Currently there are estimates of 100 million Africans lost in the middle passage. But what would be better to die or live as a slave ? The treatment of living slaves and Indigenous Americans on reservations is also genocide.
The UN Convention on Genocide includes not only murder but torture and and serious mental harm to living people in its definition of genocide.
ARTICLE II,CONVENTION ON THE PREVENTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE CRIME OF GENOCIDE:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
If the Indigenous Peoples of North "America" were less numerous than the Jews (in 1940), then the proportion of the whole annihilated is greater. Some studies, however, place the North population at 10 million. If the South is added, the population is much bigger, with Mexico and Peru. The destruction of the indigenous culture is part of the genocide.
Indigenous cultures integrated "land" in their life ways in a way we cannot conceive. To this day "Land Recovery" is a major demand of the Indigenous liberation movement.
In listing historical "thugs", how about adding not only Jackson, but slave owners Washington, Jefferson (the great liberal patriarch). Truman was mentioned and questioned on body count. How many bodies in Hiroshoma and Nagasaki ? For Kennedy/Johnson/Nixon two million plus bodies in Viet Nam. For Reagan, how many bodies in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Mozambique and Angola ?
Hitler was a bourgeois politician. Nazism was not external to captialism.
What is the body count for the whole history of European colonialism ?
In a certain sense pinning genocide on an individual is a trick bag, that lets the bourgeois system off the hook in comparison with the socialist system in history. The former has been overwhelmingly more genocidal than the latter in the total picture of history in terms of body counts and everything else that defines genocide.
Unified against Genocide,
Charles Brown
>>> Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com> 05/18 1:02 PM >>>
>Ah, and do not forget the genocide of the Native Americans. That they were
>not as numerous as European Jews should not provenet us from seeing that US
>presidents pioneered genocidal policies of the same sort as those later
>pursued by Adolf Hitler.
>
>regards,
>WS
Hitler actually pointed to the extermination of the American Indian by such "enlightened" progressives like Andrew Jackson as a model for the Third Reich. Jim Craven has been digging deeply into the documentation on this for a suit against the state of Washington by 15 tribes. What's interesting is that the case is being heard in an Indian court. The governor of Washington State has been subpoenaed and he is pissed!
ps to Jim: Doug's mailing-list and mine are now online and they're pretty darn good. Let me know if you want to get added.
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)