Homicide, literally translated as "man-killing," is the murder of one individual by another. Genocide refers to campaigns to eradicate entire ethnic or cultural populations. This still does not cover the true scale of politically-motivated slaughter, though. Professor R. J. Rummel coined the term democide to describe all instances of murder by political actors through deliberate slaughter or malign neglect. The scope of this issue is staggering.
Rummel's archive at the University of Hawai'i includes a digital version of his work, Democide: Death by Government. He defines his terms as follows:
Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).
Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political purposes.
Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government.
Democide: The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
Remember that the Nazi German genocide of the Jewish population was only a part of their campaign of mass murder of anyone in opposition to the regime, whether because they served as scapegoats like the Jews, Slavs and Romani (genocide); a threat to their power like classically liberal dissidents and rival socialist movements (politicide); or wanton slaughter of citizens deemed inconvenient for any other reasons.
While Hitler is the best-known murderous dictator, Stalin's starvation campaign against Ukraine, Pol Pot's brutal extermination of anyone who might have even the slightest hint of an education, or Mao's Great Leap Forward are all too easily ignored by most today due to the obscurity of the event, or even degrees of sympathy for communist dictators. And that blindness to mass murder makes it easier for people to ignore the threats imposed by their own governments today.
One of the complaints against the libraries by those who demand censorship and removal of materials is disrespect for police. Do they not know how many people have been brutally murdered by "law enforcement" around the world, or even here in the US? The George Floyd incident was hijacked from police accountability to racial conflict by Black Lives Matter, but the fact remains that extrajudicial execution by police is a serious problem in the "western world" even today, to say nothing about in foreign lands with more brutal governments.
The most dangerous aspect of democide is the way people see it at the time. Politicians do not proclaim themselves as bloodthirsty supervillains. There is always a Utopian promise of a better tomorrow, and those ends justify any means, even if it includes decimating the populace. We must be ever vigilant as those who claim to represent us promise a bright future, lest we discover the path they would lead us down is paved with corpses.
Do you remember just a few years ago, when people were first seriously questioning COVID policies in 2020? "Two weeks to flatten the curve" became for some a justification for perpetual quarantine of the entire population, science and morality alike be damned. Some even demanded concentration camps detention centers for those who dared dissent. And if evidence of political involvement in gain-of-function research creating SARS-COV-2 can be corroborated, every single death by COVID can be directly attributed to government, to say nothing of the despair and delayed treatment deaths from the policies they enacted in response. But I can see people clamoring for rounding up or even executing dissidents should another disaster arise, regardless of evidence or ethics.
Could another wave of democide wash over European or American populations? We may be facing a looming financial collapse worse than 2008, with a need for new scapegoats. Russia has been at war with Ukraine for over a year, and we could face nuclear escalation which can only result in mass death through political negligence in seeking a responsible and peaceful conclusion to conflict. In the US, police brutality is an epidemic, and the prison system is rife with abuse. It is the nature of power to be abused, and those who believe otherwise will have blood on their hands when it inevitably lashes out against the innocent again.
I am an anarchist because governments are always territorial monopolies in violence with no legitimate claim to power. Wars abroad and mass murder at home are systemic injustices, and an inevitable consequence of centralized political power. As Robert Higgs said at timestamp 22:20 in the video linked below,
Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey. They did not deliberately starve to death millions of Ukrainians. They did not create a system of death camps to kill millions of Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe. They did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them. They did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese people. They did not kill more than 500,000 members of the Indonesian Communist party, alleged party sympathizers, and others. They did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia, murdering 1/4th of the country's population. They did not kill as many as 200,000 Mayan peasants and others in Guatemala. They did not kill more than 500,000 Tutsis and pro-peace Hutus in Rwanda. They did not implement US and allied trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. They did not launch one aggressive US war after another. There's a great deal anarchists did not do, but statists did do.
Suggested listening: Death by Government: Democide, Liberty, & The State from the Smoke Filled Rooms podcast and Power Kills: Discussing Democide on The Dangerous History Podcast.
