Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] Defending Socialism: Deconstructing the "Communism Killed 100 Million" Lie

Episode Date: April 18, 2022

[Originally released Oct 2019] Alekx and Ethan from Proles of the Round Table podcast join Breht on this All Hallows Eve to deconstruct the myth and logic of the oft-stated claim that Communism is responsible for the deaths of 100 million human beings.  On this Halloween, we urge our listeners to reject the anti-communist propaganda of our enemies, while also realizing that the real blood-drenched monsters, ghouls, goblins, and vampires of this world are not to be found within the pages of fairy tales, but rather at the highest echelons of capitalist class society: the very people who want nothing more than for you to fall, hook, line, and sinker, for their anti-communist lies in order to maintain their murderous grip on the ill-gotten seats atop our world's bloody and unjust hierarchies of wealth and power.  Here are just some of the sources used for this episode: https://medium.com/@discomfiting/debunking-communism-killed-more-people-than-naziism-7a9880696f67 https://mronline.org/2011/06/26/revisiting-alleged-30-million-famine-deaths-during-chinas-great-leap/ https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/did-mao-really-kill-millions-in-the-great-leap-forward/ https://mronline.org/2017/10/18/mao-reconsidered/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4331212/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/03/the-holodomor-and-the-film-bitter-harvest-are-fascist-lies/ https://www.newcoldwar.org/archive-of-writings-of-professor-mark-tauger-on-the-famine-scourges-of-the-early-years-of-the-soviet-union/ https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/research/furr_yezhov_jls17.pdf  Outro Music: 'Bury a Friend' by Billie Eilish Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I'm your host and comrade Brett O'Shea, and today we have on two members of Proles of the Roundtable, Ethan and Alex, to basically debunk and examine the logic of the popular myth that we hear all the time that communism killed 100 million people. We talk about Stalin, we talk about Mao, we talk about the Black Book of Communism. It's really a wide-ranging conversation centered around that myth, how it got started, why it's perpetuated, and by whom and in whose interest, etc. So I think it's really a good conversation. And it's one of those conversations where we debunk popular myths about communism

to give people that are listening to tools to defend themselves and their tradition against naysayers and critics who often rely on these really lazy critiques that they've passively absorbed. And, you know, sometimes we can easily be able to. destroy them, but if we don't really have the information to do so, we can be stumped by a relatively bad faith criticism. And so hopefully this acts as a tool to help people do that. So here is our episode with Proles of the Roundtable talking about the myth that communism killed 100 million people. Enjoy. My name is Ethan, and I'm not.

I am a Marxist Leninist from Colorado of Springs, Colorado. I read a lot of books, and I'm on the Poles of the Roundtable podcast. Hey, this is Alex. I'm also from Prols of the Roundtable, and also this proletarian life. I'm a full-time grad student for neuropsychology, and I'm also Marxist Leninist from Colorado. Wonderful. Well, thank you both for coming on the show. I know we've been close sort of comrades and friends over the existence of both of our podcast.

We've hung out multiple times. So it's awesome. Every time we get a chance to talk and hang out and have a conversation or even better do a collab, I'm always looking forward to it. So before we get into this topic, which, you know, again today is we're going to be sort of critiquing and deconstructing this lie that we hear so much that, you know, communism is responsible for 100 million deaths. Before we get into that, I just want to maybe talk about your show a little bit.

So for those of our listeners who still haven't heard about Pearls of the Roundtable, can either of you talk a bit about your show? show, what its focus is, etc. We have a surprisingly large population of MLs in Colorado Springs, and so we have gotten most of us together, and we started as just us teaching each other about history, and then we just decided, hey, we should record that. And so it's sort of a often lighthearted, but still serious what needs to be, look at various historical topics from a Marxist lens.

Yeah, and I absolutely, you know, I love the show. I learned so much from it. It's accessible, but it's also like a deep dive on a lot of. of historical events and topics that you either won't hear a lot about and there's our broad culture. And if you do, you certainly won't hear it from this principled sort of Marxist Leninist perspective. So I really appreciate and, you know, still stand proles forever. Thanks, Brett. Love you. But let's get into the main point of this episode, which is, you know, analyzing and critiquing

the well-known, infamous sort of myth that communism killed 100 million people. Perhaps the best way to sort of broach this subject would be to discuss like where this number comes from and what is and isn't counted as a death that, again, communism is responsible for. So can you just talk about that a little bit? Well, a great way to kind of like gauge this idea is to look at the Black Book of Communism from 1997. So it lists several countries and states that supposedly cause the deaths of around 94 million people. And it includes so many broad things that you could not say was inherently due to communism. Some of them are like famines, environmental. Some of them are just through struggle. Some of them are, gosh, like

actually getting rid of people who did crimes. And it's interesting because they never list, and we'll kind of get to this in the future when we're talking about like capitalism, but it never lists like death due to not having access to health care and the things like that. And the interesting thing about the Black Book of Communism is that the co-authors have even criticized this book itself and saying that Cottois, the editor, tended to inflate the estimations, exaggerated, even at sometimes pulled numbers out of thin air. Like, for instance, with his estimation of 20 million casualties in Vietnam, like it isn't explained for or given any data to support it. And so it really is a lot of inflation and doing as much as they can to blame communism for any

casualty within the time and context of the existence of the state. And not only that, but some of these estimates are even including people that weren't born because of some reason or like a lot of, you see this in some of the death tolls of the Soviet Union. It counts like people who would have been, who they say would have been born but weren't because of, like, various social factors that lower birth rates, which can include, you know, social development and, like, women entering the workforce, that sort of thing. With the, I mean, the Soviet Union one is particularly egregious because I think the, uh, the Black Book of Communism and some of these other just really extravagant sources include things like the Nazis that were killed fighting the Soviet Union in the, uh, in World War II. Like, yeah, I guess technically the Nazis were a victim of communism, but like, we should be cool with that, right? Yeah, so, and so it didn't, it's, it really is just finding any way to make this huge number that looks really scary and that you can just say, oh, well, communism killed 100 million people.

I mean, I grew up hearing, oh, Stalin killed more people than Hitler did. Mao's the greatest mass murder of all time, like that sort of thing. And it's, and a lot of people, that's sort of the only thing they know about communism just because it's such a, it's such a digestible thing and like obviously a hundred million people dying that's that's monstrous so like if this thing did that if this political ideology did that obviously it's bad right and um i always like to point out when that's the only thing that people hear about communism um in psychology we have a term called the confirmation bias it's where when you have one idea about something and you don't know much about it if that tints your view of something everything that you

learn afterwards will be to confirm your biases already. And so we see that a lot as well as like this whole just negative scope of communism based on these falsities. An interesting thing that I noticed is that like in the Black Book of Communism in particular, they list USSR, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Latin America, Africa, and Afghanistan. And if you kind of take an international perspective to this, it sounds, it's a little bit like it might be a little Western chauvinistic and maybe even a little orientalist the approach they take. And it kind of, I don't think it's by accident that these are all the states and the societies that they're including in this book. Right. Yeah, absolutely.

You guys mentioned the black book. This is a book that was published in 1997. You can think of the sort of quote unquote fall of the USSR in like the early 90s, you know, the Berlin Wall and So it's really coming. This black book comes in the wake of the collapse of the USSR. Can you just say anything else about the black book for people that might not have ever even heard of that? The people who compiled it were a bunch of French historians. And it's been hotly debated in the academic world. Like a lot of academics are like, wow, this is not empirical. Like they don't have everything cited. But yet still, there's always that bias in history where if you have some something written, they assume that it's been done in good faith, you know? And so a lot of people still take it as a piece of authority. And like even with my conversations of random people I meet today, they'll be like, oh, all the atrocities and human rights violations. And oftentimes it's basically parroting similar lines from the Black Book of Communism. Yeah. Well, and it was published by Harvard University Press, which is like, so it gives it that sort of academic

veneer of credibility, right? I mean, if you do 10 minutes of research into this book, you can see that this is just a completely it's a completely unreliable. If someone is citing that as their main source for like, why communism is bad, then like you can, you can immediately

discredit the things they're saying because this is not a like valid, legitimate source. Right. And even like the co-authors have said that it's not completely accurate and in the academic world. Like, even people who wouldn't consider themselves Marxists or communists have even criticized it. That's where you know it's pretty bad, you know? Right. Absolutely. I don't believe in communism, but this book, you're kind of stretching there. And like, there's like a lot of

comparisons of communism to Nazism. And that's been criticized like by Jewish organizations, like how they're comparing gulags to concentration camps. And a lot of, um, Jewish organizations have really criticized that because it definitely like trivializes Jewish deaths and concentration camps and stuff like that. So I it's reaching real far. Yeah. And it absolutely is, you know, like a major plank in this like horseshoe theory, especially after the fall of communism. Like there was a sort of ideological urge on the part of the West to tie communism.

