They destroyed my commute yesterday, the jerks.

Well, them and the guy who drove his car onto the Metra tracks in Park Ridge.

Last March I went up to Madison. I parked 6 or 7 blocks away from the capitol.

The first car that drove by after I parked had a Soviet flag hanging off it.

Makes me wonder what’s really going on with these movements…

Yep Allen.

I felt the same way when i saw a Confederate flag at a Tea party rally.

Americans: Kill 3,000,000 People in North Vietnam alone, accuse others of being murders.

Hilarious.

Well John, if it’s a number game you’re after, Stalin purportedly killed anywhere between 12-20 million of his own people…

In a battle of relativism, number do count….

Ok I think I get what the problem was with my longer post. It contained a link so maybe your automatic spam filter kept it out. So I’m posting it without the full link but you should be able to Google it. But as it says in the post, it’s only useful for people who speak Russian.

“Well John, if it’s a number game you’re after, Stalin purportedly killed anywhere between 12-20 million of his own people…

In a battle of relativism, number do count….”

First, incorrect, and doesn’t take into account the historical context of revolutionary Russia. These numbers don’t jive with what we know about demographics of the Soviet Union, plus the detailed information we have from the archives on the subject of executions and GULAG statistics. The only way one can get numbers that high is by counting deaths due to underdevelopment, famine, etc. as people killed by Stalin. That might seem legit at first, until you consider that millions die every year due to economic policies(many encouraged by the IMF, for example), yet we do not say things like “To date, the IMF has killed XX million people in Africa.” In fact what John said about the US in Asia is basically true(it’s something like 4 million if you count Korea and Vietnam, and you could throw in another 500,000 to 1 million as a result of the Suharto coup in Indonesia), yet in mainstream society you rarely see people make statements like that.

Lastly on this point, some historians have pointed out that by using some of the same methodology which was used to calculate deaths under Stalin, you could “prove” that the US or in one case Canada starved millions of their citizens to death. In fact one overzealous Russian historian attempted to prove just that a few years ago, claiming that 7 million Americans died during the Great Depression. Ironically while he is certainly wrong, his methodology isn’t far removed from that of many anti-Communist scholars, particularly those who focus on the so-called Holodomor in Ukrainian history.

The bottom line is that if people are going to take things such as excess deaths, deaths due to famine, underdevelopment(a condition inherited by the Communists, which they overcame after the war), etc. in the USSR and attribute these deaths to Stalin and Communism, then they need to come up with a legitimate explanation as to why we shouldn’t do the same when looking at things such as the number of deaths due to starvation in the non-socialist world, or deaths due to preventable disease. Otherwise it is a logical fallacy known as special pleading.

Anyway, if there is someone else here who can read Russian I will leave you with a link which has scans of some of the previously secret archival documents along with statistics on executions, GULAG populations, and GULAG deaths over the whole of the “Stalin era”(In fact it begins a year before he became General Secretary of the Communist Party, that is it begins in 1921, and ends in early 1954 after his death). It is worth noting that this document dates back to 1921, because the civil war was still in progress at the time and the country was in massive turmoil.

kakovy-masshtaby-stalinskikh-repressijj.html <Google this and the first link will provide a better copy of the paper than I previously had.

BTW John. I looked it up and… The overall number killed in the Vietnam War on all sides was about 1,216,000 people.

Cindy, did you not just claim that Americans kill 1.21 million babies each year?

I assume you consider abortion to be murder.

What’s the count up to, I mean going back to Roe v. Wade, thus far?

Would you also care to cite your sources?

Because your claim is less than half of the total casualties.

For example, when you include all casualties from 1955-1975, including Cambodians and Laotians, the total number is over 5 million.

And again, throw in the Suharto coup in Indonesia and you get another 500,000-1,000,000.

So just in Southeast Asia alone we’re already getting into Holocaust territory(in terms of numbers alone, I don’t mean to say that this equates to the deliberately program of extermination which characterizes the Holocaust).

(I sure hope these posts get approved. Because I KNOW that conservatives are confident enough in their beliefs so as to expose them to criticism. Their often-professed love of the Constitution must surely compel them to appreciate the 1st Amendment.)

R.J. Rummel?

Perfect!

You’ve just totally set fire to your credibility on this subject.

Rummel is precisely the embodiment of what I wrote about in my larger post.