Stalin has killed his millions, and Mao his tens of millions. REALLY?

[JW Insider]

On 12/13/2018 at 3:50 PM, Arauna said:

.It was state sponsored killing . . . 20,000,000 . . .

Just to round out the high-level discussion about communist, totalitarian government in USSR/Russia, I wanted to mention that Wikipedia (in places) even puts the Russian death toll of WW2 itself at up to 40,000,000 fighting Hitler. But when people speak of state-sponsored killing they usually think of Stalin's purges and the famines caused by communist mismanagement.

FAMINES

Before going into the documentation I should also mention that the famines were a problem, but that there is usually a big anachronism in these claims. It turns out that even haters of communism and haters of Stalin will admit that the famines ended after Lenin's and Stalin's efforts at collectivization, and were virtually eliminated after the 1933 famine.

Of course, there was the Nazi destruction of productive land, and the probable Nazi killing of 7,000,000 soldiers and "murder" (via war atrocities) of 20,000,000 more Russians. Nazis even inadvertently starved themselves by heading so far into Russia while destroying local supplies. So WW2 deaths don't actually count as Stalin's "state-sponsored killings" that included famines, not even the WW2-induced famine of 1946. (Stalin was too paranoid to trade machines for food, but when Khrushchev tried this he actually created the so-called "Red Plenty.")

Naming the supposed "state-sponsored famines" HOLODOMOR was a deliberately made up word to remind people of "Holocaust" as a new pillar of critique by Nazis, especially in Ukraine. This began mostly starting in the 1970's and 1980's from the Nazi party in Ukraine. In fact, Israel understands the propaganda of Holodomor as "double-holocaust theory," used as a form of Holocaust denial. 

PURGES

This leaves the "purges." USSR was a huge country and there were atrocities and deaths done in Stalin's name. Ironically, many turned out to have been done to undermine Stalin. NKVD officer, Yezhov, got permission in 1936 and 1937 to detain and shoot people over traitorist conspiracies, but as early as 1937 Stalin understood that something was going badly wrong, and he began investigating and punishing people over it. There were many cases of Yezhov and his officers torturing and killing people. By 1939, Stalin put his own favored intelligence officer Beria over the NKVD, dismissing Yezhov and his whole circle of officers, who later admitted that he and they had been working as agents of the Germans to hurt Stalin. When Beria took over in 1939, the "state sponsored deaths" dropped off immediately. And thousands released from prisons were put back in their former positions.

In reading some well-documented books, even by anti-communists, I'm seeing the admission that Stalin himself may have not wanted or had any involvement in ANY civilian killings, even when there really were conspiracies, and he really was paranoid about outside plots. These books readily admit that Stalin himself had these perpetrators of crimes punished when plots were discovered. Also, I'm amazed to learn that Stalin remained very popular -- extremely popular -- throughout his regime. This would have been hard to imagine if he had been killing every fourth person in the USSR. Also, there is the fact that United States knew nothing of these supposed Stalin atrocities, or at least documented none of them, in spite of spies who documented so many other Russian problems, even with Stalin himself.

The best documented "guesses" of the number of persons "purged" by Yezhov and his officers are maybe 250,000 dead and 400,000 to 600,000 imprisoned. I have not seen a documented book that tries to put the number much over 3 million, which is still terrible. What I think are the most reasonable discussions of the history of Stalin and the USSR put the number between 400,000 and 600,000. But these books show how the confusion and terror over who to side with was part of the admitted plot by German infiltration, through spies and fifth column efforts along the "edges" of the USSR.

Although I can't find any evidence of Stalin's own involvement in the state-sponsored deaths, under his regime I can easily see a number between 500,000 and 1 million.

BACK TO FAMINES AGAIN

Just an aside, but it is very easy to look up some of Churchill's atrocities, where, for example, he purposely starved upwards of four million Bengals, an ACTUAL HOLODOMOR! See, for example, the flimsy arguments that defend Churchill and compare them with the documented evidence in the historical record. For an overview, look at this article in the UK paper, the Independent:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/winston-churchill-genocide-dictator-shashi-tharoor-melbourne-writers-festival-a7936141.html

Winston Churchill has as much blood on his hands as the worst genocidal dictators . . .

[JW Insider]

10 hours ago, Arauna said:

History has proven that humans are inherently wicked - we have ample examples in history of despots killing as many people as they wish and getting away with it.  If people do not actively work at being righteous according to the standards of God - anything is possible.

This is very true. In fact, when I responded to @Kosonen about Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge, I forgot to mention something important about those MILLION deaths. (Some would say 1 to 3 million.)

