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Name change

I suggest we change the name to "Victims of Communism" which is a term used in reliable sources. While it lacks neutral tone, so do all the other alternatives. While it also lacks precision, since victims could include people who suffered in any way from Communism, the term is defined to refer to deaths.

There is recent literature that addresses the debate over whether Communism should be blamed for crimes that occured in Communist states. For example:

  • "Their reading of the past led to criminalising communism by making criminality the essence of the communist ideology and of the regimes that claimed it across all national contexts and historical periods." (Neumayer, Laure. "Introduction."The criminalisation of communism in the European political space after the Cold War. Routledge, 2018.)
  • "One way of dealing with the Nazism-Communism comparison is to adopt the idea of totalitarianism, stating that there is a straight line between ideological intention and repression." p. 73 (Adler, Nanci, et al. Perspectives on the Entangled History of Communism and Nazism: A Comnaz Analysis. Lexington Books, 2015. P. 73[1])

The reason this article attracted controversy is that it begins with an assumption that socialism (at least in its Marxist form) is homicidal and sets out to prove it through a body count. The criticism of this approach is that it could be applied to any ideological or other grouping. A neutral approach would be to explain the arguments connecting communism ideology and mass killings carried out by Communists. TFD (talk) 13:33, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

No, the title implies mass killings occurred under governments that attempted to implement their vision of communism. --Nug (talk) 21:16, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I like that idea. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:40, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
The reason this article attracted controversy is that it begins with an assumption that socialism (at least in its Marxist form) is homicidal and sets out to prove it through a body count. And the title "Victims of Communism" doesn't do this... how, exactly? BSMRD (talk) 14:11, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I was writing about the article not the title. The current first sentence is not neutral: "Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century." Compare this with the following: "Many murders have been committed by men with the surname of Smith." In both cases there is an implied connection.
Titles are not required to be neutral, per Non-neutral but common names. Elsewhere the policy says that "Boston massacre" is an acceptable title, because that is its common name, even though it probably was not a massacre but was described that way in order to advance political agenda. We don't for example call it "1770 Boston shooting incident."
The title Jewish Bolshevism is also non-neutral but preferable to "Allegation of undue influence of Jewish people under communist regimes."
TFD (talk) 14:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Ok, I think I see your point. Not 100% sure that's the best name, but it's not the worst I guess. BSMRD (talk) 15:56, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
The heading of your discussion is confusing. It appears at first glance, as though you are suggesting an RM. GoodDay (talk) 15:58, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Doesn’t “Victims of Communism” significantly broaden the scope of the article? I don’t think that this is a WP:COMMONNAME and I’m not convinced that it is better than the current name (or something very similar, like “Mass killings by Communist regimes”). Jewish Bolshevism is a WP:WORDISSUBJECT-like article title to describe the particular idea that was influential in the rise of Nazism. Untermensch is similar in this regard—the term has no value in terms of academic merit in its own right, but it has received significant coverage owing to the influence of that particular term in Nazi ideology. But, this article isn’t a word-is-subject sort of article. I do not think the point of the article is to describe the term “victims of communism”, but instead to be a summary style article on mass killings committed by communist regimes. As a result, I am inclined against the name change. — Mhawk10 (talk) 16:04, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, but the problems with "Victims of Communism" as a title don't solve the (similar) problems with the current title. Since this was discussed in 2020, the conclusion from that earlier discussion should be summarized here, as the counterargument to renaming in this discussion has been weak. Boston Massacre is a widely recognized term of art. "Mass killings under communist regimes" doesn't roll off enough tongues to meet the WP:NPOV threshold: An article title with non-neutral terms cannot simply be a name commonly used in the past, it must be the common name in current use. The common name. --Wragge (talk) 16:12, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
The current article title is no less neutral than say, Domestic violence in the United States. That article isn't making an implicit claim that the USA is a nation of wife beaters. --Nug (talk) 16:18, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I think this is an important point. The idea that mass killings are somehow inherent to communism is clearly very contentious - but the title is referring to that contentious claim, not asserting it is true. For example, Creation science doesn't need to be changed to 'Pseudoscience of Creationism' because the article is about the concept of 'Creation science' and the validity of the concept is discussed in the article. I think once we can improve the article to include a more clear description of the criticisms and academic consensus on the subject of MKUCR the name issue will become moot. Vanteloop (talk) 16:25, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Yes, I agree. Creation science is a good example, the title doesn't imply that creation science is a real science. Also note title is referring to the regime type, not the ideology. --Nug (talk) 16:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Disagree. All nations have at least some domestic violence; not all nations have mass killing. Furthermore, the "communist" grouping implies that there is something special or unique about mass killings under individual communist governments that makes it worthy to collect them all and discuss them as a single topic. The comparable title would be if we had an article named eg. Domestic violence under Capitalist regimes - something there actually are some sources for[2]. But that'd obviously be a non-neutral way to approach that topic. --Aquillion (talk) 19:13, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
We have Communist terrorism, all communists certainly did not engage in terrorism or that communism is intrinsically terroristic, but terrorism was certainly carried out by groups who claim to adhere to it, in the advancement of it. Similarly, this title is careful to include "regime", to indicate it is about the governments actions rather than the ideology --Nug (talk) 21:16, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I mean, Communist terrorism is in even worse shape than this article? A big chunk of the history section describes the term as political propaganda created by Nazis. The background section contains a small paragraph mostly consisting of passing mentions from timelines of terrorism that, again, don't really establish that there's a unified topic there, then a single paragraph containing back-and-forth between a handful of scholars over whether Lenin supported terrorism. And the bulk of the article (both in the history section and the examples section) is a list of random examples from sources that largely don't treat it as a unified topic - essentially editors trying to argue the topic of that brief paragraph in the history section via WP:SYNTH. That's certainly not an article I would use as an example for anything - at the very least, I'm glad you brought it to people's attention here, given that most of the problems on this article are even worse there due to it not having really attracted enough attention in the past. --Aquillion (talk) 09:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Here is a quote from Michael Ellman, which specifically discusses this issue in a context of Staliniam:

"Estimates of the total number of Soviet repression victims depend both on accurate estimates of the numbers in particular sub-categories and on judgement of which sub-categories should be included in the category ‘repression victims’. The former is a matter of statistics on which we are better informed today than previously but on which the Ž gures are still surrounded by a signiŽ cant margin of uncertainty. The latter is a matter of theoretical, political and historical judgement. " EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES, Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172

The title "Victims of Communism" opens a can of worms, because a whole population of Communist states may be formally seen as a "victim of Communism". Can a person who was deported be considered a victim? It is quite possible to find sources that say so. Can children of a repression victim, who lost their apartment in Moscow and have to live in a remote place be considered a victim? Can the victims of WWII time famine (which had probably never happened without Nazi invasion) be considered as the victims of Communism? Yes, some sources say so. And so on, and so forth. This title would be much worse than the current one, in particular because nothing will prevent addition of non-lethal events into this article. The title is terribly bad.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:19, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

So you don't think this title has opened a can of worms?

That's the etymological fallacy - that the meaning of an expression must reflect the original meaning of its words. It is permissable for example to have an article called anti-Semtism because it is a recognized expression that refers to prejudice against Jews even though the literal meaning is opposition to Jews and Arabs, who together are Semites. In this case victims refers to people who died as a result of Communism.

The advantage of using a term that has been reported in academic writing, rather than a term invented by Wikipedia editors, is that it is a concept defined in reliable sources.
With a new title, the scope of the article then becomes the extent to which Communism is responsbile for these deaths, according to experts.
Nug's comparison of the current title with "Domestic violence in the U.S." isn't valid as we discussed many times. The equivalent would be "Mass killings in the Soviet Union." If we had an article called "Domestic violence in Nug's family," he might complain.
TFD (talk) 19:22, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
"victims of Communism" "chinese famine"&"victims of Communism" "Soviet famine" vs "Chinese famine" victims&"Soviet famine" victims Paul Siebert (talk) 20:17, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I have to agree with Paul Siebert on "Victims of Communism". Given the rhetoric over Captive Nations, it could be argued that the entire populations of all communist countries were victims, and that would number into the billions of people. --Nug (talk) 21:16, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
It could be argued. The reality is that the term normally refers to people killed by Communists. For example, this article says, "In Hungary, the Gloria Victis Memorial to honor "the 100 million victims of communism" was erected in 2006 on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution." An article in the Heritage Foundation is called "We Must Never Forget the 100 Million Victims of Communism." The Vicims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is dedicated to "the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes."[3] As you repeatedly mention, the VOC was sponsored by the U.S. government. The U.S. Dept. of State has an article called "America honors 100 million victims of communism."
I notice it doesn't bother you that there were no "communist regimes" because communism means the state has withered away. You voted against capitalizing Communist even though it would remove ambiguity.
The VOC incidentally was set up by the National Captive Nations Committee.
TFD (talk) 00:14, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Did I? I can't find the associated discussion related to this move in June 2018, only this failed move request during that period. --Nug (talk) 00:50, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

"Mass killings under Communist party rule" might be a more accurate title because this article is more about the actions of communist parties and their leaders than the ideology of Communism itself. X-Editor (talk) 21:50, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Why are we giving “regimes” a pass, if the article must be retained? “Regime” is a term most commonly used by Western states and their media to describe governments ("democratic", dictatorial or otherwise) with whom they find themselves in dispute. It’s a loaded and inherently ideological term. It is not within the gift of Wikipedia editors to determine what is and is not a legitimate government.

Given that many of the governments alleged to have committed the crimes listed in this article enjoy (or enjoyed) popular legitimacy within their own states, why not simply refer to them as “governments?” If alleged mass killings make a government a “regime”, then the term must be applied to the United States and most of its allies. DublinDilettante (talk) 23:48, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Regime is often used to refer to governments that are dictatorships or authoritarian, which an accurate description of the governments mentioned in the article. X-Editor (talk) 23:58, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
I am once again reminding you that assertions do not become facts because you happen to believe in them. DublinDilettante (talk) 00:09, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Says the person who went on an opinionated screed about the so-called "keepist" camp for the article. X-Editor (talk) 00:12, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Indeed, these governments were all a "Dictatorship of the proletariat" after all. In any case "Communist regime" has higher usage than "Communist government". --Nug (talk) 00:08, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Nug, since you don't believe they were dictatorships "of the proletariat," and that is merely how they described themselves, I take your comments as sarcasism rather than legitimate argument. It's best to leave comments like that out of these discussions. TFD (talk) 00:19, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Do you have a diff to support your assertion? I was reading Bellamy the other day. What struck me was apart from the number of victims which distinguishes communist from non-communist mass killings, another key distinction is the fact that communist perpetrators and their supporters exhibit very little recognition that their ideology of selective extermination of large numbers of people (presumably the Völkerabfälle) might be morally problematic. Apparently Stalin and his clique remained proud of the mass killings they had sanctioned to the very end of their lives. Towards the end of the Cold War some communist regimes, notably the Soviet Union, shifted from openly espousing selective extermination to strategies of denial according to Bellamy. And this denial seems to be intensifying, as historian Professor Robert Tombs said, it is "at least as bad as Holocaust denial". --Nug (talk) 05:05, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
That’s the Robert Tombs who credits England, the country with the longest record of imperialist genocide in history (continuing well into the 20th century in Kenya, India and elswhere) with “their long pioneering of the rule of law, of accountability and representation in government, of religious toleration and of civil institutions; and for their determined role in the defeat of modern tyrannies”? DublinDilettante (talk) 13:09, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
A contributor to the SignPost quoted it slightly differently in the section "User talk:Cygnis insignis#"As bad as Holocaust denial", I feel a little better now. ~ cygnis insignis 09:36, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Dictatorship of the proletariat means, according to its entry in Encyclopedia Britannica, "rule by the proletariat—the economic and social class consisting of industrial workers who derive income solely from their labour—during the transitional phase between the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of communism."[4] You obviously do not believe that the Soviet Union was ruled by its working class.

I don't know what you were reading, but will instead reply to you. Why do you think it is necessary to compare Communist and non-Communist mass killings? Also, why would you think that other editors are not aware that such comparisons have been made, especially when the talk pages are filled with such discussions?

This article is not the place to advance personal beliefs, no matter how valid. The best we can do is to present the various views with the weight they are accorded in reliable sources. That means incidentally that view you are railing against would not receive much credit in this article. But as is obvious from the discussions, none of the editors see it as a valid view either. There are more constructive ways to advance your views than to post them here.

