Was The Democratic Peace Killed? Part VI, Death By Obama

I have shown the historical progress in foreign policies (both international and American) (see here) and the context—the nature of international relations – of such policies (see here). These have evolved through international conferences, which reset the status quo after the Napoleonic Wars and adjusted power relations to the facts of colonization; the focus on international organizations, such as the League of Nations, and law after World War I; and the rise of the theory and practice of political realism after WWII. These were all attempts to keep the peace and avoid war. When war occurred, new and hopefully better peacekeeping policies were created. Such policies (really new paradigms) often originated from the research and writing of scholars, practitioners, and international lawyers and experts.
Continued here

Why A New “Democratic Peace” Blog?

November 23, 2008

 

Why is there this new “Democratic Peace” blog. What happened to the old one at Blogger’s freedomspeace.blogspot.com? It is dead—erased from the internet.

Google took over Blogger and my blogger account had to be shifted to Google, which worked for awhile. But I had other accounts at Google, and Google unaccountably mixed up one of my other accounts with the one for Blogger. Then, when I no longer needed the other account and cancelled it, I unknowingly trashed the Democratic Peace blog–436 blogs.

 Fortunately, I had kept all the blogs on my hard disk, and that I backed up regularly. So, I created this new Democratic Peace blog with Word Press to selectively post my old blogs that are not out of date. Some provide research results, analyses, and theory just as important and relevant today as when they were published. 

On The Democratic Peace Bibliography

I have also put in the sidebar a bibliography to the democratic peace. It is as complete as I could make it up to the years 2000, and nothing I know of more recently contradicts what the listed works show. This is that the idea of the democratic peace has involved the most scholarly, scientific, and replicated research in the academic discipline of international relations. The conclusion of all this is that democracies do not fight or make war on each other. Their relations are cooperative and peaceful. This is not to say that there are no deep conflicts or crises. There are, but they are nonviolent.

This peace holds regardless of religion, culture, region, history, economic development, international status, alliances, or power; regardless of the social scientist or scholar; and, regardless of the historical period or data set.

All this provides a sound premise for a democratic peace foreign policy–to promote world peace and an end to war, foster democracy. And this has been the fundamental foreign policy of the United States Under Clinton and Bush.

What? Only 35,000,000 Killed in 20th Century War?

[First published on December 15, 2004] pointed out in a 1986 Wall Street Journal article (here) that the 20th Century is noted for its absolute and bloody wars. World War I saw nine-million people killed in battle, an incredible record that was far surpassed within a few decades by the 15 million battle deaths of World War II. Even the number killed in twentieth century revolutions and civil wars have set historical records. In total, this century’s battle killed in all its international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts is so far about 35,654,000.

I then received an email suggesting that my total is probably inaccurate; the total might be closer to 100 million.

I should have qualified the total as for military combat dead and civilians caught in the crossfire. Consider WWII for example. The most authoritative source, widely relied on in the field of war studies, are the statistical data on war published by J. David Singer (search under COW Project). His figure for WWII war dead is 15 million. Now, one may think he is in error, since the war dead ordinarily given for the USSR alone is about 20 million, and often cited is 50000,000 to 60,000,000 for the whole war. How then can Singer and I say 15,000,000 dead in the war? Part of the problem is that many figures one sees for wars include combat dead and those murdered by government (democide), such as in the Holocaust. The difference is due to Singer and I counting only combat dead, including civilians caught in crossfires, whereas the much higher totals also count those murdered by governments during the war (democide). For example, the Nazis murdered about 21,000,000 people, including the Holocaust; the Japanese murdered about 6,000,000; and the Soviets about 13,000,000. Now, when you add such democide totals to those killed in combat, one comes close to the 50,000,000 to 60,000,000 often mentioned for the war.

Overall, both WWI and WWII together had about 24,000,000 (combat) war dead. Which leaves still many, and smaller, wars to go to reach my approximate 35,000,000. A total far below the near 110,000,000 killed [later revised to about 140,000,000] by Marxist governments

I did a thorough amalgamation of the estimates of war dead for each nation, 1900-1987, in the process of collecting democide data, and included them in my statistical tables. They can be found in my books Lethal Politics for the USSR, China’s Bloody Century, Democide for Nazi Germany, and Statistics of Democide for all the other nation’s war dead. For their location on my website, see my website’s list of documents.

Pol Pot? Idi Amin? No, Its Pinochet.

[First published on December 19, 2004]

Pol Pot? Idi Amin? No, It’s Pinochet. Again.

Again, former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet is headlined, as by a recent article in BBC News . And Friday evening, Lehrer’s PBS news hour had a segment on his torture and murders. Evidence of the attention he garners is that there are 428,000 links to “Augusto Pinochet” on Google.

In 1973, Pinochet seized power from Chile’s democratically elected President Allende and ruled dictatorially until he stepped down as president in 1990 to be replaced by Patricio Aylwin, who was elected through democratic multiparty elections. 

Now, by my statistics, which end in 1987, during his rule Pinochet is likely responsible for the murder of 10,000 Chileans, possibly even as many as 30,000. He is a mass murderer, and should be locked away forever or executed.

Yet, one must ask, why in a world of mass murderers that have killed far more people than Pinochet, do the media and human rights organizations devote so much attention to him? Elsewhere, many former mass murdering dictators and their henchmen walk the streets free from publicity or have died in their sleep never having faced justice. Uganda’s former President Idi Amin, who murdered 255,000 people, some with his own hands, fled Uganda into exile and lived in Saudi Arabia with his four wives and with a government stipend until he died peacefully in 2003. 

Here is a list of those nations or rulers responsible for murdering more citizens than the probable 10,000 Pinochet killed during, or almost over, the same period of Pinochet’s rule (statistics give the number murdered, nation, and years—click the nation for sources).

• 2,000,000 Cambodia/Pol Pot (1975-1979)
• 874,000 China (1976-1987)
• 780,000 USSR (1970-1982)
• 725,000 Ethiopia (1974-1987)
• 255,000 Uganda (1979-1987)
• 230,000  Cambodia/Samrin  (1979-1987)
• 228,000 Afghanistan (1978-1987)
• 198,000 Mozambique (1975-1987)
• 125,000 Angola (1975-1987)
• 56,000 Laos (1975-1987)
• 55,000 Iran (1979-1987)
• 20,000 Argentina (1976-1982)
• 15,000 Philippines (1972-1986)
• 15,000 Bangladesh (1972-1987)

Pol Pot, the worst of the lot over this period, responsible for the murder of 2,000,000 Cambodians in four years, was arrested in 1997, charged with treason, and sentenced . . . get this now . . . to house arrest. 

For comparison, there are 361,000 references to mega murderer “Pol Pot” on Google, 67,000 less than to Pinochet who murdered probably 10,000, but in no case over 30,000 during the period I covered. As to Idi Amin who murdered 255,000 Ugandans, there are 185,000 links to him on Google, less than half those for Pinochet. Why the huge difference in attention? 

I suspect it is because Pinochet was a victorious enemy of the left. He seized power from Chile’s Marxist president who was maneuvering his own revolutionary overthrow of the democratic system, and eventually succeeded in setting the stage for a return to a moderate democratic government and full capitalism (this is a description and not praise of his mass murders to achieve this). Most of the other killers on the list above, including Pol Pot, however, were Marxist or socialist of some favor (Amin was praised by the left as an anti-imperialist, particularly his nationalization of foreign businesses; in 1975 he was elected president of the Organization of African Unity). To coin a phrase, for the Marxist and left, which dominate the major Western media, academic studies, and human rights organizations, which is the worst of the worst seems to depend on whether their ox is gored. 

Of course, I may be wrong. This attention may be coincidental, as might be the fact that the religion of those who pay so much attention to the Holocaust is Judaism.

Impact of democracy: Peace breaks out

[First published on December 23. 2004,in the WorldNetDaily] The number and severity of armed conflicts in the world is on the decline. The world is becoming more peaceful.

What are the facts?

First, in a 2004 Yearbook report, the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute states that, “In 2003 there were 19 major armed conflicts in 18 locations worldwide, the lowest number for the post-cold war period with the exception of 1997, when 18 such conflicts were registered.” In 1991, there were 33 wars. The trend line of wars and violence conflict is sharply down.

Second, this drop is further verified by the Canadian organization Project Ploughshares, which in its Armed Conflicts Report 2004 claims that the number of armed conflicts, broadly defined, fell to 36 in 2003, from a peak of 44 in 1995.

Finally, looking more systematically, I have statistically analyzed a variety of violent conflict data sets and found a clear decline in the amount and severity of conflict in recent decades.

How do we understand this?

One explanation for this striking downturn in war and armed conflict is the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union tried to prevent wars among their allies or neutrals that would risk escalation to nuclear war. With the end of the Cold War and dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is said, there was a consequent spike in wars, especially separatist and civil wars, and that we are now recovering from it.

However, this explanation seems to ignore the many wars that occurred before the fall of the Soviet Union, such as the Korean, Vietnam, Vietnam-Cambodian, Sino-Vietnamese, Sino-Indian, Pakistan-Indian, Ethiopia-Somalian, Israel and her neighbors, Iraq-Iran wars, etc. Moreover, the trend line of the annual total of those killed in war declined throughout the Cold War.

Another explanation is that with the end of the Cold War, the United Nations and regional bodies have undertaken more effective peacekeeping. True, there may be more missions, more special advisers, more diplomats running around to assess ongoing wars and recommend or try to negotiate solutions. But they hardly are more effective.

For one thing, the United Nations has itself declared its own failure in peacekeeping. For another, there are horrendous failures of the United Nations regarding peace: Israel-Arab violence; Somalia, North Korea, Rwanda, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Burma, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and terrorism. The many millions who have died in wars and democide (genocide and mass murder) since the end of the Cold War in 1991 attest to the inadequacy of the United Nations and regional organizations.

If the Cold War’s end and U.N. peacekeeping are inadequate explanations, what might better explain peace breaking out in the world? The growth in the number of democratic governments in the world. This answer is very well supported, both empirically and theoretically.

At the end of 2002, there were 121 democracies governing over 60 percent of the world’s population – 89 of these governments were liberal democracies. This number of democracies has reached such a critical level (there were no liberal democracies in 1900, and 22 in 1950) as to catalyze a reduction in the number of wars and battle dead.

In short, the explanation for the downturn in violence is the growth in democracies. I have subjected this explanation for violence up to the year 2000 to a number of scientific tests, and these are on the above-mentioned website.

Why should the growth in democracies explain the sharp drop in wars? It is because democracies do not make war on each other and have by far the least amount of foreign and domestic violence and democide. Therefore, the greater the number of democracies, the greater is the zone of peace in the world.

That this explanation is missed in the peace research community and by commentators shows how far we have yet to go in the communication and acceptance of this fundamental law of nations. However, top leaders do not miss it. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Clinton’s former National Security Adviser Anthony Lake, and former Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu have mentioned it. It was part of President Clinton’s foreign policy. In his National Security Strategy of September 2002, one of the three pillars is “to extend the peace by seeking to extend the benefits of freedom and prosperity across the globe.”

And the idea of a democratic zone of peace is the basis of President George W. Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.” Furthermore, in his speech on the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy in November 2003, he proclaimed a Forward Strategy of Freedom. He declared that, “As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace.” With regard to the Middle East, he said, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export.”

President Bush is right. Right theoretically, empirically and historically. Extending freedom extends the region of peace. And with the growth in the number of democracies, we can well see this principle in the drop in the number and severity of armed conflicts in the world.

The best foreign policy for peace is clear: Foster democratic freedom.

Left Wing, Right Wing! What About Up-Wing?

[First published December 26, 2004]In an interview with Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said (link here) that “the Republican Party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic Party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle. I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center.”

This reference to a left-right spectrum is surprising, coming from Schwarzenegger who is more libertarian than Democrats or Republicans in his political philosophy. Perhaps he felt this was a matter of communication to newsmen who seem to know of no other way of characterizing political differences than left versus right. This is all one ever hears in the news, and even by informed commentators who ought to know better.

The left –right way of understanding political differences has a long history, which some only take back to the seating on one side of the aisle or the other of different factions in the French National Assembly during the time of the French Revolution. Left versus right was used during the American Revolution as well, and even further back at the time the English Revolution of the 1640s. So reporters and commentators can be excused for believing this left-right spectrum of politics is the only one possible.

It is not. There is also up!

Libertarianism is often mentioned in the news, but it seems to hang in the air as a political philosophy without secure footing on the political left-right scale, to use a more appropriate word for what will follow. Some treat libertarian social views emphasizing maximum freedom, including legalizing dope, prostitution, and gambling, and support for abortion, as left wing. Some others treat its belief in a free market and freedom from excessive regulation as right wing. Libertarianism can’t be both left and right wing at the same time, but few seem to recognize this contradiction.

In dealing with politics at its most diverse on the world stage, what we have here is three political scales, rather than just the left-right one. There is one scale from extreme left socialist/communist to the fundamentalist monarchist or theocrat (for religious rule). Another scale is of the latter at one end to the libertarian at the other. And the third scale is from libertarian to the extreme left. These three scale are connected at their ends to form a political triangle, as shown in the figure below.
(use this link if image not shown) http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PK.FIG8.1.GIF 

 

Empirical research on political systems and an analysis of the different ideologies confirms this political triangle. Let’s place the libertarian end as up, as I did in the figure. Then we can well ask of a politician, is he left wing (towards socialism), right wing (towards fundamentalist/traditional rule of some kind), or up-wing (towards the greatest freedom in social and economic matters)?

Then again, as crazy as libertarians have become on foreign policy, maybe the triangle should be flipped top to bottom so that we have them as down-wing.

Tsunamis of Death. Why One, Not the Other?

[First published on December 27, 2004] We have been deluged in the news with pictures, stories, and descriptions of the disastrous lose of life from the earthquake and resulting Tsunami that struck nine nations in South and Southeast Asia. This is truly a disaster with the horrible death toll so far at 24,000 (link here). This deserves all the attention possible, and immediate international aid.

I wish not to lessen this human catastrophe, but I must point out an important and most curious discrimination. One would think that a human disaster of even bigger proportions, such as 30,000 killed would be as, if not more, newsworthy. And if some dictator murdered these 30,000, it is news that is even more important. It is true of our domestic news. Ten people dying in a highway crash is not as newsworthy, nor is it given as much attention, as ten people murdered in a short time by a serial murderer?

Well, then, how does one explain the incredible lack of interest in 30,000 Iranians being murdered by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in 10 days of 1988 (survivor’s report here)? Most authoritative on this, we have the memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri. I will quote from Christina Lamb’s report, “Khomeini fatwa ‘led to killing of 30,000 in Iran’” (U.K. Telegraph, February 4, 2001):

CHILDREN as young as 13 were hanged from cranes, six at a time, in a barbaric two-month purge of Iran’s prisons on the direct orders of Ayatollah Khomeini, according to a new book by his former deputy.

More than 30,000 political prisoners were executed in the 1988 massacre – a far larger number than previously suspected. Secret documents smuggled out of Iran reveal that, because of the large numbers of necks to be broken, prisoners were loaded onto forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hourly intervals.

Gruesome details are contained in the memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, The Memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, one of the founders of the Islamic regime. He was once considered Khomeini’s anointed successor, but was deposed for his outspokenness, and is now under house arrest in the holy city of Qom.

Published privately last month after attempts by the regime to suppress it, the revelations have prompted demands from Iranian exiles for those involved to be tried for crimes against humanity. The most damning of the letters and documents published in the book is Khomeini’s fatwa decree calling for all Mojahedin (as opponents of the Iranian regime are known) to be killed.

Issued shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in July 1988 and an incursion into western Iran by the Iranian resistance, the fatwa reads: “It is decreed that those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the Monafeqin (Mojahedin) are waging war on God and are condemned to execution.”

It goes on to entrust the decision to “death committees” — three-member panels consisting of an Islamic judge, a representative of the Ministry of Intelligence, and a state prosecutor. Prisoners were to be asked if they had changed loyalties and, if not, were to be executed. . . .

According to testimony from prison officials — including Kamal Afkhami Ardekani, who formerly worked at Evin prison — recently given to United Nations human rights rapporteurs: “They would line up prisoners in a 14-by-five-metre hall in the central office building and then ask simply one question, ‘What is your political affiliation?’ Those who said the Mojahedin would be hanged from cranes in position in the car park behind the building.”

He went on to describe how, every half an hour from 7.30am to 5pm, 33 people were lifted on three forklift trucks to six cranes, each of which had five or six ropes. He said: “The process went on and on without interruption.” In two weeks, 8,000 people were hanged. Similar carnage took place across the country.

News about this did get around, and it is available on the internet. But, it was backburner news, and one had to search for it. I doubt that it was reported by the major media, or as any front page or p.2 newspaper report. Now, compare flood of news on the current disaster killing at least 24,000 to that of 30,000 Iranians murdered in 10 days by order of one man — an even greater tidal wave of blood.

True, this awful, terrible, democide lacks the gruesome photos, the riveting video, the heart rending testimony of survivors, the chilling account of the disaster, but . . . isn’t there something that the murder of 30,000 human being had that the current disaster does not – humanitarian outrage over such stealing of human lives by one man — over such evil doing. What would the media have done about one American who strangled 30,000 people, one at a time, one per hour, per an eight-hour day, over 10.5 years it would take? I think it would even beat the Peterson case in the news.

Shame. Shame on the media for their inattention to such a horrible and important democide.

Leftsville — the American University

[First published December 28, 2004] Links suggested and commented on by a “Colleague:”

Two good essays — nothing new, but apparently the “problem” of lack of conservative presence in the academy is becoming more acceptable to write about. The first is a short op-ed by George Will. The second is an excellent critical essay by Mark Bauerlein, “Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual,”
in the Chronicle Of Higher Education (November 12, 2004).

Thanks “Colleague.”

Will is only really passing on campus poll results and what Bauerlein has to say. I want to focus on Bauerlein, who is maddening.

First, not a minor point, he says of the dominance of the left on campus: “outright blackballing is rare. The disparate outcome emerges through an indirect filtering process that runs from graduate school to tenure and beyond.” He is wrong, badly wrong. The black balling takes place against conservative students and in faculty hiring. It is a conscious thing, I’ve seen it many times in many ways, and it has operated as well against me.

To give him credit, he well captures the groupthink, and consensus that dominates, but he misses the essential nature of it. He refuses to see that there is a rational, conscious, left wing agenda that underlies much of this. To him, again, it is a natural growth, a social dynamic that as well could happen with a right wing faculty in charge. Bull. The left set out to capture the campus, and have done so. True, they set in motion and were helped along by a certain naturalness in the process, but their conscious effort sped it up.

I remember as a student the days when there were a fair number of conservatives or moderate democrats around (No, I never shook hands with Theodore Roosevelt, although that is rumored). Then, the word was that we should hire a Marxists or so to give the students another side. Can you imagine a Marxist or leftist saying we should hire a conservative for students to get their side?.

Finally, Bauerlein’s solution is like the Hawaii highway engineer: If people drove slowly and carefully onto or off the ramps, there would be no problem with traffic merging.” No thought given to treating human beings as human beings and constructing ramps to compensate for this. Bauerlein’s similar solution is that professors must do this and that, and panels must . . . etc. Nothing should be done by force and coercion or command. Why? “That would poison the atmosphere and jeopardize the ideals of free inquiry.” Ha!! He seems to have no comprehension that it is like telling the North Korea thugs that they should allow more freedom of speech and discussion.

In all, he writes with rational naiveté and a political blindness to the nature of the left. Sure, they should be more accepting of conservatives ideas and faculty in their midst. Sure, when pigs fly.
==============================

Link of the Day

Freedom as a solution to war and violence By R.J. Rummel

 
Freedom lovers, unite. Your beliefs are incredibly more powerful than you realize. The freedom you prize is not only the solution to genocide and mass murder (democide), as I explained in a commentary on the antiwar.com website, but also to war. Yes, a solution to war! 

On Thugsville—Oops, The UN—Dealing with Global Threats.

[First published on December 16, 2004] In an address to a December 16, 2004, luncheon hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan emphasized again, that the United Nations is central to dealing with global threats. He pointed out that the UN is “The only universal instrument that can bring States together in such a global effort.

Ha! In fact, the United Nations has become a weapon and a shield for the world’s dictators.

Not all dictators are the same. Some are no more than thugs. While hiding behind their guns and goons, they murder their captive citizens, condone torture (and a few even approve slavery and rape), and loot their country’s wealth and resources for personal gain, for power, for an ideology, or for a religion. Of the many such thugs since 1945, the list would include Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Idi Amin of Uganda, Pol Pot of Cambodia, and recently deposed Charles Taylor of Liberia Now we have such ruling thugs as General Than Shwe of Burma, Fidel Castro of Cuba, General Teodoro Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea, Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei of Iran, Colonel Muammar al-Qadhafi of Libya, Kim Chong-il of North Korea, King Fahd Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, General Umar al-Bashir of Sudan, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, General Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, to mention some of the worst of them. These and the other thugs, along with the more moderate, but sympathetic and collaborative dictators, dominate the UN and now defeat its mission.

This is a reluctant conclusion about the UN that I’ve come to since my early years of strong support.

What’s to be done? I don’t suggest withdrawing from the UN. It has too many useful functions, serves as a neutral forum for contact and communication between adversaries or enemies. When there is general agreement on conflicts, interventions, peacekeeping, refugees, humanitarian aid, sanctions, criminal tribunals, human rights, and so on, the UN helps save lives and promotes human welfare and security.

Nonetheless, what is clear to me from the UN’s overall record is that given the millions dying from war, democide, famine, and poverty, the good of the organization is still much too limited by its dictatorships. Two things should be done. There should be a democratic-nation-only-caucus to deal with all issues before the UN. Such a caucus is now in its teething stage.

Second, there should be an international governmental organization of all democracies to deal with issues about which the UN cannot or will not act, particularly the promotion of peace, human security, human rights, and democracy. I have written on such an Alliance of Democracies, and need not say more here. Given what I have pointed out about the UN’s problems, the need for such an organization is obvious. It would not compete with the UN where that body could act to promote democratic values. But, where it could not, particularly because of the opposition of the dictatorships, then the Alliance would serve a most useful cause.

There is already growing movements and governmental activities pointing in the direction of such an Alliance. Democratic activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders, have come together to cooperate in the organized international promotion of democracy. Such is already underway. Democratic activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders have come together to cooperate in the organized international promotion of democracy. They call this a World Movement for Democracy. It has it’s own website, on line publication Democracy News,
courses, a steering committee, secretariat, and periodic assemblies. It now needs strong public support, and especially a formal way to deal with global issues.

Down with thug regimes and their UN power. Democracies of the world, unite.

The More Democratic, And The More Human Rights, The Less Terrorism

[First published March 15, 2006] So far, there is considerable empirical support for the argument that promoting global freedom, if successful, will make the world generally more peaceful, and possibly end war and democide. However, there has been little empirical work that bears specifically on terrorism in the context of the democratic peace. So, I will do that here.

A relevant scale for doing this is the Purdue Political Terror Scale (PTS) shown below. It attempts to measure the degree to which governments terrorize their citizens and deprive them of human rights.

Mark Gibney and Mathew Dalton developed the Political Terror Scale. An article on it, plus “Political Terror Scale Notes” and the actual scoring on it each year for all nations, 1980-2004 is available on Gibney’s personal website . He is Belk Distinguished Professor 
and Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina Ashville.

I know, I know, this is not the terrorism that is focused on today, which is that of small groups of terrorists, their murder and genocide bombing, and their insurrections. But, behind it all are level 4 or 5 PTS states, such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea, as were Fatah’s Palestine Authority, Saddam’s Iraq, and the Taliban’s Afghanistan. Democratize these states and individual and group terrorism will dry up for want of resources and bases, at least as implied by the Forward Strategy of Freedom. But, we’ll see.

The PTS scale values for all nations were coded from the annual Amnesty International (AI) and United States State Department (State) Country Reports on Human Rights. Because of these sources, Oona A. Hathaway and Daniel E. Ho used the PTS scale for “Characterizing Measurement Error in Human Rights.” (CME — in pdf): They say:

We illustrate a method for accounting for measurement error in human rights studies — an area of research plagued by difficulties of measuring concepts that cannot be directly observed. We focus on the widely used Purdue Political Terror Scales (PTS), which quantify political terror experienced in a country based on independent qualitative narrative reports compiled by the United States Department of State and Amnesty International. A simple Bayesian measurement model systematically incorporates these two independent codings and directly models the uncertainty of a latent measure of political terror. This reveals that attenuation bias due to lagged PTS estimates can be severe, leading conventional estimates to be conservatively biased by an absolute order of roughly two. Substantively, this means that explanatory variables such as democracy may have roughly twice the impact on human rights as currently believed. We conclude that measurement methods illustrated here hold much promise for addressing concerns about measurement error in empirical scholarship. [Bold italics added]

As to the two politically antagonistic sources — State and AI — the above CME report finds that the correlation between them across all the countries in their report is .83, which means that in their reporting of human rights these two sources are at variance across 31 percent of the data (1-correlation squared).

CME shows the variation of these two sources in the chart below:

Now, my empirical question is this: How well does the degree of liberal democracy of a nation predict its scale level on the PTS, which is to say, terrorism and lack of human rights. I took the PTS values for 2004 and the Freedom House freedom ratings for the same year on both civil liberties and political rights, where the lower the average rating on both, the more liberal democratic a nation. Then, I did a bivariate regression, and found that the degree of freedom predicted 32% of the variation in terror/human rights (R squared = .32, a very conservative finding, given the CME conclusion about democracy and human rights given above). That is, the more liberal democratic a nation, the less its government terror and the more its government respects human rights [PTS = 1.51-27(Freedom rating); signs on both scales reversed].

Since the relationship may not be linear, I should note that the analysis of variance is very good (F-stat = 81.6, p <.0001) In my next post, I’m going to explain what this sometimes mysterious “p” that appears in so many quantitative studies means, and its pitfalls. Just take my word today that “p” here is not a sampling probability (it cannot be since I am dealing with all countries and not a sample in any meaningful statistical sense), but a combinatorial one.

Anyway, my plot of the two is shown below, where -HR is the reversed PTS, and the X-axis is the reversed freedom ratings. For -HR, 1 is the most terroristic nations with the least human rights, and 5 reverses this; for the -FREE average ratings, 1 is the least free, 7 the most. Thus, as one moves to the right on the X-axis and up on HR (PTS) Y-axis, the greater the freedom, and the less the terror and the more respect for human rights.

Obviously, there is considerable variation around a trend of decreasing terror/increasing human rights as freedom increases. To see this, I averaged the PTS scores for each freedom rating. I show the result in the plot below, where the axes are the same as above (sorry, the X-axis label is cut off).

The bottom line should be clear. To eliminate the terrorism of governments against their people and guarantee their human rights, foster democratic freedom.And this is now the American foreign policy, which judging by all the empirical analyses that support it, is one of realistic idealism.

How To Effectively Democratize

[First published March 3,2006] Freedom House has published a world wide empirical study of “How Freedom is Won.” (2005, in pdf). Paraphrasing and quoting from this study:

They examined 33 years of transitions to freedom (liberal democracy) made by 67 countries, of which before transition 31 were Partly Free, and 36 were Not Free. Today 35 are Free, 23 are Partly Free, and 9 are Not Free. They excluded transitions that occurred in small countries, defined as those with populations of less than one million. Excluded, too, are countries where major political transitions occurred in the last two years. This is because there has not been a sufficient interval since the transition from an authoritarian or pseudo-democratic rule to make firm assessments about the nature or durability of post-transition change in countries where institutional, political, legal, and human rights environments are still evolving or where reforms either have not yet been launched or fully implemented.

So, what can be said about democratization from this fascinating and landmark study (paraphrasing and quoting from this study):

SUMMARYThe most effective agent for promoting change toward democracy is broad-based, nonviolent civic resistance — which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience to delegitimize authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders

The central conclusion of this study is that how a transition from authoritarianism occurs, and the types of forces that are engaged in pressing the transition, have a significant impact on the success or failure of democratic reform.

DETAILS
In a preponderance of successful transitions, the most dramatic improvements in freedom tend to come quickly — in the first years of a transition, rather than slowly and incrementally over a long time, underscoring the importance of the civic and political forces that emerge as important actors in the pre-transition period.

“People power” movements matter, because nonviolent civic forces are a major source of pressure for decisive change in most transitions. The force of civic resistance was a key factor in driving 50 of 67 transitions, or over 70 percent of countries where transitions began as dictatorial systems fell and/or new states arose from the disintegration of multinational states.

Of the 50 countries where civic resistance was a key strategy (i.e., either countries in which there were transitions driven by civic forces or countries where there were mixed transitions involving significant input from both civic forces and power holders), 25 were Partly Free countries, and 25 were Not Free countries. Today, years after the transition 32 of these countries are Free, 14 are Partly Free, and only 4 are Not Free.

Y axis = mean degree of freedom; X axis = civic, mixed civic forces/ powerholders, powerholder’s intervention

There is comparatively little positive effect for freedom in “top-down” transitions that were launched and led by elites. Before transition, 6 were Partly Free and 8 were Not Free, while today, post-transition, 2 are Free, 8 are Partly Free and 4 are Not Free. On a 7-point rating scale, top down transitions led to an improvement of 1.10 points in the combined average freedom score, while transitions with strong civic drivers led to an improvement of nearly 2.7 points on the same 1-to-7 scale.

Of the 35 Free countries post-transition, 32 (or more than 9 in 10) had a significant “bottom up” civic resistance component. Twenty-two (63 percent) of them had mixed transitions, driven by a combination of civic resistance forces and segments of the power holders, while 10 (29 percent) had openings driven by primarily by the force of civic resistance. Only two transitions that have led to high levels of freedom today were driven from the top-down by power holders and one by external military intervention.

Y axis = mean degree of freedom; X axis = civic, mixed civic forces/ powerholders, powerholder’s intervention

In 32 of the 67 countries (nearly 48 percent) that have seen transitions, strong, broad-based nonviolent popular fronts or civic coalitions were highly active, and often central to steering change. In these 32 instances, prior to the transition there had 17 Partly Free countries, and 15 Not Free countries. Now, years after the transition, 24 of the countries (75 percent) where a strong nonviolent civic movement was present are Free and democratic states and 8 (25 percent) are Partly Free states with some space for civic and political life, while none of the states whose transitions featured a strong civic force are Not Free.

The presence of strong and cohesive nonviolent civic coalitions is the most important of the factors examined in contributing to freedom. In 32 of the 67 countries (nearly 48 percent) that have seen transitions, strong, broad-based nonviolent popular fronts or civic coalitions were highly active, and often central to steering change. In these 32 instances, prior to the transition there had been 17 Partly Free countries, and 15 Not Free countries. Now, years after the transition, 24 of the countries (75 percent) where a strong nonviolent civic movement was present are Free and democratic states and 8 (25 percent) are Partly Free states with some space for civic and political life, while none of the states whose transitions featured a strong civic force are Not Free.

The data suggest that the prospects for freedom are significantly enhanced when the opposition does not itself use violence. In all, there were 47 transitions in which there was no (or almost no) opposition violence. Before the transition, 23 were Partly Free, and 24 were Not Free. Today, years after the transition, 31 are Free, 11 are Partly Free, and 5 are Not Free.

Therefore, recourse to violent conflict in resisting oppression is significantly less likely to produce sustainable freedom, in contrast to nonviolent opposition, which even in the face of state repression, is far more likely to yield a democratic outcome.

Y axis = mean degree of freedom; X axis = nonviolent/mostly nonviolent opposition, significantly/highly violent opposition.

WHAT TO DO
Given the significance of the civic factor in dozens of recent transitions from authoritarianism, it is surprising how small a proportion of international donor assistance is targeted to this sector.

One way to increase the odds for successful transitions to freedom is to invest in the creation of dynamic civic life. Such support is most effectively rendered in the following sequence:

General assistance for civil society forces.
Targeted assistance focused on education and training in civic nonviolent resistance.
Assistance for cohesive civic coalitions through which such resistance is expressed.

Such developments also should be matched by efforts to establish a broad-based civic coalition focused on nonviolent resistance. There are many reasons why such umbrella civic coalitions are important in the outcomes for freedom. In short, broad-based democracy coalitions can imbue leaders and activists with the principles and experience that makes for successful democratic governance.

Opposition forces can be helped in more effectively achieving their aims if they are assisted in thinking strategically about how to push change through nonviolent means. A growing civic infrastructure of well-trained activist groups and their coalescing into broad-based coalitions also needs to be coupled with knowledge on how to devise effective strategies of nonviolent resistance to authoritarian power.

Another crucial way of assisting democratic transitions is to work to constrain insurrectionist and state violence and to expand the political space for nonviolent civic action. This means that in the cases of civil wars, governments and international organizations should seek solutions that lead to an end to hostilities and to internationally supervised or monitored elections. Democracies also should engage in preventive diplomacy to avert violence and support policies that prevent or limit the spread of violence in its earliest stages.

Authoritarian leaders lack democratic legitimacy, and this lack of legitimacy needs to be challenged by democratic civic forces. But, because repressive governments limit or control media and communications, pro-democracy activists must develop independent outlets of communication to stake their claim to represent the legitimate aspirations of the people. Invaluable in this effort are the Internet; independent newspapers and newsletters; unauthorized or external broadcast facilities; and cell phones, satellite phones, and text-messaging devices.

Much of what is recommended here is being done in Iraq by the U.S. and its coalition partners. In evaluating this, one has to keep in mind that the reason for the Iraq war to begin with was to eliminate the danger that Saddam posed to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, and American national security. Once he was gone and the battles won, the question was what to do with Iraq. Democratization was the answer, and that is now what is in process against the wishes of foreign terrorists and insurrections. With this in mind, and consistent with How Freedom Is Won, what are we doing in Iraq, as shown by my two posts (here, and here) that provided details:

Aiding and assisting cohesive civic coalitions and civil society.
Seeking solutions to constrain and end violence through direct action and international organizations.
Encouraging independent communication outlets, such as newspapers, internet, telephones, and cell phones galore.
Internationally supervised and monitored elections.
Establishing central government legitimacy.

