It’s
horrifying that it’s both possible and necessary to parse different
kinds of mass slaughter by governments. But the fact is that
hundreds of millions of people have been murdered by states because
of their membership in ethnic groups, religious beliefs, opposition
to the regime of the moment, expediency, or for sheer
bloody-mindedness. The term “democide,” encompassing all killing by
a state (including politicide, genocide and mass murder), was
coined by Prof. R.J. Rummel, who died March
2.
Democide matters, according to Rummel, who authored 24 books
examining the murderous nature of the state, because of its
mindboggling scope. It also matters because the antidote is
freedom, which is best promoted, he thought, by democracy. In fact,
he claimed that liberal democracies not only killed fewer people
than authoritarian regimes, but that they simply do not wage war on
one another—though the absolute nature of that claim sparked
argument.
We know about the Holocaust, about the Soviet purges, and about
Mao’s famine. But what kind of body count does democide
encompass?
On his website,
still maintained by the University of Hawaii Political Science
Department, Rummel noted, “given popular estimates of the dead in a
major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did
occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”
The specific numbers of dead kept rising as Rummel’s research
continued, especially as he gathered records of horrifying
colonial-era misdeeds and of the stacks of bodies piled by
secretive communist governments. His final total for 20th century
victims of state power was 262,000,000.
Rummel went
beyond the morbid busines of counting hte dead, and maintained, “It
is true that democratic freedom is an engine of national and
individual wealth and prosperity. Hardly known, however, is that
freedom also saves millions of lives from famine, disease, war,
collective violence, and democide (genocide and mass murder). That
is, the more freedom, the greater the human security and the less
the violence.”
He also pointed out that democracies are less likely than
autocratic regimes to
unintentionally kill their subjects through corruption and
incompetent policy.
More controversially, he went beyond the assertion that freedom
as protected within liberal democracy reduces violence to a
claim
that “democracies do not make war on each other.”
He sparred
with the Cato Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter (PDF), among
others, over that assertion.
Horror at the results of his research colored Rummel’s political
views. He advocated intervention by democratic regimes against
authoritarian ones in general, and the Iraq War in particular.
Originally a socialist and then a libertarian, Rummel in 2005
began calling himself a “freedomist” to differentiate himself
from the non-interventionist tendency of many libertarians. That
self-identification seemed to continue through his later writings.
Ironically for a researcher who touted freedom as the cure for
murderous regimes, he so favored the Iraq War, that he came to
support press censorship to counter what he perceived as
hostility towards the effort among journalists. Specifically, he
wanted the U.S. government to control coverage so far as military
operations were concerned: “I would use the censorship of World War
II as criteria. This would mean, for example, that news reports of
secret commando operations in Iran, or the employment of a secret
weapon, or … well, you get the idea.”
Whatever the self-contradictory details of his later calls for
curbing freedom in order to promote freedom, Rummel’s work remains
horrifying, eye-opening, and worth reading. Check out
Power Kills and
Death by Government.