Liberals crying about the death toll from communism, when said made up number includes Nazis killed in the Easter theatre.
Liberals mourning nazis out of sheer ignorance seems telling
Those are libertarians, the"I got mine and fark everybody else" crowd, not liberals.
And we aren’t even talking about imperialism, capitalism’s highest stage.
Recent years have seen a resurgence in nostalgia for the British empire. High-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist, have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll found that 32 percent of people in Britain are actively proud of the nation’s colonial history.
This rosy picture of colonialism conflicts dramatically with the historical record. According to research by the economic historian Robert C Allen, extreme poverty in India increased under British rule, from 23 percent in 1810 to more than 50 percent in the mid-20th century. Real wages declined during the British colonial period, reaching a nadir in the 19th century, while famines became more frequent and more deadly. Far from benefitting the Indian people, colonialism was a human tragedy with few parallels in recorded history.
Experts agree that the period from 1880 to 1920 – the height of Britain’s imperial power – was particularly devastating for India. Comprehensive population censuses carried out by the colonial regime beginning in the 1880s reveal that the death rate increased considerably during this period, from 37.2 deaths per 1,000 people in the 1880s to 44.2 in the 1910s. Life expectancy declined from 26.7 years to 21.9 years.
In a recent paper in the journal World Development, we used census data to estimate the number of people killed by British imperial policies during these four brutal decades. Robust data on mortality rates in India only exists from the 1880s. If we use this as the baseline for “normal” mortality, we find that some 50 million excess deaths occurred under the aegis of British colonialism during the period from 1891 to 1920.
Fifty million deaths is a staggering figure, and yet this is a conservative estimate. Data on real wages indicates that by 1880, living standards in colonial India had already declined dramatically from their previous levels. Allen and other scholars argue that prior to colonialism, Indian living standards may have been “on a par with the developing parts of Western Europe.” We do not know for sure what India’s pre-colonial mortality rate was, but if we assume it was similar to that of England in the 16th and 17th centuries (27.18 deaths per 1,000 people), we find that 165 million excess deaths occurred in India during the period from 1881 to 1920.
While the precise number of deaths is sensitive to the assumptions we make about baseline mortality, it is clear that somewhere in the vicinity of 100 million people died prematurely at the height of British colonialism. This is among the largest policy-induced mortality crises in human history. It is larger than the combined number of deaths that occurred during all famines in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia.
How did British rule cause this tremendous loss of life? There were several mechanisms. For one, Britain effectively destroyed India’s manufacturing sector. Prior to colonisation, India was one of the largest industrial producers in the world, exporting high-quality textiles to all corners of the globe. The tawdry cloth produced in England simply could not compete. This began to change, however, when the British East India Company assumed control of Bengal in 1757.
According to the historian Madhusree Mukerjee, the colonial regime practically eliminated Indian tariffs, allowing British goods to flood the domestic market, but created a system of exorbitant taxes and internal duties that prevented Indians from selling cloth within their own country, let alone exporting it.
This unequal trade regime crushed Indian manufacturers and effectively de-industrialised the country. As the chairman of East India and China Association boasted to the English parliament in 1840: “This company has succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” English manufacturers gained a tremendous advantage, while India was reduced to poverty and its people were made vulnerable to hunger and disease.
To make matters worse, British colonisers established a system of legal plunder, known to contemporaries as the “drain of wealth.” Britain taxed the Indian population and then used the revenues to buy Indian products – indigo, grain, cotton, and opium – thus obtaining these goods for free. These goods were then either consumed within Britain or re-exported abroad, with the revenues pocketed by the British state and used to finance the industrial development of Britain and its settler colonies – the United States, Canada and Australia.
This system drained India of goods worth trillions of dollars in today’s money. The British were merciless in imposing the drain, forcing India to export food even when drought or floods threatened local food security. Historians have established that tens of millions of Indians died of starvation during several considerable policy-induced famines in the late 19th century, as their resources were syphoned off to Britain and its settler colonies.
Get instant alerts and updates based on your interests. Be the first to know when big stories happen. Yes, keep me updated Colonial administrators were fully aware of the consequences of their policies. They watched as millions starved and yet they did not change course. They continued to knowingly deprive people of resources necessary for survival. The extraordinary mortality crisis of the late Victorian period was no accident. The historian Mike Davis argues that Britain’s imperial policies “were often the exact moral equivalents of bombs dropped from 18,000 feet.”
