Red Holocaust - Killings by the State

I am consistently opposed to death penalty -- even when this is awarded by a Court of Law, consequent to a fair trial (whatever may be the crime).

And yes, for this very reason, I strongly condemn the killings that did occur under the regimes of Stalin and Mao.

However when people say Stalin/ Mao "killed millions", we ought not to miss out the exaggeration; and the underlying political propaganda.

For example, the millions killed in Soviet famine of the 1930s; and in the famine in China during the Great Leap Forward; are routinely counted "as instances of mass killing underpinned by genocidal intent".  [Reference: Williams, Paul (2008), Security Studies: An Introduction, Taylor & Francis, ISBN 978-0-415-42561-2]

If the same standard is applied for the Bengal Famine of the 1943, we would need to say "Churchill killed millions"! And this was not the only famine in the British Empire...

The term "red Holocaust" was coined by the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte. 

Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine points out that the use of this term "allows the reality it describes to immediately attain, in the Western mind, a status equal to that of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazi regime". [Reference: Shafir, Michael (Summer 2016), "Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A comparative study Focused on Post-Holocaust", Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies, 15 (44): 52–110]

George Voicu states that Leon Volovici has "rightfully condemned the abusive use of this concept [red holocaust] as an attempt to 'usurp' and undermine a symbol specific to the history of European Jews."

Also included in the "killings" by Stalin/ Mao are judicial executions for crimes that are internationally considered as capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as when Bhutto was executed in Pakistan)! 

Also included among the "millions" killed by Stalin and Mao are of enemy soldiers in combat; of armed rebels, and of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets.

If we apply this last standard, we would need to say that Truman "killed" hundreds of thousands of people within minutes in 1945 -- when he ordered the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki! Not to mention the daily killings of Naxalites and Kashmiris in modern India....

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