in the text.

Re your other points, I understood them, and I'll respond later. Probably it is a time to add material to the draft (I hope I'll start in few days).--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:32, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

(od) The fundamental point is that there is no generally-agreed consensus amongst historians etc as to what 'mass killings' consists of, and neither is there an agreed definition as to what constitutes a 'communist regime' (see i.e. the debate above over North Korea - the majority may possibly say that it is 'communist', but there are still significant reliable sources that question this, on what seem on the surface to be legitimate grounds) - and yet contributors to this discussion have been arguing for years over how many 'mass killings' there have been. This is not only an attempt to arrive at a result by synthesis, it is a complete fabrication. If historians don't agree over such issues, it is a falsification to pretend that they do. Maybe an article entitled Debates over mass killings under communist regimes might be justified, though even that inserts the preferred terminology of some into the topic in a questionable manner. Wikipedia should be capable of doing better than this - and if we can't, maybe we should leave such subjects to those that can. AndyTheGrump (talk) 03:28, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

So you would also want to see the Communist state article deleted? Andy, if this is synthesis, then you must show where that has occurred. You don't get to just assert it without demonstration. We have sources which explicitly use "Communist mass killing", for pete's sake.AmateurEditor (talk) 03:35, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

"We have sources which explicitly use "Communist mass killing", for pete's sake". Possibly. Do they all agree on what the term means, and is this the general academic consensus? If it isn't we shouldn't be pretending that it is. Just how difficult is the concept that 'not everyone agrees over this' for you to understand? AndyTheGrump (talk) 07:54, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

We aren't pretending that "mass killing" is the consensus term, as is made clear by the terminology section. The title is simply a descriptive title arrived at by the earlier consensus of Wikipedia editors, per WP:NDESC. AmateurEditor (talk) 03:43, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

A substantial number of books meeting RS do, indeed, connect "communist" with "democide" (Questia finda a group thereof). As "democide" specifically includes "mass killing" oit is clear the claim of "SYNTH" is inapt. Using established synonyms is not SYNTH at all, and the number of sources is substantial, and not just "cold war propaganda" stuff. Further, it is not "SYNTH" to tak of saying that killings numbering in the hundreds of thousands of people somehow is not a "mass killing" - Wikipedia can use the "laugh test" for that sort of cavil. Cheers. Collect (talk) 12:00, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

"As "democide" specifically includes "mass killing" oit is clear the claim of "SYNTH" is inapt". What? 'X includes cases of Y' does not equate to 'all cases of X are Y' in any system of logic that I'm aware of... AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:24, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

If some famine killed 100,000 people, we cannot automatically claim that mass killings occurred. At least, we do not do that in case of Bengal or Irish famines, despite the fact that the regimes were responsible for the deaths. See Ellman for details.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:27, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Your claim pushes the laugh envelope -- if a country takes 2/3 of a harvest from an area and the people in that area die, the regime damn well was complicit in the deaths. Which is what the reliable sources state clearly. That you can say that it was "only a famine" flies in the face of the multiple reputable reliable sources I just gave above which you dismissed as a "wall of text." And since this article is not about the absolutely horrid British behaviour during the Potato Blight, affecting some of my own relatives, that aside is simply irrelevant here. Cheers. Collect (talk) 13:32, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, if you mean Holodomor, some authors agree with that. However, others disagree. Regarding other Soviet famines (Volga famine, war, and post-war famines) most authors agree that the authorities had no intention to starve people, and that they provided some help (and asked for foreign help). Therefore, I do not understand how can we include all famine victims into the "mass killing" category.

If you are talking about China, many single society neutral and serious scholars outline several factors that caused the GLF famine: (i) China was a very poor country, famine were a routine event there, so any significant economic transformation could trigger it; (ii) Mao broke old system that monitored grain production level, so he simply was not aware of actual situation; (iii) China was in economical and political isolation, so it was physically unable to obtain foreign help; (iv) bad weather; (v) believe you or not, some authors seriously discuss communal dining rooms as the factor that significantly contributed to the famine. This, along with Mao's stubbornness, lead to the famine that had no precedent in Chinese history in absolute numbers (although was less severe then some XIX centuries famine in relative figures).--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:49, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Re irrelevance of Irish famine, it is relevant. Ellman writes: "This distinction between famines and political persecution corresponds to normal historical practice." (Michael Ellman. Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments. Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7 (Nov., 2002), pp. 1151-1172) This is a general statement that is not Ellman's opinion, but reflects majority viewpoint. Therefore, we must clearly show this distinction in this article.--Paul Siebert (talk) 13:58, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

PS. To summarise, it is correct that in some cases some Communist regimes are responsible for starving people to death, and in some cases they did that consciously. However, it is absolutely incorrect to claim that all famine victims under Communists were "mass killings" victims. That may be true for Holodomor (partially), but not for the Soviet famine of 1932-33 as whole, and not for Volga famine and other famines. It seems to be untrue for Chinese GLF famine (especially is we ignore the fact that famine was a quite common event in China).--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:16, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

"How can we include all famine victims into the mass killing category"? No, we do not include anything anywhere. If victims of the Great Chinese famine were listed as people killed by Communist policies in reliable sources (as they were), this can be cited in the article. My very best wishes (talk) 16:16, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the fact that Valentino or Rummel listed all GLF famine victims as people killed by Communist policies, we have to include their opinion, along with the opinion that famines should be separated from political repressions, with the opinion of the authors who do not list them as victims of "mass killings", and, last but not list, the opinion that by adding non-coercive mass deaths to the total Communist death toll some authors are trying to convey the idea that Communism was more deadly then Nazism, and that Communist mass killings dwarfed the Holocaust. A criticism of the latter idea (which is Holocaust trivialisation), and is not mainstream) should also be added. However, this article does do that, so it fails NPOV.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:46, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

The sources I found inresponse to your request do not appear to enggage in any Holocaust denial or trivialization - so I think your desire to attribute that as their rationale is not only errant but abhorrent, as is the apparent claim that the scholars published by Oxford etc. do so out of pure anti-Communism. There comes a time when you well ought to simply accept that some things in history do not comport with your comfort level. Collect (talk) 14:16, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I wrote nothing about the Holocaust denial, so this your trick is hardly honest. Regarding my desires, please, stop discussing them, let's focus on the sources. Obviously, I meant not your sources, but the ideas expressed in some of them. This idea was expressed in the BB's introduction, and here is its criticism:

"Courtois' attempt to present communism as a greater evil than nazism by playing a numbers game is a pity because it threatens to dilute the horror of actual killings." (Kuromiya, Op. cit.)

--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:52, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Your exact quote: A criticism of the latter idea (which is Holocaust trivialisation), +

My sources are still on this talk page -- which of the sources I gave are guilty of "Holocaust trivialisation" please? You assert "some" so I am sure you will oblige us with the sources I presented and explain in what way they seek to trivialise or deny the Holocaust? In short -- give your examples or step away from your claims. As for your blatant accusation of dishonesty -- I would suggest that others reading here will examine your soo-to-be-given list of the sources which you make this claim about and determnine ckearklyt where the hosnesty is. Collect (talk) 21:56, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Paul Siebert never mentioned holocaust denial. You have been provided many sources about holocaust trivialization and how it relates to this topic, and if you have not read or understood them, then this conversation is pointless. However, I have always thought that you were concerned about how the holocaust is perceived and am surprised that you have not taken the time to explore this subject. TFD (talk) 22:18, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Can you indicate where I said Paul referred to "Holocaust denial" in any quote? If you do not understand what quotation marks indicate, then I agree your participation is pointless here. The issue is that Paul made an assertion about the sources I gave - and unless he wishes to back up his assertion that they refer in any way at all in a trivialising manner about the Holovcaust, then his claims fail like a lead balloon. I trust the mphasis is clear on this. Collect (talk) 22:32, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

See above, "The sources I found inresponse to your request do not appear to enggage in any Holocaust denial or trivialization" (14:16, 6 December 2012). Since Paul Siebert did not refer to holocaust denial, it is unclear why you brought it up. TFD (talk) 22:47, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Thank you TFD, your explanation is quite correct.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:25, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Anti-communism is so 20th century

