MIM Notes 210                   May 15, 2000

French scholars join in parade of distortion and errors

The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,Terror, Repression
Stephane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Jean-Louis Panne, Andrzej 
Paczkowski, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Margolin
Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, 
Massachusetts: 1999), 856pp. hb

reviewed by MC5
Second part of two reviews; continued from MIM Notes 207.

China: more botched numbers

To their credit, the authors admitted that their criticisms of 
Asian communists and therefore most of their criticism of 
communism is speculative.(p. 459) The reason is that they would 
like the governments there to fall so that they can see the 
archives before they pass judgement.

The largest part of the 100 million deaths they are attributing to 
communism comes from the Great Leap, where they use the upper end 
of 43 million deaths. MIM recently reviewed this literature again 
in MIM Notes 203, since Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar's 
book just came out in paperback.

Contrary to MacFarquhar who details all the actions the Communist 
Party took and how Mao made public self-criticism, Margolin says 
Mao refused to admit a problem during the Great Leap.(p. 464) He 
then goes on to list wartime atrocities in World War II by the 
communists.

Even more than MacFarquhar who misplaced a decimal in his single 
largest accusation against Mao to make it 10 times worse than it 
was, Margolin leaves us seriously questioning his basic 
quantitative skills. We can only hope it was the editors or 
translators who introduced the errors, but there were numerous 
basic mathematical errors in his chapter and no matter how one 
slices it, the chapter does not reflect well on the authors and 
editors.

"This last province [Anhui], in north-central China, was the worst 
affected of all. In 1960 the death rate soared to 68 percent from 
its normal level at around 15 percent, while the birth rate fell 
to 11 percent from its previous average of 30 percent. As a result 
the population fell by around 2 million people (6 percent of the 
total) in a single year."(p. 492)

The above is such a bungle that it is difficult to sort out all 
the errors and curiously enough, it refers to Margolin's biggest 
accusation at the provincial level. The first number is actually 
68.58 per thousand. 68 percent is 68 per hundred. Once again, we 
have an error overestimating by a factor of 10. What is worse is 
the stupidity in saying that the mortality rate was 68 percent but 
only 6 percent died! In this way Margolin exceeds the stupidity of 
MacFarquhar's mistake. Of course, the birth rates are similarly 
exaggerated by a factor of 10. At least MacFarquhar correctly 
reported these figures in a table in his third volume.(12)

In more obvious moralistic "have your cake and eat it too," 
Margolin denounces the regime in China for creating a situation 
where "the birth rate fell to almost zero as women were unable to 
conceive because of malnutrition."(p. 494) He does not realize 
that if that is true, his death toll must be very low, much less 
than the 20 million lower end estimate he uses. It's clear that he 
has never sat down to think through questions like what goes into 
creating a life expectancy figure.

Further exceeding MacFarquhar by covering more years with his 
ignorance, Margolin says "For the entire country, the death rate 
rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, 
peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 
1957 to 18 percent in 1961."(p. 495)

Given this sort of record it is not surprising Margolin also 
botched the imprisonment rate figures where he momentarily got on 
the right track before falling off (and actually compared the 
imprisonment figures with the U$A's and found them equal in his 
own error-prone way). (p. 541) He apparently is OK with reporting 
8 digit figures raw and re-reporting percentages, but anything 
actually involving his own understanding of division is suspect.

At one point saying that the peasants were too weak to harvest 
grain rotting on the farms, (p. 493) Margolin also says that once 
capitalist-style organization came into place, they quickly ended 
the famine. (p. 496) Which was it Margolin? Were the peasants too 
weak as the Great Leap went on to harvest or just needing 
capitalist incentives? Nor does Margolin seem to flinch at saying 
the worst year was actually 1961,(p. 491) after the Great Leap had 
ended and widescale private farming and systems tantamount to it 
had come into play.

