Are Europe’s Horrid Crimes Forgiven?

(It's) built on the enslavement of colonized peoples; it is built on the unimaginable horrors visited on those hundreds of millions of men, women and children, who were slaughtered mercilessly by the colonial European powers. It is built through oppression, terror, and almost exclusively, on theft and plunder.

Yes, Europe has social nets and in many of its countries, decent subsidized medical care systems and education, but, but… once again, these have not been built or sustained from its creativity and production, instead, it has mostly come from the colonial and neo-colonial plunder perpetrated all over the world.

How many Asian and African families have to starve, in order to have some early-retired, still strong, German man or woman farting deep holes into his or her sofa, immobilized in front of the television set?

How many Senegalese farmers have to lose their livelihoods and go totally bust, so that French and Spanish farmers get their ‘subsidies’ and drive those latest BMW’s? Its generous compensation for ‘not producing’ or it is a great incentive to produce more, depending on the year.

To admire it, is like admiring some brutal thuggish oligarch, who has amassed huge wealth by extortion and open plunder, built a gigantic palace and provided his family or his village with free medical care, education, some theatres, libraries and parks.

( http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/are-europes-horrid-crimes-forgiven/ )

DICTATORSHIP OF THE BOURGEOISIE: The most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists. Even in the most democratic bourgeois republic 'freedom of assembly' is a hollow phrase, for the rich have the best public and private buildings at their disposal, and enough leisure to assemble at meetings, which are protected by the bourgeois machine of power. The rural and urban workers and small peasants -- the overwhelming majority of the population -- are denied all these things. As long as that state of affairs prevails, 'equality', i.e., 'pure democracy', is a fraud. 'Freedom of the press' is another of the principal slogans of 'pure democracy'. And here, too, the workers know -- and Socialists everywhere have explained millions of times -- that this freedom is a deception because the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists, and while capitalist rule over the press remains -- a rule that is manifested throughout the whole world all the more strikingly, sharply and cynically -- the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example... The capitalists have always use the term 'freedom' to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death. And capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion. In this respect, too, the defenders of 'pure democracy' prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people, who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement. .................................... V.I. Lenin, First Congress of the Communist International, 4th March 1919.