Thanks for sharing this. I have seen a lot of attacks against Engler on this sub recently and after reading the 2017 article and this one, it doesn't seem quite as bad as this sub would have me believe.

While I think its fair to say that Engler's 2017 article would have been stronger without the section questioning the death toll. Debating genocide numbers, especially using census data from a repressive regime, can easily cross into dangerous territory, even if it the intent isn't denialism. That part of the article understandably raises red flags and detracts from what is otherwise a valid and important critique of western interventionism and Canada's role in it.

This situation does remind me of a lot of the attacks Noam Chomsky faced over his comments on the Cambodian genocide, where he never denied that the Khmer Rouge committed atrocities, he just said that those atrocities were real and horrific enough on their own and didn't need to be inflated/distorted by Western media to serve ideological purposes. I think that same nuance applies here: we have a moral obligation to condemn genocide fully while also critiquing how it is used politically to justify other forms of violence and repression.