Collapsed per WP:NOTFORUM

I recently asked my students, college Juniors and Seniors, the following questions: Question 2. After World War II, the two dominant world powers were ____________ and ______________ . About a third of the students answered US and China. Question 5. What organization's charter promises "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom, and for those ends to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors." About a third of the students answered either "communism" or "socialism". There is nothing so ancient as modern history. An interesting observation, Rick. And a very sad one...--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:46, 7 December 2012 (UTC) Communism is an unspeakable horror. It killed millions of times more people than the Nazis. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 11:20, 24 December 2012 (UTC) You allow your passion for anti-communism to run away with you. Certainly the Nazis killed at least a million people. A million times a million is a trillion, and there aren't that many people on earth. But the real point is that the battle against communism is won. You're fighting last century's war. Rick Norwood (talk) 21:31, 24 December 2012 (UTC) And considering that the Nazis actually killed more than 30 million humans (with 20 million being evil godless commie pinkos), communism would have killed, using Mr. Norwood's calculus, some 30 trillion. Of course the real laugh is the idea that an economic model, one that has never actaully been implemented by any government at any time (i.e., ever), can kill people. True horror is not perpetrated by concepts, it is perpetrated by men. — ArtifexMayhem (talk) 06:52, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Actually - the article says it is under "regimes" - which is entirely reasonable as an article basis. Collect (talk) 13:27, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Communism and Nazism are basically the same thing because Nazism is basically a nationalist form of socialism. Both ideologies serve Satan. If you're still not convinced, I recommend this book. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 14:59, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Dear Zloyvolsheb, I beg you... Instead of reading some obscure books, try to read, for example, this: "Stephen G. Wheatcroft. The Great Leap Upwards: Anthropometric Data and Indicators of Crises and Secular Change in Soviet Welfare Levels, 1880-1960. Slavic Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Spring, 1999), pp. 27-60. Only XX century Japan demonstrated life expectancy growth comparable to that in the USSR. By the way, the idea that true horror is not perpetrated by concepts, it is perpetrated by men is a calque from the main Valentino's thesis (remember, Valentino is a core source for this article). Regarding Satan, if you are serious, please, remember that Wikipedia is not a place for pushing your religious views. If you are just joking, please, explain me what is Satanic in socialism?!--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:17, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Paul, I am not pushing my religious views. I never do that. I only argue on the basis of what I find in reliable sources, and I rely on mainstream Western historians. In creating the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks accepted all three temptations rejected by Christ in the wilderness. But they gained the loyalty of the Soviet people by hiding the fact that they did so in the interests of Satan. The Soviet Union fell because when the long-deceived Soviet people realized, as a result of glasnost, who they had been serving in reality, they threw off their mental bondage to an evil system and began seeking other gods. David Satter (2001). Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union. Yale University Press. p. 418. Please read up. A lot of leftists need to educate themselves. A lot of useful idiots defended communism because, like those long-deceived Soviets, they did not realize its essence – what David Satter calls its satanic nature. It outrages me that well-intentioned people go on doing that. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 17:38, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Of course, the USSR fell for quite different reason, however, this is not a subject of our dispute, because failure of the USSR was not a failure of Communism. Communism had already been essentially dead in the Soviet Union by the moment of its splitting. Dissolution of the USSR was a result of decision of national elites who, for quite different reasons, realised that connecting their future with Moscow would bring more losses than gains. (I can provide reliable sources, but I see no need to do that, because as I already said, the failure of Communism and dissolution of the USSR are quite different phenomenae). Regarding "useful idiots", I assume this remark is not directed at me, isn't it? The idea about Satanic nature of socialism sounds weird taking into account that many authors find significant parallelism between socialism and Christianity, and even such a phenomenon as Christian socialism exists.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:55, 27 December 2012 (UTC) I cannot find a copy of Gordon's pamphlet, and it is not available on Amazon. Since he died in 1962, under Guyanese copyright law it would have entered the public realm this year. Do you think you could scan a copy and we could post it to a Cold War history website so that others could read it? Have you got any less obscure sources for devil worship and Satanism in the Soviet Union? I had always thought they were atheists, but would be interested in different views. TFD (talk) 18:23, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Mr. David Satter isn't that obscure, and he was, actually, a Financial Times correspondent in Moscow, reporting on the Evil Empire. Anyway, Satan's influence on Bolshevism is well-known to lots of folks. The great reverend Billy Graham labelled communism "Satan's religion." Zloyvolsheb (talk) 18:38, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Zloyvolsheb, this talk page isn't a forum for your ridiculous soapboxing. Furthermore, as you are no doubt well aware, it is under discretionary sanctions'. I suggest that you cease violating multiple Wikipedia policies here immediately: If you continue in this manner, I shall ask that sanctions be invoked, and that you be topic-banned. AndyTheGrump (talk) 19:46, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Happy New Year, Andy. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 20:19, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Andy, with due respect, I cannot believe you are speaking seriously: which sanctions are you talking about? Sanctions for soapboxing? Zloyvolsheb, one more mention of Satan, and you will fully convince me that you run out of arguments. Please, no reference to Satan, God, Buddha, Santa Claus or Harry Potter in serious discussions.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:54, 27 December 2012 (UTC) Look, this section's title is "Anti-communism is so 20th century." Well, David Satter is a 21st-century writer, isn't he? What other serious discussion do you see? Zloyvolsheb (talk) 21:05, 27 December 2012 (UTC) I was referring to the 22-page book you recommended above, Communism is Evil (1962) by Andrew Gordon, which was published by Argosy in (then) British Guiana), and funded by Fred Schwartz and Joost Sluis of the "Christian Anti-Communism Crusade".[13] Could you please scan your copy of the book so that we can post it on the internet. In the meantime, could you please tell us what the book says. BTW do think that Graham was being literal when he said that? Notice how warmly he was received by Communist officials when he visited Eastern Europe in 1983. TFD (talk) 19:41, 27 December 2012 (UTC) I don't have a copy. I judge books by their covers. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 21:09, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Requested edit

{{edit protected}}

Under the subheader dealing with the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, there is an internal link leading to a nonexistent page, "Haile Mengistu"; it should actually be linked to Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Thanks. Kurtis ^(talk) 21:37, 15 January 2013 (UTC)

 Done Thanks. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 03:53, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Not a problem. =) Kurtis ^(talk) 15:01, 16 January 2013 (UTC)

Move the article to "Mass deaths under Communist regimes"

Its a much less neutral title, and, this would stop the evident mix-up in this article between mass death and mass murder perpetrated by communist regimes... Any of you with me? --TIAYN (talk) 11:19, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

One of the problems with the current title is that the term "mass killings" does not capture all the killings. So the murder of Trotsky for example while included in the body count can hardly be described as a mass killing. So I think the word "mass" should go. Deaths is too general. The word "regime" is also either redundant or POV, and does not include killings by Communist insurgents. Even the term "killings" is problematic because we do not include enemy combatants killed in wars, yet do include deaths in famine that are not always considered to be killings and even lower birth rates. I would suggest "Victims of Communism". While that too is POV (Canadian authorities for example will not allow a statue to carry that name), and could be interpreted as including non-lethal victims, it has become the common term used by people who take an interest in the subject. TFD (talk) 17:04, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Am I reading this right that both of you would prefer a less neutral title? AmateurEditor (talk) 18:16, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

The more obvious choice would be "Democides associated with Communist regimes" as far as I can tell. YMMV. Collect (talk) 18:57, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

Neutrality in article titles says, "Conflicts often arise over whether an article title complies with Wikipedia's Neutral Point of View policy. Resolving such debates depends on whether the article title is a name derived from reliable sources or a descriptive title created by Wikipedia editors." I did in fact vote to keep "Communist genocide" as the title. The problem with the current name is that it makes the article a coatrack. With "Victims of Communism" we have a body of literature so the article itself could be neutral. Collect, that is an interesting suggestion. What about "Communism and democide"? TFD (talk) 23:04, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

I rather think it is far simpler to note that democides have occurred asscoiated with "Communist regimes" - your title would seem to require an assertion that Communism is the "culprit" and not the "Communist regime" which is the culprit. No one seriously can doubt that such democides have existed, and most especially denying Stalin's acts and Mao's acts would be ludicrous. The term "genocide" was debated and discarded because of its intrinsic requirement that the group killed be a "gens" (a race or nation - though strictly seaking it refers to patrilineal descent). Collect (talk) 01:26, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

The problem with "Mass deaths under Communist regimes" is that it seems to say "A lot of people died for some unknown reason". But most of the sources make it clear that they were killed, and there was some level of intention in causing their deaths by the Communist regimes. So "Mass killings by Communist regimes" would be better. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 03:23, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

That's a problem with the article, not with the title. Some of the sources seem to include all "mass deaths" which occur under a regime with the regime, without credible evidence that the regime caused or could have prevented the deaths. Even we could restrict the article to "democide", then changing the title should be automatic. But, under the present editing restrictions, that's not going to happen. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 06:07, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Agree with Smallbones and Arthur. Mass deaths under Communist regimes is not a separate topic. The authors who study mass mortality in some Communist societies do not make any generalisations: they place them in the historical context of the given society, and they very rarely make an emphasis on Communism as a primary cause of mass deaths.

