by JEREMY KUZMAROV
New study finds U.S. responsible for nearly 300 million deaths—and counting
In September, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation—established by a bipartisan act of Congress in 1993—opened the Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, D.C., which aims to spotlight the plight of the alleged 100 million victims of Communist ideology.
The 100 million figure was derived from the 1997 book The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University Press, which was replete with falsehoods. The book blamed communist governments for famines that occurred on a more regular basis in capitalist countries and which had resulted from environmental causes, like the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s (holodomor).
If the political culture in the U.S. changes, someone might open a museum dedicated to the victims of capitalism or the U.S. empire, whose death toll would be much greater than 100 million.
A new book by David Michael Smith, Endless Holocausts: Mass Death in the History of the United States Empire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), estimated that the U.S. empire is responsible, or shares responsibility, for close to 300 million deaths.
Smith writes that “the almost inconceivable loss of life in these endless holocausts arguably makes this country [the United States] exceptional, though in a strikingly different way than its apologists intend.”
Exceptional in its violence and killing prowess, which is truly shameful.
The Indigenous Peoples’ Holocaust
Smith estimates that 13 million Indigenous people were killed in the holocaust that resulted from the European colonization of North America.
Quoting from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Smith notes that the Indigenous nations of the Western Hemisphere had “built great civilizations” prior to the arrival of the white man whose “governments, commerce, arts and sciences, agriculture, technologies, philosophies and institutions were intricately developed,” and in which “human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe.”
The European lust for wealth and dominance, however, led to mass death and destruction.
Characteristic was the Pequot War in Massachusetts of 1636-1637 where, Smith notes, the Puritan settlers recruited Native allies and formed the first ranger forces to engage in “wilderness warfare,” where “colonial officials began paying bounties for the scalps of Native men, women and children.”
About 6,000 Wampanoag, Narragansett and Nipmuck were killed, and New England’s Indigenous population declined from at least 70,000 in 1600 to 12,000 by the end of the 1600s.
African American Holocaust
The decline of the Indigenous population in the Western Hemisphere forced the European colonizers of North America to begin importing captive people from Africa to labor for them.
Smith estimates that approximately 25 million Africans were originally captured, and 12.5 million of them died between capture and embarkation from the slave ships that brought them to North America. Twenty million more Africans are believed to have died in slave raids, raising the total that died because of the transatlantic slave trade to 32.5 million.
Of those who survived the Middle Passage, many more died from diseases and from beatings by their slave masters or by suicide. According to Smith, almost 70% of those who survived the Middle Passage were no longer alive a decade and a half later. Overall, he believes that 41.5 million may have died because of slavery.
During Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War, freed slaves died from lynching, and in prison after the imposition of Black Codes. They were also killed by white mobs in race massacres—famously in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Black Wall Street was burned to the ground.
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