• richardwallass@sh.itjust.works
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        7 hours ago

        “the claims that Courtois made in the book’s introduction were not even accepted by all of his own contributors.”

        The figure encompasses the number of Vietnamese casualties resulting from armed conflict with the US.

        • Smif_N_Lenin@piefed.social
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          6 hours ago

          As the historian Ronald Aronson pointed out, even if Margolin did not cite the figure of one million victims of Vietnamese Communism invented by Courtois in the introduction, at no point in his chapter on Communism in Asia did he mention that the US intervention in Vietnam had cost, according to some estimates, up to three million lives.

    • Pudutr0n@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      capitalism being a system that promotes the accumulation of wealth / power by few to exert over many? So like… nature? Yeah, that would be everyone.

      Everyone that has ever died ever is due to capitalism. :)

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        4 hours ago

        Capitalism as a mode of production is only a few hundred years old. It’s essentially a mode of production where private ownership is the principal aspect of the economy, and capital owners control the state. Before capitalism was feudalism, and before feudalism came slave societies, and before those came tribal communalism.

        Human nature is incredibly malleable and depends most upon how we produce and distribute, how we live and how our environment shapes us.

          • Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
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            8 hours ago

            Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production.

            There are special subdivisions with certain extra features, but the bare bones definition is just that.

            • Pudutr0n@lemmy.world
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              8 hours ago

              Isn’t private ownership kind of an extension of territorialism which is present in many species? Makes you think, huh?

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                4 hours ago

                No? Private ownership began to dominate society after feudalism. Turtles aren’t compelling others to labor for them through capital ownership.

              • Wrufieotnak@feddit.org
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                7 hours ago

                No, not really.

                Because if you do think about it, you would realize that a wide variety of species shows a wide variety of different behaviours. Which in turn means that all these opposing ways of behaviour are indeed natural, but not necessary natural for humans, as they are contradictory to each other. Or if you want to follow your proposed line of thought to the logical end, I await your proof of human males attaching to the much bigger female and atrophying to a simple ball of sacks for insemination as angler fishes are proven to do.

                Or to make the point even more direct: the whole concept of laws to give or take ownership is in itself so counter to all other animals behaviour that it is ludicrous to try and argue any part of that is in any kind of way natural. Or by definition of ‘humans as animals’ would mean any political system we adopt is natural by design.

                • Pudutr0n@lemmy.world
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                  7 hours ago

                  Or by definition of ‘humans as animals’ would mean any political system we adopt is natural by design.

                  Took you long enough