TFD (talk) 05:41, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Wasn't the Soviet Union ruled by a "Vanguard party" that claimed to represent the working class? At least the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany gained 33% of the vote in the last free elections before they seized power, who voted for the Bolsheviks? And no, not my personal thoughts, just relaying what Bellamy wrote in the Human Rights Quarterly[5]. --Nug (talk) 06:11, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Comment was edited to explain Nazi. ~ cygnis insignis 06:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Wow! You caught me out editing my own comment! --Nug (talk) 06:47, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Are you genuinely saying the Nazis were better than the Soviets because people voted for them??? BSMRD (talk) 07:19, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Nazis are the scum of the earth. --Nug (talk) 07:48, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Just not as bas as the people they were specifically sworn to destroy, and who ultimately defeated them at the cost of tens of millions of lives? DublinDilettante (talk) 13:16, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Nug -- they apparently got around 24% of the vote in the 1917 Russian Constituent Assembly election... -- AnonMoos (talk) 07:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Oh okay, that's interesting, thanks. --Nug (talk) 07:48, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Nug, I did not ask you if the Communists claimed to represent the working class. I asked if you believed the Soviet Union was ruled by the working class. TFD (talk) 07:42, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Didn't I just ask you if the Soviet Union was ruled by a "Vanguard party" that claimed to represent the working class? --Nug (talk) 07:48, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
You: "Indeed, these governments were all a "Dictatorship of the proletariat" after all. [00:08, 5 December 2021]
Me: "Nug, since you don't believe they were dictatorships "of the proletariat," and that is merely how they described themselves, I take your comments as sarcasism rather than legitimate argument" [00:19, 5 December 2021]
You: "Do you have a diff to support your assertion?" [05:05, 5 December 2021]
Me: "You obviously do not believe that the Soviet Union was ruled by its working class." [05:41, 5 December 2021]
You: "Wasn't the Soviet Union ruled by a "Vanguard party" that claimed to represent the working class?" [06:11, 5 December 2021]
Me: "Nug, I did not ask you if the Communists claimed to represent the working class. I asked if you believed the Soviet Union was ruled by the working class. [07:42, 5 December 2021]
I do not understand why you cannot answer the question. I hope you appreciate the difference between someone making a claim and its actually being true.
TFD (talk) 07:57, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
And you explicit question was where in that exchange? All I see are claims of "since you don't believe ..." and "You obviously do not believe that ..."--Nug (talk) 08:05, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Nug, do you believe the Soviet Union was ruled by its ruling Class? TFD (talk) 09:19, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Jumping in—why does the electoral success of the NSDAP or the Bolsheviks actually matter for purposes of this article? It seems like this is getting far in the weeds to such an extent that it’s diverging from the goal to discuss rationales regarding a potential change in article title. — Mhawk10 (talk) 08:03, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
It could be that Nug understand "dictatorship of the proletariat" only in Soviet terms, e.g. vanguard party ruling in representation of the working class rather than "dictatorship of the proletariat" in academic/Marxist terms, e.g. the working class itself as the ruling class. All Communist states were dictatorships in the first term, not the second. Davide King (talk) 09:24, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

This is becoming a huge mess. Paul Siebert, as far as I see it, "Victims of Communism" is the common name of the topic you outlined here:

"In my opinion, the really notable topic is the discussion of the view that Communism was the greatest mass murderer in XX century. Who said that? Why? What was the main purpose for putting forward this idea? How this idea was accepted? Who supports that? Who criticise it and what the criticism consists in? How this idea is linked to recent trends in Holocaust obfuscation? And so on, and so forth. This would be a really notable topic, and that can save the article from deletion. However, that will require almost complete rewrite of the article."

This is clearly the notable topic, and we can write a NPOV article without engaging in OR/SYNTH, since as has been noted by The Four Deuces there is, in fact, a literature about this. We need not to worry about any can of worms because the article will be theory-focused and based, and any significant event will simply be linked, thus avoiding coatracks and forks of describing events according to genocide scholars rather than summary style that fails NPOV without the majority sources which do not describe an event as mass killing, or any other term we list at 'Terminology', discuss events separately, and do not make any Communist grouping as we do here. Davide King (talk) 07:59, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that the notable article topic is the one that serves as a summary style piece covering mass killings committed by communist regimes. The topic you are proposing might be part of a section in that summary style article (or a sub-article thereof), but I do not see that as being the main focus of this sort of page. — Mhawk10 (talk) 08:05, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Then this article is unfixable because, as noted by the AfD and Robert McClenon in particular, the name is the problem. I do not understand why you are so fixed on mass killings — if you truly want a summary style about mass killings, it must be refocused on Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (three Communist leaders, not Communist regimes), plus the Red Terror, as those are the only events that majority sources describe as mass killing events. Those are also two different topics, except one has scholarly literature and does not fail NPOV/OR/SYNTH (Siebert, TFD, and mine), the other is unfixable — you also have no excuse not supporting similar articles about capitalist and fascist regimes. We have a chapter about capitalist atrocities during the Cold War, and The Black Book of Capitalism as well. I do not think engaging in such grouping is fruitful but at least we are consistent in violating policies all around, and not just for Communism ... You have repeatedly failed in providing the Communist grouping and genocide scholars as majority sources, and as something that is part of mainstream scholarly discourse rather than in isolation. Davide King (talk) 08:16, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
I agree with Mhawk10. The very first sentence in Valentino's chapter on Communist Mass Killings is "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century’s most deadly episodes of mass killing." That is just a plain fact. As to why that is the case Valentino has his conclusions, which are mentioned in Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Proposed_causes, along with the other proposed causes. --Nug (talk) 08:22, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Just like Bellamy, they say Communist regimes but in practice what they mean and discuss is Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Why we should give so much weight to those two authors, even though Valentino is about mass killings in general, and Bellamy also discusses capitalist regimes is something that none of you has answered — a chapter in a book does not mean a new topic has been created. We also still disagree about Valentino. Davide King (talk) 08:27, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Adam Jones also discusses Stalin and Mao together, and Pol Pot in a separated chapter. We never doubted that there are sources, what we doubt is whether they represent a mainstream, majority view and/or new topic; the fact that they are mostly chapters about general mass killings show that we need not to discuss this in a separate article but simply expand Mass killing discussing their theories of the events, not the events themselves. Davide King (talk) 08:31, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Doesn't matter what you think of Valentino, is there a source that disputes his claim that "Communist regimes have been responsible for this century’s most deadly episodes of mass killing"? What is this so called "mainstream view" that communist mass killings did not occur during the 20th Century? --Nug (talk) 08:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Are you returning to strawman us as denying the events? In fact, that quoted part is perfectly in line with my proposed topic. For a "mainstream view", take a look at Ellman, and note that he is referring only to Stalinism because most historians and scholars and Communism do not support such broad Communist grouping or death toll for the same reasons. Davide King (talk) 08:44, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
I just read the Ellman paper, there is nothing in there to support your claim, you are just making it up. --Nug (talk) 09:04, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Please, be more specific and to what exactly claim you are referring to. That the paper is not focused on Stalinism? That the "victims of Stalinism/Soviet power" is itself not problematic or confusing (so imagine how problematic and confusing it must be to do this for Communism as a whole)? That it is not a "mainstream view"? Davide King (talk) 09:12, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
That is why I provided Ellman, not because "communist mass killings did not occur during the 20th Century", which is a strawman on your part and no one is denying this, but because of the body counting itself and the whole grouping categorization, which serious historians like Ellman do not do for Communism as a whole. Davide King (talk) 09:15, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
I do not understand why you are so fixed on mass killings… if you are arguing that I have a personal fixation with mass killings, then I would remind you that the start of my involvement in this article was when it got nominated for deletion. The reason I am arguing this is (a) the sources I’m this article and those presented in the AfD clearly establish that this is a grouping used by scholars and that (b) attempts to transform the article to cover some other topic entirely really does not cover “mass killings under communist regimes”. Is an article on mass killings under communist regimes primarily supposed to be about the historical methods that different people use to come to various different estimates for death tolls? No; it’s supposed to be about describing the actual killings primarily. Additionally, the repeated assertion that genocide scholars are somehow a fringe minority group on the topic of… mass killings… really seems to be an extraordinary claim. But, of course, feel free to take it to FTN if you think genocide scholars are a fringe group in this regard. Regarding I do not think engaging in such grouping is fruitful, perhaps you do not, but that does not change the fact that your original research on the supposed lack of usefulness of the grouping has no bearing on notability when in-depth reliable sources exist that argue against that point. Fortunately, we do not have to relitigate that AfD on this page, but rejecting sources offhand because they find the grouping to be useful (or, alternatively, they discuss different views on how useful the grouping is) really does not seem to be consistent with WP:NPOV. And appeals to other pages feel entirely spurious; if you want to go make a page on all the mass killings conducted by fascist regimes and you have enough reliable sources that discuss the killings as a group to attain notability, then go for it and make the page. — Mhawk10 (talk) 08:43, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
About mass killing fixation, I was talking in general — it is precisely because mass killing is an academic term with certain criteria that we should drop it if we want to discuss all Communist regimes. As noted by Valentino, only Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot engaged in mass killings under the most accepted definition; of course, people died under many other Communist regimes but they do not fit this mass killing categorization, which is why I propose that we drop this, e.g. we should re-focus to death tolls rather than mass killings, hence "Victims of Communism" renaming. the sources I’m this article and those presented in the AfD clearly establish that this is a grouping used by scholars Let me stop you right here — by scholars is not sufficient, it is either majority or minority of scholars, and which ones?
Also, we have disputed some sources that you and others say they support Communism as a special grouping, when I and others say they do not (e.g. Fein and Valentino), so there is a dispute about sources, and I think Paul Siebert is better at explaining this and go down on each source. I never said genocide scholars are fringe, I always said they represent a minority, and that is because if they are going to discuss Communism, they should not contradict what historians and country specialists say, and that their attempts at comparative analysis have had many problems. Again, it appears that you are denying the NPOV probelms repeatedly outlined at both the AfD and by DRN moderator, so I kindly ask Robert McClenon to weight in and comment to help us on this — because we obviously disagree, and unless we engage in an analysis of sources to compare whose reading is correct, we are not going to move forward. Davide King (talk) 08:55, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
File:Welcome logo VOC Logo Words Navy copy.png
Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation logo

The title Victims of Communism currently redirects to Soviet and Communist studies#Victims of Communism, not sure if that has been pointed out. ~ cygnis insignis 08:19, 5 December 2021 (UTC) & note the website of another VOC is victimsofcommunism.org ~ cygnis insignis 09:13, 5 December 2021 (UTC) The site includes current successful programs like VOC Spurs Uruguay’s Elimination of Cuban Medical Brigades Program"We found that Cuba’s communist medical brigades in Uruguay have been penetrating Uruguay since 2005 … " ~ cygnis insignis 09:23, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

That could be the lead of a separated article, e.g. a rewrite/move of this. Davide King (talk) 08:28, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Excuse the post scripts after replies, unhelpful really. ~ cygnis insignis 09:30, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Also compare "victims of communism" (first results shows literature) vs. "communist mass killings" (first results show the mass killings of communists in Indonesia). Davide King (talk) 09:20, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The problem with this proposal is that this article was originally Communist Genocide; its proponents seek to claim that the article ought to speak about a real phenomena of preventable, intentional, mass killings, due to an ideology, which certain states possessed. Sadly the categories or real, preventable, intentional, mass, ideological and trans-state have all been demonstrated as faulty, or non-scholarly. As a result the article genuinely belongs at hysteric titles: about a fabulist conspiracy theory. State specific crimes against humanity are sufficient articles: go forth and edit famine as politics in the soviet union. Fifelfoo (talk) 09:01, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

