Katrina, the Iraq War and the case for Democide

[formercia]

http://gseweb.harvard.edu/~t656_web/peace/Articles_Spring_2004/Plourde_Shawn_Democide.htm

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One man who decided to make it his life’s work to study the subject of genocide is Professor Rudolph J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Rummel has spent the better part of the last forty or so years studying collective violence and attempting to find solutions to this phenomenon. Where Dr. Rummel has made his name, especially in the last quarter century, is in the study of democide, its causes, and consequences, and how we as a race can prevent it from happening in the future. Among his many books on the subject of collective violence, two books have drawn wide praise: Death by Government and Power Kills. Both books deal with the subject of democide. It should be noted that Dr. Rummel was made a finalist for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his life’s work.

What is Democide?

Rummel noticed that there was a problem with the term genocide. He roughly noted that genocide is among other things, the killing of people by a government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, etc.). <1>He noticed that genocide left out other victims that were targeted by governments for murder. He concluded that genocide does not include those victims murdered by their governments for their politics or for other political purposes. For this type of collective murder he coined the term politicide.<2> Rummel still noticed, however, that genocide, for the most part, does not include large groups of people murdered by governments who do not fit in to any recognized group (i.e. the bombing of a village to instill fear by a government). This type of collective murder he would simply refer to as mass murder. Thus, Rummel coined the term democide to encompass the act of collective murder by governments (including foreign governments ), which include genocide, politicide and mass murder.<3>
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