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SteelHands Capitalist Wars’ Death Tolls
For a rapid comparison with the grand total of “100 million victims of communism” from all causes, one can start with World War I. About 23 million deaths were directly caused by mostly liberal democratic regimes at war with each other. Then, between seven and 12 million people died in the Russian Civil War, during 1917–1923 (Mawdsley 2009). This is entirely imputable to capitalist regimes since they intervened to crush the Revolution (the Czarists trying a military coup even earlier, arguably hastening the Revolution). Czarist forces (the White Army) tried in vain to re-impose the Romanov dictatorship while foreign governments, including the US, sent much military aid and invaded with tens of thousands of troops in support of White Army rogues. During that upheaval, a budding Turkish state’s genocide (1919–1923) included at least a quarter million dead, largely Armenian. From the early 1920s through the 1930s, the Italian government murdered nearly 400,000 people in Ethiopia (1923–1936) and 80,000 in Cyrenaica (mainly in the 1930s). In South America, the 1932–1935 Chaco War (between the Bolivian and Paraguayan states) caused possibly 130,000 deaths. The Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), entirely concocted and supported by capitalist regimes of all stripes (liberal to authoritarian), is associated with between a quarter of a million and a million deaths, with the wide uncertainty due to the suppression of information by the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975), supported throughout its existence by liberal democracies. On the other hand, 70 to 85 million people died in World War II, a war entirely again caused by capitalists and their state and fascist allies. Many major businesses (Fiat, Krupp, Volkswagen, Ford, IBM, etc.) also supported and profited from the war-imposing Fascist and Nazi regimes. And this is small wonder. Those dictatorships were based on defending private property, privatising public assets (against the general trend at the time), busting unions, and persecuting and murdering leftists of any sort. The resulting dividend for many capitalists was rising profits and greater market control.
Also let's not forget the deaths of people having to work in "third world countries" while producing products for the west under dire conditions.