Communism
Lets take a look at what you get when you put together the desire to redistribute wealth equitably, increase government control over markets, and use experts to inform bureaucrats how best to manage resources and people.
The introduction, by editor Stéphane Courtois, states that that “…Communist regimes…turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government”. Using unofficial estimates he cites a death toll which totals 94 million, not counting the “excess deaths” (decrease of the population due to lower than the expected birth rate). The breakdown of the number of deaths given by Courtois is as follows:
* 20 million in the Soviet Union
* 65 million in the People’s Republic of China
* 1 million in Vietnam
* 2 million in North Korea
* 2 million in Cambodia
* 1 million in the Communist states of Eastern Europe
* 150,000 in Latin America
* 1.7 million in Africa
* 1.5 million in Afghanistan
* 10,000 deaths “resulting from actions of the international communist movement and communist parties not in power.”(p. 4)It explicitly states that Communist regimes are responsible for a greater number of deaths than any other political ideal or movement, including Nazism. The statistics of victims includes executions, intentional destruction of population by starvation, and deaths resulting from deportations, physical confinement, or through forced labor. It does not include “excess deaths” due to higher mortality or lower birth rates than expected of the population.
This comes from The Black Book of Communism.
Capitalism is all about greed and the ignoble virtue of getting and keeping whats your’s.
Communism is about equity and the noble virtue of sharing whats your’s with all.
If you ask me I would live in the ignoble world of greed than the noble word of sharing. I base this primarily off the likelihood that I would be dead in a world of good intentions.
February 25th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
-Winston Churchill
February 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
-Winston Churchill
February 25th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Sounds good to me; that still doesn’t seem to address questions of regulating free markets or of using taxes to provide services, within a democracy.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I dug around a bit at their compilation, and it’s worthwhile to note that many of the deaths attributed to Communism in the Soviet Union occurred during the mass deportations 1941-1944. Others for which communism was blamed were starvations that occurred in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War, in which all sides (communist, anarchist, secessionist, white) routinely supported their armies through the seizure of food from peasants, which, combined with the fact that much of the expert and educated population fled during the war, drastically reduced production. Also noteworthy is the fact that the highest density of Chinese deaths occurred in 1958-1961. So for the two biggest line items in that table, we have a country at war, and a country where the leader has taken a strongly anti-intellectual stance in regards to policy - completely ignoring the advice of experts and letting his ideology trump them (I think calling the PRC mass starvation deaths during 1958-1961 ‘intentional’, rather than the result of gross negligence is a bit of a stretch, but that is an issue for another day).
The various smaller line items are no less problematic. Afghanistan, for example (these are deaths blamed on communism for the Soviet Union invading them) - if a country invades Afghanistan and kills a bunch of militant Islamist extremists, as well as causing some collateral damage, we can blame their economic model for the fact that they (according to this logic) “turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government”?
If we were to apply these same standards, which blame the organization of the economy for just about everything, to capitalism, it’s not hard to see that the death toll that capitalism is ‘responsible’ for is even greater than 95 million. Many of the deaths during both World Wars were inflicted by nations that happened to have a capitalist economic system - add that to the death tolls of various slave trades and colonial actions likewise perpetrated by countries with free-market economic models, or mass starvations that happened to occur in nations with more free-market economic models (such as the Irish Potato Famine) and it’s readily apparent that there must be some other variable that is at least as important as economic model, in terms of predicting death toll. Just to drive that point home further, some communist countries (Cuba) have caused fewer deaths than others (China) just as some capitalist nations (Luxembourg) caused fewer than others (Belgium).
So, as far as I can tell, if we operate from the assumption that human deaths are a bad thing (which I think even Steve must agree with, otherwise he wouldn’t have found this information relevant enough to link), the data summarized above indicates that (A) going to war has bad consequences, and (B) failing to heed the advice of experts when making policy choices has bad consequences.
Is capitalism better than communism? My summary judgment would be yes. But - I think this is an important distinction - capitalism is better because it is somewhat more efficient about spreading the benefits of experts, science, and technology, rather than being better because of direct death tolls.
