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From: Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: [OT] Wikipedia is going far left
Date: Wed, 21 May 2025 22:13:48 -0400
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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