seanl

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Perform for the benefit of whom?

"smoothly conflate mercantilism and capitalism."

That mercantilism was a phase of capitalism is a common - though not universally accepted - point of view.

"WW2 flat requires the re-branding of command economies as "capitalist"."

Repeating myself somewhat, but that depends on how you attribute causation. That capitalism was in crisis in the 1930s is pretty uncontentious. That the effects of that crisis on Germany contributed to the rise of Nazism is also fairly uncontentious. The rest depends on how you weight those factors against others.

I appreciate that you are not open to the view that a non-murderous and non-totalitarian socialist society is possible. I myself am on the fence.

However I do strongly believe the first half of my argument: that capitalism begets death and destruction on a scale that exceeds the murderousness of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes (whether within 'wartime' or 'peacetime' matters not to me).

I hope that something better is possible. I accept that based on the empirical evidence we are screwed.

That would be a simple version of the argument I have in mind. Basically I don't think WW1 and WW2 were disconnected events, there is a path of historical causation that runs through both.

Only if you see the rise of Nazism and WW2 as discrete historical events with no causal relationship to the years that immediately preceded them. I've encountered reasonable arguments that the first half of the 20th century was dominated by a single protracted world war with a lapse in explicit hostilities in the 1920s. The rise of any ideology has to be accompanied by conducive political and economic conditions.

You might; I'm as impressed of that as I am by ID.

Apparently your repeated mistake is to confuse the methodologies that lead to sound scientific theory and the methodologies that lead to sound historical theory. I'm attempting to highlight complexity and nuance in the history of the 20th century that you are overlooking. If you refuse to see it then no amount of rational argument will help.

Of course you may well reject such an argument, as I might reject the argument that the tens of millions of deaths in totalitarian states that described themselves as communist were an inevitable consequence of their politico-economic structure.

My point is not to claim that either of these points of view are true or false. My point is that complex, somewhat subjective and potentially contentious historical analyses are required to attribute causation to the 20th century's multiple clusters of mass homicide (unlike, say, the deaths caused by the 1918 flu pandemic where an objective attribution of cause is relatively straightforward).

The evidence is not as straightforward as you portray it.

(edit: I missed out the word 'deaths' in the first paragraph)