It is obvious that Margolin likes to study history, but his 
quantitative skills are so lacking it is no wonder that he came 
out against communism. His essay along with MacFarquhar's error 
introduces further doubt into the basic competence of the people 
doing bourgeois academic research on the Great Leap. Anyone with 
any experience in mortality figures, life expectancies or 
statistics and the slightest knowledge of the Great Leap from any 
perspective should have caught Margolin's mistakes right away and 
should have known off the top of their heads that what he was 
saying was impossible. Anyone with a high school education should 
have caught the mistakes if studying carefully. When talking about 
China with its large population and the potential for 8 digit 
famines, it is essential that an author be comfortable with 
numbers.

With regard to the charge of 100 million dead from communism, 85 
million are from the Soviet Union and China, 20 million from the 
Soviet Union and 65 million from China.(p. 4) As we have just 
shown the crucial lynchpins to that argument concern a famine 
reported by Nazi collaborators in the Ukraine and a Great Leap 
toll where repeated and obvious arithmetic errors were published 
in the book. Together these two items account for 49 million dead 
out of 100 million alleged victims.

Conclusion

The book goes on to treat other countries as well, but those 
countries are all said to stem from the Leninist "genetic code." 
Many of these other regimes that the authors attack are not 
communist and as usual they omit significant facts such as the 
landslide Sandinista victory's portion of the population (not just 
the voters) won in a bourgeois style election (p. 670) or the fact 
that their notion of "responsible" for deaths in the case of the 
Sendero Luminoso refers mostly to indiscriminate killings carried 
out by the government but which the Sendero Luminoso is 
"responsible" for because they started a civil war.(p. 680)

The "Black Book" sold 70,000 copies in four weeks in France.(13) 
Of course, the Wall Street Journal endorsed it as well as most of 
the rest of the bourgeois press. There are 175 entries in an 
Internet search using the "Google" search engine. Many of the book 
reviews can be seen by visiting MIM's bookstore under reviewed 
books and going to the Amazon bookstore link for the "Black Book." 
The positive reviews can be taken as an indication of the lack of 
historical knowledge of some, the weak quantitative skills of 
others and the overall conscious distortion of the bourgeoisie. In 
the end, MIM agrees that Courtois has recognized the truth about 
the media: it will buy anything anti-communist.

Despite his correct recognition of the nature of the monopoly 
capitalist media, Courtois will fail in his goal, because the 
truth regarding the overall situation is already widely available 
and cannot be excised from history by selective compilations of 
statistics or gruesome detail of death on one side of the 
capitalism versus communism conflict. Despite the whinings of the 
Solzhenitsyns, Khruschevs and other intellectuals and former party 
members, nothing will eradicate the fact that the average persyn 
lived longer under socialism than under capitalism.(14) 

Notes:

1. 
http://x25.deja.com/getdoc.xp?AN=533524259&search=thread&CONTEXT=9
49783412.290127893&HIT_CONTEXT=942257934.934412361&HIT_NUM=1&hitnu
m=9 
2. I thank HC88 for the following reference: William Shirer, Rise 
and Fall of the Third Reich, pp. 296, 526, 563f.
3. www.encyclopedia.com
4. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/mn/mn.php?issue=144
5. http://www.linguafranca.com/br/9911/shatz.html
6. http://www.ukar.org/safer17.shtml
7. http://www.shss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html
8. http://www.tiac.net/users/knut/Stalin/book.html
9. http://www.humanite.presse.fr/journal/1997/1997-12/1997-12-
10/1997-12-10-054.html
10. See our article on this at 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/stalindeaths.html
11. For some examples of the half-assed anarchists who continue to 
support Makhno against Lenin, unfortunately we have to refer to 
some of the better anarchists including the Rage Against the 
Machine, the International Workers of the World 
http://iww.org/~jah/russia-rev-anar.html, the web site 
www.spunk.org and burn.ucsd.edu.
12. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: 
The Coming of the Cataclysm 1961-1966, vol. 3, pb., (NY: Columbia 
University Press, 1997), pp. 7-8.
13. http://www.mindszenty.org/report/1998/feb98/feb98.html
14. We suggest readers follow the following links: 
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/wim/mythsofmao.html
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/failure.html
http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/philviolence.html