Difference between revisions of "Mass killings under capitalist regimes"

Revision as of 18:02, 16 July 2010

Mass killings of non-combatants have occurred under several forms of government, including capitalist ones.

Terminology

"Capitalist regimes" refers to those countries which operate a capitalist economic system.

Scholars use several different terms to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants.^[1] Under the Genocide Convention, the Crime of Genocide does not apply to the mass killing of political and social groups. Protection of political groups was eliminated from the UN resolution after a second vote, because many states anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.^[2]

The term "politicide" is used to describe the killing of political or economic groups that would otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention.^[3] Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term "politicide" to describe an arc of mass killings from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.^{[nb 1]} In his book The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.^[5]

R. J. Rummel coined the term "democide", which includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder.^[6] Jacques Semelin prefers "crime against humanity".^[7] Helen Fein has termed the mass state killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia as the "genocide and Democide".^[8]

Michael Mann has proposed the term "classicide" to mean the "intended mass killing of entire social classes."^[9]

Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown the significance of terminology in that, depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type. Template:fv^[10]

Proposed causes

Primitive accumulation of capital

In the Marxist view, primitive accumulation of capital is a key element in the development of capitalism, and is linked with colonialism.

Karl Marx wrote in Capital Volume I, "‘The discovery of gold and silver in the Americas, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production’ (1967: 751). Through such varied forms of violent expropriation, capitalism was born, ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (1967: 760), but having achieved the consolidation of ‘the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few’ (1967: 762)."^[11]

Failure of the rule of law

Eric D. Weitz says that the mass killing are a natural consequence of the failure of the rule of law, seen commonly during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century. For both communist and non-communist mass killings, "genocides occurred at moments of extreme social crisis, often generated by the very policies of the regimes."^[12] They are not inevitable but are political decisions.^[12]

Influence of national cultures

Some authors called American exceptionalism and the Cold War general reasons for barbarity.Template:citation needed

Personal responsibility

Individual figures can be highlighted, such as Henry Kissinger; in The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens presents evidence of Kissinger's complicity in a series of alleged war crimes in Indochina, Bangladesh, Chile, Cyprus and East Timor.

States where mass killings have occurred

• Anti-communist mass killings for mass killings directed against communists and others on the left

Africa

• Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa

Cambodia and Laos

• Operation Menu during the Vietnam War

Chile

• 1973 Chilean coup d'état and aftermath (cf The Shock Doctrine Part 2)

The Chicago Boys were a group of young Chilean economists who trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, or at its effective offshoot in the economics department at the Catholic University of Chile. The training was the result of a "Chile Project" organised in the 1950s by the US State Department and funded by the Ford Foundation, which aimed at influencing Chilean economic thinking. The project failed singularly to do so, with the Chicago Boys' ideas remaining on the fringes of Chilean economic and political thought until the 1973 Chilean coup d'état on 11 September 1973, when what became known as "The Brick" would form the basis of the new regime's economic policy. "The Brick" was a 500-page plan for the junta economic program, prepared in conjunction with the coup plotters; 8 of its 10 principal authors were Chicago Boys. Although the coup was described as a military coup, Orlando Letelier, Salvador Allende's Washington ambassador, "saw it as an equal partnership between the army and the economists".^[13]

Europe

• Ireland - famines under British colonial rule, such as the Great Famine (Ireland)

Germany under the Nazis

Scholars are divided over whether Nazism is capitalist, there is much evidence on either side. Evidence in Hitler's speeches of both anti-capitalist and anti-communist rhetoric is found in the context of these capitalist nations also being his current adversaries in politics and his future opponents in already planned wars of conquest. Communism and anti-capitalism were at their most popular at the time, and the Nazi Party, eager for converts, planned their speeches accordingly.

Less importantly, it was unequivocally anti-communist. For example, the Reichstag Fire, which convinced many to grant then-Chancellor Hitler emergency powers, was loudly blamed by the Nazi Party on communist elements, although this was never proved.

Most convincing is the economic practices of Nazi Germany; capitalist enterprise survived the coup largely intact, and in fact with a certain degree of autonomy.

Ideology

It is doubtful whether the libertarian elements of capitalism per se have anything to do with the genocide that occurred under the Nazis, but most certainly capitalism relies for its acceptance of inequality of resource distribution on the concept of more capable individuals being heir to rights that supersede those of other less talented individuals (less talented being defined by their ability to operate within the capitalist system itself). Those who stress the competition of economic forces are said to believe in Social Darwinism; Hitler believed that races similarly compete. Without the belief in the right of self defense and self interest, much touted by capitalist systems without any other reason being given, one has to either compartmentalize or can not also believe that the interest of one individual or nation can supersede another's. The Nazi ideology of the Master Race purported to give the German people the right to administer a world populated with lesser races.

