I remember on reddit someone made a logic pretzel to argue that capitalism had killed no one. And it wasn't the "fault of the individual " argument. Closer to "capitalism is the default so they don't count" but not quite
Yeah, that's pretty much their line. When people die under communism it's because something something evil commies, but when people die in capitalism it's some bullshit about them deciding not to voluntarily pull themselves up by their free market bootstraps. Just stupid childish thinking, the kind you can't even really demonstrate is wrong because the weren't really saying anything coherent in the first place.
It was a slightly different argument but ultimately as meaningless. The user seemed proud of having an 'original' thought tho
You know, when you think about it, death sure kills a lot of people.
The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.
Sounds similar to "when people leave a poor AES country they're political refugees, but when people leave a poor capitalist country they're economic migrants."
For a very brief moment the USA was too communist for killing nazis. They realized this and instead enlisted their help in making bombs and rocket ships.
For a very brief moment the USA was too communist for killing nazis.
to be fair, America only joined the Soviets in killing nazis after about 19 years of the American bourgeoisie:
- helping them rise to power
- selling them Ford motor cars
- selling them IBM computers (which they used to build punch card databases of holocaust targets)
- selling them weapons
- deporting german jewish refugees back to germany
- writing op eds in the new york times about how hitler was a super clever centrist merely using antisemitism to rile up his dumb base
- countless other things i can't think of right now.
England/America's role in continental Europe in WW2 wasn't defeating the nazis so much as racing the Soviets to Berlin so they could do damage control on the spread of Communism, and then setting up rat lines for the nazi war criminals to escape to South America or, even worse, go on to have lucrative roles in NATO, the EU, the CIA, NASA, etc.
There was also the whole failed invasion of the not yet USSR
I remember someone on the old sub made an effort post collating the death tolls of capitalism using the extact same metrics and methods of victims of communism and the number came out to around 3 billion over 150 years
So many good fuckin posts were lost, goddammit
Yeah, there's a few of those. I'm sure people that trot out the 100 million number find it unconvincing though, even if they don't know where it comes from
I think Boots Riley did something similar on twitter recently but on a smaller scale. He compared the great depression to the famines in... China? or maybe it was in the USSR? Funny how no one thinks of the great depression as a consequence of capitalism.
Tito, fire up the pit, we got some VoCMF wonks to throw in there