Links on Iraq

“U.S. Troops in Iraq: 72% Say End War in 2006″ This is a very suspicious Zogby poll just released, and did in conjunction with the far left, “anti-war” Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies. For some questioning comments on it, see below:

Murdoc Online

“Mystery Pollster”

“The Officer’s Club”

“The Soldiers Speak. Will President Bush Listen?” (subscription required) Of course, Nicholas D. Kristof at The New York Times likes it.

Now, how can we explain the incredible contradiction between what American troops believe according to Zogby, and what public opinion polls show the Iraqis themselves believe as given in the chart below.

What? Saddam Was Going To Do That?

[First published February 27, 2006] Former Iraqi Air Force General Georges Sada has written a book, Saddam’s Secrets: How An Iraqi General Defied And Survived Saddam Hussein, with Jim Nelson Black, and which includes information about various Saddam military plans largely unknown to the public. Now, Georges (Iraqis go by their first names) graduated from the Iraq Air Academy in 1959, was trained in the Soviet Union and U.S., and by Britain, to fly the most advanced fighters, and became a first rate pilot well recognized for his skills.

As he rose in rank, he gained the confidence of Saddam by telling the truth, even though it was dangerous to do so. He was retired before the Iraq war and became a consultant to American forces after Saddam’s defeat. He has also been a spokesman for the newly elected prime minister of Iraq. An Assyrian Christian, he is now the president of the National Presbyterian Church in Baghdad and chairman of the Assembly of Evangelical Presbyterian Churches.

See the reviews here, here, and here.

There is always the question of how much is true in the biographies or memoirs of those who were high up in defeated, tyrannical regimes. In Georges’ case, much of what he says about Saddam is consistent with information from other sources, such as Saddam being a small time punk who rose in the Baath party through assassination and murder, and who once in power, systematically purged the party through mass murder, used poison gas against his Kurds, launched a war against Iran, invaded and raped Kuwait, slaughtered the southern Shia after the loss of the Gulf War, and so on.

What troubles me, however, is not the matter of Georges’ truthfulness, but his morality. Through all Saddam’s horrors, Georges remained, as he says, a “loyal patriot.” That is, he did not resign, or find a reasonable excuse to leave Saddam’s military, and he was a willing participant in a military that was carrying out all Saddam’s horrors that he writes about. Moreover, when his family was outside the country and he was sent to Britain, in spite of his awareness of Saddam’s plans on Israel below, he did not defect, and he never became a spy for the U.S. or Britain (that I know of). But, he did save the lives of all those airmen shot down over Iraq. When one of Saddam’s despicable sons demanded they all be killed, Georges refused even at the risk of his own life, and for this he spent some time under arrest thinking he would soon die.

Aside from what I mentioned above, which is well known, I also found the following important:

In 1990, Saddam ordered a poison gas and chemical attack on Israel with 98 of Iraq’s best fighters. No warning would be given, nor would permission be requested to use Syrian and Jordanian airspace. He could not be dissuaded from this even when Georges argued that all 98 would be shot down before reaching Israel. Saddam was willing to gamble that at least 10 aircraft would be able to drop their bombs. He also ordered a similar attack on the capital of Saudi Arabia. The launching of the Gulf War by the United States caused him to cancel these plans.

As to what the U.S. would do if Israel were so attacked, “everyone” thought the U.S. would rattle its papers and do nothing. This estimate was based on Clinton’s weak response to attacks on American ships, bases, and citizens. Saddam believe that the Americans were afraid to fight.

The invasion of Kuwait was predicated on the belief that American Ambassador April Glaspie had given Saddam a free hand regarding Kuwait, or to do whatever else he planned. So, after Saddam invaded Kuwait, they thought the American military buildup in Saudi Arabia and threats were for show.

With the exception of Georges, so he says, all the generals and ministers surrounding Saddam were afraid to tell him the truth, and lied to him continually.

The whole military and civilian establishment was corrupt and incompetent, based on nepotism, favoritism, bribery, and fear.

Much internationally and by human rights groups was made of an American attack on civilian air raid shelters during the Gulf War, but it was unknown that contrary to the Geneva Convention, Saddam had built command bunkers beneath these civilian shelters.

If Saddam were to be defeated, he wanted the whole country to be destroyed with him.

During the Iraq-Iran war he wanted to make a statement about Iranian subversion among the Iraqi Shia, so he ordered a heavy bomber to be loaded with nine-tons of bombs, and that they be dropped on the University of Tehran when the classes were in session. The bomber actually took off and headed for its target, but ran into mechanical difficulties and crashed.

Iraqi battle dead during the Gulf War totaled about 100,000, with about 200,000 seriously injured. These soldiers were Saddam’s throwaway pawns, as much victims as those he murdered outright.
I
In its relations with Iraq, the UN was thoroughly corrupt.

When UN sanctions were imposed on Iraq, Saddam easily manipulated them through kickbacks and bribes, while the Iraqi people suffered greatly.

Doubtlessly, Saddam was trying to develop nuclear weapons. He spent tens of millions of dollars buying the services of scientists and technologists and acquiring the needed equipment.

Saddam arranged to pay $100 million, and made a $5 million down payment, for Chinese scientists to make nukes for him, but apparently the deal was too close to the invasion for him to receive any useful warheads in return.

There can be no doubt that Saddam had WMD (and Georges is amazed there is any question about this). He not only used them on his own people, but also planned to use them against Israel and Saudi Arabia. WMDs were his “obsession.” When it looked like Iraq would be invaded, Saddam had his scientists commit to memory the designs of their weapons before destroying this paper trail.

Trucks and converted civilian aircraft transferred WMDs in large amounts to Syria before the Iraq invasion.

What are the lessons of this book:

America and other democracies must pay close attention to their credibility for responding to provocation and attacks.

The Department of State must be clear about warning dictators about where we draw the line. Replace the diplomatic, “We will take seriously . . . ,” with, “We’ll stomp your ass if you . . . .” When dealing with these tyrants, any ambiguity is a sin.

Just in getting rid of Saddam, and preventing a like replacement, was a momentous victory for the Iraqi people, for American national security, for that of other democracies, and in the War on Terror.

American national security and that of other democracies, such as Israel, must not be dependent on the absolute power and whims of such bloody tyrants as Saddam. In this age of transferable nuclear knowledge and equipment, easily producible poison gas and chemical weapons, missiles, passenger planes that may be hijacked, cargo ships that may be made into launching pads, possible suitcase sized nukes, transportable closed containers galore, and thousands of religious fanatics willing to commit suicide for a cause, all democratic leaders should have their foreheads tattooed with the warning:

COEXISTENCE WITH BLOODY TYRANNICAL THUGS IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR HEALTH

I hasten to add that I am not advocating we make war on them, unless they are an immediate threat, as Saddam and the Taliban (by their support of terrorism against the U.S.) were, or are murdering their people wholesale. Otherwise, I argue we should strongly support internal or expatriate democratic forces, and use the thousand and one ways available to us to peacefully bring down a tyrannical regime.

Global Corruption And Democracy

[First published February, 2006] Kenneth Sikorski has tested whether democracies are the least corrupt compared to other forms of government. He showed they are, using Transparency International’s 2005 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Transparency International has just released its Global Corruption Report 2006, which includes Chapter 10 on “Ten years of the CPI: determining trends,” by Johann Graf Lambsdorff. Their global index for previous years is here.

Lambsdorff found that:

Overall, our findings indicate that significant improvements between 1995 and 2004 occurred (in descending order of significance) in Estonia, Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Mexico, Hong Kong, Colombia, Costa Rica, Taiwan, Australia, Iceland and Russia. Deterioration, on the other hand, was significant in Argentina, Ireland, Poland, Czech Republic, Zimbabwe, United Kingdom, Ecuador, Indonesia, Turkey, Canada, and the Philippines.

In a following chapter, “Governance matters IV: new data, new challenges,” Lambsdorff discusses governance indicators covering 209 countries for 2004. These indicators are based on 352 different underlying variables measuring perceptions of a wide range of governance issues. The variables are drawn from 32 separate data sources constructed by 30 different organizations worldwide. For those of you interested in global performance and the effect of freedom, this report and those discussed and linked below are a bonanza.

One of the findings is:

that there is a strong causal impact of institutional quality on per capita incomes worldwide. Figure 12.1 [shown below]shows a representative set of estimates of this “development dividend” of good governance. These estimates suggest that a realistic one-standard deviation improvement in governance would raise incomes in the long run by about two- to-threefold. Of course, there is variation around these relationships, since governance is not the only thing that matters for development – but it certainly is a very important factor deserving policy-makers’ attention.

The rule of law, as measured on the X axis, is a major indicator of democracy, and as shown is closely related to a countrie’s wealth — its GDP per capita. Note that this is logged, which means that the wealth of countries curves sharply upward with the presence of the rule of law.

Then, there is chapter 13 on “Corruption in the United States of America” by Edward Glaeser and Raven Saks. This is measured by the number of public officials convicted for corruption in each of the 50 US states. They find that “states with higher incomes and a larger share of college-educated population are less corrupt.” States that are most corrupt during 1976-2002 are Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Illinois, New York, Oklahoma, Montana, and North Dakota. States least corrupt are Colorado, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Utah, Iowa, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Vermont, Washington, and Oregon. The authors conclude:

In general, the patterns documented in the data for US states reveal the same basic relationships that have been found using international evidence. This similarity is particularly interesting given that, here, corruption is measured using federal conviction data rather than the type of opinion survey that is the norm in the cross-country literature.

RELATED LINKS

“Wolfowitz’s Corruption Agenda”:

In sum, Wolfowitz’s World Bank presidency, which had seemed to lack an organizing theme, has acquired one. The new boss is going to be tough on corruption, and he’s going to push this campaign beyond the confines of the World Bank; [and he has] persuaded the heads of several regional development banks to join his anti-corruption effort.

RJR: The empirical results mentioned above and in the links below provide strong support for Wolfowitz’s campaign.

“Legal Corruption”:

We undertake to identify general determinants of the pattern of legal and illegal corruption worldwide . . .

RJR: One of the things that the study found is “that fundamental accountability may [play] a clear role in development. This may be a key variable in the determination of corruption in richer societies — policies oriented to its reinforcement may be very fruitful.” What is most important about this is the way accountability was measured — the freedom of the press. This is also a cental indicator of democratic freedom.

“Myths and Realities of Governance and Corruption”

A number of popular notions and outright myths on governance and corruption are addressed in this chapter. We distinguish clearly between governance and anti-corruption, while probing the links between both notions. In so doing we challenge the conventional definition of corruption as being too narrow, legalistic and unduly focused on the public sector, while underplaying the role of the private sector.

“Corruption, Governance and Security: Challenges for the Rich Countries and the World”:

We suggest that the undue emphasis on narrow legalism has obscured more subtle yet costly manifestations of misgovernance, which afflict rich countries as well….Further, we find that governance constraints, and corruption in particular, is a key determinant of a country’s global competitiveness. These findings challenge traditional notions of what constitutes the country’s ‘investment climate’, and who shapes it. It is also found that illegal forms of corruption continue to be prevalent in the interaction between transnationals of the rich world and the public sectors in many emerging countries. Finally, we suggest an empirical link between governance and security issues.

My latest democide painting

Why Are Americans So Incredibly Happy?

[First published February 14, 2006] In spite the continual deluge of bad news from the major media, are Americans happy with their lives? The Pew Research Center (PRC) has published a survey, “Are We Happy Yet?” The PRC did telephone interviews of a randomly selected sample of 3,014 adults. The margin of sampling error is 2%, which is meaningless given the huge differences between groups of responses.

The most interesting result is on the overall happiness of Americans, as shown in the chart below.

About one-third of Americans are very happy, and half pretty happy, which totals to 84% of Americans are happy versus 15% who are not. This great happiness of Americans has been consistent since 1972, without much variation across economic recessions, war and peace, and presidential administrations.

How does this happiness compare to other nations. While questions are not quite comparable, we can get some feel for this from the World Data Base of Happiness overall rating of nations on, “How much people enjoy their life-as-a-whole on a scale of 0 to 10.” The U.S. is 7.4, which is exceeded by fellow liberal democracies Denmark (8.2), Switzerland (8.2), Iceland (7.7), and Mexico (7.7), while at the bottom are Armenia (3.7), Ukraine (3.6), Moldova (3.5), Zimbabwe (3.3), and Tanzania (3.2), all nondemocracies, except for marginally (electorally) democratic Ukraine.

I can’t believe any readers of my blog are politically oriented, but just in case I should note how American happiness breaks out by political party. The Chart below shows this.

And this is not due to Republicans having more money. The same breakout occurs regardless of income. Also, if rather than party, we look at ideology, then conservatives are happier (40%) than moderates (33%) and moderates are happier than liberals (27%). What is more revealing is that the strength of ideology makes a difference. Conservative Republicans are happier than moderate liberal Republicans (47 to 45%), and conservative democrats are happier than liberal Democrats (31 to 28%). Independents are almost at the bottom (29%).

The PRC carried out multiple regression analysis to pin down what accounts for the overall happiness of Americans. Overall, what best explains this are health, income, church attendance, being married, and being a Republican. Now, we know why the major media trumpet the gloomy, pessimistic, and depressing news. They are overwhelmingly dominated by non-church-going, liberal Democrats.

And note this carefully, the regression analysis showed education, gender, and race did not account for happiness, holding the other effects constant. Yet, our unhappy media liberals tend to focus on these three characteristics, and especially the last two, as though happiness dependent exclusively on them.

Finally, and to me the most important result of all. Being a cat or dog owner makes no difference to being happy or not. Again, so much for theory.

World Public Opinion–People Vs. Leaders

[First published February 14, 2006] Gallup has published a number of world poll results, and the most interesting is their poll of near 50,000 people in more than 60 countries , that statistically represent over 2 billion of the world’s population.

Of most interest, is that 35% vs. 30% believe the next generation will live in a safer world. Compared to similar polls in 2003 and 2004, those who feel the world will be safer has gone up from 25% to 40%.

The World Economic Forum also did a similar poll of 2,500 world leaders that participated in the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. This enables us to do a fascinating comparison between leaders and the people. See below

Then as to whether the next generation will live in a more economically prosperous world, see below

And then there is a comparison of people versus leaders on the importance (priority) of specific issues.

The report also presents the results for people versus leaders on a number of issues. The greatest difference is on economic growth, where 31% of the leaders give it priority compared to only 17% of the people. Note that reducing wars and the war on terrorism are not that important for leaders and people, and human rights are even less so. Full equality for women, reducing organized crime, and overcoming AIDS are at the bottom of people and leader’s priorities. Stunning. And the polltakers did not even ask about genocide, democide, and famine, the major causes of unnatural non-disease deaths in the last century.

Doubtlessly related to the world being safer and more prosperous, Gallup asked whether people thought 2006 would be better or worse than 2005, and divided the results by region and country (here in pdf). The most pessimistic regions are Western Europe and Eastern/Central Europe, where 31% and 30% respectively think 2006 will be worse, while the most optimist regions about 2006 being better are the Pacific (54%), and Africa (57%). As to countries, Vietnam, China, UN Kosovo, and Afghanistan were most optimistic, while Bosnia, Greece, Philippines, and France were among the most pessimistic.

For comparison, we have the 20 nation poll taken by the World Public Opinion Organization Organization. They ask whether respondents agree or disagree with the statement that, “The Free enterprise system and free market economy is the best system on which to base the future of the world.” The highest agreement is by China (74%), Philippines (73%), and the U.S. (71%). Those at the bottom are France (36%), Argentina (42%), and Russia (36%). Compare this to the average for the 20 nations on their support for increased government regulation of large companies to protect workers being 74%, the rights of consumers being 73%, to protect the environment being 75%, and rights of investors being 54%.

As to whether large companies are seen as having too much influence, the average is 73%, with the U.S. being 85%, and China far below at 47%.

Such polls provide a treasure trove of raw data. We now have a world values survey, freedom house, and the index to economic freedom. A problem is that these data are formatted in different ways, but not impossible to reconfigure, reformat, and intercorrelate. One question that would be interesting to answer is: How do the people of the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe view human rights? I suspect it is with much less priority than other issues, since they already have them, and take them for granted. Also, because of their constant bombardment by a negative major media, I suspect that these people are far more pessimistic about the world being a safer and better place.

But, Didn’t The U.S. Support Tin-Pot Dictators?

[First published February 9, 2006] Whenever I give a speech on the democratic peace to university audiences, questioners always shift the focus to the United States, and especially this kind of question:

Has not the U.S. intervened in many countries, some democracies such as Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador, supported death squads murdering rebels, and behind the scenes helped mass murder, such as in Indonesia?

Even if true, none of these events was a war. No collection or list of international wars includes them. They are therefore irrelevant to the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, and cannot be used as evidence to disprove it. As to democide, I have only counted those governments directly responsible. If one were to also count indirect responsibility, then this would have to be done not only for the U.S., but all regimes, including those of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. I bet that if this were done, the proportional differences between democracies and nondemocracies would be even more weighed toward totalitarian regimes.

To understand why a democracy like the U.S. would be allying itself with dictators, one has to understand that in the late 1940s to the late 1980s, American foreign and defense policies were geared toward containing communism, and responding to the realistic fear of a Soviet Invasion of Europe or a nuclear first strike on the U.S. This Cold War was World War III, with hot battlefronts in Korea, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Afghanistan; and with theaters of related guerrilla warfare, subversion, spying, and political action throughout Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Within this context, American alliances, and ties to “right wing” dictators, or interventions to prop them up, were meant to prevent their communist takeover or revolution, and/or to secure their support of our side in the Cold War by, for example, providing basis. There has been much criticism of this among academics, but strangely, there has been no similar criticism of the American alliance with Stalin to defeat Hitler in World War II. Yet, of all regimes, Stalin’s was worse than any military or authoritarian regime we supported after the war, and on par with Hitler’s.

One example always brought up is the 1973 military coup in Chile against an elected president that America presumably engineered. To many on the left it is the proof of American imperialism and true antidemocratic nature. But, the U.S. did not intervene against President Allende, or help overthrow him. See my “The Chilean Coup–Icon of the Anti-American Left.” The coup against him was an internally generated matter. The U.S. did favor it, however. Keep in mind that Allende was a communist, aided by Castro and the Soviet Union, and was attempting to convert Chile to a communist dictatorship, like that of his model, Castro. By the time of the coup, Allende had destroyed virtually all his pubic support, including the unions, business, the church, and, of course, the military.

World War III has been won, communism defeated as a competing and threatening world force, and there is no longer a perceived need to contain it. If people are stupid enough to elect communists, as they have done in Venezuela, and Bolivia, so be it. People who don’t learn from history, will have to repeat it.

In any case, in general, where the U.S. has intervened, and supported dictators under communist threat, these countries are now democracies. In two notable cases where we could have intervened and did not, the worst not only happened to these countries, but the horrible result continues to this day. Think of Cuba for one, where President Eisenhower refused to save the Fulgencio Batista regime from Castro, until it was too late. Then President Kennedy inherited Eisenhower’s plans to overthrow Castro with the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban expatriates, which was miserably prepared and handled. Of course, had we supported Batista, we would be hearing to this day about American imperialism and intervention to save right wing Batista, but had we done so we would have saved tens of thousands of lives, and the Cuban people from a miserable existence under communism. And by now, Cuba would probably be a democracy, as are El Salvador, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.

Then there is Iran. At the time of the Ayatollah’s 1978-1979 revolution, Iran was led by a pro-American and secular modernizing dynasty, much to the rage of the Iran’s Ayatollahs and Islamic extremists. When the dynasty was on the verge of collapse, the Iranian military contacted President Carter asking for support for a military takeover — a protective coup. Typical of his softheaded worldview, Carter refused, and in effect gave a go ahead to the Ayatollah’s revolution. We now all know the result in the hundreds of thousands murdered, the infliction of totalitarian Islamic rule on a people, and the danger of its revolutionary regime producing nuclear weapons The irony of this is, as with Cuba, had we supported a coup this would have become another black mark against the United States.

Foreign and defense policy in wartime, which included the Cold War, and now the War on Terror, is messy and shot through with moral ambiguities and compromises. Thus, we dropped a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; allied ourselves with the fascist Chiang Kai-shek regime of China, and the communist megamurderer Stalin; and agreed to turn over Eastern Europe to Stalin’s tender mercies after the war. Now we are allied with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, among other distasteful regimes, who are hardly models of democracy. It all boils down to the balance sheet of pluses and minuses in defending freedom and waging peace.

But, then those pure in heart, innocent in mind, and morally self-righteous, will always find something in such foreign and defense policies to attack, while assuming no responsibility for the inevitable consequences. Witness the Patriot Act, alleged torture of terrorists, and the Al Qaeda NSA surveillance (“Bush spying”) program.

Understanding The Cartoon Riots

[First published February 8, 2006] Muslim riots over the Danish media’s cartoons that demeaned Mohammad; wild demonstrations; the burning and trampling of the Danish flag; the destruction of Danish embassies; and huge crowds of madly waving signs and fists. And Muslims are getting killed.

Of course, these outbursts reflect a double standard — Muslims debase other religions, call for the extermination of Jews, and every day publish hate cartoons and articles against other religions and people. It is clear that they have no appreciation of what freedom of speech means.

Correct? It this how we should see this madness? As a clash of civilizations?

No, as common as this view is, it is wrong headed. True, Muslims are largely stuck in distant centuries. Not much imagination is needed to consider what Christians would have done about such cartoons in centuries long gone, had they disparaged Jesus. There was a time when Christians murdered witches by the thousands, Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other over their beliefs, Catholics led crusades against each other over doctrinaire disputes, the Spanish inquisition burned heretics at the stake, and Jews were blamed for any disaster, such as the Black Plague, and murdered wholesale.

What has happened to change Christianity and Christian attitudes was the growth of a rational secular view encouraged by economic development, the growth of science, and the evolution of a liberal democratic culture — in brief, democratic modernity. Much of that has yet to permeate the Middle East. So we have a profound religiosity, and fundamental values imbedded in clans that emphasize tradition — authoritarian leadership, male authority, family, and childbearing.

But, these traditional, nonsecular, and irrational values are background and have always been there. They are a constant, and a constant cannot explain a change in behavior. They simply provide the fuel for the cartoon riots. The riots themselves were provoked by the Syrian and Iranian dictatorships to draw Western attention and pressure away from them, and they are led by their street warriors, the imans and mullahs, who are always eager to stir up believers against the West and its threatening infidel values.

Rather than looking at the riots as a clash of civilizations, consider them a tactic in political warfare. They remind me of the Soviet engineered anti-nuclear and anti-American mass demonstrations in Europe during the Cold War. Much was made of them being a reflection of popular opinion, when in reality they were well planned and executed by local communists who on orders from Moscow played on the nuclear fears and fundamental ignorance of the young and excitable. The cartoon riots are similar and should be looked at in the same way — as war by other means.

What can be done? In the short run, we have to understand that this is political warfare, so condemn it, and continue our pressure on Syria and Iran. In the long run, the democratization and economic development of the Middle East and other Muslim dominated nations will gradually shift their people toward secular, rational, and democratic values.

In the meantime, don’t let such riots and demonstrations fool you, as they are intended to do.

Links to Share

” Cartoon Riots”:

Widespread street demonstrations and riots are produced historically by propaganda for specific political purposes, beginning with the storming of the Bastille and murder of Ancien Regime officials in 1789. Steve Kellmeyer provides illuminating historical perspective on today’s Islamic riots ostensibly protesting religious intolerance in Danish newspaper cartoons.

“Islam and Freedom and Democracy (Updated, Revised Data)” Dean is someone who looks at the data, and we all benefit by it.

“Learn about Islam through pictures ” Not your usual travel pics.

“When People Freely Choose Tyranny” By Michael Ledeen:

Those of us who advocate democratic revolution are often criticized for an excess of naïveté, for failing to recognize that the passion for freedom is not universal, and that there are many people — perhaps even many peoples — who despise democracy. Given half a chance, these self-proclaimed ‘realists’ say, much of the world will choose tyranny. True enough, I know it well. But it doesn’t lead me to be more tolerant of tyranny, it reinforces my passion for democratic revolution.

RJR: I disagree with Ledeen’s whole assumption that if given a true choice between freedom and tyranny at the ballot box, people will choose tyranny.

“The Myth of a Moderate Hamas” By Barry Rubin:

A few months ago I was invited by an embassy to meet a visiting delegation to discuss European policies toward Hamas and Hizballah.
     “Before I decide,” I asked, “tell me what you think about this issue.”
     “Oh,” replied the diplomat, “we’ve already decided to deal with them.”
     “If you already have made up your minds,” I answered, “why should I come to talk about it?”
     Now, as the Financial Times says in a January 18 article, the European Union is preparing to do business with Hamas despite the fact that it is on their list of banned terrorist groups because they worry “that heavy handed actions by the EU could prove counterproductive, pushing Hamas further from the political mainstream.”

An expert on the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Barry Rubin is always worth reading.

” United States: The Congress and Democracy Promotion” On the 2005 Congressional “Advance Democracy Act,” still pending in the Senate. A very important act, but being held up by the usual suspects.

Read them and weep

Happiness — This Utilitarian Argument For Freedom Is True

[First published February 7, 2006] One of the best sources for how values are distributed is the World Values Survey (here), and I have consulted its results a number of times, such as providing evidence on how Arab peoples view democracy (here). Now, I want to provide their results on the relationship between freedom and subjective well being — happiness and satisfaction. I think all of us assume that the more freedom a people have the greater their happiness and satisfaction with their lives. If this is true, the utilitarian argument — policy should promote the greatest happiness and least pain — alone justifies promoting freedom.

Is it true?

The World Values Survey has published a study by Ronald Inglehart and Hans D. Klingemann, ” Genes, Culture, Democracy, and Happiness,” (in pdf; go here, and search under Hans Klingemann) which tries to answer the question. Utilizing surveys done by the European Union over 25 years about respondents’ well being in 11 European nations, the author’s first show that national language differences are not responsible for different survey responses on happiness and satisfaction. They moreover establish that there is not much change within nations over the 25 years. The correlation between earliest and latest EU survey in 1998 is .80. For the World Values Survey sample of 64 nations, it is .81, an amazing stability.

That out of the way, the author’s show that subjective well being is highly correlated with economic development (.70) as measured by GNP. No surprise there. But, they point out:

This process is not linear, however. The correlation weakens as one moves up the economic scale. Above $13,000 in 1995 purchasing power parity, there is no significant linkage between wealth and subjective well being. The transition from a subsistence economy to moderate economic security has a large impact on happiness and life satisfaction, but above the level of Portugal or Spain, economic growth no longer makes a difference.

Another factor in subjective well being is so commonsensical to many of us that I hesitate mentioning it. But it is commonsensical to all but the Marxists out there, who won’t believe it anyway. That factor is whether a nation was communist or not:

Virtually all societies that experienced communist rule show relatively low levels of subjective well-being, even when compared with societies at a much lower economic level, such as India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria. Those societies that experienced communist rule for a relatively long time show lower levels than those that experienced it only since World War II.

Religion also plays a role, especially Protestantism. The author’s show that:

Virtually all historically Protestant societies show relatively high levels of subjective well being. A similar effect persists today in countries (the United States being an exception) where only small minority of the public regularly attends church. As Max Weber pointed out, Protestant societies were the first to industrialize, and although economic development now has spread throughout the world, Protestant societies still are relatively wealthy in large part because of this early lead.

Now for the most relevant part. Subjective well-being is critical to the stability of a nation’s political institutions and particularly the stability of democracy. The authors measure freedom using the Freedom House annual freedom ratings (here), which they added together for 1981 to 1988. Since the ratings summed for both civil liberties and political rights for a nation for a year vary from 2 to 14, with 2 being the freest, they subtracted the summed ratings for a nation from the highest total rating to reverse the freedom scale. This way the highest total rating is the freest. They then plotted freedom against the percent of a nation’s people happy and satisfied with their life. It is below (click it to enlarge)

The correlation between well-being and freedom (liberal democracies, in effect) is .78. This is linear. The curvilinear (polynomial or logged correlation would be higher, since it would account for the slight sag in the middle of the distribution) of a number of partially free nations, some being electoral democracies such as Mexico and Turkey. Although the plot seems to imply that freedom is the cause of well-being (it can’t be the other way around), the authors believe that this is in question, and that other factors may better account for well-being.

So, they did a multiple regression of well being against measures of a nation’s economic development, whether it was historically ruled by Protestant elites or not, its years under communist rule, and its measure of freedom. These variables account for 80 percent of the variation in well being, a remarkable fit. They then removed independent variables with low significance in stages to achieve of fit of 78 percent of the variance with three significant variables, which in the order of their significance are: GNP per capita, years under communist rule, and freedom. Aside from applying sample tests of significance to a universe of cases, a problem with their analysis, is the high multicollinearity among these three variables (on this problem, see my blog here). Without eliminating this intercorrelation, it is impossible from this regression alone to determine what variables are dominant.

They conclude:

These findings in no way refute the evidence that genetic factors play an important role in subjective well-being; we find that evidence compelling. But these findings do indicate that genetic factors are only part of the story. Happiness levels vary cross-culturally. Since cultures are constructed by human beings, this suggests that the pursuit of happiness is not completely futile. Genes may play a crucial role, but beliefs and values also are important. Our findings also indicate that varying levels of well-being are closely linked with a society’s political institutions: sharp declines in a society’s level of well-being can lead to the collapse of the social and political system; while high levels of well-being contribute to the survival and flourishing of democratic institutions.

We now know that a nation’s past communism, economic development, and freedom are closely related to well being, and that freedom has the highest correlation with well being suggests that it is the strongest factor.

see the regression of human security on freedom

Democracy As A Spontaneous Society

[First published on February 7, 2006] This is in response to a comment by Gus DeZerega on “The Myth Of ‘The Myth Of Democratic Peace’”. Gus is a 1984 Berkeley Ph.D. in political science and a Visiting Assistant Professor, Dept. of Government, HYPERLINK “http://www.stlawu.edu/”St. Lawrence University. His website is here. He is also into art , as I am. He has written, among others, Persuasion, Power and Polity: A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, and the article, “HYPERLINK “http://www.dizerega.com/demspon.htm”Democracy as a Spontaneous Order,” published in Critical Review.

Pro Forma, Gus, and I are the only ones, to my knowledge, who have recognized the critical role that F.A. Hayek’s felicitous term, “spontaneous society,” plays in understanding democratic freedom and the democratic peace. This is very close to the idea of a free market, but involving all of a society and not only its economic system. In my mathematical, and subsequent philosophical development of the theory, I use the idea of a social field instead of spontaneous society, but no matter, although the former is more precise the meaning is much the same.

Now, in his comment, Gus DeZerega (GD) said:

This is an excellent rebuttal of the libertarian position, which unfortunately too often these days puts having the ideologically correct conclusion ahead of good analysis. (Disclosure: I am a former libertarian.)

RJR: As I am. I now call myself a freedomist.

GD:

However, I think that Dr. Rummel’s disparagement of anti-Iraq war positions, libertarian or leftist, is tangential to the strength of the democratic peace argument. 

There are two separate issues at stake. First, is there a democratic peace? Some of us have said “Yes” for a long time – in my case pretty much since Cliff Ketzel pointed it out in an IR class at the University of Kansas in the 60s. Alas, he didn’t publish and it took me years to arrive at insights similar to those Dr. Rummel arrived at first. Happily so eventually did many others.



Second, if there is a democratic peace, how do we get more democracies and therefore more peace? Here there are two broad positions, and the answers to this question do not translate into where we stand on the validity of the first. 

The first position is that it is possible to bring democracy to undemocratic areas by means of liberating war. The second does not necessarily oppose that view in every instance, but is skeptical and cautious, emphasizing a country needs certain socio-cultural pre-conditions before it can reliably become democratic. This view argues that stable democracy needs to arise largely within and through the efforts of people in the society adopting the institutions. Democracies can assist this process but they cannot impose or control it under most circumstances. (Germany, Italy, and Japan are seeming exceptions, but I would argue otherwise.)

RJR: As I would.


GD:

As I read him (and I may misread him) Dr. Rummel is in the first camp, and I most definitely am in the second.


RJR: While I do not accept that war should be fought to democratize a nation, I do say that if it is fought for other reasons, such as to stop wide scale democide, as it would be in Sudan, than once a country is defeated, I believe its people should be freed from their former enslavement by promoting democratization. Japan, Germany, and Italy are examples of what I mean. It may fail, as it has done in Haiti, but better to fail than not try at all.




A fascinating experiment is taking place in Palestine today that may shed light on the strength of one or the other position, though the real world is always messy enough to make a single case only suggestive, no matter what the issue. I truly hope the Palestinian experiment in democracy works. I am dubious. I am even more dubious regarding Iraq because it is far more divided internally than Palestine and its democratic institutions more obviously imposed.

RJR: Not imposed, but the Iraqis have been freed from a bloody tyrant. If freeing slaves is “imposing” freedom on them, then so is imposing freedom on the prisoners of a concentration camp by killing the guards and throwing open the barbed wire gates for all to leave.

GD:

Further. My own analysis, which shares a great deal in common with Dr. Rummel’s, emphasizes the degree to which democracies are unlike undemocratic states in their internal organization as a crucial element in the democratic peace phenomena. War unites democracies behind executive power, weakening those differences. Thus, war that is not truly necessary runs the risk of weakening those systemic elements in a democracy that are most crucial to maintaining the democratic peace.

Which general view is correct? Perhaps the next few years will give us a pretty good test.

RJR: War is always a danger to a democracy in that it more or less creates a garrison state, which after a war is only partially dismantled. It is not as though, however, democracies can pick and choose whether to fight a war because of this danger, since often survival in the short or long run is at stake, as it has been for the U.S. with its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Korea, and World War II. WWI was an exception and need not have been engaged by the U.S., in my view. Thus, by creating a garrison state that cast a long shadow over the future of a democracy, as Gus points out, fighting a war can weaken those very aspects of the democratic peace that promote long run peace. However, if the war ends in the further spread of democracy, then this garrison state effect is more than offset.

Links of Day

Quadrennial Defense Review Report: This is the once every four years review of American defense policy. Rather, what’s new, what’s old, what’s changed, and what’s to be changed. It starts with this provocative, but correct, statement:

The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.

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Liberty vs. democracy: An argument for liberty under an authoritarian regime, rather than for a corrupt and economically unfree democracy. Not a parody.

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“Freedom first, democracy after”. Relevant to the Hamas electoral win, this expresses Natan Sharansky’s argument that freedom should come first and then democracy.

