I hate to pick on Mr. Brennan here, but this is the kind of lazy thinking the Epstein regime preys on us with. They think we're dumb enough to believe their narratives and never do any investigation of our own. Little do they know, I'm an obsessive reader and even more obsessive about exposing the lies that keep people slaving away by emotionally manipulating them. Sucks to suck, I guess. First, I have no idea where Mr. Brennan gets these numbers. Some of these are real historical tragedies that the Epstein regime told him to blame on Communism and he didn't check on, some are wildly inflated figures with zero connection to reality, and others seem to be things he seems to have just thrown together without bothering to understand what actually happened. Anyway, here we go: 1. "Nazi Germany was allied with the USSR to take Poland." First and foremost: This is retarded on its face. But let's actually examine what happened before August 1939, because apparently history begins with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and everything before it just magically disappears. Throughout the 1930s, the Soviet Union pursued a policy of collective security against Nazi Germany. (It was NOT a secret that the Nazis planned on invading the Soviets.) Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov spent years attempting to construct an anti-fascist coalition with the Western powers. The USSR joined the League of Nations in 1934, signed mutual-assistance treaties with France and Czechoslovakia in 1935, and repeatedly pursued cooperation against German expansion. And what happened? Britain and France repeatedly resisted Soviet proposals, distrusted Moscow, and pursued accommodation with Hitler. In 1938, when Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union maintained that it was prepared to fulfill its mutual-assistance obligations. But Soviet assistance was tied to French participation, and getting Soviet forces into Czechoslovakia presented another problem: Poland and Romania opposed allowing the Red Army passage through their territory. So what did Britain and France do? They signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, handing Germany the Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia wasn't even invited to the conference. Neither was the Soviet Union. Read that again. Britain and France sat down with Hitler and Mussolini and agreed to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia without Czechoslovakia even being represented. And we're supposed to believe that the great diplomatic scandal of the 1930s was the Soviet Union signing an agreement with Germany the following year? But wait. It gets better. In 1939, the Soviets were STILL trying to negotiate an anti-German alliance with Britain and France. Those negotiations failed. And we don't have to rely on Soviet accounts to establish what happened. On August 23, 1939, American ambassador Laurence Steinhardt reported to Washington that the French ambassador in Moscow placed principal responsibility for the breakdown of negotiations on Poland, which had consistently refused to accept Soviet military assistance. That's an actual American diplomatic document. The French ambassador explained that Moscow had warned Britain and France that military negotiations were pointless unless Soviet troops could reach the territory they were supposedly going to defend. Think about how effing absurd that is. The Soviets were negotiating to help defend Eastern Europe against Nazi Germany, but the countries involved couldn't agree on allowing Soviet forces to reach the battlefield. And then, after years of failed collective-security diplomacy, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with Germany. Now let's talk about those pacts for a minute. Because apparently signing an agreement with Nazi Germany automatically makes you a Nazi ally. Interesting! 1934: Poland signed a nonaggression declaration with Nazi Germany. 1935: Britain signed the Anglo-German Naval Agreement, permitting Germany to build a navy beyond the restrictions imposed by Versailles. 1938: Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, accepting Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. 1938: Britain and Germany signed a declaration expressing their desire never to go to war with one another. 1938: France and Germany signed a declaration concerning peaceful relations. 1939: The Soviet Union signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Notice anything? European governments were signing diplomatic agreements with Nazi Germany throughout the decade. These agreements differed in purpose and content, but nobody seriously argues that Britain became a Nazi ally because Chamberlain signed an agreement with Hitler. The Soviet-German pact DID contain secret protocols dividing supposed spheres of influence in relation to nonaggression. Those protocols were not an ordinary feature of nonaggression agreements. But it wasn't an alliance or a mutual invasion. And if you're going to explain why that agreement happened, you cannot erase the preceding six years of diplomacy. The Western powers had already accommodated Hitler's expansion, failed to establish collective security with Moscow, and demonstrated at Munich that they were prepared to sacrifice another country's territory in negotiations with Nazi Germany. The Soviet leadership faced the prospect of war with Germany without a reliable coalition to its west. It chose an agreement that postponed direct conflict while also securing territorial advantages. That decision can be examined and criticized without inventing some ridiculous Nazi-Soviet alliance. And how did this fantasy alliance end? In the real world, that is? With Hitler invading the Soviet Union in June 1941. With the Red Army fighting the largest land campaigns of the European war. With the destruction of the overwhelming majority of Germany's fighting power on the Eastern Front. And with THE RED BANNER OF THE PEOPLE flying over Berlin, thank God. The Soviet Union suffered approximately 27 million military and civilian deaths during the war. So the country you're attempting to portray as Nazi Germany's ideological partner was also the country that made the LARGEST