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RfC: Neutrality tag

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In September, a {{POV}} tag was added atop the article. Is it still the case that the tag should be in the lead of the article?

• Option A No, the {{POV}} tag is not necessary atop the article, nor in any section.
• Option B The tag should be moved to particular sections where neutrality is contested, using {{POV section}}.
• Option C Yes, the {{POV}} tag should be placed atop top of the article.

— Mhawk10 (talk) 06:19, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey: Neutrality tag

• Option B. It does not seem to be the case that the neutrality of the entire article is meaningfully contested in a way that warrants a tag on top of the article. I've yet to see any meaningful objections that characterize the terminology section as being non-neutral. The same goes for the sections on Cambodia, Legal status and prosecutions, and Memorials and museums. I'm seeing some opposition to the inclusion of particular Soviet content, as well as particular PRC content, but it makes more sense to me to actually tag the appropriate sections rather than to lump the whole article together as non-neutral. Section-level tagging would also serve to focus on content discussions within particular sections, which would seem to be more helpful than the current system of going back-and-forth and getting nowhere over the article more broadly. — Mhawk10 (talk) 06:19, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
•  Comment: As long as we are relying on genocide scholars, who are a minority, and only one side of historiography, we are always going to have NPOV issues for the whole article. "Terminology" should go as SYNTH, not as NPOV, because the first three sentences are about Mass killing in general, and because there is no consensus even among genocide scholars, as we already acknowledges; as has been noted, it also mixes scholarly terminology with legal one. Davide King (talk) 07:23, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
  • A minority among whom? Ecologists are a minority among scientists, but they seem to be the relevant people in the field of ecology. Genocide scholars seem to be the relevant people to look towards to analyze genocides from a scholarly perspective. — Mhawk10 (talk) 07:37, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
    • We would have no problem if genocide scholars and mainstream historians supported and relied on each other, but that is not the case. Genocide studies is a relatively new field, have had issues with mainstream political science, and they are not bent on Communism as this article appears them to me. As noted by Siebert, "when some author group some fact into one book chapter, that does not implies a new topic is created." This is why need to drop them off and focus the article on Courtois et al. theories about Communism being the greatest murderer of the 20th century from a mainstream scholarly POV, that is the notable topic. You mention genocide but Communist/Soviet genocide is even more controversial — see Weiss-Wendt, Anton (December 2005). "Hostage of Politics: Raphael Lemkin on 'Soviet Genocide'". Journal of Genocide Research. 7 (4): 551–559. doi:10.1080/14623520500350017. ISSN 1462-3528. Davide King (talk) 08:19, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
      • I'm sorry, but are you supporting your argument that these scholars should be ignored due to POV issues with a reference to the Journal of Genocide Research, which is run by... the International Association of Genocide Scholars? If there's disagreement within the field, that's fine—there often is. But to dismiss the field wholesale because of the concept of Commmunist Genocide being messy (with the exception of the particular Cambodian genocide) doesn't do service to WP:NPOV, which would compel us to include all the significant views published by RS on a topic in a manner consistent with the principle of due weight. What articles like that one show is that genocide scholars do serious work and, while they disagree with each other at times, they're more than well-equipped to engage in scholarly inquiry in this area. — Mhawk10 (talk) 08:44, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
        • No, what I am saying is that we cannot have an NPOV article if we do not identify majority, minority, and fringe views, and genocide scholars are clearly a minority for not being relied by country experts when discussing the events. As was admitted by major contributor AmateurEditor, the article is based on minority views, especially in regards to proposed causes; how can we write an article from a minority POV? We got the whole structure wrong — it is those who we currently dismiss as controversy and criticism that are majority views, and genocide scholars and all others that represent a minority view. Academic fields are also not all the same and do not hold the same weight, and you seem to overlook all their problems, especially in comparative analysis, which is what this article tries to do by creating a commonality between all those events — contrary to what we do here, majority of genocide scholars do not treat this topic as a separate topic but write in general terms; it is for the same reason I do not support similar articles categorized by other ideologies and system like capitalism or fascism — "when some author group some fact into one book chapter, that does not implies a new topic is created." I think Paul Siebert can explain you this better than I did. Davide King (talk) 10:16, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option C, given that my addition of an unreliable sources tag was removed with the reasoning that it was covered under {{POV}}, the large amount of content dispute occurring in the article as well as the continued use of...dubious...sources throughout the article, it should be clear that the tag should remain where it is. Dark-World25 (talk) 08:37, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option C. We've just had an AfD discussion, where it was quite obvious that neutrality of the article was disputed by a significant proportion of participants (or at least, a significant proportion of those who actually understood what the RfC was about). I really don't understand why this even needs to be discussed, under such circumstances. AndyTheGrump (talk) 11:38, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• This needs DR or other collaborative approach, not a contentious RFC immediately following a contentious AFD, but if I had to pick it would be "A" (invited by the bot, plus I was already here.) Most bias claims seem to be about the mere existence of this article, and we just went through and AFD on that. North8000 (talk) 13:36, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

• I agree in a collaborative approach, but that is clearly not the reasoning being the NPOV tag — the reason is that is not only selectively about sources but they represent a minority view, no matter how significant, and that there is a contradiction between historians and scholars of Communism, and country experts and specialists in general, and genocide scholars, whose comparative approach, which is what we are trying to do here by positing a commonality, has failed and/or is rifled with problems. We simply cannot write a NPOV article from the POV of a minority, and/or if everything has to be attributed and cited to A rather than B or C. Davide King (talk) 00:42, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

• Trout the nom for a waste of time RFC, on the heels of our biggest AFD ever, and while here is an open DRN and an open RSN. No RFCBEFORE? No discussion about what is necessary to clear the tag? I don't think I've even seen an RfC over a tag before. Levivich 13:41, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
  • Option C since we're voting, because the NPOV problems haven't been cleared yet (and they apply to the whole article, including but not limited to the title and the lead). Levivich 16:51, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

• Talk:Socialism#RfC about the POV tag in the article, if you really want to see one. While I'm here, procedural close. At the very least, the RSN needs to be concluded before we can determine if the tag is appropriate or not. BilledMammal (talk) 10:01, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

That RFC hasn't been properly closed. Someone should make the request at Misplaced Pages:Closure requests. -- GoodDay (talk) 15:06, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

• Procedural close. Per North8000 and Levivich. This RfC should not have been started. ––FormalDude 14:41, 2 December 2021 (UTC) (Summoned by bot)
• Option C Since the purpose of the article is to present evidence to prove that genocide is a core component of communist ideology, rather than reporting sources that make this conclusion, it is POV. TFD (talk) 15:50, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option C. Other people have detailed the specific reasons, but all else aside there have been long-running POV disputes over essentially the entire article (not just one or two parts of it) for years, none of which have come anywhere close to resolution. Obviously it needs the article-level tag to indicate that fact and to encourage new people to enter the discussion in hopes that it will eventually go somewhere. --Aquillion (talk) 18:53, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• C I don't really care where the POV tag ends up, but considering the entire article has been called POV repeatedly in the AfD that just closed, a global tag seems warranted. Definitely Not A. BSMRD (talk) 18:58, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• C Should be procedurally closed but otherwise Status Quo until actual effort is made to resolve the decade long concerns of editors. Slywriter (talk) 21:12, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• B - Heck knows, it's close to impossible to get 100% neutrality in these types of articles. GoodDay (talk) 21:24, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• Multi-Whack! If we can't stop arguing about arguing, maybe an RfC to RfC the RfC is in order. And then we can dispute the closure of the RfC of the RfC. It'll be Turtles all the way down. MarshallKe (talk) 23:45, 2 December 2021 (UTC)
• B - we need focus here, and methodically sort out the specific issues. Indiscriminate WP:TAGBOMBING is disruptive. --Nug (talk) 00:16, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• C many long standing unresolved issues, so no need to change anything. ActivelyDisinterested (talk) 00:54, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• C - The tag should be at the top of the article. The title of the article is itself problematic, as has been mentioned. The AFD closers did not state that the article is neutral or partly neutral. Robert McClenon (talk) 08:00, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• C although I admit to giving it no more consideration than I already have, being a nice day to go out. ~ cygnis insignis 08:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• C and procedural close — I agree that the title is itself problematic, and thus the main topic and its structure as a result. As long as we are relying on genocide scholars, who are not relied on by historians and country experts, cherry pick and misrepresent sources (e.g. works about genocide and mass killings in general, authors like Mann whose main thesis is that many genocides, such as Rwandian genocide, were a result of democratic transformations in those countries, hence the book's title Dark Side of Democracy, but we cherry pick his mention of classicide and Communist regimes,1 Kotkin, who does not support the view that the Holodomor was a genocide/mass killing and is talking about demographic losses, not mass killings, and many other examples), and only push the view of the most extreme one-sided, Cold War-like of Communist historiography, we are going to have NPOV issues for the whole article. Mention of WP:TAGBOMBING, which says is the unjustified addition of numerous tags to pages or unjustified addition of one tag to multiple pages, is clearly contradicted by the AfD and not tag bombing. Wanting to remove them in light of this, and lack of consensus, is disruptive.

Notes

1. What we need to do to fix NPOV issues is to look at secondary/tertiary coverage — is there any credible academic source that emphasizes classicide and Communist regimes in Mann's work? If there is not, they are likely undue and/or cherry picked; if there is, in what context is it cited and what is its status — majority, minority, fringe? Is it part of scholarly literature and discourse, or is it in isolation and limited to genocide studies? We need to ask the same questions about Valentino and any author that we discuss here. Rather than write "A says B", and cite it to A itself, we need to find if there is C, and whether C is quoting A in the context of Communist mass killings, e.g. this topic, or not (e.g. it could be about mass killings in general or criticism of Communism, or a totally different topic). Davide King (talk) 11:24, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

• A or B We should not tag the article as a whole. There is simply no doubt that there were mass killings under communist regimes, and we should not do anything that makes this appear dubious. Section tags can be decided on a case-by-case basis, but tags should be used with caution. Adoring nanny (talk) 13:28, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

  Ah, POV pushing by removing the {{POV}} tag I see. I suggest reading through the AfD and especially both the nomination and the deletion votes by Paul Siebert and Davide King to understand why the topic is problematic. Dark-World25 (talk) 14:14, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Good lord, how are people still saying this. IT IS NOT IN CONTENTION THAT MASS KILLINGS OCCURRED UNDER COMMUNISTS. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN IN CONTENTION. No one here thinks that Communists didn't kill anybody, and no one here wants to "hide" killings by Communists. It's just tiresome at this point. BSMRD (talk) 15:55, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Bold capitalised printing isn't required. AFAIK, nobody here has optical difficulties. GoodDay (talk) 16:55, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

• A or B, the whole article doesn't have neutrality issues. If a section is not deemed neutral, then that section should be tagged and worked on.--Ortizesp (talk) 18:15, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option A Cloud200 (talk) 21:00, 3 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option B Maybe certain sections have such problems, but certainly not the whole article. --TheImaCow (talk) 12:32, 4 December 2021 (UTC)
• Option C The primary sources grouping all of these together are either highly politicized and unreliable (Rummel/Courtois) or non-experts (Valentino).--C.J. Griffin (talk) 14:12, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

You cannot say Rummel's data is unreliable in light of Wayman and Tago's analysis of his dataset in 2010. Also Harff has grown more critical of country experts who challenge these systematic empirical studies. --Nug (talk) 17:11, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

• C Disputes obviously persist, so removing the notice altogether is wrong; bikeshedding over details of tag placement isn't going to solve content problems, so let's leave the tag as it is and move on. XOR'easter (talk) 17:26, 5 December 2021 (UTC)
• C It´s not only specific sections with a disputed validity, the existance of the article itself is not even something we have consensus on. The issues with this article are still far from being resolved. 24.51.233.5 (talk) 16:30, 10 December 2021 (UTC)
• B Tag the section so the problem areas can be identified and solved. Tagging the whole article is not helping identify the issues so they can be rectififed and the article can be improved. Deathlibrarian (talk) 22:03, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
• C – I haven't reviewed the article, so I have no opinion about whether it is neutral, but from this talk page and the DRN discussions, it seems that major neutrality-related concerns affecting the article as a whole are still being discussed and are not remotely resolved. Therefore the tag should remain for the time being. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 00:43, 18 December 2021 (UTC)
• C Judging by the recent AfD and the talk page here, the neutrality of this article seems to be disputed by many editors and should remain for now. RoseCherry64 (talk) 10:56, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Discussion: Neutrality tag

Mere hours after the AfD was closed? Ok. GoodDay (talk) 08:28, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

So much for the DR lol. BSMRD (talk) 08:44, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think an RfC on where maintenance tags should be placed precludes a DRN. — Mhawk10 (talk) 08:47, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I know, it's just amusing. I have no real opinion on this so I probably won't vote. I do think the Dispute Resolution has become... less efficacious, considering the vastly increased activity and attention on the article. BSMRD (talk) 08:53, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@Mhawk10: Admins panel recognosed that there is a major disagreement about neutrality of this article, and this disagreement must be resolved via dispute resolution tool. The tag cannot be removed until that disagreement is resolved. By starting this RfC you literally propose a community to overrule this decision by merely !voting. This is a disruption of a normal process, and if I were you I would withdraw this RfC ASAP. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:50, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Two things:

1. This is an RfC on where the dispute tags should be placed. I take the view that it should be section-by-section. You may not. But, admins did not close the AfD with instructions in this regard; to imply that they made such a statement is simply wrong. And, even if such a statement were to be made, the proper place to resolve issues with the placement of maintenance tags is surely the article talk page, rather than a discussion that is centered around the question over whether or not to delete the article.
2. Admins did not conclude that DR was the only pathway forward for resolving the dispute. I have actually only encountered the article and all of the related walls of DR text after !voting to the AfD. I am not a party to the DR and I take the view that the DR is at a point where we need to fire off RfCs to start to actually move anywhere—especially since the DR has achieved very little in terms of approaching a consensus among those involved. I am not the only one who thinks this, nor am I bound to enter into a months-long DR that is running into the same exact issues that killed the WP:Mediation Cabal. On top of that, the DR is not about answering the philosophical question whether to place a maintenance tag on top of the article or only in the specific sections to which it applies.

Your aspersion that this is somehow disruptive to the normal process is unfounded, and I kindly suggest that you strike it. — Mhawk10 (talk) 16:22, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@Mhawk10: The neutrality tag is just an indication of a major disagreement over an article's neutrality. It is removed only after the disagreement is resolved. I put this tag because I see serious and fundamental problems with the article's neutrality, and I provided quite convincing arguments in support of this my actions. By starting this RfC you invite other users just put my arguments into a trash and to !vote for removal of this tag without analysing if neutrality issues have been resolved. This is an utter disrespect and a misuse of the AfD procedure. I don't find my statement an aspersion.

A more correct AfD question would be: "Do you think that the neutrality issues that lead to the NPOV placement have been resolved, so the tag may be removed or placed to some individual sections?" That question would be more in agreement with a procedure, but it would be still illegitimate in light of the conclusion of the admins panel, which explicitly recognised that there IS a major neutrality dispute, which is still unresolved.

Therefore, I don't find your arguments convincing. If this AfDRFC will not be speedy closed or withdrawn, I may ask admins if it is in accordance with our rules. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:39, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul, I am not proposing another AfD, nor do you have to find my argument convincing for an RfC to be held on an article talk page. If you don’t like the proposal to move the neutrality tag into article sections, you can simply !vote and make your arguments. I think that this is a fine RfC to place, so I see no need to withdraw it. Especially considering the exact locations of the neutrality dispute seem to be unclear and not strictly defined in the admin close of the omnibus AfD, I think this is appropriate. — Mhawk10 (talk) 16:47, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@Mhawk10: I fixed the typo. Of course, I meant RfC.

With regards to the rest, if one user placed a NPOV template and provided a reason for that, you should discuss a reason first, and only if the reason will be found frivolous or already resolved, a discussion of the tag removal may start (or it may be removed automatically). The opposite is a disruption. Do you want me to discuss this question at ANI? Paul Siebert (talk) 16:55, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul, with due respect, if you are going to take me to ANI over my decision to launch an RfC over whether it is better to include the tag in particular sections or if it is better atop the page, I cannot stop you. That being said, I don’t think that a discussion over where is the best place to apply maintenance tags in this article is disruptive. — Mhawk10 (talk) 17:09, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

The option A says: No, the "POV" tag is not necessary atop the article, nor in any section. That needs no comments.

And, discussion of the tag's placement without discussing an original reason for that is inappropriate.

Furthermore, the question " Is it still the case that the tag should be in the lead of the article?" implies that some significant changes happened in the article that resolved the problems. That question if misleading, because NO significant changes has been made.

It could be quite correct to start this RfC after some work has been done to resolve the problems with NPOV-violations. However, no such work have been done yet, and the attempt to resort to voting is a misuse of the procedure. Actually, that RfC is a direct attempt to undermine the results of the recent AfD, which confirmed that the article has severe problems. Although they are insufficient for article's deletion, they are quite sufficient to keep this tag. If the RfC will not be withdrawn, I'll put this text to ANI. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:31, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

If you have a policy-based reason against A (I !voted for B but included A for completeness) then you can make the case against A. If your implication is that I am trying to remove all mention of the neutrality issue from the article (which I agree would not be appropriate) then the implication is wrong. — Mhawk10 (talk) 17:36, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

"A" directly means that you are trying to remove all mention of the neutrality issue from the article.

Discussion of the tag placement without discussing the reasons is hardly appropriate. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:42, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

It looks premature and uncalled for (there are more pertinent and important RfCs that we should be doing, like the main topic, its structure, its core sources), and the issues have already been confirmed by both AfD1 and DRN. But by all means, go ahead. If this lead us to a discussion about sources' majority, minority,2 fringe status — it may move us forward.

Notes

1. As noted by the AfD closure, 'Keep' side's main argument was not that the article was neutral and/or there were no issues but that it was a notable topic and issues could be fixed. Having the first RfC to be about whether or not we should have tags until such issues are fixed is disingenuous to say the least.

2. The China section relies on Dikötter, Valentino, and the Newsweek rather than country and famine specialists. Majority of sections do not accurately summarize majority views on each event but present a minority POV within the context of genocide and mass killings,3 e.g. the section about the Red Terror does not really explain the context and background of the Russian Civil War and White Terror, which is how majority scholarly sources treat the topic, and/or present popular history sources like Figes and Pipes, or outdated sources pre-1991, and even one from 1927 (!). It certainly is not a summary of the events but a presents specific POV within the context of a Communist death toll, hence why most 'summary style' events are more about how many people died, or how the main cause was communism, rather than fairly summarize the events according to majority scholarly sources. Paul Siebert can explain this better than I did, and I would love to see their take on each sources by sections, and how it would look like if we relied on majority sources, e.g. Ó Gráda for the Great Chinese Famine, or Ellman and Wheatcroft, who ignore the global Communist grouping and/or death toll and focus on the Soviet Union, especially the Stalin era.

3. Just look at how many of the sources' titles are general topics about mass killings to see how majority of events are discussed separately, not together, and so are Communist states — even those who discuss together Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (three leaders of three specific periods of three different Communist regimes), some like Jones separates Stalin and Mao from Pol Pot, and Fein sees Pol Pot more in line with fascism than Marxism. Davide King (talk) 10:28, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

GoodDay, I don't understand the reasoning in your vote. Neutrality means fairly representing the facts and opinions with the weight they have in reliable sources. We can do this among other ways by seeing how a topic is treated in tertiary sources such as reputable encyclopedias and academic textbooks. Just as sources may disagree on their analysis, so can editors. But which facts and views have greatest weight should never be a matter of disagreement, since we have a clear policy to determine it. TFD (talk) 21:57, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think every section in the article has NPOV problems. GoodDay (talk) 22:00, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

We cannot tell that until the issue of the article's overall neutrality is addressed. The section on Romania for example could be neutral for an article on mass killings under romanian communist regimes, but be undue for inclusion as a separate section of this article. TFD (talk) 22:18, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll accept whatever the decision/result of this RFC turns out to be. GoodDay (talk) 22:21, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

• I’m seeing some mentions that the title is contested. Does anyone plan to open a move request to try to get the community to resolve that dispute? — Mhawk10 (talk) 16:11, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

• First, I propose that Robert McClenon open and neutrally write any RfC, if they want. Second, even before discussing the title, we need to agree on what exactly is the main topic and how it should be structured — I do not know whether this can be done in a single RfC or in two separated ones but we clearly need to agree on what the main topic is, and which sources support it, and analyze them, as suggested by Dark-World25. Davide King (talk) 23:50, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

While I agree with Siebert and those at ANI that Mhawk10 was not a behavioral issue and that they simply put 'Option A' for completeness, even though I think Robert should have started the first RfC and that this was premature and useless, the fact that several users have supported 'Option A', even though the AfD's conclusion is 'Option C' (not every single section may have the same NPOV issues but many sections would have to be tagged, and considering the controversy and dispute it just makes more sense to place it at the top), is telling and may be disrupting, not least because we simply cannot fix the article if there are users who still think it is either perfectly fine or has no NPOV issues. Davide King (talk) 23:55, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

User:Davide King - What RFC are you saying I should have been allowed to start before we were distracted by this tagging dispute? Robert McClenon (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Robert McClenon, essentially about what you have outlined so far and below too. We need one or more RfCs about:

1. What is the main topic, and its structure and core sources

• (majority, minority, fringe — is majority discussing Communism as a separate or special topic, or simply as part of genocide and mass killings discourse in general?)

2. Theory-based and focused

• (e.g. Courtois' thesis and link between Communist states and mass killings, and whether the link can be extended to communism itself)

OR

3. Events-focused and based

• (e.g. summary of events according to majority scholarly sources and country experts, not genocide scholars, so rather than discuss them as death toll events, we simply say what happened and summarize majority views, in which case the article must be refocused away from mass killings1 and Communist regimes, and focused on Communist leaders (e.g. Valentino's thesis) and limited to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, plus the Red Terror within the context of Russian Civil War and White Terror)

WHETHER

4. It is part of scholarly mainstream literature and discourse, or is in isolation with one-sided historians like Courtois and/or a minority of genocide scholars.

5. If it is more of an anti-communist propaganda topic in the (right-wing) popular press (100 million, oversimplifications and generalizations about the causes) that is used to dismiss left-wing politics in general as part of an anti-communist/totalitarian field of memory to criminalize communism as a whole, not just Bolshevism/Leninism/Stalinism.

6. If it is part of Holocaust obfuscation (double genocide) and trivialization in equations with Nazism, and politicization of Holocaust memories.

I think I have already provided sources in support of this (e.g. Neumayer 2018 and others), but if you feel the need, I can provide them for each claim, and I am sure Siebert can also provide more. Some of the same points may be discussed in the same RfC, so we may not need literally six RfCs — I hope you can organize and summarize those disputes in one or more RfC, and add anything I may have missed. Davide King (talk) 03:20, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Notes

1. I found this comment by Siebert about terminology particularly revealing and helpful, and why we need to drop it and move away from mass killings, which is a proposed umbrella term, including Valentino (who gave this article the current name), "to discuss all XX century coercive deaths inflicted by governments and paramilitary organizations. It was proposed as a category for statistical analysis and general theorizing, and it has no special implication to Communism ."

Davide King (talk) 03:46, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

In my opinion, any tagging dispute is a distraction from resolving a content issue. This is different from other article tagging disputes only in that the underlying content dispute is larger, and so the tagging issue is potentially a larger distraction from a larger issue. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I disagree with the idea that we can remove the top-level tag and work on the sections, because that is based on the assumption that the section organization of the article is correct. It only makes sense to work on the article section-by-section if the sections are correct. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Also, we should only remove the top-level tag after we have resolved any disputes about the meaning of the title of the article. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I am still willing to work with any editors at DRNMKUCR on any other RFCs that can run while this tagging RFC is in progress. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:06, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

An RFC & DRN occurring at the same time, about the same article. Rather confusing. GoodDay (talk) 01:39, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

An interesting source

I was looking for sources about "democide", and I found this. The author warns against biased studies that "may unwittingly and erroneously incorporate aspects of thinking endemic to one region, religion, or political orientation." The author provides four examples of biased approaches:

"... if one studies only cases of African democide, political or cultural features associated with Africa may inadvertently and erroneously become part of a purportedly scientific model of democide. This would lead to erroneous overdiagnosis of African polities or societies as proto-democidal, and underdiagnosis elsewhere. Analogously, an analysis that focused only on democide carried out in communist regimes would lead similarly to a biased model, misconceiving aspects of communist systems as part and parcel of democidal tendencies. A different bias would arise if only fascist or authoritarian cases were examined."

The author concludes that any study of democide with a particular provenance should bereated with cautions, and more general model of the phenomenon are preferrable. Interestingly, that is exactly the argument many of us were making during the AfD and talk page discussions. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:56, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Best I can tell, this is their motivation for the particular approach they take in their paper rather than a general injunction for methodology. They specifically want to compare vary different types of cases because they believe this will highlight stuff that is missed in research which focuses exclusively on one category of cases. But that's different than saying that any other approach is invalid. Volunteer Marek 19:20, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, that is certainly interesting. It certainly proves that it is problematic, and makes it harder to write a NPOV article about it. It would be much better to have a general article, which should indeed be general and not limited to Communism. Both The Cambridge History of Communism and the Oxford History of Communism attempt to do a globalized categorization but it is much more nuanced than The Black Book of Communism and is not discussed as a single phenomenon either (e.g. there was certainly some connection and clear), and take a middle position between Communism as a single phenomenon (The Black Book of Communism) and communisms (Le Siècle des communismes).1 They are both concerned in providing context, e.g. what communists thought, what they expected, general historical and societal context (e.g. World War I, post-revolutionary waves, etc.). They include chapters by Michael David-Fox, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Geoffrey Roberts, and appear to confirm what you wrote here.

There are many "... under Communism" chapters but no "Mass Killings under Communism" or "Communist Death Toll" chapters.2 Of course, one may argue that is the job of genocide scholars but it does prove it is not as notable as it may appear on first glance, and that events are discussed individually and in context, indeed both works provide plenty of context from what I have been able to read so far. It would have also been different if genocide scholars actually wrote plenty of Communist Mass Killings books but they are at best chapters in general books about genocide and mass killing, and are mostly limited to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. I do not think chapters are enough for a standalone article, or else Mass killings under capitalist regimes and other regime types would have been created already, since genocide scholars do not categorize Communism as something separate or special but discuss it like any other times and even compare it with non-Communist regimes. I do not think doing such grouping for any regime type is encyclopedic, if there are no such academic works specifically devoted to it as a separate topic (e.g. there are plenty of sources about "Genocide of indigenous people", there is even a book devoted specifically to a critical bibliography review; if we had such things for Communism, we would not even need to discuss this in the first place. That is why I think the best structure if following scholarly sources, e.g. either actually expanding Mass killing3 or turn this into a general article for mass killing events.4

Notes

1. The Oxford Hanbook of Communism, p. 4.

2. The Oxford Handbook of Communism does cite The Black Book of Communism and Matthew White in a reference but I could not see the context, and either way it appears to be in passing, which is the point. A useful chapter may be "Communism, Violence and Terror" by Hiroaki Kuromiya from the Cambridge History of Communism. I could only read the first page but it already tells that ideology was more used as a justification, rather than a cause, and says that "iolence ebbed and flowed dependent on many factors, and often Bolshevik terror had little to do with the ideology of communism per se." The same work also distinguishes it from fascism, which saw violence as an end in itself, while communists saw it as a means or inevitability. I hope you can get access to the full chapter because it could be very useful.

3. If it grows too big, we may simply split it — indeed, the problem is that this article was created before the latter, when the general article should have been created first and the Communist mass killings article should have been seen as a split due to space. As we have sources reviewing the literature, I think we can certainly briefly discuss the events irrespective of regime type, with the main articles being each event, without having do group mass killings by ideology, or whatever, in separate, too synthy articles.

4. If there would be a problem of space, the solution should be a general article like is done for Genocides in history to discuss all relevant mass killing events, as scholarly sources do (e.g. discusses together, not separated in category, which means we can use a header to regime types by ideology, region, or whatever, which is one thing, it is a whole another thing to have full main article based on category by ideology, region, or whatever if we do not have enough works that are specifically relying on such categorization, rather than chapters in general works of mass killings. Davide King (talk) 01:50, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

If you want my opinion, The Cambridge History of Communism and its Oxford twin are good sources for Communism, but what they tell about "Communist mass killings"?

I am familiar with Roberts's works, he is expert in Stalin, but he discusses Stalin in a context of political situation in Russia and in Europe, and not in a context of Communism. If all chapters in these books are authored by the authors who approach to the topic in the same way, then TCHoC is not a good source for this article: according to this source, all those events should be analysed in their own historical context, and they are loosely linked to each other and to Communism. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:00, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

It is just further proof that we need to move on from this Communism as a single phenomenon, and it is proof both those two academic sources represent mainstream, majority views, and that this article fails NPOV as a result. If we cannot rely on such scholarly sources, we cannot write a NPOV article about it. That is why the only solution to write within the context of Communism is the "victims of communism" topic put forward by TFD, for which we actually have tertiary sources and a literature about it. It will be about Courtois and Malia's thesis, and those in the popular press who see the events caused mainly by communist ideology, that Communism was the worst murderer of the 20th century, and as a result should be criminalized like Nazism, irrespective of the different views among communists and anti-authoritarian and democratic/libertarian communists, because mass deaths is the inevitable result of any form of communism and radical politics anyway.

Again, we simply cannot write a NPOV article for the POV of a minority — if those writing within the context of Communism represent a minority view, we cannot rely on them to write a NPOV article. Instead, we must refocus and restructure the article, and rely on secondary and tertiary coverage like Neumayer for the linkage and narratives, and put it within the context of "anti-communist memory entrepreneurs" and attempts at criminalization. Indeed, Communism as a single phenomenon can only be justified if it represented a majority view; if we cannot use academic sources that do not write in such context, we should not drop such good scholarly sources but restructure the article according to majority, and minority, academic and scholarly sources and views. Davide King (talk) 02:14, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

"Where revolutionary regimes in general, and communist regimes in particular, part company from non-revolutionary regimes is in the degree to which they have been historically willing—indeed compelled—to deploy escalating degrees of extreme political violence...The Soviet Union's formative experiences of civil war, forced collectivization, and ever wider waves of terror against presumptive internal enemies, both within and outside the Communist Party, established a template that that other communist parties in power variously imitated, adjusted, reacted against, and occasionally amplified in the light of their own domestic and regional security circumstances. Full-scale Terror with a capital T was not, a priori, irreversible encoded into the DNA of communist revolution: some states experienced relatively more severe, protracted, or spasmodic versions of terror than others. But common to all communist states were factors, albeit influential to varying degrees, that systematically removed constraints on the prosecution of terror as a means to guarantee the revolution...

from Strauss "Communist Revolution and Political Terror" in Oxford. I do not have access to the entire chapter, but you are way out on a limb in some of your claims. fiveby(zero) 18:42, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

@Fiveby: It seems my last responce to Cloud200 (see the section below) addresses your point. In addition, Strauss is not an expert in Soviet history, so some of her interpretations or generalizations may non-justified. Thus, many authors (whom I already cited) note that there much more difference between USSR and Cambodia than commonalities (thus, KR used revolutionary peasants to suppress and destroy urban population and create a rural utopis, whereas in USSR forceful collectivisation of peasantry was used to accelerate urbanisation).