Even, I mean, not even after the fall, but like after World War II, right? during the Cold War, there's obviously this huge thrust to pitch communism as just as bad, if not worse, than fashion, especially after like Operation Paperclip where the United States brought over a bunch of Nazi intellectuals and scientists and basically saved them for many sort of accountability. And then they start infecting academia and these sort of anti-communist Cold War fights. And then, you know, when you're talking about like the black book, it's just important to understand this source because one way that capitalist ideology works, you know, is that it makes you it like sort of inserts passively ideas into your mind and then it makes you think that

you came up with them on your own so like when you're online debating some like no nothing anti-communist they'll regurgitate the stuff that's like third-hand information and once you start tracing back these these absurd little statements and claims they do end up in like a black book sort of era and like on the Stalin episode last time proles were on we spent like a big chunk of the episode specifically just tracing sources because it's so important you know if you can sort of obscure and muddy the water of like a source trajectory, then you can say like, well, yeah, it's, I mean, these books are saying it. So maybe it's not 100% right, but it's pretty much right. And they, they are citing sources. So I'm not going to go look at those sources, but just the mere fact that they're

citing them must mean there's some intellectual validity to what they're saying. So, you know, I think for all those reasons, it's important to sort of push back on this stuff. And even today, like if you Googled right now, worst dictators in human history, the top three that would pop up would be Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Right. You know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's a grotesque sort of comparison. And I think a lot of times Mao will be number one followed by Hitler. And that's just horrific. That's crazy.

Yeah. And to build off of what you were just saying about this happening right after the fall of the Soviet Union, just trying to like put a, trying to treat it like a coup de grace to communism, another organization or another thing that is a source of a lot of this horseshit that gets passed around is the victims of communism, Memorial Foundation. And this is very easy to find. They're not hiding this fact. It's an organization that's created by an act of Congress in 93 to educate Americans, quote,

about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism. And it was to build a memorial. And I think one of the amendments to build that memorial was sponsored by, co-sponsored by Jesse Helms, like famous segregationist, racist senator. And like, yeah, and Bill Clinton signed this act in 93, which cited, quote, the deaths of over 100 million victims in an unprecedented impeachment. imperial holocaust. Oh, no.

Yeah, and it resolved that, quote, the sacrifices of these victims should be permanently memorialized so that never again will nations and peoples allow so evil a tyranny to terrorize the world. Jeez. And so the victims of communism, they're still around. And there were three people who started it, who were, like, in charge of it at its beginning. There was Zebanyu Brzynski, who was Ronald Reagan's, like,

main foreign policy guy, just terrible, terrible. guy, like Kissinger Light almost. Then you've got Lee Edwards, who is this conservative historian, like right-wing asshole. Then you had Lev Dobryonsky, who was an economics professor

and like famous anti-communist, made a career like shitting on communism and was an ambassador under Ronald Reagan appointed by Reagan. So like, you've got these conservative right-wing arch-capitalists who are heading this organization, which is

often cited nowadays, like some people consider it a non-ideological source, but their whole thing, like they were started for those ridiculous reasons that I quoted before, and they're still around, and they're still funding and publishing all of any time there's anything that looks, anything remotely left wing, they're going to be there complaining about it and comparing it to like the worst massacres in human history and all of this stuff. So, yeah, they viewed the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of history. and they were trying to do what they could to make sure that capitalism was the only game in town. Yeah, absolutely.

So moving on to the next question, you know, why do you think it's important for communists to push back on this myth? Because, you know, I think there's a lot of people on the quote unquote left that just, I mean, all the time, just distance themselves from these movements from the USSR, from China, from all these national liberation movements because, you know, of these lies and lots of other reasons. But, you know, there's this urge, especially on like the American left, to really distance themselves from this history and to just disavow it as, you know, not real socialism or whatever. So, like, you know, why don't we just ignore it, distance ourselves from these movements and pick a different battle to fight? Like, why is it important to sort of fight this fight? Well, I think as principal leftists, we have to take a historical materialist lens to everything that we look at. And we have to dispel these myths because it's some of the only things that color people's ideas of history. And we have to make it known like a lot of these people that were in these socialist countries and states had their lives markedly bettered through these changes that were put in.

And if all that people are seeing are the quote unquote deaths, they're looking at a very, gosh, limited look at this history. And like there were such positive things that actually happened materially for these people and we need to learn from them and apply it to our contemporary circumstances. We can't just have something based purely in theory. We have to learn from what's happened. We also have to dispel these myths so that people do have a view of how much history has been altered in favor for capitalism and to continue discounting it and discrediting communism and socialism. Yeah, so building off what Alex said, I think we should want to be part of the same movement that has been, like, the biggest force for human freedom and human flourishing and human liberation in history. like we have a long there's a long tradition of people who are given the chance to to live and be and like experience the various joys and pains of being a person for the first time because they weren't subject to the whims of capital or the whims of a feudal lord or any of these things and and that's a that's a really noble and beautiful thing to be a part of and so we're entering into a long tradition and then also another another thing that Alex was saying sort of is that like if we say, okay, listen, like, the things that we know, like, the things that they've told us about

the Soviet Union and China about socialism and communism, the things they've told us those are correct, but it's going to, like, I'll grant you that, but like this other thing is new. And the thing is that they're not going to stop. They're not going to accept a watered down form of anything. Like, they're not going to give concessions. If you give ideological concessions to capitalists and to, like, capitalist states that are writing history, books, then it just keeps shifting it further and further to the right and towards capitalism. It narrows the spectrum of acceptable ideas and continues to do that until finally all that you have left is something that is not even recognizable as socialism. And we sort of see that

sometimes today, but like they're not going to accept you if you tell them like, okay, listen, I understand, I'm not going to be like them. I'm not going to do that. They don't care. It's not they're not going to give you whatever's left, they're not going to give you the scraps. They're not even going to give you that. So you might as well actually work with the truth. You might as well actually look at history and fight because that's what people have been doing for hundreds of years. Exactly. To kind of build off of that, something that I hear often and I kind of get into debates about is when someone finds out I'm a communist, they go, well, communism always fails. How many times are we going to try?

At least one more At least once more, please not And the thing is like That shows a lack of understanding of what happened For so many people it didn't fail It was successful Their lives were beautiful They could live comfortably

They had more of a sense of community Of arts, of music And it's like If they only got the full picture of it Maybe they could see Oh, let's compare that to the shithole lives we live right now and say maybe it didn't fail and maybe we could look at the context in which maybe the USSR at USSR fell and understand why that happened rather than just say oh it failed

yeah it's all built on this idea that the capitalists they need us to be content with what we have they need us to not to think that you know this is it like this is this is pretty much the best it can be you know and it's hey at least you're not work at least you have uh Adidas Well, yeah 37 deodorant choice Yeah, exactly Like at least you can go to the store

And pick out which Like shitty cereal you're gonna have And it's all that As opposed to, It doesn't matter that you have to pay Massive percentages of your annual income To get any sort of health care It doesn't matter that

People in the quote unquote Like most developed richest country in the world Are Some people are still dying from hunger People are dying from preventable diseases is people are dying from exposure to the elements. We need to, like, people need to know, like, they have to be told that, like, from the capitalist perspective, they have to be told that this is the best we can do.

If you try for something else, all it ends, it just ends up in authoritarianism. It ends up in people, a lot of people dying. A hundred million deaths. Exactly. It ends in 100 people, 100 million people dying. So, like, we have to believe that this is the best it is because anything else leads to mass murder. Yeah, no, exactly. And, you know, just a few points from my end is, you know, there's a, there's a huge difference between reclaiming a sort of stigmatized word like socialist versus actually

reclaiming the history and the narratives that that build up that term. So a lot of times you'll see on like the sort of left liberal or like DSA left in the United States, this like, yeah, look at we're reclaiming the word socialism. But at the same time that you're reclaiming it, you're also stripping it of its actual meaning, its actual history, and it's becoming something totally different. In a lot of ways, it's more compatible with liberalism,

and so they think, look, it's not going to be this scary to the reactionaries and capitalist. But if you think about that, it's like, yeah, these people call Obama a fucking Marxist. They think Hillary is a communist. Like, they're not going to give a fuck if some DSA or is like,

yeah, I'm a socialist, but I'm not that type of socialist. They don't give a fuck. So why even, once you start playing that game, you've already chosen to play on the field, that the reactionaries have set up and then you're already playing a losing battle. Exactly.