contribution to destroying Nazi Germany. You don't get to erase Soviet collective-security diplomacy, erase Munich, erase the failed negotiations of 1939, erase the Western agreements with Hitler, and then erase the Eastern Front. That's not an examination of history. That's taking one diplomatic agreement out of a decade of events and pretending the rest of the century never happened. That's getting taught to think in childish terms, and saying, "Yessir, Mr. Epstein, sir." 2. "The Holodomor: USSR deliberately starved Ukraine, 3.5–5 million deaths." Or: the hollow dumber Now THIS one deserves some attention, because the popular version of this story rests on historical propositions that can actually be investigated. Millions of people died during the Soviet famine of 1932–1933. Nobody needs to deny that. But the claim that Stalin deliberately organized a famine to exterminate Ukrainians as a nationality is an additional claim about intention. It isn't established merely by counting the dead. And there's an enormous body of agricultural and archival evidence that complicates that interpretation. Not to mention ZERO actual evidence for the claim. But who needs evidence when you got Epstein thinking for you, right? Let's begin with historian Mark B. Tauger. In his 1991 study, The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933, published in Slavic Review, Tauger challenged the official harvest statistics on which several influential accounts of the famine had relied. Why? Because the Soviet harvest figures substantially overstated the grain actually available. The distinction between grain theoretically produced in the fields and grain actually harvested, processed, and available for consumption matters enormously. If your argument assumes that the government possessed enough food to feed everybody but deliberately withheld it, then discovering that the harvest was much smaller than your figures indicate is a pretty serious problem. Tauger didn't stop there. In Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933, he examined the actual agricultural catastrophe: crop diseases, environmental conditions, poor yields, harvest losses, and the interaction between these problems and Soviet agricultural policies. He argued that natural and biological disasters contributed substantially to the famine. This is a positive historical explanation, not simply a declaration that the genocide interpretation is disputed. It examines what was produced, what destroyed the crops, and how much food was actually available. And here's another thing. The Soviet central government repeatedly authorized famine relief. Not according to some Soviet propaganda poster. According to archival decisions. On February 7, 1933, the Politburo authorized food-grain allocations for affected regions, including Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa. On February 18, central authorities approved seed-grain loans and food assistance for Ukrainian farms. Further relief decisions followed in March, May, and June. These were actual government measures to provide grain and agricultural assistance during the famine. Now, seed grain intended for planting isn't the same thing as food delivered to starving families, and a government order doesn't prove every shipment reached its destination. But these documents absolutely belong in the historical account. They establish that the central leadership was organizing relief while the famine was occurring. If the point was to kill people, this would not have kept happening. Unless you get your notions of history from a class of people who wouldn't spit on your grandmother if she was on fire and consider you LESS HUMAN than they are, even though you carry their water and kiss their toes. And this isn't the only relevant archival research. R. W. Davies, Stephen Wheatcroft, and Tauger examined all Soviet grain stocks and the famine in a 1995 study. Davies and Wheatcroft subsequently argued that Stalin's policies were ruthless, but rejected the proposition that he consciously pursued a policy of starving the peasantry. Read that again. These are historians examining the actual agricultural and government records, not people who simply decided the famine never happened. There's also the rather inconvenient fact that the famine wasn't confined to Ukraine. Kazakhstan suffered catastrophically. So did the North Caucasus and other Soviet regions. The causes and experiences weren't identical everywhere, but any serious explanation has to account for the famine's actual geography. Tauger's work is particularly valuable because it starts with the material conditions of production instead of beginning with a political conclusion and arranging the evidence around it. So here's my question. How much grain was actually harvested? How much was lost? How much was requisitioned? How much remained? What relief was authorized? What arrived? And which documents establish an intention to destroy Ukrainians as a nationality? Those are historical questions. "STALIN KILLED EVERYBODY" is not a historical explanation. 3. Nazino Island. Yeah, Nazino happened. In 1933, thousands of deportees were transported to an island in Siberia under catastrophically inadequate conditions. Starvation, exposure, violence, and cannibalism followed. Thousands died. The episode is documented in Soviet investigations, and officials were subjected to disciplinary and criminal proceedings. But what are you trying to establish here? That the Soviet state had an absolutely harsh form of punishment as a one-off while they were still trying to industrialize and surrounded by enemies attacking them on ALL sides in ALL ways? Compare that to generations of chattel slavery and get back to me. Tragedies happen. Horrible things happen. But Epstein won't allow you to dismiss capitalism because of the horrible things that happen in capitalism? 