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 So, I created this new Democratic Peace blog with Word Press to selectively post my old blogs that are not out of date.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 penalty.”

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who supported the U.S.-led war, also emphasized his country’s opposition to the death penalty. . . .

Of course, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had to relieve himself. He said that the world body (read thugsville) would not support bringing Saddam before a tribunal that might sentence him to death.

Then there is the Vatican’s Cardinal Renato Martino, who stressed the Roman Catholic Church’s longtime opposition to capital punishment. He said he felt “compassion” for Saddam, despite his crimes, after seeing images of “this destroyed man” being “treated like a cow, having his teeth checked” by an American military medic.

Martino must have had tears in his eyes when he said that.

How can we ever justify executing a man? Here one must be careful about the words used, for they can hide and mislead. We have to understand that an execution is the killing of a man or women — the taking of a human life, the most prized possession that any of us have. It is irrevocable, the end of all a person’s dreams, hopes, memories, accumulated wisdom, skills, and love. It is a human soul lost to eternity. Forever. How can we justify this killing?

First assume that the execution follows a fair trial with right of appeal, and that there can be no doubt about the guilt of the accused. That said, in contemporary debates over such executions, its justification is usually based on some utilitarian calculus. One argument is that such executions deter criminals and thereby save more lives, and then out come the rape and murder statistics for states that have executions compared to those that do not. Then there is the argument that the person executed, if for murder, will never kill again. Then out come the stories of escaped or early released murderers killing some family or another. Such a utilitarian approach is irrelevant to what is to me a moral question. Does a murderer of another human being deserve to die?

And this is the question that should be asked of Saddam Hussein. The answer is as Bush said above. To put it in my words: he is evil incarnate. Evil! How else can one characterize the ruler of a killing machine that wiped out perhaps a million human beings in democide alone, and is responsible for launching wars against Iran and Kuwait that may have cost a million more lives. He deserves the death he inflicted on so many others. It is unbelievable and morally outrageous that Europeans should oppose his execution. Would they have done the same for Hitler, if captured? If the answer is yes, it only shows their moral corruption.

Frankly, I go further on this. How about burying him up to his neck and then giving a representative of each group he slaughtered one swipe on his neck with a blunt bamboo saw. Now, that would be justice.

What? That would demean us, lower us to his level, be barbaric? We should forgive and forget? Ha! Tell that to the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives of his victims.

The Red Plague

[First published May 1, 2005] I have put on my commentary page a much longer version of this article. A full version (minus the last two paragraphs) is also published at Catallarchy.net as a May Day Remembrance (turn off your block pop-ups option). What follows are its major points and statistics.

The bubonic plague that in 1347-1353 depopulated Europe has horrified historians and surely all those who have read about it. Death. Death everywhere. Cities and towns devastated. Whole families of several generations gone. About 25,000,000 people perished, at least.

Yet, we have had a different kind of plague in the last century, one over four times more deadly, and historians shy away from writing about it. Indeed, most contemporaries did not even know it was occurring, for the media and politicians that were not effected by it, tended to ignore it. It was a Red Plague. A plague of democide by communist governments.

The table below lists all communist governments that have committed any form of democide and gives their estimated low, mid-estimate (what I call the prudent estimate), and estimated high. It also shows the total for communist guerrillas, including quasi-governments, as of the Mao soviets in China prior to the communist victory in 1949.

As you can see, the total mid-estimate is about 110,286,000, an incredible total. It is around 65 percent of all democide over the same period, and is about three times greater than all the international and domestic war deaths, including the two world wars, Vietnam, Korea, and the Iran-Iraq War, to mention the bloodiest. This is the Red Plague driven by ideological fervor. The Black Plague, only carried by fleas from rats and not by ideology, killed a quarter of the number the communists murdered.

There is much to dwell on in the table, if your stomach is up to it, and I will only note the most incredible estimates. The Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all time, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these (I know you’ve read the toll as 20,000,000, but it was only for the 1930s and has been mistaken applied to Stalins full and bloody reign 1928-1953). Most of the Soviet deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto.

Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the Cultural Revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer (I excluded the great famine of 1959 to about 1961 as nondemocidal – it alone cost about 27,000,000 lives). Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito’s Yugoslavia.

Obviously, the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his henchmen likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot’s rule of slightly over 2 to 1.

Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment of all time. It failed utterly and in doing so it probably killed the number of men, women, and children, totaled in Table 1, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed. This is but one reason, but perhaps the most important one, for fostering democratic freedom and assuring a democratic peace.

Oh, yes, our academic and intellectual Marxists today are getting a free ride. They get a certain respect because of their words about improving the lot of the worker and the poor, their utopian pretensions. But when empowered, Marxism has failed utterly, as has fascism. Instead of with respect and tolerance, Marxists should be treated as though they wished a return of the Red Plague, which they do, passionately, blindly, innocently, or not, it would make no difference to the hundreds of millions that would be killed.

The next time you come across or are lectured by one of our indigenous Marxists, or almost the equivalent, leftist zealots, ask them how he can justify the murder of over a hundred million their absolutist faith has brought about, and the misery created for many hundreds of millions more.

The Holocaust Obsession

[First published May 12, 2005] To avoid any misunderstanding, I must say at the beginning that I stand with all those who absolutely condemn the Holocaust. It was one of the most despicable acts of evil in history. I have done much research on it, and have written on it in my book, Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (link here), and calculate that the number of Jews murdered, often gruesomely and painfully, amount to about 5,291,000.

That said, I think there is a gross distortion of history with the near total emphasis on Hitler and his Holocaust to the exclusion of genocide and mass murder by those whose murdering regimes rivaled the Holocaust, or killed even many more by an order of magnitude. With the number of their victims in parenthesis in millions, I have in mind Stalin (42.7) Mao (since 1928 = 37.8), Chiang Kai-shek (10.2), Lenin (4), and Tojo (4). Compare the memorial Museums built, the movies and TV programs shown, and the paragraphs written in textbooks on the Holocaust compared to what is written or shown about just the tens of milions murdered by the world’s deadliest killer of all time, Stalin.

And yet, in Russia they are now erecting statues in Stalin’s honor. And it has taken many years for those trying to get the funds and site permissions to built a modest memorial to the communist murder of about 110,000,000 people (about 21 times the Holocaust toll). So far, they have raised $300,000 of the $600,000 they see necessary. I can’t even guess at the huge sums appropriated or gifted for the many Holocaust museums and memorials.

Just to get some other measure of this incredible disparity, I used Google. Key words “Stalin (dead OR murder OR genocide OR democide OR killed)” = 989,000 links; Stalin = 1,868 links

“Hitler (dead OR Holocaust OR murder OR genocide OR democide OR killed)” = 1,260,000 links; “Holocaust” = 4,667.

Besides the disparity in treatment of democide across regimes and countries, even for Hitler’s mass murders the focus in on the Jews and few others. Counting the Holocaust, Hitler murdered about 21,000,000 people. The table below provides the statistical breakdown.

Not counting Jews, the Nazis killed about 2,400,000 Poles, 3,000,000 Ukrainians, 1,400 Byelorussians, and 1,593,000 ethnic Russians, all Slavs. They were often murdered because they were Slavs, as Jews were murdered because they were Jews, and the total Slavs thus killed amounts to 10,547,000, many more than Jews killed.

Oh yes, I sometimes read that the Holocaust was special because the Jews were singled out by virtue of their ethnicity/religion. Well, so were Slavs, or regarding my post of two days ago, so were Hindus and Bengalis by Pakistan in their genocide in 1971, and so were Tutsi by Hutu in the Rwandan genocide. And so on for all cases of genocide. However, for me genocide is not a special case at all, but simply a kind of murder by government.

Is the death of a Jew to be thought more horrible because he was a Jew than the murder by quota of some Russian, Chinese, or Vietnamese? One might say that at least those murdered in genocide died because of something about them, and not simply to contribute to a quota. But still, what about those murdered for political reasons or because they stopped clapping for the “leader” too soon, or draped a newspaper temporarily over a bust of Lenin, or had a Western book in their possession, or could speak English, or had a college education, or wore glasses. All these deaths are pitiful and to be condemned. Purposely extended agony, medical experiments, gruesome torture, and painful deaths distinguish no group. Dictator’s creative ability to contrive the most horrible deaths extends to all of them.

All these poor souls deserve recognition. At least we can do them all the honor of learning from their horror. They all should get a memorials.

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Link of Note

”Genocidal Threats Demand More Than Just Memorializing” (5/13/05) By Yehuda Bauer

Yehuda Bauer I know well and we once taught a class together. He is a foremost Holocaust scholar, a professor of Holocaust studies at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a member of the Israel Academy of Science, and the author of “Rethinking the Holocaust”.

He says:

Each genocide is different, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the similarities. Foremost among them is the suffering of the victims. There is no better or worse genocide, just as there is no better or worse murder, no better or worse torture. There is no scale to measure suffering. Jews, Armenians or Poles who were martyred and murdered all suffered the same. . . . The Holocaust was not unique, because that would mean that it could never happen again, to anyone, Jewish or otherwise. This is simply not true. The Holocaust was perpetrated by humans, for human reasons, and anything done by humans can be repeated — not in exactly the same form, but in similar or parallel ways.

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The Democratic Peace

[First published October 21, 2005] In spite of the violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Angola, and elsewhere, there is a cause for much optimism. World violence has been in sharp decline for over five years, and the march of democratization continues with about 119 [as of 2008] democracies now existing, and 8 [as of 2008] of them liberal democracies. In almost every country where elites have been persuaded of the value of socialism there is now talk of multiparty systems, democracy, and the free market. Even in the classical authoritarian systems, such as those in the Middle East, voices are heard for a free press, legislative power, and political parties.

Obviously, we are riding a democratic wave. The technology of the mass media has brought us all closer together (and who can forget watching the elections in Afghanistan and then Iraq) and in its universal availability and content it has carried implicitly the message of democracy and freedom. And freedom and the rule of law itself has become the most universally accepted political idea and human right, even enshrined in the UN Human Rights Convention

The components of this idea are clear in broad brush although the details, as always, are subject to academic dispute. These are political rights, such as to compete and choose one’s candidates for political power, equal and secret ballot, and freedom to organize and protest against office holders; and for liberal democracies, civil rights, such as freedom of religion, organization, and speech. Often we collectively refer to these rights by the term Rule of Law, a basic constitutional order that protects these rights and that lies above the whims of government, groups, and individuals.

But in our enthusiasm for the global movement toward democracy, we should ask ourselves why we support it. A century and more ago the answer would have been almost automatic, as it was for the writers of the American Constitution. It is a natural law, an inalienable right, and a self-evident principle that people should be free. But natural law is no longer intellectually popular and indeed the idea is now so strange that journalists cannot understand the references to it by conservative nominees to the American Supreme Court. They classify it along with such sayings as, “God wills it.”

A currently more respectable justification for democracy is that freedom is a fundamental human value and desire. People want to live their own lives, pursue their own interests as free from the meddling of others as possible. If such intrusion is necessary, they want to play a role in determining the who, what, and when of it. And since this is what people universally want it is what they should have. Although the non sequitur in this argument is glaring–one cannot derive a “should” from a “want” or “desire” alone–it at least can be made respectable by reference to the Social Contract Theory of justice. That is, if we argue that a just social system is one whose fundamental principles people would universally choose if they were blind to their selfish interests (if they had no knowledge of where they would end up in that system–rich or poor, tall or fat, black or white), then persuasive is the argument that people would choose as their first principle freedom under the Rule of Law.

But this approach to justifying democracy has been unsatisfactory to many. We live in a utilitarian age and it is hardly strange that the major justification for democracy should be in terms of its consequences. Particularly, that where people are free under law that is fair and equally applied to all, they are most happy. Of course, this utilitarian justification itself is subject to question. What is happiness? Although people prefer happiness to sadness, grief, and pain, do they really know what will make them happy?

The democrat argues that we really do not know what makes people happy in general and that this is something that only they can decide for themselves, and if for some issues it must be determined generally, as with regard to pollution or public education, it should be through publicly elected representatives under law. And the democratic individualist has argued further with their democratic socialist friends that the free market is a necessary mechanism through which individuals have the greatest choice as to what will make them happy, both in the relative diversity and cheapness of goods and in the creation and dissemination of wealth.

This utilitarian argument for democracy is what has now won the battle for the minds of men. Democracy, it is widely believed, assures the happiness of the greatest number because it provides freedom and wealth (through economic development). There is much to quibble about this, as can be seen in the arguments between various political parties, and I do not intend to get into these debates. But leaving these details aside, I think that we can accept this as the general argument of the American, Soviet, or Chinese democrat (even those who favor social democracy no longer mean full-scale socialism but now mean a free market qualified by government welfare, safety nets, regulation, and limited government ownership of basic services and production, such as in the public health sector).

But those who make this utilitarian argument for democracy have missed perhaps the strongest possible justification. Democracy preserves human life. In theory and fact, the more democratic two states, the less deadly violence between them; and if they are both democratic, lethal violence is precluded altogether. That is, democratic states do not make war on each other. Moreover, the less democratic two states, the more probable war between them. And also, the less democratic a state, the more likely will occur internal warfare.

This is not all. Perhaps least surprising is that the less democratic a government, the more likely that it will murder its own citizens in cold blood, independent of any foreign or domestic war.

Now, war is not the most deadly form of violence. Indeed, I have found that while about 37,000,000 people have been killed in battle in all foreign and domestic wars in the last century, government democide (genocide and mass murder) have killed about 175 million, most by far by totalitarian governments. There is no case of democratic governments murdering en masse their own citizens.

The point is this. If a utilitarian justification for democracy is to be given, then in addition to the happiness that follows from freedom and the from wealth produced by the free market, democracy preserves and extends human life. It does this through the life extending benefits of the market (as in food production). But most important, it does this through the reduction of deadly violence. Democracy is the successful institutionalization of the forces, culture, and techniques of non-violence.

This is also what we should be shouting from the roof tops. This is also what should be the substance of our utilitarian justification for democracy. Yes, freedom. Yes, development. Yes, happiness. But yes, also life for those saved from murder by their own governments and death from war.

Nothing is certain about the future, but this is true of all predictions based on past events, natural or social. Within this limitation think about this. By fact and theory, we appear to have within the power of democracy the opportunity to end war, genocide, and mass murder, and minimize revolutionary and civil violence. And the epochal movement of our times is toward universal democracy.

It is true that a few political leaders such as President George Bush and practitioners have already pointed out that democracies do not make war on each other. But this has not been a general understanding; virtually no journalists mention this in their analyses of democracy and contemporary trends. I have yet to hear or read about an expert, academic or otherwise, mentioning this in a media interview. Why is this?

First, until recent decades there has been an historic erosion of the tenets of classical liberalism and its faith in democracy and the free market. The pacific nature of democracy is a matter of insight and knowledge gained and lost among liberals. So long ago as 1795, in his virtually now forgotten Perpetual Peace, Immanuel Kant systematically articulated the positive role of republicanism in eliminating war. He proposed that constitutional republics should be established to assure universal peace. The essential idea was this: the more freedom people have to govern their own lives, the more government power is limited constitutionally, the more leaders are responsible through free elections to their people, then the more restrained the leaders will be in making war.

Through the writings of Kant, de Montesquieu, Thomas Paine, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill, among others, it became an article of classical liberal faith in the 18th and 19th centuries that “Government on the old system,” as Paine wrote, “is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new [republican form of government as just established in the United States], a delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promotes a system of peace, as the true means of enriching a nation.”

These liberals believed that there was a natural harmony of interests among nations, and that free trade would facilitate this harmony and promote peace. Most important, they were convinced that monarchical aristocracies had a stake in war. In contemporary terms, it was a game they played with the lives of the common folk. Empower the common people to make such decisions through their representatives, and they would generally oppose war.

In the 18th Century, classical liberals wrote about democracy and peace in the abstract, by hypothesis. Reason, the instrument for uncovering natural law, was their guide. Now we have the longer historical record, empirical research, and social theory to show that indeed, their reason and intuition were not misplaced.

Nonetheless, by the middle of the 20th century, this insight became almost completely ignored or forgotten. There are several reasons for this. First and foremost, the classical liberal view itself fell into disrepute among intellectuals and scholars. Essentially, classical liberals believed that the government that governs least governs best. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was their economic bible. And in current terms, they preached democratic capitalism. But beginning in the 19th century capitalism came under increasing attack by socialists. First, the socialist agreed with the classical liberal that the people had to be empowered, and that this would bring peace. But what the socialist saw when the liberal creed was enacted into law, especially in Britain, was that the bellicose aristocracies were replaced by bellicose capitalists. Democracies and their attendant free market appeared to foster exploitation, inequality, poverty, and to enable a very few to rule over the many. Most important here, capitalism was seen not just to promote, but to require colonialism and imperialism, and thereby war.

But what was to be done? Here the socialists divided essentially into the democratic socialists, state socialists, and Marxists. The democratic socialists argued that true democracy means that both the political and economic aspects of their lives must be under the people’s control, and this is done through a representative government and government ownership, control, and management of the economy. Elected representatives, who would oversee economic planners and managers, and above all be responsive to popular majorities, would thus replace the capitalist. With the aristocratic and capitalist interests in war thus eliminated, with the peace oriented worker and peasant democratically empowered, peace would be assured.

The state socialists, however, would simply replace representative institutions with some form of socialist dictatorship. This would assure the best implementation and progress of socialist egalitarianism, without interference by the bourgeoisie and other self-serving interests. Moreover, the people cannot be trusted to know their own interests, for they are easily blinded by pro-capitalist propaganda and manipulation. Burma today is an example of state socialism in practice.

While agreeing on much of the socialist analysis of capitalism, the Marxists added a deterministic, dialectical theory of history, a class analysis of societies, an economic theory of capitalism, and the necessity of the impoverishment of the worker and the inevitability of a communist revolution. However, the Marxists disagreed with the socialists on the ends. Never far from the anarchists, the Marxists, especially the Marxist-Leninists of our century, looked at the socialist state that would come into being with the overthrow of capitalism as nothing more than an intermediary dictatorship of the proletariat through which the transition to the final stage of communism would be prepared. And stripped of its feudal or capitalist exploiters, and thus its agents of war, communism would mean enlightened cooperation among all people as each works according to his ability and receives according to his need. The state then would wither away, and the masses would live in true, everlasting peace and freedom.

Regardless of the brand of socialism from which the critique of capitalism ensued, the protracted 19th century socialist assault on capitalism had a profound effect on liberalism and especially the theory of war and peace. Falling into disrepute, its program seen as utopian or special pleading for capitalists, pure classical liberalism mutated among western intellectuals into a reform or welfare liberalism that is hardly different today from the programs and views of the early socialists. And this modern liberalism, or “liberalism” as it is now called, has been heavily influenced by the socialist view of war; and became widely influential in scholarly research on international relations, and thus war and peace. It must be recognized that such research was largely the preserve of the social sciences, and an overwhelming number of social scientists were by the mid-20th century modern liberals or socialists in their outlook.

But what happened to the idea that individual freedom promotes nonviolence? With the protracted socialist attack on the classical liberal’s fundamental belief in capitalism, coupled with the apparent excesses of capitalism, such as sweat shops, robber barons, monopolies, depressions, and political corruption, classical liberalism eventually lost the heart and minds of Western intellectuals. And with this defeat went its fundamental truth about democracy promoting peace. Interestingly, in the last decade there has been a resurgence of classical liberalism. Former President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher exemplify this, and their often-expressed views on the positive role of free institutions for peace are straight out of classical liberalism. This renewal, however, has yet to have much influence on the media, professionals, or social scientists.

This is not to say that most democrats view capitalist political-economic systems as the cause of war, as asserted by hard-line socialists. Many who think and write about these matters generally view capitalism as one cause among several. They have moved to a middle position: both capitalism and socialism can be a source of peace or war, depending on the circumstances. In either case, neither is a general factor in war.

Now, capitalism and democracy is not the same thing. Democratic socialist systems exist, as in Sweden and Denmark, as do authoritarian capitalist systems like Chile, and Taiwan, or South Korea of a decade ago. Why then has the peace-making effects of democratic freedoms been tossed out with capitalism? As mentioned, these freedoms were part of an ideology emphasizing capitalism–as the ideology retreated, so did its belief in the positive role of freedom in peace. But there are other factors at work here that are at least as important.

One of these factors causing many to reject democracy’s peacefulness is a misreading of history. It was believed that democracies not only do go to war, but they can be very aggressive. Americans could easily note their American-Indian Wars, Mexican-American and Spanish American wars, and of course the Civil War And even if one argues that the United States was dragged into both World Wars, there are the invasions of Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Then, of course, there is Great Britain, which between 1850 and 1941 fought twenty wars, more than any other state. France, also a democracy for most of this period, fought the next most at eighteen. The United States fought seven. These three nations alone fought 63 percent of all the wars during these ninety-two years. Of course, Britain did not become a true democracy until 1884 with the extension of the franchise to agricultural workers, but she was afterwards still involved in numerous European and colonial wars. The historical record of democracies thus appeared no better than that of other regimes; and the classical liberal belief in the peacefulness of democracies seemed nothing more than bad theory or misplaced faith.

But all other types of regimes seemed equally bellicose. The supposed peacefulness of socialist systems was belied by the aggressiveness of its two major totalitarian variants, that of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany; and other types of regimes, whether authoritarian dictatorships like Japan before World War II, or absolute monarchies like czarist Russia before World War I, appeared no less warlike. The verdict was and largely still is an easy one–all types of political, or politico-economic, systems make war; none is especially pacific. Clearly articulated in Kenneth Waltz’s widely read Man, the State and War, this critique is today the consensus view of American academics and intellectuals. Among students of international relations, it is the major alternative belief to that of the inherent bellicosity of capitalist systems.

How could it be missed that democracies do not make war on each other and are generally more peaceful? For one there has been an unfortunate tendency to focus on the many wars of a few democracies while ignoring the many wars of many nondemocracies. Moreover, to the disadvantage of democracies, there is an inclination to treat all wars equally, such that the American invasion of Grenada, the Falklands War, and World War II, are each counted as one war.

Still, how could it be missed that democracies do not make war on each other? The problem is that many who write and speak about these issues do not ordinarily think dyadically. They think of nations as developed or undeveloped, strong or weak, democratic or undemocratic, large or small, belligerent or not. That is, they think monadically.

Like so much in life, this is a matter of perspective. A shift in focus to bilateral relations shows that when two nations are stable democracies, no wars occur between them. Even going back to the classical Greek democracies, the democratic guilds and principalities of the Middle Ages, the democratic Swiss forest states, or the democratic city-states of Italy, there was no full-scale war between those that were democratic in institutions and spirit; nor has research by political scientists uncovered any wars between stable democracies in the 19th or 20th centuries. And this still holds true today, even though the number of democratic states has grown to at least 117, 88 of them liberal democracies, or about 44 percent of the world’s population.

Just consider that in a world where contiguous nations often use violence to settle their differences or at least have armed borders between them, the United States and Canada have had for generations a long, completely unarmed border. Even in Europe, the historical cauldron of war, once all Western European nations became democratic they no longer have armed against each other. Indeed, the expectation of war among them became zero. That all this should be missed shows how powerfully misleading an improper historical perspective or model can be.

There is one more factor at work in the rejection of the classical liberal view of democracy and peace. Beginning with the First World War and accelerated by the second, there has been a strong antipathy among intellectuals to any hint of nationalism. Nationalism was seen by many non-socialists as a fundamental cause of war, or at least of the total national mobilization for war and ensuing total violence. Internationalism, rising above one’s nation, seeing humanity and its transcending interest as a whole, and furthering world government, became their intellectual ideal. Social scientists have almost universally shared this view. In fact, one of the attractions of socialism for many was its inherent internationalism, its rejection of the nation and patriotism as values.

Internationalists generally have refused to accept that any one nation is really better than another. After all, cultures and values are relative; one nation’s virtues are another’s evils. Best we treat all nations equally to better resolve conflicts among them. As Professor Hans Morgenthau pointed out in his popular and influential international relations text, Politics Among Nations, both the United States and Soviet Union should be condemned for the Cold War; it is their evangelistic, crusading belief in their own values that made the East-West conflict so difficult to resolve.

This two-partyism can be seen easily in reading the peace oriented literature. There is no victim or aggressor, no right or wrong nation, but only two parties to a conflict (when this two-partyism did break down, it was usually in terms of American, or Western “imperialist, aggression”). Consequently, to accept that the freedoms espoused by the United States and its democratic allies lead to peace, and that the totalitarian socialism that was fostered by the Soviet Union and China lead to violence and war, is to take sides. It is to be nationalistic. And this for many internationalists was ipso facto wrong.

There is another psychological force toward two-partyism that should not be underestimated. The statement that democracy fosters peace seems not only nationalistic, but also inherently ideological. After all, freedom was one of the flags in the “ideological Cold War.” No matter that this was an observational and historical statement. To accept it appeared not only to take sides; but what is worse, to be a right wing, cold warrior.

Finally, the peace that the classical liberals had in mind involved not only the absence of war between nations, but also harmonious international relations. They, like our contemporaries, had no conception of the degree to which governments could and would massacre their own people. After all, presumably, mankind had progressed since the bloody Albigensian Crusade in France, Inquisition in Spain, and witch hunts throughout Europe.

Today, we can extend the idea of peace through democracy to cover freedom from government genocide and mass murder. But to do so requires overcoming incredible mass ignorance even about the megamurders for which authoritarian and totalitarian governments have been responsible. Of course, everyone knows about the Nazi genocide. And most consider the near 6,000,000 Jews murdered as a monstrous crime against humanity by Hitler and his Nazi gang of racists. Few know that they also murdered in cold blood an additional near 14,000,000 Poles, Gypsies, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Czechs, Frenchmen, and others. Few outside of the Soviet Union know about Stalin’s horrors, that he killed people by the tens of millions (I calculate about 43,000,000). Even fewer realize that under the communist regime in China more tens of millions were killed (as shown in Table 1). And virtually no one except Armenians seems to remember the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the Pakistan genocide and mass murder; except Bengalis; and the Japanese atrocities during the Sino-Japanese and Pacific Wars, except the Chinese and Koreans. And now, virtually no one remembers anymore the mass murder of about 10 million Chinese by their Nationalist regime. It is understandable, then, that the global magnitude of murder by governments in this century is almost universally unknown, that it might exceed an absolutely incredible 150,944,000 men, women, and children killed, or more than four times all this century’s battle deaths in all its domestic and international wars. Of course, it must then be unknown that virtually no democratic citizens are among this utterly fantastic number.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this time of democracy’s victory there has been little gleeful shouting about one terribly important value of democracy–the victory of democracy over violent political death, over war, revolution, genocide, and mass murder.

==================

sent to http://tymelytopics.com/
How can we justify democracy, aside from the standard philosophical argument that freedom is a natural right and democracy is the best way of assuring that? Not widely known are the utilitarian and empirical arguments for democratic freedom: democracies don’t war against each other, they have the least foreign and domestic violence, they don’t murder their own citizens, the don’t have famines, and they enrich their people. Related article (here.

The Courts Take Over

[First published May 5, 2005] I usually keep my focus on international events, since what is stake surpasses almost any concern with domestic matters, given that a coup against the American government, or a rise into political power of a fascist or communist, or their ilk, is most improbable. However, some unconstitutional domestic trends that already weigh heavily on present American freedoms and especially what they portend for the future must be addressed.

One of these is the creeping, nonviolent coup d’etat against the American balance of power and check and balances system that has been underway for over fifty years. This is the gradual assumption of unchecked, unbalanced legislative power by the judiciary. The judiciary collectively and increasingly has taken over legislative power—they throw out laws they don’t like; make law state and federal legislatures would oppose, and that is widely unpopular among the people; and defend unconstitutional laws that they like.

Some examples:

The massacre of free speech: The Supreme Court approving the McCain-Feingold in the McConnell v. Federal Election Commission case.

Giving captured foreign terrorists access to American courts: The Supreme Court’s ruling in the Rasul v. Bush and Hamdi v. Rumsfeld cases.

Trumped citizenship—noncitizens have a right to government jobs: The Supreme Court in the Hampton v Mow Sun Wong cases

And so on for giving illegal aliens rights that make them virtual citizens, intervening in elections to decide the outcome, determining who can marry whom, overturning the results of referendums (such for legislative term limits), defining how much of what can be bought and sold and where, breaking up companies because they are successful, deciding who can live and die when on life-support, and approving the most blatant racism and sexism against white male Anglo-Saxons and Asians (as in college admissions), etc.

Is it no wonder that the appointment of judges is now a most important partisan matter, as can well be seen in the Senate battle between Democrats and Republicans over President Bush’s nominees. Who wins will decide how judges will rule, often unconstitutionally, on the most important domestic and political issues of the day. The issues the courts now determine range from marriage, through the death penalty and abortion, to prisoners of war and how a war is waged, leaving aside the itty-bitty cases such as how much fat they will allow in my McDonald’s hamburger.

And yet, these federal court judges, deciding the most major issues for the whole nation, superceding even state courts and constitutions, are only a tiny, unelected group—nine (9!) on the Supreme Court—each with this lifetime, incredible power. The only way to remove them is by impeachment, a clumsy and difficult process, possibly achievable only when a judge rapes a teenager in his courtroom at noon on a weekday.

I suggest three ways of dealing with this growing non-democratic judiciarchy, which are constitutional. One is to restrict what issues the courts can decide to strictly constitutional matters. Second, is to restrict the terms of judges to six years (what I recommend for university faculty plus one-year to correspond to the election cycle), and to make them run for election every six years. I trust the people more than I do the appointment process, which is so easily governed by special interests and political considerations that are hidden, and not transparent, as they have to be in political campaigns.

---

Link of Note

Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America By Mark Levine

I read the book and highly recommend it as an informative eye opener. The link takes you to Amazon.com and the huge number of reviews of the book by readers. The following is an editorial review by John Moe for Amazon.com (I could not find a review by a constitutional lawyer or professor of law):

Conservative talk radio host, lawyer, and frequent National Review contributor Mark R. Levin comes out firing against the United States Supreme Court in Men in Black, accusing the institution of corrupting the ideals of America’s founding fathers. The court, in Levin’s estimation, pursues an ideology-based activist agenda that oversteps its authority within the government. Levin examines several decisions in the court’s history to illustrate his point, beginning with the landmark Marbury v. Madison case, wherein the court granted itself the power to declare acts of the other branches of government unconstitutional. He devotes later chapters to other key cases culminating in modern issues such as same-sex marriage and the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill.

Like effective attorneys do, Levin packs in copious research material and delivers his points with tremendous vigor, excoriating the justices for instances where he feels strict constitutional constructivism gave way to biased interpretation. But Levin’s definition of “activism” seems inconsistent. In the case of McCain-Feingold, the court declined to rule on a bill already passed by congress and signed by the president, but Levin, who thinks the bill violates the First Amendment, still accuses them of activism even when they were actually passive. To his talk-radio listeners, Levin’s hard-charging style and dire warnings of the court’s direction will strike a resonant tone of alarm, though the hyperbole may be a bit off-putting to the uninitiated. As an attack on the vagaries of decisions rendered by the Supreme Court and on some current justices, Men in Black scores points and will likely lead sympathetic juries to conviction.

The Commonplace Horror Of It All.

I find it more revealing to read the reports or biographies of escaped refugees and political dissidents from an evil dictatorship than what the country-experts write about it. This way I get a sense of the commonplace horror of it all. I just finished reading Kang Chol-Hwan’s The Aquariums of Pyongyang. Kang, you may recall, spent about 45 minutes with President Bush giving him a briefing on his experience. Taken in by North Korean propaganda, his whole extended Korean family emigrated from Japan to the “paradise of North Korea.” Of course, coming from a highly developed and free country to the bankrupt, rigidly control North Korea, his family was loose lipped. Eventually they were all arrested and sent to a forced labor camp when Kang was ten-years old. He and those of his family who survived spent ten awful years there.

This book as mainly about Kang’s experience in the camp, but enough about North Korea itself is described to show that life inside and outside the camps is a matter of degree. Trying to escape the camps means execution if caught; similarly, trying to escape the country means a fast death by execution or a slow one in the camps. A returned escapee is then one of the so-called irredeemables who along with those who spoke out against the regime, or the “revered Great Leader,” are purposely worked to death. And their children with them.

Some things that stick in my mind:

One is that it seems so easy for people’s minds to be so swayed by propaganda as to give up their freedom and wealth in a democracy to enter . . . hell.

Also, as in South Vietnam when it was taken over by the North, everything is a matter of bribes. They are not the lubricant, but the basis of order. Whatever one needs or wants to be done in North Korea was possible if one had enough money or precious goods to barter. Up and down the communist hierarchy, the currency was Omega watches, color TV sets, Japanese Yen, food, and anything else of material value.

Third, are the deaths. Deaths from malnutrition, deaths from lack of medical treatment, deaths from accidents, deaths from everyday beatings, deaths from overwork, deaths from the cold in winter, and deaths from executions. One vignette that sticks in my mind is of three boys that were put to work in a gold mine setting off explosives without adult supervision. They would light the fuses and run. Once they were not fast enough, and two were killed in the explosion and one had half his face blown off.

Fourth is the food, always inadequate, such that painful hunger would cause people to lose their decency, and even take food from their children’s mouths. The ever-present hunger stimulated creativity in catching and nurturing rats for food, catching insects, or finding something to eat in the woods around the camp.

Finally, is the ease with which people were sent to these gulags. No trial, no hearing, no interrogation. Perhaps word from friends or insiders that one was under surveillance would be a first clue of what was to come. But one day, the security police would arrive and haul a whole family, even babies and children, off to one of the camps with virtually no time for preparation or explanation. Or, one might be arrested at work without any chance of one’s family finding out what happened, even when it was separately arrested.

Is this gulag worse than Stalin’s? It’s like asking which is worse, torture with a burning hot iron, or with a knife.

Quite understandably, Kang condemns the South Korean government’s refusal to make human rights in the North an issue, and reluctance to help North Korean refugees, who when caught in China are returned to Kim Jung Il’s loving arms to be executed or worked to death in one of the camps.

His book should be widely read. But, it won’t be by those who need to be educated by it the most.

Link of Note

“N. Korea defector seeks help from Bush” (7/19/05) By Bill Gertz. In The Washington Times

Gertz says:

A North Korean defector who survived 10 years in a prison labor camp said he told President Bush last month that the United States should do more to help those who flee the communist regime. 
    ”The people who are at the camps, the [North Korean] government wants to kill them all,” Kang Chol-hwan said in an interview with The Washington Times. “Instead of executing them, they kill them slowly, making them work in forced labor. That was the hardest part.”

What gets me the most about this horror is that it is happening now. Not 60-years ago under the Nazis, or Stalin, or 50-years ago under Mao, or 30-years ago under Pol Pot, but now.

The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong

click me^–>

[First published September 11, 2005] As a libertarian on domestic policy, I’ve supported, agreed with, and been happy to see much of the policy analyses and recommendations that the CATO Institute has published. It is with sadness, therefore, that I must point out how bad is CATO’s Chapter 2 in their Ninth Annual Ranking of Economic Freedom. Perhaps I can encourage them to be more careful in the future about their publications.

It is more than appropriate to focus a critique on this chapter by the Columbia University Political Scientist, Erik Gartzke , since it is not buried in the report, but given fanfare in CATO’s news release:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war, according to the Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report, released Thursday by the Cato Institute in conjunction with the Fraser Institute of Canada.

This is not only wrong, but also the Chapter 2 study on which this is based is incompetent. Even the very data Gartzke’s analyzes contradicts the above claim. For example, as I will document below, in his data there are NO (zero) wars between democracies over almost two-centuries. How can economic freedom improve on that, not to mention being 50 times better?

Dean Esmay (blog here) and Colleague had independently pointed me toward the blog by Daniel W. Drezner (here), which favorably reported on this CATO study, repeating not only what CATO says in its press release, but adding Garzke’s conclusion:

The results here suggest that efforts to promote peace in the Middle East and in other regions dominated by autocratic governments through democratization are of particularly questionable worth.

This is the particular danger of the Gartzke’s study, and the reason it was so important beyond CATO’s reputation or it to have been especially careful in including this in their report. It may well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions about the importance of democratization.

Now, for the details. I’ve gone to the study to see how it arrived at a conclusion that contradicts so much research on the democratic peace. It is here. First, some nitpicking. It is wrong to say, as Drezner does, that: “researchers have found that democracies are less likely to fight each other, while being no less ready to use force generally.” Presumably, the “no less ready” refers to nondemocracies. I published an article on this, “Democracies are less warlike than other regimes,” (here) in which I showed the errors in claims such as Drezner’s, and established empirically that in the 20th Century, democracies engage much less in severe foreign violence than do nondemocracies.

Gartzke says further that: “Democracy is desirable for many reasons but policies that encourage, or even seek to impose, representative government are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace.” There is that misbegotten “impose” again. This is a misunderstanding in what democratization of other countries means. See my blog, “Unchaining Human Rights, Not Imposing Democracy,” on this here.

He also says that, “Developing countries do not benefit from a democratic peace.” Consistently, whether developed or not, developing or not,” the democratic peace of no wars between democracies holds. When there were, depending on the year, 25, 50, 80, or 117 democracies, as of now, the list surely includes all developing democracies as well as those at all levels of development. Yet, no two of them make war on each other. But, he claims that his study finds otherwise. He can only claim this and that democracies are unlikely to contribute to peace by ignoring his own data

So, lets look at his data. These are the Militarized Dispute Data (MID) set on “violence” that is widely available. The particular set he used is for 1816 to 2000. I’ve looked at the original data 1816-1992 in detail, and covered in my own collection the eight additional years to year 2000. (As to the original data set, see Frank W. Wayman’s paper on the “Incidence Of Militarized Disputes Between Liberal States,”) and Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, And Empirical Patterns”).

For one, the MID data involves threats, military action (e.g., alerts, mobilization, and hostile movements), and violence short of 1,000 killed. Note that in using these data Gartzke confounds nonviolence with violence, a serious mistake in evaluating the democratic peace since it concerns only violence (some researchers limit this to war, but I do not and consider any combat deaths to be relevant). Still, it may be that his data is capturing enough violence between democracies to be useful.

So how many incidents of violence between democracies are there? In the whole data set, OVER ALMOST TWO CENTURIES, out of 350 cases for all nations (up to 1992), and in the eight additional years, there are ZERO (0) CASES OF WAR, between democracies, and only 3 cases of violence between democracies in which someone was killed. Two of these involved Peru and Ecuador in 1981 and 1984 (26 to 100 killed in the first and 1-25 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 in the data set was marginally democratic Ecuador (initiator) vs. the U.S. in 1954 in which 1-25 were killed.

Given that this is not the best data set to test the democratic peace against economic freedom, how does he do the test? He uses multiple regression analysis to regress MID on economic freedom, democracy, and a number of other variables. Before evaluating this analysis, I should note from my own study that the correlation between economic freedom and democraticy is high. In fact, they form a common dimension among nations with many other human security and economic variables, and with which democraticy is correlated .83 and economic freedom .85 (table here). Their common , as apart from accidental or random correlation, is therefore, .85 X .83 = .70, which is high. (To better see this relationship, look at the table and figure in my “The Solution to Mass Poverty Blog” here).

This correlation is meaningful for the kind of regression analysis Gartzke did, but he apparently doesn’t know it. A problem in regression analysis is multicollinearity, which is to say moderate or high correlations among the independent variables. If two independent variables are highly correlated they are no longer statistically independent, and the first one entered into the regression, in this case economic freedom, steals that part of the correlation it has with democracy from the dependent variable. Thus, economic freedom is highly significant, while democracy is not. If Gartzke had done two bivariate regressions on his MID data, one with economic freedom and other with democracy as the independent variables, he surely would have found democracy highly significant. (An important statistical point about his use of significance tests — he is not analyzing a sample, but the universe of cases — thus standard significance tests are irrelevant). To protect against multicollinearity in his multiple regression, he should have orthogonalized the independent variables, which is to make them statistically independent of each other. Orthogonalization can be done through factor analysis, and then using the resulting factor scores in the regression.

Thus, his CATO acclaimed results are a result of his misuse of multiple regression and an ignorance of what is in his data. Even then, given his dependent variable, were the regression analysis properly done, I don’ think his data consisting of nonviolent and violent acts would be relevant to what is meant by democratic freedom and violence.

I did my own analysis of democracy, violence, economic development and economic freedom, plus some other human development variables. I asked: Can we predict the level of a nation’s human security (which includes violence) by knowing its level of democracy (analysis here). The final regression is of logviolence factor scores on the factor scores of freedom and human development (thus erasing the problem of multicollinearity), and dummy variables as to whether Moslem or not, or Christian or not (given the purpose of the regression, it did not matter if these two were correlated with the other impendent variables or each other). The regression was excellent, accounting for 74 percent of the variation in violence (with residuals properly dispersed), with democracy (freedom) being far more significant than human development (see Table A.23 here), which includes economic freedom.

How could CATO let such a poor study into their prime report? Was it their libertarian opposition to intervention abroad, even if it is in favor of democracy? Was it their libertarian dislike of the democratic peace, shown by so many libertarian anti-democratic peace articles? Whatever. After reviewing the one study on what I know something about and finding it so poor, it provokes a questioning of their other studies in areas I know less about.

Link of Day

“Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” (just released by the Pentagon)

Deterrence is live and well. This strategic policy report elaborates on American nuclear policy, including that of preemption or FIRST USE, which bush signed off on in 1992. I consider this the most important document on defense policy issued in the last ten years. For those who are bored by such documentation, consider that it was decisions like this about American strategic policy that brought victory in the Cold War, without a world hot war.

Links I Must Share

“Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan”:

he Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

[RJR: one view of the above report]

“New Pentagon plans envision possible nuclear strikes”:

A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of pre-emption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies.

[RJR: Another view]

Arms Control Wonk:

The Joint Staff hates freedom. What else should I conclude when its staff knowingly place classified material they believe could be harmful to national security on a public webserver?

[A professional arm controller's view]

Books/articles/statistics

The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong

click me^–>

[First published September 11, 2005] As a libertarian on domestic policy, I’ve supported, agreed with, and been happy to see much of the policy analyses and recommendations that the CATO Institute has published. It is with sadness, therefore, that I must point out how bad is CATO’s Chapter 2 in their Ninth Annual Ranking of Economic Freedom. Perhaps I can encourage them to be more careful in the future about their publications.

It is more than appropriate to focus a critique on this chapter by the Columbia University Political Scientist, Erik Gartzke , since it is not buried in the report, but given fanfare in CATO’s news release:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war, according to the Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report, released Thursday by the Cato Institute in conjunction with the Fraser Institute of Canada.

This is not only wrong, but also the Chapter 2 study on which this is based is incompetent. Even the very data Gartzke’s analyzes contradicts the above claim. For example, as I will document below, in his data there are NO (zero) wars between democracies over almost two-centuries. How can economic freedom improve on that, not to mention being 50 times better?

Dean Esmay (blog here) and Colleague had independently pointed me toward the blog by Daniel W. Drezner (here), which favorably reported on this CATO study, repeating not only what CATO says in its press release, but adding Garzke’s conclusion:

The results here suggest that efforts to promote peace in the Middle East and in other regions dominated by autocratic governments through democratization are of particularly questionable worth.

This is the particular danger of the Gartzke’s study, and the reason it was so important beyond CATO’s reputation or it to have been especially careful in including this in their report. It may well lead intelligent and policy-wise analysts and commentators to draw the wrong conclusions about the importance of democratization.

Now, for the details. I’ve gone to the study to see how it arrived at a conclusion that contradicts so much research on the democratic peace. It is here. First, some nitpicking. It is wrong to say, as Drezner does, that: “researchers have found that democracies are less likely to fight each other, while being no less ready to use force generally.” Presumably, the “no less ready” refers to nondemocracies. I published an article on this, “Democracies are less warlike than other regimes,” (here) in which I showed the errors in claims such as Drezner’s, and established empirically that in the 20th Century, democracies engage much less in severe foreign violence than do nondemocracies.

Gartzke says further that: “Democracy is desirable for many reasons but policies that encourage, or even seek to impose, representative government are unlikely to contribute directly to international peace.” There is that misbegotten “impose” again. This is a misunderstanding in what democratization of other countries means. See my blog, “Unchaining Human Rights, Not Imposing Democracy,” on this here.

He also says that, “Developing countries do not benefit from a democratic peace.” Consistently, whether developed or not, developing or not,” the democratic peace of no wars between democracies holds. When there were, depending on the year, 25, 50, 80, or 117 democracies, as of now, the list surely includes all developing democracies as well as those at all levels of development. Yet, no two of them make war on each other. But, he claims that his study finds otherwise. He can only claim this and that democracies are unlikely to contribute to peace by ignoring his own data

So, lets look at his data. These are the Militarized Dispute Data (MID) set on “violence” that is widely available. The particular set he used is for 1816 to 2000. I’ve looked at the original data 1816-1992 in detail, and covered in my own collection the eight additional years to year 2000. (As to the original data set, see Frank W. Wayman’s paper on the “Incidence Of Militarized Disputes Between Liberal States,”) and Daniel M. Jones, Stuart A. Bremer, and J. David Singer, “Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, And Empirical Patterns”).

For one, the MID data involves threats, military action (e.g., alerts, mobilization, and hostile movements), and violence short of 1,000 killed. Note that in using these data Gartzke confounds nonviolence with violence, a serious mistake in evaluating the democratic peace since it concerns only violence (some researchers limit this to war, but I do not and consider any combat deaths to be relevant). Still, it may be that his data is capturing enough violence between democracies to be useful.

So how many incidents of violence between democracies are there? In the whole data set, OVER ALMOST TWO CENTURIES, out of 350 cases for all nations (up to 1992), and in the eight additional years, there are ZERO (0) CASES OF WAR, between democracies, and only 3 cases of violence between democracies in which someone was killed. Two of these involved Peru and Ecuador in 1981 and 1984 (26 to 100 killed in the first and 1-25 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 in the data set was marginally democratic Ecuador (initiator) vs. the U.S. in 1954 in which 1-25 were killed.

Given that this is not the best data set to test the democratic peace against economic freedom, how does he do the test? He uses multiple regression analysis to regress MID on economic freedom, democracy, and a number of other variables. Before evaluating this analysis, I should note from my own study that the correlation between economic freedom and democraticy is high. In fact, they form a common dimension among nations with many other human security and economic variables, and with which democraticy is correlated .83 and economic freedom .85 (table here). Their common , as apart from accidental or random correlation, is therefore, .85 X .83 = .70, which is high. (To better see this relationship, look at the table and figure in my “The Solution to Mass Poverty Blog” here).

This correlation is meaningful for the kind of regression analysis Gartzke did, but he apparently doesn’t know it. A problem in regression analysis is multicollinearity, which is to say moderate or high correlations among the independent variables. If two independent variables are highly correlated they are no longer statistically independent, and the first one entered into the regression, in this case economic freedom, steals that part of the correlation it has with democracy from the dependent variable. Thus, economic freedom is highly significant, while democracy is not. If Gartzke had done two bivariate regressions on his MID data, one with economic freedom and other with democracy as the independent variables, he surely would have found democracy highly significant. (An important statistical point about his use of significance tests — he is not analyzing a sample, but the universe of cases — thus standard significance tests are irrelevant). To protect against multicollinearity in his multiple regression, he should have orthogonalized the independent variables, which is to make them statistically independent of each other. Orthogonalization can be done through factor analysis, and then using the resulting factor scores in the regression.

Thus, his CATO acclaimed results are a result of his misuse of multiple regression and an ignorance of what is in his data. Even then, given his dependent variable, were the regression analysis properly done, I don’ think his data consisting of nonviolent and violent acts would be relevant to what is meant by democratic freedom and violence.

I did my own analysis of democracy, violence, economic development and economic freedom, plus some other human development variables. I asked: Can we predict the level of a nation’s human security (which includes violence) by knowing its level of democracy (analysis here). The final regression is of logviolence factor scores on the factor scores of freedom and human development (thus erasing the problem of multicollinearity), and dummy variables as to whether Moslem or not, or Christian or not (given the purpose of the regression, it did not matter if these two were correlated with the other impendent variables or each other). The regression was excellent, accounting for 74 percent of the variation in violence (with residuals properly dispersed), with democracy (freedom) being far more significant than human development (see Table A.23 here), which includes economic freedom.

How could CATO let such a poor study into their prime report? Was it their libertarian opposition to intervention abroad, even if it is in favor of democracy? Was it their libertarian dislike of the democratic peace, shown by so many libertarian anti-democratic peace articles? Whatever. After reviewing the one study on what I know something about and finding it so poor, it provokes a questioning of their other studies in areas I know less about.

Link of Day

“Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations” (just released by the Pentagon)

Deterrence is live and well. This strategic policy report elaborates on American nuclear policy, including that of preemption or FIRST USE, which bush signed off on in 1992. I consider this the most important document on defense policy issued in the last ten years. For those who are bored by such documentation, consider that it was decisions like this about American strategic policy that brought victory in the Cold War, without a world hot war.

Links I Must Share

“Pentagon Revises Nuclear Strike Plan”:

he Pentagon has drafted a revised doctrine for the use of nuclear weapons that envisions commanders requesting presidential approval to use them to preempt an attack by a nation or a terrorist group using weapons of mass destruction. The draft also includes the option of using nuclear arms to destroy known enemy stockpiles of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

[RJR: one view of the above report]

“New Pentagon plans envision possible nuclear strikes”:

A Pentagon planning document being updated to reflect the doctrine of pre-emption declared by President Bush in 2002 envisions the use of nuclear weapons to deter terrorists from using weapons of mass destruction against the United States or its allies.

[RJR: Another view]

Arms Control Wonk:

The Joint Staff hates freedom. What else should I conclude when its staff knowingly place classified material they believe could be harmful to national security on a public webserver?

[A professional arm controller's view]

Books/articles/statistics

The Answer to the “Insanity” of Democide

[First published December 15, 2005] Among the many questions I got from those who received or read here my estimated increase in the last century’s democide to 262,000,000, two in particular I want to mention. One is, “What is the answer to stop this insanity?” And the other is, “how do you deal with the sheer horror of what we are capable of doing to one another?”

