Necrometrics reports that the median of several estimates of the death toll during 1947-49 is about 8,200. That includes all parties on each side.

Firstly: Genocide isn’t just a matter of numbers but of intent, and to a lesser degree proportions. Relatively few Jews died in the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941, but it was unquestionably intended as genocide. Even fewer Danish Jews died because of a concentrated effort to save them, but the Nazis still intended.

Secondly: Whoever puts together Necrometrics is not merely a goddamn idiot, but a rankly dishonest one. This becomes abundantly clear if you read through their sourcing and argumentation, and doubly so when you read this insufferably smug bullshit:

https://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#Stalin

There are basically two schools of thought when it comes to the number who died at Stalin’s hands. There’s the “Why doesn’t anyone realize that communism is the absolutely worst thing ever to hit the human race, without exception, even worse than both world wars, the slave trade and bubonic plague all put together?” school, and there’s the “Come on, stop exaggerating. The truth is horrifying enough without you pulling numbers out of thin air” school. The two schools are generally associated with the right and left wings of the political spectrum, and they often accuse each other of being blinded by prejudice, stubbornly refusing to admit the truth, and maybe even having a hidden agenda. Also, both sides claim that recent access to former Soviet archives has proven that their side is right.

As you can see, there’s no easy compromise between the two schools. The Big Numbers are so high that picking the midpoint between the two schools would still give us a Big Number. It may appear to be a rather pointless argument — whether it’s fifteen or fifty million, it’s still a huge number of killings — but keep in mind that the population of the Soviet Union was 164 million in 1937, so the upper estimates accuse Stalin of killing nearly 1 out of every 3 of his people, an extremely Polpotian level of savagery. The lower numbers, on the other hand, leave Stalin with plenty of people still alive to fight off the German invasion.

Although it’s too early to be taking sides with absolute certainty, a consensus seems to be forming around a death toll of 20 million. This would adequately account for all documented nastiness without straining credulity:

A few things to note here.

Firstly: Note the framing, hyperbole, and attempts to posture “Right” and “Left” wing, and conflate the former with “exaggerating” and “pulling numbers out of thin air” while the latter are presented as reasonable opponents.

Secondly: Note this absolute smug idiot who made their entire living off of supposed competence at being able to catalog deaths…. HAS MANAGED TO FUCK UP THE BASICS OF WHAT THE SOURCES SAY. A key component of competence is the ability to accurately re-state what another party is claiming, and this idiot fails to do that.

Note particularly the “but keep in mind that the population of the Soviet Union was 164 million in 1937, so the upper estimates accuse Stalin of killing nearly 1 out of every 3 of his people, an extremely Polpotian level of savagery”.

This is stupid on multiple levels that it is worth unpacking.

A: Apparently the author of this piece of shit blog would have you believe that at no point whatsoever did Stalin murder anyone who was NOT a part of the registered Soviet census in 1937. Meaning that the likes of Witold Pilecki (the heroic Polish spy who VOLUNTEERED to infiltrate Auschwitz and then escaped, writing up a record, only to later be captured and murdered by the Soviets and their communist Polish puppets) simply do not exist according to this estimate.

Nor do any in Mongolia, which in spite of being a Soviet vassal state that received direct orders from Moscow was nominally “independent” and thus not included in the 1937 Soviet Census under the USSR>

Of course I imagine if you flat out asked this idiot “Did Stalin cause the deaths of non-Soviets? And do you think the murders of non-Soviets by Stalin should be accounted in his tally?” even his malfunctioning brain would recognize the problems with this and go “Yes, yes of course I do.” But how this is framed is jarring.

Secondly: This idiot would also have you believe that at no point whatsoever were any of the millions Stalin murdered of his own people were done so before the 1937 census (and so would not show up on it). In spite of the fact that Stalin was a ranking member of the Bolshevik Party since 1917 at the very latest, and had been in unquestioned power since 1923 (again, at the latest), that this had already seen the Holodomors of Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, and the height of the Great Terror.

Of course again, if you flat out asked this idiot “So do you think Stalin only started murdering people in 1937?” he’d probably know better and say “No no, of course I don’t.”

And to be fair I do not in fact think he would believe the likes of the high sources are claiming Stalin murdered 1/3 of his nation’s people alone. But he is willing to mislead people into thinking they do.

Which raises another question: “Why are you framing this issue and the death tolls in such a flagrantly biased, nakedly dishonest, utterly incompetent way?”

Which is what he is doing, make no mistake about it whatsoever.