4. "The Red Terror killed 1.3 million." Show me your source. Not a general estimate of deaths during the Russian Civil War. Not famine mortality. Not typhus deaths. Not battlefield casualties. An actual historical accounting of 1.3 million people executed during the Red Terror. Because those are different things. The Russian Civil War involved the Red Army, White armies, foreign military interventions, political repression, famine, epidemics, and economic collapse. The Bolsheviks carried out executions and political terror. So did their opponents. White forces also carried out extensive massacres and antisemitic pogroms. If you're going to discuss revolutionary terror, discuss the actual institutions, circumstances, and victims. You don't get to attribute every death in a civil war to one side's execution squads. 5. "The Great Purge: 1–7 million executions." Seven million EXECUTIONS? Where are you getting this stuff? Archival figures commonly cited for 1937–1938 record approximately 682,000 executions. That is an enormous number of human beings, and political repression during those years was extensive. The total number imprisoned, deported, or otherwise persecuted was much greater. Ezhovschia it's called, after the anti-communist responsible. Who was caught and executed for his crimes. Also: prison sentences, deaths, and deportations are different categories. Seven million executions during the Great Purge is not supported by the archival figures. If your estimate has a range from one million to seven million, perhaps you should figure out what you're actually counting before presenting it as a historical fact. Because that is an absolutely ridiculous margin for error. 6. "Tambov: 240,000 civilians killed." The Tambov rebellion and its suppression involved brutal military operations, hostage-taking, executions, detention, and coercion. But 240,000 civilians killed is not an established death toll. The rebellion occurred amid civil war, agricultural disruption, and state requisitioning. Its suppression deserves examination. What doesn't deserve acceptance is a giant number with no demonstrated relationship to actual mortality records. 7. "Decossackization: 500,000 murdered." Again, where is the evidence for 500,000 people murdered? The campaigns against Cossack communities involved killings, deportations, displacement, and political repression. Historians debate their scale and character. But estimates that combine population losses, displacement, and executions cannot simply be relabeled as murder statistics. If 500,000 people were executed, establish that. If you're talking about population decline, say so. These are not interchangeable categories. 8. "The Kazakh famine: 2 million killed." The Kazakh famine was a catastrophic event in which approximately 1.5 million people died according to one widely used estimate, with some estimates higher. Forced settlement, livestock losses, pre-industrialization conditions, requisitions, and state policy contributed substantially to the disaster. Again, this is a genuine historical tragedy. But the important question is HOW it happened. Kazakh pastoral agriculture depended on livestock and mobility. The transformation of that system, combined with requisitions and massive herd losses, devastated the traditional forms of social reproduction and ended up in tragedy. That's an actual explanation. Notice that we can examine the mechanisms of a catastrophe without pretending every famine death was an execution ordered by Stalin. Interesting that all the death and destruction accompanying industrialization in capitalism isn't given the same treatment here. Because guess what? It was FAR worse. And the remaining incidents you've named need to be identified properly before anybody can verify their figures. Now, here's where this gets interesting. LET'S DO CAPITALISM. And we're going to apply the same standard you've been applying to Communism. Every war? Count it. Every famine under a capitalist or colonial government? Count it. Every death caused by forced labor and slavery? Count it. Every imperialist invasion, colonial massacre, and campaign of political repression? Count it. Now, I wouldn't normally argue that every death occurring under a capitalist government is automatically attributable to capitalism. That's a ridiculous method of historical analysis. But it's YOUR method. So let's see what happens when we stop granting capitalism a special exemption from the rules. THE CAPITALIST AND COLONIAL BODY COUNT The conquest of the Americas. Tens of millions of Indigenous people died amid introduced diseases, conquest, enslavement, forced labor, displacement, and the destruction of existing societies. European colonial accumulation was inseparable from this process, although epidemic mortality cannot simply be equated with deliberate killing. The Atlantic slave trade. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forced aboard slave ships. Only about 10.7 million survived the crossing. Roughly 1.8 million deaths at sea alone, before counting deaths during capture, transport to the coast, or enslavement in the Americas. Plantation slavery in the Americas. Generations of enslaved workers produced sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other commodities for commercial profit. People were literally owned as property and used as capital. The Congo Free State. Forced rubber extraction, hostage-taking, mutilation, killings, and demographic catastrophe under Leopold II's colonial regime. Estimates of population loss run into the millions, although precise mortality figures remain uncertain. The Great Indian Famine of 1876–1878. Millions died under British colonial rule. Drought initiated the crisis, but taxation, poverty, market conditions, and inadequate relief shaped its consequences. The Indian famine of 1896–1897. Millions more died under colonial administration. The Indian famine of 1899–1900. Another catastrophe involving millions of deaths, poverty, drought, and colonial relief failures. The Bengal famine of 1943. Approximately three million deaths amid wartime inflation, food distribution failures, colonial policy, and agricultural disruption. The Irish Great Famine. Approximately one million deaths. Potato blight was the immediate cause, but the existing system of landlordism, poverty, property relations, and British government policy determined much of the disaster's severity. The Herero and Nama genocide. Tens of thousands killed through German colonial warfare, starvation, forced displacement, and concentration camps. The Dutch colonial