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Mass killings occurred under some self-described democratic and imperial capitalist regimes maintaining landed property rights during the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Many of the killings were the result of colonial policies or imperialist aggression implemented by capitalist powers, such as the Bengal famine of 1943 or the Opium Wars. They've also taken place internally within capitalist regimes as tools of political repression or ethnic cleansing.[1] Scholarship focuses on the causes of mass killings in single societies, though some claims of common causes for mass killings have been made. Some higher estimates of mass killings include not only mass murders or executions that took place during the elimination of political opponents, civil wars, terror campaigns, and imperialism, but also lives lost due to war, famine, disease, and exhaustion in labor camps. There are scholars who believe that government policies and mistakes in management contributed to these calamities, and, based on that conclusion combine all these deaths under the categories "mass killings", democide, politicide, "classicide", or loosely defined genocide. According to these scholars, the total death toll of the mass killings defined in this way amounts to many tens of millions; however, the validity of this approach is questioned by other scholars. As of 2011, academic consensus has not been achieved on causes of large scale killings by states, including by states governed by capitalists. In particular, the number of comparative studies suggesting causes is limited. The highest death tolls that have been documented in capitalist states occurred in the British Raj under colonial rule, in the Republic of Chile under Augusto Pinochet, in the Congo Free State under Leopold II of Belgium, and in Ireland under Robert Peel.

Terminology

Capitalist regimes - refers to those countries who declared themselves to be capitalist states under the liberal economic, democratic, or imperialistic definition (in other words, "capitalist states") at some point in their history.

Scholars use several different terms to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants.[2] The following have been used to describe killing by capitalist governments:

Slave memorial in Zanzibar . The Sultan of Zanzibar complied with British demands that slavery be banned in Zanzibar and that all the slaves be freed.

Proposed causes

Imperialism is typically condoned by owners of private property (not to be confused with personal property), and merchants in the Capitalist Market seeking to lower the cost of wages in the underdeveloped world for the sake of personal gain.

Permanent arms economy

Adam Smith and Karl Marx theorized that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall was a feature inherent in capitalism, but was only a tendency, and could have countervailing tendencies that delay it. One of these is "military wars or military spending causing capital assets to be inoperative or destroyed, or spurring war production."[17] War becomes a source of profit for companies selling weapons, and new markets that form after capital has been destroyed or devalued by war become a source of profit for businesses in the wider economy.

Ideology

Mass killings have been undertaken by capitalists in an effort to defend their private property (the basis of the economic system itself). Capitalist-created "markets" themselves and less brutal monopolistic policies harm people by denying basic rights to those who lack adequate purchasing power (e.g. eviction, starvation, lack of medical care) due to violence and corruption undertaken to defend landed property. This results in lack of economic opportunities, creating a vicious cycle.

Theories, such as those of R. J. Rummel, that propose ideology as a significant causative factor in mass killings have attracted scholarly dispute;[18]

Klas-Göran Karlsson writes that "Ideologies are systems of ideas, which cannot commit crimes independently." However Karlsson also notes that "individuals, collectives and states" that identify themselves by specific ideologies have "committed crimes" in the name of those ideologies.[19]

By such definition, states that have defined themselves as Liberal Capitalist Democracies have committed crimes in the name of capitalism or self-proclaimed democracy.

Crisis conditions

Other claims

Influence of national cultures

Personal responsibility

The largest mass killings

Bengal famine of 1770

The Bengal famine of 1770 is estimated to have caused the death of around 10,000,000 people, reducing the population to around thirty million in Bengal. It was caused by the widespread cultivation of opium (forced upon local farmers by the British East India Company as part of its strategy to illegally export it to China) in place of local food crops, resulting in a shortage of grain for local people in Bengal.

Bengal famine of 1943

3-4 million killed.

Churchill was both indifferent to the Indian plight and even mocked the millions suffering, chuckling over the culling of a population that bred 'like rabbits.' Leopold Amery... vented in his private diaries, writing 'on the subject of India, Winston is not quite sane' and that he didn't 'see much difference between his outlook and Hitler's.'... Churchill was one of a coterie of imperial rulers who worked to create sectarian fissures within India's independence movement between Indian Hindus and Muslims, which led to the brutal partition of India when the former colony finally did win its freedom in 1947. Millions died or were displaced in an orgy of bloodshed. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2031992,00.html

Colonial El Niño Famines (1876-1900)

TOTAL deaths: 31,700,000 to 61,300,000

Book source: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001)

"Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (2001) argues that the business policies of the imperial European landlords, merchants and bureaucrats in the face of El Niño drought intensified these famines and thereby caused millions of deaths. If true, this accusation could easily create a moral equivalence between these famines and the devastating Communist famines of the 20th Century, but so far, Davis is the only major authority I found who tackles this question. Estimated death tolls: 1876-79 Famine: India: est. by Digby: 10.3 M, est. by Maharatna: 8.2 M est. by Seavoy: 6.1 M China Broomhall: 20 M Bohr: 9.5-13 M Brazil: 0.5-1.0 M (Cunniff) 1896-1900 Famine India The Lancet: 19.0 M Maharatna: 8.4 M Seavoy: 8.4 M Cambridge: 6.1 M China: 10 M (Cohen) Brazil: 1.0-1.5 M (Smith) TOTAL: 31,700,000 to 61,300,000 (midpoint: 46.5M)"[20]

Congo

Deaths: 10 million.

The Guardian & Spiegel.de:

10 million Congolese were either murdered or worked to death by Leopold's private army, that women were systematically raped, that people's hands were cut off and that the local populace endured kidnapping, looting and village burnings, have never been the subject of serious debate in Belgium, let alone brought an apology... When it was published in Belgium in 1999 it outraged the country's historians but failed to bring about a genuine period of reflection. Controversially, Hochschild compared the death toll in the Belgian-administered Congo to the Holocaust and Stalin's purges."[21][22]

Genocide of Native Americans

The median scholarly estimate of Native American lives prior to European colonization is 50 million; the total native population declined to its all-time low of 1.8 million.[23]

David Stannard argued that the destruction of the American aboriginals from 76 million down to a quarter-million over 4 centuries, in a "string of genocide campaigns", killing "countless tens of millions", was the most massive genocide in world history.

Killings of central American natives

Deaths: 40 million according to Bartolome de las Cases.

The main period of Spanish conquest of the Astec, Maya and Inca civilisations and the escalation of the demographic collapse of indigenous society... The celebrated friar Bartolome de las Cases estimates that by now up to 40 million indigenous people may have died."[25]

Britain's Irish Potato Famine:

Deaths: about 1 million

In adhering to laissez-faire, the British government also did not interfere with the English-controlled export business in Irish-grown grains. Throughout the Famine years, large quantities of native-grown wheat, barley, oats and oatmeal sailed out of places such as Limerick and Waterford for England, even though local Irish were dying of starvation. Irish farmers, desperate for cash, routinely sold the grain to the British in order to pay the rent on their farms and thus avoid eviction."[26]

Deaths: 3 million.

Cambodia's suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot" The Nation, globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/190/39190.html

Henry Kissinger:

You should also tell the Cambodians that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. — yale.edu/cgp/us.html

One of the top leaders of the Khmer Rogue:

We are not communists... we are revolutionaries' who do not 'belong to the commonly accepted grouping of communist Indochina. — Leng Sary, 1977, quoted by Vickery, Cambodia: 1978-1983, p. 288

Other mass killings, sorted by states

South America

Chile

Caravan of Death

Pinochet's desire to install fear among the general population manifested with his authorization of the “Caravan of Death", whose members traveled by helicopter throughout Chile between 30 September and 22 October 1973. Following the coup on September 11, Pinochet ordered this Chilean Army death squad to target the leaders of the communist PU party by any means necessary. Pinochet feared the PU and felt they would oppose his capitalist regime, and he lived in a constant state of paranoia of losing power or being executed.[27] As his suspicions grow, he targeted anyone who was associated with left-wing politics.[28] The Caravan of Death killed or ordered the killing of 97 victims.[29] The establishment of the Caravan of Death served three main purposes: 1) silence dissent through murder, 2) weed out military officials who were not aligned with Pinochet’s regime and 3) establish fear within leadership ranks. The Caravan of Death resulted in the institutionalization of a state-sponsored system of terror.[30]

Disappearances

A common mechanism of torture and execution employed was “disappearing” those who were deemed to be potentially subversive because they adhered to leftist politics. The tactic of “disappearing” the enemies of the Pinochet regime was systematically carried out during the first four years of military rule. The "disappeared" were held in secret, subjected to torture and were often never seen again. Following Pinochet's defeat in the 1988 plebiscite, the 1991 Rettig Commission, a multipartisan effort from the Aylwin administration to discover the truth about Pinochet's human rights violations, listed a number of torture and detention centers (such as Colonia Dignidad, the ship Esmeralda or Víctor Jara Stadium), and found that 2,279 people were killed or disappeared by the regime.[31](p1122)

Colombia

In 1993, Amnesty International reported that clandestine military units began covertly operating as death squads in 1978.

