Posts Tagged ‘R. J. Rummel’

LinkSwarm for January 19, 2015

Monday, January 19th, 2015

Enjoy a Monday LinkSwarm to get your week started:

  • Police conduct anti-terrorism raids in Germany, Belgium and France. Could this be the start of a real effort to halt Islamic extremism in Europe? I rather doubt it. Too many leftist parties across Europe need Muslim votes, and European elites still seem implacably hostile to the Euroskeptic parties pushing for an end to unlimited Muslim immigration.
  • Old and Busted: Never again! The New Hotness: More dead Jews? Meh.
  • The late Anwar al-Awlaki was good at two things: drawing up plans to kill innocent people in the name of Islam, and banging skanky whores.
  • The Prime Minister of France: “I refuse to use this term ‘Islamophobia,’ because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology.” (Hat tip: JihadWatch.)
  • More from France’s PM on the new antisemitism:

    “There is a new anti-Semitism in France,” he told me. “We have the old anti-Semitism, and I’m obviously not downplaying it, that comes from the extreme right, but this new anti-Semitism comes from the difficult neighborhoods, from immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa, who have turned anger about Gaza into something very dangerous. Israel and Palestine are just a pretext. There is something far more profound taking place now.”

    In discussing the attacks on French synagogues and Jewish-owned businesses this summer, during the Gaza war, he said, “It is legitimate to criticize the politics of Israel. This criticism exists in Israel itself. But this is not what we are talking about in France. This is radical criticism of the very existence of Israel, which is anti-Semitic. There is an incontestable link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Behind anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

  • Michael Totten quotes the late Christopher Hitchens. on the jihadist opinion of the current controversy: “Carving up grandfathers and granddaughters with an axe on New Year’s Eve can be okay if it’s done to protect the reputation of a seventh century Arabian man who heard voices.”
  • Bobby Jindal: “Islam has a problem.”
  • “Victimology is the language and currency of our politics.”
  • All those Harvard professors supporting ObamaCare are shocked to discover they’re paying for it.
  • “In 2009, 76 Democrats represented primarily white working-class congressional districts. Just 15 of them are still in the House today.”

    A majority of the GOP gains since then have come from the Democrats’ near-total collapse in one set of districts: the largely blue-collar places in which the white share of the population exceeds the national average, and the portion of whites with at least a four-year college degree is less that the national average. While Republicans held a 20-seat lead in the districts that fit that description in the 111th Congress, the party has swelled that advantage to a crushing 125 seats today. That 105-seat expansion of the GOP margin in these districts by itself accounts for about three-quarters of the 136-seat swing from the Democrats’ 77-seat majority in 2009 to the 59-seat majority Republicans enjoy in the Congress convening now.

  • “It was not merely Democratic politicians who were wiped out in November. A plethora of liberal shibboleths were also massacred.”
  • Virginia voters won’t let a little thing like pleading guilty of contributing to the delinquency of a minor prevent him from regaining his seat in the House of Delegates. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
  • How big is Texas?
  • Three myths about Medicaid expansion. I hope that Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick understand that we didn’t elect them to cave in on ObamaCare…
  • Are your tweets University of Indiana-approved, comrade? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Feminism’s empathy gap. Or the Shanley Kanes of the world reject the experiences of women that don’t fit their preferred victimhood narrative…
  • How a Global Warming true believer became a skeptic.
  • 10 bodies, 11 severed heads found in Mexico.
  • Pictures of empty Venezuelan store shelves, as Socialism continue to work its usual magic.
  • Liberal California billionaire Tom Steyer may run for the senate. Hopefully he’ll have the same luck as the politicians he donated to in 2014…
  • Only found out recently that Death by Government and genocide/democide expert R. J. Rummel died March 2, 2014.
  • Conservatives win several rule fights in the Texas House.
  • Rick Perry’s farewell address.
  • Gregg Abbott’s inauguration will have 4 tons of brisket. Or, as we call it in Texas, “an appetizer.”
  • Times when climbing down a chimney is a good idea: Your name is “Santa Claus.” Otherwise? Not so much.
  • A cure for cracked winter hands.
  • “My personality is as spartan as a Danish furniture catalog, why can’t yours be the same?” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • American Sniper kills at the box office:

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    Posted in Communism, Democrats, Global Warming, Jihad, ObamaCare, Republicans, Texas, Waste and Fraud | No Comments »

    Current Death Estimate for the Great Leap Forward: 45 Million

    Thursday, December 16th, 2010

    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.)

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    Posted in Communism | No Comments »

    How Many People Did Communism Kill?

    Friday, May 7th, 2010

    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.

    A Select Bibliography of Communist Genocide in the 20th Century

    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.

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    Posted in Communism, Foreign Policy | 54 Comments »