The answer to both is the same. First, one must recognize that the regimes carrying out this mass murder of thousands and millions are not insane, but rational and calculating rulers who are eliminating what they see as threats to them, consolidating their power, seeking to increase their power, exacting revenge on former ruling groups, or exterminating those who they believe pollute their nation, race, or ethnic group. True, paranoia, fear, hatred, and lust for power are driving forces, but these human emotions should not obscure the rational calculations involved, and the problem solving nature that democide is to them. One of the shocks to the myth (of some introductory political science textbooks) that governments are generally benevolent is that some of the most horrendous democides were decided on in a conference or cabinet meetings of top officials.

Once understood that democide is usually a government policy made by rational decision makers, we can then understand why some governments do this and others don’t. It dependents on how top government leaders become so, the mechanism by which they are chosen, and the pressures the come to bear on them. To wit: democratic decision makers go through a long, torturous process of election or appointment, usually at different levels, as they gradually ascend to president, senator, representative, cabinet member, or judge. In the process, they become acculturated to negotiating differences, conceding some issues, and tolerating differences. Once they are elected or appointed, their electoral or official power depends on staying close to the beliefs and values of those who put them in power, and the expectations of the larger public. Any domestic democide is out of the question, for news of it could not be contained, and it would be the most extreme violation of democratic culture. Any such action, if validated, would assure a unanimous impeachment and certain imprisonment.

Compare this to dictators who seize power through coups, revolutions or assassinations. Their power depends on their guns, and how they maneuver against possible opponents. The only restraint on them is the loyalty of those commanding their palace guards and troops. If such dictators are ruthless enough, they can make all those around them quake in so much fear that no one would dare even think of raising a finger against them. Then, as a Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, they can order their troops and secret police to murder anyone, no matter whom or how many.

What is the answer to democide, then? It is a system of government that puts its leaders through successive tests of their values and beliefs and a process of acculturation until they reach the top, and then makes their power beholden to the people and that culture. This is democracy. Seeing the above should make it easy to understand why liberal democracies (in which the culture of negotiation, compromise, and tolerance is most deeply imbedded) do not murder their own subjects.

So then, how can I emotionally handle all the genocides, massacres, politicides, atrocities, and mass murder I constantly deal with? Why is it I am not near suicide or in deep depression? The answer is because I see the solution to this. And, I see all the data I have collected and their objective analysis as proof that we have the correct solution. Now, with all of this data collected and their analyses behind me, I now see a world democide of 262,000,000 in the last century as a flag on which is written in blood, “Dictatorships are a bloody crime against humanity.” With this belief, any new democide I come across, as horrible as it is, as emotionally wrenching as it might be, are more sprays of blood on this flag.

All that is needed now is for this bloody flag to be seen, waved, and carried into nonviolent battle against those who enslave, starve, impoverish, and murder our fellow human beings. This is the fight of our era, our time, and how we fight this is what our century will be remembered for.

Let freedom ring. ,

The “Peace” of Nuclear Nonproliferation

…
[First published August 2, 2005] Several days ago I came across such an egregious blindness to the democratic peace that I dragged the offending article to my desktop for its display on my blog. So I thought. But I can’t find it there or on the net.

So, from memory, a columnist obviously concerned about nuclear proliferation asked a presumed authority about the ahistorical peace in Europe since the end of World War II (ignoring the violence resulting from the breakup of Yugoslavia) and whether it was related to nonproliferation. The answer was yes, this was one of the reasons.

No, this peace couldn’t be because all Europe is democratic. Excuse me, but doesn’t France and Britain have nukes. And anyway, these weapons and the deterrent strategy of the United States surely were responsible for keeping the peace with the Soviet Union. The United States refused to declare no first use of its nukes so that they could be used defensively in case of a massive Soviet Invasion of Europe.

Here we have a strong case for the actual existence of nuclear weapons possibly saving us all from a nuclear War.

And since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the universalization of democracy in Europe, has nonproliferation in Europe beyond Britain and France kept the peace? No, and if one is going to be ridiculous, one could also argue that it is Britain’s and France’s arsenal that has kept the peace since then.

Truth to tell, I have to throw up my hands in frustration. How can the role of democracy be missed? It goes beyond something in the water. It must be an ideological unwillingness to accept this truth, much like the left’s unwillingness to accept the power of the free market.

Link of Note

“Al-Qaida nukes already in U.S.” (7/11/05) From WorldNet Daily.com

It says:

According to captured al-Qaida leaders and documents, the plan is called the “American Hiroshima” and involves the multiple detonation of nuclear weapons already smuggled into the U.S. over the Mexican border with the help of the MS-13 street gang and other organized crime groups.

Al-Qaida has obtained at least 40 nuclear weapons from the former Soviet Union – including suitcase nukes, nuclear mines, artillery shells and even some missile warheads. In addition, documents captured in Afghanistan show al-Qaida had plans to assemble its own nuclear weapons with fissile material it purchased on the black market.

???

Books/articles/statistics

Why Terrorist Nukes the Greatest Threat Ever

[First published February 10, 2005] Why, it is asked, should we be so afraid of terrorists having nuclear weapons when during most of the Cold War the Soviets had enough nuclear weapons to utterly destroy every major American city, and then some? Surely, the terrorist could not develop such a vast number of nukes. Yes, may be one or two, maybe in the long run even three of four, and certainly they will be a threat, but nothing like the Soviets were, it seems. And since we handled the Soviets, we should be able to deal with terrorist’s nukes. Right?

Wrong. What protected us from a Soviet first strike with their nuclear weapons was the American defense policy of deterrence. That is, if the Soviet’s attacked us, we would massively retaliate with our own nuclear weapons. In the early years of the Cold War, this meant attacking Soviet cities and major military targets. In the waning years of the Cold War, this policy was redefined to mean targets of value to the Soviet rulers, which were not only the most important military targets, but also the Communist Party, the rulers themselves, and their means of control over the nation.

Now, if the terrorists get nukes, how do we deter them? They operate in diffuse gangs, often with the secret help of sympathetic nations or groups within nations (such as a Muslim sub-community). And they are willing to die for their cause, which is often simply killing Americans. If the terrorists are able to hide a small nuclear bomb in a container unloaded in New York, and set it off, the result would be a city destroyed and perhaps half-a million murdered. Now, whom do we retaliate against?

Of course, we will try to track the source of the nuclear bomb, and perhaps find that it was constructed with the secret help of rogue scientists from Russia and Pakistan, with ingredients and parts from N. Korea, France, and China, much of it commercial. You can be sure that if such a bomb is exploded in the U.S., there will not be a clear relationship between the terrorists and any nations, as there was between El Quida and the Taliban of Afghanistan.

In other words, an anti-terrorist-use-of-nukes policy of deterrence will not work. For this reason alone, their getting nukes are more dangerous than when the Soviets had them.

This understood, then what is to be done? What we are doing now. Imprison or kill the terrorists, destroy their infrastructure, warn states that are supporting them about the consequences and apply pressure and sanctions, and prevent supporting states such as Iran from getting nukes themselves. And work at the underlying cause by working to democratize possibly supportive tyrannies. Democracies will never be a danger to us, or support terrorism. Above all, treat global terrorism as the war it is. There is too much at stake not to.

Oh, yes, let “nukes” stand for all weapons of mass destruction, and not a word of the above need be changed.

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Link of Note

”N. Korea Announces It Has Nuclear Weapon” (2/10/05) By Sang-Hun Choe

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – North Korea on Thursday announced for the first time that it has nuclear arms and rejected moves to restart disarmament talks anytime soon, saying it needs the weapons as protection against an increasingly hostile United States.

N. Korea was helping Libya develop nuclear weapons, and is reportedly helping Iran. How long before Kim Il-jong decides the way to hit at its greatest enemy, the United States, is by helping the terrorists go nuclear. As for N. Korea itself, too much is made of its lack of reliable and long-range nuclear tipped missiles. Come now, there are many ways to deliver nuclear weapons without a missile (beside which the source of a missile is easy to track). How about exploding one hidden in a freighter off the port of New York?

On Ward Churchill and Academic Leftmania

[First published February 25, 2005] I have read Ward Churchill’s “’Some People Push Back’ On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” (link given below). It’s a propaganda piece, and could have been written by Bin Laden with hardly a change in wording.

Churchill has become a popular figure on campus and is often invited to give speeches and talks, and indeed, has even been invited by faculty to speak at the University of Hawaii, from which I retired years ago. In light of this, I want to say a few words about the leftist university climate in which an ignorant fraud, and expressed enemy of the United States like Churchill, can thrive. I’ll focus this on two hallowed academic principles. But first, a word about the leftism of the university.

The university is institutionally diverse, with schools and departments of law, medicine, business, engineering, natural sciences, social sciences, and so forth. Generally, the faculty in business, engineering, natural sciences, mathematics, agriculture, and related, are least on the left, although as I understand the latest polls or surveys, Democrats still dominate in them. However, it is the humanities, social sciences, and law, and such programs as ethnic studies, woman studies, peace studies, and such, that are most dominated by the left. So, when a survey claims that 85 percent of the faculty vote Democrat, and that covers all the way from engineering and the hard sciences to the humanities, then the figure for the humanities and social sciences alone has to be much higher. Indeed, judging from my experience, a conservative or Republican in these fields is extremely rare, say, one out of thirty, or forty faculty. There are more communists (they call themselves Marxists), than either libertarians or conservatives together, and It appears to me that those on the left outnumber the average liberal and moderate Democrat.

Now, as to the two hallowed principles. One is diversity. There is none in political orientation. The left has captured the university and fight to maintain their control. They refuse to hire or give tenure to those perceived conservative or nonsupportive of their ideology. It is done cleverly, you see, by pointing to problems in a candidate’s research or lectures. For example, if a candidates supported Bush’s foreign policy, they would find his research inadequate, insensitive to Iraq deaths, hawkish, nationalistic, and so forth.

This also extends to sending out invitations to speakers. Almost always, these speakers are liberal or left; hardly ever conservative or libertarian, unless certain conservative student groups fight like hell to bring one. And even then, hostile leftist students may so threaten disruption, that the university administration may use this as an excuse to cancel the engagement they didn’t want anyway.

The second hallowed principle, which you hear often in defense of Churchill, is academic freedom. After almost forty years of being in a university as a student and teaching, I have seen the campus go from the existence of a wide range of extensive academic freedom to a narrow band in the social sciences and humanities. I’m retired now, but if I were teaching, I know many things I believe related to my field that I could not say on campus or while teaching. What we have now is a leftist enforced control of speech such that every academic has academic freedom as long as they stick close to the liberal-leftist line.

To put this bluntly, academic freedom is now a charade, a leftiwocky, most often expressed by liberal and leftist faculty and ideological innocents to protect these faculty from outside criticism.

How do they enforce this? If a faculty member does not have tenure, he had better hue the liberal and leftist line if he wants it. If he has tenure, then at least through their control of the department chairmanship and major committees, they can make a conservative or libertarian professor suffer a thousand cuts: worst parking spaces, worst offices, no assistants, no promotions (if possible), no salary increases (if not automatic) or merit increases, heaviest teaching load, assigned largest and most elementary courses, many committee assignments (but never a chairmanship), no travel allowance, no research support, a campaign among leftist students to get others to avoid their classes, and plain old social isolation. It has to be an unusually dedicated faculty member to stick this out. And this is just at the department level. What a dean can do is far worse, such as using leftist student complaints to set up a Star Chamber investigation.

To be clear, I am not saying that liberal of leftist academics are more incompetent, more biased, less intelligent, less productive, or poorer teachers than conservatives or libertarians. I am not saying they all are bad people or academics in some sense. A lot of the good work in my area on international relations, foreign policy, and the democratic peace has come from these academics. I will say this, however. In general, they are less open minded, less tolerant of opposing ideas, less willing to engage them, and more self-righteous.

Something has to be done about the lack of diversity and freedom of speech on campus and, I’m afraid, we simply can’t wait until the passage of several generations of faculty moves universities more towards the center. What should this be? Well, that will take another blog or so.

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Link of Note

”’Some People Push Back’ On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” (nd By Ward Churchill)

 On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well. . . . it may not have been (only) the ghosts of Iraqi children who made their appearance that day. It could as easily have been some or all of their butchered Palestinian cousins.
Or maybe it was some or all of the at least 3.2 million Indochinese who perished as a result of America’s sustained and genocidal assault on Southeast Asia (1959-1975), not to mention the millions more who’ve died because of the sanctions imposed thereafter.

Comment by Colleague Two
Colleague Two is a professor of international law.

The problem with Churchill is not merely that he’s a left-wing screwball, but that his whole life has been one big lie. He got a job as a professor pretending to be a “Native American” and that’s been proven false. He portrayed himself as a Vietnam war hero and turns out he was a Public Affairs specialist who changed reels on a movie projector.

Tenure, like Power, Corrupts

[First published February 28, 2005] In my 3/17/09 blog “On Ward Churchill and Academic Leftmania,” I described the state of American universities, particularly the social sciences, humanities, and special studies or programs (woman’s studies, ethnic studies, etc.). In effect, they constitute anti-American, socialist, and leftist propaganda factories. I will refer to them all as leftsville.

The academic leftists have one and really only one argument for legislatures, regents, and other outsiders to leave them alone to spew their propaganda, and that is academic freedom. That is, the leftists argue, academics should be free to say unpopular things, to teach what they believe, and to research the unconventional. It is a powerful argument, and we all are for it in these terms. Thus, we have tenure, whose prime purpose is to protect this freedom by making it almost impossible to fire a professor for his beliefs.

But in application, this academic freedom has been destroyed from within. Simply, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, devoted Christians, or the otherwise politically incorrect will not be hired; or by mischance if they are, they will not get tenure; or if they change their views after they get tenure, they will be not too gently encouraged to find other employment. Thus, we have academic departments with democrats/liberals/communists (called Marxists) outnumbering Republicans/libertarians/conservatives 30 or 40 to 1.

What this means is that students get only views on history, current events, and contentious issues, for within a narrow band of liberal-left-communist beliefs. They are not being educated, but propagandized. And what academic freedom has come to mean in practice is to protect leftsville from attempts to create a true diversity of beliefs, teaching, and research.

What to do?

First, is to inform. Universities depend on public funds, gifts and contributions, and tuition. The more legislators, the wealthy, and parents come to understand that they are paying for the country’s future leaders to be taught how good is the socialist-equalitarian model, including communism for some (you see, what happened in communist countries, with all the democide and other horrors, was “state capitalism,” not true Marxism), and how bad is the United States.

Second is to investigate. There should be outside (inside is almost hopeless) research into this Leftsville—what is being taught and how, the treatment of nonleftist students, favoritism toward leftist ones, and what happens to non-liberal and leftist faculty. Of course, leftsville will go to war against this and the drums of academic freedom will beat mercilessly on everyone’s ears. Stuff them with cotton, and investigate. I think the results will shock the public.

And third, discard tenure. It is the dirty bath water and not the baby. Tenure is precisely the reason leftsville has expanded to envelope the whole university. There are other reasons besides creating a diversity of beliefs to get rid of this protection of leftsville, and that is tenure also protects the deadwood and stupid among them. There is little opportunity for the young, mentally vigorous, and promising scholars to move into this world now made up so many old professors with their yellowing lecture notes, and two or three articles in some left wing magazine or journal.

In the place of tenure, I suggest a five-year contract, renewable every five years. The renewal should be based on a department’s recommendations, evaluation of peers at other universities, and student evaluations. And, I suggest that the university committee making the final decision has administration, faculty, student, and outside members (suggested by the regents or governing board).

This may seem impossible, given tenure’s grip on higher education and the mass of the naïve and innocents outside the universities that are taken in by the academic freedom battle flag. But, all universities have one vulnerability that can win this battle. Money. Hit their funding sources. Weigh in on federal and local tax money. Inform the wealthy of what their endowments are really supporting. Organize boycotts among parents against sending their children to the worse leftsvilles. Encourage business and federal agencies to hire graduating seniors from other universities, and so on. There are so many ways in a democracy like ours to persuade universities that perhaps it is time to rethink tenure, that all it really takes is information, communication, and will.

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Link of Note

”Lifetime Tenure in Academia and Government “ (2/18/05) By Gary Aldrich

“. . . in a recent meeting with several hundred students at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, I made the allegation that too many tenured professors proudly declare themselves “Communists” while pushing hard-left agendas on students. They’ve made it clear that conservative and Christian views are unwelcome in their classrooms.

“I said that students were being blackmailed into silence by professors who hold grade point averages over their heads as punishment for expressing conflicting ideologies.

“I also stated that our students are being brainwashed, while parents are being forced to pay large sums of money for the privilege of watching professors play with their children’s young minds.

“Two professors who had infiltrated the meeting rose in protest. Red-faced, they declared me to be a liar and demanded that I prove my ‘outrageous” allegations.’ A young lady in the front row of the packed auditorium bravely raised her hand.

“First timidly, then with increasing firmness, she spoke of several of her Lehigh professors who had expressed hatred for American values and fondness for the likes of Fidel Castro. Following her lead, other students rose to give similar testimony. The angry and now ‘outed’ professors quickly made their exit.”

Subjective Perception and the Democratic Peace

click me^–>

[First published September 1, 2005] Our perception, what we see, is influenced by the context, our background, and our beliefs, particularly our “ism.” There is a reality out there to be sure, but what it manifest to us is what we partly create. In this sense, each of us is nature’s conductor, enlarging here, endowing meaning there, ignoring this, inflating out of all proportion that, and so on. Politics, because there is so much at stake, including life and death, is particularly prone to this seeing-what-we-want-to-see or -believe.

There are many metaphors for this general perceptual process, one of the best I’ve recently come across is here. It illustrates vividly how what color we think we are seeing is determined by context — by the adjacent colors.

If our perception is so subjective, how do we ever really see socio-political reality? In the long run through the slow evolution of Truths that stand the test of time and challenge; in the short run through clear scientific tests (like those by Adam Przeworski and colleagues on the durability of democracies that I discussed in the last two blogs) and their presentation such that others can duplicate them. This is the story of the democratic peace. It began in 1795 with Immanuel Kant’s philosophical argument, and entered politics as an assumption of 19th Century classical liberalism — freedom promotes peace. But, this particular perception of reality competed with monarchism and the growing anti-freedom belief in socialism of that era; and in the last century, fascism, communism, and militarism — all different perceptions of the same reality of politics, economy, and peace.

Then came the first scientific tests of the democratic peace by Dean Babst in 1964, to be followed by those of Melvin Small and J. David Singer in 1976 (mistakenly negative), and my War, Power, Peace in 1979 (complete book on my website here.). Then, came my explicit retests published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution (1983), the central journal of conflict studies, and the tests by Michael Doyle appearing in the American Political Science Review (1986), the organ of the American Political Science Association. This all stimulated and provoked a flood of replications and extensions as doubters tried to show how wrong we were, and ended up convinced (see my democratic peace bibliography).

True, perception is subjective and so is any statement of fact. Until, that is, it reflects a long history of challenge and response, or it can be subjected to scientific tests, as has been the idea of a democratic peace. By tests, I mean that all clearly defined cases (or a random sample) of democracies, violence, and wars should be collected (the data available to all for their own confirming tests) and employed to test the democratic peace hypothesis, with statistical tests to determine how likely the results occurred by chance. The emphasis here is on the plural, “tests.” For no one scientific test or empirical study is sufficient (as the major media is yet to learn). It has to be subjected to replication, which is best if conducted by those with different perceptions. Then, if across data sets, testers, years covered, and definitions the results generally agree, then we have perceived a Truth of the political world.

Such is the democratic peace.

Link of Note

CHAPTER 7.”Perception and Reality” By R.J. Rummel. In The Dynamic Psychological field (1975)

Conclusion:

. . . there is an active, psychological engagement in perception, a confrontation of external reality with a psychological reality, a clash of two worlds whose battle lines comprise our perception. Therefore, while useful as an initial provisional sketch, the simple view of perception as a unidirectional process running from external object to stimuli to receptors to perceptibles to percept to concept will have to be modified in favor of a dialectical field theory of perception.

God, what incredible prose.

Democratic peace Q&A/FAQ

Still Not 50 Times Better Than Democracy–Part I

click me^–>

[First published September 19, 2005] Gartzke has responded to my critique, “The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong,” (here) of his chapter 2 published in the CATO Annual Ranking of Economic Freedom. In reading my response, keep in mind how this Gartzke chapter was trumped in the very first lines of CATO’s news release:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war.

My response will be in two parts. Here I will respond to Gartzke’s claim about the literature on whether democracy as less warlike as other types of government. This is an important question, for I have asserted as a proposition of the democratic peace, that democracies have the least foreign violence. I will present Gartzke’s reply on this interspersed with my comments in green. Gartzke says:

Dr. Rummel claims that I am wrong to write that [IR] researchers have found that democracies are less likely to fight each other, while being no less ready to use force generally. [RJR: First "less likely" is a weak way of putting this -- in the main, the research literature finds that democracies either don't make war on each other, rarely do, or virtually never do. Second, my statement that Gartzke was wrong refers not to the literature, but to his acceptance of it] This is what other researchers have found. In fact, it is what most proponents of the democratic peace claim to show. Dr. Rummel knows that the majority of studies by democratic peace proponents do not support the assertion that democracies are generally less warlike (Rousseau, et al. 1996). Indeed, he has advocated the strong claim that democracies are generally pacific, in opposition to other proponents of the democratic peace. This difference of views within the democratic peace research community is not made clear in Dr. Rummel’s comments and may confuse his readers. [RJR: I reference my study on this, and hoped that Gartzke would have read it first before replying. In regard to democracies being "less ready to use force," this literature in general is wrong in finding this is not true and I am unimpressed by how many studies on this one can quote. To see the consistent error in the literature, see the excerpts from my study below. ]

The comment that Dr. Rummel objects to thus simply summarizes the dominant view among democratic peace researchers. As Huth and Allee put it “patterns of military conflict between democracies and non-democracies are not very different from patterns of military conflict among non-democracies” (page 1, 2002). [RJR: This is wrong, as I will show below.] Bruce Russett, the dean of quantitative democratic peace researchers acknowledges that there is little systematic evidence in support of the claim that democracies are generally less warlike (page 11, 1993). Together, Russett and his research partner John Oneal, state that, “Our analyses clearly reveal the separate peace among democratic states” (page 288, 1997). [RJR: This is old stuff. In a personal communication, Russett now agrees with me]

There are many other examples. HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory#Claims”I quote the wikipedia encyclopedia:

Democratic peace theorists make two possible connections between democracy and war:
Babst, Singer, Rummel and Doyle claimed that democracies, properly defined, have never made war on each other; such DPTs face the difficulty that Ted Gurr classes both Spain and the United States as democracies in 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War. [RJR: Gurr's classification is based on political attributes being given equal weight, and does not take account of the great importance that should be given to the independent power the King of Spain had in foreign and military policy. This is similar to that of the Germany's Kaiser in WWI. Neither Spain in 1989 nor Germany in 1914 was democratic in making war and peace. ] Most more recent studies assert that two democracies are less likely to make war on each other than other pairs of states. [RJR: I see where Gartzke got the weak "less likely" from, but he shouldn't accept this as consistent with the literature. ]

Now, what is going on in the literature on democracies being least likely to fight a war? The following excerpts are from my, “Democracies Are Less Warlike Than Other Regimes” (European Journal of International Relations 1, December 1995: 457-479):

While a consensus has grown that democracies don’t make war on each other, a second consensus has developed in parallel that democracies are neither more nor less likely to make war or commit violence than other types of regimes. . . . In spite of this consensus, it does not well reflect the evidence. As I try to show here, a careful reading of the studies underlying this consensus and of my own 1983 HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP83.HTM”"Libertarianism and International Violence” (here) that is assumed to be the only exception (actually there are many more, [which I cite in the study] show that democracies are in fact the most pacific of regimes. Moreover, an analysis of the methodology of the core research studies that underlie this consensus further supports this conclusion. . . .

To begin with my [what the literature claims to be] “exceptional findings”, in HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE13.HTM”Vol. 4: War, Power, Peace (here) offered the HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WPP.APPEN16B.HTM#P27″Freedom Proposition that “[T]he more libertarian a state, the less it tends to be involved in violence:”

A . . . question has to do with the kind of violence limited by libertarian [democratic] systems. Libertarian systems are the natural enemies of authoritarian and totalitarian states. By their example and the products of freedom they are naturally subversive of authoritarian or totalitarian systems; and these freedoms seem to make libertarian states defenseless against unilateral changes in the status quo. Thus, libertarian states are often involved in reactive and defensive violence against the initiatives of nonlibertarian states. Therefore in general, I do not expect that there will be a correlation. . . between libertarianism and the frequency [note: the frequency] of involvement in war or violence. Nor should there be for the conflict behavior variables. The predicted correlations for these variables are therefore random . . . .

However, once a libertarian state is involved, domestic forces will usually begin to coalesce against increased violence and for a settlement of some sort. The growth in anti-Vietnam war [and the war in Iraq] sentiment and its impact on the American leadership’s war policies and decisions are a paradigm case of [this proposition]. It follows that the intensity of violence variable (which measures the scope, occurrence, and degree of violence) and the conflict scale (which has intense violence at the extreme) should be negatively correlated with libertarianism [democracy] . . . .

There are two things to note about this quote. One is that it emphasizes the severity of violence as the crucial variable; and, second, it throws out the frequency of war involvements or other violence as a relevant variable, predicting that the correlation between democracy and the frequency of foreign violence should be random. Ironically, this zero or near zero correlation that I predicted is in fact what allegedly has been found by the subsequent studies underlying the consensus that democracies are no less or more violent than other types of regimes, to which my positive findings on severity are supposed to be an exception. Indeed, I also had found through HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/UFA.HTM”factor analyses and HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/UC.HTM”correlational studies that there was little correlation between a dimension of foreign conflict and violence and a dimension of democratic versus authoritarian and totalitarian regimes [citations in source]. . . .

[the proposition I will test using war intensity as the variable, and not frequency is:]

The More Democratic a Regime, the Less its Foreign Violence
To test this and show that my results are not due to the peculiarities of my own data set, I first used the most commonly employed data on war in this area–those of Small and Singer (1982)–in spite of their problems, to be subsequently described. They define war as any military action in which there are 1,000 or more battle dead and provide figures on battle dead for each participant in a war. It is these battle-dead data that I employed to operationalize foreign violence, since, as should be clear from the above, it is severity and not frequency of war that the theory predicts (the more democratic a regime and the more deadly a potential war, the more domestic and psychological restraint a leader will have to go to war). . . . [see Table 1 below]

The Table also presents the comparison of means for battle dead as a percentage of the regime’s population. This is a theoretically less important measure than that of battle dead itself. For democratic people and interest groups, as well as the governing elite, that a war may cost thousands of dead, or is in fact causing hundreds of deaths per week, is the more salient factor–not that a certain percentage of the population is being killed. Indeed–whether in the US pre-Pearl Harbor debate about coming actively to the aid of Great Britain (whose defeat appeared imminent), or in the great domestic debate about ending the Korean or Vietnam wars, or in the debate over launching military action against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait–no one, not at least according to my resources, phrased the concern about casualties in terms of the number of US citizens as a percentage of the population that would be or were being killed. Nonetheless, this is a favorite indicator among researchers and is included in HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP95.TAB1.GIF”Table 1 for that reason.

HYPERLINK “http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP95.FIG1.GIF”Figure 1 plots the means listed in the Table.

“

[for another test] on 73 additional regimes that did not commit democide, that reflected major regional and cultural patterns, and that involved large differences in type of regime from previous or succeeding ones, using the foreign violence dead of these non-demociders, and I again relied on the Singer and Small data, supplemented by my own data for the years 1900-87, see Table 2 (here). See also wealth, which is highly correlated with economic freedom factored out in Table 3 (here. To see power as capability factored out, go to Table 4 (here]

[How could other researchers miss this? It is because they counted frequency of wars as their dependent variable.] Counting wars or military actions equates conflicts that are vastly different. For example, according to Small and Singer the Philippines lost 90 killed in the Korean War (1982: 92), and this is counted as a war for the Philippines because there were more than 1,000 troops involved. But in the Small and Singer tables [cited in source], the Soviet Union lost 7,500,000 battle dead in World War II, and this also is counted as one war. Thus, in comparing the democraticness of regimes and their use of force, if we measure force by a frequency count of wars, then Great Britain in the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippines in the Korean War, and the USSR in World War II are treated as equally using force, since each gets a count of one for war, even although Great Britain lost only 34 in combat, the Philippines 90, and the Soviet Union over 7,000,000. Yet, such frequency counts of wars or the use of force have been the main way the Propositions on democracy and violence have been tested by others.

Consider also that whatever we theorize to be the underlying conditions inhibiting or preventing democracies and near democracies from violence, to my knowledge no one argues that democracies are equally inhibited from using force in a conflict in which the expectation is of losing a dozen or so soldiers versus engaging in a total war in which the loss of millions may be suffered. But this is the theoretical implication of the use of a simple count of wars.

[Now with this understanding, if one looks in detail at] the three most-cited studies — those of Small and Singer, Chan, and Weede — at the core of the consensus in the field that the Proposition is false, Small and Singer’s results tend to support the HYPERLINK “file:///Users/rudyrummel/INTERNET.WEB/WEB%20SITE%20FILES/DP95.HTM#FP”Proposition, and if one could accept their measurement of violence Chan and Weede would also support the Proposition. Small and Singer used an appropriate measure of severity (battle dead) and their results are relevant to the Proposition. But the Chan and Weede studies are inappropriate, since they measure violence by the number of years at war, by the frequency of wars, or by the existence of war, none of which measures the severity of violence central to the Proposition.

There are five other studies following on these that do analyses bearing on the HYPERLINK “file:///Users/rudyrummel/INTERNET.WEB/WEB%20SITE%20FILES/DP95.HTM#FP”Proposition, but they all use the Small and Singer (1982) war or the Gochman and Maoz (1984) militarized dispute data and cross-tabulate or correlate violence or war frequencies with some measure of democracy. If their use of frequencies was relevant to the Proposition, one study would be positive (Morgan and Schwebach, 1992), two would tend to be ambiguous (Domke, 1988; Maoz and Abdolali, 1989), and two studies would be negative (Cole, 1990; Morgan and Campbell, 1991), neither one strongly so. . . .

Overall, then, we find that when the Freedom/Foreign Violence HYPERLINK “file:///Users/rudyrummel/INTERNET.WEB/WEB%20SITE%20FILES/DP95.HTM#FP”Proposition is properly tested in terms of the severity of violence, all correlations or cross-tabulations of democracy and violence are in the proper direction. That is, democracy is less warlike (severity) than other regimes. This is contrary to the prevailing wisdom among students of war, but upon careful inspection the results underlying their consensus have not only been shown to equate for a nation wars involving a few dozen killed with wars killing millions, but also, were frequencies relevant, to support the Proposition, not negate it.

I say again, Gartzke was right in saying the literature mostly opposed the proposition, but wrong in accepting what these studies claimed, and what was claimed about them.

Link of Day

“Most scientific papers are probably wrong” By Kurt Kleiner (30 August 2005)

Kleiner says:

Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.

Yes, this is what I have generally found in the scientific studies of the democratic peace, as shown in my response to Gartzke above.

Links I Must Share

“Do blacks believe levee was blown?”

Washington Post columnist ‘stunned’ by ‘reasonable’ people suggesting plot.

This shows the power of racist demagoguery, especially among Black liberal leaders.

“Church wants to apologize for Iraq war”

Bishops of the Church of England are calling for Christian leaders in Britain to publicly apologize for the war in Iraq and its aftermath.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste.

“Chavez: U.S. Plans to Invade Venezuela

Hugo Chavez says he has documentary evidence that U.S. plans to invade Venezuela.

Just as Allende did, accuse the U.S. of planning to attack as a way of finessing opposition at home and unifying his people around him. Typical communist trick.

Books/articles/statistics

Still Not 50 Times Better Than Democracy–Part II

click me^–>

[First published September 12, 2005] This is Part II of my response to Gartzke’s defense against my critique, “The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong,” (here) of his chapter 2 published in the CATO Annual Ranking of Economic Freedom. In reading my response, keep in mind how this Gartzke chapter was trumped in the very first lines of CATO’s news release:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war.

I will present the rest of Gartzke’s reply that I didn’t cover yesterday, and will intersperse it with my comments in green.

Gartzke:

Dr. Rummel argues that I am doing democratization injustice by using the term “impose.” He suggests no alternative term, but references another blog post titled “Unchaining Human Rights, Not Imposing Democracy.” Certainly, “unchaining” sounds more affirmative, just as “freedom fighter” sounds more affirmative than “terrorist.” By “imposed,” I meant situations like Iraq, where democracy has not evolved endogenously. [RJR: What difference should this make in understanding that Iraqis were freed from a bloody tyranny?] In Iraq, for example, unless democratic peace exists and is general (monadic), there can be no robust effect of democratization because other states in the region (besides Israel and Turkey) are not democracies. Research by Hegre (2004) shows that increasing democracy when few states are democratic tends to increase, not decrease, conflict. Even many advocates of democratic peace doubt that democratization in the Middle East will lead to peace in anything but the very long run. [RJR: This misses what is perhaps most important about a democratic Iraq: people are free; their government will not murder, rape, and arbitrarily imprison them; it will not support terrorism, and aggrandize against its neighbors] This, of course, also requires that we assume that US efforts to democratize Iraq will succeed, a debatable claim in its own right.
Dr. Rummel takes my study to task because I point out that the democratic peace observation has recently been limited to prosperous states [RJR: All my research and most I know of have been done on all democracies, regardless of development and prosperity]. Here again, I am simply reporting the evolving consensus of democratic peace researchers themselves. Mousseau (2000) and Hegre (2000) report that an interaction term between variables for democracy and economic development leads the democracy term to become no longer statistically significant. In a newer study, John Oneal himself collaborates with Mousseau and Hegre in further substantiating this conclusion. As the result makes clear, democratic peace, if it exists, is conditioned by economic development. My view is that it is development itself, along with economic liberalization, that explains the peace. [RJR: Leave all these studies aside and just look at he world today. Among the 117 democracies now existing, which range across all levels of development and prosperity, there is no war between any two of them, no expectation of war, and no arming against another. Moreover, there is no violence between any two. Also, I've tested this in a variety of ways, and found that even holding development constant, the relationship between democracy and war is robust. See again the chart on this I showed yesterday (here), where "wealth" in equivalent to economic development. See also my Appendix to Saving Lives (here)]
Dr. Rummel claims that my assertions are falsified in my own data. As evidence, he argues that there are no “wars” between democracies. The specific claims that I make, and the data that I use involve militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), a broader category of conflict behavior. Wars are very rare. There are just 44 state participations in wars beginning in 1970, the earliest date for which the Index of Economic Freedom supplies data. Less than 1% of state years (think “man hours”) involve a war. For this reason, democratic peace researchers and others studying conflict among nations have overwhelmingly preferred in recent years to examine MIDs [RJR: Yet, Gartzke has much to say about democracy or economic freedom and war based on this analysis of a data set in which there are no wars for democracies]

Still, it is not difficult to have a look. I examined the Correlates of War project listing of wars (conflicts involving at least 1000 battle deaths per year per participant). I find no statistical relationship between either the index of economic freedom, or the democracy variable, either separately or together, using these data. [RJR: not clear -- is this a monadic or dyadic analysis? In any case, there were no wars between democracies in these data either.] The effect of capitalism is either more subtle, reducing conflicts only over a lower intensity, or the sample of wars is too small, or both. In any case, democracy does not have the effects Dr. Rummel claims in these data, even when it is left by itself in the regression. [RJR: I don't understand Gartzke's reasoning, when in the data set he originally used and in this one, there is NO WAR between democracies] As a further check on these findings, I also examined data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). These data report conflicts involving at least 25 fatalities. Thus, they are clearly conflicts involving “violence.” Using SIPRI conflicts as the dependent variable [RJR: I also analyzed a larger data set involving these data for the years 1973-2003 and found NO VIOLENCE causing deaths between democracies (see table here).], I am again unable to find a statistically significant relationship linking democracy and peace [RJR: This is an incredible statement, considering the all the data sets he consults show NO WAR between democracies]. I can, on the other hand, find weak support for the suppression of major violence by the economic freedom variable. [RJR: The methodological error is in turning a point prediction into a linear correlation one. The best way of testing a point prediction is by a contingency count, and this is what in effect I did with the table I referenced above] This variable is just short of the 5% significance threshold in a quick statistical comparison of democracy and capitalism as determinants of peace. [RJR: Gartzke is again applying statistical significance inappropriately to a population, and not to a sample that is assumed in statistical inference-- there is, however, a way of applying the test, and that is if one is assessing the probability of getting a specific combination of data, but this is not what Gartzke is doing]

So, to summarize, Dr. Rummel’s critique that I should look at wars seems unfounded, though it did not hurt to check. The claim that democracy generally causes peace is again unsupported. [RJR: Again, in all the data he uses, there is either no wars, or no violence, although in a much longer set of data over almost two centuries, as I indicated in Part I, there are three minor cases of violence between democracies. In other words, the democratic peace holds, regardless of what Gartzke says]
Dr. Rummel claims I am using the wrong data and that my study “confounds nonviolence with violence.” I am not sure what this means. Every Correlates of War Project MID involves threats or acts of a militarized nature, almost all of which involve violence (the threshold for inclusion in the dataset is high, resulting in relatively few threats and more “uses of force”) [RJR: The data he is using involves both violence and nonviolence as a test of a point prediction that democracies do not commit violence against each other, or have less violence than other regimes. This is the dependent variable. It includes nonviolence, and thus as a test, confuses violence with nonviolence in whatever relationship is found may involve to some unknown degree nonviolence. This means that it is impossible to say then what is found about the relationship between democracy and violence]. Again, I rely on the same data as democratic peace researchers, the most widely used and referenced data, in fact, in the quantitative study of international relations. For Dr. Rummel to claim that the MIDs data are not an appropriate framework for testing the democratic peace is to reject most studies of democratic peace out of hand, something I, and most other researchers, are unwilling to accept [RJR: If they do regression analysis on data that combines violence and nonviolence, then I do reject it as inappropriate to the democratic peace hypothesis. I'm unimpressed with how many do this. ] Still, it would be nice to establish that my findings do not depend on a particular kind of data source. MIDs, COW wars, and the SIPRI data code conflict behavior of a given intensity level or higher. The Interstate Crisis Behavior dataset, on the other hand, examines crises. This can be useful because some conflicts, even relatively violent ones, do not involve direct leadership decisions. Suppose some sergeant decides to lob mortar shells at the enemy, perhaps because he is tired, irritated, or afraid. This would be a MID, and possibly a SIPRI conflict, depending on casualties, but it would not be an ICB crisis if the actions of the sergeant were not initiated by national leaders. The ICB data have also been used in studies that support the democratic peace (Hewitt and Wilkenfeld 1996), and potentially better reflect some of the arguments made about why democracies should be more peaceful. If democracies are more peaceful in any context, it should be in situations where decision making is explicit, conscious, deliberate, and not the result of accidents on the front lines. Results using the ICB dataset, however, are largely the same as those I report for MIDs in my chapter in the 2005 edition of Economic Freedom of the World. [RJR: Hardly the same. This is what Jonathan Wilkenfeld, Michael Brecher, and Sheila Moser, who created the data set, say in their book, Crises in the Twentieth Century:

The more authoritarian a regime the greater was the probability of violent crisis triggers [provoking crisis by the use of violence ] (democratic–37%, civil authoritarian–49%, military–56%)…. As expected, there was a higher frequency of violence responses by military regimes (50%) than by democratic (30%) and civil authoritarian regimes (33%). Non-violent military responses were most often employed by democratic regimes (32%), compared to 20% for the other two types . . . . in short, the effect of type of regime on an actor’s responsive behavior was evident for violent response–the more authoritarian a regime the more likely its response to a crisis would be violent.

The data on crisis management technique reveal an even sharper escalation of violence–(democratic (37%), civil authoritarian (49%) and military regime (63%), with a considerable higher tendency toward full-scale war as well (18% and 21% for civil authoritarian and democratic, 39% for military regimes). Conversely, democratic regimes which were most likely to perceive non-violent acts as triggers to their crises tended to choose pacific [crisis management techniques], with negotiation the most frequent among them: it was highest among democratic regimes (32%), and dropped to 11% for military regimes.

]
Dr. Rummel argues that colinearity between economic freedom, other variables, and democracy interfere with the effect of democracy on militarized disputes. As Dr. Rummel almost certainly knows, but did not explain to the reader, multicollinearity is not a severe problem in multivariate analysis until correlations are quite high, on the order of 0.9 (he argues they are 0.7. I find that the two key variables correlate at 0.4135) [RJR: This is wrong. The effect of multicollinearity is linear. The higher the correlation between two independent variables, the more this effects the regression coefficients.]. Similarly, the idea that democracy creates capitalism is, I think, questionable. [RJR: Not creates, but promotes] Few, if any, of the archetypal laissez faire economies of nineteenth century Europe would be considered democratic by contemporary standards, though they became democratic in time. Similarly, in South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and elsewhere in recent decades, capitalism and development gave rise to pressures to democratize, not the other way around. [RJR: I do not say that democracy is a necessary condition for capitalism. Authoritarian systems can be capitalist as well.] Rather than treat democracy as a gift of the gods or something that landed from outer space, it seems more reasonable to recognize that democracies formed out of the same soup as did contemporary capitalism and economic development. In any event, the claim that capitalism and democracy are correlated does not obviously lead to the conclusion that democracy should be given preference (or deference) as the key contributor to liberal peace. If the two processes are related, then why treat one as if it is important and the other as if it does not exist? [RJR: The simple reason is that democratic countries, regardless of their internal socialism and level of development are most peaceful and don't make wars on each other, whereas authoritarian countries that are capitalist, regardless of level of development, are on the average much more violent and do make wars on each other].

Yet, again to be safe, I remove all of the variables from the regression model, except democracy. Democracy is not remotely statistically significant, even with no competitors (P value 0.448). Maybe economic freedom gets “help” from the other variables? I ran the regression model with just democracy and the freedom index, and find that economic freedom is statistically significant (P value 0.001), while democracy is insignificant. [RJR: Irrelevant, since in his data there are no wars between democracies, and as I say, in almost two centuries, only 3 minor cases of violence] The claim about sampling is debatable, and is debated, in the literature [RJR: No, it is not debatable in the case of statistical inference. Read your statistics books]. Whether we observe all possible states of the world, or just the ones that came to pass in this iteration of history hinges on issues outside the realm of the knowable. Democratic peace researchers have consistently used the statistical significance of democracy as evidence of the validity of their claims. How else can I challenge the conventional wisdom? [RJR: Use the three rules of research: (1)You look at your data and get as familiar with its details as with your own body, (2) you fit the method of analysis to the nature of the data, which is to say (3) you study the assumptions, problems, and interpretation of the method before applying it. The appropriate method in your case is contingency analysis].

At several points, Dr. Rummel notes that “there are NO (zero) wars between democracies over almost two-centuries.” This sounds persuasive, but note that the claim treats as a conclusion that which is presumably the subject of this debate. [RJR: Huh? It is a statement of fact. There were no wars between democracies.] Is it democracy that makes peace or something closely associated with democracy? Dr. Rummel emphasizes that capitalism is correlated with democracy, but refuses to treat seriously the possibility that it is capitalism that causes peace. [RJR: I explained this above: capitalist nondemocracies do make war on each other, while capitalist democracies do not.] The “two-centuries” claim is also misleading. Democratization is a recent phenomenon in world affairs. How many two-centuries old democracies are there? Indeed, we can also say that over the same period, no advanced free market economies have gone to war with each other, either. [RJR: Okay, look at the 117 democracies today, or the 50 or so several decades ago. The same thing holds].

Dr. Rummel asks “How could CATO let such a poor study into their prime report?” Clearly, this is a rhetorical question, but let me answer it as honestly as I can. The study conforms as closely as possible to the state of the art in democratic peace research. Rather than being “incompetent,” I adopted the same variables and evaluation standards, and a similar research design to those of the most widely cited research program on the democratic peace. That this happened to be the approach of Oneal and Russett and not Rummel is unfortunately a consequence of the greater popularity of the former among researchers and the wider public. Dr. Rummel does not like the choices I made in my analysis, but he does not like the choices made by other democratic peace researchers either. Differences between Dr. Rummel’s views and those of the larger democratic peace research community were not made clear in his comments, a possible source of confusion.

At the same time, I do not claim that my findings are definitive. They are a cautionary tale that gives some backing to those who are concerned that enthusiasm for the democratic peace has exceeded good judgment. [RJR: that this is a cautionary tale is inconsistent with the flat statements made in the study] No doubt this is not the end of the debate, though I hope Dr. Rummel and other interlocutors will cease from impugning my professional reputation every time I offer evidence that differs from their conclusions. Science is a perpetual learning process, in which we gradually whittle away at uncertainty. The fervor with which researchers on the subject hold to their respective visions of democratic peace should itself lead intelligent observers to caution. [RJR: Gartzke does not even try to justify his and CATO's claim that "economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war." To make this claim based on data that show no wars between democracies, and to criticize the American attempt to help democratize Iraq based on this, is where the incompetence comes in.]

Let me add in closing that, while the study Dr. Rummel critiques does not directly contradict the dyadic version of the democratic peace, my other research does. I have replicated the major dyadic studies of Oneal and Russett and others, using several indicators of capitalism, including but not limited to, the Index of Economic Freedom. I find that democracy does not sustain a dyadic effect on conflict either (there is not even a special peace among democracies), when appropriate measures of global market integration and economic development are introduced. I have shared these findings with democratic peace researchers (John Oneal, Bruce Russett, Erik Weede, Patrick James, James Lee Ray, to name a few), and expect that they will soon be available in print. Of course, I will also provide copies to Dr. Rummel, if he wishes.

In sum, Gartzke does not provide any persuasive evidence against the democratic peace, and in fact his data, as well as my own analyses of the other data to which he refers, confirms the democratic peace. Moreover, my contingency analyses of the relationship between democracy, development, and violence show the dominance of democratic freedom. Finally, the claim that stimulated my critique of Gartzke’s study — that economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in restraining nations from going to war — remains ridiculous, and also undefended by Gartzke.

Link of Day

“Clear and Clean: The Fixed Effects of the Liberal Peace,” By John Oneal and Bruce Russett (Spring, 2001) In International Organization

They conclude:

Caution is essential: the world has ample experience of public policy made on the basis of untested, badly tested, or untestable theories. But there is abundant corroboration from many different researchers using a wide variety of empirical techniques—including statistical analyses that allow for fixed effects and other methods of examining cross-temporal effects—that democracy and interdependence substantially reduce the danger of violent interstate conflict. There are good scientific grounds for confidence in these results. The bloody nature of our subject compels us to
practical guidance when the theory—and the evidence—are so strong.

Links I Must Share

“Democratic Peace or Economic peace? Who cares!?” Lennart Regebrro blog. He says:

The CATO institute claims that a free economy and free trade is more important than democracy. RJ Rummel writes that
HYPERLINK “http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2005/09/still-not-50-times-better-than.html”it is not. But does it matter? I’m not so sure. Democracies tend to have a free economy and countries with non-free economy tends to be authoritarian. Therefore, in reality, there is no choice. We need democracy *and* free economy.

Yes, it matters, because free economies are not exclusive to democracies. Authoritarian states with free economies do make war on each other and murder their citizens.

“Jakarta tackles bird flu outbreak”

“You Can’t Handle the Truth”

A shadowy media firm steps in to help orchestrate a sophisticated campaign of mass deception. Rather than alert the public to [a simulated] smallpox threat . . . .

This is why you can’t depend on public services to alert you to a global epidemic of bird flu. It’s up to us blogsters.

“North Korea linked to counterfeiting”

“North Korea hedges on nuclear deal”

North Korea said today that it would not dismantle its nuclear-weapons program until the United States first provides an atomic energy reactor, casting doubt on its commitment to a breakthrough agreement reached at international arms talks.

Typical and predictable.

A chart
of the democratic peace

Still No Wars Between Democracies

Still, No Wars Between Democracies

[First published July 13, 2005] Thanks to Dean Esmay for referring me to Matthew White’s page that raises questions about the democratic peace. I know of White’s useful Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century , and have used his statistics in my own research. He is careful, thoughtful, and systematic in what he presents, so when he questions the democratic peace, he has to be answered.

First, he presents the pros and cons about the various possible exceptions to the democratic peace. Keep in mind that the democratic peace, among other propositions, says that democracies don’t make war on each other. So, a true negative example thunders against this. Many have been proposed such exceptions, such as the War of 1812, the Boar War, WWI and Germany, democratic Finland being allied with Hitler in WWII, and the American Civil War. The sheer number of these exceptions and the weight of all the pros that White provides gives the impression that there has to be something to at least one or more of them. I have not studied them all, but those I have spent some time on in my own research, such as Germany in WWI, the case of Finland, the Boar War, and the Civil War simply cannot be treated as true exceptions. Others who have investigated these possible exceptions, in addition to the rest of them on White’s list, agree. In particular, I point you to Bruce Russett’s Grasping the Democratic Peace , James Lee Ray’s Democracy and International Conflict , and Spencer R. Weart’s, Never At War. Russett and Ray are political scientists, Weart is an historian. See also my democratic peace bibliography and my Q & A, which answers questions about some of these supposed exceptions (use the search command to find them).

After going through the exceptions, White concludes that the democratic peace depends on the definition of democracy and war. Researchers know this, of course, and have done different things about it. One is to collect their own data according to very clear, replicable criteria, while others have used data on democracy and war that have a wide reputation for their validity. Two sources especially have been important. One is the statistics on war collected by Melvin Small and J. David Singer, such as their data on wars during 1816 to 1992. I have used this in my research (see the table in the upper right here) as have hundreds of others. I should say that Small and Singer do not accept the democratic peace, which makes their classification of wars and democracies since 1816 particularly important. For democracy, in addition to the Small and Singer classification, which I am one of the few to use, there is the very popular and respected Polity data, which provides a scale for measuring the degree to which a country is democratic or autocratic. For additional data sets used in replicating the democratic peace, go here.

What is noteworthy about all the different data on democracy and war whose definitions or criteria slightly differ, is that those using them have come out with the same conclusions: there is a democratic peace. Replications have well established this to the point that students of international relations say it is the best-tested proposition in the field and almost has the status of a law.

