(I also considered Andrew Jackson, a Christian who was responsible for the Trail of Tears, which killed more non-Christian people than the 9/11 attacks, and yet gets to be on our $20 bill.)
(but, you know, iconographical brevity and all that)
Excuse me sir, may I have a moment to talk to you about Jesus?
It really just gets me when people forget about the fucking crusades.
nooooooooooooooooobody remembers the Spanish Inquisition!
Indian Boarding Schools, anyone?
Colonization of the Americas and the genocide of millions of Indigenous people in the name of “Manifest Destiny”?
….or what about the biggest forced migration in human history, the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade? The enslavement of millions of Africans was all done in the name of Christianity, sooooooooo…..
Oh HEY, what about all those radical Christian bombings that happen, lik ethe Oklahoma City bombing, pictured above, or the bombing of Planned Parenthood and Abortion Clinics?
Poor shelter, polluted water, inadequate sanitation, often from homelessness (sideeffectsincludenausea helped with this one): 50,000 per day [x]
Occupational Asbestos Exposure: 107,000 per year [x]
International Sex Trafficking: 30,000 per year [x]
“Communist Death Toll,” according to The Black Book of Communism: 94 million
Capitalism Death Toll: 369 million (369,790,731), according only to the statistics I could get sources for. This number doesn’t even scratch the surface.
But, guess what? Tomorrow, we know for sure that capitalism will kill at least 77,000 more people.
You know what? No. Fuck this. I’m sick of clueless young Westeners undermining the deaths under communism to further their argument. My parents lived trough this shit. My grandparents lost half their families during Mao’s reign, were sent to labour camps and beaten and worked half to death and I’m sick people like you ignoring their lives in favour of some cheap argument to prop up communism.
You can argue against capitalism and I won’t say a word against it – but if your argument is based on the idea that communism is somehow the “lesser evil”, thereby completely disregarding the government-sanctioned genocide, famine, violence and oppression that actual people suffered, then you can take several fucking seats – especially if you’ve never experienced that violence, never lost family members to that violence and never seen first-hand what it drives people to.
Because you’re using statistics from over 500 years and across the globe (60 countries going by your stats) to compare to the death toll of what occurred over 50 years and in 11 countries.
95 million is an extremely all-inclusive number and it’s been debated about the historical accuracies and how broadly covers. Even so, a majority of that number is spread out to a few countries in under fifty years.
Now obviously, more than eleven countries have been communist states – but going by the ‘95 million’ statistic, most of the these numbers are split between China under Mao, USSR under Stalin and Cambodia under Khmer Rouge. The rest are rough estimates from about 262 000 to 1.1 million which were under North Korea, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, North Vietnam, Ethiopia.
Communism may have killed less, but the death toll is far more saturated. To break this down a bit. Coming second to none is China:
an estimate of 42 million died in China during the three-year famine of 1958-1961. Historians dispute over the actual number; 15 million is official government numbers but unofficial estimates vary between 23 mil. (Peng) to 46 mil. (Chen), but the closest and most recent estimate is about 45 million by Dikötter, who included deaths from suicide, militia executions and violence.
sidenote: according Yang Jisheng, who estimated 30 million dead from famine, another estimated 40 million ‘failed to be born’, making about 70 million in population loss.
This happened during 3 years. in one country.
and oh yeah, there was also another 92,000 Tibetans killed under Communist Government from Mao to current and another estimated 1.2 million died during the Cultural Revolution from labour camps, prisons, murders and executions (‘61-‘69).
Now, lets look at Russia, coming second place.
not including war casualty, 20-30 million died under Stalin from 1924-1953. Again, numbers vary – some estimates go as high 60 million.
Of those, 1.2 million were from the Great Purge of ‘36-39 (including invasion of Mongolia and purge of XinJiang because guess what, communism doesn’t magically erase a white dude’s sense of imperialism).
Then there were from gulags, deportation and ethnic cleansing (of Jews, Slavs, Romani, Poles, among others).
The rest were deaths from from famine from ‘26-’38. If we add deaths that occurred during deportations, POW died under care, and death in other Soviet countries during Stalin’s rule, then the average number gets closer to 30 mil.
Not to forget:
2.2 million were killed in Cambodia during Khmer Rouge’s rule, 1975-1979. Half were from famine/disease, half were executions.
North Korea has no an ‘official’ number, but calculated deaths from 1948-87 were about 1 million. 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine.
The death toll during Mao’s Famine during the Great Leap Forward would be an estimated 52,000 per day, going by 40 million death-toll estimates – and that from one country alone.
During Stalin’s Great Purge, executions were calculated to be 1000 per day.
