re: #5 Destro

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:

[Link: www.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.

Stalin’s Ukraine famine was, in the very most generous interpretation, the result of a decision to confiscate food and export it for cash, knowing full well that those whose food had been confiscated would starve.

Though the account is embedded in a work of fiction, it’s explained rather well in Vassily Grossman’s novel “Everything Flows”. Solzhenitsyn also speaks on the matter, and of course for technical details and so forth you can go to The Black Book of Communism.

For lies and excuses, go to the Pulitzer Prize winning series that appeared in the New York Times, by Soviet apologist Walter Duranty.