The arguments i've seen have been very piss poor.
They ignore the fact that there's actually two volumes of this book and seemingly never address it.
As for the first book that is so well known I found out about the controversy but didn't know much about the actual "arguments" used until I came into contact with one Marxist, and he just rattled off the wikipedia critique with a few embellishments, such as claiming that ALL the authors came out and "denounced the book" as if they suddenly had a revelation that it was HERESY! And they'd lied to defame the "good names" of Marx, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin! (suddenly I fail to see how Hitler attacking the Soviets couldn't been anything other than a service to humanity).
The usual "arguments" go like this:
1. Well actually Capitalists have killed more people so Communism is good
2. Actually Hitler killed more because he started world war two and is responsible for all those casualties (yet they actually make this "argument")
3. "Death camps did not exist in the Soviet Union" (apparently that's NOT what Gulags were, how do they figure that?)
It's all pretty weak shit. Not to mention hypocritical. The wiki states for example:
Historians Jean-Jacques Becker and J. Arch Getty have criticized Courtois[23]:178 for failing to draw a distinction between victims of neglect and famine and victims of "intentional murder"
Which is so fucking hypocritical it begs belief. The exact SAME distinction SHOULD be made when it came to German actions in the east and preserving foodstuffs. As in, the Germans not having much food for themselves, fed their people back home and their soldiers before POWs and the Western inhabitants of the Soviet Union, however, this utilitarianism and ruthless logical pragmatism is overlooked for the more favourable anti-german mythology of "exterminating the Slavs". Anyone who knows ANYTHING about the claims made on that issue of the Second World War know quite well that the "evidence"doesn't exist and there's no mention whatsoever about exterminating anyone, only the mention of possible casualties it's a joke.
But we MUST go easy on the Marxists apparently, yet we all know the reasons for this. The entire controversy about this book is Marxists trying to deny their criminally genocidal political views, while in the same breath morally grandstanding about the Hoax that is the refuted Holocaust narrative.
To illustrate this I would like to recommend this paper titled "
Nazism And Communism: Evil Twins?" (
https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/alaindebenoist/pdf/evil_twins.pdf) written by French New Right Nationalist and academic thinker Alain de Benoist, Alma Master at the University of Paris.
Pp. 119
The debate concerns these two questions. The notion that communism can be regarded as inherently criminal and virtually exterminationist continues to generate intense opposition, but no less so than the notion of the comparability of communism and Nazism. Courtois has been attacked for even broaching these two subjects. The attacks have been so violent that some authors have not hesitated to speak of the Black Book as an “intellectual deception” and “propaganda” (Gilles Perrault), a “mess” (Jean-Marie Colombani), “a gift to the National Front at the
time of the Papon trial” (Lilly Marcou), “the gruesome accounting of wholesalers” (Daniel Bensaid), “an ideological tract” (Jean-Jacques Marie), “a fraud” (Maurice Nadeau), “the denial of history” (Alain Blum) and even “negationism” (Adam Rayski). Revealing in this regard is that Courtois has been reproached for having written that: “the death by starvation of an Ukrainian kulak child as a result of the deliberate famine orchestrated by the Stalinist regime rates the same as the death by starvation of a Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto during the famine brought about by the Nazi regime.” What is scandalous, however, is not this sentence, but the fact that it was even questioned. Philippe Petit went as far as to write that “all deaths do not have the same value.”5 Unfortunately, he did not provide any criteria to distinguish between victims of the first rank and those of the second. The fact that today it is still unclear whether a crime is a crime or whether all the victims have the same value says much about the spirit of the times.
And there it is. The lives of Jews are WORTH MORE than those of European gentiles. They admit this, they defend this, and they hate books which questions this, or rather, books like the Black Book that don't AT ALL question the Holocaust narrative but simply put into perspective the orthodox view of National Socialism with that of Communism. This kind of comparison is one that the Jews of the Academic world, most often Marxists themselves it seems, cannot bare to see.
Benoist also notes on the first page:
this work attempts to provide an accurate account of the human cost of communism in view of the documentary evidence available today. The estimate is around 100 million dead — four times the body-count of Nazism. These figures are not really a revelation. From Boris Souvarine to Robert Conquest and Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn, many authors have dealt with matters such as the Gulag; the famines deliberately provoked by the Kremlin (which in 1921-22 and 1932-33 killed in the Ukraine five and six million people respectively); the forced
deportations, between 1930 and 1953, of seven million people within the Soviet Union (kulaks, Volga Germans, Chechens, Tatars and others from Caucasus); the millions killed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, etc. By comparison, the Black Book’s figures are rather conservative.1
and
The intense interest in the Black Book is due to the fact that it is based on accurate documentation from the Moscow archives, now open to researchers. This is why the figures have not been questioned. Based on this documentation, some reviewers conclude that “the balance sheet of communism constitutes the worst case of political carnage in history,”2 or “the greatest, the bloodiest criminal system in history.”3 Thus, the debate has not been about the facts themselves, but their interpretation. According to Courtois, communist regimes everywhere have “raised mass criminality to the level of a veritable system of government.” From this, one can infer communism did not contradict its principles when it killed people, but followed them — in other words, that communism was not just a system which committed crimes, but one whose very essence was criminal. As Tony Judt put it,4 today no one can dispute the criminal nature of communism. It should be added, that communism killed many more people than Nazism, it killed over a longer period of time than Nazism, and it began doing so before Nazism. “The methods used by Lenin and systematized by Stalin and those who emulated them,” writes Courtois, “are not only reminiscent of Nazi methods, but preceeded them.” This alone calls for “a comparative analysis concerning similarity between a regime which, since 1945, has been regarded as the most criminal of the century, and the communist system, which up to 1991 retained its international legitimacy, is still in power in some countries, and has supporters throughout the world.”
The last thing I will add is a mention from the book "Hitler: Stalin's Stooge" by James B. Edwards where he not only affimrs the fact that Stalin wanted to invade Europe, that Hitler acted preemptively, but that Stalin STARTED World War Two. He also mentions the Communist deathroll which he estimates along with others lies at around 130 million.
I don't have the exact page number as I was only able to view a preview of the book here:
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/hitler-james-edwards/1102172068
. And I don't think Sebby here would disagree with that figure or the absolute necessity of that figure. We can pretty much declare that Seb is a hypocrite on this point alone, as it isn't likely he'd "deny" the Jewish Holocaust.