Economic practice

See Main article Economy of Nazi Germany

The Nazis viewed private property rights as conditional upon the mode of use.^[14] If the property was not being used to further Nazi goals, it could be nationalized. Government takeovers and threats of takeovers were used to encourage compliance with government production plans, even if following these plans cost profits for companies. For example, the owner of the Junkers (aircraft) factory refused to follow the government’s directives, whereupon the Nazis took over the plant, placed the owner Hugo Junkers under house arrest, then compensated him for his loss. While the Nazis transferred public ownership and services in the private spector, they increased state control, regulation, and inference in economic affairs.^[15] Under the Nazis, free competition and regulation by the market greatly decreased.^[16] Nevertheless, Hitler's social Darwinist beliefs made him reluctant to disregard competition and private property.^[17] Privately, Hitler stated in 1942, “I absolutely insist on protecting private property… we must encourage private initiative”.^[18]

Internationally, the Nazi Party believed that an international banking cabal was behind the global depression of the 1930s. Control of this cabal, which had grown to a position where it controlled both Europe and the United States, was identified with an elite and powerful group of Jews. Nevertheless, a number of people believed that this was part of an ongoing plot by the Jewish people, as a whole, to achieve global domination. The counterfeit Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which began its circulation in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, were said to have confirmed this, already showing “evidence” that the Bolshevik takeover in Russia was in accordance with one of the protocols.

Broadly speaking, the existence of large international banking or merchant banking organizations was a matter of political dissent worldwide at this time. Many of these banking organizations were able to exert influence upon nation states by extension or withholding of credit. This influence is not limited to the small states that preceded the creation of the German Empire as a nation state in the 1870s, but is noted in most major histories of all European powers from the sixteenth century onward. Nevertheless, after the Great Depression, the libelous and unverified Protocols manuscript took on an important role in Nazi Germany, thus providing another link in the Nazis ideological motivation for the destruction of that group in the Holocaust.

Nazi economic practice concerned itself with immediate domestic issues and separately with ideological conceptions of international economics. Domestic economic policy had four major goals: elimination of unemployment, rapid and substantial rearmament, protection against the resurgence of hyper-inflation, and expansion of production of consumer goods to improve middle and lower-class living standards. Heavy taxes on business profits were implemented. Between 1933 and 1936 the German Gross National Product (GNP) increased by an average annual rate of 9.5%, and the rate for industry alone rose by 17.2%.

Many companies dealt with the Third Reich: Volkswagen was created by the German state and was heavily supported by the Nazis; Opel employed Jewish slave labour to run their industrial plants; Daimler-Benz used prisoners of war as slaves to run their industrial plants; Krupp made gas chambers; Bayer worked with the Nazis as a small part of the enormous IG Farben chemistry monopoly; and Hugo Boss designed the SS uniforms (and admitted to this in 1997). There has been some disagreement about whether IBM had dealt with the Nazis to create a cataloguing system, the Hollerith punch-card machines, which the Nazis used to file information on those who they killed.^[19] Some companies that dealt with the Third Reich claim to have not known the truth of what the Nazis were doing, and some foreign companies claimed to have lost control of their German branches when Hitler was in power.^[20][21]

Monopoly rights were granted to marketing boards to control production and prices through a quota system on pig iron, steel, aluminum, magnesium, gunpowder, explosives, synthetic rubber, all kinds of fuel, and electricity. A compulsory cartel law was enacted in 1936 which allowed the Minister of Economics to make existing cartels compulsory and permanent and to force industries to form cartels where none existed, though these were eventually decreed out of existence by 1943 with the objective being to replace them with more authoritarian bodies.^[22]

In place of ordinary profit incentive to guide the economy, investment was guided through regulation to accord to the needs of the State. The profit incentive for business owners was retained, though greatly modified through various profit-fixing schemes: “Fixing of profits, not their suppression, was the official policy of the Nazi party.” However the function of profit in automatically guiding allocation of investment and unconsciously directing the course of the economy was replaced with economic planning by Nazi government agencies.^[23]

Farmers, on the other hand, were tied to land, by prohibiting the selling of agricultural land. Farm ownership was nominally private, but ownership in the sense of having discretion over operations and claims on residual income were taken away. Government financing eventually came to dominate the investment process, which the proportion of private securities issued falling from over half of the total in 1933 and 1934 to approximately 10 percent in 1935–1938. The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits, however government control of these were extensive enough to leave “only the shell of private ownership.”

