[Peace-discuss] David Green's letter to the editor in the News Gazette, nails it.

[Karen Aram]

Capitalism has deadly past, too
Thu, 12/07/2017 - 8:06pm | The News-Gazette<http://www.news-gazette.com/users/digitalmedia>

Bruce Kauffmann (History Lessons, Dec. 3), finding himself aroused from his American exceptionalist complacency by alleged ignorance of history among millennials, states: "Democracy and capitalism, for all their faults and inequities, have improved and saved far more lives than they have ended."

This euphemistic assertion of moral relativism was occasioned by a poll in which the majority of millennials expressed a preference to live in a "Communist or Socialist nation" rather than under capitalism. So how many million massacred/cleansed Indians, enslaved Africans, incinerated Jews, and carpet-bombed and napalmed Asians does it take to make "saving lives" not OK, at least in hindsight?

Such morbid apologetics and finger-wagging condescension are unbecoming, and more so from someone whose hortatory anecdotes are boring and useless to youths who — nearly three decades after the end of "Communism" — are faced with radical inequality, perpetual war, and environmental and social ravages of climate change.

Capitalism triumphant — that is, wealth-hoarding, austerity-enforcing, mass-incarcerating, structurally racialized, war-making, species-destroying capitalism — is the global systemic outcome of five centuries of coercive accumulation and two-plus centuries of liberal/elitist democracy.

Pardon millennial realism and idealism if they see capitalism as functioning in contradiction to "government of, by, and for the people." Pardon their admirable faith in democracy — however betrayed — to support popular movements for governmental limits on "free markets" and socialized provision of education and health care, for modest starters.

Kauffmann shamelessly quotes Ronald Reagan: "If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are." Absurdity gives way to irony; irony to truth.

DAVID GREEN
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