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In The Lost Literature of Socialism literary historian George Watson cites an 1849 article written by Friedrich Engels and published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung as evidence that "the Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." Watson also asserts that "genocide was an idea unique to socialism",(p. 85) and that although the issue of race has "for half a century prevented National Socialism from being seen as socialist", this is a misunderstanding.(p. 77) He says this perspective means that, rather than the Holocaust being a refutation of the socialist nature of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, it can be seen as a support.(p. 77)

Watson has been criticized by reviewer Robert Grant for citing evidence that "seems dubious", arguing that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is [...] at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." Historian Andrzej Walicki, talking about Engels. 1849 article and citing Watson's book, has said, "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."

The Cambridge literary historian and former Liberal Party activist, George Watson, wrote in his book, The lost literature of socialism, that although socialism was essentially the same thing as conservatism, that socialists differed from conservatives because only they had called for genocide. He observed that Friedrich Engels' comment that "the next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth... of reactionary peoples", whom Engels called "residual fragments", referring specifically to small Slavic nations, was a call for genocide. This made Engels an ideological predecessor of Hitler, whose debt to Marxism had been neglected. The Soviets were blamed for the Holocaust because, he claimed, the Nazis had observed the Soviet gulags and the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolph Hoess had shown admiration for them. He also claimed that Adolph Hitler was a socialist. However, Robert Grant, who reviewed Watson's book said that it was not obvious from the readings that Marx and Engels had called for mass killings, and more likely meant that smaller cultures would be assimilated. He also observed that the racial and imperialist language used by Marx and Engels was wholly normal for their time and by no means confined to socialists.

In The Lost Literature of Socialism literary historian George Watson states that the writings of Friedrich Engels and others show that "the Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history."(Watson - no page cited) Watson's claims have been criticised by Robert Grant for "dubious evidence", arguing that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is [...] at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question."(Grant)

George Watson, a literary historian at St. John's College at the University of Cambridge, cited an 1849 article by Friedrich Engels published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung in his book The Lost Literature of Socialism, as evidence that "The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." According to Watson, "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engel's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found."

Historian Andrzej Walicki, also referring to this article by Engels, has said, "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."

Motivation
Some authors argue that a connection exists between the events and communist ideology.

Robert Conquest stressed that Stalin's purges were not contrary to the principles of Leninism, but rather a natural consequence of the system established by Lenin. Alexander Yakovlev, former member of the Politburo, elaborates on this point, stating that "The truth is that in punitive operations Stalin did not think up anything that was not there under Lenin: executions, hostage taking, concentration camps, and all the rest."

Political scientist John N. Gray argues that "The socialist genocide of small, "primitive" peoples, such as the Kalmucks and many others, has been a recurrent element in polices at several stages in the development of Soviet and Chinese totalitarianism." Gray goes on to state "that communist policy in this respect faithfully reproduces classical Marxism, which had an explicit and pronounced contempt for "small, backward and reactionary peoples – no less than for the peasantry as a class and a form of social life"..

Literary historian George Watson argues in The Lost Literature of Socialism that analysis of the writings of Engels and others shows that"[t]he Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." He also writes that from 1840 until the death of Hitler "everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found." Watson's claims have been criticised by Robert Grant for evidence that "seems dubious", arguing that "what Marx and Engels are calling for is [...] at the very least a kind of cultural genocide; but it is not obvious, at least from Watson's citations, that actual mass killing, rather than (to use their phraseology) mere 'absorption' or 'assimilation', is in question." (p558) Grant also claims Watson's concept of 'socialism' is "at best nebulous...and at worst, anything at odds with his own classical liberalism." (p559)

