I've posted about the following site a number of times at Celestial Junk, so I thought I'd give you a heads up while I'm guest blogging on SDA.
Titled, Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century, this site is brought to us by Matthew White. I'm not even sure if Matthew is keeping the site up, but it's still one of the best resources available when you need that special number. "That number", being how many people died in any given 20th Century conflict of significance. I’ve linked to the Alphabetical page above. You can access the Table of Contents Here, where White includes links to graphs and other chartings of humankind’s destructive capability.
Note that unlike the standard method of reporting in the MSM, White uses multiple and often varied sources.
It’s difficult to peruse the site without having to contemplate just how self-destructive our species can be.
Man, ghastly. That Hitler guy. Compared to Stalin and Mao, what an amateur! I wouldn't dismiss the human race as penultimately self destructive. It's really amazing how so few among us can do so much damage by compelling the masses to that self destruction. Disturbing to think that there is still a Marxist Leninist Party in Canada! Why do we tolerate parties with totalitarian pretext? Is it our inability to learn? No, that can't be it. Sorry, just can't put my finger on it.
the thing about the worst aspect of communism, the death toll, its mostly their OWN people dying.
thats why despite being ascribed the label neo-communist in this forum I detest that political preference the most of any.
Good point t.
Yep, people get all in a lather about the Crusades but compared to Mao and Stalin your Champeen All Time Killers, I think the Crusades were a garden variety dust up.
The Weekly Standard
Dead Souls: Tallying the Victims of Communism
December 13, 1999
A review of "The Black Book of Communism."
The Black Book of Communism
Edited by Stephane Courtois et al,
trans. Mark Kramer and Jonathan Murphy
Harvard University Press, 1120 pages, $37.50
Its pages were yellowed, its cheap binding broken, its typeface uneven: there was nothing imposing about the copy of Un Bagne en Russie Rouge - `A Prison in Red Russia' - which someone once handed me as a curiosity. Nevetheless, the book, published in Paris in 1927, was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union's earliest political prisons, located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea. Quoting survivors, escapees, and what little information had been published in the Soviet press, the author Raymond Duguet accurately described the geography of the islands, the barracks within a former monastery, the lack of food, the mass executions. He correctly named prisoners and several guards. He mentioned the mosquitoes. For sixty years, Duguet's book was the most complete source on Solovetsky in the French language.
But Un Bagne en Russie Rouge was a failure. Its author was not famous, and its literary value was minimal. Worst the book was mistimed. Because it appeared at the end of the 1920s, when the bloodiness of the Russian revolution was already fading into memory, it was easily outshone by volumes like L'amour en Russie, and "Ma Petite Bolchevique", books describing the romance and excitment of Soviet Russia. Wrote one Magdeleine Marx, in "C'est La Lutte Final" ("It's the Final Struggle") of her trip to Russia at that time: "Such boutiques there are! The happy crowds promenade beneath the trees with an air of well-being." Stories of dismal Russian prisons were not then popular in France, and in any case, they could be countered by better stories, those told by the distinguished French communists who had been invited to visit Russian prisons (specially prepared for that purpose) and found them not to be dismal at all.
"Un Bagne en Russie Rouge" fell into the black hole of forgotten books. The information it contained did not become part of French culture. Only a fraction of the intellectual class had heard of Solovetsky; to the general public, the name of the place meant nothing. One could say, even, that although the story of the Solvetsky Islands was then `known' in France, it was for all practical purposes, unknown. "Human knowledge," once wrote Pierre Rigoulot, a French historian of communism, "doesn't accumulate like the bricks of a wall which grows regularly, according to the work of the mason. Its development, but also its stagnation or retreat, depends on the social, cultural, and political framework." The framework, in this case - the book's style, its author, and above all the political atmosphere in which it was published - was not conducive to the growth of knowledge about Soviet prisons.
All of which is a roundabout way of explaining the phenomenal, surprise success of the "Black Book of Communism" when it first appeared in France in the autumn of 1997, as well as the fierce controversy it provoked. A serious, scholarly history of the crimes of communism - in the Soviet Union, East and West Europe, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America - the "Black Book" did not look like an immediate candidate for the best-seller lists. Any book publisher will tell you that gloom doesn't sell, and the "Black Book" is essentially a catalogue of gloom: torture, murder, political repression, artificial famine, terror and terrorism, without much by the way of politics or social history to lighten the atmosphere.
