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Revision as of 06:27, 3 July 2010

Reply to four sections set up to discuss templates

This article was created by the blocked editor Joklolk as Communist genocide and was quickly adopted by members of the Eastern European Mailing List. When the article was listed for deletion, they decided off-wiki to rename the article. However the new title does not exist in academic sources. So basically the article is not supported by any sources and represents a far right view of history. There have been a number of attempts by the far right to create articles, including one about how the Jews control Hollywood. The argument they presented was that since some people believe that the Jews control Hollywood there is a controversy meriting a separate article. Fortunately the inherent bias and anti-Semitism of that article was obvious and it was deleted. Unfortunately the inherent far right racist and anti-Semitic bias of this article is less obvious, which is why it has not been deleted. But it does explain why it can never be a neutral article. TFD (talk) 23:21, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Whoever created the article is not relevant. Nor is the history of the name. Nor is the EEML shibboleth relevant. Nor does WP require articles to conform to your sensibilities that everyone else is racist and anti-Semitic. Now can we go back to the purpose of the talk page which is to improve the article? Collect (talk) 23:29, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

You are missing the point. The topic itself is inherently biased. It is based on a far right conspiratorial view of Communism represented in this article by the fringe theorist Watson. No real encyclopaedia would have an article like this. The fact that the article was created by a troll and supported by a group that was willing to break the rules of Misplaced Pages in order to support their own personal view of Russia and the minorities that supported the Soviet Union is evidence that the topic matter is loaded. That is why this article cannot be improved. As I mentioned, we had a similar discussion with an article about how the Jews control Hollywood, created by an editor who believed that the Holocaust was a hoax. The discussion came down to that there were two legitimate articles: about the far right conspiracy theory that the Jews controlled Hollywood and an article about Jews in Hollywood. In the end it was agreed that the inherent bias of the article made it better to be deleted. TFD (talk) 00:33, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

TFD, WP:AGF is not good policy because all editors are in fact acting in good faith, it is good policy because editors' motivations are irrelevant to the merits of their arguments and because talk page discussions of other editors' motivations are counter-productive. Your concerns appear to be misplaced. Watson is a very small portion of the article. Judaism is not even mentioned in the article. The editors of the EEML are also not participating in this discussion and haven't been for some time. The title achieved a consensus of editors far beyond the members of that mailing list. That the title of this article does not exist verbatim in academic sources should suprise no one as it is a compromise descriptive title of the topic. There are several reliable sources which discuss the topic, so the article is in fact sourced. If you can think of a better title, please present it. If you think the article represents a far right view of history, please present additional sources you would like to see included. If you think there is an "inherent far right racist and anti-Semitic bias" in the article, then make your case as well as you can. I don't see it. AmateurEditor (talk) 01:02, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

The bias probably is not apparent to you and I notice that the quotes on your user page are from Karl Rove and Jonah Goldberg. If you actually respect Goldberg, then you probably do not have an appreciation for neutrality. TFD (talk) 01:28, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Personal attacks will not get you what you want. AmateurEditor (talk) 02:20, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

AmateurEditor, I am not making a personal attack. Unfortunately you present yourself on your user page as supporting highly partisan persons, none of whom is respected as an historian or as a neutral writer. None of them are considered to be rational critics of social sciences. TFD (talk) 02:44, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict)The article is biased because it collects the views of those scholars who see commonality between mass killings under different Communist regimes (and the regimes that only declared their adherence to the Communist doctrine). By contrast, the views of other scholars, who see no such commonality, and, therefore, discuss these events separately, cannot be included in this article because that would be a synthesis. As a result, this article article leads to a collision between two major WP principles, neutrality and NOR, which is immanent to such type articles.

In addition, I already quoted some sources that convey quite opposite ideas, namely that Cambodian regime was the only Communist regime whose nature was genocidal, whereas other Communist regimes, by contrast to Nazi, were not genocidal. The same source states that it was a Communist ideology that prevented a full-scale genocide in the USSR. In addition, other sources describe Cambodia as only formally Communist regime, thereby refusing to see any commonality between the events in this "Communist" country and other Communist states. Unfortunately, these example are not abundant, because the scholars that see no commonality between different mass killings prefer to write about the history of some concrete country, leaving the theories of various "...cides" to political writers and journalists.