The Black Book of Communism is a collected set of commissioned essays by academics on the theme of repression in Communist controlled states. It claims to detail "Leninism's 'crimes, terror, and repression' from Russia in 1917 to Afghanistan in 1989." (p x) The editor, Stéphane Courtois' object of analysis is the soviet-style system of states. (p727) Courtois claims an association between communism and criminality, "...Communist regimes...turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government," (p4) and proceeds with a claim that this criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice. (p2) However, Courtois admits that the project is to conduct a nineteenth century moral history, "whereby historians performed research more for the purpose of passing judgement than understanding the issue in question." (p10)  This is also the position of Malia who claims in the Foreword that Communist criminality caused mass killings is the shared analytical tendency of the collection, (xvii–xviii), culminating in the judgement that Communism or "an absolute end to inequality" must be "accorded its fair share of pure evil." (xx) Accepting that this practice of history is non-standard, Courtois justifies his capacity to judge by recourse to an ideology rooted in Catholic individualism which is capable of exceeding its own "certain hypocracy". (p29) Courtois establishes a corrupted cradle theory: that bolshevism perverted the communist movement. (727) He proceeds to elucidate two general reasons for barbarity: racialist Russian exceptionalism and the War Experience; neither, as he observes, "explain the Bolsheviks' propensity for extreme violence." (727–735). Courtois retreats from analysis and conducts a moralism of Lenin claiming simply that power was Lenin's aim and his ideology was fundamentally voluntarist, and universally totalising both intellectually and in social conflict. (727–741) Ultimately, Courtois' conclusion falls into the error he accuses Trotsky and Lenin of, "a strong tendency to develop general conclusions based on the Russian experience, which in any case was often exaggerated in [Trotsky's] interpretations." (742) Courtois treatment of East Asian communism is cursory, and follows his corrupted cradle thesis, drawing no distinction between Vietnamese re-education structures and Kampuchean mass killings, and does not address other communist societies or parties. (748) Courtois acknowledges but dismisses this deficiency in his theory, "a linkage can always be traced to the pattern elaborated in Moscow in November 1917." (754) The Black Book of Communism's correctness has been disputed based on claims of serious methodological, interpretive, narrative and (to some commentators) ideological flaws.

Valentino theorises that mass killings occur for strategic reasons, and that all communist mass killings are united by a single theoretical descriptor: that mass killing is readily chosen as the optimum strategy by small leaderships to successfully economically dispossess large numbers of people. (pp34–37) Valentino's own typology indicates this as a subset, (Table 1), and his theory is explicitly a general theory of mass killing. (p1) He additionally particularises this in a later work: that a common structure unites Soviet, Chinese and Cambodian mass killings: the defence of a utopian and shared version of radical communism.

Valentino's theory has been used in other works, but is contentious, as other authors claim there is no common link between various incidents where communists have been responsible for mass killing.

Regarding the use of democide and politicide data, Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown that depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type.

In the view of Anton Weiss-Wendt, academic debate regarding the common features of mass killing and other legal measures in communist countries originates in the political advocacy of Raphael Lemkin in advocating the genocide convention. (p557) According to Weiss-Wendt, Lemkin's hobby-horse was the international ratification of a Genocide Convention, and he consistently bent his advocacy towards which ever venue would advance his objective. (p555-6) Associating with the US government, Central European and Eastern European emigre communities, Lemkin bent the term genocide to meet the political interests of those he associated with, and in the case of communities of emigres in the US, funded his living. (p554-556) In this way, contends Weiss-Wendt, Lemkin was enmeshed in an anti-Soviet political community, and regularly used the term "Communist genocide" to refer to a broad range of human rights violations—not simply to mass-killings of ethnic groups—in all the post 1945 communist nations, and claimed that future "genocides" would occur in all nations adopting communism. (p551, 553-6) Lemkin's broad application of his term in political lobbying degraded its usefulness, "Like King Midas, whatever Lemkin touched turned into “genocide.” But when everything is genocide nothing is genocide!" states Weiss-Wendt. (p555-6) Additionally, Lemkin displayed both a racialism against Russians who he believed "were incapable of “digesting a great number of people belonging to a higher civilization,”" (p552) and made broad use of his term in the political service of the USA's anti-communist position in the 1950s concludes Weiss-Wendt. However, Lemkin has been praised for being the first to use the comparative method into the study of mass violence.

Methods
Political scientist John N. Gray argues that "that the political creation of an artificial terror-famine with genocidal results is not a phenomenon restricted to the historical context of Russia and the Ukraine in the Thirties, but is a feature of Communist policy to this day, as evidenced in the sixties in Tibet and now in Ethiopia.
 * quotas/terror
 * purges
 * famine
 * forced labor

Documentation
=3=

The book The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, by Michael Mann includes a chapter called Communist Cleansing: Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. Here's the first paragraph:


 * "All accounts of 20th-century mass murder include the Communist regimes. Some call their deeds genocide, though I shall not. I discuss the three that caused the most terrible human losses: Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These saw themselves as belonging to a single socialist family, and all referred to a Marxist tradition of development theory. They murderously cleansed in similar ways, though to different degrees. Later regimes consciously adapted their practices to the perceived successes and failures of earlier ones. The Khmer Rouge used China and the Soviet Union (and Vietnam and North Korea) as reference societies, while China used the Soviet Union. All addressed the same basic problem - how to apply a revolutionary vision of a future industrial society to a present agrarian one. These two dimensions, of time and agrarian backwardness, help account for many of the differences."

