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.
Are there any statist circles (not minarchist or bog-standard libertarian, I mean uniparty apologetic or proper authoritarian circles) that you post this kind of stuff in? I ask because I know of a few that I could direct you to, pretty sure @thepholosopher does as well, and they need to see this a hell of a lot more than those of us already red-pilled on statism. As a reminder, I say this as an ex-Communist, though I had already long since abandoned Communism by the time you met me.
"The greater good is nothing more than the alibi of tyrants." - Albert Camus
"But we need more government to prevent government tyranny! We need people to watch the watchers and make sure they aren't watching the wrong people!" - William Astore, paraphrased with a reference to the 1998 movie Enemy of the State.
"A totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary to bring about a stateless, classless society." - Karl Marx, paraphrased
Some people don't learn, some people won't learn, and some people can't learn. The trouble is figuring out whom is who (who is whom?). Some are insufferable ideologues, some are unscrupulous propagandists, others are merely useful idiots, and frankly, my patience well is bone-fucking-dry, so I'm not going to be the person to de-convert any of them, as @prydefoltz could tell you (by which I mean I'm happy to see her come round, but I think Justin Trudeau is more responsible for that than either of us).
None of my posts will ever convert the masses. It's only to support the remnant willing to explore liberty. I probably should slouch back onto Facebook and share my posts on some groups I used to belong to.
Putting this stuff up on FakeBook is a good way to get banned. I would suggest exploring the blogosphere instead, where individual bloggers may be able to curate their comment section, but not so much articles written in rebuttal. There are some WordPress blogs and other websites out there with fairly large followings that are propagandising people outside of the mainstream. Part of the reason that I lambast Bill Astore so damn frequently is because he keeps attempting to convert normies into authoritarian collectivists (more so than they already are, that is). The following is a passage from an article I wrote titled Bracing Views is a Cesspit of Midwittery which I intend to have my foul-mouthed alter-ego recycle in a future article titled The Doctor Dino of Reformists :
He believes that a perfect society would be bereft of a free market, with “essential” products and services being nationalised, prices and wages set by the government, and all wealth would be “equitably distributed,” in his own words. He also says, in no uncertain terms, that he believes these proposals to be “neither right nor left,” but simply “reasonable.” Reasonable or not, these ARE left-wing economic policies, these are socialist policies, and he knows as much.
I have a bunch of links to relevant articles in Bracing Views is a Cesspit of Midwittery, but the article is currently private, so let me know if you're curious, and I'll make it temporarily available.
I no longer care about getting banned. If I am silenced by their pressure, I have already lost without acting. I may as well say what needs to be said, and consequences be damned.
Exactly my sentiments before I got myself banned from LinkedIn. I'm sure @fiberfrau would approve!
At present, I am mainly taking a sabbatical from Facebook for the sake of my mental health, but my account under my real name where I try to be professional isn't even safe thanks to our regional library censorship nonsense. These slanderous psychopathic control freaks are invading the most mundane of local pages with their lies and accusations. I am just tired.
The one job that govern-cements are good at doing, democide.
And you can watch it in America. Slowly starving people out of homes, and soon out of food. It is evil, but they always have a good story. "It was the dreaded 'chicken POX' the chickens all need to be killed"
Government isn't even very good at wars and mass murder, though, and that is our saving grace. The same incompetence and waste that permeates everything they do is still there in the most overtly destructive aspects of statecraft, thank God.
How do you feel about the Florida bill proposal that allows books to be banned in school libraries if a person objects to them? It's technically not the government banning the books...
Laws empowering Karens are a bad idea. Period.
Public schools are government institutions, and the teachers are therefore government employees, so, technically, wouldn't it be the government banning the books?
No, the bill isn't about teachers banning books. The bill opens up the opportunity for literally anyone to ban books. If anyone in the public has a problem with a specific title in a school library then the librarian, under the new proposed law, would have to remove the book until the matter is resolved.
