On Thursday, August 16, 2001 at 16:59:36 (-0400) J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. writes:
> Well, I certainly do not wish to get into this
>appalling numbers game. But, since I started
>this with that forward, I guess I'll add a comment.
>The main one I would note is that the really big
>numbers one sees in places like Le Livre Noir
>de Communisme come from the famine deaths,
>especially those in the USSR in the early 1920s
>and 1930s, along with those in the GLF in China,
>which alone amount to around 30 million by most
>recent accounts (give or take several million).
>...
This from Noam Chomsky, adding as usual sound observations:
Writing in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no
such famine. He attributed the India-China difference to India's
"political system of adversarial journalism and opposition," while in
contrast, China's totalitarian regime suffered from "misinformation"
that undercut a serious response, and there was "little political
pressure" from opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze
and Amartya Sen, _Hunger and Public Action_, 1989; they estimate
deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million). The example stands as a dramatic
"criminal indictment" of totalitarian Communism, exactly as Ryan
writes. But before closing the book on the indictment we might want to
turn to the other half of Sen's India-China comparison, which somehow
never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He
observes that India and China had "similarities that were quite
striking" when development planning began 50 years ago, including
death rates. "But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity,
mortality and longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive
lead over India" (in education and other social indicators as
well). He estimates the excess of mortality in India over China to be
close to 4 million a year: "India seems to manage to fill its cupboard
with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its
years of shame," 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen). In both cases, the
outcomes have to do with the "ideological predispositions" of the
political systems: for China, relatively equitable distribution of
medical resources, including rural health services, and public
distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when
"the downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted,
and possibly reversed," thanks to the market reforms instituted that
year.
Overcoming amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the _Black
Book_ and its reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally
acceptable half. We therefore conclude that in India the democratic
capitalist "experiment" since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the
entire history of the "colossal, wholly failed...experiment" of
Communism everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens
of millions more since, in India alone.
Bill
