So, I’ve been reading “Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World” by Mike Davis. And as he recounts famine after famine, each of which claimed millions of lives, I started thinking to myself: even granting the ludicrous assumptions of the anti-communists with the “Victims of Communism” webpage (and proposed memorial or something?), the victims of capitalism easily outnumber them. And I wasn’t alone. Here, the authors of the linked article recount how British colonial policy was responsible for 100 million excess premature deaths in India alone, over the course of a half century.
#Capitalism #Colonialism #Communism #VictimsOfCommunism #VictimsOfCapitalism #books #NonFiction #History @bookstodon @histodons https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/12/2/how-british-colonial-policy-killed-100-million-indians
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Sadly, we Brits have a LOT to answer for historically! Our imperial use of systematic violence was no different from that used by our rivals. We were just better at hiding it. [see Elkins C., “Legacy of Violence: a history of the British Empire”]
Eg we pioneered concentration camps & mass starvation (Boer War); mass murder of civilians (India, Palestine, Ireland, Kenya); reprisal killings (Ireland); torture (Ireland, Kenya); rape, & castration (Kenya);