According to the report, throughout the 1980s political killings rose to a peak of 3,500 in 1988, averaging some 1,500 victims per year since then, and "over 1,500 civilians are also believed to have "disappeared" since 1978."[32] The AUC, formed in 1997, was the most prominent paramilitary group.

A report from the country's public prosecutors office at the end of 2009 reported the number of 28,000 disappeared by paramilitary and guerrilla groups. As of 2008 only 300 corpses were identified and 600 in 2009. According to the prosecutor's office it will take many more years before all the bodies recovered can be identified.

North America

Cuba

Spanish-American War, Slavery in Cuba and Batista's rule.

Since the Cuban Revolution, the country has also been subjected to attacks on infrastructure and crops, covert espionage, invasion and attempted coups as well as economic isolation by the United States.[33] [34]

United States

Slavery

Native genocide '

Indian removals: an approximate 16,000 deaths during the forced emigration Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Seminole nations, the most famous of these marches being the Cherokee's "Trail of Tears".

Race Riots

Throughout its history, the United States has periodically had large race riots, most often of white people responding to a political event involving Black people such as the lead-up to the Civil War, the return home of Black troops from World War I, etc. Government and police management of the riots ranged from open abetment to secret collusion to allowance, and rarely if ever stepped in to prevent riots.

East St. Louis riot: 200 people killed Red Summer: 276 people killed

Labor Wars

The 1915 "Final report of the Commission on Industrial Relations" - Bertrand Russell in "Proposed roads to freedom: Socialism, anarchism and syndicalism" describes the conclusions[35]:

"What French Syndicalists say about the State as a capitalist institution is peculiarly true in America. In consequence of the scandals thus arising, the Federal Government appointed a Commission on Industrial Relations, whose Report, issued in 1915, reveals a state of affairs such as it would be difficult to imagine in Great Britain. The report states that ``the greatest disorders and most of the outbreaks of violence in connection with industrial `disputes arise from the violation of what are considered to be fundamental rights, and from the perversion or subversion of governmental institutions (p. 146). It mentions, among such perversions, the subservience of the judiciary to the military authorities, the fact that during a labor dispute the life and liberty of every man within the State would seem to be at the mercy of the Governor (p. 72), and the use of State troop in policing strikes (p. 298). At Ludlow (Colorado) in 1914 (April 20) a battle of the militia and the miners took place, in which, as the result of the fire of the militia, a number of women and children were burned to death."

Although uniformly held that the writ of habeas corpus can only be suspended by the legislature, in these labor disturbances the executive has in fact suspended or disregarded the writ. . . . In cases arising from labor agitations, the judiciary has uniformly upheld the power exercised by the military, and in no case has there been any protest against the use of such power or any attempt to curtail it, except in Montana, where the conviction of a civilian by military commission was annulled Final Report of the Commission on Industrial Relations (1915) appointed by the United States Congress, p. 58

Literary Digest, May 2 and May 16, 1914.

Guatemala

See: Guatemalan Civil War#Human rights abuses

Guadeloupe

Murder of 10,000 by re-occupying French forces in retribution for slave rebellion.

Haiti

Murder of 30,000 by François Duvalir, particularly focused on Leftists and Communists in order to improve relations with the United States, and of thousands (heavily disputed numbers) by Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic, in the Parsley Massacre.

Mexico

El Salvador

In December 1980, three American nuns and a lay worker were gang raped and murdered by a military unit later found to have been acting on specific orders. Death squads were instrumental in killing thousands of peasants and activists. Funding for the squads came primarily from right-wing Salvadoran businessmen and landowners.[36] Because the death squads involved were found to have been soldiers of the Salvadoran military security forces, which were receiving U.S. arms, funding, training and advice during the Carter, Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations, these events prompted some outrage in the U.S. Human rights activists criticized U.S. administrations for denying Salvadoran government links to the death squads. Veteran Human Rights Watch researcher Cynthia J. Arnson writes that "particularly during the years 1980–1983 when the killing was at its height (numbers of killings could reach as far as 35,000), assigning responsibility for the violence and human rights abuses was a product of the intense ideological polarization in the United States. The Reagan administration downplayed the scale of abuse as well as the involvement of state actors. Because of the level of denial, as well as the extent of U.S. involvement with the Salvadoran military and security forces, the U.S. role in El Salvador- what was known about death squads, when it was known, and what actions the United States did or did not take to curb their abuses- became an important part of El Salvador's death squad story.".[37] Some death squads, such as Sombra Negra, are still operating in El Salvador.[38]

Europe

Finland

See: Finnish Civil War prison camps

Greece

Dekemvriana

Russia

See: Shock therapy (economics)

Soviet Union

See: White Terror (Russia)

Germany

See: Extermination camp, Persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, The Holocaust

Croatia

Murder of 330,000 Serbs by the Ustaše in concentration camps.