......
Finally, the most important effect of the Black Book is cumulative: more than 800 pages of murders, massacres, famines, concentration camps, prisons, wars, terrorist acts and assasinations cannot fail to impress even those readers inclined to see silver linings. By the time one has reached the end of the book, in fact, one feels that the question central to the introduction ought to read somewhat differently. Given the kind of material - documents, testimony, official statements - that we now have, why do we still need to compare Communism to Nazism? True, the comparison will go on being interesting to the same kinds of historians and political philosophers who have always found it interesting. But it should by now be unnecessary for those like Stephan Courtois, who simply want the evil of communism to be intutitivly accepted the way that the evil of Nazism is intuitively accepted. We have reached the end of the twentieth century with its multiple horrors, we have all of the necessary documentation spread before us, and we should now be able to say, without making a contest of it, that Hitler was evil - and that Stalin was evil. That some still need conjure up the ghost of one in order to condemn the other merely testifies as to how far popular culture lags behind historical research. Communism now looks bad enough by itself. ...-
http://www.anneapplebaum.com/communism/1999/12_16_weekst_blackbook.html
Islam: a religion of Genocide and Honour Killings. ...-
Honor Killing in Louisville?
Father charged in stabbing deaths of children. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky (AP) — A man charged with killing his four young children and assaulting his wife was ordered held without bail Saturday after a judge entered a not guilty plea for him.
Said Biyad, 42, faces four counts of capital murder and one count of aggravated assault. If convicted of murder, Biyad could face the death penalty, although prosecutors have not said whether they will seek it.
A funeral was held Saturday at the Islamic Center in Elizabethtown, south of Louisville. Islamic tradition calls for burial as soon as possible after death. Outside the mosque, Imam Mohamed Lunat led about 50 men in prayers in Arabic, The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported. Women stood nearby in the shade of a tree. The mother of the four children, 29-year-old Fatuma Amir, was in serious condition in the hospital and unable to attend.
The children’s bodies, wrapped in white sheets, were buried in a Muslim cemetery. ...
Biyad, a Somali refugee who had been living in Oregon until recently, entered a Louisville police station Friday morning and told detectives, “I just killed my family,” said Lt. Col. Philip Turner, an assistant chief. Police discovered the bodies of the couple’s son, Sidi, 8, and three daughters — Fatuma, 7, Khadija, 4 and Goshany, 2 — in their mother’s apartment. ...-
LGF
How many people died in the black death in the 1300s? how many died of SMALL POX and THE SPANISH FLU? and dose anyone know of TYPHOID MARY?
uh plover, ummmm ...... you saying the stalinist genocides were because of some microscopic pathogen called communicoccal?
ffffoyyyytsch !!!
Stalin was a bigger mass murderer then hitler he stole the crop from all those folk and exported them while the NYTs left-wing reporter WALTER DURANTIE lied about it all
The Black Book of Communism
Mistitled, as usual, (but a very good book) one should replace "Communism" with "socialism" 99% of the regimes claim, correctly, to be socialist.
Reminds of the MSM's constant use of "hard line conservatives" as a tag line when some one is bad in their eyes... so often it turns out that they are refering to hard line _socialists_ or other LEFTIST types
There's another great web site out there, google "democide" to find it. Another good catalogue of man's inhumanity.
What gets me me though is despite all these massacres human population continues to rise like that of cockroaches with too much food.
Black death: Death rates are hard to establish as it it came and went over decades. I know in Norway the death rates were over 50% in one episode (all those people crammed in small houses down in isolated fjords all winter)- a prelude to Norway being taken over my Denmark - The Norwegian urban aristocracy was especially hard hit.
Elsewhere in Europe the death rates were less brutal apparently, but it went on for decades in multiple wavefronts of disease. It's good thing people reproduced enthusiastically.
Mind you I've never heard of the black death in the rest of asia/africa...did it not reach there, or was it simply not as virulent in those populations?
Fred