Here are the ground rules for this source analysis subpage:
Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:01, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
As a reminder to editors from the main DRN page (including myself), or an introduction to new editors from the article talk page, I have pasted the following paragraph regarding this page Vanteloop ( talk) 18:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
“ | As User:Nug has suggested, my role will be primarily that of an observer, but I will provide headings to organize the source analysis, and will collapse negative interaction if necessary. I will expect the editors to provide me with one-paragraph status reports on this page, approximately weekly, and I will provide the dates that I want the status reports. I will allow no more than four weeks for the analysis of sources before an RFC is posted on restructuring the article. The RFC will be posted no later than 12 January 2022. If the source analysis either bogs down or results in too much negative interaction, I reserve the right to post the RFC at any time, in which case the source analysis can continue while the RFC runs.
The first report will be due on 18 December 2021. If it isn't one paragraph, it isn't the required report, which means that I may guess as to whether you and the other editors are making progress. |
” |
— Robert McClenon (neutral moderator), WP:DRNMKUCR |
For the discussion, we must operate with a common set of sources, for, per Aumann's Agreement Theorem, creation of a common knowledge domain is important for achieving consensus. Obviously, we are incapable for analyzing all sources on the topic, so I propose to agree how to create a representative set of them for each subtopic of our discussion. The procedure must be neutral, which means each of us cannot just pick the source they like: our procedure must be transparent, reproducible, and independent on a personality of those who perform a search. Does everybody agree with these principles?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 15:20, 15 December 2021 (UTC) @ Robert McClenon: You rules say:
That de facto eliminates us from the process of working on the article. This situation cannot last long, so I insist on strict deadlines and prompt responses. We either finish that process quickly, or I will not consider this rule as mandatory.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 19:04, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
I would also like the source analysis to move quickly. What does User:Paul Siebert want the other editors to submit by 18 December 2021? Robert McClenon ( talk) 04:41, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
In addition to anything else that is agreed on, I will ask each editor who is taking part in the source analysis to identify between two and four sources no later than 18 December 2021, and then other editors can comment on whether they are acceptable. Robert McClenon ( talk) 07:53, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I have no idea what the formatting is for this page (e.g. separate section headers for each editor?) so if I'm doing this wrong, somebody please refactor or let me know.
I agree step #1 is to identify the criteria for source inclusion, before talking about specific sources.
The sources should be:
Two obvious top-notch examples: Cambridge History of Communism doi: 10.1017/9781316137024 and Oxford History of Communism doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199602056.001.0001. Levivich 16:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
User:Levivich - I think it will be second-level headings for dates, and third-level headings for editors. As long as the back-and-forth does not get out of hand, there is not a prohibition on back-and-forth at this time. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:01, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I believe that Siebert gave a good intro and I hope we can agree on (i) subtopic, (ii) neutral research, and (iii) source quality, for which Levivich gave good suggestion. For the topic about the link and theories, "mass killing" "communism"
is fine as a good Google Scholar search, though we may get too much results of works about mass killings in general; for the topic about the events, I suggest "communist mass killings"
(also used in the AfD's closure) or "mass killings" "communist regimes"
. One thing that must be noted is that "anti-communist mass killings"
gave me 50 results in total, while "communist mass killings"
gave me 81 results in total; however, that is a bit misleading, since the latter includes many sources about anti-communist mass killings, which gave us more results than communist mass killings, which is reduced to 31 results in total.
The Cambridge History of Communism and Oxford History of Communism are certainly good and balanced sources. It is interesting that the latter has chapters about "Religion under Communism" and "Sport under Communism" but no "Mass Killings under Communism" or "Communist Death Toll" chapters. Cambridge's History of Communism includes "Communism, Violence and Terror" by Hiroaki Kuromiya, which may be used to discuss links and theories. Davide King ( talk) 01:54, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I find [3] this very useful. I also encourage all participants to read WP:RSVETTING I respectfully request @ Nug: and @ Vanteloop: to confirm their intentions to participate in this discussion, otherwise I see no reason to continue our conversation here, for there seems to be no significant disagreement among other participants.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:30, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I presented some source analysis at the MKUCR talk page, but if DRN participants prefer to discuss it in a quite place, I am ready to continue here. In general, it may be useful to make long posts with sources and quotes that the article's talk page, and to discuss them here. What do you guys think?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:41, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
I think it is a good idea to "make long posts with sources and quotes that the article's talk page, and to discuss them here." I think Siebert delivered in their first analysis, and I do not think Nug gave a good rebuttal here. I believe Siebert provided plenty of evidence that Rummel's estimates are unreliable; if someone is unreliable about something (in this case estimates and Communism), there is no point discussing whether it is due or undue. Next, I would like to see Siebert perform an analysis of Bellamy, Chirot, Jones, Mann, Sémelin, and Valentino (e.g. the sources used to support the status quo and listed here), and what they actually say and support, and what weight they hold in regards to genocide studies and Communist studies, what they have published about Communism in particular, and in general how accepted they are. Davide King ( talk) 21:45, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
It is Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, not Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide under Communist Regimes; The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, not The Dark Side of Communism: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing; Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, not Purify and Destroy: The Communist Uses of Massacre and Genocide; and Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, not Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Communist Mass Murders. Can one truly look at their own publisher's synopsis and tell me that Communism is their main focus? All of those sources may be acceptable for B, not for A or C as has been done, and most important they are not supposed to be synthesized to broaden the scope to Communism as a whole just because they say Communist regimes or Communist mass killings, when what they mean and discuss are Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, three very specific Communist leaders who are universally recognized to have engaged in mass killings but communism was not the main cause, not Communist regimes as a whole. Davide King ( talk) 14:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Source | RS status | Diffs/RfCs |