The book Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, by Jacques Semelin and Stanley Hoffman, includes within the chapter Destroying to Subjugate a section titled Communist regimes: Reshaping the social body. Here's the first paragraph:


 * "Dynamics of destruction/subjugation were also developed systematically by twentieth-century communist regimes, but against a very different domestic political background. The destruction of the very foundations of the former society (and consequently the men and women who embodied it) reveals the determination of the ruling elites to build a new one at all costs. The ideological conviction of leaders promoting such a political scheme is thus decisive. Nevertheless, it would be far too simplistic an interpretation to assume that the sole purpose of inflicting these various forms of violence on civilians could only aim at instilling a climate of terror in this 'new society'. In fact, they are part of a broader whole, i.e. the spectrum of social engineering techniques implemented in order to transform a society completely. There can be no doubt that it is this utopia of a classless society which drives that kind of revolutionary project. The plan for political and social reshaping will thus logically claim victims in all strata of society. And through this process, communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire."

Although the context is limited by Google Books preview restrictions, the next chapter of that same book, called Destroying to Eradicate, contains the following paragraphs:


 * "'Classicide', in counterpoint to genocide, has a certain appeal, but it doesn't convey the fact that communist regimes, beyond their intention of destroying 'classes' - a difficult notion to grasp in itself (what exactly is a 'kulak'?) - end up making political suspicion a rule of government: even within the Party (and perhaps even mainly within the Party). The notion of 'fratricide' is probably more appropriate in this regard. That of 'politicide', which Ted Gurr and Barbara Harff suggest, remains the most intelligent, although it implies by contrast that 'genocide' is not 'political', which is debatable. These authors in effect explain that the aim of politicide is to impose total political domination over a group or a government. Its victims are defined by their position in the social hierarchy or their political opposition to the regime or this dominant group. Such an approach applies well to the political violence of communist powers and more particularly to Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea. The French historian Henri Locard in fact emphasises this, identifying with Gurr and Harff's approach in his work on Cambodia.


 * "However, the term 'politicide' has little currency among some researchers because it has no legal validity in international law. That is one reason why Jean-Louis Margolin tends to recognise what happened in Cambodia as 'genocide' because, as he points out, to speak of 'politicide' amounts to considering Pol Pot's crimes as less grave than those of Hitler. Again, the weight of justice interferes in the debate about concepts that, once again, argue strongly in favour of using the word genocide. But those so concerned about the issue of legal sanctions should also take into account another legal concept that is just as powerful, and better established: that of crime against humanity. In fact, legal scholars such as Antoine Garapon and David Boyle believe that the violence perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge is much more appropriately categorised under the heading of crime against humanity, even if genocidal tendencies can be identified, particularly against the Muslim minority. This accusation is just as serious as that of genocide (the latter moreover being sometimes considered as a subcategory of the former) and should thus be subject to equally severe sentences. I quite agree with these legal scholars, believing that the notion of 'crime against humanity' is generally better suited to the violence perpetrated by communist regimes, a viewpoint shared by Michael Mann."

In the book Why Not Kill Them All: The Logic and Prevention of Mass Political Murder, by Daniel Chirot and Clark R. McCauley, the authors identify one of four motives for mass political murder as Fear of Pollution, and write the following:


 * "The modern search for a perfect, utopian society, whether racially or ideologically pure is very similar to the much older striving for a religiously pure society free of all polluting elements, and these are, in turn, similar to that other modern utopian notion - class purity. Dread of political and economic pollution by the survival of antagonistic classes has been for the most extreme communist leaders what fear of racial pollution was for Hitler. There, also, material explanations fail to address the extent of the killings, gruesome tortures, fantastic trails, and attempts to wipe out whole categories of people that occurred in Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia.


