[PEN-L:9466] Re: DeLong's statistics

[Brad De Long <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>I want to remind PEN-L'ers that DeLong has a tendency to use false figures
>in order to scandalize postcapitalist governments. He really doesn't come
>up with them himself but relies on the work of highly dubious sources such
>as Rudy Rummel. For example, Rummel asserts that the USSR was guilty of
>more mass murders of its own citizens than any country in the 20th century,
>namely 61,911,000...
>
>Louis Proyect


I'm *very* tired of being deliberately lied about by things that I wouldn't
let into the compost heap.

What I said, at:
http://econ161.berkeley.edu/TCEH/1998_Draft/five/Slouching2_5genocide.pdf

	...the dictator who won the strugle for power after Lenin's
	death--Josef Stalin--was a paranoid psychopath to boot. Stalin
	made Lenin's terror look mild and reasonable.

	Peasants were shot, died of famine, and were exiled to Siberian
	prison labor camps by the millions during the 1930s. Factory
	workers were shot or exiled to Siberian labor camps for failing
	to meet production targets assigned from above. Intellectuals
	were shot or exiled to Siberian labor camps for being
	insufficiently pro-Stalin, or for being in favor of the policies that
	Stalin had advocated _last_ year and being too slow to switch.

	Communist activists, bureaucrats, and secret policemen fared
	no better. More than five million government officials and party
	members were killed or exiled in the Great Purge of the 1930s
	as well. All of Stalin's one-time peers as Lenin's lieutenants were
	gone by the late 1930s--save for Leon Trotsky, in exile in Mexico,
	who survived until one of Stalin's thugs put an icepick through his
	head in 1940.

	Of the 1800 delegates to the Communist Party Congress of 1934,
	less than half were alive by 1939.

	We really do not know how many people died at the hands of the
	Communist regime in Russia. We know more about how many cows
	and sheep died in the 1930s than about how many of Stalin's opponents,
	imagined enemies, and bystanders were killed. R.J. Rummel estimates
	62 million dead.

I stand by these paragraphs. They are what I said. They are what I say.


And again:

	The table... presents a few estimates from R.J. Rummel's _Death by
	Government_--a book that undertakes the grim task of attempting
	to roughly count up the violent death toll of the twentieth century.1/
	... Since Rummel is the only person to undertake a serious,
	comprehensive study of this century's many oceans of blood--any
	look at governments in the century as a whole has to start from his
	work.

	footnote 1/Some of the estimates are solid; some are shaky; some
	are wild guesses. I think some estimates are too high, and some
	too low. (I suspect that Communist China and Nazi Germany should
	be switched on Rummel's list.) But Rummel's estimates are not
	without supporting evidence. On average, I believe they are close
	enough to correct to serve as a very useful starting point.


I stand by the paragraphs above. Rudy Rummel has worked hard, and has given
it his best shot. I think he is wrong in a bunch of places--he is perhaps
20 million too high for Russia; he is perhaps 20 million too low for
Germany; his "Mexico" estimate is way too high; his "British" estimate (and
his U.S. estimate too) seem to me to be too low. But until someone else
comes up with an alternative set of *comprehensive* estimates, there is
really no other place to start assessing the history of the twentieth
century.

And no piece of rotting carrion has the right to put *any* words into my
mouth for *any* purpose whatsoever.


Brad DeLong