However, some authors place some (or most) of mass deaths, both coercive and dispossessive, into a category of "mass killings" (democide, politicide, etc), and draw significant connections between them and Communism. The subject of this article are the works of those authors (Courtois, Rummel, Valentino, Goldhagen et al). Therefore, the title is quite correct, however, we need modify the article. Concretely, we don't need to tell about the events as if we are talking about established facts. Instead of that, need:

• to describe the concepts of each author, and to attribute them to those authors explicitly. Thus, cannot write "Mass killimgs occurred in Communist states, and 80 million were killed", but "according to Courtois, Communism caused deaths of up to 100 million people, a small part of those deaths were a result of coercive killings (murders, executions etc), whereas most of them were caused by deterioration of living conditions (which resulted in major famine). Courtois combine all those death together and concludes that Communism was more deadly political system then Nazism."
• to explain how did the authors came to their conclusions, and what information were their conclusiona based on. For example, during the discussion of Goldhagen's views we should explain that most figures he took from early Rummel's works.
• to add due criticism of their works. For example, regarding Courtois' views, we should add that the idea to combine direct and indirect deaths has been videly criticised by such authors as Aronson, Kuromiya, Werth et al, and to trace the origin of the BB introduction to the post-Vichy syndrom of French leftist intellectuals.
• to provide a description of the discussed events in each separate country based on the works of single society scholars. Thus, regarding the Chinese famine we can extensively use the works of such reputable scholar as O'Grada.

All of that requires unprotection of the article, and we need to discuss this possibility with Arbcom. We have serious reasons for that, because the situation has considerably changed since the moment of article's protection: a disruptive sock Tentontunic (one of the sources of the conflict) has been blocked indefinitely, and some sober and intelligent editors as AmateurEditor, Arthur Rubin, Amerul, Annie Hall, Zloyvolsheb, and some others seem to express serious desire to contribute. I think it is a guaranty that old conflicts will not be resumed after article's deprotection.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:31, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

It's still POV ether way. Both names are negative and should be changed to an entirely new name that is much less POV then this articles current name. --Hinata talk 19:51, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

I rather think any topic relating to deaths at all would be considered "negative" by someone - the question only is "would such a title be as NPOV as is reasonably possible" and titles which refer in no way to deaths at all are likely not to be rational titles for any article on Wikipedia here. Collect (talk) 23:12, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

The "regimes" is the part I have a problem with. --Hinata talk 19:37, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

How about "Democides occurring under goverments identified as Marxist or Communist"? Collect (talk) 21:20, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Identified by whom? AndyTheGrump (talk) 21:32, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

By reliable sources so denoting them. Same as Wikipedia does for any claims on any topic. Collect (talk) 23:30, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't see the problem with the term regime. it's basically neutral. you can have a "human rights regime," a "bush regime", a "capitalist regime", basically whatever. The problem is, is that mass killings are not exclusive to communist regimes, they are not endemic of it, there is no special relationship between the two. The occur under democracies, authoritarian governments, capitalist, communist, mixed economies, fascist states, and so on. This article implies that there is a special relationship between communism and mass death that does not occur under different regimes and systems. Obviously mass deaths and killings occur elsewhere. (This is obviously not the only problem with this article - ie, lousy sources, poor writing, dumping of information that may not be relevant to this precise topic, or superfluous information, and so on). This is why encyclopediae other than this one will isolate singular occurrences or mass killings and discuss it. In an essay, theorists will group genocides, democides, etc. and so on, and try and find common grounds for why mass killings have occurred, so that preferably they won't be repeated. This is why the article has to be called "under communist regimes", because they are not necessarily "by" the regime, but they occurred under its reign. You can get a much bigger total, and therefore more shock value, by having it as "under x regime" than "by". I find it very interesting that this article is acceptable, but an antithetical article for the opposite economic regime is not. This title also implies that there is some universalism under communist regimes (which there is not, each state has its own particular history and system and so on, which this article has no means of exploring). AnieHall (talk) 06:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Anybody who is having problems putting the words killing and Communist in the same sentence or title is just denying reality, as documented in reliable sources. When folks start arguing that they can't be reliable sources because they put killing and Communist in the same sentence, it time that they just leave this article alone. Accept reality and reliable sources, or just go bother somebody else. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 23:16, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree with that, especially with the advice to "accept reality and reliable sources". Unfortunately, some editors prefer to accept just some reliable sources and to ignore others. For example, you Smallbones, still provided no satisfactory arguments explaining why a source that has been severely criticized by the best quality reliable sources still remains in the first sentence of the article. In that situation your advice to accept reality is absolutely hypocritical.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:29, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Smallbones, the criticism of Courtois has been explained in reliable sources that have been presented to you. It is an attempt to rehabilitate elements of the French Right that sided with Germany over the greater evil of Communism. Notice the timing, the book was published after Communism ceased to be a major political force either in Eastern Europe or France and long after Stalin's death. In that sense it was an attack not only on Communists but on the entire range of people who sided with the Allies, and therefore disturbing on many levels. TFD (talk) 10:02, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

I have no problem with communist or killing, but I do have a problem with the regimes. This article is a classic POV fork that is inherently negative POV and will likely stay that way unless it would be deleted. --Hinata talk 12:32, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

As far as I can see this article isn't a "classic fork" of anything. VєсrumЬа ►TALK 06:02, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Is there any information in this article that should not also be included in another article? Otherwise it is a fork. TFD (talk) 06:19, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Great Chinese Famine article does not describes the event as mass killing, therefore, this article is its POV fork.

Soviet war in Afghanistan does not tell about mass killing, therefore, this article is its POV fork.

Soviet famine of 1932-1933 does not speak about mass killings, therefore, this article is its POV fork.

And so on.--Paul Siebert (talk) 08:11, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

In order to be a POV fork of another article, this article would have to be about basically the same topic as another article but from a different POV. This is a different topic with a different scope than those three. Those articles are at best subtopics of this one, so this is not an actual problem. And why would you not conclude that the absence of discussion in those articles of "mass killing" reflects an omission in those articles, rather than evidence of bias in this one? For example, one of the sources used in the Great Chinese Famine article has historian Frank Dikötter calling Mao " the greatest mass murderer in world history"[14], yet this is only reflected in the article as "Historian Frank Dikötter, having been granted special access to Chinese archival materials, estimates that there were at least 45 million premature deaths from 1958 to 1962." In the case of Soviet war in Afghanistan, you are wrong that the article does not "tell about mass killing", because it does so in the "Destruction in Afghanistan" section. Likewise, in the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 article, the "Estimation of the loss of life" section mentions "victims of famine and repression" (repression often being a euphemism for killing) and cites estimates from both the "Black Book of Communism" and "Stalin's Genocides", sources which certainly do not refer to the killing in euphemistic terms. AmateurEditor (talk) 18:40, 30 December 2012 (UTC)

Cannot agree. The Soviet war in Afghanistan article says 250,000 were killed by Soviet troops and 178,000 by Afghan government. The MKuKR article implies 1 - 1.5 were killed during mass killings (otherwise it is not clear why this figure is there). Importantly, SWiA article does not characterise Afghan regime as Communist.

Regarding China, I am aware of Dikotter's views, and I am aware of criticism of his writings. Thus, Felix Wemheuer (SITES OF HORROR: MAO'S GREAT FAMINE [with Response]Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962. The China Journal, No. 66 (July 2011), pp. 155-164) describes his methodology as follows:

"Western and Chinese demographers have estimated that between 15 and 40 million people died. Dikotter argues that the minimum would be an excess mortality of 45 million (p. 33). It seems that his interest is in presenting the highest number possible, to label the Great Leap as the greatest mass killing in human history. He arrives at this figure based on discrepancies between the estimates of historian demographer Cao Shuji and data from some county security police reports. Basing his estimate on all available county gazetteers, Cao suggests excess mortality to be 32.5 million; Dikotter adds 40 to 50 per cent to official county statistics, and arrives at 45 million. The economist demographer Coimac O Grada has criticized this method as speculation. Furthermore, Dikotter does not present much evidence for his claim that 2.5 million people were beaten to death and 1 to 3 million committed suicide (p. 304)."

