MIM Notes 229 March 1, 2001
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