What is up with FPN?

[david i]

I have not done hard research on the following, but a quick search yields numbers (which seem a bit high to me) on one of the largest genocides last century ( a rather protracted thing), by one of the most non-religious indeed anti religious gov'ts in recent history.

Remember, people hate people. People covet resources. People try to secure power. Usually it is bigots who try to blame religion...

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"How long will you keep killing people?" asked Lady Astor of Stalin in 1931. Replied Stalin, "the process would continue as long as was necessary" to establish a communist society.

Probably 61,911,000 people, 54,769,000 of them citizens, have been murdered by the Communist Party--the government--of the Soviet Union. This is about 178 people for each letter, comma, period, digit, and other characters in this book. Old and young, healthy and sick, men and women, and even infants and infirm, were killed in cold-blood. They were not combatants in civil war or rebellions, they were not criminals. Indeed, nearly all were guilty of ... nothing.

Some were from the wrong class--bourgeoisie, land owners, aristocrats, kulaks. Some were from the wrong nation or race-- Ukrainians, Black Sea Greeks, Kalmyks, Volga Germans. Some were from the wrong political faction--Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries. Or some were just their sons and daughters, wives and husbands, or mothers and fathers. And some were those occupied by the Red Army--Balts, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Rumanians. Then some were simply in the way of social progress, like the mass of peasants or religious believers. Or some were eliminated because of their potential opposition, such as writers, teachers, churchmen; or the military high command; or even high and low Communist Party members themselves.

In fact, we have witnessed in the Soviet Union a true egalitarian social cleansing and flushing: no group or class escaped, for everyone and anyone could have had counter-revolutionary ancestors, class lineage, counter-revolutionary ideas or thought, or be susceptible to them. And thus, almost anyone was arrested, interrogated, tortured, and after a forced confession of a plot to blow up the Kremlin, or some such, shot or sentenced to the dry guillotine--slow death by exposure, malnutrition, and overwork in a forced labor camp.

Part of this mass killing was genocide, as in the wholesale murder of hundreds of thousands of Don Cossacks in 1919,1 the intentional starving of about 5,000,000 Ukrainian peasants to death in 1932-33,2 or the deportation to mass death of 50,000 to 60,000 Estonians in 1949.3 Part was mass murder, as of the wholesale extermination of perhaps 6,500,000 "kulaks" (in effect, the better off peasants and those resisting collectivization) from 1930 to 1937,4 the execution of perhaps a million Party members in the Great Terror of 1937-38,5 and the massacre of all Trotskyites in the forced labor camps.6

And part of the killing was so random and idiosyncratic that journalists and social scientists have no concept for it, as in hundreds of thousands of people being executed according to preset, government, quotas. Says Vladimir Petrov (who in 1954 defected while a spy-chief in Australia and whose credibility and subsequent revelations were verified by a Royal--Australian-- Commission on Espionage7) about his work during the years 1936 to 1938.

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