They control the terms. They're going to move the goalposts. You're not going to win playing their game. So just go whole hog and just be full. Just yeah, just be a just just be a fucking communist. Join us. Absolutely. And the last thing before we go on to the next question is,

you know, capitalism is in crisis and that crisis is not going away. It's only going to intensify. And as that crisis intensifies, there's an ideological crisis that is all, also parallel to the material crisis. And so, you know, the defenders of the status quo, reactionaries, capitalist, liberals, et cetera, they will actually, I think, in my opinion, like intensify this sort of anti-communism, anti-socialism rhetoric as more and more people begin sort of, you know,

passively looking for alternatives to the neoliberal status quo, that ideological apparatus is going to need to step up the intensity at which it's saying, okay, but not that alternative, you know, to get that option off the board as much as possible. And this whole myth of $100 million definitely plays a sort of central role in that ideological sort of momentum. Yeah. No, absolutely. All right. So let's go ahead and move on to the question. Now, you know, we could take a bunch of different examples. But I think, you know, since we have two guests, breaking it down into the two largest communist movements, instead of trying to cover every single, you know, communist movement included in this $100 million number,

would be just a good way to just deconstruct the logic and point towards, you know, what it would be like if we try to tackle all these numbers from all these different instances. So basically let's break it down into the two largest communist movements that are emphasized in this myth, China and the USSR. And let's go ahead and take the USSR first because it occurred chronologically before China, Mao's communist China. So how many so-called communist deaths are roughly attributed to the USSR and to Stalin and then maybe explain the actual history of the USSR and specifically where those death tolls came from, etc? And you can kind of take this in any direction, just focus on the USSR and Stalin and the myth of countless. deaths under this regime. Right. So I'm just going to preface this by saying it's going to be kind of a broad scope. Obviously, when Jeremy and Justin were on the show about Stalin, they covered a lot of the specifics. So that's a great episode for anyone who hasn't listened to it

to go into more depth as well some resources we're going to list. So according to the Black Book of Communism, they list around 20 million deaths just for the USSR. And the thing is, I have a list of the things that they considered subsumed within the caused deaths of the USSR. But it's funny because just like that whole anti-Stalin paradigm that Grover-Ferr brings up, like any death that occurred in the USSR, whether it was intentional, quote unquote, or not, they attribute to Stalin and the USSR. And, you know, Stalin is often the figurehead of the USSR and the one who supposedly enacted many of these deaths by roundhouse kicking people to the face. But let's see.

So gosh, they even include some parts of the struggles during the revolution. They include famine. So they include the Russian famine of 1921, which was very much an environmental cause for the famines. They include, they say tens of thousands in common. concentration camps, which is funny because even one of the co-authors of the book has stated like there weren't any. Like he admitted even three million people in gulogs were eventually set free. So some weird numbers and facts that weren't facts. They include the great purges, obviously. So without going to too much detail, they list 690,000 people. And like they talked about

in the Stalin episode, Yezhov was purposely conspiring against the USSR, working with German intelligence, and like killing innocent people through ways of trying to lessen the trust between the leadership of the USSR and the people. And furthermore, even those in prisons and camps, like hundreds of thousands of them were let free. So it's not like they were actual.

casualties of the USSR. They even include the deportation of Kulaks, which is really interesting because when people hear about the situation with Kulaks, they don't understand who they were and how awful they were. So they were, for anyone who hasn't heard or want to want a little refresher, they were like very affluent, greedy rural bourgeois who hoarded the wealth and the means of agriculture and did not want to collectivize. And they outright, committed acts of violence. They burnt buildings, barns, fields and stuff to prevent the peasants from collectivizing because they were finding that collectivization was a very useful, effective system in the USSR. And to like really hone in how wealthy the Kulaks were, like the people

who worked within the collectivization, they were able to produce about 2.2 million tons of market wheat. And that was equivalent to this 5% that the Kulax made that year. So they were quite wealthy. And the USSR, you know, even while trying to collectivize, brought out 25,000 specialists to help with collectivization. And like the Kulaks were violent to them, murdered a few of them, like, were actively trying to stop the collectivization. And so finally, like after trying to contest with them, to try to work with them, trying to make. sure that they would have the least amount of casualties and losses. The USSR was like, you know, we can't do this. Like they're being violent. Like they even halved some of the,

the Kulaks even halved some of the livestock because they were like, no, we're not going to let this happen. We're not going to let the peasants gain any equality on us. And they even murdered a bunch of livestock that were essential to collectivization just to be assholes and to hoard things. Yeah. And they like even some of the estimates that, were brought up were like decreasing certain livestock from like 20 million to 10 million like really ridiculous numbers really unnecessary just very violent hateful greedy people so the USSR began the decoulication so the USSR even set at a limit of like how many households they would approach and oftentimes it was the most wealthy families that they would basically take

and expropriate their means of production, their wealth, and they would leave them with the essentials that they needed. You know, they didn't take everything from them. And for some of the more violent and extreme ones, the heads of households that were actively engaged in violence could be put to death. Some of them were just put in prisons. And the set limit for these extreme families that were very counter-revolutionary was 63,000 Kulak families. And that's not even the number for deaths that they put for the Kuulaks. And then other households that were less violent, if they were very wealthy and had a habit of trying to stop the collectivization without more of the violence, they set an upper limit

of 150,000 households to, you know, come take some of their items, but leave them with basics. And then they relocated them to some more regions of where they live that were a little less populated. But it was honestly to control the backlash and the last vestige of capitalist class in rural USSR. And even after some of the Kulaks were moved, they committed violence in the places that they moved in in an attempt to still fight back. So it's not like these were just like, oh, these are some bourgeois people that we're just going to pick on. You know, like they had valid reasons because they were a violent class that horded and held onto their wealth and were actively counter-revolutionary. It's not like some biased ethnic cleansing or

anything like that. Right. I want to just give some context for when like saying, oh, they like they're taking all this, all this land and like giving people like giving their farms to other people. You have to look at the context of the Russian Empire before the Soviet Union. I mean, for most of these peasants, they were living in almost literally feudalism. And like, these are some of the poorest people you can imagine who just were practically slaving away at other people's land and only getting the barest minimum for themselves. And this is the first time that this was being challenged on a large scale. And so some of the people who were benefiting from that and had historically benefited from that obviously were upset about that. But you have to look at this in the context of

like human history and that this is we're coming off of thousands of years of just emisseration and just people like growing food that they can't even eat and I mean at the time 82 percent of the USSR's population were peasants and the Kulocks were like five percent of that so very small very wealthy group of individuals that had historically oppressed the rest of the agricultural sector and really made it impossible for people to live or survive in some cases. And the thing is, when the USSR finally started to push back against the Kulaks, like they had the backing of many of the peasants because they're like, for once the state is on our side. For once, we're actually having support for making ends meet, basically.

And the thing is, like, people want to take Kulaks out of context. You know, they want to completely ignore, like, what they did for the years up into this point. And they want to ignore the fact that they were a small class of rich people who didn't care about the greater good or the whole of the USSR. They were just very selfish and actively trying to push against collectivization, which was starting to gain momentum and, like, help people who ever joined in on it. How can you say that those are innocent lives lost to communism, basically? Right. Exactly. Exactly. Other than just those specifics with the Kulaks, it's funny because, like, oftentimes they consider deportation a part of these numbers of the deaths of communism, which I don't really understand. Like, I'm just going to make a note. Like, I don't understand why they would do that because simply being deported doesn't predicate that you're going to die.

And they even have, as I discussed earlier, they have. have accounts of the Kulaks once moved committing active violence against the areas that they moved to. Like we know that they didn't all die. So yeah, a lot of the book goes into deportations and oftentimes they are taken out of context. You know, some of the deportations or the relocations were because of war and military tactics because of fear of espionage, fear of fighting back, fear of fascist circles and so oftentimes they ignore that context and just say look at them they're they're making them move and it goes into that whole idea of just confirming your biases against the USSR so the last thing that i was just kind of lightly touch on was famine and the

halanamoor i'm not going to go into depth because listen to the stallan episode on that listen to the they spend three hours debunking that yeah but this is just like a a little taste test a little But basically, yeah, Grover does some amazing extensive research on this. And I really hope that anyone who wants to look into this further would look at it. But it basically comes down to the fact that some fascists started to turn the historical famines that they were experiencing and making it seem like Stalin and the USSR were purposely and deliberately causing famine because of nationalism and because of anti-com. rhetoric, which is just ridiculous. They even have like a list of past famines on record. And it's like, it happens. It is an environmental catastrophe. Like the USSR was maybe slow to recognize and slow to react to it. But they did their best. Like Stalin reduced the exports of grain that

were set for each region. He even did some food aid and agricultural aid to the famine. areas. It wasn't out of some weird like power hungry, like controlling personality that people kind of try to put it on. And it wasn't because of collectivization. Rather, collectivization helped recover from it. It wasn't because of industrialization. Some people say that. That doesn't make sense. Why would industrializing and trying to get the means of agriculture cause a famine? But yeah, one of the things that Grover really talks about based on research from Taugher is that it was due to poor harvest and through rust and through poor change of environmental reasons that had been seen before in 1918 to 1920, 1920 to 21, 1928 to 1929, etc. It wasn't like the only time that this kind of thing has happened.

