Hey Fairweather

[Dru]

i enchained a

[youngprofessor]

let's remember "the truth" of whatever one looks at, truly depends on the person presenting it.

 

a good example are the Holocaust revisionists

 

they go on and on, and think of a number of ways to explain "the truth" as the rest of us know it. left or right, it's a viewpoint that can be twisted when controlled by maligned people with hidden agendas.

 

speaking of twisted truth....

[JayB]

JayB-

Are those books going to present a credible case that "liberals" (democrats is what I think Fairweather means) rather than conservatives sought to appease Hitler, tried to block out information about Mao's Cultural Revolution, actively ignored or concealed the crimes of our enemies in Central America, the Carribean, and Southeast Asia while pointing out those of our proxies in these regions during the cold war, or tried to ignore what Saddam was up to? I am sure some liberal did turn a blind eye to some atrocity somewhere, and I'm sure I have been blinded by my own enthusiasm for some "progressive" cause to at some point do the same. However, I don't think a credible case can be made that liberals have ignored genocide or opression while conservatives have not - again I ask: the opposite would be closer to the truth, would it not?

 

Most of the books in question were motivated by a desire to provide an accurate history of precisely what transpired within the major Communist powers this century, and as such they spend most of their time describing the precise manner in which the political systems within them operated, and how many people died as a result. Most of the books also spend at least some time chronicling the popular perception of these regimes in free countries over the course of the 20th century, part of which involves asking why the leaders of these nations and the causes/ideologies that they championed retained widespread sympathy and support in the West long after the true nature of these regimes was no longer in doubt, as by this time they had exterminated several times more persons than all Fascist regimes combined. That the vast majority of those who provided the regimes with the aforementioned sympathy and support were Leftists with an ideological committment to economic collectivism is simply a historical fact that will admit of no dispute.

 

The BBC estimates that Pinochet and his regime murdered 3,000 political opponents. This is horrible. The best scholarly estimates to date calculate a death toll of somewhere between 40 and 65 million under the Communists in China. This is between 13,333 and 21,667 times as horrible. The same studies estimate that roughly 25 million people were killed as a direct result of state policies in the Soviet Union. This is 8,333 times as horrible. Pinochet and his regime were indeed awful. The regimes presided over by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were several orders of magnitude worse, but one would never know it by comparing the Left's denunciation of Pinochet with the stunning silence directed towards their former heros.

 

Exhibit A: Eric Hobsbawm

 

"IN A 1994 BRITISH television interview, the journalist Michael Ignatieff put a startling question to Eric Hobsbawm, the distinguished historian and long-time communist. ''Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created,'' Ignatieff asked, referring to the Soviet Union and its bloody history, ''the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?'' Hobsbawm's answer was perhaps even more startling. ''Yes,'' responded the historian. He did not hesitate."

 

Source

 

Had anyone been mad enough to offer such an estimation of the Nazis or National Socialism, they would have rightly been denounced from all quarters. Yet here we have a man who is widely respected, if not revered on the Left cheerfully offering up such an assesment with no loss of esteem amongst his fellow travellers. Amazing.

[scrambler]

JayB-

Are those books going to present a credible case that "liberals" (democrats is what I think Fairweather means) rather than conservatives sought to appease Hitler, tried to block out information about Mao's Cultural Revolution, actively ignored or concealed the crimes of our enemies in Central America, the Carribean, and Southeast Asia while pointing out those of our proxies in these regions during the cold war, or tried to ignore what Saddam was up to? I am sure some liberal did turn a blind eye to some atrocity somewhere, and I'm sure I have been blinded by my own enthusiasm for some "progressive" cause to at some point do the same. However, I don't think a credible case can be made that liberals have ignored genocide or opression while conservatives have not - again I ask: the opposite would be closer to the truth, would it not?

 

Most of the books in question were motivated by a desire to provide an accurate history of precisely what transpired within the major Communist powers this century, and as such they spend most of their time describing the precise manner in which the political systems within them operated, and how many people died as a result. Most of the books also spend at least some time chronicling the popular perception of these regimes in free countries over the course of the 20th century, part of which involves asking why the leaders of these nations and the causes/ideologies that they championed retained widespread sympathy and support in the West long after the true nature of these regimes was no longer in doubt, as by this time they had exterminated several times more persons than all Fascist regimes combined. That the vast majority of those who provided the regimes with the aforementioned sympathy and support were Leftists with an ideological committment to economic collectivism is simply a historical fact that will admit of no dispute.

 

The BBC estimates that Pinochet and his regime murdered 3,000 political opponents. This is horrible. The best scholarly estimates to date calculate a death toll of somewhere between 40 and 65 million under the Communists in China. This is between 13,333 and 21,667 times as horrible. The same studies estimate that roughly 25 million people were killed as a direct result of state policies in the Soviet Union. This is 8,333 times as horrible. Pinochet and his regime were indeed awful. The regimes presided over by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were several orders of magnitude worse, but one would never know it by comparing the Left's denunciation of Pinochet with the stunning silence directed towards their former heros.

 

Exhibit A: Eric Hobsbawm

 

"IN A 1994 BRITISH television interview, the journalist Michael Ignatieff put a startling question to Eric Hobsbawm, the distinguished historian and long-time communist. ''Had the radiant tomorrow actually been created,'' Ignatieff asked, referring to the Soviet Union and its bloody history, ''the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?'' Hobsbawm's answer was perhaps even more startling. ''Yes,'' responded the historian. He did not hesitate."