The degree of acceptance of a theory does not determine whether or not there can be an article about it. So for example, there are articles about evolution and creation science. We can for example have an article about the theory an hysterical conspiracy theory. In fact the article Jewish Bolshevism already exists. Some editors thought that article should list the numbers of Jews in the Soviet Communist Party and explain their "disproportionate" influence. TFD (talk) 09:37, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
I have my own title proposal, since "mass killings" implies that the communist regimes actively pushed people to die and is, therefore, why it is SYNTH, I propose that we instead rename this article to "Deaths under communist regimes" which is exactly the premise of the article, especially since it includes deaths from famines, and not exclusively politicides. Additionally, I would propose to drop the term "regime" to shorten the title of the article, so it should read "Deaths under communism". MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 11:51, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
People are always dying, so your proposal is too broad and ambiguous. Scholars have more correct terms: "excess mortality" or "excess deaths". That would be a solution, and I proposed that earlier. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:50, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
@Fifelfoo: Actually, you are not completely right. Thus, Valentino discusses the "mass killing" category as real, preventable, intentional, but he explicitly excludes ideology, and do not discuss it as a trans-state phenomenon. That is sufficient to discuss those events in one article, but insufficient to link them to Communism (which is the main goal of this article, according to the most numerous party) Paul Siebert (talk) 15:54, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Per WP:CRITERIA my proposal is fine and acceptable, however, I do not object your idea. Simply put: Anything would be better than the current title. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 16:05, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
"Victims" is incredibly vague. If we're talking about deaths, we should say "deaths". For example, "Death toll of the X, Y, and Z regimes" would be more specific, although regime is a loaded term; to avoid it, we might go with "Excess deaths under the X, Y, and Z governments". Specifically naming the regimes/dictatorships/governments involved would also curtail the risk of WP:SYNTH. XOR'easter (talk) 17:23, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
But "Victims of Communism" is incredibilty not vague, since it is a term defined in reliable sources. Similar arguments to yours have been made for changing the names of Anti-semitism, Homophobia, Islamophobia, etc. We could even change the term "communist regime," since communism literally means no regime. Maybe we should not call it the West Indies, since it is nowhere near India. It is not up to Wikipedia editors to correct or reinvent terms defined in reliable source. TFD (talk) 18:39, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Your title is bad, because it is blatantly non-neutral. If we are not going to narrow the article's scope, we cannot use the title derived from the term that is used by a tiny fraction of sources.
  • How many sources describe the victims of the Great Purge as "Victims of Communism"? (a hint: majority of sources that I saw do not discuss them in that context: they were the victims of Stalin's campaign directed against his political opponents, real or perceived);
  • How many sources describe the victims of Cambodian Genocide as "Victims of Communism"? (a hint, read, e.g. Kiernan)
  • I can analyse each category of deaths described in this article, but I see no need in that. Everyone can do that, and for almost every category the conclusion will be the same: those deaths are described as VoC only by a minor part of sources.
In addition, there are sources (quite reliable sources) that openly criticize the idea to ascribe all those deaths to some "generic Communism". I already cited those sources, on this talk page and elsewhere. Thus, one of the authors who objects to that approach is Nicolas Werth. Therefore, by proposing this term, you present the views expressed by Courtois or Malia (which have been extensively criticised) as majority views, and imply that the views expressed by such authors as David-Fox or Werth are a minority views.
It is your real intention? I don't think so. Please, stop pushing this absolutely biased title. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:57, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Sources that connect the Great Purge, Khmer Rouge mass murder and other mass killings to the communist ideology, or movement use the term "Victims of Communism." That should be the topic of the article: the theory that these events are connected and how accepted that view is in reliable sources. That can be neutral in the same way the articles on evolution and creation science are neutral. The fact that we are using the term created by people who draw a connection should not be a problem: people who see no connection have not invented a term to describe the connection because they don't see one.
Both the title and the first line of this article make an implicit connection between Communism and mas killings: "Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century." It then goes for a body count and provides a number of authors who explain what the connection is. No Wikipedia article should ever make an implicit connection.
You say that neutrality can be achieved by saying that many if no most scholars draw no connection. But the whole structure of the article, beginning with the title, prevents this.
We could begin this article by saying, "Vicims of Communism" is a term used by some writers to attribute mass killings in various Communist led countries to the international Communist movement or ideology."
TFD (talk) 21:01, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
In other words, you propose to rename it to "Victims of Communism", and not to Victims of Communism. In other words, it is supposed to discuss the narrative rather than the actual events. However, by doing that, you put a cart before the horse: renaming does not reflect the content of this article, in contrast, it reflects your vision of its future scope.
If the article's topic will be changed as you proposed (actually, I myself, as well as @North8000: also proposed something of that kind), then this title would be ok. However, currently it is absolutely premature to speak about that, because majority of users will interpret this title as a story of all (real or perceived, lethal and non-lethal) victims of some "generic Communism". I propose you to drop this idea, at least for a while, and to focus on more realistic and local things. One of the most obvious article's problems is its "Terminology" section, which creates an absolutely false impression that the topic ("Mass killings under Communist regimes") is a focus of research interest of a scholarly community, which is trying to develop some common terminology. That is obviously wrong, and this section must be deleted. It would be great if you helped us to resolve this dispute. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:24, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
(edit conflict) First, even if "Victims of Communism" were a solidly established term of art within a narrow field, there would still be a good argument not to use it as a title for an article that will be read widely outside that field. Second, the claim that it is an established term of art is in dispute. Third, WP:NOTDICT: we generally write about what things are, not what they're called. Why would an article about a term used by some writers be called for? Surely the priority ought to be on the historical events themselves. Fourth, the term "victims of communism" is used in other meanings, including those imprisoned or displaced but not killed (e.g., [6][7]). XOR'easter (talk) 21:43, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
Lots of Wikipedia articles use words or phrases for their titles, that doesn't mean they are dictionary entries. In the example provided, a definition of an octopus would tell you what the word means and so would a dictionary. The difference is that an encyclopedia would provide empirical information about the animals. The fact that a word or term may have different meanings does not mean that it should not be used as an article title. Octopus has different meanings which is why there is a page called Octopus (disambiguation). TFD (talk) 00:58, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Now I'm thinking about octopuses, but wanted to note another article title resulting from expertly crafted propaganda, The Jewish question, and I believe race and intelligence has been mentioned before, neither of these necessarily imply they are 'mainstream' scholarly fields. The proposal would align the content to what is discussed, such as who, why and where these questionable propositions, 100 million victims of communism are being expounded. ~ cygnis insignis 02:15, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
XOR'easter, that is the problem — this article should not be events-focused but theory-focused. The events are notable on their own, not as a grouping, which is at best a minority view. The topic of this article should be about the theory that those events are connected, 100 million is the number of victims (while victims of communism may be used to include non-deaths, it is commonly used to mean the 100 million dead), and that communism is the main cause.
Paul Siebert, what TFD proposed is what I propose too, and what you, TFD, North8000, I, and others support is indeed that — the only disagreement is how to arrive that, hence why your suggestion to TFD, which I can understand and is why I support your latest edits. I would, however, propose that we seriously start thinking about having a sandbox about it, especially because many users may better understand how it would look like and change their mind to support it, and another sandbox from the current version that you can work on (e.g. as you did for World War II), where you may make more extensive edits that may be reverted here, and also to better show and explain the problems, the why, and the how to fix them. Because I really want to have a NPOV article about it but I would not know how to start without some help or clear structure, e.g. some of my edits were reverted as OR/SYNTH but that is because the current article is OR/SYNTH, and saying that the concept is disputed or ignored, while true, it is OR/SYNTH with the current structure because we got the structure wrong.
As an example, we have citation needed tags for this: The concept of mass killing as a phenomenon unique to communist governments,[citation needed] or ideologically inherent within them,[citation needed] is heavily disputed.[59][61] This is totally backwards. Davide King (talk) 04:47, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
"Victims of Communism" is a bad name for the theory, not least because people who didn't die are called "victims of Communism". If the page is supposed to be about a theory, we ought to call it something like Attribution of excess deaths to communism. XOR'easter (talk) 16:12, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Open an RM on this proposal

Terminology

I invite everybody to present arguments in a support of this section. Concretely, I would like to know an answer to the questions:

  • What is the need to explain the terms "Genocide" etc in this article?

I am asking because I see no logic in explaining broad and general terms in a more special and narrow article. Thus, the terms Plank constant, Momentum, uncertainty, coordinate are quite relevant to the Uncertainty principle article, and are being widely used in it. However, that article has no "Terminology" section that describes those terms, for a blue link system makes it redundant. In addition, most terms mentioned in the "Terminology" section are not used in the article at all.

Furthermore, some "terms" are not terms at all. Thus, the "term" red holocaust has no definition (if someone knows it, feel free to post it here). In contrast, it is ambiguous (a German book with this title is devoted exclusively to criticism of the Black Book; the same term is being used by other authors for the Holocaust obfuscation).

Another term, "repressions" has simultaneously much more narrow and more broad meaning, because it describes non-lethal victims, but it was applied to Stalinism only.

In summary, this section is misleading, useless, and it created a false impression that majority of scholars really try to propose some specific terminology for mass killings specifically in Communist states.

The only exception may be Mann's neologism "classicide", but, ironically, he proposed it in the book about a linkage between Democracy and mass killings.

In summary, I propose to delete this section. Deletion of this section will not lead to a loss of any valuable information from Wikipedia, for similar section exists in the Mass killing article, of which this one is a daughter article. The deletion will be a big step towards neutrality of this article.

Any objections? Paul Siebert (talk) 00:09, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I object. The Mass killing article, which was recently expanded into an article in 2018 has serious underlaying POV issues. Let's discuss this in the DR process. --Nug (talk) 00:21, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
I've got to agree that this section seems questionable. An attempt to gather together multiple sources describing several seemingly different concepts, in order perhaps to construct a synthesis around the idea that they are all synonyms for 'mass killing'. Some may be, but if they are, in the context of the specific subject of this article ('communist regimes'), they don't need to be defined, merely cited in any appropriate section for material they directly support. As for discussing it 'in the DR process', feel free to do so if you like, but meanwhile the rest of us (those not participating in DR) will continue the process of trying to resolve the obvious issues this article has. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:32, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Ironically, I think that Mass killing was the NPOV article of Mass killings under communist regimes, e.g. it reflects majority of sources which discuss the topic in general and do not make such grouping and/or treat it as a separate category, so MKuCR is a content POV fork of Mass killing — that you think the reverse is true is certainly interesting but also doubtful. I agree to discuss it at the DR process, though you could have replied us back at Talk:Mass killing. Davide King (talk) 00:33, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
I don't have a feeling all participant of this talk page discussion are interested in that DRN, and it is not binding. That is why I want to see an opinion of a broader audience. What kind of POV issues are you talking into account? What concrete POV is overrepresented or underrepresented there?
In addition, we are talking about this article, and you failed to provide any argument in support of this section. Please, do it, otherwise I delete it. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:41, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
@Nug: I see no fresh comments from you. If you are still objecting, I don't mind to start the DRN. If you are still insisting on a mediated discussion, please, let me know. However, I don't see why cannot we try to resolve the dispute here. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:26, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
One more point. This section conflates legal terms (genocide and crime against humanity) with scholarly terms. The former belong to a totally different section. All of that is deeply misleading, confusing, and aims to push one specific POV. That is an additional argument for deletion. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:45, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
I think the difference in regard to the Uncertainty principle article is that the vast majority of scholars use substantially identical definitions for those terms, which isn't the case in this area.
My personal opinion is that the section is useful to introduce the reader to these terms - and importantly to the idea that different scholars approach the concept in different ways. However I do think for example Professor Klas-Göran Karlsson uses crimes against humanity, which includes "the direct mass killings of politically undesirable elements, as well as forced deportations and forced labour." Karlsson acknowledges that the term may be misleading in the sense that the regimes targeted groups of their own citizens, but he considers it useful as a broad legal term which emphasizes attacks on civilian populations and because the offenses demean humanity as a whole.[5] Historian Jacques Sémelin and Professor Michael Mann[6] believe that crime against humanity is more appropriate than genocide or politicide when speaking of violence by communist regimes.[7] See also: Crimes against humanity under communist regimes. is overly-long for a definition and that the section should be cut down. Vanteloop (talk) 01:27, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Why it is useful in this concrete article? Most of those terms are not used in the article at all, and, importantly, they are not used by 99% of country experts. "Genocide" and "Crimes against humanity" are not scholarly terms, they are legal terms, and they should be discussed in other sections.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:45, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Usually, when we need to introduce a reader to the term "democide", we just used brackets like this: "Democide". That was invented specially for that case. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:47, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose proposed deletion. A list of terms is useful. If you feel the "Genocide" item can be trimmed down, boldly go ahead. Thanks, XavierItzm (talk) 05:02, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
    @XavierItzm: If you believe it is useful, please, provide your rationale. In particular, please, explain how this list helps understand other sections if most "terms" listed there are not mentioned at all? And, please, demonstrate what is a purpose of usage of such terms? Why some many terms were proposed? If you provide no answer, your post is just a !vote, which is not a part of a consensus building process. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:24, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
As a general rule, explanations of terms are extremely useful to define how certain terms, which may be controversial, are used in an article. Feel free to boldly remove any terms which are not used in the article, of course. Posts not in agreement with such generally self-evident principles of building an encyclopaedia may perhaps not be considered part of an encyclopaedic process. XavierItzm (talk) 16:16, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
@XavierItzm: What is the need to explain a term if a simple blue link automatically directs a reader to the article that explains it in details? In reality, an overwhelming majority of scholars and other authors absolute;y do not care about a specific terminology for the topic. The whole story is aimed just to mislead a reader and create an impression that they do.
In reality:
  • "Genocide" (and "Crimes against humanity") is a legal term, and its discussion is more relevant to the "Legal status ..." section. In particular, it should be explained in a context of a discussion of some concrete case, in particular, Cambodian genocide.
  • "Mass killings" is a Valentino's term proposed as an umbrella to discuss all XX century coercive deaths inflicted by governments and paramilitary organizations. It was proposed as a category for statistical analysis and general theorizing, and it has no special implication to Communism
  • "Politicide" is the same type terms, but it includes a subset of mass killings.
  • "Democide" is a Rummel's concept that was discussed in details in another article. For all three cases, a blue link to relevant articles is quite sufficient.
  • "Red Holocaust" is not a term at all.
  • "Repressions" are used by the scholars who study USSR, and they do not imply any broader generalization. Wheatcroft's opinion was directly misinterpreted here.
In summary, all those terms must be either moved to another section ("Legal status ..."), where the discussion of what mass killings are considered genocide and why, and what are not is quite relevant, or deleted completely as useless and confusing.
However, if there is a disagreement about that, I propose to make that a subject of the first new DRN. Does anybody wants to participate? @Robert McClenon: is a brilliant mediator, and I am sure discussion under his supervision will lead to some consensus. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:25, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, you say "an overwhelming majority of scholars and other authors absolute;y do not care about a specific terminology for the topic". This is untrue. As you know, scholars do spill a lot of ink using and defining the highly specific terms they have chosen to use to cover this topic. You yourself mention Valentino and Wheatcroft; your internal inconsistency here is glaring. This is so blindingly obvious, I won't even bother citing further sources.XavierItzm (talk) 16:41, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
@XavierItzm: Can you please answer two questions:
1. What is the main reason why Valentino introduced his term "Mass killing"?
2. What exactly Wheatcroft writes about the term "Repressions", and in which context he is using it?
In general, I think we definitely need a well organized and mediated discussion. I propose DRN. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:24, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
Paul Siebert, it is interesting that 'Terminology' pushed the view of Soviet machination of opposition to inclusion of political genocide, when even Genocide tells a different story, and use the more cautious may wording, at 'International law.' Davide King (talk) 04:37, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
This section hardly serves the reader in understanding the further content in the article. It looks more like an artifact of the talk page disputes rather than a genuine attempt to aid the reader. Besides the mentioned reasons for removing (which are not being addressed) it's just plain poor writing. fiveby(zero) 14:30, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Ok, I saw no reasonable arguments in support for keeping this section. In next few days, I am going to move "Genocide" and "Crimes against humanity" to the "Legal status ..." section, where this content is quite relevant, and to remove general terms, neologisms, non-terms, and country-specific terms. That will lead to a complete deletion of the section, which will be an important step that will make the article more neutral. If someone has reasonable arguments against this step, please, present them here. If someone plans to resits to that, please, identify yourself, and we will start a DRN right now. --Paul Siebert (talk) 06:07, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose removal User:XavierItzm , User:Nug, and myself have all disagreed with this proposal. There is clearly no consensus. Sections of the article dont get removed if Paul isn't satisfied. They get removed according to consensus. To remove this section without further discussion leading to consensus would be a clear act of bad faith. Filibustering to the point of exhaustion does not mean you have 'won' Vanteloop (talk) 10:39, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
It is not sufficient to disagree, you need to make a rational analysis based on our policies and guidelines, and explain why we are wrong — consensus is based on respect for our policies and guidelines, not votes. All the terms are already linked in the lead and are blue, so what does it add? It would have made sense if the terminology was actually widespread used, or limited to Communist mass killings, but it is not — except perhaps for classicide. Davide King (talk) 11:24, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
...and the side that argues for mass deletion has not yet made arguments sufficient to generate a consensus for mass deletion of a section. Therefore, any hypothetical such mass deletion of a section would be subject to review and potential revert due to lack of TP consensus.XavierItzm (talk) 16:48, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Religious experience has a section called "definitions" but it's not a glossary, it's a comparison of various author's definitions. Have you actually read the section we're discussing? That's exactly what it does.