February 29th, 2008 at 1:52 am
Citations or just out of your ass?
February 29th, 2008 at 3:49 am
The link you posted provides ample support for the first component of my argument. As for details, I’m going to try to provide web links since I doubt anyone would bother to dig up a book over this.
Please specify which part of the following events you doubt:
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/5RFHJY
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Chinese_Famine
This happened before Marxism was implemented into any country - I can provide additional references if you remain unconvinced that this famine did in fact occur.
http://www.tourclare.com/faminememorial.php
As for the slave trade - yes, it did exist. I’m not sure why that would be controversial. For the transatlantic slave trade alone 10 to 20 percent of the slaves died during the transatlantic voyage, and many more died as a result of disease or other factors upon arrival. Extrapolating based on the number of slaves that made it, this would yield an estimate in the millions.
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/slav/hd_slav.htm
http://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article-24159
“the population of the Congo has declined from an estimated 20-30 million to less than nine million” during the height of the Belgian rubber trade.
http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/leopold.html#backg
For the others:
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat0.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wars19c.htm#Nino
8 million Congolese + (55 million WW2 minus 10 million WW2 caused by communist states) + 15 million WW1 + 20 million annihilation of American Indians + 46.5 million colonial famines = 134.5 million people killed ‘by capitalism’, if we go along with this rather odd method of attribution. And that’s not even a remotely exhaustive tally.
February 29th, 2008 at 9:39 am
Let me start with the Russian famine. Here was the economic policy of the communists at that time:
If you don’t call that communism then I don’t know what the fuck you would call that. To claim that such human suffering and death is merely an artifacts of post war conditions reveals an ignorance and naivety that call into question the utility of discussing this with you.
How much mass starvation occurred during the continental army during our revolutions from Brittan. How much starvation was there during our civil war. What kind of economic polices did they employ?
February 29th, 2008 at 10:20 am
As for the Chinese famine, to deny that the bureaucrats did not use experts to develop the economic policy is simply absurd. Note:
Here we have policy being informed by expert theory on rapid reformation to industrialize a country. I have absolutely no doubt that within this framework there were experts justifying and explaining how the policies should be implemented. News flash! Just because you don’t like what an expert is saying does not mean they are not an expert.
February 29th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
You still haven’t directly addressed point that if you were to apply the same standards to capitalism you would wind up with a higher death toll.
As for your examples, famine and disease are always byproducts of war under any economic model. It’s amazing that even your efforts to choose the examples in the entirety of history most beneficial to your position still result in examples that fall short of demonstrating even isolated instances of non-destructive wars under capitalist economic models. “An estimated 25,000 American Revolutionaries died during active military service. About 8,000 of these deaths were in battle; the other 17,000 deaths were from disease” in the British navy: “About 1,240 were killed in battle, while 18,500 died from disease.” Germany wasn’t a country at the time, but some countries in the region that would later be called Germany intervened on the British side “Approximately 1,200 Germans were killed in action and 6,354 died from illness or accident.” Partisan and irregular forces were used by both sides, and I don’t think I need to spell out for you what that means for civilians. Additionally, one of the contributing factors to the French Revolution was the public debt France incurred by intervening on the rebel side. So clearly there were noncombat consequences. The number of deaths were lesser, but that of course is a natural and expected consequence of the fact that the action occurred on a vastly smaller scale. I don’t see how this causes me any problems, nor does it even begin to address more severe cases of death or starvation in the wake of war in capitalist nations.
As for the American Civil War: “The war produced about 970,000 casualties (3% of the population), including about 620,000 soldier deaths—two-thirds by disease.” - it caused hundreds of thousands of noncombatant deaths - less than the Russian Civil War perhaps, but this is, again, to be expected given its limited scale and much more clearly defined (for most of the war) borders, combatants and objectives. As an aside, it also -dramatically- increased the powers of the federal government, so its consequences must have been extremely bad from your perspective, right?
