: : Well...ya gotta reach 100 million somehow...: 100 million? shouldn't be too hard. let's give it a shot. 100 million killed by forces which were right-wing, capitalist, or closely allied to the US. (Any, not ALL of the above).
: Let's start with the 35 million killed in the wars the Nazis started, plus the 15.5 million killed by the Japanese and the 850,000 killed by Fascist Italy. What else do we have? 10 million killed in the names of progress and private enterprise in King Leopold's "Congo Free State" (hailed at the time as a capitalist marvel). 3,150,000 killed by Chiang Kai-Shek in China. 2 million killed by the French in China, 1.3 million killed by the Indonesians, a quarter-million killed by teh Guatemalans....If you add to this the crimes of Junker-Capitalist Germany, colonial Britain, the US Army in the Philippines and Vietnam, Pakistan, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chile, Mozambique, Rhodesia, Brazil, and several other right-wing regimes or terrorist armies, you get a total of about 84,400,000 people directly killed this century by capitalism and its armies. (The Congo Free State overlaps somewhat with last century, but so what....) That's within striking distance of the 85 million that the French researchers "found" as a result of tehir "unbiased" survey. If you then do what they did, and add another spurious 15 million on for effect, then presto- 100 million victims of capitalist murder this century. Of course, that's neglecting that most of those killed by 'socialist regimes' died of starvation, and who's better at encouraging starvation than the capitalists? Thre million died in British-ruled Calcutta in 1943 alone, in psite of the fact that food wasn't lacking. If you add the estimated 40,000 deaths EVERY DAY from hunger and deprivation, capitalism beats socialism in teh death toll by many country miles.
*If we're talking just this century (bearing in mind that the new millenium actually begins 1/1/2001), let's not forget the 6 million workers/peasants killed in WWI... literally the Grand-Daddy of modern expansions of commerce and market share through warfare... add to that the one million who died in the influenza epidemic of 1919 which resulted from conditions of dysentary throughout western Europe at the conclusion of the war.
It's funny, because I believe that we do have to 'face the music' when it comes to Pol Pot (let's also not forget that it was the Army of Vietnam which finally cleared out the Khmer Rouge once and for all...), but the apologists for Capital never acknowledge the fact that it was the US which carpet bombed Cambodia under Nixon which created the opportunity for the Khmer Rouge to seize power. It was the US which sent millions of small arms (M-16's) and intelligence information via the CIA to the Khmer Rouge, because they fought along the border with Vietnam. It was the US which cast the sole dissenting vote on the UN Security Council on those occasions when it came time to strip the Khmer Rouge of their seat on the UN... and guess who the ambassador to the UN was who cast those votes? George Bush ('Senior' one must add given the way political power tends to run in families in this democratic-oligarchy). So why does this retard Courtois give 'communism' all the blame, but none of the credit?* --K
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