I. 10 Chomsky Lies About Communist Mass Murderers – General
10.
The Lie: “in comparison to the conditions imposed by US tyranny and violence, East Europe
under Russian rule was practically a paradise.”1
The Truth: The communists murdered 4 million people in the Ukraine; 753,000 in Poland;
360,000 in Romania; 300,000 in Belarus; 200,000 in Hungary; 100,000 in East Germany;
100,000 in Lithuania; 70,000-100,000 in Yugoslavia; 30,000-40,000 in Bulgaria; 20,000 in
Czechoslovakia; and 5,000 in Albania. Other atrocities included the murder of over 500,000
POWs in Soviet captivity and the mass rape of at least 2 million women by the Red Army.2
9.
The Lie: “Western norms require that we compare Eastern and Western Europe to
demonstrate our virtue and their vileness, a childish absurdity… Elementary rationality would
lead someone interested in alternative social and economic paths to compare societies that
were more or less alike before the Cold War began, say Russia or Brazil… Such comparisons,
if honestly undertaken, would elicit some self-reflection among decent people…”3
The Truth: In Russia, Lenin’s food confiscations inflicted famine on over 33 million people,
including 7 million children, and left 4-5 million dead; Stalin’s assault on the peasants killed
another 8.5 million, half of them children.4 Brazil experienced nothing of the kind.
8.
The Lie: “Internal [Soviet] crimes abated [after 1945]; though remaining very serious they
were scarcely at the level of typical American satellites, a commonplace in the Third World,
where the norms of Western propriety do not hold.”5
The Truth: In 1947, the Soviets withheld food from famine victims, causing up to 1.5 million
deaths.6 During 1945-53, there were over 300,000 officially recorded deaths in the Gulag; by
1 Letter reprinted in Alexander Cockburn, The Golden Age Is In Us (Verso, 1995), pp149-51.
2 Sergei Maksudov, “Victory Over the Peasantry,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Fall 2001, p229
(Ukraine); Marek Tuszynski, “Soviet War Crimes Against Poland During the Second World War and
its Aftermath,” The Polish Review, Vol. 44, No. 2, 1999, pp183-215 (Poland); Martyn Rady, Romania
in Turmoil (I.B. Tauris, 1992), p31 (Romania); Washington Post, January 16, 1994 (Belarus); Tamas
Stark, “Genocide or Genocidal Massacre? The Case of Hungarian Prisoners in Soviet Custody,”
Human Rights Review, April-June 2000, pp109-18 (Hungary); Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1991
(East Germany); US News & World Report, October 20, 1997 (Lithuania); New York Times, July 9,
1990 (Yugoslavia); Karel Bartosek, “Central and Southeastern Europe,” in Stephane Courtois, ed., The
Black Book of Communism (Harvard University Press, 1999), p395 (Bulgaria); Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 3, 1999 (Czechoslovakia); New York Times, July 8, 1997 (Albania); David M. Glantz and
Jonathan House, When Titans Clashed: How the Red Army Stopped Hitler (University Press of Kansas,
1995), p307 (POWs); Anthony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin 1945 (Penguin, 2003), p410 (rapes).
3 World Orders, Old and New (Pluto Press, 1994), p40.
4 Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Vintage, 1995), pp410-9; Roman Serbyn, “The
Famine of 1921-1923” in Roman Serbyn and Bohdan Krawchenko, eds., Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933
(Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1986), p169 (Lenin); Sergei Maksudov, “Victory Over the
Peasantry,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Fall 2001, p229 (Stalin).
5 World Orders, Old and New (Columbia University Press, 1996), p39.
6 Michael Ellman, “The 1947 Soviet Famine and the Entitlement Approach to Famines,” Cambridge
Journal of Economics, September 2000, pp603-30.
2
1953, the slave population exceeded 5.2 million.7 No American satellite – whether in Europe
or in Latin America – was guilty of anything even remotely comparable.
7.
The Lie: “In the Soviet sphere of influence, torture appears to have been on the decline since
the death of Stalin… Since it has declined in the Soviet sphere since the death of Stalin, it
would appear that this cancerous growth is largely a Free World phenomenon.”8
The Truth: Until the late 1980s, the Soviets ran 1,000 concentration camps where at least 2
million inmates endured constant violence. Torture was systematic in Soviet satellites in the
Third World.9
6.