 

Source

 

Had anyone been mad enough to offer such an estimation of the Nazis or National Socialism, they would have rightly been denounced from all quarters. Yet here we have a man who is widely respected, if not revered on the Left cheerfully offering up such an assesment with no loss of esteem amongst his fellow travellers. Amazing.

 

A few thoughts…in the interest of clarification, not ideological standing.

 

Numbers themselves do not present a complete picture. How many of the deaths were due to specific causes, for example, how many for political assassination and seizure of dissidents as opposed to those who died as a result of faulty programs such as lame agricultural policies like those championed by the likes of Lysenko in the former USSR?

 

I agree with the basic premise that as the leaders of totalitarian systems struggle to maintain political power a multitude of people are sacrificed. I suggest in the case of Pinochet if he and his henchmen had control of a larger population such as that of China and for a longer period of time then the total number would have been nearly proportional.

 

It is not so much the comparison of inequal objects but rather the support our government may have given to the tyrants through official or non-official means. In a black and white world, this support is wrong. But I recognize as you stated before, that the world is shades of gray and sometimes that in the interests of geopolitics we must commingle with dictatorial governments.

 

The man is a historian some of whom have a different perspective from you and I. Some historians see things with the eye that sees the currents of history. The lives of individuals are as meaningless and random as Brownian motion. It is the grand sweep of history that appears to endure with lasting influence.

 

What if there were a socialist society not atheistic but religious such as a Christian socialist system, so that we would have a society not dominated by capitalistic self interest but rather would be communitarian? BTW, I think the mindless repetition of ‘give the markets free reign’ is just that, mindless.

[JayB]

The specific causes of death are accounted for as well as possible in "The Black Book of Communism." Reading some of the reviews of this work on the web will give you a general idea of the specifics in each country.

 

As far as specific details of who was killed when and how within the Soviet Union, I think that the best books on those particular subjects are "Harvest of Sorrow" and "The Great Terror" by Robert Conquest. Works of a similar nature that are concerned with China are a bit less definitive since the Communist Party is still in power and has been strangely reluctant to open its archives to historians.

 

Review - Harvest of Sorrow

The Harvest of Sorrow is the first full history of one of the most horrendous human tragedies of the 20th century. Between 1929 and 1932 the Soviet Communist Party struck a double blow at the Russian peasantry: dekulakization, the dispossession and deportation of millions of peasant families, and collectivization, the abolition of private ownership of land and the concentration of the remaining peasants in party-controlled "collective" farms. This was followed in 1932-33 by a "terror-famine," inflicted by the State on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and certain other areas by setting impossibly high grain quotas, removing every other source of food, and preventing help from outside--even from other areas of the Soviet Union--from reaching the starving populace. The death toll resulting from the actions described in this book was an estimated 14.5 million--more than the total number of deaths for all countries in World War I.

Ambitious, meticulously researched, and lucidly written, The Harvest of Sorrow is a deeply moving testament to those who died, and will register in the Western consciousness a sense of the dark side of this century's history.

 

Review, "The Great Terror."

"The definitive work on Stalin's purges, Robert Conquest's The Great Terror was universally acclaimed when it first appeared in 1968. Edmund Wilson hailed it as "the only scrupulous, non-partisan, and adequate book on the subject." George F. Kennan, writing in The New York Times Book Review, noted that "one comes away filled with a sense of the relevance and immediacy of old questions." And Harrison Salisbury called it "brilliant...not only an odyssey of madness, tragedy, and sadism, but a work of scholarship and literary craftsmanship." And in recent years it has received equally high praise in the Soviet Union, where it is now considered the authority on the period, and has been serialized in Neva, one of their leading periodicals.

Of course, when Conquest wrote the original volume two decades ago, he relied heavily on unofficial sources. Now, with the advent of glasnost, an avalanche of new material is available, and Conquest has mined this enormous cache to write a substantially new edition of his classic work. It is remarkable how many of Conquest's most disturbing conclusions have born up under the light of fresh evidence. But Conquest has added enormously to the detail, including hitherto secret information on the three great "Moscow Trials," on the fate of the executed generals, on the methods of obtaining confessions, on the purge of writers and other members of the intelligentsia, on life in the labor camps, and many other key matters.

 

Both a leading Sovietologist and a highly respected poet, Conquest here blends profound research with evocative prose, providing not only an authoritative account of Stalin's purges, but also a compelling and eloquent chronicle of one of this century's most tragic events. A timely revision of a book long out of print, this updated version of Conquest's classic work will interest both readers of the earlier volume and an entirely new generation of readers for whom it has not been readily available. "

[scrambler]

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

 

Or rather the corruption of good intentions into the Frankenstein terror of State power.

[cj001f]

JayB-

 

Hobsbawm is an acknowledged Marxist. Still. To this day.

 

The liquidation of the kulaks was a horror. So is rounding up people in stadiums to have them disapear(Peron/Pinochet). Or having people called out of a meeting to be shot.(Saddam, on his rise to power - who was then funded by the US)

 

And the quote is "Hell is paved with good intentions"

 

And