MIM Notes 229 March 1, 2001

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MIM demands factual correction from Harvard University Press for ITAL The Black Book of Communism END When MIM reviewed "The Black Book of Communism" (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/bookstore/commie.html) we found that besides the expected ideological and methodological differences it contained numerous boneheaded mathematical errors that over-estimated death rates in communist-led countries by at least a factor of ten! In January, we sent Harvard University Press the letter reprinted here, asking for a public correction of these errors -- as a matter of academic integrity and intellectual honesty. As this issue of MIM Notes goes to press we have still not heard back from them. We ask that our readers send and solicit similar letters to Harvard University Press, asking for appropriate corrections. Letter-writers need not agree with MIM's assessment of the USSR or People's Republic of China. This is not a matter of interpretation, but of getting the empirical facts straight and basic mathematical literacy. Maoist Internationalist Movement PO Box 29670 Los Angeles CA 90029-0670 mim@mim.org Harvard University Press 79 Garden Street Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 Contact_HUP@harvard.edu January 15, 2001 Dear Harvard University Press, We of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, an organization founded at Harvard, have become increasingly concerned about a number of quantitative errors in academic publications about communist-led countries especially under Stalin and Mao. We searched your web site and found no errata, so now we must detail these errors below in the hopes that you will issue an erratum or inform us of the already extant erratum so that we may publicize it. As you are no doubt aware, your publication titled "The Black Book of Communism" has generated thousands of reviews and articles in all the most widely published press of the West. Its admirers include the likes of France's Jean-Marie Le Pen and these admirers strive mightily to promote your book on the Internet. Therefore, we hope to hear from you soon that you have published an erratum on the following outright arithmetic errors in the book in its 1999 hardback edition: 1. p. 492 "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." No doubt China would be a very small country by now if this sort of thing were true--a 68% death rate in one year!--instead of the 68.58 per thousand that a bourgeois scholar should have meant. It is mind- boggling mathematical illiteracy to say that the death rate is 68% while only 6% died that year! Conveniently for the authors, the over-statement was a factor of 10 in what they say is the largest single event of death adding up to their 100 million dead from communism, the 43 million of the Great Leap. 2. p. 495 More of the same errors by a factor of ten occur here: "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." 3. p. 494 We will not ask for a factual correction for this point, but obviously your author Margolin and his editors lacked in mathematical competence and elementary knowledge of comparative demography to say that "the birth rate fell to almost zero as women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition" while still claiming the absurd figures for a death toll in the Great Leap. It is obvious that Margolin does not know how to calculate the kind of projected deaths involved in using birth rates and death rates; even though he is citing these sorts of projections. The low birth rate also means that the projected deaths are lower because of the technique he used to calculate them; yet Margolin uses one of the most highly inflated estimates of Great Leap deaths that there is. It's an example of having one's cake and eating it too. We would ask that you not allow your authors to mix bits and pieces of mathematical methods. On the whole, the chapter on China was botched and it should be admitted as so quantitatively speaking. 4. p. 541 By the time you published the book, the incarceration rate in the United States was already higher than 0.5%. In fact, the incarceration rate was already 0.645% in 1997, and the United States had 1.7 million prisoners of all kinds according to U.S. Government statistics compared with what the authors say is 5 million in China, a country four times larger. 5. Your author Margolin cites Harvard's own Roderick MacFarquhar repeatedly in the footnotes, but MacFarquhar's work also contains a similar and influential misplacement of a decimal point regarding the Great Leap. "Nationwide, the mortality rate doubled from 1.08 per cent in 1957 to 2.54 per cent in 1960. In that year the population ITAL declined END by 4.5 per cent." (Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: The Great Leap Forward 1958-1960, vol. 2, (NY: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 330.) MacFarquhar meant 4.5 per 1000 and he got it right in the third volume of his book, but he did not state it as a correction of his previous work, so we are not sure to this day whether he understands the difference between 4.5 per 1000 and 4.5%. It seems that Margolin has picked up on this sort of error. None of the factual corrections we have requested here are a matter of interpretation or theory. In points 1 and 2 of the "Black Book" and point 1 of the MacFarquhar book, we are talking about misplaced decimal points repeatedly exaggerating communism's faults by a factor of ten. We have published these errors before and distributed them in the Harvard community. To stay abreast of our reviews of your books, please read MIM Notes and MIM Theory. Our own errata are published frequently on pages 2 and 3 of our newspaper. Sincerely, Maoist Internationalist Movement cc: news@thecrimson.com editor@harvardindependent.com perspy@hcs.harvard.edu