@apolymask has written some posts about democide. It's really disappointing that those who want to strip their own rights to defend themselves are so naively ignorant of history. When power disparities exist, the powerful eat the weak. Governments, even ones that began as benevolent, inevitably begin on the slippery slope towards oppressing the people they claim to serve. As the oppression increases, the people making up the governmental bodies are quite aware that their actions create enemies. And at that point the paranoia of losing power, or outright death, dumps gasoline on the oppression fire.
Someone else to follow here!
George Floyd: democide.
Waco & Ruby Ridge: democide.
Jim Crow and the Tuskegee syphilis study: democide.
US and Canadian treatment of natives: democide.
Civilian deaths in civil wars: democide.
We don't need to erect conspiracy theories. We just need to strip away the veneer of legitimacy from the history we have been taught, and it's right there, plain as day. And people can easily see evil in the past, but turn a blind eye to the evil surrounding them today all over the world.
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To put it bluntly, bullshit. How can you hijack something that is inextricably linked? The war waged by the police on anyone who is poor or isn't white long predates BLM, trying to separate calls for police accountability from addressing that as well is absurd and reeks of deliberate misdirection. Police can trace their lineage back to the strikebreakers and slavecatchers of old and until we acknowledge and address that any attempt at 'accountability' is going to be at best half measures.
As to the main topic of your post, my money is on either large scale repression/democide or civil war here in the US in the near future. There's already plenty of democide going on now, China's going after the Uyghurs, the military in Burma is going after everybody, Eritrea is a nightmarish modern Sparta, North Korea is undergoing another manmade famine that may soon exceed the one in the 90s, Russia is treating Ukrainians like the USA did Native Americans, could keep going but you get the idea.
If you look back in history there's a nice correlation between economic downturns and upswings in oppression, unrest, and all the various -cides. There's also a correlation between pandemics and economic downturns, and while correlation and causation are two different critters it seems like we've got all the necessary conditions for widespread death and disruption. Personally, I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg the last few years and it's going to get much worse.
On a side note, I'm slowly working my way through 'Shake Hands With The Devil,' which is enlightening and infuriating look at indifference and inaction towards the Rwandan Genocide.
Police as we know them trace back to space patrols and Tammany Hall. This does not alter the fact that BLM activists killed the possibility for progress by making it all about race and driving away potential allies in the process.
I saw it from my conservative community. "That George Floyd thing was fucked up, but now people are rioting, vandalizing, burning buildings, and calling me guilty by association because of my skin color? That's fucked up, too, and maybe we need police to handle this kind of thing."
It was counterproductive at the key point when progress was possible. Police brutality is not a racial issue, or at least far from just a racial issue.
Once again, bullshit. If your 'progress' doesn't involve addressing the racist policing tactics that have driven the overwhelming majority of calls for accountability, then what the hell are you even addressing?
Waco and Ruby Ridge are about the only instances where race wasn't inextricably linked with the calls for accountability and that all seemed to disappear with the nitromethane and ammonium nitrate that got the Murrah Building.
If Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only counterexamples you can think of, perhaps you are not paying attention yourself?
I'm not saying racism does not exist or is not a problem or even isn't the motivation behind many laws and police abuse cases. I am saying it is not the root problem, and people who focus myopically on race to the exclusion of everything else to the point where they lash out against potential allies are shooting themselves in the foot.
Waco and Ruby Ridge are the only ones that generated much noise for accountability and they got muted with ANFO. Not saying it stopped with that but the bandwidth got mighty narrow.
Mind giving an example of 'where they lash out against potential allies'? I'm starting to suspect that at least part of the disparity in our views of all that is due to how shit gets spun in the media. I can't attest for anywhere else but that was not the case down at the square here in Louisville. Not that you could tell by watching the evening news but we had no control over that. It was solidarity in action and there was a lot of people who learned what that meant for the first time there. Race was definitely the dominant issue there but it was far from the only issue and they repeatedly emphasized this. In the years since many of the same people have turned out for other causes as well.
When the feds got done poking around here they confirmed just about everything we were saying about LMPD, not only in regards to race but also how they treated the mentally ill and women.