On another hand, many authors see more commonalities between genocides in Asia (communist and non-communist ones) than between mass killings in Asian communist states and in Europe.

That is only a small part of possible counter-arguments. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:15, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I see no mention of 'mass killings', 'mass murder', or any other terms we employ as common terminology in reference to all Communist regimes. Indeed, the chapter can be useful for the topic about the links and theories (though they seem more indicated to be about communism and terrorism/violence rather than a proposed topic of link between communism and mass killings), which is exactly what I support. What I oppose is describing the events as a single phenomenon, when that is not what majority of scholarly sources do, and essentially treating them as death toll events (e.g. the emphasis on listing how many people died according to several sources rather than summarize and contextualize the events as majority of sources do, distinguishing between universal mass killing events, and mass deaths and excess mortality events) within the context of a global Communist death toll. Davide King (talk) 21:00, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Another interesting source

A lesson from a parallel Talk:Denial of the Holodomor debate: please very carefully verify the sources and quotes supplied by people proposing "objective and transparent" review of sources by means of Google Scholar because, as you can clearly see from that debate, even our champions of objectivity can, in a completely random and unintended slip of keyboard, miss key paragraphs from the sources they are quoting that testify to the opposite of the thesis they are proposing. Trust, but verify, pun intended.

I skip the whole Holodomor denial-related debate, and just move to one particular source - found by replicating the "objective and transparent" methodology - that in my opinion demonstrates how you can present the topic of mass-killings in multi-dimensional yet objective manner. The publication is from a historical conference in Russia in 2012 and discussed the topic of Holodomor in the broader context of mass-scale repressions in the USSR:

The greater context of the Holodomor within the Soviet famines of the 1920’s and 1930’s as well as the apparent political goals of the Soviet leadership at the time indicate that the Holodomor was in fact not genocide but should be classified under the more general concept of democide. Soviet repression, although often affecting certain ethnic groups more than others, was not designed to eliminate certain ethnic groups, but was a result of state policies aimed at modernization as well as general repression of the entire Soviet populace. There can be no doubt that the Soviet collectivization policy played a major role in causing the Holodomor. Stalin’s desire to modernize the Soviet economy at unprecedented speed, coupled with an attempt to destroy the remaining power and influence of the kulaks served as the primary vehicles for the collectivization policies (Naimark, 2010, 71).

He then goes into details what specific particular policies led to the death of 6 million people:

The Ukrainian harvest of 1932 was 10-12% below the 1926-1930 average, a significant decrease but not necessarily enough to cause an emergency situation (Subtelny, 1988, 413). However, the harvests of 1931 and 1932 both fell below expectations, and this coupled with Moscow’s increasing quotas accelerated the situation (Ellman, 2007, 677). As the state began to seize more and more grain from the peasants, Ukraine’s communist leadership warned Moscow that the grain procurement would cause grave food shortages. Despite these warnings, Stalin actually raised Ukraine’s grain quotas for 1932 by 44%..

Now, there's a piece that I personally don't agree with but respect 1) the author's admission that "many commentators" have different view, 2) a pretty balanced and nuanced flow of arguments on why he disagrees with one interpretation (of intentional destruction of Ukrainian nation) in favor of another (destroy a specific social class).

Many commentators have claimed that it had always been Stalin’s intent to destroy Ukrainian nationalism with famine. Although there is evidence supporting the idea that Stalin’s regime sought to weaken the position of the kulaks, there is no substantial evidence proving that the Soviet regime wanted to use the famine to wage a campaign of genocide against the Ukrainian people as a whole. Davies and Wheatcroft note that Soviet authorities vastly underestimated the time it would take to mechanize collective farms. The Soviet government expected an above average crop in 1931, grossly overestimating the initial effectiveness of collectivization policies. These miscalculations created the conditions for the famine. (Davies & Wheatcroft, 2006, 626) Repression of the kulaks, which had been ongoing since the Revolution in 1917, continued during the famine. Soviet policies of closing the border coupled with failures to provide needed aid can be attributed to Soviet authorities seizing the opportunity to destroy the kulaks, but cannot be seen as an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian nation.

Finally, on that subject:

The Holodomor serves as a reminder that governments can be responsible for millions of deaths without actively exterminating their populations. Although the Holodomor was not an attempt to exterminate the Ukrainian people, it was a crime against humanity and a result of unrealistic industrialization policy goals.

Now, on everone's favorite subject of generalizing the ideology of communism onto the mass killings:

A full examination of the Holodomor must view the Great Famine as part of the greater scope of Soviet policies throughout the pre-World War II era. Soviet policies covered the entire scope of Goldhagen’s “eliminationism,” ranging from the Red Terror in the 1920’s that was clearly an act of state terrorism, to the forced internment and relocation of ethnic groups in the Caucuses region (Goldhagen, 2009, 14-15). Soviet policies of eliminationism were part of an over-reaching program of nation-state building. The Soviet leadership sought to euthanize potential threats and create a more docile society that would easily acquiesce to efforts from Moscow to create a communist utopia.

Please also note that he, quite logically, considers the whole Soviet period as one continuum of terror, from 1920 on, without jumping into excuses popular among some editors such as "it was all Stalin" and the link between the mass-scale extermination of people (however you call it) is quite obvious to the author. One source that draws attention is Goldhagen, D. (2009) Worse Than War: Genocide, Eliminationism, and the Ongoing Assault On Humanity. New York. Affain Books which I don't have but looks like it's focused just on the topic of this article. Cloud200 (talk) 14:07, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

That's not how I would interpret it. While it says that the Soviet motivation was communist, it doesn't link it to other communist countries. Someone for example might kill someone because he thinks God told him to, but that doen't necessarily connect him to eveyone who kills in God's name. Also, per weight, Daniel Goldhagen's views are fringe and largely ignored in the literature of mass killings, hence don't belong in this article. TFD (talk) 16:45, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Goldhagen

As the source is easily found on LibGen, I can now summarize how the author describes the communist flavor of eliminationism (the book describes all of them from right to the left, each of them with their own specifics and rationales):

The political Left’s murderous ideologies, communisms of various hues, seek to reorganize society according to a totalizing political and social vision, glorify that vision and the class or segment of society that is declared to be its bearer, and declare as enemies all individuals and groups that consider themselves or that are “objectively” defined to be opposed to that vision. This vision admits little possibility of coexistence with doubters and dissenters, let alone actual enemies. Communist regimes and their followers have a strong proclivity for eliminating the communist vision’s opponents. Because Marxism promises and requires a homogenous, dissent-free paradise, and because it posits sizable groups as being, by definition, “socially dangerous elements,” powerful roadblocks to that world’s creation, communists see the need to remove them as acute, so the restraints on how it may be done crumble. (Goldhagen, 2009)

The above is quite obvious and directly flows from the principles of Marxism-Leninism. Now, about the global scope of these communist-inspired state policies:

Mass-murdering communist regimes have most notably, after initially drawing on poor and resentful proletarians and peasants, reared generations of true believers, by inculcating the young, who then readily lend themselves to eliminationist programs. Especially using their control of schools, the Soviets, communist Chinese, and communist North Koreans instilled in many of their subjects the fanatical belief in their political systems’ rightness, in the existence of systematic enmity among many people inside and outside the country, and the systematic need to do just about anything to eliminate those enemies. The Soviets erected the gulag, produced mass famine death, and deported putatively disloyal peoples. In some Soviet satellite countries, communist regimes killed (especially in Yugoslavia) and imprisoned in labor camps (as in Romania) real and imagined enemies. The communist Chinese slaughtered more people than the Soviets, including mass numbers in their Laogai labor camp gulag. North Korea’s true believers have turned the entire country into a quasi-gulag, with a landscape peppered by the camps of the regime’s formal gulag, the Kwanliso, or Special Control Institutions. Each communist system’s most loyal supporters were continuously replenished by new communist-raised generations. (Goldhagen, 2009)

Cloud200 (talk) 14:28, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: I am sure that it is possible to find even more sources that say essentially the same as the sources provided by you. The problem is not in that. The questions that we need to answer is as follows:

1. "What majority of reliable sources say about the events described in this article, and do they link them to Communism (as some general phenomenon), or to some local factors, which were specific to each concrete society?"

2. "Do majority of reliable sources see a significant linkage between these events, or they prefer to discuss them separately, and to provide separate explanations for each of them?"

These two questions are impossible to answer by presenting just a couple of sources. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:54, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: There is an obvious flaw in your approach: If you look for information specifically about a linkage between Marxism and mass murder, you definitely will find it. However, does it prove anything?

• If you do, e.g. this, you get a lot of sources supporting your POV. However, there is absolutely no proof that these sources reflect majority views on mass killings in the USSR in 1937.
• If you do this, you get another list of sources, and this list is more neutral (teh keywords "stalinism repressions" are more likely to be selected by a user who has no preliminary knowledge of the subject, and, therefore, no POV).

I am not going to analyse each sources in these lists right now (I would like to do that later). However, one source that is found in both lists is interesting. This source is Vincent Barnett (2006) Understanding stalinism—the ‘Orwellian discrepancy’ and the ‘rational choice dictator’, Europe-Asia Studies, 58:3, 457-466, DOI:10.1080/09668130600601982

It is a discussion of a linkage between Marxism, Stalin's personality and repressions (a.k.a. mass killings). Author's conclusion is:

"Hence it should be accepted that Stalin was not rational, but neither was he mad: he was just ignorant and corrupt. He was ignorant of conventional economic theory, ignorant of the real long-term consequences of the terror, and blind to the original impetus of Marx’s egalitarian vision of a communist economy. He was also paranoid with regards to maintaining power, as any dictator must be. The implications of all this are that it is ignorance, paranoia and dictators that must be overcome; their actions should not be surreptitiously justified through the attempt to interpret them as ‘rational’ or as ‘more complex than previously thought’ or even as ‘generated by difficult circumstances’, no matter what their nominal political affiliation might have been. This does not mean that studying the detail of Stalin’s rule is not a completely legitimate activity for historians, only that the temptation to use this detail as valediction should be resisted. "

As you can see, the main factors that lead to the most murderous mass killings ("repressions") in the USSR are seen in Stalin's personality, and it is more a deviation from Marxism than its implementation. If you are familiar with history of Soviet Russia, you probably know that late Stalin's period was marked by restoration of many features of pre-revolutionary Russian Empire: separate education for boys and girls, old-style uniform (and batman) for military officers, conversion of peasants to de facto serfs, imperial style in architecture, formation of nomenklatura as a new nobility, etc.

In other words, we have two conflicting views (at least). Which one is more predominant? That question is absolutely necessary to answer before we rewrite this article. And it can be answered only by analysing a representative set of sources, not by cherry-picking a couple of sources that you (or I) like.

However, some preliminary conclusions can be made even using the sources used in this article.

Thus, Valentino's theory (which is one of the core sources for this article) says that ideology is not an important factor, and the key factor is leader's personality. That is closer to Barnett than to the sources cited by you. And, importantly, Valentino's views were twisted and misinterpreted in this article, which must be fixed.

Michael Mann, in his super-influential "The Dark Side..." (which is also cited in this article) concludes that XX century mass killings were the dark side of democracy (not Communism or Marxism), and mass killings in Communist states were, to some degree, democratic ("bottom up") too, and they were a result of perversion of socialist ideas in the same sense as mass killings in other states were a result of perversion of liberal-democratic ideas. That is also more in agreement with Barnett than with your sources.

Of course, this is just a preliminary conclusion, but it is an additional argument in support of a comprehensive source analysis. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:05, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

...and more

I was not my intention to analyse sources from this biased list, but one of them worth mentioning. It is fifth in the list (Eagelton). The first chapter starts with:

"Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx’s ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands? The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called generalized scarcity, by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of the old filthy business—or, in less tasteful translation, the same old crap. Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated workforce might catapult themselves into the modern age."

T. Carver, who wrote the introduction, is from University of Bristol, and the list of his publications makes him a good expert. I, again, am surprised how desperately biased the MKuCR article is. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:47, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Jesus was not obsessed about the necessity of "violent revolution", while Marx was. Cloud200 (talk) 15:05, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

In XIX century, almost every progressive thinkers was advocating revolutionary violence. A Greek revolution, Bolivarian revolutions, Hungarian revolution, French revolutions (several), American revolution, Italian Garibaldi wars, German revolution, Russian revolution (February), and many others have nothing in common with Marxism, but most of them were violent, and all of them were supported by progressive thinkers. Violence was seen as one of the most common and normal way for changing a state system, and Marx was not the first and not the last thinker who said that.

Please, stop your ahistorical claims. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:00, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

"Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia" - yes, Marx made different and often contradictory statements during his life, but this doesn't justify author's ignorance as to the presence of 1881 correspondence between Marx and Vera Zasulich where he happily allowed for such application of Marxism based on agrarian communes instead of proletariat. Cloud200 (talk) 15:10, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

...and what is a linkage between a support of agrarian communes and advocacy of mass killings? Paul Siebert (talk) 17:01, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Paul Siebert: Elementary: the whole purpose of Marxian violent revolution was eradication of bourgeoisie as a class through means of violent revolution, revolutionary terror and dictatorship of the proletariat. As some argued it's not possible in Russia in absence of proletarian masses, Marx hinted it's still possible to use the agrarian communes as the necessary instrument for the eradication. Which is precisely what happened, with necessary ideological linkage creatively provided by Lenin in "State and revolution", with the Soviet state describing itself as "Workers' and Peasants' state". Seriously, I' terrified by the ignorance of fundamental concepts of Marxism-Leninism among Western scholars who you describe as "good experts". And this explains a lot, too. Cloud200 (talk) 09:35, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: Your understanding of the Marx concept is superficial. Marxism does not see classes as some biological construct, and social mobility is a part of the Marxist concept. "Eradication of some class" means not physical destruction of its members, but elimination of some concrete social relationships that allow this class to exist. Thus, elimination of a private property of means of production automatically eliminate capitalist economic relationships, which is tantamount to elimination of bourgeois, who are not bourgeois anymore.

I didn't find any statement in Lenin's "State and revolution" where he insisted on physical destruction of all members of the class of bourgeois. And I am not sure this interpretation of Marx or even Lenin's writings is a majority views. If you can provide evidences that majority RS say that, we can continue. So far, all of that is just your speculations.

However, one important reservation is needed. In East Asian society, class division was so significant that different classes were de facto different ethnic groups. One of the most extreme example is Cambodia, where rural (poor) population were Khmers, whereas urban population was composed largely of ethnic Vietnamese or Chinese. Moreover, even urban Khmers were seen by a rural population as some different sub-ethnos. In that situation, the slogan "eradication of bourgeoisie" was interpreted by many revolutionaries as a call for ethnic cleansing. However, that is a feature that was specific to Asian societies, not to Marxism. Paul Siebert (talk) 18:45, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Maybe you didn't find it because you haven't read it.

We have already said above, and shall show more fully later, that the theory of Marx and Engels of the inevitability of a violent revolution refers to the bourgeois state. The latter cannot be superseded by the proletarian state (the dictatorship of the proletariat) through the process of ”withering away”, but, as a general rule, only through a violent revolution. The panegyric Engels sang in its honor, and which fully corresponds to Marx’s repeated statements (see the concluding passages of The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto, with their proud and open proclamation of the inevitability of a violent revolution; see what Marx wrote nearly 30 years later, in criticizing the Gotha Programme of 1875, when he mercilessly castigated the opportunist character of that programme) — this panegyric is by no means a mere “impulse”, a mere declamation or a polemical sally. The necessity of systematically imbuing the masses with this and precisely this view of violent revolution lies at the root of the entire theory of Marx and Engels. The betrayal of their theory by the now prevailing social-chauvinist and Kautskyite trends expresses itself strikingly in both these trends ignoring such propaganda and agitation.

Details on how these ideas were actually understood and implemented by Bolshevik are documented further in Dictatorship of the proletariat and Red terror. Cloud200 (talk) 19:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

"It was not my intention, but here's another cherry-picked source that I happen to like"

No amount of "preliminary conclusion" or "it was not my intention but" syntactic sugar changes the fact that you are just doing exactly the same thing as you have done above in the discussion under Mann, Marx and "classicide" and countless other times. You call for an "impartial review of sources" and immediately come up with "interesting sources" that by means of careful cherry-picking happen to support your POV. When someone comes up with other sources that happens to not suit your taste, you immediately unroll an elaborate and extremely verbose discussion to discredit these sources.

This is simply disruptive and this is precisely why this debate has been fruitless since September.

Your claim that the article must be based on a single thesis supported by "majority of reliable sources". This is nonsense. From WP:BALANCE (subsection of WP:NPOV):

Neutrality assigns weight to viewpoints in proportion to their prominence. However, when reputable sources contradict one another and are relatively equal in prominence, describe both points of view and work for balance. This involves describing the opposing views clearly, drawing on secondary or tertiary sources that describe the disagreement from a disinterested viewpoint.

This has been of course proposed plenty of times but you always dismiss them, and come up with your own "preliminary" sources, which of course are not "preliminary" - you propose them to support your POV. The only purpose of you insisting on finding the "more predominant", "main factors" and "majority of sources" in this case it to prevent any progress in improving this article and wasting people's time until they give up, and you are certainly quite successful at this. Cloud200 (talk) 20:31, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: Please, refrain from personal attack: you literally accuse me of cherry-picking. If you are still a participant of the DRN process, please, stick with common rules. If you are not participating in this process anymore, please, let me know. In the latter case, next time when you make similar remarks, I'll report you.

I didn't cherry pick anything. I pointed editors's attention on this source, because I myself didn't expect to see this source among the search results that I was seen as an anti-Communist subset of sources.

Frankly, I think my explanations are sufficient to stop the conflict between two good faith users. If you will continue in the same vein, that may cast a doubt on your good faith, or on your ability to understand other's arguments.

Regards, --Paul Siebert (talk) 20:49, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Absolutely Cloud200, this sort of analysis would make for an excellent blog post, an impartial source analysis? Not so much. Dare ask for evidence to support their preconceived conclusions? Well then you are being disruptive. Dare call them out on their behaviour? Well then they'll report you. If we cannot discuss and critique the arguments of others without being accused of bad-faith then there is no hope of achieving meaningful progress. Literally posting every single source you can cherry pick to confirm your bias to an already cluttered page doesn't advance the discussion, and then retreating into overly verbose fillibustering while dismissing criticisms out of hand while giving the impression you "own" the page do not help anyone. Vanteloop (talk) 22:34, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

One general problem with source analysis

To avoid possible misunderstanding, let me reiterate the following.

• It is absolutely clear, and noone in clear mind is going to deny this fact, that some sources link Communism (in general) and Marxism (as an ideological doctrine and social theory) with "mass murder" or "mass killings". Let me call these sources as "group 1" sources.
• Definitely some sources exist that directly criticise the views that link Communism (in general) and Marxism (as an ideological doctrine and social theory) with "mass murder" or "mass killings". Let me call these sources as "group 2" sources.
• Finally, some sources exist that see no significant link between Communism (in general) and Marxism (as an ideological doctrine and social theory) with "mass murder" or "mass killings". They are not debating with "group 1" sources, they just tell a totally different story about each of those events taken separately, Let me call these sources as "group 3" sources.

The problem with this article is that it picked "group 1" sources and created a narrative that is based exclusively on them. It embedded "group 3" sources into that narrative, thereby totally misinterpreting them. And it totally ignored "group 2" sources. That may be quite correct if "type 1" sources represent majority view, "type 3" sources are significant minority view, and "type 2" sources are fringe. However, so far I saw no evidence of that. Therefore, the goal of our source analysis is not just to pick another source that confirms one's POV, but to reveal relative weight of these three groups, and then represent all significant facts and opinia, and required by WP:NPOV Paul Siebert (talk) 22:03, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree that there exists such source types. Could you provide a few examples of good sources for each group type? Both to better comprehend it and to compare them and their weight. Davide King (talk) 22:18, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that the best sources from the group 1 had already been found, and almost all of them are already in this article. The most important one is the Black Book (Courtois).

The "group 2" sources are, for example, the sources that discuss The Black Book of Communism (they can be found in the BB article or at its talk page). Frankly, since the "group 1" sources do not seem to be mainstream, majority of historians ignore them, hence the lack of criticism. For example, the fact that Rummel's approach to data collection and treatment was a subject of criticism by only two authors (one of whom is an expert in Yugoslavia), suggests that most experts simply ignore him (his data are neither cited nor discussed by experts in Russian history).

"Group 3" sources belong to several subcategories. The first category is country-specific sources. One example is ... the Black Book, more specifically, its best part (Werth's chapter, where he traces the origin of terror back to Sergey Nechayev, who was a nihilist, but not a Marxist), another examples is the book by Kiernan about Cambodian genocide.

Another subgroup of "group 3" sources are devoted specifically to some event or a group of events. Examples are this or that.

One more subgroup pf "group 3" sources is the writings of genocide scholars. As a rule, all of them (except Rummel) do not write specifically about Communism. They discuss just "mass killings"/"politicides"/"genocides" in general, and they are not focused on any specific linkage between Communism and mass killings. Thus, Harff identified four Communist states (out of 18) where politicides occurred, which implied no correlation between politicides and Communism. Valentino's core idea is that regime type does not matter, and he does not link Communism with mass killings, although he notes that in those Communist states where mass killings took place they had some specific features. Similarly, Mann openly disagrees with Rummel, and he proves that mass killings are rarely linked with totalitarianism: his point is that mass killings is a result of perversion of democracy and socialism. His opinion is especially important, for he, in contrast to Rummel, is sociologist, who does not focus on mere correlations. Interestingly, the views of Valentino, Mann, Werth, Harff and others is totally misinterpreted, and they are presented as "Group 1" authors, which is, frankly speaking, a blatant lie. IMO, at that level of misinterpretation, WP:CIR becomes applicable. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:57, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

This is a pretty convoluted reading of sources. How can you possible characterize Valentino as regime type does not matter? Please read again his extensive comments and comparison of regime types.

The single most important cause of mass killing in the twentieth century appears to be fading into history.

p. 150. He does not link Communism with mass killings??? You are picking at the edges of some works on genocide. It is hardly surprising given such complex questions that many differing answers and perspective arise concerning modern genocide or mass killings. These nuanced opinions on the overall causes and factors leading to mass violence do not negate the specific opinions authors may take concerning Communism. Valentino can say in his introduction that: "understanding of mass killing must begin with the specific goals and strategies of high political and military leaders, not with broad social or political factors." This does not somehow make Valentino inappropriate for this article, and it is a very poor reading of the source to make that claim. The three proposed categories look like an effort to divide sources based on the anti-communist and anti-anti-communist narratives and to exclude the middle ground. fiveby(zero) 16:12, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Cherry picking from Valentino is not a good approach either; we need to look at what academic reviews say about it, and they show that Valentino does not focus only of Communism (he actually discusses eight case studies), and Tago & Wayman 2010 consider his Communist mass killings subcategory as a complication of original theory his book is based on because Valentino's theory is that regime type are not as important, and it is the leaders that can explain mass killings. I could only find that quote in The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and Its Causes by Steven Pinker, who is neither a scholar of Communism or a genocide scholar, and the book was published by Penguin Books, which is not an academic publisher. Davide King (talk) 17:24, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

You will find the quote on page 150 of Final Solutions and throughout an extensive discussion of the relation of Communism to mass killing. Pinker was quoting Valentino. You and Paul Siebert have proposed that regime type is not important to Valentino, demonstrating the ridiculousness of that proposition with a quote is hardly cherry picking. That he did not find Communism as an important consideration for preventing future episodes of mass killing while "fading into history" does not in any way negate his observations of Communism in the 20th century. fiveby(zero) 19:01, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

You clearly missed the point, since I was not questioning Valentino saying that; what I questioned is the relevancy and whether that same quote, or point, was reproduced in secondary academic sources or cherry picked. I could only find it reproduced by Pinker, who is an expert in a different field and the book was not published by the academic press. Again, I am sure both Siebert and I can cherry pick from Valentino to show you otherwise, but we are not going to do that because that is the point — we should not look at what Valentino said, we should look at what academic reviews have said about him and how they summarized his book (e.g. independent reliable sources, Valentino is a primary source about himself, we need secondary sources about him). If you actually read them, you will see that Siebert gave a good summary of academic secondary coverage of Valentino's work. Like most genocide scholars, Valentino is perfectly good for B, which is the topic and approach I support and see as the best way to fix the article. Davide King (talk) 19:16, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

@Fiveby: You may look at p. 91, where the author says:

Communism has bloody record, but most regimes that have described themselves as communist or been described as such by others have not engaged in mass killings.

The page 97 says:

Communist regimes have also engaged in mass killings for variety of other reasons, mostly unrelated to communism itself.

In connection to that, I think an accusation of cherry picking should be addressed not to me, but to you. In contrast to you, I am discussing the core idea of Valentino, and it is quite obvious that the claim that Valentino sees Communism as a primary cause of mass killings in Communist states is inconsistent with his major thesis (although I agree that some of his statements contradict to that, but that inconsistency had already pointed by reviewers, and it does not undermine his major thesis). Paul Siebert (talk) 19:40, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

@Fiveby: What is the main idea of Valentino's theory? To understand that, we must keep in mind that the main reason for all his work was development of new approached to prevention of mass killings. To this end, he analyses eight cases of mass killings, which took place under different regimes, and analysed them in a context of similar regimes that committed no mass killings.

And his conclusion was that main factor leading to mass killings was a decisions of some concrete persons, a small group of elite, who decided that mass killings in that concrete case are the most optimal way to achieve that goal. And this conclusion leads us to some practical recipe to eliminate mass killings: that can be achieved by removing a small group of people from power, and that does not require changing the regime type.

Actually, his theory fully confirmed even when we compare Khrischev's USSR (Communist) with Stalin's USSR (Communist too). Regimes were the same, but removal of a small group from power totally stopped mass killings.

Finally, as you can see, Valentino does not include Afghanistan into the "Communist mass killings" chapter. And that, again, demonstrates that he does not see Communism as a factor (Afghan case was a "counter-guerilla mass killing", which resembled other mass killings of that type, according to Valentino. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:47, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually, many authors noted inconsistencies in Valentino's writing, who initially claims that regime type does not matter, and then discusses the role of Communist ideology. That is why it would be totally incorrect to pick just one phrase, and, instead, to focus of the main idea of his work. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:51, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Indeed, this could explain disputes about Valentino. You and I are using secondary coverage (e.g. academic reviews), whereas others are using Valentino's work itself, which has some inconsistency per academic sources, yet they make it clear that your summary of them is adeguate and correct. Davide King (talk) 18:06, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

It makes perfect sense that Valentino compares atrocities committed during the Soviet–Afghan War to atrocities committed during other counter-insurgency wars (including those committed by the U.S. during the Vietnam War), while simultaneously discussing the commonalities that led a disproportionate number of communist states to commit mass killings during peacetime. I would hardly say that this constitutes an "inconsistency" or contradiction.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:40, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

The point is different, and it is described by Valentino at p. 97: many mass killings in Communist states were not related to Communism, according to Valentino. Therefore, it would be incorrect to describe them as a single phenomenon that had some common causes and that is seen by majority of authors as a single topic. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:45, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

(ec)Why do observations made concerning the best way to predict or prevent future violence negate the observations of violence in the 20th century? Valentino's four factors that distinguish the "less violent" Communist regimes are relative population size, degree of radicalism, capability of the dispossessed to leave the country, and degree of paranoia of the leaders. That is along with

Why did the communist utopias of the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia become history's greatest slaughterhouses? I argue that radical communist regimes have proven such prodigious killers primarily because the social changes they sought to bring about have resulted in the sudden and nearly complete material and political dispossession of millions of people. These regimes practiced social engineering of the highest order. It is the revolutionary desire to bring about the rapid and radical transformation of society that distinguishes radical communist regimes from all other forms of government, including less violent communist regimes and noncommunist, authoritarian governments.

How is that not appropriate for this article? Why is Werth reduced to Nechayev while the "misunderstandings" and conflicts between the Bolsheviks and greater society ignored? The spiraling cycles of violence based on acceptance of prior atrocities? If this article follows to closely or takes the moral argument and exhortation of Courtois—the arithmetic to create a billboard slogan—and presents as fact; well, point taken. But that is no reason to exclude or downplay the sources that directly address the article's topic and are not part of the "anti" narratives. fiveby(zero) 19:43, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

If you want a serious discussion, maybe, we move it to a separate section? Paul Siebert (talk) 19:47, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Why are so many discussions being opened about the same (sources) topic? GoodDay (talk) 23:44, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Good point.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:03, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

The problem is that since Group 3 does not discuss the communist genocide theory, that you cannot make any assumptions on what their authors' thought or even comment that they don't mention the connection. Furthermore, most Group 2 authors are not genocide scholars and generally don't rebut Group 1. Instead, they explain what motivates group 1. The final problem is that most of group 1 is poor scholarship compared with Group 3. Even if they were, we are using writings that never received much scholarly attention, such as Rummel's website. The only actual dispute that is reliably sourced is Werth's criticism of Courtois' arithmetic. TFD (talk) 00:13, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: You mix two different things: (i) source analysis that reveals majority/minority/fringe POV and (ii) the way majority/minority POVs must be presented. These are two totally different aspects, and, for the beginning, I propose to focus on the first one. That will be a preliminary but quite necessary step. Since this discussion does not lead to any immediate changes of the article, any possible accusations of OR/SYNTH (if someone decided to accuse us) are not acceptable. Moreover, keeping in mind that NPOV requires us to do source analysis as a path to neutrality, this discussion is quite legitimate. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:21, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

If I understand you, you are trying to establish the weight of opinion in reliable sources by writing a review article. To me, that is original research and beyond the scope of what editors should do. Instead we should rely on reliable sources that explain weight. We do not for example read all the papers on global warming in order to determine the weight of scientific opinion but use sources that have already done and explained that.

The other issue is that if a source does not explicitly attribute mass killings to Communism, that does not mean they are claiming there is no connection.

TFD (talk) 02:12, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

You understand me almost correct, although I prefer different wording. I am trying to carefully and critically analyze a variety of reliable sources and then attempting to convey to the reader the information contained in them fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without editorial bias. And I have a strong doubt that is violates any policy.

As I explained, this is just the first step, which will not lead to some concrete text in the article's space. However, from this analysis, we will be able to define a correct way for re-writing this (desperately POV) article. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:45, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Valentino, Communism etc

@Fiveby: In responce to your 19:43, 19 December 2021 post, let me explain you that my answer to your question:

How is that not appropriate for this article?

is: "That IS appropriate". The problem is, however, that, instead of presenting that as one opinion (actually, as one aspect of one author's book), the article presents it as the only mainstream viewpoint.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:47, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Furthermore, you assume that Valentino's " population size, degree of radicalism, capability of the dispossessed to leave the country, and degree of paranoia of the leaders" are independent parameters, although they are obviously dependent (and many authors implicitly assume that). Thus, it must be obvious to any reasonable person that "population size" and "capability of the dispossessed to leave the country" are strongly correlated, and this correlation is inverse: just imagine how and where could 100 million Chinese escape; that would be technically impossible, and no other country would accept them. Similarly, it is obvious that the degree of radicalism is correlated with the degree of social and economic tensions, which usually are higher in desperately poor countries. It is easy to see that the first three factors are strongly dependent from each other, and only the last one is not. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:09, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

However, even if we assume that those factors are independent, I don't see how Communism can be a cause of any of them.

In reality, majority of authors (including Werth) use a very rational approach: they just put a horse before the cart, and they do not discuss how an evil ideology brought havoc to some idyllic society, instead, they explain how the society with huge internal tensions leads to radicalisation of ideology.

That approach is correct because it is not Manichean: instead of creating a false dichotomy ("evil Communists vs good liberals) it gives a nuanced picture.

In reality, if you look at post WWI Central Europe, you may see that only two states were really democtratic: Czechoslovakia and Finland. All other states were to some degree authoritarian and repressive, and Volyn massacre or widespread Jewish pogroms (when local population enthusiastically participated in killing Jews when Nazi allowed them to do that) are example of huge tensions in those societies. In reality, we don't know what could have happened in Europe if Bolsheviks were defeated, but it is highly likely that the new Russian state could be similar to fascist regimes in Croatia or Italy, and it could be even more murderous, keeping in mind pre-history of its formation (Civil war etc). Furthermore, it is quite possible to imagine a scenario when Stailn was defeated in a political struggle against, e.g. Bukharin, and in that case it would be quite unreasonable to expect that collectivisation or Great Purge ever happened.

There is no reason to claim that horrors of Stalinism were pre-determined in October 1917, and there is no reason to expect that a failure of October revolution would bring peace and democracy to Russia: most likely it would be a grim authoritarian state with huge internal social and ethnic tensions.

Most authors who study Soviet Russia do not discuss Stalin in a context of Communism: they explain his steps through the prism of is paranoid desire of personal power, his attempts to militarise and indiustrialise Soviet society, his strategic blunders and incompetence. And that is realistic approach, which is a mainstream POV. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:29, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

You mix up categorisation with conclusions. Valentino groups together communist mass killings into one chapter because the common element of these mass killings phenomena is that they arose from both the agricultural collectivization and political terror, which is unique to communist regimes. Valentino's conclusions are independent of that categorisation. --Nug (talk) 22:32, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually, no. "Collectivisation" was Stalin's invention, and Mao picked it from Stalin. Therefore, it would be more correct to speak about commonalities between Stalin's USSR (not USSR in general) and Mao's China (not PRC in general). In other words, some actually, two, regimes that committed collectivization related mass killings had something significant in common. That is true, and I see no reason for not discussing Mao and Stalin as closely related phenomenae.

However, political terror in China and USSR had different roots. In China, the campaign against landlords was de facto a civil war: landlords were a signoifocant military and political power in provinces, which was not the case for Soviet Union in 1930s. In contrast, Stalin's repressions were dictated by his desire to accumulate and keep power on his hands, and, as I explained, there is no reason to expect that some other leader (even Trotsky, and definitely Bukharin) would have unleashed so huge terror campaign: they simply didn't need to do that.

With regard to Pol Pot, it was a totally different case: in Cambodia, urban population was destroyed by peasants, and that movement was democratic (i.e. it had a wide popular support). And, taking into account specifics of agriculture in Cambodia, there were not much opposition to collectivisation (as far as I know, but I am not sure, I need to check it). Paul Siebert (talk) 22:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Stop trying to divert the discussion, this thread is about Valentino, and he clearly and explicitly associates mass killings under collectivization and political terror as a scenario common to the communist mass killing type, and conducts a comprehensive discussion of the nature of these collectivization actions with to the USSR, PRC and Cambodia, while indicating collectivization in Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, North Korea and Vietnam may also be mass killing events. --Nug (talk) 00:31, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Please, be civil. Although I took an obligation not to report you while DRN is in progress, that does not allow you to commit personal attacks. I am not "diverting" anything.

You perfectly know W&T who said:

"Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter..."

although the same source admits that

"A complication in his work is that one of Valentino's three main categories of killing is 'communist' mass killing, so he brings in regime type, after

all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than one would have expected at the outset of the book."

In other words, this source is intrinsically controversial. This controversy can be resolved only if we look at the core of his theory. If we remove his major thesis (that regime type does not matter}, it is unclear what is new in Valentino's book: it contains no new facts, no new sources, just a new theory.

Therefore, the stress should be made on his main thesis (that regime type does not matter)

WRT "Communist mass killings", that is a specific Valentino's definition, which includes famine, but excludes, e.g. Afghanistan. Actually, Valentino's book cannot be a core source for this article, for it does not define "Communist mass killings" as all killings committed by Communist, it speaks about some specific events, which Valentino (but not majority of scholars) sees as mass killings. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:55, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

You are taking two pieces of text out of context from different parts of W&T and putting them together to claim it is "intrinsically controversial". The first part "Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter..." is related to Valentino's conclusions, but the second part "A complication in his work is that one of Valentino's three main categories of killing is 'communist' mass killing, so he brings in regime type, after all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than one would have expected at the outset of the book." is related to categories, the other two categories being "ethnic" and "counter guerilla". Do you really not understand the difference between categorization of types and conclusions of the causes, or are you willfully confusing them here? --Nug (talk) 03:28, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Thank you for quoting the same piece again.

"Categorisation" and "causation" is not the same. In reality, it is quite correct to say that some mass killings that happened in some Communist states had something in common. Communism is one of the factors that made them somewhat similar. However, it does not mean that Communism was a cause of those events, and that is exactly what Valentino says.

Do you understand in now?--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:07, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Paul Siebert: "Most authors who study Soviet Russia do not discuss Stalin in a context of Communism" - the fact that you're calling for "source analysis to establish the majority" while at the same time routinely making far-fetching (and unsourced) statements about "most authors" clearly indicate that you already have a well-established POV on what the majority is and the whole discussion is just a diversion. Cloud200 (talk) 14:58, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Cloud200: You again commented on my alleged POV. Are you still a party of the DRN? Please, answer. If you will not confirm that you are a participant, and will not comment at WP:DRNMKUCR in 2 days, I will conclude that you are not a participant anymore, and I will act accordingly (which may include reporting you at AE).

When I wrote "Most authors ...", I meant my conclusion that I made based on my superficial and preliminary analysis of sources. I never pretended it was exhaustive and final, and already proposed discuss the results of my search, which lead me to that conclusion, and I, for several times, invited other user to finish that work jointly. However, they, including you, seem to ignore my proposal, and prefer to resort to personal attack. I am not going to tolerate it anymore. You either explicitly apologise, or you make some concrete steps that will confirm your active participation in DRNMKUKR. If you fail to do that in next few days, I may report you at AE. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:43, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Paul Siebert: Oh, back to Rummel. Gotcha. Yes a messy contrast to Rummel. Even more problematic might be his "strategic approach", he is not looking for underlying conditions which may lead to violence, but instead looking for the conditions under which leaders might see violence as a valid solution. So for instance where you see population size as not independent, he is looking at: Small population size, especially in the agricultural sector, can open up an entirely different set of options for communist leaders with examples of options that do not include dispossessed leaving the country.

Wayman and Tago are looking at the Harff/Rummel datasets and all democide/politicide. Communism is mostly past tense for Valentino and the "strategic approach" creates a "complication" for W&T. I would say Valentino is only "intrinsically controversial" insomuch as the article is intrinsically stuck on answering Rummel or "Communism was a cause of those events". Source analysis to determine appropriate sources for the article is much different than source analysis to attempt to reach a conclusion on Rummel. fiveby(zero) 13:42, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

@Fiveby: Actually, you are not completely right. Rummel's approach looks attractive due to his simplicity, but there are some serious problems with it. First of all, his approach is not sociological, but statistical, and, as we know correlation does not mean causation. And that is one reason why Mann, a very respectable and influential sociologist, strongly disagreed with Rummel.

Second, Rummel operates with very questionable data: he didn't perform source criticism, and he took all data, including obviously unreliable ones, into his data set.

Third, there is a problem with his regime categorisation: he describes some concrete regime as, e.g. totalitarian during the whole period of the regime's existence, and he attributes "democide" to the regime as a whole, not to the regime in its concrete stage.

In that aspect, Valentino's "controversial" approach is actually more nuanced: he correctly notes that majority of Communist regimes didn't commit mass killings, and correctly points out that mere change of leadership usually leaded to cessation of mass killing tactics. Actually, majority of genocide scholars are more in agreement with Valentino's conclusions than with Rummel. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:13, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Not completely right is not bad, but I did not mean that Valentino is messier in comparison with Rummel and therefore the latter preferable. His "strategic approach" is problematic for Wayman and Tago (they are looking at the datasets), didn't mean problematic in any other sense. fiveby(zero) 16:38, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

RFC: Structure of Mass killings under communist regimes

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Which of the following approaches should be used as the overall structure for the article on Mass killings under communist regimes? Robert McClenon (talk) 06:12, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

The four approaches that are being considered are listed below. Please reply as to each approach, indicating whether it is acceptable, with a brief explanation.

A. The article should be reorganized as a summary style article, providing an overview of mass killing events under communist governments, and linking to articles on each of the mass killing events.

B. The article should discuss the concept of a correlation between mass killings and communist governments, including proposed causes and critiques of the concept

C. The article should be an amalgamation of A and of B.

D. The article should be split into two articles, as described above.

Instructions to Editors: Please enter your approval or disapproval of each approach in the Survey subsection for that approach, by entering Yes or No with a brief statement. That means that you are requested to enter four statements, one in each lettered Survey. You may reply to the statements by others in the Threaded Discussion section. Note that this RFC, and the article, are subject to Eastern Europe discretionary sanctions for disruptive editing of this RFC or this talk page or article. (You don't need to worry about discretionary sanctions if you observe Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines.) Robert McClenon (talk) 06:13, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Closer: Please determine what approach is most strongly supported by strength of arguments. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:13, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey on A

• Yes - An overview of the major events seems appropriate for wikipedia. Option B, while interesting, it would make the article very lengthy, and may give ground for important major events to be excluded from the article where there is no RS to explain the connection between the event and the government. Deathlibrarian (talk) 07:40, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - Would effectively remove important information from Misplaced Pages rather than reforming it or adequately presenting it. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC) This is by far and large the worst option on the list due to how contentious the estimate section is compared to the remainder of the information within the article. This option serves no purpose other than that it will make the SYNTH problem tenfold more apparent, all the while erasing useful information from Misplaced Pages. Of course, the "Estimates" section could be fixed, but in that case you might as well vote yes for C or D. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 23:18, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No if discussing all Communist regimes but if limited to its proper scope, it would be an improvement — if we limit it to proper universally recognized mass killings, i.e. to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (three Communist leaders), and the only debate about famines is limited to the Holodomor, as I noted in my addendum.

• It also depends on whether it is to be treated as a single phenomenon or not; most of the events are treated individually, and as noted by The Four Deuces, " list of MKuCR implicitly says they are is a consensus that the events are connected", which is the biggest issue and is the reason why we do not have any other Mass killings under ... regimes article. If we are going to use country experts, we can achieve NPOV but may violate OR/SYNTH because they do not discuss them within such a global or single phenomenon context (e.g. Soviet specialists about the Great Purge); if we are going to use genocide scholars, the grouping may be justified as a generalization but we cannot achieve NPOV because we would have to rely on non-experts when describing the events; hence, while this approach may easily improve issues, I am not sure all NPOV and OR/SYNTH issues would be solved — certainly, it is better than the status quo or C. In conclusion I would prefer that we expand Mass killing and/or create Mass killings in history (akin to Genocides in history), irrespective of regime types, as the simplest way to avoid NPOV and OR/SYNTH issues and still discuss Communist regimes.
• Notes — I do not know why but I thought the topic also included excess deaths and mortality, which is why I mentioned it; instead, it appears to be exactly what I proposed (e.g. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), and may be fine if we highlight both similarities and diversities
• This is in line from the genocide and mass killing literature I have read. Communism is placed within the context of genocides (basically Cambodia, which is compared to the non-Communist Holocaust and Rwanda) and mass killings in general, and mainly limited to Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes (I do not think chapters about Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, with passing mentions about the obvious facts that people were also killed in other Communist regimes, make this particularly topic, as proposed, stand out on its own — the only reason is due to space, but we should at least attempt to expand Mass killing first rather than assume a priori it will be necessary; as there is literature that summarizes that for us, and that events can simply be linked without wasting space to describe each one by one as we do here, it can be done in short paragraphs). This will also likely solve any content forks issues between Mass killing and this article, as this approach will allow us to remove any inconsistency between the two articles.
• Another thing to consider is that such scholars focus on universally recognized mass killing events, not excess mortality; it is country experts who focus on the latter, and it is only a minority of scholars (Courtois and Rummel) who mix the too, further adding demographic losses, to create a global Communist death toll. Again, I do not exclude that this topic, as proposed here, is not possible or will not be possible in the future (I would like to see a draft and a list of sources first) but I do not think this is a good choice that would help us fixing the article, it is likely the hardest because I still see many disagreement among us. Davide King (talk) 14:11, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Addendum — another possibility is taking the Communist mass killing(s) name from Valentino but limiting the scope only to mass killings under Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes (e.g. as I discussed in my comment about D). Excess mortality is better discussed in separate articles by each state (e.g. Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin) because having a general article focused on all deaths under Communism would be too close to OR/SYNTH, for (1) country experts do it for each country, and do not engage in a global Communist death toll, and (2) the latter of which has been controversially done by Courtois. As currently worded, A is too close to OR/SYNTH.
• Either this, or a disambiguation page as another alternative. Davide King (talk) 15:43, 19 December 2021 (UTC) Davide King (talk) 19:51, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Neutral --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:06, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Besides that, I would like to make an important note to participants. During the preparation of this RfC, there was a disagreement among DRN participants about a description of A and C. I, and DK insisted that it was necessary explain that WP:SS must include all important aspects, and if the source analysis demonstrates that the linkage between Communism and mass killings is seen as important by at least significant minority sources, the discussion of this linkage will be added to A-style article per WP:NPOV. This reservation was removed from the final version, but I (and, I assume, DK too) believe it was implied by default. Therefore, posts made by North8000, @ModernDayTrilobite: and @Cloud200: and some other may be partially a result of misunderstanding of our proposal. I apologise for that.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:17, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• No A list of MKuCR implicitly says they are is a consensus that the events are connected, which is POV OR. TFD (talk) 18:19, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes This seems fine. A listing of all qualifying events with short summaries culled from the ledes of their primary pages seems straightforward and useful. There are enough sources tying the events together such that the page itself needs little justification for its existence. 73.152.116.51 (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - Best not to make into a summary. GoodDay (talk) 19:30, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Maybe This one really depends on how strictly we curate entries, which is a debate that I can already see never ending. If we can find a reasonably strict list that actually relies on widely recognized mass killings, this could be good, but I can see it becoming a quagmire very quickly. BSMRD (talk) 20:29, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Preferable to C / current or to D, but not ideal (ie. prefer B). It'd be better than the current version by reducing the directness of the synthesis the list is presented to support, and clear inclusion criteria would certainly reduce the problems it causes somewhat, but it would be a backwards way to solve the underlying dispute in that we'd be omitting any discussion of the underlying controversy that gives the list meaning and context while retaining a list whose meaning is still mostly synthy. --Aquillion (talk) 22:05, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Comment - Since we all accept Valentino’s definition of mass killings as “50,000 killed within five years”, we should also accept Valentino’s topology of mass killings too, where he groups communist governments together because they share the common mass killing scenario of collectivisation and political terror that is unique to them. Valentino groups USSR, PRC and Cambodia together as confirmed mass killers, and adds Bulgaria, East Germany, Romania, North Korea and Vietnam as possible mass killers. So can we stop with this "the grouping is WP:SYNTH", Valentino has published such a grouping. --Nug (talk) 01:01, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, but I don't know how feasible it is. There would have to be an inclusion criteria, and that criteria would have to be defined in prose. There would also probably have to be some definition of terms. However, I think that this would be the most NPOV, and therefore the best, version possible, as there wouldn't be any fiddling with motives and critiques of one scholar verses another. Grouped together, the events would pass WP:NLIST, and that may just be the best way to go. schetm (talk) 01:57, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No as it will result in significant loss of well-sourced content mentioned in "B". Cloud200 (talk) 15:02, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, prefer C. My very best wishes (talk) 19:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - Discussion of individual mass killing events, without a discussion of the underlying academic views on their relationship, would constitute WP:SYNTH. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• No This option as a stand-alone (i.e. not as a part of "D") would eliminate coverage of a possible cause-effect relationship. IMO, the possible cause-effect relationship should be covered somewhere, and such is the main thing that is uniquely covered in this article. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:57, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - This would eliminate the core debate of the topic, which is definitely notable. Fieari (talk) 03:59, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, hard to see how this could follow NPOV and NOR. An article like this would implicitly endorse the claim that there's a connection between communism and mass killings, but apparently without explaining the analysis behind that claim or describing opposing views. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 16:49, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• No: we need to have sources that analyse a topic as a whole to host an article/list on that topic, something I'm constantly declining drafts at AFC on the basis of. We need to see that there is a shared historical connection between all events considered by mainstream historians to be "mass killings under communist regimes"—non-obvious as there are primitive communisms, communisms that predate Marx and communist regimes across at least four different continents that I'm aware of; and because the mass killings could have completely unrelated causes. Consider what separates this topic from Mass killings in countries beginning with "E" in English. It is that there are sources describing the group as a whole (otherwise we need another AFD). — Bilorv (talk) 21:27, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey on B

• Yes Providing a list of killings implies that there is a connection, which is implicit synthesis and contrary to neutrality. TFD (talk) 07:53, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - Would effectively remove important information from Misplaced Pages rather than reforming it or adequately presenting it. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC) It will not solve SYNTH issues as that spares the sections "Proposed causes" and "Debates over famines" which are overtly opinionated and up to interpretation. Therefore, once the RfC concludes, editors should have to edit both sections of the article repeatedly until the issue is resolved which admittedly is very unlikely as this article just brings about dispute after dispute about the content therein. The least that could be done and should be done is to add a paragraph that states that they are entirely subjective and the opinions of experts in that field of research. Additionally, particularly since the article is 290 thousand bytes in size, it won't fix the LENGTH problem : They would have to be removed outright and I feel that this would effectively remove information from Misplaced Pages. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 23:12, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• B will still run the issue of synthesis since it still gives opinionated sources weight and will still very much lead to the article being highly controversial. B includes "Proposed causes" and "Debate over famines" which are both highly subjective and up to interpretation. Some will choose to believe what the scholars and specialists say are entirely true, others will be more skeptic - ultimately leading back to the issue that was originally posed by the "Estimates" section. That was why I proposed what tantamounts to D since we could have a fully fact-based article (Example: Adolf Hitler) and a fully theory-based article (Example: Principle of relativity) which would include the estimates, the proposed causes and the debates, mainly my concern was about the proposed causes section originally. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 20:53, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Yes — this is the best approach to fix the article, and does not necessarily exclude any of the other option. By choosing this topic, we will commit to source analysis to weight scholarly sources and individuate majority, minority, and fringe views. If Courtois and Rummel are majority views, there would be no problem in following their approach.

• If there is no universal agreement among scholars on the link, other options (e.g. the events themselves, or "providing a list of killings implies that there is a connection, which is implicit synthesis and contrary to neutrality") may violate NPOV and SYNTH. Again, compare the Soviet Union with Cambodia, the former used forceful collectivization of peasantry to accelerate urbanization, while the latter used revolutionary peasants to suppress and destroy urban population. An events-based-and-focused article, by the mere fact of grouping them together implies that there is a clear connection, but that is not there and scholarly sources alo emphasize their differences, and more importantly give each event and country separate causes; it is only a minority of sources, some of it significant, some of it fringe, that gives general causes for mass killings; even genocide scholars, who give generalizations and correlations, do not say communist ideology was the main cause as Courtois and Malia claim — Mann says they were a perversion of both democratic (Rwanda) and socialist ideals (Communism), and Valentino (who writes within the context of mass killings in general) is more concerned about leadership than ideology, and concludes that by removing leaders who engaged in genocides or mass killings, that can stop them from happening, which is based on reality.
• Valentino's work is Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, not Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide under Communist Regimes. Mann's work is The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, not The Dark Side of Communism: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing. I could go on and on, but there is cherry picking in treating Communism as a single or special phenomenon when that is not what scholarly sources do. Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide is about "demonstrat that it is indeed possible to compare the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina while respecting the specificities of each appalling phenomenon." No emphasis or mention of Communism. We can only discuss the theories and link about the events, not the grouped events themselves as a single, special phenomenon, as is done by Courtois and Malia in The Black Book of Communism. Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder is not Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Communist Mass Murders. Both of those sources may be used for this topic but they are clearly misunderstood to imply they discuss Communism as a separate or special new topic on its own; rather, they place it in the proper context of a general topic. In regards to events, they can simply be linked when mentioned or discussed, or through 'See also' links, where they are discussed in context; there is no need to coatrack them here too.
• See also proposed topic and non-primary literature. Davide King (talk) 14:41, 19 December 2021 (UTC) Davide King (talk) 19:44, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

• Neutral--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:07, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes This seems fine. There is a clearly an ongoing debate on the effect communist founding principles had on the actions chosen by the resultant governments. There are enough sources to justify the existence of this page, though I expect it will be a battleground for years. 73.152.116.51 (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - as this could invite disputes over the topic. GoodDay (talk) 19:31, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes This is the actual topic here. Simply listing Communist deaths is something only done by some proponents of the idea that mass killings are inherent to Communism, but that question, whether or not they are inherent, has a much larger body of scholarship and will lead to a much more neutral and informative article. This won't remove any information from WP, all the articles on the individual events are still right there and will be linked when discussed. This version of the article would in fact add information to Misplaced Pages, as an analysis of this debate does not exist elsewhere on WP. BSMRD (talk) 20:38, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, an article cannot discuss any debate on the correlations or causes without mentioning the government actions that has led to that debate in the first place. It would be like discussing Causes of World War II without having the article World War II. --Nug (talk) 21:24, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, with the caveat that individual killings can be mentioned when referenced by specific authors, in the context of describing their views and how they believe they are connected - ie. we can say "author X has thesis and Y says that this and this and this support their thesis", if we have appropriate cites. What we can't do is perform WP:OR to argue their thesis for them - we ought to be reporting notable research that others have done (and any notable debates over that research), not doing our own. --Aquillion (talk) 21:57, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - I can't see a faster way to get this page permalocked again than by going down this route. There are very strong willed individuals with strong POV's on both sides of this issue active in the article/on this talk page, and I'm not sure that those POV's can be set aside to create an NPOV article. I'm also not sure as Option B would even pass the GNG or could avoid being entirely SYNTH. If someone wants to go this route, they should draft Option B first so that the community could see if it is at all encyclopedic - I'm unsure it ever could be. Nonetheless, if Option B is chosen, individual killings/historical events must be at least mentioned to give the reader context. schetm (talk) 01:58, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No as it will result in significant loss of well-sourced content mentioned in "A". Cloud200 (talk) 15:02, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, prefer C. My very best wishes (talk) 19:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes - This is the best option, in my opinion. There are certain prominent scholars who draw a correlation between Communism and mass killing – enough to make a discussion of the concept notable, even if it is not a majority viewpoint. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes I consider B,C & D to all be fine, and in an ideal world "C" would be best (see my notes there), but if you include being pragmatic, this is the one I most recommend. This would be trickier to write (it would need to refer to mass killings without actually covering them) but much better in the long run because it is the one most likely to avoid the eternal unsolvable debates of which should be covered under killings and what to call them. It sticks to the thing that covered only in this article vs. a summary or condensed version of what is covered in other articles. North8000 (talk) 21:08, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes - I also support option C, as I think including the data under scrutiny is important from the sources, but I do believe more weight of the article should be focused on the meta-discussion of cataloguing these lists. Fieari (talk) 04:02, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes – seems like the best option. I understand this option to mean that specific historical events would be mentioned and explained in context where relevant and discussed by sources, but they would not each have their own section with a standalone summary like they do now. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 16:49, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes per my rationale under A. — Bilorv (talk) 21:27, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey on C

• No - The current article is not presented correctly and that is why the article got a hefty amount of criticism. Additionally, I can see the length of the article being a problem as it is fairly difficult to read through. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:28, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes - to clarify, this option represents the current status quo with respect to scope. —-Nug (talk) 14:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Further, imagine we have some phenomenon X and several theories that explain it. Can we write an article that discusses only the theories without mentioning the phenomenon X? Obviously not. That is explicitly prohibited by our policy, which says all facts and significant points of view on a given subject should be treated in one article. The phenomenon X here is the mass killings that have occurred under communist governments (option A), and the possible causes/linkages are discussed are in an appropriate section (option B). --Nug (talk) 22:27, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• No — as noted by Nug, this is essentially the current version, on which the the latest AfD (2021) ruled that "the Misplaced Pages editing community has been unable to come to a consensus as to whether 'mass killings under communist regimes' is a suitable encyclopaedic topic." It is not a good approach either to fix the article because it is too close to OR/SYNTH, and a split would be better. We tried this approach for over a decade by now, it is time to change it.

• Again, this does not exclude it cannot be written but I do not think that this is the good approach to fix it. B is the best one because if we find scholarly sources saying there is a universal link, and this is a majority view, then the automatic results will be this. The only possibility could be to rely on country experts and specialists for A and genocide scholars and other mainstream scholars for B; however, this is still too close to OR/SYNTH, as A scholars do not write within the context of Communism as a single phenomenon and give different causes or interpretations from B scholars, who write within the context of finding generalizations and correlations, which may be at odds with each other. Nonetheless, this approach would be the easiest way to fix the article in the now but I do not think it is going to fix the greater OR/SYNTH issues later on.
• Addendum — Even if we may not have given the exact same '!comments', I appreciate and share ModernDayTrilobite, North8000, and Fieari's comments and think all of them gave very good arguments, and I feel myself closer to them than my mere 'Yes' or 'No' difference may say. Thanks to everyone else too for participation and civility.
• Davide King (talk) 14:58, 19 December 2021 (UTC) Davide King (talk) 04:51, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• Neutral (Actually, a neutrally written A and neutrally written C are the same articles. --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:09, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• It seems there is a misunderstanding of what people are voting for. The @Nug:@Aquillion: posts are a good example. They both are right, but they focus on different aspects. Nug is right that a discussion of a theory that explains X should include a description of X, provided, but only provided, that this theory is a majority view. In the context of the option C, the opposite question is legitimate: should the theory that describes X be presented in the article about X? The answer is obvious: "Yes, but it must be presented along with all other voewpoints, fairly, proportionally, and without editorial bias. That inevitably makes C and A the two identical options: if we describe mass killings in Communist states, we must discuss all important theories that explain them, as a group and/or as separate events. If the concept that Communism was a primary factor in mass killings is a majority or a significant minority view, this topic will be discussed in the A-type and C-type articles, and it will be discussed at the same level of detailisation. Our policy simply does not allow anything else.
• Therefore, "A" and "C" is intrinsically the same, and "C" is not necessarily the status quo. It may be the status quo, if our prospective analysis of sources will demonstrate that "Communism as a primary reason of mass killings" is a mainstream view shared by majority of genocide scholars and country experts. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:57, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• No for the same reasons I opposed A. Having a list of incidents implies there is consensus that they are connected, which is POV OR. TFD (talk) 18:21, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No I do not think these topics can coexist and produce a useful article. 73.152.116.51 (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes - as that's basically what we've already got. GoodDay (talk) 19:32, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No All this debate and consternation is happening because the status quo is obviously not satisfactory. If we want to improve this article in any way, it needs structural change. BSMRD (talk) 20:17, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, such an amalgamation (as we have currently) effectively uses the list from A as synthesis to support the arguments presented in B; it's an inherently non-neutral article. --Aquillion (talk) 21:55, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes - this is what we have, and it's fine. Not super (that would be Option A), but fine. The historical events are treated with accuracy and, most helpfully, there are wikilinks to the main articles of each of these events. Theories about those mass killings, their connection to communism/their connection to communist regimes are dealt with, and a coherent, albeit lengthy, article is the result, to the benefit of our readers. schetm (talk) 01:58, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes Cloud200 (talk) 15:02, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Comment The purpose for including this option is because the community did not reach a consensus to delete the article as it is (nor to keep) in the AfD. Therefore to not include an option to represent the article as it currently is would be controversial and could be seen as a way to 'backdoor' a deletion of the article following the unsuccesful AfD. In this sense Nug, Davide King, and others' interpretation of this option reflecting the current version are correct. Also a reminder to please use the section below for replying to other people's comments, or for multiple paragraphs of statements if possible. Ta Vanteloop (talk) 21:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, which corresponds to "status quo" of the page. One should not separate data and conclusions that follow from the data. My very best wishes (talk) 19:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - Although the discussion of the underlying concept makes this option preferable to A, it still retains Option A's OR/SYNTH issues. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, but my #2 choice Ideally, this could make the best article. Coverage of possible correlation, and a short summary of key killings which would support and optimize that coverage. But this is basically the status quo, which under current realities and current wiki policies and guidelines has been an eternal painful unsolvable situation. North8000 (talk) 21:14, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• 'Yes - But to be clear, I'm not necessarily voting for "the status quo". I feel that both the data/list and a discussion of the list is important, but I feel that the discussion of the list should take precedence over the list itself... and I don't think that is how the article is currently. Fieari (talk) 04:03, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Maybe, but probably not ideal. The current state of the article makes it look like Misplaced Pages is endorsing the claim that all of these events were killings and that all were due to communism (both controversial in some cases). It would be better to explain individual events as needed to support explanation and analysis of the overall topic, not to give each one its own section. If we do go with this option, I agree with User:Fieari that the focus should be on the discussion rather than the list. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 16:49, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes. An article that discusses "Mass killings under communist regimes" should be summary style on that topic: it should include a summary of the killings, a summary of the debates regarding proposed causes, a summary of reactions to the killings outside of the academic world, etc. The whole point of WP:Summary Style is that we should be trying to create a summary of the topic that exists. And the topic of mass killings is exactly at the intersection of these sorts of things. I disagree with those above that write that doing this is novel synthesis when there are a plethora of sources that already do so and treat them as unique from other sorts of mass killings. Aside from Rummel and Valentino, who have been discussed to death on this page, these sources include: Bellamy, who distinguishes communist from non-communist mass killings both in scope and in the differences in moral ideologies between Communist and non-Communist states and Wayman & Tago, who open by reviewing differences between the conclusions in Rummel's work and those of (for example) Valentino and then goes on to predict the probability that at least one mass killing event will occur in a communist regime by year. There are also many mainstream Cold War historians, like Miscamble, who write that the reality that every Marxist regime that existed proved to be an experiment in mass murder or even genocide as well as the location for political repression on a vast scale. — Mhawk10 (talk) 22:16, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
• Maybe, per my rationale under A. So long as sources tie the events together, I don't see the harm in a bit of context for some of the most major mass killings under communist regimes. — Bilorv (talk) 21:27, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Survey on D

