On My Mind: Recent Episodes

Economics Professor Evan Osborne of Wright University says he can't teach the class "Marxism: A History of Theory and Practice" except to honor students per his administration and it is clearly just censorship. He wants to counter criticism of capitalism. I wanted to ask him a few questions.
(DL)
Can you give me some examples in history of societies where "marxism" took place prior to genocide.
I always distinguish between genocide and democide, The former is an attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic or religious group, and the latter the mass killing of people by government. I think only one example in the history of communism might
qualify as genocide, the death of millions of Ukrainians because of famine under Stalin in the 1930s. Historians are not unanimous whether he was merely indifferent to their suffering or actively sought to bring it about.

But if you want to talk about democide, there are many examples. The Chinese government had a murderous campaign against alleged landlords in the early 1950s, in which several million people were executed. (They took power in 1949, but had engaged in similar activities in areas they controlled before that.) Stalin is estimated to have killed perhaps 3/4 of 1 million people in the Great Terror in the late 1930s. Cambodia, which had a population of maybe 7 million when the Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, killed at least one and perhaps 2 million of them in an extermination campaign that lasted almost until the moment Vietnam invaded and threw them out of power. North Korea is less well documented, but it is known that they engaged in similar brutal terror campaigns.

There were also mass famines, which were usually met with Government indifference. In addition to the Soviet example above, China lost 30 million people during a famine from 1957 to 1961, even as chairman Mao was seizing food from the rural communes so that people in the cities could eat, and so that grains could be exported to other communist countries in exchange for industrial equipment. Communist Ethiopia created and ignored a mass gone in the mid-1989s. If you have heard of the Live Aid concerts, they were organized in response to this famine, although the Marxist nature of the government was seldom discussed. There was also a major famine in North Korea in the late 1990s, although again the death toll is difficult to estimate.

(DL) what research materials/books can you recommend to someone interested in this topic (and concerned about the risks to Americans in the current political climate)

The black book of communism is a meticulous compilation of other people’s scholarship on deaths under communism in all communist countries. It is written for scholars, so it may be tough sledding, but the documentation is meticulous. Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe is more suitable for a general audience, as is Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, which discusses many other topics. I also recommend Bloodlands, which discusses the mass killings and territory controlled by Stalin and Hitler from The late 1930s to 1945.

(DL)What other classes do you teach?

I am in economist. In addition to teaching a variety of first-year courses, I teach upper-division classes in law and economics, sports economics, and the economics of diversity. As you noted, I have also taught several broader courses for the honors program at our university, for which most students are not eligible, including the Marxist course twice and a course on the Great Depression.

(DL)why do you think the school is limiting the class "Marxism" A History of Theory & Practice" to only honor students?

I want to be clear, it’s not the university, it’s the economics department. Our department is unusual, although not unique, in having many radical professors who expressed enthusiasm for Marxism among other doctrines. They are simply unwilling to accept that academic freedom implies that the ideas they believe in can be criticized too....