You’ve once again allowed Harold W. Pease to present another intellectually dishonest analysis of Socialism.  First of all, he conflates Socialism into Communism, an authoritarian regime that has as much to do with genuine Socialism as National Socialism (Nazis).  He doesn’t mention the Democratic Socialist forms of government and economy demonstrated by the European Union, and especially modeled by the successful economies in Scandinavia.

But it is the focus on the genocide perpetrated by Communist States without a comparison with Capitalism that is most egregious.  Capitalism, especially practiced by Colonial Empires, have a genocidal record 10 times worse than the Communists.  This is mostly the result of centuries of colonialism all over the world, whereas the Communists and Fascists had but a half dozen decades before they crashed and burned.  Communist genocides were largely perpetrated against their own people, whereas capitalists ranged across the globe, exterminating indigenous people, enslaving others, while they kept the majority of their own population in poverty.

About 50 million African slaves died in the Americas.  85,000 in transit.  Half of all slave babies died in their first year in North America alone, bringing the toll up to 2 million.  The Spanish Empire exterminated 8 million indigenous people throughout the Americas, followed in close succession by the British, French and Dutch.  80 percent of the indigenous population of North America were dead from epidemics, starvation, massacres or displacement by the end of the Indian Wars.

In the Congo, the Belgians massacred 3.7 million Congolese of various tribes.  The French reduced the Algerian population from 3 million to somewhere between 500,00 to a million in less than 30 years. But the global champions of genocide has to be the vast British Empire, that decimated populations in North America, Africa, the Middle East, India and China.  Hundreds of millions of people.  Besides the slave trade, which Britain banned in 1808, they introduced China to opium imported from India, and when the inevitable effect of the narcotic threatened social collapse in China, British capitalists insisted that the British military enforce the trade.  Britain fought two wars with China over the opium trade.

I’m not saying that democratic socialism is better than capitalism.  I’m merely pointing out Pease’s dishonest presentation of it as a synonym for Communism, presenting all of the horrible murders under Communism as socialist, and, completely ignoring the far greater genocides perpetrated by Capitalist Empires.  It’s brazenly dishonest and manipulative.