They did manage, after all, to wipe out an entire people in South-West Africa.
Perhaps not as rampagingly genocidal as good old King Leopold, but still, deucedly good. (3) Concentration camps and working to death weren't really the British way.
The Brits specialized in tardy responses to famine, with Amartya Sen's famous 1942 Bengal famine being only the last (and by no means the largest) in a string of famines in India that lasted nearly two centuries. (The 1770 Bengal famine may have killed 10 million out of 30 million - comparable to the Thirty Years' War.) (4) The Western Hemisphere's great dying was by far the biggest of the genocides, although the main culprit was unintentional biological warfare (see Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism). There were cases, like California, where the native populations were intentionally hunted to extinction, and places like the mercury mines of Huancavelica where the workforce was intentionally worked to death, but the vast majority of the work was done by diseases that were badly understood by their carriers. (5) With all of this, there is still something distinct about the Nazi creation of an industrialized machinery of death, the creation of places where efficient and methodical killing was the whole point. That, of course, distinguishes the Nazis from other fascist movements as well. Really, the Italian fascists and the Spanish phalangists weren't in the same league.
----- Original Message ---- From: Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 11:04:15 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] More Rightwing proto-fascism
[WS:] I think you are trying to pull wool over my eyes here. You know darn well what time frame I am talking about. So let's be clear on basic facts - the Brits and the Americans were wiping out, enslaving, locking up in concentration camps and working to death entire populations way before the Germans did it in the 1930s. I do not see how these two are different in any other than superficial ways, such as the lethal methods, skin color of their victims, or slogans used to justify their deeds (lebensraum vs. freedom cum democracy - big fucking deal.) I am not even sure if the Germans killed more people than the Brits and the Americans, but then they had fewer years to do it. You may prefer to call one "fascism" and the other one by some other word, but this is a matter of semantics.
Furthermore, as a sociologist you must know that the perceived seriousness of a crime is affected by how much observers identify with the victim. There is tons of research showing that. So why do you object to the idea that perceptions of Nazi and British, American, or Japanese atrocities may be affected by how much the observers identify with their victims?
As to Ragin - I am not writing an academic journal article or even a newspaper article but a comment to an internet chat list for chrissake.
Sheeeesh.....
Wojtek
On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 10:58 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure you pay much attention to how what you write might read by
> others
> before you click Send...
>
> What I am talking about is that the majority of the list to which you
> posted
> your polemic are "European and American whites" and you referred to how
> "we" had to
> abandon the ethnocentric view of fascist victimization and stop
> erroneously believing that fascism is something unique and
> unprecedented and accept the fact it is something quite common in
> history, there will be nothing imprecise in calling US right wingers
> fascists.
> before you informed us that
> They are fascist in their hearts, they just happen to
> operate within the constraints of a liberal state which
> limits what they can do to their political enemies.
>
> If we were supposed to read this as directed at folks other than us, it
> would
> have been helpful if you'd made that clear...
> At the same time, however, since it still appears that you haven't gone
> back
> to read what was discussed a year ago, a good deal of effort and a good
> number
> of reputable sources of efforts to define fascism - sources which didn't
> agree -
> were posted.
> You treat fascism as if it is were quite common in history. Do you mean,
> by
> history, millennia? many centuries? a century and a half? Do you mean,
> within that history, to also suggest that the commonality was
> geographically
> widespread? Everything I have ever read about fascism has argued that it
> is
> a feature of modernity, and usually capitalist modernity but, like in the
> other
> thread, you're point focuses on hearts and minds and homogenizes - by
> refusing
> to carefully differentiate between varieties of right wingers - all
> right wingers into
> the fascist camp.
> Surely you've seen Charles Ragin's work on comparative methods where he
> advocates extensive case studies compared and contrasted on a range of
> diverse variables en route to a complex process of elimination seeking to
> ascertaining whether apparently common cases are substantially similar?
> In this light, I have absolutely no sense of what specific characteristics
> of
> fascism that differentiate it from anything else right wing and violent in
> your
> mind. We actually sought to determine at least some of the valences of a
> reasonable discussion on this issue last year which is why it might could
> make sense to stop shouting.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > WTF are you talking about? I did not say anything about members of this
> > list. I made a statement about general Western perceptions of European
> > (German) fascism vis a vis atrocities against non-white people, which I
> > believe is true. What does this have to do with what you or others on
> this
> > list said six months ago?
> >
> > Wojtek
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
___________________________________
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk