User:Robert McClenon/sandbox8

Twelfth statement on MKUCR (moderator)
This post is long. Please take your time to read it and consider it before replying to it. If you have any questions, please take your time in composing your questions about it.

Conciseness

Just because this post is long does not mean that your replies should be long. They should not.

Some of the statements have been very long. I am not sure who they are replying to: me, the other editors, the community? I am a moderator and not a judge, so I do not need to be persuaded by long posts with a lot of evidence. The other editors probably either agree with you or disagree with you. The community is more likely to be persuaded by concise statements than by lengthy statements.

Negative Consensus

As I previously noted, there seems to be what I will call a negative consensus, that the current state of the article is not satisfactory. I think that the editors agree that it has neutrality problems, although they disagree on the nature of the non-neutrality. Some editors have identified other, possibly associated problems, such as verifiability issues. So the question is where to go from here. I think that a Request for Comments is in order. What we will do now is to identify the alternate ways forward, and to put together the RFC to choose between them.

AFD ?

I will second address at least one comment by an editor. User:Davide King writes:

''I think that if we truly want to move forward, we need to identify the main topic of this article. If we cannot agree on what the main topic is, and is to be structured, we should have both AfD and RfC — because it is not sufficient that AfD results in Keep or No consensus, if we, in fact, do not agree on what the main topic is, hence a RfC will be necessary.''

Does that mean that User:Davide King thinks that an AFD is in order? On the one hand, if they think that an AFC is in order at this time, they might as well initiate it now, and I will put this DRN on hold again. On the other hand, I think that an AFD at this point is premature, and an AFD is only necessary if the RFCs result in No Consensus or are otherwise inconclusive. But if there is to be an AFD first, rather than RFCs first, let us have it now.

Inconsistencies

I don't need any more evidence that there is a serious POV fork problem. The inconsistencies are one of the issues that must be resolved. Either this article should be reorganized and made consistent with the other articles, or the inconsistencies should be resolved in this article in some other way, or the other articles should be revised. However, I don't think that revising the other articles is feasible. Changes, probably to this article, are needed to resolve the inconsistencies.

Conduct Allegations

I don't understand what any editor expects to gain by raising conduct issues. We are aware that there is strong disagreement as to how to achieve a neutral point of view, and on other content issues. I have no reason to believe that any editor is consciously trying to impose a non-neutral point of view. If any editor really wants to report a conduct violation, they may report a conduct violation. I may then fail this mediation, or I may put it on hold. If an editor wants to complain about conduct issues in order to gain an advantage in discussion, that is not useful and will not work. Remember to assume good faith, and avoid wasting time with unnecessary comments about conduct. I may collapse any further comments about conduct issues, unless they are substantial.

The Immorality of Communism

I think that we all agree that atrocities have been committed in the name of Marxism-Leninism, also known as communism. We do not need to argue about whether there is or is not a moral equivalence between Stalinism and Nazism, or between any form of dictatorship and any other form of dictatorship. We will not discuss whether anyone is a "Communist apologist". Whether anyone was "soft on communism" was a distraction in American politics in the 1970s, and it is still a distraction. I may collapse any comments about moral equivalence, which is irrelevant, or apologies for communism, or any similar distractions.

The Name of This Article

The title of this article raises at least two questions. First, we have already discussed that it is not always clear what was a mass killing, and we should continue to be aware of this. In particular, there are questions among scholars over the extent to which at least two famines, the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 and the Great Chinese famine of 1959-1961 were human-caused.

Second, this article is about Mass killings under communist regimes, but that really means mass killings under self-identified communist regimes, governments that had a stated ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Not all governments that described their economic and political policies as Leninist have been the same, and no government that described itself as Leninist has followed the same policies over a period of more than five decades. This means that any decision to lump together atrocities under different governments may be controversial. This does not mean that it should not be done, only that it must be recognized to be combining atrocities based on an identified ideology rather than specific actual policies.

The point is that parsing the meaning of the title of this article should illustrate that the topic is not straightforward, and requires resolution.

RFCs

There seems to be agreement that this article has major issues that need to be resolved. The next step is to identify one or more RFCs concerning how to fix this article. If there are two or three competing ideas, they can be proposed as alternatives. User:Paul Siebert has said that this article should be reorganized in either of two ways. Those can be options on an RFC.