To directly address your quotation from wikipedia, that same article goes on to point out that none of those policies were really even implemented, if they can even be called policies: “regions loyal to the Bolshevik government often had to act on their own, lacking any orders or central coordination from Moscow. It has long been debated whether “war communism” represented an actual economic policy in the proper sense of the word or merely a set of desperate measures intended to win the civil war at any cost.” To me, this sounds like total war is the culprit - after all, capitalist nations have done pretty screwed up things in the name of victory at any cost.
Regarding the Great Leap Forward, this is from that same article:
“Mao’s deep distrust of intellectuals and faith in the power of the mass mobilisation of peasants led him to order this massive countrywide effort without consulting expert opinion.”
Please provide me with your alternative interpretation of the phrase “deep distrust of intellectuals”.
If he had consulted the expert opinion of metallurgists, they would have pointed out the flaws in his plans and advised him of an alternative course of action.
March 1st, 2008 at 12:19 pm
“During 1945 it was estimated that the average German civilian in the U.S. and the United Kingdom occupation zones received 1,200 calories a day… undoubtedly a large number of refugees have already died of starvation, exposure and disease… The death rate in many places has increased several fold, and infant mortality is approaching 65 percent in many places. By the spring of 1946, German observers expect that epidemics and malnutrition will claim 2.5 to 3 million victims between the Oder and Elbe.”
To put the 1200 calories/day in perspective, inmates at Auschwitz were provided with 1300 calories/day for light labor and 1700 calories/day for heavy labor, and this caused many of them to begin to experience wasting and starvation in weeks.
http://www.auschwitz.org.pl/html/eng/historia_KL/warunki_bytowani_ok.html
So yes, mass starvation can occur in capitalist nations following war.
The prediction was that the situation would worsen even further after spring 1946, but instead a massive program of redistribution (both private and government-mandated) was undertaken and the worst of the disaster was averted.
Some have tried to argue that trade barriers imposed immediately after the war were responsible for this mass starvation, and the relaxation of these barriers correlated with the cessation of starvation. I would grant that trade barriers may have aggravated the situation. However, the argument that they were the cause holds up very poorly, given that mass starvation didn’t occur during the early phases of the war, when Germany was blockaded by the U.K. navy and at war with many of its immediate neighbors, severely limiting the possibilities for international trade.
March 1st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
I don’t understand what your point is. In disputing death by famine as direct result of economic policy post war you quoute death by disease and war. That baffles me. I was arguing that economic policy caused death by famine you seem to think you have refuted me by arguing that post war death by disease is equivalent. Huh!?!?!?
Furthermore, communist economic policy killed a shit ton more Russians after this first round. Communist in conjunction with experts were just getting started with the killings. For example:
No war. Just bad economic policy. Six million dead. Point, point to anywhere in all of the history where an actually democratically elected government that protected the right to private property (Capitalism) killed SIX MILLLION of it’s own people. Please point to where this has happened.
Or how about the Great Leap Forward. This is another example of communism in conjunction with expert opinion set policy that killed anywhere between 20-43 million people.
POINT ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD DURING ANY POINT IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND WHERE A DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED GOVERNMENT THAT RESPECTS PRIVATE PROPERTY KILLED 20-43 MILLION OF ITS OWN PEOPLE. Good luck. It aint going to happen. Communism kills. That about the only dimension it beat the US at.
March 1st, 2008 at 9:26 pm
Disease and famine deaths are often counted together since they tend to go hand in hand (nutrient deficient people tend to succumb to opportunistic infection, and diseased people tend to be less able to obtain food). This is tangential though, since I pointed to post war death by famine in Germany. My contention is that post war death by famine is equivalent to post war death by famine, yet you seem to have a problem with this logic.
We’re not talking about democracy or dictatorship. We’re talking about capitalism and communism. Totally different categories of contrast. Communists can and have been voted for, and dictators can and have run countries under capitalist economic models. Is your reasoning so weak that you are mixing and matching these things just to have ground to stand on?