And the thing that changed it was that some Ukrainian fascists decided to frame it in this way and made publications creating the term Holodomor, which is hollow hunger and more murder and purposely trying to make it sound like a holocaust in order to blame the USSR. And they published this in Ukrainian fascist circles. And then it kind of went to that thing that we talked about earlier where people just keep siding and reciting and reciting and recent. citing. And after a while, you lose the first citation, which had no credence to it in the first place. So that's a big chunk that, like, the Black Book of Communism considers part of the death toll. The book lists up to 6 million deaths, which in the scholarly recent estimates of famine deaths in general, it was around 2.6 million, which, you know, not to say that famine is not sad and like of course those are awful deaths but it wasn't a deliver action of the USSR which is

just absolutely ridiculous like the audacity to say that Stalin was like you know what we're going to do we're going to cause a famine in this area to weaken Stalin like Stalin paid the clouds not to rain is the meme yeah exactly that's where that meme comes from I I am just flabbergasted so those were like the main ones um that I think at uh brought up a lot and are so easy to debunk. Like a lot of Grover Fur, he goes over so much of that in his several books, but especially in his most recent book about Stalin. And if people are interested, you know, there's stuff about the Cadden Massacre by Grover Fur. There's stuff about the different types of ethnic deportations, which go more into depth about the context, which

it came from. And really, a lot of it is based on misinformation about skewing, the history, especially in part of like Khrushchev's secret speech, like even calling a lot of things like ethnic deportations and stuff. They're just completely out of context. And I do want to, I do want to reemphasize this at the beginning. The Black Book does include Nazis killed on the Eastern Front. I think it's, it's something like 5 million get thrown in there to boost up the numbers because that's how many like access casualties are on the Eastern front. And I mean, it includes killed on front or captured and executed. Nazis and Nazi collaborators. One that they mentioned specifically is this guy Vlasov, he was

captured by the Nazis. He was a Soviet general who was captured by the Nazis, and he defected and formed the Russian Liberation Army, which was, they were just Nazi troops, basically. And the Soviet Union captured most of them at some point, and then executed them because they were literal, in the literal definition of the term, literal traitors, who had been working with the Nazis. So, and those get counted as victims of communism. Like, yes, the Soviet Union did kill those people, but they were fighting for the Nazis. I cannot state this enough. Exactly. And so it just makes a mockery of like any liberal, you know, sitting there being like, you know, communism killed a hundred million people and that's bad. Well, if you really break that statement down, what they're

saying is a large part of the people that communism killed are Nazis, and that's bad. And so that's an interesting little tell on themselves if they know or if whether they know or not you know it's just that number is is brought in there and then those people wax sort of tragic about the deaths of Nazis but at the same time those same people will turn around and say America won world war two you know so it's just it's just ridiculous yeah so you know we have the cullocks a violent parasitic class that just brutally exploits the majority of peasants in the country we have world war two numbers and nazi deaths thrown into it we have a bunch of nonsense Stalin becomes an almost supernatural figure when it comes to what he what he personally is responsible for and so yeah so

that's that's the USSR now let's go ahead and transition to to communist china let's talk about communist china during the Mao period can you talk about how the death tolls are tallied there and then just talk about the historical reality in order to correct the record yeah so this is where the bulk of those this is where the bulk of the deaths of communism come from um Wikipedia says quote Mao's regime and you have to always look for that word because that's a fun one, was responsible for vast numbers of deaths with estimates ranging from 30 to 70 million victims

through starvation, prison labor, and mass executions. And so, like, obviously, that's a crazy number. And when you break that down, somewhere between 30 to 40, although I've seen someone attributed as high as 60, million people were attributed to... There was a famine during what is known as the Great Leap Forward.

but this 30 to 40 million I see this number in my research I saw it come up over and over again it was everywhere from the economist was publishing that fucking Slovoi Gijs preface to Mao's book on contradiction and praxis he mentions the 30 to 40 million

killed in the Great Leap Forward yeah it's it's everywhere and so here's what so here's what's going on with that so 1958 was to start of the second five year plan in China and so the five year plans were this idea that they borrowed from the Soviet Union where the party would develop goals for the next five years, including like

economic targets, social changes, and that sort of thing, and they would assign tasks to the various state and party organs to accomplish these goals. The first one was in 53. It was kind of right as the war in Korea was winding down. And it was based on like industrial development, agricultural reforms, and continuing the process that they started right after the revolution of redistributing land and organizing some of it in farming collectives. And the second one was incredibly ambitious and they called it the great leap forward

because of the scope they were going to utilize China's huge population of eager revolutionaries eager like people who were ready to like make the revolution continue develop China's economy

and come back from hundreds of years of colonial under development and by the way these five year plans the People's Republic of China is still using them if you're ever like like they're on their 13th one

I think if you're ever like man what is the what is China doing like what is their goal you can go on the website they they tell you it's uh they publish it in english so uh anyway and so yeah a great leap forward um 1958 and this is about yeah and this is when the bulk of the deaths under Mao's China are attributed and so here's what we know for sure in 1960 there were three bad harvests with a 30% drop in grain output and the official death rate which had been declining since 49 due to the communist party's public health and sanitation

campaigns, it rose from, so in 1957 it was 12 per thousand to its highest in 1960 of 25.4 per per thousand. And then in 1958, the birth rate declined significantly. And I'll talk about this in a minute, but that didn't decline because of malnutrition. It declined because of collectivization and people going to work, women specifically entering the workforce. And like I said, I'll talk about that in a second. And so we know there was a drought and a famine around the early part of the 60s. India experienced it too, famously not communist India. It's although they only had a 25% decline in their grain output instead of 30. And there were a number of major floods that had wiped out some agricultural lands. So again, it's, it's this situation

where various environmental factors are attributed to like mismanagement or it's like, oh, I'll see, this is why, like, socialist collectivization, like, doesn't work. Like, and it's, and again, you had like right across the border in india um you had the same kind of thing with like a lot of people dying a lot and yeah and i'm no one's going to deny that a lot of people did die during this period but it's the tragic result of a famine um and you and again you have to put this in context of china had been having famines pretty regularly for literally thousands and thousands of years um and there haven't been like like huge famines where a lot of people have died since the 50s in like around 1960 and it's as a result of largely the like communist party of china's

like agricultural policies collectivization policies and so yeah most of the so the slightly more honest or I guess just less dishonest people talking about this will say that it was like oh it was mismanagement or result of collectivization but there are some people I see this all the time there was this one guy published named Joseph Alsop he gets excited a lot. He argued, and like, this is still used to argue, that the famine deaths were intentional, as in it was Mao and the Chinese Communist Party targeting people to kill political dissidents or to make the people weak and easier to rule. Wow. Which is like a wild take, and it attributes almost these godlike powers to Mao and the other CCP leaders. Like, yeah,

like, again, like Mao specifically paid the, pay the clouds not to rain, paid for these floods. Like, he just made these floods happen. He, um, he, um, He went out to the countryside and released all of these locusts that ate the grain. Like, that was him. That was all him. And so, yeah. And so, but like, so where does this number of 30 to 40 come from? And this number emerged in the 1980s.

And the first place we saw it was from some U.S. demographers, that's a scientist who studies populations, these demographers coal and banister. And so they were analyzing a population pyramid, which basically looks at the population of China before, during, and after the Great Leap Forward. And they were saying that if the population numbers followed the previous numbers of increase that it had over the whole, like, over history, then there were 30 million people missing, like, that you would expect to be in the population that weren't there. But they said those people died in the famine. So, but so here's the thing. We don't have exact census data from these years. But what we do know is that, like, it is a standard fact in demography and sociology that social, that social. development like what was happening in China, for example, like with women entering the workforce and the various social changes like that, it causes a decline in birth rates. That's everywhere in the world. That is a pretty solid fact that when women are working and when women are more empowered as they were as a result of the communist revolution, there are birth rates decline. Like women on average have fewer children. And so the most recent census had been in 1953 and even then it wasn't a super rigorous one by modern.

standards. And in 53, there were over half a billion people in China. So when birth rates decline, we're talking about enormous numbers of people who weren't born that demographers are counting as having died. And that's, you can't do that. That's not how it works. That logically makes no sense. Exactly. Exactly. And so there's this, there's this demographer and economist named Utsa Patnaic, who is from India and as a result of India also experiencing famine, was looking at the Chinese famine numbers and she broke them down at length about how these massive death tolls

attributed to the Great Leap Forward just don't really make sense and don't work out under any scrutiny. And she does a lot of interesting deep dives on this and if people want to, like I'll give you the links for her stuff, it's very interesting. So what the Great Leap Forward was was it was increased collectivization,

agricultural collectivization, but also just in villages, more collectivization of social life with like collectivized child care, education, that sort of thing. Like producing massive quantities of natural resources, mining, but also building, like, water collection systems, building dams, building irrigation systems, all of these sorts of things. It was a really massive undertaking, and we'll probably talk about this later.

Like, there were some missteps. There were some mistakes. No one's going to claim that wasn't the case. But you cannot say that the Great Leap Forward and the communist agricultural policies caused 30 to 40 million people to die. I mentioned I had seen someone say 60 million starvation deaths. That's this guy named Frank D. Codder. I don't know how he pronounce his name, but fuck him. He wrote this book called Mao's Great Famine, I think it was like 10 years ago or something like that.

