The Death Toll of the American Empire

I was reading one of the book reviews in issue 59 of Lobster yesterday, when I was struck by this little piece of information. The article included an estimate of the number of people, who have been killed worldwide, thanks to the Americans propping up a series of extreme right-wing and Fascist dictators as part of their global war on Communism. The number of people these butchers may have murdered is somewhere from eight to thirty million.

One of the very strong arguments against Communism, at least in its Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist variety is the number of people it’s killed around the world. And the strongest argument against Fascism is also the number of people those regimes have murdered, for no reason other than their ethnicity, political convictions or that they were simply disabled and so ‘unworthy of life’. The death toll inflicted by American imperialism, however, puts the US well into the league of murderous global states.

But this imperialism is still being promoted as giving the world freedom and democracy, despite the fact that it manifestly doesn’t. It gives instead its victims nothing but slavery, torture and death, all for multinational corporate interests.

Tags: Chairman Mao, Cold War, Deaths, Imperialism, lenin, Lobster, Multinational Corporations, racism, stalin, the Disabled, Torture