| Accepting Adam Smith as articulating the underlying ideas of capitalism, this barbarity was not capitalism by any stretch of the imagination. Nor were most of the deaths deliberate, however culpable the authorities may have been for creating the circumstances under which starvation and disease could take place. But the main thing is that we are talking about a period of 40 plus years. The Ukrainian Terror Famine claimed about 7 million in about a year, the Gulag under Stalin claimed about 10 million in 30 years, and there are other outrages to tally. The Great Leap Forward, which, it has been ascertained, involved Mao deliberately ignoring reports of famine, and thus willfully starving people rather than admit a mistake, claimed as many as 30 million people in a few years.In the 4 years that the extermination camps ran, the Nazis killed about 6 million people. If you credit them with the death toll for the war, then they were responsible for far more deaths in a brief period. The best you can say is that you came close to finding the lone exception: culpable, non- ideological death on a truly massive scale....... |
