24A030 Democide by Jim Davies, 8/6/2024

The late Prof. R J Rummel led the University of Hawaii study of a new subject: Democide.

That's not the same as genocide (in which a governing entity sets out to liquidate a whole, defined class of people) nor of warfare (where soldiers battle each other to death) but the killing of civilians in the "care" of some government either deliberately or by culpable neglect.

His primary book is Death by Government, which will dismay the many who see government as maybe imperfect but basically good and necessary. It has over 400 pages of detailed information about government murders, compiled meticulously and conservatively; that is, when there is a range of estimates he doesn't take the highest but picks a mid-range figure.

He died a few years ago but the UHi web site on democide continues to be updated using Prof. Rummel's methods of research and estimation, and his findings are undeniable: firstly that the numbers murdered are huge (262,000,000 in the 20th Century alone) and secondly that the democide rate is much lower when the government concerned is a democracy; ie when the people can to some degree hold it to account. To my mind he is rather generous to democracies; for example he states that there have been no wars between any two of them, yet all the players in WW1 were democracies, except Russia - and that was the most devastating war to date.

Even the "dictator" Hitler was elected by a democratic process about as fair as any, and currently every member of NATO is a democracy yet it is resolutely threatening to escalate the present war in such a way as to incur a heavy risk of turning nuclear and so of killing even larger numbers of human beings. Nearly all would be civilians, so that would be an even larger democide.

For that reason I take a step of reasoning that Prof Rummel was unwilling to take: that the threat to human life is not so much the FORM of government, but the FACT of government. Put another way: if democracy curtails the arbitrary power of rulers (it does) and if that tends to reduce their democide rate (it does) then that rate would be reduced to zero if governments were abolished altogether.

Now, that would mean ANARCHY! - for anarchy is, by definition, the absence of rulers. There is nothing whatever about that which is scary; it means merely that we each rule ourselves - and hence, nobody else. If that concept is new to you, gain a quick overview at The Anarchist Alternative.

Why he would not reason that way we may never learn, but two possibilities are obvious:

(a) he genuinely believed (contrary to the argument offered here) that some minimal government is necessary in any society, or

(b) as a tenured professor in a State University, he was not prepared to rock the boat that much, for it would almost certainly mean the loss of his job and the closure of the department. Before condemning such a compromise, reflect: he broke new and vitally important ground, achieved a very great deal, and set up a school whose students contunue his research to this day. And let the first stone be cast by those who have made no compromise at all with rulers.

It can be argued that whereas genocide and warfare are deliberate policies by governments, deaths by democide are sometimes the unintended consequences of well-meant policies. For example the dreadful Chinese famines of the 1960s and -70s came about because Mao Tse Tung and his Communist pals truly believed that collective agriculture would benefit the people. They were dead wrong and could quite easily have learned that from the repeated failures in the USSR, from von Mises' seminal 1922 book "Socialism" or from any of numerous other free-market economics books written later; so I offer no excuse for them. They killed over 30 million of their countrymen.

So, whether by deliberate malice or blundering incompetence, governments kill - on a massive scale. After ten thousand years, the era of their miserable existence needs to come to an end. "Rummel's Law" says it well: Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.