Talk:Mass killings under communist regimes/sandbox

Terms
Majority of mass non-combat death in Communist countries occurred during the Stalin's rule in the USSR and Mao's rule in China; majority of the victims died in famines.

Scholars use several different terms to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants. Discussion of the number of victims of Communist regimes has been "extremely extensive and ideologically biased".

Many of the terms are generic, i.e. not specific to communism - these different definitions are not super important to keep on this page (a page that already is huge). Why not move this section to already referred page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_definitions ? One additional benefit of moving the terms there would be that more terms could be compared to each other on a broader scale. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.102.90.134 (talk) 22:19, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Genocide
The term Genocide was initially coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe Nazi policy in occupied Europe, and The Holocaust in particular. The term was formalized by the UN Genocide Convention, which defined it as an act committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group; genocide defined in such a way is a crime punishable according to international laws, thus applying limitations on the sovereignty of governments that destroy their own peoples. This legal definition of genocide has several limitations that made it inapplicable to many mass killing and mass mortality events in XX century. These limitations are as follows:
 * Protection of political groups was eliminated from the UN resolution, because many Eastern Bloc, Latin American, and some other governments anticipated that clause could apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal rebellions.
 * The highest level of specific intent needs to be established for conviction of genocide.
 * The intent to destroy some group in part may fit the genocide definition only if the perpetrators view the part of the group they wish to destroy as a distinct entity which must be eliminated as such.

As a result, most mass killing and mass mortality cases in Communist led countries do not fit the UN legal definition of genocide because the acts were either against political groups (Great Purge, Cultural Revolution), lacked established intentionality, or affected just a small part of some group (Soviet Famine of 1932-33, Great Leap Forward famine).

Genocide is also a popular term for mass political killing, which is studied academically as democide and politicide.

Because of the ambiguities of the definition, the meaning of the term has long been debated by genocide scholars. And as Genocide Studies developed and it became more apparent that political groups were being targeted, their exclusion has been re-evaluated. Some modern scholars propose that the term "genocide" should be defined more widely in order to expand the protection of the Genocide Convention to political groups, include both specific and constructive intent (i.e., the cases when perpetrator should realize that his actions make deaths likely), and bring the term "in part" in accordance with lay people's understanding. If this wider definition becomes commonly accepted, it can be applied to most cases of violence in Communist led countries. However, such an approach has been met with skepticism by other scholars, who argue that a looser definition would make genocide not a uniquely horrible and rare event and a large number of cases, starting from the colonization of America and ending with the economic sanctions against Iraq, would fit such a definition.

Nevertheless, many authors use the term "genocide" as metaphors for various forms of lethal and non-lethal violence, including the violence under Communist regimes. Killing by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia has been labeled genocide or auto-genocide and, more controversially, the deaths under Leninism and Stalinism in the USSR and Maoism in China have been investigated as possible cases. In particular, the famines in the USSR in the 1930s and during the Great Leap Forward in China have been "depicted as mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent." According to Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, "historians and philosophers close to politically liberal groups" in Europe, especially in Romania, have made the term Communist Genocide part of today's vocabulary.

Limitations of the term "genocide" prompted scholars to propose alternative terms describing lethal forms of mass violence, which are being discussed below.

Politicide
The term politicide is used to describe the killing of groups that are not covered by the Genocide Convention. It includes the mass killing of political, economic, ethnic and cultural groups. Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term politicide to describe an arc of mass killings from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia. In his book The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.

Democide
R. J. Rummel coined the term democide, which includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Unlike politicide, randomly conducted and non-targeted mass killing are included. Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown the significance of the differences between the democide and politicide data-sets in that statistical analyses based on them can produce very different results, including whether or not regime type is a significance variable. Helen Fein has termed the mass state killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia as "genocide and democide."

Crimes against humanity
Klas-Göran Karlsson uses the term crimes against humanity, which includes "the direct mass killings of politically undesirable elements, as well as forced deportations and forced labour". He acknowledges that the term may be misleading in the sense that the regimes targeted groups of their own citizens, but considers it useful as a broad legal term which emphasizes attacks on civilian populations and because the offenses demean humanity as a whole. Jacques Semelin and Michael Mann believe that crime against humanity is more appropriate than genocide or politicide when speaking of violence by Communist regimes.

Classicide
Michael Mann has proposed the term classicide as the "intended mass killing of entire social classes".

Repression
Stephen Wheatcroft notes that, in the case of the Soviet Union, terms such as the terror, the purges, and repression are used to refer to the same events. He believes the most neutral terms are repression and mass killings, although in Russian the broad concept of repression is commonly held to include mass killings and is sometimes assumed to be synonymous with it, which is not the case in other languages.

