RE: Who has killed more people? Nazis? or Communists?

[digitalfirehose]

How come when it comes to mass killings, capitalist always gets a pass? The link below is to a calculation of 1.6 billion murdered by capitalism.

http://sayitaintcapitalism.tumblr.com/post/81932846515/capitalism-16-billion-murdered

Comments

[davebrewer]

The list includes both WW1 and WW2.

So that discredits the full list in my opinion.

I am not familiar with the background of every item on the list, but when you put WW1 WW2 on the list, which are clearly not started by capitalists, and were started by Nazis and communists and dictatorships, then not worth my time to investigate beyond that obvious mischaracterization.

[digitalfirehose]

With regard to the WWII, it has been fairly well documented that the Bush family, well known and 'respected' capitalists, helped Hitler rise to power.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar

With regard to WWI, while The Economist would like to divert attention to the shrill protests of business interests to war, the seeds of war had been growing for decades before then, cultivated by capitalists:

An identical competition between the Great Powers had developed for the control of oil, in particular that of Mesopotamia, then under the Turkish control and which today coincides geographically with Iraq. Britain, in March of 1914, blocked Germany’s project that, through the construction of a railway between Baghdad and Constantinople, sought to obtain from the Ottoman government the rights to oil extraction. Thus the First World War was anything but the result of the improvident superficiality of European governments, but the necessary outcome of the structural crisis of the capitalist mode of production and the conscious showdown between imperialist states in the face of the crisis of hegemonic power.

See https://revolting-europe.com/2014/07/29/ww1-100-years-on-capitalism-is-still-the-driving-force-for-war/

I have yet to see an example of a large capitalist country that can thrive without imperialism. Sure, you may be inclined to discount my sources as "socialist", but that is your call. Or, you could try to refute them with other evidence. If you believe that the list I presented is not worth your time, so be it.

I have laid out what I think is a good case that capitalists, through constant and unending need for raw materials through imperialism, have fomented plenty of wars and conflict for financial gain at the cost of more than a billion lives. I can't stop thinking of DeBeers on this point.