I believe that we can attribute about half a million of those deaths to the Pol Pot regime itself. The other half million happened when Kissinger and Nixon prosecuted a secret war against Cambodia that ended up bringing Pol Pot to power. Kissinger and Nixon had decided to level a bombing campaign on Cambodia that used up more than one ton of napalm for every single person in Cambodia. It was a bombing campaign matched only by the earlier US terror strikes on North Korea where the effective policy was to bomb every building in the entire country of North Korea that was over a certain number of stories (5?) in addition to a lot of "accidental" carpet bombings of civilians in smaller buildings and houses.

This campaign in Cambodia resulted in US terror strikes killing about 500,000 civilians which made it easy for Pol Pot to come to power amidst this chaos, after which he killed upwards of 500,000 more.

Remember, too, that this was in the midst of the US led genocide in Laos which killed millions through bombing of civilians.

[Arauna]

I agree blood is blood - if it is 10 or 40 million.   But I am interested in how people get to that point of killing large numbers and how they justify it.... and could it happen again.  Are we on our way to another wave of this? 

My mentioning these  numbers was to demonstrate how deadly the philosophy is and how we may see more killing. Under communism, neighbors snitched on neighbors they did not like and made up stories to get their apartments, food or other privileges.  Could this happen again?  Many of those in the Gulags were innocent victims.

There is an arabic word THULM which means injustice... and the related word : thalaam means darkness.  Very apt for what is waiting for mankind.

 

 

[Arauna]

Stalin killed so many of the trusted people in his government - those who were close to him.  His mind was cold and calculating. They were all afraid of him.  That was why they did NOTHING when he had his stroke.

Stalin reminds me of Herod who killed most of his close family members because he was paranoid they would take his throne.  If there was just a whiff of a person "seeming " to be disloyal (no proof needed)  they were executed.  To try to say that such a person was not so wicked..... and that he was not behind the killings is ... well..... like Herod not being responsible for the order to kill all the babies. 

[JW Insider]

8 minutes ago, Arauna said:

I agree blood is blood - if it is 10 or 40 million.   But I am interested in how people get to that point of killing large numbers and how they justify it.... and could it happen again.  Are we on our way to another wave of this? 

I think this is where people should pay attention in the way you have paid attention to ongoing and current events, even those that seem so innocuous. Agenda 21 may have been exactly the right thing to propose based on the evidence. But the reasons for these proposals, as you point out, are reasons that are extremely dangerous. Even if Agenda 21 was all marvelous and wonderful, it would point out exactly how an imperialist or fascist state could undermine the good intentions.

As you say, water shortages are already here in places and are on the horizon for many more. I perceive a purposeful delay in ocean desalination technology and collection of freshwater at places where large rivers empty potable water into oceans. I think it's just one of many areas of potentially imperialist control. Deaths could easily number into the millions or even billions during a great "water" tribulation. Satanic schemes, as you say, seem so easy to plant into the minds of human leaders. The actual events of the great tribulation are supposed to remain unpredictable so that sudden unexpected destruction could truly come at any time like a thief in the night. But there are many options that appear all too visible.

You have big names like Bill Gates for example falling into the Malthusian propaganda saying, in effect, that the world has too many poor people to take care of.

And although this belongs as a response in the Agenda 21 topic, it can be just as appropriate here. It's the letter that Summers wrote in 1991 about how places like Africa are still "UNDER-POLLUTED." There was a claim that this proposal to dump more toxic waste in third-world countries was a joke, but the context of other speech surrounding this letter shows that it wasn't:

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.

3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

— Lawrence Summers, ^[6][7]

Summers, was Chief Economist of the World Bank, and nominated to be the US Secretary Treasurer in 1993. As an aside, he was even a recent president of the college my youngest son graduated from.

[JW Insider]

26 minutes ago, Arauna said:

Stalin killed so many of the trusted people in his government - those who were close to him.  His mind was cold and calculating. They were all afraid of him.  That was why they did NOTHING when he had his stroke.

I'm not saying that Stalin wasn't like that, only that as more and more documented evidence comes to light, this evidence supports a very manipulated story. What you say here is what I always believed for almost my whole life. If the evidence doesn't support the story I was told to believe when I was in school, then I prefer to look more closely at that evidence.

But this doesn't mean he wasn't just as wicked as so many others. A person who kills one, or even none, might be just as evil in other ways as someone who kills millions.

[Srecko Sostar]

1 hour ago, Arauna said:

we have ample examples in history of despots killing as many people as they wish and getting away with it

Bible book history contains similar reports.

[Arauna]

Someone posted a response today on one of those two videos about the "code" enforcement for Agenda 21.  They said it was to get people off the land to build a speed train track.   Trains are a large part of the UN plan - to get people out of cars and in public transport.

I may mention that South Africa is badly polluted too!  DDT was used when I was a little girl - literally everywhere!  I played on grass with DDT.  It was later banned but when the new government came in  it was again legal  and most probably ongoing.

