[lbo-talk] Free Market Genocides

Wojtek Sokolowski swsokolowski at yahoo.com
Tue Aug 5 15:21:26 PDT 2008


--- On Tue, 8/5/08, dredmond at efn.org <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:


> There's another, more recent example which doesn't
> get a lot of air-time:
> Imperial Britain's murder of 2-3 million Bengalis in
> 1943. There's no
> evidence of a serious drop in food production, it seems the
> British were
> in a panic at the rapid advance of the Japanese Army into
> Burma and
> disrupted key trade routes. Prices skyrocketed, the British
> authorities
> ignored the problem, going so far as to turn down offers of
> help from the
> Americans, and millions of people died.
>

[WS:] I would not call it "free market genocide." This is the scorched earth tactic used in the war time by many nations - Russians used in the Napoleonic wars and WW2, the North used it agains the South in the American Civil war.

In my mind, "free market genocide" evokes the notion of profits before people even in times of emergency. For example, not sending anti-HIV drugs to Africa and preventing others from doing it to protect corporate profits and monopolies.

Wojtek



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