If you define what it means to kill very carefully and what it means for those leaders to be responsible very carefully, you can make those numbers real. Lots of people died in Russia and China. Lots of people died the world over, too.
The first thing I'd point out is that their methodologies are so ridiculous that they count invading genocidal Nazi soldiers in those numbers. Not only that, they include the Soviet soldiers that died defending against them! There are obvious absurdities there for which you'll want to spell out the meaning: the sources are by charlatans. People that are full of shit, who made careers out of lying in the right way.
Then I'd offer resources to break it down further. For example, it's always surprising to liberals when you bring up a comparison to other countries. This is useful because you can challenge the key issue: what level of death is your normalized baseline for every other country and leader? Why pick out those two and not compare to... the rest? These are very basic questions that libs don't even think about because they've adopted thought patterns that accept anticommunist narratives without prompting any amount of critical engagement.
List the methodologies and ask them to (1) evaluate whether they're fair in the first place and (2) see whether it's possible to apply it to other countries like India or Brazil or Nigeria.
In terms of resources, I recommend two resources in addition to those already mentioned in this thread. The first is Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It helps provide perspective. The second is Amartya Sen's calculations of excess mortality in India, particularly comparing it to China: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Sen2006.pdf
Sen is useful because he is excessively liberal and literally the only thing he's doing is saying, "okay let's just try to calculate one thing between the two". The result is about 4 million deaths per year in India that are prevented in China. This means capitalist India racks up the full 100 million from this one statistic alone every 25 years. And this is using much fairer methodology than the babies that whine about Mao as if he was a vicious tyrant. The professional liars peddling that nonsense even count unborn babies in their stats, saying that if people decided to not have a baby during hard times, that's someone killed by Mao and communism.
Basically... your audience needs perspective. The deaths normalized under capitalism are all around us, they're just... normalized. We just saw a worldwide pandemic get normalized by capital that forced everyone to work in unsafe conditions, prioritized withholding vaccines for profits, and is trying to get everyone to pretend it isn't still raging. There are various stats out there, but basically every COVID death could have been prevented by prioritizing public health over the whims of the owners of industry. Tens of millions. China did it. Likely saved millions right off the bat.
I'd ask the liberals if they're going to deduct the people saved off of China's "killed" list and put the COVID deaths on capital's. Or have they normalized it as if being propagandized and forced to go to unsafe workplaces are just acts of God? What else is normalized?
If you define what it means to kill very carefully and what it means for those leaders to be responsible very carefully, you can make those numbers real. Lots of people died in Russia and China
The thing about China is that you can't use people who died to prove the famine "death toll" because it's about 50% the statistical abstraction of people who weren't born rather than literal people who died.
You can if you are a ridiculous person. It's what they actually did!
It's ridiculous to do so but also it's not consistent with how we look at other countries. If black book authors applied the same reasoning to India or basically any colonized place in Africa they'd have much larger numbers to contend with re: capitalism. But they are sophist propagandists so of course they don't do that.
If you define what it means to kill very carefully and what it means for those leaders to be responsible very carefully, you can make those numbers real. Lots of people died in Russia and China. Lots of people died the world over, too.
The first thing I'd point out is that their methodologies are so ridiculous that they count invading genocidal Nazi soldiers in those numbers. Not only that, they include the Soviet soldiers that died defending against them! There are obvious absurdities there for which you'll want to spell out the meaning: the sources are by charlatans. People that are full of shit, who made careers out of lying in the right way.
Then I'd offer resources to break it down further. For example, it's always surprising to liberals when you bring up a comparison to other countries. This is useful because you can challenge the key issue: what level of death is your normalized baseline for every other country and leader? Why pick out those two and not compare to... the rest? These are very basic questions that libs don't even think about because they've adopted thought patterns that accept anticommunist narratives without prompting any amount of critical engagement.
List the methodologies and ask them to (1) evaluate whether they're fair in the first place and (2) see whether it's possible to apply it to other countries like India or Brazil or Nigeria.
In terms of resources, I recommend two resources in addition to those already mentioned in this thread. The first is Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis. It helps provide perspective. The second is Amartya Sen's calculations of excess mortality in India, particularly comparing it to China: http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Sen2006.pdf
Sen is useful because he is excessively liberal and literally the only thing he's doing is saying, "okay let's just try to calculate one thing between the two". The result is about 4 million deaths per year in India that are prevented in China. This means capitalist India racks up the full 100 million from this one statistic alone every 25 years. And this is using much fairer methodology than the babies that whine about Mao as if he was a vicious tyrant. The professional liars peddling that nonsense even count unborn babies in their stats, saying that if people decided to not have a baby during hard times, that's someone killed by Mao and communism.
Basically... your audience needs perspective. The deaths normalized under capitalism are all around us, they're just... normalized. We just saw a worldwide pandemic get normalized by capital that forced everyone to work in unsafe conditions, prioritized withholding vaccines for profits, and is trying to get everyone to pretend it isn't still raging. There are various stats out there, but basically every COVID death could have been prevented by prioritizing public health over the whims of the owners of industry. Tens of millions. China did it. Likely saved millions right off the bat.
I'd ask the liberals if they're going to deduct the people saved off of China's "killed" list and put the COVID deaths on capital's. Or have they normalized it as if being propagandized and forced to go to unsafe workplaces are just acts of God? What else is normalized?
Whataboutism? What about deez nuts?
The thing about China is that you can't use people who died to prove the famine "death toll" because it's about 50% the statistical abstraction of people who weren't born rather than literal people who died.
You can if you are a ridiculous person. It's what they actually did!
It's ridiculous to do so but also it's not consistent with how we look at other countries. If black book authors applied the same reasoning to India or basically any colonized place in Africa they'd have much larger numbers to contend with re: capitalism. But they are sophist propagandists so of course they don't do that.