populism vs. Marxism (was RE: Frank Sinatra)

Dennis R Redmond dredmond at gladstone.uoregon.edu
Mon May 18 17:05:23 PDT 1998


On Mon, 18 May 1998, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


> By the body count, how do FDR, Truman, Nixon, Reagan, etc. fare? Anybody
> ever counted?

It's hard to know for sure, but I imagine Truman scotched 1 million Koreans/Chinese, assorted Americans, and 50,000 Greeks; Ike responded by plunging Guatemala into hideous civil war (500,000 dead over 30 years), installing the Shah of Iran, funding the French war machine in Vietnam, etc.; Kennedy had the Bay of Pigs to his (dis)credit, and offed maybe 200,000 Vietnamese directly; that twin-headed vulture, Lyndon Bainehouse Nixon, kicked the carrion machine into high gear, to the tune of 2 million residents of Southeast Asia, assorted Americans, and a bumper harvest of Cubans and other Latin Americans; Reagan slaughtered 50,000 El Salvadorans, 30,000 Nicaraguans, maybe 50,000 Guatemalans, and an unknown number of Palestinians; Bush offed several thousand Panamanians and 100,000 Iraqis. By contrast, the Soviets murdered maybe 50,000 Eastern Europeans in the various post-WW II uprisings/occupations, plus tens of thousands of their own citizens in the various post-Stalin gulags.

Those are just the direct, military victims of the Pax Americana. The real toll is far higher: our elites have maintained and enforced, on a global scale, an economic neocolonialism which has meant bailouts for the rich and debt-spurred underdevelopment/IMF structural adjustment deforms for everyone else. Such policies have and continue to impoverish billions and kill, through premature death, unnecessary disease, and the violence of social decay, millions of people (while also laying waste to the ecosphere). Global capitalism, to paraphrase Adorno, is Auschwitz with an atrium -- only this time, the whole planet is going up in smoke.

-- Dennis



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