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Carnage That College Ignores
Malcolm A. Kline, April 15, 2010

Storied Soviet dictator Josef Stalin once famously said that one man’s death is a tragedy, a thousand is a statistic. He and his successors compiled so many human statistics that the unfortunately few academics and intellectuals who are trying to ascertain the true number are still working on it.

“One cannot discuss the past, present, or future while they lay there unacknowledged,” University of Pennsylvania historian Alan Charles Kors pointed out in a speech to the Atlas Foundation last November. “We are surrounded by slain innocents and the scale is wholly new.”

“This is not the thousands of the Inquisition, it is not the thousands of American lynching, this is not the six million dead from Nazi extermination.” Kors is the co-founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

“The best scholarship yields numbers that the mind must try to comprehend—scores and scores and scores and scores of millions of bodies, all around us,” Kors said on November 9, 2009. “Martin Malia, author of The Soviet Tragedy, with only partial views of the Russian Archives, posited 20 million dead.”

“Robert Conquest, who’d been right all along, argued in his revision of the Great Terror for yet more millions of deaths.” When I went to see a lecture Conquest gave at the Smithsonian back in the 1990s with a student from Marquette, the young man told me that the professor who taught his Soviet studies course never even mentioned this death toll: That professor was George McGovern, the former Democratic senator who ran unsuccessfully for president in 1972.

As Kors laid it out for the audience at the Atlas dinner, the inside view is even more startling. “Anton Antonov-Ovseyenko—consulting with those historians who had studied the problem for Khruschev, who kept the numbers secret—claimed at least 50 million dead, excluding the victims of civil war and World War II.”

“Gorbachev’s right-hand man, Alexander Yakovlev, in a century of Soviet violence, entered the Archives for the last Soviet leader and wrote that 60 million were slain in the Soviet Union alone.” Moreover, as Kors points out, this is not the total but the base of the basest atrocities.

“The brilliant Chinese author Jung Chang with her husband, historian Jon Halliday, had access to scores of Mao Zedong’s closest friends and collaborators,” Kors said. “They benefited from the temporary opening of the Russian Archives (the Russians had kept the most detailed tabs on Mao).”

“In their stunning book, Mao: The Unknown Story, they reached the figure of 70 million individual lives snuffed out by Mao’s deliberate choices. If we count those dead of starvation from the Communist’s ability to experiment with human interactions in agriculture, 20 to 40 million in three years in China alone” perished.

“It was no accident of time or place that the concentration of power over all human life in a centrally planned society attracted and rewarded the aggressive, unscrupulous, and demagogic—who would attract around them the simultaneously submissive and ruthless,” Kors observes. “Central planning would bring forth leaders who took power, not as a necessary evil, but as an end in itself.”

Kors made many valuable observations in his address. I’ve never known him to make anything but.

He draws an interesting distinction between the system so-called elites cannot bring themselves to critique and the one they have nothing good to say about and say it a lot—the American one. “In a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of ‘station by birth,’ they cry injustice,” Kors notes.

Indeed, the U. S. may be the only nation, and seems to have been for a very long time, in which you are not born into your job, whether in the board room or the boiler room.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia. http://www.academia.org/

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If we count those dead of starvation from the Communist’s ability to experiment with human interactions in agriculture, 20 to 40 million in three years in china alone” perished.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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If we count those dead of starvation from the Communist’s ability to experiment with human interactions in agriculture, 20 to 40 million in three years in china alone” perished.

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Excellent!

So when I bring up the number of people who died from the economic conditions of capitalism, I'm SURE you'll have no objections!

Goose sauce= gander sauce

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Ignore everything else, and cherry pick a quote which I'm sure you'll feel gives you the right to distort and falsely lay any imagined # of deaths at the feet of capitalism. By all means, have at it.

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The main PURPOSE of my response is to show how the right wing academia ignores, minimizes, and other wise leaves out the true horrors that have occurred in some parts of history, while hyper analyzing others.

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The main PURPOSE of my response is to show how the right wing academia ignores, minimizes, and other wise leaves out the true horrors that have occurred in some parts of history, while hyper analyzing others.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
No, Mike, hurling epithets and calling people names is "bullying", you know perfectly well that's what Geezer was saying.

You're one of the biggest bullies here and you know it. You've freely admitted you like being a "shit disturber", and for more often than not, you exaggerate or deliberately misinterpret what Raptor says, and I have to believe you know that too.

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As to bullying, I don't think anyone here bullies anyone else. There are a few who get ugly and attcking, and Raptor is one of them, and his attitude is to crazy that I find it hard to believe they truly reflect how he feels. I'm trying to figure out how to deal with him, the best way, I realize, being to ignore him. I haven't managed that; his statements are so over the top that I take the bait all too often. I'll try to do better.

