House of Jamie - The less we care...

The less we care...

2009-Jan-11

There appear to be a growing number of Wordpress blogs sporting this tshirt design. "Communism killed 100 million people and all I got was this lousy tshirt." As a Socialist, this instantly grabbed my attention.

Communism has killed no one. Communism, like Capitalism, has never been achieved. Different degrees of Socialism have been achieved, but never the extreme of either wing. Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, or Castro's Cuba are all Totalitarian Dictatorships. Marx talked of a Classless, Stateless system as true Communism. Anything short of this is not Communism. When the Right Wing uses Communism to suggest responsibility for millions of innocent lives lost, they take the blame away from the crazed dictators like Stalin and Mao, and into the hands of an ideology that never existed in the first place.

But if they insist on suggesting that Communism is responsible for millions of deaths, using their very logic, let's examine the alternative, Capitalism.

Millions die every year in parts of Africa, because parts of Africa don't have natural resources that the Americans can use as a reason to invade and free the country.

AIDs and other disease victims throughout the third world who are denied access to the much needed treatments and drugs, because the Pharmaceutical companies might lose a bit of money.

Every victim of the Iraq war. Including British and American soldiers.

In fact, every victim of a war waged by America against any nation that isn't Democratic or isn't allowing McDonalds to set up shop, since the 1950s.

The miners and the child chimney sweeps of the Industrial Revolution.

The local tribes who were displaced so that Coca Cola and other such companies can use the Water supply, which they then contaminate, causing untold dreadful mutations and deaths.

The wiping out of the left wing of Chile, under Pinochet, supported by America and Britain.

Opposition to Organised Crime backed candidates for Political positions in "liberated" Eastern Bloc nations, who happen to have connections to the US and UK intelligence quarters. Proving that justice and politics is just as much a commodity as the rest of the World.

Famine and extreme poverty victims. We can afford to feed all of these people. But it isn't profitable, so we don't. Inexcusable.

Anti-Communist waged wars.

The people who die in fuel poverty every year because E-on and British Gas quite like the idea of giving their bosses huge bonuses.

The forgotten people of the poor undeveloped nations, who are used for profit and then slung out into the mud the moment they aren't valuable any more.

Over the next century, millions more, due to the frenzied, animal like chase for natural resources, slowly killing the planet. The very essence of an unplanned economy.

It is easy for me to blame all those deaths, on Capitalism. But that isn't intelligent. Much like blaming Communism itself for millions of deaths, isn't a well thought out logical argument. Capitalism did not cause the deaths of the people mentioned above. Terrible regimes, and failures of Government caused those deaths. In much the same way as Communism is not responsible for the extreme amount of deaths under the dictatorship of Stalin. In much the same way that Islam is not responsible for 9/11.

There is no justifiable way to explain away the deaths of those under Dictatorships using the cover of "Communism" such as the deaths of....
20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in the People's Republic of China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa and 1.5 million in Afghanistan. However, us Left Wingers, can freely and happily denounce the Right Wing propaganda attempts to suggest that the ideology of Communism itself is responsible for those deaths, because it isn't, any more so than Capitalism is responsible in some part, to the billions of deaths since the early 1900s throughout the World.

Only today, The Observer ran a story about Primark using a range of products from a producer who use illegal immigrants paid at just under half the minimum wage. The workers, who naturally come to the West for a better life, for a better chance for their families, are used for cheap labour (£3 an hour they're paid, not a living wage) for 12 hours a day, for seven days a week. We all know Primark exploits. We all know the only reason clothes are disturbingly cheap in Primark is because poverty stricken men, women and children throughout the third World are exploited every hour of every day. And the majority of us don't care. The less we think about it, the less we care. The less we care, the more ignorant, oblivious, greedy and self important we become. This is the result of the Capitalist way of thinking.

Long Live Socialism.

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