What do you mean, “remembered by few”? Just look at this.

Just to be difficult, do you term the other Soviet deportations genocide?

I think from a legal perspective, they certainly are, but then again, many things that most wouldn’t call genocide look to fall under the legal definition.

Saying that shipping a whole people into the middle of Siberia in the winter isn’t “intent to eliminate” is like saying that moving a guy’s office down to the boiler room and giving him no work to do is not the same as firing him.

Ahhh the joys of totalitarian governments, let us all join hands and support our immortal leaders Kim Jong Il and Castro, just like the rest of the world excluding the US and some crackpot former Russian or formerly conquered by Russian states.

Kenneth, can you support that statement with objective information? The Dalai Lama has done a superb job of bringing Western attention to the plight of Tibet, and China in general gets a lot of criticism from the left and the right.

So, to follow Nathan’s line of curiosity, where would you place the Armenians on your chart?

That’s the subject of a whole other post. Which I will get to, one day.

China would make the list well before them, sun bin.

Are democracy activists a race? Anyone seen the front page article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) on how Michail Khodorkovsky is doing in Siberia?

This really isn’t that related to Curzon’s post, but I thought that the timing was poignant. A brief excerpt:

KRASNOKAMENSK, Russia—Near a cluster of tatty gray prison barracks on the Siberian steppe, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky got his first job since police arrested him aboard his privately chartered jet two years ago: He helped mend his penal colony’s barbed-wire fences.

Mr. Khodorkovsky, once among Russia’s richest men, will have a shot at other jobs in the years ahead. He may sew bed sheets, underwear and work clothes in the prison textile shop. Or scrub dormitory floors.

If anyone thought that Martha Stewart had it rough at her West Virginia confines, Russia’s fallen corporate idols have it worse. Prison life has become easier since the days of the Soviet Union, when millions toiled and often died in the now-defunct gulags of the far north and east. But the new abode of Mr. Khodorkovsky, founder of the Yukos oil company, is a reminder that no Russian prison is Camp Cupcake.

Wake-up at Correctional Facility #10 is at 6 a.m. Breakfast is porridge and tea, inmates say, while lunch is porridge and water and a typical dinner is macaroni with soybeans. Temperatures drop to around minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit in winter….

Sonagi: Kenneth, can you support that statement with objective information? The Dalai Lama has done a superb job of bringing Western attention to the plight of Tibet, and China in general gets a lot of criticism from the left and the right.

The double standard surrounding support for communism, among other things. Despite the fact that communism has been responsible for far more death and destruction than fascism or western imperialism, it is still considered a respectable position. The phenomenon has been documented in In Denial: Historians, Espionage, and Communism .

Intent is a vital legal principle. To use a mundane exampe, if I accidentally hit someone with my car and kill them, that is quite from me trying to run them over. See the wikipedia article on intent.

The book link was written by two staunch anti-communists, one of whom shows sympathy for McCarthy’s Red scare witchhunts.

Bahahaha. “Red scare”? Sorry buddy, but Ethel and Julius Rosenberg really were spies, and the red menace was real.

I still challenge you to prove that communism is respected in university circles. None of my profs in university uttered any words of praise for communism or communist regimes, including two economics professors. Sure, there are some looney leftists just as there are some looney rightists like the McCarthy fan who wrote that book.

FIne. I’ll quote one of the reviews:

Von Laue defends Lenin, Stalin and the totalitarian murder machine they created: “How then are we to judge Stalin? Viewed in the full historical context Stalin appears as one of the most impressive figures of the twentieth century.” “Regard for individual life was a necessary sacrifice in Lenin’s ambition to enhance life in the future.” “The specific design of Soviet totalitarianism has perhaps not been sufficiently appreciated. However brutal, it was a remarkable human achievement despite its flaws.” (pg 24-26) This apologist for mass murder is a “professor” and one of the authors of a much used history book.

Kolko, another revisionist whose books were widely assigned as college texts, justifies the cold and calculated murder of 21,857 Polish reserve officers and intellectuals stating “Whoever destroyed the officers at Katyn had taken a step toward implementing a social revolution in Poland.” He also states that “Katyn was the exception” in Soviet behavior and “its relative importance….must be downgraded very considerably.” (pg 21) Exception? Apparently Mr. Kolko has conveniently forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens deported to the gulag during the Nazi-Soviet pact and the 110,000 ethnic Poles residing in the USSR who were executed during the Great Terror.