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There's a huge difference between debating facts and figures and picking on someone. I've done it, I admit, and I've also read your posts with distaste often because they're personal attacks, not refutations. I wish you and a couple of others were as affected by what Geezer said as I was. It was a valid statement, and this place would be mightily improved if either side were more willing to be less personally attacking. You and I and others are every bit as culpable in the devolution of threads as any on the other side. You in particular can't seem to resist posting comebacks and getting into one-on-one hatefests to the point where the original theme of the thread was completely lost.

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To be fair, shots are taken across both bows. But I wonder how nasty it get be if those with more self-control didn't give in to snarking back--or at least in quite the vicious way sometimes happens, and you frequently do.

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As much as I'm coming to believe more and more that Raptor is here to stir things up rather than express reasonable views, I kow you get a kick out of triggering him and going to extremes to minimize him...you've explained yourself that you enjoy it. So be it; that's your right certainly. It's not what I want to do. We all choose where we get our enjoyment, all we can do is be responsible for ourselves, not what the other person does.

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Those are a stretch. A HUGE stretch. You're gonna blame Haiti's cluster F of mismanagement on BANKERS ?

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"It may have been good for some of my farmers in Arkansas, but it has not worked. It was a mistake," Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 10. "I had to live everyday with the consequences of the loss of capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed those people because of what I did; nobody else."

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Originally posted by AURaptor:

The main PURPOSE of this linked article is to show how the Left wing academia ignores, minimizes, and other wise leaves out the true horrors that have occurred in some parts of history, while hyper analyzing others.

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Originally posted by Bytemite:
flame warfare thread jacking

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Originally posted by Niki2:
I felt I had to defend myself, as all that hurt, coming from you. That's all I have to say.

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Originally posted by Niki2:

Oh good...I was wondering if it was overreaction or defensiveness or something. Just didn't seem like you. I'm happy to leave it in the trash where it belongs if that's okay; sorry I got preachy. I still need to learn to be responsible for only myself, dammit...sigh...work in progress.

Peace out, dude...

Or, we could have a nice flame war; I'll start:

You're nothing but a Commie Fascist Marxist Socialist Nazi...uh, what's the worst thing I can come up with?

Aha, I got it: TEXAN!!! Put THAT in your pipe and smoke it, Mister Smartmouth!

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At some point, I think you just have to laugh.

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I don't think you can equate anything that has happened in the US or by the US as being quite as bad.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Because right off the bat, I can tally least five million murders (two million in Vietnam) caused by the USA alone...

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Because right off the bat, I can tally least five million murders (two million in Vietnam) caused by the USA alone...

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So you don't consider the North Vietnamese support of an insurgency in South Vietnam, and later a full-on invasion of South Vietnam by NVA troops, at least a contributing factor to the deaths in Vietnam?

"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
To about a similar degree that U.S. trade sanctions against Japan were at least a contributing factor to the Rape of Nanking, making the U.S. at least partly culpable for that atrocity.

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Originally posted by Niki2:
Nobody that I'm aware of has tallied up the number of deaths attributable to both US invasion of, sanctions against, and US BACKING of governments around the world, not to mention covert actions and unprompted killings by out-of-control troops.

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Originally posted by Geezer:

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Originally posted by Kwicko:
To about a similar degree that U.S. trade sanctions against Japan were at least a contributing factor to the Rape of Nanking, making the U.S. at least partly culpable for that atrocity.

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Not the answer to my question.


"Keep the Shiny side up"

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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I don't think you can equate anything that has happened in the US or by the US as being quite as bad.

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Then I propose that you're not used to thinking about history objectively, and that is the point of this thread.

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it's occupation and control of Eastern Europe was hardly a cause celebre for the people who endured those puppet regimes.

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Not everything IS equal.

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So you don't consider the North Vietnamese support of an insurgency in South Vietnam, and later a full-on invasion of South Vietnam by NVA troops, at least a contributing factor to the deaths in Vietnam?

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The First Indochina War (also known as the French Indochina War, The Anti-French War, the Franco-Vietnamese War, the Franco-Vietminh War, the Indochina War, the Dirty War in France and as the Anti-French Resistance War in contemporary Vietnam) was fought in French Indochina from December 19, 1946, until August 1, 1954, between the French Union’s French Far East Expeditionary Corps, led by France and supported by Emperor Bảo Đại’s Vietnamese National Army against the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh and Võ Nguyên Giáp. Most of the fighting took place in Tonkin in Northern Vietnam, although the conflict engulfed the entire country and also extended into the neighboring French Indochina protectorates of Laos and Cambodia.

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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it's occupation and control of Eastern Europe was hardly a cause celebre for the people who endured those puppet regimes.

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Funny thing is, my hubby grew up in Hungary. I can say w/o equivocation you don't know the whole story, so let me give you some idea:

When Hungary entered the war, they were a feudal country. They had landless peasants, lords and dukes, overseers with whips. My husband's mother worked as a governess for a lord. They had (aside from the peasants whom they whipped for motivation) a driver, various cooks, maids and laundresses, kitchen servants, servants who took the food to the sideboard, and the most refined servants who served the food at table.

My husband's father grew up in a family where the mother was married off to a duke, who promptly spent her inheritance and died in an insane asylum... but not before HIS family threw the wife and her four children out onto the street.

Many Hungarian idolized Hitler. Those who left in 1956 still put picture of Hitler up no their walls... I know, I saw them.

Many Hungarians.. especially the peasants and the poorer people... actually liked life under Communism. Conditions were harsh after WWII... hubby likes to remind me there was one working truck in the whole nation.. but better than before the war. He grew up in a lot of places: at his grandparents' in the hills in summer, or sometimes at his uncle's farm on the karst, in Tata in the winter, and in Budapest when he was older than 5. He remembers wandering the streets of Budapest with his younger brother, completely safe. There is an island in the middle of the Danube called Margitsziget (St Margaret's Island) entirely devoted to fun. They had hot springs and - even then- a wave pool!

In 1956, the "revolution" was fomented by college students, but when it started to run out of steam the revolutionaries emptied the jail cells of thugs and former (and not so former) Nazis. My hubby remember walking past people... still alive... who'd been hung upside down from lamposts, slowly bleeding to death from hundreds of razor cuts. This was the work of the "revolution".

And even though he was afraid of the Russian tanks, and still remembers how a .50 caliber sounds hitting a stone wall... he remembers the Russian soldiers as lonely.

He has a lot to say about how the US press treated him and other immigrants. Needless to say, the US press wasn't interested in how he REALLY felt, or what he REALLY had to say. All they wanted to hear was RAH RAH USA!

I used to think that hubby's view of Hungary was based on fond childhood memories until his aunt visited the USA. We toured her through the exurbs of a very nice city in the NE, and what she said was: "It's all very nice, but nobody can use it. It's all owned by somebody" Her eventual view of the USA was "bleh".

So I think your view is incomplete, based in biased information.

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Not everything IS equal.

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Except death. Death IS the great equalizer, isn't it? And death for death, I wouldn't be surprised if Kissinger and Stalin were in the same league.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
What was the insurgency against? The French colonization of Vietnam.

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In 1941, the Viet Minh — a communist and nationalist liberation movement — emerged under Ho Chi Minh to seek independence for Vietnam from France as well as to oppose the Japanese occupation. An estimated 2 million Vietnamese, or 10% of the population then, died during the Vietnamese famine of 1944–45.

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Following the military defeat of Japan and the fall of its Empire of Vietnam in August 1945, Viet Minh occupied Hanoi and proclaimed a provisional government, which asserted independence on 2 September.

In the same year the Provisional French Republic sent the French Far East Expeditionary Corps, which was originally created to fight the Japanese occupation forces, in order to pacify the liberation movement and to restore French rule. On November 20, 1946, triggered by the Haiphong Incident, the First Indochina War between Viet Minh and the French forces ensued, lasting until July 20, 1954.

Despite fewer losses — Expeditionary Corps suffered one-third of the casualties of the Chinese and Soviet-backed Viet Minh — during the course of the war, the French and Vietnamese loyalists eventually suffered a major strategic setback at the Siege of Dien Bien Phu, which allowed Ho Chi Minh to negotiate a ceasefire with a favorable position at the ongoing Geneva conference of 1954. Colonial administration ended as French Indochina was dissolved. According to the Geneva Accords of 1954 the forces of former French supporters and communist nationalists were separated south and north, respectively, with the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone, at the 17th parallel north, between.

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A Partition of Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam in North Vietnam, and Emperor Bao Dai's State of Vietnam in the South Vietnam, was not intended by the 1954 Agreements and they expressly forbade the interference of third powers. Counter to the counsel of his American advisor, the State of Vietnam Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem toppled Bao Dai in a fraudulent referendum organised by his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and proclaimed himself president of the Republic of Vietnam. The Accords mandated nationwide elections by 1956, which Diem refused to hold, despite repeated calls from the North for talks to discuss elections. In July 1955, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem rejected the nationwide elections agreed to by France and North Vietnam at the Geneva Conference of 1954. The pro-Hanoi Vietcong began a guerrilla campaign in the late 1950s to overthrow Diem's government, which an official Vietcong statement described as a "disguised colonial regime."

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