Mass killing
Ervin Staub defined mass killing as "killing members of a group without the intention to eliminate the whole group or killing large numbers of people without a precise definition of group membership. In a mass killing the number of people killed is usually smaller than in genocide." Referencing earlier definitions, Joan Esteban, Massimo Morelli and Dominic Rohner have defined mass killings as "the killings of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action against the military forces of an avowed enemy, under the conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the victims". The term has been defined quantitatively by Benjamin Valentino as "the intentional killing of a massive number of noncombatants", where a massive number is defined as at least 50,000 intentional deaths over the course of five years or less. This is the most accepted quantitative minimum threshold for the term. He applies this definition to the cases of Stalin's USSR, the PRC under Mao, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, while admitting that mass killings on a smaller scale also appear to have been carried out by regimes in North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, and Africa.

Holocaust
The United States Congress has referred in legislation to "an unprecedented imperial communist holocaust" and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation established as a result of that legislation refers to this subject as the "Communist holocaust". The term Red Holocaust has been used by German historian Horst Möller; American academic Steven Rosefielde has published a book on this subject titled Red Holocaust. According to Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, "historians and philosophers close to politically liberal groups" in Europe, especially in Romania, have made the term Red Holocaust part of today's vocabulary.

Victims of totalitarian regimes
The European Parliament, the second-largest democratic electorate in the world with 375 million eligible voters in 2009, has proclaimed and annually pays for a yearly act of remembrance of "the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes", which it describes as "Stalinism and other totalitarian communist regimes", in addition to Nazism and fascism.

Estimates

 * In his introduction to the Black Book of Communism, Stéphane Courtois gives a "rough approximation, based on unofficial estimates" approaching 100 million killed. In his foreword to the book, Martin Malia notes "a grand total of victims variously estimated by contributors to the volume at between 85 million and 100 million."


 * According to Benjamin Valentino, the estimates of the number of non-combatants killed by Communist regimes in the Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, and Cambodia alone range from a low of 21 million to a high of 70 million.


 * In 2005, R. J. Rummel revised his estimate of total Communist democide between 1900 and 1999 upward by 38 million to "about 148,000,000", due to recent publications about Mao's role in China's Great Famine.


 * According to Steven Rosefielde's book Red Holocaust, "approximately 60 million people and perhaps tens of millions more" were killed.

Cambodia
Modern research has located 20,000 mass graves from the Khmer Rouge era all over Cambodia. Various studies have estimated the death toll of the Khmer Rouge regime at between 740,000 and 3,000,000, with perhaps half of those deaths being due to executions, and the rest from starvation and disease. The U.S. State Department-funded Yale Cambodian Genocide Project estimates approximately 1.7 million. R. J. Rummel, an analyst of historical political killings, gives a figure of 2 million. A UN investigation reported 2–3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million had been killed. Demographic analysis by Patrick Heuveline suggests that between 1.17 and 3.42 million Cambodians were killed, while Marek Sliwinski estimates that 1.8 million is a conservative figure. Researcher Craig Etcheson of the Documentation Center of Cambodia suggests that the death toll was between 2 and 2.5 million, with a "most likely" figure of 2.2 million. After 5 years of researching grave sites, he concluded that "these mass graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution".



Helen Fein, a genocide scholar, claims that the xenophobic ideology of the Khmer Rouge regime resembles more a phenomenon of national socialism, or fascism, than communism. Daniel Goldhagen explains that the Khmer Rouge were xenophobic because they believed the Khmer were "the one authentic people capable of building true communism." Sociologist Martin Shaw described the Cambodian genocide as "the purest genocide of the Cold War era". Steven Rosefielde, by contrast, states that there is "no evidence Pol Pot sought to exterminate the Khmer people, or even the Cham and religious minorities." Instead, he defines Khmer Rouge killings as "dystopicide": "The no-prisoners-taken pursuit of badly implemented, poorly conceived communist utopia-building." Cyprian Blamires and Paul Jackson wrote that "In the final analysis, several typical features of fascist regimes - such as qualified protection of private property, state toleration of a national religion, and an express rejection of Marxism-Leninism in all its variants - were not in evidence during Democratic Kampuchea, and the regime cannot, as such, be considered fascist." Henri Locard argued that Khmer Rouge repression was "similar (if significantly more lethal) to the repression in all Communist regimes" and that "revisionist" accusations of "self-genocide" were employed "by the invading Vietnamese to distance themselves from a government they had overturned." According to the Khmer Institute, "While ethnic minorities were disproportionately harmed during the Khmer Rouge period, this was not due to a policy of "ethnic cleansing" per se, but one of trying to eliminate religious or cultural differences to create a pure Communist society."

In 1997 the Cambodian Government asked the United Nations assistance in setting up a genocide tribunal. The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007. On 19 September 2007 Nuon Chea, second in command of the Khmer Rouge and its most senior surviving member, was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, but not charged with genocide. He will face Cambodian and foreign judges at the special genocide tribunal.

