Re: What's a life worth?

At 05:42 PM 4/28/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>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.)"
>
>-----------------------------------------------
>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 don't blame you. I _did_ say that I liked Eudora Pro since it allowed me
to edit my messages. 

You have my most sincere apologies if my statement came across that badly.

In my passage quoted above, I pointed at that although colonialism wrought a
terrible toll on non-European peoples (and later in Asia, following Japan's
industrialization, non-Japanese peoples), you can say one thing about it:
Its violence was at least limited by geographic scope. There are many
observers who feared the very negative effect that the conquest of hundreds
of millions of people would have upon morals at home -- for instance, the
general revulsion in France after 1960 or thereabouts following the
terrorist attacks, tortures, and mass murders perpetuated in Algeria in the
name of France.

You can say that colonialisms are totalitarian ideologies so far as the
colonial subjects are concerned -- they seek to revolutionize, against the
will of the people concerned, the entire culture of a subjugated population.
As it worked in practice, Soviet-style state socialism was a totalitarian
ideology claimed everyone, colonial subjects and metropolitan citizens. You
weren't spared the KGB because you were a Kazak herder; neither were you
spared the tender mercies of the Lubyanka chambers because you were a
Russophone Muscovite intellectual.

I consider myself a person on the left wing; in my university community, I
have come out against racism, against petty xenophobia, against homophobia.
I detest political oppression, in my home province, in Canada, in the
Balkans, in the world generally. And I detest colonialism, but at least its
cruelties face _some_ geographic and legal limits.

(And who said anything about non-European colonial empires? Hey, a Libyan
colonial empire in Italy, or a Korean empire in Japan, is just as moral as
an Italian Libya, or a Japanese Korea.)

>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.

Too often true, yes, I agree. Racism isn't limited to capitalist societies,
though -- it's present in state socialist societies, too. And very often it
is more difficult to overcome official racism in state socialist societies
due to official rigidity. The civil rights movement in the United States
encountered severe problems, with everything state harassment to policemen
looking the other way to extrajudicial murder. But the horizontal non-state
networks that eventually allowed for the abolishment of many of the most
visible signs of racism in the United States would not have been allowed to
form in the Soviet Union under Stalin, for instance.

>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.

It _is_ terrible. As I have stated in a previous E-mail, I favour open-door
policies on the part of First World nation-states in regards to immigrants
from the Second and Third Worlds. Would a racist favour those policies? 
It is hard, in a province that is 95% Anglophone, and 99% Christian and
white, for anyone interested in being a xenophile (like myself, I'm pretty
sure) to encounter other cultures, but I certainly try. I am not a racist;
never was, never will.

>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.

Germany _was_ unquestionably more lethal than the Soviet Union. As I've
said, when the Soviet system broke up, there was still an Estonia, still a
Ukraine, still a Chechnya. When the Nazi system broke up, less than a tenth
of the Jews living in Poland before the Holocaust were still alive, and if
the Nazis had their way, most of the Poles and Ukrainians who survived the
death squads and gas chambers would have been deported to Siberia. (!)

The crimes of the United States and the leading democratic western European
colonial powers, in their colonies and quasi-colonies and protectorates, are
beyond dispute by myself. I'll only say that unlike the Soviet Union, and
most unlike Nazi Germany, their crimes occurred outside the boundaries of
the metropole. In thats sense and that sense only, they were limited.