The Black Book of Communism

Hilarious. No one ever talks about the world wide starvation during the depression or blames capitalism for the death of the 12 million Americans who starved in the US during the great depression.

Let the airbrushing of history begin.

Never forget the casus beli of fascism was anti-communism.

100 million? I thought it was 100 billion. Why is this character understating the evils of the Left???

Never forget the 100 billion.

Suddenly I do. LOL!

Death by sexual deprivation under Capitalism. Discuss.

Gee, I don't often get called "useful".

Do you have a source for the 12 million figure?

While we're at it, let's discuss one of the true evils inflicted upon the world by American Capitalism: Modern Art

Using the demographic methods of the previously mentioned Black Book of Communism, some put the figure at over 7 million. But most reputable scholars reject the methodology used, in both instances.

Wasn't using the methodolgy used to determine the death toll of the Ukrainian famine and applying it to the depression, the hidden point of Borisov's research?

That wasn't an answer. But here's why I think the 12 million number is improbable. You can get annual population death rates from, for instance,

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005131.html

If you think that 12 million starved over, say, 1930-1939, that's 1.2 million a year, which on a population base of say 120 million is 1% (or 10 per 1000) per year. That means that the death rates for those years should be at least 20 per 1000, which they aren't. The death rate during the depression never cracks the death rate for 1925.

So, once again, what's your source for the 12 million figure?

What makes capitalists doubly guilty of genocide and infanticide around the democratic capitalist third world today is that it's happening in a modern age of computers and increasingly integrated global economies. Capitalism has the advantage of globalization working in its favour, and still tens of thousands are dying in agony every day like clockwork and millions every year. 85% of chronically hungry nations are exporting food to "the market" while their people are starving.

 Capitalists continue to hide millions of skeletons in their ideological closet of holocaust arithmetic every year. Capitalism works only if they ignore basic human rights to food and other necessities of life denied billions of human beings living in third world capitalist  misery. Capitalism is a colossal failure.

...and if he pulled it out of thin air, it matters how?

Now back to the question of modern art, the hoax perpetrated on the world by the CIA, please.

Sigh. It's clearly under 12 million, and I think 7 million is also far too high to be consistent with the data. I also think that I found your source:

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc0903/amholomor.htm

You can read this yourself to decide whether Borisov is a reliable source of demographic information, given that his objective appears to be to establish moral equivalence between the Holodomor (definitely caused by Stalin) and an American famine (caused by Hoover or FDR? Who can say?). I appear to have cut him too much slack by assuming deaths spread out over 10 years - since he refers to the "American Holodomor of 1932/33", a naive interpretation would be that the deaths occurred over two years, boosting the mortality rate by a factor of four or five. I'm pretty sure that someone other than Boris would have noticed this.

Yes. That is precisely what he is doing. And using precisely the same methodolgy of statistical analysis upon which your claim that Stalin caused "X" number of deaths by starvation is founded on. Yet for some reason, you take on face value the basis of your last assertion about Stalin and then reject the same method of analysis when applied to the USA. Just because you want to believe the last, and don't want to believe the former, it would seem.

You say that the deaths cause by famine in the Ukraine are directly the result of Stalin's government policy. In fact, I agree! Indeed, even Nikita Kruscheov agrees, it would seem. However, does not the fact that the US government bought huge amounts of surplus food from farmers, and then burned and otherwise destroyed it not also implicate the US government in hardship caused by the great depression? People are starving in the streets of New York, and the government is keeping the value of food prices high by reducing the supply of food.

How about the fact that millions were put into work camps, and paid next to nothing by the US government?

In anycase, what is your estimate and source for the number of deaths caused by the Great Depression in the USA.

I've noticed that your number is no longer 12 million. And I never attributed a specific number to Stalin, because I don't have to: the liquidation of the Kulaks is well-known.

I've already posted population mortality stats for the U.S. during the 20th century, available from this link:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005131.html

There is no spike in the 1930's, relative to say 1925. Here's some additional public health stats that might be useful to you:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2024011/pdf/pubhealthreporig00184-0087.pdf

Similarly, no spike in the 1930's.

So I'm going to go out on a limb and say, that my estimate of U.S. depression starvation deaths, to the nearest million, is zero.