---|---|---|
Victims of Communism Memorial | Unreliable | 1, 2 |
Valentino 2004 [1] | Reliable | |
Mann 2005 [2] | Reliable | |
Malia 1999 [3] | Not reliable | 1, 2 |
Courtois 1999 [4] | Not reliable | |
Werth 1999 [5] | Reliable | 1 |
Owens, Su, Snow 2013 [6] | ||
Wayman, Tago 2010 [7] | ||
Karlsson, Schoenhals 2008 [8] | ||
Rummel 1994 [9] | ||
Horowitz 2002 [10] | ||
Arendt 1951 [11] | ||
Fein 1993 [12] | ||
Harff 2003 [13] | ||
Harff Gurr 1988 [14] | ||
Kuper 1981 [15] |
Per WP:CCC, you may change the reliability of each source if the consensus changes. MarioSuperstar77 ( talk) 15:08, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
To demonstrate my point, I created another version of the table. If you like it, feel free to edit/expamd.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 19:50, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Regarding the table above, Malia wasn't even discussed in the two RSN discussions, yet it is listed as "not reliable" in the table. The first RSN discussion was about the reliability of Courtois' estimate and I don't see any consensus, and the second about the whole book BBoC, with most !votes saying use with attribution for the introduction. If we can't honestly represent RSN discussions, it doesn't bode well when it comes to interpreting published sources. Regarding the table below, the two columns "Cause(s)" and "Links to Communism as a primary causative factor?" can be merged into a single column "Cause(s)". The "Is there any controversy?" is subjective and should be removed, and the column "Broader context?" needs to be renamed "Context". -- Nug ( talk) 23:43, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Source | Terminology/scope | Cause(s) | Links to Communism as a primary causative factor? | Broader context? | Is there any controversy? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Valentino 2004 [1] | All mass killing/mass mortality | Leader's personality | No | Yes, Communist mass killings is just a subtopic | No |
2. Mann 2005 [2] | "Classicide", a small subset of mass killings/excess deaths, mostly Cambodian genocide, and, to a much smaller extent, executions of "class enemies" in Stalin's USSR and Mao's China | Mann considers "classicide" a perversion of socialist theories of democracy, in the same sense as "ethnic cleansing" is a perversion of nationalist theory of democracy (p. 350) | It links non-intential deaths as a result of malnutrition etc (i.e. not "classicide") to social transformations inspired by Marx, but not much stress is made on that | Yes, "classicide" is a "dark side of the democracy" | No |
3. Malia 1999 [3] | No specific terminology. All spectrum of excess deaths | "generic Communism" | Communist ideology | No | Very controversial |
4. Courtois 1999 [4] | No specific terminology. All spectrum of excess deaths | "generic Communism" | Communist ideology | No | Very controversial |
5. Werth 1999 [5] | No specific terminology. Execution, camp mortality, mass murder, etc in Soviet Russia | Pre-WWI social tensions and the policy of Bolshevik authorities | No. A stress is made on Russian revolutionary traditions | No | No |
6. Kuper 1981 [15] | Genocide. Convention, Ideology, Armenia, Holocaust, 1971 Bangladesh genocide, Ikiza | a liberal assumption of ideological legitimation as a necessary pre-condition for genocide | ideological determinism rejected (Soviet), Marxism incorporates ideologies of dehumanization | Yes | So old China is still the counter-example to Soviet |
Additional analysis on the Communist democides by Nug, from talk page. MarioSuperstar77 ( talk) 20:42, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
Location-Dates | Description | Additional Motives | Deaths |
---|---|---|---|
Soviet Union (1917-23) | Russian Civil War and Red Terror | Counterguerrilla | 250,000-2,500,000 |
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1927-45) | Collectivisation, Great Terror, occupation/communisation of Baltic states and Western Poland | Counterguerrilla | 10,000,000-20,000,000 |
China (including Tibet) (1949-72 | Land reform, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and other political purges | Counterguerrilla | 10,000,000-46,000,000 |
Cambodia (1975-79) | Collectivisation and political repression | Ethnic | 1,000,000-2,000,000 |
POSSIBLE CASES | |||
Bulgaria (1944-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 50,000-100,000 | |
East Germany (1945-? | Political repression by the Soviet Union | 80,000-100,000 | |
Romania (1945-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 60,000-300,000 | |
North Korea (1945-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | Counterguerrilla | 400,000-1,500,000 |
North and South Vietnam (1953-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 80,000-200,000 |
Communist democides can be, and already are, discussed at Democide. Rather than take Rummel or Valentino's theories as fact, it would be good to present their weight in the literature. Valentino says nothing know and what I have repeatedly told about, namely that universally recognized mass killings were done under Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's leaderships, and his emphasis on leaders is in fact very grounded in reality; whether those other possible cases are relevant, we cannot base it from Valentino alone but from its weight in the literature, especially if some of them fit another category than Communist mass killings (e.g. counterguerilla mass killings, as is done for Afghanistan, which means that being a nominally Communist regime is not as important, and Siebert's point about Afghanistan is still correct, and is indeed also supported by Tago & Wayman 2010 — we need not to confuse Valentino's Communist mass killings category with any mass killing that happened under a nominally Communist regime); the literature (Chirot, Jones, Mann, and others) emphasizes Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and unless those other possible cases become universally recognized as Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's, we should not give them more weight than universally recognized events warrant, other than a short paragraph saying this. Davide King ( talk) 21:21, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
References
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Fiveby ( talk) 15:22, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
"The convergence of terror and revolution has been noted from the time of the French and Russian revolutions. This article lays out the ways in which the concept of extreme political violence in communist revolution from Russia to Cambodia continues to be both politicized and resistant to agreement about such basics as definition, scale, and numbers of victims. There is particular disagreement about whether to count as victims of terror those who were the collateral damage from poorly conceived and brutally implemented policies such as collectivization and the Great Leap Forward alongside terror deliberately inflicted upon particularly targeted individuals and groups. The article suggests that whether deliberate or incidental, terror in communist systems is best understood as proactive and reactive campaigns to ensure regime security by mobilizing the bureaucracy and engaging in a display of communicative theatre with mass populations through such forms as mass trials."
