Currently in an argument with a chud on Reddit that pulled the 100 million dead figure, and he doesn’t believe that they’re including dead Nazis and unborn descendants of dead people in that figure. I want to show him how ridiculous the figures are in that book is by calculating the victims of capitalism using the same flimsy logic.
He doesn’t appear to be one of those “capitalism didn’t kill anyone because how can two people exchanging goods be deadly” types that you sometimes see, as he’s willing to attribute the Nazis to capitalism’s death toll. He sent me this:
"You should check the democide concept developed by Prof. R. J. Rummel:
Rummel coined the term democide, defined as
“the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.”
Obviously the definition excludes natural causes as you suggest. Democides were mostly exerted by communist regimes:
128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS
61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist China
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime
19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGA-MURDERERS
5,964,000 Murdered: Japan’s Savage Military
2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey’s Genocidal Purges
1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
1,585,000 Murdered: Poland’s Ethnic Cleansing
1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
1,072,000 Murdered: Tito’s Slaughterhouse"
Actually looking it up, even the black book of communism has the Soviets at 20 million murdered so I have no idea where he’s getting 62 million dead.
No, doing that is basically useless. The people citing the Black Book of Communism would never be convinced by doing it from the other side, I mean they didn’t even read the BBC, they just cite it as a cudgel.
He’s missing the death toll of colonialism on capitalism’s high score. The British Raj alone is believed to have killed 35-45 million people (one scholar claims an enormous body count of 1.8 billion Indians). The Belgians killed between 10 and 15 million people in Congo. 15 million native Americans were killed in what is now the US. And the list goes on and on and on. Wherever white people showed up, driven by capitalism, people started to die.
Another missing number is the total body count of both world wars.
And then one should remember that capitalism is an ongoing atrocity. Global capitalism starves nine million people to death each year, not because of a lack of food, mountains of food goes to waste in the imperial core, but purely because of ideological decisions not to give starving people food. Millions die from preventable diseases, not because of a lack of knowledge or resources but purely because healing them is not profitable.
One could say that people starved to death or denied healthcare are not intentional killings. This is bullshit. If famines that happened in the underdeveloped and war torn Soviet Union are the responsibility of communism then those who die from hunger or denial of healthcare today are the responsibility of capitalism. We know about the problems, the resources to stop the deaths are there, all that is lacking is political will to put human lives above profits.
The future of capitalism looks even grimmer than the present. Climate change brought about by capitalism’s refusal to think beyond the next fiscal year is making huge areas in the global south unable to support its current population. The current century is going to be one of unparalleled death and horror.
The big surprise was seeing the Nationalist Chinese there at 4th place. We know all the others but you never hear about what they did.
By the way those numbers are wrong, the real ones can be seen at the source: https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
The best chapter is 13, Death By American Bombing And Other Democide https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP13.HTM
If he’s not using the Black Book then debunking the Black Book won’t help you. You should ask for his source.
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM
This is the source provided
