Better dead than red

According to R. J. Rummel's book Death by Government (1994), about 110 million people, foreign and domestic, were killed by communist democide from 1900 to 1987 In 1993, Rummel wrote: "Even were we to have total access to all communist archives we still would not be able to calculate precisely how many the communists murdered. Consider that even in spite of the archival statistics and detailed reports of survivors, the best experts still disagree by over 40 percent on the total number of Jews killed by the Nazis. We cannot expect near this accuracy for the victims of communism. We can, however, get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range". Due to additional information about Mao's culpability in the Great Chinese Famine from the work of Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, in late 2005 Rummel revised upward his total for communist democide between 1900 and 1999 to about 148 million, using their estimate of 38 million famine deaths via /r/communism https://ift.tt/2VFxIO5