Whenever you point out that capitalism kills – quietly, bureaucratically, with paperwork instead of bullets—someone inevitably pipes up about the Great Leap Forward or the Holodomor. It’s a reflex, like the ideological hiccup of a system allergic to self-reflection.

One such defender of the sacred market recently wrote:

“Half a truth is often a great lie. What about the Great Leap Forward? The Holodomor? The Cambodian Genocide? The slaughters caused by socialism?” (thread)

You can almost hear the pearls clutching.

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For context, I share the text from his profile. I’ll let you perform the personality assessment.

One thing I will promise; I never block anyone just because I may disagree with or dislike their words. Because the only people who do are cowards. Want to attack me? Fine. If you think that makes the world a better place, go ahead; you cannot hurt me with your words.

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Let’s be clear: the crimes of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot are not Communism™ incarnate, any more than Donald Trump represents Democracy™. Systems don’t commit atrocities; people do – though some systems make atrocity easier, more efficient, and more deniable.

To illustrate: imagine Luigi Mangioni shoots and kills Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Luigi is an individual agent. Thompson, by contrast, is the face of a healthcare system that quietly decides who lives and who dies based on profitability.

If Thompson represents a system that allows people to die for lack of coverage, who bears the greater moral burden? Luigi, with his single bullet – or the corporate mechanism that kills by neglect, at scale, every day?

Capitalism hides behind its abstraction. It kills by omission. Stalin and Mao at least had the decency to be explicit. The capitalist death machine grinds on invisibly, its victims written off as ‘market externalities’.

So when a self-described truth-teller tells me to make a video about ‘the slaughters of socialism’, I’ll happily oblige – right after he makes one about preventable deaths under his beloved market: the uninsured, the unhoused, the unprofitable. The only difference between Stalin’s gulags and our modern equivalents is branding. One killed by decree; the other kills by design.