Welcome aboard, Pat......
At 12:58 PM 5/25/01 EDT [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Gautam Mukunda wrote:
><<The Soviet Union under Stalin killed _at least_ 20 million of its own
citizens. There was nothing under the Czars that was remotely comparable.>>
>
>Is this purely a function of the evils of communism, though, or also a
reflection
>of the fact that we have gotten _much_ better at killing large numbers of
people
>in the past 100 years?
It depends what you want to consider the predominant figure. Certainly,
technology helped. Nevertheless, communist governments seem to have
outpaced authoritarian regimes in terms of brutality, and that cannot be
ignored.
>Also, does the relative ease of killing off a concentrated, urbanized
> population vs. a scattered rural population have anything to do with it?
Actually, Cambodia, Ethiopia, and Ukraine were all largely rural populations.
>On another tangent, don't these deaths have more to do with totalitarianism
>than economic systems? Was it communism or the fact that he was a dictator
>that let Stalin kill so many? Could he have been a capitalist dictator and
killed
>20 million?
Well, there *have* been capitalist dictators. Pinochet comes to mind
And yes, while Pinochet was a brutal killer, the number of deaths under his
regime pales in comparison to the atrocities committed by the communists.
JDG
__________________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - ICQ #3527685
"The point of living in a Republic after all, is that we do not live by
majority rule. We live by laws and a variety of institutions designed
to check each other." -Andrew Sullivan 01/29/01