Don't you find adding 40 to 50% (i.e. 12-15 million) an acceptable approach for a scholar who pretends to do serious "archival research"?

Regarding the overall evaluation of Dikotter's writing, this can be interesting.

"However, if one is familiar with the research3 and expects a brand new interpretation of the famine, one will be disappointed. Dikotter's account reads like a long list of atrocities committed by Mao's regime against the Chinese people and bears the hallmarks of having been written in furious outrage. The polemic and emotional language of the book is clearly targeted at the general reader." (ibid.)

"Dikotter clearly does not always adhere to this promise of analytical rigor. In many chapters, he makes an argument and provides five or six examples from archival documents that deal mostly with events on the county or village level. His method is revealed through the use of problematic statements such as "rape spread like a contagion through a distressed moral landscape. A few examples will suffice" (p. 258). His estimate that 30 to 40 per cent of houses were demolished in China is based on a generalization of the data for Hunan Province (p. 169); this typifies his over-the-top approach to quantification. Moreover, Dikotter often selects the most shocking cases."(ibid)

"It is very obvious that Dikotter is less critical about famine deaths during the "Age of Openness" than of those in the "Communist hell"."(ibid.)

Clearly, writing by Dikotter and similar authors hardly reflect mainstream scholarly views. In contrast, MKuCR is based primarily on that type sources, so it is definitely POW fork.--Paul Siebert (talk) 06:10, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Clearly the article has problems. This article just looks like anti-communist propaganda (or counter revolutionary) that beginning with the name, and then some. Here are the problems with the article:

This article was created by a now banned user. Attempted improvements led to an "incredible POV violations" "On a scale never before seen in my history of being here". Though I wasn't involved or ever edited this article in any way, the situation that led to being protected is clearly unfounded and unjust to protect it forever - is very extreme. Also, to the article itself, it says how people died of supposedly state terrorist by the communist, and I do not believe it. The reason I say this article is a fork is because it clearly is dedicated to anti-communist community. As a matter of fact, this article is a fork of communist criticism. --Hinata talk 20:05, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, the definition of a POV fork requires that the topic itself be a POV and a fork. Mass killings under Communist regimes is neither. Hinata's denialism[15] notwithstanding, mass killing did occur under Communist regimes (this is not a point of view, unless everything is a point of view) and we have good sources to that effect. That the article uses sources that you dislike or that you feel are not representative of the field as a whole does not make the article a POV fork, it makes the article incomplete. You were wrong when you said that the subtopic articles you gave did not include mention of mass killing. Whatever differences exist between the numerical estimates given in different Wikipedia articles reflect that 1)the numbers are rough estimates for events where the exact numbers will never be known and 2)multiple estimates exist from multiple sources. Therefore, to criticize the estimate used in one article based upon another estimate having been used in another article is not proving anything other than that both articles lack comprehensiveness. Since this is Wikipedia, and one expects articles to be perpetually incomplete, this does not much bother me. But the appropriate response is to work toward making the articles in question more comprehensive and to add those missing estimates. In the special case of MkuCr, this work must unfortunately take place on our workpage (where there has been a notable lack of activity). In your specific example of the 1-1.5 million figure given for Afghanistan, this looks like a clear error in the article because the actual figure given from that source is slightly smaller. It has been tagged as suspect in the article already, but should be changed.

Regarding what is "mainstream" on this topic, that cannot be determined in a controversial field simply by citing one source's criticism of another. The only way to deal with this is to gather as complete a range of sources as possible (which is what we are supposed to be doing on the workpage), so that an accurate impression of the range can be given to the reader. Explanations for the differences must also be provided. The article should be inclusive and comprehensive. We are not here to arrive at the Truth or to average various sources together to arrive at a central estimate, or to exclude estimates from reliable sources which differ from other reliable sources. All estimates must be attributed to their particular authors and presented in the context of alternative estimates by others. If there turns out to be a tight consensus in the sources on a particular number, then this will be obvious to the reader, and if there is a widely divergent range of estimates, this will also be obvious to the reader.

Regarding Felix Wemheuer's review of Dikotter's book, his criticism is of both style and substance. We can ignore the criticism of style. We should not ignore that Wemheuer states at the very beginning of his review that "The greatest famine in Chinese history caused between 15 and 45 million deaths." 45 million, then, is acceptable to Wemheuer as one end of the mainstream. Also very significant are two things which help to explain why Dikotter's number would be at the large end of the range: he includes a longer time frame for the starvation than is typically used (1958-1962, rather than 1959-1961) and that "[i]n contrast to other Western scholars, Dikötter managed to gain access to eleven provincial archives. This is a significant achievement, given that the archival system in China is highly restricted. Remarkably, about 80 per cent of his footnotes are based on these archival documents." From your quotes, the substantive criticism by Wemheuer is as follows:

1. "Dikotter adds 40 to 50 per cent to official county statistics, and arrives at 45 million. The economist demographer Coimac O Grada has criticized this method as speculation. Furthermore, Dikotter does not present much evidence for his claim that 2.5 million people were beaten to death and 1 to 3 million committed suicide (p. 304)."

2. "Dikotter clearly does not always adhere to this promise of analytical rigor. In many chapters, he makes an argument and provides five or six examples..."

3. "His estimate that 30 to 40 per cent of houses were demolished in China is based on a generalization of the data for Hunan Province (p. 169); this typifies his over-the-top approach to quantification."

4. "It is very obvious that Dikotter is less critical about famine deaths during the "Age of Openness" [i.e. Nationalist regime period] than of those in the "Communist hell".

Here is Dikotter's response:

1. "Wemheuer repeats the allegation made by Ó Gráda that the total number of victims that I give is too high. The basis of this claim is that a one per cent rate of death is too low to be considered normal. Would it really change that much if we doubled it to two per cent? In Fuyang 2.4 million died out of a total population of 8 million (in Cambodia under Pol Pot, 1.7 to 2.4 million people died out, of a total of 8 million). A whole chapter entitled “Sites of Horror” shows how, in county after county, over 15 per cent of the population died, sometimes up to a third. It is fine to query my figures, but one also has to explain why every historian who has spent a long time in the archives has reached a very high figure, from 38 million by Yang Jisheng to 43 million by Chen Yizi, and most of all (but never mentioned by Wemheuer) Yu Xiguang, who after two decades of archival research puts it at 55 million."

2;3. "Wemheuer in his review wishes to have it both ways. On the one hand, he complains that the book is a “long list of atrocities”, yet on the other he alleges that I generalize from “a few examples”. The chapter on housing alone is over 4,500 words long, and a lengthy section looks at the many reasons for which houses were destroyed. The figure that I give is up to 40 per cent, not 40 per cent. He believes that my example of a kindergarten supervisor who used a hot iron to punish a child is extreme, but there is another chapter of 4,500 words on the fate of the most vulnerable members of society, children, many of whom suffered far more exacting forms of punishment. Wemheuer ends up replicating the view of the perpetrators of violence: after all, the Party leaders at the time were the ones who dismissed cases of cannibalism as mere “metaphors” and punished those who reported them."

4. "Of course the famines under the Nationalist regime are deplorable, but a wartime disaster is hardly comparable to a man-made famine by a government that is not directly threatened by invasion or civil war. There is a difference between starving to death and being starved to death."

4. "There is a point, in historical debates about 20th-century atrocities, where the absence of sufficient evidence allows doubt and even denial to flourish. Yang Jisheng, Yu Xiguang, Qiao Peihua and I, among others, have tried to document what happened during the Great Famine on the basis of an abundance of material straight from the Party archives. Let us hope that more historians will move into the archives rather revert to the published speeches of Chairman Mao."

I don't see much substance in Wemheuer's criticism, but it would be original research for us to take sides in a dispute between reliable sources. We must present what is available neutrally. AmateurEditor (talk) 20:36, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

Dear AmateurEditor, I respectfully disagree with your vision of the situation. That is not a dispute between two author; what we actually have is a book that has been criticised by peers for numerous flaws. Interestingly, Dikotter himself adds arguments to his own criticism. Thus, he characterised thoughtful and balanced O'Grads's criticism as "allegations". Is it acceptable in a dispute between two serious scholars?