He gets cited a lot because it's like a very readable, but also like it's got a lot of, he's got a lot of, he's got a lot of numbers and stuff. And he's saying, he's using a lot of these, like, same spurious sources that I'm going to talk about in a minute here. And he puts the number of starvation deaths at 60 million, which is crazy. Nobody has done that. But this guy, you have to look at the context of this. He's a historic, I think he's a British historian. He's a historian from some European country. But he's, like, he's argued for the, uh, the Kuomintang in China, like, before the Communist Party and all the deaths they caused that that

that was preferable he's explicitly argued that the United Kingdom's opium trade in China in the 19th century where they flooded this colony with opium and tried to get as many people addicted as possible he like has a I think it's either a book or a long essay

about how that was like justified and it wasn't as bad as people said so you have to look at these people and what they're saying yeah and so what about what about all the other deaths. You've got, they say labor camps, mass executions, et cetera. Another big one is you've got the, it was in the early 50s, the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. And it was somewhere between 200,000 to 2 million, which is obviously a huge discrepancy. The China

quarterly published a very popular figure of 712,000 people killed, which we'll talk about them in a second. But the thing with the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries is that they just say like, oh, it's just willy-nilly people running around, just killing everybody they hated. And it, that's not true. The people that ended up being imprisoned and in a lot of cases executed were either the equivalent of Kulox, like people who refused to submit to collectivization and were actively fighting against communist restructuring of society. or there were a lot of people who had participated in the previous government, in the Kuomintang and this right-wing reactionary government.

And so it just looks at, it's complicated, but it's basically people just completely ignore context of what was happening, who is being targeted. And a lot of times it was people that you would, in almost any situation, situation consider well yeah those are like enemies and maybe we don't necessarily want and advocate for mass executions but like you have to put yourself in the headspace of these people and their history right it was pretty much a civil war right in i mean in some in a lot of ways yeah a lot of ways it was and so like and so it's just it's just ridiculous to make it sound like there were just you know roving roving gangs of uh of communists just executing people for

for laughs, basically. And then the other one that gets cited a lot is there were something like a million deaths in the cultural revolution, which is a very complicated topic. Proz actually did an episode with someone.

Go check it out. Yeah. Someone you may be familiar with if you're listening to this. Where we talked about this, and it's a complicated thing, and it's a complicated historical legacy, and there were excesses, but also they weren't keeping great track of numbers,

and so you can't really trust the Western numbers on these things. And so, for example, with that, a lot of these numbers come from publications like the China Quarterly, which I mentioned before. The China Quarterly was published by this organization called the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in 1967, the CCF publicly stated that they were funded by the CIA.

And the editor of the China Quarterly, his name was Roderick McFarquhar. I don't know. Again, asshole, who cares? So when I was, he said, when I was asked to be the founding editor of the CQ, it was explained to me that the mission of the CCF was to encourage Western intellectuals to form a community committed to the free exchange of ideas. The aim was to provide some kind of organizational counter to Soviet efforts to attract Western intellectuals. into various front organizations. So, like, this is explicitly created as, I mean, this word gets used a lot, a sci-op. Like, it was literally funded by the United States government to discredit communism. And so that's where a lot of these numbers come from is Western academics, accepting money through organizations that are, that have the interests of the capitalists in the West.

there's this other guy named Victor Marchetti he was a former staff officer in the office of the director of the CIA he wrote that the CIA set up this thing called the Asia Foundation and they would give it millions of dollars a year to support the work of

quote anti-communist academicians in various Asian countries to disseminate through Asia a negative vision of mainland China North Vietnam and North Korea and like these things people are saying this like you don't have to dig

to find, I mean, it's a little bit of digging, but it's like taking the top layer of soil off. Right. It's right there. I mean, I could, I could give more examples of things pulled out of context, like things explicitly doctored by Western capitalists. But like, but you can find all these things. I'll include notes. But the point is that like, there is a strong, strong basis for people to lie about these things. There are people whose interests are served. by passing on a false narrative about what happened in China and what happened in the Soviet Union and what happened in Vietnam and the DPRK and all these places is in their interests to obscure what actually happened. And what actually happened isn't even necessarily like a just a beautiful, like wonderful, everything was perfect. No, we're not even trying to argue that.

We're just trying to say that the truth is not this like horrific, like mind-boggling. scale of suffering and oppression, we're trying to say that the attempts at human liberation that were made in the 20th century were ultimately good. I mean, I could, I mean, I could spend 10 minutes talking about the gains of China just in terms of literacy, life expectancy, education, women's rights, all those things. Like, I could spend a lot of time talking about that, but people can find that elsewhere. And I mean, you've talked about it as well. And so like yeah and i and i and we'll probably talk about this in a few minutes of just like why it's so and we did why it's so important to try and correct these records because there is a powerful

legacy here and we shouldn't just throw it away because it's easier to accept the accept the narratives like there are amazing accomplishments and we should be proud to be part of that tradition right yeah i mean very very well said and you You know, just a few thoughts, and you mentioned it, you gestured at it a few times, but, you know, this idea that even when you Google, like, the worst dictators, these deaths aren't even just laid at like, okay, the Communist Party of China, but they're laid at the feet of Mao specifically. And that's wrong for a fuck ton of reasons. I mean, partially because it's the same thing with Stalin, like this great man of history, but it also completely erases the complexities of the party structure, the different positions that Mao had in that sort of the hierarchy of the party at the time. Like Mao was not a singular dictator his entire life handing down orders. There was internal conflict, internal battles between different factions within the Communist Party.

Mao fell out of favor at certain times and came back into favor. And the undertaking of the entire communist revolution, I mean, you're talking hundreds of millions of human beings. This is not one person or just one small cadre of people orchestrating this. This has to be a grassroots mass movement in order to even take place in order to even exist. So it's not Mao doing it. It is not only, it's not even just the Communist Party doing it, it is hundreds of millions of regular Chinese peasants and workers coming together and trying to industrialize their country, trying to move forward through history, trying to bring up the living standard of the least well off throughout the country. I mean, Mao was born into the peasant class and, you know, Mao became a communist, not because he desperately wanted power. There's a lot of easier ways to go about getting power.

Mao became a dedicated communist because he was of the peasant. class and he really genuinely wanted a better China for all of its people. And so like when you talk about the great leap forward, you know, you're talking about how these reactionaries, some would say that Mao just was indifferent to the to the human cost. Some would say that Mao specifically wanted those people to die, you know? It's like they don't even understand Mao at all if you're saying those things. This was an attempt by the people of China to progress and industrialize and move forward with their countries while also restructuring the brutal, you know, hierarchy of that country at the same time. It's not going to be a perfect thing. It's going to have

its errors, its mistakes, its failures, its unforeseen consequences. But to say that this was some brutal, bloodthirsty, you know, bloodletting, it's just an absurd revisionist understanding of history. And even in the cultural revolution, I mean, you had people in fighting. So it wasn't like Mao is saying, you know, like slaughter these people. Lots of different little factions formed. Lots of people that were, you know, fighting each other were saying we're both sides are fighting in the name of Chinese progress in the Chinese Communist Party. I mean, things did definitely get out of control. This is, you know, hundreds of millions of people in a radically transitionary phase

of their entire history and country. So, you know, things did go wrong. Of course, we're not trying to downplay that. But again, it's not certainly not Mao individually's fault. And, you know, just one thing worth noting, like the lifespan, not only the education for the lower classes, the liberation of women, but the lifespan of the average Chinese person doubled under the Mao period. And, you know, there's scientific studies that show that the least well off before the sort of Mao era, the Communist Party revolution, the least well off

materially advanced and the best well off before the revolution were brought down to a more equal sort of things. And that played out over multiple generations, like even like three generations after the Chinese revolutions, the people that descended from that first generation of like you know people that were living during that period they're better off than they would have been otherwise so you can't just say all these people died it was a horrible terrible detour in human history that we should never look at to learn from again it's like people died the country was trying to do this amazing thing that was really unprecedented in history and bad things happened but also a fuck ton of good things happen i mean this is dialectics right nothing is black and white

nothing is a dualistic good or evil bad or you know good thing and so just the the complexity of this situation are just completely erased from the entire discussion and then you have a little infographic that shows Mao's face and then the number 80 million deaths underneath it and it's like my god this is so fucking childish yeah yeah i mean it's just it's a it's a very simplistic way of understanding how things happen that there's a guy who's like kill let's kill 40, 50 million people so that I can come to power

like it's not it's always more complicated even when they are even when they're not communist even when they're like asshole capitalist fascists it's more complicated motivations are complicated

and there are a lot of people involved in these things and like I was saying earlier like the thing of socialism and the socialist legacy is that like yeah there were some there were a lot of there were mistakes absolutely any

any principled Marxist Leninist which is most of the ones that I know, like they're going to acknowledge those things. But we're also not going to grant credence to just like the outright fabrications and lies to discredit people on the left trying to make a better world for everybody. Right. Exactly.

