Re: Taiwan, capitalism, socialism, and mass murder

I am not an expert on China, but as far as the USSR is concerned, this
is Cold War trash. The censuses of 1927 and 1939 are accepted by
demographers as reliable (that of 1937 was distorted to cover the purge
deaths and perhaps those of the Ukrainian famine).
        In 1946, before the Cold War became the measuring rod for "scholarship"
on the USSR, the League of Nations (then still existing), published in
Geneva a classic by the leading American demographer of the day, Frank
Lorimer, THE POPULATION OF THE SOVIET UNION: History and Prospects.
Using the populations of 1927 and 1939 (pre-and-post purge and famine),
natural rates of increase at the initial and terminal dates and a curve
between them covering the intervening years, he arrived at a population
deficit of approximately 3,000,000 in 1939, i.e., people who should have
been there but weren't. That is a horrible figure, but it is a fraction
of the number used in Cold War works.
        To which it should be added that population grew significantly
thereafter until the Nazi attack in mid-1941, despite the fact that most
purge deaths were of men in the age group that principally fathers
children. 
        I find remarkable the reasoning that ignores imperialist wars as
massacres per se, so the deaths of 27,000,000 Soviet citizens in World
War II are either blamed on "war" as such or, mirabilis dictu, on the
Soviet government, because all bad things in that country from the
Bolshevik Revolution on were its fault, right?
                                                        William Mandel

InvictusCapPart@aol.com wrote:
> 
> Interesting and distressing.
> 
> One possible hypotheses as to why the "drumbeat goes on about how
> "capitalism" is "inherently more favourable to human rights.....etc.
> etc." is
> the question of  scale & intentionality:  the two largest self-styled
> socialist regimes (the USSR and the PRC) appear to have contributed
> directly
> to the deaths of at least 40 million people between 1925 and 1965 (via
> 
> collectivisation of agriculture and the Great Leap Forward,
> respectively).
>
===================================================================
Do you teach in the social sciences? Consider my SAYING NO TO POWER 
(Creative Arts, Berkeley, 1999), for course use. It was written as a
social history of
the U.S. for the past three-quarters of a century through the eyes of a
participant
observer in most progressive social movements (I'm 83), and of the USSR
from the
standpoint of a Sovietologist (five earlier books) knowing that country
longer than any
other in the profession. Therefore it is also a history of the Cold War.
Positive reviews
in The Black Scholar, American Studies in Scandinavia, San Francisco
Chronicle,
forthcoming in Tikkun, etc. CHAPTERS MAY BE READ AT BillMandel.net