Quoting Sharansky, “Germany and Japan didn’t have elections in 1945, either,” he claimed. “Elections are the end of the building process of a free society, not the beginning.”

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“Violent Rhetoric or Flush Toilets”:

Democracy may not be a perfect defense against the Mafia — obviously, it is not. American mobsters exist. They intimidate judges in New Jersey, own aldermen in Chicago, and slide cash to congressmen via K Street. Democracies, however, tend to marginalize gangsters, in the same way they tend to marginalize political extremists. With checks and balances like the rule of law, the free press and electoral politics, Al Capones and Jack Abramoffs end up in jail. Even a president can lose his law license for “misleading” a federal judge.

Democracy is no perfect defense against religious and ethnic terrorists, either. Hamas won an election, soundly drubbing secular Fatah.

Democracy is flawed — the other choices, however, are fatal.

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“DEMOCRACY AND VIOLENCE GO TOGETHER LIKE BUSH AND LIES”: Re the claim that democracy and violence are incompatible:

it nearly made me choke over my breakfast.
The hypocrisy of it all. . . . As if democracy and violence do not go simply and always hand in hand. Which present day democratic state does not employ violence and terror?

RJR: I give this link just to show that I am not making up the incredibly ignorant, if not ideologically dogmatic, opposition to the democratic peace.

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“Facts vs. Fiction: A Report from the Front “ By Karl Zinsmeister, author of Dawn Over Baghdad:

Well, nearly every war is riddled with disappointment and pain, Iraq certainly included. But judged fairly, Iraq has been much less costly and debacle-ridden than the Civil War, World War II, Korea, and the Cold War, each considered in retrospect to have been noble successes.

Warning: a blood and gore democide
painting not for the queasy

Is The U.S. The Most Violent Of All?

[First published February 3, 2006] I’ve had the most respected academics in peace research tell me flatly that the United States is the most violent nation in the world. And after I’ve given lectures and speeches on the democratic peace, some questioners have said or implied the same thing. This myth has been widely believed among peace researchers and is a matter of religious faith on the left.

In response, I would point out the bloody wars in Africa and Asia not involving the U.S., including the Iraq-Iran war which cost about a million lives. Then, I would note the worst domestic democides, including that of Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, and so on, and compare the top annual domestic democide rates (the percent of the population murdered per year of the regime) to that for the U.S. (I always had a special page in my notes with the figures):

U.S. = .000016
USSR = .42
Communist China = .12 (if 1959-1962 famine treated as nondemocidal)
Hitler’s Germany = .09
Pol Pot’s Cambodia 8.16

And, I would add, here are the average overall domestic democide rates (average percent of the population murdered) for types of regimes.

Democracies = .043, of which the U.S. = .001
Authoritarian regimes = 1.1
Totalitarian regimes = 3.9, of which communist = 5.2

Particularly note how small the annual rate is for the U.S. even compared to the average for democracies.

But, the leftist mind assumes that there has to be something bloody wrong with the U.S. (in addition to its raging imperialism, blood sucking capitalism, and ardent support for right wing dictators), and so they fall back on the civil murder rate. They say, “No one is secure in America, since Americans murder each other at a rate greater than any other nation, and that’s why it is the most violent nation in the world.”

Well, this can be easily checked on the Internet, such as through The International Crime Victim Survey and here. From the latter source, I reproduce its rank ordered list of murder’s per nation per capita.

Note that the U.S. is not only 24th, but that its murder rate is tiny compared to the top four nations. It is 6.9% of Colombia’s, 8.6% of South Africa’s, 13.2% of Jamaica’s, and 21.2 % of Venezuela’s.

The next time a so called “anti-war” activist, self-righteous “peace researcher,” or blathering leftist declares that the U.S. is the most violent nation in the world, kindly tell them that their ignorance is only exceeded by their ideological blindness.

Why Freedom?

[First published February 2, 2006] In his State of the Union speech, President Bush said:

Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer — so we will act boldly in freedom’s cause.

Far from being a hopeless dream, the advance of freedom is the great story of our time. In 1945, there were about two-dozen lonely democracies in the world. Today, there are 122. And we’re writing a new chapter in the story of self-government — with women lining up to vote in Afghanistan, and millions of Iraqis marking their liberty with purple ink, and men and women from Lebanon to Egypt debating the rights of individuals and the necessity of freedom. At the start of 2006, more than half the people of our world live in democratic nations. And we do not forget the other half — in places like Syria and Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea, and Iran — because the demands of justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom, as well.

In the past too many have identified power with greatness, thugs with statesmen, and propaganda with results; they have let moral and cultural relativism silence our outrage, while conceding the moral high ground to the utopian dreamers; they have refused to recognize evil as evil; and they have ignored the catastrophic human cost of such confusions, and the natural and moral right to freedom. This cannot be said of Bush, who well recognizes why people should be free.

In the world today, billions of human beings are still subject to impoverishment, exposure, starvation, disease, torture, rape, beatings, forced labor, genocide, mass murder, executions, deportations, political violence, and war. These billions live in fear for their lives, and for those of their loved ones. They have no human rights, no liberties. These people are only pieces on a playing board for the armed thugs and gangs that oppress their nations, raping them, looting them, exploiting them, and murdering them. We hide the identity of the gangs—we sanctify them—with the benign concept of “government,” as in the “government” of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany.

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.

International law now recognizes that if these gangs go to extremes, such as massive ethnic cleansing or genocide, then the international community has a countervailing right to stop them. However, this area of international law is still developing, and in the current examples of Cuba, Burma, Iran, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Syria, among others, the thugs still largely have their way with their victims. This is unconscionable. The people of these countries, and all people everywhere have the right to freedom of speech, religion, organization, and a fair trial, among other rights, and one overarching right to be free subsumes all these civil and political rights. This right overrules sovereignty, which is granted according to tradition based on a system of international treaties, not natural law. Freedom, by contrast, is not something others grant. It is a right due every human being.

For too many intellectuals, however, it is not enough to point out that a people have a right to be free. They will counter by arguing that freedom is desirable, but first people must be made equal, given food to eat, work, and health care. Freedom must be limited as a means to good ends, such as the public welfare, prosperity, peace, ethnic unity, or national honor. Sometimes the intellectuals who go about creating such justifications for denying people their freedom are so persuasive that even reasonable people will accept their convoluted arguments. Need I mention the works of Marx and Lenin, for example, who provided “scientific” excuses for the tyranny of such thugs as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot?

To many compassionate people, such intellectuals, arguing that freedom must be sacrificed for a better life, have had the best of the argument and the moral high ground. These intellectuals have tried to show that freedom empowers greed, barbaric competition, inefficiency, inequality, the debasement of morals, the weakening of ethnic or racial identity, and so on.

To be defensive about freedom in the face of such justifications is morally wrong-headed. No moral code or civil law allows that a gang leader and his followers can murder, torture, and repress some at will as long as the thugs provide others with a good life. But even were it accepted that under the cover of government authority, a ruler can murder and repress his people so long as it promotes human betterment, the burden of proof is on those who argue that therefore those people will be better off

There is no such proof. Quite the opposite: in the twentieth century, we have had the most costly and extensive tests of such arguments, involving billions of people. The Nazis, Italian fascists under Mussolini, Japanese militarists, and Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek have tested fascist promises of a better life. Likewise, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have tested the utopian promises of communism, to mention the most prominent communist experiments; and Burma, Iraq, and Syria, among others, also have tested state socialism. All these vast social experiments have failed, utterly and miserably, and they have done so at the vast human cost that has included global social upheaval, the displacement of millions, the impoverishment of billions, and the death of tens of millions from famine, extreme internal violence, and the most destructive wars—not to mention the many hundreds of millions murdered outright.

These social experiments have involved the mass murder of 262,000,000 Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, Poles, North Koreans, Cubans, Vietnamese, and others, such that were their souls to comprise a land of the dead it would be among the world’s top three in population

In sharp contrast, there are the arguments for freedom. Not only is a right certified in international law (e.g., the various human rights multinational conventions), but a supreme moral good in itself. The very fact of a people’s freedom creates a better life for all.

Free people create a wealthy and prosperous society

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. Moreover, it is not by chance that:

No democratically free people have suffered from mass famine

It is extraordinary, how little known this is. There are plenty of hunger projects and plans to increase food aid for the starving millions, all of which is good enough in the short run. A starving person will die before the people can kick out their rulers or make them reform their policies. Yet simply feeding the starving today is not enough. They also have to be fed tomorrow and every day thereafter. However, free these people from their rulers’ commands over their farming, and soon they will be able to feed themselves and others as well. There is an adage that applies to this: “Give a starving person a fish to eat and you feed him only for one day; teach him how to fish, and he feeds himself forever.” Yet teaching is no good alone, if people are not free to apply their new knowledge—yes, teach them how to fish, but also promote the freedom they need to do so

Surprisingly, the incredible economic productivity and wealth produced by a free people and their freedom from famines are not the only moral goods of freedom, nor, perhaps, even the most important moral goods. When people are free, they comprise a spontaneous society the characteristics of which strongly inhibit society-wide political violence. Freedom greatly reduces the possibility of revolutions, civil war, rebellions, guerrilla warfare, coups, violent riots, and the like. Most of the violence within nations occurs where thugs rule with absolute power. There is a continuum here:

The more power the rulers have, and the less free their people, the more internal violence these people will suffer

Surely that which protects people against internal violence, that which so saves human lives, is a moral good. And this is freedom

Then there is mass democide, the most destructive means of ending human lives of any form of violence. Except in the case of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, few people know how murderous the dictators of this world have been, and could be. Virtually unknown are the shocking tens of millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, and the other millions wiped out by Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and their kind. Just omitting foreigners, who are most often murdered during a war, such thugs murdered about 161,000,000 of their own people from 1900 to 1987. Adding foreigners and including the whole twentieth century raises the toll they have killed to nearly the incredible aforementioned 262,000,000.

Even now, in the twenty-first century, these mass murders still go on in Burma, Sudan, North Korea, and the Congo (DR), just to mention the most glaring examples.

What is true about freedom and internal violence is also so for this mass democide:

The more freedom a people have, the less likely their rulers will murder them. The more power the thugs have, the more likely they are to murder their people

Could there be a greater moral good than to end or minimize such mass murder? This is what freedom does and for this it is, emphatically, a moral good.

There is still more to say about freedom’s value. While we now know that the world’s ruling thugs generally kill several times more of their subjects than do wars, it is war on which moralists and pacifists generally focus their hatred, and devote their resources to ending or moderating. This singular concentration is understandable, given the horror and human costs, and the vital political significance of war. Yet, it should be clear by now that war is a symptom of freedom’s denial, and that freedom is the cure. First:

Democratically free people do not make war on each other

Why? The diverse groups, cross-national bonds, social links, and shared values of democratic peoples sew them together; and shared liberal values dispose them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each other. It is as though the people of democratic nations were one society

This truth that democracies do not make war on each other provides a solution for eliminating war from the world: globalize democratic freedom

Second:

The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the wars between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars become

And third:

The more freedom the people of a nation have, the less bloody and destructive their wars.

What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost all nations to become liberal democracies to reduce the severity of war. As we promote freedom, as the people of more and more nations gain greater human rights and political liberties, as those people without any freedom become partly free, we will decrease the bloodiness of the world’s wars. In short: Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be a moral good. And this is freedom

In conclusion, then, we have wondrous human freedom as a moral force for the good, as President Bush well recognizes. Freedom produces social justice, creates wealth and prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solution to war. In two words, it creates human security. Moreover, and most important:

People should not be free only because it is good for them. They should be free because it is their right as human beings.

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.

Now, to summarize, why freedom?

Because it is every person’s right. It is a moral good—it promotes wealth and prosperity, social justice, and nonviolence, and preserves human life. And it enables all other moral goods.

To Begin With, It’s In The Mind

[First published January 25, 2006] “Why can’t they see this?” is an often expressed frustration of conservatives over many liberal reporters and editors not seeing their liberal bias, but the question goes beyond this. Why didn’t the CIA and FBI connect the dots and anticipate 9/11? Why was the insurrection of the Sunnis and their coalition with foreign terrorists not anticipated before our military victory? Why is it so hard to understand the need for spying on calls to terrorist organizations by American citizens? And so on.

Such questions assume that the real world out there is what we perceive. But it is not. What we believe reality to be is our painting. We are the artists. We mix the colors, draw the lines, fix the focus, and achieve the artistic balance. Reality disciplines our painting, of course; it is our starting point. As the artist, we add here, leave out there; substitute color, simplify; and provide this reality with a point, a theme, and a center of interest. We produce a thousand such paintings every moment. With unconscious artistry, each is a personal statement; each is individualistic.

Now, Perception is what we hear, see, taste, smell, and feel (touch). Most people realize that their perception of things can be wrong, that they may be mistaken. We all have had disagreements with others on what we saw or heard. And we have heard of eyewitnesses who widely disagree over the facts of a crime or accident. Some teachers who wish to dramatically illustrate such disagreement have staged mock fights or holdups in a classroom. A masked man rushes in, pointing a weapon at the teacher, and demands his wallet; and with it hastily exits, leaving the class stunned. Then each member of the class is asked to write down what he saw and heard. Their versions usually differ widely.

But, of course, such are rapidly changing situations in which careful observation is difficult. Surely, one might think, if there were time to study a situation or event, as do intelligence analysts and academics, one would perceive it as others do. This is easy enough to test. Ask any two people to describe a furnished room, or a specific car. Then compare. We would find many similarities, but we should also find some important and interesting differences. Sometimes such differences result from error, inattentiveness. However, there is something more fundamental. Even analysts and attentive reporters often see things differently. And each can be correct.

There are a number of reasons for this. First, people may have different vantage points and their visual perspectives thus will differ. A cylinder viewed from above will appear round and flat; from the side a rectangle slightly rounded at the top and bottom if long enough; and from an angle, it will appear the cylinder it is.

But people can compare or change perspectives. Were this all, perception would not be so individualistic. The second reason for different perceptions is more fundamental. We endow what we sense with meaning. The outside world is an amorphous blend of interwoven colors, lights, sounds, smells, tastes and touch. We make sense of this complex by carving it into different concepts, such as table, chair, terrorist, democracy, Iran. Learning a language is part of learning to perceive the world, and each language is a slightly or vastly different system of perceptions.

We also bestow this reality with value. Thus, what we perceive becomes good or bad, repulsive or attractive, dangerous or safe. We may see terrorists as freedom fighters, the U.S. as imperialist, Iran as evil, and Israel as a threatened democracy.

Cultures, and to a lesser but similar extent, ideologies (including theologies) are systems of meanings laid onto reality; to become acculturated and an ideologue is to learn the language through which a person gives the world unique shape and evaluation. A clear example of this is a cross, which to a Christian signifies the death of Jesus for mankind as well as the whole complex of values and beliefs bound up in the religion. Yet, to non-Christian cultures a cross may be meaningless, simply two pieces of wood connected at right angles, or a sign of infidels.

Besides varying perspectives and meanings, a third reason for different perceptions is that people have unique experiences and learning capacities, even when they share the same culture and ideology. Each person has his own background. No two people learn alike. Moreover, people have different occupations, and each occupation emphasizes and ignores different aspects of reality. Simply by virtue of their separate occupational interests, philosopher, priest, engineer, union worker, and lawyer will perceive the world differently.

Two people may physically see the same thing from the same perspective, therefore, but each through their diverse languages, evaluations, experience, and occupations, may perceive it differently and endow it with their own personal meaning. Dissimilar perspective, meaning, and experience together explain why our perception will often differ radically from others, or that between CIA and DOD analysts will sharply differ.
There is yet an even more basic reason for differing perceptions, however. What we sense is unconsciously transformed within our mental field in order to maintain a psychological balance. This mental process is familiar. People often perceive what they want to perceive, what they ardently hope to see. Their minds go to great pains to extract from the world that which they project onto it. People thus tend to see things consistent with their beliefs. If we believe Bush is bad, we will tend to see his failings. If we like Hilary Clinton, we tend to see her as good. Moreover, as to events, some people are natural optimists, always seeing sunshine; others are pessimists, seeing storm clouds instead.

Our perception is thus the result of a complex transformation of amorphous sensory stimuli. At various stages our personal experience, beliefs, and character affect what we perceive.

This process of perception may be described in a way to show its importance people being free. Consider that things outside our mental field have different powers to make us perceive them. I like to use the examples of a thunderclap, a screaming baby, or a dripping faucet late at night. Each has a different degree of strength, but for most of us, each has the power to force itself on our perception. Even were we busily occupied with something of great interest, a thunderclap (or an earthquake, or smell of fire, or a scream) will break through, making us perceive it. However, the rustlings of leaves, a humming in the background, or a low, monotonous voice, are weak. We may have to “reach out” to hear them. Concentrate on something and we no longer perceive them.

Independent of the outside world’s powers to force our perception, we have power to impose a perception on reality. We can hallucinate. We can magnify some things such that we perceive them in spite of what else is happening. Think of the whisper of one’s name.

What we perceive in reality is a balance between these two sets of powers, one the outside world’s power to force us to perceive specific things, and the second our power to impose a certain perception on the world. This is the most basic opposition, the most basic conflict. Its outcome is what we perceive reality to be.

This balance of our mental field changes with our interest and concentration. Its shape and extension will depend on our personality and experience. And, of course, our culture and ideology. No wonder, then, that we are likely to perceive things differently from each other. Our perception is subjective and personal. Reality does not draw its picture on a clean slate in our minds. Nor are our minds a passive movie screen on which sensory stimuli impact, to create a moving picture of the world. Rather, our minds are an active agent of perception, creating and transforming reality, while at the same time being disciplined and sometimes dominated by it.

What I have said so far can lead to several kinds of misunderstanding that I will clarify.

Misunderstanding 1: “There is no real truth — reality is relative.”

To say perception is subjective is not to deny that we can have true perception. Through trial and error, we can converge on a reality sufficiently true for us to survive and prosper. Consider that we cannot long survive driving a car unless we have a reliable perception of the road, other cars, driving conditions, and so on.

Science is the best method humanity has developed for distilling truth from our subjectivity, and there is no doubt that this truth has been sufficiently precise to aid us in understanding and coping with our environment.

Misunderstanding 2: “We only perceive what we want to perceive.”

While we do tend to perceive things consistent with our desires and beliefs, for the normal person this tendency is limited by what in fact exists. While we may tend to see a girl we do not like as hostile or negative, we will still perceive the specific girl, what she is wearing, doing, saying. Nor will we perceive her if she is not there, unless our senses have been distorted by drugs or alcohol. To understand perception as subjective is to comprehend that we color, select, and differentiate the world through our mental field, not that we generally create a wholly new world.

Misunderstanding 3: “There is one true perception.”

Two people may perceive reality differently and both may be right. They are simply viewing the same thing from different perspectives and each emphasizing a different aspect. Blind men feeling different parts of an elephant may each believe they are correct and the others wrong about their perception. Yet, all can be correct; all can have a different part of the truth.

Misunderstanding 4: “If there is agreement on the physical facts of an event or object, perceptions will agree.”

Here is a source of much confusion about perception and its subjectivity. A European intellectual and an American conservative can agree on the physical facts of Iran’s nuclear development, but to each this will have also intense and opposing complexes of meaning making their perceptions of it different in quality.

The problem here is that there are two aspects of a sensory fact: its physical nature, with which natural science has been most concerned and about which people can most easily establish agreement; and its endowed meaning. Now, meaning is a matter of culture, of ideology, of personal experience. Among Americans in a committee meeting, a participant who pleasantly questions the chairman, disagrees with the others, and presents his own views may well be seen as independent minded and making a contribution. Among Japanese, such a participant might be perceived as rude and destructive of consensus. A Republican might see a new government regulation what should be on food labels as another unnecessary intervention in business of big, bureaucratic government; a Democrat may see this as a compassionate attempt to help people make decisions about buying and eating food.

Misunderstanding 5: “We are the victims of our perception.”

This is the belief that we cannot help what we perceive and therefore cannot be blamed if we act on it. That is, we cannot censure a Marxist (communist) for his view of the world, or a Catholic, or a Frenchman. I disagree. To point out the subjectivity of perception is not to excuse one for allowing a particular perspective to dominate. The best test of one’s perception is checking the facts, comparing meanings, and keeping an open mind on the possibility of misperception. And the most important corrective to being a victim of perception is that we realize its subjectivity, our tendency to see things our way. This helps avoid a belief in one’s infallibility, a disease of the mind intrinsic to many political movements and religions.

Given all this, what can we do as a society to minimize or compensate for misperception? Maximize freedom, openness, and political transparency. That is, promote liberal democracy. In this way, different perceptions, and at their most basic, competing cultures and ideologies, contest against each other. Over the long run, those that best fit reality will win, as they do in natural science. You might say that this is an evolutionary challenge and response theory of perception.

A Freedomist View of Liberarianism

[First published January 25, 2006] When I wore my heart on my sleeve as a youth, I was a democratic socialist and a Democrat, but in the early 1970s, I gave up socialism for democratic libertarianism under the hammer blows of von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman. Libertarian is what I called myself until recently. I remain libertarian in domestic policy, which is to say the more domestic freedom from regulation, government controls, taxation, and oppressive laws, the better up to a point. I am not an anarchist, but believe social justice means minimal government consistent with protecting and guaranteeing all have equal civil and political rights, even against majorities.

However, on foreign policy the libertarian, with some exceptions, is a raving isolationist, starkly opposed to foreign involvements and interventions. Let international relations also be free, the libertarians say, which means free trade and commerce, and freedom for other countries to do whatever they want with their people. Not our business.

Lest you think I exaggerate, look at the “National Libertarian Party” platform:

The Issue: Intervention by the government in Washington in the affairs of other nations is an attempt to impose our values on those nations by force. 

 The Principle: The important principle in foreign policy should be the elimination of intervention by the United States government in the affairs of other nations. Solutions: We favor a drastic reduction in cost and size of our total diplomatic establishment. We would negotiate with any foreign government without necessarily conceding moral legitimacy to that government.

Then on foreign intervention, the platform reads :

End the current U.S. government policy of foreign intervention, including military and economic aid, guarantees, and diplomatic meddling. Individuals should be free to provide any aid they wish that does not directly threaten the United States.

I don’t know how one can read this platform in any other way than isolationist, and this is the NATIONAL Libertarian Party.

On foreign policy and fostering democracy, even peacefully, the libertarians are blinded by their desire for freedom here and now, not realizing that everything, including freedom demands contextual qualification (should those with a dangerous infectious disease remain free, when they could spread it far and wide, killing maybe hundreds with it?). By their isolationism, libertarians are making the world safe for the gangs of thugs (euphemistically, called dictatorships) that murder, torture, rape, enslave, and thus rule by fear.

Not our business, the libertarian still will say, although his fundamental belief in freedom is being violated in the most horrible ways. By implication, his isolationism is declaring that since it’s somebody else that’s suffering, not me, or my loved ones, it’s okay.

But besides this basic human me and mine, it is also a blindness to his own welfare. For in an age of state supported terrorism, readily transportable biological weapons, such as anthrax, and nuclear weapons, no longer can a country like the U.S. sit back and ignore terrorism, and what goes on elsewhere in the production and deliverability of WMD, as with North Korea and Iran. In the hands of those who hate the democracies and their libertarian values, terrorism and WMD make democracies too vulnerability to attack and blackmail. Intervention by the democracies in the rapacious affairs of such thug regimes, therefore, is ultimately to protect ourselves, not to mention to advance as a by product the human rights and the very freedom libertarians praise. Quite simply, no thug regimes can be trusted with either the possession or the capability to produce such weapons.

Feeding into libertarian isolationism is an apparent distrust, if not outright hatred, of democracy. They put this in various ways, some pointing out how questioning our classical liberal forefathers were of democracy when they opted instead for an American constitutional republic. Other libertarians simply point out that democracy is a disguised tyranny by a majority. Leaving aside their vast misunderstanding of what democracy means today, which includes the traditional definition of a republic, libertarians generally offer no alternative form of government. The anacho-libertarians among them throw government out altogether, not realizing that any anarchy will evolve into a democracy, gang rule, or a system of self-governing, independent groups, like international relations today.

Then there is the democratic peace, which one libertarian after another has tried to attack, but ended up misrepresenting its propositions, ignoring the relevant literature, doing incompetent empirical analysis, or making illogical claims. All have been wrong in detail, and if anything, their attempts to topple this edifice have only left it stronger. Why they do this is beyond me, except that what appears to aggravate them the most is that the democratic peace proclaims the value of . . . . democracy.

Not able to deal with the democratic peace directly, some take a side path — it is wrong to make war for democracy, they say. The innocents that die don’t care if it be for democracy or by a dictator’s hand. They are dead nonetheless. But, then, who is saying we should spread democracy though war? Not President Bush, not Vice-President Cheney, not Secretary Rumsfeld, not Secretary Rice, not my colleague Pro Forma, and not me. We all argue for doing so through nonviolent methods. The wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, and the other wars before our time that ended with the democratization of Japan, Germany, and Italy were not fought to spread democracy, but democratization was the best answer to the question as to what to do with these countries once they were defeated.

On a different path, a few libertarians argue that most attempts to democratize countries have failed. Okay, say it has failed in 70 percent of the cases, the most pessimistic argument. But, that would mean success in 30 percent of the cases. And consider the happiness of these millions freed from the enslavement and possible torture and murder at the hands of some dictator. With so much at stake, better to have tried and failed, then not try at all.

And perhaps the final argument — there is a stage of democratization where partial democracies are more dangerous to the peace than dictatorships. This view is gaining prominence among libertarians due to the publication of Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield’s book Electing To Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go To War. I have reviewed the book, and pointed out that their empirical claims for this are faulty. What is most amazing about the libertarian’s reliance on this work, however, is that they ignore its support for the major democratic peace proposition that democracies don’t make war on each other.

So, my libertarian friends, often admirers of my book Death By Government have been upset with my apostasy. I’ve gone conservative, they claim. NO way. I’m as hard on the conservative’s repression of social freedom, as I am on the liberal’s socialism and the libertarian’s foreign policy.

Then, am I still a libertarian, although an insurgent one? No, I no longer accept that label. Instead, I am a freedomist (ist is a suffix meaning a follower or believer in certain beliefs, such as in socialist or feminist). This is one who believes not only in maximum freedom at home, but also unlike the libertarian, in fostering democratic freedom abroad. This is to protect our own freedom, to end war and democide, and to further human security.

Let freedom ring.

Another of my democide paintings. This is of the Croatian fascist Utashi genocide during WWII. Original here.

The Myth of “The Myth of Democratic Peace”

[First published January 22, 2006]
They have become so predictable. Consider this bio: Dr. Leon Hadar is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, where he analyzes international politics and economics with a special focus on the Middle East and East Asia. A former United Nations bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post.

Now, what do you think Hadar’s take will be on the democratic peace? With the key words CATO and UN bureau chief, you’re right. He’ll be totally negative. And so he is in his recent article, “The Myth of Democratic Peace.”

What is it with these CATO libertarians? It’s not incompetence, not when there has to be a conscious avoidance of studies with which they disagree. It has to be a visceral prejudice. Well, my colleague Pro Forma lets rip on them, and he’s right. He says:

I think what really annoys me about these bozos are four things:

First, they rely on no actual social science (neither empirical nor theoretical) to make their points — the paleolibertarian case against the democratic peace is almost entirely rhetorical.

Second, they completely ignore the vast DP literature. It’s not that they say it is flawed and cite any examples…they just don’t even deal with it. The DP literature is incredibly rich in all sorts of empirical research, and abounds with theoretical explanations at many levels. Yet, they refuse to engage any of this. It’s like studying world geography, and despite Columbus and Magellan and Drake and modern cartography and trips into space and satellite photography, they are still using maps without the Americas, but instead a big vast emptiness between Europe and Asia. You can’t do science this way!

Third, they seem to dismiss any possibility of democratic peace by arguing that democracy has many definitions, so nobody really knows what it is…. yet they are quick to assert that this thing that no one can define is actually very non-peaceful. This not only is bad science, it denies the possibility of science.

Fourth, the implications — both philosophical and policy — of the anti-DP rhetoric by the paleolibertarians is profoundly disturbing for anyone who loves freedom and values liberty. Let’s think about this.

If democracy is so bad, then non-democracy should be pretty good. In fact, Leon Hadar concludes his article with a proposal to inquire if non-democracies are actually more peaceful than democracies (note to Hadar: it’s been done; they aren’t). If peace is a human value, and a good thing (since it favors life and well-being, and democracies were found to be actually less peaceful than non-democracies, we would not want democracy, and should work to establish and spread non-democracy.

Yet, I cannot think of any realistic non-democratic form of government that anyone would rather live under. The core difference between democracy and non-democracy is that you can change democratic governments with ballots (peaceful), while you can only change non-democratic governments with bullets (non-peaceful). This is philosophically very confusing: we want a peaceful government, so, according to the paleos, we want a non-democratic government so we’ll have peace. But we can only change this non-democratic government with non-peaceful means.

Does this mean we are doomed to renew and alter our government only with bloody means, and that the great experiment the American founders engaged in is a failure? If so, then all this writing about universal aspirations for democracy is false. And Fukuyama was wrong when he argued that over the past few thousand years, in the “marketplace” of history, democracy has been desired by people more than any other form of government.

If all this is wrong, then what form of government should we desire, and work and fight to put into place? On this, the paleos are strangely silent. Which is VERY worrisome. Since you cannot rely on government protecting rights and minimizing its incursions on liberty by either hoping the government will behave, or by putting power in the hands of a benign dictator who promises to keep government small, just how do the paleos think freedom will be protected? Thinking about this — and of the impossibility in history of establishing an anarchy-country, I’m beginning to think that the paleos, for now only on a theoretical level, are really enemies of freedom, and anti-liberty in their core.

Links of Note

“Diplomats Will Be Shifted to Hot Spots “:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that she will shift hundreds of Foreign Service positions from Europe and Washington to difficult assignments in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere as part of a broad restructuring of the diplomatic corps that she has dubbed “transformational diplomacy.”
The State Department’s culture of deployment and ideas about career advancement must alter now that the Cold War is over and the United States is battling transnational threats of terrorism, drug smuggling and disease, Rice said in a speech at Georgetown University. “The greatest threats now emerge more within states than between them,” she said. “The fundamental character of regimes now matters more than the international distribution of power.”

The democratic peace oriented transformation (revolution?) of the Department of State continues. Now, think of what she would do if president.

“Public unrest increasing in China”:

The Public Security Ministry said it handled 87,000 public disturbances last year, a rise of more than 6% on 2004. . . . A ministry spokesman said the figure did not refer just to mass protests, but to all criminal cases linked to public disorder, including mob gatherings, obstruction of justice, fighting and trouble-making.

The greatest likelihood to the collapse of communist rule will come when a depression, or steep inflation, occurs, not with this mild unrest in the face of rapid economic growth.

“The Region: Moving apart “ By Barry Rubin:

The world is about to rethink its views of the whole Arab-Israeli conflict, due to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s past policy shift, his evident departure from politics, and Palestinian developments. The critical variable here is not what has happened to Sharon but a Palestinian political situation which makes any progress toward peace impossible for years to come. Sharon’s illness may be distracting attention from the Palestinian crisis, but it is ultimately much less important in shaping the region’s future.

Read Rubin. He is good and informative on this intractable ME conflict.

“The “Democratic Peace”: A Skeptic’s View “ By Mark Pietrzyk:

an alternative view is that the long peace between democratic states is the result of reverse causation. That is, the current peaceful international order (created by such factors as U.S. hegemony, the solidification of borders, economic growth, and the nuclear revolution) has made it possible for liberal democracy to flourish in many countries which have found it difficult or impossible to build and maintain free institutions in previous eras of international violence and instability.

Another book on the democratic peace. Note the logical problem. If (A) nations made war on each other before becoming democratic; and (B) did not make war on each other after becoming democratic, how is that B implies A. Does time reverse itself?

“A Lesson From Somalia”:

Somalia offers a sobering lesson of what can happen to American forces when our government blunders into the middle of a civil war. We dare not do it again. And we had better see the warning signs.

I must be the only one that sees the American intervention in Somalia as a victory. We saved about a million lives at the cost of 18 American marines. Have ever before so few given their lives to save so many?

The vast literature on the
Democratic Peace

Can’t CATO’s Foreign Policy People Get Anything Right?

[First published January 22, 2006] Leon Hadar, research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, has responded to my previous blog on “The Myth of “The Myth of Democratic Peace.” His response was consistent with the sophomoric research and writing of his article, “The Myth of Democratic Peace.”

His reply below continues in this vein, for he didn’t read my blog with sufficient care to realize I did not write the part to which he objects, my colleague Pro Forma did. Since Hadar makes a point of his Ph.D, I should note that Pro Forma has one also in political science, and his major field is international relations focusing on the democratic peace.

First, Hadar’s mistaken response to me:

Wooo… Bozos? No reliance on social science? The entire article was a summary/review of a book by two leading American political scientists, Edward D. Mansfield of the University of Pennsylvania and Jack Snyder of Columbia University, Electing to Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go to War (MIT Press, 2005). Doesn’t that count as reliance on “acutal social science?”[sic] Isn’t their book part of the vast “DP literature?” Do the two represent the “anti DP rehtoric [sic] by paleo-conservatives?” And although I myself have a Ph.D. in political science… to compare the very primitive social science field to the scientific research that led to the discovery of America? You seem to give intellectual arrogance a bad name. I’ll discuss the points you made on my blog in a few days. [he does so here] Just to make one point: I make a clear distinction between a liberal government and a democratic government. They’re not the same. If anything, you probably could make an argument that liberal nationalism is more peaceful than non-liberal and democratic form of nationalism, or that liberal governments don’t go to war against each other (in general). And btw most of the people I know would have preferred to live in pre-1971 Switzerland (before it permitted women to vote) or in British-controlled Hong Kong than in democratic (?) India. Finally, my opinion piece was not an academic research paper and it certainly didn’t represent the views of the Cato Institute, where scholars conduct debate on the issues without calling each other Bozos. Leon Hadar.