And the thing that I find interesting is you can tell that a lot of these people haven't gone to the written words of Stalin and Mao. They don't understand their theoretical. theoretical or philosophical perspective, you know, people read Hitler's stuff and like that hateful garbage and they take that in to understand him. Exactly. And yet I don't see that same kind of work happening with Stalin and Mao per se, you know. Yeah, great point. Absolutely. Yeah, that's really funny to think about definitely. When people try to understand Hitler, you always will

talk about a reading of mind conf. But people try to understand Mao or Stalin. There's not one mention of the things they actually wrote that when they're telling you what their motivations are and what they're inspired by and what their plan is their vision all of that is just completely wiped out just to be replaced with this static sort of petrified scary great man of history caricature of the human being and by extension the entire country of those people because you know by saying that Stalin or Mao did all this you're erasing I mean just not only the complexities but you're erasing hundreds of millions of human beings who were a part of these mass movements and that's just that's just ridiculous yeah i mean why is it you can go to like a major chain

bookstore and buy a copy of mine comf but you can't find a copy of foundations of leninism and we're on contradiction or yeah yeah probably not i mean unless you're like really lucky and you find the verso printing of it with the again the shitty introduction from jizs yeah and like but like why is it that why is it you can get oh like so much there's so much access to like Nazis and fascists, like, what made them tick and all of that? But like, if you recommend someone read dialectical historical materialism from Stalin or like, uh, anything like on guerrilla warfare from Mao, it's like, well, why would I want to read that? It's just a mass murderer, like, it's interesting. Like, I've had more of a shock factor when people see me reading Stalin

versus when I've had to read like Hitler for school. They're like, oh, what you're reading? They're Oh, Stalin. I was like, it's good. You should pick it up. Yeah. So there is that double standard. Furthermore, with not understanding Mao or Stalin through their written word, you don't understand how intelligent and thoughtful they were,

which totally goes against like a lot of the stereotypes of Stalin being like a brute, you know? Oh, absolutely. And again, like I really do genuinely believe that that discrepancy between like, let's actually try to figure out what Hitler and the Nazis were inspired by. and let's not even think about what Stalin and Mao were inspired by. I mean, it's really hard to argue against the fact that that is a form of orientalism. It's like, you know, this Georgian and this Chinese person, we're going to reduce them to a one-dimensional caricature of a human being.

Whereas Hitler, we're going to psychoanalyze him. We're going to read his text. We're going to think about how his failing of art school contributed to his psychology. It's a joke. Yeah, no. They humanize him a lot. This, like, white, like, Western European guy gets to be a fully, like, developed human being. complicated human being

where it's like yeah these like Eastern despots are just simple yeah exactly like oh they all they thought about was murder and power which is crazy because I've had so many people who

you know like aren't outright Nazis aren't outright fascists literally humanized Hitler be like oh you know he was just at the wrong place the wrong time he got roped into it I'm like bro bro bro

all right well let's go ahead and move on and let's sort of like you know invert the logic a little bit. So now that we have a general idea of the logic behind these numbers, like what would it look like if we use that same logic against capitalism broadly and even the United States specifically?

Like, in other words, using their own logic, what's the death toll of capitalism? Oof. Oh, boy. It's big. What do we want to include? Billions and billions and billions. There's that, yeah, there's a video where someone cut together every time Carl Sagan

said billions or millions in cosmos. And it's basically that. Um, no, I mean, uh, yeah, Alex now we're talking about this this morning. Like, how do we even, how do you start to count it? Do we talk about everyone that dies from a preventable illness? Right. In a capitalist society, do we talk about everyone who dies from hunger and like hunger related conditions? Homelessness? In, uh, yeah, do we talk about people who die from homelessness? Uh, do we talk about people who die from the various social ills that exist in capitalist countries? Like, uh, yeah, so. So UNICEF, famously communist organization UNICEF, they estimated that 15 million people die every year from preventable poverty, and of whom an 11 million of those people that die are children under the age of five. So in 10 years, so, okay, so even if we grant that 100 million people died from communism in the 20th century, which we have proven, which we talked about is not true. even if you grant that in 10 years capitalism kills more children under the age of five than socialism did

in 150 years Jesus and then it's like well that's not then people are like oh that's not capitalism's fault that's just like scarcely you're under development or whatever well then why are you blaming 40 million deaths in China on socialism and inefficiency because we have enough food to feed

more people than exist in the world it's just not distributed efficiently yeah I mean in the U.S. U.S. alone, because that's where I am, in the U.S. alone, 20 to 40,000 deaths every year from lack of health insurance. And on average, like, if you average that out, that's like 300,000 in the last decade. Again, I'll send, I'll send sources and stuff. In the U.S., there's like over 200,000 deaths just in the, just in the year 2000 from a thing I saw, over 240,000

deaths attributed to low levels of education and the various stuff that that resulted in, 176 due to racism, 162,000 to low social support, 119,000 to income inequality, 39,000 to area level poverty. That was just in 2000. So that's like 2 million people every 10 years just in the U.S. Yeah. And we're not even considering like the explicit hate crimes, the state back to violence against people like during the Jim Crow era, the LGBT community.

like so much um yeah and then i mean even if you're going into the past and and so you'll notice we haven't even referenced any wars yeah like that so but if you're just looking at capitalist countries like you can look at um the various famines in india while under british rule like the in 1876 there was a famine over five million people died in india because the british government was just trying like yeah we're not we'll just we'll let the market sort it out and then like there have been famines there were I mean there were famines even in the in the 20th century in India under British rule Winston Churchill Western hero was in charge of that and basically explicitly said fuck them send the grain elsewhere and starved like millions and millions of Bengalis that's capitalism

and that's what that's what Stalin was accused of doing with the Ukrainians right we've said this a few times on on proles but like pretty much everything Stalin is accused of doing Churchill actually did. Yeah, and so, and so, like, you have a hundred, like, over a hundred million people homeless in the world, I mean, and that, if you go up to not having

adequate, like, adequate housing, like housing up to decent standards, that's over a billion, we have almost like two billion people lacking adequate housing. Capitalism gets it both ways, because when something good happens in a capitalist society, it's because of capitalism. If something bad happens, it was despite it.

It's other forces. And it's a double standard that's not applied to socialist countries. So, like, yeah, when people died from a famine, from flooding and famines in China, well, that's added to the death toll of communism. But if someone, if a family, like, loses members of it because they starve to death in the West, like, well, that's just they didn't work hard enough. Or it's just like there's, there's inequality and it's regrettable, but what are we going to do about it? And it's like, and it's just completely, it's externalized. There's nothing you can do, right? Again, it goes back to this is just the way it is.

Yep. Yeah, it's just natural. Yeah, we were kind of talking even this morning, like, how much could we include in the death of the... Yeah, I mean, like, let's bring up wars. Yeah, wars, deportations in the USA alone, like, you know how they countered all those deportations in communism? Like, since 19 or 1892 to 2016, there has been. 7.1 million people deported So I don't know. From the U.S.?

Yeah, from the U.S. alone. If you want to use that number and, I mean, wars, oof, like imperialism, gosh. Well, yeah, I mean, both world wars are imperial wars. Both world wars can be laid to defeat. You can't even, like, if you want to talk about the death toll of capitalism, just like

they're, just like they talk about the death toll of communism, it almost like staggers the imagination. Just how many deaths have been caused by imperialism. and colonialism and extracting resources from people and slavery, which is a colonialist, which is the basis of capitalism. In 1860, they were recorded almost four million slaves in the USA. So if you want to include them because they don't have lives. Right, exactly. They aren't living. And then include the legacy that their lives put on up until today. That's exponential. That's capitalism.

If we're going to count the people that weren't born because of capital, Now we're getting into, like, just, yeah, like ludicrous numbers. I mean, and then, yeah, wars, how many, how many fucking civilians, how many people died in Korea? How many people died in Vietnam? How many people died in Iraq? Just this most recent thing. It's like a million, right? It's sad because I couldn't find statistics on the other people that were not U.S.-based military casualties.

But I found even just U.S. casualties alone in all of wars that America has participated in were over two million. So imagine applying that to the places they went to, which I'm sure is disgusting. Yeah, I mean, yeah, like a bunch of, a bunch of U.S. troops died in Korea in the 50s, but the U.S. also, like, destroyed two-thirds of that country and killed millions of people there. And, like, yeah, so you can't really tally it. It's massive. I mean, even just in this, I think our, I was doing some general calculations. We're up to like 700 million or 800 million in 200 years. If we include indigenous Americans. Oh, my God.

And we haven't even touched on that. By 1691, they estimate that indigenous Americans had declined by 90 to 95 percent. So around 130 million people. Yeah. Just with the genocide of the Native America. Just in North America. That doesn't even include South America, Central America. Central America, that doesn't include

like every, yeah, I mean Yeah, that doesn't include all of the countless, countless indigenous people like murdered and displaced by colonialism, by capitalism, by the precursors of capitalism. And I mean, yeah, even if, even if we completely ignored everything we just said and just focused on indigenous people.

Oh, God. Yeah, it's ridiculous. If you think about the legacy that it has put even to contemporary times, indigenous Americans have higher rates of suicide, of alcoholism, of preventable diseases. They have lack of access to health care, lack to basic resources, to food, to water. Like, how far are we going to take this? Even thinking about cities in the U.S. that are overstricken with poverty and don't have access to potable water, like, how far are we going to take this?

