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I realise by putting up this thread I could well be pegged as “anti-Semitic.”

However, being a well adjusted atheist, I really couldn’t give a flying “filipendulous filibeg” about my fellow earthling’s race, colour or especially their religion. I either love or hate them with equal passion.

Anyway, a recent research sortie into early and mid-twentieth century Chinese and Soviet Union atrocities got me thinking about the following:

Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev butchered between 50 and 60 million earthlings between them.

Between 1958 and 1969 in China and Tibet during the Cultural Revolution, Mao Ze-Dong and his Communist Party killed between 50 and 80 million earthlings.

However despite the fact that in the above massacres, some 100 to 140 million souls were forced to flee their earth-bound bodies, I cannot recall the USA, Britain or Europe doing anything at all to bring the perpetrators thereof to book.

On the other hand …

It is universally accepted today that about 5.8 … round it off at 6 million, Jews died in the Holocaust. This is a mere 6% of the total who died in the Soviet Union and China.

Even so a total of 5025 Nazis were convicted at the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings between 1945 and 1949; 40,000 persons were tried at the polish tribunals and in all about 80,000 Germans have been convicted for committing crimes against humanity.

Even today, Israel and Germany are cooperating in a new legal campaign to find and put on trial thousands of Nazi war criminals. The joint project is the result of a recent precedent-setting ruling in Germany in the case of John Demjanjuk. There are about 4,000 names on the list of possible defendants, but probably very few are still alive, and many of those may be in no condition to stand trial.

Yet the search for these surely by now very, very old people continues, some 70 years after the event.

Why, I ask were the killers of the all those people in the Soviet Union and China not put on trial too?

Why, I ask were the killers of the all those people in the Soviet Union and China not put on trial too?


Because most of what is written about them is untrue. If you add up all the numbers of people that died in Greater Russia (European Russia, Siberia et al) between 1905 and 1950 you are confronted with a startling fact. There's still a lot of Russians around. Russian women must have litters of kids to replace all those that were exterminated. Do the math, natural death rates, birth rates yadda yadda. Oh yeah, you forgot the 60+ million Breshnev and Putin slaughtered too. Or do they get a free pass?

Oh and why do we still honor that murdering bastard Andrew Jackson? He murdered a hell of a lot of Indians. Remember the Trail Of Tears? Remember the US government paying small armies of thugs to slaughter the California Indians?

Apart from the obvious, that we have never been at war with Russia or China never mind ever having defeated them to have the ability to bring their leadership to trial, that the majority of the deaths you refer to were the outcome of bloody civil wars and that those who did die in the progroms were their own people supposedly executed for criminal activities the answer probably lies in the very statistics that you use to support your argument.

Firstly, where do your figures come from - even the most inflated estimated of the number of deaths in Tibet during the uprising put them at less than ninety thousand and a realistic estimate of the number killed during the Cultural Revolution stands at half a million. Even during the regime change after Mao's death the show trial of the Gang of Four could only point to less than thirty five thousand deaths attributable to them.

Even accepting your figures, whilst six million is only 6% of a hundred million, China's supposed fifty million was only 6% of their population over that period.

The difference between the deaths you find unacceptable and the holocaust is that Hitler made a serious attempt to murder every Jew in Europe and nearly succeeded. The pre-war population of was about nine million, the Nazis killed six million - a 65% success rate over a period of six years.

This is vastly more evil than anything Stalin or Mao ever did or were even accused of doing during the Cold War propaganda - you need to look at Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to find anything remotely comparable in the last hundred years.

It was the deliberate and systematic attempt to eradicate a particular group of people, simply because of their race and religion that made the Nazi Holocaust so unique in modern history.

The Jews, however, were not the only target of the Nazi wrath. Gypsies were also rounded up and sent to the chambers.

As for Scrat's post, the Nazi's studied the American treatment of the "Indians" and used the reservation system as a guide to planning their handling of the Jews and Gypsies.