That number includes deaths caused by the White Russian counter revolution, and Nazis and Nazi collaborators
The co authors of the book are on the record saying it is sloppy and exaggerated
"Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin sparked a scandal in Paris when they publicly disassociated themselves from Courtois's opinions about the scale of Communist terror, asserting that his introduction was more a diatribe than a balanced scholarly treatment. They felt that he was obsessed with attributing a body count of 100 million to communism, and like several other scholars, they rejected his equation of Soviet repression with Nazi genocide. Werth, a well-regarded French specialist on the Soviet Union whose sections in the
Black Book on the Soviet Communists are sober and damning, told
Le Monde, "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union.""
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The methodology used paints an even worse picture of liberal capitalism:
"Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the
Black Book and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist "experiment" since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire history of the "colossal, wholly failed...experiment" of Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more since, in India alone. The "criminal indictment" of the "democratic capitalist experiment" becomes harsher still if we turn to its effects after the fall of Communism: millions of corpses in Russia, to take one case, as Russia followed the confident prescription of the World Bank that "Countries that liberalise rapidly and extensively turn around more quickly [than those that do not]," returning to something like what it had been before World War I, a picture familiar throughout the "third world." But "you can't make an omelette without broken eggs," as Stalin would have said. The indictment becomes far harsher if we consider these vast areas that remained under Western tutelage, yielding a truly "colossal" record of skeletons and "absolutely futile, pointless and inexplicable suffering" (Ryan). The indictment takes on further force when we add to the account the countries devastated by the direct assaults of Western power, and its clients, during the same years."
Brutal authoritarianism and tyranny is bad regardless of the side of the aisle it comes from. You should note though that the authoritarianism and tyranny you criticize was not ushered in by communism, the countries suffered under authoritarianism and tyranny long before communism. Communism was just a rebranding and often times softening of the authoritarianism. A person living in Moscow post-Stalin was freer than a person living in Moscow under the Tsars.
See Noam Chomsky above. Also please take a moment to better consider the victims of liberal western democracy. Slaves, Native Americans, Indigenous Australians, Zulus, Boers, The people of India and China, The people of Russia in the 90s, the people dying in prisons today in America, the people dying today in America especially the southeastern states because of inadequate medical care. Then add to that all the bodies from military interventions. Its not a pretty picture Dan.
Is America closing in on becoming socialist? Is tyranny being heightened? Dan if you say all collectivist governments are tyrannical, all it take to disprove that statement is that one collectivist government isn't tyrannical? I'll let you guess which government I have in mind.
I have a feeling this is going to go about the same way as your CDC tyranny prediction and your inflation prediction. We'll see!