Our research finds that Britain’s exploitative policies were associated with approximately 100 million excess deaths during the 1881-1920 period. This is a straightforward case for reparations, with strong precedent in international law. Following World War II, Germany signed reparations agreements to compensate the victims of the Holocaust and more recently agreed to pay reparations to Namibia for colonial crimes perpetrated there in the early 1900s. In the wake of apartheid, South Africa paid reparations to people who had been terrorised by the white-minority government.
History cannot be changed, and the crimes of the British empire cannot be erased. But reparations can help address the legacy of deprivation and inequity that colonialism produced. It is a critical step towards justice and healing.
By Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel.
It’s kinda shocking how the tactics of colonialism end up mirroring itself throughout history. The occupation and destruction of Gaza and the occupation and destruction of the Indian Mughal empire are devastatingly similar.
The beginning of the end for the Mughal happened during the Indian rebellion in 1857 when troops of the Mughal empire rebelled against the British East India company. It started as a popular uprising against the military of the company, but after an incident akin to Oct 7th around 200 British women and children were taken hostage and eventually killed by a small group of rebels.
In response the British went on a retribution campaign that would end up killing upwards to 800k Indians, most of which were civilians. During the retribution campaign there were motifs we can recognize today being implemented in modern colonialism.
Particularly the use of false allegations in media to justify retributive violence and sexual assault against women.
“British soldiers also committed sexual violence against Indian women as a form of retaliation against the rebellion.[163][164] As towns and cities were captured from the sepoys, the British soldiers took their revenge on Indian civilians by committing atrocities and rapes against Indian women.”
“Incidents of rape allegedly committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls appalled the British public. These atrocities were often used to justify the British reaction to the rebellion. British newspapers printed various eyewitness accounts of the rape of English women and girls. One such account was published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi. Karl Marx criticized this story as false propaganda, and pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion, with no evidence to support his allegation.”
“During the aftermath of the rebellion, a series of exhaustive investigations were carried out by British police and intelligence officials into reports that British women prisoners had been “dishonoured” at the Bibighar and elsewhere. One such detailed enquiry was at the direction of Lord Canning. The consensus was that there was no convincing evidence of such crimes having been committed, although numbers of British women and children had been killed outright.[181]”
About two years ago, I had an argument with a random dude who was vehemently denying the fact that it was effectively Churchill and the decisions of the British government that caused the Bengal famine - there was a lot of back and forth, a lot of citing.
Ultimately he came to the conclusion that the famine happened not because of the British, no Churchill was a saint - it was because of lack of biological “food storage” within Bengalis or some bullshit.
Yep according to them every hunger related death under a communist government is communists fault but the many famines under capitalism don’t count against their favorite system.
When you ignore established agricultural science because it’s too capitalist, and your crops fail, starving a significant portion of your country, yeah that’s kinda the governments fault.
I wonder if it would be fairer to count all of them from both sides or have some more selective metric, though that cab be pretty hard to create
You might be getting closer with that, but this still doesn’t account for the deaths caused by the fallout of decisions under feudal or capitalist systems before switching to communism that took years to repair or deaths caused by imperialist meddling (sanctions, wars, coups).
Or like the Memorial to Victims of Communism in Canada that was mostly Nazis and collaborators on it.
Failures in communist countries are systemic issues, failures in capitalist countries are individual failures.
Also failure of public works, like a train crash that kills 20 people, means that trains are bad. Clearly this program isn’t working and should be privatized. But 20 people killed daily on the highways, well those people are just idiots. Never mind the structural issues.
This message brought to you by the people who stand to benefit and also, by coincidence, own the newspapers.
Or plane crashes due to cheaping out on parts or maintenance or training to save a few pennies for the investors
There is no such thing as society!
Ain’t that right!
The difference is that for the people dying under capitalism, the system is working as intended, and for the people dying under communism, it is not. In both cases, the leaders don’t really care, because it works for them.
Anyone know where this image is from? I keep trying to find it but have never been able to.
5·5 hours agoThe guy is “Michael Does Life”
Holy shit, thanks. Always thought it was pyrocynical XD
Theres like 3 different tags in the image.
Too bad they’re all laid over each other so you can’t read them.
