Edit: Why downvotes? Idea of communism does not propose violence, Nazis and ISIS on the other hand do.
...or Maoism "struggle sessions" which resulted in 2 million deaths [1]
...or just read about mass killings in communist regimes[2]. Clearly communist governments have mass killed a lot of people.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_...
> on top of the estimated 20 million Soviet troops and civilians who perished in the Second World War
What does it have to do with Stalin? It was a war and people perish during a War.
> estimated that the death toll directly attributable to Stalin’s rule amounted to some 20 million lives
Just think about it, Stalin was in power for 30 years, so he had to "directly attribute" to a death of 2000 people every single day? Sounds quite bizarre to me. No official data of the 20Mln of "dead by Stalin's attributing", if you want to down vote me - at least show me official data.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Calculating_the_...
[2] - http://www.theguardian.com/education/2002/sep/12/highereduca...
Remember, Stalin didn't go in for executions; he preferred slave labor. Deaths in the GULAG -- which could be as high as in the non-death-camp Nazi concentration camps, or higher -- should be counted as well as executions. (Remember how part of Stalin's price for peace with Japan was 300,000 Japanese slaves, none of whom ever returned to Japan after the war.)
Also, some deaths in the war should be attributed to Stalin -- at the very least, deaths in the punishment brigades. If you force someone to march through a minefield, and he hits a mine and dies, it's your fault.
More people have been killed in pragmatic endeavours, like colonialism, and land grab/turf wars, than from "utopias".
This includes smaller scale utopias -- far less innocent people have been killed by ...hippies than by policemen.
At least, that's what the sorta person who bunches together ISIS, Nazis, and Communists has in mind. He fails to realize that Capitalism is just another utopian philosophy that will fail just like the others. It is also as violent as the others, even if its violence is covert.
The general consensus is that Germany under Hitler killed around 11 million noncombatants. The USSR under Stalin killed at least 20 million, with some estimates ranging much higher.
Many people in the west still say that Hitler was worse because he tried to exterminate entire ethnic groups, where Stalin mostly killed anyone that he thought might get in his way. I think they were both monsters, and there's no profit in trying to measure which one was worse.
Stalin did help defeat the Nazis. Don't make the mistake of thinking that makes him the good guy. In stories, the villain's enemy is always a hero, but in real life, villains fight other villains all the time.
Heck, there were 2 world wars in which communists countries were only involved in the second, and only on the allies side. How many people were killed there, including civilians?
And let's not get started in the 18th-19th century history, before marxism was even invented...
War, murder and dictatorship are what they are -- they don't just belong to one single side of the political spectrum.
In Indonesia, for one example, nearly a million communist sympathizers were executed by right wingers (as were in Pinochet's Chile and elsewhere). This is an interesting watch:
That's a war, Nazi Germany attacked USSR, people had to fight them, Stalin is not a field officer to force solders to march through a minefield, people die in a war, I don't think you are right here equating people who died fighting for their country with those who were executed for whatever reason.
Most of those Japanese POWs who survived the winter of 1945 / 46 had been repatriated by 1956, with mediation by the Red Cross.
Furthermore:
In 2005, the Russian government provided the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare microfilms of personal information of 40,940 Japanese POWs who had died during their detention.
Still horrific but less than 10% of the total number.
There is a fascinating history of those who returned to Japan but couldn't fit-in again due to Soviet indoctrination.
Only under the naive assumption that we assess things in isolation and not comparatively and in historical perspective.
>It's akin to saying, "We excuse X for doing something bad because Y (something to which we are ideologically opposed) did the same bad thing".
No, it's more akin to saying "You singled out X as the cause of something bad when it's also an attribute of Y".
E.g. something like: "- Python is slow because it's a GC language". "- Nope, Java and Swift also have GC and are very fast".
Also note that I never said anything about "excusing" -- I actually condemn both.
>In other words, it's the "side", not the "principle" you are arguing. If you take that position you can be an apologist for practically anything that happens.
What you can actually be is pragmatic, someone who assesses things in historical and relative perspective, instead of taking sides and singling out.
It's amazing how someone that begins by saying that "this discussion is only about X, anything else is irrelevant", accuses someone adding the stats for Y for comparison as "taking sides".
Well, why single them out then if both sides can be dangerous?
If you think they are the "more dangerous", then I think the previous 2 milenia of bloodshed for pragmatic land/power grabbing, including WW I, refute that.
Besides, even so-called utopians are quite pragmatic in their actions. When Mao executed tons of people, it wasn't some "utopianism" guiding him, but a very pragmatic power grab to stay in power and get rid of possible contenders.
(You might say that this was only possible because his subordinates were deluded by some utopian zeal. But lots of other cases, from the Belgian colonies and Pinochet to Indonesian "death squads", prove that you don't need that to have mass killings, just unquestioned power and the upper hand).
>Did you reply this way because you approve of communism?
No, I replied this way because I approve of utopias. The US was one too at some point -- for persecuted from Europe religious nuts.
Also because I like being objective, which needs taking all sides into account. Of any binary (utopia/pragmatism e.g.) I'd never say "the first is dangerous" if the second has been historically proved just as dangerous.