Terminology and usage

Several different terms are used to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants.[1][a][b][c][d][e] According to Anton Weiss-Wendt, the field of comparative genocide studies has very "little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe."[2][f] According to Professor of Economics Attiat Ott, "Mass killing" has emerged as a "more straightforward" term.[g]

The following terminology has been used by individual authors to describe mass killings of unarmed civilians by communist governments, individually or as a whole:

• Classicide – Professor Michael Mann has proposed the term classicide to mean the "intended mass killing of entire social classes."[3][h] Classicide is considered "premeditated mass killing" narrower than genocide in that it targets a part of a population defined by its social status, but broader than politicide in that the group is targeted without regard to their political activity.[4]
• Crime against humanity – Professor Klas-Göran Karlsson uses the term crimes against humanity, which includes "the direct mass killings of politically undesirable elements, as well as forced deportations and forced labour." Karlsson acknowledges that the term may be misleading in the sense that the regimes targeted groups of their own citizens, but he considers it useful as a broad legal term which emphasizes attacks on civilian populations and because the offenses demean humanity as a whole.[5] Historian Jacques Sémelin and Professor Michael Mann[6] believe that crime against humanity is more appropriate than genocide or politicide when speaking of violence by communist regimes.[7]
• Democide – Professor Rudolph Rummel defined democide as "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command."[8] His definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims; killings by "unofficial" private groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines as well as killings by de facto governments, such as warlords or rebels in a civil war.[9][i] This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government,[10] and it has been applied to killings that were perpetrated by communist regimes.[11][12]
• Genocide – Under the Genocide Convention, the crime of genocide generally applies to the mass murder of ethnic rather than political or social groups. The clause which granted protection to political groups was eliminated from the United Nations resolution after a second vote because many states, including the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin,[13][j] feared that it could be used to impose unneeded limitations on their right to suppress internal disturbances.[14][15] Scholarly studies of genocide usually acknowledge the UN's omission of economic and political groups and use mass political killing datasets of democide and genocide and politicide or geno-politicide.[16] The killings that were committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia has been labeled a genocide or an auto-genocide; and the deaths that occurred under Leninism and Stalinism in the Soviet Union, as well as those that occurred under Maoism in China, have been controversially investigated as possible cases. In particular, the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 and the Great Chinese Famine, which occurred during the Great Leap Forward, have both been "depicted as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent."[k]
• Holocaust – The term communist holocaust has been used by some state officials and non-governmental organizations.[17][18][19] The similar term red Holocaust—coined by the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte[l][20]—has been used by Professor Steven Rosefielde for communist "peacetime state killings," while stating that it "could be defined to include all murders (judicially sanctioned terror-executions), criminal manslaughter (lethal forced labor and ethnic cleansing), and felonious negligent homicide (terror-starvation) incurred from insurrectionary actions and civil wars prior to state seizure, and all subsequent felonious state killings."[m] According to Jörg Hackmann, this term is not popular among scholars in Germany or internationally.[l] Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine writes that usage of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime."[n][21] Michael Shafir writes that the use of the term supports the "competitive martyrdom component of Double Genocide," a theory whose worst version is Holocaust obfuscation.[22] George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."[o]
• Mass killing – Professor Ervin Staub defined mass killing as "killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group membership. In a mass killing the number of people killed is usually smaller than in genocide."[23][p] Referencing earlier definitions,[q] Professors Joan Esteban, Massimo Morelli, and Dominic Rohner have defined mass killings as "the killings of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under the conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims."[24] The term has been defined by Professor Benjamin Valentino as "the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants", where a "massive number" is defined as at least 50,000 intentional deaths over the course of five years or less.[25] This is the most accepted quantitative minimum threshold for the term.[24] He applied this definition to the cases of Stalin's Soviet Union, China under Mao Zedong and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge while admitting that "mass killings on a smaller scale" also appear to have been carried out by regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and various nations in Africa.[26] Alongside Valentino, Jay Ulfelder has used a threshold of 1,000 killed.[r] Alex Bellamy states that 14 of the 38 instances of "mass killing since 1945 perpetrated by non-democratic states outside the context of war" were by communist governments.[s] Professors Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago used the term mass killing from Valentino and concluded that even with a lower threshold (10,000 killed per year, 1,000 killed per year, or even 1 killed per year) "autocratic regimes, especially communist, are prone to mass killing generically, but not so strongly inclined (i.e. not statistically significantly inclined) toward geno-politicide."[t] According to Attiat F. Ott and Sang Hoo Bae, there is a general consensus that mass killing constitutes the act of intentionally killing a number of non-combatants, but that number can range from as few as four to more than 50,000 people.[27] Yang Su used a definition of mass killing from Valentino but allows as a "significant number" more than 10 killed in one day in one town.[u] He used the term collective killing for analysis of mass killing in areas smaller than a whole country that may not meet Valentino's threshold.[v]
• Politicide – the term politicide is used to describe the killing of groups that would not otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention.[28][j] Professor Barbara Harff studies genocide and politicide—sometimes shortened as geno-politicide—in order to include the killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups.[w] Professor Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term politicide to describe an arc of large-scale killing from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.[x] In his book The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.[29]
• Repression – Professor Stephen Wheatcroft notes that in the case of the Soviet Union terms such as the terror, the purges, and repression are used to refer to the same events. He believes the most neutral terms are repression and mass killings, although in Russian the broad concept of repression is commonly held to include mass killings and it is sometimes assumed to be synonymous with it, which is not the case in other languages.[30]

