Oh well, you really need to consider how many of those prisoners would have died of cancer or a heart attack anyway!
I know it would never pass the U.S. Supreme Court, but when reading something like this I am quite thankful that Germany has outlawed such kind of pseudo-scientific minimizations regarding the Holocaust.
I really have lost any respect for the remaining western communists/socialists. They never run out of excuses for all the attempts to build the socialist paradise on earth (which always resulted in piles of dead bodies, mass starvation and police states), yet they always decide to continue living in capitalistic hellholes like the U.S., France or Germany (in not so rare cases even being paid by the state, which German socialists not long ago liked to call the "pig system"). Probably the only common sense reply is: Put the rest of yourself where your mouth is or shut the hell up. And thank goodness you stand no chance to come to power (again).
I could reply to this in a number of different ways, so I will choose all of them, and enumerate:
1. I certainly agree that Holocaust denial should be a crime.
2. It's always funny how ardently people will cleave to ideology, and doubly so on a forum like this one, where everyone takes great pride in being (or claiming to be), you know, an iconoclast autodidact, who sees through society's tricks and is smarter than your average pathetic consumer. Yet change the topic to
literally anything else, as in this case, and your response is a non-argument "pfeh! propaganda! gahooey!" because it differs from prevailing ideology. I have deliberately avoided replying to gimp because I don't doubt that he has family members who experienced bad things in the Soviet Union, but I am not interested in either arguing against an anecdote or fighting with someone who is too emotionally close to the subject to escape the bias of a personal grudge. And for the record, there are far, far more people who have that sort of legitimate personal grudge against the United States than ever did against the Soviet Union.
On the other hand, those of us who have some emotional remove
should be able to evaluate historical fact with cool heads. Nothing I've said is even
controversial to people who "know anything" about the history of communism (at least, those who aren't bought-and-paid-for pro-Western ideologues). But even if you took Robert Conquest and
The Black Book of Communism at face value (which you shouldn't, because they belong in the garbage can),
it still wouldn't matter, because...
3. Even if Stalin did "kill" 20 million people and Mao did "kill" 65 million people,
those are rounding errors compared to the number of lives that they saved. The advances in public health that took place under communist governments have no historical parallel. In Russia between the 1920s and 1950s, and in China between the 1940s and the 1970s, life expectancy
doubled or nearly doubled. No other country has ever done that. While Mao was in power in China, life expectancy increased by
more than one year per year. The first objection to these miraculous achievements is that "life expectancy would have gone up anyway," which may be true, but it is very unlikely that it would have risen nearly as far or as quickly. In the Chinese case, we actually have a ready-made historical experiment, because India won independence at nearly the same moment China was liberated, and had similar vital statistics, but did not benefit from communist central planning. As a consequence:
Go ahead; take the integral of those curves and run the numbers on how many additional billions of
life-years Chinese have enjoyed as compared to their Indian counterparts. Even by the insane and misleading history of wild-eyed anti-communism, if you consider communist policy in totality, Joseph Stalin was
still the second-greatest humanitarian to have ever lived, right after Comrade Chairman Mao Zedong.
4. For all the weepy tears that are shed for the victims of famine in communist countries, and the extremely dubious connections to policy errors that maybe-could-have-been malicious if you look at them really squinty and hold your breath for 90 seconds, it's very curious that nobody seems to "give a crap" about massive famines that were
unambiguously engineered and
unambiguously callously exploited for the benefit of capitalism. This was true of the Irish famine as well as famines that occurred in India and China in the late 19th and earlier 20th centuries. They are detailed very well in the book
Late Victorian Holocausts.
5. You made the remark about where I live snidely, but I take it seriously. From a purely selfish perspective, it would be very foolish for me to leave the United States, because not only am I a citizen of the first world (to which the ill-gotten gains of global labor exploitation and resource theft accrue), but I'm also white, and male, and extremely overpaid. In other words, I am a direct beneficiary of the whole rotten system. I don't like it, but I also have bills to pay and a family that needs health insurance. I don't speak Spanish or Korean (not that the North Koreans are particularly welcoming to would-be defectors, and understandably so). I do speak Chinese, and I would gladly follow in the footsteps of heroes like Norman Bethune and Joan Hinton, but China abandoned the communist project nearly a decade before I was born. The truth is that imperialist capitalism has won so thoroughly in the post-Soviet era that it is not possible to opt out. Everyone is either a capitalist or a victim of capitalism; everyone here (myself included) aspires to own sufficient property that we can be sustained in whole or part by capital returns -- the labor of others! How perverse! But the other alternative, mandatory full employment, with reasonable working hours and egalitarian living conditions, no longer exists, either because it was destroyed by the imperialists, or because it was wrecked from within by a capitalist-roader comprador bourgeoisie.
6. It is not communists you should fear coming to power; it is the inevitable alternative. A long time ago, Rosa Luxemburg wrote that "The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization." She was writing about World War I, but it is not less true now and it is not a figure of speech. Not so long ago, there was a stable, secular, multicultural, tolerant, well-educated society in Iraq, which had a Sunni government in the socialist Ba'ath party. The Western, capitalist, imperialist countries (all words for the same thing) destroyed it. In its place, as a direct consequence, we now have the Islamic State caliphate. Again, this is not figurative. The exact same
individuals who once supported the secular Hussein government,
including his own daughter, are now on the side of IS. Caliph Ibrahim's deputies in charge of the Syrian and Iraqi portions of IS are both former military officers from the Hussein era. The people have not changed. Material reality has; because it is impossible to defeat the United States as a secular socialist government, they must do it as mujahideen. The old dichotomy Engels described between "socialism and barbarism" remains true. The more capitalists prevail, the more the world will look like Islamic State, because
imperialists always lose, and socialism has been so thoroughly defeated that jihad is the most successful recourse for anti-imperialist resistance. The United States is presently at war in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libyia, Afghanistan, and Northwest Pakistan. Do you think we will win? What do you think will happen when capitalist imperialism loses? The problem, of course, is that imperialists never think.