glossary is a section of an work that defines terms used in the work to help the readers' understanding of the work. That is exactly what Ethics does in its section "Defining ethics". Simply saying Ethics doesn't have a glossary. doesn't make it true. The ironic thing is that I agree the section needs to be improved considerably - but this idea that you can't define terms when discussing a contentious area in which there is significant disagreement between authors barely merits discussion. Why dont we work to formulate a RfC that can be used to improve the section? Vanteloop (talk) 18:14, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

  • It seems we need a mediated discussion, because a further continuation of the discussion in this vein will hardly lead us to anything reasonable. I asked Robert if he thinks it makes sense to start the DRN process about that issue.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    I agree approaching this in a different way could be useful, whether thats by agreeing a RfC or through some mediated discussion. I do believe there is a chance of consensus to improve this section - including signficantly changing it where necessary. I don't think that the solution is to remove it entirely, or to declare that those in opposition to deletion haven't satisifed some criteria so that means it will be done regardless of consensus, but don't mistake opposition to those things as a wholesale endoresement of the section as is. The reason I suggest we work to create a RfC is that other parts of WP are clearly wary of being dragged into discussion, so showing that disagreeing parties have agreed that some area needs improvement, and at least agreed on some of the possible ways forward (even if not endorsing them) they might be convinced that contributing will be worthwhile Vanteloop (talk) 18:20, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    I explicitly object to RfC. That is not a substitute for a normal discussion. That is a misuse of the procedure, because Editors are normally expected to make a reasonable attempt at resolving their issues before seeking help from others. I see no evidences that you made any reasonable attempt to resolve this dispute. In that situation, resorting to de facto !vote would be a misuse of the RfC procedure.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:30, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    Just a couple of notes 1) RfC isn't a vote. 2)I see no evidences that you made any reasonable attempt to resolve this dispute I believe you are making the same mistake as when you took the other editor to WP:ANI for creating a RfC (for which you were rebuked) in that you think "reasonable attempt" means satisfying you personally. That being said if there are objections to even creating an RfC then that undermines my reasons for suggesting it. Vanteloop (talk) 18:36, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    1} Whereas RfC is formally not a vote, it is de facto a vote: outside users come, cast their ballot ("Support"/"Do not support"), and most of them disappear. There is usually no multi-round discussion, and, importantly, people change their opinion (vote) very rarely during RfCs. Therefore, RfC is a tool to figure out people's opinion, but it is not a tool to reach some consensus.
    2) I didn't take anyone to RfC, I called no names, I just wanted this RfC to be speedy closed, because, in my opinion, it is an attempt to bring democracy where it is not supposed to be.
    I hope you will accept my invitation to join the DRN, and I hope our discussion will be productive.
    Sincerely, Paul Siebert (talk) 18:47, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    Having looked at WP:DRNMKUCR I would be hesitant in using that as a method of moving forward on this. That DR has been open for more than 28 days and 14 rounds and what has actually been achieved? If editors go into a similar situation and after 3 months come out with a compromise we have already seen editors express that they dont think decisions made through that process carry any more weight than on the talk page. Vanteloop (talk) 18:45, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
    It was devoted to a very global topic. In contrast, the DRN that I propose is much more narrow: it discusses just one section. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:49, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I checked Wheatcroft (1996), the source cited in this section, and the author says:

"The events we are discussing are sometimes referred to as 'the terror', 'the purges', repression, 'the holocaust', genocide and mass killings. The most neutral of these terms are repression and mass killings. 'Repression' is the broader concept, and although in common Russian usage will certainly include mass killings,4 in other languages and in reference to Hitler's Germany would not normally be assumed to cover mass killings. This is the main reason for the rather clumsy title of this article. The use of the word repression alone would imply that the events in the different countries at different times were uniform and in some aggregate sense comparable. I think that this would be mistaken. "

Note, the author discuss Stalin's USSR and Nazi Germany, and he explicitly objects to any attempt to describe the events as uniform and comparable in some aggregate terms. This source was directly misinterpreted in the MkuCR article, and I remove it.--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:22, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

I checked through the source as well and I agree that Wheatcroft is not using the term 'repression' to refer to subject of this article, you were correct to remove it in my opinion Vanteloop (talk) 21:18, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I moved "Genocide" into the "Legal status" section. There is no need to mix legal terms with scholarly terms. Actually, a discussion of "genocide" in a context of MKuCR should focus on one question: why this term is generally NOT applicable to MKuCR. In reality, just few events (mostly Cambodian genocide) was recognized as such by majority of sources.
I removed "Crimes against humanity", because this term is much broader, and it includes non-lethal actions. And, similar to "Genocide", it is not a scholarly term. It is not used in the article except the "Legal status" section. A blue link is quite sufficient.
I am going to remove "Democide", because that is just a statistical category: that is literally a criterion for collection of data into the Rummel's database. It is equally applicable to all deaths that occurred as an act of omission or commission and perpetrated by a state against its citizen. There is nothing specific in application of this term to Communist mass killings.
I also plan to remove "Red Holocaust" as useless (it explains nothing, is not used in this article, and it is highly provocative).
If somebody disagrees, or if my edits will be reverting, I propose to continue at DRN. If you believe this issue is relatively minor, and there is no need to involve Robert McClenon, let's resolve all possible disagreement here, in this section.--Paul Siebert (talk) 03:06, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
  • In general, the whole "Terminology" section looks like a collection of individual examples of usage of some epithets by some authors. That looks more like trivia: for example, does a reader really need to know that some author called some mass killing "the Holocaust"? How does it help a reader to understand the rest of the article? All of that is especially ridiculous keeping in mind that an overwhelming majority of authors do not use those terms at all, or apply them to "communist mass killings" in the same manner as they apply them to other mass killings. Thus, Barbara Harff applies "genocide" to Cambodia and Indonesia, and there is nothing in her usage of this term that needs a separate explanation.
Furthermore, can anybody explain me a reason for invention of the neologism "classicide"? Actually, I know the answer, because I read Mann (and that is why I understand that text is irrelevant to the article, and I am going to remove it). However, I am wondering if those who objected to its removal realise the actual context. --Paul Siebert (talk) 03:48, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I hoping the answer is in the article: classicide. ~ cygnis insignis 03:59, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
No. That is not an answer. How Mann itself explained the need to introduce the term "classicide", and why it was introduced? Again, I know the answer, but I would like some proponent of this term to explain that. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:13, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

RFC on Terminology Section

User:Vanteloop has stated that they are interested in an RFC on the Terminology section. The development of the RFC can be done here (the article talk page), although it is "noisy", or in some quieter corner, such as the DRNMKUCR subpage. The RFC will run on this article talk page when it is ready to run. I will add User:Vanteloop to the list of participants in the DRN subpage, but the list is unimportant because all editors are welcome to participate as long as they agree to moderation. Alternatively, if User:Vanteloop wants to moderate the development of an RFC, I will create another subpage where they can moderate. Where do we want to discuss the Terminology, with the objective of developing another RFC? Robert McClenon (talk) 16:23, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

In short, yes I am interested for the rationale I gave above. If you are willing I would prefer you to moderate. You are vastly more experienced than me and I believe I am too involved in the discussion. In regards to where to have the discussion I have no strong preference. I want to work with as many editors as possible to create a RfC that fairly represents the disagreements and proposed solutions of this section - I honestly believe this is possible. My only concern is if other editors refuse to even entertain the idea of a RfC and then don't accept the outcome. In that case we have wasted everyones time. Finally, I just want to note I am also willing to work in whatever way on other topics, not just the 'terminology' section. Whatever will do the most to actually achieve some meaningful progress. Vanteloop (talk) 16:50, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I strongly object to this RfC. First, I have no idea how the question can be formulated. Any short question would be totally misleading, and it is tantamount to manipulation. We need not an RfC, but a discussion. Before starting an RfC, editors are normally expected to make a reasonable attempt at resolving their issues. Have those reasonable attempts been made? I saw no such attempts. In that situation, any discussion of an RfC can hardly be seen as a demonstration of genuine efforts to resolve the dispute.
Another reason why this RfC is a bad idea is that we still have no agreement on the article's topic. We must decide what this article is about, and our answers to more local questions will depend on the answer to that (main) question. The text of the prospective RfC about this section strongly depend on whether the community votes for A or for B. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:50, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
It's up to Vanteloop. GoodDay (talk) 18:03, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Personal attacks