Now, White also lists 39 wars 1945-1999, and says that six “might have been between democracies,” which means they might not have been, but still he makes much of it in calculating the probability of this happening by chance. Rather than deal with his might have been, I’m going to actually collect data from two sources on democracy and international violence between countries. The source I will use for violence is compiled by Monty G. Marshall on “Major Episodes of Political Violence 1946-2004,” ; for democracy, I will use Freedom’s House’s “All Country Ratings from 1972-2003″. Freedom House is not a proponent of the democratic peace (I don’t recall them ever mentioning it), so we can treat their data as independent of this proposition. Similarly with Marshall, who along with Ted Gurr, is the author of the Peace and Conflict Survey 2005 that I referred to in my last blog for ignoring the democratic peace.

From Marshall’s data, I’ll include as violence any that is indicated in his data as “international.” This is a hard test, since it includes violence short of war. From Freedom House, I will use their Free (F) rating of a country for a year as defining a liberal democracy in terms of civil liberties and political rights.

First, how many liberal democracies are there versus the total number of countries. For five years spans after 1972 and ending with 2003 (year, number of liberal democracies, total number of countries):

1972, 43, 148
1975, 39, 158
1980, 50, 162
1985, 55, 166
1990, 64, 165
1995, 75, 191
2000, 85, 192
2003, 87, 192

Now, for the classification of violence between types of regimes (F = free, PF = partly free, NF = not free, where F-F = between free countries, etc.)

F-F = 0
F-PF = 6
F-NF = 11
PF-PF = 5
PF-NF= 4
NF-NF= 20

So, between which countries is there the least violence ? Between liberal democracies. Which countries are the most violent towards each other? Nondemocracies. All as precisely predicted by the democratic peace. A note on statistical tests. Think of this subjectively. Here you have all these liberal democracies for each of thirty-one years, and none of them have violence between them. This is not a matter of just five or ten democracies, but by the end of the 1990s, there are over eighty. This number is not my reckoning, but that of Freedom House. And by Marshall’s data, in spite of so many democracies, none had violence between them vs. 20 cases of violence between the nonfree ones during these years.

Now, some people don’t llike subjective statistics, so lets calculate the probability. There are 46 cases of international violence, and six alternative ways that could occur (e.g., F-F, or PF-PF). Let the number 1 stand for the F-F alternative, and the other five numbers for each of the others. Throw a six-numbered die 46 times, and what is the probability that it will never come up with a 1? The probability that it will not come up a 1 in one throw is 5/6. So, the probability of no 1 in 46 throws is 5/6 to the 46th power (assuming each case of violence is independent), which is a probability of happening by chance of 8.017E-36, or about the probability of one being hit by a meteor. Obviously, there has to be something more than chance here. And what is that something? Surprise. It is two countries having democratic governments. That is, the democratic peace.

Link of Note

“DOES DEMOCRACY CAUSE PEACE?” By James Lee Ray. In Annual. Review of Political Science 1998. 1:27-46.

ABSTRACT
The idea that democratic states have not fought and are not likely to fight interstate wars against each other runs counter to the realist and neorealist theoretical traditions that have dominated the field of international politics. Since the mid-1970s, the generation of new data and the development of superior analytical techniques have enabled evaluators of the idea to generate impressive empirical evidence in favor of the democratic peace proposition, which is reinforced by substantial theoretical elaboration. Some critics argue that common interests during the Cold War have been primarily responsible for peace among democracies, but both statistical evidence and intuitive arguments cast doubt on that contention. It has also been argued that transitions to democracy can make states war-prone, but that criticism too has been responded to persuasively. The diverse empirical evidence and developing theoretical bases that support the democratic peace proposition warrant confidence in its validity.

Yep.

Books/articles/statistics

Somme Deadly Madness

[First published May 29, 2005] War remains ugly, a bloody evil, but one often necessitated for the democracies by the worse evil of not going to war. We should never forget, however, what war is like, and how even with the best of intentions, human lives can be squandered by the tens of thousands.

So it was in the Battle of the Somme in World War I, a battle that changed the public’s view of war. Up to that time war had been seen by too many as a glorious crusade against evildoers, replete with medals, parades, cheers, and handsome uniforms. And after World War I, when the horror and cost in lives of the Battle of the Somme became known, war was believed the worst of all evils. It spawned a general pacifism — a deep hostility to war, armaments, nationalism, and patriotism. Less than two-decades later, this fed the French and British appeasement of Hitler, and American isolationism, when confronting him might have avoided World War II. The general public learned the wrong lesson from the Battle of the Somme, and other such bloody battles in that war, and this lesson remains still deeply imbedded in our culture and helps fuel the antiwar movement.

Read the following docudrama and feel what war can really mean for the individual soldier, regardless of which side they are on.

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Half squatting, Jimmy leaned against the side of the muddy trench, the toes of his boots invisible in the muck at the bottom. Jimmy was a short, skinny fellow, with a frame on which not even his military training could put muscle. His baggy uniform now rippled like a sail in a crosswind. His helmet hid his short brown hair, except when his shaking tipped it forward over his eyes and a few strands escaped.

Jimmy had grown up in Bristol, England. Before joining the army, he had spent most of his evenings drinking with his buddies at the local pub, or going to the new silent movies with them. That was his entertainment. Even at eighteen years of age, Jimmy had never gone out on a date and was shy of girls. His friends constantly ribbed him about being too embarrassed to participate when they’d dragged him off to a French bordello.

Once Jimmy had thought of going to college, and teachers had told him that he had the intelligence for it, but his father had never paid the family bills and later, he disappeared altogether, leaving Jimmy to support his mother and two sisters. He could read up and learn on his own, Jimmy told himself, and he did enjoy the rough and tumble of a warehouseman’s job.

Jimmy was part of the Army’s plan to create new volunteer divisions to fight alongside the regulars. The Army kept together as units all those volunteering from a particular company, town, or city neighborhood. This meant that Jimmy knew most of the soldiers around him, who in civilian life had drunk with him, sold him goods, or delivered ice or milk to his small home. Many had been his good friends. All but a few were now dead, as were his two best friends and his cousin. Jimmy had cried for hours after he had helped drag the upper half of his cousin’s body to the rear—all that remained of someone Jimmy had grown up with, played with, eaten many meals with, and, as boys do, argued with. Half his body gone!

As Jimmy waited for the scheduled cessation of seven days of shelling on the German trenches, he thought about dying. Despite his captain’s assurance that this next attack would be an easy victory, that Jimmy could walk over to the German lines and simply shove all the dead Germans out of the way, he knew he would die, as his friends had died. So he trembled as he awaited the silence that would follow the end of the shelling, and the captain’s whistle that would send him climbing out of the trench, to his death. He only hoped it would be quick and painless.

George Finch, crouched next to him in the trench, poked him in the side and leaned over to shout in his ear, “Jimmy, could you do me a favor?”

“What?” Jimmy yelled back.

“If I’m killed, will you give this to my mother?” George held out a small piece of dirty packaging from their rations. He had scrawled a few words on it with a blunt pencil. “You can read it,” George said.

It was easy to read in the dawning light, and said simply, “My Dearest Mom—I love you. Sonny.”

George lived several houses down from Jimmy on Bloy Street; Jimmy knew George’s mother. “Come on,” Jimmy said, “you won’t die.”

“Please!”

Jimmy shrugged and tucked the wrapper into his pocket. “Okay.”

At least this will make him feel better, Jimmy thought, although I’m the one that’s going to die.

Minutes later, there it was: The awful silence as the shelling stopped. Immediately, the officers came down the trench, getting them ready to move out. Jimmy heard the shrill whistle and then the yelling, and he scrambled out of the trench with all the others up and down the line and advanced on the Germans.

Jimmy’s jitters vanished. He focused everything on the trenches in the distance and unconsciously switched to automatic motion. Carrying sixty pounds of ammunition, food, water, and gear, he doglegged along the paths through their own barbed wire, moving at a slow walk through the mud.

“Please, God,” Jimmy kept murmuring, “no pain. Please, God, make it sudden.”

More here

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See Them And Weep

[First published March 3, 2005] Everyone knows the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and it is true. One way to catalyze public opinion into doing something about mass murder and death is to show the ugly photographs of the bodies over and over again. And even more.

Most visitors may not remember what provoked the American intervention in Somalia in December 1992 with 25,000 troops, which was to secure the trade routes in Somalia so that food could get to the starving people. It was the daily photos of starving and dead Somalian children.

But, forever afterward, because of our inability to stop the civil war there, and Clinton’s ignominious retreat when 18 American soldiers were killed in Mogadishu and the bodies were dragged through the streets, commentators have labeled this intervention a failure. It is now a poster board for nonintervention. No matter how many people believe it, this is absurd. We saved about a million Somalians from starvation, and that to me is a whooping victory.

Photos of democide are powerful, and for this reason I put on my website dozens of photos of them, some sickening (link here). My hope is that they will stimulate visitors to learn more about the underlying cause of all this horrible democide by going through the documents on my website. And what to do about it, which is foster freedom.

Now, Nicholas Kristof, columnist for The New York Times has provided some photos on the Sudan democide (link here). They tell the story. If every major newspaper were to present such photos day after day, this democide would be stopped dead.

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Link of Note

”The Massgraves—Victims of Saddam’s Regime”

For those who question the American led attack on Saddam Hussein’s control of Iraq, I wish I could take them on a tour of the 53 confirmed mass graves (270 reported) of Hussein’s victims that have been uncovered since Iraq’s people were freed. Young and old; men, woman, children, babies; crippled and infirm; all in one mass grave after another, totaling hundreds of thousands (Human Rights Watch estimates that in two decades 290,000 Iraqis disappeared. This does not count those openly murdered in massacres such as the gas attack on a Kurd village that killed 5,000, the individual murders, such as the husband of a bride raped by Hussein’s son, or the suicides, such as the bride herself). Since such a tour is impossible, look at the above website’s pictures of what came out of the mass graves.

Then I must ask the noninterventionists to answer to the souls of these poor people. How can you be so sickenly immoral as to let such evil murders continue?

SEE The Democratic Peace At Work

[First published March 8, 2005] While the left and their surprising allies, libertarians, pooh-pooh the democratic peace, the evidence for its promotion of a more peaceful world is overwhelming. See for yourself in the following two plots of armed conflict and the growth of democracies 1946-2004 (from The Center For Systematic Research here):

As the number of democracies increase over the 58 years, they reach a tipping point in 1992 where armed conflict then steeply decline.

I predicted that a decline would occur with this growth of democracies in my 1979 book on War, Power, Peace (link here). For additional evidence of this decline and a related Q and A, see my democratic peace clock (link here) and my blog “Democracies Increase and Ipso Facto, World Violence Declines” (link here) chastising commentators for missing this.

Yes, yes, I know, correlation does not prove causation. But, if there is a solid theory, consistent replications, and complimentary evidence, then it is no longer a working hypothesis, but fact.

I present the facts, you decide.

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Link of Note

”Can the Whole World Become Democratic? (4/17/03) By Larry Diamond

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is also professor of political science and sociology (by courtesy) at Stanford University and coordinator of the Democracy Program of the new Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford’s Institute for International Studies.

“Can any state become democratic? Can the whole world become democratic? This lecture argues that the answers to both questions are yes, and that neither culture nor history nor poverty are insurmountable obstacles. Indeed, for much of the world that remains trapped in poverty, a growing body of evidence and policy analysis suggests that democratic, accountable, transparent governance is a fundamental condition for sustainable development. There are no preconditions for democracy, other than a willingness on the part of a nation’s elite to attempt to govern by democratic means. But that, in itself, will require strong pressure from below, in civil society, and from outside, in the international community, to generate the political will for democratic reform. And sustaining democracy in the context of unfavorable cultural, social, and economic conditions requires institutions to foster effective, accountable governance as well as robust international engagement and support. Democracy can emerge anywhere, but it can only take root if it brings about, however gradually, a more prosperous, just, and decent society.”

On Freedom

[First published June 18, 2005]
From Colleaque:

One of the mottos I have all my students memorize and understand is “RTM — Regime Type Matters.” I use your Power Kills to make sure they understand this both empirically and theoretically, as well as making sure they see the practical implications “since Power kills, if you want non-violence, promote democracy”).

I also use the famous satellite photo of the Korean peninsula at night: the North is almost completely dark, while the South is lit up like Times Square.
I ask why? Since the people are the same, the resources pretty much the same, the weather almost the same, the culture the same, what is the explanatory variable? Obviously politics! This makes “RTM” vividy clear to them.

Yesterday (Friday) Rush was asked what made America so different, and his answer is a classic statement of the importance or regime type — freedom is the answer. Transcript below….

….
Rush:

Who’s next? Anchorage, Alaska, this is Adam. Hello, sir.

CALLER:

Hey, Rush, mega dittos here from the great state of Alaska. You actually helped make my college experience bearable. My question is, democracy and freedom work so well here in America because we fought for it, we died for it, our blood was shed. How can we be assured that the Iraqis will have that same appreciation?

RUSH:

We can’t be sure. There is a lot of faith here and I will tell you why I am willing to try it. I ask this question of people constantly. You thanked me for getting you through the college experience, so you’re relatively young. I don’t know how much you’ve traveled internationally, but if you haven’t, you someday will, and when you travel the world, you will see a stark difference in almost every aspect of the human condition, when compared to this country. Even if you go to civilized parts of the world, western Europe, Japan, you will see a marked difference in the quality of life. And for the moment here I’m not talking about political circumstances. I’m just talking about economic. You will see civilizations that have been around far longer than we have who are not nearly as advanced. You will see civilizations and cultures that are on the road to where we are, but they’re not really near it, and they have been at it for thousands of years longer than we have. And you’ll ask yourself, “Why? Why is this?” The first thing you’ll do is say, “What is it about the United States geographically, what is it about the United States that enables us to be the leader of the world?” And you’ll start looking at things like, “Well, is it because of our agriculture? Is it because of our natural resources? Is it because of the cooperation so many people on one continent have because we are part of the United States, so Arkansans freely trade with Missourians, who freely trade with Californians, we’re all Americans, is it that?”

And then you’ll say, “Well, wait. It can’t all be that because we don’t have nearly enough oil to supply our own needs, we have to get that elsewhere from around the world.” Then you’ll say, “It can’t be that because when I go to the store I see all kinds of products made in China and Japan and Mexico. So what is it,” you’ll ask yourself, “what is it about us?” And then you’ll ask yourself, “Are we different human beings? Is there something about us as human beings that makes us different than, say, human beings in Africa or Asia or Europe?”

And then you’ll have to conclude, no, because a human being is a human being, regardless what a human being looks like, regardless what a human being’s skin color is or where a human being is born, we’re all human beings. We’re no better than any other group of human beings, collectively or individually anywhere else on the planet. So why are we so far advanced in every which way, politically as well? Let’s bring the political system in – and you will conclude, Adam, as I have, after many experiences and asking yourself these questions, that there’s one thing that sets us apart from all these other people, and that is freedom. We as human beings here are allowed, because of the freedom we have compared to other human beings on the planet, to maximize our potential as human beings, our creativity, our industriousness, our talents.

Now, we have shackles on ourselves here, we’ve got restrictions and regulations, but it’s nothing compared to people that live in totalitarian regimes run by dictators and thugs and so forth. It is therefore the conclusion, the theory is that guides our policy, President Bush’s policy, I’m sure, is that a human being has a natural yearning as a result of creation to be free and to be the best he can be. But society, culture after culture, generation after generation, when you tamp that down, step on it, you suppress it for generation after generation after generation. Now in Iraq, it’s being put to the test. And I think it’s succeeding. I think the Iraqis themselves are getting along much faster than we did in getting a Constitution. I wouldn’t say this is a lost cause, just the exact opposite. I think what’s going on over there is a sight to behold and it’s a model for the rest of that region.

BAR.RED.BLACK.GIF

Roots Of War

[First published April 5, 2005] I have put on my website Frank H. Denton’s book, Knowing the Roots of War: Analyses and Interpretations Of Six Centuries Of Warfare. It is unavailable elsewhere. Well experienced and knowledgeable to write a book on war, Frank Denton has had a career of 50 years in defense and foreign affairs. After a time with the defense industry, he joined RAND and the foreign service. He served in Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia, Philippines, and Washington, and has retired to do research in the Philippines. He has published extensively in several different fields, but concentrated on patterns and trends in the political use of warfare. After undergraduate work in statistics and math, he obtained a PhD in International Relations from the University of Southern California.

Denton’s statistics and insights into war are useful and interesting for both the student of warfare and international relations, and those with a moral or historical interest.

He says:

While I am not in any sense someone who might be classified as a pacifist, the fundamental conclusion that is inescapable is that quite in antithesis to the Clausewitzian model of the employment of warfare to manage conflicts, warfare has demonstrably been used, if you will, to mismanage conflicts. Society has need of and opportunity to seek means for better controlling the use of warfare for the practice of initiating warfare is inordinately costly in lives, disruptions and treasure and is shown here to be frequently a failure. It is my observation that this presentation of results provides some background that can lead to better control of warfare. Just as importantly, it opens a wide range of ideas and hypotheses for further investigation.

His overall evaluation is this.

Across all time periods, in all types of governments, for any power relationships other than big/small, the party making the decision to go to war, that is firing the first shot in a war, has for two hundred years had less than a fifty-fifty success rate, often much less, in achieving its objectives in firing that first shot. Time-after-time, year-after-year, conflict after conflict, political leaders took decisions to initiate wars in which they failed to achieve their objectives. Based on a listing of 500 incidents of warfare that took place in a two-century interval this provides a hard to dispute validation of Barbara Tuchman’s statement in the first paragraphs of The March of Folly.

A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity. In this sphere, wisdom…is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

Why did successive ministries of George III insist on coercing rather than conciliating the American colonies though repeatedly advised by many counselors that the harm done must be greater than any possible gain? Why did Charles XII and Napoleon and successively Hitler invade Russia despite the disasters incurred by each predecessor?

Former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara makes a saddened assertion in his memoirs of the Vietnam War build-up that is strangely similar to Tuchman’s:

Readers must wonder by now…how presumably intelligent, hardworking and experienced officials-both civilian and military-failed to address systematically and thoroughly questions whose answers so deeply affected the lives of our citizens and the welfare of our nation.

There is perhaps no better way of stating the results found here than to assert that Folly Marches Onward.

By his statistics, this is true across all types of governments, except when one focuses on democracy. Not only do they not make war on each other, as I have found (this is outside of Denton’s data, which focused on a nation’s war and not on the type of government of those who fought each other), but as he shows (search for the keyword “democracy”), in the 19th Century democracies won 76 percent of the wars they fought, while monarchies won 43 and dictators 42 percent. In the 20th Century, the percentages are respectively, 54, 37, and 33.

So, democracies have the best fighting machine, if they have to go to war against the thugs of this world or are attacked.

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Link of Note

”The Berger wrist slap: A dangerous precedent” (4/5/2005)

By David Limbaugh
Limbaugh notes:

[Sandy] Berger, a national security adviser in the Clinton administration, was caught red-handed removing sensitive, classified documents from the National Archives. He wasn’t doing something as innocuous as research for his personal memoirs. No, he was preparing for testimony before the 9-11 commission to vindicate Bill Clinton’s performance in response to the terrorist threat. The documents he secreted, purloined and later deliberately destroyed, were exceedingly relevant to the subject matter of his 9-11 testimony. . . . Under a plea agreement with the government, Berger will be fined $10,000 and his national security clearance will be suspended for three years.

Note that at first Berger said that he took the documents unintentionally — his destruction of them was accidental or inadvertent. Now, he admits to the court he did it all intentionally.

Note also that for lying to investigators, Martha Stewart got five months in jail and two years probation. She destroyed no documents.

President Clinton was found by a court to have lied before a grand jury and to have lied under oath in a civil deposition. He eventually admitted wrongdoing, was fined $25,000, and barred from law practice for 5 years.

Why did Stewart get jail time when Berger and Clinton served no jail time for far more serious crimes?

Rethinking Hiroshima/Nagasaki

click me^–>

[First published August 28, 2005] I came across an article,“Why Truman Dropped the Bomb” by Richard B. Frank (an historian of World War II, author of Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire) appearing in The Weekly Standard. Frank provides new intelligence (the complete “Magic” intercepts released in 1995 of Japanese communication at the highest levels) and information, and a new slant on the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombs that I had not considered.

I should note that Frank believes that dropping the bombs were not only a good decision, but necessitated by what we have now come to understand was the situation at the end of July in 1945 (the Hiroshima bomb was dropped on August 6).

What do we now know we didn’t know or know well a decade or more ago?

1. The Japanese knew we were planning to invade Kyushu, were building up their forces to a make an invasion very difficult, if not impossible, and we knew that from our intercepts of their high and low level communications.

2. Aware of this, and believing that such an invasion would be too costly to be sustainable by the American people, the commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet Admiral King, and Pacific Fleet Admiral Nimitz opposed the invasion and when the final decision had to be made, the Navy would have fought for a blockade and bombardment of the Japanese Islands instead. Frank writes that the invasion “had become unthinkable.” So much for justifying the A-bombing by the cost in lives of such an invasion.

3. While the Japanese inner Cabinet did authorize peace feelers in Moscow, their bottom line strictly adhered to until after Nagasaki, was not only the continuation of the prerogatives of the Emperor, but also of the old fascist order. So, if we had moderated our unconditional surrender demand to allow for the continuation of the emperor, it would not have made any difference. So much for peace feelers.

4. While the dropping of the A-bombs was by all standards of warfare, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions, a war crime and democide in my terms, on balance I have to consider that daily throughout Asia and the Pacific, the Japanese military were murdering vast numbers of civilians and POWs. The American historian Robert Newman put the death toll at about 400,000 Asians a month. By my calculations, this is not too far off, since I tally a total Japanese democide during the war of 5.9 million (Calculated here. See the resulting table in the uper right). In honesty, in considering the morality of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had completely forgotten about the ongoing Japanese democide.

5. Whether we invaded or not, we can’t ignore Stalin. He entered the war against Japan on August 9. Had we not used the A-bombs and had the Japanese inner cabinet and emperor continued to fight to the end, he would have taken all of Korea, and even perhaps undertaken an invasion of Japan’s northern Island of Hokkaido of western Honshu (Stalin had no compunction about squandering millions of lives). I leave to your imagination what a Korea ruled totally by Stalin and his having a foothold in Japan would have meant for the post-war world, human lives, and Japanese democracy.
So, have I changed my view? By definition and how I have labeled similar actions by the Soviets, Nazis, and Japanese military, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were democide. I can’t change that unless I totally rewrite and recalculate all I’ve done on democide. But morally, is it right to murder hundreds of thousands to save the lives of even more? Or, to save nations (South Korea and Japan) from Stalin’s democidal horrors?
I have to tell you, recognizing these arguments is painful for me. For the last two-decades, I have consistently opposed any democide as a crime against humanity and immoral. Now, the above arguments inexorably force me to accept that massive democide can be necessary to prevent even greater democide (Japanese democide was not speculative, but known, and ongoing; nor was what Stalin did in occupied countries speculative), and thus a moral tradeoff. It is the same for the assassination (an international crime) I recommend of Kim Jung Il, or my approval of torture (an international crime also) when it would save many lives.

Sometimes I envy those on the far left or right. They live in a world of red and blue absolutes, and will not be bothered by conditionals and qualifications; and do not understand that nature, life, and ethics are a balance.

Link of Note

“ENDING THE PACIFIC WAR: HISTORY AND FANTASY” (3/25/01) By Richard B. Frank

Frank says:

The decisions made by President Truman and his subordinates to add nuclear weapons to the campaign of blockade and bombardment cost the lives of between 100,000 and 200,000 Japanese at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on top of the many tens of thousands of others who died in the incendiary raids or due to the ultimate effects of the blockade. Those Japanese noncombatants, however, held no stronger right not to be slaughtered than the vast numbers of Chinese and other Asian noncombatants dying daily, the Japanese noncombatants on the Asian continent dead or forever missing in Soviet captivity, or the Japanese noncombatants (not to mention Allied prisoners-of-war and civilian internees) who would have perished of starvation and disease in the final agony of the blockade. Thus, alternatives to the atomic bombs carried no guarantee as to when they would end the war and a far higher price in human death and suffering.

Finally, the deaths actually incurred in ending the war were not gratuitous. American goals were not simply victory but peace. Had American leaders in 1945 been assured that Japan and America would pass two generations in tranquility and still look forward with no prospect of future conflict, they would have believed their hard choices had been vindicated- -and so should we.

Yes, well put.

Nukes for Democracies

[First published August 1, 2005] Some ideas have such a tight hold on thoughts and actions, that the underlying logic is taken for granted. One such is the idea of nonproliferation. For example, the usual arms control crowd are outraged that President Bush has reversed the long standing, blindly held American nonproliferation policy by helping india develop nuclear power. He said that India, “as a responsible state with advanced nuclear technology, should acquire the same benefits and advantages as other such states.” He added that he will “work to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India as it realizes its goals of promoting nuclear power and achieving energy security.”

As Strobe Talbott put it in an article titled, “A bad day for nonproliferation, this will:

give India virtual membership in the club of recognized nuclear-weapons states created by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. . . . “The administration tends to see the world in black-and-white terms, a view that has translated into a nonproliferation policy that cuts extra slack for “good” countries, like India, while cracking down on “bad” ones, like North Korea and Iran. . . . Seeing the outcome of [India's Prime Minister] Singh’s U.S. visit, at least some of those states will be more inclined to regard the nonproliferation treaty as an anachronism, reconsider their self-restraint, and be tempted by the precedent that India has successfully established and that now, in effect, has an American blessing.

Talbott and many other’s of like mind seem not to realize that democracies with nukes are no threat to each other or the United States. They, in fact, are the “good guys.” Britain has almost 200 strategic nuclear warheads, France near 500, India 45 to 95 nonstrategic (short to intermediate range) warheads and israel perhaps 75 to 125 also nonstrategic. But they are of no national security concern to the United States. We do not defend against them. Only Pakistan’s 30-50 nonstrategic, China’s strategic 300, and now that Russia has slipped into authoritarianism, Russia’s 6,094 are of concern. We do defend against them with our growing missile defense shield, and with the threat of retaliating with our own 7,296 war heads if attacked with their nuclear weapons.

The idea of nonproliferation never took into account the democratic peace between democracies and the need for democracies to defend themselves against dictators. I’m for proliferation among the democracies and have often said that South Korea, Japan, and yes, Taiwan, stable liberal democracies all, should develop nukes for their own defense (with utmost secrecy in the case of Taiwan).

Yes, I know, I know — this would create instability, encourage the bad guys to develop nukes, and risk democracies using nukes in local crises (as between Pakistan and India). Yes, so we should prevent the democracies from protecting themselves with nukes (and thus from having their own defense policy of assured destruction), while the likes of North Korea and Iran develop their own.

Link of Note

“Kissinger warns about the Iranian threat “ (5/1/05) NBC

Question:

Where does a nuclear Iran rank on a list of American security concerns?

Answer by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger:

It ranks very high, partly by accident. Partly by the fact that it’s the next country. And partly by the fact that it has a government that has demonstrated great hostility over a long period of time.  But our concern should be great, regardless of the government, essentially because of the government. Because each expansion of the nuclear club brings with it comparable countries who then feel they have to, that they are entitled to do the same thing.
Iran first of all has a terrorist capability but also it would bring with it Turkey, Egypt, similar-type countries and, at some point, the nuclear problem is going to get out of control, at some very early point.

Yes, Iran must be stopped, but not as a matter of nonproliferation applied indiscriminately to all nations, but because it is a dictatorship.

Not a Parody — China’s White Paper on Democracy

click me^–>

[First published October 20, 2005] China has published a white paper, “Building of Political Democracy in China.” (full paper here). This is a remarkable paper and provides an invaluable view of the Chinese communist elite’s perception of democracy, or what they believe would justify their dictatorship to the democracies. In short, what we see as red, they claim is truly blue. A few choice paragraphs:

In the course of their modern history, the Chinese people have waged unrelenting struggles and made arduous explorations in order to win their democratic rights. But only under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC) did they really win the right to be masters of the state. The Chinese people dearly cherish and resolutely protect their hard-earned democratic achievements.

Because situations differ from one country to another, the paths the people of different countries take to win and develop democracy are different. Based on the specific conditions of China, the CPC and the Chinese people first engaged in a New Democratic Revolution, and after New China was founded in 1949, and proceeding from the actual situation of the primary stage of socialism, began to practice socialist democracy with its own characteristics. The experience over the past few decades has proved that embarking on this road of development of political democracy chosen by the Chinese people themselves not only realized the Chinese people’s demand to be masters of their own country, but is also gradually realizing their common ideal to build their country into a strong and modern socialist country. . . .

The experience of political civilization of mankind over a history of several millenniums is ample proof of the truth that the political system a country adopts and the road to democracy it takes must be in conformity with the conditions of that country. The socialist political democracy of China is rooted in the vast land of fertile soil on which the Chinese nation has depended for its subsistence and development over thousands of years. It grew out of the experience of the CPC and the Chinese people in their great practice of striving for national independence, liberation of the people and prosperity of the country. It is the apt choice suited to China’s conditions and meeting the requirement of social progress.

Then there is the choice part of the paper on “Respecting and Safeguarding Human Rights:”

Respecting and safeguarding human rights, ensuring that the people enjoy extensive rights and freedom according to law, represents an intrinsic requirement for the development of socialist democracy. Socialist democracy means that all power of the state belongs to the people and people enjoy in real terms the civil rights prescribed in the Constitution and law. China’s socialist democracy is a kind of democracy built on the basis that citizens’ rights are guaranteed and constantly developed.

As a committed representative of the Chinese people’s fundamental interests, the CPC has always taken as its basic task the maintenance of national sovereignty and independence, as well as the safeguarding and development of the various rights of the people, and regards the rights to subsistence and development as the paramount human rights. The CPC adheres to taking development as the task of first importance, implements the scientific concept of putting the people first and seeking an overall, coordinated and sustainable development, and strives to promote economic development and social progress to satisfy the people’s multiple needs and realize their all-round development.

The Chinese Constitution comprehensively stipulates the citizens’ basic rights and freedoms. Based on the Constitut ion, China has enacted a series of laws on the protection of human rights, and set up a relatively comprehensive legal system for the protection of human rights. On the basis of achievements made over the 50-plus years of economic and social development, the Chinese people are now enjoying human rights more comprehensive and fuller than they have ever enjoyed in the past.

All I can say is read my “Introduction and Overview” of China’s Bloody Century (here), and note that even with the recent advance in freedom of the Chinese people (still not democracy, even electorally), as Michael Backman says (from here):

China routinely executes hundreds and sometimes thousands of its citizens each year. There were 27,120 death sentences reported in China’s official media in the 1990s and more than 18,000 confirmed executions. More than 50 crimes are punishable by death. Famously, relatives of the executed are invoiced for bullets used in the dispatch.

Pre-trial confessions are still relied on extensively in place of forensic evidence and although torture is illegal it is still used to extract confessions. It is likely that many innocent people are executed each year on the basis of such “confessions”.

The legal system is poorly resourced. Many judges are poorly trained. They are nominated by local and provincial party committees and approved by local people’s congresses. The congresses provide the salaries, housing and other benefits for judges, many of whom are former military personnel with little or no legal training. There is not even a pretence of judicial independence: judges are expected to discuss sensitive cases with members of their local Communist Party political-legal committees before making rulings..

As to the Chinese Communist Party’s after 1949 beginning to “practice socialist democracy with its own characteristics,” what these characteristics were is well illustrated in the pie chart below.

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Link of Note

“[China's] DF-5 (CSS-4) INTERCONTINENTAL BALLISTIC MISSILE

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The Dong Feng-5 (DF-5, NATO codename: CSS-4) is China’s first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). Developed by China Academy of Launch Vehicle (CALT, also known as 1st Aerospace Academy), it is a silo-based, two-stage, liquid propellant ballistic missile. The missile carries a single 3 megatons nuclear warhead and has an effective range of 12,000km. The DF-5A is the improved variant with an extended range. The PLA currently deploys approximately 24~36 of this missile deployed in central China.

Following the success of the DF-4 (CSS-3) long-range ballistic missile, in 1964 China began to develop its first true ICBM capable of reaching the United States. The same design was also later used to develop China’s Chang Zheng (Long March) family space launch vehicle and became the foundation of the Chinese space programme.

RJR: And liberals and libertarians oppose our development of a missile space shield, which they still derisively call “Star Wars.” But, they offer no alternative defense except massive retaliation against Chinese ICBMs. Keep in mind what this would mean — the killing of tens of millions of Chinese people in retaliation for what a gang of Chinese communist thugs have done.

Links I Must Share

Terrorism Knowledge Base
RJR: this is an incredible resource, and even enables you to generate online your own terrorism time series charts.

Transparancy International
RJR: Provides a corruption index for most nations. Least corrupt is Iceland, U.S. is ranked 17th, under Germany and Hong Kong. At the bottom is Chad. China is 78th, along with Morocco, Senegal, Sri Lanka, and Suriname. It seems from scanning the ranks that the democracies are the least corrupt. If no one correlated these ranking with democratic freedom, I will.

“Death With A Smile”
A docudrama of China’s Cultural Revolution

Repeat After Me — There Was An Armenian Genocide

click me^–>

[First published September 26, 2005] I’ve gotten more email from Turks or Muslims asking how I could make such a damning claim that Turkey committed genocide. I write back that they’ve been brainwashed.

Turkey did murder about 2,000,000 Armenians and 350,000 Greeks, the first such extensive genocide of the last century (the first was the German slaughter of 65,000 Herero in Namibia in 1904). I know, I know, my figure of Armenian’s murdered far surpasses the 1,500,000 most often given by Armenian and genocide scholars, but they are only counting that period during WWI when the Young Turks were in power. I included the post war period when the Nationalist under Atatürk continued the genocide of Armenians and added the Greeks, and so mentioning Atatürk enrages Turk students the most. After all, he is a hero to Turks and the father of modern Turkey.

There is no doubt this genocide occurred. Genocide scholars, without exception, agree on this, the relevant documents were generated by two court trials, there is voluminous reports from the American ambassador and other diplomats in Turkey, and refugee reports are consistent on this. Nonetheless, Turkey has succeeded in casting doubt on the genocide. Their story is that the Armenians were in rebellion and siding with Russia, which invaded Turkey during the war, and besides which they had killed many Muslim Turks, which they did. Thus, what is interpreted as genocide was an attempt by the Young Turks to subdue the rebellion, and deport Armenians away from the border with Russia.

Then there are the American academic experts on Turkey who agree with Turkey that there was no genocide, but in effect a civil war. But, one has to be careful with these people. Often they are doing research on Turkey under Turkish grants or support, and second they can be denied access to the Turkish archives. Its inner reaches are only available with government permission.

And with sorrow, I must add that the American State Department refuses to recognize this genocide even though our ambassador at the time, Henry Morgenthau, reported extensively on it. We know this because he wrote a book, Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story , in which he detailed the genocide. In spite the of documentation that must fill a significant area of the State’s archives, why does it continue to deny what every researcher with the exception of Turkey’s sycophants know, and even what Congress is now considering as a concurrent resolution recognizing the genocide (go here)? Real politics.

Our relationship with Turkey is considered important, and being on the northern borders of Iraq and Syria, a Turkish support is critical, especially it swallowing the acerbic pill of autonomy for the Iraqi Kurds under the proposed Iraqi constitution — for Turkey a bad example to their own near 14 million Kurds (about 20% of the population). Repeatedly, the State Department has refused to recognize genocide, or even democide. Not by Turkey, not by Nazi Germany, not by Stalin, not by Mao, not by Pakistan (in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh), not by the Pol Pot, not by Rwanda, not by Serbia, not by Hussein (in his slaughter of the Kurds, often with poison gas), and at first, not of Sudan. Secretary Colin Powell did recognize this genocide, but notice that it is not part of the current vocabulary.

Real politics is always the dominant consideration. I’m tempted to call this the let-them-die policy that there are considerations that are more important then the lives of hundreds of thousands and even millions. State gets away with this because there is little general recognition of how much democide, and its component genocide, is carried out by dictatorships, and what a significant impact on these thug regimes and this awful practice America could have by calling such mass murder what it is, and pointing a trembling, outraged finger at it.

Link of Day

“Turkish Genocide of Armenians”

: A website museum of material on the genocide

Links I Must Share

“Turkish protest over genocide conference “:

Turkey avoided a damaging row with the EU on free speech at the weekend when a conference on the Armenian genocide was finally held in Istanbul after the organisers circumvented a court ban.

“He’ll Have To Go”:

Amidst rumours of his imminent flight from Nepal, King Gyanendra abruptly cancelled his scheduled visit to New York for the UN General Assembly meeting. . . . Kathmandu civil society’s opposition, spearheaded by the Citizen’s Movement for Democratic Peace, has unambiguously adopted the slogan of republican democracy.

The last throes of another monarchy and birth of democracy.

“China’s leaders launch smokeless war against internet and media dissent”:

China announced a fresh crackdown yesterday on the internet amid further revelations of a plan by Hu Jintao, the president, to suppress dissent.

“Senior U.S. Officials Criticize International Failure to Fight Terrorist Financing”

“Anti-War Harangue Feeds Muslim Murderers”

In a time of war, we used to call this treason.

“Please Kill Him Now”
A docudrama of the Armenians genocide

Redefining Historical Democracy

click me^–>

[First published August 21, 2005] On the frontside of the Democratic Peace Chart [linked in right sidebar] I have defined democracy as: government by the people either directly or through elected representatives, and subdefined a modern version as one of two types — electoral, with universal franchise, secret ballot, and regular and competitive elections; and liberal with all that an electoral democracy has in procedures, plus freedom of speech, religion, association, and rule by law. So far, this is consistent with the political science literature on contemporary democracy.

The problem is that research has extended as far back in history as classical Greece and Rome to test the democratic peace proposition. Clearly, no ancient or medieval country was democratic in a modern sense. Not even the United State until 1920, when the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was approved and women could vote. Researchers have finessed this by asking how much the democratic franchise can be limited before the idea of democracy collapses into a form of oligarchic rule. Major researchers have agreed that as long voters have equal rights, voting is secret, competitive, and regularized, and winners can lose the next election, then the limitation of the franchise to adult males still does not historically defeat the idea of democracy in the democratic peace proposition.

Therefore, I defined historical democracy as:

At least 50% of population can vote
Competitive elections for legislature and executive
At least one transfer of power

But, still there is a problem. Slavery was legal until modern times, and in the United States, slaves could not vote until the 14th Amendment ratified in 1868, and even then many states made it almost impossible for Afro-Americans to vote until Congress passed the voting rights bill in 1965. So, even allowing the franchise to be limited to 50 percent of the population, as I did above, does not work historically because of slavery, the limitation of the franchise to adult males, and the fact that at some time in some countries men were a minority due to war and a higher death rate.

I had adopted the historical definition from James Lee Ray in his book Democracy and International Conflict: An Evaluation of the Democratic Peace Proposition, where he defined democracy, among the other criteria, as where, “. . . at least half the adult population is eligible to vote . . . .” (p. 98).

How have other researchers dealt with this problem? Melvin Small and J. David Singer, in their article “The War-Proneness of Democratic Regimes, 1816-1965″ (The Jerusalem Journal of International Relations Vol. 1, No. 4, 1976) list democracies in their classification of interstate wars (able 1, p. 56). They defined as democracies:

all those nations from 1816 to 1965 that (a) held periodically scheduled elections in which opposition parties were as free to run as government parties, and in which (b) at least ten percent of the adult population was allowed to vote either directly or indirectly for (c) a parliament that either controlled or enjoyed parity with the executive branch of government. Constitutional monarchies having hereditary rulers with circumscribed powers — England and Belgium, for example — were included in this category. But the existence of a popularly elected parliament alone was not sufficient for qualification. The Germany of the turn of this century featured a parliament which held only the most limited authority over the Kaiser.

Several states met the parliamentary criterion but failed on the suffrage issue: England until the Second Reform Bill of 1867, Italy until its electoral reform of 1882, and Holland until a comparable reform in 1887. During the periods prior to these reforms, all of these states failed to meet our relatively modest ten percent suffrage criterion. Less obvious, but reasonable and consistent, we note that Czechoslovakia in 1919 and Israel in 1948 — both “declared” republics — participated in war before elections could be held. Thus they had not met our criteria on the eve of their wars.

Then there is the historical analyses of Spencer Weart’s Never At War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another , an historical detective-like search for wars between democracies (a summaryis on my website). Since he goes back in time to the Greek city-states, his limitation of the voting franchise is especially interesting. He makes a distinction between republic and democracy, and says (p. 12) “I would begin by calling a republic a democracy if the body of citizens with political rights includes at least two-thirds of the adult males.”

Finally, Michael Doyle in his historical analyses of the democratic peace, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and foreign Affairs, part 1,” (in Philosophy and Public Affairs , Vol. 12, No. 3) makes his franchise cutoff at 30 percent (Table I, footnote a).

With all this in mind, I will change the historical definition of democracy included on my chart to any regime that:

Has competitive elections for legislature and executive
At least one such transfer of power
A franchise extending to at least two-thirds of the adult male population.

It is a question whether this change in the franchise criterion would have any effect on the statistical relationship between democracy and war. Since Small and Singer, and Doyle had even more restrictive definitions, what I am defining as historical democracies would form a subset of those they included in their analyses, so that what is true for their democracies must be true for those I define. Moreover, I have adopted Weart’s definition, and so nothing should change regarding his most extensive historical analyses and the democratic peace propositions.

Link of Note

“DEFINING DEMOCRACY” A U.S. Department of State publication.

It says:

Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, it is possible to identify the time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law that any society must possess to be properly called democratic. . . .

Today, the most common form of democracy, whether for a town of 50,000 or nations of 50 million, is representative democracy, in which citizens elect officials to make political decisions, formulate laws, and administer programs for the public good. In the name of the people, such officials can deliberate on complex public issues in a thoughtful and systematic manner that requires an investment of time and energy that is often impractical for the vast majority of private citizens.

How such officials are elected can vary enormously. On the national level, for example, legislators can be chosen from districts that each elect a single representative. Alternatively, under a system of proportional representation, each political party is represented in the legislature according to its percentage of the total vote nationwide. Provincial and local elections can mirror these national models, or choose their representatives more informally through group consensus instead of elections. Whatever the method used, public officials in a representative democracy hold office in the name of the people and remain accountable to the people for their actions.

On Democratization

New Estimate Of 20th C. Democide As 262,000,000

[First published December 12, 2005] Although this post repeats some of what I’ve posted previously, for the record and easy linking, I’m including here all the changes I’ve recently made in my democide estimates.

Occasioned by my study of King Leopold’s democide in his Congo Free State, I have raised my estimate of colonial democide to 50,000,000. I published the details of this in my blog here , and followed that up with a docudrama — what it was like to be a native in Leopold’s Congo — to give heart and feeling to the cold statistics. It is here (bottom of the page).

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Note that democide is any murder by government, and includes genocide, politicide, massacres, mass murder, extrajudicial executions, assassinations, atrocities, and intentional famines.

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To recap my change in PRC democide, my estimates for democide in the last century for China were from my book, China’s Bloody Century, Mao/CCP Democide:

1928-1937 = 850,000
1937-1945 = 250,000
1945-1949 = 2,323,000
1949-1953 (totalization) = 8,427,000
1954-1958 (collectivization) = 7,474,000
1959-1963 (Famine/retrenchment — famine itself not counted) = 10,729,000
1964-1975 (Cultural Revolution) = 7,731,000
1976-1987 (liberalization) = 874,000
Total = 38,702,000

Now, by virtue of my reevaluation of the 1958-1962 famine dead that I had not counted in the above (unlike many experts who did include it in PRC’s toll), I have to add 38,000,000 to the above, which brings the total to a democide of 76,702,000.

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As to colonial democide:
My prior calculation of colonial democide for European colonizers = 870,000.

Estimate for democide in Leopold’s Congo Free State = 10,000,000, which is line with the estimates of others (listed in the my blog linked above)

Including the Congo, my new estimate for colonial democide is 50,000,000 plus the original estimate of 870,000

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World democide, old total 1900-1999 = 174,000,000
New World total = 174,000,000 + 38,000,000 (new for China) + 50,000,000 (new for Colonies) = 262,000,000.

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Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.

“Please Now, Rest In Peace:” A Docudrama on Mao’s China

[First published May 16, 2005] I was not at home when police arrested my husband, Peng. As I approached our home on my bicycle after shopping, I saw him, handcuffed, being pushed into one of two police cars. I knew immediately that I would probably never see him again.

All the scientists at the institute understood that arrest was a possibility. As scientists, they had interacted with foreigners, had read foreign publications, and therefore were always in danger of having such normal activities misunderstood or misinterpreted by the Red Guards. Peng and I had prepared, as had so many others, for such an eventuality.

I quickly pedaled my bicycle past the police cars and down a side street. I could hardly steer it, I was shaking so much. My feet shuddered off the pedals several times. My breath caught in my throat; my stomach knotted. The devastating thought, Peng, my poor, dear husband Peng, kept beating in my mind. I could barely see through the tears that stung my eyes.

I wonder now how I stayed upright on my bike and didn’t crash into the police cars or a tree. I knew if I did, the police would discover who I was and arrest me. The Red Guards often jailed whole families. I steered the wobbly bike around a corner, around another corner, and into some bushes. I dragged it behind the bushes and fell on the ground, beating the earth with my fists, and sobbed into the dirt for my husband and our lives, now totally destroyed.

Maybe an hour or two later, emotionally and physically exhausted, I used the bottom of my dress to clean by face and wipe my eyes. I ignored the food that had fallen out of the bike’s rear basket. I knew what I had to do.

I headed for my cousin’s small dim sum restaurant on Yunnan Lu Road. There, I hid my bicycle in the rear among the garbage cans. I entered through the back door.

My cousin, Ding Xiaoshuang, was in the kitchen preparing meals with another cook. He was too skinny to look like a cook—cooking made him lose all taste for food, he said. Lack of a good chief’s fat might cast suspicion on the quality of his food, but his friendly, outgoing nature compensated for that. About every fifteen minutes he toured the restaurant, asking customers how they were, what their children were doing, and how they liked his dim sum. He always suggested his custard tarts as a treat.

Ding looked at me without surprise when I came in the back door. This was one of the signals we had planned if Red Guards, soldiers, or some other faction arrested one or the other of us. Otherwise, I would have come in the front door of the restaurant.

No doubt my eyes were puffy and red. “Hello, cousin,” Ding said, as mindful of his cook working nearby as I was in hiding my face from him. Moving towards the stairs to his apartment above the restaurant, Ding added, “I have that present for Peng you wanted me to get. Come on upstairs and I’ll give it to you.”

I had so far not said a word. I followed Ding up the stairs. We moved towards the room at the front, where Ding’s cook and the waitresses hustling in and out of the kitchen would be least likely to hear us.

He put both his arms around me, and I quietly wept into his chest. He just held me tight and rubbed my back with one hand. He had never seen my tears before. He knew what would cause them. He didn’t hurry me, but he risked arousing his cook’s suspicion, so I knew I had to stop. I fought for control.

Peng and I had been married for only a year. I had met him at a conference at the institute, where I had served as a lab assistant. I had a degree in physics and had participated in experiments on magnetic propulsion, his chief area of research. I found Peng, with his tall, athletic build and his strong Manchurian features, handsome; he often attracted the stares and smiles of strangers when we ambled down the street—although he claimed they were admiring my willowy figure.

After we were married, we tried to reduce the risk of arrest. Only Peng worked at the institute, and we cleared our home of everything foreign. We concealed as much as possible from those at the institute the fact that we were married—as I mentioned, whole families were often arrested—and that both of us spoke and read English.

As I pulled back from my cousin and rubbed my eyes to clear them, Ding asked me in a subdued voice, “What do you want to do now? I haven’t touched what you and Peng prepared. Do you want to flee to Hong Kong?”

Wearily, I answered, “No. I first want to be sure about what happened to Peng.”

Ding had to lean forward to hear me. I tried to raise my voice but only increased its quaver. “This might only be a warning or harassing arrest, and he might be home within a week or so.” More firmly, I added, “I must find out. Can I hide here until I do?”

Ding hesitated. He took my hand and held it in both of his. “I think I can find out for you. You know my dim sum is famous,” he whispered proudly, “and I get many prison guards with their families coming here to eat. When one of them gave a party for his son’s graduation, I offered to cater it. There were over one hundred relatives, friends, and their families there. The food was sumptuous, I must admit, and I gave him a big cut on the cost. Now I can get my payment, yes?”

“How often does that guard eat here?”

“About once every one or two weeks, and I think he was here about a week ago.”

I didn’t have to think about that. I wanted to know. Absolutely. “Then I’ll wait. I’m leaving now, so that no one gets suspicious. I’ll come back after you close at . . . when, eleven?”

“Right.” He took a rag out of his back pocket and carefully wiped my face with it, and leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “Be careful, now. Oh, here, take this package and make believe it’s the present I mentioned.”

I straightened up and went down the stairs first. At the bottom, I turned and yelled up with false cheer, “Thanks cousin, Peng will really like this.”

I headed for the waterfront on my bike, where I could bury myself and my heartbreak among the crowds.

Ding met me at the back door when I returned that night. “Peng’s dead,” he told me, reaching to hold me. “I’m sorry.”

I’d known it was coming. Now it was real. I staggered under the blow of his words, and sagged into his arms.

“You have to escape,” Ding continued. “Go to Hong Kong.”

Through his contacts in the Shanghai harbor market where he often bought fish for his restaurant, Ding knew a fishmonger named Wen who dealt with freighter captains that could be bribed. Much later, in his room, when I had stopped sobbing, he tore a small piece from a sheet of rice paper on his worktable and scribbled a message on it. He brought it back to me and, pressing it gently into my hand, said, “Give this to Wen. If the police stop you before you see him, you can easily swallow and digest it.”

I sought Wen first thing in the morning.

He was easy enough to find. He sold tuna filets at the market in the third stall nearest the dock. After looking over several filets, I asked Wen for one. When I paid him, I included the note. He took it with the money and placed it in the bottom of his moneybox, so that only he could read it. Closing the box, he told me to come back at 4:30, when he could give me a special deal on fish.

When I returned at the appointed time, a thin young boy stood with Wen. When Wen saw me approaching, he said something to the boy, who then moved from behind the fish table. As he brushed by me, he whispered, “Follow me.”

I followed him through the market crowd, out onto the Shanghai docks, and into Dadong Warehouse through a small side door. I found myself in a small room that smelled of long-dead fish and rotting wood. Rope, hooks, canvas, and bags of all descriptions were heaped in corners and against two walls. The place was so dirty that I halted and flinched back as I entered.