"In his introductory essay, S. A. Smith acknowledges the basic contradiction within the conditions needed to propagate Communism, as outlined by Marx, and the reality of those states which actually adopted it practically. With certain notable exceptions, he shows that Communism often took root either as a direct result of war/colonial insurrection and/or within countries with authoritarian systems already in place 'changes of borders, the devastation caused by war, genocide and forced migration as a consequence of the imperial politics' that beleaguered Eastern Europe and that 'played an essential role in the establishment of communist regimes' (p. 204). Thus the basic premise is that Communism took root in countries which were unprepared economically and as a result, the implementation of it at a state level was flawed from the beginning."
Abstract needed. Paul Siebert may be able to get full access and summarize.
Both of those are much better, and more importantly mainstream, sources on the topic. Davide King ( talk) 15:43, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
Subsections include:
"There were repeated stimuli that pushed communist regimes to pursue campaigns of terror against their citizens, and ultimately against themselves. Part of this was situational: communist parties came to power in wartime contexts rife with competitive militarization, brutality, and the disintegration of even the most basic elements of physical security. Communist parties were in part successful because in many environments they were better organized, better disciplined, and more ruthless than their competitors. Once established, the dictatorship of the proletariat required that all manner of defined enemies be either exterminated or cowed into submission, and the main way in which this was accomplished was through the institution of the bureaucratic campaign. The problem that many communist regimes ran into was that freed of legal or social constraints, the vanguard party, convinced of its access to absolute truth, was also free to make catastrophic errors. Whether it was the pursuit of disastrous policies to (p. 368) realize economies of scale in grain production or the collateral damage from a campaign against putative internal enemies, there were no institutional restraints on the vanguard party. Social groups that might have blunted excesses were eliminated, fractured, or cowed into silence. In a system in which the vanguard party was only accountable to its own fluctuating notions about how to best pursue the revolution, the methods that had enabled it to come to power and consolidate its rule against real or likely enemies became naturalized as methods of rule that, by vanquishing imaginary and fantasy enemies, would ensure the maintenance of the power of the party and the ultimate victory of socialism."
"And contemporary demographers who reconstruct numbers of excess deaths in the notoriously bloody twentieth century—i.e. deaths in excess of the statistically expected number of deaths in a population over a specific length of time—feature communist regimes prominently, although not exclusively. A quick perusal of websites on the topic shows that many of the activities associated with terror (in lower-case letters) and 'The Terror' of the Stalinist Soviet Union and its imitators feature on lists of what is often called 'democide': purges, executions, forced deportations, and famine-induced excess deaths. It is natural to slide between terror and democide, since all forms of mass killings clearly involve a great deal of terror for the victims. The more careful of such websites acknowledge the wide variation in estimates of excess deaths, with annotated citations, suggesting that these differences are down to a left–right bias on the part of the individual researcher or else are due to incomplete or inaccessible data. However this conflation of terror and excess deaths in general conceals more than it illuminates."
"The literature on what Lenin was and was not responsible for in terms of establishing the basic template for terror in the Soviet Union is considerable. Recent books that identify Lenin with terror and callous regard for human life are Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer, et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Both, while cataloguing undoubted horrors, lump together different causal dynamics. The subject matter of both, and the lack of comparative and contextual framing, skews the resulting analysis in favour of a very high number of deaths."
"The second half of the first volume presents eleven essays summarizing (mainly) the state of Soviet historiography on Stalin's consolidation of state power on the eve of World War II, from 1924 to 1941, and four more essays on the broader Eurasian context. In the opening essay of part 2, Hiroaki Kuromiya brilliantly summarizes the relationship between Communism, violence, and terror in Stalin's rise to power: 'Terror and violence are endemic to dictatorships. In the history of political violence, the Soviet practice marked a new stage. Political violence was ideologically justified and exercised by the first communist state in world history. Backed by Moscow, communists elsewhere also resorted to violence as a political weapon' (1:279). Here Kuromiya takes a bow to The Black Book of Communism (1997) and its lead essay by Nicolas Werth. In this way, Kuromiya seems to embrace the controversial Black Book and its conclusions. But a close reading of Kuromiya's essay substantially reduces the absurdly exaggerated data of the Black Book, presenting numbers that are a fraction of those in the Black Book—chronicling evil, yes, but on a much smaller scale than the scales of atrocities depicted in the Soviet-bashing typical of Cold War and post–Cold War Western historiography."
