Misplaced Pages

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Nug have failed to realize we understand the topic differently, so saying the topic is notable is not helpful if those on the 'Keep' side do not provide a clearly defined topic; e.g. I would vote 'Keep', provided the article is rewritten on this topic as summarized by Siebert here:

"In my opinion, the really notable topic is the discussion of the view that Communism was the greatest mass murderer in XX century. Who said that? Why? What was the main purpose for putting forward this idea? How this idea was accepted? Who supports that? Who criticise it and what the criticism consists in? How this idea is linked to recent trends in Holocaust obfuscation? And so on, and so forth. This would be a really notable topic, and that can save the article from deletion. However, that will require almost complete rewrite of the article."

Since the 'Keep' side has refused any attempts at rewrite, identify a topic, and even acknowledge any issue, I see the only solution as 'Delete', with no prejudice in a future rewrite that is NPOV, in respect of our policies, and a clearly defined topic. Now let us move on to the issue of sourcing.

Helen Fein

Nug cite Helen Fein but they fail to realize and do not point out something that is even in the article itself (as you can see here), e.g. the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime bears a stronger resemblance to "an almost forgotten phenomenon of national socialism", or fascism, rather than communism, therefore the Khmer Rouge regime should not be discussed per Fein. We must not cherry pick authors and acts as though they are proposing MKuCR when they are discussing genocide and/or mass killing in general; as noted by Nug themselves, that is chapter but the book is about genocide and/mass killings in general, so I do not see how that justifies MKuCR rather than a general article about mass killings during the 20th century, irrespective of regime type.

Adam Jones

Adam Jones also separates Stalin and Mao, who are discussed together, from Pol Pot, as you can see here.

Benjamin Valentino and other genocide scholars

Benjamin Valentino is the core source but his actually main idea is, to quote Siebert from WP:DRNMKUCR, that the regime type is not a good predictor for mass killings onset. He came to that conclusion by having analyzed similar type regimes, and he found that one of them committed mass killings, whereas another one didn't. His main conclusion is that leader's personality is the main factor responsible for mass killing, and a practical conclusion is: if we remove some concrete group from power, we may eliminate a risk of mass killings even without making serious transformation of the state's political system. It is ironical that the work of the researcher who wanted to demonstrate that some limited number of persons are real culprits became a core of the article that puts responsibility for mass killings on Communist ideology as whole. ...

Valentino demonstrated that by the fact that many (majority) of Communist regimes had not been engaged in mass killings (his own words), and the core of his methodology was a comparison of similar regimes, one of which committed mass killings, whereas another didn't. That means the article twisted the idea of the main source it is based upon. A title that correctly transmits Valentino's views would be "Mass killings under some Communist regimes", but I am not proposing it, for that would be non-encyclopaedic, and because the views of genocide scholars are not fully in agreement with views of historians.

While Misplaced Pages articles are not reliable in themselves, their sources certainly are and all this can be verified at Benjamin Valentino, Genocide studies, and Mass killing. Nug has argued that all those articles have problems because they do not reflect what is said at MKuCR but these remain unproven allegations, as is showed by the fact that there has been no serious discussion in support of Nug's allegations and at Talk:Mass killing they have been rejected by at least two other users, meaning that if Nug refuse to engage with us at Mass killing and do not gain consensus, they must concede that their allegations are wrong, and stop using this as an argument.

Genocide scholars,1 such as Valentino and many others, are a minority, lack consensus among themselves, and have not achieved mainstream status in political science (Weiss-Anton 2008 and Verdeja 2012), which is further proved by the fact they are not relied by scholars of Communism and many events discussed at MKuCR are not described as mass killings et similia by historians and country experts/specialists. As has been noted by Barbara Harff, a disciple of Rudolph Rummel, genocide scholars are mainly concerned in establishing patterns and not data accuracy for which they must rely on country experts and specialists (Harff 2017), who do not necessarily reach their same conclusion.

Rudolph Rummel

From Crimes against humanity under communist regimes – Research review, which is a tertiary source and a core source of both MKuCR and Crimes against humanity under Communist regimes (CaHuCR),2 Rummel is considered to be controversial ("they are hardly an example of a serious and empirically-based writing of history"), and is only mentioned "on the basis of the interest in him in the blogosphere." In addition, Rummel has been discussed at WP:RSN (1, 2). Harff herself, a disciple of Rummel, has acknowledged it (Harff 2017), there is no point in denying this any longer.