 * "The revolutionary thinkers who formed and led communist regimes were not just ordinary intellectuals. They had to be fanatics in the true sense of that word. They were so certain of their ideas that no evidence to the contrary could change their minds. Those who came to doubt the rightness of their ways were eliminated, or never achieved power. The element of religious certitude found in prophetic movements was as important as their Marxist science in sustaining the notion that their vision of socialism could be made to work. This justified the ruthless dehumanization of their enemies, who could be suppressed because they were 'objectively' and 'historically' wrong. Furthermore, if events did not work out as they were supposed to, then that was because class enemies, foreign spies and saboteurs, or worst of all, internal traitors were wrecking the plan. Under no circumstances could it be admitted that the vision itself might be unworkable, because that meant capitulation to the forces of reaction. The logic of the situation in times of crisis then demanded that these 'bad elements' (as they were called in Maoist China) be killed, deported, or relegated to a permanently inferior status. That is very close to saying that the community of God, or the racially pure volksgemeinschaft could only be guaranteed if the corrupting elements within it were eliminated (Courtois et al. 1999)."

=2=

The most appropriate terms to use in describing large scale killings by Communist governments is an issue of contention among scholars. A variety of terms have been used and proposed. Genocide, as defined by the United Nations under the Genocide Convention, does not cover political and economic groups. Because of this, Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr proposed the term "politicide" in to describe both genocide as understood by the Genocide Convention and the killing of political or economic groups. Democide, coined by R. J. Rummel, is even wider, including within its definition genocide, politicide, and mass murder. According to Benjamin Valentino, "no generally accepted terminology exists to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants." Valentino uses the term "mass killing" to fill this gap in his book "Final Solutions: The Causes of Mass Killings and Genocides", and identifies communism as one of several major motives. He defines mass killing as "the intentional killing of a significant number of the members of any group of noncombatants (as the group and its membership are defined by the perpetrator)", using the standard of at least 50,000 deaths within five years. In a chapter called "Communist Mass Killings: The Soviet Union, China and Cambodia", Valentino focuses on these three largest perpetrators and other communist states.

There are several proposed definitions for the term genocide beyond that established by the United Nations and some prefer to use the term under these other definitions or with a qualifier, such as socialist genocide, soviet genocide, communist genocide, class genocide, or autogenocide. Rather than "genocide", Jacques Semelin prefers "crime against humanity" when speaking of the violence perpetrated by communist regimes. Michael Mann, also rejecting "genocide", has proposed the term "classicide" to mean the "intended mass killing of entire social classes."

In his book "Final Solutions: The Causes of Mass Killings and Genocides", Benjamin Valentino defines mass killings as "the intentional killing of a significant number of the members of any group of noncombatants (as the group and its membership are defined by the perpetrator)." p4 Valentino admits that he is finessing Rummel's controversial notion of democide. p4 at fn6. Wayman and Tago describe the academic focus as being on mass killing of political, economic, ethnic, religious, or racial groups in order to eliminate the group or sharply reduce its numbers, noting that "the UN convention on genocide in order to gain support among the communist nations during the Cold War, this treaty-based definition left out the killing of economic and political groups." . Harff and Gurr use the term "politicide" to describe genocide as understood by the Genocide Convention plus the killing of a political or economic group. Regarding the use of democide and politicide data, Wayn and Tago have shown that depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type.

=1= John N. Gray, a British political philosopher and author, formerly School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics, wrote in his 1990 book Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought "that the political creation of an artificial terror-famine with genocidal results is not a phenomenon restricted to the historical context of Russia and the Ukraine in the Thirties, but is a feature of Communist policy to this day, as evidenced in the sixties in Tibet and now in Ethiopia. The socialist genocide of small, "primitive" peoples, such as the Kalmucks and many others, has been a recurrent element in polices at several stages in the development of Soviet and Chinese totalitarianism." Gray goes on to state "that communist policy in this respect faithfully reproduces classical Marxism, which had an explicit and pronounced contempt for "small, backward and reactionary peoples - no less than for the peasantry as a class and a form of social life".

George Watson, a literary historian at St. John's College at the University of Cambridge, cited an 1849 article by Friedrich Engels published in Marx's journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung in his book The Lost Literature of Socialism, as evidence that "The Marxist theory of history required and demanded genocide for reasons implicit in its claim that feudalism, which in advanced nations was already giving place to capitalism, must in its turn be superseded by socialism. Entire nations would be left behind after a workers' revolution, feudal remnants in a socialist age, and since they could not advance two steps at a time, they would have to be killed. They were racial trash, as Engels called them, and fit only for the dung-heap of history." According to Watson, "In the European century that began in the 1840s, from Engel's article of 1849 down to the death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist, and no exception has been found."

Historian Andrzej Walicki, also referring to this article by Engels, has said, "It is difficult to deny that this was an outright call for genocide."