>>> Wojtek Sokolowski writes:
What I miss in your tallying is how you attribute deaths to the leader's account. There are two problems here: who is to blame, and for whose death?
Charles - Yes, I agree with these questions. But, as you say below, the individual "big men" are in conspiracy with a bureaucracy. cut.
Wojtek- But then we get to things like misguided policies and events that were not intended as genocide. That includes slavery,
Charles - The United Nations legal definition of genocide includes acts less than murder. The main purposes and conduct toward living slaves fits the UN definition of genocide.
Wojtek- but also potato famine in Ireland, collectivization in the US, or the various "development" policies directly and indirectly forced by the IMF, Washington, etc. Here the criterion 'for whose death'beacomes really fuzzy indeed.
Charles - I believe you mean SU ? This is an important point you make.
For example, there are now 40,000 U.S. auto deaths/year. The long term policy of the U.S. transportation monopolies has caused a holocaust. We recall Ford's admission regarding the exploding, rearend collision Pinto: It was cheaper to pay the wrongful death damages than make the cars safer. This is the general attitude of the transportation monopoly with respect to the enormously dangerous instrumentality they have created. There should be a body count for Henry Ford I and II. Henry Ford I directly financed the Nazis as well. He had a picture of Hitler in his office.
By the current count system, nobody is the blame for all of the bodies in WW I, because it wasn't ethnic murder. It was class murder however, and the bourgeoisie should be blamed as a class, naming Rockefeller, Morgan and the houses of Europe for personal body counts. WW II adds 50 million to the bourgeois body toll.
Wojtek- The US propaganda managed to equate the responsibility with national borders and for a good reason. That makes the US and Western European leaders squeeky clean because most of the skeletons from their closets are buried in the Third World couintries. They learned how to externalize not just the cost of economic development, but the social and human cost of capitalist prosperity as well.
This invisibility of the victims, because of their skin color and geo-politcal location, was aptly captured by George Orwell, himself a colonial functionary, in his essay _Marrakech_.
So the bottom line is to use a truly universalistic criteria to judge all national leaders, instead of ones that are tainted by class or national interests.
Charles - Any count system that makes US and Western European leaders and ruling classes less world historic criminals than other leaders and ruling classes is flawed. The modern mode of mass destruction was invented and is practiced and controlled by US and Western European warriors, colonialists and neo-colonialists.
Charles Brown