France

Suppression of revolt in the Paris Commune of 1871.

Funding Middle Eastern terrorism

The Brzezinski Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur (1998):

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime [which became known as Al-Qaeda] in Kabul."[39]

Asia

Japan

Fire-bombings of Tokyo resulting in as many as 200,000 deaths and roughly 1 million displaced, in addition to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which killed between 129,000–246,000+ as well as several thousand more due to radiation in the following decades.

China

The Opium Wars, Japanese intervention in China. as well as KMT persecution of Chinese Communist Party.

As with the former Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China has been categorized as State Capitalist by economists such as Richard D. Wolff.[40] Mass killings and repression by the Communist government can therefore be seen as having been committed by a capitalist regime.

India

Famines during British colonialism. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre,[41] Nestlé,[42] etc.

Indonesia

Anti-Communist Purges.[43]

Philippines

The Phillipine-American War resulted in as many as 1 million deaths, most of which were Filipino civilians. Ferdinand Marcos implementation of martial law in 1972, resulting in 3,257 extrajudicial killings primarily carried out to combat the rising influence of Communists.

Republic of Korea

See: Jeju Uprising, National Defense Corps Incident

Burma

Railroad Construction.

Iraq

The sanctions against iraq which began in 1990 and stayed largely in force until 2003 were potentially responsible for up to 1 million deaths (500,000 being children). Denis Halliday was appointed United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, Iraq as of 1 September 1997, at the Assistant Secretary-General level. In October 1998 he resigned after a 34-year career with the UN in order to have the freedom to criticise the sanctions regime, saying "I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide"[44]

This is in addition to multiple invasions resulting in over half a million more casualties.

Bangladesh

War with Pakistan,[45] US-manufactured famine.

East Timor

Invasion by Indonesia and resulting occupation.[46]

West Papau

Indonesian occupation.[47]

Africa

Algeria

Sétif and Guelma massacre

Burkina Faso

Assassination of Thomas Sankara.

Mauritania

PRDS killed 500 people who are almost entirely from the Halpulaar and Soninke ethnic groups of the country.[48]

Nigeria

Murders of 2000 of the Ogoni people of the Niger Delta for demanding that oil profits be shared with the people.

Kenya

Mau Mau Uprising.

Rwanda

The Rwandan Civil War and genocide were manipulated by European nations to consolidate power and control.

Madagascar

Malagasy uprising of 1947. The local colonial authority initially boasted about the killing of 89,000 people (two percent of the Malagasy population) before the central administration issued a lower official figure of 11,342 deaths.[49]

Somalia

See: Somali Civil War and History of Somalia (1991–2006)

South Africa

Second Boer War and Marikana killings.

Namibia

Herero and Namaqua Genocide.

Inclusion of famine as killing

The journalist and author Seumas Milne has questioned whether deaths from famine should be considered equivalent to state killings, since the demographic data used to estimate famine deaths may not be reliable. He argues that, if they are to be, then Britain would have to be considered responsible for as many as 30 million deaths in India from famine during the 19th century, and he laments that there has been "no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record".[50]

Daniel Goldhagen argues that in some cases, deaths from famine should not be distinguished from mass murder: "Whenever governments have not alleviated famine conditions, political leaders decided not to say no to mass death – in other words, they said yes." He claims that famine was either used or deliberately tolerated by the Soviets, the Germans, the communist Chinese, the British in Kenya, the Hausa against the Ibo in Nigeria, Khmer Rouge, communist North Koreans, Ethiopeans in Eritrea, Zimbabwe against regions of political opposition, and Political Islamists in southern Sudan and Darfur.[51]

In 2006, more than 36 million died of hunger or diseases due to deficiencies in micro-nutrients".[52] According to the World Health Organization, malnutrition is the biggest contributor to child mortality, present in half of all cases.[53] Hunger kills 17,000 children daily.[54]

Noam Chomsky argues that it is correct, as in the case of communist regimes, to attribute deaths under an economic or political system to the policies of those systems. In his piece 'Counting the Bodies', a review of The Black Book of Communism, he cites work by economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze, which demonstrates that in capitalist India there had been "over 100 million deaths" between 1947 and 1979 and "tens of millions more since", meaning in "India alone" there had been "more deaths than in the entire history of the "colossal, wholly failed...experiment" of Communism everywhere since 1917".[55]

Almost all of these deaths can be attributed to mis-allocation of resources due to financial accumulation from landed property, as arguably the only country not strictly capitalist is Cuba, having eradicated hunger.[56]