The boy spoke for the first time since we’d left the market. “Turn around and face the door and be still.” He studied me for a moment, eyes curious. He twitched his shoulders as though shrugging, turned, and swiftly disappeared out the door.

I could hear muffled sounds from the warehouse and occasional yells from dockworkers outside. An engine roared in the distance. I was beginning to worry about Wen setting me up to be kidnapped into the Chinese sex trade. This sometimes happened on the docks.

A door opened and closed on the other side of the room. Softly at first, then louder, I heard footsteps approaching behind me. As the person drew closer, I heard heavy breathing. The person stopped. The breathing got louder. I twitched my nose at the added stench.

I jumped at a sudden, unpleasant sound.

“Name?” a man’s voice rasped in the most awful Chinese. I thought I recognized a Portuguese accent.

“Gu . . . Gu Yaping,” I said, trying to keep my voice firm.

“Got jewel?” the voice grated.

“Yes.” In the emergency store that Ding had hidden for us, Peng and I had included most of our family jewels, especially several antique jade rings and miniature ivory statues left to us when our parents died. The items were worth thousands of dollars on the black market.

“Give me.”

I spun around and saw an older Caucasian man in a dark blue coat with two stripes on each sleeve. He wore an officer’s cap with salt-tarnished, fake gold braid. His face was barely visible, but its red complexion and his bulbous nose could not be missed.

“No,” I said, speaking pidgin Chinese, “you get when go on ship.”

The man asked, “You go Hong Kong?”

“Yes.”

“You fuck on ship?”

I gasped. I felt my face get hot. I suddenly shivered in the warm room.

The man stared at my hips, trying to imagine me naked, I guessed. He then unhurriedly raised his eyes to my blouse, apparently judging my hidden breasts. I wore a shapeless white blouse and it hung loosely over my gray slacks. I had done my best to hide my femininity, not only out of traditional modesty in public, but so as not to invite any propositions in the docks, where many prostitutes worked their trade. But, I couldn’t hide everything.

I forced myself to stand still, stop trembling, and endure his lusty inspection. I had to. I was not dumb. I knew that, once aboard his ship, he could take my jewels, kill me, and throw my body in the Huangpu River as the ship traveled to the sea. All that would keep him interested in keeping me alive would be sex and the promise of more sex.

Now blushing at what I must do, I lowered my head a little and looked at him demurely out of the corner of my eye. I whispered, “Yes.”

“Do now. Take off clothes.”

Well, I thought, what choice do I have? This was not going to be a strip tease. I promptly set a personal speed record in taking off my clothes, and let them fall anywhere. I stood naked with a straight back, head high, looking into his eyes, willing my knees not to shake. He probed me with his eyes, hurriedly took off his coat, tossed it on the dirty floor, and motioned me to lie down on it.

As hasty as he was to gratify his lust, I was more anxious to get this over with. I dropped down and spread my legs, turning my head away from him. He did nothing more than pop the buttons on his trousers to spring his erection free and fall on top of me. Straightaway he tried to enter me, but I was too dry. It was painful. I motioned for him to stop. I might have had more success in halting the charge of a bull. I had to grab his shaft in one hand to get him to stop long enough for me to spit on the fingers of my other hand and moisten his penis as best I could. Then I guided him into me.

As he vigorously pumped back and forth, my body jerked in unison. It was nothing to me but forced physical exertion, but I knew to save my life I had to fake pleasure. I moaned and put my legs around his back and moved my hips in rhythm with his. Fortunately, the time he took to ejaculate was almost shorter than it took to pronounce the word. I had to rush to lower my legs, reach between them, and pull his quivering penis out. I slid down and managed to put it in my mouth a second before he came.

Damned if I’ll get pregnant, I thought, spitting everything out.

Afterwards, he lay on me and stroked my breasts. Finally, getting his breath, he murmured, “Good.”

I pitied this man’s frustrated girlfriends.

He got up, helped me to my feet, and again devoured my naked body with his eyes for a few minutes. Finally, he picked up his coat, shook the dirt off it, and motioned for me to get dressed. While watching me cover myself, he said, “Go to Longwu Port dock by Longwu Road. At 1 AM. You know?”

I felt sick and dirty. My tears seemed to have a will of their own. I struggled not to show them, but I felt one escape down the side of my face. “Yes,” I whispered.

“What?”

“Yes, I be there,” I said, more loudly than I’d intended.

The man disappeared without another word.

***

When the Portuguese freighter Bartholomeu Dias docked in Hong Kong, among the many boxes unloaded was one labeled “Toys” in Chinese. Customs passed the box, as did a British inspector who beat on three sides of the box with his baton to make sure it was full and not hiding a refugee. A small truck picked up the box and took it to the bustling market on Tung Choi Street. There, two men unloaded the heavy box in front of a small women’s dress shop and lugged it through the front door and into the rear, where they dropped it on the floor with a loud thunk.

The owner of the shop, Wu Jin, a thin man in his thirties whose thick, black-framed glasses dominated his face, signed for the delivery, and then impatiently waited on two women in the shop. When they left, Wu closed and locked the front door, then rushed into the rear. He pried open the box, flung aside the toys and stuffed animals inside, and then saw me.

I was curled up in the box, my chin touching my knees. I turned my head slowly and looked up at him with what must have been weary, red-rimmed eyes. Suffering and fatigue had etched years onto my face, I’m sure. I whispered huskily, “Hello, third cousin. I see you got Ding’s message.”

I tried to get out of the container, but fell back. Wu bent over me and, with a grunt, lifted me out. I moaned and put a hand over my abused crotch as he carried me over to a Chinese low chest and set me down on it. I must have lost ten pounds.

Weakly bracing myself with my hands to stay upright, I looked over at the container and saw the label. “Toys from China,” I murmured. Yes, I thought, how appropriate. I had been a sex toy for half the ship. But I’m alive.

My hand trembled when I raised it to my lips. I kissed the palm, then tilted my head back and blew the kiss toward the ceiling. That’s for you, my sweetest. I made it and I will never forget you and what was done. Please now, rest in peace.

A docudrama of the Armenian Genocide: “Please Kill Him Now”

March 30, 1916 Sambayat, Turkey

The sky was azure blue and dotted with fluffy, white clouds. Beneath it, a convoy of young women and children shuffled into the town and down the main road. All bore the look of death. Some stumbled, some were helped along; some, the youngest ones, nearly skeletons, were carried in the bony arms of their mothers. Some wore ragged clothes. Some none. All were filthy. All stared down at their bare feet with cavernous eyes and sunken cheeks.

Those who were naked were helped by a gentle, surprisingly warm breeze blowing up from the desert to the south. Combined with the bright sun, it overcame the normal spring chill and made for a comfortable coatless day. The air was clear, and the breeze wafted along the smell of cooking food from nearby buildings.

It would have been a great day to be alive. Uniformed, bearded guards, carrying their long rifles with bayonets fixed, ambled along beside the convoy. The women could no longer be hurried.

An officer at the head of the convoy lifted his head at the smell of food, then turned and raised his hands for the guards to stop the convoy. He waved to the side of the road. The guards pushed and prodded the women to a grassy area, and two of them were ordered to watch over the women. The rest formed a circle in the shade of a sweet gum tree, opened their packs, and began to eat lunch. No food was given the women, but they were allowed to dip their hands in a nearby puddle and drink from them.

One woman limped off the road and stood stock still for minutes, holding her two shriveled little girls by the hand. Then she slowly fell to her knees and toppled over, dead. Her girls sat down at her side, obviously believing she was only asleep, and again clasped her bony, cooling hands in theirs.

Another woman gave no attention to the water. She held the half-putrefied cadaver of a newborn infant tightly to her chest, cooing softly to it.

Nearby, a naked woman lay on her back, her head turned away from the sun. Her haggard face still retained some of what must have been ravishing beauty. Her body bore the bruises and slime of frequent rape. As the light in her eyes gradually extinguished, they momentarily reflected her agony before turning vacant.

After a half-hour, the officer stood and signaled for the guards to reform the convoy. Reluctantly, some at the point of a bayonet, the women and children struggled to their feet and tottered back to the road. One woman took the hands of the two children whose mother had died, and pulled them struggling away from her. The guards checked those that remained on the ground for signs of life, poking some with their bayonets. Finally, the trudging mass of despair was taken out of town on an intersecting road, heading toward the south and the desert. The guards left the corpses for the townspeople to bury.

Two nargile smokers in the rear of the Ligor Kiraathanesi coffee house along that road, each sitting comfortably next to his traditional pipe, had watched the convoy come and go. They knew exactly what was going on. Not so the young man seated at a tiny table on the patio of the coffee house. Shielded from the sun by a large Syrian juniper, Peter Kahan watched, mouth agape, only moving when the discomfort of the hard wooden chair on which he was sitting demanded it. He had traveled to several towns and was now in Sambayat on his way to the ancient city of Adiyaman. He had just had lunch and, of course, Turkish coffee, and still held the small coffee cup as though it was frozen in his hand.

He was a foreign correspondent for The Times of London, which had sent him to Turkey because he spoke Turkish. He had learned it at home from his parents, who had immigrated to Britain before he was born. As always, The Times did not trust Foreign Ministry handouts. He was to interview members of the Young Turk government regarding Turkey’s two-front war with Italy over Libya, and with Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro. The Times also wanted him to appraise Turkish public opinion, and that was why he was traveling through this region. Peter had heard rumors about what he had just seen. Some Greeks swore to him that it was happening and that he must inform the world through his newspaper, but the government officials he queried about it denied it flatly. Oh, there were some deportations of Armenians from the east, they said. But they were only to relocate those sympathetic to Russia from the eastern border regions in case Russia joined the war against them. They insisted that the deportations were humanely done.

But now he had seen a deportation with his own eyes. He looked again at the two scrawny corpses, and the doner kebab—thick grilled bread stuffed with lamb shavings and cabbage, topped with a spicy sauce—he’d had for lunch weighed heavily in his stomach. It was beginning to revolt; he could taste the spicy sauce again. He quickly put the cup down and doubled over, spewing his lunch on a nearby bush.

Forty-three Miles Away

One after another, the muscular, heavily-built man hacked at their heads and necks with his axe. When they tried to shield themselves, he hacked off their arms first. His comrades, armed with their bayonets and knives, worked into the quaking, screaming crowd of women, children, and old men. He and the other soldiers were under orders to save ammunition.

Then he saw her. She stood silently, hugging her younger brother to her, her head resting on his. She was from his town of Okaris, and very beautiful. She was not one whose name he would forget, and he yelled to her above the tumult, “Quick, Siran. Come to me.”

She did not hear him.

He pushed several women aside, kicked over one who was praying on her knees, and came up alongside Siran. He put one bloody hand on her shoulder, and when she looked at him, he yelled above the terrible noise, “I will protect and save you. Release your brother, and follow me.”

She shook her head.

He grabbed her arm and tried to pull her away from her brother, but she held him tighter. The hacking, stabbing soldiers were getting closer.

“I give you life,” he urged.

Again she shook her head. She turned her head to look into his eyes, and finally shouted, “If you are so kind, I ask only this favor.”

“What? Quick!” he barked.

“I know you will not save my brother. Please. Kill him now. Please, before me. Then while I wait for you to kill me, I will not worry about him. I do not want him to suffer any agony, any torture.”

The muscular soldier vigorously shook his head, and again tried to pull her away. She resisted.

“Please,” she said.

It was too late anyway. He could feel his comrades at his back, and one was approaching from the side with his bayonet pointed toward her. He nodded.

Siran quickly turned her brother to face her, and whispered into his ear, “A temporary goodbye, my brother.” She kissed him. “We will meet in the next world and be in God’s hands. Do not fear. It is a matter of seconds.”

They kissed each other for the last time, and the boy stood apart, facing him without fear. The soldier now had no choice. Orders were orders. He quickly cleaved the boy’s skull open with the axe, and he collapsed at sister’s feet, dead. He turned to the girl. She stood with her hands at her sides. Her chin was uplifted toward him, and her eyes were misty. “Thank you,” she said, barely loud enough to hear. “Please, now, do the same to me. One blow. No torture.”

He nodded, heaved back his axe, then hesitated, looking into her eyes. He saw only acceptance. He brought the axe down on her head.

Link of Note

“Statistics of Turkey’s Democide:
Estimates, Calculations, and Sources”
By R.J. Rummel

Quote:

The infamy of executing [the last century's] first full scale ethnic cleansing belongs to Turkey’s Young Turk government during World War I. In their highest councils Turkish leaders decided to exterminate every Armenian in the country, whether a front-line soldier or pregnant woman, famous professor or high bishop, important businessman or ardent patriot. All 2,000,000 of them.

Books, articles, statistics

Picking a Good Law

[First published April 3, 2005] As a freedomist (minimum government at home, fostering freedom abroad), I often must ask whether a proposed law is desirable. Now, I could take a utilitarian approach, which I think rationalizes most arguments for or against policy. The problem is that different ideologies assess what would make people happy or cause pain in different ways. The libertarian would say that the freer people are, as long as their freedom does not impinge on that of others, the happier they will be. I’m attracted to this idea, but it runs into questions of social justice (no groans please—wait me out).

I could consider a proposal’s popularity, which is a good democratic approach for many issues, but this also can lead to aroused majorities trumpeting the Bill of Rights (and here courts have the most important role to protect these rights – if they stick to the constitution). I could base my judgment on my religion or ideology, as does a libertarian, conservative, liberal, and so on. But, this often ends up as ethical objectivism—I’m right and you’re wrong. End of story.

And then I could assume that certain political proposals (such as the death penalty for murder, outlawing dope, and marriage as between a man and woman) are right in themselves, obviously and intuitively correct beyond ideology and argument. Yes, but others may feel the same on opposite sides of the issue. And this can only lead to a struggle to the political death, as it has over abortion.

Are not there basic criteria that transcend ideology? I think so, and it is the best metasolution I know of to the problem of assessing political proposals. This is the social contract approach. This approach reached its greatest popularity when a natural law doctrine was widely assumed true. Individual (natural) rights and keeping promises were part of this doctrine and played a large role in various social contracts. Perhaps the best-known contract theorists were Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, although Grotius (famous for his naturalistic work on international law), Spinoza, de Montesquieu, and Kant sometimes employed this approach.

Social contract theorists usually made rather unrealistic statements about humanity prior to the social contract, especially in reference to the state of nature. The growth of anthropology and modern sociology, and increasing acceptance of an ethical relativism and subjectivism that seriously questioned natural law, brought social contract theory into disrepute. Recently there has been a revival of social contract theory, as can be seen in the divergent work of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971) and Ardrey’s The Social Contract (1970), particularly in the understanding of the theory as an effective conceptual tool for critiquing society and government. It is a mechanism for framing such questions as: “Do individuals have rights above government?” “What would a society without the state be like?” “Are society and government voluntary?” “Can individuals withdraw from society or government?” “Under what conditions?” “When is the social contract broken by society or government?” The answers given need not be libertarian, liberal, or conservative. They can be authoritarian (Hobbes) or God forbid, totalitarian (Rousseau).

But, the approach is seldom used in the way I apply it to proposed laws. But, it should be. It has conceptual power to frame pointed questions about society. It enables me to spotlight critical assumptions underlying, and the principles formulating, a proposal. It follows from my definition of society as an implicit overarching social contract. And, it is consistent with my view of freedom as an implicit social contract.

So, how do I use the social contract? I imagine a hypothetical Convention of Minds involving all citizens in which they are empowered to approve or not a proposed law. However, while retaining their beliefs, opinions, ideologies, religions, and ethics, they are blindfolded (“a veil is pulled over their eyes,” as Rawls would say) to their capabilities, sex, race, ethnicity, age, wealth, occupation, and any other personal characteristics or attainments that would be benefited by deciding on a proposal one way or the other. Thus, they must be truly objective in deciding a proposal, and must weigh it with no idea as to how it would benefit them personally. What, then, would they decide together?

Thank about this for a moment. If you were to decide on the question, say of a negative income tax, with no idea about your faculties, status, and so on, how would you come down on it. I would be for it, even though I recognize the arguments of many libertarians that this is the forced transfer of money from A to C by B, the government. I’m for it, since due to circumstances beyond my control (family, neighborhood, bad luck, etc.) I could have ended up in need of such support for minimal survival.

How is this consistent with freedomism? Freedom itself, I argue, would be the most basic decision of such a Convention of Minds. And, I’m only being consistent in using the same metaethics to decide less basic issues.

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Link of Note

”Toward a Global Social Contract (nd) By Michael J. Mazarr

Mazarr says:

And yet reality–actual events and trends in the world–seems more and more to diverge sharply from “realism” and its analytical cousins. The collapse of the Soviet Union and nearly violence-free end of the cold war, the expansion of democracy and economic reform worldwide, the emergence of embryonic global rule-making institutions, the halting drive toward unity in Europe and hints of regionalism in the Americas and Southeast Asia–these and many other developments suggest a more peaceful and orderly future, not a warlike one.

The bleaker theories of world politics, long fraying around the edges, could soon collapse altogether. What will be left in their place? A very different approach to world politics, one that foresees gradually increasing global peace, order, and stability. Borrowing insights from fields as diverse as biology, sociology, political science, and the new sciences of complexity, this approach holds that, in a globalizing age, interaction among nations and peoples may bring nearly as much order to world politics as we find within most nations today. A “global social contract” is in the process of emerging that will fundamentally change our assumptions about international relations, foreign and defense policy, and our own identities.

Mazarr seems to discover for himself the core of Hayek’s libertarianism, the “spontaneous society.” He gives democracy a kind of wave of the hand credit for this movement to a global social contract, and seems unaware of its basis, which is freedom to interact. Much of this paper (article?) could be rewritten as a freedomist essay.

Peace Studies Vs. Peace Research

[First published February 14, 205] When I fist started my studies of war and peace as an undergraduate in 1956 there was no peace studies or peace research generally identified as such. There were well known scientists and scholars working on war, international conflict, and peace (I will let war stand for all three related interests), however, such as Lewis Fry Richardson, Quincy Wright, Karl Deutsch, and Harold Guetzkow. In the early 1960s, their work and that of others began to form a critical mass that researches soon identified as peace research (or peace science). I was one of those that promoted this by my MA thesis, Ph.D. dissertation, and subsequent publications on the causes and conditions of war and violence. The idea was to apply to the study of war the scientific method that had been so successful in physics and medicine, conjoined with solid scholarship.

Peace research is now a concentrated field of study, with such excellent researchers and scholars as Bruce Russett, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and J. David Singer, and such rigorous journals as the Journal of conflict Resolution and the Journal of Peace Research. Much of our understanding of war causation and conditions have come out of peace research, as has the modern conception and empirical substantiation of the democratic peace. My web site is a peace research one.

However, peace is a political term, and a favorite among those on the far left. Now, I want to be careful here not to use too broad a brush. There are peace studies organizations, programs, and departments that are doing very good peace research. But they are in a small minority. Of peace studies as whole, however, it has attracted many of the anti-war, peacenik, and leftists who see peace as a flag in the struggle for ideological supremacy, or don’t know any better. Thus, much of what comes out of this group displays ignorance, and deep misunderstanding of war and international relations; or are diatribes and propaganda, largely against the United States. You know the mantras—American imperialism, war for oil, or murder of millions (Johan Galtung, a major organizer and entrepreneur of such peace studies has claimed that the U.S. has murdered six million); inequality the cause of war; capitalist hegemony; 9/11 was terrorists getting even; and so on.

Now, the peace studies industry has overshadowed peace research, as shown by the link below, and few outside of the field know the difference. This is too bad, but what I suppose one should expect, given that peace studies is imbedded in the left-wing academic culture. And I believe it will remain that way until American universities, as least, return to true academic freedom and political diversity of thought.

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Link of Note

”Peace Studies’ War Against America” (4/30/03) By Greg Yardley

”Peace studies is hardly a mainstream course of study in America, but it just might be the latest academic fad. Over two hundred and fifty colleges and universities in North America offer ‘Peace Studies’ programs; many allow students to obtain complete graduate or undergraduate ‘Peace Studies’ degrees. If trends continue, more are on their way. That’s unfortunate – from the first major study of Peace Studies programs, a cutting pamphlet by human rights activist Caroline Cox and conservative philosopher Roger Scruton, these programs have been condemned as incoherent, incapable of being a serious topic of study, and loaded with political bias. . . .

“Unfortunately, these Peace Studies courses are nothing more than the academic bastion of the ‘blame America first’ crowd. America is presented as the aggressor in the Cold War, as a society founded on militarism, colonialism, and oppression, and as a society that sustains itself through racism, sexism, and class conflict. “

Peace Love, Compassion–A Vietnamese Story

click me^

[First published October 18, 2005] I had a hard time sleeping last night. I had just finished Le Ly Hayslip’s, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, the autobiography of a Vietnamese peasant girl who grew up during the Vietnam War. Many times, she was threatened with death by both sides in the war, raped, tortured, prostituted herself, was deceived and abused by her lovers, and barely survived. Eventually, she married an American contractor and, even with all her hardship, reluctantly left her family and the Vietnam she loved, to come with her husband to the United States. Here, she made marvelous use of her new freedom to help the poor and repressed in Vietnam through her East meets West Foundation (here) and the Global Village Foundation (here). That’s her photo in the upper right.

Her book is centered on her village and her family. It was split up by the war, some family members going North to fight with the communists, some joining the South’s army or government. This story is played as point, counterpoint against her eventual risky return to Vietnam in 1986 (the Vietcong had sentenced her to death), and reunion with what was left of her family and a former lover, and meeting with communist officials, one of whom also was family.

It is truly a moving and educational story of a Vietnamese family’s love, courage, intelligence, and will, especially that of Le Ly and her mother.

Now, Le Ly was also a Vietcong. Keep this in mind as you see what I have written about Vietnam:

Perhaps of all countries, democide in Vietnam and by Vietnamese is most difficult to unravel and assess. It is mixed in with six wars spanning 43 years (the Indochina War, Vietnam War, Cambodian War, subsequent guerrilla war in Cambodia, guerrilla war in Laos, and Sino-Vietnamese War), one of them involving the United States; a near twenty-one year formal division of the country into two sovereign North and South parts; the full communization of the North; occupation of neighboring countries by both North and South; defeat, absorption, and communization of the South; and the massive flight by sea of Vietnamese. As best as I can determine, through all this close to 3,800,000 Vietnamese lost their lives from political violence, or near one out of every ten men, women, and children.1 Of these, about 1,250,000, or near a third of those killed, were murdered. And that 3,800,000 figure of course does not include the 3,000,000 in Cambodia.

To understand this, you could do no better than to read this book.

It personalizes these abstractions, helps to understand why poor peasants could become Vietcong, and how ordinary people suffered in this war.

I stand behind no one in my hatred of what the communists, and secondarily the South, did in Vietnam, and yet I have nothing but sympathy for this former Vietcong and her family and for the poor peasants, who were lied to, deceived, misinformed, and threatened by both sides. Always, in wars by dictators, the people have no choice. And even if they enthusiastically participate in the dictator’s game, it is because they have been brainwashed (a useful and unfortunately discarded term). If I had lived in Le Ly’s village, was largely uneducated as villagers are, experienced the degradation of French rule as they all did, then seeing the Americans as new colonialists, and then convinced by the North that the Vietcong were fighting for freedom and independence, I would have joined them also.

Le Ly’s story itself got to me, but what did me in last night was the many sad and happy memories of my near three years in Japan during the Korean War. I arrived there as a soldier in 1950, my mind still stuffed with WWII propaganda about the Japanese. They were inscrutable, buck-toothed, savage, and fanatical, bloody monkeys. Instead, I found in Japan people who could cry, laugh, and love, who appreciated beauty, music, and ideas, who could be sympathetic and understanding. That is, I found human beings. What we had fought in WWII, was not the Japanese people; it was their fascist military rulers.

Always remember. It is not the people democracies fight in wars with dictators. It is against the thugs who rule, enslave them, and brainwash them This is why the democratic peace works. In democracies, it is the people that have ultimate power, people like Le Ly and her family.

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Links of Note

” A welcome surprise: war waning globally “ The Christian Science Monitor

On the Human Security Center’s report I discussed yesterday (here), the CSM says:

Why the vast improvement? The report credits an “explosion of efforts” in conflict prevention and peacebuilding. The number of UN “preventive diplomacy” missions and government-based “contact groups” aimed at resolving conflicts has risen sharply in the last decade. Other specialists note that the number of democracies in the world is growing. And democracies, recent history suggests, do not go to war against each other.

RJR: Cheers. The media is getting it.

“Study says conflicts, genocide in decline” The Boston Globe

RJR: Not all media is getting it. Here, there is no mention of democracy.

“Cold War makes way for world peace “
RJR: And here is an Australian Newspaper that not only misstates the findings, but also goes out of its way to avoid mentioning democracy.

Links I Must Share

“Iraqi officials checking ballots “

Iraqi election officials are conducting random ballot recounts from Saturday’s constitutional referendum because there were particularly high numbers of “yes” or “no” votes in most of Iraq’s 18 provinces.

RJR: That this will be done is almost as positive at the outcome of the referendum. Although the government wants to have the constitution pass, they are CHECKING ON ELECTION FRAUD. In the United States, not even Cook County (for those of you from Molokai, that’s where Chicago is) does that.

” Media Parasites Undermine Bush’s Attempt to Rally Troops “

The “mainstream” media today, in a stunning display of left-wing bias, engaged in a coordinated anti-war propaganda campaign designed to overshadow an attempt by President Bush on Thursday to rally America’s troops. The effort was so gratuitously spiteful, partisan, and transparent that Joseph Goebbels himself would have applauded it.

RJR: See for empirical substantiation, see in the article the day’s round up of stories on Bush’s videoconference with the troops.

“Poll says Iowans like Rice in ’08″

Among 400 Republicans who said they are likely to attend the 2008 caucuses, Rice received the backing of 30.3 percent. U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona was second in the survey with 16 percent, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani received support from 15.3 percent. Roughly 20 percent were undecided.

The concluding novel of the Never Again series
And an alternative history
novel about the Vietnam War and Boat People
Free download

Pakistans Megagenocide–A docudrama

[First published May 10, 2005] I have given a lot of statistics about democide in this blog. But, who can digest my mention of a 1,000,000 murdered here or there. It is near impossible to empathize with the human catastrophy such statistics dimly reflect when we have difficulty getting a feel for numbers greater than six or seven. A murderer tortures and kills three people, and that gets into our gut – three loving, feeling, human beings killed in agony. We can imagine this happening to our family or circle of close friends. But mention 10,000, 100,000, or 1,000,000, and that is beyond imagination and feeling; they are only a numbers.

So, to do something more than just provide statistics, I’m going to present a docudrama about one democide you probably know nothing about. It will demonstrate how much of democide is unknown—not hidden, but put away like all unwanted memories, and in the particular case I will relate, for political reasons. I’m going to tell you what Pakistan’s military rulers did in 1971—not the present government, but a previous one. Its genocide is still unmentionable, since Pakistan is an ally of the United States and a part of its coalition in the war against terrorism.

Pakistan is India’s neighbor to the west. And squeezed into the lower southeasern side of India is Bangladesh. Until 1971, that country was part of Pakistan, and was called East Pakistan. Its major ethnic group was Bengali, and their religion, as in West Pakistan, was Islam, although a slightly different variant.

Leading up to 1971, East Pakistan had been working politically and nonviolently toward independence from West Pakistan, almost a thousand miles away. It was on the verge of success after Pakistan’s 1969 national election, when the Bengali Awami League gained an absolute majority in the national legislature.

However, the ruling generals of Pakistan were absolutely opposed to East Pakistan gaining independence, so in 1971 General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, the self‑appointed president of Pakistan and commander-in‑chief of the army and his top generals, prepared a careful and systematic military operation against East Pakistan. They planned to murder that country’s Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. To reiterate what is hard to believe, at the highest level of this regime, the rulers planned, prepared, and executed the cold-blooded murder of the best and brightest Bengalis in East Pakistan, and murdered indiscriminately many of its Hindus, driving the rest into India. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.

Now, imagine that you were a student there. Before going to bed one night, you may have been in the library studying, working on your term paper, or doing a lab assignment. You may have written home or been out in Dacca with some friends. You may have given your friend a secret kiss before parting, already looking forward to seeing each other the next day. You go to bed that night with a future for which you are studying hard, with a future of loved ones and children, with a future of hope and bright dreams. You have not the slightest hint that the next day will be any different than the last; you close your eyes without any thought that you will be lucky to see the dawn, or if you do, that you will not live through the day.

So students the world over have gone to bed, to be destroyed there by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, tornadoes, and fire. But these are nature’s doings. What would happen this night was done by fellow human beings. Intentionally.

In the middle of the night, with no warning, West Pakistani tanks began shelling the dormitories of the University of Dacca, where students like you were sleeping.

Visualize it: you are blasted awake by tank shells suddenly bursting through the dorm walls and windows to explode throughout the dorm amongst your beds, your study rooms. Red-hot shrapnel flies, randomly seeking out those who will die, lose a leg or arm, or have their belly slit open so wide, their guts tumble out. Then the trembling fear, wild panic, and screaming; the mute dead, the crying wounded, the smoke and fire, destruction and blood, everywhere. And the forever unknown courage and heroism as you and others help the wounded and try to escape the flames and explosions.

You try to run or crawl out of the dorm, and help others to escape. You’re shaking. Your heart is beating wildly. You can’t get your breath. But you finally climb over smoking debris and make it outside.

But outside, the West Pakistan troops are waiting, and you are rounded up at bayonet point to stand or sit in trembling shock. You don’t know what happened or what they will do to you. You can’t believe it. You think this must be a nightmare as you watch the dormitories burn down with your fellow students still screaming inside or jumping from windows. If you have only minor injuries or none at all, you may try to help the crying, moaning wounded on the ground around you.

Dawn slowly shows through the smoke, and soldiers begin pushing and prodding all of you through the haze toward a grassy area near a parking lot. The soldiers bayonet those who resist, or who are too wounded to move. You are stunned and trembling — you cannot believe what you just saw. Students are being murdered, some you know, and as they are repeatedly bayoneted their screams and pleas for mercy rip through your mind.

Self-preservation takes over and you allow yourself to be herded along with the other survivors toward the grassy area, where you see a pile of shovels, hoes, and digging sticks that a small truck nearby has dumped. You are jabbed and shoved toward the pile and then the soldiers form a tight ring around all of you. An officer shouts, ‘Dig a trench. Dig it deep. Or be tortured to death.’

Your knees are almost knocking together, your heart thudding in your ears, and tears drip from your face as, in utter, mind-devastating terror, you pick up a hoe and begin hacking at the ground where one soldier is pointing. Through your fear, through your shock, through the terror, you have only one impossible realization—this trench is for you. For your dead body. You are going to be killed.

You hack away; you pull the loose dirt out with the hoe; you hack again and again. You stop crying. You don’t hear the cannon in the distance or the shooting nearby. You hear but barely recognize the scream of the girl who was digging near you, but made a break for it. She is tripped by one of the soldiers, and then is stabbed in the leg—you refuse to look as she writhes on the ground and shrieks and screeches while being stabbed in the other leg, and then in one arm, then the other, and finally in the stomach. It’s a calculated lesson for you, which you dimly recognize, and you blank out the girl’s moans and cries for her mother.

Now you’re resolute and focused. You hurry up your digging. You want to get it over with. Your body has grown cold. You shiver. Your mind closes down as you hack and pull the dirt, and deepen the trench with the others. Your soft hands, used to books and pencils, are bleeding and sore; your body is getting heavy and fatigued. But you feel nothing.

You and the others have dug three feet down. You are on automatic. Four feet. Then five. Several of the girls and two of the boys have collapsed in heaps at the edge from the unaccustomed labor, or have fainted from fear.

Someone yells, “Stop. Enough. Get out of the trench and line up on the edge.” This is it, but your mind refuses to recognize it. Your body obeys and lines up with the others. You see soldiers standing about twenty feet away with automatic rifles, but it means nothing.

You stand. You think of nothing. There is no passing time. You don’t see that the fire in the dormitories has nearly burned out, or that the smoke is drifting away, leaving the beautiful morning to prize. You don’t see the robin’s egg-blue of the sky, the gentle white clouds; you do not register the sound of birds chattering. You don’t even think of your loved ones, of your lost future, of your lost hopes, of your dead dreams. Of all your wasted study and effort.

Then, Brrrttt! Brrrttt!

Your body twitches from the impact of bullets ripping across your chest, blowing your last breath out the holes in a red mist. Now your body is as dead as your mind; you fall backward into the trench to be covered with dirt.

And how was your death received? The actual messages between the soldiers that killed you and army headquarters were intercepted. We know what was said. Your soul might be happy to know that you contributed to a prized well done.

The message was this:

“What do you think would be the approximate number of casualties at the university—just give me an approximate number in your view. What will be the number killed or wounded or captured. Just give me the rough figures”.

“Wait. Approximately three hundred.”

“Well done. Three hundred killed? Anybody wounded or captured?”

“I believe in only one thing—three hundred killed.”

“Yes. I agree with you that is much easier. No, nothing asked. Nothing done, you do not have to explain anything. Once again well done. Once again I would like to give you shabash and to tell all the boys . . . for the wonderful job done in this area. I am very pleased.”

The Pakistan military ultimately went on to murder about 1,500,000 Bengalis and Hindus. Only India’s invasion stopped them. The Indian army rapidly defeated them, and midwifed the formal independence of East Pakistan, which promptly named itself Bangladesh.

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Link of Note

”Statistics of Pakistan’s Democide: Estimates, Calculations, And Sources” Chapter 8 of Statistics of Democide By R.J. Rummel

After a well organized military buildup in East Pakistan the military launched its campaign. No more than 267 days later they had succeeded in killing perhaps 1,500,000 people, created 10,000,000 refugees who had fled to India, provoked a war with India, incited a counter-genocide of 150,000 non-Bengalis, and lost East Pakistan.

This is the equivalent of a Rwanda in duration and murdered. Yet, it is Rwanda’s genocide that has gotten the publicity.

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PAGE \# ‘Page: ‘#’
’ wow, very effective scene, Rudy.

Our Own Reeducation Camps

[First published December 22, 2005] When North Vietnam took over the South in 1974, they introduced re-education camps. Their purpose was to brainwash those who had lived under capitalism and an anti-communist government. First, camp leaders daily drilled into prisoners’ minds the evil of greedy, exploitive capitalism and the selfishness and self-centeredness of freedom. This was followed by drilling, drilling, and more drilling into prisoners’ cleansed minds the glories of the people’s democracy, and its selflessness, compassion, and real freedom. The prisoners had two choices: accept this or else.

Well, you may not have realized it, but we have our own re-education camps in the United States. Young people are practically forced into the camps if they want to be professionals in some field or get a good job and income. Once in the camps, these youths are required to submit to re-education sessions (called classes) led by those well selected for this purpose. As they move towards getting a signed release from the camps in four or more years, they are successively brainwashed of the mental pollution instilled by parents, and their capitalist, racist, homophobic, bigoted Christian, right wing conservative environment. And year-by-year they are re-educated into the left’s view of the world — socialism, secularism, moral relativism, rabid environmentalism, fanatical feminism, anti-anti-communism, pro-homosexuality, and finally, but not least, fervent anti-Americanism.

Before they get their release from these camps, students must undergo constant testing to assure their session leaders that their minds have been washed, dried, and ironed with the approved mental creases and folds. The students have two choices: accept this or else.

Such is the higher education system in the U.S.

What, I exaggerate? Tell that to the young conservative Democrat, Republican, or libertarian who has gone through four years in almost any university or college to see how well this re-education analogy holds true.

For those who attended college before the 60′s flower children, “anti-war”, and pro-Vietcong demonstrators took over higher education as faculty and administrators, and need additional evidence, this can be easily found on the Internet. Just some recent references: “Intellectual diversity hoax”, “What keeps conservatives out of academia?”, “College chiefs favored Kerry 2-to-1, poll finds”, “Jihad on Campus”. And here is one of a long line of formal studies, “College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds” When reading such reports, keep in mind that academic departments include mathematics, physics, chemistry, and those in the business and engineering schools. These are where the small percentage of conservatives come from. The social sciences and humanities departments, however, have virtually no conservatives or libertarians.

No informed reader can deny that the University now runs to the left; that the left owns and controls it. Why is this? It is because universities are inverted pyramids of power, quite unlike organizations outside this enclave. It is the faculty that decide the essential questions — who will be hired and fired, what courses will be taught, what grades will be given students, and what their recommendations will be. Moreover, faculty decide what students will be awarded teaching and research assistantships, and higher degrees. So as the faculty moved left, so did the university.

And the reason for this is that once leftists gradually got control over university departments, such as sociology, political science, anthropology, English, and history, they always could find a reason not to hire someone not loyal to their cause: he or she is “politically insensitive,” their research is “incompetent,” their scholarship is “lacking,” they would not “fit into our program,” or they are “anti-diversity.” Moreover, students who try to keep an open mind are soon taught to keep their ideas and questions to themselves. Leftist teachers and advisors approve and shape their term papers, MA thesis, and Ph.D. dissertation. Anyway, few lowly students have the ego to disagree with a full professor who may be well known and often cited in his field.

What to do? Any attempt to work inside these re-education camps is doomed to failure. Since administrators are generally drawn from the faculty, and therefore are often as leftist as the faculty, the left organize and control these camps. They will bloc, weaken, delay, and redefine any attempt to reduce their power. It must be done from the outside, by boards of regents, legislatures, alumni, and grant givers. I suggest that a first step is to abolish tenure, which assures the left its positions and stability, and in its place have a five-year contract system, with renewal.

Secondly, I subscribe to the Academic bill of rights, and believe it should be legislated for those camps receiving state funds, and established as a governing charter by boards of regents for private camps.

Third, these bodies should also establish an outside appeal system for faculty and students who believe they have been subject to ideological bias.

Finally, if students and the few non-liberal-left faculty there are would expose what is going on in their departments and courses, legislatures and board of regents would be encouraged to act. It is the great ignorance of the public as to how their tax or tuition dollars are being spent that enables these re-education camps to exist as they are.

And how will the leftist faculty attack all this? They will scream that this is “a direct right wing attack on academic freedom.” Yes, freedom for the left to run their re-education camps. Can’t give the same freedom to those “stupid, ignorant, immoral, fascist, and just plain wrong,” conservatives, you know.

On War and Interventionism

[First published June 9, 2005] This is to clarify my position on war and intervention, given the confusion shown in the various comments here and to my website]

At first, I will provide the empirical and value assumptions on which my arguments are based.

Empirical:

Democratic freedom (liberal democracies) is a solution to war, internal violence, democide, famine, and national impoverishment. Thus, fostering freedom is a way to global peace and human security.

The more unfree, or totalitarian a regime, the more its rulers will murder its people, and is likely to make war.

Such thug regimes have killedseveral times more people than have wars. Thus, on the scale of bodies, thugs are more to be feared than war.

There ae about 117 electorla democracies in the world 2005, and about 89 of them are liberal democracies. Their exisence and the corresponding democratic peace has impacted world violence, such that for over five years it has been in sharp decline.

Values:

As established by the UN and international conventions, thus by international law, every human being has a right to individual freedom and a democratic government. All dictators are criminals denying people their basic rights, if not murdering them in the process.

The life of every innocent human is as precious as that of any other; there is a moral equality among all our souls and individual consciousnesses, except for those who show by their intentions and actions that they don’t respect human life (e.g., Saddam, Stalin, domestic murderers, etc.)

War is just when the evil resulting from not going to war is greater than the evil of war itself, such as in self defense, the defense of other democracies, or in the saving of lives (e.g., as in stopping the Rwandan genocide). Not only must there be a just cause, but also the war must be fought justly, that is proportional to the threat (no nuclear bombs on terrorist camps) and with due concern for the lives of noncombatants (E.g., in line with the Geneva Conventions).

Conclusions:

When is war/intervention justified? If there is large-scale democide being carried out, as in Sudan (As happened in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo), military intervention is justified, and so it is in Burma. North Korea is a special case, because of the proportionality criteria — given Kim’s military capability and possible nukes, the cost in lives and destruction of intervention in the North may not be proportional to the evil of, or threat of, the regime. This is one reason I have called for Kim’s assassination — it would be just. It would be more than a proportional response to his evil and threat.

If by acquiring WMD’s, a regime is a danger to the national security of a democracy. A Pre-emptive war is justified. It is justifiedi also when a regime is supporting and aiding direct attacks, as by terrorists, on a democracy.

When is war/intervention not justified? For revenge, honor, territory, resources (e.g., oil), or to spread democracy. Democracy can be spread by means other than war, and war for democracy may well unleash demons that make democracy more unlikely. For many dictatorships, democracy is an evolutionary path in line with their economic growth, trade, communications, and is encouraged principally by the example of democracy in other countries.

Afghanistan:

The war in Afghanistan was justified for two reasons. The Taliban was a murderous regime killing Afghans by the tens of thousands, and enslaving he rest. It also provided aid and comfort to terrorists, particularly those intent on attacking the United States and other Western democracies.

Iraq:

In light of the intelligence available to President Bush about the potentially dangerous WMDs being developed by Saddam Hussein as reported by the UN and all major intelligence services, the uniformity in these intelligence reports, Saddam’s use of poison gas –a WMD — against his own people, his aid and connections to terrorists, and his mass murder of his own people amounting to the hundreds of thousands, the war against Hussein was justified by UN resolution and Just War doctrine.

Once such a war is fought and successful, then as with Japan and Germany after World War II, democratization should become the goal of the following occupation so as to create a democratic peace oriented government, such that war will not again be necessary in the future, and to set a democratic example for other countries in the region.

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Link of Note

“Far from media focus: steady democratic progress in Iraq” (6/7/05) B A. Heather Coyne

Coyne writes:

These wild swings in the security and political environment that are depicted on front pages around the globe are not as evident here on the ground in Baghdad.

In fact, having spent the past two years in Iraq, first as an Army officer and now as the head of the Iraq office of the Washington-based US Institute of Peace, I am struck by the determination and steadiness of Iraqis as they struggle to build a stable, democratic country, and by the continuing, firm commitment of Iraqis to participate in – and manage – that process.

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On The Sharp Drop in Global Violence, Again

[First published December 28, 2005] As I’ve pointed out a number of times, the growth in democracies, which now number 122, has reached a tipping point, where their contribution to a global democratic peace has caused a sharp decrease in the extent of global violence. This drop is pointed out by Andrew Mack, the director of the Human Security Center at the University of British Columbia, in a Washington Post article, “Peace on Earth? Increasingly, Yes.”. He says:

By 2003, there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than in 1992. The deadliest conflicts — those with 1,000 or more battle-deaths — fell by some 80 percent. The number of genocides and other mass slaughters of civilians also dropped by 80 percent, while core human rights abuses have declined in five out of six regions of the developing world since the mid-1990s. International terrorism is the only type of political violence that has increased. Although the death toll has jumped sharply over the past three years, terrorists kill only a fraction of the number who die in wars.

This change is extraordinary, and he wonders why it has been given so little attention in the media. His answer is that the media is addicted to reporting global violence. I agree, and in my terms, no violence is no news.

However, the most interesting aspect of Mack’s article is how he accounts for this decline. It is

The end of the Cold War, which had driven at least a third of all conflicts since World War II, appears to have been the single most critical factor.

In the late 1980s, Washington and Moscow stopped fueling “proxy wars” in the developing world, and the United Nations was liberated to play the global security role its founders intended. Freed from the paralyzing stasis of Cold War geopolitics, the Security Council initiated an unprecedented, though sometimes inchoate, explosion of international activism designed to stop ongoing wars and prevent new ones.

He seems unaware of the predictions at the end of the Cold War that conflicts and violence that the Soviets and U.S. kept a lid on so they would not escalate to involve them would now break out. But, lets say that this prediction was wrong, and lets suppose that the end of the Cold War meant less global violence.

As to the UN being also responsible for the drop in violence, this is an understandable claim from Mack, who was director of the Strategic Planning Unit in the executive office of U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan between 1998 and 2001. I think he is flatly wrong, and even the UN’s own internal study, “Report of the Panel on United Nations Peace Operations,” says it failed. In any case, Mack gives no credit to the growth of democracies — not a whiff.

Strange, since in personal communication he does recognize this growth also as a cause, and so does his Center’s report, ” War and Peace In The 21st Century,” that I discussed and presented in my blog, “More: The Democratic Peace Causes a Sharp Decline In Violence.” I suspect that among those who have dealt personally with the complexities of international relations and violence, it seems too simplistic, and even too idealistic, to ascribe the drop in violence to . . . democracy. With all its diverse variables and conditions, nations and cultures, and leaders and dictators, the political world seems more complex than that.

Rule by Decree Best for China?

click me^–>

[First published August 29, 2005] It is rare these days that I will be aghast at what I read in the press, but the article, “In China, democracy equals disaster,” by Gary Hogan in the Baltimore Sun (here) did it. At first I thought it was a parody and smiled as I read the first few paragraphs, but then it became all too clear that this was serious. For the rest of my reading I must have looked as though I was reading one of those beamed-up-to-an-alien starship stories. When I finished, I had to double-check my calendar to make sure indeed that I had not been transported by some quirk of nature back to the 1960s when this sort of article was popular.

Hogan begins by extolling the “Four Pests” campaign by Mao soon after the communists seized China. It was an attempt to eliminate sources of disease, such as flies and mosquitoes, by decreeing a daily quota to be killed and turned in. “And it worked,” says Hogan, and he uses this successful campaign as a model for the way China should be run. Oh yes, there was the “disastrous” Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, “But rule by imperial decree was and is the best way to govern the planet’s largest nation. . . . For China must be controlled. Tightly. A centralized oligarchy is vital for this. Democracy would be disastrous for China, for the United States and for everyone.

He concludes this incredibly article this way:

Like it or not, communism – or to use the boilerplate popularized by Mr. Deng, a “socialist market economy” – with its matrix of failsafe controls strictly applied by the Beijing leadership elite, works for China. And a workable China is in the best interests of the United States.

There is no recognition that the eradication of pests by quota was coincident with the eradication of human beings by the millions and later by quota also. While he does recognize that the Great Leap Forward was disastrous, he seems not to see the human horror in it leading to the world’s greatest famine that may have killed 30-40 million Chinese. And while also recognizing the disaster that was the Cultural Revolution, he seems unaware of the human toll, which may have been as high as 10 million (my calculation is about 7 million). China’s Communist Party, the government of China, was and still is (with it being the greatest executioner in the world today) a killing machine. Living bodies in, corpses out.

Then Hogan seems content that Chinese have no freedom of speech, no freedom of religion, no freedom of association, no freedom to choose their leaders, no rule of law, no right to a fair trial. After all, they live in a “stable and predictable China, [which] is vastly preferable to the vagaries and vicissitudes of a 1.3 billion-strong democracy.”

I wish I could twitch my nose and as though a witch, whisk him off to live under this marvelously stable rule be decree.

Link of Note

China’s Bloody Century: Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview R.J. Rummel (1991)

I say:

Once control over all of China was won and consolidated, and the proper party machinery and instruments of control were generally in place, the communists launched numerous movements to systematically destroy the traditional Chinese social and political system and replace it with a totally socialist, top to bottom “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the beginning their model was Stalin’s Soviet Union; Soviet advisors even helping to construct their own Gulag. Their principles were derived from Marxism-Leninism, as largely interpreted by Mao Tse-tung; their goals were to thoroughly transform China into a communist society. In this they were consistent with their beginnings, but they now had a whole country to work with, without the need to give tactical and strategic consideration to another force–the Nationalists or Japanese–seeking and capable of destroying them.

Now, beginning in 1950, carefully and nationally organized movement after movement rapidly followed each other: Land Reform, Suppressing Anti-communist Guerrillas, New Marriage system, Religious Reform, Democratic Reform, Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries, Anti-Rightist Struggle, Suppressing the “Five Black Categories,” etc. Each of these was a step towards the final communization of China; each was bloody. Self-consciously bloody. Witness what Mao himself had to say in a speech to party cadre in 1958: 


What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars. In the course of our repression of counter-revolutionary elements, haven’t we put to death a number of the counter-revolutionary scholars? I had an argument with the democratic personages. They say we are behaving worse than Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty. That’s definitely not correct. We are 100 times ahead of Emperor Shih of the Chin Dynasty in repression of counter-revolutionary scholars.

Only when these movements and especially the final, total collectivization of the peasants and “Great Leap Forward” destroyed the agricultural system, causing the world’s greatest recorded famine–[at least] 27,000,000 starved too death–did the communist begin to draw back from or slacken their drives. Shortly after this famine, in the mid-1960s, an intra-party civil war erupted between Mao Tse-tung and his followers, who wanted to continue the mass-based revolution, and a more moderate, pragmatically oriented faction. This “cultural revolution” probably cost near [10 million] lives. Mao won, but only temporarily. With his death soon after, the pragmatists and “capitalist roaders” regained power and launched China in a more open, economically experimental direction; even, until the Tianamen Square demonstrations and subsequent massacres of 1989, on a more liberal path.

So, overall, counting the democide, nondemocidal famine, and battle dead, the total cost of Chinese communism has been about 73 million lives. But, they did temporarily eradicate the flies and mosquitoes

China’s Cultural Revolution
A Docudrama

On Power

[First published June 21, 2005] This post is a chapter on the power principle from my book on Freedom’s Principles. linked in the fight sidebar. If you want a better theoretical understanding of political freedom and conflict, regardless of the level — family, social, national, and international — this chapter you must read. For one, it shows that power is a complex concept encompassing a family of powers that include, of course, authority and coercion, but also love and intellectual power. It illuminates the basic point that there is a world of difference between physical and social powers, and that social powers operate through another’s mental field (know this, and you then understand the essentials of politics). Such power is nothing unless others see and respond to it. Moreover, the chapter begins to lay bare the basic difference between dictatorships and free societies, which is in their basic ordering power — coercion for the former and exchange for the latter. And here begins the all-important understanding of the spontaneous society of a free society, and what makes it function.

Most important, is the power equation. If I could, I would have everyone tattoo this on their shoulder, for it is the basis for understanding all kinds of conflict and peaceful cooperation. Why do couples, groups, and nations go through long periods of cooperation and peace and suddenly break down in conflict? The power equation. How do people who hate each other and nations arrive at a peaceful entente? The power equation. How can a society of free people, without rules or regulation, establish a productive and efficient division of labor? The power equation.

If you get anything out of the chapter on power, it should be that what we do and the social power we have, of whatever kind, is a result of our interests, capability, and will. Yes, will — the underestimated, if too often ignored, spine of politics.