As expected, majority of sources cited are cherry picked from passages about Communism and Communism as a whole but are about genocide and mass killings in general, therefore they are in fact in support of my Mass killing expansion and/or Mass killings in history article proposal. Even those that are focused on Communism, and as a result have 'Communist' in the title, focus mainly (if not only) on Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, not Communism as a whole, because it is those three leaders who are universally recognized to have engaged in mass killings. In addition, the major issue is NPOV and WEIGHT, not VERIFY; of course there are going to be sources discussing Communist regimes but in what context? Majority of given sources do not fit Levivich's suggested criteria here, which is in fact very acceptable. Finally, several of them still rely on totalitarian theory, which is clearly a minority view at best in academia. If possible, I would like Robert McClenon to comment on Levivich's suggested criteria and whether the points I raised here are warranted.
The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.
The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. ... Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s.
At first sight, accusations that Hitler and Stalin mirrored each other as they 'conducted wars of annihilation against internal and external enemeis ... of class, race, and nation,' seem plausible. But such a perspective, in reality a recapitulation of the long-discredited totalitarian perspective equating Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's National Socialist Germany, is not tenable. It betrays a profound misunderstanding of the distinct natures of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which made them mortal enemies. Stalin's primary objective was to forge an autarkic, industrialized, multinational state, under the rubric of 'socialism in one country'. Nationalism and nation-building were on Stalin's agenda, not genocide; nor was it inherent in the construction of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state—however draconian.
Davide King ( talk) 15:20, 28 December 2021 (UTC) [Edited to add Guilhot 2005] Davide King ( talk) 15:50, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
I am not sure the discussion develops in a right direction. It is premature to discuss any quotes until we came to an agreement about reliability of each source, its scope, terminology, main thesis and controversy. The reason is obvious, because:
Therefore, I would be grateful if, instead of filling the space with large quotes, we all sick with the scheme shown in the second table. Please, add new sources to that table and fill all fields.
Furthermore, as soon as we started to discuss Harff, let me point out that this source is very old. It was published before the "archival revolution" in the USSR, and the data used by the authors are obsolete, Cold war era data. Thus, I checked her Table 1, and the first line is 1943-47 politicide in the USSR that killed 0.5 to 1.1 million repatriated Soviet nationals. I saw no mention of those deaths in modern sources that discuss victims of Soviet repressions. Wheatcroft, Ellman, Rosefielde, and other authors never tell about that. I decided to check if my conclusion was correct, and I found this source. It is the first in the list, it is peer-reviewed, it is cited by peers, it is telling specifically about repatriation of Soviet citizens, and it is recent. All of that makes it much more trustworthy. This source says:
Moreover, the Gulag article cites a source (Zemskov V.N. On repatriation of Soviet citizens. Istoriya SSSR., 1990, No.4) that provides a detailed statistics of a fate of repatriated civilians: out of 4.1 million of repatriated citizens, only ~7% of repatriated citizens were imprisoned in Gulag, and others were sent home, conscripted etc. There is no information about a million of killed in some "politicide": teh first line in Harff's table 1 tells about a politicide that never was, which adds no cfredibility withg other lines in her table. That means by using Harff as a source, we create a POV-fork: we tell a story of a politicide that never occurred, according to new sources. This is a very complex situation, because we cannot combine Harff and Zemskov in one narrative without a danger of OR. We have a very unusual situation when different groups of sources tell different stories and present different facts, but there is no dispute between them. We need to develop a general approach to this situation.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 21:34, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/MKUCR Quotes from Sources.
(I have moved the 69 sources because, with separate headings, they make it nearly impossible to navigate the Table of Contents. Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:05, 29 December 2021 (UTC)}}
Sorry but what Nug did above is not only unhelpful but even disruptive in light of Siebert's comment before, and the moderator's rules about posting here. To avoid escalation of disputes, I am not going to do it but I kindly ask Robert McClenon to revert them — Nug are free to link the same list of sources from a sandbox, there is no need to bloat the page like this, and is not unhelpful at all. The issue is not VERIFY, but NPOV and WEIGHT, therefore providing cherry-picked sources, most of which are already used in the article as it stands, and we all know what the AfD said about it, does not lead us forward but backward. Davide King ( talk) 23:39, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
Here are the ground rules for this source analysis subpage:
Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:01, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
As a reminder to editors from the main DRN page (including myself), or an introduction to new editors from the article talk page, I have pasted the following paragraph regarding this page Vanteloop ( talk) 18:23, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
“ | As User:Nug has suggested, my role will be primarily that of an observer, but I will provide headings to organize the source analysis, and will collapse negative interaction if necessary. I will expect the editors to provide me with one-paragraph status reports on this page, approximately weekly, and I will provide the dates that I want the status reports. I will allow no more than four weeks for the analysis of sources before an RFC is posted on restructuring the article. The RFC will be posted no later than 12 January 2022. If the source analysis either bogs down or results in too much negative interaction, I reserve the right to post the RFC at any time, in which case the source analysis can continue while the RFC runs.