Because these are the casualties of capitalism. Exactly. And that genocide of the indigenous people is. is an ongoing thing. It's not something, you know, safe in history. Yeah.

Yeah, it didn't happen 250 years ago and like, we got better. No, it's still happening. All of these things

are still happening. And the thing with capitalism is that you hear all the time like people be like, oh, communism, I mean, it looks great on paper, but like,

look what happens when it's applied. And their alternative is to advocate a system that by its own admission produces staggering inequalities inequalities and massive, like,

even capitalism stands are going to be like, well, that's just uh you know that's just like it those things had to happen like the the indigenous people dying needed to happen the uh the mass of like famines it's just it happens like that's just the way it is you know because what what else we're going to do it's disgusting and and that's what we're fighting that's what we're fighting against because people who don't know any better that's what they've been told right and and so that's why that's why it's important for us as socialists as

communists to fight these stories and say no that's you're just they're displacing their own crimes on the on the things that we're trying to make the world better is capitalism basically saying no you yeah it's almost Freudian in its projection exactly it's it's incredible the amount of the amount of projections happening and so capitalism historically and nowadays is a machine that runs on human suffering right like it is it is powered by human blood and it has been and it always will be and it can't be otherwise and that That's why we're fucking fighting it. That's why we're trying to say, like, no, the things that the, the experiments, the

movements in history that have tried to fight this, those were good and honorable and noble. And even with their mistakes, we advocate for the justice of that, the righteousness of and the correctness of these movements. Exactly right. Yeah. And I just wanted to add a couple things. I mean, perfectly beautifully said and you covered so much territory. It is so mind-boggling once you start trying to do.

do these numbers. We talked about genocide in North America alone, but what if we expanded to include South America and the Caribbean, Central America? I mean, you're talking hundreds of millions over, you know, a long period of time. Slavery, you can talk about all the deaths and the devastation and the robbing of countless lives in that process, but even just the American Civil War, which was fundamentally fought over slavery, it can be seen as an outgrowth of it, and thus those numbers can be added to the death toll of capitalism. You said Vietnam, We have Korea where, you know, U.S. forces slaughter 20% of the population, death squads throughout Latin America, the atomic bombing of not only just one, but both Nagasaki and Hiroshima. You're talking slaughtering babies and infants and mothers.

I mean, those pictures are devastating. Hundreds of thousands of lives ruined and the radiation, you know, continued the next generation and the one after that. And this is that, you know, that's two bombings, not only just to just to defeat, quote unquote, Japan. and you hear these idiots, you know, constantly say, well, we would have had to do a ground invasion if we didn't kill all those babies. Like, shut the fuck up. You don't even know what you're, what you're talking about, you know? Yeah, yeah. We did, we talked about that on proles. Like, we broke that down if you're interested, if people are interested about nuclear weapons in particular and, like, why the bombings were not justified. You should listen to that.

Yeah, please do. It's a great one. And so I just wanted to say, like, before we go on to the next question, like, I just wanted to make clear that this is not what, what aboutism, right? We're not saying like, yeah, communism was bad, but what about this other thing? We're just using the exact same logic pushed against one movement and taking their own logic at their own word and reapplying it to their own history. So, I mean, I think this is important, essential work and an essential thing to understand when you hear this number. Yeah, and even if you take that, if you take all of all of that at face value, all of the accusations, like, yeah, then communism has a lower death count. So damn, we got to, we should, we should be doing that. Even if it killed a hundred million, that's fewer of capitalism.

So, yeah. So let's move on, but we're ending the, we're working towards the end of this conversation, you know, two more questions. And an important part of being a communist, in my opinion, is not only to push back on these lies and slanders, but also, you know, to take honest account of the mistakes that we've made throughout proletarian history. So having debunked the lie of the 100 million death toll and having shown the body count of capitalism to be much higher in every respect, what are some genuine concerns or criticisms or just

failures with regards to our own communist proletarian history that that either of you think are legitimate to bring up and things that we should take account of as communists. Well, Stalin him out died. First of all, that was a mistake. No. So the thing is, I always feel like I have to preface this by saying, I don't have the full picture. I don't know everything that went on. And so obviously my criticisms are based on limited knowledge, obviously. One thing that even reading and debunking, like, the quote-unquote ethnic deportations, I do understand a lot of it had to do with protecting the USSR, trying to fight against espionage and stuff. But, you know, maybe at that time when I live there, I would be like, Stalin, chill out,

brother. Please, bro. It's okay. Like, you don't have to deport 63,000 people because there might be a couple hondo spies, you know, like, come on. Lay off, brother. Hit this join and relax. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe if he had some of that beep-pe lettuce, he would have been fine. No. And, you know, like a thing that deserves its own episode in itself is LGBT individuals in the USSR.

We're talking about this kind of earlier, how the thing is a lot of these criticisms are because we're not looking at it from that context and that time. We're taking our contemporary ideas and baselines to a historical moment. Yeah, I mean, maybe some of the, maybe some of the collectivization policies weren't implemented as effectively as they maybe could have. Who knows? I mean, yeah, from hindsight, yeah, it's tough. I would also, like, my criticisms of the Soviet Union would also be some of the deportations, some of the cultural policies. There were cultural policies in like the 30s and 40s, specifically in regards to like abortion, contraception, some of those things. Like, yeah, there were, yeah, there were mistakes made.

in China, I already mentioned some of these concerns. Like, I think we did an episode on the Cultural Revolution where we talked about, like, some of that stuff got way out of hand. It got a little rowdy. But Mao acknowledged that afterwards. He was like, yeah, we kind of should have implemented that a little bit differently. The Great Leap Forward, I think, had really,

it was a really noble goal, and I think it, in many ways, succeeded. But, like, some of the things that happened during the Great Leap Forward were basically people getting too overzealous with too little oversight. There's, I mean, there's stories about, like, the pig iron, people melting down all kinds of stuff in these homemade forges to make ultimately useless steel, things like that. And, yeah, some of the collectivization policies weren't implemented super effectively in some areas.

And so some areas were hit by the famine harder than others. And sometimes there was a, like, slowness to react in some cases. also have to look at in China we're talking 500 600 million people like one of the largest populations in the world trying to mobilize and control for these things it's really it's difficult I mean I can't imagine what it was like to be in the like upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party and trying to trying to balance like here's our goals as the party and like that we're trying to work for like the advancement of Chinese society and then also trying to factor in all of the information and the ideas coming from the base, coming from

the small cadres that trickle up because that's a dialectical thing that happens in these sorts of countries where the top is informed by the base and vice versa. And yeah, I can't imagine being like Stalin or the central committee trying to manage the geographically largest country in the world when you're beset on all sides by capitalists and fascists. Like I can't imagine these things. And so yeah, there were mistakes. And I think, and I think as principled leftists, I mean,

and for us here, principal Marxists, like, we're looking at it in, we try to have a scientific way of looking at it. We try to look at what worked, what didn't. And it's not upholding Stalin and Mao and all these other people for just like, no,

Stalin did nothing wrong. Like, it's a meme. No one actually thinks that. It's ironic. exactly um but we are trying to say like hey we're going to look at history we're going to look at it with context and say if something worked then that's good we can use that as a tool in the future if it didn't work that sucks like we need to look at the mistakes that that led to that happening and learn from them and don't do them again in the future exactly yeah so a few a few thoughts from from my end um you know one thing is just the industrialization process sort of regardless of what economic or political system it takes place in is always utterly brutal.

So you can look at like, you know, the UK or the U.S.'s industrialization phase. And you're talking like, you know, it's a child labor. We have all these images in our head of like the brutality of like slums and immigrant, immigrant ghettos and babies being worked to the bone on fucking, you know, factory floors. The industrialization process isn't, I think, in my opinion, is an inherently brutal one. and every sort of country on its way towards being an industrial country needs to go through it. And there's really, I don't see any path in history that has been like a flawless and move into industrialization. It's brutal, not only on people, but on the environment, etc. So when you're looking at these transitions and you're saying like look at all this brutality and stuff,

you really have to understand what industrialization is and what it entails. Another thing would be central planning without a certain level of technological advancement is sort of limited. right? The amount of information that you can get back and spread across the kind of limited in time and space. With a lot of these technologies we have today, central planning would be infinitely easier in so many different regards. Just the information capacity to flow across time and space instantaneously would be a huge advantage to any central planning taking a place now. I would criticize Mao, especially towards the end of his life, with the Sino-Soviet split and then Mao turning towards Nixon in the United States. I mean, Mao at that period of his life

was in decline in a lot of ways. There's so much complexity there. You could talk for hours on the Sino-Sovia split. But Mao coming sort of to the side of U.S. imperialism against the Soviet Union and sort of meeting with Nixon and stuff, that's just bad. I don't think any Maoists would defend that period of time. And then the last thing I would just say is when you're thinking about the move from one economic system to another, you have to like look at history that move from feudalism to capitalism. If people that defend capitalism want to say, like, I think Alex said earlier, like, you know, how many, we've already tried socialism and echoing critics' words. We've already tried socialism and communism. It doesn't work. Therefore,