As for your claim that the Chinese used ‘experts’ to guide their policy, I assume you are referring to this person:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
This is not particularly problematic for my position, as all I have to do is say “qualified experts” and this issue is solved. The Chinese used his “expertise” after he had been completely discredited by his peers for being a quack and basing his work on theories that had been discredited by scientific -consensus- (yes, I just had to throw that word in).
And I just pointed to an instance where governments, under a capitalist economic model, killed 31.7 million to 61.3 million of their own people through policy, you goof. There’s no need to repeat your tired mantra in all caps when I’ve already done as you asked.
March 2nd, 2008 at 12:22 am
Could you point to these examples again?
March 2nd, 2008 at 3:03 am
To reiterate:
Eight million Congolese killed, not by an organized government but by a wealthy investor acting as an entrepreneur. Millions killed by the transatlantic slave -trade-. Yes, trade. Even if you only count those who died during the voyages, millions of people died -because of free trade- (and saying ‘that’s not really free trade’ is just as bad an excuse as saying the USSR wasn’t really communism). The 31.7 million to 61.3 million represent the low and high estimates of starvation occurring “as a result” of the policies of European landlords, merchants, ect. during the 19th century in China, Brazil, and India alone. Citations for all this are in the post above.
I put “as a result” in quotations, because just like the mass deaths of the 20th century numerous different factors contributed. However, you want to imagine that the responsibility for many 20th century mass deaths falls entirely on economic policy. If you want to play that game, the 19th century causes you some problems when we apply the same standards.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:26 am
One of the links you send showing slavery as an example of capitalism killing states:
Yeah this totally sounds like a democratically elected government that protected the rights of private property. You totally got me with the slave trade. I just didnt realize we were defining protecting private property as
And democratically elected government is defined as:
Some might argue that protecting private land ownership does not mean private ownership was non existent, in fact some might persist, and argue protecting ownership means by definition is has to exist otherwise it can’t be protected. Some might argue that democratically elected government are not called kingdoms given that kingdom are normally ran by, on I don’t know, lets say a king. Last time I checked democracies are not ran by kings. But when you want to deny communism is no worse than democratically elected capitalism sometimes you have to blur the distinction between democracy and monarchy. I understand. Your just chaging the meaning of the terms so you can be right. Its cool.
Looking up the Congo crap you brought up which, was not easy to do cause you non-existent link sucked, we find:
Another interesting way to define protecting private property.
If one was not careful one might draw the conclusion that this is better example of communism killing eight million Congolese than capitalism or democratically elected government.
Ah fuck sticks. Unfortunately for you I looked up the word communism in the dictionary and it states:
That sounds just like what happened in the Congo. I guess it wasn’t capitalism in the Congo but communism that killed the people. Add that 8 million to my side. Just for shits and giggles lets see what capitalism means.
Huh. You don’t say. I guess if the state owns it then it ain’t capitalism. Imagine that.
The Congo argument further blows because your so called entrepreneur was actually serving as the king of that land. Again, because you seem to be woefully ignorant of political science, kings are not elected by the people. Governments that have kings as rulers are called monarchies not democracies.
As for this:
I’m really going to need more specifics so I can see what you are talking about. Given your absolute failure with the other examples to show democratically elected government respecting capitalism to cause death I’m going to have to go with these other examples will fail just as miserably.
By the way, China killed 40 million people under my constraints. An expert, a state that denies private property, and bureaucrat that uses expert advice and state power to implement a policy that leads to the starvation of at least 40 million shows my point without me having to change the definition of words. Quite honestly I feel like im waisting my time. It’s obvious communism kills. I’m sorry you have some proclivity for communism. Im sorry you think this means you should try and argue out its utterly inexcusable death toll. However, at the end of the day, communism kills and democratically elected governments that implement policy favoring capitalism does not kill.
Evolution is true. Theory of relativity is true. And the statement ‘communism kills’ is true. Put your big boy pants on an man up to it.
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I specifically excluded the fates of slaves remaining in Africa and only counted to deaths that occurred during their transatlantic trade, so I’m not clear on how your objection causes me any problems.
“Yeah this totally sounds like a democratically elected government that protected the rights of private property.”