The first report will be due on 18 December 2021. If it isn't one paragraph, it isn't the required report, which means that I may guess as to whether you and the other editors are making progress. |
” |
— Robert McClenon (neutral moderator), WP:DRNMKUCR |
For the discussion, we must operate with a common set of sources, for, per Aumann's Agreement Theorem, creation of a common knowledge domain is important for achieving consensus. Obviously, we are incapable for analyzing all sources on the topic, so I propose to agree how to create a representative set of them for each subtopic of our discussion. The procedure must be neutral, which means each of us cannot just pick the source they like: our procedure must be transparent, reproducible, and independent on a personality of those who perform a search. Does everybody agree with these principles?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 15:20, 15 December 2021 (UTC) @ Robert McClenon: You rules say:
That de facto eliminates us from the process of working on the article. This situation cannot last long, so I insist on strict deadlines and prompt responses. We either finish that process quickly, or I will not consider this rule as mandatory.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 19:04, 15 December 2021 (UTC)
I would also like the source analysis to move quickly. What does User:Paul Siebert want the other editors to submit by 18 December 2021? Robert McClenon ( talk) 04:41, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
In addition to anything else that is agreed on, I will ask each editor who is taking part in the source analysis to identify between two and four sources no later than 18 December 2021, and then other editors can comment on whether they are acceptable. Robert McClenon ( talk) 07:53, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I have no idea what the formatting is for this page (e.g. separate section headers for each editor?) so if I'm doing this wrong, somebody please refactor or let me know.
I agree step #1 is to identify the criteria for source inclusion, before talking about specific sources.
The sources should be:
Two obvious top-notch examples: Cambridge History of Communism doi: 10.1017/9781316137024 and Oxford History of Communism doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199602056.001.0001. Levivich 16:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
User:Levivich - I think it will be second-level headings for dates, and third-level headings for editors. As long as the back-and-forth does not get out of hand, there is not a prohibition on back-and-forth at this time. Robert McClenon ( talk) 20:01, 16 December 2021 (UTC)
I believe that Siebert gave a good intro and I hope we can agree on (i) subtopic, (ii) neutral research, and (iii) source quality, for which Levivich gave good suggestion. For the topic about the link and theories, "mass killing" "communism"
is fine as a good Google Scholar search, though we may get too much results of works about mass killings in general; for the topic about the events, I suggest "communist mass killings"
(also used in the AfD's closure) or "mass killings" "communist regimes"
. One thing that must be noted is that "anti-communist mass killings"
gave me 50 results in total, while "communist mass killings"
gave me 81 results in total; however, that is a bit misleading, since the latter includes many sources about anti-communist mass killings, which gave us more results than communist mass killings, which is reduced to 31 results in total.
The Cambridge History of Communism and Oxford History of Communism are certainly good and balanced sources. It is interesting that the latter has chapters about "Religion under Communism" and "Sport under Communism" but no "Mass Killings under Communism" or "Communist Death Toll" chapters. Cambridge's History of Communism includes "Communism, Violence and Terror" by Hiroaki Kuromiya, which may be used to discuss links and theories. Davide King ( talk) 01:54, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I find [3] this very useful. I also encourage all participants to read WP:RSVETTING I respectfully request @ Nug: and @ Vanteloop: to confirm their intentions to participate in this discussion, otherwise I see no reason to continue our conversation here, for there seems to be no significant disagreement among other participants.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:30, 17 December 2021 (UTC)
I presented some source analysis at the MKUCR talk page, but if DRN participants prefer to discuss it in a quite place, I am ready to continue here. In general, it may be useful to make long posts with sources and quotes that the article's talk page, and to discuss them here. What do you guys think?-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 20:41, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
I think it is a good idea to "make long posts with sources and quotes that the article's talk page, and to discuss them here." I think Siebert delivered in their first analysis, and I do not think Nug gave a good rebuttal here. I believe Siebert provided plenty of evidence that Rummel's estimates are unreliable; if someone is unreliable about something (in this case estimates and Communism), there is no point discussing whether it is due or undue. Next, I would like to see Siebert perform an analysis of Bellamy, Chirot, Jones, Mann, Sémelin, and Valentino (e.g. the sources used to support the status quo and listed here), and what they actually say and support, and what weight they hold in regards to genocide studies and Communist studies, what they have published about Communism in particular, and in general how accepted they are. Davide King ( talk) 21:45, 22 December 2021 (UTC)
It is Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century, not Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide under Communist Regimes; The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, not The Dark Side of Communism: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing; Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, not Purify and Destroy: The Communist Uses of Massacre and Genocide; and Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, not Why Not Kill Them All?: The Logic and Prevention of Communist Mass Murders. Can one truly look at their own publisher's synopsis and tell me that Communism is their main focus? All of those sources may be acceptable for B, not for A or C as has been done, and most important they are not supposed to be synthesized to broaden the scope to Communism as a whole just because they say Communist regimes or Communist mass killings, when what they mean and discuss are Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, three very specific Communist leaders who are universally recognized to have engaged in mass killings but communism was not the main cause, not Communist regimes as a whole. Davide King ( talk) 14:58, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Source | RS status | Diffs/RfCs |
---|---|---|
Victims of Communism Memorial | Unreliable | 1, 2 |
Valentino 2004 [1] | Reliable | |
Mann 2005 [2] | Reliable | |
