100 million deaths due to capitalism in the 20th century.

[lomiller]

The deaths are part and parcel of communism, there's no way around it.

Repeating a claim isn't the same thing as providing evidence for it.

 

[bikerdruid]

But communism is both an economic and a political system. The deaths are part and parcel of communism, there's no way around it.

codswallop.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

You know, this subject often makes me think of a verse from a song, written by a Communist band...

Many history books condemn the terror of revolutions
And with rising fears count crosses and executions
But how to measure slavery and sweat, the terror that never ends?
The only thing interesting enough is unexpected death

Granted, this is a song that ends with the line "... and freedom dictated by workers in every country.", but I think the perspective is somewhat interesting. Granted, not very many people have been executed in the name of capitalism. But child labour, horrible working standards in factories, and the other dreads of 19th century capitalism? Pretty bad. Does it compare? I don't know. I don't think counting deaths is a great way, anyway. The bulk of all deaths (say 70 million) under totalitarian Communism occurred in the enormous Soviet Union, and China. But I think the most horrible of all remains Cambodia, even if the numbers don't compare.

Had Hitler been Chinese, surely he would've given Mao a run for his money in terms of numbers. Had Stalin been a fascist, would the number of deaths under him have been smaller?

I think the penis-measuring contest in "who killed the most" is somewhat silly. Communism has enormous numbers by and large for 3 reasons - Communism is susceptible to totalitarianism, Communist government existed primarily in the 20th century, and finally, those governments existed largely in FREAKING HUGE countries that also happened to be mostly non-industrialised. Given that classical Marxism contains the idea of society's progress, and so on, you have a recipe for disaster.

I am not a communist, and I think that any system preferential to dictatorship is insane. But it is entirely possible to discuss and analyze the causes of deaths in countries both capitalist and communist without getting into a finger-pointing discussion about "LOOK! COMMUNISM IS BAD!!" or "LOOK! CAPITALISM IS BAD!" We can learn a lot from those discussion, without having to resort to sniping at each-other's ideologies.

Because last time I checked, no postmortem has concluded "Communism" as a cause of death.

 

[lionking]

codswallop.

Fine argument. I'm convinced.

 

[Robrob]

We're just saying that the Communists killed 100,000,000 people last century which makes them the greatest mass-murderers in human history.

Your grasp of "human history" is apparently not all that good. Your ranting against "communism" is not different than the others' ranting against "capitalism." Neither of you have presented a reason why the particular political system is inherently causing these deaths.

 

[Orphia Nay]

No. For starters I generally don't assign degrees of morality to nations.

That just seems bizarre to me.

But secondly, it's ironic that someone can point to a country and complain about how terrible they are to incarcerate their people while ignoring that their own country by a large margin incarcerates the most citizens of any nation on this Earth.

The United States: 5% of the worlds population ... 25% of the world's prisoners.

I'm simply advocating for a little awareness and balance.

OK...

http://www.straightdope.com/columns...ed-states-lead-the-world-in-prison-population

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000).

Yes, but if you think and read a bit further...

I'm not aware of any attempt to systematically compare imprisonment rates for all the world's sovereign states throughout history, and compiling such a list would be a daunting task. (Fax me those Sumerian jail records, would you?) But Stalin's Soviet Union, with its huge network of forced-labor camps, would surely be near the top. I've seen widely varying figures, but let's use the conservative Britannica number of five million prisoners in the Gulag in 1936. That works out to more than 3,000 per 100,000. The record holder, though, is undoubtedly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: the regime forced virtually the entire population into labor camps or prisons during the late 1970s, killing as many as two million of the country's six to seven million people.

Communist countries were vastly worse.

 

[TubbaBlubba]

Communist countries were vastly worse.

Yeah, but really, is their exact ideology relevant? Saloth Sar/Pol Pot made Kim Il-Sung look like a sane, calm, moderate guy. I really don't think his ideology could've mattered that much. I will admit I'm not an expert on the Democratic Kampuchea years, however.

 

[Virus]

Your grasp of "human history" is apparently not all that good. Your ranting against "communism" is not different than the others' ranting against "capitalism." Neither of you have presented a reason why the particular political system is inherently causing these deaths.

The people who carried out the genocides, purges and terror were Communists.

 

[dafydd]

Your grasp of "human history" is apparently not all that good. Your ranting against "communism" is not different than the others' ranting against "capitalism." Neither of you have presented a reason why the particular political system is inherently causing these deaths.

True.

 

[WildCat]

Repeating a claim isn't the same thing as providing evidence for it.

The evidence was provided ad-nauseam in other threads, you simply choose to ignore it.

The only way for communism to work is heavy-handed and brutal government suppression of basic human nature. This can mean anything from forced relocations to collective farms (with a subsequent famine-inducing drop in food production) to imprisonment for those who dare question the party line, as we see in places like China and Cuba and North Korea. An inherent necessity of communism.

Have you found a "Capitalist Party" yet?

 

[WildCat]

codswallop.

I note you cannot find a single example of a Communist country that didn't oppress its people.

I note no Cubans have posted in the Cuba thread yet... nor do I expect any to post there so long as Cuba is communist. You cannot have both freedom and communism, they are incompatible.

 

[WildCat]

Granted, this is a song that ends with the line "... and freedom dictated by workers in every country.", but I think the perspective is somewhat interesting. Granted, not very many people have been executed in the name of capitalism. But child labour, horrible working standards in factories, and the other dreads of 19th century capitalism? Pretty bad.

None of that, however, is a core requirement of capitalism. You can have capitalism without child labor and sweatshops, you cannot have communism without a brutal government apparatus to stifle free thought and free expression.

 

[WildCat]

Yeah, but really, is their exact ideology relevant?

Of course it is, for reasons I've already hilited in this very thread.

The US isn't imprisoning people because of political ideas that threaten capitalism.

 

[Roboramma]

I was more interested in looking at it from the side that it doesn't seem to promote peace. A subtle difference. You boys don't seem to do subtle very well.

That's my bad. I thought imagined JREF was more intellectually curious than it is. Now I know better.

Capitalism promoting peace: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

The Marshall Plan took a war ravaged and divided Europe and put it on the path to integration (not to mention economic renewal) that led to the EU. At a time when many thought another European war was inevitable (look at the French insistence on keeping Germany production down in the early years after the war), the Marshall Plan helped us to avoid that.

How? By tearing down trade barriers and developing economic integration, as well as through foreign aid to help european countries invest in their own economies' futures.

It's interesting that in the same period that the US spent $13 billion (not adjusted for inflation) on European recovery, the USSR took the same amount out of eastern europe.

 

[Virus]

The 100,000,000 dead from Communism doesn't even include war casualties or collateral damage. It's pure murder of civilians by Communists. To put the 100,000,000 victims of Communism into perspective, the total number of war dead in the last century was 38 million.

 

[Virus]

I looked for a translation of the appendix from the book and the best I can find is a post on a Commie discussion board by a guy who claims to have translated it:

Yeah, I looked it up and translated a page describing their accounting, it seems pretty inadequate from what I could tell. Their calculations run like this:
Slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries: 10 million
Liquidation of the American Indians 1500-1860: 70 million
Crimean War 1853-56: 252,000
American Civil War 1861-65: 617,000
Franco-Prussian War 1870: 220,000
Massacre of the Paris Commune 1870: 20,000
French colonization of Algeria 1839: 10,000
French conquests in West Africa 19th century: 112,000
Belgian colonization of the Congo in the 19th century: 1 million
Spanish-American War 1898: 100,000
Boer War 1899-1902: 57,000
First World War 1914-18: 10 million
Spanish Civil War 1936-39: 410,000
Second World War 1939-45: 50 million
French military repression in Madagascar 1947: 80,000
War in Algeria 1954-62: 380,000
Indochina War(s) 1946-75: 3, 107,000
Anti-communist repression in Indonesia 1965: 500,000
Repression during May 1968 in Paris: 4
Massacre of students in Mexico City 1968: 400
Biafra War 1967-70: 1 million
Dictatorship in Chile 1973-90: 3,197
Dictatorship in Argentina 1976-82: 30,000
'Disappearances' in Guatemala and El Salvador 1975-96: 50,000
Falklands War 1982: 1,005
Union Carbide Bophal disaster 1984: 2,900
Persian Gulf War 1991: 160,022
TOTAL: 147 387 051

Kind of a wimpy calculus, in my view.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/black-book-capitalism-t131237/index.html?t=131237

 

[lomiller]

The evidence was provided ad-nauseam in other threads, you simply choose to ignore it.

All I see is see is ideology. You are essentially saying that when de4aths occur under communism ism it's because of the communism and when they occur under capitalism it''s not at fault.

Your reasoning for this doesn't extend beyond just because you belvi8e it.

Again the reality is that the correlation is whit political structure and authoritarianism which isn't owned by either. If there is a relevant point to be taken away it's that conservative societies tend to be the most authoritarian and most prone to this type of disaster.

 

[Beerina]

Oh i get it: whenever someone dies in a capitalist country, for whatever reason, it's because of capitalism. Brilliant.

Or not capitalist countries, keep in mind.



Capitalism...as derivative of freedom and the right to association and property, seems to be doing just fine.

Indeed, a counter-argument could be made that nations that stray from it thus slow their own, and thus world-wide, technological development, and thus the world is further behind, technologically, than it would be were everyone like the Evil US. And that that number of lives lost, due to lagging tech, makes that 100 million look like a day at Disney World.


If a business-unfriendly climate, for example, makes medical tech lag 10%, then after 100 years, you'd be 10 years behind. A 30% slowdown and you'd be 30 years behind. Overjoyed to be receiving free 1981-level med tech in 2011? How many lives are you actually saving?


If the FDA delayed a drug that saved 10% of heart disease patients by 10 years, well, there's 400,000 needless lives lost right there. Compare it to how many they may have saved by merely existing and stopping (some) harmful drugs from getting to market too fast? I don't think people want to do the math on that one.



I don't know the numbers to plug into those equations, but I also know nobody has, and it's loaded with nothing but hot air touting and stroking how awesome these things are.

 

[Virus]

All I see is see is ideology. You are essentially saying that when de4aths occur under communism ism it's because of the communism and when they occur under capitalism it''s not at fault.

Your reasoning for this doesn't extend beyond just because you belvi8e it.

Again the reality is that the correlation is whit political structure and authoritarianism which isn't owned by either. If there is a relevant point to be taken away it's that conservative societies tend to be the most authoritarian and most prone to this type of disaster.

Just as we say "The Nazis killed 20 million people." We say "The Communists killed a hundred million people." Which happens to be the world record for mass extermination.

 

[DC]

does it include the people that starved do to food speculations of wealthy capitalists?