The Lie: “Imagine the reaction if the Soviet police were to deal with refuseniks in any way
comparable to the Israeli [anti-riot] practices that briefly reached the television screens.”10
The Truth: The Soviet police held 10,000 dissidents in psychiatric prisons and concentration
camps. An estimated 50,000 were sent to uranium mines to die of radiation poisoning.11 Such
practices elicited no reaction because the Soviets did not allow them to reach the television
screens.
5.
The Lie: “[Regarding] China’s actions in Tibet… it is a bit too simple to say that ‘China did
indeed take over a country that did not want to be taken over.’ This is by no means the general
view of Western scholarship.”12
The Truth: The Chinese invasion provoked massive popular uprisings. Mao welcomed the
Tibetan resistance because it could be crushed by force. State terror and man-made famine
had killed up to 500,000 Tibetans by the mid-1960s.13
4.
The Lie: “It’s clear, I believe, that the emphasis on the use of terror and violence in China
was considerably less than in the Soviet Union and that the success was considerably greater
in achieving a just society.”14
7 Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday, 2003), pp583, 579, 581.
8 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), p8.
9 Avraham Shifrin, The First Guidebook to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union
(Bantam Books, 1982); US News & World Report, May 19, 1986. For the Third World, see, e.g.,
Armando Valladares, Against All Hope (Coronet, 1987), pp400-26; Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag:
Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam (McFarland, 2004), pp133-6.
10 Fateful Triangle (rev. ed., Pluto Press, 1999), p486.
11 Wall Street Journal, December 21, 1984; US News & World Report, May 19, 1986; The Times, UK,
July 11, 1986.
12 Letters, New York Review of Books, April 20, 1967.
13 Warren W. Smith, Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations
(Westview Press, 1996), pp399-412, 440-50, 548-51, 600; Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The
Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp473-7 (revolts); Patrick French, Tibet, Tibet (HarperCollins,
2003), p292 (deaths).
14 Alexander Klein, ed., Dissent, Power, and Confrontation (McGraw-Hill, 1971), p112.
3
The Truth: China’s communists officially stated that they had executed 800,000 in the first
few years of their dictatorship; unofficially, they admitted to the massacre of 2 million in just
one year. Concentration camps held an estimated 8 million, with 280,000 killed annually. The
communists publicly declared that they had persecuted 20-30 million as class enemies in their
first decade and that there were 100 million victims of the Cultural Revolution.15
3.
The Lie: “There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China;
one also finds many things that are really quite admirable… [In China] a good deal of the
collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place
after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.”16
The Truth: The communists reduced 550 million peasants to slavery. They forced at least 90
million to work on furnace-building projects alone. When famine resulted, they cut the food
ration and used mass terror to stop the peasants eating their own harvest. Victims, including
children, were tortured, buried alive, strangled or mutilated.17
2.
The Lie: “Also relevant is the history of collectivization in China, which, as compared with
the Soviet Union, shows a much higher reliance on persuasion and mutual aid than on force
and terror, and appears to have been more successful.”18
The Truth: Its culmination was the Great Leap Forward, the worst man-made catastrophe in
history, in which 30 million died.19
1.
The Lie: “Of course, no one supposed that Mao literally murdered tens of millions of people,
or that he ‘intended’ that any die at all.”20
The Truth: Mao spoke of sacrificing 300 million people, or half of China’s population. He
warned that the policies he later adopted would kill 50 million people. Grain exported by the
communists was sufficient to feed the numbers who starved to death, which they privately
estimated at 30 million.21
15 New York Times, June 13, 1957 (official executions); November 15, 1970 (unofficial figure); Joel
Kotek and Pierre Rigoulot, Le siècle des camps (Jean-Claude Lattès, 2000), p647 (camps); The Times,
UK, November 14, 1984 (first decade); New York Times, November 17, 1980 (Cultural Revolution).
16 Alexander Klein, ed., Dissent, Power, and Confrontation (McGraw-Hill, 1971), pp117-8.
17 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp450, 452-4.
18 American Power and the New Mandarins (rev. ed., The New Press, 2002), p137n56.
19 Basil Ashton, Kenneth Hill, Alan Piazza, Robin Zeitz, “Famine in China, 1958-61,” Population and
Development Review, December 1984, p614.