Estimates

According to Klas-Göran Karlsson, discussion of the number of victims of communist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased."[31] Rudolph Rummel and Mark Bradley have written that, while the exact numbers have been in dispute, the order of magnitude is not.[y][z] Rummel and other genocide scholars are focused primarily on establishing patterns and testing various theoretical explanations of genocides and mass killings. In their work, as they are dealing with large data sets that describe mass mortality events globally, they have to rely on selective data provided by country experts, so precise estimates are neither a required nor expected result of their work.[32]

Any attempt to estimate a total number of killings under communist regimes depends greatly on definitions, and the idea to group together different countries such as Afghanistan and Hungary has no adequate explanation.[33] During the Cold War era, some authors (Todd Culberston), dissidents (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), and anti-communists in general have attempted to make both country-specific and global estimates, although they were mostly unreliable and inflated, as shown by the 1990s and beyond. Scholars of communism have mainly focused on individual countries, and genocide scholars have attempted to provide a more global perspective, while maintaining that their goal is not reliability but establishing patterns.[32] Scholars of communism have debated on estimates for the Soviet Union, not for all communist regimes, an attempt which was popularized by the introduction to The Black Book of Communism and was controversial.[33] Among them, Soviet specialists Michael Ellman and J. Arch Getty have criticized the estimates for relying on émigre sources, hearsay, and rumor as evidence,[34] and cautioned that historians should instead utilize archive material.[35] Such scholars distinguish between historians who base their research on archive materials, and those whose estimates are based on witnesses evidence and other data that is unreliable.[36] Soviet specialist Stephen G. Wheatcroft says that historians relied on Solzhenitsyn to support their higher estimates but research in the state archives vindicated the lower estimates, while adding that the popular press has continued to include serious errors that should not be cited, or relied on, in academia.[37] Rummel was also another widely used and cited source[aa] but not reliable about estimates.[32]

Notable estimate attempts include the following:[aa]