• Yes - Per proposal. The article, as it, does not give proper weight to the facts while it focuses too much on the opinions of academics. Hence, it is partially the causality for WP:SYNTH, and the article itself, as mentioned earlier, is already very lengthy. However, I should add that I am completely opposed to A and B and would prefer status quo over the previous two options as that information could still be used either separetely (The preferable option) or mutually to teach people about the horrors of auth-left Communism that plagued the Earth for decades and continues to do such in present day. With all due respect, Deathlibertarian you could have picked option D, so that this article is not so lengthy. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:24, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• I do note that I changed my mind from my original proposal on the prospect of possibly removing entirely a section of the article, I do not think that will do much good in the long run since it can, at any time, be reintroduced accidentally or intentionally. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:54, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Comment - When I originally voted for this, I was not aware of an article with my expressed idea above already existing (Thanks @Davide King:), that article is Criticism of communist party rule which is a noncontroversial opinion-focused article that repeats verbatim several paragraphs from Mass killings under communist regimes. I do not know which article plagiarized the other, but one fact I know for sure is that several opinion pieces within MKUCR are very ill-fitted to be here, whereas they belong in that other article as highlighted previously. My new proposal would be to just nuke the estimates section, the proposed causes section and the debate section off MKUCR since they already exist elsewhere, and due to how the other article is much better presented in contrast to this one (MKUCR) which has a heavy focus on facts, therefore, partly the cause for the SYNTH issues within MKUCR with its improper synthesis of textual content + the sources implying something that isn't necessarily true. I am not voting in support of A or B as they still spare those sections and instead will propose a procedural close for status quo, afterward those sections should be removed, and I wish to hear no "but" nor "wait", just nuke them off MKUCR please. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 18:48, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
  • To quote Davide King: No information is actually going to be lost, as we already discuss all the events either indivdiually or by each Communist state as is done by majority of scholarly sources, and the current "Proposed cause" section as well as "Estimates" are already at Criticism of communist party rule, and estimates are further discussed at Democide, which is a more accurate category, since it is very broad. I am gonna ping other people who had similar concerns to mine about information erasure, so to make sure that they are aware that removing information from here will not completely remove said information off Misplaced Pages since it already exists elsewhere: @Cloud200: @Schetm: @My very best wishes: @X-Editor: MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 19:06, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

    @MarioSuperstar77: We can absolutely move the "Causes" discussion into that Criticism of communist party rule article. In such case this article could just contain a link or excerpt template. Cloud200 (talk) 09:23, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

    • I definitely agree on that idea, someone else already attempted to scavenge some parts of this section for the other article. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 12:23, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

• Yes | No — only if | unless they are general articles and not limited to Communism

• As I showed in my comments, genocide scholars write general works about genocide and mass killings, they do not limit themselves to Communism or treat it as a special category that represents a separate or new topic. Causes of genocide and/or Causes of mass killing would be more in line with genocide scholarship, majority of which does not necessarily emphasizes regime types or treat them as separate categories, and those who do can easily be discussed in an appropriate section, including one about correlations in general and correlations by regime type or other characteristics that scholarly sources analyze or compare, which should make everyone happy.
• If there were mainstream academic books fully dedicated to Communist Mass Killings rather than chapters about it, like is done for any other regime type, and most of them limited to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (three Communist leaders rather than Communist regimes), establishing this as a separate and new topic, I can accept such possibility. As things stand, I can only propose a separate article about Mass killings under Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot. Davide King (talk) 15:09, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Yes - The article is a bit long, so splitting it in two as proposed would make reading more comfortable for the reader. I also think it would be counterproductive to remove information about either topic, as both the mass killings and the causes of them are notable topics. The two articles, in my opinion, should be named Mass killings under communist states and Proposed causes of mass killings under communist states. There should also be a third article named Terminology of mass killings under communist states and a fourth article named Estimates of the death toll for mass killings under communist states. The sections "Debate over famines", "Legal status and prosecutions", and "Memorials and museums" should be kept in the Mass killings under communist states article as they relate most to the killings themselves. If the terminology section is too problematic to be split into a separate article as suggested below by Paul Siebert, then the section and its information should be removed entirely, as terminology is the least important factor of Communist mass killings. Any information in the Mass killings under communist states article that cannot be backed up by sources calling them Communist mass killings should be removed, as that would be original research and synthesis. As for the concern that calling these mass killings "communist" is not neutral, calling them communist states would create a distinction between the ideology itself and the execution of the ideology in real life as a form of state. Per WP:COMMONNAME, we would also have no choice but to use the term communist, since it is the most common term used to refer to these mass killings. This is my proposal for dealing with this topic. X-Editor (talk) 16:06, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• I'm honestly not sure what should be done about this article. MarioSuperstar77's proposal sounds interesting, but I'm still not so sure about it, as it wouldn't make sense to have an article discussing these mass killings without also explaining their causes and the debates surrounding them. As for the Criticism of communist party rule article containing better information about the estimates and debate over famines, why can't that information just be added to this article instead of removing the information in this article entirely? X-Editor (talk) 01:47, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Neutral --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:09, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No per POVFORK. We would then have one article that implcitly states the events were connected and another that examines whether or not they were. TFD (talk) 18:23, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes The only real solution here, to my mind, is to segregate the "article about the bodies" from the "article about the debate." This isn't because the two topics are disjoint; this is a practical matter as I do not believe editors drawn to the first topic can coexist with editors invested in the second. Perhaps in some decades these two subjects can come together again, but for now we should split the baby and take advantage of the notability of the resultant parts. 73.152.116.51 (talk) 18:49, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - as we can't deny that Communist regimes were destructive to humans, who dared to oppose them. GoodDay (talk) 19:33, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No This really is just asking to become a WP:POVFORK issue. These articles will inevitably diverge from each other despite theoretically very similar content, which is explicitly not allowed by WP. Keeping it all one article is the best way to avoid these issues. BSMRD (talk) 20:22, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, too likely to result in a WP:POVFORK. Arguments that tie together individual mass killings should be presented (with appropriate attribution and discussion) in a central article; a laundry-list of mass killings without that key secondary framing is going to turn into editors using their own WP:OR / WP:SYNTH to argue the point of the main article. --Aquillion (talk) 22:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, as I'm not sure Option B could stand on its own - see my comments above. schetm (talk) 01:59, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes for the sake of making the article more readable in editorial sense. Cloud200 (talk) 15:02, 20 December 2021 (UTC)
• No, prefer C. My very best wishes (talk) 19:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes, but B would be preferable. This solution would create one article about the concept of communism/mass-killing linkages, which would be a useful encyclopedic article in line with other articles on historical theories. The other, summary-style, article would likely be problematic under WP:SYNTH or WP:POVFORK; however, splitting it off could be a first step toward the establishment of a more balanced summary article on mass killing events. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 16:27, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• Yes but my #3 choice It includes coverage of the possible correlation which is essential. And the "possible correlation" article is less likely to have the huge unsolvable questions that have kept this article in pain for over a decade. It would be a bit tricky to write the "possible correlation" article without covering the killings themselves, but that is likely to get solved. Those "huge unsolvable questions that have kept this article in pain for over a decade." would likely remain with the "cover the killings" article. Also, without the purpose of supporting the "possible correlation" coverage, the criteria is a bit POV'ish. So this would be my #3 choice of the 4. North8000 (talk) 21:24, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• No - WP:POVFORK. Let's not do this. Very bad idea. Fieari (talk) 04:04, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• Probably not – I agree with those above who say it's likely to lead to some kind of POVFORK. Seems like asking for trouble. But I'm open to being convinced if someone has an argument for this being workable. —Mx. Granger (talk · contribs) 16:49, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
• No per my rationale under A (we can't have an article solely with the scope of A). — Bilorv (talk) 21:27, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Threaded discussion

As I explained during the DRN discussion, if we stick with NPOV, the options "A" and "C" must be the same, so addition of "C" just dilutes the voices, and "A"/"C" option may not win. Just think: the article of the type "A" tells a story about mass killings in Communist states, and if Communism, according to majority RS, was an important factor, then its discussion must be added to the "type "A"" article. As an example, take a look at the World War II article: it includes such general sections as "Background" or "Aftermath", and, similarly, if we choose SS AND Communism is seen as a significant factor by majority RS, we will inevitably have the section about the role of Communism in the SS (type A) article. It would be against NPOV to do otherwise. Similarly, the "Type "C"" article is a combination of the story of mass killings and their linkage with Communism, which is described "fairly, proportionally, and without editorial bias". Actually, these two options are the same, and that if why I initially proposed to remove "C" as redundant. However, since other DRN participants didn't support removal, I agreed on "C". I am neutral about the outcome of this RfC, and I am pretty comfortable with any result. Happy voting :)

--Paul Siebert (talk) 17:17, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

@X-Editor: "Terminology" section is a pure original research and minority POV-pushing. --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:27, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Are anonymous users usually allowed to comment on a RfC? Especially on an article that they cannot edit as it is semi-protected? MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 18:56, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

MarioSuperstar77, WP:RFC says: "All editors (including IP users) are welcome to respond to any RfC." I am also not concerned, since RfCs are not a vote and Robert McClenon has made it clear that the closer has to "determine what approach is most strongly supported by strength of arguments." Davide King (talk) 20:13, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

User:Davide King - The statement that the RFC is not a simple vote is always the policy. I didn't make it as a special rule.

User:MarioSuperstar77 - The closer can decide how much credence to give to any editor including unregistered editors.

Any editor is welcome to invite the unregistered editors to create accounts. Robert McClenon (talk) 22:47, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, I have clarified that RfC is not a vote not per you but per policy. I am fully aware of it, I just wanted it to be clear for IPs and users who did not take part to any RfC before. Davide King (talk) 23:00, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that giving extra emphasis on strength of arguments in the close as Robert McClenon did is a good idea and serves many purposes. One of them is that it provides emphasized notice that canvassed votes will not count for much thus discouraging that activity. Also I think that it is fine for the person who has moderated parts of this to suggest extra emphasis on that from the closer. North8000 (talk) 17:32, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@North8000: That is a rare case when I think that strength of arguments doesn't matter. I see several reasons for that.

• First, I have no idea who will analyse strength of arguments, and how deep this analysis will be. I suspect that a uninvolved user will hardly be capable of diving into all details of what was discussed here, and, therefore, the analysis will almost inevitably be superficial.By "will hardly be capable", I mean not intellectual capabilities, but readiness to invest a significant amount of time for analysis of all aspects of this (very complex) issue. It would be unfair to expect that from an uninvolved user.
• Second, this is a rare case when rational arguments do not matter. We pro;posed an RfC that is fully consistent with our policy, and implementation of each of those options will not result in a loss of any information from Misplaced Pages. Thus:

- If the community chooses "A", it will be a summary style article about all significant facts and opinia on this topic. Therefore, if a subsequent source analysis will demonstrate that Communism was a significant common cause, the section about Communism as a common cause will be added in the "A-style" article. If teh source analysis will show that that issue is a subject of controversy, the section about that controversy will be added to the "A-style" article. We just have to do that, for NPOV leaves us no choice.

- If "B-style" will be implemented, the story about each individual mass killings/mass mortality events still can be found in other article, and that was a main reason for the last AfD: this article (in its present form) tells a different story about the facts and events that are already described in other Misplaced Pages articles.

-If "C-style" will be selected, the result will be essentially the same as "A": if source analysis demonstrate that Communism is a significant causative factor and is extensively discussed by country experts, then a big section will be added to the article as a part of the rest summary-style narrative. If the source analysis does not confirm that, and Communism is not seen as a significant factor, then that section will be very small. Again, everything depends in the results of the future source analysis (which we have already started). NPOV does not give us much freedom of maneuver in this aspect, and I sincerely don't understand why some people who vote for "C" believe this option reflects the status quo". It doesn't.

-And, if the community votes for "D", no important information will be deleted either: we create two articles, and one of them (the role of Communism as a causative factor) will be a spinoff article of the SS-article in the same sense as Race and crime in the United States is a daughter article of the Crime in the United States article.

• Therefore, all four options comply with our policy, and the choice of one of those options will not remove any significant information from Misplaced Pages. Therefore, I don't see how any rational argument can be proposed in support or against each of those option. All of that is just a matter of the community's taste, and the most important factor here is the vote count. In that sense, I see absolutely no problem with canvassing: the more votes, the better.

All of that is a reason why I am absolutely neutral in my choice.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:29, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for your post. I don't agree with various things there, but feel no need to pursue here. Sincerely,North8000 (talk) 19:01, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@North8000: Frankly, I would be grateful if you explained what you disagree with. I am not sure that will lead to a real dispute, but it would be very useful for me to know your opinion on what I wrote. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:27, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that you are being too optimistic. I also disagree that all options are in line with our policies, and I am not the only one to think so, e.g. TFD's comment that " list of MKuCR implicitly says they are is a consensus that the events are connected, which is POV OR", Aquillion's comment that "such an amalgamation (as we have currently) effectively uses the list from A as synthesis to support the arguments presented in B; it's an inherently non-neutral article", and Aquillion's, BSMRD's, Fieari's, and ModernDayTrilobite's comments about content POV forks. You would be right if there were academic books fully devoted to Communist Mass Killings rather than chapters in works about Genocide and Mass Killing in the 20th Century and in general; as things stand, the only structure in line with sources and full respect of our policies is B and the strength of arguments so far reflect this. Davide King (talk) 19:43, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

If they were not in agreement with policy, I would vetoed the DRN, and this RfC never started. Of course, they are. As I already demonstrated, each of those choices perfectly allow us to write an article that complains with all policies. Therefore, the concrete outcome of this RfC absolutely does not matter: any choice is good.

The main obstacle that prevented improvement of this article was ambiguity of its topic. Different users interpreted it differently, and that almost totally prevented its improvement. After this RfC will lead to come definite outcome, everything will be much easier. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:17, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree that is the main obstacle and we are making progress; whether they are not violating them will greately depend on source anslysis. For me A, means discussion of universally recognized mass killings (no famines) under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (the Red Terror is also a mass killing event but I have not seen it discussed within this context because it was within the context of the Russian Civil War), and that would be fine by me, yet as you noted once, we already have articles for each event and very little comparative analysis, so what does it add? C (status quo) obviously violates our policies, but as you should know by now and as I wrote in my comment, C in general may also violate NPOV and OR/SYNTH because the only way to write it is to merge country specialists (A) with genocide scholars (B), which may constitute OR/SYNTH because country specialists do no write within the context of Communist mass killings or Communism in general, and may not be SYNTH/OR only if they actually relied on each other but they seem to mostly act in isolation from each other; in this sense, I think AmeteruEditor, Nug, and TFD were right (it is not your fault though, it is the structure that is totally wrong), but you and TFD are obviously right about the article's problems. Without source analysis, D likely violates content POV fork but may be a good means to fix the article in the end. I do not disagree that a NPOV article may be written for each option, without also engaging in OR/SYNTH, but I am very skeptical of it and preliminary source analysis leads me to see B as the only solution and really notable topic, and thus the only option that does not violate our polices and guidelines (e.g. the only option for which an NPOV article can be written about it). Davide King (talk) 21:37, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll add myself to the list of users who also disagree with your post, but I am comforted by the fact you have previously committed to respect the outcome of the RfC. That includes if you misinterpret the stated options , as this is a community consensus that is not required to satisfy one user. Vanteloop (talk) 19:52, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

C

_{note:these comments were originally left in the main section of the RfC, but were later moved here for clarity Vanteloop (talk) 17:20, 21 December 2021 (UTC)}

This option does NOT present the status quo: the current article does not present all significant point of view fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, and its current structure may create some apparent hierarchy. Therefore, voting for C is not an endorsement of the correct topic/structure. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:17, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

_{Responding to this comment by Nug. Note added by Davide King (talk) 18:57, 21 December 2021 (UTC)}

...and we should accept the main conclusion made by Valentino: that regime type is not an important factor that explains mass killings. You may speculate about the meaning of each of his phrases, but that does not change the fact that the core if his theory is: "leader's personality is the main factor, so removal of few persons from power eliminates a risk of mass killings even without political transformations of the regime." Paul Siebert (talk) 01:18, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Again, you confuse his grouping of the phenomena into a communist type with his conclusions as to the causes of the phenomena. I've told you this multiple times, yet you seem to instantly forget. I'm starting to think this may be some kind WP:NOTGETTINGIT. --Nug (talk) 01:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Frankly, I think there is some confusion here: it was me who says that Valentino's grouping does not imply he saw Communism as a significant cause. The current version of this article carefully attenuates this fact. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

The purpose for including this option is because the community did not reach a consensus to delete the article as it is (nor to keep) in the AfD. Therefore to not include an option to represent the article as it currently is would be controversial and could be seen as a way to 'backdoor' a deletion of the article following the unsuccesful AfD. In this sense Nug, Davide King, and others' interpretation of this option reflecting the current version are correct. Also a reminder to please use the section below for replying to other people's comments, or for multiple paragraphs of statements if possible. Ta Vanteloop (talk) 21:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

And that is why I was insisting on clear and detailed explanation of "A-D". You disagreed, and as a result, different people understand each of four options differently. I am afraid after closure of this RfC we may have another RfC to resolve a dispute on how exactly the results of this RfC should be interpreted. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:45, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Please move your reply and my response to the section below, to avoid clutter - and do the same for your other replies in the wrong section. So far you are the only one who has failed to understand the instructions of the RfC not to reply to other's top level comments (and the only one who has misunderstood the meaning of C). Vanteloop (talk) 22:07, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I referred to "C" as essentially the status quo only with respect to scope (which is the core topic of this RFC), not as a statement that the current article has achieved the goal of "C" aspires to be. North8000 (talk) 16:38, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

B and D

MarioSuperstar77 say B is still synthesis like C but what do they respond from both BSMRD and The Four Deuces that D is a content fork? " e would then have one article that implcitly states the events were connected and another that examines whether or not they were." If they think B is SYNTH, how can they support D, which is essentially A and B as separate articles? What did I miss in their arguments? I invite them to clarify and discuss this. Davide King (talk) 21:56, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

I had stated it in several different ways, but apparently I am not able to make myself clear. I checked on the net for something that I'd like to call "Interpreting an opinion as fact" since I am certain that I have not invented this, but the best citation I could find relating to my point is from the philosopher's mag. Any way, I will attempt to reiterate what I have said above one more time; my idea is to split the article into two articles: one that is based in facts with all the data and statistics fact-checked several times and the other based in theories, hypotheses, and debates. My proposal intends to clearly highlight that one of the articles is fully objective and factual and must be read as such, and the other is fully subjective and the opinion of academics, scholars, researchers and specialists, and therefore, must be read as such, therefore, no synthesis because the reader knows what to expect from both articles. Option B does not fix the synthesis issue that plagues the article, to fix the synthesis issue, first you would have to remove the Proposed causes section which heavily implies that the motives of Communism are always going to cause massive democides. The paragraphs that start in "The concept of mass killing as a phenomenon unique to communist governments-" and "Many commentators on the political right state that the mass killings-" were added to the article solely as a means to add balance to the section, not because of POV mind you, but because the section implies something that none of the sources attested for. If you go to any major article relating to politics on Misplaced Pages such as Donald Trump, Conservative, Liberal, Adolf Hitler, etc, none of them have any major focus on opinions from experts that can are implied to be true and, therefore, misinterpreted for facts; whereas, this article has multiple. B only removes the estimates which, for all intent and purpose, are one of such implications, "Proposed causes" and "Debates on famines" are the other two, and there are a few paragraphs across the article with similar synthesis. If B or A do pass, I can stipulate that we will continue to hear about this article for weeks on end because as I said multiple times now, this does not fix the synthesis problem from the article. At the very least, there ought to have been an option E that proposes to remove everything that I previously mentioned above and more to make the article fully objective. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 00:06, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I am not sure it still clear what you are saying, and I think you may get a better response from Aquillion, BSMRD, The Four Deuces, Siebert, and other users in this regards, and indeed I may update this comment to give you a better reply and better address your points. For now, let me tell you that you seem to assume B must imply "Proposed causes" and "Debates on famines" as currently written rather than completely changed; B will require significant rewrite, so any issues you may have about SYNTH can be solved and I hope that this is clear (indeed, both sections as currently written are SYNTH but I am not advocating for them, I am advocating for rewrite, which will solve major issues), if you did not take in consideration that B would require significant rewrite. Secondly, the topic will be about theories and narratives, and it will be made clear, so I do not get your point about presenting opinions as facts and vice versa. If I get you right, pretty much any A and B article (e.g. Race and intelligence), which is how I imagine B to be similarly named, is SYNTH to you because you think it presents opinions as facts but that is not the case, and will not be the case for B. To conclude, it appears that your issues are mainly with the article's current structure, and because of this it is hard to check sources, and you are indeed correct "the article is so bloated in size that nobody would bother to properly check the information on the article and simply assumed that the article had no issue." We both want the same thing — a NPOV article without any SYNTH issue; I see B as the only possibility to achieve that, and I am skeptical about D because I am afraid it may give defenders of the current structure yet another excuse to not improve the article because we can simply create a separate article, so we need not to worry about this article. Davide King (talk) 01:52, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Race and intelligence's opinions are presented as being unreliable, yet historically relevant. Again, the presentation is one important thing that makes D a proper option as all the elements that cause synthesis will no longer do so if they are written on the prospect that they are hypotheses, all the while keeping all the information intact. I have read WP:SYNTH page 5 times now because I don't think we're on the same line, so to make sure, we define synthesis as An implication which results into an incorrect conclusion that was never attested by the sources themselves. With this definition in mind, assuming we both agree that this is the correct definition in other words, an article on the subject of "Possible explanation for the democides within Communist regimes" would very clearly highlight that the article is entirely focused on opinionated theories such as Principle of relativity and Obesity paradox rather than hard facts like other pre-existing articles, and that distinction would prevent synthesis as the conclusion is never reached, there is a difference between "This person is probably evil" and "I think this person is probably evil", the former reaches a conclusion thanks to its implication, the latter does not and specifies that the person is thinking about it. Now, one valid concern here is POVFORK and I admit that I did not think about that, though if both articles are monitored frequently that issue should not occur, if it does occur an AfD could be created for the offending article. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:20, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Have you looked at my sandbox possibility? Change Race and intelligence's opinions are presented as being unreliable, yet historically relevant to 's opinions are presented as being disputed, yet historically notable, and there should be no issue; there are indeed authors who see a link between race and intelligence, or between Communism and mass killings, that is indeed their conclusions but the article does not, and will not, treat it as a fact or even a mainstream position that is uncontroversial or not disputed; both articles are about notable yet controversial discussions. Again, see Race and crime in the United States. A really SYNTH article is Communism and Jews — that is truly SYNTH and even antisemitic, which is why it has been deleted. B does not even come close to it, and would be perfectly in line with all others and articles we already have discussion correlations and links, whether they are supported or not, whether they are controversial or not, all of which is to be made clear per NPOV and WEIGHT; what matters is whether they are notable and B clearly is — again, look at non-primary literature I proposed at sandbox.

You do not seem to understand SYNTH — it is grouping events without a clear connection (e.g. they happened in Asia, were Communists, their common language is Indo-European, therefore we must have an article about mass killings in Asia or mass killings under Indo-European languages — this is SYNTH), not B. If the issue is you think an article discussing Communist regimes and mass killings, and that this implies all communists support mass killings or something like that — well, I do not know what to tell you because by this standard every options, from A to D, is SYNTH and you should have supported 'Deletion' in the AfD. As for POV forks, the problem is that both articles will be seen as POV forks of each other and thus both should be deleted. Davide King (talk) 14:46, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Your sandbox would definitely improve the article by a margin, but that is assuming that all the offending sources within the article are removed, but from your previous comments I learned that you intended to remove them anyway, so it would be a step toward the right direction. Comparing option B to an article that was deleted ensuing an AfD is not a good look, I trust that you will clean up the article proper once this RfC concludes, regardless of which option passes, but if that is not done well the article will continue to draw ire from other Wikipedians.

You do not seem to understand SYNTH — it is grouping events without a clear connection Here comes what is written on WP:SYNTH Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source.-. I think this is clear and concise to me, so I have to return the favor that I believe that you may not understand WP:SYNTH, although you have been on Misplaced Pages for much longer than I, so perhaps I am missing something from the page in spite of reading it 6 times now. DublinDilettante actually thinks that this article was synthesis on the premise of it being about Communist mass killings; however, the information can be presented in such a way that only data and facts are present on the article which would void the synthesis. First off, the article should not be called "Mass killings under Communist regimes" which is a clear implication that mass killings would occur majoritarily within Communist regimes and that was what the AfD mainly focused on. Then, it should be void of any opinion piece, regardless of the expertise of the person who writes said opinion, so to make this article not-synthesis, Kotkin, Rummel, etc should be removed entirely, or per my proposal moved into its own article focusing on the theories of what led to Communist mass killings in the first place. I had opposed the AfD because I was afraid that extremists were attempting to whitewash the bloodstains of statist Communism. Additionally, although that was fairly paranoid on my part, I was afraid that would give the green light to Fascists to remove articles critical of Fascism. I genuinely do not understand why you bring up my vote on the AfD as that is completely unrelated to the current RfC. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 16:57, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Chiming in here, there is no implication in article title that communist regimes are more prone to mass killings, any more than the title War crimes of the United States implies that the USA is more prone to committing war crimes than any other country. --Nug (talk) 02:33, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

No, that is cheating. The "War crimes of the United States" is a quite legitimate title simply because "the US" is a quite concrete single entity. In contrast, there is no consensus among scholars that such an entity as "Communist regimes" or "generic Communism" exists. Many authors discuss, e.g. genocides in Cambodia, China and Indonesia, or discuss Stalin and Hitler. A similar situation is impossible for the US, for, e.g. "War crimes in California and Baja California" is hard to imagine. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:27, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Yet, only Communism is discussed as a separate topic, users make 2+2, do it too. Just like Crimes against humanity under communist regimes is a POV fork of Crimes against humanity because (1) it implies Communism is a special phenomenon (we do it only for it; if the scope is simply to list crimes against humanity under Communist regimes, that can be done for any other regime type and category) and (b) Crimes against humanity only discuss Cambodia and Yugoslavia, not China, North Korea, and other states discussed there. That is why I think Crimes against humanity under communist regimes and Mass killings under communist regimes are also both content POV fork of Crimes against humanity and Mass killing, which are simply NPOV version of the topic; neither of them discuss Communism in a way that warrants a separate article. If you think that a chapter is enough to justifify a new topic, I suggest you to start creating Mass killings under capitalist regimes, Mass killings under fascist regimes, etc. I would not do that myself because it may appear as WP:POINT and I think they are going to have the same problems as this one. If we do not do this for other regime types, you should stop being surprised when users take it for granted that is indeed the implication if we do this only for Communism. Davide King (talk) 04:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

First of all, thanks for your kind words and for engaging with me, it is really interesting, which is why this reply is going longer than usual and I hope to you can forgive me for that. The problem is that it has been a decade that we have tried to cleanup the article, and any major attempt to fix it, including removing stuff or adding stuff, has been reverted and is opposed by those who were for 'Keep' and denied that the article had not even issues in the first place; indeed, my comment in the AfD was for 'Delete' but it essentially was for 'Rewrite' because I saw that, and I still saw it, as the only way to fix issues once and for all. I also did not compare B but a delete article (Jews and Communism), if that is what you think; Jews and Communism was an article that was indeed SYNTH, while B is not, just like Race and intelligence, and like-minded article, are not SYNTH either. Speaking of which, do you understand the difference between causation and correlation? If some authors say there is a causal connection, whereas other say there is not, it should be not "Proposed causes", but "Discussion of possible causal linkage between mass killings and Communism", or "Communist states and mass killing" for short. If B (again, keep in mind the difference between causation and correlation) and SYNTH, then Race and intelligence, Race and crime in the United States, and a majority of article structured as B are SYNTH. If B is SYNTH, so is D, which includes B, and would also be content POV fork; nonetheless, I myself can support D as a means to improve things, but I think that you are being contradictory if you think B is SYNTH, since D entails that A and B are discussed separately rather than together like in C — it appears to be that A is the option that would fit better what you actually put forward, if you think B is still SYNTH, or I persuaded you that is not the case.

I will try to explain this better — if there was agreement among scholars that communism caused mass killings in those states, it is not SYNTH to treat them as a single group; indeed, for A not to be SYNTH, that communism caused mass killings, or was the major cause, and that this represent the mainstream and majority view among scholars, this would have to be true. Do not combine material from multiple sources to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by any source. Similarly, do not combine different parts of one source to reach or imply a conclusion not explicitly stated by the source. It means that we cannot combine country-specific sources about mass killings about Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (e.g. taking one book about mass killings under Stalin, another book about them under Mao, and so on, and us concluding that since they happened under three or more Communist regimes, we can write Mass killings under communist regimes, if that is not what the sources also conclude or make) to imply there is a MKuCR grouping, or that sources that do discuss Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot together to imply it is a MKuCR, which means a much broader discussion, rather than Stalin–Mao–Pol Pot grouping, which is a much more narrow scope and is how I understand A to be. In addition, sources that discuss together Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's mass killings are a minority, while the overwhelming majority of them discuss them separately and individually, or are country-specific, and thus the former would be a content POV fork of the latter and NPOV violation. NPOV requires that all majority and minority views are discussed but that cannot be done if only a few sources group Stalin–Mao–Pol Pot together, and even then they disagree (Jones discusses Stalin–Mao together and Pol Pot separately).

I agree that there should be a name change, though that mass killings would occur majoritarily within Communist regimes and that was what the AfD mainly focused on is an oversimplification, since the main reason for delete was that while all events indeed happened, majority of sources discuss them individually or by country, and only a minority of them discuss them together — again, there is no Communism Mass Killings scholarly book, only chapters in general works about mass killings, and they are limited to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, even thought the name may imply they are talking about every nominally Communist regime. I do not know why I brought up your AfD comment, but I think that since you are critical of the article perhaps you should have considered 'Delete' as a bigger possibility than you thought, especially since 'Delete' can also result in reducing the article to a stub or totally rewrite, rather than total removal of information, which seems to be one of the reasons you did not consider it as a serious possibility. In this regards, I suggest you to reconsider this. No information is actually going to be lost, as we already discuss all the events either indivdiually or by each Communist state as is done by majority of scholarly sources, and the current "Proposed cause" section as well as "Estimates" are already at Criticism of communist party rule, and estimates are further discussed at Democide, which is a more accurate category, since it is very broad. Finally, that the AfD was the result of extremists ... attempting to whitewash the bloodstains of statist Communism is part of right-wing misinformation, as has been noted in the closure, since the overwhelming majority of 'Delete' comments had a totally different reasoning. Again, that we are going to remove the Holocaust next is an absurd strawman, as noted by several users.