I said "to the nearest million, zero". This is not the same as zero. It means 500,000 or less. Did you look at the links I provided?

No, I based it on the fact that there must have been some starvation deaths (only a commissar would say zero) but that there weren't enough, based on the death rates that I already posted, to move the mortality statistics, as I've already pointed out. That's my estimate and I'm sticking with it, until I see credible data that would cause me to update it.

Your new material adds nothing to this discussion, It is a discussion about deaths from infectious diseases from 1900 to 1950.

Stalin cared about one thing, and one thing only: the REVOLUTION! And he kept the revolution going longer then reflection says was humanly possible. How does anyone KNOW what misinfo the ratwingers were slipping into Stalin's daily briefing papers? The brits got to RULE India by lying and cheating and ratting and all sorts of nasty tricks even that ancient culture hadn't even though of (i read a book recently set in 1947 India/Pakistan breakup where the ex colonist brits were commonly referred to as 'four-twenties' which was the India Police Service code for 'petty thieves!)  Stalin was, no question, as ruthless a revolutionary as the world has ever seen. Stalin never did anything without thinking about the Paris Commune and the failure of the revolution to consolidate its early success, and the horrific price it paid for eventually losing to overwhelming reactionary force. It seems a great, unspeakable TRAGEDY that the revolution failed, is failing - the USSR was effectively murdered by a multi generational plot hatched and carried out in secrecy- with the pig's media the main player in hiding the facts from the people. No one here at Babble even seems startled by the simple truth that it was the allies, Britain & USA mainly, who caused the division of Germany, the 'cold war' and the Iron curtain, and the subsequent appalling burden the USSR was forced to carry  The USSR was killed, and the same confidence tracksters (churchill, Truman etc) types who arranged the 'Iron Curtain'  have since arranged the murder of JFK, the coup against Nixon, the placing of 1/2 wit reagan into white house in 1980, the KAL shootdown in 1983 and god knows what else since. The mass media, in order to be succesful under the prevailing rules of ad hoc dishonesty, has been turned into prostitutes. No matter how much integrity they have, they have to sell out if they want to work in newsmedia

The data on deaths per thousand is very simplistic.

That kind of simplistic data really says nothing without analysis. Indeed, if you look at the year 1900 you can see a vast drop in the rate of death per 1000 over the period up to 1930,  So, one can consider that advances in medical science are decreasing the overall death rate steadly. In the case of the Great Depression we do not know if advances in medical science are increasing the longevity of those who are best served by society, while deaths per thousand in the bottom strata of society are dying from privation.

So what you should actually be looking for is a consistent rate of decrease in the number of death's per thousand, and indeed, looking at the period between 1930 and 1940 we can see no consistent decrease in the number of deaths per thousand, and between 1930 and 1937 the deaths per thousand hovers around the same mark as it does in 1930.

After 1940, there is a return to a consistent patern of decrease in deaths per thousand over the next decade. No such consistent decrease is evident in the decade before and the depression era decade ends with roughly the same number of deaths per thousand, as it begins.

As if Robert Conquest isn't biased. Prior to devoting his career to writing, he was a researcher for the British agitation and propaganda effort of the Information Research Department for the British Foreign office.

You missed the point. The entire reason I brought up Borisov was to establish how the whole census based guesstimates system was a bunch of hocus-pocus. For my money, the whole reason that Borisov did his estimate in this way was to show what a bunch of hocus pocus the system used (by Conquest et al) for establishing the number of people who died in the Ukrainian Famine and the Stalin purges was a bunch of hocus pocus, that either you or I can do on the back of a napkin, because he can use the same system of analysis applied in the Soviet case to establish that 7 million people died of privation in the USA during the great depression.

There are real statistics around based in archival records released by the post soviet government of Russia. There is no longer a reason to go through this phoney census based estimation.

Now. You still have got to explain why there is no meaningful decline in the number of deaths per thousand in the years between 1930 and 1937, that is consistent with the rate of decline in the period 1940 and 1950, where the number of deaths per thousand drops by 1 per thousand, whereas, between 1930 and 1937, the height of the depression years there is no real decline are all. The rate of deaths per thousand remains steady, and even hits the high water mark of deaths per thousand of 1925 in 1937!