conquest of Indonesia. Forced cultivation, military campaigns, coerced labor, and extensive civilian mortality in the development of colonial commercial interests. The American conquest of the Philippines. War, military repression, disease, displacement, and extensive civilian deaths during the establishment of American colonial rule. The Opium Wars. Britain used military force to secure commercial privileges in China, including the protection of the opium trade. Nothing says "voluntary exchange" quite like warships forcing open a market. The suppression of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Mass reprisals, executions, and civilian deaths under British imperial rule. The French conquest and colonization of Algeria. Massacres, land confiscation, forced displacement, and prolonged warfare. British repression during the Mau Mau Emergency. Detention camps, torture, forced resettlement, and killings in colonial Kenya. The South African apartheid economy. Land dispossession, racially controlled labor markets, migrant labor, mining exploitation, and state repression. The Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966. Hundreds of thousands killed in an anti-communist campaign. Western governments supported the Indonesian military and welcomed the destruction of the Communist Party. The Chilean dictatorship after 1973. Executions, disappearances, torture, and imprisonment accompanied the overthrow of the socialist government and the introduction of market-oriented economic reforms. The Guatemalan Civil War. Approximately 200,000 killed or disappeared. Extensive atrocities, including genocide against Maya communities, occurred during a conflict in which successive anti-communist governments received American support. The Salvadoran Civil War. Approximately 75,000 deaths. Military repression, death squads, and substantial American support for the Salvadoran government. The Vietnam War. Millions died during decades of colonial and postcolonial warfare, including the massive American intervention against Vietnamese communism. The Korean War. Millions died during the destruction of the Korean Peninsula, with enormous civilian casualties in a war inseparable from the Cold War struggle over Korea's political future. The invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hundreds of thousands of violent deaths, with further mortality associated with displacement, damaged infrastructure, and the destruction of social institutions. The global system of colonial forced labor. From plantations to mines to concessionary companies, millions were subjected to compulsory labor, violent discipline, and displacement in systems designed to extract commodities and profits. Industrial labor exploitation. Mine disasters, occupational diseases, dangerous factories, child labor, and preventable workplace deaths throughout capitalist industrialization. Imperialist resource extraction. Forced displacement, environmental destruction, violent land seizures, and military intervention associated with the control of mineral, agricultural, and energy resources. Anti-communist political repression. Executions, disappearances, imprisonment, and torture across numerous military dictatorships and counterinsurgency campaigns supported by capitalist powers. The destruction of subsistence economies. Colonial land policies, taxation, commercialization, and forced integration into world markets repeatedly undermined populations' existing means of survival. Preventable deprivation in the modern world economy. Deaths associated with inadequate nutrition, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inaccessible medical treatment continue despite the world's enormous productive capacity. Establishing capitalism's responsibility for particular deaths requires examining the institutions governing access to those resources. And that's hardly an exhaustive list. Notice something? We're not talking about a few isolated governments. We're talking about centuries of historical development in which private accumulation, colonial conquest, forced labor, and the use of state power to secure property and markets were deeply interconnected. Marx examined this process in his discussion of so-called primitive accumulation in Capital. The historical development of capitalism wasn't simply a bunch of peaceful merchants exchanging goods until everybody got rich. It involved the violent separation of producers from their means of production, the enclosure of common lands, colonial conquest, slavery, and the creation of a world market. And once capitalism became a world system, imperialism and finance capital introduced further mechanisms through which economic power was exercised internationally. Now, before somebody starts screaming that all these deaths weren't caused by capitalism, congratulations! You've discovered the problem with your own method. Of course every death during a war isn't automatically attributable to an economic system. Of course every famine requires examination of agricultural conditions, government policy, production, distribution, and property relations. Of course every execution requires us to identify who ordered it, why it happened, and what institutions carried it out THAT'S THE EFFING POINT You cannot count every death in a communist country as Communism murdering somebody, then turn around and insist that colonial famines, slavery, imperialist wars, and capitalist dictatorships have absolutely nothing to do with capitalism. You can't use one historical method for socialism and another for capitalism. And there's a much more important question beneath all this. What are these societies actually doing? What are their relations of production? Who owns the means of production? What institutions direct economic activity? What material conditions give rise to particular policies? How do those policies change over time? If we want to understand the Soviet famine, we investigate Soviet agriculture, environmental conditions, collectivization, grain procurement, relief, and the decisions of the government. If we want to understand British India, we investigate colonial landownership, taxation, trade, agricultural production, imperial policy, and famine relief. 👇