Currently in an argument with a chud on Reddit that pulled the 100 million dead figure, and he doesn’t believe that they’re including dead Nazis and unborn descendants of dead people in that figure. I want to show him how ridiculous the figures are in that book is by calculating the victims of capitalism using the same flimsy logic.
He doesn’t appear to be one of those “capitalism didn’t kill anyone because how can two people exchanging goods be deadly” types that you sometimes see, as he’s willing to attribute the Nazis to capitalism’s death toll. He sent me this:
"You should check the democide concept developed by Prof. R. J. Rummel:
Rummel coined the term democide, defined as
“the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.”
Obviously the definition excludes natural causes as you suggest. Democides were mostly exerted by communist regimes:
128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS
61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist China
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime
19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS
5,964,000 Murdered: Japan’s Savage Military
2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey’s Genocidal Purges
1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
1,585,000 Murdered: Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing
1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
1,072,000 Murdered: Tito’s Slaughterhouse"
Actually looking it up, even the black book of communism has the Soviets at 20 million murdered so I have no idea where he’s getting 62 million dead.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF
This gives a more detailed breakdown, it looks like they’re claiming 50 million dead from forced labor camps (“at least 1 million dead per year”) and he claims it’s a “conservative estimate”.
I think that’s a few times more than the total number of people even sent to gulags in the USSR’s entire history.
Would really need to get ahold of the sources this source is citing to do a thorough debunking, might look into it when I have some free time and feel masochistic.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.REFERENCES.HTM
This is the list of references he says he used on the site.
