quote:
At the same time, however, I do not believe that most professed atheist know the horrors and religious persecution that went on under these regimes. I believe the liberal Universities downplay these facts.
Actually, this is mostly bullshit spewed by American conservatives. The USSR, for example, allowed freedom of religion for the first time in Russia. The Russian Orthodox Church had a monopoly on religion in Russia, which was only ended by the Bolsheviks.
For a modern treatment of this subject, read
World Christianity and Marxism by Denis R. Janz, who does a great job of debunking the shit spewed by conservative Christians.
quote:
I know that you took your 100 million people lost their lives because of atheistic communism because of the book that was published called "The Black Book of Communism." I would say, however, that the figures are disputed and the authors I believe have admitted that the figures should be downscaled. If you search the internet under the Black Book of Communism you will discover this. I know that this was an honest mistake on your part and the book was published by 11 scholars and was published by the Harvard University Press. So there definitely was some scholarship that went into the book.
This book is nothing but a continuation of bankrupt anti-Communist ‘scholarship’. In fact, the numbers of ‘deaths’ attributed to Mao is literally exaggerated by a factor of 10, based on a typo in another book, which has since been corrected. In fact, the Maoist Internet Movement was able to get Harvard University Press to admit this mistake on their part.
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/agitation/blackbook/
Nevermind how these numbers are arrived at in the first place! It is literally done with statistical tricks played with census data. How do anti-Communist historians like Conquest ‘know’ Stalin killed X million people? Well, they took data from the 1929 census, then compared it with data from the 1939 (or 1937) census, and with a few highly dubious assumptions about population growth, mortality rates, etc, they arrive at a number people supposedly killed by communism. The fact that the results produced by this method vary so wildly doesn’t seem to phase most anti-Communist morons, who continue spouting this bullshit anyway.
For a good peer-reviewed critique of this kind of crap, read Anderson and Silver’s
Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR, Slavic Review vol.44 1985.
quote:
In addition, I would say that it is hard to know how many were killed since these were closed tyranical societies that often did not keep records. There also was a lot of chaos and confusion in these societies. As a result, it is hard to say how many people were killed. I will say though that without a doubt the atheist controlled societies that have had no strong Bibical Christianity foundation before them have the bloodiest chapters in history.
Actually, the US and other Western powers have killed far, far more people than all communist countries combined ever have.
[This message has been edited by Intelligitimate, 03-26-2004]
™ Version 4.2