In order to understand how this works, I soon will be writing a chapter for the book blog on the conflict helix, which provides the dynamic linkage of individual power equations. Though it I will show that peace and the spontaneous society (what I call a social field) are the simultaneous solution to individual power equations.

Link of Note

” Getting the hang of this Democracy thing…” (6/8/05) By Major K

Major K says:

This is what progress looks like. It is slow, painful, and usually accompanied by a lot of cigarette smoke, especially in this area of the world, where it seems like everyone smokes. This is the local council of Sheikhs meeting with the local leaders of the Iraqi Police, Iraqi Army and US Forces. There was plenty of arguing about security, the tactics of the Iraqi Army, and the Sheikhs using their influence to root out the arhabi in their neighborhoods and report them to the Iraqi authorities. Our interpreter was struggling to keep up with the number of people speaking. As usual, almost everyone was looking out for themselves, but the key was this. No one got shot, stabbed, slapped, punched or thrown out a window. In fact, they Iraqi leaders of the meeting admonished everyone to watch their tone and be respectful toward each other in spite of their disagreements. Just like meetings back in America, much more was said than was actually accomplished, but the fact the these folks are getting together without being at gunpoint is another sign that we’re moving in the right direction. They all walked away, and will live to meet again next week.

Colleague comments:

Here is a great real world contemporary example of “Democracy is a Method of Non-Violence” — from a Blog by a military guy in Iraq – -who is showing more sophistication and “realism” than any dozen professors of political science . . . . THIS blog entry is what “power to the people” and “democracy” and “freedom” are all about — not all the crap dissertated upon by totalitarians in disguise!

Graphical experiments on visualizing democide

On Democratization and Its Globalization

[First published December 6, 2005] You may remember my blog on “Does Incomplete Democratization Risk War?”. I evaluated the book by Jack Snyder and Edward Mansfield on Electing To Fight: Why Emerging Democracies Go To War, and concluded that their quantitative results about the war likeness of nations in transition to full democracy do not prove (show, establish, indicate) that they are more likely to make war than other nations. I warned, however, that their results are being misapplied to Iraq.

Well, here is a review of the book by John M. Owen IV that does so. To give you some priceless quotes:

According to the academics, Bush’s chief transgressions have had to do with foreign policy, especially the Iraq war — a mess that could have been avoided if only the president and his advisers had paid more attention to those who devote their lives to studying international relations. . . . [RJR: I am a former academic who has spent his life studying international relations, and I support Bush's foreign policy and Iraq War]

[On] Iraq, and in particular the notion that the United States can turn it into a democracy at an acceptable cost. In effect, Mansfield and Snyder have raised the estimate of these costs by pointing out one other reason this effort may fail — a reason that few seem to have thought of. . . . . What if, following the departure of U.S. troops, Iraq holds together but as an incomplete democratizer, with broad suffrage but anemic state institutions? Such an Iraq might well treat its own citizens better than the Baathist regime did. Its treatment of its neighbors, however, might be just as bad. . . .

If Mansfield and Snyder are correct about the bellicose tendencies of young, incompletely democratized states, the stakes of Iraq’s transition are higher than most have supposed. They are high enough, in fact, that those who called so loudly in the 1990s for an end to UN sanctions because Iraqis were dying but who are silent about the Iraqis who are dying now ought to reconsider their proud aloofness from the war. An aggressive Iraq, prone to attack Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Syria, or Israel, is in no one’s interest. The odds may be long that Iraq will ever turn into a mature democracy of the sort envisaged by the Bush administration.

Note that Owen does not even let a wisp of doubt cross his mind that Mansfield and Snyder are wrong.

Larry Diamond, editor of the Journal Democracy has a very good article on “Universal Democrary? appearing in Policy Review Online. He says:

[Re Iraq] This is the most ambitious effort to foster deliberate political change since European colonial rule drew to a close in the early post-World War II era. Can it succeed? Since Iraq lacks virtually all of the classic favorable conditions, to ask whether it can soon become a democracy is to ask, really, whether any country can become a democracy. Which is to ask as well, can every country become a democracy?
[note that Iraq is not a fully functioning democracy, and under a constitution that has been approved by the Iraqi people]

My answer here is a cautiously optimistic one. The current moment is in many respects without historical precedent. Much is made of the unparalleled gap between the military and economic power of the United States and that of any conceivable combination of competitors or adversaries. But no less unique are these additional facts:

• This breathtaking preponderance of power is held by a liberal democracy.

• The next most powerful global actor is a loose union of countries that are also all liberal democracies.

• The majority of states in the world are already democracies of one sort or another.

• There is no model of governance with any broad normative appeal or legitimacy in the world other than democracy.

• There is growing international legal and moral momentum toward the recognition of democracy as a basic human right of all peoples.

• States and international organizations are intruding on sovereignty in ever more numerous and audacious ways in order to promote democracy and freedom.

He concludes:

The fully global triumph of democracy is far from inevitable, yet it has never been more attainable. If we manage to sustain the process of global economic integration and growth while making freedom at least an important priority in our diplomacy, aid, and other international engagements, democracy will continue to expand in the world. History has proven that it is the best form of government. Gradually, more countries will become democratic while fewer revert to dictatorship. If we retain our power, reshape our strategy, and sustain our commitment, eventually — not in the next decade, but certainly by mid-century — every country in the world can be democratic.

No, Not 50-60Mil. War dead. It Was 15 Million

[First published April 11, 2005] I recently came across a reference to the number killed in World War II to about 60,000,000. This figure, or one lower at about 55,000,000 is not uncommonly mentioned. But, these figures are wrong and way too high. The correct count is closer to 15,000,000, but when I use this figure I get emails like one that said—“Your total inaccurate and detracts from your credibility.”

What confuses people is the way war dead are often counted. The most authoritative sources, widely relied in the field of war studies, are the statistical books of J. David Singer (See his Correlates of War Project here). His figure for World War II war dead is 15,000,000. Crazy, right? You often read figures like those I mentioned, and here is an authoritarive source which gives a figure only 25 to 30 percent of that usuallygiven. Even more confusing about this is that the World War II death toll for the Soviet Union is widely accepted as about 20,000,000. What gives?

What has caused these massive disparities is the confusion between those killed in combat and its crossfire, and those murdered by governments during the war (democide). Aside from battle or military engagements, during the war the Nazis murdered around 20,000,000 civilians and prisoners of war, the Japanese 5,890,000, the Chinese Nationalists 5,907,000, the Chinese communists 250,000, the Nazi satellite Croatians 655,000, the Tito Partisans 600,000, and Stalin 13,053,000 (above the 20,000,000 war-dead and democide by the Nazis of Soviet Jews and Slavs). I also should mention the indiscriminate democidal bombing of civilians by the Allies that murdered hundreds of thousands, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Most of these dead are usually included among the war-dead. But those killed in battle versus in democide form distinct conceptual and theoretical categories and should not be confused. That they have been consistently confounded helps raise the toll during World War II to some 60,000,000 people, way above Singer and my estimated 15,000,000 killed in battle and military action. And that the almost universally accepted count of genocide (a form of democide) during this period is no more than “6,000,000″ Jews, around 13 percent of the total wartime democide, has further muddled research and thought.

Overall, both World War I and World War II had about 24,000,000 (combat) war dead. This leaves still many, and smaller, wars to go to reach my approximate 35,000,000 war dead 1900-1987. I did a through search of the estimates of war dead for each nation, 1900-1987, and you can find them in my books Lethal Politics for the U.S.S.R., China’s Bloody Century, Democide for Nazi Germany, and for all others, Statistics of Democide. For their location on my website, see my list of documents

Good to clear that up. I trust I won’t see those highly inflated World War II war dead totals again.

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Link of Note

”Why Not Here” (2/26/05)

By David Brooks [only available for purchase at The New York Times]
From Colleague: Along with the idea of memes and the zeitgeist, here’s a good oped by David Brooks. I especially like his mention of the argument that US foreign policy is at its best when it is not accommodating, but “maximalist” for freedom….Another reason to be grateful that John “Rodney King” Kerry ain’t president!

Brooks says:

[Why not here] This is the most powerful question in the world today: Why not here? People in Eastern Europe looked at people in Western Europe and asked, Why not here? People in Ukraine looked at people in Georgia and asked, Why not here? People around the Arab world look at voters in Iraq and ask, Why not here?

Thomas Kuhn famously argued that science advances not gradually but in jolts, through a series of raw and jagged paradigm shifts. Somebody sees a problem differently, and suddenly everybody’s vantage point changes.

“Why not here?” is a Kuhnian question, and as you open the newspaper these days, you see it flitting around the world like a thought contagion.

Wherever it is asked, people seem to feel that the rules have changed. New possibilities have opened up.

The question is being asked now in Lebanon. Walid Jumblatt made his much circulated observation to David Ignatius of The Washington Post: “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”

So now we have mass demonstrations on the streets of Beirut. A tent city is rising up near the crater where Rafik Hariri was killed, and the inhabitants are refusing to leave until Syria withdraws. The crowds grow in the evenings; bathroom facilities are provided by a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts and a Virgin Megastore.
The head of the Syrian Press Syndicate told The Times on Thursday: “There’s a new world out there and a new reality. You can no longer have business as usual.”

Meanwhile in Palestine, after days of intense pressure, many of the old Arafat cronies are out of the interim Palestinian cabinet. Fresh, more competent administrators have been put in. “What you witnessed is the real democracy of the Palestinian people,” Saeb Erakat said to Alan Cowell of The Times. As Danny Rubinstein observed in the pages of Ha’aretz, the rules of the game have changed.

Then in Iraq, there is actual politics going on. The leaders of different factions are jostling. The tone of the coverage ebbs and flows as more or less secular leaders emerge and fall back, but the amazing thing is the politics itself. If we had any brains, we’d take up Reuel Marc Gerecht’s suggestion and build an Iraqi C-Span so the whole Arab world could follow this process like a long political soap opera.

It’s amazing in retrospect to think of how much psychological resistance there is to asking this breakthrough question: Why not here? We are all stuck in our traditions and have trouble imagining the world beyond. As Claus Christian Malzahn reminded us in Der Spiegel online this week, German politicians ridiculed Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech in 1987. They “couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany.”

But if there is one soft-power gift America does possess, it is this tendency to imagine new worlds. As Malzahn goes on to note, “In a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. … We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.”

Stephen Sestanovich of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote an important essay for this page a few weeks ago, arguing that American diplomacy is often most effective when it pursues not an incrementalist but a “maximalist” agenda, leaping over allies and making the crude, bold, vantage-shifting proposal – like pushing for the reunification of Germany when most everyone else was trying to preserve the so-called stability of the Warsaw Pact.
As Sestanovich notes, and as we’ve seen in spades over the past two years in Iraq, this rashness – this tendency to leap before we look – has its downside. Things don’t come out wonderfully just because some fine person asks, Why not here?
But this is clearly the question the United States is destined to provoke. For the final thing that we’ve learned from the papers this week is how thoroughly the Bush agenda is dominating the globe. When Bush meets with Putin, democratization is the center of discussion. When politicians gather in Ramallah, democratization is a central theme. When there’s an atrocity in Beirut, the possibility of freedom leaps to people’s minds.

Not all weeks will be as happy as this one. Despite the suicide bombings in Israel and Iraq, the thought contagion is spreading. Why not here?

No, Poverty is not the Cause

[First published April 27, 2005] It is a common myth that revolutionaries and terrorists are spawned by poverty, and thus have an understandable desire to overthrow the system or global order that they feel is responsible. Eradicate poverty, it is argued, and one furthers human welfare, peace, and good will.

Nice thoughts about poverty, and who doesn’t wish to help the very poor get a better life? But poverty is not the causative agent it is made out to be for revolution and terrorism. Not for war either, or collective violence. Empirical investigation shows that a country’s poverty has little correlation with its foreign and domestic violence. Moreover, a look at the biographies of leading revolutionaries and terrorists makes clear that they come from middle and upper class families, and are usually well educated.

Then what is the cause? In general, it is the socio-political structure of a society and its culture. Whether they are rich or poor, developed or underdeveloped, industrialized or not, democratic countries, with the resulting democratic culture, have a minimum of such violence. There is a clear relationship here. The less democratic a country, the more likely it will suffer from internal violence, including revolutionary violence and domestic terrorism of some kind.

The democratic peace even operates at this level.

As to what stimulates violence in nondemocracies, it is usually contextual, such as ethnic-racial violence aided and abetted by the government, protest demonstrations that turn into extreme violence over new regulations or repression, the assassination of a popular opposition leader, peasant uprisings over government controls, etc. Where the ruling government is always a “they” versus “us” on every major political or socio-economic issue, even minor demonstrations can turn into a countrywide conflict front that soon breaks into bloody rebellion and revolution.

Not incidentally, the cure for massive poverty is the same cure as for violent revolution and terrorism. It is democratic freedom.

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Link of Note

”Understanding Terror Networks” (11/1/04) By Marc Sageman (Foreign Policy Research Institute)

Marc Sageman was a CIA case officer in Afghanistan between 1987–89 and is now a forensic psychiatrist. This essay is based on his book, Understanding Terror Networks.

The 400 terrorists on whom I’ve collected data were the ones who actually targeted the “far enemy,” the U.S., as opposed to their own governments. I wanted to limit myself for analytical purity to that group, to see if I could identify anything different from other terrorist movements, which were far more nationalistic.

Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing—the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they’re just plain evil.

Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority—90 percent—came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that’s usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.

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“No, God, I Can’t Believe It”–A Ducudrama Of The Forced Ukrainian Famine

[First published in May 18, 2005] In 1932, Stalin went to war against Ukrainian nationalism and resistance to collectivization. His weapon of choice was enforced famine. Stalin won. The “war dead?” About 5,000,000 Ukrainians who starved to death or died of associated diseases. Want to know what it was like for a Ukrainian villager then? Here is one possible story.
***

“We were starving to death,” Viktor suddenly blurted as I placed another beer before him. “My father, Petro Pynzenyk, was powerless to do anything about it, which made him very angry. I remember him shaking his feeble fist in the air and yelling to my mother Olena, ‘How could he do this to us? How could he starve us to death? God, why? What have we done to him?’

“My mother wouldn’t answer. Skeletal and weak with hunger, she could no longer leave their bed.”

Ignoring his beer, his eyes turned inward, Viktor finally let it all out.

***

Drought had brought famine to the Ukraine. But this famine was nothing compared to what Stalin, the absolute dictator of the communist Soviet Union, or USSR, was doing. He had launched a total blockade that prevented any food from getting into that Soviet republic. The communist cadre even searched travelers to the Ukraine to make sure they carried no food with them.

According to Stalin’s fanatical communist reasoning, Ukrainian peasant nationalism was a danger to his power that had to be subdued. The peasants also had strongly resisted giving up their homes, farms, and livestock to be collectivized into factory farms. Stalin’s weapon against such stubbornness and nationalism was starvation. He sent the communist cadre, activists, and security forces into the region to enforce his own man-made famine.

Petro Pynzenyk’s anguished outbursts against Stalin would almost exhaust him. He had been a handsome man in his youth, taller than most other peasants, with a round, open face and a strong brow. Even when age had grayed his hair, he had been well muscled, as heavy farm workers usually were. Now his ribs showed and his stomach was caved in; his arms and legs had grown bony, their muscles raped by his body for sustenance.

Viktor remembered watching him pry the soles off his shoes and then drop them into a pot of boiling water hanging in the fireplace. “Maybe they’ll add some flavor to the tree bark,” he rasped. It seemed that he could no longer say anything normally.

He was nonpolitical, tried to stay out of trouble, and did what the local communist functionaries asked. Except that, with all his being, he dreaded the demand he knew would soon come from Kiev—that he give up his one-acre farm and small home to collectivization. His father had worked all his life to develop and build this small farm. Petro did not want to give it up, but if he resisted, the communists would shoot him and his family.

Viktor was fourteen at the time. He spent the days hunting alone, because Petro, much to his shame, had grown too weak to join him. With a long-handled net, Viktor tried to catch any animals he saw around the village or in the unplowed fields, even former pets that the communists had missed when they came through, shooting them and stuffing the dead ones in sacks to be carried or trucked away. They’d also taken all the livestock, and had gone house to house looking for food, even seizing warm bread off the tables. When they learned that the villagers had started catching birds to eat, the communists again came through, shooting the birds out of the trees and bagging their little bodies.

When they came to the Pynzenyk home, they poked around the grounds outside the house with long rods, searching for buried food. They thus found the seeds Viktor’s mother had hidden by the pump, which they’d planned to use for planting if they survived.

Finally, as much as he didn’t want to believe it, Viktor realized they would not survive much longer.

One late afternoon when Viktor returned empty-handed to their house, he was just pulling the door shut behind him when he heard a distant scream. Alarmed but too weak to move himself, Petro waved Viktor outside to find out what was happening. Petro and Olena waited in tense silence as Viktor left the house. Viktor could tell they were scared. He followed the sound of the screams, which were soon punctuated by loud moans and gasps for breath.

When Viktor discovered what had caused the screams, he vomited up what liquid lay in his empty stomach. Sickened, revolted, he ran home and lay by his house and wept until too exhausted to cry anymore. Finally, he staggered inside.

He pushed the door shut behind him and stood there, swaying as if cornered. He could only gape at his parents, his mouth working. He started crying again, fighting to gulp air into his lungs, but dreading the news he had to tell his parents.

“What is it?” Petro demanded weakly.

Viktor ran over to his mother’s bed and threw himself down beside her, his whole body shaking. Olena put her bony arm around him, murmured some soothing words, and waited.

Finally, still trembling, Viktor blurted, “They ate her.”

“Ate who?” asked his father.

“Yana.”

“Yana? What are you talking about?” His mother looked from Viktor to Petro in confusion.

Viktor calmed down enough to explain, although tears still flowed. “Little Yana down the road. She went missing, and her father searched the woods and finally checked that crazy man Taran’s house on the other side of the stream. She was . . . ”

“What, Viktor?”

“She was . . . cut up in his . . . in his food pot. Her father grabbed a shovel and killed Taran and his mother with it.” Viktor’s stomach heaved at the memory, but nothing would come up. He whimpered, “She was such a fun little girl. She was always laughing and trying to trip me. She would make believe I was a horse.”

“My Holy God in Heaven,” Petro groaned. “I had heard this was going on, but in our village? No, God, I can’t believe it.”

Olena could only close her eyes and let the tears flow.

The days went slowly by, each a torment of hunger. Petro also grew too weak to leave his bed. Viktor continued to hunt, and captured some rats in the field. With the head of one he saved from the pot, he actually caught a starving dog whose own hunger had overcome its natural fear. His parents always gave him the largest part of any catch. They wanted Viktor to live to remember them, and what had happened.

Olena died two weeks later, and Petro the following week. With the death of his father, Viktor gave up all hope. He was lying on their bed, just waiting for the end, when Stalin ordered the release of grain from the military warehouses.

Local officials soon started going from village to village, looking for survivors. When they came to Viktor’s house, they knocked on the door. Receiving no response, they entered and, one told him later, were nearly overcome by the smell of urine, feces, and death. They found Viktor almost dead, lying next to the rotting corpses of his mother and father on a pile of filthy blankets. Viktor was not the first one they’d seen in this condition; they knew what to do. He was carried outside and propped on the ground to be spoon-fed thin soup.

***

Unlike all but a few in his village, Viktor survived. Five million Ukrainians did not.

Even this did not satisfy Stalin. He decided that the core Ukrainian culture had to be destroyed. And who was at the heart of this culture? The blind traveling musicians, who played and sang the classical Ukrainian music and folk tunes, and recounted tales of Ukrainian heroes. So, Stalin had communist officials call all the folk musicians together for a festival, and then had them all shot to death.

How can we prevent this from ever happening again? Through the democratic peace.

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War/democide Docudramas

The Blood Of Millions On Their Hands

The Blood of Millions on Their Hands

[First published on April 19, 2005] April 30th marks 30 years since the fall of Saigon, a horror story of the treason of American leftists and communists, and the blood on their hands. Their lying and deceit, their bamboozlement of a willing media and Democrat Party, and especially their exploitation of an army of young and empty minds that fearing the draft, or aroused by communist propaganda on behalf of North Vietnam, powered their demonstrations and protests marches.

In spite of the continued public support (as polls at the time showed) for our staying the course in Vietnam, and even though the war had been in effect won militarily, the alliance between the left, communists, Democrats, and major media forced an American military withdrawal from Vietnam, and a sharp decrease in aid to the South. Without sufficient American aid and support, the South collapsed under a conventional North Vietnam military offensive, and the North occupied and absorbed what had once been a sovereign country (no, it was not a civil war, but an invasion—the North and South had never been one country). Millions were killed and murdered before the United States turned tail to run off, and after the North’s victory, the killing did not stop. Hundreds of thousands were murdered — executed outright, or dying in “re-education camps,” and in the “new economic zones.” And never forget the over a million Vietnamese that risked an awful death on the ocean to escape the communists enslavement (the Boat People), of which perhaps 500,000 never made land again.

Then there was the communist Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in April 1975 after the United States stopped all aid to its defending Lon Nol regime. Result: about 2,000,000 murdered (for one Cambodian’s story, see ”The Karma of the Killing Fields,”, and for another, see ”A Birthday wrapped in Cambodian History”).

The left seems not to care about such consequences. They opposed the war against the Afghan Taliban, and against Saddam Hussein. And even after both were defeated, in the face of terrorist attacks they wanted immediate withdrawal. I leave it to your imagination the resulting cost in blood of terrorist victories in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Michael Dickey has informed me that:

On April 30th, thousands will be marching in Washington to honor the millions of killed and subjugated people of Indochina, to thank the forgotten heroes, and to remind us of what could have been. 57,000 Americans lost their lives defending the people of South Vietnam but history has proven their cause just. South Vietnam stood alone for two years; with minor material support, it could have defended itself indefinitely, just as South Korea has for nearly 50 years. Activists and protestors have been as silent as the [millions] murdered by the Vietnamese Communist government . . . . If there is a lesson to be learned from the Vietnam War that is applicable today, it is to not abandon a people in their darkest hour.

Visit www.april30.org for more information.

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Link of Note

”Statistics Of Vietnamese Democide: Estimates, Calculations, And Sources (1997) By R.J. Rummel

Below is a summary table (from my Death By Government) of the Vietnam war dead and murdered. The link of note above gives all the sources and estimates involved in making the table, as noted in its footnotes. Study the table and then weep. These dead were all fellow human beings.

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A Just Democide Doctrine?

[First published December 28, 2005] I just finished reading Downfall: The End Of The Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard B. Frank, which is on what led up to and caused the defeat of Japan in World War II. Based on the latest disclosures about the Magic and Ultra decoding of Japanese diplomatic and military messages and the debate among top Japanese rulers, this is the definitive book on the effect of our dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It answers the major questions I had:

Were the bombs decisive? Yes. And it had to be two bombs. Hiroshima alone would have allowed the Japanese to conclude, which they were on the verge of doing, that we had only one bomb, and it would take a long time for us to make another.

Were the Japanese peace feelers in Moscow serious? No. Not by the Japanese or by the Soviets, who were bent on conquering Japanese held territory

Would a change in American surrender terms from unconditional surrender to allowing a continuation of the emperor and imperial dynasty have brought about surrender. No. The reason the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender was so as not to repeat the mistake of the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI. It allowed the Germans to keep their government and military organization in place, and left it to Germany to punish her war criminals, and reform the military that led her into war. Now, in WWII, Britain and the U.S. were convinced that Japan and Germany would have to be occupied, and democratized by the Allies. Few critics of our Afghanistan/ Iraq nation building seem aware that this is what we did successfully in “authoritarian and militaristic” Germany and Japan after their defeat.

Would a million Americans have been killed if we invaded Japan? Unknown. Contemporary estimates were 300,000 more or less would be killed. However, given that the Japanese had predicted where the invasion would take place, had reinforced her forces there well above what we anticipated, would use all her aircraft for suicide attacks, and had prepared civilian battalions for suicide attacks, the toll on our side may not only have been close to a million, but the invasion may have been defeated. In any case, the Navy finally opposed invasion, and preferred to rely on blockade and air attacks alone. However, the war ended before this became an open fight between the Army and Navy.

Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki democide? Yes, it was mass murder, as was the firebombing of Tokyo and all other major cities.

Therefore, should we not have dropped the bombs and carried out the firebombing? As an adamant opponent of democide, I must painfully conclude that with foresight as to the reasons below, I would have approved this democide:

It ended the war

It thereby saved the lives of millions of Japanese who were on the edge of starvation. They would have died of a nation-wide famine if we had started bombing the internal transportation network, and tightened the blockade, as planned had we not dropped the bombs. These are sure deaths aside from those who would have been killed had the Navy agreed to go along with an invasion.

It saved the lives of the millions who would have been killed under Japanese occupation and by continuation of the fighting in China, the Pacific, and Southeast Asia. Perhaps a million or more were saved by the A-bombs.

Had we invaded Japan, all POWs held by the Japanese would have been killed. That was a standing order.

At the time of the surrender, Soviet forces were on the verge of invading the home islands from the north, and had the war continued for months (the bombs were dropped on August 6 and 9, 1945. Our invasion of southern Japan was planned for November, and that of the Tokyo area in March 1946. By then, the Soviets might have taken and occupied half of northern Japan. Thus, once Japan was defeated, the Soviets would have shared in the occupation as they did in Germany. Many Japanese lives alone were saved from communist terror as a result, or from fighting invasion Soviet forces.

Even if the ruling military in Tokyo had been forced to surrender by an invasion or strangulation of Japan, her vast armies in China and elsewhere might have continued to do battle (deeply ingrained in the Japanese military by their culture and unique history was to never surrender — this was a matter of honor and self-esteem), and the attempt to occupy Japan would have met a nation-wide insurrection and terrorist attacks by civilians that would have made those in Iraq look puny. What brought about a total surrender of Japan’s people and armies was the Emperor overriding the military and making it an imperial decree to end the war forthwith, and his radio broadcast calling for all Japanese to surrender. He had to be obeyed. He did this because of the two atomic bombs.

So, for me, as for American decision makers at the time, there is the awful choice between two stark evils. One is to murder hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians versus ending the war quickly with the millions of lives thus saved. What we have here is the need for — and even to think about it gives me a feeling of horror — a Just Democide Doctrine — that is an ethical rational for democide comparable to the Just War Doctrine developed by Catholic Theologians centuries ago. That is: If the lives to be assuredly saved by a democide far exceed in number the lives to be murdered, than the murdering is justified, although evil.

As to the ethics of this, I’ve been a deontologist, and much influenced by Immanuel Kant. Now, with this idea of a Just Democide, I’ve collapsed into situational ethics. So be it. That’s the world we live in.

A Little Primer on Multicollinearity

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[First published September 25, 2005] Many of the studies on the democratic peace I deal with here, including mine, use multiple regression, and involve the problem of multicollinearity. Now, I want to deal with this problem to aid readers and students in understanding what it is, why it is a problem, and what to do about it. I meant this to be more conceptual than technical, as I did regarding the correlation coefficient (here and factor analysis (here), but it would be much too long for a blog. So, I will have to go technical. For a brief, largely nontechnical introduction to regression analysis, go here.

First, I have to distinguish descriptive MR from inferential. Few applied statistics books do this, for it is almost universally assumed that one is analyzing a sample of data collected from and assumed to properly represent a population (sometimes called the universe), as an analysis of the IQ and income on a randomly selected group of 100 people might be assumed to reflect the variation in these variables for all people, or an opinion poll of 1,000 selected adults might represent the opinions of all Americans. But, in political analysis, we often deal with the total universe, such as of all Senators, all nations, or all Supreme Court Justices. Then our analysis is not inferential, but descriptive, and tests of significance are not applicable, except in a special sense. (It has been argued that these are actually samples from history, but then they are not random in any sense) I will deal with this in another blog, and assume here that we are dealing with all cases — the total universe.

UNDERSTANDING REGRESSION COEFFICIENTS

For simplicity, I will deal only with two independent variables, although theoretically there could be a dozen or more. In general terms, consider the function y = a + bx + cz + e, where: y is the dependent variable, a the intercept, and b and c the regression coefficients (weights, constants) for the independent variables x and z, and e is the error of estimate of y (or the residuals). One would hope in fitting this function to a set of data (called regression analysis), that e is minimized such that the independent variables provide a good fit to (explanation or prediction of) y. This fit is assessed by the squared multiple correlation (SMC), which gives the amount of variance in y that is accounted for by (linearly related to) the independent variables.

The standard but not only way of minimizing e is called least squares, which virtually every MR statistical application does.

Now, let us say that the variables are all standardized (each variable’s mean is subtracted out, and the result is divided by the variable’s standard deviation). The resulting standardized variables have a mean = 0, and standard deviation = 1. The virtue of standardization is that it makes variables measured in different units comparable, such as exports in dollars and deaths per 100,000 people. The sum of the products of the standard scores on two variables divided by the number of cases = their (product moment) correlation coefficient.

Now, define the squared correlation coefficient as SCC. If all the data are so standardized, then the SMC = SCC(y,x) + SCC(y,z, holding x constant) times (1-SCC(y,x)), which is to say that the proportion of variance in y accounted for by the independent variables = (that explained alone by x) + (the additional variance explained by z)(the variance in y unexplained by x)

The additional variance explained by z is the squared partial correlation coefficient between y and z, holding x constant. If there is no multicollinearity in the standardized independent variables, then their partial correlation coefficients with y, holding the other variable constant, equals their correlation coefficients with y. And the regression coefficients (sometimes called beta weights or beta coefficients) are simply the squared correlations of x and z with y. Moreover, note that if there is multicollinearity, then the regression coefficient for z depends in part on the partial correlation coefficient it has with y controlling for x.

Perhaps a simpler way of seeing this is to consider a bivariate regression of y just on x with error e. Then when the second variable is included, it would account for y-e, that is the residuals — the variance left in y after that accounted for by x is removed.

WHAT IS MULTICOLLINEARITY?

This occurs when the independent variables are intercorrelated, that is they are linearly interrelated. The term intercorrelated is crucial, since it is not the simple correlation between the variables that is critical, but the linear dependence of each independent variable on all the others. If there is no such linear dependence, there is no multicollinearity.

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

Usually, and especially in the social sciences, independent variables will have some linear relationship. Depending on the degree of multicollinearity, the effect can be very misleading in interpreting the regression coefficients. In the worst case, the regression coefficients will be effected by substantive and random errors in the data such that they are noncomparable one to another, and descriptively uninterpretable.

Were this regression analysis done on a sample and inferential statistics applied (e.g., tests of significance), then the standard error of the regression coefficient would be much enlarged and thereby the t-test would be sharply reduced in apparent significance, and even perhaps show no significance for any of the regression coefficients. One could have a scratch-one’s-head regression fit where the multiple R is large, while no regression coefficient is significant.

Even the signs of the regression coefficients may be changed. Let b(y,x) stand for the regression coefficient between the dependent variable y and independent variable x, and r(y,x) stand for their correlation. If b and r(y,x) have the same sign, then the bias in the regression coefficient is upward; otherwise, the bias is downward.

If one is seeking to compare the causal effect of variables, as in Gartzke trying to compare the effects of democracy versus economic freedom on violence, high multicollinearity makes such a comparison difficult in part because of the involvement of partial correlations for successive variables. Not only is it inflating or deflating the regression coefficients, but also may even be changing their signs.

HOW TO GAUGE MULTICOLLINEARITY

This is a problem because multicollinearity is a continuous function of the intercorrelations among the independent variables. There is no easy way to do say that there is or is not too much multicollinearity except at the extremes. But, there are measures we can use.

Consider the matrix of independent variables X (variables by column, cases by row). In getting a least squares solution, the symmetrical matrix X’X, (where X’ is the transpose of X) is calculated. Then if the determinant (D) of X’X = 0, the independent variables have perfect multicollinearity. As D –> 0, the resulting regression involving X increasingly involves random and substantive error. If the variables in X are standardized, then X’X divided by the number of cases = R, the correlation matrix — the usual case in statistical applications. Then, perfect nonmulticolinearity, or linear independence obtains when D = 1.

However, regretfully, few MR programs calculate D, but D = 0, then the inverse of R is singular, and the statistical application will usually warn the user with something like, “Error — calculations cannot be done because of singularity.” D, however, may be close to zero. Then the inverse can be computed, although the result is mush. Another approach is to use a factor analysis program to get the eigenvalues of R, which are often listed along with the other results. If any are zero or near zero, then this is the same as D being zero or near zero. If there is one huge eigenvalue (the average eigenvalue = 1) and the rest are very small by comparison, the variables in X are multicollinear. Note that if the eigenvalues are not given, the percent of variance accounted for by a factor (component) is a function of the eigenvalue. The more one factor accounts for the variance in the data compared to other factors, the greater the multicollinearity. (warning — if you do a lot of pair-wise removal of missing data and the correlations are therefore calculated for variables with different numbers of cases, R can be non-Gramian, thus inflating some eigenvalues of R and even making some negative, frightening mathematicians, and causing distorted regression coefficients.)

Another method is to regress each of the independent variables on all the others (not including y). If the SMC for each regression is small, such as an SMC less than .25 (which means the other independent variables account for 25 percent of the variance in this one regressed against them), then multicollinearity is not a problem. If any SMC = 1, or approaches 1, then there is dangerous multicollinearity, and that independent variable should be removed from the regression.

A wrong approach is to look at the correlations among independent variables as a measure of multicollinearity. The problem with this is that the correlation between any two variables may be a function of their correlation with the other variables. Thus, the correlation between x and z may be near zero due to their correlations with another variable w. Remove w, and that of x and z may jump.

WHAT TO DO?

If one suspects or finds multicollinearity, what can be done? Transform the independent variables such that they are all uncorrelated, that is so D = 1 for their correlation matrix. Because of partial correlations, simply selecting out variables that have high correlations cannot do this. Rather, one has to take account of all partials and correlations simultaneously. That is, orthogonalize the independent variables.

This can be done by a factor analysis (component analysis) of the independent variables X, which almost all major statistical programs have as an option. This will produce linearly independent factors and factor scores. The factor scores (unrotated or othogonally rotated) best reflect the variation among the independent variables and absolutely no multicollinearity. Their correlation matrix will have D = 1. They thus can be used in place of the original independent variables.

If one is wary of using factor scores, which may seem to lose touch with the original, nicely interpretable, independent variables, then one can substitute the highest loading variable on each factor instead. There may at most be only slight multicollinearity introduced into the MR as a result.

I’ve tried to keep this short and thus have left out the full regression model and many examples that could be included. However, the whole approach can be seen in the Appendix to my Saving Lives (here). There my research question was: “What best accounts for human security, taking into account democracy, economic freedom, demographics, culture, and so on? This is a MR question, but for independent and dependent variables that have high multicollinearity (in some cases the SMC of some independent variables regressed on all the others was 1.0, .99. or 98). Therefore, I orthogonalized the data through a series of factor analyses, and then I carried out the regression with the factor scores. Result:

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 [mainly] 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.

Link of Day

“The Ignorant Freedomist”

Eunomia Blog of Daniel Larson:

What can one say in the face of such foolishness? I have occasionally encountered Mr. Rummel’s ramblings about HYPERLINK “http://larison.org/archives/000076.php”"democratic peace” and HYPERLINK “http://larison.org/archives/000055.php”"freedomism” before, and I have wasted little time on taking them seriously, but the troubling thing is that Mr. Rummel’s bizarre theory readily wins acceptance in conventional thinking. . . . But even a brief, cursory glance at history would tell us this political theory is simply false and has virtually no supporting evidence. . . .

Mr. Rummel’s claim that there have never been wars between democracies make him either an historical ignoramus of the first order or a dishonest hack. I sincerely hope it is the former, as this is at least remediable.

See also: “Democratists and Democratic Wars” Eunomia Blog add on:

Mr. Rummel’s simplistic theory of “democratic peace” reveals something about democrats and democratists that is not often commented on. There is in this theory the naive faith that there is a type of regime that guarantees an end to war, which is to seek a mechanistic and institutional cure to something that originates in the sinful will of man, man’s boundless acquisitiveness and the finite resources of the world. It is what Voegelin might have called a gnostic faith. . . .

. . . magical thinking . . . .the nonsense. . . . Most other democratists, keenly aware that the “democratic peace” idea is either an embarrassment while there is a democratic war of aggression going on or that it is simply false . . . .

Links I Must Share

The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century By Paul K. Huth and Todd L Allee:

Their statistical results provide strong support for the importance of democratic accountability and norms in shaping decisions to negotiate and settle disputes as well as to threaten force and escalate to war.

The North American Democratic Peace By Stéphane Rousse:

Since the nineteenth century war seems to have been banished as a way to solve conflict between Canada and the United States. Why did this happen and why have the two states developed a relationship of cooperation that is much more “egalitarian” than one would expect, given their very different levels of power.

“Democratic Peace Theory – What Relevance To East Asia?”:

According to Samuel Huntington, “the democratic peace thesis is one of the most significant propositions to come out of social science in recent decades.” If true, it has crucially important implications for both theory and policy.” My purpose today is to take a glimpse at the theory and, because the democratisation literature is generally weak on Asia, ask whether democratic peace theory has any application to East Asia.

It’s the Democracy, Stupid! By Per Ahlmark.

“The first part of the book consists of a long essay on the miracles of democracy. No democracies have gone to war with one another. Democracies should work together against totalitarian states.

Democratic Peace Bibliography

Muslim Arabs Favor Democracy

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On the right is my graphite stick painting, I call “Hero”, of one of the most memorable photos from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, China. The blog below is a repost of my July 24, 2005, post on my non-functioning Freedomist blog.

For those interested in freedom and systematically collected statistics on it, there are a few essential websites to know about. Among them are Freedom House and its rating of countries by their freedom and various reports on democracy; and another is the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal “Index of Economic Freedom”. Another site, apparently not well known outside of academia, is The World Values Survey at the University of Michigan.

So much of what the media has to say about other countries, their values, and their view of democracy and the United States, is by assumption, unreliable personal experiences, and hearsay. Yet, here is a huge survey that assessed the values of 65 societies over six continents and encompassing 80 percent of the world population. Moreover, they can track the change in values of particular societies over time, since they have done surveys in 1981 (limited to Europe), 1990-191, 1995-1996, and 1999-2001 (all global). Their sample for each nation ran to at least 1,000 people. All their reports and data are available from their website or given links.

One more thing. Their systematic analysis of the values they uncover is systematic and at the forefront of available methodologies. They use correlation, multiple regression, and factor analysis extensively, on which I have written a textbook (see my summary article here, and so I can attest to the validity of their results.

Of course, I will be exploiting their conclusions and data as relevant to freedomism, and for this blog want to focus on the valuation of democracy among Arab Muslim countries. I don’t need to garner quotes for what is obvious in the American media, which is the belief that by culture and religion, Arabs do not think highly of democracy. Or to make this comparative, they think much less highly of democracy than do Western democracies. Wrong. See their studies, Muslims and Democracy” (use the search box in the upper right to search under the author, Fares al-Braizat), and “The Worldviews of Islamic Publics in Global Perspective” (use the search box to search under the author, Ronald Inglehart).

Some tidbits from both studies:

The major differences in values lie along two dimensions (75% of the variance) a traditional vs. secular rational dimension, or religiosity vs. economic development; and a survival values vs. self-expression (e.g., economic security over self-expression).

Religion defines compact cultural zones, but historical experience plays a role just as it did for those nations that were ruled by communism

As low income societies, fourteen Islamic societies tend to emphasize tradition and survival values (e.g., low tolerance of outgroups such as gays and women, and low valuation of freedom of speech and political participation), except for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Iran, which tend to be more secular-rational.

The correlations between secular-rational societies across the globe and freedom is.83.

To the statement that, “Democracy may have problems but it’s better than any other form of government,” the people of five Arab countries strongly agreed. See the table below. Note with amazement how this agreement is greater than that for the sample from other regions, such as Western Europe. Agreement for other Muslim nations is a little lower, but still greater than for Latin American and U.S./Canada/Australia/New Zealand..

I trust the validity of this study, and therefore must ask: why is there such a democracy deficit in the world’s 47 Muslim countries, only a fourth of which are at least electoral democracies? In the main, it is the rule by dictators who fear radical Islamicists. Besides their personal gain and their lust for power, these dictators see democratization as a risky gamble. Thus, they use the popular language of democracy to maintain their rule. Given the popularity of democracy among the people, why don’t they rise up and demand democracy. Tradition, religion, but above all the fear of what dictatorship will do to them.

As Natan Sharansky wrote in his important and informative book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, what most clearly distinguishes democracies from nondemocracies is that in nondemocracies people live in fear. We see this in the Arab countries. Therefore, if the democratization the Arab people value is to come, it must come from pressure from the outside. In this, President Bush’s ”Forward Strategy of Freedom” is well aligned with our understanding of the Middle East, and it is working.

Links to Share

“Islam and Freedom” Dean’s World Blog:

In short, regardless of the percentage of muslims in the population, the trend in most of these nations is toward greater and greater freedom (although Albania sure has staggered a lot). The only nation in this group to have regressed significantly is only 20% muslim, while nations with 35, 60, and even 99% muslim populations have measurably increased in freedom.

“Uganda Misses US Cash Over Freedom”:

ANDA has once again missed out on the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) because of its poor performance in political freedom and civil liberties. The two-year-old MCA is a development initiative that was established in January 2004 when the US Congress provided nearly $1 billion in initial funding that financial year for more than a dozen selected poor countries. President George Bush has requested $3 billion for 2006 for this democracy incentive.

“The North Korea ‘Quagmire’”:

The steady economic decline and the barely adequate humanitarian assistance received from China have brought North Korea into an economic desperation that has caused the governments controlling the nation to rely on income from illegal drug sales, sales of arms and missiles and counterfeiting currency. All of these illicit dealings are highly documented.”

Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine
Through Democratic Freedom.
Downloadable free as pdf

Arab Freedom Ahoy

[First published January 4, 2006] There are many commentators and analysts who assert that Arabs are not interested in democratic freedom, or that the Arab culture is hostile to it. It is important, therefore, to publicize the Arab Human Development Report 2004: Towards Freedom in the Arab World published by the United Nations Development Programme, Arab Fund For Economic And Social Development (link here). It begins with the theme of the whole report:

Of all the impediments to an Arab renaissance, political restrictions on human development are the most stubborn. This Report therefore focuses on the acute deficit of freedom and good governance.

Given its source and funding, the report is surprisingly honest:

No Arab thinker today doubts that freedom is a vital and necessary condition, though not the only one, for a new Arab renaissance, or that the Arab world’s capacity to face up to its internal and external challenges, depends on ending tyranny and securing fundamental rights and freedoms.

Ah, you might think, it must mean something different by freedom than we do in the West. No way. By freedom the report means not only civil and political rights, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary, and therefore, as it says, “freedom from oppression,” but also “the liberation of the individual from all factors that are inconsistent with human dignity, such as hunger, disease, ignorance, and poverty.” These, the report points out, rest upon popular participation, government transparency, accountability, and fair and free selection processes. In other words, democracy as we know it.

Keep in mind this is an Arab report as it also asserts what we all know:

Some Arab governments also violate the right to life extra-legally and extra-judicially. Human rights organizations have observed that official reports on killings tend to be short on facts. In most Arab states, the names of the victims are not mentioned, and no public investigation is conducted.

Extremist groups which perpetrate assassinations and bombings and espouse the use of violence also violate the right to life. Armed confrontations between security forces and armed groups result in civilian casualties that can outnumber victims in the ranks of the combatants.

And more surprising, it also frankly deals with the way Arab men treat their women:

In general, women suffer from inequality with men and are vulnerable to discrimination, both at law and in practice.

Despite laudable efforts to promote the status of women, success remains limited. Greater progress is required in women’s political participation, in changes to personal status laws, in the integration of women in development, and in the right of a woman married to a foreign husband to transmit her citizenship to her children. The inability of existing legislation to protect women from domestic violence or violence on the part of the state and society is another deficit area.

And now for the most important observation of this report — the claim the Arab and Muslim “mind” makes them incapable of democracy. Says the report:

[A] recent research effort, the World Values Survey (WVS), has exposed the falseness of these claims by demonstrating that there is a rational and understandable thirst among Arabs to be rid of despots and to enjoy democratic governance. Among the nine regions surveyed by the WVS, which included the advanced Western countries, Arab countries topped the list of those agreeing that “democracy is better that any other form of governance.” A substantially high percentage also rejected authoritarian rule (defined as a strong ruler who disregards parliament or elections).

Why have Arab countries failed to meet their people’s desire for freedom and democracy?
Undoubtedly, the real flaw behind the failure

of democracy in several Arab countries is not cultural in origin. It lies in the convergence of political, social and economic structures that have suppressed or eliminated organized social and political actors capable of turning the crisis of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes to their advantage. The elimination of such forces has sapped the democratic movement of any real forward momentum. In addition, there are region- specific complexities that have deepened the crisis.

In other words, dictatorships are at fault. There is much to gladden the freedomist in this report. Even if it is projecting on the Arab world a bias toward freedom, this report still contains enough undoubted detail and facts, like the above WVS survey, to question the view that democracy is incompatible with Arab culture, and that President Bush’s Forward Strategy of Freedom for the region is grossly unrealistic.

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Link of Note

“The unmentionable Freedom” (5/28/05) By Joseph Loconte, The Heritage Foundation

Joseph Loconte is a research fellow in religion at the Heritage Foundation. He says:

Last month a group of Arab intellectuals released their third report in an unprecedented study of the many failures–economic, social, and political–that plague the world’s Arab states. The latest report, “Towards Freedom in the Arab World,” endorses democracy and laments the “acute deficit of freedom and good governance” in Muslim countries. Its authors are getting high marks from the Bush administration. Too bad they’ve largely ignored the most basic freedom under any democratic government: the guarantee of religious liberty.


Although understandable, given his interest in religion, I think he overdoes his criticism of the report for not explicitly favoring religious freedom. But this is implicit in the report’s general treatment of freedom, and then there are these snippets:

The dominant trend in Islamic jurisprudence supports freedom. Enlightened Islamic interpretations find that the tools of democracy – when used properly – offer one possible practical arrangement for applying the principle of consultation (al-shura). The fundamental principles in Islam which dictate good governance, include the realization of justice and equality, the assurance of public freedoms, the right of the nation to appoint and dismiss rulers, and guarantees of all public and private rights for non-Muslims and Muslims alike. Notwithstanding these key theological and philosophical interpretations, political forces, in power and in opposition, have selectively appropriated Islam to support and perpetuate their oppressive rule.
. . . .
In contemporary jurisprudence, human rights constitute the collection of rights incorporated in international agreements and treaties that guarantee all people, irrespective of their nationality, ethnicity, language, sex, religion, ideology and abilities, the fundamental rights to which they are entitled by virtue of being human. However, in Arab countries the issue of ‘specificity’ is frequently raised to weaken international human rights law.
. . . .
The confusion between religion and state is nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the Sudanese Constitution, which provides that God, the Creator of humankind, holds supremacy over the State, without specifying the meaning of supremacy. Governance practices apparently sanctioned by God are likely to be immune to criticism and opposition.

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Books, articles, and data

Only Mass Murder, Not Like A Disaster

[First published December 5, 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 subtracted that from the total to get the above 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 and Mao’s democidal famines, the later 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.

Are Free People Happier and More Satisfied?

[First published November 14, 2005] 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 (xx). Here, 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 answer tries to question. Utilizing surveys done by the European Union over 25 years about respondents well being in 11 European nations, the authors 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 wellbeing. 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. Subject 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 1981to 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 so 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 liner. 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 author’s 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 rule by Protestant elites of 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 in the order of their significance: 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. We still don’t know whether it is freedom that is the strongest factor. That it has the highest correlation with well being suggests that it is, but a proper analysis of this has yet to be done. I will do it, and give the conclusions here.

see the regression of human security on freedom

Death By Marxism

[First published November 10, 2005. Among all the democide estimates appearing here, some have been revised upward. I have changed that for Mao's famine, 1958-1962, from zero to 38,000,000. And thus I have had to change the overall democide for the PRC (1928-1987) from 38,702,000 to 76,702,000.

I have changed my estimate for colonial democide from 870,000 to an additional 50,000,000.

Thus, the new world total: old total 1900-1999 = 174,000,000. New World total = 174,000,000 + 38,000,000 (new for China) + 50,000,000 (new for Colonies) = 262,000,000.

Just to give perspective on this incredible murder by government, if all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5', then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.]

What is the greatest source of democide?

First, I should note that by democide I mean to define the killing by governments as the concept of murder defines individual killing in domestic society. And it is focusing on this democide, rather than the genocide that is one of its components, which uncovers the true dimensions of mass murder in the world.

Since democide is a government activity or policy, we must consider what type of governments are the worse murderers. Is there a political factor that discriminates between mortacracies–governments characterized by murder–and those who may kill incidentally or situationally? Yes, totalitarianism. Almost without exception, totalitarian governments are or have been mortacracies.

There is much confusion about what totalitarian means in the literature. I define a totalitarian state as one with a system of government that is unlimited constitutionally or by countervailing powers in society (such as by a church, rural gentry, labor unions, or regional powers); is not held responsible to the public by periodic elections via secret ballot, and competitive elections; and employs its unlimited power to control all aspects of society, including the family, religion, education, business, private property, and social relationships. Under Stalin, the Soviet Union was thus totalitarian, as was Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Hitler’s Germany, and U Ne Win’s Burma. Presently, North Korea is a prime example.

Totalitarianism is also an ideology for which a totalitarian government is the agency for realizing its ends. Thus, totalitarianism characterizes such ideologies as state socialism (as in Burma), Marxism-Leninism as in the former Soviet Union, and Italian fascism. Then, of course, there is Nazism, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei–National Socialist German Workers’ Party — although racist and nationalist doctrines dominated, economically, all become subverted to the Party, as under communism; as Hitler said: “We are socialists.” Other versions of totalitarianism dot the modern world, such as the socialist Baathist Party that ruled Iraq under Hussein and still rules Syria.

Not all totalitarianism is socialist. Theological totalitarianism, for example, characterized the Taliban, does so for revolutionary Moslem Iran since the overthrow of the Shaw in 1978-79 and Saudi Arabia. Here totalitarianism is married to Moslem fundamentalism.

In short, totalitarianism is the ideology of absolute power.