And you want to compare this to a world-wide conglomerate?
And before you put words in my mouth, I’m not saying a damn thing in defense of capitalism.
You can denounce capitalism all you want, but you need take several steps back and reconsider if you’re going to do so on the backs of people who actually suffered through an oppressive, abusive, totalitarian regime by devaluing their suffering and using it as an example of how communism is the “"lesser evil”“ – especially if you have never lived through it, lost family members or felt the fear of such a regime.
Don’t attribute the death toll to Stalinism or Maoism or say it was ‘wrong form’ of communism. You do not get to cherry pick your flavour of totalitarianism so that it suits your social stance. You do not get to undermine, appropriate and white-wash the human atrocities and genocides committed in the name of communism so that you can cover up the ugly underbelly of how these regimes will work, has worked and is currently working.
These are not statistics for you to brush under the mat so that communism can seem ‘less evil’. People who deported, sent to labour camps, starved to death, sold out by the colleagues, murdered by their students are not collateral fucking damage for make-believe, Westernised idealistic communism.
(and another side-note: the Anti-communism cleansing in Indonesia had fuck-all to do with capitalism and everything to do with anti-Chinese sentiments. These were all tied in with the historical socio-politics at the time, such as the foreign policy of CCCP, the relationship and influence of the Chinese government under Zhou Enlai , and the state of Indonesia’s militarisation under Sukarno that was helped by China. To use their complicated and brutal political and social history that literally nothing to do with Western capitalism and everything to do with East Asian international relations to back your argument is really fucking imperialist.)
Thank you for the take-down.
I would’ve got an aneurysm trying to elaborate on everything wrong with OP’s post and how it’s stuffed with smug Western imperialism and US-centrism. (So now, all the deaths in Europe and Asia in WW2 were just about ‘capitalism’? Not, I dunno, some ideas of German and Japanese ethnic and racial superiority? Unless you want to tell me racial and ethnic tensions that long-predated capitalism somehow were caused by capitalism? Fuck that bullshit.)
And slavery as a system has been present in human societies long before capitalism was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It can exist in a non-capitalist society. And let’s just say there were plenty of forced labour camps and gulags in Communist regimes. I mean, if I recall correctly, didn’t the ostensibly “”Capitalist”” World War 2 in Europe begin when Nazi Germany AND the Soviet Union invaded Poland? Maybe because imperialism isn’t tied strictly to a capitalist society though the two can reinforce each other. Or no empires would have existed before the modern era.
TBH I’ve no more patience for people who love glossing over the complexities of the violence suffered by our families just to fit their agenda, especially when these people are trying to appear Oh So Progressive but it’s just Western imperialism on steroids.
Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley’s official response to a letter urging him not to prosecute Ku Klux Klan members who bombed a church that killed four black girls in 1963.
In a private cemetery in small-town Arkansas, a woman single-handedly buried and gave funerals to more than 40 gay men during the height of the AIDS epidemic, when their families wouldn’t claim them.
–Source
One person who found the courage to push the wheel is Ruth Coker Burks. Now a grandmother living a quiet life in Rogers, in the mid-1980s Burks took it as a calling to care for people with AIDS at the dawn of the epidemic, when survival from diagnosis to death was sometimes measured in weeks. For about a decade, between 1984 and the mid-1990s and before better HIV drugs and more enlightened medical care for AIDS patients effectively rendered her obsolete, Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She had no medical training, but she took them to their appointments, picked up their medications, helped them fill out forms for assistance, and talked them through their despair. Sometimes she paid for their cremations. She buried over three dozen of them with her own two hands, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
How have I never heard of this?
People like her should be remembered. And even more importantly, we must remember that there was a time in our history when we needed someone like her.
History geek note: Now I’m imagining an editorial cartoon from 1615 comparing “Ye Moderne Bible Reading Woman” with the good, old-fashioned women from 1315 who didn’t insist on learning to read the bible for themselves but were content to have a learned Man of the Church interpret it for them. I’d try drawing it myself if I could draw anything other then stick figures.
The editorial cartoon from 1615 you imagine actually exists! Or at least, something a lot like it.
This is an illustration from the 1600s. First picture shows the good old days, when people carried around lances to stab people with and we actually read literature and wore spurred boots. The second picture is THE DEGENERATE PRESENT, where all these 1600s millennials wear RIBBONS and play DICE and SMOKE and DRINK STUFF FROM SNAKE FLAGONS. Damn 1600s hipsters. It was better when I was your age.
Humanity, never change.
Look! Silvermarmoset posted an editorial cartoon from the 1600s, providing more proof that no matter what century you were born into you always just missed the good old days.
Waiting for Winter 