Denying imperialism is worse than denying the holocaust

[GracchusBabeuf]

.

[blackwave]

How do you mean 'worse'?

[Zanthorus]

Agreed. In fact the Holocaust is usually used as a rationale for justifying Allied Imperialism in world war two.

[Palingenisis]

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1960/auschwitz.htm


Interesting article on the subject by Amadeo Bordiga.

[Antifa94]

More than six million people died in the holocaust.
As evil as imperialism is, modern day imperialism doesn't seem to be systematically exterminating a race of people through psychological terror and incarceration, as bad as it is. let's not trivialize the Holocaust.
15th-mid 20th century imperialism is certainly as bad as the Holocaust, King Leopold, extirpation of the samurai in Japan, eradication of the Maya and Incas, etc.
I mean, then again, American and NATO treatment of iraqis and Afghans is barbaric..We just don't seemed to be rooted in a supremacist/social darwinist ideology.
See, I believe America(at least under Obama) doesn't appear to want to take over the world, subjugate certain races as slaves and eradicate others. This was the ideology of the Nazis.
So, until America starts a conquest for World domination, No, I can't say that 21st century imperialism is as horrific as the holocaust.
Nonetheless, Nato and America and Israel are war criminals. Especially America.

[Antifa94]

Well I just completely ignored the question, didn't I.
Yes, denying Imperialist genocide and mass murder is equally as bad as denying the Holocaust, however, I can see why people care less about it. Unlike the Holocaust, imperialism is not burned into our subconscious as something utterly evil, as it happened long ago. I think it is a tragedy to forget the subjugation and suffering of native people, and that we must raise awareness of the horrors of Imperialism.

The Holocaust happened more recently and therefore it receives attention and sympathy that the killing of say thousands of Carib Indians in the 1490s does not.

[Antifa94]

Hmm, also, the horrors of modern day imperialism haven't been exposed yet and those that are and will be are countered by an incessant barrage of propaganda.

[Robocommie]

Generally, I don't like to rank crimes and atrocities, not by numbers of dead nor by chronological time span. It's enough to say it's horrible and needs to be ended. After all, this perspective tends to lend itself to the kind of tally-mongering in the Black Book of Communism - it becomes a question of how many, and not the what and why.

[GPDP]

American imperialism: the only imperialism in world history that vehemently denies it is imperialism.

[9]

It is true, as someone else pointed out, that the Holocaust is used as a justification for Western and Zionist imperialism, past and present. There are no words to describe how disgusting this is, when the victims of the Holocaust died from what is at root the same system which is making genocides and ethnic cleansing today. I think it is a mistake to actually separate the Holocaust from imperialism as if they are separate and unrelated phenomena, rather than symptoms of the same disease.

Also,


http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1960/auschwitz.htm


Interesting article on the subject by Amadeo Bordiga.

This is in an incredible piece imo; reading it was really important for me. That translator’s note is super pathetic, though.

One has to wonder, too, why ‘GracchusBabeuf’ has ‘thanked’ this post of yours, since when someone posted this article on revleft just two months ago (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1685828&postcount=14), he was ‘thanking’ calls to censor it and claims that it was “pissin’ on Holocaust victims”, in addition to himself calling those who agreed with the article “pieces of trash”. So I guess the real question is: has his position changed, or is he just a super sad Stalinotroll?

[Robocommie]

I agree that we should not rank these crimes of the various factions of the bourgeoisie of the past and present, but my point was that the imperialists of today tend to trumpet the crimes of the Nazi imperialists from the rooftops while remaining quiet on and suppressing any voices against their own heinous crimes.

Without a doubt, governments tend to play down their own crimes while wrapping themselves up in the flag of others. Sadly I must say that that can be true of our own side as well.

[Palingenisis]

This is in an incredible piece imo; reading it was really important for me. That translator’s note is super pathetic, though.


Im not sure if I go along with totally but it is definitely worth reading and thinking about. I have no respect for Trotsky but I believe that Amadeo Bordiga was probably one of the most interesting Marxists of the 20 th century and Im also a Stalin-troll.

And the translator's notes are worse than super pathetic.

[KC]

This thread is pretty poorly thought out. It isn't really reasonable to compare the actions of a single political party/state with those of an entire global socioeconomic system. It's quite obvious that the latter will have a much larger effect than the former, so not only is the comparison invalid but the conclusion reached in the OP is blatantly obvious because of this.

However, I think the greatest mistake made in this thread is in throwing around the word imperialism and attempting to moralize about it (which was the purpose of the comparison, after all) without even really understanding what it means or expounding upon what imperialism actually is. You can't just throw around a word as if everyone knows what you mean by it.

The problem, of course, is that nobody really knows what it means anymore. Sure, we could go back to Lenin's pamphlet, but that isn't really valid anymore; it's been almost a century since that was written, and capitalism has changed profoundly, so to dogmatically cling to that is absolutely ridiculous and bordering on insanity.

[index]

I think both are just as bad

[ComradeOm]

The holocaust killed 6 million people, while imperialism has killed uncounted millions of peopleThe Holocaust killed six million people in around four years. Plus tens of millions of additional deaths in the same period. Your "uncounted millions of people" stretches over at least two centuries. This, alongside reasons outlined above, makes your comparison deeply flawed


On the contrary, the victims of the imperialists know very well what imperialism is. You can ask the people who have been made homeless and whose relatives have been killed by the various imperialist armies in the past century, a practice that goes on unfettered todayAnd they would provide you with an in-depth and nuanced analysis of imperialism as a socio-economic system or stage of development?


Its probably a fashionable thing for you to say that capitalism, imperialism etc have changed, given the prejudice and hostility that exists among most Western leftists of today about the Third World, but for the victims of the neo-colonial exploitation that goes on today, nothing much has changed from the times of the old colonialists to the times of neo-colonialists in the form of transnational corporations all armed to the teeth and backed by a vast global military empire composed of numerous countries.What a terrible sentence. I'll deal here with the words in bold, the rest is waffle

Put bluntly, the idea that there is no difference between the colonialism of today and (say) a hundred years ago is pure idiocy. This should be obvious to anyone making even the most casual comparison, for example between the "vast global military empire" of the USA 2010 and Britain 1913. Its impossible to believe that someone living in Brazzaville, again for example, perceives little to no difference between French and local rule. Whatever about the underlying economic relationships between the West and the ROTW, there is no denying that the form and style of these has undergone massive structural changes in the past century

[Devrim]

In short, the Nazis and fascists are nowhere compared to the mass murders committed by imperialism.

This seems to miss the point that Nazi Germany was a capitalist imperialist state.

Devrim

[son of man]

I think that the holocaust was imperialism. Hitler was building an empire and he viewed jews as an obstacle.

The population of China could be said to have suffered more from the hands of the Imperial Army of Japan than did European Jews from the Third Reich. I think such comparisons are vulgar and unhelpful.

Britain was running slave labour tin mines in which numerous murders and human rights abuses occurred in right through the duration of WW2.

I don't value the comparison between the holocaust and imperialism.