Some critique of Mann’s concepts and analysis “The extensive mass murders of Communist states are problematic,” argues scholar Martin Shaw in his review of Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy . “Mann plausibly describes many of them as classicide , because their targets were social classes, and explains them as ‘mistaken revolutionary projects’ rather than as ethnic conflict. But he also offers the perversion of socialism as a class variant of the more common ethnic perversion of democracy: ‘socialist ideals of democracy also became perverted as the demos became entwined with the term proletariat , the working class, creating pressures to cleanse other classes.’ Along with the perversion of national democracy, this was then a second ‘general way in which democratic ideals were transmuted into murderous cleansing.’ However[,] we may question whether the idea of the proletariat (working class) was really a moving force in the perversion of Soviet de...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51