Not that it would lead to the source, anyways
People* who talk about the death toll of communism when you bring up 10-20 million dying to poverty caused by capitalism every year.
It’s pretty much a liberal thing.
Monarchists, far right people etc. would probably react the same. Maybe discounting people on the right who are anti-capitalist but I’m not sure how large of a group that is
I’ve said it elsewhere, but In my opinion, beyond simply being for progressing onto the next mode of production (at this time socialism) vs remaining on our current or going backward (capitalism, monarchism, etc), I don’t think comparing ideologies by how far they are on this “spectrum” actually makes much sense.
For example, I don’t think comparing Marxists and anarchists by how “left” we are is a useful metric. Both of them are on the left, but trying to do a comparison outside of the differing propositions and analysis leads into contradictions and absurdities when trying to make it fit onto a clean spectrum. The same goes for the right.
All that is to say that personally, I use left and right by our present moment, and don’t put too much effort into analyzing how far left or right something may be considered. Liberalism was left during the French Revolution, against the monarchy, but we are several hundred yeard beyond that now and capitalism is dominant, not monarchism. The present divide is socialism vs capitalism, and the few monarchists that exist don’t really have much of an impact on that.
Make sense? This was kind of a ramble.
I just meant that “liberal” doesn’t cover all the people who would hold the sentiment pictured in the meme. A lot of ardent anti-communists are also against liberalism and can’t be really described as liberal imo.
I think the group that holds those views, ie monarchists, etc, is very, very small and not really relevant. That’s more my point.
There’s all kinds of authoritarian ideologies that are incompatible with liberalism. Not unfortunately that uncommon, especially nowadays that that shit has had a resurgence
Liberalism itself, in that it upholds capitalism, is “authoritarian.” Not sure what you’re getting at, ideologies all vary in quantity of holders and historic importance, I see no reason to pretend monarchists are equally as relevant to the right as liberals.
And a Republican thing. Did you forget about the even larger group of people who believe in capitalism even more? I agree that the hand-winging “oh, maybe we’ll vote in a better president in a few years, let’s wait things out” crowd is a pain, but the sentiment that “capitalism is the best we’ve got” is championed primarily by people even further to the right than them.
I have heard that phrase more from the mouth of a “Vote Blue, no matter who” democrat than I have from a conservative. The conservatives on the other hand wanna return to monarchy and feudalism. A bunch of regressionists.
Republicans are liberals too, for what it’s worth. When leftists refer to liberals, we don’t exclusively mean those that support the DNC. Either way, though, if liberals ultimately wrap around to supporting capitalism even if they don’t have as strong an attachment to it, they still end up supporting capitalism and desiring its persistence.
Both are shit
Dumb
Tankies gonna Tankie i guess. I actually lived under a communist regime, i didn’t grow up in American stupidity and comfort. I actually lived your dream communism and it sucked. Don’t mean I like capitalism
No you didn’t quit lying
I grew up in South America, not in the suburbs like you. I grew up with American funded death squads and communist guerillas going at it. I know you think it’s impossible that a brown person would exist but it’s true, we do exist and we did indeed live under communism. But keep up the racism colonizer Tankie
Are you talking about the Shining Path of Peru? The Gonzaloite terrorists? I don’t think anyone on Lemmy actually supports them, at least not that I’ve seen, and they never actually implemented anything but instead just slaughtered peasants and performed terrorist attacks.
So you grew up in a country where the US staged a coup? Like I said quit lying
Could it be that the imperialist puppet sending death squads has something to do with things being bad?
No, it’s the communists who are bad
Lol as if we can’t hate both.
Living up to your username
why? And why count hunger deaths under communism as marks against but don’t apply this to capitalism much more deaths?
A lot of assumptions being made off of my shitty one line joke, starting to feel like you have an agenda you’re trying to push and are attempting to start a fight you’ve already had in your head.
I maybe a dumbass, but I’m not idiot.
Oh now that you got pushback, it’s suddenly a joke😂
Push back? Ohhhh you mean the downvotes and shit, nah it was always a joke, I make shitty jokes, sometimes they land, sometimes it pisses off a bunch of random people online and today it pissed off a bunch of people online.
You’re deffo both, my guy.
Nice!
Lol as if we can’t hate both.
please explain what a joke is and how this can be understood as one
Nah I’m all good, I’ll leave the interpretation up to y’all.
I wasn’t expecting you to. I’m saying you’re full of shit.