• In 1978, journalist Todd Culbertson wrote an article in The Richmond News Leader, republished in Human Events, in which he stated that "[a]vailable evidence indicates that perhaps 100 million persons have been destroyed by the Communists; the imperviousness of the Iron and Bamboo curtains prevents a more definitive figure."[ab][aa]
• In 1985, John Lenczowski, director of European and Soviet Affairs at the United States National Security Council, wrote an article in The Christian Science Monitor in which he stated that the "number of people murdered by communist regimes is estimated at between 60 million and 150 million, with the higher figure probably more accurate in light of recent scholarship." [ac]
• In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, wrote that "the failed effort to build communism in the twentieth century consumed the lives of almost 60,000,000."[38][aa][ad]
• In 1994, Rudolph Rummel's book Death by Government included about 110 million people, foreign and domestic, killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987.[39] This total did not include deaths from China's Great Famine of 1958-1961 due to Rummel's then belief that "although Mao’s policies were responsible for the famine, he was mislead about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies."[40][41] In 2004, Tomislav Dulić criticized Rummel's estimate of the number killed in Tito's Yugoslavia as an overestimation based on the inclusion of low quality sources and stated that Rummel's other estimates may suffer from the same problem if he used similar sources for them.[42]
• In 1997, the Stéphane Courtois introduction to the Black Book of Communism gave a "rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates" approaching 100 million killed. The subtotals listed by Courtois added up to 94.36 million killed.[ae] Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, contributing authors to the book, criticized Courtois as obsessed with reaching a 100 million overall total.[43] In his foreword to the 1999 English edition, Martin Malia noted "a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million."[af]
• In 2005, Benjamin Valentino stated that the number of non-combatants killed by communist regimes in the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and Cambodia alone ranged from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.[ag][ah] Citing Rummel and others, Valentino stated that the "highest end of the plausible range of deaths attributed to communist regimes" was up to 110 million."[ag][aa]
• In 2005, a retired Rudolph Rummel, due to additional information about Mao's culpability in the Great Chinese Famine from the work of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, revised upward his total for communist democide between 1900 and 1999 from 110 million to about 148 million by including their estimated 38 million famine deaths.[40][41]
• In 2010, Steven Rosefielde wrote in Red Holocaust that communism's internal contradictions "caused to be killed" approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more.[44]
• In 2011, Matthew White published his rough total of 70 million "people who died under communist regimes from execution, labor camps, famine, ethnic cleansing, and desperate flight in leaky boats," not counting those killed in wars.[ai]
• In 2012, Alex J. Bellamy wrote that a "conservative estimate puts the total number of civilians deliberately killed by communists after the Second World War between 6.7 million and 15.5 million people, with the true figure probably much higher."[aj]
• In 2014, Julia Strauss wrote that, while there was the beginning of a scholarly consensus on figures of around 20 million killed in the Soviet Union and 2-3 million in Cambodia, there was no such consensus on numbers for China.[ak]
• In 2016, the Dissident blog of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation made an effort to compile ranges of estimates using sources from 1976 to 2010 and concluded that the overall range "spans from 42,870,000 to 161,990,000" killed, with 100 million the most commonly cited figure.[al]
• In 2017, Professor Stephen Kotkin wrote in The Wall Street Journal that communism killed at least 65 million people between 1917 and 2017: "Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering."[am][45]

Criticism is mostly focused on three aspects, namely that the estimates are based on sparse and incomplete data when significant errors are inevitable,[46][47][48] the figures are skewed to higher possible values,[46][49][an] and victims of civil wars, Holodomor, and other famines, and wars involving communist governments should not be counted.[46][50][51] Criticism of the high-end estimates such as Rummel's have focused on two aspects, namely his choice of data sources and his statistical approach. Historical sources Rummel based his estimates upon can rarely serve as sources of reliable figures.[52] The statistical approach Rummel used to analyze big sets of diverse estimates may lead to dilution of useful data with noisy ones.[52][53]

Another common criticism, as articulated by anthropologist and former European communist regimes specialist Kristen Ghodsee and other scholars, is that the body-counting reflects an anti-communist point of view and is mainly approached by anti-communist scholars, and is part of the popular "victims of communism" narrative,[54][55] with 100 million being the most common, popularly used estimate,[56][ao] which is used not only to discredit the communist movement but the whole political left.[57][ap] Anti-communist organizations seek to institutionalize the "victims of communism" narrative as a double genocide theory, or the moral equivalence between the Nazi Holocaust (race murder) and those killed by communist regimes (class murder).[54][58] Alongside philosopher Scott Sehon, Ghodsee wrote that "quibbling about numbers is unseemly. What matters is that many, many people were killed by communist regimes."[58] The same body-counting can be easily applied to other ideologies or systems, such as capitalism.[56][aq][58][ar]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes