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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27342 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Russian civil war deaths were about 10 million and I think at most you could probably only ascribe about third of those to direct or indirect killing of civilians by communists.

I think it's quite reasonable to ascribe all civil war deaths to the Bolsheviks because they did consciously started it.

and there is good reason to believe it given for example the Holodomor

1.5 million of Russians and similar amount of Kazakhs, not counting many other smaller ethnicities also died in the collectivization caused famine. Turning this international communist caused tragedy in the "genocide" against specifically Ukrainians in the eyes of the public is the great achievement of Ukrainian nationalists.

Maybe, but that isn't a good argument in the context of trying to write a critique of communism because by that standard, all American Revolution deaths are the fault of the revolutionaries, and so on. Which might be a valid argument, but my point is that it sheds no light on communism versus other political beliefs. All political movements that start revolutions can be blamed for all of the resulting deaths, by this standard, so it is not something that distinguishes communism from other ideologies.

I take your point, but on the other hand, think of it this way: the American Revolution, the French Revolution(s) and the Russian Revolution were all radical overhauls of society that required tens of thousands of people to die for the movement to succeed. That seems like valuable information that shouldn't necessarily be discarded in a general analysis unless you are performing a specific comparison of one armed revolutionary movement* against another.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

https://www.history.com/news/revolutionary-war-deaths

*The question of how far you can hold an ideology responsible for the movements that it produces is vexed, obviously, but if there's a strongish link between a given ideology and violent rebellion I think you have to take that into account to some degree.

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