As the historian Ronald Aronson pointed out, even if Margolin did not cite the figure of one million victims of Vietnamese Communism invented by Courtois in the introduction, at no point in his chapter on Communism in Asia did he mention that the US intervention in Vietnam had cost, according to some estimates, up to three million lives.
“the claims that Courtois made in the book’s introduction were not even accepted by all of his own contributors.”
The figure encompasses the number of Vietnamese casualties resulting from armed conflict with the US.