Talk:Victims of Communism Memorial (disambiguation)

Requested move 7 October 2021

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

The result of the move request was: moved. Consensus exists to move this page. This search suggests most English-language sources refer to the DC memorial with two about the Tallinn one and a few on the one under construction in Canada. This close keeps the DC memorial article at its long-standing title. Per WP:OTHEROPTIONS, anyone who disagrees may requested another move, as long as it is not back to the original title. (non-admin closure) Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 15:47, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

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Victims of communism → Victims of Communism Memorial (disambiguation) – Following up from Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Victims of communism. This disambiguation page lists monuments and memorials which are formally or commonly known as a "Victims of Communism Memorial", and should be titled to match that scope. This is not an article about victims of communism, and I don't believe we have such an article (while we do have various articles on conflicts in communist regimes, the subject of "victims of communism" is inherently POV). We already have a Victims of Communism Memorial article, thus a disambiguator is required. Ivanvector's squirrel (^trees/_nuts) 12:50, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

• Nom comment - in the AfD, several editors suggested turning this page into a list of victims of communism memorials. I'm not against that but I don't see why we shouldn't have both a list and a dab (i.e. the list should be a new, separate article). A list serves as a directory of related topics; a dab is a navigation tool for articles which would otherwise have the same title, and many of the memorials which would be included in the list would not be suitable to include in the dab. Ivanvector's squirrel (^trees/_nuts) 12:52, 7 October 2021 (UTC) Courtesy ping AfD participants: @Mikehawk10, Vladimir.copic, Clarityfiend, No Great Shaker, My very best wishes, 4meter4, and Nug: Ivanvector's squirrel (^trees/_nuts) 16:51, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
• Support - Regardless of one's views on the phrase "victims of Communism" (for my part, I tend to agree with Davide King's comments below), this page is currently serving as a disambiguation of Victims of Communism memorials, and the proposed title reflects that fact more effectively than the current one. I also agree with the nominator that a list article would also be useful for this topic, but would make most sense as an entirely separate article rather than a rebrand of this one. ModernDayTrilobite (talk) 21:36, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
• Support. The content of the page is itself a disambiguation page for those sorts of memorials. An article titled "victims of communism" really doesn't fit the actual content of the page very well. I'd have no prejudice against deleting the redirect from this page after a move or retargeting it, though that would be a separate discussion at RfD. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 22:25, 7 October 2021 (UTC)
• Support, except two entries (Memorial to Victims of Stalinist Repression and Monument to the Victims of the Soviet Occupation) alleged without proof to be also known as "Victims of Communism Memorial" should go in the separate list ModernDayTrilobite mentioned. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:52, 11 October 2021 (UTC)

• I disagree about splitting out Memorial to Victims of Stalinist Repression and Monument to the Victims of the Soviet Occupation. As WP:DAB states: "This page in a nutshell: It is necessary to provide links and disambiguation pages so that readers typing in a reasonably likely topic name for more than one Wikipedia topic can quickly navigate to the article they seek." it seems to me that is is reasonably likely that readers would expect these two articles would fall under a topic of "Victims of Communism memorials", since they are both memorials to victims to an ideology and regime both of which are associated with communism. --Nug (talk) 06:07, 12 October 2021 (UTC)

• Move to Victims of Communism Memorial. This page is about the memorials. However, the American one is not primary, so that should be moved to Victims of Communism Memorial (Washington, D.C.) and the Prague one to Memorial to the Victims of Communism, Prague, with Memorial to the Victims of Communism redirecting here. There are plenty of similarly named memorials around the world. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:52, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

• You have nailed it on why we need a disambiguation page, hence this current discussion. --Nug (talk) 23:55, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

• Move to Victims of Communism Memorial per Necrothesp. There is no primary topic. The base name should not have "disambiguation" in the title per WP:NOPRIMARY. Vpab15 (talk) 18:36, 18 October 2021 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Comment

Ivanvector, actually "victims of communism" is the proper name (see Ghodsee 2014, Neumayer 2017, Neumayer 2020, and Dujisin 2021) of mass killings under communist regimes, and POV titles are allowed if common name. Problem is that this is a very popular in the popular press but actually a minority, or fringe, view in the academic press (the whole mass killing categorization and genocide studies are a minority school of thought that has not gained mainstream status in political science and has not been published in mainstream political science journals (Verdeja 2012, p. 307) but until recently presented as mainstream, fact (categorization), and non-controversial (the whole Soviet and Communist studies field is controversial and politicised, despite less polarisation since the end of Cold War, and Communist scholars and genocide scholars disagree on the events because the job of genocide scholars is not reliability but establishing patterns, see Harff 2017) because it is legitimized by the comparison of Nazism and Stalinism (even though it is largely discredited in academia, see Doumanis 2016, pp. 377–378), the double genocide theory, and the Prague Declaration, to which many users seem to subscribe. As you noted, the subject is inherently POV but we have an article about it, even though, as it is structured and written, it still violates many of our policies and guidelines, as recently as September 2021 before my copy editing, by treating it in the lead as an uncontroversial, scholarly accepted fact rather than a controversial subject among the few scholars who have discussed it, and a popular but scholarly fringe "victims of communism" narrative. The problem is that article, not using the common, proper name for the narrative.