"We have a lot of books and monographs that provide a neutral and balanced description of WWII as a topic. However, we have virtually no such books about MKuCR: a couple of sources that discuss this topic are highly controversial, and other works do not discuss the topic as a whole, and they focus on subtopics (or more global topics) instead." —Paul Siebert

"WWII is also a single unified topic with no serious (overarching) dispute over what falls under it, or over if and how the things that fall under it are connected. None of this is true here, which means that collecting events, framing them as mass killings, and lumping them together into a single unified topic becomes WP:SYNTHESIS unless the discussion is informed by, structured according to, and attributed to secondary sources, with appropriate text in each case being devoted to underlying academic disputes." —Aquillion

"The reason there is an article on WWII is that there is academic consensus that the various wars were part of a larger war, viz, WWII. There is no consensus that killings in Stalin's Soviet Union, etc., are part of a pattern of MKuCR." —The Four Deuces

This also perfectly applies to World War II, so you have nothing to be afraid of. Compare the Google Scholar results of "the Holocaust" and "World War II with "communist mass killings" and "mass killings under communist regimes". Davide King (talk) 04:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

And because of WP:LENGTH, because you can theoretically go for C and fix the synthesis. But, what is the point when the article is so long that it is difficult to read? This makes editing the article take more time, this makes checking the citations and the text take more time, and this is what introduced the synthesis because the article is so bloated in size that nobody would bother to properly check the information on the article and simply assumed that the article had no issue. This is one thing that I am thankful for the AfD as that brought so much attention to the article. Finally, we are now trying to fix it after years! The least that could be done is to make the article shorter. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 00:18, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

This is because Mass killings under communist regimes was created many years before Mass killing, which is the NPOV article. Before rasining any issue about length, we should at least first attempt to expand Mass killing in the first place. Finally, have you considered a Mass killings in history, akin to Genocides in history, as an alternative? I do not understand this obsession for Communism as a separate topic when there is not a non-controversial academic work (apart from The Black Book of Communism and Red Holocaust) that treats it as a single phenomenon, so why should we too? Chirot, Jones, Mann, Valentino, and others all place Communist mass killings within the context of mass killings in general, and this can be easily done at either Mass killing and/or Mass killings in history. Again, this article may be justified only if we first attempted to do this. Davide King (talk) 01:52, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I do not understand this obsession for Communism as a separate topic when there is not a non-controversial academic work (apart from The Black Book of Communism and Red Holocaust) that treats it as a single phenomenon I like when things are properly categorized, it makes it easier to research a certain topic. I should note that I am also supportive of a mass killings under Capitalist regimes article and a mass killings under Fascist regimes article. As for the mass killings article, it should be improved, but not everybody is necessarily enticed to overlook it. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:20, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I believe The Four Deuces can explain you this in a simpler way but that is why we have policies about SYNTH; for a grouping, there must be a connection, it is not sufficient that something was nominally capitalist, Communist, or fascist. It is the reason why we only have Mass killings under communist regimes and not for any other regime type; it is SYNTH without majority of scholarly sources making a clear connection, and your proposal is simply a recipe for further OR/SYNTH. Indeed, that was one scholarly criticism of The Black Book of Communism, see below. Why must we give so much weight to such a controversial work and discuss Communism as a separate and single phenomenon, rather than how majority of genocide scholars treat it (e.g. chapters in works about general mass killings book)?

• Dallin, Alexander (Winter 2000). "Review. Reviewed Work: The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Margolin, Jonathan Murphy, Mark Kramer". Slavic Review. 59 (4). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press: 883. doi:10.2307/2697429. JSTOR 2697429. Whether all these cases, from Hungary to Afghanistan, have a single essence and thus deserve to be lumped together—just because they are labeled Marxist or communist—is a question the authors scarcely discuss.
• David-Fox, Michael (Winter 2004). "On the Primacy of Ideology. Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia)". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 5 (1). Bloomington, Indiana: Slavic: 81–105. doi:10.1353/kri.2004.0007. S2CID 159716738. David-Fox, Michael (Winter 2004). "On the Primacy of Ideology. Soviet Revisionists and Holocaust Deniers (In Response to Martin Malia)". Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. 5 (1). Bloomington, Indiana: Slavic: 81–105. doi:10.1353/kri.2004.0007. S2CID 159716738. Malia thus counters by coining the category of 'generic Communism,' defined everywhere down to the common denominator of party movements founded by intellectuals. (Pol Pot's study of Marxism in Paris thus comes across as historically more important than the gulf between radical Soviet industrialism and the Khmer Rouge's murderous anti-urbanism.) For an argument so concerned with justifying The Black Book, however, Malia's latest essay is notable for the significant objections he passes by. Notably, he does not mention the literature addressing the statistical-demographic, methodological, or moral dilemmas of coming to an overall communist victim count, especially in terms of the key issue of how to include victims of disease and hunger.

Do you still think this is a good idea? Have you considered my Mass killing expansion and Mass killings in history spinoff (general article about mass killings irrespective of regime type) proposals? Concerns about length are not legitimate if we do not even try first. Davide King (talk) 14:23, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

The only issue from my proposal is POVFORK and that is assuming the article will not be monitored enough to keep it fresh and encyclopedic, therefore, I still do not think my idea is a bad one, only that it would require effort to manage both articles. As for your idea - yeah, it is a decent idea. You could and should expand on that. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 16:57, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I think you are being too optimistic about it; we discussed this over the last year and nothing has actually been truly changed or improved. I do think that D may be a way to actually incentivize improvement and a means to that end, but I also ask you to seriously consider some of my arguments, and if you think they are wrong, I am missing something, please let me know and rebuke them; in particular, I would like to see you discussing sources and your thoughts about my sources research and analysis; again, if I missed anything or you disagree about something, feel free to tell me.

• (e.g. to actually discuss Communist mass killings together, there must be a correlation; since there is not but some authors have proposed correlations, we cannot discuss them together or separately but only the discussion of correlations put forward)

notes about sources

• (there are no Communist Mass Killings books that would establish it as a separate topic, only "Communist Mass Killings — Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot" chapters within the context of mass killings in general, which is how I propose to have them discussed — cft. Google Scholar results for "communist mass killings" and "mass killings under communist regimes" — do you see the difference?)

and information

• (no information is actually going to be lost ("Terminology" is discussed at Mass killing, "Estimates" are discussed at both Criticism of communist party rule and Democide, "Proposed cause" is discussed at Criticism of communist party rule, all events have their own articles and are discussed in each state's history, "Debate over famines" is also already at Criticism of communist party rule when discussing loss of life, and "Memorials and museums" are discussed at Communist state; we also already have Communist crimes (Polish legal concept), Lustration, and other articles for "Legal status" — I think Criticism of communist party rule is the more appropriate article for that, or did I miss your point?

so nothing is going to be lost, only the SYNTH of it. Davide King (talk) 04:35, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

B and C

Nug say "an article cannot discuss any debate on the correlations or causes without mentioning the government actions that has led to that debate in the first place. It would be like discussing Causes of World War II without having the article World War II." The problem is that there is no academic work fully dedicated to mass killings under Communist regimes,1 or Communist mass killings — they are mostly chapters of works about the general topic and are limited to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot; indeed, there are a bunch of books about World War II as a whole, there are no academic books about Communist mass killings as a whole (again, they are mainly chapters limited about Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot — Chirot, Jones, Mann, and Valentino, all of which are within the context of mass killings in general). I can accept an article limited to those three Communist leaders, but I do not accept Nug's premise if by A they mean Communism as a single phenomenon and exclude country experts by default, and broad it to include any other Communist regime.

Notes

1. The Black Book of Communism and Red Holocaust (limited to Stalin, Mao, Kim, Ho Chi Min, and Pol Pot) appear to be the exceptions, and it is those kind of works that we need, e.g. works fully devoted to Communism as a special phenomenon rather than chapters in books about mass killings in general. The Red Holocaust's "ubsequent chapters make comparisons with Germany and Japan under Hitler and Hirohito, respectively. Although several topics are raised, the book's message can be easily summarized. Totalitarian ideologies have taken different forms in the twentieth century (communism, Nazism, and fascism), but they have all produced similar results: mass terror and crimes against humanity. Some distinction are also made." In light of this, we may have an article focused on totalitarian crimes and mass killings, and discuss their similarities and differences.

Davide King (talk) 21:56, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• WRT @Nug:'s It would be like discussing Causes of World War II without having the article World War II. We have a lot of books and monographs that provide a neutral and balanced description of WWII as a topic. However, we have virtually no such books about MKuCR: a couple of sources that discuss this topic are highly controversial, and other works do not discuss the topic as a whole, and they focus on subtopics (or more global topics) instead.--Paul Siebert (talk) 22:34, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• WWII is also a single unified topic with no serious (overarching) dispute over what falls under it, or over if and how the things that fall under it are connected. None of this is true here, which means that collecting events, framing them as mass killings, and lumping them together into a single unified topic becomes WP:SYNTHESIS unless the discussion is informed by, structured according to, and attributed to secondary sources, with appropriate text in each case being devoted to underlying academic disputes. --Aquillion (talk) 23:03, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

• Except that it isn't WP:SYNTHESIS, otherwise why would some authors be disputing the grouping of events as communist mass killings if that grouping didn't exist in published sources, are they hallucinating? Can we finally stop this "it's WP:SYNTH" bs? --Nug (talk) 00:42, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Ok, by combining Valentino (who considered Stalin's mass killings as "Communist mass killings", but Afghan mass killings as non-Communist) with Courtois, who considered Afghan victims as vicrims of Communism, but didn't use Valentino's term "Communist mass killings", the article is doing no synthesis?
• Actually, the article is a collection of events that were called as "mass killings"/"genocide"/"politicide" etc by at least one author. If that is not synthesis, then what is? Paul Siebert (talk) 00:59, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Valentino did mention "Communist" as an "additional motive" for the killings in Afghanistan in his typology table on page 83. --Nug (talk) 01:18, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• "Communist" is, to some degree, an additional motive in all events that we discuss. But the claim that it was a main motive in all cases is a minority POV, as my analysis of sources demonstrates. Grouping some events together based on some minor trait is a clear and unequivocal POV-pushing.
• So far, you provided no such analysis, and I have no reason to believe you are expressing a majority POV. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:27, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Again you are trying to conflate Valentino's mass killing types with his mass killing causes. --Nug (talk) 02:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  Actually, it seems you described your own point of view. In contrast, I am objecting your attempts to conflate grouping with causation, which you do for Valentino, Bellamy and some other authors. Yes, Valentino put some mass killings in Communist states in one group, which called "dispossessive a.k.a. Communist mass killings". However, from that, it does not follow that he saw Communism as a cause. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:00, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Well, if we have authors making the connection, we can rely on those (as I specified in my comments above.) But it isn't enough just to vaguely say they exist; we actually have to cite them, and rely on them, and use them to determine how we structure and discuss the events in question, without relying on any sources that don't make that broad topical connection. Put simply, it's WP:SYNTH / WP:OR to make or imply a connection that the sources we're using don't. Obviously this is a sweeping RFC so it's hard to drill down into the individual examples, but if you're confident that you can write a version that carefully documents and attributes each example in the context of an author connecting it to the concept of mass killings as a specifically Communist thing, then doing so should make a lot of the objections go away and will, basically, be B - a focused, specific article that reflects actual arguments people make. You can't, though, just point to a source that said "this mass killing occurred in this communist regime" because building a list out of that to imply that the commonality is significant, using sources that don't say or discuss things like "this mass-killing happened because Communism", is synthesis and means you're making the argument yourself as an editor - you need to rely on the sources that specifically discuss that commonality. --Aquillion (talk) 03:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• Let's put this in perspective for the closer, shall we? One user is relying on their personal reading of Valentino (Nug), while another is relying on academic secondary coverage of Valentino (Siebert); if Nug's reading is correct, surely it would be reflected in academic secondary coverage already? But those sources, in fact, give a more nuanced picture that is closer to what Siebert is summarizing for us, and I do not have no reason to believe Siebert got this one wrong. So please, I ask that everyone rely on secondary coverage rather than cherry picking from Valentino. Again, surely if you are right and what you are citing or quoting from Valentino is due, it has been reported and mentioned in academic secondary coverage of him, and should be easy to provide, don't you think? Davide King (talk) 01:33, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• What the heck? Priselac's review of Valentio's book explicitly mentions the three mass killing types: communist, ethnic and counter-guerrilla and takes no issue with it while praising the book as excellent. I don't to see how Paul Siebert's view is "a more nuanced picture", given he seems to not understand the basic difference between case study type and conclusion. --Nug (talk) 02:04, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• And? No one is denying that Valentino outlines such mass killing types; however, as noted by Straus, Communist mass killing is a subtype, not a major type, which means it can be discussed at Mass killing, not as a separate topic. To quote Straus:

  "Valentino identifies two major types, each with three subtypes. The first major type is 'dispossessive mass killing,' which includes (1) 'communist mass killings' in which leaders seek to transform societies according to communist principles; (2) 'ethnic mass killings,' in which leaders forcibly remove an ethnic population; and (3) mass killing as leaders acquire and repopulate land. The second major type of mass killing is 'coercive mass killing,' which includes (1) killing in wars when leaders cannot defeat opponents using conventional means; (2) 'terrorist' mass killing when leaders use violence to force an opposing side to surrender; and (3) killing during the creation of empires when conquering leaders try to defeat resistance and intimidate future resistance."

• "One of Valentino's central arguments is that 'characteristics of society at large, such as pre-existing cleaves, hatred and discrimination between groups and non-democratic forms of government, are of limited utility in distinguishing societies at high risk for mass killing. Valentino's strongest arguments in support of this statement are his comparative studies of regimes that committed mass killing with similar regimes that did not." Did you also miss this from Prisalec? This is literally what Siebert have been saying the whole time. Davide King (talk) 02:11, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• No, it can't be discussed in Mass killing because the article would be absolutely huge if it discusses all the types, this communist type is already almost 300kB, so it would have to be split up anyway. You also don't understand the difference between type topology and conclusion, or are you purposely confusing them? And coming back to my original point, it proves that grouping mass killings based on communist type is not WP:SYNTH. --Nug (talk) 03:14, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• You ignore that much of the space is occupied by non-free, lengthy quotes, and that even if we have space issues, we can have a Mass killings in history article; you also act as if this article is the be-all and end-all, and cannot be rewritten or restructured to make it much more concise and space-saving. As I said, Valentino's Communist mass killing is not even a major type but a subtype, which makes it undue as a separate topic. Even if you are right, such category must be the mainstream, majority view and not be disputed or controversial; Aquillion gave a good summary and criteria. None of Valentino's scholarly publications emphasize Communism or are publications about Communism. Chapters or passing mentions are not good enough to establish it as a separate topic, and they are placed within the context of mass killings in general, therefore they must be discussed together generally; they can be grouped together as part of the structure but it must be a general article.1 This is what genocide scholars do, and their main concerns are correlations and generalizations, which fits B; they rely on country experts and specialists to summarize the events. Davide King (talk) 04:08, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

  Notes

• 1. If it is not so clear, by this I mean that the article's grouping will be irrespective of regime type (it will be a general article about mass killing events irrespective of categories) but we can have a section categorized by Communist regimes, if not geographically or other fitting categorizations used to have a well-organized table of contents. What I oppose is having separate articles about the events for each regime type, whether it is capitalist, Communist, fascist, or whatever, when we already discuss them individually. There are simply no sufficient scholarly sources that treat them as separate topics, and it is better to discuss them in short paragraphs together (e.g. no need to say what happened in great details, just mention and link the events themselves, there is no need to provide a coatracked summary there too). Davide King (talk) 04:19, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• WP:GNG is the criterion by which we determine if a standalone article is warranted, it states "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material". The fact we have a chapter in Valentino (and in Bellamy and others) meets the requirement. --Nug (talk) 04:39, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• I am curious to see Aquillion's response to this, since you did mention at least two sources now and your back-and-forth discussion was interesting and useful, so I hope that you can discuss that further; however, Bellamy and Valentino fit B more than anything, and is fine by me because that is what I support — my issue is how such sources are used to support A or C rather than the more proper B.
• I do not think that excludes my proposal of general mass killings either; in addition, Bellamy puts Communism within the context of the Cold War, while Valentino puts it within that of mass killings in general and as a subtype of dispossessive mass killings. If there is consistency, then a similar article about capitalism must be created due to Bellamy's chapter about "Capitalist Atrocities" — I do not think A-style articles for both are good, but at least there would be consistency. I also do not think this solves NPOV and WEIGHT issues, and the contradictions between country experts and historians, and genocide scholars and their weight (majority, minority, fringe), which is necessary to have for an NPOV article.
• Bellamy has the chapter "Totalitarian Mass Killing", so I do not see why we should not go for a general article, with Communist regimes being a section, or a general mass killings article divided into Capitalist, Communist, and Totalitarian as Bellamy does. Indeed, now that I think about it, Bellamy's work is perfect for my proposal of Mass killings in history. It may well be such article's table of content.
• 2. State Terror in the Long Nineteenth Century
• 3. Totalitarian Mass Killing
• 4. Terror Bombing in the Second World War
• 5. The Cold War Struggle (1): Capitalist Atrocities
• 6. The Cold War Struggle (2): Communist Atrocities
• 7. Atrocities and the 'Golden Age' of Humanitarianism
• 8. Radical Islamism and the War on Terror
• I fail to see how you can read Bellamy and come to the conclusion that Communism is a single phenomenon and must be discussed as a new topic. Davide King (talk) 05:15, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• The chapter The Cold War Struggle (2): Communist Atrocities also discusses communist mass killings. --Nug (talk) 06:15, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

• And? I already acknowledged it when I said the book places it within the context of the Cold War. My issue has never been if we can discuss mass killings that happened under Communist regimes, my issue has always been how to do that and make it encyclopedic, which is what the AfD tried to rule and said there is no consensus among us. If Bellamy and Valentino are perfectly acceptable sources for the topic of mass killings, can you explain why they cannot be used for Mass killings in history (or a general article about mass killings, a spin off of Mass killing that analyzes the concept in greater details, using summary style for each event, etc.)? Why must we cherry pick chapters about Communism only, and ignore all the others? You said a chapter is sufficient to establish a topic, I have at least two full books about mass killings in history, why is not this proposal preferable? You simply cannot assume space or length a priori, so that is not a good rebuttal, find a better one. Davide King (talk) 14:01, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: I think a symmetry in the Bellamy's book is clearly seen: he groups Cold war perpetrators by camps, and he analyzed atrocities committed by both camps. It should be clear to any good faith logical thinker that Bellamy does not connect Communism with atrocities: he forms two groups of perpetrators, each of which belong to one of opposing camps. Therefore, a proper context here is not Communism, but Cold war.

In general, I find your position non-constructive and disruptive. It is absolutely clear to any good faith user that picking one more source and claiming "My source says this" is totally senseless. As I (and admins panel) noted, we need a detailed source analysis. I already proposed to establish the majority viewpoint by collecting a representative sample of sources and analyzing them. I am expecting to see your thoughts on what other users have already posted at WP:DRNMKUCR, as well as your own ideas. If you will not do that in next few days, I will not consider you as a party of the DRN process, and my voluntary obligation not to take any actions against you will not be in effect any more. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:17, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Re Nug's comment: "an article cannot discuss any debate on the correlations or causes without mentioning the government actions that has led to that debate in the first place. It would be like discussing Causes of World War II without having the article World War II."

The reason there is an article on WWII is that there is academic consensus that the various wars were part of a larger war, viz, WWII. There is no consensus that killings in Stalin's Soviet Union, etc., are part of a pattern of MKuCR.

There was a similar discussion about Jewish Bolshevism, aka Jewish Communism. Some editors argued that the article explained one theory connecting Jews and Communism but there should be an article about the facts behind the theory. Therefore, Jews and Communism was created as a fork. At AfD, I argued that although there was literature about Jewish involvement in Communist movements in different times and places, there was none about the topic as a whole. The article was therefore a POVFORK which implied that Jews had a propensity to become Communists or had a "disproportionate" influence on it.

Nug's reasoning is circular because he begins with the assumption that there is a correlation or causal connection. But there is no consensus for that view in reliable sources, just as there is none for Jews and Communism. This could be an example of apophenia, "the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things." Or it could be because the theory precedes the evidence, which is collected to support a predetermined theory.

TFD (talk) 05:13, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Nope, I never said there was a causal connection. Some authors say there is, other say there isn't, that why there is a Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes#Proposed_causes section. But then again you said I "voted against capitalizing Communist even though it would remove ambiguity" when you know very well I never did such a thing and that MOS:ISMCAPS was the reason for not capitalizing per the discussion you participated in at Talk:Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes/Archive_39#Capitalization_of_"Communist". --Nug (talk) 06:24, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

I said "correlation or causal connection." Do you not beleive there is a correlation? TFD (talk) 06:36, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: Do you realise that if some authors say there is a causal connection, whereas other say there isn't, the section's title should be not "Proposed causes", but "Discussion of possible causal linkage between mass killings and Communism"?

And, in reality, your description is still desperately incomplete: in reality, some authors see a strong connection between mass killings and Communism, other authors disagree, and another group of authors just ignore this dispute, and prefers to discuss mass killings not in a context of Communism. My preliminary source analysis demonstrates that the last group is an overwhelming majority. Paul Siebert (talk) 19:29, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

Okay, by your logic if source analysis reveals that the majority of sources do not discuss the education system in communist countries, we can conclude that the overwhelming majority view is that no education system existed in these countries. That's basically your argument about the "third group" in a nutshell. --Nug (talk) 22:28, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

No. If according to my logic, majority of sources discuss education system in each communist country taken separately, then we can write an article that discuss each country separately, and discuss commonalities in a small section at the very bottom. And that would be pretty much ok, keeping in mind that e.g. Vygotsky's works are discussed in almost all sources not is a context of Mao's China, and not in a context of Marxism. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:35, 20 December 2021 (UTC)

No. Your logic is if we have 10 sources that discuss the education system of a group of communist states, and 40 sources that discuss education system in each communist country separately, then the argument is that commonalities discussed in the 10 sources are a minority viewpoint because the 40 sources that discuss the individual countries make no mention of any commonalities with other communist states. --Nug (talk) 02:45, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

That is not that simple. Let's make a situation even more extreme: we have 5 sources that discuss the education system of a group of communist states, and 500 sources that discuss education system in each communist country separately. However, if majority (or a significant fraction) of those 500 sources cite those 5 sources, we still can speak about some significant commonality or a linkage. If the same were true for mass killings, then the current article (in it's current shape) would be Ok. The problem is that so far my analysis does not confirm that. "Genocide scholars" work in separation from country experts, the latter cite the works of genocide scholars very rarely. And even genocide scholars themselves (e.g. Harff) do not see Communism as an important factor affecting mass killings.

One way of the other, this is becoming fruitless. I propose to switch to a real source analysis at DRNMKUCR and to let this RfC come to some logical end. We have done our part of the job. We could have done that better, but now it is too late. Let's wait for results.

I am expecting to see your posts at DRNMKUCR. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:14, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Okay, list these 500 sources at DRNMKUCR so that we can analyze them. --Nug (talk) 11:01, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

In the example, we would have an article that compares and contrasts education in communist countries. East Germany for example inherited a well developed education system onto which they imposed their own ideology. Someone reading a brief article does not want to read how East German universities developed in the Middle Ages or how Prussia developed a system that was later imposed on the states of East Germany. If they did, they can go to "Education in Germany" or "Education in East Germany." Basically it would be filled by cut and paste information rather than what the reader wanted to know. TFD (talk) 00:47, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Consider the article Education in the United States. (Education is a state matter in the U.S.) It doesn't have separate sections for each state. It merely points out the commonality and differences between states. TFD (talk) 01:40, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Undue weight given to source

This paper is cited no less than three times in the article, as in the following: "Another common criticism, as articulated by anthropologist and specialist in former European communist regimes Kristen Ghodsee and other scholars, is that the body-counting reflects an anti-communist point of view..." The article describes Ghodsee as a specialist in former communist regimes, however a look at her published work shows a focus on gender studies and Bulgaria, with nothing on the USSR, China, or Cambodia. Given the clear ideological bias of this academic, and the extent to which we are running the magnifying glass over cherry picked sources and domain expertise of actual, widely cited historians, is it really fair that this academic is sourced at all for this article, let alone 11 times? AShalhoub (talk) 22:05, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

I like your approach. However, it is valid only when applied consistently. We can limit ourselves with sources that say "A" and the sources that criticise "A" only in one case: if "A" is a majority viewpoint, and no other significant viewpoints on the subject exists.

The problem with this article is, however, quite different. Thus, Rummel was criticized only by a couple of authors, and none of them performed a global analysis of his "democide" data set. Normally that implies wide acceptance, but... Take a look at such a topic as Soviet Russia history, or at Great Chinese famine. Imagine that you have no preliminary knowledge about that, but you know that there were some political repressions in the Soviet Union under Stalin, and the Great Leap caused a terrible famine in China. With this knowledge in mind, try to find most reputable sources that discuss history of these two events. After that, try to find how the authors estimate the number of victims, what terms they use, and what causes they propose. Finally, try to check how frequently each of them cite Rummel.

All of that would be quite instrumental for understanding of who is cherry-picking and who gives undue weight to which sources. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:19, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

A hint: if you will do a neutral and unbiased source analysis you will find that most country experts essentially ignore Rummel, so both those who made estimates of "global Communist killings" and many of those who criticize them do not express a majority viewpoint, whereas majority scholars just ignore this topic, and they prefer to focus on study of separate countries.--Paul Siebert (talk) 22:26, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

I disagree with mentioning anyone's opinions in text unless their opinions are significant to the topic. For example, I would mention Raphael Lemkin's opinions on genocide because he came up with the concept and is frequently cited. Is this "common criticism" the consensus view in the literature, is it a left-wing view or is it the view of communist apologists? Policy requires us to explain the weight of different opinions. Incidentally saying something is a "common criticism" is a violation of Unsupported attributions. Although we can use that term if it is taken from reliable sources, we cannot make that conclusion based on our understanding of the literature. TFD (talk) 23:10, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

@The Four Deuces: What you say is indisputable but trivial. Now answer the following question: is the opinion of Rudolph Rummel significant to such topic as "Stalinist repressions in the USSR"? If "yes", how do you explain a nearly total lack of support, criticism and even mentioning of his works by major experts in this topic?--Paul Siebert (talk) 23:18, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

No, it is not significant. Furthermore, since he is not an expert on this topic, his writings on it published outside academic publishing are not reliable for facts. TFD (talk) 23:43, 21 December 2021 (UTC)

Rummel’s books Death by government (cited by 1577), Power kills: Democracy as a method of nonviolence (cited by 540), Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (cited by 238) and China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (cited by 190] were all originally published by the academic publishing house Transaction Publishers, with new editions by Francis Taylor. --Nug (talk) 01:51, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

There has been previous discussion of Transaction Publishers. See for example Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 54#Pioneers of genocide studies. While their main focus was reprints of post war era social sciences classics, they were a publisher for modern extreme right books, that reputable publishers would avoid, such as books defending racism. So if you are an academic who wants to argue that the black race is inherently violent, the wrong side won the U.S. Civil War or the Communists killed 100 million people, that's the publisher you went to. The company was bought by Taylor and Francis in 1997. After it disappeared as a separate imprint, Taylor and Francis did not publish and new works from Rummel, who turned to self-publication. TFD (talk) 02:40, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Oddly enough the only people seeing an issue with Transaction Publishers (and certainly no mention of anything untoward in the article) at Misplaced Pages:Reliable sources/Noticeboard/Archive 54#Pioneers of genocide studies are involved editors who have perviously voted to delete MKuCR, all other uninvolved people say it is perfectly fine. Strange coincidence that. As for Taylor and Francis they certainly have published Rummel since acquiring Transaction Publishers. --Nug (talk) 03:38, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I think this discussion is senseless. We already had two (or even more) RSN discussion, and we have a consensus that Rummel is generally reliable, his democide theory is seen as a serious contribution, but it contradicts to later works by second generation of genocide scholars. Valentino and especially Mann explicitly disagree with his conclusions. And, more importantly, Rummel is not reliable for figures (except Cambodia). Therefore, yes, you are right about the source in general, but you are not right about some aspects of this source. TFD is not right about the source in general, but we still cannot use Rummel as a source for figures, and we need to discuss Rummel's theory in a context of latter works by other scholars. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Why are you continuing to discuss Rummel, when this section is about Ghodsee? --Nug (talk) 05:06, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Because too much weight is given in the article to the views of Rummel and few other authors that advocate similar ideas. Actually, the whole article is written from their perspective. Therefore, we need to fix this issue first, and then focus on Ghodsee and similar sources, which are on the opposite side of the opinia spectrum. It doesn't matter (now) whether Ghodsee is a good or bad source, it is not a major article's problem. Later, when we fix the main problem, we will probably think about putting Ghodsee in a proper content (and I cannot rule out a possibility that this source may be completely removed; I have no strong opinion yet, because that is not urgent). Paul Siebert (talk) 06:13, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Dismissing User:AShalhoub's legitimate concern regarding WP:UNDUE usage of Ghodsee and continuing to focus on Rummel after making this commitment: "If you agree to apply policy "even handedly", let's do that. First, White should be deleted as a poor quality tertiary source authored by a non-expert, which duplicates figures from the sources that are already presented in this article. After you self-revert, I am ready to discuss other issues." raises a question about your sincerity. --Nug (talk) 06:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

And your post raises a question about your abilities to understand what I write.

I never dismissed any legitimate concern, I just wrote that it is not my priority, because, WP:UNDUE should be primarily applied to Rummel himself. I cannot rule out a possibility that when we change the article's structure to something more neutral, and put Rummel, Courtois etc into a proper context, there will be no need in such sources as Ghodsee at all. Paul Siebert (talk) 14:15, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

That's because the Transaction Publishers was at the time so small that it had very few original volumnes. In fact most if not all of the discussions at RSN were about Rummel. While you may believe theories advanced in their books that blacks have substandard intelligence, that goes against mainstream thought. Basically, it was a a publisher for extremists who couldn't get published anywhere else. But as you say, Nug, you don't see an issue with it. TFD (talk) 04:46, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

No, I said uninvolved editors like User:Jayjg, User:Crum375, User:Jayen466 and User:DGG had no issue with the publisher. --Nug (talk) 05:06, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Transaction also published a book by Ivan Van Sertima who is best known for the obviously fake theory that Amerindian culture was created by Africans. Calling it discredited would give it too much credit. Serious writers cannot be bothered to reply to it, which is similar to Rummel's theories. Usually people who hold minority views don't argue their views are mainstream, they argue that the mainstream is suppressing their views because they are controlled by whomever. Do you think that reputable publishing houses publish racism and pseudohistory? TFD (talk) 06:15, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

This is nonsense, Francis and Taylor still publishes Rummel but not Ivan Van Sertima, so clearly they still find Rummel's work relevant. Do I detect a personal attack in your "Usually people like you...", do you want to refactor that? --Nug (talk) 06:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't know what the policy is when they acquire another publishing company. They still have books by Joseph Scotchie. See Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction, p. 40: "Scotchie is a neo-Confederate sympathizer, has been a League of the South member....He has published essays in Southern Review that are hostile toward imigrants." No mainstream academic publishers would publish these books if they were written today. The League of the South incidentally is listed by the SPLC as a neo-confederate hate group. TFD (talk) 14:42, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• I agree with that usage of Ghodsee is WP:UNDU and saying something is "common criticism" is a violation of WP:WEASEL. Unfortunately Paul's justifications for ignoring policy with: "However, it is valid only when applied consistently" and "What you say is indisputable but trivial" followed by a digression to Rummel raises questions on whether we can trust Paul Siebert to apply policy even handedly rather than selectively. --Nug (talk) 01:28, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

  @Nug: If you agree to apply policy "even handedly", let's do that. First, White should be deleted as a poor quality tertiary source authored by a non-expert, which duplicates figures from the sources that are already presented in this article. After you self-revert, I am ready to discuss other issues. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:29, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think Misplaced Pages policy is meant to be transactional but rather an absolute we all have to adhere to. In any case I already reverted nine hours ago after I read this. --Nug (talk) 03:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Ops, didn't see it, sorry. I agree that our policy is absolute.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:20, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• I agree this academic seems to be given undue weight in the article. With regards to their 'bias', that doesn't make them an unreliable source although in-text attribution of their views may be appropriate. To be honest, I think on such a contentious article as this on such a politically polarised subject in-text attribution is going to be needed for almost all sources. I also agree that we should make changes on individual merit, not taking an 'all or nothing' approach. Vanteloop (talk) 13:18, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
• This section should be called Undue weight given to source because I fail to see how one can read the article, and not see any problem and think Ghodsee (of all sources) is the issue. By the way, everything is attributed (the article is a bunch of "he said, she said", which is not a good approach in writing a good article) because pretty much everything has been recognized as a minority view, and is why I think we should refocus and restructure the topic to something for which we have tertiary sources and a clear weight of sources, but we make no distinction between significant ones and fringe ones. Are not Stephen Hicks, George Watson, and many others also not only undue but even non-experts? If it can be argued that people raising concerns about Transaction Publishers' history of publishing fringe authors and dismiss them because they are critical of this article, it is telling that any source dissenting or criticizing the topic is dismissed as undue (first it was Karlsson for being dismissive of Courtois and Rummel, two core sources), even though it is attributed like everything else and at least has some expertise and publications on Communism. Davide King (talk) 14:11, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Undue weight

Ok, we achieved a consensus with @Nug: that NPOV should be applied even handedly. I take Nug's words not just as mere a declaration, because he demonstrated his good faith by self-reverting his (re)addition of a highly questionable White's book.

