I don't like going there, but in the interests of using an argument that I don't think much
of but to make a different point... Many people opposed to socialism, communism and so on like
to use what I call "count-the-deaths" arguments. They count deaths, and say something like this,
"Stalin killed millions," or 10 million. Many of them do the same exercise with Mao. There's
no question that the tumultuous transformations in Russia after 1917 and in China after 1949-
those are the days when they changed their society and tried to construct some sort of socialism- at
least that's what they called it. That these were traumatic transformations, a lot of people died-
no question. And if you want to blame that on socialism, I don't understand quite what
you're doing there. Social transformations- as I'm about to show you- incur deaths in large numbers,
and they always have. But okay, let's do it for a moment. And this time, I'm going to ask the
question, what about capitalism? If we're going to charge socialism and communism as responsible for
the deaths under Stalin and Mao, well then we have to look at capitalism and ask what? Well,
over the last two or three centuries how many people died as a result of them in that sense?
And the answer is- not that it gives me any satisfaction to tell you this but- that the
number of dead is much, much larger than we can attribute to Stalin and Mao. To be crude,
maybe it's because Stalin and Mao didn't sit for two or three or four centuries. They're much,
much younger systems. They haven't had the time yet to perhaps do comparable damage,
but let me give you an example of the first time I encountered this. First book I ever wrote- it's
called the "Economics of Colonialism". It's about a small country in East Africa known as Kenya,
and it touches all of this. The period of my book and my doctoral dissertation covers 1895,
when the British take over that area in something called the East Africa Protectorate, and it runs
till 1930. The British were in charge that whole time. It was a British colony. When the British
arrived, the census that they took indicated roughly 4 million African people. In 1930,
another time of a census, it was two and a half million. A million and a half people vanished-
died as a result (it's easy to show) of the British colonial regime.
It literally moved the mass of the African population around the country,
throwing them out of areas they had lived in for many centuries because it was useful to grow
coffee there. Arabica coffee grew on the highlands in the middle of Kenya to be sent to England where
there was a big merchant coffee business that took it and distributed it in England, Europe,
all over the world. Made a lot of money but to use that good land to have the coffee,
you had to get rid of the Africans and where did you put them? In reserved area. That's what they
were called reserved. You know, like what we did with the people we called Indians, the indigenous
people here, reservations? They did that there too. Cost them millions of lives. It subordinated
their economy to the British. "You are subordinate people. You're going to get paid nothing. You have
no education. You have very little medical care. Your job? Live short, work, produce coffee, ship
it to England. You may not like this story, and it may upset you in terms of Queen Elizabeth. But
she was the monarch presiding over all of this. So it should come as no surprise that in 1953,
a year after she becomes Queen, Kenya erupts with a revolution. It was called The Mau Mau revolt.
If we can talk about millions in that little corner of the empire, imagine if we had a census,
no more would you hear death count be the way of comparing capitalism and socialism and communism.
Socialism and communism may catch up, and they will be criticized if
they do. But they have a long way to go to catch up to the murder that is part,
the mass murder that is part of the evolution of colonialism as the extension of capitalism.