The only reason you can possibly think this is because you didn't read what I wrote in post number 18:

In other words, Borisov is making a joke.

So, instead of priding yourself in your awesome abilities of analysis and argumentation, do me the favour of letting me speak for myself, and you can speak for yourself.

Well, what do you really want here? Before you were asserting that I was "admitting" that Borisov is my source and now you seem to be claiming that it couldn't possibly be so because I didn't mention him in post number 2? Which is it? I am relying on Borisov or not?

I am allowed to add additional information later, when it suits you, but not when it doesn't?

Seriously I had a vague recollection of the original article, and haven't followed the story closely, but I remembered the upshot of what Borisov was doing was showing the falacy of the statistical system used to assert the often outrageous numbers of people who are considered to have been killed by Stalin, as exhibited in the OP. He inverted the paradigm. I said this various times at various places in this thread.

I have also pointed out that there are far better existing number sets available for making some of this analysis that was not merely guesstimates based in census data.

Amazing.

Of all the stupid shit in this thread, this one's the prize-winning poop.

I found "BIRTHS, DEATHS, AND NEW DEAL RELIEF DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION".  Upshot seems to be that there were some excess deaths bur relief efforts were effective in preventing demographic catastrophe.

Somewhat inconclusive about the utter horrors of western political economy.

Isn't studying the numbers of people who "died prematurely compared with what would have happened if the trend of the 20's had continued" precisely what we are talking about when we are analyzing census data, comparing population growth trends in the pre-Communist era in Russia with those in the Soviet Union, and then following that through until the 1940's?

We certainly are not looking at a precise data set, such as the state records regarding trials and incarcerations, executions and so on.

A lot of people seem to put a lot of stock into the exact terminology you use. For example, Above the USNews seems to think its merely "ironic" that food supplies were being deliberately destroyed in order to keep the market value high in the middle of the Great Depression while people were starving in the streets. I imagine if this was a policy enacted by Stalin, the same news source would call it a crime, possibly even paying lip service to the idea that it was a deliberate attempt to starve black people in Harlem.

I guess it will be ok as long as I don't use any emotionally charged terminology.

Speaking of which, can any one find any specific analysis of the impact of the depression on racial minorities in the states? It stands to reason that they were more impacted by the event than other segments of society. Lo! Has anyone carted out the genocide word, yet?

It's not obvious that blacks were hit harder in health terms.  There had been a migration north, but it wasn't as big as later, so many would still be in agriculture in the south.  Certainly they would be economically hit, but they may have had access to their own cropland to eat.  They were not in the dustbowl, but insect borne diseases would be a problem.  All in all, not clear.  Data would be useful.

When did that process take place?

My understanding (I sit to be corrected) is that sharecropping was a dominant form of farming for blacks before 1940.  Large farms are a 1950's and later phenomenon.

My point was that if you are a poor farmer, an economic collapse would be less damaging than if you were a poor factory worker.

My understanding is that those farms were largely in the dust bowl.  Blacks would be in hock to the buyer, not the bank, and they didn't own the land.

It's a little perverse, but to some extent I would expect that because blacks were worse off before the depression, and less connected to the money economy, they would be less damaged by it.

From Wikipedia, sharecropping increased during the depression and collapsed afterwards due to mechanization.

Edited to add reference and details.

Perhaps you should also realize that just because they on-occasion elected a party that called itself 'socialist' don't make it so. My tolerance for such stupidity has been worn out over the years by arguments about the infamous german party that once included 'socialist' in its name.

Here's a hint for you: If they can't manage to feed their people and provide healthcare for them, they ain't all that 'socialist' - particularly when their well-fed capitalist elites enjoy the finest of private healthcare.

"ever seen"

The Japanese and Korean economies post war were the model for tightly controlled "capitalist" growth, then the Asian tigers went to the Wall Street economic model. Has any country every made substantial economic gains once the American financiers take over their economies? 

I just realized which German party you were referring to.  No, the Indian National Congress (who don't have the word "socialist" in their name btw) are not at all comparable.  Nehru was a true believer in Fabian-style democratic socialism if there ever was one.