I remind all participants to stay polite and assume good faith. This edit summary is a clear and unprovoked personal attack. I removed this text, and supplemented it with a quite adequate edit summary. That was a legitimate BOLD edit, and it was aimed to initiate a discussion. I did that after I got no objections to my last arguments on the talk page. I don't need an explicit permission to make edits. If a user abstains from further participation in a discussion, that means they either accepted the arguments, or they lost interest to the discussion. Anticipating possible disagreement, I proposed a DRN, but there was no response. Accusations of bad faith without providing strong evidences is a personal attack, and it may be reported. If you believe removal of that text was unjustified, please, explain that on the talk page, otherwise, do not prevent others from editing. I am waiting for your counter-arguments, or for your agreement to participate in the DRN. --Paul Siebert (talk) 19:00, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Multiple editors already presented our counter arguments. You ignored and said you were going to delete anyway. I and two other editors explicitly stated that you should not do so as there was clearly no consensus. I also told you that to do so would be in bad faith. You then did so, as mentioned by User:‎Robert McClenon your actions are bordering on WP:CPP and without a hefty amount of good faith would be seen as disruptive. I will remind you once again of WP:FILIBUSTER which states repeatedly pushing a viewpoint with which the consensus of the community clearly does not agree, effectively preventing a policy-based resolution. Can we spend less time playing games and work on improving the article. If you continue with this behaviour it may be seen as evidence of a pattern of disruptive behaviour Vanteloop (talk) 19:17, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Furthermore please read WP:SATISFY Vanteloop (talk) 19:20, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Vanteloop: Well, let me explain you something.
  • "Yes, I object. The Mass killing article, which was recently expanded into an article in 2018 has serious underlaying POV issues. Let's discuss this in the DR process. --Nug (talk) 00:21, 2 December 2021 (UTC)" Is not a counter-argument. That is just an objection. The only positive information here is the idea to take the dispute to DRN. However, that post was made on 2 December, and Nug didn't respond to my invitation to join a DRN that I made on 03:26, 6 December 2021 (UTC). From that, I conclude they changed their mind.
  • "Oppose removal User:XavierItzm , User:Nug, and myself have all disagreed with this proposal. There is clearly no consensus. Sections of the article dont get removed if Paul isn't satisfied. They get removed according to consensus. To remove this section without further discussion leading to consensus would be a clear act of bad faith. Filibustering to the point of exhaustion does not mean you have 'won' Vanteloop (talk) 10:39, 4 December 2021 (UTC)" is not an argument at all. There is nothing to address here; all of that can be summarised as "I object"
  • "Are we going around in circles here? This was already discussed a year ago in Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes/Archive_44#Terminology_section. --Nug (talk) 16:12, 4 December 2021 (UTC)" It is not an argument either, for there may be some fresh arguments, which the user does not want to hear.
Who else objected? Meanwhile, there were some users who supported removal. I fully realise that vote count is not a good approach, but you should keep in mind that you even cannot pretend you are speaking on behalf of majority of users.
I raised a legitimate concern about this section, and I expect this my concern to be properly addressed. By the way, do you know that the process marked by addressing legitimate concerns held by editors is called "consensus building"? And your "I object" is by no means an attempt to address my legitimate concern.
I placed a DS template on your talk page, which means you have been duly warned. Any personal attack from your side may be reported now at WP:AE. You already made this attack: you accused me of filibustering, and you claimed I am "repeatedly pushing a viewpoint with which the consensus of the community clearly does not agree, effectively preventing a policy-based resolution". I have strong reasons to believe that that claim is false: first, the number of users who objected to my proposal is not bigger than the number of those who supported it, so there is no reason to speak about any consensus. Second, I repeatedly propose DRN, and I have no response. In that situation, your accusation, which lack a strong support, is an obvious personal attack. Please, remove this statement.
I am not going to participate in that discussion until the new RfC, which I am going to initiate, will lead to some concrete outcome. However, if you will make another personal attack, I'll report you.
P.S. It would be very helpful if you confirm that the edit summary, where you accused me of bad faith was your error, and you regret about that. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:13, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
User talk:Paul Siebert Be aware yoour report may WP:BOOMERANG like your previous report to ANI. I see the neutral moderator Robert McClenon has already placed a DS template on your talk page so I wont bother repeating it, but be duly warned. I also note that you are again exhibiting in the behaviour that neutral moderator Robert McClenon described as civil POV pushing, which is disruptive. If you classify all our objections as simple statements then I'm not convinced you've read the section you're talking about. Have you read WP:SATISFY as I suggested? As I have said before, please spend less time engaging in unproductive disputes and more time in helping to improve the article. With regard to this argument first, the number of users who objected to my proposal is not bigger than the number of those who supported it, so there is no reason to speak about any consensus. You should note WP:VOTE which i have tried to explain to you previously when you objected to any RfCs on this page. Vanteloop (talk) 20:35, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Template removals

Obvious sock puppet accounts (IP only, no edits before today) are removing the templates from the page, for which there is obviously no consensus. Edit summaries make clear this is being done on an ideological basis. Can someone keep an eye on it and revert when necessary? I presume this is an attempt to sucker editors into falling foul of the revert sanctions, so if whoever is doing that happens to be reading this, please grow up and stop. Thanks. DublinDilettante (talk) 18:07, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes these edits are clearly vandalism. I don't think anyone could reasonably argue that editors undoing them are breaking the revert sanctions. Vanteloop (talk) 18:11, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@DublinDilettante: Per WP:NOT3RR (which also applies to 1RR), obvious vandalism (which undiscussed template removal is) is free to revert as many times as needed without fear of reprisal. BSMRD (talk) 18:30, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@DublinDilettante and Vanteloop: - There were no IP edits for a week or so until today because it was semi-protected. The semi-protection has expired, and I have requested that it be restored for a month or so. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:39, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
That seems sensible Vanteloop (talk) 22:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Additional Comments on Analysis of Sources

I was asked whether I will facilitate an RFC for the analysis of sources. The answer is "It all depends", for at least three reasons. First, questions about the reliability of sources should be addressed at the reliable source noticeboard rather than here.

Second, in my opinion, much of the discussion about the analysis of sources reflects a misconception about what can be accomplished by the analysis of sources. An analysis of sources can have either or both of at least two objectives, analysis of verifiability and analysis of reliability. The first objective is to compare the source to a section or statement in the article and see if the source supports the statement. The second objective is to assess the source to decide how reliable it is. The first is relatively easy, and the second is likely to be contentious. However, most of the questions about sources are not really about whether they are reliable but whether they are neutral or biased, and how to present an overview of what different sources and types of sources say. (The idea that an analysis of sources will decide that some sources should be accepted and others rejected, and that that will resolve the questions about the article, is a distraction.)

Third, there have been questions identified, since the start of this discussion, about types of sources, including journalistic and historical sources on specific events, genocide scholars, and critics of Marxism-Leninism. In my opinion, the issue (as noted above) is not what sources to exclude, but how to organize an article that refers to multiple types of sources.

If an editor has a specific idea for an RFC on how to organize the article in order to reflect the different sources, I will work with them to facilitate the RFC. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:26, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

We could start with these sources:
  • Benjamin Valentino, Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College, in a chapter called "Communist Mass Killings: The Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia" in his book "Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the Twentieth Century", published by Cornell University Press: Communist regimes have been responsible for this century's most deadly episodes of mass killing. Estimates of the total number of people killed by communist regimes range as high as 110 million. In this chapter I focus primarily on mass killings in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia - history's most murderous communist states. Communist violence in these three states alone may account for between 21 million and 70 million deaths. Mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by communist regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa." ..."Communism has a bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or have been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killing. In addition to shedding light on why some communist states have been among the most violent regimes in history, therefore, I also seek to explain why other communist countries have avoided this level of violence." ..."I argue that radical communist regimes have proven such prodigious killers primarily because the social change they sought to bring about have resulted in the sudden and nearly complete material and political dispossession of millions of people. These regimes practiced social engineering of the highest order. It is the revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society that distinguishes radical communist regimes from all other forms of government, including less violent communist regimes and noncommunist, authoritarian governments.
  • Michael Mann, UCLA sociologist, in a chapter called "Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot" from his book "The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing" published by Cambridge University Press: All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of the differences." ..."Ordinary party members were also ideologically driven, believing that in order to create a new socialist society, they must lead in socialist zeal. Killings were often popular, tha rank-and-file as keen to exceed killing quotas as production quotas. The pervasive role of the party inside the state also meant that authority structures were not fully institutionalized but factionalized, even chaotic, as revisionists studying the Societ Union have argued. Both centralized control and mass party factionalism were involved in the killings." ..."This also made for Plans nurtured by these regimes that differed from those envisioned in my sixth thesis. Much of the Communist organization of killing was more orderly than that of the ethnonationalists. Communists were more statist. But only the Plans that killed the fewest people were fully intended and occurred at early stages of the process. There is no equivalent of the final solution, and the last desperate attempt to achieve goals by mass murder after all other Plans have failed. The greatest Communist death rates were not intended but resulted from gigantic policy mistakes worsened by factionalism, and also somewhat by callous or revengeful views of the victims. But - with the Khmer Rouge as a borderline case - no Communist regime contemplated genocide. This is the biggest difference between Communist and ethnic killers: Communists caused mass deaths mainly through disastrous policy mistakes; ethnonationalists killed more deliberately.
  • Jacques Semelin, professor of political science and research director at CERI-CNRS in Paris and founder of the Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, in his chapters "Destroying to Subjugate: Communist regimes: Reshaping the social body" and "Destroying to eradicate: Politicidal regimes?" in his translated book "Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide" published in english by Columbia University Press: Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole, i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implememted in order to transform a society completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire." ..."'Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' - a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia. However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of 'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again, the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann.
  • Daniel Chirot, Professor of International Studies and Sociology at the University of Washington, and Clark R. McCauley, Professor of Psychology at Bryn Mawr College and Director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, in the chapter "Why Genocides? Are they different now than in the past?: The four main motives leading to mass political murder" in their book "Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder", published by Princeton University Press: The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The revolutionary thinkers who formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported, or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999).
  • David Bellamy, Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at The University of Queensland, Australia and Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, in the chapter "The Cold War Struggle (2): Communist Atrocities" in his book "Massacres and Morality: Mass Atrocities in an Age of Civilian Immunity", published by Oxford University Press: Communist regimes massacred millions of civilians during the Cold War. Governments in the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia initiated programs of radical social transformation and killed, tortured or allowed to starve whole groups thought hostile to change or simply unworthy of life. But it is not simply the number of victims that distinguishes communist from non-communist atrocities in the Cold War. guided by ideologies of selective extermination, communist perpetrators rarely even acknowledged the moral questions raised by their policies of sometimes systematic extermination. Ideological solidarity prompted communist governments to support one another, often enabling communist perpetrators of mass killing to secure sufficient legitimacy.
Feel free to add others. --Nug (talk) 19:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
User:Nug - Thank you. Am I correct in inferring that those sources are not currently used in the article? If so, I see no reason that they cannot be added to the appropriate sections of the article, but the structure of the article is being discussed and they might be moved. However, I had been discussing analysis of sources, which is a different matter than adding sources. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Robert McClenon, as far as I understand it, those sources are all used at least once already in the article, and they are better considered to be the core sources of MKuCR — indeed, those sources were the reason why the article resulted in 'Keep' for the first time but that is no longer the case, as there is no consensus.
By the way, have you noticed that all those sources are about genocide and/or mass killing in general (as was noted by AndyTheGrump in the AfD), and while they discuss Communism (some of them give them chapters, but they also give them for capitalism and other regime types, while others are more in passing), I am not sure that supports Communism as a separate and/or special category by majority sources.
As noted by Paul Siebert, they do not necessarily entails that a new topic is created; as they are works about mass killings in general, and discuss all sort of regime types, it looks cherry picked in single outing Communism as a special and/or separate category; in other words, all those sources are good ones to actually expand Mass killing, not creating a new topic and article about Communism as if it was a separate category, hence the POV forking; we also still disagree about Valentino. It could be a different thing if they were focused solely on Communism (note that they say Communist regimes but in practice they mean Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot because those are the Communist regimes under which mass killings happened, so those sources are still misread1 to imply Communism as a whole, which can be done only if we, ironically, move away from mass killings and focus on excess deaths) and represented a majority view. Davide King (talk) 07:21, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Notes
1. Mann's main thesis, as shown by the book's title, is that democratic transformation can result in genocides, as it has happened in Rwanda. Yet, we treat him as if he was writing about Communism in a special or separate category when they are passing mentions, and he is proposing the concept of Classicide. Davide King (talk) 07:24, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Comment About Source Analysis

The closing administrators wrote, in closing the RFC with No Consensus: "We therefore strongly recommend that the DRN process be resumed and pick up the attempts at source analysis carried out in this discussion, which show promise in breaking the deadlock." I wish that I could be as optimistic as the closers about the ability to break the deadlock by source analysis. However, I am willing to facilitate an RFC to the effect as noted above. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

As I explained in my previous post, the core issue, which had been recognised many years ago, but which is still unresolved, is the article's topic. Actually, many discussions, for example, a recent discussion about the new title, lead us to thin core issue. If we resolve this issue (I always maintained that I am totally neutral about that), that would be a huge step forward. That has a direct relationship to the your question about the best way to reflect sources. If that linkage is not obvious, ask me, and I'll explain.
It can be resolved only via an RfC. However, the RfC question must be very well written, because (i) users must clearly understand what they are voting for (that should be a real vote, because, from the point of view of our policy, both options are acceptable, so the answer to that question is a matter of taste), and (ii) there should be no ambiguity in its implementation (if a majority of users vote for "B", then it should be clear what concrete consequences it has).
I propose to start writing this RfC. It is much more realistic goal, it does not require a deep knowledge of sources, and there should be no fundamental disagreement among users. If you agree, what platform is more suitable for that? This talk page or DRN? Paul Siebert (talk) 16:47, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Robert Tombs

Just so people know, this is the historian being relied upon as the moral authority for the retention of this article, and who was permitted to influence the AfD (and is even mentioned on the Ideological Bias article itself!)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9543161/PROFESSOR-ROBERT-TOMBS-daftest-lecture-wokery-yet.html

He’s writing in the Daily Mail, a far-right tabloid deprecated as a source on Wikipedia, decrying the Liverpool Guild of Students’ decision to rename an accommodation block after Dorothy Kuya. The previous title, Gladstone Hall, has been changed because (he says) "...in the eyes of the woke brigade, Gladstone committed the mortal sin of having a family connection to slavery".

