[Socialists] Do you condone communist crimes such as the Holodomor?

  • How about the famine in Bengal that killed 10 million under rule by British capitalists in 1769-73? Does that counts toward the number of people "captialism has killed"? Or in that vein, how about the Agra famine of 1837-38 that killed 800,000 under imperial British rule? Or again the Great Famine of 1876 in India under imperial British rule. Are they "victims of capitalism" ?

  • Or what about the Great Famine of Finland in 1695–97 that wiped out at least a third of that country's population under early capitalism there? Or yet again the Finnish famine of 1866 that wiped out another 15% of the population?

  • Or what about the Highland potato famine in Scotland in the mid-1800s? Does that count against capitalism? Or the Great Famine in Ireland in the same period) that killed over one million people and caused mass emigration?

  • Or perhaps we can consider the drought and famine in China that was the result of imperialism, the opium wars and the Taiping Rebellion and caused the population of China to drop by more than 60 million between 1850-1973?

  • How about the Ruzagayura famine in 1944 that killed up to 50,000 people and was exacerbated by attempts of the colonial/capitalist authorities to send agricultural produce to the Belgian Congo to serve their own interests during WWII?

  • What's your view on the Bangladesh famine of 1974 that killed 1.5 million people, the main cause of which is normally thought to be not food shortages but rather the U.S.'s withholding of 2.2 million tonnes of food aid in retaliation for Bangladesh's policy of exporting jute to socialist Cuba?

  • We could also mention the 3.8 million people who died mostly from starvation and disease during the Second Congo War in 1998-2004, a war like many others that was driven by the trade in conflict minerals for eventual purchase by multinational electronics companies for the manufacture of your consumer electronics such as mobile phones, laptops, and MP3 players?

I could give many more examples of famines and horrific disasters that have occurred under capitalist rule, many of which are easily demonstrable to be the direct effect of the capitalist mode of production and/or distribution. Does any of this count as a strike against capitalism, or can we only blame economic systems for mass disasters when the deaths occur under a socialist regime?

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