20 “Second Reply to Casey,” ZNet, September 2001:
http://www.zmag.org/chomreply2.htm21 Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Jonathan Cape, 2005), pp457-8. Cf. Carl
Riskin, “Seven Questions About the Chinese Famine of 1959-61,” China Economic Review, Autumn
1998, p119: “enough was known to let us conclude that ignorance is not even an accurate excuse.”
4
II. 10 Chomsky Lies About Communist Mass Murderers – Indochina
10.
The Lie: “the basic sources for the larger estimates of killings in the North Vietnamese land
reform were persons affiliated with the CIA or the Saigon Propaganda Ministry… there is no
evidence that the leadership ordered or organized mass executions of peasants.”22
The Truth: Reports from North Vietnamese defectors suggested that 50,000 were massacred.
A Hungarian diplomat was told that 60,000 were massacred. A French leftist witness wrote
that 100,000 had been slaughtered. Land reform cadres reported 120,000-160,000 killed. A
former official has said that 172,000 were killed or driven to suicide in a “genocide triggered
by class discrimination.” Victims’ families starved to death under the policy of “isolation.”23
9.
The Lie: “Revolutionary success in Vietnam both in theory and practice was based primarily
on understanding and trying to meet the needs of the masses… A movement geared to
winning support from the rural masses is not likely to resort to bloodbaths among the rural
population.”24
The Truth: Viet Cong death squads assassinated at least 37,000 civilians in South Vietnam;
the real figure was far higher since the data mostly cover 1967-72. They also waged a mass
murder campaign against civilian hamlets and refugee camps; in the peak war years, nearly a
third of all civilian deaths were the result of Viet Cong atrocities.25
8.
The Lie: “given the very confused state of events and evidence plus the total unreliability of
US-Saigon ‘proofs,’ at a minimum it can be said that the NLF-DRV ‘bloodbath’ at Hue [in
South Vietnam] was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed.”26
The Truth: The communists boasted of murdering thousands in Hue. One regiment reported
that its units alone killed 1,000 victims. Another report mentioned 2,867 killed. Yet another
document boasted of over 3,000 killed. A further document listed 2,748 executions.27
7.
The Lie: “In a phenomenon that has few parallels in Western experience, there appear to have
been close to zero retribution deaths in postwar Vietnam. This miracle of reconciliation and
restraint… has been almost totally ignored.”28
The Truth: A prominent defector reported that 50,000-100,000 had been massacred. An expolitical
prisoner and a former Gulag commander said that 200,000 Viet Cong deserters were
22 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), pp342, 432n168.
23 Robert F. Turner, Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development (Hoover Institution Press,
1975), pp141-3, 155-7 (defectors, diplomat, isolation); Gerard Tongas, L'enfer communiste au Nord
Viêt-Nam (Nouvelles Editions Debresse, 1960), p222 (French leftist); Lam Thanh Liem, “Chinh sach
cai cach ruong dat cua Ho Chi Minh,” in Jean-Francois Revel et al., Ho Chi Minh (Nam A, 1990), p203
(cadres); interview, Radio Free Asia, June 8, 2006 (official).
24 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), pp340-1.
25 Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 1978), pp272-3, 448-9.
26 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), p352.
27 Stephen T. Hosmer, Viet Cong Repression and its Implications for the Future (Rand, 1970), pp73-4.
28 The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (South End Press, 1979), p28.
5
targets for execution. Mass expulsions caused the drowning of 200,000-400,000 boat people,
according to the UN High Commission for Refugees.29
6.
The Lie: “When the war ended in 1975, the victorious Pathet Lao appear to have made some
efforts to achieve a reconciliation with the mountain tribesmen who had been organized in the
CIA clandestine army [in Laos].”30
The Truth: The Pathet Lao waged a campaign of genocide, murdering an estimated 100,000
tribespeople. They inflicted massacres, terror bombing, concentration camps and mass rape.31
5.
The Lie: “it seems fair to describe the responsibility of the United States and Pol Pot for
atrocities during ‘the decade of the genocide’ as being roughly in the same range.”32
The Truth: Demographic evidence indicates that America killed about 40,000 Khmer Rouge
fighters and Cambodian civilians during 1970-5, and that the Khmer Rouge murdered at least
1.8 million civilians during 1975-9.33
4.
