Re: [OT] Wikipedia is going far left

On 2025-05-21 5:52 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:

May 21, 2025 at 2:07:38 PM PDT, Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com>:

 

So says Leo Kearse, who offers both evidence and his usual humour in
this video:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zu0PVaBj7Q [19 minutes]

 

The most amazing one is Wikipedia's claim that there were no mass killings
under communism. I guess Stalin's purges and Mao's Great Leap Forward and Pol
Pot's killing fields were all just figments of our imagination.

 

Communism: Where you always seem to be just one execution away from utopia.

 There were no mass killings. Each of the 10s of million of murder victims,
either executed or starved, was personally selected.

There were definitely *some* cases of individually selected victims, like Stalin's enemies among the Old Bolsheviks (which was nearly all of the people who'd been in the Party before Lenin's coup), the senior officers of the Red Army, and quite a few members of Stalin's family who knew too much about him, like his in-laws and their extended families. However, the vast majority of deaths, whether by execution or starvation, came about via quotas. Stalin would send a telegram off to the secret police headquarters in Upper Buttfuckski and tell them to round up 20,000 or 30,000 people by the end of the month or else. The people arrested didn't need to be guilty of anything: a simple accusation by a neighbour who disliked them was enough. Then they were tortured to reveal more names of people who were "plotting against the state" and eventually the tortured people just gave names, any names, to make the torture stop. Court proceedings were an utter joke and never lasted more than a few minutes except in the case of a few show trials. Then the hapless prisoner was either shot or sent off to one of the many camps. Many prisoners starved, froze to death or were worked to death. The rest were condemned to living east of the Urals for the rest of their lives if they survived their sentences, which by the late 1940s was almost always 25 years.
It has been said that not a single family in the Soviet Union was untouched by the Great Purge.
--
Rhino