The worst of the totalitarian governments, however, by far have been the socialist. Socialist self-righteousness, desire to radically reconstruct the fundamental institution of society (throwing out the institutional evolution and cultural learning of generations), the belief that those who disagree are evil, and that one must “break eggs to make an omelet,” have led to monumental democide, as for example by the Soviet Union (about 61 million murdered), Mao’s China (about 35 million), and so on for all the communist regimes, as well as the nationalist socialists like Germany (21 million), state socialist like Burma, Baathists like Syria and Hussein’s Iraq, socialist Libya, and so on. See the figure below.

The details of communist democide are below:

By my count (here) for 1900-1987, totalitarian regimes murdered about 138 million (communist regimes about 110 million out of 169 million overall for all governments. Electoral or procedural democracies murdered 2 million (149 thousand domestic, mainly due to the Spanish Civil War); liberal democracies murdered none of their citizens.

Some, mainly on the left, argue that my figures for communist systems are way too high, while being too low for democracies, especially like the United States. Okay, cut in half all my estimates for communist systems, and double those for democracies. That leaves the communist murdering 55 million versus 4 million for the democracies (almost all wartime democide against enemy civilians). We can even go further and do this again, and the conclusion remains the same–nondemocratic socialism is one of the great threats to human life. In other words, as far as democide is concerned, the major danger, by far, is from the nondemocratic far left.

Be clear, regimes on the right, such as the absolute monarchies and non-socialist fascists like Chiang’s Nationalist government of China (10 million murdered) and Japan’s WWII military government (6 million), also committed major democide, but overall much less than the Marxists. Truly, we can say of communism, it is death by Marxism.


Are Democracies Least Corrupt?

[First published October 27, 2005] One of the extraordinary characteristics of dictatorships, especially absolutists ones, is their government corruption. This comes out in biographies of those who, for example, have lived in North Korea or in South Vietnam when it was defeated and occupied by the North. And under authoritarian regimes, this corruption seems only marginally less, as under the Chinese Nationalists before their defeat by Mao. My impression, consistent with that of others, has been the democracy is among the least corrupt types of government.

Now, this has been tested. Transparency International has provided for 2005 a perception of corruption index for 146 nations (here). Kenneth Sikorski added to this index the freedom house ranking of nations on their civil liberties and civil rights (from here), which measures their freedom, and found that the index included 67 free, 45 partly free, and 34 unfree nations (excluding North Korea). He then averaged these three political groups on their perceived corruption, as shown below (total scores for all nations in the group/number of nations in the group — personal communication):

Free (2901/67) = 43.3
Partly Free (4076/45) = 96.6
Not Free (3470/34 = 102.05

So, partly free and not free nations are perceived to be over twice as corrupt as democracies. This is another plus for democracies, of course. They don’t war on each other, have the least domestic violence, virtually never kill their own people, experience no famines, and also are least corrupt.

This gets almost embarrassing after awhile in relating this to people who ignorant of research on the democratic peace, as I did in a talk today. It seems that one is obsessed with a one-factor theory of humanity’s major problems. This runs counter to general intuition, and to common sense in the social sciences, which is that the socio-political world is complex with multiple causes and conditions interacting to produce events. No one factor is sufficient, so it is felt. Well, there is one major factor, and that is democratic freedom. The evidence, such as the above, is always available to doubters, if only they will look at it. All I can say is what Galileo Galilei said when his astronomical observations were doubted and he was persecuted for them. “Look through the telescope,” he responded.

Its Democide, Not Politicide

click me^–>

[First published October 25, 2005] Some of you may have come across the term politicide. Barbara Harff (here) and I independently developed the concept. I used it to refer to the murder by government of people because of their politics, political activities, or their threat to the government. Politicide is not genocide, which is the attempt to eliminate in whole or in part people because of their race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion.

Harff, unfortunately, and those who have followed on her research have used the term to define any government murder other than genocide. This is a simple misunderstanding of the extent and variety of government murder. True, when a government kills “rightists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” or officials of the former defeated government, as Mao did in China, it was politicide. When Pol Pot tortured and murdered Khmer Rouge for supposedly plotting against him, it was politicide. When Lenin had Czar Nicolas II and his whole family assassinated in 1918, it was politicide. But then much, if not most, government murder is not politicide or genocide, but democide.

Now, democide is any murder by government, which is the intentional killing of unarmed people for whatever purpose. It is comparable to the concept of murder in domestic law. It includes genocide, politicide, massacres, atrocities, assassination, extermination, ethnic cleansing (if killing is involved), suicide bombing, and indiscriminate shelling, bombing, and strafing.

The problem with equating politicide with democide is the killing that is thereby omitted. For example, everyone knows about the so-called Rape of Nanking by the Japanese Army when it captured the city on December 13th, 1937. Its soldiers were given freedom to rape, loot, and kill for nearly two months. I calculate that about 200,000 civilians and POWs thus were massacred. But while some killing was politicide, most was not. The label cannot be applied, say, to women being raped and then murdered, or husbands and fathers shot while trying to prevent their wives or daughters from being raped. Nor, can it apply it to the binding of POWs together, pouring gasoline on them, and burning them alive, or using them for bayonet practice.

Similarly with the widespread rape and murder of helpless women and children as the Red Army pursued the defeated Germans across Eastern Europe and into Germany in 1945. None of this should be characterized as politicide, but as democide.

You may be surprised at the extent to which empirical research and solid research conclusions depend on the proper conceptualization of the subject. While the discussion of politics can tolerate confusion over such terms as liberal (as vs. 19th century liberal), scientific research begins with establishing and defining terms. And in research on the democratic peace, it is especially important to distinguish politicide from democide — that is, murder for political purposes from wanton murder.

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Link of Note

“‘Us’ or ‘Them’?” By Thomas Sowell

:

Compromise and tolerance are not the hallmarks of true believers. What they believe in goes to the heart of what they are. As far as true believers are concerned, you are either one of Us or one of Them.
. . . [M]any issues that look on the surface like they are just about which alternative would best serve the general public are really about being one of Us or one of Them — and this woman was not about to become one of Them.

Many crusades of the political left have been misunderstood by people who do not understand that these crusades are about establishing the identity and the superiority of the crusaders.

RJR: Exactly. And now I have the characterization of the 50-times-more-effective Gartzke (here) for which I was looking. He is a true believer.

Links I Must Share

“79% of Iraqi voters back constitution “

RJR: Much better than the American Constitution would have done if put to a referendum, and like the two Sunni provinces that voted in large numbers against it, so would have Maryland for sure, and perhaps Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts (only nine states needed for ratification).

“Rice Outlines Iraq Victory Strategy On Capitol Hill “:

. . . .The key to victory over the insurgency in Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Senate Committee on Foreign Relations members, is to “clear areas from insurgent control, hold them securely, and build durable, national Iraqi institutions.” American servicemen and women are fighting in Iraq “at a pivotal time in world history,” Rice said. Efforts to defeat the insurgents “must succeed,” she said, if the Iraqis are to be successful in establishing an inclusive, democratic government unique in the Middle East. “Let’s work together on how we will win,” Rice said, calling for increased collaboration between U.S., coalition, and Iraqi security forces, as well as help from the U.S. Congress.

“Leahy says president needs to find plan to bring troops home”:

The president must develop a plan to bring the troops home from Iraq, U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Tuesday. “The American people need to know that the president has a plan that will bring our troops home,” said Leahy in a speech delivered in the Senate.

“This war has been a costly disaster for our country,” he said. “Far from making us safer from terrorists, in fact it has turned Iraq into a haven and recruiting ground for terrorists and deflected our attention and resources away from the fight against terrorism,” he said. “If anything, it has emboldened our enemies, as it has become increasingly apparent that the most powerful army in the world cannot stop a determined insurgency.”

RJR: Relevant follow-on to Rice’s hope above. This was said after the above announcement of the Iraqi constitution’s victory. He, and his liberal-left colleagues, are playing the Vietnam song all over again. We won every battle in Vietnam, the South was democratizing, but with the Democrats controlling Congress and the budget, they forced us to leave Vietnam to the communists and many Vietnamese to their deaths. Good thing the Republicans now control Congress, and we should make sure they continue to do so after the 2006 election.

” With a Whimper” Victor Davis Hanson:

How the violence in Iraq will end. . . . So when this is all over — and it will be more quickly than we imagine — there will be a viable constitutional government in Iraq. But the achievement will be considered either a natural organic process, or adopted as a success by former critics only at its safe, penultimate stage.
Most of us tragically will forget many of the American soldiers who courageously fought, died, and gave the Middle East its freedom and us our security. Purple fingers, not overloaded American helicopters taking off from the embassy roof, is the future of Iraq.
Yes, the terrorists’ assault against the Iraqi democracy will end — as all failed insurrections do — not with a bang but with a whimper.

RJR: As history has mercifully forgotten all the no-sayers about the democratization of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Germany, and an American victory in the Cold War, so it will do so when Iraq is fully democratized and a stable contributor to peace and human security in the Middle East.

“Syria’s dissidents unite to issue call for change “
RJR: Democratic change in Syria is inevitable, but given the small ethnic gang that rules with their guns, I fear that such change will come only through massive internal violence, and life-saving intervention.

Book 3 of the Never Again Series
free in pdf

More on the Democratic Peace and Sharp Decline in Violence

click me^–>

[First published October 17, 2005] A study has just been published by the Human Security Center, War and Peace In The 21St Century (pdf here). I recommend reading it for the comprehensiveness of its data and analysis.

The reports conclusions are:

Over the past dozen years, the global security climate has changed in dramatic, positive, but largely unheralded ways. Civil wars, genocides and international crises have all declined sharply. International wars, now only a small minority of all conflicts, have been in steady decline for a much longer period, as have military coups and the average number of people killed per conflict per year. The wars that dominated the headlines of the 1990s were real—and brutal—enough. But the global media have largely ignored the 100-odd conflicts that have quietly ended since 1988. During this period, more wars stopped than started. The extent of the change in global security following the end of the Cold War has been remarkable:

°The number of armed conflicts around the world has declined by more than 40% since the early 1990s. [See the igure below from the report]

°Between 1991 (the high point for the post–World War II period) and 2004, 28 armed struggles for self-determination started or restarted, while 43 were contained or ended. There were just 25 armed secessionist conflicts under way in 2004, the lowest number since 1976.

°Notwithstanding the horrors of Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere, the number of genocides and politicides plummeted by 80% between the 1988 high point and 2001.

°International crises, often harbingers of war, declined by more than 70% between 1981 and 2001.

°The dollar value of major international arms transfers fell by 33% between 1990 and 2003 (Figure 1.10). Global military expenditure and troop numbers declined sharply in the 1990s as well.

°The number of refugees dropped by some 45% between 1992 and 2003, as more and more wars came to an end.

°Five out of six regions in the developing world saw a net decrease in core human rights abuses between 1994 and 2003.

The positive changes noted above date from the end of the Cold War. Other changes can be traced back to the 1950s:

°The average number of battle-deaths per conflict per year—the best measure of the deadliness of warfare— has been falling dramatically but unevenly since the 1950s. In 1950, for example, the average armed conflict killed 38,000 people; in 2002 the figure was 600, a 98% decline.

°The period since the end of World War II is the longest interval of uninterrupted peace between the major powers in hundreds of years.

°The number of actual and attempted military coups has been declining for more than 40 years. In 1963 there were 25 coups and attempted coups around the world, the highest number in the post–World War II period. In 2004 there were only 10 coup attempts—a 60% decline. All of them failed.

How do they explain this great decrease in warfare and its severity?

A dramatic increase in the number of democracies. In 1946, there were 20 democracies in the world; in 2005, there were 88.10 Many scholars argue that this trend has reduced the likelihood of international war because democratic states almost never fight each other.

An increase in economic interdependence . Greater global economic interdependence has increased the costs of cross-border aggression while reducing its benefits.

A decline in the economic utility of war . The most effective path to prosperity in modern economies is through increasing productivity and international trade, not through seizing land and raw materials. In addition, the existence of an open global trading regime means it is nearly always cheaper to buy resources from overseas than to use force to acquire them.

Growth in international institutions . The greatly increased involvement by governments in international institutions can help reduce the incidence of conflict. Such institutions play an important direct role in building global norms that encourage the peaceful settlement of disputes. They can also benefit security indirectly by helping promote democratisation and interdependence.

There you have it. The first empirical anslysis to note the sharp decrease in violence other than my own, and to attribute it to the democractic peace. My only disagreement is that I would consider the democracies achieving a critical mass to be the major cause, and the others to be minor. The other causes existed before the decrease in violence, and it is only that growth in democracies that is the factor that significantly changed — that along with the end of the Cold War, which be it recalled, was predicted at the time to lead to a leap in violence, since the Soviet Union (having disappeared) and U.S. were no longer concerned to cap any violence that might draw them into a major war with each other.

Link of Day

“Final Report of the Commission on Human Security” A UN Report different from the above

The report proposes a new security framework that centers directly and specifically on people. Human security focuses on shielding people from critical and pervasive threats and empowering them to take charge of their lives. It demands creating genuine opportunities for people to live in safety and dignity and earn their livelihood.

RJR: Note this policy conclusion: “Clarifying the need for a global human identity while respecting the freedom of individuals to have diverse identities and affiliations.”

Links I Must Share

“Book Learning:

A controversial new work says French school textbooks are just plain anti-American.

RJR: Is there any doubt?

“Rice: No presidential ambitions”

RJR: This is politicospeech for, “I’ll run if people show enough interest.”

“TRUE ACADEMIC FREEDOM HAS A NEW ALLY”

The cultural left has a new tool for enforcing political conformity in schools of education. It is called dispositions theory, and it was set forth five years ago by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education: Future teachers should be judged by their “knowledge, skills, and dispositions.”

RJR: By dispositions, or what in my academic experience was called “political sensitivety,” which was used to evaluate faculty and graduate student applicants, means bowing before the left’s holy icons. Five degrees is no good. It has to be a full forty-five degrees.

“United Nations uselessness”

The chief of mission for Sudan in Washington, Ambassador Khidir Haroun Ahmed, assures the world in a Sept. 28 Op-Ed in The Washington Times that since “Every reliable report coming our of Darfur indicates that the situation has stabilized and the mortality rate has returned to pre-war levels,” at last there is “the beginning of a new era in Sudan.” Despite this exercise in public relations, the facts on the ground in Darfur are savagely different.

RJR: This is the UN, you know. It could not be otherwise.

On WWI, Stalin, Holocaust,
China, Cambodia, and others

Academic Tenure- Protecting Incompetence, Malingering, and Extremism

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[First published October 12, 2005] I have taught for most of my life in a university and had tenure. But I oppose its system of tenure. It has become a system that protects incompetent faculty, and a shield behind which many faculty take their salary, teach their courses from yellowed notes, do little real research, and spend much of their time socializing, pursuing personal interests, a hobby, or promoting their politics. It is an unbelievable life compared to that of the working stiff or the businessman. Faculty may teach six to twenty hours a week, depending on whether they are at a research university (one that has a Ph.D. program in most disciplines), or not. Aside from his teaching hours, the tenured professor is free to come and go. For those at a research university, teaching only six to nine hours, he may be expected to also counsel students, chair Ph.D. dissertations, and participate in department and university committees. But, through various ruses, he may avoid much of this. And indeed, if their incompetence and stupidly is known — and there are seldom secrets about this — he may be relieved of these academic obligations. Thus the dumber and less competent, the more free time to idle away at maybe $50,000-60,000 a year (if there is a faculty union, raises are across the board).

Those who suffer from this system are the students and fresh PhDs, from whom positions are held by the aged and feeble. With tenure, a guaranteed salary, and associated perks, these hanger-ons will not retire even when their lecture notes disintegrate from age and use.

There is something more here. The tenure system has enabled a coalition of leftist-socialist-Marxists (communist) professors to establish a politburo-like rule over an academic department. They control who is hired; who does not get tenure; the criteria for accepting graduate students into the department, and awarding them teaching assistantships, and grants; and the content of the curriculum. Because of tenure, this control is virtually impossible to change except by the death or, exceptionally, retirement of its members. And this is a wide-ranging coalition across departments and universities. They give good reviews to each other’s books; as peer reviewers, they recommend the publication of each others articles; as panel chairmen, they select who will be on a professional panel and who the discussants will be; and as grant application readers, they determine who will get funds for research; and perhaps most important, they decide what dissertations will be accepted. In other words, these tenured leftists move whole disciplines, such that they become marked by a dominant leftist ideology. Such is sociology, political science, and the humanities today.

The left shields their tenure by claiming it guarantees academic freedom. Don’t believe it. Even the tenured who disagree with the dominant left, or step on one of their icons (e.g., American “imperialism,” “greedy” capitalism, the Palestinian “just cause”), can be fired, or the conditions of their academic life made so miserable that they will leave. For the left, academic freedom is for the leftist professor, not the libertarian, conservative, or heaven forbid, Bush supporter. What applies to faculty is multiplied for students. To get a good grade and, most important recommendation (the coin of the academic realm), mirror the prof. on exams (if he claims white is black, then so it is), ask softball questions, or shut up.

What to do about this system? Legislators in some states are trying to pass an academic bill of rights (see link below) By itself, it will do no good as long as there is tenure to protect incompetence, malingering, and extremism. Other than getting rid of tenure (I favor five-year renewable contracts), the best way to deal with this is sunshine — transparency of what goes on with tenured academics. If outraged non-leftist faculty and students speak out with their personal stories, if what is going on within the university with tenure is disclosed, then this pollution will eventually be known by boards of overseers and regents, and those who support and fund universities and their projects. And students and their parents may start avoiding certain schools.

And finally, the poor worker, dedicated professional, and hard working businessman may see how their taxes or the tuition they pay for their children is being used. Especially, they will eventually see how while they work hard for what they earn, there is a malingering, money-sucking class like an ancient aristocracy, living within their university-castle, and surrounded by a tenure-moat

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Links of Note

“The Tenure Debate — Near and Afar” ()

“Academic Bill of Rights”

Links I Must Share

“Why God Never Received Tenure at any University “

“Taking on the pro-Islamacists at Columbia U.”

Harvard Law prof Alan Dershowiz has a long track record of leftist political views and defense of human rights. After 9/11 he began to speak out openly on the need to confront militant Islamacism and terror tactics. So it’s not surprising that yesterday he took on Columbia Univ. and its faculty.

“Herd Behavior At Institutions Of Higher Leftism”

Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University writes on the effects of left wing groupthink at universities, and the effect it has on career advancement and curriculum.

RJR: I’ve seen it all.

Students Fight Back: Introducing NoIndoctrination.org

The recent firestorm of controversy over the Campus Watch website may be only the beginning. Now a new website called NoIndoctrination.org has the potential to draw wide public attention to the abuse of fairness and trust regularly practiced in today’s politically correct college classrooms.

RJR: This is the way democracy is supposed to work.

Arguments Against the Democratic Peace

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[First published October 10, 2005] I have on occasion linked to or critiqued articles arguing against the democratic peace (DP). They fall into four groups.

First, are those who argue from historical examples that allegedly disprove DP. Favorites are the Civil War, WWII against “democratically elected” Hitler, democratic Finland being allied with Germany in World War II, the various French-British crises, , and certain democratic American Indian tribes on which the U.S. made war. Also, there is the finger pointing at all the wars that the U.S. and U.K. fought. No amount of historical analysis that disproves these as exceptions persuades members of this group, who generally argue that DP supporters are defining them away.

Lets say that all the exceptions are true exceptions. There were 371 pairs of countries involved in wars against each other 1816-2005 About 22 exceptions have been put forward, which if excepted would mean that democracies fought that many wars out of 371, or 6 percent. Therefore, taking every claimed exception as true we can still say that democracies tend to be most peacefully disposed to each other. That is, if democracy were universalized, war in the world would still be sharply reduced.

The second group is those who, misunderstand what DP is, and thus use examples that are at different levels of analysis or conceptual design. For example, they argue: “Look at all the wars that Britain and the United States have fought. Indeed, Britain has fought more wars that any other nation.” Yes, but this says nothing about what nations Britain fought against after it became a democracy with the Reform Act of 1884 (which extended the franchise to agricultural laborers). Although both the U.S. and Britain have fought many wars, none were against democracies.

A variant of this is to argue that the U.S. and Britain were the aggressors in many wars. True, the U.S. started the Spanish-American and Mexican-American wars, and now the Afghan and Iraq Wars. But the DP does not say that democracies will never launch wars. Only that it will not do so against other democracies.

The third group argue from balance of power or power superiority theories, a la Hans Morgenthau, and assert that DP is Wilsonian idealism, i.e., unrealistic, and wishful thinking. This is the most common argument appearing in the elite journals and by foreign policy commentators. In effect, it is arguing DP away in a nice way — by labeling it as head-in-the-clouds idealism in contrast to the feet-on-the ground realist. Yet, it is the other way around. It is DP that is grounded in historical data, and its claims have been well tested by scientific methods. Those promoting their “realism” cannot say this. And in those cases where power and its balancing have been tested against DP, the results were in favor of DP, not the other way around. Most often, however, the comparison is a matter of speculative realism versus empirically well tested DP. But either this is something that realists are unaware of, or will deny by lifting arguments from the two groups mentioned previously.

Finally, there is the group of those who question the methodology, with one of the favorites being “correlation does not mean causation,” as though all of us using quantitative methods on DP never took Statistics 101. I find these people usually don’t know what they are talking about (although sometimes wrapped in the usual quantitative jargon), or like the above quote, assume we’re all naïve or empty headed. In some cases, however, they apply apparently sophisticated statistics to data on war and democracy, among other variables, and conclude: “Hey, see, how insignificant democracy is compared to other variables.” When, however, these studies are looked at carefully, one usually finds that the methods have been misunderstood, misapplied, or the data were inappropriate to the method used (for an example of this, see “The CATO Institute Gets It All Wrong” here). Such is the kinds of war counting, empirical studies, I referred to in my blog, “Counting the Democratic Peace Away” (here).

In 1981, to the conclusion of my five volumes on Understanding Conflict and War (here), I wrote: 

In total, some violence is inevitable; extreme violence and war are not. To eliminate war, to restrain violence, to nurture universal peace and justice, is to foster freedom.

That conclusion has not only held up well, it also now declarative American foreign policy.

Link of Day

” Democracy, Spontaneous Order and Peace” By Augustus diZerega

Abstract: The democratic peace hypothesis which states that democracies rarely or never go to war against one another and that democracies do not commit democide raises issues penetrating to the core of modern liberalism, classical and otherwise. If democracies are unique from other forms of government, as claims for their peacefulness towards citizens and one another suggest, then possibly the classical liberal and libertarian critique of democratic government needs re-examination. By separating liberal democracy from undemocratic states, the democratic peace hypothesis separates the classical liberal and libertarian critique of the state from a straight forward application to liberal democracy. The work of F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi holds the key to understanding the democratic peace, and thereby leads to rethinking the classical liberal and libertarian critique of politics. To jump ahead, democracies are spontaneous orders in Hayek’s sense of the term. Consequently democracies are not states in the usual sense, and often do not act like them.

RJR: diZerega is one of the few to recognize that Hayek’s spontaneous society provides an explanation of DP. Nonetheless, Hayekian libertarians, excepting diZeerega, will continue to treat DP as the muttering of diseased minds.

Links I Must Share

Marshall vs. Miers

Unqualified, no judicial experience, just a political crony. Miers? No, John Marshall, whose name generally is preceded by the adjective great, some describing him as the greatest figure in the history of American law. . . . But let’s ask ourselves realistically whether a fracas precipitated by an in-your-face nomination of a conservative with strong and well known commitments to hot-button issues would not simply have led to yet another ignominious defeat by the legions of Darth Vader.  At no time in recent memory has the Republican Senate leadership evidenced any notable parliamentary, tactical, or PR skills.  The Democrats have out-maneuvered them at every turn.

Maybe President Bush simply looked at the facts in the cold light of day and concluded that the nation’s interests would be better served by appointing someone who is both confirmable and committed to sound general principles.  Maybe he concluded that reliance on Senators like Arlen Specter and Bill Frist was as likely to be successful as buying a lottery ticket.

RJR: Too many conservatives are blind to this. For too long, they have wanted a fight with the Demos, and now they are upset by not getting it. Well, getting another strict constructionist on the Supreme Court is more important, and anyway, they would have lost the fight.

“Media Ignore Freedom’s Victories”

It’s troubling that so many refuse to recognize, let alone support, the struggle for freedom in Iraq. The groups behind the September 24 anti-war march on Washington, D.C. really do not care if an American withdrawal ushers in a terrorist victory. One of the co-sponsoring groups, International ANSWER, is actually led by members of the Workers World Party, a communist group that has backed Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Kim Jong-Il. But don’t look for the media to mention that fact.

RJR: They never do. The communist are free to organize as they will without mention of their involvement. True now, true during the anti-nuclear demonstrations, true during Vietnam. Can’t seem a McCarthy, you know.

“SAT-GUIDED CANNON READY TO BLAST”

. . . . the Army has been bankrolling “HYPERLINK “http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/micro_stories.pl?ACCT=149999&TICK=RTN&STORY=/www/story/09-26-2005/0004131807&EDATE=Sep+26,+2005″Excalibur,” a Raytheon effort to build a 155mm artillery shell that’s guided by GPS. Think of it as the howitzer’s answer to smart bombs.

RJR: Combine this with a drone providing the GPS coordinates of a tall man dressed all in white, and . . . .

Synopsis, three chapters, and free download

Counting the Democratic Peace Away

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[First published October 9, 2005] I often come across the assumption that science is so explicit, empirical, precise, and clear that it is a proven alternative to assumption laden philosophy, traditional scholarship and what passes for social analysis. Wrong.

Social scientific research is laden with assumptions. For example, one assumption in the scientific studies of which I’m aware that concerns me is the following. So many applications of correlational methods, as of the correlation coefficient itself or regression analysis, assume that the relationship between an x and y is necessary and sufficient (necessity: y does not occur without x; sufficiency: if x then y; necessary and sufficient: y occurs if and only if x). But what if x is sufficient only; or necessary only? Then the correlation could be weak, even though there is a very strong causal relationship. For example, that both nations be democratic is a sufficient condition that they will be at peace with each other. However, they may be at peace for other reasons, such as distance (e.g., Ecuador and Kenya), shared interests of the moment (e.g., Syria and Iran), or fear of a third party (e.g., China and Taiwan). For peace between countries, that they be democratic is only a sufficient, but not necessary condition. This theoretical relationship is shown in the figure below, each dot representing a hypothetical war or act of violence.

If the figures reflect the true relationship, which I’m sure it does, then it is incorrect to test this relationship between democracy and peace by correlational methods, since they would obscure it. But this is what is most often done, followed by the exclamation: “See, the relationship is weak. There is no significant democratic peace.”

A more appropriate way to test this is by cross-classification tables, such as Tables 1 and 2 in the upper left of the democratic peace chart below (click to enlarge)

A more specific problem of concern is the general use of a simple count of wars to test/assess relationships. The problem is especially evident in testing whether democracies are less warlike than other types of regimes. But a count of wars is very misleading, since a regime coded as having a war can have virtually no one killed in the war as long as, using the common criteria that it had over 1,000 troops involved, or that many were killed overall in the “war” (thus, a nation suffering 800 killed in a violent confrontation in which the overall toll is 950 would not be counted as having fought a war).

For example, in the Boxer Rebellion (1900), which is classified as a war since there were over 3,000 battle dead, Great Britain lost 34 killed, the United States 21, and France 24. Yet, this would be classified as a war for each of these nations. Then consider the Falklands War of 1982 between Great Britain and Argentina. Figures vary on the number killed, but somewhat less than 1,000 seems a good number, with about 650 to 700 of those being Argentineans. But by virtue of the criteria mentioned, since it did not rise to the 1,000 battle dead threshold, in spite of her high number killed compared to Great Britain, the USA and France in the Boxer rebellion, this would not be counted as a war for Argentina or Britain.

The problem with this simplistic count of wars for a regime can be seen in another way. Counting wars or military actions equates conflicts that are vastly different. For example, the Philippines lost 90 killed in the Korean War, and this is counted as one war for the Philippines because she had more than 1,000 troops involved. But the Soviet Union lost 7,500,000 battle dead in World War II, and this also is counted as one war. Thus, in comparing, say, the democraticness of regimes and their use of force, if we measure force by a frequency count of wars, then Great Britain in the Boxer Rebellion, the Philippines in the Korean War, and the USSR in World War II are treated as equally using force, since each gets a count of one for war, even although Great Britain lost only 34 in combat, the Philippines 90, and the Soviet Union over 7,000,000. Yet, such frequency counts of wars or the use of force have been the main way the relationship between democracy and violence, among other relationships, have been tested.

Consider also that whatever we theorize to be the underlying conditions inhibiting or preventing democracies and near democracies from violence, to my knowledge no one argues that democracies are equally inhibited from using force in a conflict in which the expectation is of losing a dozen or so soldiers versus engaging in a total war in which the loss of millions may be suffered. But this is the theoretical assumption in the use of a simple count of wars.

Sometimes I think that the mechanics of analysis (getting and preparing data for analysis, setting up the computer application, applying it to the data, and then reporting the results), and the pressure to do what others have done in their research, overwhelms common sense.

Keep this in mind when you will read here and there on the internet that democracies are as warlike as other regimes.

Links of Day

“Mark Steyn: Islamist way or no way” By Mark Steyn (10/4/05)

:

. . . . the Islamists don’t even bother going through the traditional rhetorical feints. They say what they mean and they mean what they say. “We are here as on a darkling plain …” wrote Matthew Arnold in the famous concluding lines to Dover Beach, “where ignorant armies clash by night”.
But we choose in large part to stay in ignorance. Blow up the London Underground during a G8 summit and the world’s leaders twitter about how tragic and ironic it is that this should have happened just as they’re taking steps to deal with the issues, as though the terrorists are upset about poverty in Africa and global warming.
. . . . The word peace, for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam — or House of Islam — to the entire world. This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought. Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar a-Salam, or House of Peace.”
That’s why they blew up Bali in 2002, and last weekend, and why they’ll keep blowing it up. It’s not about Bush or Blair or Iraq or Palestine. It’s about a world where everything other than Islamism lies in ruins.

” Zarqawi justifies killing of civilians”:

Iraq’s al Qaeda leader Abu Musab Zarqawi said militants were justified under Islam in killing civilians as long as they are infidels, according to a new audiotape attributed to him yesterday. “Islam does not differentiate between civilians and military, but rather distinguishes between Muslims and infidels,” said the man on the tape posted on the Internet, who sounded like Zarqawi.

RJR: If I may spell this out (assuming that you and your family is nonMuslim), it’s like getting an email or phone call from a gang leader saying, “I’m going to murder you, your mate, and your children.” What protects us is that we are hidden in a crowd of hundreds of millions of Americans.

Links I Must Share

“NATO widens role in Afghanistan”

NATO will increase its force in Afghanistan to as many as 15,000 soldiers and will take on counterinsurgency operations as its expands its mission into southern Afghanistan over coming months . . . .

RJR: This is quite a breakthrough in this war on terror. NATO, an all democratic 26 member military alliance of mainly East and West European democracies (plus Turkey, Iceland, Canada, and the U.S.) has broken out of its Europe only shell with its increasing involvement in African peacekeeping, and now this enlargement of its contribution to the Afghan democracy. Can one hope that NATO will soon be the military arm of a global Alliance of Democracies?

“Who Cares About Midterm Elections?”

RJR: This is sardonically put, I’m sure. The point is that too many are caught up in the 2008 battle, while ignoring the 2006 one for Congress that is of utmost importance. Imagine that the Democrats take over the House and Senate. What will they do then about Iraq and the War on Terror? Hmmmm.

“Terrorism Strikes the Heartland”:

. . . .it’s not every day that there’s a terrorist attack on U.S. soil and supposedly there hasn’t been one since 9/11. But that’s exactly what happened outside a packed football stadium at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma on Saturday night (10/1).

RJR: That authorities would suppress and distort information on this terrorist attempt to murder thousands should be a wake up call regarding what they will do if bird flu hits some area in the U.S. I’m not trying to malign health authorities, but their primary concern will be to avoid a panic that would make quarantine and the isolation of the pandemic difficult. What is society-wise may not be for the alert individual, if they can avoid the pandemic altogether.
STAY ALERT. Consult pandemic 2005 every day (here).

A Nobel Peace Prize “Finalist”?

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[First published October 4, 2005] If you will forgive me, sometimes I have to get personal because of the importance of a question to the credibility of my research and data. I have for years claimed I was a “Nobel Peace Prize finalist”. This has been questioned by both friend and foe, which have asserted that (1) there is no such category, and (2) the Nobel Committee does not release such information, and (3) it doesn’t leak. Several years ago, someone unhappy with my research results checked with the Committee, was told the above, and then spread the word that I lied and, therefore, my assertions about my data and results could not be trusted.

So, to those who emailed me about this slander, I pointed out that I was only passing on what the local media told me in setting up an interview on this. Assuming it would settle the matter, I emailed them this pre-interview news item from the Honolulu Advertiser (3/1/96): 

Rudolph Rummel’s lifelong study of war, violence and mass killing has led him on a quest for peace. So it is only fitting that . . . he is among 117 finalists for the prize, which will be announced in October.

Recently, a colleague who I highly respect, is a friend who supports my research, and who is knowledgeable about the workings of the Nobel Committee tried to persuade me to drop the claim to being a finalist as not too important, and anyway, to people like him in the know, it looked “foolish.”

He simply is unaware of the esteem many without his inside view of the Nobel nomination give to it or even better, to being “finalist.” Of the prizes and awards I’ve won, and all the books and professional articles I’ve published, this is the number 1 credibility booster for my research claims.

In any case, I passed on to him the above news item. He then communicated with the Director of the Nobel Institute (who is ex officio secretary of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee) and I received this reponse:

He confirmed my impression that there is no short list of 117 nominees. Not in 1996 or in any other year. There is a list of people nominated for the Prize, as you indeed were. There is a short list of at most 30-40 people. The credentials of these candidates are examined by a group of confidential reviewers for the Nobel Institute.
 
In his time as Director, and he has been in that position since well before 1996, Geir Lundestad has never experienced a leak of either the long list of all nominees or the short list of those reviewed.

Okay, so I went on LexisNexis and did a search for the February 1996 wire from which the local media said they got their information. The incredible Internet came through again. I found the wire and it is below in full, so that no one feels I left anything out:

Associated Press
February 29, 1996; Thursday 09:21 Eastern Time
SECTION: International news
BYLINE: DOUG MELLGREN

DATELINE: OSLO, Norway

BODY:
Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, has been nominated for the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize for his pro-democracy drive, one of 117 names on the final list tallied by Nobel officials this week.

Lee, Taiwan’s president since 1988, was nominated by a former Swedish deputy prime minister, Per Ahlmark. Ahlmark also submitted the names of Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng and Rudolph J. Rummel, professor emeritus at Hawaii University, who has collected evidence on repressive political regimes.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which never releases lists of candidates, on Thursday refused to confirm the names of nominees for this year’s prize.

However, those making the nominations often announce them. Other known nominees this year include U.S. President Clinton and his emissary Richard Holbrooke for their peace efforts in Bosnia.

”I can only say that we now have a final count on nominations. There are 117 this year, including 28 organizations,” said Geir Lundestad, the committee’s non-voting secretary. The number in past years has been between 120 and 130.

The five-member awards committee arrived at the final number Wednesday when it began sifting through this year’s nominations mailed by the Jan. 31 deadline.

Taiwan is planning its first democratic presidential election on March 23. However, the drive toward democracy has heightened tensions with mainland China. Beijing regards Taiwan as a breakaway province and threatens to attack the island if it declares independence.

”Almost the entire transition by Taiwan to a democracy has occurred during Lee Teng-hui’s presidency,” said Ahlmark in his nomination letter, released in Sweden.

”For the first time in several thousand years of Chinese civilization, part of the Chinese nation is today run through elections and an equal voice under political freedom,” Ahlmark wrote.

Taiwanese are worried about China’s reported plans to hold a military exercise by 150,000 troops on the mainland coast facing Taiwan. Some regard the exercise as an attempt to dissuade Taiwanese voters from supporting Lee.

Other known nominees include former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who has acted as a mediator in crises in North Korea, Haiti and Bosnia; Mordechai Vanunu, a nuclear technician jailed for revealing secrets of Israel’s atomic weapons program; Russian Human rights activist human Sergei Kovalyov; East Timor’s Catholic Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo; Bishop Samuel Ruiz of Mexico, and Maha Ghosananda, a Buddhist Monk, for his efforts to bring peace to Cambodia.

Groups nominated include Russia’s anti-war group Soldiers’ Mothers, The Salvation Army and Doctors without Borders.

The peace prize, worth 7.4 million Swedish kroner (about dlrs 1 million) this year, will be announced on a Friday in mid-October, Lundestad said.

The award is always presented in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, a Swede who invented dynamite and endowed the prize in his 1895 will.

The other Nobel Prizes in literature, economics, physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine are awarded on the same day in Stockholm, Sweden.

There you have it. Regardless of what he says, Geir Lundestad was a source of inside information — a leak. Moreover, the wire refers to a “final list” of nominations, and “arrived at the final number Wednesday when it began sifting through this year’s nominations.” Clearly, the Committee winnowed down all the nominations that came in to a “final list,” which is consistent with saying this was a list of finalists. Therefore, the local media got it right. I was a finalist on a list of 117 nominations.

[But since most colleagues will accept Geir Lundestad's claim that there was no leak of the finalists list, and to claim I was a finalist is controversial, I just note that I have been frequently nominated by the the Nobel Peace Prize by former Swedish deputy prime minister, Per Ahlmark (see here]

Method, Method, Its All In The Method

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[First published September 29, 2005] I don’t see the need to respond to every criticism of my research unless doing so cast more light on the democratic peace, or the incredible democide of the last century, being carried over into our new one by the ruling thugs in Burma, Sudan, and North Korea. For this reason, I will pay some attention to Dr. John Grohol’s item on my research and attendant criticism (here).

I will quote his points and respond to each below:

Rummel’s conclusions have been criticized the lack of definite correlation. He neglects current conflicts between Israel and Palestine as well as India and Pakistan, all of which are democratic nations–although Rummel’s defenders would retort that Palestine was never a real democracy until 2005, and that Pakistan is ruled by a strongman who wields a great deal of undemocratic power.

Moreover, were Israel truly at war with Palestine, Palestine would be destroyed due to the enormous disparity of power, and if Pakistan and India were truly at war with each other then tens of millions would die. Rummel’s real point is that democracies rarely go to war with each other, and liberal democracies (defined by free speech, free press, and universal franchise) never do. Neither Pakistan nor Palestine, at this time, qualifies as a liberal democracy.

RJR: He raises the criticism and then rebuts it himself

Rummel’s conclusions have also been criticized for not considering the number of deaths due to anarchy and the lack of government, through mechanisms such as civil conflict, the breakdown of society, and foreign invasion.

RJR: I do, and my estimates for each country include that for war dead and internal nondemocidal violence. Moreover, the most anarchical system is international relations, wars of which I have tallied and included in my analysis.

Some have found the data that he uses to be questionable.

RJR: This is unhelpful. Details please.

Other people point out that his methods of calculation of the death toll are highly controversial. He compares the statistical data before and after a certain date and derives an estimate about the number of killings that occurred between.

RJR: This is called interpolation, and what interpolation is wrong is not detailed.

However, he fails to establish evidence of actual killing.

RJR. No indication of what estimates of mine were wrong. I use all kinds of documents to establish democide, such as refugee reports, memoirs, biographies, historical analyses, actual exhumed body counts, records kept by the murderers themselves, and so on.

Moreover, his results are based on an absolute trust in statistical data and statistics are prone to errors. However, he himself uses the wider sense of “killed by”, including all kinds of “reason-result” relationships between acts of government and actual deaths. Moreover, in calculating the number of victims, he doesn’t feel he needs evidence of a death; the result of statistical calculation is, for Rummel, effective proof that death occurred.

RJR: Wrong. This deserves a full response: I don’t believe any of my estimates of democide tell the true death toll. Nor do I believe anyone will ever know the precise number of people murdered in any democide, including the Holocaust (estimates in this best of all studied genocides and with the best archival and other records still differ by over 40%). Then what is the purpose of estimating democide? Two reasons dominate: moral assessment, and related scientifically based policy. Democide is a crime against humanity, one of the worst crimes the rulers or leaders of a government can commit. But there are levels of democide, and I see a moral difference between rulers that murder at different orders of magnitude (powers of ten). That is, I find the evil of a Stalin who most probably murdered over 20,000,000 people (and this seems to encompass 99.9 percent of all estimates) greater than rulers who murdered 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, or even 1,000,000. More specifically, my moral gauge clicks in at orders of magnitude. (There are other moral gauges, of course, such as the proportion of a population murdered; how people were murdered, such as randomly or by ethnicity or race; whether the intent was genocide or revenge, etc.) The moral question for me is then whether an estimate captures the order of magnitude. While I don’t think we can ever get a true estimate, I do think we can bracket the range of estimates within which the true value must be found, either absolutely or probabilistically.

As to the second criteria for accepting an estimate, my concern is to forecast the most likely order of magnitude of democide based on the characteristics of a society, nation, culture, ruler, leadership, people, geography, and so on. This is a scientific problem and engages methodological and technical questions inappropriate here. What is appropriate to the question of errors in democide estimates is at what level of error we get meaningful enough results to define the causation involved in democide, when no actual estimate is true. And since the estimates are usually close enough in magnitudes to enable us to rank nations, and divide them into groups of more or less, then we have enough precision to carry out scientific tests as to what causes democide.

For an example of alleged manipulation: Rummel estimates the death toll in the HYPERLINK “http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Rheinwiesenlager”Rheinwiesenlager ( see here) as between 4,500 and 56,000. Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The high figure of 56,000 also merited the notation “probably much lower” in Rummel’s extracts.

RJR: Misleading. This is about the German POWs that died in American camps after the war due to mistreatment and lack of care. The different estimates I used are record here (lines 228-237). As you can see, the estimates generally are close to the ones given above, and I end up with a range of 3,000 to 56,000, with a most probable estimate of 6,000. Grohol does not understand that the low and high are meant to be the most unlikely low and high, and thus to bracket the probable true count (I did point this out). It is to determine these lows and highs that I include what some others might consider absurd estimates. And in this case, my low and high does bracket the figures he gives.

Another flaw in Rummel’s statistical calculations is that he doesn’t use error margins.

RJR: Of what meaning are error margins when dealing with the universe of data, and not a sample? For example, if one takes a poll of 1,000 people about their opinion on the Iraq war, the result may be 48 percent favorable within a margin (standard deviation) of 2.4 percentage points. But, if the poll is taken of all American adults, this is the universe and there is no error margin or standard error. I am dealing with all estimates available in English for ALL NATIONS over a period of a century, and available in the libraries I worked in, including the Library of Congress. In no way can these estimates be considered a sample, not even a sample of all estimates (say those in the Russian, Chinese, and Korean archives), since then the estimates I used are not random, or selected in some statistical sense.

Link of Day

“5 yrs of intifada: 1,061 Israelis killed”

AND

“Palestinians’ celebrate five years of terror war”

Yes, celebrating the murder en mass of unarmed civilian women and children, mothers and fathers, and sometimes whole families, walking the street, eating in restaurants, dancing in a club, or marketing. Some who survived paralyzed, with lose of their limbs, blinded, or suffering life long internal injuries might envy the dead. And genocide scholars, mainly American and European Jews who tend to side with the Palestinians, refuse to recognize the genocide it was. A case of genocide denial by the very people who are outraged at those who deny the Holocaust. But, there is no denial by the Palestinians, there is celebration.

Links I Must Share

“An Islamic guide on how to beat your wife”
And leave no marks.

” Top U.S. Military Intel Officer: Zarqawi ‘Hijacked’ Insurgency”

“The Mother of All Connections” By Stephen F. Hayes & Thomas Joscelyn. In. The Weekly Standard :

From the July 18, 2005 issue: A special report on the new evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda.

Excellent article. Read and inform yourself.

“Somaliland in first vote for MPs”
Another new democracy. Cheers.

Democide data estimation method

A Moment for A good Laugh

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[First published September 27, 2005] One can’t be serous all the time. I love a good laugh and the following are hard to beat. They came from annual “Dark and Stormy Night” competition — actual analogies and metaphors by way of Scripta Word Services (here). Found in high school essays:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances likeunderpants in a dryer without ClingFree.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guywho went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of thoseboxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at highschools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of thoseboxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli and he wasroom-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes justbefore it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot-three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because ofhis wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerlysurcharge-free ATM.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowlingball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filledwith vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie,surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardycomes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you frythem in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across thegrassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having leftCleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 pm. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences thatresembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who hadalso never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant and she was the EastRiver.

18. Even in his last years, Grandpappy had a mind like a steel trap, onlyone that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, thisplan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eatingfor a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either,but areal duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine orsomething.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en pointe and extended one slender legbehind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.24. It was an American tradition,like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as ifshe were a garbage truck backing up.

26. Her eyes were like limpid pools, only they had forgotten to put in anypH cleanser.

27. She walked into my office like a centipede with 98 missing legs.

Link of Day

Can you bear this?

Take a look and be sure to move your cursor around. Fun for you and your kid.

Links I Must Share

“SCIENTISTS DOUBT EXISTENCE OF DEMOCRATS”

“Hamas Will Stop Attacks From Gaza Says Note Attached To Missile”

“Seoul : Yes We Have No Nukes!”

“Conservatives And Liberals Thrilled At Sheehan’s Arrest”

Capitol Steps

Can We predict War and Is It Inevitable?

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[First published September 22, 2005] This blog is inspired by Navin’s blog, “Can We Predict Wars? (here), described as “based on the premise that “we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. Logically, it must then be possible to predict war based on historical events.”

I quite agree that it is to history we must look for the ability to predict war and peace. But the recourse to history must go beyond the subjective reading of historians; it must also add to this knowledge a systematic treatment of cases and events, much as any scientist treats his empirical observations. That is, we have to well define what we mean by war and any variables we believe predict or account for war in a way that people who disagree with us can duplicate our data; our data should contain all or a well selected sample of wars and be made available to other researchers; and we should use systematic and replicable techniques of some sort to assess the relationships among the data.

If we do this, which quantitative researchers on war and peace have done, we are able to predict when and where wars will not occur, and explain why. We can also establish the probability of war occurring. In light of the common view of war today, these two statements are amazing. Consider the first statement that we can say with high confidence where wars will not occur. For example, I predict with a feeling of absolute certainty that there will be no war between France and Germany, France and Spain, and Germany and Poland in the next five years. Now, from history, with all the wars that these two peoples have fought, this is quite a prediction. Yes, you will say, but no one now expects such a war, which begs the question as to why.

Okay, how about there will be no war between Greece and Turkey (which some do expect), or Colombia and Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia, or Botswana and Namibia. But, there might be a war between Israel and Syria, Iraq and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, or Tanzania and Uganda.

How do we know this? Because we know empirically from history and verified theory that democracies don’t make war on each other, and therefore we can predict that between any two democracies there will be no future war. However, war can well occur between two if one or both are not democracies. Moreover, the probability of war is far higher if both are nondemocracies.

In this case, can we predict when war will occur? It is most likely when there is a shift in the balance of interests, capabilities, and wills between two nondemocracies such that the balance no longer supports their status quo. There is a ton of nuances and things to be defined in this apparently simple statement. I’ve done this in my draft book, Principles of Freedom on my interactive book blog (here). See Part III, and specifically the conflict helix.

Thus, I argue the we define a sphere of peace in which we can predict with near certainty that war will never occur, and one in which we can also predict that war has its greatest likelihood — one the sphere of democracies, the other of nondemocracies. In the latter sphere war will occur when the status quo — structure of expectations — between nondemocracies collapses.

Is war inevitable? No! We can expand the sphere of democracies to encompass the globe and thereby make war history. There is no reason to suspect that the relationships among democracies will be any different than they are today if all countries are democratic. Democracies will remain intrinsically democracies, and thus the essential nature of democracies –political rights for all citizens, the democratic culture, multiple civic groups, a spontaneous society, and bonds and cross pressure — that ensure peace will remain.

Link of Day

“A Neural Net for Predicting War and Peace” By A. OLBRICH, & A. HERGOVICH

Abstract: Background: Social Identity Theory (Turner, 1986), Theory of Integrative Complexity (Tetlock, 1985) and the Theory of Groupthink (Janis & Mann, 1977) provide powerful tools for predicting international conflicts and wars. The aim of this study is to develop an application of artificial intelligence for predicting war and peace.

I’ve seen so much of this kind of psychological reductionism over the years when all one has to do is look at the type of government a country has –but, this is too simple. Yet, what personalities become rulers or leaders depends on the political system, and its culture, and history, and what they can do with the power they have also depends on these variables.

Links I Must Share

“China’s model for a censored Internet”:

Some worry China’s controls could be copied elsewhere.

“Iran ‘will trade nuclear secrets’:

Iran is ready to trade nuclear secrets with other Islamic states for peaceful purposes, the country’s leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said.

“EU drops hardline stance on Iran”:

The EU’s “big three” are said to have backed down from a demand that the UN nuclear watchdog should immediately report Iran to the Security Council.

“Rita: Watch This Blog”:

Defense Tech pal HYPERLINK “http://alexandertheaverage.blogspot.com/”Kris Alexander works for Texas’ homeland security department. Which makes his HYPERLINK “http://alexandertheaverage.blogspot.com/2005/09/h-48-its-big-one.html”blog (here) essential reading, now that a HYPERLINK “http://home.accuweather.com/index.asp?partner=accuweather”category 5 killer hurricane is about to put the whomp on the Lone Stars.

Books/articles/statistics

Measuring Victory In The War On Terror

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[First published September 12, 2005] During World War II, one could measure the progress of the war by the territories taken from the enemy, and the change in the front lines. So far, we have no such measure of our war on terror. I will now offer one.

Assumption 1: free countries — liberal democracies — do not sponsor terrorism or support it against other free countries.
Assumption 2: if the whole world were liberal democratic, terrorism would be defeated in that:

2a. They would not have a support base
2b. The remaining isolated gangs of terrorists would be treated as criminals.
2c.Democracies would combine forces to defeat those that remain, e.g., in the Philippines

Therefore, the progress of global liberal democratization measures the progress of the war on terrorism.

