DEMOCIDE

By R. J. Rummel

The more power a government has, the more its foreign violence, democide, and famine. The more constrained the power of governments, the less its foreign violence, democide, and famine. At the extremes of power, despotisms kill, murder, and starve people by the millions, while many democracies grow surplus food, and refuse to execute even serial murderers. Power kills.

I have packaged the various threats to human life against which a people’s freedom protects them by the idea of human security. Human insecurity, then, involves:
• economic and gender inequality,
• malnourishment and famine,
• poor health and disease,
• domestic turmoil and civil war,
• foreign war,
• genocide and mass murder.

Freedom is a solution to all these threats—democratic freedom produces human security.

Liberal democracy is the institutionalization of human rights—it is the most practical solution to the freedom of each being compatible with the freedom of all.

Where power becomes absolute, massive killing follows, and rebellion is a concomitant.

By shooting, drowning, burying alive, stabbing, beating, and crushing, with torture, suffocation, starvation, exposure, poison, and other countless ways that lives can be wiped out, governments have killed unarmed and helpless people. Intentionally. With forethought. This is murder. It is democide.

In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 174 million men, women, and children. It could be over 340 million.

- democide is a government’s murder of people for whatever reason;
- genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language.

What connects all these cases of democide is this: as a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal wishes, or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted.

As a species, we have been killing ourselves by the millions in war after war throughout history. Now, finally, we have the power of knowledge to end forever—or at the very least drastically reduce—all this human slaughter. Freedom gives us the answer.

These cross-national groups become separate pyramids of power, competing with each other and with governments. As a result, both democratic nations then are sewn together into one society, one crosscut by these multifold groups, with multiple bonds between them. Moreover, between democratic governments there are many official and unofficial connections and linkages made to achieve similar functions and satisfy mutual interests. Their militaries freely coordinate strategies, and may even share equipment in line with their mutual defense arrangements and perceived common dangers. An example is nuclear weapons and military equipment shared by Great Britain and the United States. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects, and provide health supplies when needed. Such multiple shared interests bond these societies together. Politicians, leaders, and groups, therefore, have a common interest in keeping the peace.

We have identified power with greatness, thugs with statesmen, and propaganda with results; we have let moral and cultural relativism silence our outrage, while conceding the moral high ground to the utopian dreamers; we have refused to recognize evil as evil; and we have ignored the catastrophic human cost of such confusions, and the natural and moral right to freedom.

The gangs that control these so-called governments oppress whole nations under cover of international law. They are like a gang that captures a group of hikers and then does with them what it wills, robbing all, torturing and murdering some because gang members don’t like them or they are “disobedient,” and raping others. Nonetheless, the thugs that rule nations “govern” by the right of sovereignty: the community of nations explicitly grants them the right by international law to govern a nation when they show that they effectively control the national government, and this right carries with it the promise that other nations will not intervene in their internal affairs.

When people are free to go about their own business, they put their ingenuity and creativity in the service of all. They search for ways to satisfy the needs, desires, and wants of others. The true utopia lies not in some state-sponsored tyranny, but the free market in goods, ideas, and services, whose operating principle is that success depends on satisfying others.

The more power the rulers have, and the less free their people, the more internal violence these people will suffer. Keep in mind that throughout the world, people are essentially the same. It is not that the people of any culture, civilization, or nation are by nature any more bloodthirsty, barbaric, power-hungry, or violent than those of another. What makes for peace within a nation is not national character, but social conditions that reduce tension and hostility between people, lessen the stakes of conflict, cross-pressure interests, and promote negotiation, tolerance, and compromise. Such are the conditions created by democratic freedom. The more a people are free, the greater such conditions inhibit internal violence.  Surely that which protects people against internal violence, that which so saves human lives, is a moral good. And this is freedom.

Enhancing, spreading, and promoting human rights and democracy are the way to enhance, spread, and promote nonviolence. Proponents of nonviolence have worked out many peaceful tactics for opposing dictators, such as sit-down strikes, general strikes, mass demonstrations, refusal to pay taxes, underground newspapers, sabotage by excessive obedience to the rules, and the like. Much thought has gone into how a people can nonviolently promote human rights. Overall, however, nonviolence works best among a free people. And: Freedom itself promotes a nonviolent solution to social problems and conflicts.

In opposition to freedom is power, its antagonist. While freedom is a right, the power to govern is a privilege granted by a people to those they elect and hold responsible for its use. Too often, however, thugs seize control of a people with their guns and use them to make their power total and absolute. Where freedom produces wealth and prosperity, such absolute power causes impoverishment and famine. Where freedom minimizes internal violence, eliminates genocide and mass murder, and solves the problem of war, such absolute power unleashes internal violence, murders millions, and produces the bloodiest wars. In short, power kills; absolute power kills absolutely.