[PEN-L:7581] Re: Re: Re: Re: RE: DeLong Compares Mao to Hitler

[david dorkin <ddorkin@xxxxxxx>]

Is it not possible to use varying degrees of abstraction in the case of
the US then and say that x millions of people died, led short brutish
lives, or emigrated, due to US imposition of  monocultural agriculture
in their countries, provocation of coups and civil unrest, as well
exports of arms to much of the world such as East Timor, Vietnam
Guatemala etc? Why exempt the US on the basis of its avowed "democratic"
principles a la Walter Lippman? If you accept explanations of death
tolls for others, would you also accept them for the US? or would you
simply dismiss anyone who made a case for this as being "ideological"?

Brad De Long wrote:

> Gee. Other people complain that I do not abstract enough--that I argue too
> much from relevant historical contexts  and so,as some put it, wind up
> making the same arguments that justify the Nazi New Order.
>
> Let me try to distinguish between two kinds of "relevant historical
> context." The first--which I reject completely and utterly--is that there
> is a difference between people killed by the Okhrana, shot by Franco's
> police, or starved to death because the Czar was uninterested in famine
> relief and the landlords were interested in exporting wheat through Odessa
> on the one hand; and people killed by the NKVD, or people starved to death
> because the soldiers took all their grain (and no one would dare tell Mao
> that the harvest was low) on the other hand because people who fall in the
> second group are counterrevolutionary scum or enemies of the people. Dead
> is dead. To deny the humanity of some of the dead seems to me to simply be
> anti-human.