Meanwhile, O'Grada writes:

"MGF may become the best-known account of the GLF famine for a while. But should it? It is not a comprehensive account of the famine; it is dismissive of academic work on the topic; it is weak on context and unreliable with data; and it fails to note that many of the horrors it describes were recurrent features of Chinese history during the previous century or so. More attention to economic history and geography and to the comparative history of famines would have made for a much more useful book. In what follows I focus on the economic context of the famine, review features of the famine treated by Dikötter but worth further study, and conclude by discussing the role in these events of Mao and the party elite."

I cannot reproduce all what O'Grada says, however, his calm and intelligent tone, his serious argumentation creates an impression that that authors is unbiased and objective. The same can be said about Wemheuer, whose review on Dikotter's book is much more thoughtful and detailed then Dikotter's brief and emotional responce.

In summary, whereas both authors agree that Dikotter's narrative shed a light on the details of those time events, his generalisations are far from adequate.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:22, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for the response. If we are going to respectfully disagree with each other on this, then I ought to do what I can to make sure I have explained myself as concisely and clearly as possible, in case there is a chance for agreement after all:

I consider none of these sources to be impartial. I don't mean just these particular sources; I mean all of them. And on top of that, none of us are impartial either. That may sound like an evasion, but I think it is actually the critical point for establishing consensus here. I have no doubt that, where our sources disagree, some are more accurate to the (unknown) truth than others, because how could it be any other way, but we as Wikipedia editors have virtually no way of determining that for ourselves. Certainly we cannot rely on who sounds more sober and credible to us since we are not objective here, let alone experts; and certainly we cannot engage in original research by picking and choosing based upon any expertise that we do have. I think the only way we can deal with this neutrally is to be exhaustively inclusive: we include every unique estimation, clearly attributed as the specific position of its author, and every substantive criticism of it. Not only will this allow readers to evaluate the credibility of estimations for themselves, but the variety will demonstrate better than any sourced statement we can make that this is a contentious issue and is not settled. This approach also seems to be what Wikipedia policy encourages us to do in a situation like this, if the NPOV FAQ is any indication. AmateurEditor (talk) 00:30, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

This is a very interesting discussion, I find useful if a comparison can be made between Mao's famine and those of the previous government under Chiang Kai Shek and the Emperors. Here's some sources I gathered:

*Famine scholar O Grada's review of Dikkoter's book:[16][17], in which he quoted Yang Jisheng that between 1920 and 1936, "famine due to crop failures took the lives of 18.36 million people". O Grada also cited Tawney's claims that the famine of 1849 Great North China Famine of 1876–79 killed around 13 million people each.

*Li Minqi, who is a Chinese new leftist dissident: [18][19], argued that even the peak death rates were typical of pre-Republican China.

Personally, I also think Dikkoter should not be given undue weight, as he is somewhat considered a "revisionist" historian [20], having stressed the benefits of British introducing opium and praised Chiang's KMT government as a "democratic". Furthermore, the book was not peer-reviewed, and was funded in part by the pro-ROC Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation. Thus I think alternate sources be used, including Yang Jisheng's "Tombstone". — Preceding unsigned comment added by LucasGeorge (talk • contribs) 14:45, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Am I correct in saying you view 18 million deaths over 17 years to be roughly equivalent to 45 million deaths in 2 years? And if you wish to debate whether a source meets WP:RS the place to do it is thataway and not here.Collect (talk) 15:02, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Do you understand what context is? By the way the section is presented, it's as if communist policies alone is the culprit of the GCF, and makes no mention of the numerous famines which occurred under Republican China and prior, as noted by famines scholars such as O Grada in their review of Dikotter. For example, a 1928 TIME article [21] noted that prior to the GCF, 1,828 famines has been recorded since 108 BC, averaging to one famine a year, to the degree that large scale famines were seen as the harbingers of regime change.

And despite your claims, I certainly am not asking for the removal of Dikotter, but merely noting that his estimate is far higher than common scholarly estimates, and note the availability of other authors who worked on the issue, such as Chinese author and dissident Yang Jisheng.--LucasGeorge (talk) 16:13, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Collect, firstly, did I understand you correct that your "45 million death" came from Dikotter (who has been severely criticized by serious authors)? If this figure came not from Dikotter, you probably refer to the estimates that included both deaths and birth deficit. OGrada says:

"...more recent estimates such as those by Peng (23 million),Yao (18 million), and Houser, Sands, and Xiao (15 million) are lower than the 30 million or more that gained wide currency in the 1980s,14 never mind the figures of fifty and sixty million deaths . . . cited at internal meetings of senior Party officials’ and lent currency by Becker."

so we can speak about less then 30 million deaths.

Secondly, you are probably unfamiliar with the source you discuss: OGrada does not claim famine lasted for over 17 years, he says that two famines took place, in 1935–6 and again in 1942–3.

To summarise, whereas OGrada agreed that the GLF famine was the greatest famine in absolute numbers (because of the increase of Chinese population), some famines in past were more devastating in relative numbers. In other words, the GLF famine was not something outstanding in Chinese history.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:10, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

PS. I recall, I already explained that on this talk page, and you seemed to participate in that discussion. What is the reason for raising the same (already addressed) arguments again and again?--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:15, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

IOW 1.1 million deaths per year when the population was 500 million (1920 to 1936) was equal to 15 million deaths per year when the population was 600 million (GLF rates)? Do you really think the ratios are the same? Sorry Paul - I rather think when deals with orders of magnitude as a difference, that Wikipedia can not assume that they are remotely comparable. Cheers. Collect (talk) 18:43, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

A typical refusal to get a point: who said the deaths we are talking about were uniformly distributed among the whole 17 year period? As I already explained, O'Grada said that "For the two centuries or so before 1949, major famines in China were probably frequent enough to warrant Mallory’s and Tawney’s descriptions". (O'Grada refers to their words "land of famine"). In 1849 major famine destroyed ca 14 million, in 1876–9 famine killed 9.5 to 13 million (more than GLF famine in relative numbers). Regarding the Republican period, O'Grada speaks about two major famines, in 1935-36 and in 1942-43. I think the 18 million you are talking about were the victims of those two famines.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:54, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

Aha - ad hom since you have no real answer again? The point is that far more than ten million deaths occurred under communist regimes - contrary to what you seemed to try claiming in the past. That the argument here is whether 45 million is so far in excess of 40 million (the "scholarly top") that you can deride it. This person had access to records from the government - so you can not deride it as "cold war rhetoric" either. The source gives 18 million as the total from 1920 to 1936 (Republican China famine deaths) (I used the review via Questia, so I doubt the reviewer was making it up). Now can you finally accept that your "total of ten million over all countries" is silly? [22] where you limit it to in the millions as opposed to even "tens of millions", [23] makes clear your position that any "excess deaths" were not a result of deliberate government action. In the case of China, the fact is that "deliberate government action" was well documented in the files released. I know you wish it were otherwise, but these files seem a teesy bit more conclusive that you had indicated. Cheers. Collect (talk) 22:11, 13 January 2013 (UTC)

It would be easier to discuss it if you provided the exact citation. I any event, if you are talking about 1920-36 period, O'Grada writes that, for example, (during the Republican period) in Gansu province one-third of the population had died since 1926 owing to famine, civil war, banditry, and typhus. According to Lillian Li (Fighting Famine in North China: State, Market, and Environmental Decline, 1690s-1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), p. 304) 10 million died as a result of North China famine in 1928-30. Taking into account that many authors believe the GLF killed in between 15-40 million, this difference is by no means "orders of magnitude". And, the North China famine was not the only Republican era famine...