While taxes and subsidies were used in order to direct the economy, the underlying economic policy was the use of terror as an incentive to agree and comply. Nazi language indicated death or concentration camp for any business owner who pursued his own self interest instead of the ends of the State.^[14]

It is often regarded that businesses were private property in name but not in substance. Chritoph Buchheim and Jonas Scherner dissent, saying that despite the economy being state directed, firms still had significant freedom in planning their own production and investment activities.^[24]

India

• India - famines under British colonial rule

Indonesia

• Indonesian killings of 1965–66.

The Indonesian killings saw the killing of half a million or more people, some 4-500 through targeted "shooting lists" (with progress reported to the US Embassy), most through sweeps of the countryside.^[25] Farid (2005) argues that "First, that the killings are in fact a case of state violence despite of the efforts to make it look like spontaneous violence. Second, that the killings are crucial to the expansion of capitalism in Indonesia. Using Marx's concept of 'primitive accumulation', it attempts to show that the mass killings and arrests, the expropriation of people from their houses and lands, and the elimination of working-class political formations, are integral parts of an economic strategy of the New Order."^[26] Naomi Klein notes that the Berkeley Mafia "worked closely with the military in the run-up to the coup, developing 'contingency plans' should the government suddenly fall",^[27] and after the coup "Suharto packed his cabinet with members of the Berkeley Mafia, handing them all the key financial posts, including minister of trade and ambassador to Washington".^[28]

United States

Native American mass killings during the colonisation of the United States

A controversial question relating to the population history of American indigenous peoples is whether or not the natives of the Americas were the victims of genocide. After the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust during World War II, genocide was defined (in part) as a crime "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such". Hitler claimed that concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much to his studies of English and United States history^[29]Template:Page needed.

Historian David Stannard is of the opinion that the indigenous peoples of America (including Hawaii)^[30] were the victims of a "Euro-American genocidal war."^[31] While conceding that the majority of the indigenous peoples fell victim to the ravages of European disease, he estimates that almost 100 million died in what he calls the American Holocaust.^[32] Stannard's perspective has been joined by Kirkpatrick Sale, Ben Kiernan, Lenore A. Stiffarm, and Phil Lane, Jr., among others; the perspective has been further refined by Ward Churchill, who has said "it was precisely malice, not nature, that did the deed."^[31]

Stannard's claim of 100 million deaths has been challenged because he does not cite any demographic evidence to support this number, and because he makes no distinction between death from violence and death from disease. Noble David Cook, Latin Americanist and history professor at Florida International University, considers books such as Stannard's– a number of which were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the Columbus voyage to America– to be an unproductive return to Black Legend-type explanations for depopulation. In response to Stannard's figure, political scientist R. J. Rummel has instead estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were the victims of what he calls democide. "Even if these figures are remotely true," writes Rummel, "then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history."^[33]

Some historians argue that genocide, a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization while in America. Historian Stafford Poole wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews and Armenians, to mention but two of the major victims of this century."^[34]

However, a number of historians, though not viewing the history of European colonization as one continuous long act of genocide, do cite specific wars and campaigns which were arguably genocidal in intent and effect. Usually included among these are the Pequot War (1637) and campaigns waged against tribes in California starting in the 1850s.^[35]

Inclusion of famine as killing

The journalist and author Seamus 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 laments that there has been "no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record".^[36]

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.^[37]

In Late Victorian Holocausts (2000), Mike Davis explores the impact of colonialism and the introduction of capitalism during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation related famines of 1876-1878, 1896-1897, and 1899-1902, in India, China, Brazil, Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines and New Caledonia. It focuses on how colonialism and capitalism in British India and elsewhere increased rural poverty & hunger and how economic policies exacerbated famine. The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30-60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments. Davis argues that "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed, many were murdered ... by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham and Mill."^[38]

Mass killings of non-combatants have occurred under several forms of government, including capitalist ones. This article describes the best known examples of those mass killings, including both those that were intentionally carried out by capitalist governments and those where mass death occurred as a result of government policy, but whose intentionality is disputed. Though this article is limited to deaths under regimes labeled as capitalist, the influence of capitalist ideology in many of these events is disputedTemplate:cn.

Terminology

Template:off-topic "Capitalist regimes" refers to those countries which operate a capitalist economic system.