Okay, then how to measure the progress of liberal democratization? Freedom House has been rating nations on their freedom since 1972, giving a 1 to 7 rating their civil liberties, and then to their political rights. Adding these two ratings together, a 2 to 4 joint rating is what they define as a free country and what I will define as a liberal democracy. The worst rating on each is a 7, so a joint rating of 14 for a country is what they define as an unfree country and what I call totalitarian. See their ratings over the years here.

To get my democratization score, I will do this:

Take the average of the civil liberties and political rights rating for each country for each year. For a liberal democracy, this will average to 1 or 2, and to 6 or 7 for the worst unfree countries.

Then I will average all these averages across all countries for a year. If all countries are liberal democracies in a year, the average of the averages will be no greater than 2; if all counties were unfree for a year, the average of the averages would be greater than 6.

A problem is that I want to measure increasing democratization, but increasing democratization is so far measured by decreasing average ratings. So, to get the measurement moving in the proper direction, I will subtract each average of the averages from 7, the maximum possible. I will call the result the modified ratings. Then the modified 0 to 1 rating will mean all countries are unfree for a year, while 5 to 6 will mean all are liberal democratic.

With this understanding, I plotted the modified ratings in the figure below. I have set it up so that it is easy to see the progress in democratization, and thus by my assumptions, the current progress in the war on terror. I have fitted various trend estimates to the plot, such as a log, or polynomial fit, but all agree with what you can see. The trend line is up, and if it continues this way the world will be democratic in 3 or 4 decades, or liberally democratic in about two or three decades after that (to fit an equation just to determine the exact number of years to democracy or liberal democracy would be misplaced precision, given the uncertainties involved).

From now on, I will try to do this table year-by-year as a measure of the progress of the war on terror [not done, but will do in a new blog when I complete republishing these old blogs several months from now], not to mention the fulfillment of the democratic peace in the ending of war, democide, famine, and mass impoverishment.

Link of Day

“Of Minds and Metrics,” By Michael Barone (8/29/05)

Barone says:

Metrics are hard to come by in the war on terrorism. We can know the number of improvised explosive devices that go off in Iraq and the number of suicide bombers there, but we can only guess at whether these numbers represent the last throes of a terrorist movement or its continuing growth. We can count the number of days the Iraqi parliament has moved the deadline for drafting a constitution–seven, as this is written–but cannot be sure what the effect of a finally drafted constitution will be. We can note that some 220,000 Iraqis took part in deliberations over the constitution and that the Iraqi electricity supply now exceeds that of prewar levels.

Written with the excellence I’ve come to expect from Barone

Links I Must Share

“Reassessing the war on terror” By Harlan Ullman:

: Several weeks ago, the Pentagon led an attempt to rename President Bush’s global war on terror as the global struggle against violent extremism. Many commentators took this effort as a sign of a policy reassessment within the administration. But the name change was stillborn by the president himself, who in a subsequent speech pointedly referred to the global war on terror more than a dozen times.

A shallow analysis that lives up to my expectations.

” StrategyPage Looks At War on Terror Metrics”:

. . . discusses US strategy in the war on terror and then addresses the difficulty of measuring success in this intricate war.”

This is Austin Bay’s blog, and this article is informative and worth reading.

” Scoring the war on terrorism” resents five measures of success and concludes:

There is no easy long-term strategy that guarantees success. Instead, the United States and its allies must accept the inevitability of a large, global movement bent on murder as a form of political expression. With skill and energy; we can beat it back. Outright defeat will be far harder. That may depend ultimately on the proverbial draining of the political swamp. But by any measure it is a very large swamp.

RJR: another important article to make time for.

More on the progress of
democracy via a clock

How Freedom Is Won

[First published September 11. 2005] Freedom House has published a study on “How Freedom is Won (link here). The study covers all transitions to democracy that have occurred in the last 33 years, 67 of them, and shows that:

Far more often than is generally understood, the change agent is broad-based, nonviolent civic resistance—which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes, and civil disobedience to de-legitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders.

It goes on to say:

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 significant impact on the success or failure of democratic reform.

The study lists each transition, the factors involved, and provides a narrative on the transition. It concludes that the top down attempts at democratization is less successful than bottom up, nonviolent coalitions. Thus, the best way of aiding democratization from the outside is to:

aid the creation of “civic life,” broad based coalitions,
“transfer knowledge on strategies and tactics of nonviolent civic resistance,”
“provide enhanced resources for independent media and communications,” and
“expand space for nonviolent action through targeted sanctions.”

This is to say:

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.

Because of Freedom House’s intensive and extensive analysis of freedom, nonfreedom, and their transitions for all the world’s countries, as shown in its annual Freedom In the World annual report (the 2005 Report is here), this study on how freedom is won is especially credible.

Does the study have anything to say that is relevant to Iraq and Afghanistan? Yes. I have pulled out the two relevant passages below:

. . . 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.

Efforts to restore personal security in extremely violent environments in countries that have suffered from war or civil war, therefore, can contribute in the long term to the emergence of civic coalitions for democratic change.

I believe that the American Coalition Iraq and Afghanistan is doing precisely this, while fighting the insurrectionists and terrorists. It is helping and aiding he process of creating a civic society with Iraqis and Afghans having the freedom to form political parties, businesses, educational institution, and other organizations that satisfy diverse interests (this is the invisible part of the war you don’t read much about in the opposition media). And the Coalition has brought in the UN and other international organizations to monitor and supervise democratic elections. The upshot of this Freedom House study is that if the insurrection and terrorism is defeated, the long run success of democracy in these countries looks promising.

A chart
of the democratic peace

Do Republicans Hate Blacks?

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[First published in September 7, 2005] In response to my endorsement of Secretary Rice for president in 08, I received this comment: “It will NEVER happen — the GOP would NEVER support an African American for President (well, maybe Idi Amin). Look at all the blacks in Congress – all Dems.

Dream on . . . .”

At the outset, I should say that I am not a Republican, although I strongly support the Bush’s foreign policy. As I pointed out in one of my blogs, I’m a freedomist (link here). Nonetheless, as a matter of promoting nondiscrimination and racial tolerance, I’m troubled by the mythology about Republicans in general and as a Party being anti-Black. This myth has been fostered and nurtured by liberals for over fifty years, especially by the leftist Black leaders. Lets look at the record. If one favors reparations for slavery, which most Black leaders do, then it is appropriate to recall that it was the Republicans — Lincoln — that ended Black slavery. It was a Republican Congress that passed the 13th Amendment outlaying slavery, and passed the 15th Amendment that established the voting rights of all adult males regardless of race.

Until the 1950s and 60s, it was the Democratic Party and Democrats that with their control of the southern states refused to accord Blacks the voting rights that constitutional was theirs, and supported a system of discrimination that made southern blacks third class citizens.

And it is a myth widely believed, even by some Republicans, that it was the democrats that passed President Johnson’s Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act begins:

To enforce the constitutional right to vote, to confer jurisdiction upon the district courts of the United States to provide injunctive relief against discrimination in public accommodations, to authorize the attorney
General to institute suits to protect constitutional rights in public facilities and public education, to extend the Commission on Civil Rights, to prevent discrimination in federally assisted programs, to establish a Commission on Equal Employment Opportunity, and for other purposes.

In effect, it was the Republicans that got this passed. Yes, the R-P-U-B-L-I-C-A-N-S. Republican Everett Dirksen, used his power as minority leader to midwife the bill through Congress, and had to overcome a 83-day filibuster by Democrats.

On the various versions of the bill, the distribution of votes were thus (D= democrats, R=republicans):

Original House version: D=153-96, 38 percent opposed; R=138-34, 20 percent opposed.

Senate version: D=46-22, 32 percent opposed, R=27-6, 18 percent opposed.

Senate version voted on by the House: D=153-91, 37 percent opposed; R=136-35, 20 percent opposed.

Proportionally more Democrats opposed the Civil rights Act than did Republicans. On the final bill voted on by the House and Senate, 113 Democrats voted against the bill, while 41 Republicans did. Moreover, as one can see from the votes, the bill would not have passed at all were it not for the support of Republicans.

You would never know this from the way this has been covered by the media since.

Then also note this. It was Republican Bush, the senior, who appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, with vigorous resistance from liberal Democrats. It was the House Republicans that elected J.C. Watts, Republican from Oklahoma, to be Chairman of the House Republican Conference. It was President George Bush that appointed General Colin L. Powell as the Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice as National Security Advisor, and with Powell’s resignation, Rice to replace him. He also appointed Roderick R. Paige as the Secretary of Education; Alphonso Jackson as the Deputy Secretary to Housing and Urban Development; Claude Alien as the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services; Leo S. Mackay, Jr, as the Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Larry D. Thompson as the Deputy Attorney General; and Stephen A. Perry as Adminstrator of General Services Adminstration; Roderick R. Paige as the Secretary of Education; Alphonso Jackson as the Deputy Secretary to Housing and Urban Development; Claude Alien as the Deputy Secretary of Health and Human Services; Leo S. Mackay, Jr, as the Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs; Larry D. Thompson as the Deputy Attorney General; and Stephen A. Perry as Adminstrator of General Services Adminstration; and Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (which many consider one of the most important courts in the nation — her confirmation had been blocked by Democrats). Not even Clinton, who Black leaders called their first “Black President, appointed so many Blacks to high position.

The comment hat started all this also said “Look at all the blacks in Congress – all Dems.” Yes, and almost 90 percent of Blacks vote for democrats. Two things explain this. One is that Blacks have bought the liberal line about only Democrats supporting their rights. Second, the Black leadership and organizations are almost all on the left, as are blacks in general. Often poor, not well educated, and susceptible to leftist slogans about the rich, the White Republican establishment, the anti-black rapacity of White businesses, many Blacks have come to see themselves as victims, the Democrats as their protectors, and vote that way. That virtually all Black Representatives are Democrats does not reflect on Republicans, but on the power of mythology, liberalism, and its propaganda.

Link of Day

” How Americans Voted [in 04]: A Political Portrait” By Marjorie Connelly

She points out:

A majority of Protestants, particularly white and Hispanic Protestants, supported Mr. Bush. Black voters, regardless of religion, continue to support the Democratic candidate overwhelmingly, giving almost 9 in 10 of their votes to Mr. Kerry. Jewish voters also remained firmly in the Democratic column, though Mr. Bush expanded his share to 25 percent this year from 19 percent in 2000.

Links I Must Share

” Sniping and griping” By Mark Steyn: ”  Anyone watching TV in recent days will have seen plenty of “reprimitivized man,” not in Liberia or Somalia but in Louisiana. Cops smashing the Wal-Mart DVD cabinet so they can get their share of the booty along with the rest of the looters, gangs firing on a children’s hospital and on rescue helicopters, hurricane victims raped in the New Orleans Convention Center. [RJR: Yes, we now hear that Bush is responsible -- I'm waiting for the Islamicist follow up -- It is Bush and the Jews]

“The Suicide Solution” By Christopher Dickey: “To stop the spread of the suicide disease, in other words, we have to stop the spread of the occupation disease. [RJR: He means we should stop occupying Muslim countries, and misses entirely the importance of the war on terror and the democratization solution]

“Iran’s strategy in Iraq” By Arnaud de Borchgrave: ” “If Iran wanted, it could make Iraq hell for the United States.” So said Iraq’s deputy Foreign Minister Hamid Al Bayati last February. Well, Iran not only wants to, it already has.” [Read this to realize that war with Iran probably cannot be avoided, unless the internal democratic movement is successful]

“Feingold Flirts With Anti-War Platform” By issuing an early call for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, Sen. Russ Feingold could emerge as the Democrats’ anti-war candidate of 2008, in the tradition of Eugene McCarthy and Howard Dean” [RJR: Not a candle's chance in a hurricane of his being nominated over Hillary]

Democratic peace Q&A/FAQ

Hitler Was A Socialist, (And Not A Right Wing Conservative)

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[First published August 22, 2005] What is socialism? It is a politico-economic philosophy that believes government must direct all major economic decisions by command, and thus all the means of production for the greater good, however defined. There are three major divisions of socialism, all antagonistic to each other. One is democratic socialism, that places the emphasis on democratic means, but then government is a tool for improving welfare and equality. A second division is Marxist-Leninism, which based on a “scientific theory” of dialectical materialism, sees the necessity of a dictatorship (“of the proletariat”) to create a classless society and universal equality. Then, there is the third division, or state socialism. This is a non-Marxist or anti-Marxist dictatorship that aims at near absolute economic control for the purpose of economic development and national power, all construed to benefit the people.

Mussolini’s fascism was a state socialism that was explicitly anti-Marx and aggressively nationalistic. Hitler’s National Socialism was state socialism at its worse. It not only shared the socialism of fascism, but was explicitly racist. In this it differs from the state socialism of Burma today, and that of some African and Arab dictatorships.

Two prevailing historical myths that the left has propagated successfully is that Hitler was a far right wing conservative and was democratically elected in 1933 (a blow at bourgeois democracy and conservatives). Actually, he was defeated twice in the national elections (he became chancellor in a smoke-filled-room appointment by those German politicians who thought they could control him — see “What? Hitler Was Not Elected?”) and as head of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, he considered himself a socialist, and was one by the evidence of his writings and the his economic policies.

To be clear, National Socialism differs from Marxism in its nationalism, emphasis on folk history and culture, idolization of the leader, and its racism. But the Nazi and Marxist-Leninists shared a faith in government, an absolute ruler, totalitarian control over all significant economic and social matters for the good of the working man, concentration camps, and genocide/democide as an effective government policy (only in his last years did Stalin plan for his own Holocaust of the Jews).

I’ve read Hitler’s Mein Kampf (all online here) and can quote the following from Volume 2:

Chapter VII:

In 1919-20 and also in 1921 I attended some of the bourgeois [capitalist] meetings. Invariably I had the same feeling towards these as towards the compulsory dose of castor oil in my boyhood days. . . . And so it is not surprising that the sane and unspoiled masses shun these ‘bourgeois mass meetings’ as the devil shuns holy water.

Chapter 4:

The folkish philosophy is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its view of life. 


If the National Socialist Movement should fail to understand the fundamental importance of this essential principle, if it should merely varnish the external appearance of the present State and adopt the majority principle, it would really do nothing more than compete with Marxism on its own ground. For that reason it would not have the right to call itself a philosophy of life. If the social programme of the movement consisted in eliminating personality and putting the multitude in its place, then National Socialism would be corrupted with the poison of Marxism, just as our national-bourgeois parties are.

Chapter XII:

The National Socialist Movement, which aims at establishing the National Socialist People’s State, must always bear steadfastly in mind the principle that every future institution under that State must be rooted in the movement itself.

Some other quotes:

Hitler, spoken to Otto Strasser, Berlin, May 21, 1930:

I am a Socialist, and a very different kind of Socialist from your rich friend, Count Reventlow. . . . What you understand by Socialism is nothing more than Marxism.

On this, see Alan Bullock, Hitler: a Study in Tyranny, pp.156-7; and Graham L. Strachan “MANUFACTURED REALITY: THE ‘THIRD WAY’”

Gregor Strasser, National Socialist theologian, said:

We National Socialists are enemies, deadly enemies, of the present capitalist system with its exploitation of the economically weak … and we are resolved under all circumstances to destroy this system.

F.A. Hayek in his Road to Serfdom (p. 168) said:

The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism—Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism. …. From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine.

See also his chapter 12: “The Socialist Roots of Naziism.”

Von Mises in his Human Action (p. 171) said:

There are two patterns for the realization of socialism. The first pattern (we may call it the Lenin or Russian pattern) . . . . the second pattern (we may call it the Hindenburg or German Pattern) nominally and seemingly preserves private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates. There are, however, no longer entrepreneurs, but only shop managers … bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by government.

This is precisely how Hitler governed when he achieved dictatorial power.

In a previous blog, i referred to John J. Ray’s piece (“Hitler Was A Socialist”, and I was asked who he is. He has a Ph.D. in psychology, but taught sociology for many years. His fulsome bio is here. His article on Hitler is excellent and well researched. He has a blog on “dissecting leftism.”

Link of Note

“Myth: Hitler was a leftist By Steve Kanga

(note: A liberal activist, Kanga apparently shot himself to death outside of the office of anti-Clinton billionaire philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaif, February 8, 1999. It was ruled a suicide.)

Kanga says:

Many conservatives accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named “National Socialist.” But socialism requires worker ownership and control of the means of production. In Nazi Germany, private capitalist individuals owned the means of production, and they in turn were frequently controlled by the Nazi party and state. True socialism does not advocate such economic dictatorship — it can only be democratic. Hitler’s other political beliefs place him almost always on the far right. He advocated racism over racial tolerance, eugenics over freedom of reproduction, merit over equality, competition over cooperation, power politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy, capitalism over Marxism, realism over idealism, nationalism over internationalism, exclusiveness over inclusiveness, common sense over theory or science, pragmatism over principle, and even held friendly relations with the Church, even though he was an atheist.

Here you have a taste for how the left maintains its myth, as in conflating democracy and socialism. That is, true socialism “can only be democratic.” Right, like the Democratic People’s Republic of [North] Korea, or the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Democratic peace Q&A/FAQ

Muslim North Africa

[First published July 28, 2005] Not all Muslims are terrorists. Dictators do not rule not all Muslims in these nations. Some live in democracies, although one wouldn’t know it from the commentators who exclaim that the Muslim religion is inconsistent with democracy. Although this often appears a sally against the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East, I think many of them believe it. It is helpful, therefore, to look at the status of Muslim nations in what is considered the hard-core, anti-democratic region, of North Africa, including the Horn of Africa. The map below shows the region to which I’m referring.

Now, lets look at these nations in detail. Below are two statistical tables on them, with their freedom status added. All those labeled free are liberal democracies, and those partly free with an asterisk are electoral democracies. As you can see, there are four liberal democracies out of 25 Muslim nations, and eight democracies when the electoral democracies are counted. This is far below the global proportion 44 percent liberal democracies and of 61 percent democratic.

So, for Africa it is clear that the Muslim religious culture appears as a hindrance to democracy. But, this is misleading. For the implication is that Muslims then oppose democracy, which is not true. I went into this on my Freedomist Blog (link here). Muslims place a higher value on democracy than do some people of the democracies. See the chart below

As I concluded my Freedomist Blog, what most clearly distinguishes democracy from nondemocracies is that in nondemocracies people live in fear. We see this in the Arab and North African Muslim countries. Therefore, if the democratization the Muslims value is to come, it must come from pressure from the outside. In this, the Forward Strategy of Freedom of President Bush is well aligned with our understanding of Muslim nations, and it is working.

Link of Note

“Talk By Radwan Masmoudi: “Islam & Democracy:  Between The Past, The Present & The Future”

Dr. Radwan Masmoudi is the Executive Director of Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. He says:

The old methods of oppression are simply outdated.  More than 50% of the population of Muslim countries is under 30 years old.  They did not witness colonization, and do not care about the independence struggle.  They are highly educated, they speak several languages, and they watch CNN and al-Jazeera.  Many of them even have access to the internet.  They see how other people live, in terms of prosperity and freedom, and they want the same.  They watch other peoples vote and elect their new leaders, while they are stuck with the same rulers for what seems like eternity.  The new generation is fed up with the status quo.  Change is inevitable.  The only question that remains is: What kind of change?

Our answers should be direct and unambiguous: democratize and we will help you in the process and afterwards.

If Democracies Have No Famines, What About India?

[First published July 10, 2005] In response to my empirical claim that democracies have never had a famine, I sometimes get questions about India, particularly about the 1943-1945 Bengal famine when India was under British rule.

First, of the 86,000,000 people who died in famines in the 20th century, not one of them lived in a democracy. Nor has any famine occurred in India while it was a democracy. Consider the work of Amartya Sen, for example, the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics from India. He became the youngest chairman of the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University, at the age of 23. He has been the President of the Econometric Society (1984), the International Economic Association (1986-89), the Indian Economic Association (1989), and the American Economic Association (1994). He is now Master of Trinity College Cambridge. So, he should know something about India. Sen says as well that no democracy has had a famine, and as far as India is concerned, its last famine was the 1943 Bengal famine ( Development as Freedom , p. 180) when India was a colony of Britain.

Second, as to the devastating Bengal famine, I’ve put some time into studying the scholarly works on it, including those by Indians. The highest estimate of the famine toll I could find is 4,500,000 dead; the lowest at 1,500,000. After going through these works, I settled on a range of 1,500,000 to 4,500,000 dead, most likely about 3,000,000. I did not mark this famine down as British democide. True, they are partly responsible for it, since it was aggravated by the British taking food supplies for their Burma campaign and to stock up for a possible Japanese invasion.

However, the famine was not intended and once it happened the British took steps to deal with it. This is the same argument I used for not counting the Chinese communist famine of 1959-63 as democide. If the Bengal famine is to be defined as British democide, then the Chinese famine must also so be counted, which would add at least 27,000,000 or more to the Chinese communist of about 35,000,000 murdered.

Link of Note

“Facts About Hunger” From CARE

CARE’s facts:

More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished — 799 million of them live in the developing world.

More than 153 million of the world’s malnourished people are children under the age of 5.

Six million children under the age of 5 die every year as a result of hunger.

Malnutrition can severely affect a child’s intellectual development. Malnourished children often have stunted growth and score significantly lower on math and language achievement tests than do well-nourished children.

Lack of dietary diversity and essential minerals and vitamins also contributes to increased child and adult mortality. Vitamin A deficiency impairs the immune system, increasing the annual death toll from measles and other diseases by an estimated 1.3 million-2.5 million children.

While every country in the world has the potential of growing enough food to feed itself, 54 nations currently do not produce enough food to feed their populations, nor can they afford to import the necessary commodities to make up the gap. Most of these countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Most of the widespread hunger in a world of plenty results from grinding, deeply rooted poverty. In any given year, however, between 5 and 10 percent of the total can be traced to specific events: droughts or floods, armed conflict, political, social and economic disruptions.

True, hunger and malnutrition occur even when famines are not present, but famine is the extreme and most deadly case of hunger and is reflected in these “facts.” Then note what is missing. There is no reference to democracy or dictatorships. Yet, the most glaring cause of extreme hunger and poverty is that thugs rule a country. How does one explain this blindness about hunger and poverty? How about ideological blindness and ignorance?

Graphical experiments on visualizing democide

Myths About Terrorism

[First published July 8, 2005] There are two myths about terrorism that have gripped commentator’s’ minds and won’t let go. One is that poverty is an engine of terrorism and the other is that Madrassas provide the fuel.

In virtually my whole academic career I’ve had to shoot down the belief that poverty causes one problem after another, whether it is war, internal violence, criminality, or unhappiness. Now, it’s the cause of terrorism. Poverty causes none of this. Until recently, the evidence against this has been anecdotal, a matter of unsystematically looking at the background of terrorists. Now, a systematic empirical analysis has been conducted by Alberto Abadie at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government entitled, “Poverty, Political Freedom, and Roots of Terrorism.”. Its abstract follows:

This article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level. In contrast with the previous literature on this subject, which focuses on transnational terrorism only, I use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism. In line with the results of some recent studies, this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries, once the effects of other country-specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account. Political freedom is shown to explain terrorism, but it does so in a non-monotonic way: countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes. This result suggests that, as experienced recently in Iraq and previously in Spain and Russia, transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism. Finally, the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities.

Then there is the widespread belief that Madrassas breed terrorists. A recent empirical analysis, “The Madrassa Myth” by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey found otherwise. Its abstract is below:

Op-Ed article by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey disputes notion that Muslim religious schools, known as madrassas, are graduating students who become terrorists; says madrassas may breed fundamentalists, but they do not teach technical or linguistic skills necessary to be effective terrorist; says that as matter of national security, United States need not worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom it disagrees; cites examination of educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists behind some of most significant recent terrorist attacks against Westerners, finding that only 9 of them attended madrassas; says World Bank-financed study raises further doubts about influence of madrassas in Pakistan, country where schools were thought to be most influential and virulently anti-American.

Phillip Carter on his blog Intel Dumpdisputes the above conclusions:

It’s true that the madrassas do not generally produce people like the educated terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. However, the madrassas *do* produce many of the the foot soldiers for Al Qaeda (and its affiliates) who are fighting us now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and who have fought in the Balkans, Chechnya, pre-9/11 Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Link of Note

“Militant Convicted of ‘Propagating Terror’” (6/26/05)

Latimes.com

An Algerian militant considered the mastermind of the 2003 kidnapping of 32 European tourists in the Sahara desert was sentenced to life in prison for helping to form a terrorist group, but his whereabouts remained a mystery.

Amari Saifi, a leader of the Al Qaeda-linked Salafist Group for Call and Combat, didn’t appear in court even though he was captured by Chad rebels and later turned over to Algerian police last fall. Saifi, a former Algerian paratrooper known by his nom de guerre, Al Para, was convicted by the criminal court of “constitution of a terrorist group” and of “propagating terror among a population.”

This is an amusing example of how the LA Times refuses to call terrorists terrorists, even when their own report has to so identify a terrorist. I fell out of my seat with laughter when I read the headline.

Just Published in the alternative history Never Again
Series. Click cover for synopsis and free download.

Freedom of Speech? Ha!

[First published July 6, 2005] Recently a professor returned from China and exclaimed about his freedom there. He lectured in several universities and said about it, “I could say anything I wanted.” This is typical of many Liberals and leftists who visit China and see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil, During the Cultural Revolution when there was blood shed across the land and maybe as many as 10,000,000 died, a member of the Sierra Club came through Hawaii and gave a speech. In it, he lauded what progress China had made and that there was much America could learn from them, especially on controlling population growth. Yes, kill a thousand here and another thousand there and it adds up.

China lovers have dominated discourse on China and since they have played a central role in communications and teaching, the public’s knowledge of the horrors of life under Mao and the massive megamurders of his communist regime, second only to Stalin’s [recent updating of the data has put Mao first], had never really reached public consciousness. Indeed, the general impression has been the communists made life better. No way. People in the later 1950s and 60s were worse off economically then they had been in the 1930s under the corrupt Nationalist regime, even though fascist it still allowed much more liberty than did the communists.

Anyway, here we have another Professor returning to extol his freedom of speech in China, and what do we soon thereafter find out. Bloggers and searchers on China’s internet are limited in what words they can use or search for. Words such as “freedom,” “democracy,” “human rights,” and “Taiwan independence” are forbidden. If one attempts to use them, or any other political speech, they get a popup which says “This message contains a banned expression, please delete this expression.”

Users will be fortunate if that is all that happens. Bloggers have been arrested, and now all Chinese websites and bloggers have had to register with the government (keep in mind that the government is the Communist Party) by the end of June, or be shut down.

The communists have created two planes of existence in China, the one hovering over the other. The bottom plane is the economic one, involving a more open and freer market system. Above it is the forbidden plane of political policy and activity run by the communist and military elite. It will be interesting to observe this duality, for by theory much accepted in political science, the lower plane with its growing middle class will gradually dissolve the upper one, like warm water undermining a glacier, or their will be a revolutionary outbreak that will shatter the upper plane.

What am I predicting? A “right wing” palace coup as took place in 1976 against the Gang of Four (including Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and her close associates) that eventually through Deng Xiaoping created the lower plane of economic activity we see now.

Remember. You read it here.

Link of Note

“MSN China Agrees to Ban ‘Freedom’ “ (6/14/05) By Tim Gray

Gray said:

Chinese bloggers are likely choosing their words a little more carefully this week after another American Internet behemoth gave in to Beijing’s restrictions regarding certain politically sensitive words.
Microsoft . . . agreed abide by censors banning the words “freedom” and “democracy” on its Chinese internet portal, MSN China, as well as other potentially politically charged subjects such as “Taiwan independence”, “human rights” and the “Dalai Lama.”

Microsoft is a business out to make money. And China with its huge mass of people, China has always been able to make Western businessmen forget their shame.

Proof that More democratic
freedom = less war/violence

Easterbrook End of War

[First published June 1, 2005] In a blog on the relationship between the decline of violence and the increase in the number of democracies, I quoted from John Tierney about the decline in violence, and he referred to Gregg Easterbrook’s article “EXPLAINING 15 YEARS OF DIMINISHING VIOLENCE — The End of War?” in The New Republic Online (link here). Unfortunately, the magazine has joined the growing trend to make full articles available on to subscribers.

Well, Colleague sent me a copy and I am posting it in full here. It’s long, but for those interested in the sharp drop in violence, the possible causes, and the democratic peace as an explanation will be rewarded by reading this in two ways. One is in the variety of explanations, so you are not stuck with my explanation. And then, how finally, when he has to mention the democratic peace, he does so in no more than a paragraph in this long work. Which in the context of the other explanations gives you a different view of what I have been treating as the explanation.

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Daily explosions in Iraq, massacres in Sudan, the Koreas staring at each other through artillery barrels, a Hobbesian war of all against all in eastern Congo — combat plagues human society as it has, perhaps, since our distant forebears realized that a tree limb could be used as a club. But here is something you would never guess from watching the news: War has entered a cycle of decline. Combat in Iraq and in a few other places is an exception to a significant global trend that has gone nearly unnoticed — namely that, for about 15 years, there have been steadily fewer armed conflicts worldwide. In fact, it is possible that a person’s chance of dying because of war has, in the last decade or more, become the lowest in human history.

Five years ago, two academics — Monty Marshall, research director at the Center for Global Policy at George Mason University, and Ted Robert Gurr, a professor of government at the University of Maryland — spent months compiling all available data on the frequency and death toll of twentieth-century combat, expecting to find an ever-worsening ledger of blood and destruction. Instead, they found, after the terrible years of World Wars I and II, a global increase in war from the 1960s through the mid-’80s. But this was followed by a steady, nearly uninterrupted decline beginning in 1991. They also found a steady global rise since the mid-’80s in factors that reduce armed conflict — economic prosperity, free elections, stable central governments, better communication, more “peacemaking institutions,” and increased international engagement. Marshall and Gurr, along with Deepa Khosla, published their results as a 2001 report, Peace and Conflict, for the Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland [reports avaiable here]. At the time, I remember reading that report and thinking, “Wow, this is one of the hottest things I have ever held in my hands.” I expected that evidence of a decline in war would trigger a sensation. Instead it received almost no notice.

“After the first report came out, we wanted to brief some United Nations officials, but everyone at the United Nations just laughed at us. They could not believe war was declining, because this went against political expectations,” Marshall says. Of course, 2001 was the year of September 11. But, despite the battles in Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere that were ignited by Islamist terrorism and the West’s response, a second edition of Peace and Conflict, published in 2003, showed the total number of wars and armed conflicts continued to decline. A third edition of the study, published last week, shows that, despite the invasion of Iraq and other outbreaks of fighting, the overall decline of war continues. This even as the global population keeps rising, which might be expected to lead to more war, not less.

In his prescient 1989 book, Retreat from Doomsday, Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller, in addition to predicting that the Soviet Union was about to collapse — the Berlin Wall fell just after the book was published — declared that great-nation war had become “obsolete” and might never occur again. [A related article by Mueller is here.] One reason the Soviet Union was about to collapse, Mueller wrote, was that its leaders had structured Soviet society around the eighteenth-century assumption of endless great-power fighting, but great-power war had become archaic, and no society with war as its organizing principle can endure any longer. So far, this theory has been right on the money. It is worth noting that the first emerging great power of the new century, China, though prone to making threatening statements about Taiwan, spends relatively little on its military.

Last year Mueller published a follow-up book, The Remnants of War, which argues that fighting below the level of great-power conflict — small-state wars, civil wars, ethnic combat, and clashes among private armies — is also waning. Retreat from Doomsday and The Remnants of War are brilliantly original and urgent books. Combat is not an inevitable result of international discord and human malevolence, Mueller believes. War, rather, is “merely an idea” — and a really bad idea, like dueling or slavery. This bad idea “has been grafted onto human existence” and can be excised. Yes, the end of war has been predicted before, prominently by H.G. Wells in 1915, and horrible bloodshed followed. But could the predictions be right this time?

First, the numbers. The University of Maryland studies find the number of wars and armed conflicts worldwide peaked in 1991 at 51, which may represent the most wars happening simultaneously at any point in history. Since 1991, the number has fallen steadily. There were 26 armed conflicts in 2000 and 25 in 2002, even after the Al Qaeda attack on the United States and the U.S. counterattack against Afghanistan. By 2004, Marshall and Gurr’s latest study shows, the number of armed conflicts in the world had declined to 20, even after the invasion of Iraq. All told, there were less than half as many wars in 2004 as there were in 1991.

Marshall and Gurr also have a second ranking, gauging the magnitude of fighting. This section of the report is more subjective. Everyone agrees that the worst moment for human conflict was World War II; but how to rank, say, the current separatist fighting in Indonesia versus, say, the Algerian war of independence is more speculative. Nevertheless, the Peace and Conflict studies name 1991 as the peak post-World War II year for totality of global fighting, giving that year a ranking of 179 on a scale that rates the extent and destructiveness of combat. By 2000, in spite of war in the Balkans and genocide in Rwanda, the number had fallen to 97; by 2002 to 81; and, at the end of 2004, it stood at 65. This suggests the extent and intensity of global combat is now less than half what it was 15 years ago.

How can war be in such decline when evening newscasts are filled with images of carnage? One reason fighting seems to be everywhere is that, with the ubiquity of 24-hour cable news and the Internet, we see many more images of conflict than before. As recently as two decades ago, the rebellion in Eritrea occurred with almost no world notice; the tirelessly globe-trotting Robert Kaplan wrote of meeting with Eritrean rebels who told him they hoped that at least spy satellites were trained on their region so that someone, somewhere, would know of their struggle. Today, fighting in Iraq, Sudan, and other places is elaborately reported on, with a wealth of visual details supplied by minicams and even camera-enabled cell phones. News organizations must prominently report fighting, of course. But the fact that we now see so many visuals of combat and conflict creates the impression that these problems are increasing: Actually, it is the reporting of the problems that is increasing, while the problems themselves are in decline. Television, especially, likes to emphasize war because pictures of fighting, soldiers, and military hardware are inherently more compelling to viewers than images of, say, water-purification projects. Reports of violence and destruction are rarely balanced with reports about the overwhelming majority of the Earth’s population not being harmed.

Mueller calculates that about 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century by warfare, other violent conflicts, and government actions associated with war, such as the Holocaust. About twelve billion people lived during that century, meaning that a person of the twentieth century had a 1 to 2 percent chance of dying as the result of international war, ethnic fighting, or government-run genocide. A 1 to 2 percent chance, Mueller notes, is also an American’s lifetime chance of dying in an automobile accident. The risk varies depending on where you live and who you are, of course; Mueller notes that, during the twentieth century, Armenians, Cambodians, Jews, kulaks, and some others had a far higher chance of death by war or government persecution than the global average. Yet, with war now in decline, for the moment men and women worldwide stand in more danger from cars and highways than from war and combat. World Health Organization statistics back this: In 2000, for example, 300,000 people died in combat or for war-related reasons (such as disease or malnutrition caused by war), while 1.2 million worldwide died in traffic accidents. That 300,000 people perished because of war in 2000 is a terrible toll, but it represents just .005 percent of those alive in that year.

This low global risk of death from war probably differs greatly from most of the world’s past. In prehistory, tribal and small-group violence may have been endemic. Steven LeBlanc, a Harvard University archeologist, asserts in his 2003 book about the human past, Constant Battles, that warfare was a steady feature of primordial society. LeBlanc notes that, when the aboriginal societies of New Guinea were first observed by Europeans in the 1930s, one male in four died by violence; traditional New Guinean society was organized around endless tribal combat. Unremitting warfare characterized much of the history of Europe, the Middle East, and other regions; perhaps one-fifth of the German population died during the Thirty Years War, for instance. Now the world is in a period in which less than one ten-thousandth of its population dies from fighting in a year. The sheer number of people who are being harmed by warfare is without precedent.

Next consider a wonderful fact: Global military spending is also in decline. Stated in current dollars, annual global military spending peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been falling since, to slightly over $1 trillion in 2004, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan Washington research organization. Since the global population has risen by one-fifth during this period, military spending might have been expected to rise. Instead, relative to population growth, military spending has declined by a full third. In current dollars, the world spent $260 per capita on arms in 1985 and $167 in 2004.

The striking decline in global military spending has also received no attention from the press, which continues to promote the notion of a world staggering under the weight of instruments of destruction. Only a few nations, most prominently the United States, have increased their defense spending in the last decade. Today, the United States accounts for 44 percent of world military spending; if current trends continue, with many nations reducing defense spending while the United States continues to increase such spending as its military is restructured for new global anti-terrorism and peacekeeping roles, it is not out of the question that, in the future, the United States will spend more on arms and soldiers than the rest of the world combined.

Declining global military spending is exactly what one would expect to find if war itself were in decline. The peak year in global military spending came only shortly before the peak year for wars, 1991. There’s an obvious chicken-or-egg question, whether military spending has fallen because wars are rarer or whether wars are rarer because military spending has fallen. Either way, both trend lines point in the right direction. This is an extremely favorable development, particularly for the world’s poor — the less developing nations squander on arms, the more they can invest in improving daily lives of their citizens.

What is causing war to decline? The most powerful factor must be the end of the cold war, which has both lowered international tensions and withdrawn U.S. and Soviet support from proxy armies in the developing world. Fighting in poor nations is sustained by outside supplies of arms. To be sure, there remain significant stocks of small arms in the developing world — particularly millions of assault rifles. But, with international arms shipments waning and heavy weapons, such as artillery, becoming harder to obtain in many developing nations, factions in developing-world conflicts are more likely to sue for peace. For example, the long, violent conflict in Angola was sustained by a weird mix of Soviet, American, Cuban, and South African arms shipments to a potpourri of factions. When all these nations stopped supplying arms to the Angolan combatants, the leaders of the factions grudgingly came to the conference table.

During the cold war, Marshall notes, it was common for Westerners to say there was peace because no fighting affected the West. Actually, global conflict rose steadily during the cold war, but could be observed only in the developing world. After the cold war ended, many in the West wrung their hands about a supposed outbreak of “disorder” and ethnic hostilities. Actually, both problems went into decline following the cold war, but only then began to be noticed in the West, with confrontation with the Soviet empire no longer an issue.

Another reason for less war is the rise of peacekeeping. The world spends more every year on peacekeeping, and peacekeeping is turning out to be an excellent investment. Many thousands of U.N., nato, American, and other soldiers and peacekeeping units now walk the streets in troubled parts of the world, at a cost of at least $3 billion annually. Peacekeeping has not been without its problems; peacekeepers have been accused of paying very young girls for sex in Bosnia and Africa, and nato bears collective shame for refusing support to the Dutch peacekeeping unit that might have prevented the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. But, overall, peacekeeping is working. Dollar for dollar, it is far more effective at preventing fighting than purchasing complex weapons systems. A recent study from the notoriously gloomy rand Corporation found that most U.N. peacekeeping efforts have been successful.

Peacekeeping is just one way in which the United Nations has made a significant contribution to the decline of war. American commentators love to disparage the organization in that big cereal-box building on the East River, and, of course, the United Nations has manifold faults. Yet we should not lose track of the fact that the global security system envisioned by the U.N. charter appears to be taking effect. Great-power military tensions are at the lowest level in centuries; wealthy nations are increasingly pressured by international diplomacy not to encourage war by client states; and much of the world respects U.N. guidance. Related to this, the rise in “international engagement,” or the involvement of the world community in local disputes, increasingly mitigates against war.

The spread of democracy has made another significant contribution to the decline of war. In 1975, only one-third of the world’s nations held true multiparty elections; today two-thirds do, and the proportion continues to rise. In the last two decades, some 80 countries have joined the democratic column, while hardly any moved in the opposite direction. Increasingly, developing-world leaders observe the simple fact that the free nations are the strongest and richest ones, and this creates a powerful argument for the expansion of freedom. Theorists at least as far back as Immanuel Kant have posited that democratic societies would be much less likely to make war than other kinds of states. So far, this has proved true: Democracy-against-democracy fighting has been extremely rare. Prosperity and democracy tend to be mutually reinforcing. Now prosperity is rising in most of the world, amplifying the trend toward freedom. As ever-more nations become democracies, ever-less war can be expected, which is exactly what is being observed.

For the great-power nations, the arrival of nuclear deterrence is an obvious factor in the decline of war. The atomic bomb debuted in 1945, and the last great-power fighting, between the United States and China, concluded not long after, in 1953. From 1871 to 1914, Europe enjoyed nearly half a century without war; the current 52-year great-power peace is the longest period without great-power war since the modern state system emerged. Of course, it is possible that nuclear deterrence will backfire and lead to a conflagration beyond imagination in its horrors. But, even at the height of the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union never seriously contemplated a nuclear exchange. If it didn’t happen then, it seems unlikely for the future.

In turn, lack of war among great nations sets an example for the developing world. When the leading nations routinely attacked neighbors or rivals, governments of emerging states dreamed of the day when they, too, could issue orders to armies of conquest. Now that the leading nations rarely use military force — and instead emphasize economic competition — developing countries imitate that model. This makes the global economy more turbulent, but reduces war.

In The Remnants of War, Mueller argues that most fighting in the world today happens because many developing nations lack “capable government” that can contain ethnic conflict or prevent terrorist groups, militias, and criminal gangs from operating. Through around 1500, he reminds us, Europe, too, lacked capable government: Criminal gangs and private armies roamed the countryside. As European governments became competent, and as police and courts grew more respected, legitimate government gradually vanquished thug elements from most of European life. Mueller thinks this same progression of events is beginning in much of the developing world. Government and civil institutions in India, for example, are becoming more professional and less corrupt — one reason why that highly populous nation is not falling apart, as so many predicted it would. Interstate war is in substantial decline; if civil wars, ethnic strife, and private army fighting also go into decline, war may be ungrafted from the human experience.

Is it possible to believe that war is declining, owing to the spread of enlightenment? This seems the riskiest claim. Human nature has let us down many times before. Some have argued that militarism as a philosophy was destroyed in World War II, when the states that were utterly dedicated to martial organization and violent conquest were not only beaten but reduced to rubble by free nations that initially wanted no part of the fight. World War II did represent the triumph of freedom over militarism. But memories are short: It is unrealistic to suppose that no nation will ever be seduced by militarism again.

Yet the last half-century has seen an increase in great nations acting in an enlightened manner toward one another. Prior to this period, the losing sides in wars were usually punished; consider the Versailles Treaty, whose punitive terms helped set in motion the Nazi takeover of Germany. After World War II, the victors did not punish Germany and Japan, which made reasonably smooth returns to prosperity and acceptance by the family of nations. Following the end of the cold war, the losers — the former Soviet Union and China — have seen their national conditions improve, if fitfully; their reentry into the family of nations has gone reasonably well and has been encouraged, if not actively aided, by their former adversaries. Not punishing the vanquished should diminish the odds of future war, since there are no generations who suffer from the victor’s terms, become bitter, and want vengeance.

Antiwar sentiment is only about a century old in Western culture, and Mueller thinks its rise has not been given sufficient due. As recently as the Civil War in the United States and World War I in Europe, it was common to view war as inevitable and to be fatalistic about the power of government to order men to march to their deaths. A spooky number of thinkers even adulated war as a desirable condition. Kant, who loved democracy, nevertheless wrote that war is “sublime” and that “prolonged peace favors the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice and effeminacy.” Alexis De Tocqueville said that war “enlarges the mind of a people.” Igor Stravinsky called war “necessary for human progress.” In 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. told the graduating class of Harvard that one of the highest expressions of honor was “the faith … which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty.”

Around the turn of the twentieth century, a counter-view arose — that war is usually absurd. One of the bestselling books of late-nineteenth-century Europe, Lay Down Your Arms!, was an antiwar novel. Organized draft resistance in the United Kingdom during World War I was a new force in European politics. England slept during the ’30s in part because public antiwar sentiment was intense. By the time the U.S. government abolished the draft at the end of the Vietnam War, there was strong feeling in the United States that families would no longer tolerate being compelled to give up their children for war. Today, that feeling has spread even to Russia, such a short time ago a totalitarian, militaristic state. As average family size has decreased across the Western world, families have invested more in each child; this should discourage militarism. Family size has started to decrease in the developing world, too, so the same dynamic may take effect in poor nations.

There is even a chance that the ascent of economics to its pinnacle position in modern life reduces war. Nations interconnected by trade may be less willing to fight each other: If China and the United States ever fought, both nations might see their economies collapse. It is true that, in the decades leading up to World War I, some thought rising trade would prevent war. But today’s circumstances are very different from those of the Fin de siècle [turn of the century]. Before World War I, great powers still maintained the grand illusion that there could be war without general devastation; World Wars I and II were started by governments that thought they could come out ahead by fighting. Today, no major government appears to believe that war is the best path to nationalistic or monetary profit; trade seems much more promising.

The late economist Julian Simon proposed that, in a knowledge-based economy, people and their brainpower are more important than physical resources, and thus the lives of a country’s citizens are worth more than any object that might be seized in war. Simon’s was a highly optimistic view — he assumed governments are grounded in reason — and yet there is a chance this vision will be realized. Already, most Western nations have achieved a condition in which citizens’ lives possess greater economic value than any place or thing an army might gain by combat. As knowledge-based economics spreads throughout the world, physical resources may mean steadily less, while life means steadily more. That’s, well, enlightenment.

In his 1993 book, A History of Warfare, the military historian John Keegan recognized the early signs that combat and armed conflict had entered a cycle of decline. War “may well be ceasing to commend itself to human beings as a desirable or productive, let alone rational, means of reconciling their discontents,” Keegan wrote. Now there are 15 years of positive developments supporting the idea. Fifteen years is not all that long. Many things could still go badly wrong; there could be ghastly surprises in store. But, for the moment, the trends have never been more auspicious: Swords really are being beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks. The world ought to take notice.

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No To Reifying Groups

[First published May 31, 2005] To me the unit of measure is always the individual –only the individual exists in nature and the group is an abstraction, but a necessary abstraction and benign one as long as we keep in front that it is made up of real individuals.

Dave Schuler commented:

That is patently demonstrably false. In every part of the world at every time in the history of the species, human beings have lived together in groups. We are social animals and we have always been social animals. We are not cats. For human beings groups have precisely as much objective existence as the individual.

We are also not ants or bees. The prevalent human mode of life has been the small group (although not exclusively the family group) for most of our history and pre-history. The village.

Ted Kaczynski is not the epitome of human beings—he’s the pitiful exception.

Your litany of countries that divided are all divisions along ethnic lines. Does one join an ethnic group (the act of an individual) or is one born into it?

This disagreement is of no little importance. Politicians and demagogues often treat groups as real, existing things, as though the individual members were secondary to the group. Indeed, much democide is carried out against individuals, not because of their personal qualities or crimes, but because of their group membership, such as bourgeoisie, Jews, landlords, Armenians, infidels, and so on.

However, groups have no real existence, as do individual human beings, although it is common to reify them. Groups, even the family, is a socio-cultural construction, more simply, a concept, that wholly exists in the mind. It cannot be kicked, touched, or seen. Even its supposedly outward manifestations, such as IBM’s headquarters building, a Federal courthouse, Catholic Mass have a group meaning that we project onto them.

Similarly, with racial and ethnic identities, with which clever politicians are often trying to make individuals identify (identity politics — see link below), are socio-cultural in origin, and exist only within certain cultures at certain times. True, there are certain physical characteristics identified with such groups, but this is the way the concept, say of Jew, has become socioculturally defined in our minds, and that can readily change as do cultures. There is always a subset of human beings that share certain characteristic, and generally these shared characteristics do not define a group presently, such as hair or eye color, skinniness, or nose size, or behavior like jogging, card playing, or swimming.

Note however how the reification of the group has led to laws that ignore the individuals involved, such as racial set asides and university admission policies that give special credit to Blacks and Hispanics, regardless of the capabilities and background of individual Black and Hispanics in comparison to the others that are discriminated against. Thus, a privileged Hispanic from a rich family could be given preference over a poor non-Hispanic who has had to work his way through school and overcome a broken family.

True, everywhere people have chosen to live in groups. These are, however, cultural-traditional groups with which individuals identify. But, that makes them no less individual human beings, with their own perceptions, expectations, sense of esteem, and so on. Nor does it make the groups any more real. To the outsider, they are only the clustering of individuals on which we impose certain concepts, such as family, clan, sect, and tribe. Note, however, the time and place conditionality of such groupings. For example, tribal membership is of utmost social significance in many African countries. It doesn’t exist in the United States outside of Indian reservations.

Can you tell me your tribe or clan?

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Link of Note

“Identity politics” In the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Introduction:

The laden phrase “identity politics” has come to signify a wide range of political activity and theorizing founded in the shared experiences of injustice of members of certain social groups. Rather than organizing solely around ideology or party affiliation, identity politics typically concerns the liberation of a specific constituency marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive characterizations, with the goal of greater self-determination.

Democracies Up, Violence Down Again, Media Still Blind

[First published May 30, 2005] In his May 28, 2005, op-ed piece, “Give Peace a Chance,” in The New York Times (link here), John Tierney points out:

The new edition of “Peace and Conflict,” a biennial global survey being published next week by the University of Maryland, shows that the number and intensity of wars and armed conflicts have fallen once again, continuing a steady 15-year decline that has halved the amount of organized violence around the world.

Tierney is at a loss to explain this and first looks to an economist for an explanation, which is the there is less and less to gain economically from war. And then says:

Of course, wars are also fought for noneconomic reasons, but those, too, seem to be diminishing. The end of the cold war left the superpowers’ proxy armies without patrons, and the spread of democracy made nations less bellicose. (Democracies almost never fight each other.) Mr. Easterbrook calculates that the amount of military spending per capita has declined by a third worldwide since 1985. [Easterbook here]

He has pulled aside the shade and looked out the window, but since this is the only mention of the democratic peace in the whole article, he seems unsure, if not doubting, what he has seen. Again, I will provide some of the compelling evidence in a series of charts.

The following two charts show the rapid increase in democracies and liberal democracies since 1900.

The following chart plots the overall non-freedomness of the international system per year. This is the average rating of nations per year in their degree of freedom (the higher the rating, the less freedom).

The above are based on data from Freedom House (link here)

Now, lets look at the changes in regime type, as plotted by the “Peace and Conflict” study Tierney wrote his op-ed about (link here). See below.

The anocracies are akin to partially free, authoritarian, nations. Note that in these charts around 1990 is the critical year when the number of democracies spurt up and autocracies, those lest democratic, dive down in numbers. Now, lets see what happens to violence since 1946.

All forms of violence are headed down, and the crucial years are between 1985 and 1990, which is just the time when after a continual increase (see the first three charts), the number of democracies jump up. The way to understand this is that in the late 1980s, democracies achieved a critical mass in the international system, a tipping point for violence. Decades ago I predicted this point would be reached eventually, and now it has.

