Currently in an argument with a chud on Reddit that pulled the 100 million dead figure, and he doesn't believe that they're including dead Nazis and unborn descendants of dead people in that figure. I want to show him how ridiculous the figures are in that book is by calculating the victims of capitalism using the same flimsy logic.
He doesn't appear to be one of those "capitalism didn't kill anyone because how can two people exchanging goods be deadly" types that you sometimes see, as he's willing to attribute the Nazis to capitalism's death toll. He sent me this:
"You should check the democide concept developed by Prof. R. J. Rummel:
Rummel coined the term democide, defined as
"the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder."
Obviously the definition excludes natural causes as you suggest. Democides were mostly exerted by communist regimes:
128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS
61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist China
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime
19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS
5,964,000 Murdered: Japan's Savage Military
2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey's Genocidal Purges
1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
1,585,000 Murdered: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing
1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
1,072,000 Murdered: Tito's Slaughterhouse"
Actually looking it up, even the black book of communism has the Soviets at 20 million murdered so I have no idea where he's getting 62 million dead.
I wanted to do a podcast (because of course) that goes through the black book of communism backwards and applies the same standards to "Capitalism". There'd hopefully be lots of riffing and absurdity to go through.
The Bigger Blacker Book of Capitalism (a podcast)
That's a very common copypasta from those dorks
Just make fun of the patent absurdity of the 62,000,000 Soviet figure. Thats like half their 1920-something population
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
This is the source provided
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.FIG1.4.GIF
This is how they got to 62 million by the USSR
So they literally are including WWII casualties as "victims of communism"
Death tolls for the Collectivization and famine and the 37-38 terror are greatly exaggerated based on estimates of current scholarship.
I also have absolutely no clue how they got that "Post-War" figure, that's ludicrous.
Those numbers are worse than Conquest's and Conquest's have been a laughing stock for 30 years.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF
This gives a more detailed breakdown, it looks like they're claiming 50 million dead from forced labor camps ("at least 1 million dead per year") and he claims it's a "conservative estimate".
I think that's a few times more than the total number of people even sent to gulags in the USSR's entire history.
Would really need to get ahold of the sources this source is citing to do a thorough debunking, might look into it when I have some free time and feel masochistic.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.REFERENCES.HTM
This is the list of references he says he used on the site.
Absolutely ludicrous, IIRC the most recent estimate I've seen of the TOTAL dead from GULAG during the Stalin period is 2 million, mostly occurring during the war years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Criticism
[T]wo of the book's main contributors (Jean-Louis Margolin and Nicolas Werth) as well as Karel Bartosek publicly disassociated themselves from Stéphane Courtois' statements in the introduction and criticized his editorial conduct. Margolin and Werth felt that Courtois was "obsessed" with arriving at a total of 100 million killed which resulted in "sloppy and biased scholarship", faulted him for exaggerating death tolls in specific countries and rejected the comparison between Communism and Nazism...
Margolin likened Courtois's effort to "militant political activity, indeed, that of a prosecutor amassing charges in the service of a cause, that of a global condemnation of the Communist phenomenon as an essentially criminal phenomenon." Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty criticized Courtois for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder"...
Noam Chomsky criticized the book and its reception as one-sided by outlining economist Amartya Sen's research on hunger. While India's democratic institutions prevented famines, its excess of mortality over China—potentially attributable to the latter's more equal distribution of medical and other resources—was nonetheless close to 4 million per year for non-famine years. Chomsky argued that "supposing we now apply the methodology of the Black Book" to India, "the democratic capitalist 'experiment' has caused more deaths than in the entire history of [...] Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, and tens of millions more since, in India alone."
Chapter 5 of Blackshirts and Reds is another great debunking (although it's focused on the USSR), but it's much harder for people to write off Wikipedia as a source.
There was this push to use the metric system during the Carter years. He was probably in school then.
If he's not using the Black Book then debunking the Black Book won't help you. You should ask for his source.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
This is the source provided
https://old.reddit.com/r/CommunismWorldwide/comments/n4b6jc/i_used_the_black_book_of_communisms_metric_of/
Death By American Bombing And Other Democide https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP13.HTM
This article was helpful for me: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/capitalism-socialism-khmer-rouge-cambodia-china-famine-friedersdorf also here's a link to the book they quote regarding capitalism's body count in India: https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0198283652.001.0001/acprof-9780198283652
He's missing the death toll of colonialism on capitalism's high score. The British Raj alone is believed to have killed 35-45 million people (one scholar claims an enormous body count of 1.8 billion Indians). The Belgians killed between 10 and 15 million people in Congo. 15 million native Americans were killed in what is now the US. And the list goes on and on and on. Wherever white people showed up, driven by capitalism, people started to die.
Another missing number is the total body count of both world wars.
And then one should remember that capitalism is an ongoing atrocity. Global capitalism starves nine million people to death each year, not because of a lack of food, mountains of food goes to waste in the imperial core, but purely because of ideological decisions not to give starving people food. Millions die from preventable diseases, not because of a lack of knowledge or resources but purely because healing them is not profitable.
One could say that people starved to death or denied healthcare are not intentional killings. This is bullshit. If famines that happened in the underdeveloped and war torn Soviet Union are the responsibility of communism then those who die from hunger or denial of healthcare today are the responsibility of capitalism. We know about the problems, the resources to stop the deaths are there, all that is lacking is political will to put human lives above profits.
The future of capitalism looks even grimmer than the present. Climate change brought about by capitalism's refusal to think beyond the next fiscal year is making huge areas in the global south unable to support its current population. The current century is going to be one of unparalleled death and horror.
No, doing that is basically useless. The people citing the Black Book of Communism would never be convinced by doing it from the other side, I mean they didn't even read the BBC, they just cite it as a cudgel.
The big surprise was seeing the Nationalist Chinese there at 4th place. We know all the others but you never hear about what they did.
By the way those numbers are wrong, the real ones can be seen at the source: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
The best chapter is 13, Death By American Bombing And Other Democide https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP13.HTM