Again with this red herring. Why is democracy is remotely relevant to this discussion?
“Outside Belgium, he is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King. The state included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The extraction of rubber and ivory in the Congo relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of millions of Congolese. He ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom; for him it was a business venture.”
“a private project”
“a business venture”
Really sounds like private enterprise to me; the Belgian state wasn’t involved. He was the king of Belgium, but he didn’t inherit a congolese throne either by marriage or blood. He was not acting as king of congo. Instead, he obtained the territory entirely through the guise of a -private- holding company. It is rather astounding that you can confuse ownership by a business enterprise to public ownership by everyone and it makes me wonder whether you possess the basic heuristic faculty to carry on this discussion intelligibly.
You use the word expert loosely, without addressing how your argument still works if the adjective “qualified” is added on.
“However, at the end of the day, communism kills and democratically elected governments that implement policy favoring capitalism does not kill.”
Again, you haven’t demonstrated how democracy is relevant to the subject at hand. I could bring up an example of democratically elected capitalist governments killing people but frankly I think that is a discussion for another day - it has fairly little to do with the discussion in which we are currently engaged. This conversation arose in the context of capitalism and communism, and the fact that you added on the “democratically elected government” part to capitalism is as far as I can tell a backhanded concession of the -entire argument-, because it concedes my point that there are other kinds of capitalist policies that can and do kill people.
I said right at the outset that I think that capitalism is on the whole better than communism. However, I disagree with ideologically driven efforts to lay all the blame of many of these mass deaths at the hands of communism, because such efforts ignore the significance of the numerous other factors that played roles.
March 2nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Just wasting my time here. Put you man pants on for christ’s sake.
Sigh… You need complicity on the African side for the slave trade to work. Its up in the air who is to blame for these deaths.
Sigh… democracy is not a read herring because this discussion entails the state using its coercive for to implement an economic policy. Democarcy are much more favorable to capitalism then communisms.
Sigh… as stated countless time before, the state is the entity that has a monopoly on coercive force. If this ‘entrepreneur’ could make people do things they did not want to do then he is no longer an entrepreneur but a tyrant.
Sigh… in the example I give, the great leap forward their was a soviet expert that informed the communist part in China of the techniques forced on to the peasantry to grow food. You are going to argue that he is not an expert. It sure is nice having the lens of hindsight to determine who is and is not an ‘qualified’. You of course will probably say that even his contemporaries rejected his idea. To which I would argue their have been countless times in history in which experts were ostracized by the contemporaries only to be shown they were correct. Experts are problematic. Especially in a state organization that has entirely to much control.
Jack ass, I said killing it’s own people. And more to the point in the numbers that come even close to communism. Not only that but find one that respect private property has killed at least a million of its own people. You have not even come close. Congo is not even close for about at least three reasons.
Why its it better? If one was to agree with you then would expect to see millions upon millions of dead people in capitalism only because of extraneous factors completely independent to the economic system controlled by the state. What are the factors that killed sixty million people in china but have never obtained here in the states.
What a waste of time this is. You don’t care you just want to be right.
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:05 pm
“Sigh… You need complicity on the African side for the slave trade to work. Its up in the air who is to blame for these deaths.”
African slaves had the right to buy their freedom. It was only after they fell into European hands that they lost that ability. And more to the point, the Europeans had other sources from which they took slaves (such as native Americans) that would have just been tapped more thoroughly instead of Africans had the Africans not been complicit (and it is much more problematic to try to make the same argument that the natives were complicit).
“Sigh… democracy is not a read herring because this discussion entails the state using its coercive for to implement an economic policy. Democarcy are much more favorable to capitalism then communisms.”
As I said above, people can and have voted in governments not favorable to capitalism, while kings can and have made policies favorable to capitalism. As for what is more ‘favorable’ to what, that is totally inconsequential to the argument. The direction of causation you suggest is exactly opposite of the direction causation would need to be for it to even be logically coherent to suggest it matters for this discussion.