Pro Forma responds:

First, Hadar should read blogs more carefully: his comments were addressed to Rummel, even though the blog clearly says that the comments were made by a colleague of Rummel’s — that’s me. So I’m responding. And by the way, perhaps Hadar can go back to his own blog here and correct all the snide references to Rummel and redirect his attack from Rummel to me. And what’s this about accusing Rummel — of all people in the libertarian world — of being like a commissar? Given that Rummel toiled as the only libertarian in the leftist swamps of the University of Hawaii Political Science department for most of his career, this is really a stupid comment by Hadar. Perhaps calling someone a commissar is the paleo equivalent of lefties bringing up the “H” word (Hitler) when talking about anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. . . in any case, it is uncalled for. But since it wasn’t Rummel who wrote the words Hadar is attacking, it probably reflects more on Hadar than Rummel. So Hadar can call ME a commissar if he likes. . . . By the way, I don’t have a beard, so perhaps Hadar can move on from ad hominem remarks to more substantive ones. . . .

Hadar says his “entire article was a summary/review of the Mansfield -Snyder book.” Then why open with the snotty comment that if you listened to those who embrace democracy, you’d have to conclude that democracy is, among other things, a cure for erectile dysfunction? If you want to do political science, drop the cheap rhetoric.

Yes, Mansfield-Snyder (M-S) is part of the democratic peace literature. But it is only part. And you can’t rely “entirely” on this book, without looking at one, its methodological weaknesses, two, its core agreement that no two democracies have fought each other, and three, what policy implications M-S make.

Regarding the methodology, while M-S is an important contribution to the literature, is has significant technical weaknesses which Rummel adequately addressed several months ago concluding that: “. . . the results about the war likeness of democracy in Electing To Fight do not prove (show, establish, indicate) that incomplete democratization is a danger to peace.”

Second, and more importantly, M-S never disagree with, challenge, or disprove the most important democratic peace proposition. In fact, their study confirms that well-established democracies do not make war on each other. Yet this never surfaces or is acknowledged in Hadar’s article. This is the central tenet of the democratic peace, and failing to engage it is evidence of either ignorance (fixable: read more) or, as Rummel phrased it, “visceral prejudice” (probably not fixable . . . . )

Third, if “democracy” is so dangerous to world peace, what do M-S recommend, in terms of policy? Curiously, given the evils Hadar attributes to democracy, M-S specifically argue that the US should continue to promote democracy, but that it should be done differently: less emphasis on the rush to elections, more on building institutions of transparency and accountability — both of which are cornerstones of democracy. M-S is not an indictment of democracy, or of promoting democracy, but a cautionary warning about how to promote democracy, and the impetuousness of young democracies. This is a far cry from Hadar’s worrisome suggestions that non-democracies (universally non-libertarian) may be more peaceful than democracies, and is even more removed from real world considerations of what kinds of regimes the US would prefer to see in the world.

We need some basic Political Science 101 here. What’s this about Hadar’s “clear distinction between” liberal and democratic governments? The standard definitions of regime type in political science today center on the democratic – non-democratic distinction, with non-democracies subdivided into authoritarian and totalitarian versions, and democracies sub-divided into electoral and liberal. A liberal democracy is an electoral democracy plus a well-developed protection of rights through the rule of law. The core difference between democracy and non-democracy is that if you can change your government by ballots, you have a democracy, and if you can’t, it is either authoritarian or totalitarian. Is Hadar suggesting that there are authoritarian liberal regimes — in other words, where the people can’t change their government except by reverting to bullets, yet they have rights protected by the rule of law? What mechanisms might exist in such a regime to prevent the inevitable abuse of power by a regime that cannot be changed peacefully? What are the consequences of asserting this for the survival and strengthening of liberty?

Finally, if Hadar suggests that most of the people he knows would rather live in pre-1971 Switzerland — significant because half the population was denied a fundamental right to participate in choosing their government — then I’d suggest he doesn’t know very many women.

Pro Forma

Sometime ago, I issued a challenge to libertarians to make a reasoned argument for isolationism, or from a libertarian perspective, an argument against our war in Iraq. Thomas L. Knapp responded here, to which I replied. Knapp then
wrote a rebuttal. David Tomlin also responded to my challenge, and I posted his response and my reply together. I will leave it to the reader to characterize this exchange, and only want to note that it is informative of the world view that libertarians have on foreign policy that is well exemplified by the Leon Hadar comments above.

Nation Building and the History of Force

[First published January 19, 2006] Political Scientist James L. Payne is an excellent and thoughtful scholar in the traditional vein (no quantitative methods), and many years ago I used his book, The American Threat: National Security And Foreign Policy, as a text in my national security class. He has recently published an article, “Deconstructing Nation Building: The results are in and the record isn’t good “ in which Payne says:

When plunging into war, hope generally triumphs over experience. The past—the quiet statistical tabulation of what happened when this was tried before—tends to be ignored in the heat of angry oratory and the thump of military boots. At the outset, it is easy to believe that force will be successful in upholding virtue and that history has no relevance. Lately, this confidence in the force of arms has centered on nation building, that is, the idea of invading and occupying a land afflicted by dictatorship or civil war and turning it into a democracy. . . . Nation building by military force is not a coherent, defensible policy. It is based on no theory, it has no proven technique or methodology, and there are no experts who know how to do it. The record shows that it usually fails, and even when it appears to succeed, the positive result owes more to historical evolution and local political culture than anything nation builders might have done.

RJR: Payne identifies 51 cases (and gives the list) of attempted nation building by Britain and the U.S. since 1850, and in which they succeeded in 14 cases — 27 percent. This is the basis of his conclusion. But, he does not take into consideration that “nation building” was not the intent of the intervention or war, but the consequences of military success, as it was for Italy, Japan, and Germany after their defeat in WWI, and Afghanistan and Iraq recently. Then what is Britain or the U.S. to do after winning the battles. Occupy the country and control it, as though by imperial rule? Leave and let some bloody gang take over the country again, with a new possibility of violence down the road? Or democratize? Given the importance of globalizing democracy for eventually solving the horrendous evils of war and democide, that 27 percent of the cases were successful is great. But Payne does not understand this relationship between democracy and violence.

This is clear in his recently published book, A History Of Force: Exploring The Worldwide Movement Against Habit Of Coercion, Bloodshed, And Mayhem (2004). Payne analyzes the role and progress of force in history, and finds that:

As far as we can tell from the historical record, we live in a much more peaceful world than has ever existed. Humans are less vicious, less inclined to inflict physical injury than they used to be. Within this broad picture there are of course deviations and exceptions, cases where certain regimes and cultures have exhibited temporary increases in violence. But these exceptions cannot obscure the larger pattern. As the following chapters show, the evidence for a decline in the use of force is massive, so broad and so obvious as to make the point something of a self‑evident truth. (p.7)

To show this, he presents the chart below (p. 15).

Now, although Payne writes as though he is the only one to discover this, other’s have shown this decline, and I have presented their data in several blogs (“Democracies Increase and Ipso Facto, World Violence Declines,” “Democracies Increase, Violence decreases, Media Still Blind,” and “World Conflict in Sharp Decline”)

About this decline, Payne says:

But, for most people, the observation seems to be wrong — and not merely wrong, but irresponsibly wrong and irritatingly wrong. Swayed by a number of fallacies and distortions, they are convinced that, compared to the past, we live in particularly vicious, bloody times. They therefore are disposed to reject out of hand any study that purports to find the opposite. Even if you can get them to look at some of the evidence and to agree that the facts do indeed indicate a dramatic decline, they are convinced against their will, so to speak. In their minds there remains a bedrock of contrary conviction that will continually reassert itself. For example, they will demand still more data to support the conclusion that force has decline — never noticing that the have no data to support their conviction that is has not declined. (pp. 7-8)

RJR: All true, but then, how does he explain that others don’t see this massive decline? By three factors: people tend to focus on the here and now, there is a “vested interest in perceiving a violent world,” and “sampling bias in the mass media.” And how does he explain the decline?

The routes whereby uses of force are abandoned are often quite unexpected, even mysterious-so mysterious that one is sometimes tempted to allude to a higher power at work. Time and again one encounters violent practices so rooted and so self-reinforcing that it seems almost magical that they were overcome. One is reduced to pointing to “History” to explain how this immensely beneficial policy — a reduction in the use of force — has been gradually imposed on a human race that has neither consciously sought it nor agreed with it. (p. 29)

Mysterious? Hardly. It’s the growth in democracies, which now comprise 121 countries in the world out of 192, and nothing mysterious about this.

Payne sent me a copy of this book in manuscript, which I read, and then pointed out to him that he missed the importance of the growth of democracy. Apparently, he could not accept this, for he made no change in his book, nor will you find anything on the democratic peace in his index. He does, however, address the fact that democracies seem to employ less force than other regimes, but he says that it is not democracy that comes first, but the fall in violence. Violence decreases and this encourages democratization. I suppose he would say that the causation runs from the great decline in force to the great increase in democracies.

Payne writes as though the hundred or so democratic peace articles and books do not exist, and in that sense, his book would fit into the 1950s or 60s, rather than 2004. How could he refuse to recognize the democratic peace, as also does Frank Denton in his Knowing the Roots of War: Analyses and Interpretations of Six Centuries of Warfare, which is on my website. Both are historians who, with the traditional distain of such scholars, refuse to recognize the value and results of scientific research on history. They don’t understand the philosophy and methods of research, they cannot believe that quantitative research is better than their educated mind focused on historical events, and thus they do not recognize the results of such research.

And this goes even more for the commentators, analysts, and editorialists who struggle to explain the sharp decline in violence of the last decades.

The World Movement for Democracy

[First published January 17, 2006] In answer to all those who believe that, with the apparent exception of President Bush “using war to spread democracy,” nothing is being done to do so nonviolently. This is wrong, and leads to an unfortunate pessimism about the future. There is much reason for hope, and I hope that this post helps show why.

There is an official multinational and unofficial effort of nongovernmental organizations to secure and further democratic freedom. Most of their activity is unknown, simply because they are ignored by the major media. But, members of the freedomist network, which includes this democratic peace blog, should know of them as an extension of our effort, although they don’t know of us.

Democratic activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders, have come together to cooperate in the organized international promotion of democratic freedom. They call this a World Movement for Democracy (WMD). It has it’s own website, publications, regular online <A HREF="http://www.wmd.org/democracynews.html"Democracy News(see link below), courses, a steering committee, secretariat, and periodic assemblies. Its first and organizing Assembly was held in India in 1999; its second in Brazil in 2000 involved democrats from 93 countries, and more meetings have and will be held. The stated purpose of the organization is “to strengthen democracy where it is weak, to reform and invigorate democracy even where it is longstanding, and to bolster pro-democracy groups in countries that have not yet entered a process of democratic transition.” You can replace “democracy” with “freedom” in the above without loss of meaning, for what is usually meant is not only an electoral democracy, but one the also secures its citizens civil and political rights and liberties.

There also is the new <A HREF="http://www.state.gov/www/global/human_rights/democracy/cdi_official.html"Community of Democracies (COD) . Foreign ministers and representatives of 106 democratic governments met in Warsaw, Poland, in 2000 and concluded with the Warsaw Declaration. This expressed their unified “commitment to promote, strengthen and preserve democracy.”

Moreover, there was a meeting in Warsaw of a non-governmental first <A HREF= "http://www.batory.org.pl/english/events/wfd/""World Forum on Democracy." It included 300 democratic activists, current and former political leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organization representatives from 85 countries. Its purpose was to discuss and advance “democratic governance and values throughout the world.” Clinton’s Secretary of State Albright addressed the forum, and pointed out that, “We need a true democratic community; defined not by what we are against, but by what we are for; enshrined by leaders from every point on the compass; and strengthened by the full participation of civil society.”

The COD is an Alliance of Democracies yet in its infancy. Now the democracies should strengthen its organization and functions, and better focus its efforts on a forward strategy of freedom (to borrow President Bush’s phrase). It already has taken action to mandate the creation of a UN Democracy Caucus. The caucus convening group was Chile, Czech Republic, India, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, South Africa, and the United States, and the caucus now has a website.

Cheers, freedom networkians. These much needed organizational reforms and developments are well underway. If you are astounded that you didn’t know about this, you should be. In all the articles I’ve read on UN reform in the major media, not one to my memory mentioned the COD or the democratic caucus.

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Links of Note

Democracy News (March 2005) An Electronic Newsletter of the World Movement for Democracy

RJR: You’ve got to see this newspaper (available by free email subscription) to see how useful it is as a dynamic signpost and useful source on global pro-democracy activities.

“The State of Human rights in Ten Asian Nations — 2005″ PDF. A Report of the Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong (yes, Hong Kong):

On the occasion of International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2005, the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) has produced the following series of reports, in order to present the state of human rights in the following ten Asian countries: Thailand, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, the Philippines, Cambodia, South Korea and Indonesia.

RJR: Any guess as to why China and N. Korea are omitted?

“My Lai Hero Hugh Thompson Jr. Dies at 62″:

Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.

RJR: There are heroes and heroes, and Thomson is at the top of my list. This hero intervened with his fellow soldiers to stop their killing of My Lai Vietnamese villagers. He saved many lives. If you don’t know what courage this took, you must not have been in the military.

“Robbing the Congo. Part II: unspeakable richness”
You may remember my estimate of the colonial democide since 1900 because of new information on King Leopold’s wholly owned (that is, it was HIS) Congo Free State. This blog post provides a good summary of Leopold systematic mass murder of the natives and rape of the Congo’s resources for . . . . money.

“The Prejudice Map: According to Google, people in the world are known for …”. Fascinating, but misnamed. Views on national character are not necessarily prejudicial, but often reflect actual national character in the experience of tourists, visitors, and diplomats. Is there any doubt that Italians are passionate people who gesture a lot, while Germans really love their beer and are obsessive rule followers.

“Russia, China want talks not sanctions on Iran”:

Russia and China made clear on Tuesday they did not favor U.N. sanctions to induce Iran to scale back its nuclear program, and Tehran urged the European Union to return to the negotiating table.

RJR: As you know, both Russia and China have a veto on the Security Council. But the idea is to go on record as trying through the UN to do something about Iran’s forthcoming nukes. That having been covered for the go-to-the-UN-crowd, the only next step is . . . .

Is The Democratic Peace Elusive?

I finally have read Joanne Gowa’s often quoted, Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace. She does a statistical analysis (Poisson and probit, Chi-square and other significance tests) of war and militarized disputes (MIDS data), 1816-1980. She turned each year for each pair (dyad) of states over this period into a case to be analyzed. She ended up with 30,963 democratic to democratic dyad years, and 275,807 for other dyads.

She finds that out of 307 dyad years of war, seven involved democratic dyads. But, these seven were the Spanish-American war, and the six “wars” of Finland versus the democratic Allies in World War II. None of these are really wars between democracies. Spain was not a democracy in foreign policy, which was made by the King, and Finland allied itself with Germany in order to fight the Soviet Union. It fought no battles with the democracies. So, in reality, there were no wars fought between democracies over the long span of 174 years. But, also in the MIDs data, I know that there is only one case of violence between democracies over this period, which is the marginally democratic Ecuador (initiator) vs. the U.S. in 1954 in which between 1 and 25 were killed.

Then, how does Gowa make this claim for what she has been most quoted?

I find that the democratic peace exists only during the Cold War. No evidence of a democratic peace exists before World War I. I conclude that an explanation based on shifting interests is more consistent with this dispute-rate pattern than is an explanation based on common politics. Thus, for example, the advent of relative peace between democratic states after 1945 can be interpreted as a product of the interest patterns that the advent of the Cold War induced.

This suggests that the logic and evidence that support a foreign-policy strategy of enlargement are based on a unique and now extinct era in world politics (p. 3).

Gowa published her book in 1999, and she aimed this at then President Clinton’s third foreign policy goal of spreading democracy (he was also converted to the democratic peace), and is even more relevant today (and for the reason Gowa has been now so quoted) regarding President Bush’s singular Forward Strategy of Freedom.

Even though there has been a sharp increase in the number of democracies since the Cold War ended, and since there still has been no war between them, she is manifestly wrong. But, she is still quoted, and her claims still apply to the years before the Cold War.

Gowa’s conclusion seems strange, given that over the 174 years of her data there was no war between democracies, and only one case of violence causing at most 25 dead. She does it through statistical obscurantism (my tennis was out on the left, and the next one on the right, but what the hell, on the average I was getting them in right down the center of the court). First, she divides the data into three periods, pre-1914, 1919-1938, post-1945, eliminating from the analysis World Wars I and II. Then she applies statistical analysis to the wars to determine if the lack of wars between democratic dyads is significant, holding constant whether the dyads are contiguous and their major power status. Only in the case of the post-1945 wars and MIDS is democracy “significant.” Moreover, only in this period do democracies “significantly” enter into defense treaties with each other.

What is going on here? First, it is a social science convention to apply tests of significance to any relationships between data. There are times when this is appropriate and useful, and I have done it often in my studies, but there are also times, hardly recognized, when it obscures what the data mean. Here, Gowa has covers cases for 174 years — not a sample, but what statisticians call the universe. Then a simple tabulation of the cases of war and nonwar between democracies and others would have been instructive. But, Gowa wanted to go further. She wanted to test the possibility that the lack of war between democracies could have occurred by chance. She finds that except for the post-1945 period, the lack of war for prior periods could have been a chance result (technically, she could not reject the null hypothesis that democracy had no effect).

But, she neglects two things. One is that her results were predicted by democratic peace theory, and second, they are consistent with the results of other democratic peace studies. If studies a, b, c, … come up with the same results, one should not then isolate any one of the studies as a unique event that may have occurred by chance. If the data of each study are independent of the data used in the other studies, then the likelihood of getting a probability p of chance cross all the studies would be a multiple of all the p of their significance tests.

She can respond that what she did is in fact unique, which was to divide the tests into periods. But, the zero for wars between democracies for the 174 years has to be true for any periodization of the data. What happens when she so subdivides her data is that the “sample size” decreases, and the zero wars become insignificant. For example, for 1919-1938 there were zero wars between democracies for 5,919 democratic dyads, and three wars for 31,483 other dyads, which testing the significance of this distribution by chi-square, yields a nonsignificant p of .17. That is, if the study were done 100 times, seventeen or less of them would result in no difference between democratic and nondemocratic dyads. This is too high for social scientists, who much prefer a probability of .05. Therefore, Gowa claims that in the interwar years, it is not possible to reject the “null hypothesis” of these results being by chance. Taking account of similar results for the pre-World War I period, she then interprets such statistics to say, “I find that the democratic peace exists only during the Cold War.”

Well, correcting for her seven misclassified cases of wars between democracies I mentioned, all I can say is that zero wars for democracies is zero wars, and no one has yet shown there to be a case of undoubted war between undoubted democracies. And, all periodizers should note, this zero will not change regardless of the period of history unless true exceptions to the democratic peace are found.

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Other Books I’ve Read Recently

Yoshida Mitsuru, Requiem for Battleship Yamato, translated by Richard H. Minear (1985). A diary like report of one of the few survivors of the planned suicide voyage (and known to be such by the sailors) of the world’s largest, most powerful battleship. To me, the importance of this book is to help explain why this death voyage was ordered and what the men on board thought about it. It is a mistake to liken the terrorist murder bombers in the Middle East to these Japanese warriors. For them, it was emperor, country, duty, and honor. For the terrorists, it is to kill Americans, Jews, or infidels.

Yoshimura, Akira, Battleship Musashi: The Making and Sinking of the World’s Biggest Battleship, Translated by Vincent Murphy (1991). The Musashi was built on the same plans as the Yamato. Most interesting is the international and Japanese politics of their construction, and as in the book above, the final bomb-by-bomb, torpedo-by torpedo destruction of this unsinkable behemoth.

Williams, Glenn F., Year of the Hangman: George Washington’s Campaign Against the Iroquois (2005). During the France and British Wars in North America, Indian tribes fought on both sides. They did so also during the Revolutionary War, with the Iroquois Confederacy fighting with the British. They attacked and massacred along the frontier in order to draw off Washington’s forces and weaken his army facing the British. Those who constantly condemn American’s killing of Indians seem not to know about the Indian democide, the various wars involving the Indian tribes against each other, and their fighting as allies to the British, French, and Spanish.

Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J. Dubner. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005). This really should be titled the use of numerical analysis too uncover truth, such as corruption among teachers and Sumo wrestlers, why drug dealers live with their mothers, and why has the Supreme Court decision in Roe versus Wade caused crime to steeply decline. I would add, which is not in this book, how numbers have established and then persuaded a discipline and presidents as to the democratic peace.

Rowan, Roy. Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist’s Fisthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution (2004) If you want to know how American “old China hands” grew to hate Chiang Kai-chek, while soft pedaling the atrocities of Mao, and thus influencing American policy, Rowan’s account of his experience in post World War II China helps. This is a particular interesting book to read after Chang and Halliday’s Mao.

Democracy is a Method of Nonviolence Part I

click me^–>

[First published on January 23, 2006] On the right is my water color/oil painting based on a photo of an old woman waiting in the snow to be killed by the Nazis. This one hit me particularly hard, and I used art as a way of expressing my feeling.

Given recent comments on my posts, I either have not been clear about why democracy is a method of nonviolence, or new visitors are unaware of what I have posted before. First, I suggest that new visitors who have questions about what I have posted take advantage of my topically organized archive. There is also in the right sidebar of this blog the capability to search the content of all my blogs on this site.

As to democracy being a method of nonviolence, take a look at the two democratic peace charts near the top of the right sidebar, which summarize the evidence from my power kills website. The claim that democracy is a method of nonviolence is the bottom line of these empirical observations:

Democracies do not make war on each other and never have.
Democracies almost never commit any form of violence short of war against other democracies.
Of all nations, democracies fight the least severe wars by orders of magnitude.
Democracies have the least internal violence of all nations.
Democracies do not murder their own people, and when engaged in war, commit the least democide of all nations.

Therefore, democratization is a method for ending war and democide, and minimizing foreign and domestic violence short of war. Now, isn’t it fair to say that democracy is a method of nonviolence?

Over the year plus that I have been doing this blog, I have dealt with many of the claimed exceptions to the above, such as democratic Finland in WWII, the Civil War, Hitler’s Germany, the Boar War, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and so on; with the popular belief among academics that democracies are as warlike as nondemocracies; and with the supposed empirical findings that nations in the process of democratization are more warlike than other nations. None of theses claims hold up on inspection.

A particular source of misinformation and misconceptualization is Matthew White’s website: “Democracies Do Not Make War on One Another….or Do They?”. I have written a blog on his assertions, which I answer in detail by citing the empirical literature, and by collecting new data, which all show that White is systematically wrong: democracies do not make war on each other.

In Part II [also just posted], I will provide the latest and most comprehensive evidence on this from the book, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century by Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Alee.

Links I Must Share

“A forgotten war?:

We’d all like it to be, but the war’s not over. And occasionally, it still erupts in violence. No, not the war in Iraq. The Cold War between western freedom and communist tyranny.

” America’s Anti-Anti-Terrorists” By Linda Chavez:

The current hysteria over the president’s authorization of some domestic intercepts by the National Security Agency reminds me of similar reaction by liberals to the Cold War. Instead of recognizing communism as a clear and present danger to freedom and liberty here and abroad, many liberals decided the real threat to those values came from anti-communism itself.

“Midterm race still iffy for Democrats “

RJR: This is an incredibly important mid-term election, and if you think I’m exaggerating, just think of the democrats in control of all the committees in Congress and the budget.

North Korean military Physical abuse of a women at the border

“High School Teacher Beheaded in Afghanistan”:

Suspected Taliban insurgents dragged a high school teacher from his house . . . and beheaded him . . . . the insurgents had occasionally put up posters demanding that schools for girls be closed and threatening to kill teachers. . . .

RJR: What we are fighting in the War on Terror.

Democracy is a Method of Nonviolence Part II

[First published on January 23, 2006] In Part I, I presented the empirical democratic peace propositions that in their totality imply the democracy is a method of nonviolence. These propositions, however, concerned violence. However, proponents of nonviolence might say: nonviolence is not just the avoidance of violence, it also involves willingness to negotiate and compromise, and to tolerate differences. It is an attitude of peacefulness. Can you say this about democratic leaders?

Yes, and indeed, democratic institutions encourage a democratic culture encouraging these nonviolent behaviors. And we now have empirical evidence of this in a book, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century, by Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee. They focus on the process of international disputes to their ending in settlement or war. I am impressed with the author’s methodological skills in using multinomial probit and bivariate logit analysis, and attention to detail and assumptions. Therefore, I think their empirical findings are solid.

They analyzed all 348 territorial disputes involving 1,528 rounds of talks between nations 1919-1995, each of which is described in the appendices. Territorial disputes are the kind most likely to lead to war. They also analyze 6,542 observations on whether parties to the dispute adopted a status quo stance, sought negotiations, or threatened force. In 374 cases, they led to military confrontations, which in 89 cases escalated to the brink of war or, in 40 cases to war.

Now, as to their results, they further verify the propositions on violence I presented in Part I. Out of the 348 cases, only 16 between democracies involved nonviolent military confrontations (troop movements, military alerts, reinforcing the border, threats), but “there are no cases of mutual decisions to escalate to a higher levels!” (p.251) E.g., to violence or war.

Then, they find that democracies are most likely to initiate talks over a dispute, and to offer concessions. Such, however, or tied into the election cycle in a democracy. After an election, talks and concessions are most likely. This generally supports an explanation of democratic peacefulness in terms of democratic institutions, rather than nonviolent norms among leaders.

Also, democratic leaders are more likely then nondemocratic leaders to favor negotiations over threats of force.

They are more likely to seek accommodations, even in disputes with nondemocracies. The common idea that democracies are only peaceful with each other, and are as aggressive toward nondemocracies as nondemocracies are toward each other is inconsistent with the evidence.

Absence of war between democracies is due largely to their reliance on negotiations. Its jaw, jaw, rather than fight, fight.

Military conflicts short of violence are more likely in disputes between new democracies than well established ones. This provides evidence for limiting the democratic peace propositions to “well-established democracies,” which some researchers do

In disputes between democracies and nondemocracies, when a dispute escalated to the military threat level, it was usually due to the more aggressive policies of the non-democracies.

Among nondemocracies, those whose leaders had particularly violent norms were more likely to initiate violent threats rather than negotiations.

The use of deterrent strategies by democracies is more effective in preventing escalation than those of nondemocracies.

The greater political accountability of democracies enhances the credibility of their deterrence strategies.

Also, because of the accountability of democratic leaders, their concessions and agreements in a dispute are more likely to be believed.

Putting Part I and II together, democracies avoid war with each other, do not murder their own people, have the least severe foreign and domestic violence, and are most likely to negotiate disputes and offer concessions compared to nondemocracies. Since all this is due to their democratic character, it follows that:

Democracy is a method of nonviolence

Links to Share

“Stoppa krig och folkmord med ett Demokratiernas förbund” Mathias Sundan has put on his blog the Swedish version of my paper I published here yesterday.

2006 Index of Economic Freedom. The book is downloadable free. On the ratings, Hong Kong and Singapore are number 1 and 2, the U.S. is 9th, below Labor Party governed Britain, former communist Estonia, Catholic Ireland, and Denmark, which is sometimes labeled democratic-socialist.

New Freedom House Website In setting up their new website, freedom house did not include transfer link coding for all old links to their site. So, except to their home page, all my links on previous blogs to their data and reports are invalidated. Best I not comment.

Just in case you missed this. Here is former Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg, author of “HYPERLINK “http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0471656836.html”The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might” (foreword by Bill Clinton, blurb by Madeleine Albright) in an interview by Jon Stewart actually hoping for an American defeat in Iraq, and failure in negotiations with Iran and N. Korea.

“Analyzing The Brookings Numbers [on Iraq] from December” Shows that there is a downward trend in civilian deaths, in terrorist/insurrectionist attacks, but a slight rise in IED deaths.

Special Note

I have withdrawn from my collection of democide photos the one below. There is too much doubt about its authenticity. Click it to see why:

Alliance of democracies—Swedish version

[First published January 9, 2006] I’ve included below an article I had written for a Swiss newspaper Dagens Nyheter (thanks to Mathias Sundin for submitting it), but which was rejected. So, I submitted it to myself and decided to accept it for my blog. I’m pleased to publish it for me.

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Eliminating Genocide and War
Through an Alliance of Democracies

There are many complex considerations and theoretical issues to the problem of war and democide. There are the questions of general and immediate causation, and of aggravating and inhibiting conditions. There are the practical questions of how to gather timely intelligence about them and inform decision makers about what is known, how to influence the political process through which intervention against democide is decided, and how to give democide and war elsewhere the required prominence in the complex of perceived interests. And with regard to intervening to stop democide, there are the questions concerning the national mix of the necessary troops, their weapons, and the rules of engagement.

Many of the answers to these questions will fall into place if we recognize three facts and one practical necessity that cuts through the jumble of questions and problems involved. The one fact is that democracies by far have had the least domestic democide, and now with their extensive liberalization, have virtually none. Therefore, democratization (not just electoral democracies, but liberal democratization in terms of civil and political rights and liberties) provides the long run hope for the elimination of democide.

The second fact is that democracies don’t make war on each other and that the more democratic two governments, the less the likelihood of violence between them. Not only is democracy a solution to democide, therefore, but globalizing democracy is also a solution to war. That the world is progressively becoming more democratic, with from 22 democracies in 1950 to something like 119 democracies today (about 89 of them liberal democracies comprising about 2.8 billion people) out of 192 nations, makes it increasingly likely that in the long run the twin horrors of democide and war will be eliminated from human society.

The final fact is that democratization is central to the national interest of all these democracies. A fundamental national interest of a democracy is peace—the avoidance of war—and international trade and prosperity. What is the best way overall to avoid war and promote prosperity in the long run? Through the promotion of democratization. Democracies not only don’t make war on each other, democracy is an engine of wealth and prosperity. And no democracy has ever had a famine.

And the practical necessity is this. We must recognize that the United Nations is inadequate to the task of humanitarian intervention to stop democide, the promotion of democracy, dealing with HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2004/12/on-thugsvilleoops-undealing-with.html”global threats, protecting and advancing HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/02/un-united-thugs-and-human-rights.html”human rights, and it has failed in doing that for which it was chartered, HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/03/un-united-thugs-and-humanitys-hope.html”peacekeeping. Finally, it treats Israel with such HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/03/uns-united-thugs-shameful-antisemitism.html”prejudice and hostility, that were it a corporation in a democracy, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan Kofi Annan and his underlings would be now have gone to jail for systematic, hateful discrimination.

How to explain this travesty on our initial hopes for the UN? Simple. The United Nations has become a corrupt weapon and a shield for the world’s thug regimes. And the HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/03/kofi-annans-fatally-flawed-fix.html”ambitious UN reforms proposed in March 2005 by Kofi Annan did not deal with this fundamental problem. In Annan’s invocation of freedom, human rights, democracy, and human security, in his call for UN members to support these moral causes, he deserves credit. As to his suggested reforms, such as of the Security Council and Human Rights Commission, I could point to organizational, and process problems, but this would ignore the most fundamental problem of all. It is a fatal fault that Annan refuses, quite understandably, to mention; and the solution was impossible for him to suggest as it was for the 2005 world summit that met in September 2005 to consider Annan’s reforms.

If a family of skunks lives underneath a house, no amount of remodeling of the upstairs will eliminate the stench. Likewise, no amount of remodeling of the UN will change the fact that its membership consists of about 103 partly free and non-free nations, many of which are pure and simple thugdoms (Syria, Sudan, Iran, N. Korea, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, etc). They will act together to trash, alter to their advantage, or use the reforms Annan recommends to attack free countries, as has been seen in the recent world summit. Their membership is the fatal flaw. And the related and impossible solution would be to kick them all out.

What to do about it?

I don’t suggest withdrawing from the UN. It has too many useful functions and specialized agencies, such as the Food and Agricultural Organization, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, and the Universal Postal Union. The General Assembly and Security Council serve as a forum for contact and communication between adversaries or enemies. When there is general agreement on conflicts, interventions, peacekeeping, refugees, humanitarian aid, sanctions, criminal tribunals, human rights, and so on, the UN saves lives and promotes human welfare and security. Nonetheless, it is clear to me from the UN’s overall record that with the millions dying from war, democide (about 6,000 a month in Darfur, Sudan alone), famine (millions in North Korea), and poverty, the good of the organization is still much too limited by its thug regimes. Understanding all this, two things should be done.

Since democratic societies create among themselves a zone of peace, there should be an intergovernmental organization of all democracies outside of the UN to deal with issues about which the UN cannot or will not act, but particularly to further the promotion of peace, human security, human rights, and democracy — an Alliance of Democracies. Given what I have pointed out about the UN’s problems, the need for such an alliance is obvious. It would not compete with the UN where that body could act to promote democratic values. But, where it could not, particularly because of the opposition of the thug regimes, then the Alliance would serve a most useful cause.

This is now in the works. Democratic activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders, have come together to cooperate to promote democracy. They call this a World Movement for Democracy (WMD). It has its own website, publications, regular online Democracy News, courses, a steering committee, secretariat, and periodic assemblies. Its first and organizing Assembly was held in India in 1999; its second in Brazil in 2000 involved democrats from 93 countries, and a third meeting in Durbin, south Africa in 2004 involved 600 participants from 120 countries. The stated purpose of the organization is “to strengthen democracy where it is weak, to reform and invigorate democracy even where it is longstanding, and to bolster pro-democracy groups in countries that have not yet entered a process of democratic transition.”

There also is the new Community of Democracies (COD). Foreign ministers and representatives of 106 democratic governments met in Warsaw, Poland, in 2000 and concluded with the “Final Warsaw Declaration: Toward a Community of Democracies”. This expressed their unified “commitment to promote, strengthen and preserve democracy.”

And then there was a meeting in Warsaw of a non-governmental first World Forum on Democracy. “It included 300 democratic activists, current and former political leaders, academics, and nongovernmental organization representatives from 85 countries. Its purpose was to discuss and advance “democratic governance and values throughout the world.” President Clinton’s Secretary of State Albright addressed the forum, and pointed out that, “We need a true democratic community; defined not by what we are against, but by what we are for; enshrined by leaders from every point on the compass; and strengthened by the full participation of civil society.” Its second meeting was held in Seoul in 2003, and a third Ministerial meeting was held in April in Santiago, Chile, to which American Secretary Rice led the American delegation. The Community of Democracies (COD) is Alliance of Democracies yet in its infancy. Now the democracies should strengthen its organization and functions, and better focus its efforts on a forward strategy of freedom (to borrow President Bush’s phrase).