Thurston, a professor at Miami University of Ohio, claims that Stalin “was not guilty of mass first degree murder from 1934-1941 and did not plan or carry out a systematic campaign to crush the nation.” (pg 24) The aforementioned Katyn massacre (1940) is a perfect example of mass first-degree murder. The order to execute the Poles came from the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party and was signed by Stalin himself. Historians have also found orders from Stalin approving the murder of old Bolshevik comrades and setting execution quotas for the secret police.

Furr, an English professor at Montclair State University, praised the blood-drenched Communist revolutions in Russia and China: “The greatest historical events in the twentieth century – in fact, in all of human history – have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.” (pg 27) Anyone who has read about Lenin’s “Red Terror” and Mao’s “campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries” knows these weren’t “great historical events,” but bloodbaths of horror.

Additionally, many of the cultural elite praised Stalin’s regime: prominent literary figures like H.G. Wells and Bertolcht Brecht, among others. I don’t see them getting castigated nowadays.

“None of my profs in university uttered any words of praise for communism or communist regimes, including two economics professors.”

I sure hope the economics professors would not praise communism. If there’s anybody in universities who is very rarely a communist, it is economics profs, as they see how utterly ridiculous the system was economically (and otherwise).

At the same time, Sonagi, I do have to agree with you that I don’t really remember hearing any professor (I do remember some students being anti-Reagan) say anything political at all in any of my classes (though at the time I was somewhat left-leaning, being a student in the arts, so probably would have agreed and then quickly forgot about it). I would be more sensitive to political comments nowadays, as I think most people are now.

Sonali—Econ is one of several fields where leftists are few and far between. Try taking International Relations, Poli Sci, Sociology, History, or lots of other areas and apologists for Marxism are everywhere. My only conservative professors in undergrad were econ; which is why in my last year I took lots of econ classes, despite the fact that it wasn’t my major.

To relate my own experiences: I had Professor for “International Relations Theory” (from Pakistan) said the only reason the Soviet Union did these awful things was because the capitalist countries attacked it; my professor for “Ideologies of the Right” said that Communist slaughterfests occured when “Rightist” elements took over and corrupted the true Communist ethic; In Japan, I had one ethnic Korean professor born and educated in Japan who spent one year in Korea as an exchange student and got involved in the democracy movement; he was torturted and mutilated. He came back to Japan and got his PhD and taught “International Human Rights Law.” When I took this class he spent most of the course talking about the evils of America, how the division of Korea was all their fault, and how the criticism of about starvation and the personality cult in North Korea was all lies. At very best, most of my professors were moderate liberals.

I spent two years at a large state university in the US and two years at a large private university in Japan. The vast majority of my professors were liberals; there was a survey in 2000 of our profs at the poli sci department: the tally was 24 Gore voters, 1 Bush voter, 4 Nader voters and 1 for Libertarian Browne. (Japan was still liberal but more varied: there were lots of Communists, but a few right-wingers too.) US law school was much the same, although in this regard it really depends on the school.

True.

The CCP has never deliberately tried to wipe out an entire people. To the contrary, official Chinese doctrine communicated in the media, in textbooks, and in cultural activities celebrates the cultures of China’s 56 official nationalities as an integral part of the national identity. They are, of course, actively Sinocizing the misnamed “autonomous regions” by luring Han Chinese settlers with jobs and subsidized housing and by locking up, torturing, and killing dissidents.

Another clever method of Sinocizing the minorities is educating students far away from their homeland. Across from my apartment in the eastern coastal city of Qingdao was a technical college with a large Uyghur population and a fair number of Tibetans. On national holidays and other special occasions, the minority groups would all put on ethnic costumes provided by the university and do a song and dance in front of the camera. I nearly shed tears as I listened to two Tibetan girls on TV sing in Chinese, “Han Chinese and Tibetans have the same mother, and their mother is China.” Who knows, maybe their patriotism touched the hearts of some handsome local Han Chinese men.

You are right when saying that “Lop Nor is about 1000km away from any where there is human being” unless we consider the people living in Turpan,Urumqi.And i donot need to mention Qinggir which is 125 km away from Lop Nor and other villages.Thos who lives there must already have been change to a creature other than an human being.

Resistance in tibet and xinjiang were jailed. but only a few executed (in recent years only the convicted terrorists were executed.And after all,the percentage of the Uyghur people in East Turkistan (Uyghur region ) decreased to 47 % from 90 % since 1955.By this process namely “adding sand” they will be cleaned and there will be no problem of Uyghurs any more.

By the way thanks to China as SNOW also mentiones.