🎯 Main Thesis

The claim that “socialism killed 100 million people” is a politicized, misleading, and uncritical talking point. It’s not used to analyze history—it's used to shut down debate. Worse still, it collapses vastly different events and contexts into a single, dehumanized figure, and ignores capitalism’s own far more catastrophic death toll.

📖 Origin of the Claim: The Black Book of Communism

• The oft-cited 100 million number comes from the Black Book of Communism, a French historical work led by Stéphane Courtois.
• Its purpose? Tally all deaths that could be attributed—no matter how indirectly—to “communism.”
• Problem 1: Courtois made up numbers to hit his target, according to his own co-authors.
• Problem 2: He defined “victims” absurdly broadly, including:
  • Soviet soldiers who died fighting Nazis.
  • Nazi soldiers who died.
  • White army fascists killed during civil war.
  • People killed by anti-communist militias.
  • Unborn children from wartime fertility declines (yes, really).

Even his own colleagues (Margolin, Worth, Bartocek) publicly denounced the book’s approach, and resigned from the editorial board.

🤡 Other “Sources” Take It Further

• Organizations like the Victims of Communism Foundation have absurdly added COVID deaths to the count, citing conspiracy theories about a Chinese bioweapon.

This is less scholarship than it is political propaganda.

🔁 Let’s Flip the Question: What About Capitalism’s Death Toll?

If we want to play the same game, but more honestly, here's a partial and conservative estimate of capitalism’s body count:

📜 A Historical Tally of Capitalism’s Dead

🏴‍☠️ Colonialism & Primitive Accumulation

• Conquest of the Americas: 80–112 million indigenous deaths due to genocide, disease, and displacement.