But, all this is outside of the UN. What goes on in the UN cannot and should not be ignored. The democracies must act together on vital UN issues. The COD recognized this, and mandated the creation of a UN Democracy Caucus. Its convening group was Chile, Czech Republic, India, Mali, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, South Africa, and the United States. The caucus has a website. But, it still is only a consultative and collaborative group among democracies, and is not like a political party — a Freedom Party. Such the caucus should become, with a program of democratization, peace making, and peace keeping, all overseen by a chairman, whip, and all that. After all, the UN is a world government with a legislature, executive, administration, and judiciary, and well suited to organized politics.

Much progress toward democracy is being made, and increasingly democratic leaders are recognizing that democracy is not only the in the national interest, but also crucial to them. In this, there is the greatest hope of eliminating war, and with it the democide that has become widely recognized as deadlier than war and the world’s worst evil.

Women’s Freedom In The Middle East

[First published May 31 2005] We tend to speak of freedom in national terms. There is so much freedom in country x or y, or little human rights in country z. We should promote democracy in w. And so on. We tend to ignore the treatment from one country or region to another of segments of the population. We should not, for in some parts of the world where human rights are denied, it especially bad for women, who are virtually enslaved, in some Muslim ruled nations such as Saudi Arabia.

Finally, we have a detailed survey of this, with each Middle Eastern and North African nation rated on the degree to which women enjoy nondiscrimination, against, access to justice, autonomy, security, freedom of the person, economic rights and equal opportunity, political rights and civic voice, and social and cultural rights. The survey, with data and essay on the results, is here..

The source gives separate ratings for each nation of five aspects of their freedom. These are not totaled, so I did so below. The best score — women’s freedom comparable to the United States and Western Europe, would be a total of 25, or close to it; the absolute worst is a total of 5. As you can see, Saudi Arabia treats its women worst of all with a score of 6.3, very close to the bottom 5, with a little jump in ratings up to Libya. Oman, and UAE. The best treatment of women among this group is by Tunisia, with Morocco not much worse. But, even for Tunisia, its score is only 16.2 out of 25 possible.

Handling Kim With Kid Gloves

On the right, North Korea vs. South Korea at night.

[First published june 23, 2005] Robert Marquant has a fasinating article in The Christian Science Monitor (No link available) on”Tips for Proper Disposal of ‘Dear Leader’s’ Photo.

He says.

In Pyongyang, the rules are very specific about how physically to handle the Kim image.

No one is permitted to point casually at a portrait of Kim Jong II or his father, Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea. [RJR: he didn't found North Korea, Stalin did and watchfully handed it over to Kim Il Sung to rule] If you find yourself holding a book with a picture of a Kim on the cover, you’d best carry it with two hands, face up, in a dignified manner. And no thumb or fingers are ever allowed to touch or cover Kim’s face.

The image and name of the Kims are deeply Ingrained as the sacred goods of North Korea, and a special etiquette has evolved in dealing with them. Rules exist for handling, carrying, hanging and, even. disposing of Kim faces and portraits. There also are rituals for their printed names.

It is all part of a culture of propaganda designed to ensure permanent collective devotion among the North Korean people. No portrait of Dear Leader or Great Leader is to be folded. No newspaper issued on the birthday of Kim Jong Il or his father, when the photo Is likely to be a full page, should be covered or used to wrap anything. Onc a newspaper with a major photo of Kim is old or worn out, it may not be tossed out, but must be brought to a special collection point where the image Is properly discarded

A few years ago, prior to a special festival attended by many foreigners a special 100‑note currency was issued, using the Kim II Sung face.

But it was quickly withdrawn from circulation after it was discovered that foreigners were casually folding the bills and putting them In wallets placed next to the derrière.

In writing about Kim, the name or character may not be casually deleted. In fact the editing of journals and books inostly still takes place on paper. Journalists and writers must not remove Kim’s name from a sentence by crossing it out. Instead, the name must be circled, and only then removed.

And in published material, direct quotes by Kim or his father should always appear in a manner similar to how many Bible publishers treat the words of New Testament figures in — in bold or illuminated type.

This would be pathetic were it not for the deadly consequences of disobeying these rules, and that this tyrant so treated with respect and honor exceeding that of the great emperors and kings of history is a megamurderer.

Link of Note

” U.S. donates food aid to keep North Koreans from starving “ (6/22/05) CBC News

It says:

The United States is to donate 50,000 tonnes of food aid to North Korea amid growing fears of a new famine.
U.S. officials say the move is a humanitarian gesture and not intended to lure Kim Jong-il’s regime back to stalled six-party talks on the North’s nuclear program. . . . The US supplied 50,000 tonnes of food aid to North Korea last year and 100,000 tonnes the year before, making it one of the largest single providers of aid to the country. The other main donors are the European Union and South Korea.

The “imperialist, war-mongering, greedy” U.S. is the largest food donor to North Korea.
Of conflict/democide/freedom

Willful Blindness?

[First published July 12, 2005] In spite of being repetitive, I’m gong to keep writing about this as long as the press and academics keep misunderstanding or ignoring the reason for the recent decline in violence. In “Researchers see lowest levels of war in the world since ’50s,” (no free link), published in the National Weekly Edition of the Washington Times, David R. Sands points to the 2005 edition of the Marshall-Gurr “Peace and Conflict Survey, which shows a sharp drop in violence while the number of democracies has rocketed. But these and other academics, and Sands do not connect the dots. For the statistical analyses of this, see my Democratic Peace clock.

I addition to this, the Marshall-Gurr survey points to a study by Victor Asal and Amy Pate that shows that the governments practicing political discrimination against their ethnic groups has almost been cut in half while those trying to remedy past discrimination has quintupled.

It seems almost willful blindness to miss the role of democracy in all this, especially when one considers how others try to explain the decrease in violence. The most often cited reason is the end of the Cold War, which also ended the U.S. and Soviets indirectly fighting the Cold War through the Third World. I find this an amusing reach, since the most prevalent explanation for conflicts after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was that it took the lid off conflicts that the U.S. and soviets kept a lid on so that they didn’t escalate into direct violence between them. The expectation at that time among students of war and violence was that violence and war would increase in the 90s.

Another explanation is that the European Union and the U.N. have played a significant role in the decline of violence. I don’t see it. If anything, the E.U. and U.N. failed miserably in preventing the Bosnian and Kosovo violence, and then there is the U.N. and Rwanda, Sudan, and Burma. By its own reckoning, its peacekeeping efforts have been a failure.

Then there is the claim that war is an international institution that is becoming discredited and obsolete and is dying out like dueling and slavery did.

Since the huge increase in the number or democracies (about 120 today) is recognized, how can they not see the connection and completely ignore the voluminous democratic peace literature that makes the connection (bibliography here). I’m almost willing to say its willful blindness, since the Marshall-Gurr survey provides empirical support for President Bush’s claim that promoting freedom will promote peace. To my knowledge, no commentator or academic (I’m retired) has made the connection between the sharp decline in war/violence, the soaring number of democracies, and Bush’s Forward Strategy of Freedom.

Strange.

Link of Note

“Laying to Rest the Autocratic Peace (2004) By Karen K. Peterson
Presented at “Journeys in world Politics,” University of Iowa

Professor Peterson is a political scientist at Vanderbilt University.

,Abstract
This research focuses on militarized interstate conflict between pairs of nondemocratic states. It is based in part on a categorical indicator of regime type that is more comprehensive than the dichotomous indicator currently used in most research. My measure distinguishes among the different types of democratic and non-democratic regimes found in the international system between 1816 and 2001. I then use my new measure in conjunction with the existing Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute data to analyze the conflict propensity of different types of regimes.

As part of a larger project, I present findings below related to the conflict behavior of pairs of non-democratic states. Regardless of how I conceive of the idea of regime similarity, I find no evidence of an autocratic peace at either the initiation or escalation phases of militarized interstate conflict, suggesting that the notion of an autocratic peace that functions in a manner similar to the democratic peace lacks empirical support.

Her conclusion makes it clearer, “. . . there is something unique about joint democracy that reduces the likelihood of conflict initiation and escalation and that non-democratic regimes do not possess this quality.”

Books/articles/statistics

Why The 20th Century Was The Bloodiest Of All

click me^–>

[First published September 15, 2005] Some have called the 20th Century now past the bloodiest of all. Usually, those who claim this seem always to have in mind World Wars I and II, plus the Korean and Vietnam Wars. However, there were many more people in the world then, a mid-century population of 2.3 billion compared to the mid-19th Century population of 1.2 billion.

Indeed, if we calculate conflict related deaths as a percent of population for previous centuries, what do we get? We get what you see the chart below from the UN 2005 Human Development Report.

click me

By this Table, the 20th Century was the bloodiest. And this chart, I am sure, does not even take into account the massive democides accounting for about 170 million deaths. That these would make the 20th Century even more bloody compared to the past can be seen in the table I included in the upper right.

How do we account for the 20th Century bloodletting? Through previous centuries, the prevailing form of government was monarchies — inherited rule of one person. Even seemingly absolute monarchs were chained down by tradition, and violated it at their own personal peril. By the beginning of the 20th Century, monarchies had been replaced by dictatorships in many countries, and by the end of WWI, dictatorships, or democracies dominated the world.

Monarchies, of course, could be bloody in their wars and democide, but few reached the heights of mass slaughter of the Mongols in the 14th-15th Centuries. See the table below.

click me

The much greater slaughter of the 20th Century occurred because of two ahistorical socio-political experiments, one fascism (especially in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Japan, and China), and the other, communism. These absolutist, unrestricted, uninhibited ideologies murdered people in war and democide without compunction, without the inhibition of tradition, culture, or religion. Their defeat and replacement by democracies whose leaders are restricted and inhibited by a democratic culture, liberal values, and an open and competitive electoral system has brought a virtual end to such incredible killing, as the charts I showed yesterday (see here) attest.

Leaving aside its many international and internal wars, communists murdered about 110 million people.

Link of Day

The Second Draft” Website

This website is devoted to exploring some of the problems and issues that plague modern journalism. In this age of globalization, the media has unprecedented influence on the way we see the world. And yet, whether out of misplaced good intentions, unconscious agendas and predispositions, or unwarranted faith in false information, they can get the story dramatically wrong. Therefore, we want to revisit and critique journalism’s “first draft of history”, and hopefully produce a more accurate second one. In our HYPERLINK “http://www.seconddraft.org/cur_invest.php”current investigations we present the story the way the mainstream media initially told it, introduce further evidence, and let you decide what you think really happened.

A helpful corrective to the major media’s liberal bias.

Links I Must Share

“Beltway vs. Blogosphere” By Howard Fineman

Democrats are struggling to reconcile the differences between party leaders in D.C. and independent activists on the Net.

“Matt Drudge threatens N.Y. Times”:

E-journalist considers booting paper’s columnists over new reading fees

Like Drudge, I will not link to The N.Y. Times, once its pay-to-read goes into effect, or to any other source with such a retrograde requirement.

“Europe Learns the Wrong Lessons “:

Nearly one third of Germans under 30 say that the U.S. government ordered the 9/11 attacks. In France, a book insisting that Americans carried out the assault themselves to increase defense budgets becomes a huge bestseller. In Britain, major newspapers carry headlines like “The USA is Now the World’s Leading Rogue State.” Asked which countries are the biggest threat to world peace, Europeans name the U.S as often as North Korea and Iran (each are picked by 53 percent). Countries characterized by Euros as less menacing than the U.S. include Syria, Iraq, Russia, China, Afghanistan, Libya. As one American living in Britain, Anglican minister Dwight Longenecker, summarizes: “Our cultural ancestors have become unrecognizable, even hostile, to us.”

Having rescued Europe from the Kaiser, Hitler, post-WWII economic collapse, domestic communism, and Stalin, I don’t see these opinions abating until we have to rescue them again, this time from internal Islamofacism. But if one can’t wait to be appreciated, get a dog.

“But for the U.S. and its allies” By Hiwa Osman (media advisor to President Jalal Talabani):

Yesterday, [9/13/05] an important meeting took place between President Bush and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, hearalding a new era in Iraqi-American relations. For the first time in the history of the two nations, the White House received the first freely and democratically elected president of Iraq. 
The Iraqi president conveyed a thank-you message from the people of Iraq, who were empowered to vote last January, for making a democratic Iraq a reality.

This makes me proud to be an American.

Books/articles/statistics

Why Freedomist?

[First published April 16, 2005] This is a blog for communication and activism among those who want to foster freedom at home and abroad. Whether Democrats, Republicans, or Libertarians, or liberals or conservatives, if you believe in individual freedom foremost as a right of all people, and as an obligation of those who are free to help unchain those now suffering repression and enslavement in one country after another, this blog is for you.

Why invent the new terms, freedomists or freedomism, rather than apply one of the conventional political party labels? (-ist is a suffix meaning a follower or believer in certain beliefs, such as is a socialist or feminist.) Because their general politics to not entail freedom as a core theme, although some of their political leaders may so emphasize. Republicans, if I may take President Bush as most representative, are Freedomists in their foreign policy, to a much lesser extent in their economic policies, and not at all in their traditional social conservatism.

Democrats, judging by Secretary Hillary Clinton, who is not among the far left of her party, and former President Bill Clinton who is a more moderate Democrat than she is, the Democrats do want to spread democratic freedom. But precedence is given to the UN, to normalcy, and to stability in international relations. National defense is important, but second to international aid, sensitivity to the “international community, and “building bridges.” Moreover, Democrats are soft socialists at home, believing in tight government economic regulation and controls, spreading the wealth, and cradle to grave welfare. However, on social matters, they do emphasize freedom not only rhetorically, but in their policies.

Surely, however, there are the libertarians who seems much closer to what I mean by freedomists. When I wore my heart on my sleeve as a youth, I was a democratic socialist, but in the early 1970s, under the hammer blows of von Mises, Hayek, and Milton Friedman, I gave up a belief in socialism for democratic libertarianism. And libertarian is what I called myself until recently. I remain libertarian in domestic policy, which is to say the more domestic freedom from regulation, government control, taxation, and oppressive laws, the better up to a point. I am not an anarchist, but believe social justice means minimal government consistent with protecting and guaranteeing all have equal civil and political rights.

However, on foreign policy the libertarian, with some exceptions, is an isolationist, fundamentally opposed to foreign involvements and interventions, and on this some libertarians have formed an odd coalition with the democratic socialist to communist (Marxist) left. Most libertarians, however, say, “Let international relations also be free. Let there be free trade and commerce, and freedom for other countries to do whatever they want with their people. Not our business.”

On this, the libertarians are blinded by their desire for freedom, not realizing that everything, including freedom demands contextual qualification (should those with a dangerous infectious disease remain free, when they could spread it far and wide, killing maybe hundreds with it?). By their isolationism, libertarians are making the world safe for the gangs of thugs (called dictatorships) that murder, torture, and oppress their people, and rule by fear.

Not our business, the libertarian still will say, although his fundamental belief in freedom is being violated in the most horrible ways. By implication, in his isolationism the libertarian is declaring that since it’s some body else that’s suffering, not me, my loved ones, or my friends, it’s okay.

But besides this basic human me and mine, it is also a blindness to his own welfare and that of his loved ones. For in an age of readily transportable biological weapons, such as anthrax, and nuclear weapons, no longer can a country like the U.S. sit back and ignore what goes on elsewhere in the production and deliverability of such weapons. In the hands of those who hate the democracies and their libertarian values, democracies have too much vulnerability to attack. Now, explicit and concrete opposition to, and intervention in, the rapacious affairs of thug regimes is of necessity a protection of democracies, not to mention advancing human rights and the freedom libertarians praise. Quite simply, no thug regimes can be trusted with either the possession or the capability of producing such weapons.

The isolationist, of whatever political party, is willing to let the thugs rule not only their own sorry people, but the world.

So, I am a freedomists, and I believe many others are as well.

Why Are We fighting In Iraq?

[First published November 2, 2005] The foreign policy of the United States, the War on Terror, and the War in Iraq is predicated on the democratic peace. President bush has expressed this explicitly in describing his Forward Strategy of Freedom. Secretary Rumsfeld has mentioned it, and Secretary Rice has accepted it as background to her speeches on democracy. Because of the democratic peace, even President Clinton made promoting democracy one of the pillars of his foreign policy.

The democratic peace is now the best empirically established theory and most widely held among students of international relations. The theory, which goes back to the Philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Perpetual Peace (1795), is that:

The republican constitution . . . gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace. The reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. . . . But, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.

Indeed, we now know from research done over the last three decades that this is true. The table below shows that since 1816, there have been no wars between democracies, although 371 bilateral wars when one or both sides were nondemocracies.

A second table below shows that there have been only three cases of violence ending in deaths between democracies over the 190 years since 1816. Two of these involved Peru and Ecuador in 1981 and 1984 (26 to 100 killed in the first, and 1 to 25 in the second case of violence). In 1981 Peru was only marginally democratic, as was Ecuador, but less so. This was also true of Peru and Ecuador in 1984. The only other case of violence over these near two centuries was marginally democratic Ecuador (initiator) vs. the U.S. in 1954 in which 1-25 were killed. Only three cases, and none since 1984 despite there being 117 democracies today.

There is much more to the democratic peace then the avoidance of war or international violence. Democracies have been involved in many wars, some they launched themselves (Afghanistan and Iraq being the most recent example). However, by an order of magnitude or more, democracies fight the least severe wars in killed compared to authoritarian or totalitarian regimes.

Moreover, in general, democratic nations are the most internally peaceful — they have the least violence in number killed in rebellions, civil wars, civil unrest, anti-government riots, violent strikes, and coups.

Also, and perhaps most important, modern democracies seldom murder their own citizens. Democide (genocide and mass murder) is an evil of militarism (as in Burma), monarchism (Russia’s Peter the Great), theocratism (Iran), fascism (Hitler), and communism. Over the whole 20th Century during which governments murdered about 174,000,000 people, only 149,000 deaths were due to barely democratic regimes — nearly 100,000 to the far left Spanish Republican government during its 1936-39 civil war, 10,000 to Peru’s (1980-87) fight with communist guerrillas, 25,000 to India, 4,000 to Colombia, 2,000 to the U.S.A. (largely because of lynching in the early years of the century), and lesser numbers to a smattering of democracies. Among these democracies committing democide, none were liberal democracies at the time (when American domestic democide occurred women could not vote and minorities were systematically and legally segregated, harassed, and denied the vote in many states), and one might argue that some were not democracies at all. No democratically free people, liberal democracies of which there are about 88 today, have murdered their own.

How do we understand this nonviolence, peaceful nature of democracy? Kant had part of the answer. Democratic people usually oppose war. But not always. There are two other factors. One is that with democratic institutions comes a democratic culture of negotiation, compromise, and tolerance. And two, there is a civil society of independent and interlocking institutions and groups –churches, businesses, schools, and social, political, and recreation groups — that not only stitch and bond democratic society together, but also cross pressure interests so that the stakes in a conflict are never too high, and the conflicts themselves are isolated. Such a democratic culture and society also encompasses democratic nations, enfolding them in a dynamic democratic field of cross national governmental and nongovernmental organizations, multinational businesses, trade, cultural and educational exchanges, which are similarly bond the nations together and cross pressure interest that might favor violence. Moreover, the basic norm of negotiating and tolerating differences is shared among democracies, which is one reason democracies cannot well negotiate with dictatorship, to whom it is only war by other means.

So, why are we fighting in Iraq and fostering democratic freedom there and elsewhere? The answer is to promote an end to war, and democide, and to minimize internal political violence. In other words, it is to foster global human security. Surely, this is worth fighting for.

When Democracy Endures

click me^–>

[First published August 31, 2005] Research by Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi has shown the importance of economic development and growth in the survival of democracies. In the study, “What Makes Democracies Endure,” they did a second analysis, now with Michael Alvarez and Josà Antonio Cheibub, in which they studied other conditions that enhance the survival of democracy. I need not extensively quote from this article, since it is in the Journal of Democracy (7.1, 1996) available online.

The basis of this study is:

135 countries observed annually between 1950 or the year of independence or the first year when economic data are available (“entry” year) and 1990 or the last year for which data are available (“exit” year), for a total of 4,318 country-years. We found 224 regimes, of which 101 were democracies and 123 dictatorships, observing 40 transitions to dictatorship and 50 to democracy. Among democratic regimes, there were 50 parliamentary systems, 46 presidential systems, and 8 mixed systems.

Their conclusion:

If a country, any randomly selected country, is to have a democratic regime next year, what conditions should be present in that country and around the world this year? The answer is: democracy, affluence, growth with moderate inflation, declining inequality, a favorable international climate, and parliamentary institutions.

I can’t resist mentioning a few gems:

It may seem tautological to say that a country should have a democratic regime this year in order to have a democracy next year. We do so in order to dispel the myth, prevalent in certain intellectual and political circles (particularly in the United States) since the late 1950s, that the route to democracy is a circuitous one. The claim is that 1) dictatorships are better at generating economic development in poor countries, and that 2) once countries have developed, their dictatorial regimes will give way to democracy. To get to democracy, then, one had to support, or at least tolerate, dictatorships.
Both of the above propositions, however, are false.

. . . . An overthrow of democracy at any time during the past history of a country shortens the life expectancy of any democratic regime in that country. To the extent that political learning does occur, then, it seems that the lessons learned by antidemocratic forces from the past subversion of democracy are more effective than the traditions that can be relied on by democrats.

. . . . the survival of democracies does depend on their institutional systems. Parliamentary regimes last longer, much longer, than presidential ones. Majority-producing electoral institutions are conducive to the survival of presidential systems: presidential systems facing legislative deadlock are particularly brittle. Both systems are vulnerable to bad economic performance, but presidential democracies are less likely to survive even when the economy grows than are parliamentary systems when the economy declines. The evidence that parliamentary democracy survives longer and under a broader spectrum of conditions than presidential democracy thus seems incontrovertible.

. . . . For a variety of reasons, however, this is not an optimistic conclusion. Poverty is a trap. Few countries with annual per-capita income below $1,000 develop under any regime: their average rate of growth is less than 1 percent a year; many experience prolonged economic decline. When poor countries stagnate, whatever democracies happen to spring up tend to die quickly. Poverty breeds poverty and dictatorship.
Institutional choice offers a partial escape from this trap: parliamentary systems in the poorest countries, while still very fragile, are almost twice as likely to survive as presidential democracies, and four times as likely when they grow economically. Yet since it appears that poor countries are more likely to choose presidentialism, little solace is offered by the possibility of institutional engineering.

. . . . In sum, the secret of democratic durability seems to lie in economic development–not, as the theory dominant in the 1960s had it, under dictatorship, but under democracy based on parliamentary institutions.

What about Afghanistan and Iraq’s democratic institutions? Afghanistan has a Presidential system of direct election (Constitution here). The President is elected, “by receiving more than 50% of the votes cast through free, general, secret, and direct voting.” The National Assembly consists of two houses. In the House of Representatives, members represent regions by direct election, their number proportional to a region’s population. For the Senate, however, 2/3rds are elected or appointed from provincial councils, and 1/3rd are appointed by the President (50% must be women).

As to the draft Iraq Constitution (here), it creates a parliamentary system. Its legislature consists of two houses, one of which is a Council of Representatives (Parliament) to be elected by a nation-wide direct, secret ballot. A second house is a Council of Union, which will include representatives of provinces and regions. The President of the Republic is to be determined by a 2/3rds majority of the Council of Representatives.

So, in light of the above research of Adam Przeworski and colleagues, the constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq are positive for the success of their democracies. Although Afghanistan has created a presidential system, it provides in its two houses and regional councils a means for many interests to be represented in the government and, if a significant segment of the population, to make their interests respected. Similarly, with the proposed Iraqi parliamentary system, and even more so. Clearly, small parties will have to be invited to form a collation with the larger parties in order to achieve the 2/3rds necessary to elect a president. As I noted yesterday, although both are at that low level of national income which makes the success of democracy a serious question, both promise rapid development. This, along with their democratic institutions, make their democratic suvival more than a hope.

Link of Note

“Democracy, Cappitalism and Development” By Khandakar Elahi and Constantine P Danopoulos (2004)

ABSTRACT

In social science, a passionate debate continues about the expected effect of democracy on development. Many authors believe that democracy dampens development. This paper discredits this view by clarifying the debate’s critical conceptions- democracy, capitalism and development. In the non-communist state, private individuals inspire economic development, because they own the major portion of the nation=s resources. Since individuals are selfish by nature, they ordinarily improve their economic welfare if they enjoy ‘fair freedoms’ meaning that the social environment of fair freedom is the key to economic development in the non-communist state. Capitalism guarantees this environment, which suggests that the desirable functioning of capitalism is the clue to economic development. Democracy is the only system of governance that can guarantee long run peaceful functioning of the capitalist economy. Thus, a nation cannot remain poor if she is governed according to the principles of democracy.

This study, along with the two of Adam Przeworski and colleagues, suggest that there will be continued rapid growth of democracies among poor nations, and that democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq will survive as long as we continue to secure them against insurrection and terrorists.

When will the world be least 90 percent democratic? Between 2022 and 2076.
See the last question on the page.

What? Only 34,000,000 20th Century Battle-dead?

[first published November 30, 2005] Over the years, I’ve run into considerable skepticism that only 34,000,000 have been killed in all domestic and foreign wars 1900-1987. My one source for 1900 to 1980 was Melvin Small and J. David Singer, Resort to Arms: International and Civil wars 1816-1980 , a statistical compilation of wars by nations involved, years for the start and end of war, duration, and battle deaths.

My second source was the updated Small and Singer list to 1992 in Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer and J. David Singer (1996). “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns.” Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15(2): 163:213.

The Correlations of War Project (COW Project) has further updated the list to 1997 for international wars here, and for domestic wars here.

This latest compilation not only brought the collection up to 1997, but also corrected earlier figures. For this 1900-1997, the battle dead in international wars was 31,292,858; for domestic wars, it was a minimum of 9,952,452. There is a difference in the basis for the two counts. For the first, the total is of military battle deaths, including deaths from combat wounds, and from diseases contracted in the theater of war. For the dead in domestic wars, however, COW includes both military and civilians.

One correction COW made was to reduce the number of battle dead in WWI from 9,000,000 to 8,578,031; for WWII COW increased the estimate of battle dead from 15,000,000 to 16,634,907. I should note that these data are the most authoritative for research in international relations and on war, and, far, the most used and quoted.

So, overall, from 1900 to 1997, at least 41,245,310 soldiers and some civilians (in domestic wars) were killed or died from wounds and disease. Compare this to my new total of 212,000,000 for all deaths from democide 1900-1999.

What about the often-mentioned 50,000,000-60,000,000 killed in WWII? Much of these higher totals also count those murdered by governments during the war (democide). For example, the Nazis murdered about 21,000,000 people, including the Holocaust; the Japanese murdered about 6,000,000; the Soviets about 13,000,000; and Chiang Kai Chek and Mao Tse-tung murdered additional millions. Then there was the firebombing of German and Japanese cities, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which I count as democide. When you add such democides to those killed in combat, one comes close to the 50,000,000 to 60,000,000 often mentioned for the war.

My view is this. In no way do I think that the deaths of those killed in combat between armed soldiers should be lumped together with those helpless civilians lined up against a wall and machine gunned, buried alive, raped and murdered, or burned alive in their homes. It is a conceptual fallacy to do so.

I did a thorough amalgamation of the estimates of war dead for each nation, 1900-1987, in the process of collecting democide data, and included them in my statistical tables. They can be found in my books Lethal Politics for the USSR, China’s Bloody Century, Democide for Nazi Germany, and Statistics of Democide for all the other nation’s war dead. For their location on my website, see my website’s HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LIST.HTM”list of documents here.

End war and democide by fostering freedom. It’s in the national interests of democracies and all our children.

What To Do About Nukes?

[First published May 19, 2005] For a month diplomats gathered in New York about revising the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and wrung their hands over North Korea’s self-proclaimed, and apparently actual, possession of nuclear weapons, and Iran’s intent to develop them. What to do? What to do?

It seems the best that the diplomats can recommend is to guarantee North Korea that it will not be attacked by any power, including especially the United States, and to offer inducements, such as international recognition and the multilateral promise of food and material aid. Regarding Iran, the idea is the same — guarantees of its security, enhance trade, encouraged investment, and reactor fuel for nuclear power. In other words, if the thugs that rule are clever enough, and can get the resources they need to seem on the verge of developing nukes, then most of the world will appease them. Indeed, they will argue among themselves as to how to best appease these thugs.

Of course, something must be done in the short run about their possessing or soon to get nukes. But, I don’t believe appeasement works. It only feeds the thugs hunger for more, and only encourages other thugs to exploit this obvious fear so created to get their own goodies. A fundamental principle is at work here:

Appeasement begets appeasement.
But, what to do in the long run? This is another amazing case of few recognizing what is in front of their noses, such as our ability to produce invisible solids (glass). The solution is obvious, when it is pointed out. Consider: the United States, Britain, France, and Israel have nuclear weapons. (South Africa had six, but then in 1993 the South African Parliament committed the country against developing nuclear weapons, and the six were dismantled — at that time South Africa was on the road from Apartheid to being a full-fledged liberal democracy, which was achieved the following year.) Note that none of these democratic nuclear powers perceive the other as a threat or as a matter of security, and have developed no defenses against the others, ALTHOUGH THEY HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS. It is just inconceivable that such democracies would go to nuclear war against each other. The only purpose of their nukes is protection against the thugs of this world, or, in the case of France, as also a ticket to the Big Power Club.

So, what to do for the long run elimination of the supreme danger of nuclear weapons? Pure and simple:

Foster democratic freedom
In a world of democracies, there should be complete nuclear disarmament, for democracies have no need for military forces against each other.

And so an interventionist policy of freeing people from their enslavement to the whims of thugs and ordinary dictators is also to wage peace and denuclearization.

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Link of Note

” The anomalies killing nonproliferation” (5/18/05) By Ramesh Thakur

Ramesh Thakur is senior vice rector of the UN University in Tokyo. He says:

Significant gaps exist in the legal and institutional framework to combat today’s real threats. It is impossible to defang tyrants of their nuclear weapons the day after they acquire and use them. The UN seems incapable of doing so the day before: The Security Council can hardly table the North Korean threat for discussion and resolution.

If international institutions cannot cope, states will try to do so themselves, either unilaterally or in concert with like-minded allies. If prevention is strategically necessary and morally justified but legally not permitted, then the existing framework of laws and rules — not the anticipatory military action — is defective.

In other words, international law is an ass, and so is the fundamental legal norm against intervention in the affairs of a state.

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What Makes Democracy Permanent

click me^–>

[First published August 30, 2005] Sometimes I come across research that is so important, but which is unavailable unless you subscribe to research journals or are near a research library, that I must provide its substance. Such is the article by Adam Przeworski and Fernando Limongi on, “Modernization: Facts and Theories,” (World Politics, vol. 49, no. 2, 1997). It bears directly on the Bush Forward Strategy of Freedom. Published in 1997, it is not written with Iraq and Afghanistan in mind, but we can keep them and China in mind as we read it. (My thanks to Dean Esmay of Dean’s World for bringing to my attention the blog on this by TallDave.
I will include what is most relevant, leaving out the nonessential methodology, and all footnotes: (all bold italics added)

Introduction
What makes political regimes rise, endure, and fall? Do democracies emerge as a consequence of economic development? Does rapid economic growth destabilize democracies? Is there some level of development beyond which democracies are more likely to fall? Is European history unique or is it repeating itself in contemporary less developed countries?

. . . . We pose the question narrowly, examining exclusively the impact of development, rather than seeking broadly to explain the dynamic of political regimes. Hence, we deliberately ignore factors such as religion, colonial legacy, position in the world system, income distribution, or diffusion, which have been found by others to influence the incidence of democracy. We believe that our question is important in its own right, that it lends itself to divergent answers, and that it raises methodological issues that are not well understood.

I. Economic Development and Democracy

Lipset’s observation that democracy is related to economic development, first advanced in 1959, has generated the largest body of research on any topic in comparative politics. It has been supported and contested, revised and extended, buried and resuscitated.

. . . . Yet there are two distinct reasons this relation may hold: either democracies may be more likely to emerge as countries develop economically, or they may be established independently of economic development, but may be more likely to survive in developed countries. We call the first explanation “endogenous” and the second “exogenous.”

Since we are dealing with only two regimes, democracies emerge whenever dictatorships die. Hence, to assert that democracies emerge as a result of economic development is the same as to say that dictatorships die as countries ruled by them become economically developed. Democracy is then secreted out of dictatorships by economic development. A story told about country after country is that as they develop, social structure becomes complex, labor processes begin to require the active cooperation of employees, and new groups emerge and organize. As a result, the system can no longer be effectively run by command: the society is too complex, technological change endows the direct producers with some autonomy and private information, civil society emerges, and dictatorial forms of control lose their effectiveness. Various groups, whether the bourgeoisie, workers, or just the amorphous “civil society,” rise against the dictatorial regime, and it falls.

The endogenous explanation is a “modernization” theory. The basic assumption of this theory, in any of its versions, is that there is one general process of which democratization is but the final stage. Modernization consists of a gradual differentiation and specialization of social structures that culminates in a separation of political structures from other structures and makes democracy possible. The specific causal chains consist of sequences of industrialization, urbanization, education, communication, mobilization, and political incorporation, among innumerable others: a progressive accumulation of social changes that ready a society to proceed to its culmination, democratization.

Modernization may be one reason the incidence of democracy is related to economic development, and this is the reading most commentators impute to Lipset. His most influential critic, O’Donnell, paraphrases Lipset’s thesis as saying that “if other countries become as rich as the economically advanced nations, it is highly probable that they will become political democracies.” Democracy, then, is endogenous, since it results from development under authoritarianism. According to this theory, the sequence of events one would expect is one of poor authoritarian countries developing and becoming democratic once they reach some level of development, a “threshold.”

Yet suppose that dictatorships are equally likely to die and democracies to emerge at any level of development. They may die for so many different reasons that development, with all its modernizing consequences, plays no privileged role. After all, as Therborn emphasized, many European countries democratized because of wars, not because of “modernization,” a story repeated by the Argentine defeat in the Malvinas and elsewhere. Some dictatorships fell in the aftermath of the death of a founding dictator–a Franco, for instance–who had been uniquely capable of maintaining the dictatorial order. Some collapsed because of economic crises. Some because of foreign pressures.

