[or, Why It’s True That Numbers Lie]
Ilya Somin has a post up at the Volokh Conspiracy explaining why we need a holiday to honor all the murder-victims of communism. In case that’s a little too subtle– and for readers of the VC, were it making any point other than "liberals bad!!!" it well might be!– he clarifies in the next paragraph: "In addition to honoring the victims of communism, the proposal can also serve as a much-needed reminder of the dangers of allowing the state to seize control of the economy and civil society."
Yeah, THAT’S why state regulation of the economy is bad. Because 110 million people will be murdered.
Say, how many people has religion killed? Let’s see, there’s the Crusades. That’s worth, what, 1 million? Adjusted for inflation, we’re looking at a big number already. Can we count all the gay victims of hate crimes in this country? Oh, and 9/11… and the Iraq War? And… look, I’m not a historian. Nor am I a statistician. But I’m pretty sure my idiocy (religion is harmful) can top your idiocy (communism is harmful). That would be idiocy, incidentally, because we’re playing loose with our statistics, and because we’re completely ignoring the benefits of these ideologies (peace of mind for religion, redistribution of social goods/needs [incl. health care, education] for communism/socialism/liberalism/progressivism).
But like I said, my idiocy can top Ilya’s idiocy. Religion (to name something that wingnuts like) is inherently antiscientific and particularly prone to abuse. "Communism" (by which he means much more than that) is inherently good, but prone to abuse because, at bottom, human beings aren’t great people.
And this is why wingnut blogs are annoying. They spread idiocy.
Accidental Blogger 
10 responses to “Wingnut Blogs Are Annoying (Joe)”
Since I am an atheist, I can hardly be accused of being a “wingnut” who likes religion. And it is you not I who conflated communism and liberalism. So you are the one tarring liberals by association with communism.
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Fair enough on the religion point. It was a big assumption, and I conflated you with an image in my mind of conservatives generally — my apologies.
But your post is really targeted only at the communist regimes which have been murderous? If you say so; it didn’t look that way to me. Your reference to “the dangers of allowing the state to seize control of the economy” appeared to invoke the libertarian theme of hostility to “big government,” which of course in political discourse today signifies much more than Pol Pot’s regime. Add to that that there is nothing about government control of the economy which is necessarily or even strongly connected to murderous regimes, and that explains why I took your post to be making a larger point, if perhaps by implication. I am glad to hear that was not your intent. I probably jumped too quickly to take it that way (after all, this is what people do on blogs, left-wing and right-wing), although I still think there was enough there to make that a plausible interpretation.
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(I should add, I don’t think that liberals are tarred by a comparison to communism. People who have been members of communist parties have historically done awful things, true, but as I see it that’s as far as it goes.)
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Joe:
You must surely know that the word “communism” signifies something like a fearsome contagion to right wingers regardless of their religious predilections. So when they say “tarring” by association, it is a bit like religious wing nuts using the word “atheist” or “secular” – a damning indictment.
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wonderful discourse. thank you, both, er, all three.
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Ruchira,
I don’t classify my self as a Right-Winger but even for me Communism conjures up images of millions killed in gulags or simply starved to death.
We can have a debate on how much government should regulate the economy but is there any doubt that Communism killed more people than Nazism?
Joe,
I thought inflation applied only to commodities. Since when has it become a factor in counting the number of the dead? At best, you can argue from the perspective of % people dying in an incident vis-a-vis the total population.
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Yes, let’s count corpses and call it a holiday. What is a purported atheist doing proposing holidays, anyway? Being atheist, by the way, does not per se exempt one from liking religion.
About ten years ago, the contest of tyrannies was intensified with the publication of The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. A dip into the text reveals a heated rhetoric not usually encountered in history writing that aims for objective results. (I’m not qualified to assess the accuracy of the book’s tallies, which may very well be correct, but the hyperbole about a “battle for control over the story of 1917 [that] continues to rage” kinda makes me wonder.)
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confused: I, too, did a double-take at the adjustment for inflation, but then I figured it was a suitable bit of very dark humor.
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Confused and Dean:
Honestly, I just thought that counting inflation in this context would be a more reasonable option than not counting it. As a rule I’m a big believer in the theories that all lives are worth one life (hence my criticism of the media coverage of the Iraq War counting the death toll in terms of American soldiers, ignoring dead Iraqis), but here Ilya is making a point about the enormous damage inflicted by communists or communist states. If we compare the number of people Stalin killed with the number of people a Pope killed, it seems likely that we will get a better picture of the relative harm of each wrong if we account for the fact that Stalin had so many more people to kill (and thus the total number will be a small percentage).
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I understood where Joe was going with his correction for “inflation.” Add to that the more crowded world and the technology of death available in the 20th century vs the medieval crusades fought with bow & arrow and the burning stake, I think we can safely assume that the number of dead also needs to be adjusted for efficiency. Imagine the Papal Inquisitioners with WMD. And by the way, I consider Hitler’s Final Solution a religious war.
My point though was not a “defense” of communism as an ideology although there is much to defend in principle regarding human dignity if not economic theory. The culprit really is “totalitarianism” in whatever guise it may appear – be it religious, communist, feudalist or capitalist. Whenever a regime becomes rigid and oppressive in the name of a political ideology, people will be killed or left to die. One can argue that communism is especially prone to dictatorial tendencies. But then, so is religious orthodoxy.
As for Ilya Somin campaigning for a holiday to commemorate atrocities committed in other lands, I will take him and others like him more seriously if they also clamored for similar memorials for Native Americans and African Americans whose “silent” history of suffering as the result of religious / racial / economic / colonial ideologies is something we don’t like to talk about.
Now I am beginning to sound like Jeremiah Wright!
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