it would just put it out of our minds and move on to something different. Well, imagine if after, like, the first two attempts at capitalism, uh, the entire liberal ideology said that to itself with regards to feudalism. Like, it's absurd. Like, nobody would expect capitalism to do that. the transition from feudalism to capitalism took i mean centuries fits and starts things rose and were crushed things were successful and moved on i mean the french revolution you had this revolution and then you had the reign of terror and then you had napoleonic reaction so these things are very like fluid and complex and these historical transitions are always going to be intense in that way and then the last thing and i'm done after this is do we also have to think about what the alternatives would be so it's one thing to say

the USSR is bad and china is bad but it's quite another thing to say okay, let's really think through the historical implications if the USSR was defeated in the civil war, right? I think it was Trotsky who said, like, if the Soviet Union, if the Bolsheviks were defeated during the Civil War, then fascism would have been a Russian word because the level of reaction, the level of pogroms that would have taken place after that reactionary counter-revolution would have been intense. And who knows how that would have distorted history. And the same in China, like if the imperialist Japanese won or even if they were defeated in the Kuomintang one, How would that differ with regards to China's trajectory? It's impossible to say these are historical counterfactuals,

but I do think that that needs to be brought into these discussions when we're trying to analyze these historical movements. You know, the alternatives in history are an important part of trying to understand, you know, what actually was possible at that time and what different trajectories would have taken, you know? All right. So do you have any words before we move into our last question? I feel like we could talk about that forever.

Yeah, we could unpack that a lot, but we've got to keep going. Okay, cool. Let's just move into the to the final question, which is, in your honest opinions, like, how do you think the construction of socialism in the 21st century would be different from the construction of socialism through the early and mid-20th century? What is the difference with our conditions today? And, like, how would that shape proletarian movements that we might build in the here and now? Yeah, and I think you've kind of already touched on one major aspect. And Justin and I have talked about this so much, like the technology, the communication. Like, how important that is right now for how we're using it and how effective it would be in an actual socialist movement, like, amazing.

Yeah, we were talking about this in an early, early polls episode about, like, in the 20s and 30s, some of the, some of the places in the Soviet Union were doing central planning and those calculations by hand. And, like, the idea of trying to reconcile all of these millions of different inputs and, like, all of these. factors, we have super I mean, at the time of this recording, like Google just figured out like quantum computing recently. I mean like... A big breakthrough recently, yeah. Exactly. And that's and and the thing is that it's going to get used, quantum computing is going to get used to make

some, a couple people a bunch of money. Whereas we could use quantum computing and like our very supercomputers to actually figure out like how do we actually fucking distribute all the stuff we have in ways that makes sense um yeah and like and so that's why oh central planning doesn't work like the last time they tried it they were using like our computers are ex but like almost mind like they couldn't have conceived of how fast our computers are now like our phone like every one of our cell phones is like the equivalent of some of the computers they were doing planning with um so central planning yeah like the ability to central plan that's that's much more important i also yeah the communication

aspect, just being able to communicate with members of the party, like members of your, of other communities, like instantaneously, that would completely change how these things go. Like, that would change implementation. I mean, yeah, obviously it's hard to say what the construction of socialism would look like, but I think it's different now in that almost pretty much every part of the world has gone through or is going through that industrialization. That stuff's already there so we don't need to have a great leap forward we just need to use the productive forces that we already have we just need to stop capitalism stop imperialism and once we do those simple things then step two no step two step two question mark step three profit but uh the

industrializations already happened so we don't need to like there we're not in danger of famines we have enough food and then the other thing is that what they weren't thinking about in the 20th century until, I mean the Soviet Union was near the end, but was the environment and all these things. And like with climate change, we have, I've seen compelling arguments that like the only way to mitigate the worst effects of climate change is going to be through a massive state apparatus. And that needs to be a massive state apparatus working in the interests of the people. Like we need, I'm going to get a kind of ideological here. We need, we need a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Absolutely. Desperly. And that's the only thing that's going to fight the world-endingly bad climate change and the effects of climate change that are going to affect. And, I mean, you can't say this enough. They're going to affect the poorest and the dispossessed first and worst. Yeah. Can you imagine what the feedback system would be like with our technology now? You know, like how there was so much back and forth and like actually getting opinion from

the proletariat like hearing what they had to say and stuff like that would be gosh exponentially like quicker now with the technology we have like there's so many tools that are used for capital that could be used for socialism in such beautiful ways yeah i mean i was i was talking i was talking somebody i don't remember who uh i was talking with somebody about um just look at look at the logistics in terms of in place for things like like amazon or google or even in the U.S., just like Walmart, exactly. Like, we have the ability to distribute goods to the people who need them if, like, fairly efficiently.

We just don't. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, great answers. I agree with all of that. The environment's a huge thing. I mean, just the time between, like, a lot of these experiments and today, we've gone through a lot of, like, you know, sort of social movements, environmentalism,

the LGBTQ community, you know, really rising up. Lots of, like, identity-based stuff that should not be dismissed. missed, you know, those things will add to our understanding of human identity and how we can weave those into our stuff going forward and not make some of the sort of chauvinistic errors that have been made in the past. And also just the expansion of technology will not only help central planning, which I agree is absolutely essential to combat the climate crisis. The free market will never do anything but drive us deeper into the crisis. We need to, you know, break free of that sort of limitation. And central planning is the way to do it. And we can't balk in

either, right? It can't be sort of this anarchistic conception of like localism because it's a global problem. Climate change takes global cooperation. And you can talk about federalizing and all this stuff, but I do think whatever your conception of a socialist future looks like, some level of using technology to centrally plan the distribution of resources is going to be an essential piece of the puzzle to solving climate change. And then it also, though, interestingly, open up spaces for new forms of grassroots democracy, new forms of, because of this instantaneous communication and the ability for like small, more, maybe more localized communities to feed into bigger structures instantaneously with their needs and the sort of the information coming

out of those local communities and then consolidating that information, it will be huge with central planning as well as the expansion of political democracy and giving communities more of a say in what goes on in the day-to-day life in those individual localized communities. So on all of those levels, I think we have a lot of different sort of terrain to operate on today than we did back then. But we're already over an hour and a half, so I'm going to end it there. Thank you both, Ethan and Alex, so much for coming on. This has been a fascinating conversation. I think listeners will get a lot out of it by engaging with a lot of the content that we've discussed today.

But before I let you, comrades, go, can you let listeners know where they can maybe learn more about the stuff you researched for this episode and then where they can find you and your show? online? Well, I'll probably list some of the resources that probably have been listed before a lot of it's Groverford, but I did find some good articles that I can link in there too. Yeah, there's just a lot of books. A lot of people have done a lot of research on these things, debunking a lot of these narratives. And so you just have to find them out. Like, go to places, like, go to the communist, like, communist and socialists online. Most of them will have, like, resources for you if you if you look for them um and the trick yeah and the trick like we have some on uh the poll spot website we have some a bunch of ebooks um that we think are interesting and useful

um but like the important thing is that whatever the the resources that you're finding you have to look at how they're using history like who is benefiting from the story they're telling whose stories are they telling who's are they leaving out and what are they just like completely making up because it happens more than you think history is a weapon Exactly. History is a weapon, to quote, was that Howard Zinn? I think so, yeah. Yeah. History is a weapon, and it's a powerful one, and we need it. Yeah, and always be skeptical of things that are calling itself impartial or non-biased.

It's always biased. Exactly. Like, there's always, there's no such thing as objectivities. There's always, like, a slant, and you just got to find, you got to find enough stuff that you can get a full picture, like, looking at events from different angles, until you can figure out what actually has. happened or you're the closest that we can figure out you know yep and we'll put we'll put as many links as we can fit into the the show notes and i know you'll send over those links after we end this recording so if people are interested in starting that search we'll will definitely provide some links in the show notes to get you get you going in that direction and then yeah just just to reiterate what we've been saying throughout this entire episode you know

nothing is objective everything is ideological but the most pernicious kind of ideology is the kind of ideology that presents itself as non-ideological and so anytime you see see somebody saying that they're beyond ideology or that, you know, this is just a purely objective academic take on the history of socialism. I mean, such a controversial subject in the West. I mean, you have to be suspicious of anybody claiming that they're not motivated by ideology because that's literally impossible. But yeah, so thank you both so much. I'll link to Prol's pod in the show notes as well. So if you haven't heard that podcast, definitely go check it out. So much of what we talked about, like things we'd only hinted at in this episode,

proles have entire episodes on. So, so, you know, that's a huge. huge, wonderful resource for these sorts of conversations as well. So thanks again, Alex and Ethan for coming on. I really appreciate it. And let's keep in touch. Yeah. Thanks, Brett. Keep up the good work. Solidarity. Solidarity forever. Bye. What do you want for me? Why don't you run for me? What are you wondering? What do you know? Why aren't you scared of me? Why do you care for me? When we all fall asleep, where do we go? Come here. Say it, spit it out, what is it exactly?

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