Especially when you realize that the camp of the Very Big Numbers has generally had the upper hand, and have if anything been massively outpaced by the better info we have had. The chief author of the Black Book of Communism had to encourage people (improperly) to come to the nice round number of 100 Million overall as a propaganda exercise. But decades later, we now know a lot of the data they were working off of were underestimates and now we don’t need any fudging to conclude 100 Million Communist Deaths (not just from Stalin but overall), the real question is how many MORE he has.

But this does tell you a few things.

A: The author of Necrometrics is nowhere near as competent as he wants people to believe he is.

B: The author of Necrometrics is nowhere near as unbiased or as HONEST as he wants people to believe he is. Which is important because even incompetent or biased sources can give useful records, but here we have outright mutilation of the data and interpretation of it to try and flatter his concepts.

C: The author of Necrometrics has a staunch preference for what I will generously call “Shitlib Sources”, which would very likely undersell casualties both here and in the 1946-9 Mandate Wars.

D: The author of Necrometrics lacked the good judgement to parse these points out and consider accordingly, including how utterly bad this makes him look to those of us that put a few seconds of thought into his stated “logic” and realize the holes.

Of course, we as students of history can see this and study the matter, and can probably point to the obvious holes and fallacies baked in to them. But many of those trusting this source uncritically would not, and would walk away shaped.

I have more confidence in a decision to intervene directly by President Trump (destroy Iran’s enrichment program) given the advisors around him than, certainly, the Bush II administration. I think he will get serious arguments and possible repercussions on both sides.

So did Dubya.

The Big Lie the Democrats peddled for so long went unchallenged to the point that even a lot Republicans assume things about the decision to topple Hussein that are false. There were plenty of voices, inside and outside the Bush II Admin, on both sides of the issue. Bush pushed hard for the intelligence community to make sure they had the truth about the WMDs, (which they didn’t.). The decision to remove Hussein was not made casually, it was not some weird ‘payback’ for his father, or any of the other nonsense the Left has peddled unopposed for 20 years.

It was a massive intelligence failure, yes. But it was also Hussein setting out to fool the world into thinking he still had WMDs, and he succeeded…and paid the price. Note too that he was looking for uranium, too, contrary to the spin the media put out. That’s what the whole Niger business was about.

Furthermore, one of the goals of the Iraq action was to send a message to others that it was no longer safe to be a threat to the USA post-911. It started to work. Gaddafi, for ex, revealed that he was shutting down his own WMD program in 2003. TPTB don’t like admitting the connection, but everyone knew why he did it.

But then the Dems started pumping out ‘Bush lied and people died’ lie, and sending out the message that our various enemies could just wait Bush out.

And here is where Bush really does deserve blame: he let them get away with it.

The moment the Dems started up that crap, Bush should have been in their face demanding that they back it up or shut up. Instead, he kept silent (Karl Rove later admitted that he had advised that, and that he had been wrong to do so. Duh, Karl.) and let the lie get repeated to the point that even Bush’s supporters began to believe it must be true. Otherwise, why wouldn’t he rebut it?

I don’t know why myself, unless it’s just that he couldn’t bring himself to go against the Establishment. That sounds weird, but keep in mind that we saw Dick Cheney and Bernie Sanders doing a Harris commercial together during election 2024.

That was damning. What’s more, it was damming either way. If the Dems had been telling the truth about the Iraq War, it means their ‘moral leader’ was willing to be seen in a campaign ad with someone who lied the world into a war that killed thousands for nothing.

The Dems were lying, though, which means Cheney was prepared to be seen in a campaign ad with someone who lied about a war effort while American troops were engaged, and in effect gave aid and comfort to the enemy. (To say nothing of having falsely accused Cheney himself of war crimes and worse.)

All the while the Establishment can’t understand why so many people choose Trump over them.

Having read all of these well-informed comments, I am left with the impression that relying on historical precedents to predict the future is as good as relying on a Magic Eightball. For every lesson drawn out of some historical event or person, a counter-lesson is just as easily drawn. Makes one wonder about the value of studying the past at all.

— Steve

Studying history is useful if you remember that history rhymes but doesn’t repeat. A knowledge of history (and you can never know enough) gives you perspective to understand patterns, and to recognize how things played out in similar situations before. Yes, you can find examples in support and opposition to anything. But context and pattern are useful guides.

But the most valuable application of history was spelled by by George Will, back in the 1970s when he was still making sense and hadn’t become a pure shill for Conservative Inc.

