[lbo-talk] Reevaluated Democide Totals for 20th C. and China

[andie nachgeborenen]

Typical. That book's a mere hatchet job. I read about
70 pages of it, looking at the footnotes, before I
gave up in disgust. The book's thesis, sort of
embarassing for modern historical scholarship, is that
Mao was a Very Bad Man who more or less unilaterally
did Very Bad Things, like not bathing or brushing his
teeth and being responsible for mass murder on a scale
that would leave the Black Death breathless with
admiration. On their account -- I haven't done the
analysis, but I bet this is true -- China would have
no population problem at all today.  

That's the way Rummell works. He simply picks the
highest-end figure he can for Communist crimes from
any published source, regardless of reliability.  Im
mu correspondance with him I carefully went through
his sources for Russian deaths and explained to him
why they were no good. He replied politely enough, but
like tree that was standing by the water, he could not
be moved.

--- Michael Pollak <mpollak at panix.com> wrote:


> On Fri, 9 Dec 2005, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> 
> > I analysed Rummell's methodology. He's totally
> unreliable, uses right wing 
> > sources that exaggerate things that are bad enough
> already, doesn't 
> > evaluate them carefully, ignores conrary views, in
> short, is a ideologue.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > I can't believe his figures for China are any
> better.
> 
> In this email he explicitly bases them all on Jung
> Chang and Jon Halliday's 
> book _Mao: The Unknown Story._ And the impression I
> get from this review (by 
> Andrew Nathan, a very middle of the Ivy League China
> scholar) is that the 
> facts in that book are very loosely sourced.
> 
> http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/nath01_.html
> 
> Michael
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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