Needless to say, one of his issues with the mixed-race female anti-racism campaigner Kuya is that she was a member of the Communist Party. If this doesn’t make it clear where Tombs’s anticommunist perspectives come from, nothing will.

The anticommunist sources being relied on in this article are absolute garbage.

DublinDilettante (talk) 01:17, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

The Daily Mail is conservative, not far-right. There's no need to continue to complain about the AfD. That's over now and our main focus should be on fixing this article instead. X-Editor (talk) 02:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@X-Editor: regarding your revert, my backdating the article tag, do you now recognise where WP:Synthesis links to? ~ cygnis insignis 02:37, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Cygnis insignis: I don't really care that deeply about what date the tag is, so I wouldn't mind if it goes back to 2009. X-Editor (talk) 02:47, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Ta. I restored it, but self-reverted because it was 3rr, apologies for that. @Nug: was rolling back a bunch of my edits without edit summaries, so if someone could restore my edit I would appreciate it. ~ cygnis insignis 02:55, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Oh good, what I have noted above is buried and I aint done with responding to his assertions. I found another blog comment on Tomb's History Reclaimed site, explained at Why We Are Reclaiming History, which notes "Despite the facile narrative that defines this type of media, the claim is not without merit when noting that most endorsers are of emeritus status. The advancement of their own academic careers is evidently no longer central to their practice. Self-censorship is likely to operate amongst younger scholars of a similar persuasion in departments where mainstream narratives may apply suffocating pressure to conform with anti-imperial and decolonising programmes". Solares, Carlos Conde (14 October 2021). "Reclaiming an imperial history of the (white, Anglo-Saxon) West (that excludes Spain)". North East Bylines. ~ cygnis insignis 02:37, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Another source express.co.uk/news/ Woke fightback: Academics launch plan to take on 'blatantly false' reading of history. ~ cygnis insignis 02:48, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Tombs argues in his article that Gladstone's name was removed from a building because his father once owned slaves. In fact, it was removed because Gladstone himself supported slavery and as an MP voted against the Slavery Abolition Act 1833.[8] His maiden speech in parliament was a defense of slavery and the plantation system, his father being one of the largest slave owners in the British Empire, according to his Wikipedia article. Whether or not this is sufficient reason to remove Gladstone, Tombs' account of the facts is false. TFD (talk) 10:10, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
So what? This whole section is pointless and does not contribute to improving the article per WP:NOTFORUM. --Nug (talk) 11:43, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
You wrote at the AfD, "Tombs says the article is careful and balanced. What makes you better qualified than Tombs to judge?" [14:25, 28 November 2021][9] Peronally, I would say "who cares?" if a person who falsified facts in order to push a political views said this article was "careful and balanced." While this may not matter to you, it does to other editors who are more concerned with accuracy than supporting a political position. TFD (talk) 02:33, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Wow. Is this accurate, Nug? Did you brush off revelations about Tombs’s academic and political background after previously asserting that he was a better source than the participants in the AfD? Genuinely, and in all fairness, you should remove yourself from this discussion if so. I think there’s a strong case for re-running the AfD in the light of this revelation. DublinDilettante (talk) 12:18, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

DRN and RFCs

This is another follow-up about the possibility of facilitation and the (non)possibility of mediation.

I said, above, that DRNMKUCR was available for the development of one or more RFCs. That is what I said. I didn't say that was offering to conduct mediation on any limited topics.

  • User:Paul Siebert wrote: "In that case [described above], I propose to start a new DRN devoted to this specific issue, and include all parties into it. Do you think that may work?"
  • I wrote: "What would you expect to be the result of the DRN? Would you expect it to result in approval of your idea, compromise, an RFC, what?"
  • User:Paul Siebert wrote: "sorry, but your question doesn't look serious. If I wanted just an approval of my idea, it would be senseless to resort to DRN."
  • The question was completely serious. Would you be expecting compromise, or an RFC? I could instead have gone ahead to answer your question of whether it may work with "Probably not", but I had thought that maybe your objective was an RFC. Mediation does not work well with a large number of participants. That is one of the reasons that I was offering to facilitate RFCs, and not to mediate, or to conduct moderated discussion.
  • However, in the discussion of Terminology, User:Vanteloop proposed discussion leading to an RFC.
  • But User:Paul Siebert wrote: "I explicitly object to RfC. That is not a substitute for a normal discussion. That is a misuse of the procedure, because 'Editors are normally expected to make a reasonable attempt at resolving their issues before seeking help from others.' I see no evidences that you made any reasonable attempt to resolve this dispute. In that situation, resorting to de facto !vote would be a misuse of the RfC procedure."
  • When there are a large number of editors, it is unlikely that discussion will resolve a dispute or result in agreement. Editors who object to an RFC may do so because they would prefer to stonewall, or because they are unduly optimistic about their own power to persuade other editors. The good-faith assumption in this case is that an editor who objects to an RFC overestimates their own power of persuasion.
  • I personally consider explicitly objecting to an RFC to be a form of civil POV pushing, which is disruptive. I do not plan to take part in discussion in which editors have the right to refuse to take part in RFC.

I am still willing to facilitate one or more RFCs. I do not plan to lead moderated discussion with some other objective. I find the objection to RFC troubling.

I will likely comment on some specific issues in the next 24 hours, but I will clarify that I do not intend to try to mediate in any way other than facilitating RFCs. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:14, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your time, I have a few questions that I hope you can address in your next comments. Have you checked my series of questions that one or more RfCs should address to find a way forward? If so, are they good, did I miss anything? Would it be possible to also have an RfC about analysis of sources? If not, what is the best way to perform a (moderated or not) analysis of sources? I mention sources because the AfD said it is the core issue of the dispute. Davide King (talk) 06:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: I'm somewhat surprised Paul has basically ignored your efforts at DR post AfD. Maybe he is worried about any potential RFC's not going his way, I don't know. Paul flagged his removal of the terminology section in Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Terminology, several editors objected and I suggested this could be something for DR. Many articles have a "definitions" or "terminology" section to help the reader, so this could have been a candidate for an RFC. But Paul has just ignored everyone who doesn't agree with him and has started removing text anyway. --Nug (talk) 06:32, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
diddums, but Robert has just stated, more or less, they are not here to mediate individual grievances eg. sentences beginning with 'But UserName has … ~ cygnis insignis 06:54, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: I would like to put forward my willingness to work to create a RfC regarding the terminology section. I initially was willing to go some other route in the spirit of building consensus. At this point however, I am inclined to agree with your assessment of users who blanket object to any RfC. Let me also say it may well be the case the RfCs results in a consensus to remove the terminology section or make the changes Paul and others have suggested. I may even support some of those options. What I have objected to is the stonewalling of any chance of consensus, and pushing edits through over the explicit objections of multiple editors. Vanteloop (talk) 09:39, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I personally consider explicitly objecting to an RFC to be a form of civil POV pushing, which is disruptive. As a follow up can you confirm what the consequences will be for editors who continue in this disruptive behaviour (ie. refuse to work to build consensus and instead edit without regard to this discussion)? I don't think its a worthwhile use of time to engage in good faith attempts to build consensus in the face of such behaviour. Vanteloop (talk) 09:49, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
The article is under a discretionary sanctions regime, so any admin is empowered to issue topic bans or blocks at their discretion for such disruptive behaviour. --Nug (talk) 11:34, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
"under a discretionary sanctions regime" ~ cygnis insignis 15:18, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Vanteloop: is that summary of what is arguably most of the contributions to the article's long history a withdrawal of the offer to create that RfC? ~ cygnis insignis 14:22, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
This is all deeply undignified. Surely there should be sanctions applied for canvassing to get users with opposing views topic-locked during an edit dispute? This is not good faith. The circumstances for an RfC clearly don’t exist. DublinDilettante (talk) 14:44, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
This you? It's clear that, having failed to make any plausible case for retaining this article (even with the organised support of far-right media outlets), the Keepist camp is attempting to "win the peace" by locking in a hard-line, POV intepretation of history through a series of bureaucratic manoeuvres and "sandbagging" of those they see as their opponents. There is no good faith being exercised, and none is possible in these conditions. Vanteloop (talk) 15:42, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Not seeing your point? Have I tried to get anyone topic-locked? DublinDilettante (talk) 15:51, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
One assumes it was, I remind myself that a lot of comments expressing astonishment at deletion have expressed deep concern based on humanistic sentiments, censorship, and historical revisionism, and that is done in 'good faith' when the title is an 'article of faith'. ~ cygnis insignis 16:01, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: I believe I already answered your question about DRN. However, to avoid misunderstanding, let me do that again. Your question " Would you expect it to result in approval of your idea ... ?" implies that you see me as a person who is not prone to arguments and who does not respect other's opinion. Of course, I, as well as any reasonable person, am ready to all scenarios: that the RDN discussion will result in approval of my idea, OR compromise, OR even in a complete rejection of my idea, etc. Every outcome is possible, and I would be a dishonest person if joined a DRN discussion without being ready to accept all possible outcomes.
I am sure that was not your intention, but your question sounded somewhat provocative and insulting (it implied that I may be an intellectually dishonest person). Therefore, my reaction was quite understandable. I believe, we may consider this incident resolved, and there will be no misunderstanding between us in future.
WRT my objections to RfCs. Obviously, I objected not to RfCs in general, but to a misuse of the RfC procedure. An example of such a misuse is the RfC that is currently open, and, by the way, I am by no means the only person who says that (just read comments).
Sometimes, an RfC may be a very bad idea. Sometimes, it is absolutely necessary. Thus, we absolutely need an RfC that will answer a question about the article's topic. The article's topic can be either the events (mass killings etc) (an option A), or it can be the narrative (that Communism killed 100+ million)(an option B). The core problem of this article is that it a hybrid: it is a story about the events, which is embedded into some narrative (and that narrative expresses the views of a minority of scholars). I repeated, for many times, that we need to choose between A and B (btw, I myself is absolutely neutral in that aspect, I accept any decision), and that problem can be resolved only via a carefully written RfC. Note, this question is intrinsically impossible to resolve at the DRN, it can be resolved only via an RfC.
However, there are some questions that cannot and should not be discussed during RfCs. Consider this example: If I start the following RfC: Do you think that the article is well sourced?", an overwhelming majority of users would answer "Yes". And I perfectly understand them, for I myself thought the article was well sourced. However, when I started to check sources, one by one, I found that many of them are twisted, misinterpreted of just do not tell anything about the topic. That means, such an RfC would lead to totally misleading and harmful outcome, because majority of users are not deeply familiar with the topic and do not analyse sources. That would be a pure manipulation.
Therefore, there are some questions that can be resolved only in a multiround mediated discussions (such as DRN), which requires participants to deeply dive into the topic and respond to each other's arguments, and there are questions that require an RfC, and cannot be resolved at the DRN. It is also possible that a DRN discussion may lead to an RfC, but I am not sure it is really necessary in every case.
I believe the misunderstanding between us may be considered resolved now. If you still disagree, please, let me know. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:27, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
And, by the way, I agree that DRN is not a good for resolving a dispute among a large number of users. That is why I attempted to split a "big" DRN on smaller subtopics, which are more suitable for the DRN format. I asked your opinion about that, but there was no answer from you. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:40, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Let the related-DRN run its course. Before, continuing anything else here. GoodDay (talk) 21:06, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

DRN Status (yet again)

I have posted another moderator's statement at the DRN subpage, and am ready to resume discussion at DRN for the purpose of developing RFCs. As I have already said, there are too many editors for moderated discussion to be able to arrive at any compromise that all of the editors will accept.

I think that I saw a reference to the moratorium on editing the article while DRN is in progress. I have deleted the rule that says not to edit the article while discussion is in progress. Editing the article is limited by the 1RR rule, except for the reversion of disruptive edits. Edits to the article may be rolled back by any RFCs that are closed, but you knew that.

I will point out that one advantage and one disadvantage of using DRN to develop RFCs are both that it is a slower, more deliberate process than development here on the article talk page. An advantage of using DRN is that the DRN subpage is a "quiet room", while this article talk page is a "noisy room", like drafting a work document at a cocktail party. Multiple RFCs can be developed both at the DRN subpage and on this article talk page, but the editors developing the RFCs should take reasonable care to avoid having conflicting RFCs.