Democratic People's Republic of Korea
According to R.J. Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1987; others have estimated 400,000 deaths in concentration camps alone. Pierre Rigoulot estimates 100,000 executions, 1.5 million deaths through concentration camps and slave labor, 500,000 deaths from famine, and 1.3 million killed in the Korean war. Estimates based on the most recent North Korean census suggest that 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine and that there were 600,000 to 850,000 unnatural deaths in North Korea from 1993 to 2008. The famine, which claimed as many as one million lives, has been described as the result of the economic policies of the North Korean government, and as deliberate "terror-starvation". In 2009, Steven Rosefielde stated that the Red Holocaust "still persists in North Korea" as Kim Jong Il "refuses to abandon mass killing."

Vietnam
The Viet Minh collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of the Vietnamese nationalist movements from 1945-6. When the Viet Minh went to war against France they continued their campaign to wipe out the nationalist groups. According to Lucien Bodard, "Ho Chi Minh had not stretched out his hand to the Nationalists: he had ordered them to be massacred....Thousands, maybe tens of thousands of men had been liquidated in 1945, 1946 and later....We know how it ended....how Ho Chi Minh allowed Leclerc's soldiers to come and how the Expeditionary Force let the Vietminh wipe out the Nationalists, with all their hatred of the French and their xenophobia. It had meant their extermination—or very nearly."



Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform". Declassified Politburo documents confirm that 1 in 1,000 North Vietnamese (i.e., about 14,000 people) were the minimum quota targeted for execution during the earlier "rent reduction" campaign; the number killed during the multiple stages of the considerably more radical "land reform" was probably many times greater. Lam Thanh Liem, a major authority on land issues in Vietnam, conducted multiple interviews in which communist cadres gave estimates for land reform executions ranging from 120,000 to 200,000. Such figures match the "nearly 150,000 houses and huts which were allocated to new occupants". Ironically, a number of sources have suggested that about 30% of the "landlords" executed were actually communist party members. Landlords were arbitrarily classified as 5.68% of the population, but the majority were subject to less severe punishment than execution. Official records from the time suggest that 172,008 "landlords" were executed during the "land reform", of whom 123,261 (71.66%) were later found to be wrongly classified. Victims were reportedly shot, beheaded, and beaten to death; "some were tied up, thrown into open graves and covered with stones until they were crushed to death." The full death toll was even greater because victims' families starved to death under the "policy of isolation." As communist defector Le Xuan Giao explained: "There was nothing worse than the starvation of the children in a family whose parents were under the control of a land reform team.  They isolated the house, and the people who lived there would starve.  The children were all innocent.  There was nothing worse than that.  They wanted to see the whole family dead." Former Viet Minh official Hoàng Văn Chí wrote that as many as 500,000 people may have died as a result of the policies of Hồ Chí Minh's government. In his 1955 interviews, he described North Vietnam as a terrorist state where "the village guards would dig tombs" before every trial; where "ghastly" and "barbarous" torture was used; where the communists "starve the people in order to enslave them more surely"; where dissidents were either "in the other world [i.e., dead] or in the concentration camps"; and where non-communists had been "classified as landowners" and either "sentenced to hard labour" or "shot on the spot."



During the Vietnam War, communist Viet Cong insurgents reportedly sliced﻿ off the genitals of village chiefs and sewed them inside their bloody mouths, disemboweled civilians for purposes of psychological warfare, cut off the tongues of helpless victims, rammed bamboo lances through one ear and out the other, slashed open the wombs of pregnant women,  machine gunned children, hacked men and women to pieces with machetes, and cut off the fingers of small children who dared to get an education. Squads were assigned monthly assassination quotas. According to Guenter Lewy, Viet Cong insurgents assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam and routinely employed terror on a daily basis. Ami Pedahzur has written that "the overall volume and lethality of Vietcong terrorism rivals or exceeds all but a handful of terrorist campaigns waged over the last third of the twentieth century". Notable Viet Cong atrocities include the massacre of over 3,000 unarmed civilians at Huế during the Tet Offensive and the incineration of hundreds of civilians at Dak Son with flamethrowers. Up to 155,000 refugees fleeing the final North Vietnamese Spring Offensive were killed or abducted on the road to Tuy Hòa in 1975. According to Rummel, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops murdered between 106,000 and 227,000 civilians in South Vietnam.

After the war, the new communist government sent at least 1 million South Vietnamese to "re-education camps" where at least 165,000 died of brutal mistreatment, and over 1 million to "new economic zones" with perhaps 50,000 dying as a result. Lê Duẩn's purges resulted in the execution of over 100,000 people; refugees described victims being beheaded, eviscerated, or buried alive. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, between 200,000 and 400,000 Vietnamese boat people died at sea trying to escape.

Laos
The communist Pathet Lao overthrew the royalist government of Laos in December 1975, establishing the Lao People's Democratic Republic. The conflict between Hmong rebels and the Pathet Lao continued in isolated pockets. The government of Laos has been accused of committing genocide against the Hmong, with up to 100,000 killed out of a population of 400,000.