Regarding your "Now can you finally accept that your "total of ten million over all countries" is silly?" I only accept that the question itself was absolutely silly: the fact that ten or twenty million died as a result of famine in a country where famines were routine events is not an evidence of mass killing. In other words, I never declared people didn't die prematurely under Communists (for various causes). However, not every premature death is a "mass killing", and my sources demonstrate that persuasively.--Paul Siebert (talk) 02:33, 14 January 2013 (UTC)

Good points, Paul. In general, this article might be less exhausting to look at and discuss if any of its issues were ever able to be reconciled. AnieHall (talk) 06:02, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Cambodia

I've proposed a few revisions to the section on Cambodia here. According to the source, Etcheson raised the number of victims of execution in the mass graves to 1,386,734 after completing the survey. This should be corrected. Furthermore, Vickery's estimate for the total number of people killed directly and indirectly by the Khmer Rouge and by all sides during the entire civil war combined is lower than the number of victims of execution found in the mass graves. Vickery arrived at it by comparing the lowest population estimate from the early seventies and the highest from the mid-eighties, and he is not a demographer. His scholarship is shoddy, politically motivated, inconsistent with the anecdotal and forensic evidence, and effectively obsolete (as, indeed, the source cited for his estimate concludes). I suggest using the demographic studies of Sliwinski (who estimated at least 1.8 million killed including about 1 million executed) and Heuveline (who sugggests about 2.2 million excess deaths from a range of 1.17 to 3.42 million) instead. Finally, I believe we should mention the estimates before the discussion of the regime's nature. I also added a few other references, including Etcheson's After the Killing Fields. I believe these changes are fairly minor and should not arouse much controversy, but am prepared to defend them.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:25, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

BTW, I removed the (uncited) sentence about US support for the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion. According to Cambodia specialist Nate Thayer, there is "no evidence that the US gave any material support whatsoever to the Khmer Rouge". There is evidence that the US recognized the coalition government that included the Khmer Rouge at the UN, but I think that fact is beyond the scope of this article.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:57, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

That is unacceptable. You very well know there is plenty of scholarship regarding US support for the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion; we even discussed it recently. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 10:19, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Right, eminently reliable sources such as "Covert Action Quarterly". In that discussion, you seemed to agree that there was no evidence of direct US material support for the KR, but I conceded that the US recognized them at the UN. Thayer is surely more reliable than a "Covert Action Quarterly" article by a non-expert guilty of libel. In any case, you have failed to explain why this allegation, which is not widely accepted, is relevant to this article. I did not object to two sentences describing the controversy in History of Cambodia, but this is a different article.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 11:00, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Covert Action Quarterly is a reliable source, and there are many more. And it is relevant because the Khmer Rouge continued to operate and its coalition remained recognized as the legitimate Cambodian regime after the Cambodian-Vietnamese War. This made it easier for Pol Pot to keep murdering. In fact, I would say that Pol Pot got away with murdering innocent Cambodian people because the West supported him just like the Communist Dictator Stalin was able to get away with murdering innocent Jews and Balts because the West supported him. Zloyvolsheb (talk) 11:49, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, I don't think that Pol Pot really killed all that many people after 1979, or even that he cared about UN recognition (although it is true that there was a lack of international will to put him on trial). This article does not dwell on the extensive Western support for Stalin's regime. I think other editors may agree with me that adding material about Western support for communist regimes is irrelevant synthesis.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 12:11, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

One should probably mention that, according to Helen Fein, the important factor which caused KR rise to power and their radicalisation was killing of an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 Cambodians by US mass bombing.

In general, I find this section unsatisfactory. It is ahistorical, and it simply combines all possible negative facts in attempts to associate them solely with Communism. I would say the discussion of each country should be done according to the following scheme:

1. Who the leaders of this country were (in the case of Cambodia, they were followers of "a radical, annihilatory version of communism")? This is important, because a pure, classical Communist, in a case if such Communist ever existed, should be placed in between the sample of meter and kilogram in International Bureau of Weights and Measures. Each Communist movement was different from others, and each movement was severely affected by local conditions, leaders' personal history, national traditions, etc.
2. What were the circumstances of their coming to power (in Cambodia, it was a brutal civil war)? It is important, because overall brutality of the society significantly affects subsequent events.
3. What was the leaders' program? (In a case of Cambodia, it was radical isolationism and total de-urbanisation). That is important, because this program is in stark contrast with, for example, forceful urbanisation in the USSR, a difference noted by many authors.
4. What were other factors that lead to repressions? In case of Cambodia, they were extreme Khmer nationalism and centuries old revenge traditions. They major factor that triggered nationalist violence was extreme poverty and desperate situation of rural (Khmer) population. As a result, they hated predominantly non-Khmer and relatively rich urban population and "old people", and enthusiastically supported KR.
5. What kind of mass killing took place? (For example, mass shooting, or deliberate mass starvation, or deportation deaths, or widespread famine caused by different factors). That is important, because to start a risky economical transformation, and to execute peoples are two different things.
6. What was the scale of repressions? (Provide a range, and the generally accepted figure, when possible; in case of Cambodia, the latter figure is more or less known, and the stress should be made on this figure). If the scale of deaths from different causes is known, describe it.
7. Was the regime supported by other Communist regimes? (In Cambodian case, it was partially supported by China, and was strongly condemned by the USSR).
8. When and why mass killings stopped? In case of Cambodia, that happened as a result of intervention of Communist Vietnam. A new Cambodian Communist government engaged in no mass killings.

That would be, in my opinion, a reasonable and neutral way to write this article.--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:34, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I think this ^ is a good start towards improving the section. The discussion below could have been more constructive by simply suggesting additional information. The below statement goes off on a wild tangent, which indeed misrepresents what was written above.AnieHall (talk) 07:18, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Incroyable. The killings of millions were caused by the US, and the KR were not really communists anyways. Seems to me that the overwhelming scholarly consensus is that the KR were, indeed, communists and that they did, indeed, kill a huge number of people. Even Soviet scholars agree on this one, Paul. The communist Khmer Rouge perpetrators relied on bureaucracy in order to organize and implement their policies. As David Hawk has stated, "Murder-by-government under Khmer Rouge rule was so systemic and widespread that a large bureaucracy was required to eliminate the projected, suspected, and imagined opponents." (Kopf, Markusen The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century. Collect (talk) 18:20, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

This is a gross misinterpretation of my position. By the way, what did you Collect read about KR? Are you in position to make a judgement about "scholarly consensus"? In addition, consider some person who is (i) Communist, (ii) white male, (iii) Bulgarian, (iv) admirer of Mikael Jackson, (v) he suffer from bipolar disorder. Now consider a situation when he killed 3 people. Is if a Communist killing, white male killing, killing by a Bulgarian, etc? For you, a "scholarly consensus" will be that this was a killing by a Communist, isn't it?--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:28, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

By the way, what is the reason to cite a source that is only tangentially related to the issue? Why not to discuss, e.g. Fein, who sees some parallelism with Indonesia, Warsaw ghetto or Ethiopia, but who almost ignore a Communist factor?--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:31, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I used Questia and HighBeam as is common now for research - and I dd not find anyone saying the KR was not communist. Nor anyone saying that communism was not a major defining characteristic for the KR. Incroyable squared. Collect (talk) 18:37, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

And how many of the Questia cites would you like on this page? Questia finds over 300 scholarly books, HighBeam over 3000 articles. Not a single one of which says the Khmer Rouge was "not communist." Cheers -- we are now at incroyable cubed. Collect (talk) 18:37, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I didn't ask how many sources you found, I am asking how many sources you have read. In addition, can you please disclose your search procedure? Which keywords did you use for your search? My search gives more.

In addition, I agree that almost every source that discuss KR says they were Communists. However, most sources (except few rightist ones) do not discuss Communism as a key factor. Moreover, many source explicitly say that mass killings of similar scale did not occur in neighboring Communist Vietnam... Therefore, we have to go back to the question about our Communist/Bulgarian/White male/(etc) killer... --Paul Siebert (talk) 18:44, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Aha -- only "rightist sources" connect the KR with lots of killings? Like The New York Times, The Guardian, The Times, Washington Post, NPR, International Herald Tribune etc.? Incroyable to the fourth power, Paul! The US did not cause the millions of deaths. Nor do reliable sources make such a claim. Btw, I did not use "genocide" as a key word to show that the KR were communists. The number of sources that the KR killed a hell of a lot of people make up virtually all the scholarly sources out there.

Try such right wing sources as Genocide in International Law The Crimes of Crimes William A. Schabas, Cambridge University Press "In its 1999 report, the Group of Experts for Cambodia said that persecution by the Khmer Rouge of the Buddhist monkhood might qualify as genocide of a religious group. It said the intent to destroy the group was evidenced by 'the Khmer Rouge's intensely hostile statements towards religion, and the monkhood in particular; the Khmer Rouge's policies to eradicate the physical and ritualistic aspects of the Buddhist religion; the disrobing of monks and abolition of the monkhood; the number of victims; and the executions of Buddhist leaders and recalcitrant monks' , and Considerable academic literature tends to favour inclusion of economic and social groups within the scope of the crime of genocide. The persecution of rich peasants or kulaks during collectivization in the Soviet Union,295 and the massacres associated with various social changes that the Khmer Rouge attempted to effect in Cambodia during the late 1970s,296 are given as examples.