I have identified two possible topics for RFCs at the DRN subpage, one of which may also be being worked on here. Anyone is welcome to propose another RFC subject. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:56, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

We've got an DRN ongoing & a RFC being prepared separate from that DRN. Too much traffic, IMHO. GoodDay (talk) 07:18, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
Robert, I accept your invitation, and I am going to continue the discussion at DRN. If a significant number of users will ignore your proposal, and the work on this RfC will continue on this talk page, I will have no choice but to come back and to suspend my participation in the DRN discussion. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:27, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Comments to One Editor

Comment acknowledged, let's focus on content. Individual concerns are better addressed on user talk pages. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:14, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

User:Paul Siebert – I am aware that you are acting in good faith and are trying to improve an article that needs improvement. However, you should be aware that it looks to other editors as if you are attempting to exercise ownership in improving the article. You proposed that the AFD be suspended so that you could work on an analysis of sources. That idea was ignored, but you were trying, in good faith, to bypass normal process. You then went to WP:ANI concerning what I thought was a mistaken RFC, rather than simply !voting, or ignoring it. The appearance was that you had to be in charge. You then strongly objected to an RFC on Terminology as bypassing normal discussion. That was two RFCs that you objected to, maybe because you want your own approach to be the approach that is taken/. You then have proposed that you will draft another RFC. It looks as if you are trying to control the improvement of the article. I am sure that you have had your reasons each time, but the impression adds up.

If you want to regain the trust of the community, it might be a good idea not to try to lead the development of an RFC, but to let it be developed at DRN. But that is up to you. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:56, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

I am less interested in discussing editor's behaviour than I am in trying to move forward on improving this page, however it is important that when behaviour becomes disruptive it is called out. I have mentioned to User:Paul Siebert multiple times that their behaviour requires a heavy dose of good faith to intepret as constructive. I have twice (or more?) asked this user to read WP:SATISFY to correct their behaviour, because of their reasoning such as this If a user abstains from further participation in a discussion, that means they either accepted the arguments, or they lost interest to the discussion. For example, this user proposed a removal of the terminology section. Multiple editors presented counter arguments. The user ignored these and said they were going to delete anyway. I and two other editors explicitly stated that they should not do so as there was clearly no consensus. I also told them that to do so would be in bad faith. They then did so anyway. And when I reverted the changes they threatened to report me. That is just one example of the behaviour I have warned them for. The user is clearly knowledgeable and committed on this subject, so I warmly hope they correct their behaviour and join us in trying to work constructively to create a RfC or other consensus building process. Vanteloop (talk) 09:26, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
I do not get the impression that Paul Siebert (unlike other editors) is attempting to control the improvement of the article, and nor do I feel that Paul Siebert has lost the trust of the community. I would strongly question your entitlement to make that assertion, and consider it wildly inappropriate. It should be withdrawn. DublinDilettante (talk) 12:30, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: For more than a decade I've stalked this page on off, and in all that time, I think (I can't remember!) but I'm fairly sure I have never commented here nor edited the article. I am literally *loathe* to participate; I !voted delete at the recent AfD. Further, I've interacted with Paul Siebert for more than a decade; I'm well aware of his practices and efforts. My perspective on his effort during the AfD was a genuine attempt at compromise (I disagreed, but did not regard his effort as problematic); perhaps witnessing the coordinated subversion of the AfD process, he sought to propose a good-faith alternative for those committed to the project, no matter what their perspective on MKuCR. He has shown a decade-long commitment to seeking the highest possible professional standards with this article. So, I simply will not accept a statement which indicates that Paul Siebert has lost the trust of the community. Please withdraw this. He may have frustrated you, he may have engaged in a practice you disagree with, but the community is not defined by a group of editors in dispute over a single article. For the record, I have never communicated with Paul Siebert in any other form than on his talk page or article talk pages. Regards, --Goldsztajn (talk) 20:57, 7 December 2021 (UTC)
@Robert McClenon: Thank you for your comment on me. That was useful, it helped me to understand your vision of the issue. Let me, in responce, made some comments on you. Robert, I have a feeling that you are a very good moderator. I would love to resolve all article's problems at the DRN, and I would like to see you as a moderator. However,
  • First, I disagree with your description of the RfCs issue. As I already explained, I objected not to any RFCs, but to those RfCs that bypass a normal process {Editors are normally expected to make a reasonable attempt at resolving their issues before seeking help from others.) I already explained that, and I am not sure why you returned to that issue. Yes, I proposed a draft of a new RfC, but that was in a full accordance with a standard procedure. The reason is simple: "mine" RfC was not a freshly invented RfC. This RfC was a result of a several years long discussion on this talk page, and I, along with several other users, have made all reasonable attempts to resolve this problem, and now it is a time for the RfC. Therefore, your conclusion about my ostensible attempts to control the talk page process may be just a result of your unfamiliarity with the talk page history. I would be grateful if you refrained from unjustified generalisations.
  • Second, I respect your ability to mediate disputes, but I doubt that gives you a right to speak on behalf of the community. Your words "If you want to regain the trust of the community..." addressed to me, do not seem appropriate. You imply that (i) you know what the community thinks about me, and (ii) you know that the community doesn't trust me, and (iii) you know what should I do to regain this trust. Even if we leave the factual accuracy of your words beyond the scope (in reality, my views are supported by many users on this talk page, and this support is mutual, so by no means I need to regain anything), these your words sound somewhat not modest.
  • Third, during past few days, I asked you, repeatedly, how can we resume the DRN process, but your responces were scarce and not enthusiastic. In that situation, I decided to take initiative, so your accusations should be partially directed to you.
In summary, you are a reasonable person, and I am a reasonable persons. Reasonable persons can make awkward statements, but they learn from their mistakes. You pointed at some aspects in my behaviour that, in your opinion, are problematic, and I also explained some problems in your manner to express yourself. I believe we will take these comments into account, and there will be no misunderstanding between us in future.
I would like to continue to work with you as a Moderator, and I would like to resolve as many problem as possible at the DRN. I will try to minimize my activity here during the DRN, however, if other users will ignore it, I will have to return (reluctantly) here, on this talk page.
Regards, Paul Siebert (talk) 20:58, 7 December 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Mass killings under communist regimes (4th nomination)

My opinion is the page title shouldn't exist, therefore I have proposed the page be deleted and am assuming this is adequate notification, without individual pings, to those invested in its content. ~ cygnis insignis 15:07, 22 November 2021 (UTC)

May you expand the context of your opinion? WeiChengChao (talk) 22:32, 23 November 2021 (UTC)
How about no 2607:FEA8:F49A:F500:844B:8EE3:6322:1D9E (talk) 13:52, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

No. Vincenty846 (talk) 14:27, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

No. Oules (talk) 16:24, 24 November 2021 (UTC)

Deleting this article would be truly Orwellian. It’s very nomination for deletion is a political act attempting to whitewash Communism. There is absolutely no justification for deletion.

It should remain. Ashley Payne (talk) 09:25, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

No, the article should not be deleted. Minimizing, mitigating, or downplaying any sort of historical atrocity is wrong, including ones that have occurred in the communist regimes of the 20th century. Furthermore, to state that only this article be deleted amidst the countless other articles of similar style of content that Wikipedia has is special pleading. GrammarGuy16 (talk) 18:54, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

I do not see any reason for deleting this article. It should stay.Horea Vêntilă (talk) 09:55, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

All, if you'd like to have your opinion on whether this article should be deleted noted, please refer to the AfD discussion. colejhudson (talk) 18:55, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

Agreed, I think the article should be deteled. It's such an absolute mess of outdated and disproven cold-war propaganda, made up death toles, and in some cases even labelling people who were killed by captialism as "victims of communism", that I don't see how this article can be fixed without demolishing it and starting from the beginning. The History Wizard of Cambridge (talk) 02:51, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Generalized broadsides like the above are not useful to article improvement. Totally denying that there were tens of millions of excess deaths—admittedly most likely closer to 60 million rather than the 100 million figure popular in certain areas of the Internet—caused by self-described communist governments in the twentieth century is, in fact, a WP:FRINGE view in reliable academic sources, in many ways comparable to Holocaust denial, and any editor who espouses it is more likely to be topic banned or otherwise sanctioned, I believe, then the editors who advocated for keeping this article. In any case, you are not using the word "tole" correctly, and it is unclear what "even labelling people who were killed by captialism [sic] as 'victims of communism'" refers to. Regards,TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:26, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Mass killings

Stop trying to change or cover up history!! It’s history. Learn from it!! Just because you don’t like it don’t make it untrue. This stuff happened!! Teach history as it was. There are still people around that can verify all of it. 2600:1006:B1E1:FC8B:E102:AFB4:AF7B:4013 (talk) 16:47, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Stick to your main account, my dude. DublinDilettante (talk) 17:37, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
They probably don't have an account. Media is running stories on this controversy. Concerned individuals are trying to stop the page from being deleted, for obvious reasons. Aminomancer (talk) 00:33, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
The obvious reason being the right-wing media’s habitual desire to falsify history. DublinDilettante (talk) 00:41, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Are you arguing that mass killings did not occur under communist regimes? I think the general concern from randos is that people think that the information was under threat of being wiped from Wikipedia, which they see as a threat to the ability to easily access information that summarizes these sorts of mass killings. And that are some who would try to continue to deny the scope of the Katyn Massacre despite the Soviets literally confessing to it in the early 90's, for example, doesn't exactly help in convincing random people on the internet that Wikipedia is free of ideological censorship. Not that this has any bearing on Wikipedia policy, but it's worth considering. — Mhawk10 (talk) 05:35, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Link fix "there are some" ~ cygnis insignis 06:11, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Thank you — Mhawk10 (talk) 06:12, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Surely this claim in the edit comment appears somewhat disingenuous, the most basic Google scholar search shows it to be a topic of much scholarly study. Unfortunately Paul's edit has made the section Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Terminology_and_usage a POV fork of linked article Genocide definitions. --Nug (talk) 04:31, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

"Genocide" has two meanings: it is a legal term, and it is used as a synonym of "mass killing". Thus, a scholarly discipline called "genocide studies" does not study only genocides, and "genocide scholars" (like Valentinio) do not study genocide exclusively. It is not our goal to explain colloquial meaning of each term. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:37, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
Actually, I am in a progress now, thank you for pointing at a redundant link. I think, it is better to remove it. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:39, 6 December 2021 (UTC)
I guess you think The International Association of Genocide Scholars is an organisation of legal professionals. Unfortunately Paul's edits are a POV fork of Genocide studies. --Nug (talk) 04:44, 6 December 2021 (UTC)

Genocide is not merely an international legal term; if there were, there'd be no a reason that the page listing various genocide definitions would be a notable list. If we're considering whether or not to use "genocide" in Wikivoice, it's probably best to use the genocide convention definition, but to say that it's merely a legal term is simply not correct when there is so much scholarly study on the topic of genocide. — Mhawk10 (talk) 06:39, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Just change it.

Simply remove the word ‘communist’.

These regimes weren’t communist. If somewhere has a regime / dictator, it’s not communist by any stretch of the imagination - how did workers own the means of production and make decisions collectively in Stalin or Pol Pot’s dictatorships? In no way at all. 82.11.45.175 (talk) 09:36, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Communist states are called "communist" due to their self-declaration of allegiance with the communist ideology, as in Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Chinese Communist Party etc. That's pretty widespread political denomination that is discussed in detail in communist state article. Cloud200 (talk) 16:19, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Bad idea for two reasons. Firstly, this article only cites regimes that call themselves Communist, and makes no mention of the Fascist regimes. Therefore, it would be out of scope unless you are willing to put in the time to expand the article with other regimes unrelated to Totalitarian/Statist Communism (Stalinism, Maoism, etc). Secondly, if you were to focus on all regimes as mentioned above, that article would become longer than it is as of right now, and eventually, the article would be split up, causing it to revert back to Mass killings under Communist regimes, see WP:LENGTH. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 20:47, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
What a brilliant idea, surely no one has thought of "just changing" the article before. What does "Mass killings under regimes" even mean? At that point just make List of mass killings. BSMRD (talk) 22:51, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
C should be captialized to avoid confusion. Small c communism means a post socialist society where the state no longer exists. TFD (talk) 03:16, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
Why did you lie that I "voted against capitalizing Communist even though it would remove ambiguity" when you know very well that MOS:ISMCAPS is reason for not capitalizing per the discussion you participated in at Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes/Archive_39#Capitalization_of_"Communist". --Nug (talk) 21:39, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
The word itself, communism, is not derived from a personal name or any other kind of proper noun. It's derived from French communisme, whence Marx's kommunismus. From Latin root communis. Every step of the way it has been a common noun. Humorously, it literally meant "common"-ism at the time. The only reason to elevate a common noun denoting a philosophy/ideology to a proper noun is ideological. And as Nug noted, the MOS is very clear on that. Also, it does not enhance clarity. Some especially educated individuals might interpret small-c communism to mean a free post-state society. But many of the same individuals will interpret big-C Communism to mean the same thing. Simply, most people familiar with modern Russian and Slavic literature will only interpret capitalized Communism or Kommunismus or Коммунизм as an indication of the sociopolitical leanings of the author and perhaps their sympathy towards communism. It would not help elucidate the specific formulation of communism they reference. Nor would it help to illustrate whether they mean state communism or post-state communism, since in Russian sources (from which most modern communist theory operative in real world regimes was gleaned) those were either purposefully conflated or referred to by entirely different words. Aminomancer (talk) 00:28, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Except that in that case Communism is considered to be a proper noun because Communist party is a proper noun, and is why many scholars make such distinction, which is helpful to distinguish a post-socialist society and a state ruled by a Communist party. The Black Book of Communism did the same thing, I do not see why we should not be doing the same both for clarity (this is the English Wikipedia, so Russian and Slavic literature is irrelevant) and because it is indeed used as a proper noun, thus capitalization is in full respect of our policies. Capitalized Communism is clearly not referring to an ideology but to a sovereign state ruled by a Communist party — it is for the same reason we capitalize Nazism and Italian Fascism. Davide King (talk) 07:15, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

Make the section "Proposed Causes" its own article

Per WP:LENGTH and WP:SYNTH, this article is too long and for an article this controversial any theory and gossip should be avoided, which this entire section focuses about. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with this section in itself as it is properly cited, etc, but its inclusion in this specific article is a tad bit problematic for the reasons cited earlier. If not moving this section into its own article, removing it entirely will, at the very least, weed out some subjectivity from this contentious article.