If dictatorships die and democracies emerge randomly with regard to development, is it still possible that there would be more democracies among wealthy countries than among poor ones? If one is to take Lipset at his own word–”The more well-to-do a nation, the greater the chances it will sustain democracy” –then even if the emergence of democracy is independent of the level of development, the chance that such a regime will survive is greater if it has been established in an affluent country. We would thus expect to observe democracies to appear randomly with regard to levels of development, but to die in the poorer countries and survive in the wealthier ones. Thus, history gradually accumulates wealthy democracies, since every time a dictatorship happens to die in an affluent country, democracy is there to stay. This is therefore no longer a modernization theory, since the emergence of democracy is not brought about by development. Rather, democracy appears exogenously as a deus ex machina. It survives if a country is “modern,” but it is not a product of “modernization.”

Are we splitting hairs?

Examine first some descriptive patterns. The facts we report concern 135 countries between roughly 1950 and 1990. . . . All the regimes that occurred during this period were classified as democracies or dictatorships (we use the latter term interchangeably with “authoritarian regimes”). Altogether, we observed 224 regimes, 101 democratic and 123 authoritarian. . . .

If the theory that democracy emerges as a result of economic development is true, transitions to democracy would be more likely when authoritarian regimes reach higher levels of development. In fact, transitions are increasingly likely as per capita income of dictatorships rises but only until it reaches a level of about $6,000. Above that, dictatorships become more stable as countries become more affluent. Dictatorships survive, or at least succeed one another, almost invariably in the very poor countries, those under $1,000. They are somewhat less stable in countries with incomes between $1,001 and $4,000 and even less so above $4,000. But if they reach the level of $6,000, transitions to democracy become less likely. . . . [T]he probability of any dictatorship dying during any year is 0.0206; for those dictatorships with incomes over $1,000, this probability is 0.0294, over $5,000 it is 0.0641, over $6,000 it is 0.0484, over $7,000 it is 0.0333. Huntington, it seems, was correct with regard to dictatorships: they exhibit a “bell shaped pattern of instability.”

[T]he probabilities of dictatorships falling, . . . predicted by the level of development correspond closely to those observed. They increase until the $5,001-$6,000 range and then decline.

Indeed, dictatorships survived for years in countries that were wealthy. Whatever the threshold at which development is supposed to dig the grave for authoritarian regimes, it is clear that many dictatorships passed it in good health. Even disregarding those countries that derive more than one-half of their revenues from oil, dictatorships flourished in Singapore, East Germany, Taiwan, USSR, Spain, Bulgaria, Argentina, and Mexico for many years after these countries enjoyed incomes above $5,000, which Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, and Norway did not have by 1950. . . .
Yet this may not be a fair test of modernization theory. The hypothesis implied by this theory is that if a country develops over a longer period under dictatorship, so that all the modernizing consequences have time to accumulate, then it will embrace democracy. But for most dictatorships this premise is vacuous: only 19 dictatorships–to remind, out of 123–did develop over longer periods of time and reached “modernity.” Let us thus examine more closely these countries, the ones that developed under authoritarianism and became “modern,” which we will take arbitrarily to mean that at some time they had a per capita income of $4,115.)

Gabon, Syria, and Yugoslavia are the three countries that experienced a sustained increase in income over, respectively, twelve, seventeen, and eighteen years, reached the level at which democracy was the more likely regime, and, having remained under dictatorships, experienced a series of economic crises. Singapore and Malaysia are the two countries that developed over a long period, became wealthy, and remained dictatorships until now. In East Germany, Taiwan, USSR, Spain, Bulgaria, and Hungary dictatorships eventually fell, but only many years after they had reached the critical level of income. Given its 1974 income level, Uruguay should never have been a dictatorship. The economic history of the Chilean dictatorship is convoluted: its income in 1974 was $3,561, it climbed with downs and ups to $4,130 by 1981, collapsed to $3,199 by 1983, recovered to surpass the 1974 level only by 1986, and passed the threshold of $4,155 in 1989, exactly the year of transition. The history of Poland is similar: by our criteria, it reached the threshold of democracy in 1974; it experienced an economic crisis in 1979 and a mass movement for democracy in 1980, passed the threshold again in 1985, and became a democracy in 1989. In turn, Brazil, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, and perhaps even South Korea and Greece are the dream cases of a modernization theorist. These are countries that developed under a dictatorship, became wealthy, and threw dictatorships off more or less at the same income levels. But they are few.

This is not to say that democracies did not sometimes emerge because countries became modern; put otherwise, dictatorships do not necessarily fall for the same reasons in all countries. Thus modernization may “explain” why democracy was established in countries that developed over a long period even it these countries had waited for its advent for periods of time that cannot be predicted. But if modernization theory is to have any predictive power, there must be some level of income at which one can be relatively sure that the country will throw off the dictatorship. One is hard put to find this level, however: among the countries that satisfy the premise of the modernization theory, the range of levels at which dictatorships survived is very wide.

Moreover, even if to predict is not the same as to explain, “explaining” can easily entail an ex post fallacy. Consider Taiwan, which in 1961 had a per capita income of $968, which developed rapidly, passing by 1979 our threshold of $4,115, which on the basis of its income level had a probability of 0.10 of being a dictatorship in 1990, and which in 1995 elected its president in contested elections for the first time. Suppose that every year during all this time, the Taiwanese dictatorship faced a probability of 0.02 of dying for reasons not related to development. It thus had about a 50 percent chance of not being around by 1995 even if it had not developed at all. We may therefore attribute to development what may have been just a culmination of random hazards. [And, indeed, the Taiwanese dictatorship most likely democratized for geopolitical reasons, not for economic ones. Thus, the causal power of economic development in bringing dictatorships down appears paltry. Few authoritarian regimes satisfy the premise of modernization theory; that is, few developed over a long period. And even if most of those that did develop eventually became democracies, no level of income predicts when that would occur.

In turn, per capita income, our measure of the level of development, has a strong impact on the survival of democracies. The simple fact is that during the period under our scrutiny or ever before, no democracy ever fell, regardless of everything else, in a country with a per capita income higher than that of Argentina in 1975: $6,055. Thirty-two democracies spent 736 years with incomes above $6,055 and not one collapsed, while thirty-nine out of sixty-nine democracies did fall in countries that were poorer.

. . . . [T]he probability that democracy survives increases monotonically with per capita income. In countries with per capita income under $1,000, the probability that a democracy would die during a particular year was 0.125, which implies that their expected life was eight years. Between $1,001 and $2,000, this probability was 0.0571, for an expected duration of about eighteen years. Above $6,055, democracies could expect to last forever. Statistical analysis . . . confirms that per capita income is a good predictor of the stability of democracies.

These findings cry out for an explanation. Lipset himself thought that the reason democracies survive in affluent countries is that wealth moderates in various ways the intensity of distributional conflicts. This is a plausible explanation but not easy to prove rigorously. The intuitive story is this: Suppose that the political forces competing over the distribution of income choose between complying with the verdicts of democratic competition, in which case each can expect to get some share of total income, or risking a fight over dictatorship, which is costly but which gives the victor all of the income. Now suppose that the marginal utility of consumption is lower at higher levels of consumption. Thus the gain from winning the struggle for dictatorship is smaller. In turn, if the production function has diminishing marginal returns in capital stock, the “catch-up” from destroying a part of it during the war for dictatorship is faster at lower levels of wealth. Hence, in poor countries the value of becoming a dictator is greater and the accumulated cost of destroying capital stock is lower. In wealthy countries, by contrast, the gain from getting all rather than a part of total income is smaller and the recuperation from destruction is slower. Hence, struggle for dictatorship is more attractive in poorer countries.

Obviously, there are always alternative interpretations. One, for example, is that income is just a proxy for education and more educated people are more likely to embrace democratic values. But while the accumulated years of education of an average member of the labor force–the measure of educational stocks we have–does increase the probability of survival of democracies independently of level, the effect of income survives when education is controlled, and indeed it is much stronger.

These observations strongly confirm the exogenous version of Lipset’s theory. Once democracy is established, the more well-to-do a nation, the more likely that it will survive.

The reason we observe the relation between levels of development and the incidence of democracy is that democracies are almost certain to survive once they are established in rich countries. True, dictatorships are less stable when they reach the per capita income of $4,000. But what generates the pattern we observe . . . is that while democracy is terribly fragile in poor countries, it is impregnable in the rich ones. The probability that a democracy will die during any particular year in a country with an income above $4,000 is practically zero: two in a thousand years. And since at such levels dictatorships die at the rate of 5.7 percent, one would expect that independently of the initial distribution, in the long run democracies would constitute 96.1 percent of regimes in such wealthy countries. Even if wealthy dictatorships died at a double, triple, or whatever times higher rate, that is, even if development made transitions to democracy much more likely, all the difference endogenous theory could make is 3.9 percent.

To conclude, there are no grounds to believe that economic development breeds democracies:. . . . [O]nce established, democracies are likely to die in poor countries and certain to survive in wealthy ones.

II. Ups or Downs?

. . . . Rapid growth is not destabilizing for democracy (and neither is it for dictatorship). When democracies face a decline in incomes, they die at the rate of 0.0523 and can be expected to last nineteen years, but when incomes are growing, they die at the rate of 0.0160, with an expected life of sixty-four years. Moreover, democracies that grow slowly, at the rate of less than 5 percent per annum, die at the rate of 0.0173, while those that grow at a rate faster than 5 percent die at the rate of 0.0132.

What is most striking is how fragile poor democracies are in the face of economic crises. In poor countries, those with per capita income under $2,000, of the 107 years during which a decline of incomes occurred, twelve democracies fell the following year: the expected life of democracy under such conditions is about nine years. Even among countries with incomes between $2,001 and $6,000, a decline of incomes resulted in the fall of six democracies in 120 years during which this happened: these democracies could expect to last 20 years. And then, above $6,055 a miracle occurs: in the 252 years during which wealthy democracies experienced economic crises, none ever fell.

Another striking feature of these patterns is that . . . past growth does not matter: one year of economic crisis is enough to produce the political effects.

Thus the hypothesis that rapid growth destabilizes regimes is simply false. In turn, to cite Diamond and Linz, it is true that “economic crisis represents one of the most common threats to democratic stability.” What destabilizes regimes are economic crises, and democracies, particularly poor democracies, are extremely vulnerable to bad economic performance.

III. Kinks: Modernization Theory Revisited

. . . . Is there some level of development beyond which democracies are more likely to die than before? Note . . . . [that the] proportion of democracies to per capita income has a kink at levels between $3,001 and $4,000: the observed values are 42.4 percent between $2,001 and $3,000, 32.6 percent between $3,001 and $4,000, and 72.0 percent between $4,001 and $5,000. But this kink is due to the fact that dictatorships are exceptionally stable in this range, rather than that democracies are less stable. The probability of a democracy dying declines monotonically with per capita income. . . . Argentina is the only country where a democracy fell at an income above $6,000; Argentina is also the only country where one collapsed at an income between $5,000 and $6,000. Only two democracies fell in countries with incomes between $4,000 and $5,000: again one of them in Argentina, and the other in Uruguay. Five democracies fell between $3,000 and $4,000: one of them in Argentina. Indeed, outside Argentina, only five democracies fell in countries with incomes above $3,000: in Uruguay in 1973 at $4,034, Suriname in 1980 at $3,923, Chile in 1973 at $3,957, Fiji in 1987 at $3,398, and Greece in 1967 at $3,176. Thus, Lipset was right in thinking that the richer the country the more likely it is to sustain democracy, except in Argentina.

IV. Does History Repeat Itself?

Since our observations begin in 1950, the regimes we observed came into being as a result of either of two effects: their dynamic or the entrance of new countries into the world, or at least into our sample.

. . . . (1) the levels at which democracies emerged before World War II were highly scattered; (2) they did not differ between Western Europe and other parts of the world; and (3) once established, democracies were more likely to fall in the poorer countries. We are on firmer ground answering the second question. Comparing the “new” and the “old” countries shows that democracies are more brittle in the new countries while dictatorships are more likely to die in the old ones. And, . . . the level of development again has powerful effects. The probabilities of a democracy falling decline dramatically with level in both groups of countries: indeed, this probability is the same once countries reach an income above $2,000. The probability of a transition to democracy increases with level among the old countries. But among the countries that became independent after 1950, dictatorships are as stable when they are wealthy as when they are poor. Among fifteen dictatorships in new countries with incomes above $2,000, only one fell during their 185 years until 1990, in Suriname in 1988 at $2,888, and only one more, in the Seychelles, after 1990.

We may be confusing, however, the effect of levels at which countries were first observed and the effect of development they experienced during the period under scrutiny. And the new countries were much poorer–their average income was $1,103–than the old ones–which had an average income of $2,613–when they were first observed. The effects of the entry level are about the same for the two groups of countries. Democracies are more stable and dictatorships more brittle in countries that were wealthier, either when first observed in 1950 or whenever they became independent. But the effects of development since the time of entry differ greatly between the two groups of countries. The stability of democracy increases much more with development in the old than in the new countries. In turn, while development decreases slightly the probability of survival of dictatorships in old countries, the probability of transitions to democracy declines as new countries develop under authoritarian rule.

Hence, the promise that development would breed democracy proved to be particularly futile precisely with regard to those Third World countries to which it was supposed to offer hope. Development during the postwar period just did not have much of an impact on the collapse of dictatorships: an increase of per capita income of one thousand dollars raised the probability of dictatorship falling by only 1.12 percent among the old countries and lowered it by 1.90 percent among the new countries. But at least “modernization” worked in the right direction in the old countries, where most long-standing dictatorships, including those in Eastern Europe, did in the end fall. Most of the new countries, the great majority of them poor when they became independent, just remained poor; and those few that did develop remained authoritarian.

V. Conclusion

Whether couched in the language of the modernization perspective or the historical perspective, theories of the origins of democracy were deterministic. In the modernization theory no one does anything to bring democracy about; it is secreted by economic development and the corollary social transformations. Class actors do move history in Moore’s theory, but they operate at a distance of centuries: the agrarian class structure of the seventeenth century determines the regimes countries settle on two or three hundred years later. . . . The protagonists in the struggles for democracy could not and did not believe that the fate of their countries would be determined either by current levels of development or by the distant past. They maintained that, albeit within constraints, democratization was an outcome of actions, not just of conditions. Our findings strongly validate this . . . .

The emergence of democracy is not a by-product of economic development. Democracy is or is not established by political actors pursuing their goals, and it can be initiated at any level of development. Only once it is established do economic constraints play a role: the chances for the survival of democracy are greater when the country is richer. Yet even the current wealth of a country is not decisive: democracy is more likely to survive in a growing economy with less than $1,000 per capita income than in a country with an income between $1,000 and $2,000 that declines economically. If they succeed in generating development, democracies can survive even in the poorest nations.

Viewed from this perspective, the vision of the relation between development and democracy that dominated the intellectual mood and served to orient U.S. foreign policy during the cold war years appears strangely convoluted. While Lipset treated development as exogenous, his contemporaries were persuaded that dictatorship is the inevitable price of development. . . . Dictatorships are needed to generate development. Since in this view dictatorships generate development while development leads to democracy, the best way to democracy was said to be a circuitous one. Yet common sense would indicate that in order to strengthen democracy we should strengthen democracy, not support dictatorships. And, even if G. B. Shaw warned that “common sense is that which tells us that the world is flat,” the lesson of our analysis is that this time it is the best guide. With development, democracy can flourish in poor countries.

Okay, what are the implications of this study for democracy in China, Iraq, and Afghanistan? One of the favorite arguments for favoring the Chinese communist dictatorship is that as it pursues economic development it is creating the conditions for democracy. Wrong. Gross national income per capita in purchasing power parity (PPP) for China was $5,600 in 2004. At this level of development and with this growth rate, dictatorships do not fall. China will remain the dictatorship she is, unless there is an economic crisis, or outside shocks, like war. Then maybe democracy has a chance.

As to Afghanistan, it is a poor country with a ppp of $800 in 2003. In 2004, its growth rate was 7.5%, which should be even more under the new democracy the American Coalition husbanded. This means the new democracy in Afghanistan should be able to survive by itself, once the internal insurgency and terrorism is defeated.

Now, for Iraq, which is in the process of democratization, while undergoing an insurrection and terrorism, and occupation by the American Coalition. In 2004, its ppp was $2,100. Its present growth rate is incalculable. If democratization is successful, which now looks highly likely, then with the ongoing reconstruction of its economy now also underway, the removal of all the economic sanctions that were in place against Saddam Hussein, and the efficient development of its oil resources, rapid development seems certain. Just to take power generation as an example, before the war it was unable to keep up with demand and thus retarded development. By October of 2003, reconstruction had been returned to it to the prewar level, which it now exceeds. And with the continued focus of reconstruction on the distribution and generation network, it should enhance development and thus help stabilize Iraq’s democracy.

Human and Economic Development
By Level of Freedom

What Countries Are Best For Business?

[First published November 29, 2005] The World Bank, which sometimes does good things, has published on the net a ranking of 155 countries as to the ease of doing business in each for 2006 (go here). From this page, you can also download the index and its subindicies in pdf or Excel.

The data that has now become available on the net is amazing. I still remember having to squeeze it out of reports from the UN, World Bank, and Department of the Treasury in a dusty government documents room of the library, various yearbooks, and encyclopedias. I spent over a year just going through the The New York Times Index. And now to have all these data ready made for analysis in Excel . . . . With all these data around, including on conflict, war, political systems, and a variety of related variables, I sometimes wish I were at the beginning of my scientific career so that I could exploit them all.

For those of you who are students, take some statistics courses so that you can use such data to answer your own questions. You will never regret it.

Anyway, on the doing business index, you would find that the best in rank order are New Zealand, Singapore, U.S., Canada, Norway, Australia, Hong Kong, Denmark, U.K., and Japan. At the bottom are nine African countries, and Laos. Taiwan is 35th, China is 91st, and South Korea is 27th. Germany is 19th, and way ahead of France, which is 44th. Iraq is 114th, while Syria is 121st and Iran 108th. Israel, a democratic country with a mixed free market-socialist economy, is 29th. Sweden, another one, is 14th. Even those democracies that tend toward socialism, like Norway and Denmark in the top ten, and Germany, Sweden, and Israel not too far below, are better for business than most of the nondemocracies. It ultimately comes down to democratic peoples knowing on which side their bread is buttered.

I can’t do this right now, but I have a little project for someone. What is the correlation between a countries political freedom, economic freedom, and how well one can do business there. The data are easily available. Those for political freedom are here, and for economic freedom they are here.

I would bet my house that the three correlations will all be high, i.e., >.75.

Another plus for the democratic peace.

Visualizing The Democratic Peace

[Fist published July 17, 2005] On the destroyed blog, Anonymous posted a comment I’ve taken to heart. He said:

Dean Esm, ay is on an excellent track in seeking to develop a popular pedagogy for the democratic peace. A critical need is to present an easily surveyable synoptic view of the historical facts of the democratic peace. While I am extremely grateful that Dr. Rummel presents his highly detailed expertise on this matter, it is not always easy for a non-scholar to survey his websites and feel armed for argument on behalf of the democratic peace, insofar as Dr. Rummel’s work looks at the democratic peace from various frames of reference and various definitional starting points, and deals with so many complexities and ambiguities of argument and fact. That is essential to do, but nowhere have I so far seen a single overall synoptic diagram of the historical facts of the democratic peace, one including all the relevant details and possible points of confusion and ambiguity. Instead, I have seen on Dr. Rummel’s site numerous partial synoptics. For example, one sees frequently a chart that, as I vaguely and approximately remember, says that since 1816(?), there have been 0 wars between democracies, about 200 wars between non-democracies, and about 100 wars between a non-democracy and a democracy. But the chart doesn’t say if this refers to electoral democracies or liberal democracies, or both. Dr. Rummel might find the answer so obvious as to be not necessary to display on the chart, but to the common ignoramus like me, the answer is not obvious. But the chart is just one example. Another is that it sometimes seems that in one essay Dr. Rummel is starting from different definitions of democracy than he uses in another essay — the facts and arguments of the essays do not contradict each other, but the various definitional starting points — a mark of Dr. Rummel’s wide acquaintance with various scholarly approaches to the subject — sometimes make it challenging for a reader to get a total overview with which to do rhetorical battle on behalf of the democratic peace.

For reading to be challenging is good, but it would also be good, and pedagogically essential, to develop a synoptic diagram on a single page, perhaps using text of half a dozen sizes, the largest expressing main lines, and each smaller size of text a finer level of definitional, historical and quantitative detail. (But any statistical info presented should be easily transparent to persons who are math-challenged.) Perhaps a sort of bullseye shape could be used, following Dr. Rummel’s enumeration of various circles of democracy, from the 25 or so utterly undoubted ones that could be placed in the central circle, to the very slightly doubted ones in the next circle, to the more doubted ones in the third circle, and so on. As many historical states should be included as possible, even all known states, perhaps in quite small text, with accompanying dates and detail as to what elements of democracy those states possessed. Multiple colors should be used in such a way as to clarify the organization of the information.

The ideal is to join maximum simplicity with maximum complexity.

All statements and labels on the synoptic should be made transparent for a complete layman, by use of diminishing text sizes for increasing detail. The main controversies, supposed exceptions, and ambiguities of the democratic peace should be included and explained in the clearest and most immediately understandable form.

The synoptic should be tested to see if an intelligent non-scholar, holding the synoptic in hand, can fairly quickly find the answer to most any objection that might be raised to the democratic peace idea.

RJR: I’ve been trying in various ways to help visitors to my website digest the incredible magnitude of democide by metaphoric visualizations (see here), photographs (see here, or mental visualizations, as in the corpses would circle the earth four times. But, I have not tried to do the same for the democratic peace. As a first try, how about the metaphoric draft plot below?

Empirically, the chart is not correct, since freedom vs. human insecurity (violence & famine & impoverishment & human underdevelopment) all lay on one dimension, not spread across two. See the chart below.

Note the linear relationship in the plot. The better way of simply showing this is in the chart below

If you want more detail as to which countries are where, see the contingency table (link here). It is too detailed to show here with the space available, but it best makes the case. Note that for liberal democracies, there is no low human security and only one low medium (Botswana), while for the unfree nations (no illiberal democracy among them) in no case is human security high. For those of us who have tabular minds, no statistics make a better case for the power of democratic peace than this table.

Anyway, how to best communicate all this in one page? Answers, comments, alternative charts (attach them to an email to me and I can put them up on the blog).

Link of Note

Appemdix: Testing Whether Freedom Predicts Human Security and Violence (2000) R.J. Rummel In Saving Lives, 
Enriching Life:
Freedom as a Right
And a Moral Good (downloadable free in pdf)

Conclusion:

For all nations 1997 to 1998, the human security of their people, their human and economic development, the violence in their lives and the political instability of their institutions, is theoretically and empirically dependent on their freedom–their civil rights and political liberties, rule of law, and the accountability of their government. One can well predict a people’s human security by knowing how free they are.
Moreover, just considering the violence, instability, and total deaths a people can suffer, the more freedom they have the less of this they will endure.
These results are fully consistent with work done on war, revolution, and democide in other studies for different years and samples. . . .
As clear from the statistics, I am not dealing simply with the presence or absence of freedom, but with a continuum. . . . [T]he implication of this is profound for the foreign policies of the democracies and democratic activists. It is that even if we just improve the human rights of a people, even if we promote some democratization of their political institutions, it will improve their human security, and reduce the violence that inflicts them.

Graphical experiments on visalizing democide

What? There actually is Censorship?

[First published February 16, 2005] I have called for the censorship of the media on the War on Terror, particularly the Iraq Battle, Highly secret information has been published for all the read, including our enemies. This has caused considerable outrage among bloggers: To give you a sample:

“Rummel . . . now “suggests destroying the First Amendment and the inalienable right to freedom of speech.” (link here)

“Last month R.J. Rummel . . . “announced that because so many libertarians oppose the Iraq war, he is no longer a libertarian but a ‘freedomist.’ This week we learned one of the differences between the two philosophies: freedomists don’t want a free press” (link here)

“Yet, apparently he doesn’t want “freedom for the media. That damn media, always getting in the way of the fight for freedom. What happens if the media isn’t censored now? Well…” (link here)

Interesting, that so many of those reacting to my call seem unaware of the actual censorship of the media. One would think that the media was able to print or say anything, and I was trying to initiate censorship. No way. As the link below illustrates, free speech is not free, and for publishing certain things the media is punished by the government. I am only trying to sensibly protect our soldiers and pursue our war on terrorism by restricting the media from giving “aid and comfort” to our enemies (part of the Constitution’s definition of treason in Article III, Section 3).

Of interest is why there is a large group of intelligent readers who don’t know or understand that the media is already censored. Could it be that they know this, but it is just that their loose rhetoric belies it. Or, they are just not thinking—not connecting the dots? Or maybe, there sense of proportion and importance is challenged. Well, I’ll leave this to the sociology of knowledge people, and simply say that I would rather preserve military secrets and sensitive information from the enemies of freedom than protect adults and children from seeing a raw, uncovered, naked female mammary gland.

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Link of Note

”House Poised to OK Indecency Fine Increase” (2/16/05) By Genaro C. Armas

“A bill with strong bipartisan support would boost the maximum fine for indecency from $32,500 to $500,000 for a company and from $11,000 to $500,000 for an individual entertainer. . . . The Federal Communications Commission . . . has stepped up enforcement of the indecency statute, perhaps most notably with a $550,000 fine against CBS for its 2004 Super Bowl broadcast that included Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction.” Radio personality Howard Stern also has been a frequent target.

“Fines for indecent programming exceeded $7.7 million last year. Four years ago, FCC . . . fines totaled just $48,000.”

Unity? No, Self-Determination

[First published May 22, 2005] The passionate cry of the anti-colonialist of the 1960s is now almost forgotten. It was for self-determination — the freedom of people to govern themselves. It is also the cry of a people against their dictators and for democratic freedom. It is the antinomy of the statist ideology — statist unity, or simply statism — that so much infects governing elites, even in democracies .

It is the cause of so much of the internal violence we see in the world. This is the desire of the rulers, or ruling majority, to maintain the boundaries of a state as is, and to forcefully, if necessary, prevent the people of some region, province, republic, or whatever it is called, from breaking off and forming their own sovereign state. Their are many reasons for this statism, such as a strong nationalist belief in the integrity — wholeness — of the state , the belief it would weaken the state, the loss of important resources, and moral imperatives, as in the American Civil War (anti-slavery sentiment mixed with statism).

Just consider the civil and revolutionary wars and widespread internal violence the that resulted from statism: Tibet and China controls by force alone a number of areas that ought to be sovereign on their own, such as Tibet, the rebellious whole Eastern region of Sinkiang (formerly Muslim and Caucasian Turkistan taken over by Mao’s Red Army after its victory over the Nationalists in 1949, as was Tibet). Then there is bloody Chechnya to which Russia refuses to grant self-determination. In Vietnam, the South was never part of the North until seized by North Vietnam; I’m sure if the people were free to separate from the North, they would do so in a moment — over a million fleeing Boat People attests to that. Burma’s war against ethnic groups, such as the Shan and Karens, carried on by military dictators has been ongoing for decades. Giving them their independence would resolve this. Nigeria fought a senseless war against the attempt by Biafra to split off from the country — about a 1,000,000 died or were killed in the civil war. And so on and on.

A special case of this is Iraq, with almost clear division of the country between Sunnis in mid-country, including Baghdad, the majority Shiites in the south, and the Kurds in the north. Ideally, in occupying the country and establishing an Iraqi government, the U.S. should have divided the country into three sovereign parts. This would have avoided much of the present terrorist violence. However, this argument neglects the practical reality. Turkey would not have accepted a sovereign Kurd state on its southern border, for as assuredly as water runs downhill, the Kurds would have aided and provided a safe-haven to their fellow Kurds across the border in Turkey who have been fighting for their own independence for many years. Assuredly, Turkey informed the U.S. that it would not allow an independent Kurdistan, with the implication it would take military action to stop it.
Then there were the Shiites in the south bordering on revolutionary Shiite Iran, and who could tell in 2004 how susceptible they would be to inducements or control by their fellow Muslims in Iran (now it is clear they will follow an independent course). All this is to say that the Bush Administration followed the most practical and politically desirable course (a hat tip to the realists for this).
However, if such political considerations don’t intrude, and they don’t in most cases, a people have a right to self-determination, whether of a colony or of a segment of a state in which an overwhelming majority desire self-determination. What the logic of this?
I argue that the moral justification for the state is an implicit social contract: we give obedience to the state in return for the protection and rights it guarantees us (you will notice a hint of Hobbes in this, with a heavier touch of Rawls). But, when a people no longer wish to abide by this social contract, but to establish a new one, then they have a right to do so that is derived from their fundamental right to freedom (and a bow to Locke). No rulers or democratic leaders have a right to prevent by force a people from exercising their right to self-determination, unless, and the only unless, a democracy is weakened in the face of a foreign enemy by such fission.
So, if the people of California, or Alaska, or my home state of Hawaii, or the liberal North Eastern states want to split off from the United States, and they would support it in a referendum by more than 2/3rds, more power to them.
To me, the right to self-determination, if chosen by an overwhelming majority of a people trumps any but a common defense argument against that freedom. If this bothers you, consider that in wartime, democracies accept that the a common defense supercedes individual liberty via the draft of young men, censorship, and anti-strike laws.

Lets bring back the cry of our fathers, the rallying cry against colonialism that was so successful —

Three cheers for the self-determination of a people

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Link of Note

“Self-Determination theory: An Approach to Human Motivation and Personality (nd)

Epigraph: “To be self-determined is to endorse one’s actions at the highest level of reflection. When self-determined, people experience a sense of freedom to do what is interesting, personally important, and vitalizing.”

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Books/articles/statistics

Understanding the Spontaneous Society

Understanding the Spontaneous Society

[First published July 25, 2005] In my blogs I’ have tried to lay bare the incredible ability of the spontaneous society, that between free people, to provide a social order that allocates goods, runs a family, rules a neighborhood, and governs the relationship among friends, and thus satisfies the desires and values of millions of people. How can this be? So many people, so many diverse interests, so many different values, and yet the spontaneous society, does all this automatically — seemingly untouched by human hands. Certainly, it does it much more efficiency, and with the greater happiness of the greater number, than does the command society.

And how do we understand the role of conflict and cooperation among individuals in such a spontaneous society where people are free to do whatever? Nobody is telling them what to do. Nobody is establishing the framework within which they can interact without conflict. In those social spaces where no boss, government official, or chairman rules, how can people get along? They do, and wonderfully — better than anyone can dictate. What achieves this is a universal process of conflict and cooperation I call the conflict helix. It is shown in the figure below. All its aspects are described in the chapters I’ve posted on my Freedom’s Principles blog, and that have been summarized in the chapter I just posted there.

In sum, the conflict helix is a general process whereby individuals in a free society establish and maintain the understandings, accommodations, and agreements that enable them to cooperate and satisfy their interests. Within this process conflict itself is a means through which they adjust to their different interests, capabilities, and wills; it is a trial-and-error, mutual learning process that achieves an accommodation of some sort between what they want, can get, and are willing to pursue. These accommodations, whether forced or negotiated, explicit or implicit, written or unwritten, constitute a social contract: a structure of expectations defining who owns, controls, influences, gets, or does what. And this structure of expectations is based on a balance of powers (such as the capability of individuals to persuade, bargain, use authority, threaten) achieved by the conflict, such as in a family who chooses the TV programs, takes out the garbage, does the dishes, or how this is decided (flipping coin?).

The social contract that is an outcome of such conflict is initially congruent with the balance of powers established between individuals and defines their social order: it establishes and permits cooperation between them and delineates for them an oasis of peace. Unfortunately, what individuals want, can, and will get changes in time and causes the balance of powers to shift away from the structure of expectations. As the balance becomes less congruent with expectations, a gap is formed between the social contract and the underlying balance of powers. As the gap gets larger it becomes an increasing source of tension until some trigger event surfaces the disparity between power and expectations; new conflict then erupts, as it often does between people who have lived together for a short time, and their structure of expectations — social contract — is disrupted.

This new conflict establishes a more realistic balance of powers and associated social contract; a new phase of cooperation and peace is determined. And eventually, this peace will likewise breakdown into conflict as for this structure of expectations a gap between power and expectations also develop.
Although this process seems cyclic–conflict to cooperation to conflict to cooperation, and so on — and unending, conflict actually can become less intense and frequent. As the two parties learn more about each other through successive conflicts and periods of peace and cooperation, and assuming no change in the fundamental conditions of their relationship, their conflict becomes less intense and shorter, their periods of cooperation more friendly and durable. Thus the helix is an upward spiral in learning as the relationship between individuals progresses through conflict and cooperation.

Link of Note

“Why is F A Hayek a Conservative” (1987 pdf) By Dr. Madsen Pirie

Pirie says:

If there were those who thought from Hayek’s earlier work that he wanted to distil the essence of liberty and use it to build a society anew, his later writing must have changed their opinion. Hayek seeks, as conservatives do, a spontaneous society in which individual actions produce an unplanned order. He rejects, with them, the attempt to construct a rational order and impose it upon people in place of their own decisions. He stresses, as they do, the value of culture in its broadest sense as a repository of wisdom greater than can be retained by any one mind.

Hayek recognizes that societies change; that is what evolution is all about. But it is evolution, not revolution which makes change take place successfully. This, too, is part of the conservative political tradition. In Hayek’s earlier works, we saw, as he did, the differences between his own outlook and those of conservative disposition. He saw the contrast between those who wanted to win back ground for freedom and spontaneity, and those who did not. In his later work we see how his ideas mesh with the political ideas which conservatives have stood for and worked for.

Hayek searched to find a name for the party which would represent people who thought as he did. His search is over. There already is a name for the party which stands for freedom of choice, and which seeks to preserve the spontaneity of outcome which those individual choices accumulate toward. It is a party which recognizes the role played by traditions and cultural inheritance in the safe evolution of society. It is the party which rejects the pretensions of central planners, collectivists, and advocates of a preconceived design. If Professor Hayek has avoided knowing it hitherto, he should know now that the name of this party is Conservative.

The name for such a party that Hayek sought is freedomist. See “Why the Freedomist Network?”
Social Fields and
Types of Societies

Understanding Propaganda

[First published December 4, 2005] The “Strategy Page” has an excellent classification of the many propaganda techniques employed by the major media. If you thought you knew them all, there are some surprises in the list.