“Sigh… as stated countless time before, the state is the entity that has a monopoly on coercive force. If this ‘entrepreneur’ could make people do things they did not want to do then he is no longer an entrepreneur but a tyrant.”
Right, so as soon as capitalism produces something you don’t like, you say “but wait that’s not really capitalism”. This is just as pitiful as the person who decides that as soon as Communism produces the Soviet Union, and they don’t like that, they claim “but wait that’s not really communism”. It’s the same argument and it’s no more effective when you use it.
“Sigh… in the example I give, the great leap forward their was a soviet expert that informed the communist part in China of the techniques forced on to the peasantry to grow food. You are going to argue that he is not an expert. It sure is nice having the lens of hindsight to determine who is and is not an ‘qualified’. You of course will probably say that even his contemporaries rejected his idea. To which I would argue their have been countless times in history in which experts were ostracized by the contemporaries only to be shown they were correct. Experts are problematic. Especially in a state organization that has entirely to much control.”
The nice thing about science is that if the empirical evidence supports someone’s position, their views will (usually very quickly) dominate. Cases where an expert that turned out to be correct were ostracized are the exception rather than the rule, and even in those few cases the empirical evidence eventually wins out. So in the overwhelming majority of cases I would rather follow the majority opinion of experts rather than base my decisions on an inflexible and purely political doctrine (that, as I have demonstrated, conflicts with historical fact), or some stochastic process.
“Jack ass, I said killing it’s own people.”
As I see it people are people regardless of nationality, race, gender, sexual orientation, ect. I guess you have a different opinion? But regardless, I could give an example of that too if you really wanted. But like I said - topic for another day. My main point was that you are bringing up stuff that is tangential. I find it funny that you are trying so hard to squirm away from the issue.
“And more to the point in the numbers that come even close to communism. Not only that but find one that respect private property has killed at least a million of its own people. You have not even come close.”
I did. 31.7 million to 61.3 million. Is it cognitive dissonance when someone ignores evidence that conflicts with their pre-existing biases?
“Congo is not even close for about at least three reasons.”
Right, because just like the Soviet Union isn’t really an example of communism, it isn’t really an example of capitalism? I missed the other two reasons. Are they just as sad?
“Why its it better? If one was to agree with you then would expect to see millions upon millions of dead people in capitalism only because of extraneous factors completely independent to the economic system controlled by the state.”
We do see this, you just try to make rather sad excuses about them or ignore them entirely.
“What are the factors that killed sixty million people in china but have never obtained here in the states.”
Since it’s already been established that you know nothing about Chinese history, let’s review a few episodes relevant to the discussion of mass deaths: the An Shi rebellion of 756 to 763 AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Shi_Rebellion
killed 42 million people, which would have been about 17% of the world population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates
For comparison, WW2 killed about 3% of the world population in a similar amount of time. As for more contemporary examples, I could point to the second Sino-Japanese war,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War
in which 12.3 million Chinese lost their lives, or the Warlord Era
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warlord_era
which also caused numerous casualties. All of these happened before the communists came to power in China. So clearly there -were- other factors, or the deaths only would have started once the communists came to power. As to what those other factors were, I’m not sure I could tell you with certainty, but China has a much denser population, so there are more people around to kill. Also, during the 20th century, China had considerably less technological development and infrastructure than many western nations (you can’t blame this on communism because the disparity was apparent even before the advent of communism), as well as increased anti-intellectualism. Those are possible contributing factors. I could speculate on some other ones, which would be an interesting subject for a different discussion, but demonstrating that there must be other factors is sufficient to prove my point in the context of this discussion.
“What a waste of time this is. You don’t care you just want to be right.”
Of course I don’t care. I never claimed to care. I don’t even really “want to be right”. I just find this amusing.
March 4th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
[…] to Dan’s astute observations regarding communism, I now know that America has been very lucky avoiding any of those magic […]
March 5th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Dan wins!
-anonymous
March 20th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[…] the writer Daniel Hannan has not read any of Dan’s response to my condemnations of communism. Ponder the stories of two African states. Kenya banned the […]