I already proposed the solution and I repeat it again: the article can be fixed only if we build it as a story about theories that try to connect different mass killings in different Communist countries (along with their criticism). This should not be a list (each of the events listed here already have their own article).--Paul Siebert (talk) 01:44, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

But Paul, it is not synthesis to include information in this article from sources which focus on only one instance of mass killing. If the article were titled "Mass killing..." rather than "Mass killings...", then I would be more inclined to agree with you that individual explanations have no place in the article. There are sections on commonalities; there can also be sections on particularities, and they would look very much like the list. In fact, incorporating those alternate, individual, non-common causes into the current list would be a good way to incorporate them. You see, if we were to limit articles on Misplaced Pages to just the individual instances of mass killing (the situation before this article was created), then we would have the opposite bias problem: only individual causes and explanations could be discussed and commonalities would have no place to be written about. AmateurEditor (talk) 02:20, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Yes, formally, to to include information in this article from sources which focus on only one instance of mass killing is not synthesis. However, let's consider the following case: (i) a scholar V. defined a term "mass killings" as "mass killings of more than 50,000 non-combatants during the period of 5 years or less"; (ii) a scholar P. describes a decossackisation as a process of elimination of some ethnic group (Cossacks) by Communist regime in Russia; (iii) scholar X. tells a story of numerous killings committed by both sides during the Russian Civil War in the Don's basin. Can we combine all three sources to include them into this article? I doubt if that is correct. The first source (V.) tells about mass killings of non-combatants, whereas most Cossacks were the party of the Civil War, so decossackisation can hardly be described as mass killings of non-combatants. In addition, decossackisation does not fit a quantitative criterion, because 10,000 to 12,000 executed Cossacks is not "50,000". In other words, we can include decossackisation only if the scholar V. (who coined the term "mass killings") explicitly included it into his book. He didn't . The second source, P., describes the crimes of Communists against Cossacks, however, it is not clear from his book that that was a crime against non-combatants, so it is incorrect to combine V. and P. Finally, the scholar X. writes about history of the Civil War in Russia, including the crimes committed by both sides (and, btw, in similar scale). It would be incorrect to take the X.'s words out of the general context of the Civil war, and, importantly, the story of the White terror would be equally inappropriate here, because it has not direct relation to the article's subject. --Paul Siebert (talk) 02:55, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

While Valentino did come up with a precise working definition for "mass killing", he did not coin the term. It is a common term long predating him with no precise definition that I know of. And I don't know that any other writer uses Valentino's definition for "mass killing" (and Valentino himself refers to mass killings "on a smaller scale" than his definition on page 91). This article does not use his definition of the term, it uses the more general one. Whether we should or not is an open question. As for the other examples you give, whether they should be included depends on the details. We agree that only killings of non-combatants is appropriate, but shouldn't that include civilians and POWs? I don't agree that no examples can be included that are not explicitly mentioned in Valentino's book because he says explicitly that he does not discuss every example. If there is information included in the article that is taken out of context in a misleading way, then it should definitely be corrected. AmateurEditor (talk) 03:47, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

Valentino did define this term (similarly to Oscar W. Greenberg who coined the term colour), and at least one source in this article (Wayman & Tago) explicitly states that. With regard to the definition the article uses, I doubt the article in its present form to use any single definition. That opens an avenue for numerous non-neutral syntheses.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:11, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

I agree that some obvious examples can and should be included, because Valentino and similar scholars are not specialists in history of the countries they discuss (their field of interests are general genocide studies), so many details in their books are inaccurate of incomplete. However, that does not mean that the article has to become a collection of everything that has even marginal relation to real or alleged Communist crimes.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:26, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

TFD, the reason there can never be a neutral article are because your world view is so common. You, and many others, clearly have the stance that you either turn a blind eye to the murders of "communist" regimes, or you are "far-right" and anti-semitic. And equally, many on the "far-right" have the idea that you either turn a blind eye to the evils of fascism, or you automatically are a communist.

Both those attitudes are complete and utter nonsense and has no connection to reality whatsoever. Anyone who has respect for their fellow being will be egalitarian, liberal, democratic anti-communist and anti-racist, ie neither your "far-right" nor "far-left" enough to be blind for the failings of communism. The attitude of left-vs-right, us-vs-them, that you show evidence of above, makes this into a choice between communism and antisemitism, when it's obvious to any thinking person that both are evil ideas.

I'd recommend you to stop thinking in terms of "left" and "right". It's an oversimplification with nothing but negative effects. The world isn't that simple. --OpenFuture (talk) 05:52, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

You have not followed the discussion so I will summarize it for you. While it is implicit in the title of the article that there is a connection between Communism and mass killings, there are only fringe sources that make this connection. WP:Fringe means that they are not recognized in academic writing. Therefore the article is just a random list of atrocities whose only connection is that the perpetrators were Communist governments. We could just as easily write an article called "Mass killings under Protestant regimes" and include the holocaust and the Salem witch trials. The sources that do make a connection are in fact far right, and have been the subject of academic articles. The theory has been popularized in Eastern Europe because it shows Communism with its 100 million victims was a greater evil than Nazism with its 6 million victims. The political implications in Eastern Europe have been to rehabilitate Nazi collaborators, villianize the Jews whom they connect with Communism and encourage discrimination against Russians living in their countries. It is ironic that you consider opposition to a manichaean world-view to be simplistic. TFD (talk) 06:27, 3 July 2010 (UTC)