If I were still teaching, I would allocate one or more techniques to each student in my class, and then require that they bring to class an example from the media’s treatment of Iraq and the War on Terror.

Here is the list from Strategy page:

The Most Successful Propaganda Techniques

November 29, 2005: A list of the most common, and successful, propaganda techniques currently in use. If  you spend any time at all consuming mass media, you will find these techniques familiar.
 
# 1. Guilt By Association: This is used to damage someone’s reputation by associating them with an unattractive person or organization. It doesn’t matter if there is an actual association or not. 
Example: Kristen said that too many people were moving into the South without the input of Americans already living there. “This land is for my grandchildren, not world wide social experiments. She lives a couple states away from where David Duke has his national office, and some think many in the region feel the way she does.
 
# 2. Backstroke: Systematically belittling the goals of the subject of the article as the goals are being listed. For every step forward for the subject, the propagandist pulls the reader back.  
Example: This year the political party’s stated goal is to give the rally a warm atmosphere. We walked into the cave-like coliseum as the preparations for the rally were taking place. “We’re trying to create a family atmosphere” said one representative of the party as he squinted into the harsh lights. “There are the children’s rides” he said happily pointing to where union workmen smashed open wooden crates with iron crowbars.
 
# 3. Misinformation: This is a subtle technique, it involves reporting information in such a way that the final message of the story is not true, it’s what the propagandist wants you to believe. Example: Recently a well known conservative tried to run advertisements in university newspapers addressing slave reparations for black Americans. The writer listed several facts which he felt demonstrated why reparations are not necessary and not fair. One of these facts was the fact that black Americans in the United States today earn, on average, around 20 times more than blacks living in Africa, and therefore, according to the author, descendents of slaves are actually far better off today than the people who remained behind.  A second author, writing about the advertisement, stated only that “the first author said that blacks were better off being slaves.”, but didn’t explain the facts the first author had shared. Imagine if you read the second author’s report and weren’t familiar with the first author’s position. You would think the first author was a monster for saying that people were lucky to be slaves! But that’s not what the first author said, he said their descendants have a lot more money now than the people still living in the original countries have.  This is misinformation, you’re given a half truth about someone’s position, and it is presented in a misleading fashion. 
 
# 4. Over Humanization: It is a perfectly valid technique to tell a story by focusing on the real people who the story impacts. However, this is also an easy technique for manipulation when a propagandist tries to mask an issue by making anyone who has a valid disagreement look evil due to all the human suffering talked about in the story. Example: Standing in the dusty desert was Juanita Lopez Camal Esquedo and her 15 hungry children. Half of the children were blind, the other half were crippled. As the smallest child, little Juanita, looked across the barbed wire fence into America, she begged her mommy for some food. Since everyone in Mexico had died of starvation, and food would never grow there again, there was nowhere else for them to go. And after all, this was the only family that wanted to come into America anyway. Just one more family.  Over humanization can be used not only with illegal immigration, but also with any other potential tear-jerker topic. 
 
# 5. Name Calling: This is officially the oldest trick in the book. It is cheap and easy. Often immigration reform activists are called anti-immigrant, people who are against state sponsored racism are called “racists” themselves. Name calling clouds and confuses issues, and when repeated by enough people on one side of an issue, creates a weight of its own, which isn’t really there, but must now be explained before the victim “may” have an opinion regarding the issue in question. Example: By saying that the population is growing too quickly, many people assumed she was a racist.
 
# 6. He Said, She Said: This is a technique whereby the author can say something they know isn’t true, or isn’t fair, but they want to say it anyway. Example: Project USA is a group which claims to support reasonable levels of immigration. They’ve put up billboards with Department of Statistics information which states that the US population will double within 50 years. The billboards have pictures of children of different races with the words “The population of the US will double within this child’s lifetime. Stop it congress”. Some people say this is hate speech.  Note: a statistic (the fact that the US population will double at current levels of immigration) cannot be hateful. This is just a numerical fact, like saying water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The author knows this is an unfair statement, but wants to say it anyway. That’s why she says “some people say”, rather than “I say”. 
 
# 7. Unproven “Facts” This is when a (usually immature) “writer” is frantically trying to “prove” a position and they begin to quote “studies”, “reports”, and “experts” as “proving” this or that, but they never mention the study’s name, location, where copies can be found, or the conditions specific to the experiments. Example: Recent studies show that the media is right 99% of the time. Also, an expert from the University of Happiness was quoted as saying “People in the media work harder than anyone who thinks they have a real job”. 
 
# 8. Lying Sometimes complete lies are told. Example: An author in Arizona writes a report which states that the reason that a local mayor decided not to use the police to enforce immigration law was because protests by a certain ethnic group scared him away from it. In actual fact, as stated by the mayor himself, the reason the police weren’t used was because no training program had been set up between the police and the INS.  Any person who was a member of said ethnic group would gain from a report like this because, if people begin to hear that “that group is really aggressive and authorities do what they say” then the power of that group is enhanced, and everyone reading the “news” will begin thinking they should always let that group have what it wants. The fact that our police need special permission to enforce some laws and not others is a topic for another discussion. 
 
# 9. Telling the Truth, For a While  To throw people off the track, biased news services will give good accurate reporting for a while, usually when it no longer matters, then they will stick it to you the next time your guard is down. The best way to recognize this technique is to simply remember who the biggest transgressors are. You must understand that if someone lies or tries to manipulate a story once, they will do so again. They will never be non-biased. They will, however, say something fair from time to time. This is due to the fact that if they were biased every time they spoke, they would soon run out of credibility. Do not trust them twice. Would you buy a car from someone who cheated you on a previous purchase just because they say something you want to hear later? 


# 10. Not Talking at all about Something  Of course the biggest recent example of this are the Moslem riots in France. The fact that the rioters were still burning more than one hundred cars EACH NIGHT was suppressed and avoided, rather we were fed the line that the riots were over. The media went days and days not reporting on the riots which were revealing the complete failure of French social, economic, and immigration policy. However, France, being a socialist country, is favored by the socialist media, so the country’s failings were not reported. When you’re aware of a major issue underway, but see no coverage on it, then you can be sure the media is against the ideas which discussing that topic would raise. 
 
# 11. Subtle Inaccuracies/Dismissive Tone Misstating a topic, often a serious one, and pretending any objecting or concerned view is silly, unrealistic, or just not necessary. Illegal immigration is a major threat to the United States. With the rapid importation of distinct, and not particularly grateful, ethnic groups who have no interest in anything American, we create division, conflict, and risk. This is a risk that will grow to overwhelm our children.  One writer used a childlike, grandmotherly tone to try to belittle and dismiss this serious topic. Her style was to write with pleasantries such as “oh, my you’ve grown, look at the happy big new population”. This is an intentional disservice to the readers and an attempt to manipulate them into not recognizing the risk they and their children face of being supplanted in their own home once and for all by foreigners, who, by the way, won’t care about you once they outnumber you. At best, this is a foolish policy. At worst, it is self destruction. In any case, it must be controlled responsibly if we are to remain masters of our own future.  This author’s method is just one way to use a dismissive tone to trick people into not recognizing the topic’s seriousness. The next time you’re reading an article which seems to speak childishly of a serious issue, you should be aware that in all probability the author doesn’t fail to understand the seriousness of the issue, rather they may be trying to further an opposing agenda. 
 
# 12. A One One Punch pretending to represent two sides, but one side gets a couple of great lines , the other side gets a lame line. Example: Tax cuts are all the rage these days, but two senators disagree on how appropriate tax cuts would be right now. Left Senator Jones says “The rich are the ones getting a cut. Who needs rich people with more money?”. Right Senator Smith doesn’t think that’s correct. He thinks only certain individuals should benefit. “The smallest number of people who enjoy this are the people with the most money” repeated Left Senator Jones. “I think that money belongs to all the people, and the best way to give out money the government collects through friendly tax raises is for the government to do it! It’s like all the people getting a raise!”, said Left Senator Jones. Right Senator Smith didn’t agree. He thought the money should reflect the people who had earned the most. When asked why Right Senator Smith felt this way he said “People have to earn a living”. Left Senator Jones said “It is precisely this attempt by Senator Smith to keep people from earning a living that I and my party oppose!”. 
 
# 13. Volume This is related to Coordination, it is merely a deluge of the same story line everywhere, until it becomes dominant, and the media’s view of it becomes the dominant view (Elian Gonzalez, Florida Recount, Poor Election Night Coverage) If you pick a topic with a strong liberal attraction, you will often find that all the “news” stories about a given current event seem to draw a similar conclusion about it. When you notice this, just ask yourself if it’s probable that, in a nation of nearly 300 million, no one has a legitimate opposing opinion. For example, does everyone think Republicans want to poison themselves and all the rest of us? Does everyone want unlimited, uncontrolled, illegal immigration to displace their children? Does everyone love working from January till May for free to pay the government taxes? No, they don’t. 
 
# 14. Coordination This occurs when a number of like minded journalists all report the same angle at about the same time. This really doesn’t require a conspiracy, there are so few “journalists”, and they can easily see what their buddies’ takes are on issues, then parrot the same line. A couple years ago we saw an article in a Southeast paper that actually addressed the damage being inflicted by uncontrolled immigration. We were shocked. Unfortunately, there followed soon after a long rose-colored story about the wonderful immigrants saving our economy (which was the magnet for their arrival in the first place) at no expense to us, written by the previously honest author, plus 5 other additional co-authors (read “thought police”). It did have a tiny list of “challenges”, which was followed by an immediate rebuttal, and altogether comprised less than five percent of the article, which among journalists passes for equal time. Magically, a very similar article appeared at the same time in a nearby regional paper written by three other authors with almost the same structure, a list of wondrous immigrants and everything was perfect about them. Did the “Censoring 5″ and “The Three Amigos” just happen to telepathically think the same thing, write it, and publish it at the same time? We’ll let our readers decide the odds of Spontaneous Identical Publishing (S.I.P.) for themselves. 
 
# 15. Fogging an Issue/Total Nonsense Sometimes certain groups have an interest in making sure that as few people pay attention to an issue as possible. A good propagandist can write a long, nonsensical article for the purpose of confusing the majority of readers, who themselves work hard all day. It doesn’t take much for them to see a catchy headline, then begin to dig into a long rambling article, then throw their hands up and say “I don’t have the extra energy to decipher this!”. The reader is correct, the fault is with the propagandist. Example: The Real Reason Why We Need Tax Cuts! A lot of people want tax cuts these days. Here’s the real reason they might not be such a good idea. The social ramifications are themselves reason enough! Given a perplexing view of the real inter-generational conflict in today’s “live and let live” society, most people make the more responsible choice. This leads us to the logical question, with school budgets tight, can we afford to argue over social services? A close examination of IRS records plainly displays the fiduciary incentive for economic re-examination in a post-socialist sense.   (this article will then ramble on like this for 3 or 4 pages) 
 
# 16. 2,3,4 Technique Mentioning only one side of an issue 2, 3, or 4 times in an article, each time pretending you are about to present the opposing side, but you never do. Then the article suddenly ends and the reader feels bombarded, outnumbered and alone. In reality the opposing view is by definition held by many people, the author merely refused to present the side of the argument he or she disagrees with. Example: The decision to seal off an additional 4 million acres was a controversial one. Barbara Oaks of Centerville says “There are great advantages to sealing the area off”. Many in town feel the same way, less traffic means less pollution, less damage to the area, and less noise. However, not everyone agrees with her.  The most common complaints don’t address the additional benefits of closing the forest, such as increased education opportunities for area children. Not many opportunities like this afford themselves year round, and keeping the area closed will guarantee the educational hikes around the perimeter can continue. Many longtime residents feel that closing all 4 million acres will be a burden. But don’t tell that to Steve Longmont. “I hope they close even more” Steve told our interviewers. “There’s no good reason for heavy travel through the whole forest, and I’d like to see the place prohibited”. Several area polls show a large number of people in favor of closing the area. Keeping the forest closed is what is best for the town. 
 
# 17. Preemptive Strike This is when the writer “attacks” the reader viciously at the very outset of the article with the “acceptable” view of the topic. The writer tries to “beat it into” the reader. Example: Just a couple days ago the possible presidential run of a politician who is very pro-enforcement of immigration law was featured in an article by an East Coast paper. The article began by saying the candidate doesn’t expect to win because of this or that, and in fact doesn’t think he’ll win at all, he just wants people to talk about immigration.  Nowhere in the article did the candidate say he didn’t expect to win, or that he only wanted people to talk about immigration. In fact, the article pointed out that he had already visited Iowa 4 times in 6 months, not at all like someone who doesn’t even want to win.  At the end of the article were instructions on how to defeat this candidate. The opening attack on his seriousness as a candidate, and the closing advice on how to defeat him are classic examples of Preemptive Strike. 
 
# 18. Framing the Debate Setting an argument around two “alternatives” which you would prefer, rather than the true alternatives. Example: The debate over how much funding to give to the project continued. Some are arguing for a reduced amount, while others want to see a much higher contribution level. The needs for both a lower budget and a higher budget have been laid out and defended in the debate brochure, which all members of the decision making body have been reading over for the last three days. (Note: the correct decision was to stop the project completely, it accomplishes nothing and the people running it are stealing the money, but you weren’t offered the choice of stopping it.) 
 
# 19. Token Equal Time Sometimes a weak, tiny understatement is added to a propaganda piece, apparently so the writer can pretend they had been fair. This technique is quite common, it consists of an article written with entirely one point of view, then at the end a meager statement from the opposing view is printed, it is immediately refuted, then the article either ends or continues on with the preferred point of view. 
 
# 20. “Interpreting” A Statement Have you ever seen a writer say that someone said something, then what the person said followed, but it didn’t look anything like what the writer claimed was meant? Example: The official said that they didn’t hold anyone from the previous administration responsible for the loss. “I think we should just focus on the future” said the official. (note: he didn’t say he didn’t hold anyone from the previous administration responsible, he said we should focus on the future. See the difference?) 
 
# 21. Withholding Information Is it the same as lying? Some in the media might not want to answer that question. Recently a candidate for mayor of Los Angeles was portrayed as a “jubilant son of an immigrant” in an article. What the article didn’t mention was that he also once said “Prop 187 is the last gasp of white America in California”, he belongs to, or once belonged to, a racist separatist organization which plans to takeover the American south west for Mexico to rule, and at a recent ceremony honoring early black leaders he called one of the early union members a n***** in front of 400 black leaders. 100 people walked out of the meeting room, though it was reported as 25% in order to diminish the effect. None of this was included in the article about the “jubilant son of an immigrant”   More recently there is the example of multiple murders on private land in Wisconsin by a Hmong immigrant. In actual fact, of the six people murdered all but one were unarmed, one was a woman, shell casings were found all around the area, meaning the murderer chased his unarmed victims all around to try and kill them. The story as reported called all the victims “hunters” to conjure up the image of tough armed men in a fair fight, even though the victims weren’t “hunting” at all but were warning the killer to stay off of their private land, hence he murdered them. The upsetting details only came out long after the story was initially reported.  Are the authors of these articles lying to the public by not presenting all of the information about the stories, or are the authors so incompetent and clueless that they aren’t even aware of these major points even though they are supposed to be writing about these important stories? The authors are either liars or morons. 
 
# 22. Distracting or Absurd Metrics With this technique, the writer attempts to drag the reader into a debate about what the reader is even seeing. This is usually used when the propagandist is falling behind and must hurry to destroy correct understanding of events. Example: During the French riots many writers began arguing about the number of cars burned and whether the number still “indicated” riot levels. In other words, let’s argue about what a riot is, and when you have enough destroyed cars, we’ll talk. Meanwhile, you’re discussing burnt cars and not the ongoing riots.

The UN’s (United Thug’s) Shameful Antisemitism

[First published on March 22, 2005] Israel is a liberal democracy. It has as high a Freedom House overall rating of free, and scores on political rights as does the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom; on civil liberties, it is only slightly below them, but still much better than many democracies, and certainly a whole lot better that the dictatorships and monarchies that surround it. Yet, and maybe partly because of this, it is the pariah in the United Nations. It is the only UN member systematically excluded from participation in, as far as I could determine, all the committees and UN bodies. For example, it has recently been rejected for membership on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, UN Human Rights Committee, UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, and UN Racial Discrimination Committee. And, Israel is denied membership in every one of the important UN’s five regional groups.

Contrast this with the dictatorships of Algeria, China, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, just to mention a few of them, that at one time have been, or are, members of the UN Commission on Human Rights; with the dictatorship of Egypt, which is a member of the many UN bodies, including all six concerned with human rights treaties; with the dictatorships of Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan that participate on the Governing Council of the International Labor Organization; with that the bloody dictatorship Iran that is on the five-member UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; and with those dictatorships who treat women as second class citizens or slaves like Egypt, Iran, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates that are members of the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

But, the worst of this UN treatment of democratic Israel is its having ignored the genocide against Israeli Jews by Palestinian terrorist organizations, aided and abetted by thug Arab states. The repeated genocide bombings of civilian Jews going about their lives in restaurants, markets, and on buses was ignored by the UN, while it condemned whatever Israel did to defend itself or retaliate against those responsible for this terrorism and genocide.

The October 4, 2003, bombing of the Maxim restaurant in Haifa is a case in point. About 21 men, women, children, and babies were murdered, and 60 suffered diverse wounds, including the loss of limbs, that has all but destroyed their lives. The bombing was planned by Islamic Jihad, which is supported by Syria. In retaliation, Israel attacked the Islamic Jihad training camp in Syria. No one was killed.

Rather then condemn the genocide of Israeli Jews, or at least investigate the killings or the Israeli attack, the only response in or by the UN was the Syrian dictator’s demand through his representative for an emergency meeting of the Security Council. He got it. Syria then proposed a resolution condemning Israel. And had it not been for an American veto, the resolution would have passed.

Such treatment of a democratic member of the UN is reprehensible, and alone calls into question how much support democratic countries should give the organization.

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Link of Note

”Undiplomatic Imbalance: The antisemitism at the U.N. is a problem for more than just Israel.” (12/13/04)

By Anne Bayefsky
Anne Bayefsky is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a visiting professor at Touro and Metropolitan Colleges in New York.

She writes:

. . . . For the past four decades, the United Nations has become the personal propaganda machine of the nom de guerre of Arab and Islamic states — Palestinians. Their aim is to demonize, debilitate, and destroy the state of Israel — the thriving democratic beachhead in their midst — for a start. The original U.N. mission, to protect the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, has been hijacked and corrupted by nations that neither share the universal values of the U.N.’s Declaration of Human Rights nor have democratic intentions.

. . . . There is only one entire U.N. Division devoted to a single group of people — the U.N. Division for Palestinian Rights (created in 1977). There is only one U.N. website dedicated to the claims of a single people — the enormous UNISPAL, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine. There is only one refugee agency dedicated to a single refugee situation — UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (in operation since 1950.) . . . . The list of hijacked U.N. organs goes on. The General Assembly operates through six committees of the whole. One of them, the Fourth Committee, routinely devotes 30 percent of its time to the condemnation of Israel.

How about the takeover of the General Assembly emergency-session procedure? These sessions began in 1956, and since then six of the ten emergency sessions ever held have been about Israel. The 10th such session began in 1997 and has been “reconvened” 13 times, most recently this past summer.

Then there is the U.N.’s primary human-rights body, the U.N. Human Rights Commission. Thirty percent of the resolutions condemning specific states ever adopted over 40 years are directed at Israel. . . . To appreciate fully the extent to which the U.N. has been taken over, observe November 29th, the annual U.N. Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which is the only U.N. day dedicated to a specific people. The occasion was held in the U.N.’s elaborate Trusteeship Council before hundreds of delegates.

In an apparent nod to the ransacking of the U.N.’s peace and security foundation by Islamic states — that have blocked the adoption of a comprehensive convention against terrorism for years — the secretary general’s panel recommended that the U.N. adopt a definition of terrorism. On the bright side, they finally admitted the U.N. doesn’t have such a definition. Until it does, it can hardly be expected to play a serious role in the war against terrorism. But the panel was very careful to recommend that it be a “consensus definition” — U.N. code language for blessing continuing stonewalling by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

So let’s cut through all of the talk and meetings and discussion groups on U.N. reform to the root cause of U.N. disease. Arab and Islamic states have the U.N. in a chokehold and, so far, no one is prepared to do anything about it.

The UN and Humanity’s Hope — Peacekeeping

[First published March 7, 2005] I have posted blogs on the UN and human rights , and now want to say a few words about UN peacekeeping. I am sure that for most us who were optimistic about the UN, we especially thought it would help resolve international disputes and prevent or end war. This did not happen in its first decades, which many then assumed was due to the Cold War. When this ended, we thought that UN peacekeeping now would take center stage. It did not.

Some facts:

• The UN is without a standing army and relies on volunteer troop contributions for its peacekeeping missions.
  
• Since 1946, the UN has undertaken 60 peacekeeping missions, or about 19 percent of the 311 arms conflicts of all forms 1946-2004. Even in this small number of carefully selected missions, they have largely failed.
  
• Over 1,580 UN peacekeepers have died during these missions.
  
• The peacekeeping budget for 2004-2005 is $2.8 billion (26 percent paid by the U.S.).
  
• The UN has underway 16 peacekeeping missions (in Cyprus, Georgia, East Timor, between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, between Ethiopia and Eritrea, among others), with a big one in southern Sudan upcoming. It will involve 10,000 soldiers and 700 police officers in a huge country as big as Western Europe (but will not involve the deadly conflict in Darfur). This will bring the peacekeeping deployment to about 85,700 personnel.
  
• Peacekeepers come from 103 nations, of which Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Ethiopia are the top providers, together totaling over 28,000 personnel. China contributes over 1,000 peacekeepers, while for the U.S. it is 428.
  
• Most peacekeepers lack experience, training, equipment, and good officers.
  
• Some of the failed operations have been in the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Congo mission began in 1999 to stop a war involving six nations, and now involves about 17,000 peacekeepers. So far, they have been unable to stop the killing or democide, which in the last 3 or 4 years had amounted to about 3 million dead.
  
• Some of the more successful operations have been in Cyprus, El Salvador, Liberia, and East Timor
  
• Peacekeepers have sexual exploited and raped children and adults in their missions to the Ivory Coast, Haiti, and Burundi, and investigators expect to find more cases in other missions.
  
• Although not strictly peacekeeping, the 1996-2003 UN oil-for-food program in Iraq during which thug Saddam Hussein paid bribes and kickbacks has cast a cloud over all the UN’s political activities.
  

In spite of a few successes in relatively small peacekeeping operation, overall the UN’s peacekeeping has failed. This was the conclusion of the important UN Brahimi Report, linked below, and is now increasingly the subject of serious study and commentary. See for example, the book Deliver Us From Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict by William Shawcross.

The problem is with the fifteen member Security Council. The UN Charter explicitly empowers it to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” and “make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken . . . to maintain or restore international peace and security.” Each of the five permanent members of the Council, the U.S., France, United Kingdom, Russia, and China can veto any proposed action of the Council. China is still a communist dictatorship, and Freedom House now rates Russia as unfree. Either one of these countries by itself can scuttle any UN attempt to keep the peace and prevent or deal with aggression, terrorism, or democide.

Then there is France, of whom one can expect that it would veto any involvement by the U.S. that would heighten its prestige or international role.

The General Assembly elects for two-year terms ten members of the Security Council. Each has one vote, and nine votes, absent a veto by a permanent member, are required to pass a substantive resolution. The importance of this cannot be overstated. For 2005, the Security Council’s elected members were (with freedom ranking on civil and political rights by Freedom House in parentheses, where F = free, PF = partly free, and NF = not free) Algeria (NF), Argentina (F), Benin (F), Brazil (F), Denmark (F), Greece (F), Japan (F), Philippines (F), Romania (F), and Tanzania (PF). Of these, then, there is an 8 to 2 split in favor of the free democracies, the best prodemocratic ratio I’ve seen in the Council. Adding the US, United Kingdom, and France, the three permanent members rated free, to carry a resolution these 11 democratic members must first persuade China and Russia to at least abstain rather than exercise their veto (given France goes along or abstains).

However, most often in the past, even when China and Russia abstain or agree, one or more thug dicators on the Council had to be persuaded to go along. This was a frustrating diplomatic effort (perhaps entailing bribery — grants, economic aid that can be skimmed, favorable trade deals, silence on his crimes, and so on). The achievement of nine votes becomes even more difficult if any democracies abstain. Thus, Saddam Hussein, the bloody dictator of Iraq, could defy Security Council resolutions and kick out UN weapons inspectors at no cost. Finally, with Resolution 1441, the fourteenth resolution of the Security Council against Iraq, Hussein defiance posed too great a perceived danger to wait any longer and the United States led a successful military coalition against him.

On human rights, on stopping democide, especially that called genocide, and as we have seen, on peacekeeping — the peacekeeping that was the post-World War II hope of humanity — has failed. But, some would say, the UN has many functions, and surely some of its other agencies, like UNICEF and WHO provide nations with important aid and services, advancing the cause of welfare, health, development, and so forth. I will deal with this in another blog.

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Link of Note

Report of the panel on UNITED NATIONS Peace Operations (August 2000)

This is the so-called Brahimi Report (named after the Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi who chaired the panel) on UN peace operations.

The United Nations was founded, in the words of its Charter, in order “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Meeting this challenge is the most important function of the Organization, and, to a very significant degree, the yardstick by which it is judged by the peoples it exists to serve. Over the last decade, the United Nations has repeatedly failed to meet the challenge; and it can do no better today. Without significant institutional change, increased financial support, and renewed commitment on the part of Member States, the United Nations will not be capable of executing the critical peacekeeping and peace-building tasks that the Member States assign it in coming months and years.

The UN and Democide

[first published March 2, 2005] Cheers were loud and hopeful when the United Nations passed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Here was the world body of practically all sovereign countries agreeing that genocide was a crime against humanity, and that its perpetrators should be tried and punished. Thereafter, the Convention was ignored for almost five decades.

Finally, the UN has taken action against genocide, as well as crimes against humanity, although sometimes half-heartedly. It has set up tribunals to try perpetrators of the genocides in Rwanda and Yugoslavia (Bosnia), has agreed with Cambodia on setting up a joint tribunal to try those Khmer Rouge responsible for murdering millions of Cambodians, and has negotiated with Sierra Leone a Special Court to try perpetrators of crimes against humanity during its ten-year civil war.

Such tribunals or courts are one reason the UN’s record is not entirely negative. But, and this is a very crucial but, the UN has ignored or paid nominal attention to the mass murders by most other thugs, such as those who rule Burma, Iran, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea. Although with the murderers still in power a formal Tribunal may be impossible or impractical in these cases, at least they could be thoroughly investigated in the light of some of its own reports, and sanctions taken against them.

One of the most telling cases is the mass murders, and government created famine in North Korea. The country is one vast prison in which hundreds of thousands have been murdered in the last decade, and possibly three million have been starved to death. With regard to the ruling thugs responsible, and Kim Jong Il, the chief thug among them, the UN is like the three monkeys that see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

Similarly with the Taliban of Afghanistan, who when they controlled the country were systematically murdering their own people, repressing all their human rights, and enslaving (this is not hyperbole—the proper word is enslaving) all woman. The UN sat on its hands despite the written reports it received from its officials in the country pointing out that the murders were ordered or approved by Mullah Omar, the Taliban ruler. Just consider the Taliban murder of 178 people in the Yakaolang district of north-central Afghanistan, where UN officials had evidence that Omar was in contact with the Taliban troops doing the democide. One UN official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, exclaimed that, “These are the same type of war crimes as were committed in Bosnia and should be prosecuted in international courts.” Out of frustration that the UN was doing nothing to stop the Taliban, staff members leaked their reports to the public.

Then, consider Rwanda, in which during four months of 1994 about 800,000 people were murdered in a systematic genocide organized by the Hutu government, and carried out against the Tutsi minority by its troops, police, and specially trained death squads. In 1999, an independent report, commissioned by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and headed by former Swedish Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson, condemned the UN’s reluctance to accept evidence of genocide, and reluctance to act once the genocide was undeniable.

Perhaps the most famous case, although the genocide involved a much lower number of murdered–around 8,000 Muslim men and boys–was in Srebrenica, Bosnia, during the Bosnian war of 1995. Another UN commissioned report on this asserted that the UN peacekeepers stood by while Serb troops massacred those to whom the UN had promised protection. The UN had refused to reinforce their peacekeepers with enough troops, and even then severely restricted the action of those that were there.

Presently, there are a civil war and mass murders in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And again, UN peacekeepers are under armed, under manned, and over restricted by rules of engagement. Some three million Congolese have been killed so far, but all UN peacekeepers have done is stand by and watch them being murdered. In response, the UN Security Council voted to deploy an additional French led 1,400 soldiers to Bunia, the capital. But, their mandate was temporarily confined to Bunia–they could not leave it to protect refugees in neighboring areas where most of the killing was taking place. As this killing escalated, the UN deployed a new force of 3,000 Pakistani and Bangladesh troops with permission to prevent killing and violence across the whole Ituri region–3,000 UN peacekeepers across a region over twice the size of Albania.

There is also Russia’s Moslem Chechnya in which Russian troops and agents have carried out a campaign of democide, torture, and war crimes. In 2000 and 2001, the Human Rights Commission noted Russian abuses there and asked that the Russian government investigate them, and cooperate with UN human rights monitors. At no cost to itself from the UN, Russia has ignored these resolutions and in 2003, a similar resolution failed to get enough votes.

Then there was Saddam Hussein’s mass murder, those of Iran’s Ayatollahs, the terrorist genocide bombing of Israeli Jews, and further back in time, Stalin’s post World War II murders, those of the new communist thug regimes of Eastern Europe, and then Mao Tse-tung’s massive extermination of “land lords,” “antirevolutionaries,” and “rightists,” . . . Enough. Why beat a dead horse? Simply, the thugs in the UN usually have had their way on this, as with so many other political questions. Millions, tens of millions, have thus been murdered SINCE THE UN WAS CREATED. But, for virtually all these poor souls, it was as though no UN existed.

Too sad.

However, international relations are undergoing a revolutionary change that is silently preventing democide regardless of the UN. In jumps and leaps, this is the buildup of democracies, which now amount to about 121, with about 89 of them liberal democracies. As this number has grown, violence in international relations and democide has sharply declined. More on this at another time.

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Link of Note

”DEMOCIDE SINCE
WORLD WAR II” (5/98) By R.J. Rummel

In this article, I point out that since 1945, when the UN was created, and up to the end of the century, about 80,000,000 people have been murdered in cold blood by one regime or another, around thirteen times the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust . Most of this democide has been done for political reasons (reasons of state or power), but also much of it has been outright genocide (the killing of people by virtue of their ethnicity, race, religion, or nationality. About 87 percent of these murders were done by communist regimes—it was death by Marxism (see my commentary on this here).

Tyrants Several Times Deadlier Than Natural Disasters

[First published December 6, 2005] Have you noticed how disasters will dominate the headlines and mobilize the world to rush aid to the region or country involved, and help search for survivors? We’ve all see the moving videos — the bodies pulled from wreckage of hurricanes, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tornadoes, the destroyed homes and rubble everywhere. Then in hours come the headlines, “Death toll in quake feared to be 10,000,” “Village leveled by volcanic blast — 2000 dead,” or “Tsunami killed 2,500.”

These headlines are soon followed by, “Aid rushed in . . . ,” “U.S. planes carry . . . ,” or “UN Annan inspects . . . .” Surely, such headlines should invoke memories, for they have deluged us all. I do not wish to make light of such disasters or the plight of the victims. Our heats go out to them. I just want to draw an incredible comparison to the democide, which goes on and on without headlines or aid or intervention, as in North Korea, Sudan, Burma, the two Congos, Angola, and so on.

In the last century, 56,679,764 people died in disasters, totaled for those killing more than 10,000 people. The list is here, and includes the 5,000,000 Ukrainians that Stalin purposely starved to death 1932-1933. I arrived at the above 56,679,764 figure by subtracting the 5,000,000 Ukrainians from the list total. Oddly, the world’s worst famine created by Mao in China, 1958-1962, is not listed as a disaster.

There is also another list of the “Death Toll from Disasters, War & Accidents, which comes to 99,000,000 for disasters alone. I suspect that it includes Stalin’s and Mao’s democidal famines, the latter listed in a different table on the same page as 30,000,000. So, I will take the total in the above paragraph and estimate that when the dead for disasters less than 10,000 are added, the disaster toll for the last century is 60,000,000 dead.

That is an indigestible number. It is as though virtually every living human being in France, or Britain, or everyone in Italy or South Korea were wiped out. If the average height of these dead were five feet, the bodies lined up head to toe would span 56,818 miles. The circumference of the earth is 24,855 miles. So, the 60,000,000 dead from disasters would circle the earth head to toe 2.3 times! Wow, what a lot of bodies.

Of course, you know where I’m going with this. The total murdered in all communist countries alone was 148,000,000, or 2.5 times those killed in disasters. For all countries, the world total is 212,000,000 murdered in the last century — 3.5 times all of the century’s disasters. Since almost all these murders were by dictators, I can say this.

Dictatorships are human made disasters many times more deadly than nature’s. Dictatorships are not simply disasters, they are human catastrophes. Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

It should be a crime against humanity for any dictatorship to exist.

Spread the word and help freedom ring.

Treason Is Treason

[First published January 19, 2005] One of the most outrageous revelations of sensitive American secrets in the war on terror has been published. It is Seymour M. Hersh’s “The Coming Wars,” appearing in The New Yorker (1/17/2005 link here).

I’m for maximum disclosure of military and intelligence operations, as long as it does not provide important secrets to the enemy. In other words, openness stops where aiding the enemy begins.

In Hersh’s article, we have a case of providing not only secrets to the enemy, the Iranian ruling thugs in this case, but such information as to ongoing commando operations that will help the thugs locate and prevent these secret operations against their nuclear weapons development inside Iran. Even lives are at stake.

A few quotes from Hersh:

“The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer.”

“ . . . an American commando task force has been set up in South Asia and is now working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists and technicians who had dealt with Iranian counterparts.”

“The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.”

