- Capitalism and Alternatives -

Far, far more guilty

Posted by: Nikhil Jaikumar ( DSA, MA, USA ) on December 11, 1999 at 21:21:31:

In Reply to: Equally guilty? posted by Frenchy on December 10, 1999 at 15:00:54:

Don't be ridiculous Frenchy. You can't seriously suggest that communist and socialist regimes have been responsible for more bloodshed than teh capitalists. Capitalist regiems have entirely WIPED OUT ENTIRE peoples from the planet. The Tasmanians were murdered, every last amn of them, by the British settlers trying to make money off their mines and ranches in Australia. It wasn't the socialists who murdered a million Indonesians, sent hundreds of thousands to prison camps, and exterminated a third of teh east Timor population. it wasn't the socialists who killed ten million people in the Congo 90 years ago, mutilating thousands more. That crime was carried out by the Belgians, in the name of private enterprise and Christian civilization. And just to pre-empt Gee, may I add that the Congo Free State was a model of capitalsim and state non-interference; there was no state in the Congo Free State, only untrammeled private ownership. It was the privayte rubber companeis, not the socialists, who carried out genocide in the upper reaches of teh Amazon, wiping out 84% of the Brazilian Indians by murdering them and deliberately infecting them with disease. It was a right-wing capitalist government, backed by teh US, which razed Indian villages in Guatemala and wiped out a quarter of a million people. It was the right wing in El Salvador which murdered peasants, priests and trade unionists, soem 70,000 of them, under the slogan 'Be a patriot, Kill a priest.' It was a right wing government in Pakistan, closely allied with the US, that murdered three million Bengalis until the Indian Army invaded and liberated the people. It was a right-wing government in South Africa that stretched its long and murderous arms from Sweden to Mozambique. (yes, I've heard rumors that Prime Minister Olof Palme of Sweden was assassinated on orders from the South African government). It was a right-wing British regime that amid myriad other atrocities, slaughetred 400 peaceful protesters on one afternoon in Amritsar. And what about the right wing Contra terrorists who killed 30,000 Nicaraguans? and what about the 3 million dead in Vietnam?

Even the far-right scholar Eugene Genovese acknowledges these crimes.

Plus, if you even include Mao and Stalin as socialists (which most socialists here don't; do you accept Hitler as a capitalist?) most of their death toll was due to famine. This is accepted by even teh most anti-communist 'scholars'. If it's famine you want to talk about, let's look at the modern world, governed by a capitalist order, which denies food to soem 840 million people, causing gross millions to die of famien every year. If you attribute the famine deaths to Stalin and Mao, you must attribute the famine deaths caused by teh Western world, which beat Mao hands down.

A little reason and truth here, please.



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