The Lie: “The harshest critics claim that perhaps 100,000 people have been slaughtered [in
Cambodia]… Comparing East Timor with Cambodia, we see that the time frame of alleged
atrocities is the same, the numbers allegedly slaughtered are roughly comparable in absolute
terms, and five to ten times as high in East Timor relative to population… my own conclusion
is that the sources in the [case of] East Timor are more credible…”34
The Truth: A Truth Commission found that the Indonesian war in East Timor caused 18,600
violent killings and 75,000-183,000 deaths from hunger and illness.35 Genocide investigators
have determined that the Khmer Rouge perpetrated 1.1 million violent killings and murdered
2.2 million victims overall.36
3.
The Lie: “If 2-2½ million people… have been systematically slaughtered by a band of
murderous thugs [then intervention is sought]… [But not] if the figure of those killed were,
29 Human Events, August 27, 1977 (defector); Al Santoli, ed., To Bear Any Burden (Indiana University
Press, 1999), pp272, 292-3 (prisoner, commander); Associated Press, June 23, 1979, San Diego Union,
July 20, 1986 (boat people). See generally Nghia M. Vo, The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment
in Communist Vietnam (McFarland, 2004) and The Vietnamese Boat People, 1954 and 1975-1992
(McFarland, 2006).
30 After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p122.
31 Forced Back and Forgotten (Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, 1989), p8 (estimate); Jane
Hamilton-Merritt, Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-
1992 (Indiana Uniersity Press, 1999), pp337-460 (atrocities).
32 Manufacturing Consent (Vintage, 1994), pp264-5.
33 Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995),
pp41-8, 57.
34 Radical Priorities (rev. ed., AK Press, 2003), p80.
35 Final Report of the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor (CAVR),
January 30, 2006, part 6, paras. 47, 56-7:
http://www.ictj.org/en/news/features/846.html36 Craig Etcheson, After the Killing Fields (Praeger, 2005), p119.
6
say, less by a factor of 100 – that is, 25,000 people… [or] if the deaths in Cambodia were not
the result of systematic slaughter and starvation organized by the state…”37
The Truth: No honest observer thought that only 25,000 died under the Khmer Rouge or that
the mass deaths were not the result of systematic slaughter and starvation. A UN investigation
reported 2-3 million dead, while UNICEF estimated 3 million dead.38 Even the Khmer Rouge
acknowledged 2 million deaths – which they attributed to the Vietnamese invasion.39
2.
The Lie: “the evacuation of Phnom Penh [by the Khmer Rouge], widely denounced at the
time and since for its undoubted brutality, may actually have saved many lives.”40
The Truth: At least 30,000 very young children died as a direct result of the Khmer Rouge
evacuation of Phnom Penh.41 In total, at least 870,000 men, women and children from Phnom
Penh died under the Khmer Rouge dictatorship.42
1.
The Lie: “At the end of 1978 Cambodia [under the Khmer Rouge] was the only country in
Indochina that had succeeded at all in overcoming the agricultural crisis that was left by the
American destruction.”43
The Truth: Famine killed over 950,000 people under the Khmer Rouge.44 By late 1979, UN
and Red Cross officials were warning that another 2.25 million faced starvation thanks to “the
near destruction of Cambodian society under the regime of the ousted Prime Minister Pol
Pot.” They found starving children wherever they went.45
37 After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), pp138-9.
38 William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience
(Touchstone, 1985), p115-6.
39 Khieu Samphan, Interview, Time, March 10, 1980.
40 After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p160.
41 Ea Meng-Try, “Kampuchea: A Country Adrift,” Population and Development Review, June 1981,
p214.
42 Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995),
p57.
43 Language and Politics (AK Press, 2004), pp245-6. Cf.: “it was a condition of survival to turn (or
return) the populations to productive work. The victors in Cambodia undertook drastic and often brutal
measures to accomplish this task… At a heavy cost, these measures appear to have overcome the dire
and destructive consequences of the US war by 1978,” After the Cataclysm (South End Press, 1979), p
viii.
44 Marek Sliwinski, Le Génocide Khmer Rouge: Une Analyse Démographique (L’Harmattan, 1995),
p82.
45 New York Times, August 8, 1979.