“Rumsfeld planned and lobbied for more than two years before getting Presidential authority, in a series of findings and executive orders, to use military commandos for covert operations. One of his first steps was bureaucratic: to shift control of a undercover unit, known then as the Gray Fox (it has recently been given a new code name), from the Army to the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), in Tampa. Gray Fox was formally assigned to SOCOM in July, 2002, at the instigation of Rumsfeld’s office, which meant that the undercover unit would have a single commander for administration and operational deployment.”

“U.S. military operatives would be permitted to pose abroad as corrupt foreign businessmen seeking to buy contraband items that could be used in nuclear-weapons systems. In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists.”

“ . . . a terrorist cell in Algeria was “rolled up” with American help. The adviser was referring, apparently, to the capture of Ammari Saifi, known as Abderrezak le Para, the head of a North African terrorist network affiliated with Al Qaeda.”

These are treasonous revelations. But, they won’t be dealt with in these terms by the Department of Justice. And, virtually nobody in power will have the political guts to call this treason treason.

Apparently, what is needed is a few more 9/11s for the major media to realize fully that we are at WAR. Reflect on what would have happened in 1943 if a journalist wrote and a magazine published secret information as to the purpose and place of ongoing commando raids into France prior to Normandy.
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Link of Note

”Espionage by any other name” (1/19/05) By Tony Blankley

Blankley writes, “I was shocked when I read Mr. Hersh’s article.”

He suggests that Hersh’s revelations might fall under the Espionage Act. But he refrains from even using the word “treason.” I’m not so restrained. By The Constitution of the United States, Art. III, treason against the United States consists only in levying war against us, or in adhering to our enemies, giving them aid or comfort. Hersh gave our enemies aid and comfort. With Hersh around, the Iranian thugs can save on their espionage costs.

Torture? Yes, Of Course

[First published May 26, 2005] Important human rights groups, such as Amnesty International (AI), and important opinion makers in the media and politics mark certain behavior as so wrong, so bad, with moral certainty and even vehemence, that no one dare question it for fear of social and political ostracism. Yes, even though the moral claim is not only morally wrongheaded, but . . . and I’m selecting my words carefully . . . stupid.

There has been much ado about the American incarceration of terrorists in Guantánamo, and their treatment under conditions that are claimed to amount to torture. One recent AI report is titled, “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
– Human Dignity Denied: Torture and accountability in the ‘war on terror’” (link here). It says:

The struggle against torture and ill-treatment by agents of the state requires absolute commitment and constant vigilance. It requires stringent adherence to safeguards. It demands a policy of zero tolerance. The US government has manifestly failed in this regard. At best, it set the conditions for torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by lowering safeguards and failing to respond adequately to allegations of abuse raised by Amnesty International and others from early in the “war on terror”. At worst, it has authorized interrogation techniques which flouted the country’s international obligation to reject torture and ill-treatment under any circumstances and at all times.

Note how absolutists this is. Torture is wrong always and at all times. This argument, wildly accepted and constantly reiterated is itself morally guestionable. I could describe any number of scenarios in which torture was legitimate:

1. A man has raped a 14 year old girl, sealed her in a box, and buried it. He is caught, confesses, and then realizing what he has done, withdraws the confession. And realizing that if the girl is uncovered alive, she will point a finger at him, he refuses to say where the girl is, even though probably still alive. Torture him to save the girl’s life and convict the criminal?

2.The FBI picks up terrorists in Washington, DC, who they know from undoubted technical and human sources, have hidden a suitcase nuclear weapon in the city. They deny everything, but sensitive radiological tests confirm they handled such a weapon. Torture them to find the bomb and save the city and hundreds of thousands of lives?

3. Leading terrorists are caught by American marines in Baghdad. Evidence on their computers and in their safe-house indicates that plans for massive car bombing of mosques and markets are underway. Torture them to stop the bombing and save the lives of innocent civilians that would assuredly die in the explosions?

If you answered no to all the above, then you are like the absolute pacifist who says no to even defending his democratic country against outright attack by a foreign tyrant, and thus contributes, no matter how small, to defeat, and were that to happen, to all the lives lost in the resulting occupation (leave aside the person’s willingness to stand aside and let others sacrifice themselves for his freedom). But if you answered yes to torture in one or more of the above, then you are a situational moralist on this issue, as I am.

Now, as for American torture of terrorists it captures. These are evil men to begin with who think nothing of cutting off the heads of prisoners, and exploding bombs in the midst of women and children. They are all mass murderers. Moreover, they violate all the clauses of the Geneva Conventions. They fight in civilian clothes, hide weapons in Mosques and schools, fight from the midst of civilians, and use ambulances to transport weapons and ammunition. They have thrown out centuries of diplomatic efforts and international treaties and conventions designed to limit war and protect civilians. They deserve no protection by the Geneva Conventions, which in any case does not cover them as POWs.

And, if one or more of them is captured by the American forces, and they have reason to suspect that the terrorists has information that may save American and or civilian lives, torture is legitimate. To do otherwise, is to say that the lives of innocent people and soldiers must be forfeit to avoid causing these terrorist pain. Even if the toll might be 50 or 100 men, women, and children murdered in a car bomb.

That’s a crazy morality. But it is the morality of AI and many such groups, and the morality that few are willing to speak out against.

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Link of Note

United States of American (Covering events from January – December 2004) In Amnesty International’s Report 2005

It says:

Hundreds of detainees continued to be held without charge or trial at the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Thousands of people were detained during US military and security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and routinely denied access to their families and lawyers.

Military investigations were initiated or conducted into allegations of torture and ill-treatment of detainees by US personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and into reports of deaths in custody and ill-treatment by US forces elsewhere in Iraq, and in Afghanistan and Guantánamo. Evidence came to light that the US administration had sanctioned interrogation techniques that violated the UN Convention against Torture. Pre-trial military commission hearings opened in Guantánamo but were suspended pending a US court ruling.

I’ve gone through this and other AI reports on American abuse of terrorist prisoners. What soon becomes clear it that (1) considerable credence is given to prisoner allegations, even though they are enemy terrorists of the United States, and it is known that they are told by their leaders that if captured they should claim abuse; (2) claims by the American military about their investigations and treatment of the prisoners is met with skepticism.

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The World’s Greatest Q and A

[First published February 27, 2005] I’ve been running a website on the democratic peace since 2001 (links in the sidebar) and over that time have collected tons of questions from visitors to my site about the democratic peace, war, democide, genocide, and so on. I have now collected and organized all the best questions and my answers in a way useful to those interested in the website and this blog. (link here)

I have also added the link and that for my democratic peace bibliography to the sidebar on the right.

The Q&A amounts to about 170 pages single-spaced in hard copy, which is too much for even the dedicated scholar to go through. So, I set up initial links to the topic headings, and from there, the visitor can use his eyeballs or the browser search engine to find something specific.

For example, on the topic “Democracy,” are linked the following Q&A subtopics: “DEMOCRACY: Democracy, Freedom, Alternative Types of Governments, Stability, Specific Governments, Nondemocracies.”

Examples of a few of the Q&As:

Q: What color is freedom to you? Why?
A: White. This is the mixture of all colors, as freedom is the mixture of different beliefs, faiths, and political parties. Its flag would have the primary colors at the edges, all merging with each other and toward a central white circle.

Q: When it comes to totalitarian regimes, how come you like to choose the figures that are on the high side, while you tend to downplay the butcher bill of democratic states?
A: Simply not true. As a study of my many tables would show, I give both highs and lows and then a conservative estimate. Usually this estimate is closer to the low than the high. Overall the democide in this century, my range is 76,543,000 to 359,348,000 murdered, with my much quoted prudent estimate being 169,187,000. Note how much closer to the low than the high this is. Now, as to playing down the “butcher bill” of democratic democide versus totalitarian regimes, your accusation is too general. What specific estimates are too low or too high?

Q: I hear that a Russian submarine sank a ship filled with German refugees fleeing from the East around 1944-45. It is said that many more lives were lost than in any ship sinking before or since. Is this true?
A: The ship was the Wilhelm Gustloff. I estimate 7,700 lives were lost compared to about 1,503 in the sinking of the Titanic.

Q: What shocked you the most about democide?
A: That the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and communist Vietnam, at least, would order their cadre to kill a certain number of people. They were given a quota of murders they had to reach.

Q: During the Cold War, did not the U.S. intervene in many countries, some democracies such as Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador, support death squads murdering rebels, and help behind the scenes mass murder, such as in Indonesia?
A: Even if true, none of the events you mention was a war. No collection or list of international wars would include them. They are therefore irrelevant to the proposition that democracies do not make war on each other, and cannot be used as evidence to disprove it. Now, dealing with the events, in each case there appeared to be a communist revolution/overthrow in the making. They should be looked at as part of the Cold War and the American attempt to contain communist expansionism, particularly in Central and South America.

Any problems with this Q&A, please let me know.

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Link of Note

“’Realists’ have it wrong” (1/31/05) Mark Steyn

The Afghan election worked so well that, there being insufficient bad news out of it, the Western media’s doom-mongers pretended it never happened. They’ll have a harder job doing that with Iraq, so instead they’ll have to play up every roadside bomb and every dead poll worker. But it won’t alter the basic reality: that the election may be imperfect but more than good enough.

The election was more than “good enough.” It surpassed the expectations of even the optimists.

The World’s Greatest Unknown Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing

click me^–>

[First published October 6, 2005] You virtually never read about it, nor do genocide scholars generally discuss it, or include it in their books. Yet, about 15,000,000 people were simultanously expelled from 5 countries because of their nationality, and probably around 1,800,000 died in the process or were murdered outright. Did this occur in Africa? No. Surely Asia, maybe China? No. Okay, the Midde East. Wrong again. Well, it had to be in the 17th or 18th Century. And that’s why we con’t know about it. Right? No.

It occurred in Eastern Europe 60 to 66 years ago with the defeat and retreat of the German Army. As Eastern Europe recovered from the Second World War and the occupying victorious Red Army assurred that their post-war governments would be communist and Soviet controlled, ehtnic Germans, most of whom had settled in Eastern Europe well before the war, and Germans who had taken up residence there during the German occupation, were systematically expelled to East and West Germany. True, some may have worked for or supported the German occupation. True, some may have been traitors to their native Hungary, Czechoslavia, Rumania, Yugoslavai, and Poland. However, many of them rereated with the German Army. In any case, whether bemedaled by their native country for previous military service, opposed to Hitler and the occupation, whether having live in the country for generations, they were deported or murdered.

Age or loyalty to their country of birth did not matter. The old and the young, the babies and the crippiled were all expelled into the economic, choatic, defeated, starving, and destroyed Germany, approximately 15,000,000 of them.

The most reprehensible expulsions were about 8,000,000 from the Eastern Terrirories, including German East Prussia, Eastern Pomerania, Eastern Brandeburg, and Silesia. These were part of the German homeland. But, the Soviets took a chunk of the eastern part of Poland, and in compensation gave Poland these Eastern Territories as agreed to at the Yalta Conference. Being part of Germany, they were of course populated by German citizens, over 7,100,000 of them. All were expelled, while 1,400 died from maltreatment (they were systematically denied food), or murdered.

The table below provides the estimate of etthnic or Reich Germans expelled from each Eastern European country and the parallel genocide (genocide is one kind of democide).

See my Statistics of Democide, Table 7.1 for the sources, calculations, and estimates (here).

What about the ethnic Germans living in the Soviet Union? During the war Stalin deported over 1,000,000 of them to the barren wastes of Siberia and Northern Kazakstan. About one out of five died during the deportation or immediaitely there after. In this case, however, Stalin’s ethnic cleansing was nondiscrimantory. He also deported (cleansed) the Crimean Tartars, Georgian Meskhetians, Greeks, and Ukrainians. Overall, the death toll was about 750,000. (see here, from my book Lethal Politics) This was genocide, but you don’t hear about this either.

Links Of The Day

“THE EXPULSION OF GERMANS” By Dr. Alfred de Zayas

When I was a student of history at Harvard back in 1970, I knew nothing at all about the Expulsion of Germans. None of my history professors considered this event sufficiently notable to mention it, much less to assign a research paper on it. It was curiously not in history class, but in a seminar on Law of War that I first heard about the Expulsion. . . .

Now, when I first approached the subject matter, I thought naively enough that it was a legitimate field of research, like any other. But I soon learned that it was no accident that there was nearly nothing written in English on the theme — it was taboo, it was not chic, it was not fashionable to do research or to publish in this field.

After all, Germans were looked at in a rather monolithic fashion as all Nazis, and not deserving any degree of human sympathy. As citizens of the “evil empire” they were morally disqualified “ad illicio.”

When I read this kind of thing about any genocide, I think of the babies and children who could have nothing to do with any evil doers, but were murdered simply because they shared their nationality, ethnicity, religion, or race.

White House Outline of Bush’s speech before the National Endowment for Democracy (Oct. 6, 2005)

This was an excellent war speech and well done in stessing the necessary elements.

Tidbits from the speech:

This Extremism [the jihadist terrrorists] Cannot Be Given Concessions, Bribed, Or Appeased. We Must Never Accept Anything Less Than Victory”

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our century. Yet, in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century. [RJR: Yes, and the leftist opposition to the war in Iraq is like their anti-anti-communism of the past]
The stategy to win:

Prevent terrorist attacks before they occur
Deny weapons of mass destruction to outlaw regimes and their terrorist allies
Deny radical groups the support and sanctuary of outlaw regimes
Deny the militants control of any nation
Deny the militants future recruits by advancing democracy and hope across the broader middle east

And, by standing for the hope and freedom of others, we will make our own freedom more secure.

Links I Must Share

“1918 killer flu ‘came from birds’”:

The Spanish flu virus that killed 50 million people in 1918-19 was probably a strain that originated in birds, research has shown.

The informed speculation was that the virus first infected pigs in Kansas, and then mutated to infect humans. Because of the overcrowded conditions of military camps during WWI, and the continuous deployment of many soldiers overseas, the virus spread rapidly around the world. The toll may have been twice the 50,000,000, since many deaths occurred in remote areas of such countries as India.

“US Looking Sideways: Bird Flu” Senate Majority Leader William H. Frist, M.D. gave a speech on bird flu and said:

“. . . we will not be able to sleep through what is likely coming soon — a front of unchecked and virulent epidemics, the potential of which should rise above your every other concern. For what the world now faces, it has not seen even in the most harrowing episodes of the Middle Ages or the great wars of the last century.



We are unprepared for rampant epidemics. And even worse, we haven’t taken sufficient note of the fact that though individually each might be devastating, they are susceptible of either purposeful or accidental combination, in which case they could be devastating almost beyond imagination.

“Senate supports setting interrogation limits”

The Senate defied the White House yesterday by voting to set new limits on interrogating detainees in Iraq and elsewhere, underscoring Congress’s growing concerns about reports of abuse of suspected terrorists and others in military custody.

If the House approves and Bush signs it, the limits will only last until the next 9/11 type attack on the U.S. If it is believed that a captured terrorist has information that will save hundreds of American lives, if not thousands. Then the law will be breached, and rightly so.

Books/articles/statistics

The Wisdom of the Demos

[First published January 2, 2006] James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowd (2004) argues that if groups are diverse in membership and their members are independent, then the collective wisdom of the group is often better than that of even the brightest, best informed members. However, there has to be some way of aggregating and organizing the wisdom of the members to arrive at the wisdom of the group.

For example, consider the question as to how many beans (marbles, pennies, etc.) there are in a jar. Now, if each member of large and diverse group independently makes a guess, and then all the guesses are averaged, the average will almost always be closer to the actual number than any one guess. Surowiecki provides many other examples, some real world, such as how the free market illustrates the wisdom of the group (nation). He arrives at the underused concept that I employ for the working of a free market and a democracy, which is Hayek’s idea of a spontaneous society.

Surowiecki concludes his book on democracy, on which he says that democracy:

is not a way of solving cognition problems or a mechanism for revealing the public interest. But it is a way of dealing with (if not solving once and for all) the most fundamental problems of cooperation and coordination: How do we live together? How can living together work to our mutual benefit? Democracy helps people answer those questions because the democratic experience is an experience of not getting everything you want. It’s an experience of seeing your opponents win and get what you hoped to have, and of accepting it, because you believe that they will not destroy the things you value and because you know you will have another chance to get what you want. In that sense, a healthy democracy inculcates the virtues of compromise — which is, after all, the foundation of the social contract — and change. The decisions that democracies make may not demonstrate the wisdom of the crowd. The decision to make them democratically does.

And thus, democracy is a method of nonviolence

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A problem with changing one’s mind in public from X to -X, is that it takes a long time for the public to recognize -X, and then one is stuck with saying, “Oh, I no longer agree with myself then.” Thus, regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anonymous posted a comment yesterday that I should answer now before it confuses visitors. Anonymous says:

With all due respect: Your arguments seem a bit weak and a bit other-wordly.

1) Real people in the real world have to make judgment calls. Your pretending that the millions of lives saved by dropping the bomb – most of them Japanese civilians who would have been killed in the invasion or in continued fire bombings – were speculative and therefore you seem to disregard them altogether. But any real person in a position of real authority would have had to make an estimate of what the costs would have been. They really are not speculative. Based on all the available evidence, it would have been a long, drawn out bloodbath.

2. Your pretending that “maybe Japan would have just surrendered without a large invasion” is a leap into the realm of let’s pretend; maybe such and such could have happened; – but you refused to do any speculating in Issue number 1, above. Not fair.

3. Acoording to Victor Davis Hanson, the Chinese were dying at a phenomenal rate because of continued Japanese occupation. If I recall correctly, they were dying at the rate of 250,000 per month. And the Japanese probably killed about 15 million total. It is difficult to gather much sympathy for a population that supported that kind of slaughter. Plus, your position that they were all brainwashed automatons doesn’t work – they never heard from the soldiers who came home what was happening? And if you insist on the point, are you willing to grant the same to the German population that allowed the extermination of the Jews? Are they totally innocent as well?

4. The very sad part of this is that people who take your position seem to have unlimited sympathy for Japanese children, while speaking not one word about the truly innocent Chinese, Burmese, Vietnamese, Korean, etc. children who were starved to death by the Japanese, used in experiments or just plain murdered. They continued to die every day the war went on. The critical thing about the war was that it be ended as soon as possible.

War is hell. But when an A-bomb saves millions of lives by finally shattering the Japanese war machine it was a very, very good thing. It was the Japanese who put us in a very bad position. They made it very clear they would go on killing Americans and everyone else in their grasp for as long as they could – only American might saved them from becoming one of the most brutal empires ever known.

How odd that it took 60 years – and the deaths of most of the generation who were alive at the time and who actually witnessed these events – for the brave academy to come out in opposition to the dropping of the bomb. And by selectively looking at the conflict from the side of the country that started the entire bloodbath.

RJR: I agree with all that Anonymous says, leaving aside some of the wording. The problem is that Anonymous must have been reading my earlier post, “Hiroshima-Nagasaki was Democide,” where I made the assertions to which Anonymous is apparently responding. He must have missed my reluctant change of mind to accept the bombing in my “Rethinking Hiroshima and Nagasaki”, and especially, my complete acceptance of the bombing, for many of the reasons Anonymous mentions, in “A Just Democide Doctrine?”

While agreeing with Anonymous, I want to be sure that everyone who reads this understands that what is implicitly involved here is a “Just Democide Doctrine. This is to say that under certain conditions, we are faced with the ugly choice of murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians as the lesser of two evils. I want this upfront and faced directly, for it is taken as a moral absolute that one does not commit genocide or democide.

Facing this virtually indigestible moral dilemma even further underlines and capitalizes the moral good of democracy. For as democratic freedom is universalized, then the wars in which such awful choices have to be made will never inflict humanity again.

The Ugly Reality of Democide — a photo

[First published November 3, 2005]I have collected on my website a number of democide photos (here). Words do not well communicate a feel for what democide means. Pictures help express the horror of helpless lives stolen forever by some government or military butcher. Some of these photos are sickening and I don’t suggest looking at them unless you have a strong stomach. I recently came across a photo somewhere on the Taiwanese site here (I didn’t record the specific directory on the site) that is the most sickening of all.

To see it, click the tiny image below. But, don’t do so unless you have a strong stomach and don’t want to be haunted by the picture. It was a Japanese atrocity somewhere in China during the Sino-Japanese War. Perhaps, it was taken during the Rape of Nanking, but no matter. What happened there happened throughout China when the Japanese Army captured a city or town.

I think we all have an obligation to such poor souls to reveal their murder in its full horror. Maybe then, when the awful meaning of such democide for a life is seen we can recognize the true gist of such abstractions as militarism, fascism, communism, absolutism, tyranny, and jihad.

Pray tell, my brother,
Why do dictators kill
and make war?
Is it for glory; for things,
for beliefs, for hatred,
for power?
Yes, but more,
because they can.

The Shawl

[A docudrama of the Holocaust first published on May 18, 2005] As a member of Lübeck’s Reserve Police Battalion 17, I was ordered to prepare for an assignment in Poland. I was told that we had an important mission there for the Fatherland, that we’d be involved in the final solution of the Jewish problem. Our battalion of 314 men was split up into companies and trucked separately to different camps.
When members of my undersized Third Company reached their temporary barracks, a converted brick dairy barn near the Polish town of Plock, we were ordered outside to listen as Oberleutnant Hans Schaefer gave us an orientational speech.
Standing stiffly, the heels of his boots touching each other, his officer’s cap square on his head, Schaefer began in a loud monotone, “Congratulations on being chosen for the work you are about to do, and welcome to Plock. You are here in the service of the Third Reich and the Fuehrer. It would take too many soldiers from the front lines to do this glorious work, and so you policemen are to replace them.
“Now, Jews from Plock will be collected from their homes at daybreak tomorrow and trucked to a field about a mile from here. You will be taken to the field after breakfast and calisthenics. There, you will take the Jews one by one into the adjacent woods, make them lie down on their stomachs, and shoot each in the back of the head.”
The oberleutnant abruptly stopped and looked at us, as though expecting a sudden outcry. Hearing none, he resumed, his voice taking on a sermon-like tone. “I know that this will be hard; I know that you may see these people as human beings. But, they are not. They are . . . ” Suddenly changing tone, he spit, “Vermin, cockroaches!” He punctuated the words by violently swinging one fist into his other hand. “And you are pest exterminators. You will be cleansing not only Germany of their filth, but the world.” Another beat of his fist accompanied the last word.
He settled himself, and put both hands behind him. His boots had not moved a millimeter so far. Again he spoke, “I recognize the personal strain this will place on each of you, however. You have been trained as policemen, to protect and save lives. Only those of us who are privileged to participate in this work will ever know what this will cost you emotionally, but that is your challenge and your heroism.”
He paused and scanned our faces. “If you cannot do this work, if you are psychologically or emotionally unable to, then you may stay here, cleaning the barracks and helping the cooks, until we are finished. Nothing will be done to you. There will be no mark on your record.
“Now, Doctor Alfred Helmut will show you how to carry out your task.”
The doctor had been standing nonchalantly off to the side with a large pad and a portable painter’s easel, which he now carried to the front of our group and set up. He put the pad on the easel. On the front page he had drawn an outline of the back of a human torso and head. He took a red crayon from his pocket and drew a small circle to indicate the precise point on the back of the head where a bullet would kill a person immediately. Then he took out a blue crayon and drew a rough picture of the barrel of a rifle with its bayonet attached.
He stood back to look at his drawing critically, and after a moment he nodded at it. He then partly turned to us, pointed with one unwavering finger to where the bayonet was pointed in the drawing, and announced, as though declaring the winner of a lottery, “Here!” He jabbed his finger closer to the spot. “Here you must aim the point of your bayonet. Then you can sight along it for the perfect shot into the back of the head.”
Looking self-satisfied, the doctor stood beside his pad, looked at us, and waited for questions.
When none came, the oberleutnant asked, “Are there any questions?”
Some of the policemen stared at the ground; others into the distance. Metal clanked on metal as one policeman shifted his position. Nearby tree branches rustled in the pleasant northern breeze.
“Okay, you men know what to do for the Fatherland.” The oberleutnant put his hands behind him again, and nodded to Unteroffizier—Sergeant—Rudolph Hermann.
Hermann saluted the oberleutnant and immediately ordered, “Dismissed.”
All of us were quiet as we headed into the dank barracks and found our bunks. I felt nauseous and my head ached from anxiety. I sat on my bunk with my head in my hands. My skin felt flushed. I could feel my heart beating rapidly. I can’t do this, I thought. But I must. If I don’t, they will all think I’m a coward. A Jew-lover. God in Heaven, what can I do?
There were a few idle conversations going on, but most of the men ignored each other and avoided meeting anyone’s eyes. There was none of the usual banter.
I pulled a newspaper I’d brought from home out of my pack, stretched out on my bunk, crinkled the paper more than necessary just for the distracting sound, and pretended to read. Tomorrow I will be murdering Jews, I thought in disbelief. The Nazis say they are vermin, cockroaches, and subhumans. Even so, why kill them? Why not force them out of Poland or wherever they are? Send them to Africa or somewhere like that. Or put them in ghettos. From what I’ve seen, they prefer to live together anyway. But, to kill women and children?
I didn’t get to sleep until it was almost light. By then I had convinced myself that I could do it.
Early morning crawled by in a haze. Roll call, calisthenics, breakfast, and a few mumbled exchanges with the others. Then we received extra ammunition and clambered onto the trucks for the bumpy ride to the field outside of Plock.
I peered out the back of the truck as it slowed. There they were in the bright morning sun—the Jews. A few old men, old women, young women with children and babies. The last of the trucks that had brought them were just exiting the field by another road in a haze of exhaust fumes.
I gripped my rifle and got out of the truck with the other fully uniformed, helmeted policemen. Ukrainian Auxiliary Police guards around the Polish Jews began to organize them into ten columns, with about five feet between each. The Jews behaved as though they were at some civil function. They obeyed quietly. There were no screams. The only yelling came from the guards. Only the children were noisy, sometimes trying to talk to their mothers or to each other. Some of the babies cried.
The policemen lined up in front of Oberleutnant Schaefer, who stood now with his chest thrust out and, as usual, with the heels of his well-shined boots together and his officer’s cap squarely on this head. He held a typed page of instructions in one hand. Like the others, I stared at the oberleutnant as though only he existed, even ignoring the Unteroffizier, who stood beside him. Nobody looked at the Jews.
“First, are there any of you who cannot do this?” Oberleutnant Schaefer asked. He waited a few moments.
I heard the trucks that had brought us driving off in their own cloud of fumes.
“Okay,” Schaefer continued, “here is the way we will do this.” He paused to consult his instructions, and then barked, “There are twenty of you, so count off beginning on my left.” He pointed at the first man.
We counted off to twenty.
“Now,” said the oberleutnant, “those numbered eleven to twenty form a second line, eleven behind the first man, twelve behind the second, and so on. Go!”
When our two lines had formed and we stood awaiting further instructions, the oberleutnant glanced at his instruction sheet again, then said, “The men numbered one and eleven will take Jews from the first column on my left.” He turned, swung out his arm, and pointed to the appropriate column. “Men numbered two and twelve will take Jews from the next column, and so on. Keep the mothers and their children and babies together. Once you deal with the mother, the children will present no problem.
“You will take your Jews into the woods, down that path behind you. Unteroffizier Hermann will be along the path. He will point to the area in the woods where you are to take your Jew. Once you are assigned an area, pick your spot and do your work. When you are finished, come back out and pick the next Jew from the same column. Any questions?”
One of the policemen put up his hand, and when the oberleutnant looked sharply at him, he asked, “W-what will happen to the bodies?”
The oberleutnant looked confused for a moment. He looked at his instructions.
A baby somewhere among the Jews started crying loudly. I heard its mother trying to hush and comfort it. I couldn’t look away from the oberleutnant.
He finally said, “There is a small concentration camp a short distance from here. A Jew work crew will be marched here from the camp. They will dig a pit, drag all the bodies from the woods into it, and close it up. More questions?” He scanned the policemen ranked before him. “No? Then for the Fatherland, do your duty.”

***

Third in the first row, I moved stiffly toward a woman in the third column. She was perhaps in her middle thirties, with curly black hair that stuck out from her head and fell in a tangle to a shawl around her shoulders. She wore a shapeless blue dress, beneath which showed what might have been her slip. She appeared to have been suddenly roused from her sleep and forced to dress hurriedly. She was pleasant looking, with a square face, high forehead, and small eyes.
I grabbed her arm and said, “Gekommen—Come.” I pulled her toward the woods. She looked up at me with an entirely blank face and walked with me toward the path.
I couldn’t believe this was happening. This woman was so willing to go with me. She must be afraid. She must fear death. Is it that she doesn’t know? Maybe she thinks I’m just going to rape her, I thought. I was shaking. Could she feel it through my hand on her arm?
We reached Unteroffizier Hermann, who pointed to a patch of grass well into the woods on the right.
I heard the first rifle shot when we reached the assigned spot. It startled me. I heard another shot as I pointed to a small grassy area between a bush of white flowers and a tree. My hand now visibly trembled. I gestured for her to lie down. She lay down on her back. I motioned for her to turn over.
When she did, all I could see of her head was her black hair. At that moment, I heard somebody nearby. I looked to the left and saw a girl stretched out on her stomach. One of my fellow policemen had his rifle’s bayonet pointed at the back of her head. The scene seemed frozen in time, a still picture. It will be in my mind always. No day goes by that the image doesn’t appear to me, sometimes when I get up in the morning; sometimes before bed; sometimes in my nightmares. Even while I’m trying to make love it will flash into my mind, which immediately destroys all passion.
Then the rifle jerked just as I heard the shot, and blood and brain tissue splattered from the girl’s head.
I looked back at the woman on the ground in front of me. I already had my rifle’s bayonet pointed at her head and she still had not made a sound. I stood there for minutes, unable to move, unable to pull the trigger, barely able to breathe. When I did, I smelled gunpowder on the breeze, and something else I hadn’t smelled before. Maybe it was the smell of death, emanating from its executioners and their victims.
I heard more shots, but still I could not pull the trigger.
Finally, I patted her shoulder. She turned her head and looked up at me with empty eyes. I think she was already dead, but for the physical act. I collapsed next to her, pulled her into my arms, and cried, rocking my whole body. My tears seemed pulled from deep inside me, from my soul.
At first, the woman just hung in my arms as though also physically dead. Then she slowly put her arms around my shoulders and held me as well, without a sound, with no tears of her own. She pushed away after a couple of minutes, looked at the tears in my eyes, and for a brief moment her eyes came alive. In one quick motion of her hand, she removed her shawl. She wiped my tears away with it, and then shoved it inside my coat.
I heard another shot nearby. Neuberger, a fellow policeman, came over and grabbed my sleeve and shook it. He hissed, “What are you doing, Schmidt?”
I gently released the woman and she turned to lay back on her stomach. I got up in a daze. Without looking at Neuberger, holding the rifle listlessly in one hand, I plodded away, heading back to the field.
I heard a shot behind me as I passed by Unteroffizier Hermann.
I saw Oberleutnant Schaefer chatting with an officer of the auxiliary guard company that had brought the Jews to the field. They watched the progress of the cleansing operation while they spoke. I approached the oberleutnant, saluted, weakly apologized for interrupting him, and asked, “May I be excused, sir? I don’t feel well.”
The other officer looked away. Oberleutnant Schaefer gave me a steely look for what seemed like minutes, and finally ordered in a cold voice, “Stand at attention here until we’re all done with our work.”
The other policemen stared at me as each emerged from the woods to get another Jew. Shots from the woods were almost continuous, some muffled, some sharp. The light breeze carried the gun smoke into the field, and with it again the hint of death. Everything went as smoothly as it did for a Berlin speech by Hitler. There were no voices, no screams, no yells. It was like a silent movie with the offstage piano music replaced by staccato rifle shots.
After a while there were no more Jews left in the field, and our trucks returned and parked near me. With a sharp motion of his hand, the oberleutnant released me to join the others as they clambered into the trucks. No one spoke with me as we returned; no one looked at me. In the barracks, no one came near me. I just lay on my bunk staring at the ceiling, the image of the girl I had seen shot mixed in my mind with that of the woman who wiped away my tears.
An orderly came in, silently strode up to me, and gave me several papers. One was an order for me to be trucked to the local train station, another was an order for my passage to Lübeck, and the third was my pass. I was to depart within the hour.
Back home, I was reassigned to a police battalion largely made up of old and middle-aged men exempt from “exterminating vermin,” and from the front lines. I never got a promotion, of course. Word went around that I was unpatriotic, so many of the townspeople shunned my family.
I survived the war, saved all the money I could, and with my police contacts, played the black market for American dollars.
Four years after that day in the woods near Plock, I calmly walked into the law office of former Oberleutnant Hans Schaefer. Without a word to his secretary, I opened the door to his inner office and approached the astonished Schaefer, just as I had approached him in that unforgettable field, years ago. He was sitting at his huge mahogany desk, eyebrows arched, small eyes round and staring, his thin lips slightly parted, surprised by the unannounced intrusion. On seeing me, he put both hands palm down on top of his desk as though about to push his corpulent body up.
Before he could rise fully, I strode quickly behind him, jerked his head back, and sliced into his throat with my old bayonet. Blood spurted.
I pulled the still gasping Schaefer onto the floor. When he was finally still, I rolled his body face up. From my pocket, I pulled the shawl I had carried with me since that murdered Jewish woman had given it to me. I draped it over Schaefer’s open, unseeing eyes.

The Moral Argument for Killing Another

[First published December 19, 2005] There is much to be outraged about, such as The New York Times divulging state secrets that aid our enemies, the left wing control over our universities and schools, the continuing genocide in Darfur, the starving children in the nation-wide concentration camp that is North Korea, or the Holocaust denial by the President of Iran. But what struck a particular nerve for me today is the European refusal to provide any aid to the Iraqi trail of Saddam Hussein because its judges will, as night will turn into day, sentence him to execution.

First, note that president Bush has said, “I think he ought to receive the ultimate penalty … for what he has done to his people . . . . I mean, he is a torturer, a murderer, they had rape rooms. This is a disgusting tyrant who deserves justice, the ultimate justice.”

However, Our European allies had this to say (from “Bush: Saddam should pay ‘ultimate penalty’ for crimes; at odds with anti-death penalty Europe”:

Britain’s top representative in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, said his country would not participate in a tribunal or legal process that could lead to execution. . . .

Diego Ojeda, EU spokesman on external relations, wouldn’t comment specifically on Saddam, but said, “We believe there are no circumstances that can justify the death pen