How can I contradict this statement?

[Prentasid]

First of all I want to apologize for my bad English.

So I was reading trought another forum, and one of the users wrote a post titled: "Throw the red banner in the garbage", where he followed with:

"Many abuses have been committed under the red banner - it's full of blood. The red banner is tainted by around 100 million people:
Mao: 60 million, Stalin 30 million, Pol Pot: 1.7 million, Mengistu (Ethiopia): 1500000, Lenin, Kim-il-Sung/Kim-jung.Il: some million + +. Reference is Illustrated History of Science."
(Translated using Google Translate)

He said it would be the same if they waved the nazi flag on the national day.


How can I contradict this statement?

I could usually say that communism has nothing to do with this, but all of them used the red flag.
I really hope someone here can help me out!

[reb]

The numbers game is just a moralistic argument, it's not something that marxists should really take part in. It leads down the road of "the USSR wasn't as bad as the US [insert time frame]". It's comparing apples with apples. These places were capitalist states. They just used the red flag and communist rhetoric to justify themselves because of the unique situations in which they arose. Just the same as the US uses it's flag and the American dream, etc, to justify it's self.

[Futility Personified]

Amongst those people were many leftists who disagreed with the prescribed programmes and in fact wanted something quite different. Just as most leftists now want something quite different. People were critiquing the USSR with the same ideas now when it was still in existence and many paid the ultimate price.

[CommissarNgugu]

The numbers are exxagerated, indeed the "Communism killed 100 million-whatever" myth came from a Nazi who was also a wealthy newspaper publisher prior to WW2. Initially it was stated at around "2-5 million", and then as time went on, the figures were multiplied to "10-12 million", and further on. I have to find a source, though. I had the link at a point, but I lost it

[Invader Zim]

Well, you could point out that the numbers cited, in particulkar regarding Mao and Stalin's regime, are grossly inflated - in the case of Stalin's regime (if you include starvation) by about 20-23 million.

[Comrade Jacob]

First of all I want to apologize for my bad English.

So I was reading trought another forum, and one of the users wrote a post titled: "Throw the red banner in the garbage", where he followed with:

"Many abuses have been committed under the red banner - it's full of blood. The red banner is tainted by around 100 million people:
Mao: 60 million, Stalin 30 million, Pol Pot: 1.7 million, Mengistu (Ethiopia): 1500000, Lenin, Kim-il-Sung/Kim-jung.Il: some million + +. Reference is Illustrated History of Science."
(Translated using Google Translate)

He said it would be the same if they waved the nazi flag on the national day.


How can I contradict this statement?

I could usually say that communism has nothing to do with this, but all of them used the red flag.
I really hope someone here can help me out!

Firstly numbers are nothing more than petty moralism.
Secondly ask the person what events that lead up to those numbers. (They won't make it up to that, for example Gulags imprisoned only 5,000,000 people and the death rate was 2.5%).
Also point out what great economic pressure it would cause to be able to kill that many people.
Ask what communistic things pol pott did.
And finally Famine death do not count as murders.

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

I have no love for the Maoist or Stalinist regimes. They show a real danger in revolution. It is not enough that a movement overthrows an exploitative regime. It must also insure that the revolution does not get hijacked by megalomaniacs. Stalin was not only paranoid personally, but imposed an economic system that caused mass starvation. A similar development happened in China. In a rush to industrialize, the regime destroyed the agrarian economy, leading to starvation. Rather than a socialist, classless society, China and the USSR became personality cults of unquestioned belief in leaders who could not be wrong.

[exeexe]

You can tell him that the nazis killed x amount of people and USSR killed y amount of people. That gives in total x+y of people that have been killed by the state. Therefore he should be opposed to the state.

[RedMaterialist]

Reply that capitalism has killed five times as many people. Slaughter, slavery, deliberate starvation in the Americas, Ireland, India, China, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Central America, and just about anywhere else capitalism has set foot.

[exeexe]

@redmaterialist:
Yeah that too but its just hard to put any absolute integer on it

[MarcusJuniusBrutus]

Just as a side note, Stalin and the Red Army were principally responsible for ending the Nazis and their fascist allies. No people of any one state sacrificed more to end the Hitler tyranny.

[exeexe]

Just as a side note, Stalin and the Red Army were principally responsible for ending the Nazis and their fascist allies. No people of any one state sacrificed more to end the Hitler tyranny.
Yeah but where were the progress? It was just one tyranny exchanged with another tyranny. It was like Stalin tried to learn from Hitler how to be a cruel tyran but he never became as good as Hitler.

[RedMaterialist]

@redmaterialist:
Yeah that too but its just hard to put any absolute integer on it

Who cares? They just make numbers up.