Now it is my turn.

• An important note. Anticipating possible accusations of original research, I am reminding you that what the Misplaced Pages community understands as neutrality means carefully and critically analyzing a variety of reliable sources and then attempting to convey to the reader the information contained in them fairly, proportionately, and as far as possible without editorial bias. The rest of this post is an attempt to do such an analysis. Therefore, any accusations of OR will be treated as a bad faith attempt to derail the discussion.

I decided to apply WP:DUE to Rummel first.

• Step 1. Search for mass deaths. Rummel (with impressive 236 citations appears on the first page. Ok, he passes a preliminary step 1.
• Step 2. Let's see who cites him. To this end, check other authors from the top of the list.

• Ellman (#1 in the list): doesn't cite Rummel
• Wheatcroft (#2 in the list): no citations
• Mertelsmann and Rahi-Tamm (next in the list) no citations,no citations
• Rummel himself (just to test the system): 12 self-citations
• Wemheuer: this author does not cite Rummel
• Rosefielde: (next in the list): cited Rummel 3 times. I was not able to see in which context he cited Rummel, because although his "Lethal politics" was in the list of references, there were no inline references in the text, and no mention of Rummel. It looks like Rosefielde added this source just as one of books on the subject.
• Kay: (next in the list) cited Rummel 0 times
• Krischel: (next in the list): cited Rummel 0 times
• Harris (this source is irrelevant) (and it doesn't cite Rummel
• Eberstadt: no citations
• Dyadkin: no citations
• Ginger - irrelevant
• Norman - a very specific source about one late Soviet incident. Irrelevant.
• Snyder: frankly, I expected Timothy Snyder to cite Rummel, but... he doesn't

These are all sources that I found at the first two pages of the google scholar search on this topic. I didn't cherry-pick them, and even didn't know the results of my check: I am typing in a real time, I check one source in the list, then I type what I found, and then I move to the next one. I am totally transparent. My preliminary conclusion: Rummel and other sources exist in "parallel universes": they almost do not interfere.

I didn't do the opposite check for an obvious reason: Rummel's books are old, and most sources in this list are more recent, so it is not a surprise that he doesn't cite them.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:47, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• Step 3. Let's check who cites the authors from this list.

• Ellman (his second article): this list includes such authors as Cormac O Grada, Mark Harrison, Steven Rosefielde, Mike Haynes, Oleg Khlevniuk, Barnett, Stephen Wheatcroft - most of them are experts in Soviet history. It is easy to check that most of those authors cite Ellman's works., so all those scholars are interconnected by a dense networks of cross-references, which demonstrates that they exist "in the same universe" (incontrast to Rummel).
• Wheatcroft: actually, everybody is welcome to analyse this list using the same scheme. I randomly checked some sources, and they confirm my initial expectations: they cite Ellman, they cite other experts in Soviet Russia, but they do not cite Rummel.
• (I'll add my analysis of other authors from this list if needed)

• Step 4. What those authors tell about deaths in the USSR, and what sources do they use? To answer this question, I first looked at this list of sources, and one of them, On Sources: A Note. Author(s): Michael Ellman. Source: Soviet Studies, 1992, Vol. 44, No. 5 (1992), pp. 913-915 seems especially relevant. Although it is old, it is interesting for two reasons. First, the author is acting as an arbiter in the dispute among two prominent scholars, Wheatcroft and Rosefielde, so this source provides us with information about opinia of three authors. Second, Ellman analyses the the relative merits of 'statistical' and 'literary' sources for the study of Soviet history.

In this article, Ellman concludes that literary sources, and, especially, the book by Antonov-Ovseenko (in the latter book he reproduces some figures that he heard when he was a GULAG prisoner) are unreliable sources, and that early estimates of human life losses in the USSR (which relied mostly to literary sources) are unreliable.

Another article by the same author, is a more recent source, and it performs a detailed analysis of human losses in Stalin's era. To the best of my knowledge, these figures (at least, all that relates to GULAG) represent scholarly consensus. I make this conclusion based on the results of my work on the GULAG article. The edits that I made many years ago, and the sources that I added, are still there, and they have not been seriously challenged by other users. Therefore, I may conclude that the sources that I found during the above search procedure are good, and they reflect scholarly consensus. Note, I found those sources "in real time", I didn't cherry-pick them, and this procedure lead me to essentially the same facts and sources that currently represent a consensus view on the history of repressions in the Soviet Union. That means the above search procedure is quite adequate.

• Step 5. What about Rummel's sources?

Analysis of Ellman's "Soviet Repression Statistics..." shows that the author used a large amount primary and secondary sources about different aspects of Soviet repressive machinery. The full list of sources and endnotes is 7 pages long, so it is impossible to reproduce it here. A significant part of those sources are books, articles, and documents that became available after 1990 ("archival revolution"). Now it is a good time to compare it with Rummel's sources.

Rummel's sources for the USSR can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here

The problem with these lists is that they provide no full references. I can look only by names, but this, or this is not informative at all. I recognize some names, for example, Nikolay Tolstoy, a post-WWII British author whom Dulic dismissed as extremely unreliable. Next, the name of Antonov-Ovseenko already appeared in this discussion, it is the very same source that is considered by Ellman as non-reiiable (that is actually a hearsay). Similarly, Rummel uses Bukovsky's memoirs, Solzhenitsyn's figures etc as a source for statistics, and all of that is not considered as reliable data by modern authors, such as Ellman and other scholars from his pool. That my claim is totally verifiable: just open the sources that are listed in step ##2,3 (and other sources in that list) and check that by yourself.

Not only Rummel's sources are unreliable, they are outdated. Rummel cites Dyadkin, but that book was published in 1983. Rummel cites Dallin&Nikolaevsky, and I perfectly know that source: it is "David J. Dallin and B. I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia (New Haven, 1947), p. 13". Just think: it is the source published in 1947!!!

Furthermore, Rummel cites some "census data". Obviously, he cites some old and incomplete data, because more recent data, published by E.M. Andreev, L.E. Darskii & T.L. Kharkova (this source is extensively used by Whaeatcroft, Ellman and others) totally debunk his "democide" estimates: ADK say that demographic losses in the USSR from 1927 to 1946 were about 56 million people, and these losses included 26 million death during WWII, more than ten million birth deficite, migration etc}}. How can all of that be consistent with Rummel's data in table 4a (11,440,000 deaths in 1929-35), table 5 (4,245,000 deaths in 1937-38), table 6 (5,104,000 in 1940-41), table 7 (13,053,000 deaths in 1941-45: I assume he concludes all civilian deaths, including the Holocaust deaths were "Communust democide"?), and table 8 (15,613,000 deaths in 1956-53). It is inconsistent with all available modern data.

I can tell you what was the main source of Rummel's error. If you look at the tables you will see that Rummel (i) dramatically exaggerated the population of GULAG, and (ii) made a totally arbitrary assumption about the death rate. These two blatant errors are responsible for a significant part of his exaggerated figures. I am familiar with this topic, because creation of this table was essentially made by me. I know that some early estimates of GULAG population were unreasonably high, and that modern authors do not consider these figures are reliable. Obviously, the word "modern" cannot be applied to Rummel in that sense.

It is now a scholarly consensus that the number of people who passed through GULAG was 14 million + 4 million in colonies (two years term), and the mortality rate was really high only during short periods of its history. These two blatant errors are sufficient to totally remove Rummel's data and leave it in a footnote as a historical estimate. I would support keeping Rummel because he is popular in blogosphere, so its complete removal may lead to accusations of "bias".

Conclusion

Why should we use such sources as Ghodsee for critique of the views of the authors who share Rummel's ideas? The answer is simple: serious authors ignore Rummel. It is as hard to find serious sources that criticise Rummel as to find serious sources that debunk flat Earth theory.

Your comments are welcome. Participants of the DRN may make their comments at WP:MKUCRSA too, whereas other users are welcome to comment here.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:09, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

It seems to be your logic that criticism of Rummel's numbers indicates that they aren't to be relied on, but also, lack of criticism of Rummel's numbers shows that his numbers can't be relied on. Do you see the problem? Regarding flat earth theory, to rewrite the laws of spacetime is not the same thing as to have death estimates that are 10-20% too high; that is an analogical fallacy AShalhoub (talk) 09:14, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul's flawed methodology applied to other authors gets the same results

Paul's methodology is gravely flawed and can be used to "prove" any author is "undue". Let's do the same for Ellman.

• Step 1. Search for mass deaths. Ellman (with impressive 121 citations appears on the first page. Ok, he passes a preliminary step 1.
• Step 2. Let's see who cites him. To this end, check other authors from the top of the list.

• Ellman: cites himself twice
• Wheatcroft: one citation
• Mertelsmann and Rahi-Tamm no citations,no citations
• Wemheuer: no citations
• Rosefielde: cited Ellman once.
• Kay: cited Ellman 0 times
• Krischel: cited Ellman 0 times
• Harris (this source is irrelevant) (and it doesn't cite Ellman
• Eberstadt: no citations
• Dyadkin: no citations
• Ginger - irrelevant
• Norman - a very specific source about one late Soviet incident. Irrelevant.
• Snyder: he doesn't cite

So by your methodology everyone ignores Ellman his use is "undue" any where in Misplaced Pages. --Nug (talk) 21:29, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• Compare this and that.
• Compare this and that
• Compare this and that

In addition, this is just a preliminary step. The authors whom I site are in a permanent interaction: they take data and arguments from each other, they comment on each other, they belong to some common pool. In contrast, I saw no attempt to discuss Rummel by any of those authors. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:47, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks to you, I found Rosefielde's review on Rummel's "Lethal politics" among the above search results. Rosefielde finds 10 million collectivization death a quite plausible figure, but that was 1990 Rosefielde! He reconsidered his estimates after "archival revolution" (which Rummel refused to do). In addition, Rosefielde notes serious flaws:

"Specialists of various persuasions however will be dissatisfied with numerous aspects of the work. Rummel relies entirely on English language sources, some of which are of dubious worth. In one instance he cites a Newsweek report of a classified CIA study to support his estimate of post-Stalinist democide. Unfortunately the reporter either misread the primary document, or was misbriefed. As a consequence, Rummel greatly overstates the likely magnitude of democide 1954-87. Similarly, he ignores most of the specialized demographic, jurisprudential and Sovietological literature on the subject which makes his calculations extraneous to the on-going debate. His estimates are not so much erroneous as they are unresponsive to a welter of serious counter-evidence."

Actually, even the 1990 version of Rosefielde confirms my conclusions that I made. Rosefielde was not aware of many facts that we currently know, but he correctly identified the problem. Another important problem is Rummel's indiscriminated approach:

"Sovietologists will also be disappointed that Rummel does not carefully explore the applicability of his thesis to the current situation. Is democide an artifact of immature authoritarian Marxism, or should we anticipate a new wave of mass murder if and when Gorbachev finally capitulates to the right? Are glasnost' (openness), demokratzatsiia (democracy), novoe myshlenie (new thinking), and perestroika (radical economic reform) antidotes, or will democide persist even under a liberalized Soviet Marxist regime? These are profound issues which should not have been overlooked."

Again, Rosefielde correctly notes that Rummel's obsession with numbers and formal aspects makes his "theory" worthless: it has virtually no predictive power.

I think it is obvious from this review why Rummel is essentially ignored by serious historians. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:10, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually, that is just a start of the work. If we continue, we will find that there is a huge domain of sources connected by cress-references, where authors discuss each other's findings or use them. I just started this work, but I have a strong impression that Rummel is not a part of the domain that combines Ellman Wheatcroft, Davies, Getty, Alexopoulos, Werth, Graziosi, Khlevniuk etc.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:55, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

• So far, only @Nug: and @AShalhoub: presented a reasonable criticism. Nug pointed at some inconsistencies in my analysis, which, as I demonstrated, were just apparent. I am still waiting for his comments on other aspects of my analysis of Rummel.

AShalhoub made some comment that I find superficial. It should be clear from my analysis that I didn't speak about merely a lack of criticism. The point was different: (i) Rummel uses different sources that all other (modern) scholars do, and these sources are considered by them outdated and unreliable, (ii) Rummel does not use the sources modern scholars rely upon, (iii) Rummel is not cited by modern experts in Russian and Soviet history, and (i)&(ii) is a possible explanation. In this situation, lack of criticism by no means can be seen as an argument in support of his reliability. For experts in Soviet Russia, Rummel is a fringe author.

WRT "10-20% too high", that is a total ignorance. Rummel's figures for the USSR are 6-10 times higher, and that follows from the information presented by me. Please, read my posts carefully before commenting.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:52, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Paul Siebert In your argument above, I gather that you want to strike Rummel's estimates from the article. I think the approach of throwing every link and argument against the source without context is not the correct one. In the first place, I don't believe any of us are domain experts and we're not in a position to pick apart whether a researcher as cited as Rummel is using the correct methods, because this is a type of original research. What we have to do is cite other people that are domain experts, that have made this criticism of Rummel (like Karlsson): "While Jerry Hough suggested Stalin’s terror claimed tens of thousands of victims, R.J. Rummel puts the death toll of Soviet communist terror between 1917 and 1987 at 61,911,000. 121 In both cases, these figures are based on an ideological preunderstanding and speculative and sweeping calculations." That is a fair criticism. I would ask you, with your claim "Rummel's figures for the USSR are 6-10 times higher", do you mean the death toll of Soviet Communism is actually 6 to 10 million people, or are you cherry picking what you see as the weaker estimates of Rummel to discredit his estimates entirely? Also, the tables you posted (without context, which is never a good idea) don't seem to show what you described. For one example, table 8 does not seem to show death estimates from 1953-1956, but aparently from 1930 (again, the context to this table is lacking, so it's hard to tell). In any case, I definitely think it's hyperbolic to compare Rummel's estimates to flat earth theory, if he indeed placed them at 60 million. Is this really far enough from "the consensus" to make that kind of comparison?AShalhoub (talk) 16:41, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

@AShalhoub: I always prefer a step-wise approach. First, we must come to agreement about one obvious thing: Rummel's figures (especially for the USSR) are dramatically inflated and outdated, and Rummel's theory is nearly totally ignored by historians who study Russian, Chinese and Cambodian history. IMO, that is absolutely obvious from my analysis, from the quotes that I provided, and from the results of two RSN discussions.

Second, after we all agreed upon that, we should, keeping in mind that Rummel's ideas are popular in blogosphee and were reproduced by many politicians and journalists, should discuss a proper context and a way this information should be presented in this article. I will oppose to a complete removal of this information from this article, and I have some ideas how to present these figures. However, I prefer to discuss that after we come to consensus on teh first issue.

WRT your concrete question about figures, a consensus figure for GULAG deaths is 1.6-1.7 million (some authors include deportation deaths and get 2.5 million). Compare this figure with Rummel's GULAG mortality data (he obtained several million of GULAG death only for the period of a complete GULAG dissolution, and the deaths in GULAG proper were tens of millions, according to him.) Paul Siebert (talk) 17:12, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Most of Rummel's estimates were actually ranges with a probable mean, for example with the Soviet Union, Rummel estimated a range from 28 million to 127 million deaths with a probable mean of 62 million people. Rummel did also note that he would be amazed if future research did not come up with figures that deviated significantly from his own. In any case, Valentino estimates between 10 to 20 million died under Stalin's rule alone and up to 2.5 million pre-Stalin deaths, so the claim of Rummel's estimate being 6 to 10 times higher is certainly an exaggeration. Again you repeat "Rummel's theory is nearly totally ignored by historians who study Russian, Chinese and Cambodian history", but that is a flawed because global experts rely upon and cite country experts for the original death toll numbers, but the inverse is not necessarily true. --Nug (talk) 19:19, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: (The talk page becomes so convoluted that I may overlook your posts. Please, ping me next time if you want me to respond)

And why do we need to know his range if modern figures are much more accurate and trustworthy? In addition, this range is meaningful only if each estimate is equally trustworthy, and the distribution is not skewed.

You can see that by yourself. Take the figures from this table and calculate a range, and the most probable estimate. And then compare it with modern consensus data (1.5-2.5 million depending on a year). That will allow you to see how "accurate" Rummel's approach is.

WRT Valentino, I believe both you and I already agreed that genocide scholars are not good source for figures, because they are not experts, and they, as Harff conceded, do not need to know accurate numbers.

WRT the rest, I responded in details in my post in the very last section. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:09, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

And, by the way, if you provide a range from 28 million to 127 million, how can you claim the most probable figure has so many significant figures? He says "61,911,000". It should be clear to any educated person, that that precision is simply illiterate! Paul Siebert (talk) 23:21, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I continue with Rummel. In my previous posts, I presented the results of just one google scholar search. To rule out a possibility of a bias in keyword selection, I've done other searches with different keyword sets.

• soviet repressions collectivization
• soviet Volga famine
• soviet stalinist repressions

In all those lists, I see familiar names, or names of co-authors of the scholars from the previous search, or names of those whom the scholars from the previous search cite. However, I couldn't find Rummel at first 5 pages of each of those lists. I conclude that my initial search result was more an exception than a rule. You can easily check this my claim by doing an independent analysis of the above lists.

I think, if there will be no additional arguments or considerations, a conclusion from this discussion should be: an undue weight was given to Rummel's figures and Rummel's "democide" in this article. The scholars like Ghodsee hardly deserve mention in this article, but Rummel must be moved to the very bottom into some section that should be named "Attempted generalisations" (or something like that), and mentioned only briefly as a minority POV.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• Paul’s “interaction” analysis:

• Compare this and that.
• Compare this and that
• Compare this and that

is also flawed, as it is looking for interaction across different disciplines, between single country experts and systematic global study experts. Global study experts like Rummel rely upon the data from single country experts to compile data from each country into a global dataset. But the inverse does not hold, single country experts do not rely upon data from systematic global empirical study experts, that would be circular. So Paul’s claim that single country experts ignore Rummel doesn’t indicate anything other than these people work in a different domains, one involving global study of data complied from single country experts, the other involving single country studies by single country experts.

Barbara Harff is a renowned scholar in the global study of mass killings, and yet according to Paul’s flawed methodology, there is little interaction between Harff and Wheatcroft or Ellman and Harff, therefore single country experts are ignoring Harff because her data is unreliable. Paul analysis doesn’t really prove anything. --Nug (talk) 20:42, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: With due respect, I do not accept your criticism. First, you discuss just a minor part of my initial post, but you make a claim about some general flaw in my approach. That is an unjustified generalisation. Please comment on other aspects of my original post, and if you see any problems or flaws, please, explain that. If no criticism will follows in next few days, I have a right to interpret that can implicit acceptance of my arguments and conclusions, which I will do.

Second. I agree with your argument about " different disciplines, (...) single country experts and systematic global study experts". Yes, these are two different groups of authors.

Third, I find the rest unconvincing. To acknowledge the existence of two groups is just a first step. The next step is to establish interrelations between these two groups, and relative weight of their views. That is what I am doing, and that is what you failed to do. And, after we identified the first group, we need to establish a relative weight of Rummel within the first group, for even many authors in the first group disagree with him.

Fourth. With regard to global data, as I demonstrates, Rummel's data are of poor quality, and country experts do not rely upon them not because they belong to different domains, but because they are garbage.

Your argument about Harff is valid. It demonstrates that Harff also works in isolation from country experts and she belongs to the "genocide scholars" domain. I see no reason why that may be an indication of any flaws in my approach, because that is a conclusion made in one peer-reviewed publication that I cited on this talk page: yes, most "genocide scholars" work in isolation from country experts, who ignore their works. And that requites us to decide, what viewpoint should be present as a majority view and what is a minority/fringe. I proposed to discuss it, and that is a reason why I started this source analysis.

This work has already lead to one positive conclusion: both @Nug: and I acknowledge existence of two distinct domains (school of thought), country experts and "genocide scholars". The next step is to develop a common approach to determine relative weight of their viewpoints.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:06, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

P.S. You are not right about Harff: . Actually, she is recognised by country experts, but these experts specialise not on Russia, but on Cambodia. Harff performed a comparative analysis of Cambodian and Indonesian genocide, and this work is recognised by country experts.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:10, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

All of Paul’s arguments against Rummel are based on the premise that the basic goal of all academic research is to determine an accurate number of deaths, and thus if he shows Rummel’s numbers are inaccurate then that somehow makes Rummel unreliable. But that premise is flawed because accuracy, while important, isn’t the core goal here, as Harff states:

”Compiling global data is hazardous and will inevitably invite chagrin and criticism from country experts. Case study people have a problem with systematic data because they often think they know better what happened in one particular country. I have sympathized with this view, because my area expertise was the Middle East. But when empiricists focus on global data, we have to consider 190 countries and must rely on country experts selectively. When we look for patterns and test explanations, we cannot expect absolute precision, in fact we do not require it.”

Rummel’s numbers were in fact estimated ranges with a likely minimum, maximum and median numbers, and to focus on accuracy of a fixed number as some kind of measure of "fringe" really is disingenuous. As Harff also states:

"As someone who had tried to identify all cases of geno/politicide since World War II, I fully understand what it takes to collect reliable, unimpeachable global data. It is impossible. The best we can do is to seek advice about additional episodes, and to report ranges of fatality estimates, as Rummel does."

Your comment "Fourth. With regard to global data, as I demonstrates, Rummel's data are of poor quality, and country experts do not rely upon them not because they belong to different domains, but because they are garbage." is flawed. Global experts rely data from country experts, not the other way round. --Nug (talk) 21:24, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

See my response to @Fiveby:

A core of Rummel's approach is finding correlations, more concretely, the number of "democide victims" vs "regime type". If his figures are 10 times greater than in reality, that dramatically affects eigenvalues and eigenvectors, and he may see correlations that are not observed if other data sets are used.

However, Harff's point is valid: "genocide scholars" do not need to have very precise data. However, that means they should not be used as a source of data: if we know (and they themselves recognise that) that their data are not precise, what is a reason to show them? Maybe, it makes much more sense to show much more preceise and fresh data obtained by country experts?

With regard to Rummel's words about "impossibility" to collect some data, I doubt that opinion of a non-expert is relevant. Rummel is not an expert in source criticism, he is not an expert in demography, he is not an expert is Soviet history, he is not an expert in Chinese history, and I would prefer to see the opinion of some country expert or demographer on that.

And, yes, global experts rely on data from country experts, but Rummel relied on OLD data from UNRELIABLE country experts, and these data are considered as unreliable by MODERN country experts. That means, Rummel relied on BAD and OLD data from QUESTIONABLE country experts. Paul Siebert (talk) 21:37, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

That may be a valid and true criticism. However I think the best way to proceed would be to find reliable sources that espouse that criticism and we can evaluate them. As it stands this is OR that we cannot put in the article. Vanteloop (talk) 22:59, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vanteloop: At the top of this section I posted an explanation that careful and critical analysis of sources is what NPOV requires us to do. I also reminded all participants of this discussion that a reference to OR will be interpreted as disruption. Please, stop disruption.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:34, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah yes, the old 'It's not OR because I said so and anyone who disagrees with me is being disruptive'. Not very convincing Vanteloop (talk) 00:38, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

It is not OR because that is what policy requires us to do. You accused me of OR, please, demonstrate what exactly I am proposing to add to the article that was not explicitly stated by some reliable source. You should either present some evidence or apologise. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:41, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I literally just asked you to provide some sources for your claims, you then claimed that was disruptive behaviour. I ask you to strike that through as a gesture of good faith Vanteloop (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I cannot provide sources that say "there is no sources on that". And it would be ridiculous to expect somebody else could do that.

I explained everyone that references to OR is a disruption, but if you agree not to mention OR in that context then the incident may be considered resolved. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:50, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

And I explained to you that you do not get to dismiss concerns about policy violations just because you post a message saying that raising those concerns is disruptive. Your opinions on Rummel are not given special weight just because they are on a talk page, any more than they would on a random blog. They have to have citations so that we can verify your claims, else please publish your research in a journal and then come back Vanteloop (talk) 00:58, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

There is a big difference between raising a legitimate concern about a policy violations and wikilawyering. To claim that careful and critical analysis of a variety of reliable sources is an original research is hardly a legitimate concern about policy violations. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:42, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Furthermore, to be clear your accusation my request for ciations was 'disruptive' and then refusal to strike constitutes a clear assumption of bad faith, I suggest you take this second opportunity to clarify otherwise Vanteloop (talk) 01:08, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vanteloop: Can you please explain me this your post in different words? I simply don't understand it. " your accusation my request for ciations" - what does it mean? Whom I accused and of what? Which "citations"? Paul Siebert (talk) 16:38, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I note that this is not the first time you have said you don't understand when called out on bad faith accusations. I will assume good faith and remind you of the comment just a few above this one. I literally just asked you to provide some sources for your claims, you then claimed that was disruptive behaviour. I ask you to strike that through as a gesture of good faith. I also note you didn't respond until you accused me of personal attacks and I reminded you that this comment went unaddressed. I don't believe any editor can reasonably be asked to engage when requests for evidence are immediately met with accusations of bad faith. Vanteloop (talk) 16:59, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, your original post (22:59, 23 December 2021 (UTC)) contained two main theses:

• "the best way to proceed would be to find reliable sources that espouse that criticism and we can evaluate them."
• "As it stands this is OR that we cannot put in the article."

I responded that "careful and critical analysis of sources is what NPOV requires us to do". If it was not clear from that my post, I am explaining it again: the whole section where I presented my analysis was aimed not to put some new information in the article, but to rearrange/remove some information. It should be clear to any user who understands our policy that this my activity has no relation to NOR, and it is in a full accordance with NPOV. I believed that was obvious to everybody, but if it was not obvious for you, then I am sure it is obvious now.

Furthermore, I explained in my another post, that it is ridiculous to expect a source that confirms that Rummel should not be used as a source for some claims in Misplaced Pages articles. And that should be also obvious to anybody who is familiar with our policy. By writing that, I already addressed your first claim. Moreover, I presented some sources in my other post (01:09, 24 December 2021 (UTC)), which you de facto ignored (I do not consider your acrimonious comment as an adequate responce).

Therefore, I owe no apology to you, because I assumed you understand our policy.

My previous warning is still in force. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:17, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I will assume good faith that you misunderstood again, because your comment completely fails to address my argument that immediately accusing a user of 'disruptive behaviour' for requesting evidence is not acceptable, especially when asked multiple times to withdraw the accusation. Please withdraw your baseless accusation to 'stop disruption' instead of misdirecting onto some other matter. My previous warnings are still in force. Vanteloop (talk) 17:36, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

You probably haven't noticed, but the whole huge post that I made at the beginning of this section was an analysis of tons of sources and other evidences. This post was supplemented with a reservation that that it is not a proposal to add some statement to the article, and therefore it is cannot be considered as a piece of OR.

In responce, you requested for some evidences and claimed that that may be OR. That may mean one of the following:

1. You haven't bothered to read my post, or

2. You didn't understand it, or

3. The post was not a good faith action.

I would prefer if 1 or 2 were true reasons. If that is the case, please, read my explanation and stop this nonsense Paul Siebert (talk) 17:50, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

And yet you immediately accused another user of bad faith. I have extended good faith in that your misunderstandings are genuine, however it is clear at this point you will not apologise for for this baseless accusation of bad faith (a sanctionable offence), despite being given more than enough opportunities and explanations. Therefore this conversation may be carried on in a more appropriate venue Vanteloop (talk) 18:05, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Here and elsewhere Siebert backed up their statements, so what is the problem exactly? Your opinions on Rummel are not given special weight just because they are on a talk page, any more than they would on a random blog. Yet, that applies to everyone involved, so why dismiss Siebert when they say Rummel is given more weight than is warranted but not doing the same to those who disagree, even though they did not provide any scholarly source explicitily saying that either? And if we are wrong, it should be easy to provide, and we have actually provided them time and time again (one of this article's core source Karlsson saying Rummel's estimates are ideologically biased, see also both Harff's summary and Mann's criticism, and RSN's discussions). Siebert's source analysis has actually been positively reviewed in an academic journal, so while this does not mean they are always right, I find criticism of them deeply unfair and unjustified. You also should not ask us to prove a negative (e.g. that country experts do not rely on Rummel for the events or estimates, even though I think both Siebert and Harff 2017 have already proved and supported this claim). As I said many times, Rummel is unreliable or undue for estimates and events, especially about Communism, but he is reliable, though not without criticism and other genocide scholars hold more weight, ot at least due for the theories and links of Communism and mass killings. Davide King (talk) 16:56, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Yet, that applies to everyone involved, so why dismiss Siebert when they say Rummel is given more weight than is warranted but not doing the same to those who disagree, even though they did not provide any scholarly source explicitily saying that either? I couldn't agree more. Every editor should be able to provide citations for their claims, and no editor should make accusations of bad faith in response to a single comment asking for evidence. Vanteloop (talk) 17:05, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I am summarising, one time, specially for you.

• Rummel was criticised by Dulic (I provided links on this page) for flawed approach in general and for usage of poor sources for Yugoslavia.
• Rummel was criticised by Rosefielde (I already provided links on this page) for usage of questionable sources and for his approach that ignore important nuances
• Rummel was criticised by Nathan (I already provided links on this page) for poor sources for China
• Rummel was criticised by Karlssen (the work is cited in the article) for inflation of figures and for ideological bias, which makes him a bad source
• Rummel's "democratic peace" theory was criticised by Mann (p.22 of his book)
• Rummel uses very old sources that are not considered as serious sources by all modern experts in Soviet Russia (see the analysis on this page)
• Rummel uses a very ridiculous procedure for calculation GULAG "democide" (see Rummel himself): he takes absolutely unreasonable data on GULAG population (which are currently considered as a nonsense) and calculated the number of deaths based on his own assumptions about the prisoners mortality rate (absolutely amateurish approach, which is fare less reliable than detailed and nuanced estimates made by modern authors)
• Rummel's figures are ignored by experts in Soviet Russia, and his works are ignored too (see my analysis).
• Rummel was concluded to be unreliable for figures twice at RSN.

Now please answer, why Rummel is still in this article?--Paul Siebert (talk) 01:09, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

As Nug rightfully pointed out. Siebert's Special Analysis could be used to say any author is 'undue'. How about this, if you are so confident in your patented analysis, post it as an online blog and then we can take your blog to RSN. If it shown as reliable I will personally apologise to you. Furthermore you have twice been asked to rectify an assumption of bad faith and it is noted you have not done so Vanteloop (talk) 01:21, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

You may apologise right now. This author in this article said that I, Misplaced Pages user Paul Siebert use a good approach for identification of reliable sources. He says:

"It is Paul Siebert, champion of the more traditional information routine, who digs deeper into the sources than anyone else."

(To better understand a context, keep in mind that Luyt consider "traditional information routine" as something good.) Since 2013, my approach became even more advanced.

Actually that is not an argument. My approach is good simply because you guys haven't proposed anything. No alternative approaches, no fresh sources, no reasonable criticism - nothing. Are you going to collaborate? Paul Siebert (talk) 01:41, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Brilliant! I assume that means you are taking up my suggestion. Be sure to include that paper in your blog so we can discuss it at RSN. I'm sure such an even more advanced pioneer of historical analysis will have no trouble getting consensus as reliable. I await your blog post. While you write, it may be worth considering that if the wheels fall off your entire system when one users asks for evidence it may not go very far Vanteloop (talk) 01:48, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

It looks like an attempt to derail a serious discussion. Please, stop. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:54, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, champion of the more traditional information routine, Let me remind you of my first comment which started your digressions and which you have still not answered. That may be a valid and true criticism. However I think the best way to proceed would be to find reliable sources that espouse that criticism and we can evaluate them. As it stands this is OR that we cannot put in the article. In fact you are the one who derailed the discussion because you were unable to answer this simple constructive criticism. Vanteloop (talk) 01:58, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

My post that I made on 01:09, 24 December 2021 (UTC) was a detailed answer to your question. My editor automatically added it to a wrong place. Read it and give me reasonable comments. Paul Siebert (talk) 02:02, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Nug, do you understand that what you quoted proves that the topic should be B? Genocide scholars are good sources for B, not for A, for which they must rely on country experts. Country scholars are the best sources for A, so the only way to have a NPOV C article is to rely on country experts for A (e.g. summarizing and describing the mass killing events, rather than treating them as death toll events) and genocide scholars for B. Davide King (talk) 21:55, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Davide King: No it doesn't. Please don't interrupt discussions if you have nothing relevant to add. --Nug (talk) 22:28, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: Actually, DK is partially right, and you are somewhat rude. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:14, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Davide King: Some genocide scholars may be good sources for "A", and some country experts may be good sources for "A". A relative contribution of teh former and the latter can be determined based on source analysis. However, the only user who proposed any approach was I and Levivich. Nug's criticism focuses on petty nuances, and we cannot move forward. Are you guys going to work together? Can you propose your own ideas how to solve the problem?Paul Siebert (talk) 00:46, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Paul Siebert, I do not necessarily disagree but that is the point — they have continually refused to do that, and if they truly think your approach is flawed, to semi-quote Valentoop, "get published in an academic journal"; as things stand, an academic journal positively reviewed your approach, which does not mean you are always right, but we clearly need better criticism than that. In regards to this, if one does not see a difference between lower than 10 million (low) and 20 million (high), and 28 million (low) and 127 million (high), I do not know what to tell them.

But perhaps they outlined the problem there — they unwittingly confirmed that country experts are majority sources and genocide scholars are the minority because the former are relied on by the latter. If the reverse was true, and they too were a majority, surely genocide scholars would be widely cited in the context of Communism? And yes, NPOV remains the major issue (again, I ask Nug that they stop single outing me in regards to OR/SYNTH when I am clearly not the only one to have brought it up and the AfD's closure gave it enough weight, along with NPOV issue, to not be able to result in consensus for 'Keep' despite the obvious numerical advantages, which makes it an even bigger result because our arguments were able to hold enough weight to not warrant an unambiguous 'Keep'), so can you tell us how we can solve this when your comment shows that country experts represent the majority views and genocide scholars are the minority? Davide King (talk) 19:39, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

And before I get strawmanned ("If the reverse was true, and they too were a majority, surely genocide scholars would be widely cited in the context of Communism?"), while I would not find it absurd if a country expert cited Harff of a genocide scholar (just because the latter write in a global context, it does not mean country experts cannot find useful insight from particular events and countries), what I am referring to is the lack of references to Harff, Rummel, Valentino et al. in works about Communism as a whole (e.g. The Cambridge History of Communism and Oxford Handbook of Communism). They discuss sport, religion, and link with violence and terror (B) but not this topic (A or C). Michael David-Fox actually contributed to The Cambridge History of Communism, so he is a mainstream figure and his criticism of Malia cannot be dismissed as "revisionist." Davide King (talk) 19:55, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

A general discussion

This is precisely what we need to write a NPOV article without OR/SYNTH; sources need to be connected and cross-referenced, and we should use those who do, and not those who operate in a vacuum like Harff and Rummel, even though I personally respect them both and appreciate their scholarly work. The problem is that none of those sources (country specialists) appear to write within the context of this article, so I think TFD is right that we cannot use them,1 which is why I had to rely on Ghodsee and is absurd to consider her undue as things stand. But the problem is not Ghodsee, the problem is that mainstream scholarly sources ignore the sources who write within that context, and genocide scholars are distorted to falsely imply they support Courtois, Malia, and Rummel's thesis, which is the really notable topic but currently fails NPOV and OR/SYNTH because we got the structure totally wrong. As The Four Deuces asked: "Is this 'common criticism' the consensus view in the literature, is it a left-wing view or is it the view of communist apologists?" It is, in fact, the consensus or mainstream view (e.g. scholarly reviews of The Black Book of Communism).2

Notes

1. Again, here comes the contradiction. To solve NPOV issues, we must rely on country experts and mainstream, majority views of each mass killing events (e.g. structure A — using Ó Gráda and Wheatcroft rather than Conquest and Dikötter), and on genocide scholars for the theories (e.g. structure B — some genocide scholars hold more weight than other); however, scholarly sources about A write within the context of each country, scholarly sources B write within the context of global Communism (though majority of them limit themselves to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot). By merging the two, we are committing OR/SYNTH, falsely implying they rely on, and support from, each other.

2. The problem is that there is no literature for what we currently do (as noted by Aquillion, "such an amalgamation (as we have currently) effectively uses the list from A as synthesis to support the arguments presented in B; it's an inherently non-neutral article", which is also what TFD and Siebert have been saying for years, e.g. this article tries to prove Courtois', Malia's, and Rummel's thesis, hence Ghodsee appears as criticism, when it is simply a mainstream view (in regards to body-counting, especially Communism) but there are no better sources because they ignore the topic as currently structure. As noted by Siebert, this article does not even present a NPOV summary of the mass killing events according to majority scholarly sources and specialists, it treats them as death toll events.3

3. Rather than trying to explain the events when we discuss them, what happened, why (which does not necessarily imply communism), and what is to be learned from it, we put death tolls. This is why I think TFD suggested to name it Victims of Communism because that is what we do; we do not summarize the events, we treat them as death toll events/communism as the main cause, and since we put an overemphasis on ideology and generalize and oversimplify too much (this is not surprising considering the level of sources currently used, all representing minority views), we are essentially following the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation's narrative as mainstream and majority view, rather than disputed (e.g. on scientific and methodological grounds, not that many people were indeed victims of the system, which is not disputed or denied) and controversial (e.g. "Advocating the cause of the victims of Communism" in The Criminalisation of Communism in the European Political Space after the Cold War).

Davide King (talk) 22:44, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

If it was renamed "Victims of Communism," then we could concentrate more on Rummel because he was a member of the National Advisory Council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, along with Robert Conquest, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, Richard Pipes and others. Rummel was possibly the first to come up with the the over 100 million victims estimate in his 1993 unpublished essay "HOW MANY DID COMMUNIST REGIMES MURDER?" The Black Book was not published until 1997. And then there would be no need to cite authors who don't connect mass killings to Communism. TFD (talk) 23:31, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

The "Victims of Communism" article will become a loose collection of facts or events that were described as "victims of Communism" by one reliable source. That article will be an NPOV nightmare. And we don't need to concentrate on Rummel, for he and his democide already have their own articles.

Actually, I propose to stay focused. This section must answer the question: "What should we do with Rummel as a source?". --Paul Siebert (talk) 00:02, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

In regards to "a loose collection of facts or events that were described as 'victims of Communism' by one reliable source", that would be a clear violation of both our policies and guidelines, and the structure, since TFD and I advocate such renaming only for B, which would not entail summarizing or describing the events, so I am not too worried about that. We may distinguish between the popular press views (e.g. Courtois, Malia, and Rummel's thesis popular there — Communism as main cause) and the scholarly views (e.g. Valentino and other scholars who discuss Communism and mass killings as correlations and theories, not as events, which are more nuanced — it is more complicated than simply blaming communism, or communism as a whole rather than authoritarianism or one particular current). In regards to Rummel, he is due only for B but we should cite secondary coverage of him. Davide King (talk) 01:13, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

No, because Misplaced Pages is not a dictionary, it is an encylcopedia. Whereas dicitonaries are about words and their various meanings, dictionary entries are about topics. While words can have different meanings, topics can share the same name. For example, the article "social liberalism" is about the version of liberalism that emphasizes the welfare state. In the United States, people use the term to refer to cultural liberalism, which has its own article. If you define the topic, then the article will stay on focus. We don't have it to call it "the version of liberalism that emphasizes the welfare state." In any case, the current approach hasn't worked despite over a decade of discussion and never will. TFD (talk) 03:46, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• I think you guys get it wrong. There is actually a consensus of mainstream academic sources (many of which you just cited above) that all these deaths (in Gulag, during the Holodomor, Red Terror, Cultural revolution, etc.) were a result of the existing political systems. This is something articulated in the Black Book of Communism and in a lot of other books and articles by mainstream researches in this field. Are you saying these deaths were NOT a results of the communist political system? Which sources make such claim? Yes, perhaps one can find a bunch of revisionist historians like Zhukov, Grover Furr, Arch Getty etc., but they would be in minority here. Do not push WP:GEVAL. My very best wishes (talk) 02:40, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

If this consensus is so strong then why is the closed circle of the BBoC (and other works by the same authors) and Rummel all anyone can point too? If this consensus was as strong as you claim it is then we wouldn't be here. If everyone agrees on this, then go ahead and prove it. BSMRD (talk) 02:45, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

If you look at the thread above, it includes maybe 20 historians (cited on the page), all of which support this mainstream position. There are many many more. Almost all sources currently cited on this page support such position. Including even former top communist party officials, such as Alexander Yakovlev. My very best wishes (talk) 02:54, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

No, they don't. That is just a list of authors who have mentioned "soviet mass deaths". You can't just say "this is the mainstream position" and not back it up. That mass death happened under (some!) Communist regimes is not questioned by anybody, but that it was somehow the "fault" of Communism, or that Communism is somehow innately to blame is very much not an undisputed mainstream position. That almost every author cited on this page supports the assertion that "Communism" is responsible for crimes commited under leadders who believed in it is not supported by what they have actually written. Indeed, a minority of the suthors cited on this page are even used to support that claim, being cited for completely unrelated statements. Several authors have been misquoted, and others have been given vastly more credence than they recive in scholarly literature. Frankly, the fact that we are still pretending that Courtois et al. are some respected scholars of Communism or that the travesty that is the BBoC should be used for anything other than ridiculing it's authors is just tiresome at this point. BSMRD (talk) 03:07, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• Did you actually read their books? No, most of them do make such connection more or less directly. For example, Yakovlev do makes such connection explicitly. So is Snyder. But it is enough to look at citations currently provided on this page. I should say this page is informative, and in a better shape than a lot of other pages in WP. My very best wishes (talk) 03:21, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Did you really just compare Getty to Furr and Zhukov? You appear to not understand "revisionism" as a paradigm in the context of Soviet and Communist studies (Getty), and historical revisionism (Zhukov), and Furr who is not a historian. I think you are the one who is pushing GEVAL. If you actually read The Black Book of Communism you would know that Werth draw a link between Stalin and Lenin through Nechayev (who was criticized by Marx as "barracks communism"); it is really mainly Courtois, Malia, Rummel, and a few authors who go back to Marx himself; majority of country specialists focus on societal context (e.g. most Communist regimes arising in countries with no long-lasting democratic traditions, civil rights, or private enterprise, etc.). I also have to agree to what BSMRD wrote here. Davide King (talk) 03:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, I did read the book. Yes, Nechayev is a quite important and symbolic figure (that's why I edited page about him). But The Black Book of Communism is not anything outstanding. It is based entirely on a lot of other sources (as typical for many books by academics), and does not really contradict anything I read in other books, like the book by Yakovlev, for example. My very best wishes (talk) 03:45, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Ignoring comments about Poland, here Newimpartial (I do not know whether I should ping them or not) gave a good summary of recent scholarship on The Black Book of Communism, which has since been supersed by the Oxford Handbook History of Communism and the Cambridge History of Communism as more accurate and nuanced references.1 In addition, I understand the "political system" to not necessarily refer to communism (just like there is a difference between an ideology justifying and causing something — many Communist leaders indeed justified their policies ideologically but whether Marx or communist ideology actually justified that is disputed) because scholars refer to authoritarianism or totalitarianism (e.g. Rosefielde's "immature authoritarian Marxism") rather than communism itself or as a whole. If this is what you mean by "political system", I do not disagree with you in this regard and I certainly do not condone the awful and tragic stuff they caused.

The problem is that this is not really notable, what is notable is communism as main cause (Courtois', Malia's, and Rummel's thesis) but whether this is presented as a mainstream view, it is a controversial, disputed, and minority view in academia but very popular among the non-academic press. To quote Neumayer 2018, "the Black Book of Communism contributed to legitimising the equivalence of Nazi and Communist crimes. The book figures prominently in the 'spaces of the anti-communist cause' comparably structured in the former satellite countries, which are a major source of the discourse criminalising the Socialist period."

Notes

1.

• Cowe, Jennifer (October 2014). "The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism". Reviews in History (1664). Retrieved 23 December 2021. In his introductory essay, S. A. Smith acknowledges the basic contradiction within the conditions needed to propagate Communism, as outlined by Marx, and the reality of those states which actually adopted it practically. With certain notable exceptions, he shows that Communism often took root either as a direct result of war/colonial insurrection and/or within countries with authoritarian systems already in place 'changes of borders, the devastation caused by war, genocide and forced migration as a consequence of the imperial politics' that beleaguered Eastern Europe and that 'played an essential role in the establishment of communist regimes' (p. 204). Thus the basic premise is that Communism took root in countries which were unprepared economically and as a result, the implementation of it at a state level was flawed from the beginning.
• Burds, Jeffrey (April 2019). "The Cambridge History of Communism (Review)". The American Historical Review. 124 (2). Oxford University Press: 595–599. doi:10.1093/ahr/rhz214. Unlike the cardboard cutouts of Communist leadership presented in ideologically charged studies like The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (1997), these essays are both nuanced and balanced, presenting Lenin and Stalin as human leaders driven as much by realpolitik and personal histories and events as by Communist ideology.

The quoted part is, in fact, what I believe TFD, Siebert, and I have been saying this whole time and what I just pointed out above, and that this article, on which your thoughts I can respect but are clearly not reflected by DRN and AfD's conclusions, is deeply lacking. Davide King (talk) 04:25, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

What you cite are valid sources. They can be used if they say anything about "Mass killings under communist regimes" (I am not sure). Yes, this is really a good question to what degree Lenin and Stalin were driven by the communist ideology. I do not think any serious authors (including authors of "Black Book") ever claimed that Stalin was driven exclusively by the communist ideology; some say that he was not driven by the ideology at all. But this is not the point. What made these crimes possible was not just the ideology (although it did play a role), but the entire political system in the countries under discussion. The "communist regimes" is simply an established terminology, although as always in humanities, one can easily criticize terminology as poor. My very best wishes (talk) 06:19, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Still, the source would have to say that. In the Vietnam War for example, both sides killed civilians. Did North Vietnam kill civilians because the entire political system made this possible or because in any conflict of this nature, both sides kill civilians? TFD (talk) 06:24, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

According to my understanding of this subject, the answer is "yes", i.e. the war and people being killed was a product of political systems in all countries involved in this conflict, politically and militarily. One can not blame just the war. But I am not an expert. My very best wishes (talk) 15:31, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• TFD&Davide King! That is why I proposed to move the discussion of sources to WP:MKUCRSA. On this page, it immediately becomes so messy that it is not possible to follow. Please, either focus on the analysis of sources or use this section for a general discussion.--Paul Siebert (talk) 15:41, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
  • It's unclear what aspect of Rummel you consider undue? Rummel numbers or Rummel/Horowitz? The source analysis seems to be looking at the former, and general discussion focused on the latter. For the discussion in this section, why not proceed from literature reviews such as this

    Other more recent studies identify the communist state or regime as perhaps the most structurally predisposed toward genocide and mass killing, owing either to the magnitude, speed, and scope of the revolutionary goals (Valentino 2004) or to perceived factionalism and dissent that tend to be framed as categorical betrayals of an organic concept of the nation (Mann 2005).

    fiveby(zero) 19:03, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
    • I think the issue is that Siebert see all options as neutral and in respect of our policies, and on this we disagree, but I think we agree that Rummel is undue if we focus on the events, on which we must rely on country experts and specialists. For me, and I think them too, Rummel is acceptable for B but not for A. For B, I prefer using secondary coverage of him (e.g. the source you cited, which seems to be perfectly fine for B) rather than the primary work of Rummel himself, and this for other authors too; what we need to rely on is precisely such reviews of the literature to establish WEIGHT and write a NPOV article about it rather than cherry pick from their own primary works. To conclude, my main issue with Rummel is his estimates (A) and treating his theories (B) as universal and uncontroversial, or even as proof in support of C, which is how Rummel is currently used, rather than notable but not universally accepted or without criticism. Davide King (talk) 19:56, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

    Rummel is clearly undue for figures. In that sense, he (and all old sources) has just a historical value, and they should be combined together and moved to a footnote. With regard to the rest, one has to keep in mind the following:

• The core of Rummel's approach is the search for correlation (number of killed vs regime traits). If his figures are wrong (and for the USSR they are dramatically wrong), that directly affects eigenvaluses and eigenverstors that he obtains. Therefore, his conclusions should be treated accordingly.

Wayman&Tago state Rummel's database is a good framework for studying mass killings during the 1900-1987 period. --Nug (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• Rummel did not discover "democide", he invented it. He did not conclude that his results lead to a discovery of some new phenomenon, he just said: "Look, many states kill their people. I call that "democide"". He defined a new term that combines some events in one new group. This grouping is not accepted by majority of authors. Thus, Harff (another genocide scholar) does not include majority of "democide deaths" into her database: according to her, only four out of 18 Communist states were genopoliticidal. Therefore, Rummel is undue for "mass killings", because his "democide" is not what most experts see as "mass killings"

Wayman&Tago state that Harff's database (politicide + genocide) is a subset of Rummel's database (politicide + genocide + mass murder) and Rummel's 13 out of the 18 Communist states was equally valid given the broader superset that Rummel's database represents. You have wrongly equated "mass killings" with (politicide + genocide), but in fact it has a broader definition. --Nug (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• As Rosefielde notes, Rummel ignores regime evolution, and he implicitly considers Communist regimes as equally totalitarian from the very beginning to very end. As a result, his approach totally overlooks the fact that most Communist regimes that were killing their people did that only during a very short parts of their history. The same was noted by Wayman&Tago. That also make Rummel's theorising undue.

Where did Wayman&Tago say this. I fail to see how regime evolution is relevant here. --Nug (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• Finally, Rummel's conclusions were rejected by Valentinio, and, what is more important, by such a prominent sociologist as Michael Mann. That, again, makes Rummel outdated and UNDUE. Paul Siebert (talk) 20:05, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Where does Valentino or Mann explicitly reject Rummel's conclusions? --Nug (talk) 22:12, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Mann. "The Dark Side of Democracy", p.22. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:28, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: I'll answer to your other questions after you move them from my post, otherwise it will be a mess. In future, please refrain from typing inside my posts. Thanks. Paul Siebert (talk) 00:30, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I don't think it is fair to say that Rummel's conclusions were rejected by Valentinio:

Rummel and others have marshaled strong evidence to demonstrate that democratic forms of government are associated with lower levels of mass killing and human rights abuses than other governmental systems, especially totalitarian and communist regimes. The fact that democracies engage in less mass killing of their own citizens than other forms of government is one of the most carefully documented findings of the theoretical literature on mass killing. Nevertheless, two problems limit the utility of this insight.

(p. 27) and citing

• Harff, Barbara (2003). "No Lessons Learned from the Holocaust? Assessing Risks of Genocide and Political Mass Murder since 1955". The American Political Science Review.
• Poe, Steven C.; C. Neal Tate (1994). "Repression of Human Rights to Personal Integrity in the 1980s: A Global Analysis". The American Political Science Review.
• Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide. pp. 92–3.

One major idea to take from that literature review i pointed to is just how complex and difficult genocide studies are, and the perils of WP:OR by editors in this area. fiveby(zero) 11:45, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

You are correct, it is possible but we have to be extra careful in assessing claims by editors and ensuring OR does not make its way to the article from the talk page. Vanteloop (talk) 12:05, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Also, while Mann is certainly not convinced by the democratic peace theory, outright rejection of Rummel is not correct:

Like scholars of ethnic cleansing, most observers of leftist atrocities have adhered to a statist view of the perpetrators: mass killings were the top-down work of a dictator or political elite or of totalitarian regimes (e.g., Conquest, 1990; Courtois et al., 1999; Locard, 1996: 131; Rummel, 1992). They emphasize the coherence, premeditation, and planning of the killing. Indeed, these were highly statist regimes, not remotely democratic. They had abandoned their original minimalist view of the state to embrace a decidedly statist (and militarist) view of social transformation, dictatorial top-down planning backed by military-police repression...Yet the process by which this eventuated was complex...

(pp. 320-1) fiveby(zero) 12:35, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Fiveby: It was a pleasure to read your detailed responce. Yes, I am pretty familiar with all these sources, and I agree that it was some exaggeration to claim these author totally reject Rummel. However, you must keep in mind a context. I wrote that during the discussion of a criticism of Rummel, who is currently one of the core sources this article is based upon: It is easy to see that the article's structure is organised in such a way that it implies that Rummel's views are mainstream, and other authors fit into this scheme. In that situation, some exaggeration during a talk page discussion was completely justified.

I fully agree that Rummel cannot be totally dismissed, simply because it is correct that some totalitarian regimes were murderous. However, as your quotes correctly say, his theory has a limited applicability, and we must establish these limits: it is definitely a minority view, but we must agree about the amount of space that we can devote to it in this article, and about a proper context.

• I concluded that Valentino disagrees with Rummel, because that is how secondary sources describe his views (you must agree that Valentino's book is a primary source for his own views). Wayman&Tago say that Valentino "disagrees" with "Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder", and "Valentino argues that regime type does not matter". These authors do not use the word "reject", but they use the word "disagree", but the difference is not that dramatic. The same point makes Strauss (World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Apr., 2007), pp. 476-501). Therefore, although "reject" was incorrect, to say "disagree" would be absolutely correct.
• WRT Mann, he says that Rummel is "tautologically correct" (P.22), for any regime that kills its people cannot be considered as truly democratic. However, he points an many, many exceptions that undermine a value of the "democratic peace theory" as a whole. And he point at the fact that many totalitarian regimes were more efficient in stopping ethnic cleansing than democratic ones.

The quote from Mann was taken from the beginning of his chapter about Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. In this quote, he summarises the views of others, and his own conclusion is different. His own analysis of Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes leads him to a conclusion (p.350 - ) that "leftist" mass killings share significant common features with democratic (etnonationalist) mass killings, and, whereas the latter were a results of perversion of democracy, the former were a result of perversion of socialism. And he demonstrates that many mass killings in Communist states were not "top-down", but "bottom-up" (i.e. they had a broad popular support, i.e. were democratic).

In general, you must agree that the theories of those authors are more in agreement with what we see: many democracies at the early stage of their development committed mass murders and mass killings, and the same can be said about immature Communist societies. But, as we all know, both mature democratic and mature Communist societies commit much less mass killings, in a full agreement with Mann.--Paul Siebert (talk) 16:28, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

And, if you want me to respond to your next post, please, ping me (the talk page is becoming too convoluted) Paul Siebert (talk) 17:00, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

In regard to Valentino, while Wayman&Tago says "Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino argues that regime the does not matter", further on they also say "A complication is his work is that one of Valentino's three main categories of killing is 'communist' mass killing, so he brings in regime type, after all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than would have expected at the outset of the book". So Wayman&Tago are essentially arguing that Valentino's disagreement with Rummel is weakened by Valentino adopting the category of 'communist' mass killing. Therefore you can not claim Valentino rejects Rummel's regime classification because Valentino actually uses it in his study despite his conclusions. The main conclusion from Wayman&Tago was to confirm that "autocratic regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killings generically, but not so strongly inclined toward gene-politicide.". In other words, while communist regimes cannot be considered genocidal, they certainly had a greater tendency towards indiscriminate mass killings. --Nug (talk) 10:57, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

• This is a controversial and ideologically tense subject area. Basically, almost everyone in this field criticized almost everyone. Merely the fact that a scholar X was criticized (in certain aspects) by scholars A and B does not disqualify his work as RS per WP:RS. Just provide the entire range of views per WP:NPOV please. My very best wishes (talk) 23:34, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

This would be the most constructive thing to do

This has gone on for a while, so let me say what would be the best course of action. Since the information therein this article exists elsewhere, which is Criticism of Communist party rule, I think we can safely remove "Estimates", "Proposed causes" and "Debates over famines" which are all equally contentious in this article here specifically as they constitute opinion pieces whereas Mass killings under Communist regimes is supposed to be focused on facts.

Picking A, B or C will not fix WP:TOOBIG, which is a crystal clear cut violation at that which was raised by nobody, except me; WP:SYNTH; and last, but possibly not least WP:UNDUE. This is not about the quality of the sources themselves, this is about the presentation. The issues that I have noted previously will never be fixed if we continue to try to repair the article using any previously mentioned methodology, whether it would be Paul's source analysis, replacing some paragraphs with anything else or adding counter points for the sake of balance. Analogically, this would be the equivalent of tearing out some food from a dish because it tastes odd and then give it a different aroma, this is not how this should be dealt with because at the end of the day it will still taste weird. In that same analogy, Mass killings under Communist regimes would be a dessert, a chocolate cake more precisely and Criticism of Communist party rule would be a veggie salad with some beef on the side - everyone here thinks the chocolate cake does not taste good, therefore, they attempt to add a different kind of pepper into the dessert in the vain attempt to make it taste differently, maybe better, but it will not because it is a chocolate cake for crying out loud; that pepper would better serve its purpose over the veggie salad and the beef. And, as it did turn out, the reason for the chocolate cake's odd taste was due to someone that had previously added lemon slices into the recipe. Therefore, the best course of action would be to remove the lemon slices to get the best possible chocolate cake available.

In itself, it is surprising to see so many people complain about POVFORK when there is already a noncontroversial opinion-focused FORK of this very article: Criticism of Communist party rule which I encourage everyone to improve instead of focusing on this article here and its misused sources. Every single one of them should be purged from MKUCR with no exception. As for each section that is not contentious and does deserve to stay there, they should be expanded with reliable tertiary sources focused on data gathering rather than gossip from the likes of Rummel, and every other scholar, journalist and historian, to give proper context to each of the countries' mass killings. More facts, less hear-say I say!

This is the correct solution, and I would be bummed if this is not the route taken to clean up this article proper. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 21:30, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Do you realise that "Terminology", "Estimates" and "Causes" are the tree section that are the core of this article, and that are the main NPOV problem? If we remove these sections and slightly rewrite the rest, we will get a summary style ("option A").

Of course,, that does not mean I object. I support it, of course.--Paul Siebert (talk) 21:43, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Which is especially because they are the main NPOV problem that this article draws so much ire. If your computer's processor fails, you change it as soon as you can. This is clearly time for this article's main points to be entirely re-written. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 21:58, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes. But deleting these section is almost tantamount to the attempt to delete the whole article (which caused the larges AfD in Misplaced Pages history). I am saying that because deletion will cause a storm of totally emotional and absolutely irrational opposition. But we can try. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:08, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree, the problem is that there is no tertiary source about the topic (the closest one is Karlsson & Schoenhals 2008, who are dismissive towards Courtois and Rummel, and do not mention Valentino, yet it has been disputed due to being old and not cited), there are no academic books fully dedicated to Communist regimes in general (The Black Book of Communism is controversial, ideologically, charged, and chapters do not necessarily focus on mass killings, and Red Holocaust is mainly about excess deaths), only chapters limited to Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes (even when they say 'Communist regimes' or 'Communist mass killings', contrary to what we do here by broading the scope, the scope is limited to universally recognized mass killing events under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, three very specific Communist leaders), three Communist leaders who are universally recognized to have engaged in mass killings (the Red Terror can be considered another mass killing event but is placed within a totally different context). The global Communist death toll is a minority view that is ignored or criticized by majority of scholars; there are not much tertiary sources about it but there are plenty about its narrative.

A more accurate and descriptive title would be Mass killings under Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Pol Pot; however, we already discuss each event individually and together in each country's history, what would such an article add without any theories or connection about them?1 If we actually had such tertiary sources, the article would have been fixed by now. B is the only topic that has such tertiary sources, and also the only topic where we can actually discuss more than those three Communist regimes (e.g. Tago & Wayman 2010's discussion of 18 Communist regimes and the link with mass killings). D may be a solution but B should be the goal.

Notes

1. Imagine this same article with removal of "Terminology", "Estimates", "Proposed causes", "Debate over famines", and reducing "Other states" to the opening paragraph and removing merge of excess death events with mass killings. It will solve many issues but what will remain that is not new? Davide King (talk) 22:18, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

• No, I disagree. This article is mostly focused on facts about the mass killings, but it also includes interpretations of these facts, which is only natural. In contrast, the Criticism of Communist party rule is a different and a wider subject, which is mostly about interpretations. My very best wishes (talk) 23:30, 23 December 2021 (UTC)
  • but it also includes interpretations of these facts Yes we know, that's what we call WP:SYNTH. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 00:41, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

It's only synth if a wiki editor does the interpretation. And other words for interpretation (by non-editors) can be "scholarly study" , "analysis" etc. North8000 (talk) 00:44, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

• "Criticism of Communist party rule" should probably be deleted per Misplaced Pages:Criticism. While that article is not a policy or guideline, it makes sense that an article about what is bad about something is inherently not neutral. The other inherent problem is that it assumes there is a commonality of various Communist party rules. And, as other editors have pointed out, mass killings were only one of a number of criticisms. TFD (talk) 01:45, 24 December 2021 (UTC)
  • I completely disagree. The article you are referring to literally says "Dedicated "Criticism of ..." articles are sometimes appropriate for organizations, businesses, philosophies, religions, or political outlooks, provided the sources justify it" and there are many sources that provide criticism of communist party rule. Since it is not an official policy or guideline, which you yourself admit to, it cannot be used as justification for deletion anyway. X-Editor (talk) 05:45, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

• Actually, yes. If the article's topic is "criticism", that implies a discussion of this criticism, not the subject of that criticism. That includes a criticism of that criticism, and a discussion of its place in the opinia spectrum. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:38, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

• Indeed, that is why I have also once proposed to turn those two articles into a general scholarly analysis of Communism, which is of course going to include what would be considered as criticism, except it would be of higher weight. If we can get a good article out of it, it may be the cornerstone to use for all relevant Communist-related articles and significantly improve them, as the article should give us good indication of what views are mainstream, majority, minority (significant), and fringe. Indeed, I am interested to actually find this out (apart from being interested in preventing mass killing, which means we should be accurate when we represent scholars, e.g. Valentino and leaders, and societal background and context, not a narrow focus with generalizations and oversimplifications about ideology and Marx, which is why I want to greatly improve this article) because if we can do it, we may avoid so many discussions and controversies about their weight in Communist-related articles. This would also be an article where discussion of Communism as a whole can be warranted (e.g. as is done by the Cambridge History of Communism and the Oxford Handbook of Communism) because it would also include criticism of generalizations and discussion about the grouping itself (e.g. communisms vs. Communism, and other more nuanced and middle views), and not presented as facts as we do here. Davide King (talk) 16:22, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Since communist states have pursued various policies in different countries at different times, most criticism will not have application to all of them. Hong Kong for example has different economic policies from Kampuchea. The various ideoligal opponents of communism - liberals, fascists, authoritarian conservatives and Trotskyists - all criticized Communist party rule for different reasons. Furthermore, Communist states criticized each other, particularly China and the Soviet Union. The article only works if one sees Communism as a monolithic system and there being only one valid ideology from which to criticize it. One example of that is Jewish Bolshevism.

Anyway, I do not think there are sources written about criticism of Communism, there are books about Communism that criticize it.

TFD (talk) 17:13, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Based on that logic, any page pertaining to a group of 'things' which have correlation with each other, but are also different in other ways, are not encyclopedic because they are treated as a monolithic entity. Fine by me, then any article focusing on Autism, gender and Schizophrenia, just to name a few, are not encyclopedic because they treat each respective subject as a monolith, whereas they each work on a spectrum. Communism works on a spectrum too, but all stem from Marxist theory with the added Totalitarianism of a crazy leader atop of it. That argument could also be used in regards to Capitalism because the Capitalism of China is not the same as the Capitalism of the US which is not the same as the Capitalism of the EU. MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 13:04, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Can a consensus be reached on this article, for anything?

Multiple discussions occurring at the same time, on this talkpage. I'd be surprised if there's consensus reached for anything. GoodDay (talk) 01:08, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I think that the RFC, and supporting it's result would provide a foundation/ starting point. North8000 (talk) 01:43, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, this is the purpose of the RfC. It invites the opinions of uninvolved editors and will be closed with a decision. Vanteloop (talk) 01:50, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I agree. An article called Colonial genocide has potential because if I search the term in Google books, I immediately find books such as Colonialism and Genocide, Debates on Colonial Genocide in the 21st Century, Entanglements of Modernity, Colonialism and Genocide and Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies. When I search "mass killings under communist regimes," I get nothing. The only hits found in reliable sources are articles about this article. The only other source that uses this term is the neo-Nazi wiki Metapedia

That's why there are neutrality and no OR policies. Because if we leave it to editors to create their own topics, there can never be consensus.

TFD (talk) 02:41, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I tend to agree. I have realised that the whole "Estimates" section contains figure that are either more that 30 years old or were taken from unknown sources. Why only those sources are there? Because there is NO fresh sources on that topic. If newer sources from peer-reviewed publications were available, they would already be added. That is a good argument in support of the thesis that the whole topic is a fringe/minority view.

The only exception is two sources authored by country experts. Why those experts were selected? Because, unlike other country experts, they wrote about more than one communist country (although still not about "Communism in general"). In reality, we have tons of sources about human life loss in each separate case, but they are not about "Communism in general", and are not suitable for "Estimates" in this format.

Similarly, we have tons of sources about causes of each separate mass killing/mass mortality event, but the "Causes" section contains just few relevant sources, and others are directly misinterpreted or falsified (thus, one source that was published in 1980s ostensibly says about Goldhagen, who published his first book in 1990s. Why these falsifications? Because the sources that directly link Communist ideology with mass killings are virtually absent.

And so on, and so forth.

In connection to that, if propose the following. Lets collect good quality recent sources about specific events at WP:MKUCRSA and summarise what they say. That will be a good demonstration of a relative weight of each POV. Paul Siebert (talk) 03:11, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

When in doubt, WP:NUKEITTOHELL. ––FormalDude 03:43, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, but that is open to gaming by civil POV pushers, by always moving the goal posts, constantly digressing off into multiple tangents, walls of text, keep repeating the same points even though they have been refuted multiple times in the past, etc, etc, so that it appears that consensus can never be achieved. --Nug (talk) 04:03, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Please stop personal attacks against neutral editors. It is projection: those are the tactics you and your colleagues used in Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Eastern European mailing list. TFD (talk) 04:15, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Actually, I have to agree. I find it very difficult to conduct a discussion with you Nug. Your arguments are frequently directed at petty details, you ignore major point of your opponent's argument, and after your argument is addressed you "disappear" and magically re-appear in a different talk page section with the same argument as if it had never been addressed. I am starting to get an impression that you are not interested in a productive dialogue, and your goal is by filibustering preserve the current terribly POV content of this article by any possible means. I would be happy if subsequent course of events demonstrated that I was wrong. In connection to that, please, provide rational and reasonable counter-arguments to my previous arguments, and, please, explain your own approach to source identification. We need to continue our source analysis. Paul Siebert (talk) 04:33, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I find WP:GASLIGHTING can also be an issue to contend with. I don't know Paul, you must be retired that you can devote so much time here, I actually have other commitments in real life, so if I "disappear" it usually means I'm either working or sleeping, eating, going to the cinema, etc. The page becomes so rapidly bloated in the mean time it is often difficult to find the thread. --Nug (talk) 04:46, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

That is fun. For more than 12 years you are building hypotheses on who I am, and what I am doing. No, I am not retired, and I am not planning to.

Nug, this is not an argument. If you have no time to answer, don't do that. However, it seems that you have no time to answer my questions, but you have enough time to conduct other discussions and/or raise the same arguments as if they have never been debunked. That doesn't look a fair game.

Actually, I proposed a very simple and transparent thing: let's develop common rule for selection and evaluation of sources. That is a totally fair game: we develop commonly acceptable rules, and then we analyse what the sources, which we found using these rules, tell. I gave some initial example of how this procedure may work, and what I got in responce? Some petty criticism, and a full rejection of this approach under a totally artificial pretext. And you made no attempt to make any counter-proposal.

Do you realise that we cannot move forward if we have no agreement on the procedure of source selection? Paul Siebert (talk) 04:59, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Do you mean the Policies and Guidelines related to reliable sources and due weight? We don’t have to re-invent the wheel here for a particular article—the Misplaced Pages community already has established guidance for this sort of thing. If you want to try to gain a community consensus to modify the reliable sources guideline or the NPOV policy, I don’t see why you couldn’t try to do so, but I do not think that his would be a good use of anybody’s time if the intended application is to a single article. — Mhawk10 (talk) 13:25, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Well, I demonstrated that some sources (e.g. Rummel) express minority or insignificant minority view and are outdated. Do you have any counter-arguments? Paul Siebert (talk) 15:28, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Nug, you are correct. I have mentioned to Paul Siebert multiple times that their behaviour requires a heavy dose of good faith to intepret as constructive. I have thrice (or more?) asked this user to read WP:SATISFY to correct their behaviour, because of their reasoning such as this If a user abstains from further participation in a discussion, that means they either accepted the arguments, or they lost interest to the discussion. When dismissing other users arguments out of hand and fillibustering in multiple sections causes good-faith editors to disengage with them , they think they have 'won'. This is evidenced by their behaviour removing entire sections of this article above explicit objections of 3+ users that were still ongoing. The user is clearly knowledgeable and committed on this subject, so I warmly hope they correct their behaviour and join us in trying to work constructively in a consensus building process. Vanteloop (talk) 11:37, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vanteloop: WP:SATISFY is just an essay, which have no official status. In contrast, WP:NPA is our policy, and it define personal attacks as accusations about personal behavior that lack evidence. You continue to comment on my behaviour, and your comments are just declarations. Please, stop it. If you continue, I may report you. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:23, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I noticed that you had a time to post this baseless accusation, but you had no time to respond to my detailed responces to your question.

• At 01:58, 24 December 2021 (UTC), you claimed that I am "the one who derailed the discussion because you were unable to answer this simple constructive criticism."
• At 02:02, 24 December 2021 (UTC I pointed your attention at the fact that my detailed answer was posted at 01:09, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I see no response to this my post, but, instead, you continue your baseless accusations. I expect you to to be very polite and very careful in your responces in future, otherwise I am going to consults with admins if this your behaviour constitutes a gaslighting and filibustering tactics. Paul Siebert (talk) 15:35, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Furthermore, to be clear your accusation my request for ciations was 'disruptive' and then refusal to strike constitutes a clear assumption of bad faith, I suggest you take this second opportunity to clarify otherwise This comment remains unanswered, and your accusation of bad faith still stands, which has a chilling effect on any constructive discussion here and I dont see how any editor can reasonably be expected to engage when merely asking for evidence is met with the instant accusation of bad faith. I suggest you be careful your reports do not boomerang as they have previously. I have posted two notices on your talk page about your behaviour, and you have been publicly chastised by a neutral moderator - and yet you continue, I'm sure the admins will take note of that. Vanteloop (talk) 16:08, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I have answered to that post, although I am not sure I completely understand it. And, yes, when some users presents a result of their source analysis, which was done in accordance with WP:NPOV, to accuse that of original research is a disruptive behaviour. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:47, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

You have now answered with 'I don't understand' to that post. I await your apology now I have explained, and then we can have a good faith discussion. Vanteloop (talk) 17:01, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

I already answered, and I owe no apology to you. Please, stop it. Paul Siebert (talk) 17:19, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

This was also not very kind either. We have strong opinions and disagreement, I get it, but c'mon ... And I actually agree with you (Nug) that using country experts for A and genocide scholars for B may be OR/SYNTH, like I believe TFD also noted, but you deny that the structure itself is not problematic at all (Siebert is totally correct on this), which is even worse considering that if the only way to have a NPOV article is to add further OR/SYNTH, it is neither Siebert's nor mine fault but your insistence on such flawed structure. Then acting as though the fault is ours, without making no self-criticism, for not having consensus, despite what the AfD and the DSN said, is totally disingenuous. Indeed FormalDude, if we can not get any consensus even after this RfC, that may be the only way. Contrary to one discredited argument of the AfD, no information is actually going to be lost, and at this point it is better to reduce it to a stub than have serious NPOV and OR/SYNTH violations, which may act as citogenesis, stand for another decade. Davide King (talk) 15:51, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Nug, aren't you a photographer? TFD (talk) 06:16, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

TFD, you ought to try searching for "democides within communist regimes" or "excess mortality under communist regimes" on Google scholars which I think is a more appropriate article title than "mass killings". MarioSuperstar77 (talk) 12:21, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

The only google search results for those terms is this talk page and the one for GULAG. TFD (talk) 14:46, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

We already have Democide for that (democide is Rummel's creation — Rummel is mainstream mainly for the democratic peace theory, not on Communism), and there are not sufficient scholarly sources about excess mortality under Communism as a whole (Courtois, Rummel, and others make no separation between excess deaths and mass killings, hence their much higher estimates and for Rummel also due to unreliability and methodology), only by separate countries (e.g. Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin). Just because the Soviet Union was a Communist state, it does not mean this justifies making an excess mortality article about Communism as a whole; it would be OR/SYNTH unless a majority of scholarly sources do it for us. Unless there are academic studies and books fully dedicated to Communism as a whole (e.g. not just Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot), and not mere chapters in works about genocide and mass killing in general, they should be discussed in this context; hence, we should expand Mass killing or have a separate article about mass killings without limiting it to Communism because that is what majority of scholarly sources do, otherwise we are just cherry picking stuff from such works about Communism, totally ignoring the context. Davide King (talk) 16:04, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

Through using the search term "communist genocide" on google scholar, I was able to find this book which tries to make a direct connection between communism and genocide in Romania. Maybe this book could be used to expand the currently existing section about romania in the article. X-Editor (talk) 02:15, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

That is a book written by a militantly anti-communist construction engineer (part of the old Romanian aristocracy most hardly hit communist party rule) who relies primarily on personal memories and discussion the author claims to have had, citing almost no scholarly reference. The term genocide is used extremely liberally and includes, in the author's view: capture of POW, war reparations, land reform, denazification, education reform, laicization of the state, urbanization, all forms of art during the period, local campaign to prevent the execution of the Rosenbergs, etc. In short, everything which hurt the privileged position of the old Romanian aristocracy is genocide for this engineer.Anonimu (talk) 09:27, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

For the record, I've seen many items posted, including posted as being facts which I don't agree with. Including ones that seem to go against/ negate / deprecate possible outcomes of the RFC. Lack of a response by me does not mean that I agree with them. It means that IMHO the next step here is to complete the RFC and support the result of the process, even if it against my opinion. IMO a starting point for any progress here will be to decide the scope of the article(s) which is what the RFC is doing. — Preceding unsigned comment added by North8000 (talk • contribs) 15:06, 24 December 2021 (UTC)North8000 (talk) 19:11, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

1.6% of editors responsible for more than 60% of text

Since the 22nd November, when the AfD for this page was opened, 123 unique editors have contributed to this talk page. 2 of these (Paul Siebert and Davide King) have contributed 62.4% of the text, and 52% of the edits to this talk page. _{at time of writing} In comparison,the 3rd largest contributor (Nug) has contributed less than 10% of the text to this page. We appreciate your contributions and insights but when such a small number of editors are dominating the discussion in such an active page it leads to diminishing returns for further discussion. While you may have some very valid points, they get lost due to the dominant behaviour and others are less likely to consider your viewpoints because of it. I humbly request these editors and any new editors arriving on this page allow discussions room to breathe to avoid any perception of accidentally impeding the process.

Let me emphasise, I am not asking these or other editors to stop participating here. I am simply asking them to reconsider that their manner of doing so, in the spirit of collaboration. I know I, and I'm sure a fair few other editors would greatly appreciate if you could commit to this. Kind Regards, Vanteloop (talk) 23:14, 24 December 2021 (UTC)

References

1. https://xtools.wmflabs.org/articleinfo/en.wikipedia.org/Talk:Mass%20killings%20under%20communist%20regimes/2021-11-22

Interesting. I shall sit back & watch. GoodDay (talk) 01:12, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

@Vanteloop: I'm just trying to point out the flaws in arguments of Paul Siebert and Davide King (who essentially just repeats and amplifies what Paul says anyway). Are you planning on expressing a position in the RFC? --Nug (talk) 11:08, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Can you please stop make such generalizations? "... who essentially just repeats and amplifies what Paul says anyway." This is not true — I agree with them on the article's long-standing issues but I would say my position is closer to TFD's, and I actually agree with you that we cannot use country experts as long as the article's structure is Communism in general but I agree with them that this structure is wrong. To remain on topic, while such statistics may be true and I apologize for taking so much space, and I indeed welcome many other users to participate, it is also highly misleading, for I made many edits to correct typos, indents, and fix missing signature, and Siebert's and mine posts have been the biggest because we have analyzed in-depth sources, scope, and topics.12 Davide King (talk) 17:09, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Synthesis?

Some people still make the claim that grouping communist countries together is OR/SYNTH, but Valentino has published such a grouping. If we already accept Valentino's definition of "mass kiliings" as 50,000 deaths over five years we should also accept his grouping. Below is a table from page 75 of his book:

Valentino describes the events where the mass killings occurred in the table, so how is it SYNTH to include summaries of those events like Red Terror and Great Leap Forward in the article? --Nug (talk) 11:53, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

As I said many times, the grouping is perfectly fine for B because if they theorise about the grouping, it is perfectly acceptable. The problem is discussing the events without connection. Majority of scholars do not make connections, or discuss them individually, or at best make a comparative analysis of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, not every other Communist regime, or Communism as whole or in general, as we currently do, and this is not just because they are country experts as you say; as can be seen in the scholarly criticism of Communism, Dallin, David-Fox, and others directly criticize such grouping and how the authors gave no explanation or connection. We need sources doing that for us, but they mostly limit to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, which is a scope I can accept; yet you want to give sections to all those other Communist regimes, when Valentino could not verify them (therefore, we can only write a very short paragraph about it, as we do at the introduction to "Other states"). Finally, Valentino is not an expert of Communism or about A — I support Valentino for what is his expertise (B). Since you complained about me, I suggest you that you further discuss this with Aquillion. I do not enjoy talking to walls and repeating stuff either. Also ping C.J. Griffin, The Four Deuces, ModernDayTrilobite, and Mx. Granger — discuss this with them. It is certainly not just me. Davide King (talk) 13:19, 25 December 2021 (UTC) Davide King (talk) 13:52, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

@Nug: This your post is one of the reason why this talk age discussion is so not and convoluted. I already explained, many times, that

• There is NO synthesis to group Communist regimes together. At least, because two authors, Rummel and Courtois, did that;
• There is a potentially huge problem with NPOV, because we have a strong reason to believe that the authors who group Communist regimes together and draw some general conclusions about a linkage between Communism and mass murder are minority of insignificant minority views.
• To answer this question, I proposed to develop a joint and neutral approach to source evaluation.
• I provided an example of application of that analysis and asked everybody to present their reasonable criticism and/or alternative approaches.

You responded with some petty critique, and then magically disappeared from the discussion (as you usually do when we start speaking seriously). After that, we re-appeared with your straw man arguments and proposed the thesis with which noone can disagree, but which is totally irrelevant to the major problem of this article.

I am sorry, but if you will not return to the discussion of the major issue, I will try to minimise my interaction with you. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:44, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I explained to you that your methodology of finding cites of global experts by country experts as a measure of due weight is flawed because global experts generally cite country experts, not the other way around; that some country expert does not cite a global expert means nothing. Can you then atleast devote some time to convincing David Kinge to stop using "OR/SYNTH", and use DUE instead. Surely he understands the difference and is not purposely trying to confuse the discussion. --Nug (talk) 18:57, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I do not accept your explanation because it is a logical fallacy. Consider this example Anatole Klyosov published a series of works on "DNA genealogy". In his works (you can easily find tghem by yourself, but I cannot provide the link, because it is in a Misplaced Pages blacklist), he is citing works of reputable experts in population genetics, but his own works are ignored by them (they are cited either by his colleagues or by non-experts). Does the fact that he cites true experts makes "DNA genealogy" a true scientific discipline? No, DNA genealogy is considered a pseudoscience. Therefore, your argument, which is equally applicable to Rummel and Klyosov, is not working: it cannot reveal real pseudoscientists, and, therefore, it does not prove that Rummel is not a fringe author. Disclaimer. I fully realise that the analogy with Klyosov is not a proof that Rummel is fringe. However, it proves that your criticism is superficial and fallacious.

I expect to see your serious criticism, otherwise I propose to use my approach to resolve UNDUE issues. I am glad that you agree that UNDUE is a main article's problem.

WRT SYNTH, I think you guys can develop a common vision of the situation if you discuss among you (in some subsection or at the DRN page). It seems there are some elements of synthesis in your interpretation of Valentino (and I think I will be able to explain you what I mean). In that sense, DK is, to some degree, right. However, you are right that Valentino groups Communist regimes together, and it is not a synthesis to claim that. In other words, the truth is somewhere in between your and DK's position, but (if you want to know my opinion) I need to dive deeper in your and DK's rationale to understand whose view is closer to the real picture. Paul Siebert (talk) 22:58, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I never denied that Valentino or others did the grouping, or at least that is not what I meant. But Valentino, and others, is used as a SYNTH to justify writing about Communism as a whole, when proven Communist mass killings include Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (I do not think we should consider other cases not yet verified, especially if we must lower the most used threshold to do so, and certainly they are undue to have separate sections), and you are right that the fact he considers Afghanistan to be counter-guerilla mass killing prove that this is not as easy as Nug make it appear to be. What I always said was that the grouping is controversial or disputed by mainstream scholars (Dallin, David-Fox, and others), therefore we cannot treat it as fact or monolithic, the latter of which is criticized even by serious works that do a Communist grouping (e.g. Cambridge and Oxford — interestingly enough, they do it for anything, including terror/violence links, but mass killings).

By doing the grouping and treating it essentially as fact and uncontroversial, we are giving undue and unjustified weight to Courtois and Rummel, who are the ones who discuss Communism as a whole (Chirot, Jones, Mann, and Valentino limit themselves to three, proven Communist leaders who engaged in mass killings, while Tago & Wayman 2010 discuss 18 Communist regimes, not any nominally Communist regime). Such OR/SYNTH issues were seriously considered in the closure and are clearly connected to NPOV issues because we are giving massively undue weight to those who do the grouping, and treating the topic as representing majority views rather than minority views, as it is in fact the case. Another thing to consider is that it is dispossessive mass killings, not Communist mass killings, that is a major category; the latter is a subtype of the former, and the fact Valentino has published nothing else about Communist mass killings (other than passing mentions but not sure about that too) means that we have been cherry picking and acting as though Communism is Valentino's main focus.

You may also find useful what I wrote here. Davide King (talk) 23:26, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

As I wrote here, and echoing AndyTheGrump, the fact that we are still discussing the same authors and sources after all those years should be telling. If A and C are such notable topics with the correct structure, surely there would be new scholarly sources coming out every few years or so? Yet, we all go back to Bellamy, Chirot, Jones, Mann, Rummel and Valentino, with only Rummel having a work fully devoted to Communism, while everyone else's is chapters about, and clearly focused on, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, three Communist leaders, not Communist regimes as a whole. Davide King (talk) 23:38, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

(edit conflict)

Also still acting as those OR/SYNTH claims are crazy or debunked, when if that was the case, the latest AfD would have resulted in 'Keep' rather than 'No consensus.' It literally said that "the Misplaced Pages editing community has been unable to come to a consensus as to whether "mass killings under communist regimes" is a suitable encyclopaedic topic", and took OR/SYNTH issues seriously enough. So please, stop acting as though this has been debunked or is no issue. Davide King (talk) 14:27, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Just to clarify, policy distinguishes between synthesis in reliable sources and synthesis by editors. We are of course allowed to report the synthesis made by experts. But that is governed by other considerations:

• Weight. You need to establish the weight that Valentino's interpretation has in the body of reliable sources on the topic.
• You can't say Valentino says these events are connected and then provide additional information that Valentino omits, per no synthesis.

Take for exmaple the theory that Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Southern Ontario and other regions constitute a nation called "The Foundry" with Detroit as its capital. (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981.) Your article has to explain why some social scientists believe this. You can't just accept the existance of this nation as a fact and flesh it out with information about the various cities and states making up the nation. If you do, you are not objectively reporting the theory, you are trying to persuade the reader that the nation exists.

You also cannot say that Valentino's theories are similar to Rummel's and synthesize the two into a general theory: you need a secondary source that does that.

TFD (talk) 14:24, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Valentino's theory is not similar to Rummel's simply because reliable secondary sources say they are not. That had already been exhaustively discussed, with references and quotes, on this talk page. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:46, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

In few words:

• Valentino discusses several states that belong to the group of Communist regimes, and he notes that some of them engaged in mass killings, whereas others weren't, and after a comparative analysis he concludes that regime type is not a good predictor of mass killing's onset.
• Rummel, using his lousy database and tautological terminology, concludes that these is a strong correlation between what he calls "democide" and totalitarianism/Communism.

Clearly, these are totally different theories. Paul Siebert (talk) 16:55, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Can you name a source that compares Valentino and Rummel? TFD (talk) 16:59, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

• "Disagreeing with Rummel's finding that authoritarian and totalitarian government explains mass murder, Valentino (2004) argues that regime type does not matter; to Valentino the crucial thing is the motive For mass killing (Valentino, 2004: 70)." {Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 47, No. 1 (january 2010), pp. 3-13}
• Strauss, World Politics, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Apr., 2007), p. 482 Paul Siebert (talk) 18:03, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the first source, Wayman&Tago also say "A complication is his work is that one of Valentino's three main categories of killing is 'communist' mass killing, so he brings in regime type, after all, and so ends up a bit closer to Rummel than would have expected at the outset of the book". So Wayman&Tago are essentially arguing that Valentino's disagreement with Rummel is weakened by Valentino adopting the category of 'communist' mass killing. Therefore while Valentino concludes that regime type "communist" is not a predictor of mass killings, Valentino actually uses mass killing type "communist" as part of his topology of mass killings. In other words, Valentino has identified a correlation between communist regimes and mass killings (as did Rummel) but differs from Rummel in asserting that this correlation does not imply causation, which is what I have been saying all along. The main conclusion from Wayman&Tago was to confirm that "autocratic regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killings generically, but not so strongly inclined toward gene-politicide.". In other words, while communist regimes cannot be considered genocidal, they certainly had a greater tendency towards indiscriminate mass killings. --Nug (talk) 18:34, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Regarding the second source, there is no direct comparison between Rummel and Valentino, Strauss is actually focuses on second generation genocide scholarship which includes Valentino, and places Rummel in context of first generation scholarship, in terms of defining a predictor of the onset of genocide. --Nug (talk) 22:00, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Yes, W&T say, that Valentino disagree with Rummel, but some aspects of his views are closer to Rummel's views that he initially declared. When I say that I disagree with you and after that I partially accept some of your points, does it mean I agreed or not?

WTR Strauss, he says:

"Rudolph Rummel claims "absolute power is the key factor" (p. 481)

According to Strauss, that is one of the core idea of "first generation genocide scholars" including Rummel. And Stauss says, quite clearly and unequivocally

"The second-generation scholarship also consistently reject arguments about a link between authoritarian regime type and genocide" (ibid.)

Clearly, since this statement was made in a context of the Rummel's mantra about absolute power, Strauss uses the term "genocide" in its colloquial meaning, which covers mass killings, democide etc.

Therefore, I absolutely cannot understand how could Nug overlook this clear and unequivocal statement. Paul Siebert (talk) 23:59, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

I just explained to you that Valentino, while seeing a correlation between mass killings and communist regimes, says that correlation does not equate to causation. You are saying the opposite, that because there is no causation then there is no correlation, but that doesn't follow. The path to resolution is for you to honestly admit that such a correlation does in fact exist. --Nug (talk) 01:13, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

"Correla..." is found only three times in his book. This scholar does not discuss correlation neither in this, nor in his other works. That is my last post on this topic until the RfC ends. You are more then welcome to continue the discussion of source selection procedure. Paul Siebert (talk) 01:28, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

I would expect something more substantial. A couple of lines in an article isn't very useful, especially when they give conflicting accounts, viz., did Valentino attribute the killings to Communism or didn't he. TFD (talk) 21:43, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Do you not comprehend the difference between correlation and causation? Given that Valentino devotes an entire chapter to "Communist mass killings" he clearly sees there is a correlation, otherwise why did he group mass killings under communist regimes into one chapter in the first place? Valentino's conclusion that the causation isn't attributed to "communism" directly: "I contend that mass killings occur when powerful groups come to believe it is the best available means to achieve certain radical goals...". Valentino argues that ideology can shape why leaders believe that genocide and mass killings is the right course of action. So he isn't attributing the killings to Communism, but to the leadership who see mass killings as the best way to achieve Communism. That's why we have Mass killings under communist regimes and not Mass killings under Communism, there is a distinction. --Nug (talk) 00:32, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Saying that because Valentino sees a correlation between mass killings and communism because he has a chapter about Communist mass killing is synthesis. Suppose there were an article "Literature under communist regimes." That does not mean the author saw a correlation between literature and communism, since non-communist states are just as likely to have literature as communist ones. TFD (talk) 01:43, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

No, if an author is writing a chapter titled "Communist Literature" he has correlated literature written by communists together, Nazi's are just as likely to produce literature but we wouldn't see any mention of "Mein Kampf" in such a chapter. --Nug (talk) 01:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

Maybe. But then an article about Commonwealth literature doesn't necessarily imply the author has correlated literature written by Commonwealth writers together. Commonwealth literature incidently is a frequent grouping, see for example The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. That's why Misplaced Pages has a policy against edtiro synthesis. TFD (talk) 02:22, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

What synthesis? The Journal of Commonwealth Literature says it is a leading source for "literature written and published within the Commonwealth", obviously it wouldn't include literature written and published outside the Commonwealth, would it? --Nug (talk) 03:46, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

You wrote, "Given that Valentino devotes an entire chapter to "Communist mass killings" he clearly sees there is a correlation, otherwise why did he group mass killings under communist regimes into one chapter in the first place?"

I mentioned that there is a publication called, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. There is no correlation between Commonwealth literature - different languages, cultures, genres, etc.

I agree with you that Valentino's title implies a correlation or even causation, but it does not explicitly say one exists. (That's why I have always objected to the title of this article.) But if you conclude that because he used that title he saw a correlation, you are engaging in classic synthesis.

Synthesis btw does not mean you are wrong. Experts whose works are used for articles use synthesis. The difference is that synthesis by editors is not permitted.

TFD (talk) 06:41, 27 December 2021 (UTC)

This talk page is totally unreadable

It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to participate in this talk page discussions, because too many discussions take place concurrently. Actually, most of them are not necessary or premature, because they will not lead to any change in the article's content until the RfC gives us a final answer about the article's topic. Therefore, I am going to stop my participation in all discussions until the RfC comes to some logical end. I make one excepttion: development of the mutually acceptable procedure of source evaluation. We need that, because, independently on the RfC results we need to come to an agreement which viewpoint is a majority and which is (are) minority view (or views). In connection to that, I am asking @Davide King:, @Nug:, @The Four Deuces:, @MarioSuperstar77:, @AShalhoub:, @Levivich: and @Cloud200: if they are interested in that discussion. Please, let me know if you have any ideas, or if you have any objections to the approach that I propose. If you need me to re-explain my approach, I will gladly do that at WP:MKUCRSA. I may forget to mention someone's name, so I apologise in advance if I forgot someone.--Paul Siebert (talk) 00:21, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

I long ago stopped trying to keep up with this talk page. For my part I'm not planning to participate in the RFC because I do not have an understanding of what the major sources are for the article in any form. I don't feel that I can form an opinion about the proper scope of the topic until I know what sources we're summarizing. Yes, I'd be interested in a discussion about sources (and procedure or criteria for source evaluation is the place to start, IMO), but I won't have much time until after New Year. Levivich 06:20, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

Can someone who knows how adjust the duration of the auto archiver from 21 days to, maybe, 7? I think that would improve talk page readability. schetm (talk) 14:02, 26 December 2021 (UTC)

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