If it was to be made, this new article should be titled something along the lines of "Proposed causes for the democides within Communist regimes", though this title is a bit long. So, any suggestion for a shorter title is welcome. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 21:33, 8 December 2021 (UTC)

Nope, won’t do that. What it would do is allow the implicit connection between communism and mass killing to stand unchallenged within the article itself, particularly as it’s implied by many of the (ludicrously tendentious) sources quoted. DublinDilettante (talk) 23:37, 8 December 2021 (UTC)
Either the section is moved into its own article or the section in question should be removed per WP:LENGTH. Note that you can challenge the content on the newer article if you believe there is something objectionable. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 19:48, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
Yeah, and bog down the debate across two articles. Come on, let’s be serious with one another here. If only the western allies had been so keen to give the Soviets the second front they were begging for in WWII, a lot of mass killing might have been avoided. DublinDilettante (talk) 23:35, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
"Proposed causes for mass killings under communist regimes" would be a better title. X-Editor (talk) 02:51, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
  • If length is a concern, I think the "Terminology and usage" section should probably go first, or at least be cut down. I think the "proposed causes" section is much more interesting and relevant to readers. They aren't looking for a semantics debate about what "killing" really means, they're looking for an explanation of these killings. Personally, I skimmed right over the terminology section on my first read, because it just doesn't seem super relevant. I could also see cutting down the proposed causes section a bit, but I think it should stay. Also, the article isn't exceptionally long, 65k is fairly short compared to most controversial articles. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 22:42, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
    @CaptainEek: Regarding "Causes", take a look at this Majority of sources that are cited in this section either are taken from context or just tell something else. Some sources that say that Marxism supported violence (which, by the way, was not unique in XIX century, a century of national revolutions), are used to imply that Pol Pot's genocide directly followed from Marx (although they do not say that). This is a pure WP:SYNTH.
    Valentino's main idea was that regime type and ideology are not important factors - and the section selectively cites Valentino as a source for a directly opposite claim. And so on, and so forth.
    A huge number of authors stress uniqueness of each case (Nicolas Werth is among them) - their opinion is totally ignored. This section is a pure POV-fork, and it is one of the major reasons why this article is a POV-fork. We need not to put it forward, but delete, and replace with the explanation of uniqueness of each case, and add that some (minority or) authors believe in commonality, but that view is not supported by a majority of authors. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:02, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
    WRT "Terminology and usage", there is NO common terminology, these terms are used by a tiny minority of authors. Actually, I don't want to repeat myself, I already presented these arguments a couple of weeks ago.
    By the way, the only term that may be considered as specifically proposed for the topic, "classicide", was coined by Mann in his very famous book "The Dark Side of Democracy", where he argued that democracy is the main cause for mass killings, and, importantly, leftist (he prefers to use this term) mass killings ("classicide") and rightist mass killings had much more in common than many people think. It is very interesting how literally each source in this article is twisted, cherry-picked and misinterpeted. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:10, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
You are confusing phenomenon with causal factors. Valentino does in fact group communist mass killings together as a factual phenomenon (as this article does), while his conclusion as to the causal factors are reported in the "proposed causes" section. And the fact that Mann even proposed a new term for this phenomenon as "classicide" shows that the grouping isn't synthesis per RS. You made all the same arguments of SYNTH and POVFORK during the AfD, but the closing panel remained unconvinced, otherwise the article would have been deleted. --Nug (talk) 23:18, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
Valentino in fact group three communist mass killing together, but his point is that many more communist regimes committed mass killings. That is his point: to prevent mass killings, there is no need to change the regime, it is sufficient to eliminate several persons from power.
WRT Mann, may I ask you a question: did you read him? I did.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:04, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Leave space for Nug's response to Siebert.
The closing panel also remained unconvinced that there is consensus that this article is encyclopedic, so you may have had a point if the panel explicitily said they did not find our arguments convincing and the result was 'Keep' but they did not do that — therefore, please stop acting as though our arguments hold no weight or have been discredited, the mere fact it went from 'Keep' to 'No consensus' should tell you otherwise... Davide King (talk) 07:34, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
If the sources are bad, then the section should be fixed, not removed. I don't see how making the section its own article will solve its POV problems. CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:20, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
Sources are not bad, they just do not support what the article says. That means, they must be removed and replaced with "citation needed" tags (followed by rfemoval of the text after some time)
Making this section a separate article is impossible, because All facts and significant points of view on a given subject should be treated in one article, and the most sigificant point of view on this subject is that each mass killing had its own cause, and there were more differences than commonalities.
And for the same reason we cannot have this section in this article: each subsection links to other "daughter articles" that says virtually nothing about ideology or other "common causes". Paul Siebert (talk) 23:32, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
So if I understand correctly, you would prefer to integrate the section into the article, and just have sections for each country, and include the individualized reasons for each? CaptainEek Edits Ho Cap'n!⚓ 23:45, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
@CaptainEek: That is one option. Currently, a DRN discussion is in progress where we are trying to write a text of the RfC about the article's topic. Depending on the results of this DRN (and a subsequent RfC), different modifications may be proposed. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:57, 9 December 2021 (UTC)
I did not argue that it is POV, only it is subjective as it focuses on debates and arguments from historians and scholars which effectively introduces unassuming subjectivity inside an otherwise objective-focused article due to their opinions. Normally, I would not suggest this to be removed/moved in spite of its subjectivity, but the article is both controversial and has SYNTH issues partially due to this section as that is given as much weight as the remainder of the article which is meant to be fully objective instead of subjective. If it was given its own article, readers would know that it is a fully subjective article that discusses the opinion/s of historians and scholars on the potential causality of democides within Communist regimes which would be more appropriate than what we do have there. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 23:44, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Scope

I was thinking after reading Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, that changing the title of this article to "Excess mortality under communist regimes" would probably be a better title if this article is to be kept, as this article covers more than simply intentional killings, like mass famines. Thoughts? Hemiauchenia (talk) 22:33, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Yes, we discussed that, and I think that may be one option. But the article needs a major rewrite anyway. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:37, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
Maybe something like "Theories about the excess mortality under communist regimes" would be more fit if the article is to be kept as it is. Sadly I doubt that a complete rewrite would be left alone by the mob ; too many political interests are at stake behind the apparent acknowledgment of the higher estimation by Wikipedia, and now that the political focus is on the article, it will probably be hard to modify anything about the fringe estimations without conflicts in the coming months. Larrayal (talk) 23:10, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

“Excess deaths” and “mass killings” aren’t the same thing. Volunteer Marek 23:34, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Would you define the Great Leap Forward and Soviet famine of 1932–1933, which are both covered in this article, as mass killings? Hemiauchenia (talk) 23:39, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
Some scholars define them as mass killings, others don't. That's why the article has the section Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Debate_over_famines. --Nug (talk) 02:04, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Minority of scholars define them as "mass killings", and there is no "debates" (except Holodomor). Paul Siebert (talk) 04:49, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Minority of sources define them as "mass killings", majority sees them as excess deaths (or variation thereof). Taking into account that "mass killing" is a subset of "excess deaths", the latter may serve as an umbrella term for both. A part (a minor part) of "excess deaths" is universally seen as "mass killings" by all authors. Other "excess deaths" is seen as mass killings only by a minority. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:52, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Where is the proof? I'm seeing 1650 hits for "mass killings and only 145 hits for "excess deaths". --Nug (talk) 18:05, 27 November 2021 (UTC)
[12]&[13] vs [14] Paul Siebert (talk) 19:11, 27 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The argument made: "as this article covers more than simply intentional killings, like mass famines" implies that the mass famines were unintentional accidents by do-gooders such as good uncle Joe Stalin. The 3.5 million human beings killed by the man-made Holodomor may beg to differ. XavierItzm (talk) 14:17, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Not a surprising response here considering Xaviers long history of deliberately trolling. Hemiauchenia (talk) 15:54, 26 November 2021 (UTC)
Why the fuck would he do it on purpose, that makes no sense. Every historian who seriously studied the topic concluded that it wasn´t intentional. These famines were recurring events that affected Russia every few years since the tsarist times then there was one final food shortage under Stalin that was blamed on communism by the likes of you. Not only that but sufficient grain was distributed to end the famine within a year. You´re literally rephrasing nazi propaganda.
¨For two years farming was dislocated, not, as often claimed, by Moscow’s enforcement of collectivization but by the fact that local people eager to be first at the promised tractors, organized collective farms three times as fast as the plan called for, setting up large-scale farming without machines even without bookkeepers. In 1932-33 the whole land went hungry; all food everywhere was rigidly rationed. (It has been often called a famine which killed millions of people, but I visited the hungriest parts of the country and while I found a wide-spread suffering, I did not find, either in individual villages or in the total Soviet census, evidence of the serious depopulation which famine implies.)¨ -from The Soviets expected it 24.51.233.5 (talk) 15:09, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Oppose. I think the point made by @XavierItzm: is actually a historically sound one, in particular as it relates to the Holodomor and the clear intentionality with which certain mass death famines occurred. That said, I am open to continue to hear more points on the matter. I think as it stands regarding the article though that has been around since 2009 or earlier, I think the title is comprehensive for the subject as is. As for subject matter within the article, I am sure there is some cleaning up that could be done. When I have some time I'll investigate that end more as well, but I stand with "Oppose" at least for the suggestion to change the name of the article. Thanks all for listening! ♥ Th78blue (They/Them/Their • talk) 19:09, 28 November 2021 (UTC)
  • Support. Even man-made famines like Holodomor in some cases are not entirely intentional, with economic goals being at the forefront. To describe the Great Leap Forward as purposeful killings would be very much misleading, since while elements of intent exists in some forms, the goal was ultimately to industrialise China and develop its economy. Likewise, the policy of collectivisation caused excess mortality but was their goal ever to remove large amounts of the population? Dark-World25 (talk) 08:46, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Support per nom, this name would be a slightly more accurate description considering not only the famines but also other topics covered in the article like the deportations. 24.51.233.5 (talk) 15:09, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
Hemiauchenia, the topic and scope are something that we need to address if we want to move us forward and fix the article.1
Merging the fact that large-scale mass killings (50,000 dead within five years) indeed happened under Communist regimes (Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes plus the Red Terror) with a global Communist death toll, which makes no distinction between universally recognized mass killing events, excess deaths, and demographic losses, and is controversial and not done by majority of historians and scholars, and adding common causes for all events (something that is done only by a minority of scholars, several of whom have not even been represented correctly), and needing majority of sources making the connection (Chirot, Mann, and Valentino only discuss Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, do not provide any connection for all Communist regimes, and the "generic Communism" grouping as popularized by Courtois and Malia is controversial; it may be good as a general category but not when we are doing comparative analysis or finding commonalities, as this article is doing or attempts to do so), is not good — we are bordering on OR/SYNTH.
If we do not successfully identify majority, minority, and fringe views — most of the article is minority views, and we cannot write a NPOV article from this POV. If we actually had a tertiary source for this, we may write an NPOV article about it; on the other hand, there are tertiary sources about the narratives, theories, and criminalization of communism (2).
Davide King (talk) 16:59, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
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