re: #2 ckkatz

The article makes some good points regarding the huge number of deaths caused by dictators and their regimes. However, I am not convinced about the article’s methodology. Genghis and Kublai Khan are not mentioned. Additionally, I believe that the article understates by half the number of deaths, mostly civilian, caused by Adolf Hitler and his regime. Plus, how does one count the huge number of native american deaths in Western Hemisphere during the conquest by Spain? But yes, Mao, as far as anyone can tell, leads the pack.

Also, the numbers are controversial because they count deaths from non violent means like starvation due to war and to bad management and poor planning and deaths from natural causes due to increase in sicknesses and weakness from hunger.

Most of the death toll attributed to Mao has to do with a famine after his regime came to power and implemented communist programs which failed utterly rather than from direct violence like mass shootings and the like.

If you want to ascribe deaths from illness and weakness due to less calorie intake or death from migration out of the dust bowl during the Great Depression or deaths from increased suicides and violent crime we get a huge death toll:

newsrake.org

Russian historian Boris Borisov asks what became of over seven million American citizens who disappeared from US population records in the 1930s.

Seven and a half million people does not mean the number of particular victims of the famine, but a general demographic loss, or the difference between the supposed population on the date of the census that was due to be held in 1940 and the factual number of people. In reality, the total demographic loss is bigger. The fact is not contested by anyone. The figure is more than ten million people.”

In the book, “The Grapes of Wrath”, Grampa Joad dies from the journey when they leave the homestead. Now he was old anyway and who is to say he would not have died at home at the same time but clearly the exodus added stress on to an old person’s constitution and thus can be said contributed to his death. So you would need to count as mass death toll victims all the real life Grampa Joad’s during the Great Depression.