FDR's Keynesian reforms in the most capitalist country on earth are "socialist" (post #57) but self-identified Fabian socialists implementing actual public control of financial capital and central planning of the means of production is "unfettered capitalism"?  (And on what grounds?  Because they didn't manage to provide universal health care and abolish hunger in an overpopulated, disease-stricken country that had been ravaged by at least a century of colonialism?  Hint:  It's harder to do in India than in Canada.  And Indira Gandhi's government-planned agricultural reforms did achieve self-sufficiency in the area of food and an end to famine.)  And it's amazingly stupid of me to describe pre-1990 independent India as basically democratically socialist?  For serious?  They have a stock market in the US too, you know.

As for Gandhi, you're kidding, right?  I assume you're referring to Mohandas and not Indira or Rajiv.  (All three were important leaders.  The first two were pretty clearly socialist.  All were assissinated.  None of the assassins were motivated by economic policy.)

So what was the British system before Independence? Does that misery not count?

Compare World Bank statistics for just infant mortality for India and China. China was a fourth world basket case in 1949 and behind India WRT just about every social statistic. By 1976, the year of Mao's death, infant mortality in China was better than India's rate at the start of the 2000s. Life expectancy in China was doubled in Mao's time. Improvements in Chinese mortality rates actually levelled off and stalled after Deng Xiaoping. And it looks like China will achieve socialized medicine before either democratic capitalist India or even the USA. Lowering mortality rates and raising life expectancy in such a large population is difficult but not impossible as the Chinese have demonstrated. In democratic capitalist India, there is no health care for the poor and no guarantees for very many desperately poor people. There are no social programs from millions of India's widows and for those whose families don't want them anymore. This is the largest example of neoliberal flexible labour market in the world.

The US began investing money in public education and all manner of social welfare programs since the 1930s. They realized that if they continued to practice laissez-faire capitalism through central planning, the rest of the world would overtake them technologically and economically. It was either that or European fascism would overtake Europe and Asia.

During the cold war, western world governments changed  curriculum in higher education as a response to Sputnik and the Soviet space program. American began investing in all kinds of public programs which had little or nothing to do with market capitalism. The US still does have much public sector spending driving the economy and mainly why Americans are not suffering the same economically as they did in the 1930s. There is quite a lot of socialism in the US still today actually. The Americans tend not to refer to their Soviet style soft budget constraint spending as socialist though. They tend not to refer to a lot of public sector spending in that country as socialist. A lot of Americans and other nationals don't really understand the American economy. But it's never been a purely capitalist economysince about 1933 or so. Americans could no longer tolerate pure capitalism by then and rejected it in elections.

India does invest in public education today. India does have some socialist ideas still working for that country, like its government-owned central bank. India's banks were largely immune to the financial meltdown emanating from the privatized and deregulated banking mess here in the west. But there are many aspects of India's economy that are capitalist and leftovers from the caste system dragging the country down socially and economically.

Your family was right, And so are they correct here about social programs.

A good example of how your family knows the truth is there in the neoliberal genesis fable of Pinochet's Chile, from 1973 to 1989. CHile is upheld by capitalists today as a model and miracle for free market capitalism. But General Pinochet never privatized all of the copper mines in that country, which were nationalised by the previous socialist government under Allende. Copper exports accounted for a significantly large percentage of Chile's export earnings and responsible for building much of the prosperity that exists in that country during those years through today. And yet they still refer to it as a free market model for the new liberal capitalism. It's all about perception and much of what capitalists project onto the public is illusion designed to confuse people.

There were many factions within the INC. For example  Chandra Bose, was a noted socialist leaning leader, who was ousted from leadership of the INC before the war, even though he won the position of presidency of the party in a free vote, went on to raise an army to fight with the Japanese against the British during the second world war.

Because I have read a lot about Stalin, and my summation of his career is that he did not really care about the "revolution", as it was envisaged as a humanist answer to capitalism or feudalism. There is actually quite a lot of material on Stalin. Personal conversations, anecdotes, historical records. I think he had a very limited understanding of Leninism, Marx, or any of that.

His own writing doesn't even really reveal any kind of deeper understanding the politics of the movement he became the leader of.

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