One of the most important books of the 1990s was Le Livre noir du communisme, published by ex-Maoist Stephane Courtois in 1997. We will not dwell on the well-known psychology of conversion. The book was a complete Latin American idiot’s manual but from the first world and much more middle life.
From this book proceed endless publications in social networks about “one hundred million deaths of communism”, although the authors themselves estimated the death toll between 65 and 95 million, listing every event where the communist thing was involved and was of the highest figure. by any chance
The Second World War is attributed to Hitler and Stalin, since the latter was the main author of that disaster, and the latter was the cause of that tragedy. But the authors come to the conclusion that Stalin killed more than Hitler, without considering the causes of each tragedy and assigning part of the 70 million dead in the Second World War to Stalin, when he started the war, the second term. Twenty million Russian deaths are attributed to Stalin. Torturers in the Soviet era estimate Stalin’s responsibility for 100 million deaths, which is a horrendous figure, but far from what is attributed to him, and even more than some of the destruction caused by other conquerors.
In 1945, General LeMay destroyed several Japanese cities, including Nagoya, Osaka, Yokohama and Kobe three months before the atomic bombs. On the night of March 10, he ordered 300 B-29 bombers to drop 1,500 tons of explosives on Tokyo. 500,000 bombs rained down from 1:30 am to 3:00 am 100,000 men, women and children died in a few hours and millions of others were seriously wounded. “Women were running with their babies as torches were burning behind them,” recalls survivor Nihei. “I’m not worried about killing the Japanese,” said General LeMay, the same man who two decades later would recommend President Kennedy to drop the atomic bombs on Havana in order to solve the problem of bearded rebels. In the early 1980s, Secretary of State Alexander Haig told President Ronald Reagan: “Give me the order and I’ll turn that shitty island into an empty lot.”
Courtois’ book lists two of the three million total deaths in North Korea and attributes them to the community, without considering that the indiscriminate bombing by General MacArthur and other “defenders of freedom” wiped out 80 percent of the country. Since the 1950s, hundreds of tons of bombs have been dropped in one day.
Courtois also counts the millions of deaths in Vietnam due to the commons, without thinking of the war of independence against the French and the United States of America, which at least two million dead, most of them not in combat, but also. under the classic US aerial bombardment (launched in 1927 against Sandino in Nicaragua) and the use of the chemical agent Aurus, which not only promiscuously destroyed millions of innocent people, but also the effects of its genetic changes are felt today.
He also attributes the barbarism of the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia to the community at large, because it was a communist government, not to mention supported by Washington and Western corporations, and the communist United States of Vietnam, which they set up. to put an end to this brutality, while the West continues to support the genocidal, recognizing them in the UN as a legitimate government until the 1980s. Between the years 1969 and 1973, more bombs (500,000 tons) fell on Cambodia than those that fell on Germany and Japan. World War II The same thing happened to North Korea and Laos. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, children of the anti-colonial reaction against the West, were later supported by China and the United States, while killing millions of people. Vietnam ended the massacre of Pol Pot after the massacre of 30,000 Vietnamese.
The largest number of 94 million victims of communism represents the catastrophic famine in Mao’s China in the 1960s. This famine of 1958-62 killed not 60 million, but some 35 million, and was by no means a deliberate racist extermination plan, Nazi-style in Germany or British-style in India. The need for industries in the countries of Brazil and Argentina was repeated, and their only sin was that they came late. In the case of China, he combined disastrous politics with climate problems. Despite everything, life expectancy in China began to improve rapidly from the 1960s.
At the same time, India began to improve its population’s life expectancy because it ceased to be a fast-growing colony and plundered by the British Empire, which alone was responsible for the deaths of 100 million people between 1880 and 1920. However, the economist and professor at Harvard University, Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze, from the London School of Economics, published Hunger and Public Action in 1991, where, with statistical rigor, they reached a number of forgotten cases of world hunger caused by capitalist policies. it was concluded that in the same period, in democratic India, 100 million died, also for political reasons.
These studies did not resonate with the mainstream press and the world did not find them. Six years later, Le Livre noir du communisme and other fast-selling and easy-to-digest commercials of the same genre became famous. The same thing happened with the intellectual and diplomatic analyzes of Shashi Tharoor and professors Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan due to the political impact of imperial capitalism.
If we continue to calculate, using the same information as Courtois, the million indigenous people who died in America in the process of capitalism in Europe, the ten million dead whom Leopold II, King of Belgium, called and left behind in his company Congo. so many other massacres in Africa, India, Bangladesh or the Middle East, we are going to suffer several hundred million deaths in any Black Book of capitalism.
The famous economist and professor Utsa Patnaik calculated that Great Britain stole 45 billion dollars from India alone between 1765 and 1938 and caused the deaths of not one hundred million but more than one billion people over the centuries. The figure he arrived at in his book from Columbia University Press seems exaggerated at first glance. No more than what Courtois is based on the same information – only better documentation.
* Chapter of the following book of flies in the web.
I kept reading
