austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

272 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
nomic reasons, permitting greater personal individuality (as socialism
prevents rich individual owners of capital from repressing the individu­
ality of others) and greater personal freedom (as socialism prevents
"free" markets from economically repressing personal freedoms).
Regardless, since the analysis in Chapter 3 of this book shows that
the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe was not inevitable, and since
Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate that a socialist system can function and
even integrate in a capitalist-dominated world, there is also hope for
other countries even if the USA's new world order is not overthrown
by USA voters. In particular, other countries can vote in political parties
promising to attempt to create more just socialist systems that are
immune from the USA's capitalist exploitation and atrocities. While
socialism may not be perfect (and while an even better system could
perhaps be developed, maybe by developing further some of the ideas
presented in Chapter 5), it has clearly been shown to be superior to
capitalism in practice.
In the meantime, while waiting for the majority of voters to wake up
to the reality of the USA's Cold War victory, this book provides perspective
on the hypocrisy of individuals, organizations, and nations that
refrain from doing business with countries for "ethical" reasons. Such a
refusal to engage in peaceful international cooperation is often based on
citations of terrorist acts or other atrocities committed by those countries.
It is true that some of the peoples and countries against whom the
USA has committed its own extermination tactics have also engaged
in morally criminal acts. For instance, Nazi Germany and fascist Japan
both made the top ten in civilian killings (as documented in the introduction),
Cambodia executed as many as 150,000 people after the USA
slaughtered about a half million innocent Cambodians (as already men·
tioned previously), Vietnam assassinated about 40,000 civilians during
the USA occupation and extermination process there (Lewy, 1978), the
American Indians killed thousands of civilians in retaliation for the
USA mass murders (Utley and Washburn, 1985), and Iraq killed thousands
of its own civilians (Andreopoulos, 1994). 15 Nevertheless, even
though other countries have also engaged in terrible acts, none compare
to the USA (and some of those terrible acts by others actually repre·
sen ted a form of revenge for much more horrible USA atrocities committed
against them). A consistent policy of refusing to interact with
CHAPTER 7
273
countries that commit terrible atrocities would therefore also mandate a
refusal to do business with the USA itself.
In summary, this book irrefutably documents the fact that capitalism
is a much less efficient and much crueler system than communism.
While further worldwide suffering can be expected as long as the USA
is able to enforce its power and capitalist religion on the rest of the
world,16 the situation today in the year 2000 is probably not more hopeless
than it was in 1941 at the height of the triumphs of Nazi German
capitalism (which then also seemed invincible). Just as some have speculated
that Hitler's rule of Germany could have been "aborted" with
"mass protests" (Associated Press, 2000h), so too could widespread
demonstrations and other political actions terminate the rule of the
criminal USA leaders. In particular, the USA's own democratic f�ade
(which it currently uses so successfully for propaganda purposes, much
more so than Hitler did for his own elections) creates an opportunity to
overthrow the USA tyrants peacefully via the ballot box.17