Oh no, a random stranger on the internet is angry with me, what ever will I do…
I have received negative feedback, must be doing something right!
Chickenshit response
Hahah, yeah.
Both are true, this is a dumb argument and common bad faith fallacy.
“Both are true.”
Motherfucker, did you even see the source of that claim against communism? It comes from a book that counted people who died under British and other European colonialism, the Third Reich soldiers who died in ww2, UN and NATO bombings ordered by the USA, and every war casualty in 20th century wars.
Why are you people so allergic to reading books?
Yeah, buddy. I agree with you.
(I am also severely historically illiterate.)
You don’t know what a fallacy is
The death toll from communism comes from the black book of communism which was written by a staunch anti-communist who seeked out to prove communism killed 100 million people which is why it includes nazi deaths and people who weren’t even born as victims of communism.
how is it bad faith?
Removed by mod
That’s what happens when shitlibs see this, yes.
Ok liberal
This is a conservative talking point… Liberal and communism are left ideals…
Liberals are conservatives who favor nicer marketing.
Liberalism is right-wing, and is explicitly pro-capitalist and anti-communist.
Liberalism has been highjacked by conservatism and is actually a left leaning ideology
‘In most countries, classical liberalism is thought of as a right-wing ideology, but when classical liberal ideas made their debut, they were thought of as leftist.’
Liberalism was never highjacked, it was only “leftist” when monarchism was the standard. Liberalism is the standard now.
Liberalism is right-wing
I mean, you gotta define your spectrum. If you want to get French with it, the Monarchists are on the right and the Liberals are on the Left. The communists won’t really exist for another fifty years (as a European economic school).
Liberalism only exists “on the right-wing” in the modern era thanks to over a century of Socialist nation building. Even then, the very term is muddled by decades of fascist rebranding - first as Anarcho-Capitalists and then as National Socialists and then as Neo-Conservatives and then as Neo-Liberals and now in a return to White Nationalism - with “liberal” being embraced or rejected in turns as our corporate media needed it to be.
As a case in point, I challenge you to tell me whether liberals are libertarian. In Europe and Asia, they functionally are. In the Americas, they couldn’t be further from it in mainstream politics.
The political spectrum is full of double-speak. “Liberal” is a textbook case. It can mean anything and nothing.
The left starts at anti-capitalism, bozo.
Now go read a book.
If we’re being consistent, it’s an ideology centering private property and capitalism, which puts it on the right in the global context.
it’s an ideology centering private property and capitalism
That’s the economic angle. But it also promises a host of libertarian social reforms included within the free market system. What’s more, liberalism isn’t just an attempt to yank socialists back from their economic progressivism. They’re often efforts to balkinize the power base of local dictatorships and feudal aristocracies.
The original liberals were trying to break up the Old World feudal system, establish economic mobility through cross-border trade, and secularize states that had historically been married to a single branch of a particular religion. All of that was incredibly left-wing from the perspective of the theocrats and monarchists.
Hell, the whole pitch aimed at The Dictatorship of the Proletariat that liberals make is that Socialists/Communists are just Monarchists in disguise. Unipolar parties aren’t really democratic. Centrally planned economies aren’t really communally owned or beneficial. And atheist leaders are just advancing their lack-of-religion as its own kind of faith.
Are these liberals full of shit?
Yes
But the political spectrum is wide, and they’re nowhere near the right-most end of it.
I feel that this is just a consequence of trying to firmly place ideologies on a spectrum beyond whether they affirm capitalism or affirm socialism. I don’t tend to bother trying to compare how right or how left ideologies are, but instead judge the various left and right ideologies on their own propositions, which can’t be easily graphed.
I mean, you gotta define your spectrum.
It’s not a spectrum
Well liberals today forgot about equality so they can just fuck off
You guys ever think you’re being coaxed by the rich to create all these dividing groups. I sure do.
No, I don’t, because the rich persecute the orgs I work with.
Why don’t you think that? Wouldn’t it make sense that convincing groups to decimate and alienate themselves from the main body would benefit them politically? Or is this just a case of the left going off of vibes hopes and dreams
Liberals call Trump a communist on daily basis. Why should we trust these malicious and stupid people who can’t even differentiate socialism from fascism?
Liberals don’t help us. They have been in power before and do absolutely nothing.
Liberals aren’t a singular group. What do you do?