It is SYNTH the same way mass killings under any other -isms would be, namely that there is a lack of a clear link, and the whole Communist grouping, which includes vastly different regimes, is controversial (David-Fox 2004). While many people indeed have died and Communist regimes are certainly at fault, it is a narrative that all those victims, many of whom were communist themselves or other leftists, were "victims of communism", which is then often and popularly used to discredit the whole political left (Courtois 1999, p. xiv; Ghodsee 2014; Ghodsee & Sehon 2018). This is still a good summary of the issue; the SYNTH is that the 100 million and counting who died under Communist regimes were all "victims of communism" and mass killings, with different criteria and no consistency. In short, there is no clear consensus on terminology, on mass killing, on the estimates, etc. Some authors include famines as mass killings, while many others do not, or some genocide scholars list as mass killing what scholars of Communism and country specialists do not categorize as such, yet the article may treat that it was a mass killing as fact or only reporting the views of the proponents of the concept, narrative, theory, whatever one wants to call it.

The most-commonly accepted definition of mass killing is 50,000 killings within five years, and only Stalin's USSR, Mao's PRC, and Pol Pot's DK (three very specific periods of three different Communist countries out of a convenient grouped bloc that at one point covered one third of the world population) can fit this description. The "victims of communism" narrative include deaths under any Communist regimes and then treats the common 100 million as Communist mass killings (contrary to mainstream definitions) or death tolls. If we actually follow the literature (Ghodsee 2014, Neumayer 2017, Neumayer 2020, Dujisin 2021, and the like) and describe the narrative as it is, it is not SYNTH.

References

• Morgan, W. John (2001). "Marxism–Leninism: The Ideology of Twentieth-Century Communism". In Baltes, Paul B.; Smelser, Neil J. (eds.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 20 (1st ed.). Elsevier. pp. 2332, 3355. ISBN 9780080430768. Retrieved 25 August 2021 – via Science Direct.
• Morgan, W. John (2015) [2001]. "Marxism–Leninism: The Ideology of Twentieth-Century Communism". In Wright, James D. (ed.). International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Vol. 26 (2nd ed.). Elsevier. ISBN 9780080970875. Retrieved 25 August 2021 – via Science Direct.

Davide King (talk) 16:54, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, Davide King, for that explanation. I understand what you've described, and would add that "victims of communism" is more of a propaganda topic than a scholarly debate, but since we're on a move discussion for a disambiguation page decided to just say "inherently POV" and move on. You're not wrong, I'm just saying it's not really relevant to the title of a list of things called victims of communism memorials. To your point, though, if this page moves out of the way to a proper dab title, then "victims of communism" would make a good redirect to mass killings under communist regimes. I hadn't suggested it before because that article is a POV minefield, but I'm happy to hear you've given it some attention. Ivanvector's squirrel (^trees/_nuts) 17:10, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

Ivanvector, thanks to you. I wrote more in details the problem at your talk page but I actually think that this article should be what we have at Mass killings under communist regimes (for the same exact reason you described; it is more of a propaganda topic, which is not understand as such by several users because it is legitimized by political institutions, rather than a scholarly discourse; "victims of communism" is the proper name for the former, while the latter implies some scholarly consensus that just is not there), and the letter should become a redirect to a Mass killing section where we summarize it. Davide King (talk) 08:44, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

I think that the current content of the page is not reflecting that sort of stuff and that the discussion above is about what to do with the current content of the page following the recent AfD. — Mikehawk10 (talk) 22:22, 7 October 2021 (UTC)

I know, but I was the one to create this page in the first place, so I feel I should not 'vote'; however, as I found their comments interesting, I thought that it was worth responding to. Now that I think about it, I also believe that the victims of communism and victims of Communism should be inverted, so that the capitalisation also refers to the capitalised memorial, and because the proponents of the narrative make no distinction between generic communism and capital-C Communism. Davide King (talk) 08:44, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Without getting too much into rewriting the target article (mostly because it's not my area of expertise nor something I have the capacity to take on right now) we could solve this by having both of those titles redirect to this disambiguation page, with a navigation hatnote such as "'Victims of communism' redirects here. You may be looking for mass killings under communist regimes." Ivanvector (^Talk/_Edits) 11:21, 13 October 2021 (UTC)