[lbo-talk] Genocide, Holocaust

[Thiago Oppermann]

On 1/6/2003 9:15 PM, "lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org"
<lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> wrote:

> "Grant Lee" <grantlee at iinet.net.au>>...If that is your definition, then the
> introduction of capitalist livestock
> industries, in the last 18th Century, was the most significant genocidal
> act
> of all.
> 
> 
>  Calling Dr. Heidegger! "“Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in
> essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in the gas chambers and
> the extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of the
> countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs.”
> 

If someone institutes a system of economics  the outcome of which is that
millions of people die, or that whole cultural groups vanish, what do you
call that? Not genocide? So is it a genocide if one reorganises the
countryside into unworkable communes, but not if one refuses provide grain
to starving Indians so as to disrupt the play of the free market? What
difference does it make if you starve for someone else's ideals or are
gassed for someone else's ideals?

Btw, I take great offence at being compared to Heidegger in this context. I
cannot see what that adds to the debate.

Thiago