Liberals arent a singular group
They are when your definition of a liberal is material rather than aesthetic.
I don’t think the rich are creating communist orgs that accurately explain the problems today just to divide liberals from the left, considering liberalism by nature already supports the system the capitalists profit off of. If anything, your suggestion is going off of vibes, hopes, and dreams.
I didn’t say they were creating them. I am saying they’re targeting groups with more passion than brains
The rich do manipulate liberals into thinking they can get meaningful change through electoralism, but I don’t see what that has to do with leftists.
We’re not creating these, we are using words to describe how things are.
No you’re redrawing lines. It’s the new “walkaway” movement getting ready for the next election. You’re going to poison the votes.
No, lmao. Politics isn’t entirely about elections, stop it with this conspiracy theory nonsense.
“We’re not making up new words, we’re just redefining old ones!”
Dude do you even know what liberal means?
Liberalism is an ideology founded in a few core principles. Capitalism and the right to own property, the power of the government originating from the masses rather than god, and inalienable rights for its citizens.
You guys are the ones redefining old words cause you don’t like the idea of not being considered leftist anymore. The overton window has shifted since the 1700s, yall are centrists now.
Liberal policies aren’t just a singular thing. Because of these groups astro turfing they’re getting the usual gang of idiots to say there is only one group and that is the one that shares a few center right policies.
What do you think astroturfing is? Which groups are these?
We aren’t saying there aren’t different kinds of liberals, what we are trying to tell you is that liberalism is not a left wing ideology anymore. It is centrist and anti-communist. Yes you have left leaning liberals and right leaning. But that still only makes yall center-left and center-right.
Leftists issues with liberals is because liberals, no matter what are pro-capitalist and anti-communist. Communists are anti-property and liberals are pro-property. Yes a leftist has more in common with a left leaning liberal than they do a right leaning liberal, but that does not make their interests aligned. Historically anytime liberals and communists team up, communists get backstabbed. And more often than not, it never even gets to teaming up. Historically, liberals are the ones to team up with authoritarians to crush communists.
And I’m an anarchist. I trust Marxist communists just about as much as I do liberals. That is to say not much. And I have more interests aligned with a Marxist than I do a liberal
No one is redefining words here, though.
you’re being coaxed by the rich to create all these dividing groups
“Bad People tricked you into thinking that way” is such a shit way of engaging anyone politically.
It simultaneously serves to call the audience stupid and insert some nebulous outside agency as the scapegoat for failing to make your own case.
Like, if you want to rally people to all agree you fucking suck, there’s really no better way than to go to every individual group and say “I’m right, its obvious, and you’re just too dumb to notice.”
Didn’t answer what I asked. Being stupid is ignoring a question like this because of ego
And I don’t want to rally people. I’m honestly giving up on the left. I’ve watched them slash tires to protest … Cars. I’ve seen them defend blocking traffic even when we see how counter productive it is when it always produces footage of regular folks and emergency vehicles getting delayed. I’ve watched them Reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. I have seen zero effective strategies. But now I’m tired and things I wouldn’t call it I’ll say it now because I’m so fucking done watching people not realize this stuff. It’s walkaway 2.0
I’ve watched the left turn into something that is extremely toxic. There’s no social awareness. If you think what I’m saying is toxic or lacking in social awareness congratulations, that’s the strategy the left uses every single day now. There’s no effort, no consistency day to day other than areas that divide. It’s an ideology about burning bridges and purity tests
There’s no effort, no consistency day to day other than areas that divide. It’s an ideology about burning bridges and purity tests
Lol. Maybe try projecting less hard
So are you
Responds to an imperative with “so are you”, lol
Being stupid is ignoring a question
Bro, what?
Told you so
Do you losers actively try to make everyone hate you?
Are you funded by the billionaire elite to defend liberalism? Obviously we divide capitalist ideology from socialist/communist groups
😆 .ml
There’s the issue
you are in an ml com you dumb fucking lib.
Yea I can tell. Look at you.
Apparently you couldn’t tell, lol
“You’re from instance I don’t like” isn’t a particularly strong argument fyi
Especially when they’re on that very instance.
What is this?
Do you like r/thr_donald? Does not liking them invalidate your criticism for them.
You’re on world, does that mean you are pro genocide of Palestinians? 🤔
If the entirety of your criticism is where they’re from then it was never valid