Not to mention the radical right wing nation Canada: On 7 April 1978, the Canadian House of Commons adopted a motion entitled 'Condemnation of Communist Atrocities in Kampuchea' that spoke of 'the terrible genocide committed on two million babies, children, women and men': UN Doc. E/CN.4/Sub.2/414/Add.l, p. 2.

Sorry Paul - your denial that the KR was communist - failed. Your position that the US "caused" the arocities - failed. Your position that the KR was only incidentally communist and that this had naught to do with the killings - failed. Collect (talk) 19:05, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Marek Sliwinski calculates 240,000 civil war deaths--including 40,000 combatants and civilians killed by US bombing.(1) Judith Banister and Paige Johnson describe 275,000 civil war deaths as "the highest mortality we can justify."(2) There is substantial evidence that the communists committed the majority of the killings: John M. Del Vecchio mentions that the North Vietnamese shelling of Baray killed perhaps 20,000 Cambodian civilians; reports of Khmer Rouge atrocities, from slowly sawing off the heads of POWs a little more each day to the shelling of Phnom Penh are even grislier than those of the Viet Cong (Donald Kirk wrote in the Chicago Tribune in 1974 that he "can hardly believe the depth of the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge"); the American bombing initially did not extend beyond 10 miles into Cambodia and it ended years before the civil war concluded. The memoirs of genocide survivors Chanrithy Him, Haing Ngor, Sam and Sokhary You, Someth May and Thida Mam, Vann Nath, Loung Ung, Sophal Leng Stagg, Paul Thai and Molyda Szymusiak all fail to mention a single death of friends or family due to American bombing.

North Vietnam brought the war to Cambodia by using it as base from which to launch attacks on South Vietnam. Documents uncovered from the Soviet archives after 1991 reveal that the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1970 was launched at the explicit request of the Khmer Rouge and negotiated by Pol Pot's then second in command, Nuon Chea.(3) North Vietnam installed the Khmer Rouge in power over a large swath of Cambodia, enabling them to build up their forces through conscription. The pretext that they were not going to introduce communism, but merely restore the monarchy, prevented ordinary Cambodians from fighting very hard against them. The Khmer Rouge were not a populist uprising against the evils of American imperialism, but a conspiratorial movement of French-educated Marxists who gained power through deception and foreign intervention. Your claim about the US bombing is an inversion of the truth. According to David Chandler, "The bombing had the effect the Americans wanted--it broke the communist encirclement of Phnom Penh."(4) Peter Rodman and Michael Lind wrote that US intervention saved Cambodia from collapse in 1970 and 1973.(5) Etcheson dismisses as "untenable" the claim that US bombing played a significant role in the rise of the Khmer Rouge.(6) Even Shawcross has admitted that the North Vietnamese intervention played the decisive role in their victory.

The Khmer Rouge bloodbath was not peasant revenge for Western bombing but a planned mass murder motivated by communist ideology. The Khmer Rouge boasted that "we will be the first nation to create a completely communist society," hailed Mao as "the most eminent teacher.... since Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin" and drew up a plan to "eliminate the capitalist class" in order to "construct socialism."(7) While in power, they abolished all money and private property, imposing a form of communism far purer than the world had ever seen. Francois Ponchaud depicted the extraordinary violence and tyranny of the peace as a result of extraordinarily pure and extreme communist ideology, not a consequence of the violence of the war: "Its aim was to prove a theory that had been worked out in the abstract without the slightest regard for human factors".(8) Jean Lacouture wrote that "After Auschwitz and the Gulag, we might have thought this century had produced the ultimate in horror, but we are now seeing the suicide of a people in the name of revolution; worse: in the name of socialism."(9)

(There is, by the way, little evidence that the Khmer Rouge were racist. Many of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge were Chinese, and Chinese Cambodians were scarcley killed above the rate of the general population, particularly when one considers that they were the wealthiest ethnic group. The Khmer Rouge stamped out organized religion with great brutality, but they did not treat the Buddhists any better than the Chams. The Vietnamese communists, by contrast, expelled their entire ethnic Chinese community.)

1. Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995), pp. 41-8.

2. Judith Banister and Paige Johnson, "After the Nightmare: The Population of Cambodia," Genocide and Democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the International Community, (Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1993).

3. Dmitry Mosyakov, "The Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists: A History of Their Relations as Told in the Soviet Archives," in Susan E. Cook, ed., Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda (Yale Genocide Studies Program Monograph Series No. 1, 2004), p54ff. "In April–May 1970, many North Vietnamese forces entered Cambodia in response to the call for help addressed to Vietnam not by Pol Pot, but by his deputy Nuon Chea. Nguyen Co Thach recalls: “Nuon Chea has asked for help and we have liberated five provinces of Cambodia in ten days.”"

4. David Chandler, Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, Revised Edition, (Silkworm Books, 2000), pp. 96–7.

5. Peter Rodman, "Returning to Cambodia", Brookings Institute, August 23, 2007. Michael Lind, Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America's Most Disastrous Military Conflict, (Free Press, 1999).

6. Craig Etcheson, The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, (Westview Press, 1984), p. 97.

7. Quotations from Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous With Death (Princeton University Press, 1989), pp221ff, 274ff.

8. Francois Ponchaud, Cambodia Year Zero (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978).

9. Jean Lacouture, "The Bloodiest Revolution," New York Times Review of Books, Volume 24, Number 5, March 31, 1977.

Unlike the Ministry of Truth, we don't erase past history to prove that the current version of history was always the current view. One can, like Sophal Ear, look up earlier versions of history that have ceased to be politically correct. In the seventies, left-wing intellectuals everywhere loved – loved, loved, loved - the Khmer Rouge and their Vietnamese allies, and condemned the US for trying to prevent their seizure of power. The Nation compared Democratic Kampuchea to France after liberation! Malcolm Caldwell was killed while visiting his favorite socialist paradise! Western Academia is collectively guilty of the crimes of Pol Pot - the vast left majority because they spoke up in support of Pol Pot, the tiny right wing minority because they failed to speak up against Pol Pot, and this guilt and sensitivity is visible whenever they address the topic. The Standard Total Academic View on Cambodia changed suddenly, abruptly, and dramatically after Vietnam invaded (with former Khmer Rouge apologists like Kiernan defecting to Hanoi). Supposedly, the Khmer Rouge were CIA sponsored Nazis, anti-intellectual thugs, and rural yokels, and pretty much every usenet commie will proudly tell you that he and all the communist parties always opposed the Khmer Rouge from the very beginning, just as the communist party always opposed the German Nazis back when all the evil capitalists were playing ball with them. Ponchaud's observations about Khmer Rouge Left utopianism vanish down the memory hole.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:21, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

Timothy Carney gives five reasons why the Communist Party of Kampuchea (PKK) won the war:

• "(a) Norodom Sihanouk provided an enormous popular drawing card to recruit troops into the National United Front of Kampuchea (NUFK), which the party came to control. The prince also helped to islolate the Khmer Republic diplomatically and gave the PKK-dominated front credibility among opinion makers in the West;

• (b) the North Vietnamese army, the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), formed a two-year shield in eastern Cambodia behind which the party developed its infrastructure and the army trained its troops;

• (c) the adversary Khmer Republic was generally afflicted with an unimaginative set of political and military leaders whose personal corruption undercut the genuine enthusiasm among the elite that had followed the prince’s March 18, 1970, desposition;

• (d) the PKK and its army had the toughness, resolution, and discipline to prevail, and their vision of a new society attracted a dedicated core of followers;

• (e) China and the North Vietnam backed the PKK to the finish, but the United States ended its massive assistance to the Khmer Republic."(10)

10. Timothy Carney, "The Unexpected Victory," in Karl D. Jackson, ed., Cambodia 1975-1978: Rendezvous With Death (Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 13-35.

