General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What is your opinion about Marxism? [View all]idendoit
(505 posts)...by a bunch of totally discredited authors with outright lies from the Black Book of Communism.
Criticism
Historical inaccuracies
The authors of the book have been criticized for historical inaccuracies. Concerning Nicolas Werth's section about Russia, Professor Peter Kenez of the University of California wrote about what he says are historical inaccurate statements[11]
Werth can also be an extremely careless historian. He gives the number of Bolsheviks in October 1917 as 2,000, which is a ridiculous underestimate. He quotes from a letter of Lenin to Aleksandr Shliapnikov and gives the date as 17 October 1917; the letter could hardly have originated at that time, since in it Lenin talks about the need to defeat the Tsarist government, and turn the war into a civil conflict. He gives credit to the Austro-Hungarian rather than the German army for the conquest of Poland in 1915. He describes the Provisional Government as "elected."
Estimated number of victims
Left-wing[12] French journalist Gilles Perrault, writing in an op-ed in Le Monde diplomatique has accused the authors of having used incorrect data and of having manipulated figures.[13] On the other hand, some of the estimates given in the Black Book have been deemed "too conservative". For example, regarding the Soviet famine of 194648, Michael Ellman writes:
In their black book, Courtois et al. (1997, pp. 25864) do discuss the famine. The number of victims they give, however, while correct (at least 500,000) is formulated in an extremely conservative way, since the actual number of victims was much larger.[14]
Two of the Black Book's contributors, Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin, sparked a debate in France when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's statements in the introduction about the scale of Communist terror. They felt that he was being obsessed with arriving at a total of 100 million killed. They also argued that, based on the results of their studies one can estimate the total number of the victims of the Communist abuse in between 65 and 93 million.[15]
In his review of the book, historian Jean-Jacques Becker also criticized Courtois' numbers as rather arbitrary and as having "zero historical value" (Fr. "La valeur historique est nulle" for adding up deaths due to disparate phenomena (Fr. "additionner des carottes et des navets", i.e. adding apples and oranges). Becker went further and accused Courtois of being an activist (Fr. "combattant"
.[16]
Argument that the book is one-sided
Some have pointed out, that the book's account of violence is one-sided. Amir Weiner of Stanford University characterizes the "Black Book" as seriously flawed, inconsistent, and prone to mere provocation. In particular, the authors are said to savage Marxist ideology.[17] The methodology of the authors has been criticized. Alexander Dallin writes that moral, legal, or political judgement hardly depends on the number of victims.[18] It is also argued,[19] that a similar chronicle of violence and death tolls can be constructed from an examination of colonialism and capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Disputing the "terror-famine" thesis
Historian J. Arch Getty noted that famine accounted for a significant part of Courtois's 100 million death toll. He believes that these famines were caused by the "stupidity or incompetence of the regime," and that the deaths resulting from the famines, as well as other deaths that "resulted directly or indirectly from government policy," should not be counted as if they were equivalent to intentional murders and executions.[20]
Mark Tauger disagrees with the authors' thesis that the famine of 1933 was artificial and genocidal. Tauger asserts that the authors' interpretation of the famine contains errors, misconceptions, and omissions that invalidate their arguments.[21] However, the historian James Mace wrote that Mark Tauger's view of the famine "is not taken seriously by either Russians or Ukrainians who have studied the topic."[22] Moreover, Stephen Wheatcroft, author of The Years of Hunger, claims Tauger's view represents the opposite extreme in arguing the famine was totally accidental.[23]
Disputing the comparison of Nazism and Communism
Although Vladimir Tismăneanu argued that the Black Book's comparison between Communism and Nazism was both morally and scholarly justifiable,[24] others have rejected the comparison.[25]
Werth and Margolin rejected the equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth said there was still a qualitative difference between Nazism and Communism. He told Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union",[20] and "The more you compare Communism and Nazism, the more the differences are obvious."[26]
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