History contains more sadness than gladness, more dreams frustrated than fulfilled…Many modern intellectuals, like optimists throughout the ages, recoil from this truth: the best use of history is as an innoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

— George Will, 1975

A knowledge of history gives one perspective that human nature doesn’t change, for good or bad, and that the world, and the human race, are fundamentally Fallen. Broken. This realization, properly internalized, is a wonderful defense against the kind of utopian dreamy thinking that creates disasters.

We have seen this phenomenon more recently during the war in Gaza.

One really ought to be more careful with one’s definitions…

Two comments:
1. Had the Arabs been able, in 1948-49 (and later), to achieve their oft-declared goal of “driving the Jews [in the former British mandate] into the sea” then they would have done so…such that the carnage would have been horrific.

2. Had they actually done so, would this have been considered “genocide” given that their above-mentioned goal—AT THE TIME—did not pertain to ALL JEWS IN ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD? (Note that Bernard Lewis, claiming that the “Armenian genocide”, while horrific, inhumane and indefensible, could not actually be considered a genocide, got himself into very hot water vis-a-vis the Armenians, and others, regarding this very topic.)

Short version: Should a localized massacre—or even a broader series of massacres—to be considered a genocide…if the DECLARED GOAL is not to destroy an entire people?

Conclusion: Maybe being “careful about one’s definitions” is not truly possible….

Correct. German Quartermaster General Eduard Wagner estimated in the Spring of 1941 a few months before Operation Barbarossa commenced on June 22, 1941 that the Wehrmacht would take around 2 million Red army prisoners in the first first few months of the war.

Moreover, it’s worth comparing to 1940, where (in one of the many tragedies of it) the West collapsed with a speed and thoroughness NOBODY on either side anticipated, and the Germans were actually caught holding millions of prisoners they hadn’t planned on. But in spite of this the Germans were able to deport or release most of the Western Allied POWs they took in good order, save for spates of massacres (largely against non-whites and those near them). Conversely after peaking at a rate of “Holy Hell you people make the Japanese look Chill” in 1941-2 the Soviet POW death rate in Nazi captivity drops like a rock around the time of the pull back from Moscow. And notably while still remaining indefensibly high it never again reached the nadir of the 1941-2 period where well over half of Soviet POWs would be murdered, even as the situation actually did collapse for the European Axis and things like food and medicine became rarer even for the “Aryans.”

Obviously the Brain Trust realized that with the failure to either take the Caucasus or Moscow on schedule, there’d be more of a need for ex-Soviet manpower. Hence the killings slowed.

I doubt that any of these powers had the productive capacity to retain their portfolio of dependencies for long.

Depends on how we define “For Long.” India was going even before WWII was concluded it is true, and I am skeptical of other long term results. But the British, Dutch, and French won most of their military conflicts (even with the French in Algeria and Southern Indochina, before Dien Bien Phu put paid to the idea of further fighting, while the Dutch flat out had the Indonesian leadership in prison and had contained most of the guerillas when joint US-Soviet pressure pushed it, and they retained control of Western New Guinea into the 1960s and had pro-Dutch separatist elements in the Moluccas).

But even beyond the colonies there’s the fact that we helped push the Europeans to spend more on bread and circuses than military power in part so we would have the dominant “pimp hand”. Which made a lot of sense, but also came back to bite us hard.

I don’t deny a fair bit of decolonization was in the cards and unavoidable, but the US played a leading role in pushing it forward at an accelerated rate and keeping the military and political capacity of our allies weaker than it would have been.

Piecemeal divestiture over a period of 40-50 years might have been beneficial for the African and Asian territories, but that doesn’t mean it would have been feasible, especially with Soviet subversion.

Sure, but I think the results of the fighting in the 1940s-1960s does give a lot of reason to believe that. In any case the US supporting them more would have help.

See the decomposition of the Portuguese Empire (1961-75).

I agree, but I think the Portuguese example is a good case of the limits of it. Portugal was one of the outliers in NATO as a bad boy dictatorship under the decidedly un-hip Salazar who refused to even pay lip service to decolonization, and he fought on with limited support for more than a decade against a world arrayed against him, and his successor did similar. Ultimately it was the strain of the war on three fronts (arguably four given East Timor) and other humiliations that did the Portuguese in, with revolution at home putting paid to it.

OTOH, if you look at what France was able to retain, you could argue that Britain was too insistent on divestiture. Except for Djibouti and French India, France retained all insular and coastal dependencies with populations in 1960 under 400,000. Britain retained only those with populations under 60,000 and it divested itself of a few of those as well.

Indeed, and I do think that also explains it. Though part of it was due to pressure on the home front and pressure from the US making it clear the limits of its support, such as with 1956.