What's a life worth?

Randy McDonald wrote the following:


"But they differed in one crucial respect: The Soviet
abuses of power not only occurred in the colonial peripheries, but in the
metropolitan areas. For all of their faults, French colonialists never went
to Marseilles or Paris and gathered thousands of Frenchmen at gunpoint to
work as slave labour planting sugar beets, or -- the Commune aside -- never
engaged in wholesale massacre of French citizens. Soviet colonialists did
that. That alone is enough for me to place Soviet-style state socialism
below even Western imperialism -- at least the latter spared _some_ regions
of the world. (Again, I am not arguing that Western imperialism should be
the dominant global ideology, I think that it should be replaced by
something better such as the global keynesian policies suggested
elsewhere.)"

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Randy --- I really don't want to attack your integrity. Perhaps you didn't
mean for your words to sound the way that they do.  But what you wrote above
definitely does SEEM TO IMPLY that it is "not as bad" to destroy the lives
of millions of darker-skinned people of the world than it would be to "kill
your 'own' people."  Again, I'm willing to give you the benefit of the
doubt, but it really doesn't sound too good to me.

I believe that the social welfare liberal movement, including the "moderate
socialists", generally is quite insensitive to the massive destruction that
imperialism has caused to people in the "periphery." And as I stated
earlier, they have often been complicitous in this exploitation and murder.
No wonder that so many nationalist movements in the "Third World" have
decided that Marxism is just another form of racist "Western" ideology, when
so many of the leftist parties have either ignored, or worse, taken part in
the oppression of workers in other countries whose lives are not valued as
much as others.

Alan Spector

P.S.-- As to your main point, I hate to get into the project of "counting
bodies" as to which regimes have slaughtered the largest number of innocent
people, but once the topic is brought up, I guess we  have to get into it
again. I'll leave it to others on the list to document the record of
imperialism. What the USSR regime did isn't a drop in the bucket compared to
what the US, Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium have done since 1917.