According to the estimates of the 1997 French historical survey Le Livre noir du communisme, Communism has claimed the lives of some 94,360,000 people.
To illustrate this statistic, we can compare it to Worldometer's list of countries by size of population. If all the victims formed a nation of their own, they would be the 16th most populous country on Earth:
Alternatively, we could say that the size of the toll is equivalent to everyone in the globe's smaller 106 States and dependencies (from the Vatican right up to and including Croatia); every living soul in 45% of the world's nations... plus more than half of Kuwait; .
Communism is, of course, not the only ideology that kills in the name of peace, justice, equality etc; but its professed love of Man and pity for his condition seem to have involved an awful lot of destroying him.
I still wonder why the USA continued to back the Chinese Communist Party after Soviet Communism collapsed. It must have been a very sophisticated calculation.
6 comments:
Still stinging from Korea and Vietnam?
@P: You mean, not part of a radically well-thought-out, long-term plan? Well I never.
Satire aside, the US as a culture is very reactive, rather than planning things out. Hence, Churchill's comment.
I imagine that, if you compared it with all of the religious wars involving Christianity, including the Crusades and the 30 Years War, and adjusted for population size, the numbers would be similar.
Now, the champion would have to be the Mongols under Temugin, who as estimated to have killed 30 million directly or more back then and altered the climate as a result. After wiping out a city, they would send troops a week later to dispatch any stragglers.
The historians have recently downgraded the toll of the Ukrainian starvation and Stalin's purges (not to defend him). I have heard no such revisionism on Mao's Cultural revolution.
That bit about the stragglers is particularly horrible - Nazi efficiency.
In the case of the Kievan Rus, they waited until the harvest was gathered, then killed everyone.
This kind of behaviour comes from being absolutely convinced that you are correct, which is why religions and political philosophies abound in it.
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