Scholars use several different terms to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants.^{[nb 2]} Under the Genocide Convention, the Crime of Genocide does not apply to the mass killing of political and social groups. Protection of political groups was eliminated from the UN resolution after a second vote, because many states anticipated that clause to apply unneeded limitations to their right to suppress internal disturbances.^[39]

The term "politicide" is used to describe the killing of political or economic groups that would otherwise be covered by the Genocide Convention.^[3] Manus I. Midlarsky uses the term "politicide" to describe an arc of mass killings from the western parts of the Soviet Union to China and Cambodia.^{[nb 3]} In his book The killing trap: genocide in the twentieth century Midlarsky raises similarities between the killings of Stalin and Pol Pot.^[40]

R. J. Rummel coined the term "democide", which includes genocide, politicide, and mass murder.^[41] Jacques Semelin prefers "crime against humanity".^[7] Helen Fein has termed the mass state killings in the Soviet Union and Cambodia as the "genocide and Democide".^[42]

Michael Mann has proposed the term "classicide" to mean the "intended mass killing of entire social classes."^[9]

Frank Wayman and Atsushi Tago have shown the significance of terminology in that, depending on the use of democide (generalised state-sponsored killing) or politicide (eliminating groups who are politically opposed) as the criterion for inclusion in a data-set, statistical analyses seeking to establish a connection between mass killings can produce very different results, including the significance or otherwise of regime type. Template:fv^[10]

Proposed causes

Influence of market doctrine and capitalist ideology

Failure of the rule of law

Eric D. Weitz says that the mass killing are a natural consequence of the failure of the rule of law, seen commonly during periods of social upheaval in the 20th century. For both communist and non-communist mass killings, "genocides occurred at moments of extreme social crisis, often generated by the very policies of the regimes."^[12] They are not inevitable but are political decisions.^[12]

Economic and social reforms

Benjamin Valentino writes that mass killings strategies are chosen by Communists to economically dispossess large numbers of people; the same point can be made for capitalist regimes.^{[nb 4]} "Social transformations of this speed and magnitude have been associated with mass killing for two primary reasons. First, the massive social dislocations produced by such changes have often led to economic collapse, epidemics, and, most important, widespread famines. [...] The second reason that communist regimes bent on the radical transformation of society have been linked to mass killing is that the revolutionary changes they have pursued have clashed inexorably with the fundamental interests of large segments of their populations. Few people have proved willing to accept such far-reaching sacrifices without intense levels of coersion." ^{[nb 5]}

According to Jacques Semelin, "communist systems emerging in the twentieth century ended up destroying their own populations, not because they planned to annihilate them as such, but because they aimed to restructure the 'social body' from top to bottom, even if that meant purging it and recarving it to suit their new Promethean political imaginaire." ^{[nb 6]} The same point can be made for capitalist governments.

Influence of national cultures

Some authorsTemplate:who called American exceptionalism and the Cold War general reasons for barbarity.

Secular values

Some proponents of traditional ethical standards and religious faith in the 21st C argue that the killings were at least partly the result of a "weakening of faith and the unleashing of the radical values of the European Enlightenment upon the modern world." In other words, the Enlightenment was a big mistake, and everything has gone wrong since some misguided people gave up on the Holy Roman Empire. Amusing, perhaps, but not even thought provoking.

See also One Market Under God.

Personal responsibility

Individual figures can be highlighted, such as Henry Kissinger.

Comparison to other mass killings

Daniel Goldhagen argues that 20th century Communist regimes "have killed more people than any other regime type."^[43] Other scholars in the fields of Communist studies and genocide studies, such as Steven Rosefielde, Benjamin Valentino, and R.J. Rummel, have come to similar conclusions.^{[nb 7]} Rosefielde states that it is possible the "Red Holocaust" killed more non-combatants than "Ha Shoah" and "Japan's Asian holocaust" combined, and "was at least as heinous, given the singularity of Hitler's genocide." Rosefielde also notes that "while it is fashionable to mitigate the Red Holocaust by observing that capitalism killed millions of colonials in the twentieth century, primarily through man-made famines, no inventory of such felonious negligent homicides comes close to the Red Holocaust total."^[44]

States where mass killings have occurred

• Anti-communist mass killings for mass killings directed against communists and others on the left
• India - famines under British colonial rule
• Ireland - famines under British colonial rule
• Native American mass killings during the colonisation of the United States
• Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa

Inclusion of famine as killing

The journalist and author Seamus 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 laments that there has been "no such comprehensive indictment of the colonial record".^[45]

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.^[37]

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Notes and references

Footnotes

References

See also

• Genocides in history Wikipedia for now
• Mass killings under Communist regimes Wikipedia perhaps forever

External links

• Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the Twentieth Century. Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century.

Further Reading

• Weitz, Eric D. (2003). A century of genocide: utopias of race and nation, p. 360, Princeton University Press.
• Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, p. 858, Harvard University Press.
• The Black Book of Capitalism

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