To cite US bombing as the "main cause" of the genocide is, simply, a ludicrous fabrication.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:30, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

TTAAC, please, treat my words with respect, and do not misinterpret them, otherwise I may assume you are playing with the sources in the same vein. Where did I write about US bombing as the "main cause"? I wrote they were "the important factor". Being non-native English speaker, sometimes I can make mistakes, however, I do see a difference between "main cause" and "important factor". By writing "important factor", I follow what Fein says:

"The US bombing, which killed an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 Cambodians (Kiernan 1989:32), led to additional gains for the KR because the bombing drove the Vietnamese further inside Cambodia and radically dislocated and disorganized rural life, leading to an estimated two million displaced peasants in the cities (Shawcross 1979:174-6; Haas 1991:16). Malnutrition, inflation, and the corruption of the military led to further misery and demoralization among the refugees. Such effects were neither calculated for nor compensated for by the United States, whose administrations aw Cambodia as a "sideshow" in the Indochina war (Shawcross 1979). Kieran observes that "although it was indigenous, Pol Pot's revolution would not have won power without US economic and military destabilisation of Cambodia. . . . This was probably the most important single factor in Pol Pot's rise" (Kieran 1993a:1)." (Fein, 1993)

I believe you will not deny the fact that both Helen Fein and Ben Kieran are highly reputable scholars, and you will not claim I misinterpreted their position. Therefore, I expect you to withdraw your offensive remark about "a ludicrous fabrication", and to apologise.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:19, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

I have nothing to apologize for. I was not suggesting that you fabricated false claims and ascribed them to Fein and Kiernan, but that Kiernan's position is untenable and desparate revisionism (for all the reasons laid out above). Furthermore, just as Kiernan underestimates Khmer Rouge atrocities, he inflates the death toll from US bombing. I'm familiar with Kiernan's work, but not with Fein's. Is Fein any sort of expert on Cambodia? It sounds like she is just repeating Kiernan's arguments.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:40, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

The single most important factor in Pol Pot's rise was not the US bombing, but the North Vietnamese installing the Khmer Rouge in power over a large swath of Cambodia, enabling them to build up their forces through conscription. The Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese had seized two-thirds of Cambodia by 1972; refugees fled to urban areas controlled by the Lon Nol government to escape the hell of communist slavery. Carney and Jackson cite five reasons for the Khmer Rouge victory, none of which are the American bombing, except possibly the Congressional decision to stop the bombing in 1973.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:55, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, TheTimes, sometimes scholars have conflicting theories. this is why it is good to present information from multiple sources, and present different sides to the same story, and if one theory is the most widely accepted by scholars in an area of study, it should be given the most space and time. AnieHall (talk) 07:06, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

arbitrary break

TheTimesAreAChanging, in her article, Fein presented a detailed comparative analysis of Cambodian and Indonesian genocides. We have no reason to reject her work, which meets all criteria applied to best quality reliable sources. Regarding Kiernan, he is a prolific scholar studying Cambodia. I looked trough four first reviews on his book "The Pol Pot's regime...", and I found the attitude of the reviewers was mixed. According to Pike, by 1997 he was at Yale University as director of the Cambodian Genocide Program, which means he is definitely trustworthy per WP:V. Nevertheless, several reviewers, despite being generally positive, note some major omissions in Kiernan's book, and one of the most important omissions is the following:

"He seems chiefly interested in savaging Pol Pot's political science experiment-and well it deserves-not in seeking to explain it. He answers the question what and how? But not why? It is the book's chief weakness." (Douglas Pike. The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 by Ben Kiernan. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 112, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 349-350)

In connection to that, let me point out that these Pike's words can be equally applied to the MKuCR article. A group of editors seems to be more interested in collecting the data about atrocities committed by the regimes that called themselves (or have been called by others) "Communist", and these users are totally disinterested in understanding of what really happened, why, and what relation did that have to Communism. The current section is a good indicator of that. I proposed a detailed plan that would allow us (I believe) to answer the major Pike's question - and what I see in a responce? A ridiculous discussion aimed to whitewash Americans?!
TheTimesAreAChanging, if you really see serious problems with Kiernan, why are you repeating his major mistake? Let's stop that, and let's start to discuss the scheme proposed by me.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:10, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Stop with the phony outrage. Kiernan's work is devoted to whitewashing his past support for the Khmer Rouge, blaming the US bombing for their mass murders, underestimating their mass murders, and excommunicating them from the Left as some kind of alien. I think Pike would agree with me that the central flaw of Kiernan's work is his portrayal of Democratic Kampuchea as some kind of mad anarchy triggered by US bombing, rather than a totalitarian slave state motivated by extraordinarily pure and extreme communist ideology. The motive that Kiernan omits is that the Khmer Rouge were fanatical Leftists, intent on building a utopia, who wanted to make man into something better. They viewed themselves as superhuman saints whose enormous goodness, kindness, and benevolence justified the savage torture of anyone who failed to live up to their standards. Instead, Kiernan blames US bombing, Khmer nationalism, and the violence of the civil war--as you do--and is rightly criticized by Pike for focusing on the non-essential.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:31, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

TheTimesAreAChanging, that is ridiculous: I specifically asked you to comment on the general scheme to explain the causes of mass killings, and to describe all nuances, however, instead of that you are explaining me that Kiernan has been engaged in whitewashing (btw, if that is the case, then the whole Yale University program should be blamed in that too), and are teaching me what Pike said in actuality. Are you going to speak seriously? If not, I see no value in continuation of this discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:13, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

PS. Your offensive tone is just a demonstration of weakness of your position...--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:23, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

It is hard not to notice that everyone - literally everyone - who blames the US bombing for the genocide supported the Khmer Rouge from 1975-9: "While Kiernan has become a fierce critic of Khmer Rouge behavior, Peter Rodman states that "When Hanoi turned publicly against Phnom Penh, it suddenly became respectable for many on the Left to "discover" the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge-qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years. Kiernan fits this pattern nicely. His book even displays an eagerness to absolve of genocidal responsibility those members of the Khmer Rouge who defected to Hanoi and were later reinstalled in power in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978."[10] In 1994, Kiernan was awarded a $499,000 grant by Congress to help the Cambodian government document the Khmer Rouge's abuses. Stephen J. Morris, at the time a research associate in the department of government at Harvard University cited statements Kiernan had made regarding the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Morris claimed that Kiernan's earlier opinions made him a poor choice to study Khmer Rouge abuses. Gerard Henderson, executive director of Australia's Sydney Institute stated that Kiernan had "barracked for the Khmer Rouge when the Cambodian killing fields were choked with corpses."[11]"

Pol Pot's murders can most directly be traced back to his Marxist education in France. As Samuel Johnson wrote: "The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the death of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as Angka Leu ('the Higher Organization'). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they not only belonged to the Communist Party but also had absorbed Sartre's doctrines of political activism and 'necessary violence'. These mass murderers were his ideological children." (Source: Samuel Johnson, Intellectuals). Lacouture told us in 1977: "A group of modern intellectuals, formed by Western thought, primarily Marxist thought, claim to seek to return to a rustic Golden Age, to an ideal rural and national civilization. And proclaiming these ideals, they are systematically massacring, isolating, and starving city and village populations whose crime was to have been born when they were."

If US bombing actually played an important role, someone would have noticed prior to 1979. If US bombing actually played an important role, memoirs by Cambodian genocide survivors would mention the bombing. Since they never do, I conclude that Kiernan is trying to rationalize away his enthusiastic support for totalitarian terror and mass slaughter.

I proposed very simple revisions: Correcting the number found in mass graves, adding Sliwinski and Heuveline, adding Etcheson and Shawcross. Zloyvolsheb has repeatedly refused to explain why it is relevant, but I would accept the uncited sentence about US support merely to get these revisions through. Apparently, however, nothing will ever get done on this page.

Michael Lind: "In 1970, the CCAS [Committe of Concerned Asia Scholars] complained that the U.S. military effort was preventing the Khmer Rouge, with Sihanouk as a figurehead, from coming to power; after 1975, most on the left floated a new story – the U.S. military effort had caused the Khmer Rouge to come to power." (Vietnam: The Neccessary War, p. 170)

Philip Short: "Even had there been no B-52 strikes at all, it is unlikely that Democratic Kampuchea would have been a significantly different place." (Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, p. 218)

Fein's juxtaposition of the Indonesian mass killings and the Holocaust in Cambodia is nothing short of a farce--academics making false comparisons to obfuscate their past sins. Unlike the "Khmer Revolution," the Indonesian killings were a genuine populist revolt, with genuine popular support. The killings were done "face to face," by ordinary citizens, in chaotic circumstances, with little organization. The army sometimes encouraged the killings, and sometimes tried to prevent them. Less than 1% of the Indonesian population perished, whereas the Khmer Rouge systematically exterminated a quarter of their subjects. There is simply no comparison.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:53, 23 January 2013 (UTC)