Malia 1999 [3] | Not reliable | 1, 2 |
Courtois 1999 [4] | Not reliable | |
Werth 1999 [5] | Reliable | 1 |
Owens, Su, Snow 2013 [6] | ||
Wayman, Tago 2010 [7] | ||
Karlsson, Schoenhals 2008 [8] | ||
Rummel 1994 [9] | ||
Horowitz 2002 [10] | ||
Arendt 1951 [11] | ||
Fein 1993 [12] | ||
Harff 2003 [13] | ||
Harff Gurr 1988 [14] | ||
Kuper 1981 [15] |
Per WP:CCC, you may change the reliability of each source if the consensus changes. MarioSuperstar77 ( talk) 15:08, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
To demonstrate my point, I created another version of the table. If you like it, feel free to edit/expamd.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 19:50, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Regarding the table above, Malia wasn't even discussed in the two RSN discussions, yet it is listed as "not reliable" in the table. The first RSN discussion was about the reliability of Courtois' estimate and I don't see any consensus, and the second about the whole book BBoC, with most !votes saying use with attribution for the introduction. If we can't honestly represent RSN discussions, it doesn't bode well when it comes to interpreting published sources. Regarding the table below, the two columns "Cause(s)" and "Links to Communism as a primary causative factor?" can be merged into a single column "Cause(s)". The "Is there any controversy?" is subjective and should be removed, and the column "Broader context?" needs to be renamed "Context". -- Nug ( talk) 23:43, 27 December 2021 (UTC)
Source | Terminology/scope | Cause(s) | Links to Communism as a primary causative factor? | Broader context? | Is there any controversy? |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1. Valentino 2004 [1] | All mass killing/mass mortality | Leader's personality | No | Yes, Communist mass killings is just a subtopic | No |
2. Mann 2005 [2] | "Classicide", a small subset of mass killings/excess deaths, mostly Cambodian genocide, and, to a much smaller extent, executions of "class enemies" in Stalin's USSR and Mao's China | Mann considers "classicide" a perversion of socialist theories of democracy, in the same sense as "ethnic cleansing" is a perversion of nationalist theory of democracy (p. 350) | It links non-intential deaths as a result of malnutrition etc (i.e. not "classicide") to social transformations inspired by Marx, but not much stress is made on that | Yes, "classicide" is a "dark side of the democracy" | No |
3. Malia 1999 [3] | No specific terminology. All spectrum of excess deaths | "generic Communism" | Communist ideology | No | Very controversial |
4. Courtois 1999 [4] | No specific terminology. All spectrum of excess deaths | "generic Communism" | Communist ideology | No | Very controversial |
5. Werth 1999 [5] | No specific terminology. Execution, camp mortality, mass murder, etc in Soviet Russia | Pre-WWI social tensions and the policy of Bolshevik authorities | No. A stress is made on Russian revolutionary traditions | No | No |
6. Kuper 1981 [15] | Genocide. Convention, Ideology, Armenia, Holocaust, 1971 Bangladesh genocide, Ikiza | a liberal assumption of ideological legitimation as a necessary pre-condition for genocide | ideological determinism rejected (Soviet), Marxism incorporates ideologies of dehumanization | Yes | So old China is still the counter-example to Soviet |
Additional analysis on the Communist democides by Nug, from talk page. MarioSuperstar77 ( talk) 20:42, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
Location-Dates | Description | Additional Motives | Deaths |
---|---|---|---|
Soviet Union (1917-23) | Russian Civil War and Red Terror | Counterguerrilla | 250,000-2,500,000 |
Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (1927-45) | Collectivisation, Great Terror, occupation/communisation of Baltic states and Western Poland | Counterguerrilla | 10,000,000-20,000,000 |
China (including Tibet) (1949-72 | Land reform, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and other political purges | Counterguerrilla | 10,000,000-46,000,000 |
Cambodia (1975-79) | Collectivisation and political repression | Ethnic | 1,000,000-2,000,000 |
POSSIBLE CASES | |||
Bulgaria (1944-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 50,000-100,000 | |
East Germany (1945-? | Political repression by the Soviet Union | 80,000-100,000 | |
Romania (1945-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 60,000-300,000 | |
North Korea (1945-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | Counterguerrilla | 400,000-1,500,000 |
North and South Vietnam (1953-?) | Agricultural collectivisation and political repression | 80,000-200,000 |
Communist democides can be, and already are, discussed at Democide. Rather than take Rummel or Valentino's theories as fact, it would be good to present their weight in the literature. Valentino says nothing know and what I have repeatedly told about, namely that universally recognized mass killings were done under Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's leaderships, and his emphasis on leaders is in fact very grounded in reality; whether those other possible cases are relevant, we cannot base it from Valentino alone but from its weight in the literature, especially if some of them fit another category than Communist mass killings (e.g. counterguerilla mass killings, as is done for Afghanistan, which means that being a nominally Communist regime is not as important, and Siebert's point about Afghanistan is still correct, and is indeed also supported by Tago & Wayman 2010 — we need not to confuse Valentino's Communist mass killings category with any mass killing that happened under a nominally Communist regime); the literature (Chirot, Jones, Mann, and others) emphasizes Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, and unless those other possible cases become universally recognized as Stalin's, Mao's, and Pol Pot's, we should not give them more weight than universally recognized events warrant, other than a short paragraph saying this. Davide King ( talk) 21:21, 31 December 2021 (UTC)
References
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Fiveby ( talk) 15:22, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
"The convergence of terror and revolution has been noted from the time of the French and Russian revolutions. This article lays out the ways in which the concept of extreme political violence in communist revolution from Russia to Cambodia continues to be both politicized and resistant to agreement about such basics as definition, scale, and numbers of victims. There is particular disagreement about whether to count as victims of terror those who were the collateral damage from poorly conceived and brutally implemented policies such as collectivization and the Great Leap Forward alongside terror deliberately inflicted upon particularly targeted individuals and groups. The article suggests that whether deliberate or incidental, terror in communist systems is best understood as proactive and reactive campaigns to ensure regime security by mobilizing the bureaucracy and engaging in a display of communicative theatre with mass populations through such forms as mass trials."
