Today I join forces with The Volokh Conspiracy and others in proclaiming May 1st as Victims of Communism Day. The fact that communism killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 million people is not acknowledged nearly as often as it should be.
And given that communists are still in charge of North Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba (which launched a crackdown against dissidents today), Communist repression is still ongoing, with more victims every day.
(Hat tip for Cuba: instapundit.)
Every year on May 1st, there’s a single day set aside for the little guy, the poor, unfortunate common man ground beneath the boot-heels of faceless oppressors.
I am speaking, of course, of Victims of Communism Day.
Just like last year, we should take a day in memory of communism’s victims, especially given that there were somewhere between 85 million and 140 million people killed by communism.
There are a few memorials to those victims sprinkled around the world. Here’s the statue of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism in Washington, D.C.:
Here’s the online museum to the victims of communism, created by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Here’s a memorial to the victims of communism in Prague:
There’s also a Memorial to the Victims of Communism and the Resistance in Romania. One of the statue groups found there is called “Cortege of the Sacrificial Victims.”
This wall of photos is from the same museum:
Here’s a memorial in Rakowicki Cemetery in Krakow, Poland:
And here’s a statue called “Crucified Again” in Ottawa, made by Czech artist Josef Randa.
And Cambodia features fairly dramatic reminders of the toll of communism at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek:
To the best of my knowledge, there are no memorials to the victims of communism in China, Vietnam, North Korea, or Cuba. But one day there will be.
Another roundup of jihad-related news from jihadWatch and elsewhere.
According to historian Frank Dikotter, who examined hundreds of documents across China from 2005-2009.
Dikotter is author of Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962, which I haven’t read yet. But some of the descriptions of the famine echo those that Robert Conquest relayed in The Harvest of Sorrow, his book on Stalin’s terror famine in the Ukraine.
Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.
One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.
When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot. The report of the investigative team sent by the provincial leadership in 1969 to interview survivors of the famine records that the man died of grief three weeks later.
Starvation was the punishment of first resort. As report after report shows, food was distributed by the spoonful according to merit and used to force people to obey the party. One inspector in Sichuan wrote that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food. It hastens their death.”
As the catastrophe unfolded, people were forced to resort to previously unthinkable acts to survive. As the moral fabric of society unraveled, they abused one another, stole from one another and poisoned one another. Sometimes they resorted to cannibalism.
The overall 45 million figure Dikotter comes up with is slightly lower than the previous figures for the death toll by Mao’s communist government I’ve reported here:
My working assumption is that Dikotter’s research is solid, and that his estimate of 45 million is probably the floor for the number of people killed under Mao. A total twice that high is also possible.
Somehow, despite an ever-dwindling pool of apologists contending otherwise, communism has been more congenial to genocide as a instrument of policy than any other transnational ideology in the 20th century. The Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mengistu’s Ethiopia; different countries, same results. Communism, everywhere and at all times, is a ticket to oppression and death.
(Hat tip: Instapundit, who has several other readers and bloggers chiming in on the issue.)
Another week, another batch of news from the world of Jihad:
Not these Che shirts. If you can't put up funny pictures of your friends on the pretext that its vaguely related to the topic at hand, what's the point of having a blog?
Like everyone else, I’m a little slow getting back into the post-Thanksgiving swing of things, so here’s a collection of links:
When I posted about making May 1st Victims of Communism Day, I was not at all surprised that some on the left would get their knickers into a knot over the very idea. However, I was surprised that one left winger took exception not only to the date, but the idea that communists had killed millions of people at all. It was rather like coming face-to-face with a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier; you know such people exist, but you never expect to run into them in polite society. I thought such thinking had disappeared even on the left except among such hardcore dead-ender communist apologists as CPUSA or the Spartacist League (and, of course, Internet trolls). The only question today is not “did the communists kill tens of millions of people,” but “precisely how many did they kill?”
Since historical awareness of the sheer vastness of communism’s legacy of genocide seems to have faded, now would be a good time to review the extensive historical record of communism’s crimes against humanity.
In Death by Government, R. J. Rummel estimates the total Soviet death toll at just under 62 million. You can see the breakdown here. That breakdown shows 11.4 million deaths under Collectivization, which would include the Ukrainian Famine, also known as the Holodomor.
In Robert Conquest’s definitive The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (based on hundreds of sources of information, including dozens of interviews with famine survivors), he puts the total for the entire Collectivization/”De-Kulakization” period (including the Ukranian Famine, the Soviet suppression of the Kazakhs and the Crimean Tartars, etc.) at 14.5 million.
The Final Report of International Commission of Inquiry Into the 1932–33 Famine in Ukraine produced by The Stockholm Institute in 1990 came up with a total of 7.5 million.
The Black Book of Communism came up with a smaller total of 4 million for the Holodomor, and 2 million for Dekulakization, as well as a total communist death toll of 94 million (smack dab in the middle of the 85-100 million death toll estimate in the summary), broken down as follows:
65 million in the People’s Republic of China
20 million in the Soviet Union
2 million in Cambodia
2 million in North Korea
1.7 million in Africa
1.5 million in Afghanistan
1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
1 million in Vietnam
150,000 in Latin America
10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power.”
Rummel, by contrast, came up with the following estimates in Death By Government:
62.9 million in the Soviet Union
32.9 million in the PRC while in power, plus an additional 3.5 million killed by the communist Chinese before taking control
2 million in Cambodia
1.7 million in Vietnam
1.5 million post-WWII Poland
1 million in Tito’s Yugoslavia
plus a suspected 1.6 million in North Korea
If I added that up correctly, that comes out to 103.6 million people. (Rummel’s overall total for the 20th century includes murder and genocide carried out by non-communist regimes.)
In light of more recent scholarship, Rummel has adjusted his estimate of Mao’s victims upwards from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000. (Note: I do not own Rummel’s Statistics of Democide, which goes into considerable statistical detail concerning how he arrived at his estimates.)
In Jasper Becker’s Hungry Ghosts, he estimates Mao’s victims at 30-80 million.
Pretty much all the sources on the Khmer Rouge genocide give estimates in 1-3 million range, most around 2 million.
Ethiopia’s deposed Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam is one of the few communists actually convicted of genocide in a court of law.
In summation: Communism probably killed at least 85 million people, and might have killed as many as 140 million people.
I hope to have interviews with with of the most notable authors/historians on issues of communist genocide in the near future.
Below are some books I can recommend on the subject. Keep in mind that the edition I own is probably the first edition listed here, while the Amazon links go to more recent in-print editions.
The fine folks over at The Volokh Conspiracy have come up with the brilliant idea of making May 1st Victim’s of Communism Day. If the victims of a brutal ideology that killed over 100 million people doesn’t deserve a memorial day, then who does?
Here’s an Amazon carousel widget featuring a small selection of books on victims of communist oppression.
More on estimating just how many people communism killed on R. J. Rummel’s Democide page.
