Death tolls. Why does Limited Inc circle this rebarbative topic again and again, like the Biblical canine slinking back to its biblical dejecta? Simple answer, honey, is: it is history � yours and mine, for ever and ever, world without end, amen.

As I said in yesterday�s post, the historians of the Soviet Empire (file under evil) have a disconcerting habit of flaming each other about death toll numbers. How many died in the de-kulakization of the early 30s? Robert Conquests figures are holy writ to the National Review crowd, while the Nation crowd views them as insufferable puffery, fixing the death accounting books. (The same ideological divide, but a differently distributed disposition to skepticism, presides over the number of Sanction dead in Iraq.) The vested interest in increasing death toll numbers is in contrast to the usual political positions taken by the people who brandish the numbers. The larger the number, the greater the ideological difference between the accuser and the particular criminal regime. The deconstructionist in me can�t resist pointing to a sort of hostile mimicry instituted by this habit. It is as if, in order to memorialize a mass killing, the eulogists need to kill a greater number, if only figuratively. The same economic motive operates among the killers, as we know from records of the GPU and the SS. The greater the number of victims, the greater the productivity.

I�ve submitted a proposal to write about this for a more remunerative publication, so I am not going to get into it here � no use throwing pearls before swine (not you, gentle reader � Limited Inc is speaking figuratively). But the war of numbers among the historians is reminiscent of other number wars � for instance, in the estimation of demonstration crowds. I�m tempted to allude, extensively, to the master thinker of crowd symbols, Elias Canetti. But in perusing his book, Crowds and Power, I came upon a section on the increasing crowd, but not the increasing crowd of the dead. That the dead don�t fuck is one of the laws of a nature, even among the myths. But that they can increase � that we are prepared to increase them statistically, if not by the discovery of individual cases � is a modern phenomenon that must have its roots in one of Canetti�s crowd symbols.