"In his introductory essay, S. A. Smith acknowledges the basic contradiction within the conditions needed to propagate Communism, as outlined by Marx, and the reality of those states which actually adopted it practically. With certain notable exceptions, he shows that Communism often took root either as a direct result of war/colonial insurrection and/or within countries with authoritarian systems already in place 'changes of borders, the devastation caused by war, genocide and forced migration as a consequence of the imperial politics' that beleaguered Eastern Europe and that 'played an essential role in the establishment of communist regimes' (p. 204). Thus the basic premise is that Communism took root in countries which were unprepared economically and as a result, the implementation of it at a state level was flawed from the beginning."
Abstract needed. Paul Siebert may be able to get full access and summarize.
Both of those are much better, and more importantly mainstream, sources on the topic. Davide King ( talk) 15:43, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
Subsections include:
"There were repeated stimuli that pushed communist regimes to pursue campaigns of terror against their citizens, and ultimately against themselves. Part of this was situational: communist parties came to power in wartime contexts rife with competitive militarization, brutality, and the disintegration of even the most basic elements of physical security. Communist parties were in part successful because in many environments they were better organized, better disciplined, and more ruthless than their competitors. Once established, the dictatorship of the proletariat required that all manner of defined enemies be either exterminated or cowed into submission, and the main way in which this was accomplished was through the institution of the bureaucratic campaign. The problem that many communist regimes ran into was that freed of legal or social constraints, the vanguard party, convinced of its access to absolute truth, was also free to make catastrophic errors. Whether it was the pursuit of disastrous policies to (p. 368) realize economies of scale in grain production or the collateral damage from a campaign against putative internal enemies, there were no institutional restraints on the vanguard party. Social groups that might have blunted excesses were eliminated, fractured, or cowed into silence. In a system in which the vanguard party was only accountable to its own fluctuating notions about how to best pursue the revolution, the methods that had enabled it to come to power and consolidate its rule against real or likely enemies became naturalized as methods of rule that, by vanquishing imaginary and fantasy enemies, would ensure the maintenance of the power of the party and the ultimate victory of socialism."
"And contemporary demographers who reconstruct numbers of excess deaths in the notoriously bloody twentieth century—i.e. deaths in excess of the statistically expected number of deaths in a population over a specific length of time—feature communist regimes prominently, although not exclusively. A quick perusal of websites on the topic shows that many of the activities associated with terror (in lower-case letters) and 'The Terror' of the Stalinist Soviet Union and its imitators feature on lists of what is often called 'democide': purges, executions, forced deportations, and famine-induced excess deaths. It is natural to slide between terror and democide, since all forms of mass killings clearly involve a great deal of terror for the victims. The more careful of such websites acknowledge the wide variation in estimates of excess deaths, with annotated citations, suggesting that these differences are down to a left–right bias on the part of the individual researcher or else are due to incomplete or inaccessible data. However this conflation of terror and excess deaths in general conceals more than it illuminates."
"The literature on what Lenin was and was not responsible for in terms of establishing the basic template for terror in the Soviet Union is considerable. Recent books that identify Lenin with terror and callous regard for human life are Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Stéphane Courtois, Mark Kramer, et al., The Black Book of Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Both, while cataloguing undoubted horrors, lump together different causal dynamics. The subject matter of both, and the lack of comparative and contextual framing, skews the resulting analysis in favour of a very high number of deaths."
"The second half of the first volume presents eleven essays summarizing (mainly) the state of Soviet historiography on Stalin's consolidation of state power on the eve of World War II, from 1924 to 1941, and four more essays on the broader Eurasian context. In the opening essay of part 2, Hiroaki Kuromiya brilliantly summarizes the relationship between Communism, violence, and terror in Stalin's rise to power: 'Terror and violence are endemic to dictatorships. In the history of political violence, the Soviet practice marked a new stage. Political violence was ideologically justified and exercised by the first communist state in world history. Backed by Moscow, communists elsewhere also resorted to violence as a political weapon' (1:279). Here Kuromiya takes a bow to The Black Book of Communism (1997) and its lead essay by Nicolas Werth. In this way, Kuromiya seems to embrace the controversial Black Book and its conclusions. But a close reading of Kuromiya's essay substantially reduces the absurdly exaggerated data of the Black Book, presenting numbers that are a fraction of those in the Black Book—chronicling evil, yes, but on a much smaller scale than the scales of atrocities depicted in the Soviet-bashing typical of Cold War and post–Cold War Western historiography."
