On Russia's 'State capitalim'

[IcarusAngel]

A troll repeated the lie that the USSR killed 20 million in a "Great purge" and claimed China killed 100 million in a great leap purge. The second figure is actually 20 to 30 million, and while the USSR is not worth defending from a "socialist" standpoint, it's important to get the facts right.

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2004/2004-February/002368.html

The fact is, it would be just as wrong to claim that the United States killed 10 to 20 million in Vietnam when the figure was actually 2 to 3 million.

This historian, Getty, makes several important distinctions between "let die" and "murder," and while he does wrongly conflate the USSR with "socialism," he at least acknowledges the vast difference between the capitalism in Nazi Germany and the type of command economy that existed in the USSR.

He explains the basic arithmetical errors in the book "Black Book of Communism" as well, which contains purely junk scholarship:

He explains the difference between a Stalin camp, and the brutal camps that existed in Nazi Germany.

He explains the difference between let die and murder.

It's important not to use lies in regards to history:

"
What's more, Nazi Germany and the USSR had radically different social and economic systems. Hitler, despite his populist rhetoric, largely preserved and defended private property, the market economy, and existing elites. Stalin utterly destroyed capitalism and physically annihilated the social and economic elites. Although both regimes used terror, they used it differently, against different targets. Hitler's terror was designed to be finite and to exterminate particular ethnic groups (Jews and Gypsies, for example). Stalin's terror mainly sought to turn social groups such as peasants and businessmen into a slave labor force that would be a permanent part of the Soviet economy. During the Cold War, when the USSR supplanted Nazi Germany as the enemy of the West, journalists and political scientists began to associate the two regimes. Furet could dig up only a few observers who tried to make an analogy between the two dictatorships before 1945.
...

Are deaths from a famine caused by the stupidity and incompetence of the regime (such deaths account for more than half of Courtois's 100 million) to be equated with the deliberate gassing of Jews? Courtois's arithmetic is too simple. A huge number of the fatalities attributed here to Communist regimes fall into a kind of catchall category called "excess deaths": premature demises, over and above the expected mortality rate of the population, that resulted directly or indirectly from government policy. Those executed, exiled to Siberia, or forced into gulag camps where nutrition and living conditions were poor could fall into this category. But so could many others, and "excess deaths" are not the same as intentional deaths. Such arithmetical history sacrifices historical accuracy by lumping different events into the same category. Jerry Hough, of Duke University, has suggested just how ambiguous such calculations can be. Using the dramatically rising death rates in Russia in the 1990s, and with perhaps a bit of tongue in cheek, Hough calculated that 1.5 million "extra deaths" occurred in Russia in just the first four years of Yeltsin's tenure -- a total that, Hough points out, is "considerably larger than the number Stalin killed in the Great Purge" of the 1930s. The real problem with the books under review is a facile categorization in order to fix blame or make political points. It would be more polemical than accurate to equate famine deaths, victims of police terror, and deaths in Nazi gas chambers with the plight of Russians unable to buy food and health care today. One could place many of the century's deaths in any of several categories, according to the political point one wanted to make. Should we blame premature deaths in Russia today on the legacy of communism or on the failed policies of reformers? For how many deaths under Stalin should we blame communism? Stalin's personal paranoia? Backwardness or ignorance? We might do better to try to understand these grisly statistics in their contexts, rather than positing large polemical categories and then filling them up with bodies. Good history is about balanced interpretation and is usually more complicated than categorization or blame... "

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/getty.htm

Hardly "leftist scholarship."


If you let the right get away with one lie, there is no telling what they will lie about next.

[RGacky3]

I agree, a lot of what is said about the USSR and China are exagurations, that being said I won't ever defend them, but that does'nat mean you can just make up numbers and statistics and blow them up.

But just because a lot of what is said is exagurations, does'nt excuse waht the USSR DID do.

[IcarusAngel]

Of course not. That's exactly the point I'm making, keeping in mind that a lot of these lies have been refuted by right-wing academia even.

It's actually a disservice to those that suffered to lie and exaggerate. In fact, conservatives often acknowledge that they lie, and say it is to stop the greater good.

Here is a good response to that kind of thinking (where Chomsky corrected the lie that Pol Pot had killed half the population, or something like 3 million, when the actual number was far lower than this, about 1.7, or about 27%.

Anyway, here is how it went down, using first sources:

Jean Lacoture, who had written a review of François Ponchaud's Cambodia: Year Zero in The New York Review of Books, wrote this response to Chomsky:


Noam Chomsky's corrections have caused me great distress. By pointing out serious errors in citation, he calls into question not only my respect for texts and the truth, but also the cause I was trying to defend. I particularly regret the misleading attributions mentioned above and I should have checked more accurately the figures on victims, figures deriving from sources that are, moreover, questionable. My reading of Ponchaud's book was hasty, emotionally intense, too quick in selecting polemic points. But if I must plead guilty in handling the details of my review, I would plead innocent concerning its fundamental argument.

Faced with an enterprise as monstrous as the new Cambodian government, should we see the main problem as one of deciding exactly which person uttered an inhuman phrase, and whether the regime has murdered thousands or hundreds of wretched people? Is it of crucial historical importance to know whether the victims of Dachau numbered 100,000 or 500,000? Or if Stalin had 1,000 or 10,000 Poles shot at Katyn?

"Cambodia: Corrections," New York Review of Books, (May 26, 1977)

To which Chomsky wrote:


Or perhaps, we may add, whether the victims of My Lai numbered in the hundreds, as reported, or tens of thousands, or whether the civilians murdered in Operation SPEEDY EXPTRESS numbered 5,000 or 500,000, if a factor of 100 is relatively insignificant? If facts are so unimportant, then why bother to present allged facts at all?

The political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II, page 149


When the facts are in, it may turn out that the more extreme condemnations were in fact correct. But even if that turns out to be the case, it will in no way alter the conclusions we have reached on the central question addressed here: how the available facts were elected, modified, or sometimes invented to create a certain image offered to the general population. The answer to this question seems clear, and it is unaffected by whatever may yet be discovered about Cambodia in the future.

The Political Economy of Human Rights, Volume II, page 293


So, some people believe if an event is terrible you can make up facts to condemn it, and others believe in recognizing who died, and condemning the action.