In Sweden there are many wilderness areas and public transport is excellent. So this part of the plan is very good.  I believe Sweden already has a high conformity to  Agenda 21.  People ride cycles and walk a lot!  Which is also healthy.   My husband and I love to walk in the "skogen" the forests - which are stunningly beautiful.  We do some "Oxygen bathing" in the forests. 

Food is my greatest concern.   Production will be planned and will be rationed.  All mass meat farming is  the largest food sector producing methane - which is the largest contributor to global climate change. ... than transport. And what will the quality of food be if companies like Monsanto/Bayer produce it?  They genetically engineer as much as possible.... one sickness in a potato or a rice plant can leave millions without food.  They remove all diversity of plants and only genetically engineer one variety.

[TrueTomHarley]

4 hours ago, Kosonen said:

What about Pol Pot? I once saw a terrifying documentary showing piles of sculls.

I have another character, who has yet to be featured in a book, set up his own think tank. He surrounded himself with bookshelves and a globe, because that’s what smart people do. He also displayed prominently a skull, which caused him much misery when it turned out to be critical evidence in the Mugsy McDonery missing persons case.

[JW Insider]

4 hours ago, Arauna said:

Stalin killed so many of the trusted people in his government - those who were close to him.  His mind was cold and calculating. They were all afraid of him.  That was why they did NOTHING when he had his stroke.

There are some very different, yet very detailed accounts of Stalin's death which bear little resemblance to each other. This one seems to make the best attempt at making sense of divergent claims: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3228382/

And of course, Stalin had survived major plots against his person and his reputation, so he had a right to be paranoid. And while I know of no evidence that he had anyone killed, he imprisoned a lot of people, many unjustly. He made many stupid mistakes as a leader, and some resulted in injustice to many. His final days were spent with the four persons from whom his successor would be chosen. None of them trusted each other. Each of them knew that it was possible for the other to form a plot that would remove others from the running. It would be as if Trump had 4 VPs all equally ready and ambitious to take over if Trump was somehow removed from office during his term(s).

When one of them, Khrushchev, finally did win out, he went on an anti-Stalin campaign that apparently dredged up anything and everything he could dig up on Stalin. He got General Zhukov to join him (easily one assumes, since Stalin had earlier demoted Zhukov for keeping German war booty as his own property). But Zhukov claimed that he had been talked into promoting anti-Stalin propaganda that included things that weren't true. Khrushchev himself later forgot some of the things he had said (or made up?) about Stalin and contradicted them in later speeches and writing, forgetting how bad he had made him out to be. The point of differentiating himself from Stalin was for consolidation of power, and the ability to dismiss his previous circle of competitors. He even had Baria executed I believe, as the head of the police would have had a lot of potential power and leverage with an eye on the leadership position. Khrushchev even asked that some of Stalin's old enemies get re-established into political life, if possible, even some of those who had plotted against Stalin, if possible. But Zhukov (and others) kept discovering that most of these old enemies really had plotted treasonously against Stalin and therefore couldn't "rehabilitate" them under those circumstances.

But this is part of my point. By throwing Stalin under the bus, and going on a no-holds-barred anti-Stalin campaign, you'd think that Khrushchev could have included the fact of millions or at least thousands or maybe even several hundred wrongful deaths attributed to Stalin. The intended rehabilitation of Stalin's prisoners would have been able to accomplish at least a little of this.  Instead it was evidently on the order of much less, and Khrushchev couldn't even make much out of these, since their guilt was too obvious. Compare this with the fact that when Stalin dismissed his old chief of police and replaced him with Baria in 1939, that Stalin had at that time released a couple hundred thousand people who had been wrongfully imprisoned, and the executions virtually stopped.

Also, to these same points, although we haven't looked at Mao yet, the exact same patterns emerge. Mao made some dumb mistakes too, and some cost a lot of lives (e.g., Three Pests Campaign), but the outrageous claims about 100,000,000 deaths also have no evidence going for them. The political reasons for these same propaganda patterns to have been reused here should be obvious.

[Anna]

I remember the Polish film "A night with Stalin". I am not even sure if it is in English, but it portrayed Stalin as most people see him, as a crazed, murderous paranoiac. It was a good movie and quite chilling. But as with everything, there are always two sides to a story...

Correction: It was a Russian film, directed by Yuri Kara, and was screened in the US under the name "The Feasts of Belshazzar"

[TrueTomHarley]

10 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Also, I'm amazed to learn that Stalin remained very popular -- extremely popular -- throughout his regime. This would have been hard to imagine if he had been killing every fourth person in the USSR. 

A kinder gentler Stalin. Can it be?

The greatest inducement to believe conspiracy theories comes when two or three of them turn out to be true.