As expected, majority of sources cited are cherry picked from passages about Communism and Communism as a whole but are about genocide and mass killings in general, therefore they are in fact in support of my Mass killing expansion and/or Mass killings in history article proposal. Even those that are focused on Communism, and as a result have 'Communist' in the title, focus mainly (if not only) on Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, not Communism as a whole, because it is those three leaders who are universally recognized to have engaged in mass killings. In addition, the major issue is NPOV and WEIGHT, not VERIFY; of course there are going to be sources discussing Communist regimes but in what context? Majority of given sources do not fit Levivich's suggested criteria here, which is in fact very acceptable. Finally, several of them still rely on totalitarian theory, which is clearly a minority view at best in academia. If possible, I would like Robert McClenon to comment on Levivich's suggested criteria and whether the points I raised here are warranted.
The opposition between the West and Soviet totalitarianism was often presented as an opposition both moral and epistemological between truth and falsehood. The democratic, social, and economic credentials of the Soviet Union were typically seen as 'lies' and as the product of deliberate and multiform propaganda. ... In this context, the concept of totalitarianism was itself an asset. As it made possible the conversion of prewar anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism.
The word is as functional now as it was 50 years ago. It means the kind of regime that existed in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, the Soviet satellites, Communist China, and maybe Fascist Italy, where the word originated. ... Who are we to tell Václav Havel or Adam Michnik that they were fooling themselves when they perceived their rulers as totalitarian? Or for that matter any of the millions of former subjects of Soviet-type rule who use the local equivalents of the Czech totalita to describe the systems they lived under before 1989? It is a useful word and everyone knows what it means as a general referent. Problems arise when people confuse the useful descriptive term with the old 'theory' from the 1950s.
At first sight, accusations that Hitler and Stalin mirrored each other as they 'conducted wars of annihilation against internal and external enemeis ... of class, race, and nation,' seem plausible. But such a perspective, in reality a recapitulation of the long-discredited totalitarian perspective equating Stalin's Soviet Union with Hitler's National Socialist Germany, is not tenable. It betrays a profound misunderstanding of the distinct natures of the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, which made them mortal enemies. Stalin's primary objective was to forge an autarkic, industrialized, multinational state, under the rubric of 'socialism in one country'. Nationalism and nation-building were on Stalin's agenda, not genocide; nor was it inherent in the construction of a non-capitalist, non-expansionary state—however draconian.
Davide King ( talk) 15:20, 28 December 2021 (UTC) [Edited to add Guilhot 2005] Davide King ( talk) 15:50, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
I am not sure the discussion develops in a right direction. It is premature to discuss any quotes until we came to an agreement about reliability of each source, its scope, terminology, main thesis and controversy. The reason is obvious, because:
Therefore, I would be grateful if, instead of filling the space with large quotes, we all sick with the scheme shown in the second table. Please, add new sources to that table and fill all fields.
Furthermore, as soon as we started to discuss Harff, let me point out that this source is very old. It was published before the "archival revolution" in the USSR, and the data used by the authors are obsolete, Cold war era data. Thus, I checked her Table 1, and the first line is 1943-47 politicide in the USSR that killed 0.5 to 1.1 million repatriated Soviet nationals. I saw no mention of those deaths in modern sources that discuss victims of Soviet repressions. Wheatcroft, Ellman, Rosefielde, and other authors never tell about that. I decided to check if my conclusion was correct, and I found this source. It is the first in the list, it is peer-reviewed, it is cited by peers, it is telling specifically about repatriation of Soviet citizens, and it is recent. All of that makes it much more trustworthy. This source says:
Moreover, the Gulag article cites a source (Zemskov V.N. On repatriation of Soviet citizens. Istoriya SSSR., 1990, No.4) that provides a detailed statistics of a fate of repatriated civilians: out of 4.1 million of repatriated citizens, only ~7% of repatriated citizens were imprisoned in Gulag, and others were sent home, conscripted etc. There is no information about a million of killed in some "politicide": teh first line in Harff's table 1 tells about a politicide that never was, which adds no cfredibility withg other lines in her table. That means by using Harff as a source, we create a POV-fork: we tell a story of a politicide that never occurred, according to new sources. This is a very complex situation, because we cannot combine Harff and Zemskov in one narrative without a danger of OR. We have a very unusual situation when different groups of sources tell different stories and present different facts, but there is no dispute between them. We need to develop a general approach to this situation.-- Paul Siebert ( talk) 21:34, 28 December 2021 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Dispute resolution noticeboard/MKUCR Quotes from Sources.
(I have moved the 69 sources because, with separate headings, they make it nearly impossible to navigate the Table of Contents. Robert McClenon ( talk) 01:05, 29 December 2021 (UTC)}}
Sorry but what Nug did above is not only unhelpful but even disruptive in light of Siebert's comment before, and the moderator's rules about posting here. To avoid escalation of disputes, I am not going to do it but I kindly ask Robert McClenon to revert them — Nug are free to link the same list of sources from a sandbox, there is no need to bloat the page like this, and is not unhelpful at all. The issue is not VERIFY, but NPOV and WEIGHT, therefore providing cherry-picked sources, most of which are already used in the article as it stands, and we all know what the AfD said about it, does not lead us forward but backward. Davide King ( talk) 23:39, 28 December 2021 (UTC)