Atsushi Tago and Frank Wayman

Tago & Wayman 2010, who do not discuss of MKuCR but of mass killings in general (even Rummel's categorization is described as "authoritarian and totalitarian government" at p. 5 vis-à-vis Valentino's disagreement, so that is an argument to rewrite MKuCR as mass killings under any regime type but why should give so much WEIGHT to Rummel when, as I am going to show next, scholars disagree on regime type?), show that there is a disagreement among scholars, and the solution is certainly not to give too much weight to Rummel by following his categorization, which are criticized by other scholars by Valentino, who is not the only one. When scholars disagree, the solution is not following categorization by a relevant but undue (in light of disagreement and criticism) scholar like Rummel. That we must give WEIGHT and priority to Rummel by having a MKuCR (full Communist-devoted article despite scholars either disagreeing or rejecting ideology and regime type links) is absurd, false balance, does not follow, and is quite frankly beyond me. I cannot possibly be the only one to think this — I am well open to the idea of being proven wrong but I just do not see any sufficient rationale that would justify this.

Stéphane Courtois

Stéphane Courtois is as controversial as Rummel, again see Karlsson 2008, pp. 53–54.

Bearing in mind the charged nature of the subject, it is polemically effective to make such comparisons, but it does not seem particularly fruitful, neither morally nor scientifically, to judge the regimes on the basis of their 'dangerousness' or to assess the relationship between communism and Nazism on the basis of what the international academic community calls their 'atrocities toll' or 'body count'. In that case, should the crimes of all communist regimes, in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and other countries where communism is or has been the dominant party, be compared to the Nazi regime's massacre of six million Jews? Should the Nazi death toll also include the tens of millions of people who the German Nazi armies and their supporting troops killed during the Second World War? Not even Courtois' analytical qualification, that ranking the two regimes the same is based on the idea that the 'weapon of hunger' was used systematically by both the Nazi regime and a number of communist regimes, makes this more reasonable, since this 'weapon' on the whole played a very limited role in the Nazi genocide in relation to other types of methods of mass destruction, and in relation to how it was used by communist regimes.

Keep in mind this is one of MKuCR's core sources and has dismissed two claimed sources in support of MKuCR.

Courtois' participation to The Black Book of the French Revolution was also controversial and revisionist (Le Figaro 2012).

Steven Rosefielde

What is ignored is that Steven Rosefielde says Communism is less genocidal than Nazism, they are specifically about excess deaths and mass mortality rather than mass killings, which contrary to the 'Keep' side is not the same thing. To quote Siebert from WP:DRNMKUCR:

As I already explained, the question is not only the figures themselves, but in their interpretation. As Rosefielde pointed out (Premature Deaths: Russia's Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective Author(s): Steven Rosefielde Source: Europe-Asia Studies , Dec., 2001, Vol. 53, No. 8 (Dec., 2001), pp. 1159-1176) 3.4 million of Russians died prematurely in 1990s, after fall of Communism. If we consider all "premature deaths" as mass killings, should we speak about "democratic mass killings" in that case? It seems Rosefielde does not consider premature deaths in neither post-Communist Russia not in Communist USSR as "mass killings". The problem is not only in Rummel's figures, but in his interpretation of those figures.

Conclusion

The article fails NPOV and VERIFY, and is OR/SYNTH per AndyTheGrump, Levivich, and the nominator, and because Communist grouping is controversial (it was one scholarly criticism of The Black Book of Communism, see Mecklenburg & Wolfgang Wippermann 1998, Dallin 2000, and David-Fox 2004), and genocide scholars themselves do not find regime type to be significant in explaining mass killings (Straus 2007),

Notes

1. All those authors cited are genocide scholars, while Rummel is best known for his democratic peace theory, a different topic, in which he is mainstream.

2. Karlsson 2008 is completely misunderstood at CaHuCR because Karlsson says they prefer crimes against humanity over mass killings and discusses MKuCR but limits only to Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes, not any Communist regime3 — in all those cases, killings were carried out as part of a policy of an unbalanced modernization process of rapid industrialization (Karlsson 2008, p. 8).

3. The most accepted definition of mass killing is 50,000 killed within five years, and that applies to Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's regimes, and the Red Terror, which must be seen within the context of the Russian Civil War and the White Terror, not as it is described at MKuCR.

Davide King (talk) 22:00, 22 November 2021 (UTC)