The last two charts taken together well substantiate President Bush’s Forward Strategy of Freedom, that it, foster freedom to foster peace. Do you think this might have something to do with the media largely ignoring the democratic peace in action, as shown here?

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Link of Note

(Spring 2004) By John Mueller

He says:

It seems to me, though, that the most reliable restraints on violent behavior—both by individuals and by states—stem from human nature. For the most part, following the Rodney King prescription, we all—or almost all—actually do really want just to get along. There certainly is a quota of jerks out there, but most people most of the time are inclined to avoid conflict— certainly violent conflict. Their key goal is to live in peace and security, and they do this in part by adopting a live-and-let-live philosophy and by sharpening their skills from a very early age for determining whom to trust and befriend.7 By and large, their instincts predispose them not to belligerence or aggressiveness or even to stand and fight, but rather to flee conflict by removing themselves from threatening situations and moving from neighborhoods that are, or seem, dangerous. What is remarkable about most societies is how small in number, indeed how little in evidence, are the police forces required to maintain acceptable order. . . .

Thus, international war has declined remarkably since 1945 even while
international anarchy continues, effectively, to flourish: no one, surely, would confuse the United Nations or other international bodies with a Hobbesian
Leviathan.

Experience suggests, then, that alarm about international “anarchy” is much
overstressed. Regulation is not normally required, and “anarchy” could become a desirable state.

So, the decrease in violence is due to human nature and learning about violence — it is a natural result of the anarchic international system.

Not only has the democratic peace brought a greater peace to nations, but it has also enabled all kinds of theories explaining this peace to flourish.

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Books/articles/statistics

It’s Not Hopeless — There Is An Antidote

[First published May 16, 2005] Ryan Barnard lest this comment on the Thursday, March 03, 2005 Refract Blog:

So many atrocities, both epic and personal. So much sorrow in the world. Two options: turn a blind eye or work to change things. But all of these atrocities repeat, over and over again in the course of human history, in so many different societies. That suggests that it’s not cultural, that it’s human nature. Perhaps an aberration of human nature, but biologically wired nonetheless. And so how can one hope to ever make a difference?

So much suffering. So little of it need ever happen.

I really want some encouragement… I feel so hopeless. What can anyone do…?

This feeling gets to me, since I believe the evidence is persuasive — there is more than hope, there is an outright solution. And one that is desirable in itself. This is fostering global democratic freedom. I wrote a blog on this some months ago, ” Yes, There is Hope—Great Hope” ( Link here)

Rather than repeat that blog, I will present in figures some of the evidence. All are from my “Statistics of Democide” (link here). The first figure is 17.3 below. Note how the number murdered by governments rises at the high centralized power, high totalitarian end, while it’s lowest (virtually zero) at the low power, democratic end (liberal democracies). This already tells us what to do about democide. Diffuse and democratize power.

Figure 1.3 shows the rise and fall of democide with the rise and fall of totalitarian states. There is the slight rise in foreign democide by democracies during World War II (1941-1945), which is a reflection of illegal (Geneva Conventions) Allied urban bombing of German, and later Japanese cities. The others in the plot are authoritarian states, like Italy, Hungary, and China (Chiang Kai-chek).

Figure 17.2 is the best of the lot. It’s the result of a factor (component) analysis of various measures of politics and democide for over 200 nations. The result shows that political power and totalitarianism are aligned with each other and both almost completely with the total genocide, domestic democide, and democide rate (annual per capita). Democracy, however, is completely opposed. It is as though democide forms a tight cone of behavior, and down the center of that behavior, a causal force acting on it is totalitarianism, while democracy is a driving against it.

The easiest to understand figure and by virtue of that, maybe the most powerful is 17.5 below. This is a plot of domestic democide logged against the range of power, where the size of the point in the plot represents the amount of democide. Domestic democide is plainly a logarithmic function of power. That is, as power increases, domestic democide just does not increase additively, but by magnitudes – by a factor of ten.

There is much more I could present, such as what happens when many other variables are held constant. But for my purpose here, which it to prove the existence of an antidote to democide, these figures should serve.

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Link of Note

” Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict?” (February 2000) By William Easterly, World Bank

Abstract:

High quality institutions, such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts, mitigate the adverse economic consequences of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine 1997 and others. In countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic policies. High quality institutions also lessen war casualties on national territory and lessen the probability of genocide for a given amount of ethnic fractionalization.

Translation of World Bankanese: Among countries with ethnic divisions, the liberal democracies among them are least likely to commit genocide.

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An interactive book-in-the-making blog

Democide Galore

[First published May 8, 2005 Note for regular visitors: The {right} sidebar now provides a link to an archive in which I have organized together and by topic all my posts on different blogs, and website commentaries]

A few indigestible tidbits before the main course.

The democide deaths in Darfur, Sudan, have now probably exceeded 400,000, and perhaps twice the deaths from the Great Tsunami that was such oh-my-God!-news months ago. Meanwhile, with killing slowness, an underarmed, undermanned African Union force has been sent there to prevent the killing and assure peace, and now will be increased to about 12,000 troops by next year. This is not even the minimum required to stop the killing.

Dictatorial Ethiopia is suffering from another famine. The UN says that without food aid as many as 300,000 children will die. The UN has called for international help, again, as it has to help those starving under other thug regimes. Shouldn’t we also apply the “Never Again” to famine, and call also for the end to these killing. Criminal regimes? As I’ve commented before, democracies never have had a famine.

In Northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army has been slaughtering peasants and caused about 2,000,000 people to flee their villages. Worst of all, it “has reportedly abducted more than 20,000 children. Some are forced to fight, some to carry bags, others to have sex with the fighters. By way of initiation, many are obliged to club, stamp or bite to death their friends and relatives, and then to lick their brains, drink their blood and even eat their boiled flesh.” (link here) The International Court of Justice is about to issue an arrest warrant for the head of this rebel army, but local leaders oppose this as prolonging the conflict. Instead, they say, “if the rebels confess their guilt and undergo cleansing rituals, they will be accepted back into their communities.”

And then in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, over 31,000 a month die from civil war, democide, and associated disease and famine, which means that by now the toll has arisen to about 3,900,000 in six years. It is ruled by another thug regime

Then there is VJ day, and the end of World War II, which has occasioned both platitudes for the fighting spirit of Russian troops and the head shaking over their losses in the war. I did a lot of research on Soviet losses during the war. From a variety of official and unofficial sources, I estimated that the Soviets lost 7,000,000 men and women in battle, and 19,625,000 in total when I add the 3,000,000 Soviet POWs murdered, and those killed during the Nazi occupation.

But, which is seldom recognized in the outpouring of comments on the war, Stalin is responsible for the deaths by deportation, in camps, by summary execution, and through such extraordinary wartime measures as forcing prisoners to clear minefields with their feet, of around 10,000,000 citizens. Dead by Stalin and not Hitler! Then their were the mass murders carried out through Eastern Europe and occupied Germany by the Red Army and KGB, foreign deportation dead, and the mass of foreign POWs dying in Soviet camps. These dead would add another 3,000,000 to the total.

So, the Soviet’s (the use of “Russian” for Soviets is not correct, since a large number of different national groups had been forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union, such as Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Armenian, etc.) lost about 13,000,000 to Hitler’s democide. And Stalin’s democide amounted to about 13,000,000 citizens and foreigners.

Overall, Hitler murdered about 21,000,000 people, and Stalin about 43,000,000. No one in recorded history, as far as I could determine, has murdered more during his rule. And yet, . . . try to relax and take two deep breaths to get ready for this . . . in Volgograd, once named Stalingrad, authorities will unveil a statue of . . . Stalin!

But wait, got more. The All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center took a poll, in answer to which half the respondants were positive toward Stalin’s “role in the life of the country” — 20% very positive, 30% some what positive, and ONLY 12% very negative. If anything displays the kind of education and information Russians are getting, this is it.

All this reflects the gradual takeover of Russia by present and former military and security chiefs, the refusal to publicize the tyranny and mass murders of Stalin, the turning a blind eye to the complicity of present and past officials in Stalin’s murders, and the public regret about the fall of the Soviet Union (I think President Putin called it “catastrophic”). As now is well known, Russia is has become an authoritarian state with a democratic veneer. Elections, yes, but the Putin regime now controls the major media and hassles and hamstrings opposition parties.

Oh yes, one more thing. When the Allies set aside May 8, 1945, to celebrate their victory over Germany, Algeria was then a French colony. Understandably, with all the celebration about victory and freedom, the Algerians tried, with the permission of the sous-prefet, to demonstrate for independence. Although a peaceful demonstration, they were fired on by troops and legionnaires, after which the military carried out a street-by-street, house-by-house massacre of any Algerians they could lay hands on and if they could not they would, for example, drop grenades down chimneys. About 45,000 Algerians were massacred (link here), of which are shown two heads below. Thanks to Gary Busch for the email tip and photo below.

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Link of Note

”Outside View: Dictators must go” (4/19/05) By Herbutus Hoffman

Hoffman is president and founder of the World Security Network. While recognizing President Bush’s Forward Strategy of Freedom, he says,

Western foreign policy is for the most part reactionary, rather than proactive in “shaping a better world.” Foreign policy is for the most part a mix of lifeless bureaucracy and fear, almost always reactive and never preventative. Foreign policy too often contains a shot of cynicism as its actors secretly flirt with the 43 global dictators regardless of their character, only because they happen to be in power or because they bring the promise of new business.

Democratically legitimized politicians continue to hesitate when they ought to take action against them on behalf of oppressed people in other countries. . . .

It is perfectly clear for all to see: today’s Europe is secure only because there is now more freedom and democracy than there was 20 years ago. . . .

The United States is rich and powerful because it gave its citizens freedom more than 200 years ago. West Germany was rich, East Germany poor. North Korea is extremely poor, South Korea rich. Vietnam is poor, Thailand rich. . . .

Let’s start a new approach with fresh, new thought, combined with optimism for a new progressive foreign policy — with imagination a la Einstein — to promote democratic development and to get rid of the last 43 dictators in the word by 2025, now!

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An interactive book-in-the-making blog

Armenian Genocide

[first published May 4, 2005] Were the total number of human beings murdered by governments—their democide—widely known, it would be stunning and chilling. And perhaps it would bring pressure on liberal democracies, the only type of government that does not murder its own, to stop the democide now going on in Sudan, North Korea, Burma, and various other thugdoms in Africa.

In the history of this democide in the last century, one that stands out for various reasons is the mass murder of Armenians, Greeks, and other Christians by the Young Turk rulers during 1915 to 1918. It was well planned in the highest councils of government, and well prepared and organized, as was the Holocaust. Then in 1915 the telegrammed order, “Take care of the Armenians,” launched the genocide.

The Young Turk government collapsed with Turkey’s defeat along with its ally Germany in World War I. But, the killing did not end then. Within less than a year of their defeat the post-war Turkish government was taken over by Kemal Attaturk, whose positive reputation in the West hides the fact that he restarted the genocide of the Armenians, and with a greater focus on wiping out the Greek minority also.

The table below provides the totals. The large collection of estimates, sources, and my calculations behind this these numbers is in Chapter 5 of my Statistics of Democide .

Among genocide scholars the entire focus is on the Young Turks, and the United States State Department is often questioned by them about what it knows. After all, the United States had full information about the genocide from it is ambassador, Henry Morgenthau, and other diplomats in Turkey at the time. Ambassaador Morgenthau actually wrote a book published in 1919 that described the genocide. But, for political reasons the State Department refuses to make its archives on the genocide public, or even acknowledge that the genocide took place. Now, Israel—ISRAEL—not only joins the United States in this, but also pressures its genocide scholars and others against public comments on it.

How explain this? By two words that I increasingly find distasteful—real politic. I hope some day we can encase in lead the foreign policy these words describe and drop it in the deepest part of the ocean. The sound we might then hear could be the cheering of all the dead souls whose memory this policy has consigned to oblivion.

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Link of Note

”Rattling the Cage: Playing politics with genocide” (4/21/05) By Larry Derfner, The Jerusalem Post

I am including the following article in full, since one has to register with the newspaper to read it.

“And the world stood silent.” This is one of the most indelible Jewish memories of the Holocaust, and one of our most bitter accusations.

On Sunday, in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, the 90th anniversary of the Armenian genocide the slaughter of at least 1 million Armenian civilians by the Turkish Ottoman regime will be memorialized.

What does the State of Israel and many of its American Jewish lobbyists have to say about it, about this first genocide of the 20th century? If they were merely standing silent, that would be an improvement. Instead, on the subject of the Armenian genocide, Israel and some US Jewish organizations, notably the American Jewish Committee, have for many years acted aggressively as silencers. In Israel, attempts to broadcast documentaries about the genocide on state-run television have been aborted. A program to teach the genocide in public schools was watered down to the point that history teachers refused to teach it.

In the US Congress, resolutions to recognize the genocide and the Ottoman Turks’ responsibility for it have been snuffed out by Turkey and its right-hand man on this issue, the Israel lobby.

Jeshajahu Weinberg, founding director of the US Holocaust Museum, wrote that when Armenians lobbied to show the genocide in the museum, Turkey and Israel counter-lobbied to keep out any trace of it. The museum decided to make three mentions of the genocide, including Hitler’s call to his troops to be merciless to their victims: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?”

Over 125 Holocaust scholars including Elie Wiesel, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul Hilberg and Yehuda Bauer have signed ads in the New York Times demanding acknowledgement of the Armenian genocide and the Ottoman Turks’ culpability for it. Wiesel testified in Congress on behalf of such a resolution. The International Association of Genocide Scholars which, by the way, is studded with Jewish names holds the same view as a matter of course.

In the face of all this, Israel’s position, as articulated by then-foreign minister Shimon Peres before a 2001 visit to Turkey, says the Armenian genocide is “a matter for historians to decide.”

The American Jewish Committee’s position is that of “the US government, the government of Israel, and the Turkish Jewish community: that this is an issue best left to historians, not politicians,” says Barry Jacobs of the AJC’s Washington office.

Off the record, a Foreign Ministry official describes Israel’s approach to the issue as “practical, realpolitik. Whoever sees our position in this region can understand how important our relations with Turkey are.”

And that’s what determines the Israeli and US Jewish establishment stand on the Armenian genocide Israel’s crucial military, economic and political ties with Turkey.

Then, along with the “realpolitik” considerations, there’s the Jewish people’s weighty moral debt to Turkey, a safe harbor for Jews since the Spanish Inquisition over 500 years ago.

Finally, on a petty level, there’s the worry that letting the Armenian genocide out of history’s closet might diminish the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust in people’s minds.

“Frankly, I’m pretty disgusted. I think that my government preferred economic and political relations with Turkey to the truth. I can understand why they did it, but I don’t agree with it.”

That’s Yehuda Bauer talking. He’s Israel’s leading Holocaust historian, an Israel Prize winner, and now academic adviser to Yad Vashem. He began studying the Armenian genocide about 25 years ago as a natural outgrowth of his study of the Holocaust.

For 80 years, says Bauer, Turkey has been “denying the genocide… saying, ‘Yes, there was terrible suffering on both sides, the Turkish versus the Armenian, these things happen in war.’ But that’s nonsense. This was a definite, planned attack on a civilian minority, and whatever Armenian resistance there was came in response to the imminent danger of mass murder.”

To Turkey’s claim, backed by Israel and its Washington lobby, that there’s no conclusive proof of a Turkish Ottoman order for the mass murder of Armenians, Bauer says, “Oh, there’s no doubt about it whatsoever. It’s absolutely clear.” He cites “thousands” of testimonials from US, German and Austrian officials who were in Turkey and what is now Armenia when it happened.

One of the most important of those witnesses was US ambassador to Turkey Henry Morganthau a Jew, incidentally. He wrote that the “persecution of Armenians is assuming unprecedented proportions. Reports from widely scattered districts indicate a systematic attempt to uproot peaceful Armenian populations and… arbitrary efforts, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other, accompanied by frequent instances of rape, pillage and murder, turning into massacre, to bring destruction and destitution on them.”

Israel and the Israel lobby fully acknowledge that the Armenians suffered a terrible “tragedy.” A Foreign Ministry statement even notes that “the Jewish people have a special sensitivity to the murders and human tragedies that occurred during the years 1915 and 1916.”

They just won’t say who was to blame, or whether Turkey bears historical responsibility. Mention Wiesel and all the rest of the Holocaust and genocide historians, and the Israeli and US Jewish officials come back off the record with the renowned Bernard Lewis. Along with a few other American historians, Lewis says it wasn’t a genocide at all, that World War I was going on and Armenians were fighting with Russia against the Turks, and that you can’t blame Turkey for what happened, not then and certainly not now.

Thus the official Israeli/Jewish line: “It’s a matter for historians to decide.”

Fair enough. Even though Lewis’s side is terribly outnumbered among Western historians, let’s say the burden of proof lies with Wiesel, Bauer, Lipstadt et al, who say the Ottoman Turks ordered the massacre of 1 million-1.5 million Armenians. Let’s say Israeli and US Jewish leaders aren’t competent to judge who’s right and who’s wrong.

And let’s even give their declared neutrality the benefit of the doubt because of Israel’s relations with Turkey, and Turkey’s long history of welcoming Jews in distress.

The point is this: Israel and the US Jewish establishment may say they’re neutral over what happened to the Armenians 90 years ago, but their actions say the opposite. They’ve not only taken sides, they’re on the barricades. They’ve done everything they can to cover up what the great majority of historians, including the entire community of Holocaust scholars, say was a clear-cut case of genocide.

Jews shouldn’t do this for any reason. Ninety years after the Armenian genocide, there is a decent Jewish response to the sickening behavior of the State of Israel, the American Jewish Committee and other US Jewish organizations: Not in our name.

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Italian Newspaper Interview.

[First published May 2, 2005] Following is an interview of R.J. Rummel by the editor in chief of La Provincia di Como, an Italian daily newspaper.

1) Your researches about democides reveal how dangerous is government power. But when does concentrated political power produce democides?

The borderline is between democracies and nondemocracies. Democratic governments almost never murder their own citizens, while the least democratic governments murder them in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions.

2)       How did you begin to study mass murders?

The nature, causes, and conditions of war had been the early focus of my research, but I kept coming across references to this or that government murdering thousands of people. Even though a PhD in political science, I had not heard of many of these deaths. This stimulated my curiosity, so when I completed my five volumes on Understanding Conflict and War, I did a pilot study to get an estimate of the extent of government murder, which I began to call democide, in the world. I was shocked at its extent. So, I began a through eight-year data collection project to fully detail all the killing. When completed, I came up with about 170 million people murdered by governments 1900-1987. the specifics are in my HTM”>Death By Government and Statistics of Democide.

3)       From Nazism to former U.S.S.R and China, it seems to exist an internal link between bureaucracy/order and mass murders. Is it correct? How can you explain this relation?

It is a relationship between the power a regime has and the likelihood it will murder its people or those it controls. The more power at the center, the more democide. Simply, power kills.

4)       Your studies are revealing the frailty of the Hobbesian paradigm: state is not the main condition for peace, but the transcendental condition of any political violence. Do you agree?

It is not the state per se, but whether the state is controlled such that it is prevented from murdering people. Democracy is such control, since those in power are responsible to the people, but also democracies are civil societies with many contra-state power organizations and societies, like the church, universities, the media, corporations, small businesses, social groups, etc. These balance and restrain power, as does the periodic requirement that leaders submit their record to the voter, who then can fire them.

When the state is not so restrained, then we get a Hussein, Taliban, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.

5)       In your opinion, why do political scientists have generally neglected the impressive chapter of democides?

First, in their education, they only learned about the Holocaust. Second, by inclination they tend to favor government action (after all, many students select political science because they want to do something about social problems they see, and believe the government is the way to deal with them) and bristle at claims that government can do evil things, like murdering people wholesale. Third, since most are on the left, and most killing is by left-wing governments, if they do know about it, they refuse to teach or write about it for political reasons, or believe that when governments are trying to revolutionize a society to free people from exploitation, poverty, and inequality, it is a just war, and in war people are killed.

6)       How was difficult to estimate the magnitude of government killing?

Very. And this is why in my statistics I give a most improbable low and high, and then what I call a prudent mid-estimate. The low and high provide a most likely range in which the true number should lie.

7)       You said that democratic freedom is a method of non-violence. What do you properly mean?

Just that. When conflicts occur in a democratic society, they are managed democratically through debate, negotiated, compromise, peaceful demonstrations and protests, and ultimately if society wide, through voting, and acceptance of the results. Note that in the U.S. we had two huge socio-political conflicts, one in 1999 over whether President Clinton should be fired, and the other over who really won the 2000 presidential election. Both were resolved peacefully. To my knowledge, not one person was killed or injured in these conflicts, and virtually no violence occurred. Yet, it is hard to imagine conflict that is more serious where the emotions and interests of people were more engaged.

8) Carl Schmitt argued that – once a government has the power – nothing proves that law will be respected and violence will not be used. From these premises, democracy seems not enough to prevent political violence. What is you opinion?

This is dichotomous, either-or thinking. Government is necessary and anyway, an anarchy would naturally turn into some kind of government, if only by the smartest and strongest thugs. But once there is a government, the questions are then which kind most respects and law and creates the least violence. And this is democracy, especially liberal democracy with its respect for human rights. If one lists all the violence in the world over, say, ten or twenty years. the pattern would jump out of the data. Democracies by far would have the least.

9)       You argue that freedom promotes peace. Would you please indicate some evidence of it?

My God, my website is full of the evidence. The most systematic evidence is in my five volumes on Understanding Conflict and War. The evidence regarding democide is in my Statistics of Democide. Just one and the most recent publications of the evidence is in to the Appendix to my Saving Lives . I recommend it to you as an example of how I did the empirical studies. For the historical and qualitative discussion of freedom and violence, go to Chapters 5 to 7 in the book.

10)   Are we still facing, in some part of the world, the very risk of a democide?

Not only facing, it is ongoing in Sudan, Burma, North Korea, and the Congo, just to mention the worse of the democide underway.

You will find on my website the world’s most extensive Q and A regarding my work on democide and war.

Anarchies Do Exist—You Live In One

[First published April 28, 2005] There are a variety of anarchists, such as anarcho-communists, anarcho-libertarianists, and plain old anarchists. All oppose government, that is an institution that monopolizes force. What distinguishes them is their view of other institutions of society. For example, anarcho libertarians are for a free market—people should be free, which also means free to do business. Anarcho-communists oppose this, and believe that unfettered capitalism is as oppressive as government.

What is fascinating to me is that all these anarchists seem ignorant of the fact that they all live in an anarchy. And I’m not writing about some little clan, village, or town, but the largest society of all. In think about anarchy, there is a mental bug here that reminds me of what I used to do with my students in the beginning of my introductory class. I would ask them: “Do you think that we will ever be able to create an invisible solid?”

Some answered, “No,” some, a hesitant, “Yes.” Well, I soon pointed out that, “In this room there is an invisible solid.”

After they all looked at me as though I were crazy, I pointed to the classroom window on the other side of which we could see students passing by. “Isn’t that glass invisible? Can’t you see through it to the students walking by on the other side of that solid?”

The conceptual problem is simple and well explored in psychology. People are educated to see certain things and not to see others. Throughout their lives, through formal education, movies, television, books, speeches, parents, and their own chatter people develop a mind set. Even when some things are seen daily, they may not be really seen . And one such mindset is over the impossibility of invisibility, like making ourselves truly invisible as in the movie about the invisible man. And similarly with other solids. Thus, the invisibility of clear and clean glass is missed. No one has pointed it out.

And so it is with anarchy. Anarchy is not the absence of government, but of that type of government that monopolizes force and is able to back up its laws and decrees with coercive and deadly force. Try not paying taxes, or refuse to appear in court for a speeding ticket, or sell drugs on a street corner, and government agents with badges and in uniforms will come for you If you resist and fight them. You will be hauled off to jail at the point of their guns.

The arguments against anarchy are usually that it couldn’t last long, that we would have no security against thugs, and some kind of government would eventually have to come about, most probably a dictatorship, since people would be willing to give up their freedom for security. This is all wrong

We all have lived under an anarchy for centuries, since 1648 to be precise. Then, after the bloody and disastrous Thirty Years War, European monarchies signed the Treaty of Westphalia, which allowed each prince or king to govern their kingdom as they saw fit, especially regarding its religion. This treaty established the modern state system, with sovereignty and independence the governing laws. Gradually, this system of sovereign states spread throughout the world, and now is such a norm of international behavior that the thugs that rule some states, such as North Korea, are protected from interference from the outside so long as they only murder their own citizens.

Thus, there is no government that rules nations and monopolizes force, not even the United Nations. International relations, the system of nation-states, is an anarchy.

Don’t misunderstand. This does not mean that there are no norms or laws that nations obey. But obedience to the norms and rules is voluntary. That international relations, our largest and most extensive society, is an anarchy is well known and written about by students of international relations, and some professional books even have that in their title (e.g., Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society), even the fact that as Hobbes would point out, it is thus a state of war (e.g., Stanley Hoffmann, The State of War).

Moreover, those who favor an anarchy, and I do among nations, would learn much about anarchies by studying international relations. For example, anarchies can be stable—this one is over 550 years old. Although thugdoms do exist, they control only a minority of countries, not the world, while a majority (119) of democracies also exist. Moreover, in spite of the lack of a government, nations collaborate, cooperate, solve joint problems, and establish norms and customs that govern this anarchy, as norms and customs govern any group of people.

What is most important to observe is that there is much less violence in this anarchy than there is within states that have a true government. For example, not even counting the human cost of their civil wars, rebellions, and such violence within states, governments murdered in the last century over four times those killed in combat in international wars and violence. Just one state, the Soviet Union, has been far more violence internally in number of killed than anarchic international relations over the same period.

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Link of Note

”Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) Moral and Political Philosophy” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

It says of Hobbes:

His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise, what awaits us is a ‘state of nature’ that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.

Could ever a philosopher by more manifestly wrong, and yet believed so “relevant to contemporary politics.” As I said to my students about invisibility, ‘Look out the window.” As I say to our contemporary Hobbesians, look at international relations, the governance of free peoples in democracies, and what thugs (leviathaners in practice) do to the people they rule.

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How Many did Stalin Really Murder?

[First published April 26, 2005] May Day is coming up, which used to be a day of celebration in the Soviet Union with an impressive show of weapons and infinitely long parade of soldiers. Perhaps, then, it would be appropriate to pay special attention on this day to the human cost of communism in this symbolic home of Marxism, and worldwide. This blog is on Stalin and the Soviet Union. I will post one on the overall cost of communism next week.

By far, the consensus figure for those that Joseph Stalin murdered when he ruled the Soviet Union is 20,000,000. You probably have come across this many times. Just to see how numerous this total is, look up “Stalin” and “20 million” in Google, and you will get 38,800 links. Not all settle just on the 20,000,000. Some links will make this the upper and some the lower limit in a range. Yet, virtually no one who uses this estimate has gone to the source, for if they did and knew something about Soviet history, they would realize that the 20,000,000 is a gross under estimate of what is likely the true human toll.

The figure comes from the book by Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties (Macmillan 1968). In his appendix on casualty figures, he reviews a number of estimates of those that were killed under Stalin, and calculates that the number of executions 1936 to 1938 was probably about 1,000,000; that from 1936 to 1950 about 12,000,000 died in the camps; and 3,500,000 died in the 1930-1936 collectivization. Overall, he concludes:

Thus we get a figure of 20 million dead, which is almost certainly too low and might require an increase of 50 percent or so, as the debit balance of the Stalin regime for twenty-three years.

In all the times I’ve seen Conquest’s 20,000,000 reported, not once do I recall seeing his qualification attached to it.

Considering that Stalin died in 1953, note what Conquest did not include — camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939-53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939-1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941-1944; and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944-1945 is omitted. Moreover, omitted is the deadly Ukrainian famine Stalin purposely imposed on the region and that killed 5 million in 1932-1934. So, Conquest’s estimates are spotty and incomplete.

I did a comprehensive overview of available estimates, including those by Conquest, and wrote a book, Lethal Politics, on Soviet democide to provide understanding and context for my figures. I calculate that the Communist regime, 1917-1987, murdered about 62,000,000 people, around 55,000,000 of them citizens (see Table 1.1 for a periodization of the deaths).

As for Stalin, when the holes in Conquest’s estimates are filled in, I calculate that Stalin murdered about 43,000,000 citizens and foreigners, over twice Conquest’s total. Therefore, the usual estimate of 20 million killed in Soviet democide is far off for the Soviet Union per se, and even less than half of the total Stalin alone murdered.

But, these are all statistics and hard to grasp. Compare my total of 62,000,000 for the Soviet Union and 43,000,000 for Stalin to the death from slavery of 37,000,000 during the 16th to the 19th century; or to the death of from 25,000,000 to 75,000,000 in the Black Death (bubonic plague), 1347-1351, that depopulated Europe.

Another way of looking at this is that the annual risk of a person under Soviet control being murdered by the regime was 1 out of 222. But, compare — the annual risk of anyone in the world dying from war was 1 out of 5,556, from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was 1 out of 278, from any cancer was 1 out of 357, or for an American to die in an auto accident was 1 out of 4,167.

Now, I must ask, with perhaps an unconscious touch of outrage in my voice, why is this death by Marxism, so incredible and significant in its magnitude, unknown or unappreciated compared to the importance given slavery, cancer deaths, auto accident deaths, and so on. Especially, especially I must add again, when unlike cancer, auto accidents, and smoking, those deaths under Marxism in the Soviet Union were intentionally caused? They were murdered.

Anyway, when you see again the figure of 20,000,000 deaths for Stalin or the Soviet Union, double or triple them in your mind.

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Link of Note

”How Russia went from a workers’ state to state capitalism–Why did Stalin rise to power?” (9/1/2003)

By Alan MaassSo, how do communists – Marxists — now view Stalin’s mortacracy? By redefinition, a standard communist trick (e.g., “democratic people’s republic”). I quote from the article:

So-called “socialism” in Stalin’s Russia–and other countries, like China and Cuba, that modeled their systems on the USSR–is diametrically opposed to the basic principles we stand for. The rulers of the former USSR under Stalin used the rhetoric of socialism and Marxism to justify a different reality–an exploitative system, run by a minority, using forms of authority not that very different to capitalism in the West.

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It’s Worse Than You Think

[First published April 21, 2005] Academic freedom? The hallowed conflict of ideas? The sanctity of open debate? Ha! That’s not the American university anymore. Only one side now has the freedom to state its views, and the other sides beware.

What happened to Professor Thomas Klocek of DePaul University in Chicago is a case in point. Quoting from Joseph Farah’s recent article, “When ‘academic freedom’ fails,”

Last Sept. 15, the man who has taught critical thinking, college writing and cultures of the world at the Catholic university’s School for New Learning for the last 15 years, Klocek made the mistake of debating the subject of the Middle East with some extremists partial to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Arab nationalists among the Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Muslims Moving Ahead at a student activities fair.

The informal debate got heated, as Klocek was the sole defender of Israel and Middle East Christians in the room. But there were no blows exchanged. There were no verbal threats. And the spirited argument lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, according to everyone involved.

Nine days later, Klocek found himself the victim of an “emergency suspension” and unceremoniously kicked off the campus. No hearing by his peers. No formal complaints lodged against him. The unsubstantiated accusations by zealous students that Klocek made “racist” remarks was all that was needed to crush the claim of academic freedom at DePaul.

He was offered his job back if he agreed to monitored teaching and apologized to the students. He refused.

Now he finds himself with no job. . . .
You see, diversity is welcomed in academia as long as you don’t disagree with what passes for conventional wisdom in the rarefied atmosphere of academia. . . .Klocek was accused by the students of the unpardonable sins of “demeaning their ideas” and “dishonoring their perspective” and pressing erroneous assertions” and that he used his power as a “professor over them” to force them to accept his arguments as true.

What did he say? He questioned the accuracy of literature asserting Rachel Corrie was “murdered by an Israeli bulldozer” and a verbal assertion that “the Palestinians are being treated by Israelis the same way Hitler treated the Jews.”

This is not just one story. One could put together a book of sad tales of students and professors who have been punished by the left for their views or mistaken belief in “academic freedom.”

This is very serious, for the schools are now a major subversive force in our society undermining the idea of freedom. They get their hands on our children and youth and by their propaganda turn them into armies of “anti-war,” anti-globalization, anti-American, brain washed demonstrators and protestors. That is, before they eventually become teachers, businessmen, politicians, and, of course, lawyers and judges, all to further, often unknowingly, leftism.

What to do about it? Sunshine. Documentaries. Investigative journalism by blogs, talk radio, and the new media. Legislative hearings. And let the truth be exposed. The left’s anchor to the schools – tenure — could not survive arousing the silent majority.

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Link of Note

”Inside Higher Ed” (3/30/05 )

Three political scientists did a survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 four-year colleges and asked them how they identified themselves politically. This article describes the results (full report not generally available):

. . . the ideological divide on campuses may be greater than has previously been thought. And the authors of this survey say that their evidence suggests say that conservatives, practicing Christians and women are less likely than others to get faculty jobs at top colleges. . . . humanities faculty members were the most likely (81 percent) to be liberal. The liberal percentage was at its highest in English literature (88 percent), followed by performing arts and psychology (both 84 percent), fine arts (83 percent), political science (81 percent).

Other fields have more balance. The liberal-conservative split is 61-29 in education, 55-39 in economics, 53-47 in nursing, 51-19 in engineering, and 49-39 in business.

As far as reported, the study does not assess the ideological spread among liberals (moderate democrat, liberal democrat, leftist, communist) as opposed to conservatives. In my experience, many self identified liberals are on the far left or are communists (Marxists), and the those who call themselves conservatives are often moderate or liberal Republicans. Its like dividing the world into democracies and nondemocracies without showing that many nondemocracies are totalitarian and bloody thug regimes like North Korea, while many of the democracies are barely electoral democracies, with repressed human rights as now in Russia.

That the contemporary American university is an anti-American, pro-socialist propaganda mill is suggested by the survey above, but the true meaning of this division has to be experienced to fear its dire implications for individual freedom, such as it was for Professor Klocek of DePaul University.

American Vs. French Revolutions

[First published April 10, 2005] I got carried away in writing this, and ended up with five pages single spaced, much too long for a blog. So, for the full essay, and that’s what it is, go here. This blog is a brief version.

There have been two revolutions, the American and French, and they expressed not only to opposing view of government, but they represent the struggle between Freedom and Socialism today.

The Constitution that eventually emerged from the American Revolution saw man as pursuing different, and often selfish, interests. The maximum satisfaction of all these interests requires that no one interest dominates. And what prevents such domination is a balance among opposing interests. This was a conception of Freedom as the outcome of this balancing of interests, each sustained by natural rights.

The Constitution thus embodied three principles. First, all men have certain inalienable Rights standing above and limiting government. Second, all governments carry within themselves the seeds of tyranny, of the absolute State, which can be limited only by a system of checks and balances. And third, since Freedom must reign, and no man working in his own interests can be unjust against himself, the government must be limited to defining and administering the common law. Government is to be an arbiter between interests, to serve a janitorial role of defending and maintaining the commonwealth. All else is the preserve of Freedom.

A conception of Freedom as an outcome of contending interests, each guaranteed inalienable Rights, and the three principles of Rights, checks and balances, and limited government, constituted the American Revolution — a revolution that established and preserved Freedom down to modern times.

The French Revolution of 1789 was also a revolt against the power of a monarch and aristocracy. Its motto was Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; its end was Social Justice; its means were to establish the sovereignty of the people, and to eliminate social and political inequalities.

Unlike the American Revolution, whose philosophical ancestors were the English liberals, the French Revolution was fundamentally fathered by the French radical philosophers, especially Jean Jacques Rousseau, and inherited the faith in reason engendered by The Enlightenment. René Descartes’ trust in geometric like reasoning and Rousseau’s belief in the common will and sovereignty of the people framed the conception guiding the French Revolution. This conception is mechanical. Government is a machine, fueled by coercive power, and driven by reason; and its destination is Social Justice. Government is thus a tool to reach a future goal ‑‑ improving man. Those in charge of the State would therefore use reason to apply government to further and create Social Justice.

This conception is clearly different from that of the American revolutionaries. For the Americans, interests were the guiding force; for the French, reason. For the Americans, Freedom was to be preserved against the State; for the French, the State was used by reason to achieve Social Justice. For the Americans, individual rights were essential to protect interests; for the French, the collective, the sovereignty of the people, the general will stood above rights. Finally, for the Americans, no one interest could be entrusted with the State ‑- all interests had to be limited and balanced by their opposition; for the French, the State was a tool that should have no limit so long as Social Justice was pursued according to the common will.

The first principle is that the benefits to the Community outweigh individual rights. This is what the common will or sovereignty of the people means ‑‑ that individuals are members of a Community which takes precedence over the individual, and that the Community has a will to be gratified, a justice to be sought, which no individual should bar.

The second principle is that the State, and thus government as its agent, can be beneficent instruments of progress, a tool to be used to pursue the common will, the Community’s betterment. Therefore, government should not be checked and balanced. Its powers should not be divided, for then the State is severely restrained. The Application of Reason to further Social Justice is crippled. Unlike the Americans, the French revolutionaries did not fear the State as such, but only the State in the service of the wrong class and bad ends.

And this led to the third principle of the French Revolution ‑- unlimited government. As the State’s implement of Reason working on behalf of the Community, government should not be limited. If necessary to pursue Social Justice, government should centralize, regulate, and control.

So, the American and French Revolutions launched an historic struggle between two conceptions and two sets of principles. One fosters Freedom and peace; the other furthers a statism which mankind has seldom, if ever, before known, a disease that not only blighted half the world, but even with the defeat of its most monstrous version, communism (Marxism), it still infests European politics and the American liberals, and especially, the socialist left.

The opposition between these principles remains the major schism today, the major historic battlefront. We are still heirs to the American Revolution, and the left and socialist are to the French. This is a struggle we can win. It all depends on democratic peoples understanding that the American Revolution is dying from a possibly malignant cancer – the statism of the neo-French revolutionaries at home and abroad – and in one form or another, domestic or foreign, it threatens us. The people’s common sense and their desire for freedom will in the end win out, if they comprehend the war being waged against them. It is the freedomist’s mission to assure this understanding

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Link of Note

\”The” http://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/french/french.html”>”The French Revolution”

By Rich Geib
Geib says

If the French revolution was the end of monarchy and aristocratic privilege and the emergence of the common man and democratic rights, it was also the beginnings of modern totalitarian government and large-scale executions of “enemies of the People” by impersonal government entities (Robespierre’s “Committee of Public Safety”). This legacy would not reach its fullest bloom until the tragic arrival of the German Nazis and Soviet and Chinese communists of the 20th century.

In fact, Rousseau has been called the precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin . . . Rousseau has been called the precursor of the modern pseudo-democrats such as Stalin and Hitler and the “people’s democracies.” His call for the “sovereign” to force men to be free if necessary in the interests of the “General Will” harks back to the Lycurgus of Sparta instead of to the pluralism of Athens; the legacy of Rousseau is Robespierre and the radical Jacobins of the Terror who followed and worshipped him passionately.

Impoverishment and Death by Socialism

[First published April 8, 2005] Socialist of different flavors — leftists, Marxists (alias communists), fellow travelers, and the economically ignorant — continue to rant about the greed, inequality, and economic slavery of the free market (they prefer to call it capitalism), but yet in the grandest of economic experiments, their socialism has utterly failed in practice. When these socialists are free to fully apply their ideas, they end up impoverishing whole countries.

In social science, one way to test a theory it to select two groups of people such that they are virtually identical on all variables but the theoretical one. Want to test whether nature or nurture make a difference in making spelling errors (I insist it’s nature), then test this on identical twins separated shortly after birth.

But, surely, you say, we can’t do such tests on free market vs. socialist systems. Well, we can’t organize it for this purpose, but we can observe what socialist have done. We have had people of one nation, language, culture, religion, literacy, wealth, and so on, divided into two, such that one had a largely free market economic system and the other a purely socialist one, with the socialist being the more prosperous and industrial region to begin with. The divided countries were North Vietnam vs. South Vietnam, and East Germany vs. West Germany, and still is North vs. South Korea. Some might include mainland China vs. Taiwan, but Taiwan (formerly Formosa) was not part of China, although one might point to the fact that both the mainland and Taiwan are now Chinese in language and customs, and thus show what the Chinese can do when they are free as on Taiwan, or still dominantly socialist as on the mainland.

Okay, the experiment. How did these two halves fare, with their economic-political systems being the only meaningful difference? In each case, the socialist half has failed economically compared to its free market one, which in contrast substantially uplifted its people in health, technology, services, economic growth, and wealth. Let me focus on the two Koreas to provide some statistics on this. In what follows, the first figure will be for socialist North Korea, the second for the South (source: The Wall Street Journal, 3/11/05):

Population: 22.5 mil vs. 49.9 mil.
Gross National Income (GNI): $18.4 bil. Vs. $606.1 bil.
GNI per capita: $818 vs. $12,646
Exports: $.78 bil. Vs. $193.8 bil.
Imports: $1.61 bil. Vs. $178.8 bil.
Power generated: 19.6 bil. kwh vs. 322.4 bil. kwh

But, these statistics show only part of the cost of socialism. N. Korea has again cut food rations from last years near starvation level of 300 grams per person per day. Now it is 250 grams (8.8 ounces) per person, according to the UN World Food Program (WFP). This is far below the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) minimum. Also, keep in mind that Kim’s food distribution system is highly unequal. Food is put aside first for “patriotic rice” and “military rice.” And then it has a graded ration system depending on whether a family is considered supportive of the regime at higher ration end, and unreliable, possible anti-regime at the bottom.

In the last decade, the human cost of this socialism, leaving aside the regime’s mass murders, has been about 3 million starved to death. Further, malnutrition has caused excessive underdevelopment and brain retardation of children, and fostered rickets, scurvy, nyctalopia, hepatitis, and tuberculosis, among other diseases. And the country is one of the few in which population mortality rates have been increasing. The life expectancy has fallen to 66.8 years from 73.2; newborn mortality rate has increased from 14 to 22.5; and the rate for those less than five years of age has increased from 27 to 48 per thousand.

Meanwhile, in South Korea the per capita calorie intake is 3,268, which is 139 percent of the FAO recommended minimum requirement. This calorie intake is made up of about 84 percent vegetable products and 16 percent animal products. A typical South Korean meal consists of steamed or stir-fried vegetables, thin sliced meats, grilled fish, and bean-baste soup. Life expectancy is 75.6 years and rising; infant mortality is 7.18 per 1,000 live births, and falling.

What more need be shown? Socialism not only kills by the conditions it creates, encourages the ruling thugs to murder their own people (how else impose such a anti-humanitarian, prison like system?), it greatly impoverishes them. The free market, however, constantly improves overall wealth and welfare, and if part of a democratic system, protects and saves lives.

These historical social experiments have cost tens of millions of lives. We must now say, “ENOUGH ALREADY!”

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Link of Note

”North Korea: Human Rights Concerns,” (nd) Amnesty International USA

The report has good links and a fair overview:

Amnesty International’s long-standing concerns about human rights violations in North Korea include the use of torture and the death penalty, arbitrary detention and imprisonment, inhumane prison conditions and the near-total suppression of fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression and movement.

Their expressed “concern” is not the way I would put it. More like horrified, disgusted, sickened.

Leftimania Uncovered

[First published on March 30, 2005] I’ve often wanted to know the political connections and ideological presumptions of a commentator, noted academic, or the leaders of a protest, as of “antiwar” demonstrations. But, it would take too much time to track down the information and establish its reliability. Now, this has been done for those like me who believe that what you see depends on where you sit. David Horowitz has set up a web site called DISCOVERTHENETWORK.ORG: A Guide to the Political Left (link here) that provides information about the backgrouond, ideology, and connections of groups and individuals.

For example, on Ward Churchill it begins a mulipage profile with this summary:

• Marxist professor of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado
• Advocates political violence
• Denounces “the slaughter perpetrated by the United States around the world”
• Accuses white Americans of genocide
• Characterizes the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus as a ”mistaken landfall” that “unleashed a process of conquest and colonization unparalleled in the history of humanity”
• Lamenting that the terrorism of 9/11 had proved “insufficient to accomplish its purpose” of destroying the United States, Churchill said, ”What the hell? It was worth a try.

Note that Marxist means communist. In discussing his case, virtually no major media has mentioned that he is a communist (I know of none). On this blog site, I’m going to hit the Marxism = communism as often as I can. The communists have largely succeeded, even with libertarians and conservatives, in hiding behind Marxism, which they make out to be a philosophy or theory different from communism. It is not. It is a philosophical and historical, socio-political theory alright, and precisely what all communist regimes have forced their slaves to except and exclusively study. Marx is to communism as Christ is to Christianity.

On Teresa Heinz Kerry, the guide says:

• Wife of 2004 Democratic Presidential candidate John Kerry
• Chaired the Howard Heinz Endowment, a major funder of leftwing groups and causes
• Has personally financed the Tides Foundation, which funds many leftwing organizations

The mainstream media has overlooked the very important story of Teresa Heinz Kerry’s close financial ties to radical Left. Mrs. Kerry has financed the secretive Tides Foundation to the tune of more than $4 million over the years. The Tides Foundation, a “charity” established in 1976 by antiwar leftist activist Drummond Pike, distributes millions of dollars in grants every year to political organizations advocating far-Left causes. The Tides Foundation and its closely allied Tides Center, which was spun off from the Foundation in 1996 but run by Drummond Pike, distributed nearly $66 million in grants in 2002 alone. In all, Tides has distributed more than $300 million for the Left. These funds went to rabid antiwar demonstrators, anti-trade demonstrators, domestic Islamist organizations, pro-terrorists legal groups, environmentalists, abortion partisans, extremist homosexual activists and HYPERLINK “http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11838″open borders advocates.

Do some browsing on the website, and you will find some amazing and, perhaps, depressing information. As a last example, note this of the Ford Foundation:

Originally funded by the Ford Motor Company stock from the estates of Henry and (son) Edsel Ford in 1936
• Largest private funder of the American left and its radical agendas
• Supports communist front groups like the Center for Constitutional Rights and the National Lawyers Guild
• Key funder of the Open Borders lobby
• Assets: $10,015,612,595 (2003)
• Grants Awarded: $431,643,480 (2003)

My compliments to Horowitz and all those who helped him. The liberal and communist left can only survive in the United States and influence policy by hiding their activities, memberships, associations, and ideology under a vast blanket. Horowitz has helped to lift a corner of it.

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Link of Note

”Navigating the left” (3/24/05) By Robert Stacy McCain

McCain’s intro:

David Horowitz, a radical turned conservative author and activist, has created a Web site, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, which he describes as “a navigation tool for identifying, mapping and defining the left and its elaborate and extensive political network.”

In a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home, Mr. Horowitz discussed the idea for the site . . . .

Selected quotes:

Soon, pro-communist leftists like Angela Davis and Tom Hayden were being referred to as “liberals” by the media, and liberals like Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick were being referred to as “neoconservatives.” … So, to understand our present situation, I felt you have to try to restore accurate political labels. And that’s partly what my new Web site, DiscoverTheNetwork.org, is about. . . .

Q: You have documented the Marxist backgrounds of several leading anti-war groups and individuals. Why do you think the media have routinely ignored these connections?

A: On one page, you get a list of every major anti-war organization and each listing is a link to a profile of the individual group, and each group is connected to a map icon, which, if you click on it, opens up a diagram that shows all the other groups with radical agendas … that they are connected to.

The fact that the two major peace organizations, International ANSWER and the Coalition for Peace and Justice, are headed by easily identifiable communists, was known to the mainstream media, specifically the New York Times. Because the New York Times is essentially a fellow-traveling institution of the left, it chose not to mention this fact.

Note that McCain refers to “Marxists,” which Horowitz, quite correctly, terms communists.

Dare To Call Evil Evil

[First published on March 29, 2005] I am told that some of my colleagues and readers wince when I use the term “evil.” How can I say that democide, terrorism, and mass murderers like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, and Omar Hassan al-Basher (Sudan) are evil? This is the worst moral accusation one can level at an activity or another human being. Who am I to do so?

To discuss evil in any depth requires either a theological discussion of evil, or a philosophical safari into ethics. I wish to leave theology aside, and as far as ethics is concerned, simply express my view of evil. First, I do not accept some prevailing ethics, such as that ethics is simply a personal emotive expression of something one hates (like ugh!), a situational expression about some gross immorality, or an objective fact that exists outside of us. In my view, ethical statements are prescriptive, state what ought to be deontologically (I’m a Kantian on this), and are universal. That is, they state what everyone would agree to for their moral governance, were they to have to live under them without advanced knowledge as to their socio-economic status, race, religion, sex, etc.

Evil for me is then something all would agree is not only morally reprehensible under these conditions, but also fundamentally reprehensible to what it means to be human and civilized. In this sense, any murder is evil. We lock up people for life or execute them for this reason. But we also have to recognize that there are different levels of reprehensibility, as to whether a person murders one fellow human being, 10, or 10,000 in one pen stroke, as have some political leaders like Stalin.

I would turn the question around and ask, “How can one not call such thugs evil, or the mass murderers of millions evil (Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot)?” Not to do so means that one is without the moral gauge that is crucial to civilization and humanity, or his real politics has corrupted him, as it has the leaders of South Korea.

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Link of Note

” Toxic Indifference to North Korea” (3/26/05) By Abraham Cooper

Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and a member of the North Korean Freedom Coalition.

He says:

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such “crimes” as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from “official ideology of the state.” Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: “I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth

From Colleague:

I re-read this article again, still not believing the incredible tale told.

What do North Korean apologists have to say about this?

Where are the voices of Johan Galtung, Bruce Cummings, Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky. . . ? These people are so willing to accept any story of US evil, no matter what the evidence, and so unwilling to accept anything critical of the remaining communist regimes — despite the inescapably logic that argues that regime with lots of power tend to kill lots of people.

Oh, right. How dumb of me. All these stories of North Korean murder are nothing more than CIA propaganda and deceit. After all, no Beloved Leader would permit anything such as gassing political prisoners….unless there was good cause. Anyway, I’m sure America has gassed more political prisoners than North Korea ever dreamed of gassing.. . .

I wonder, when Korea is re-unified, how many people will emerge to give color to this dismal portrait of power run amok. And how many leftists will be trying to first deny, then disparage, then defend these actions, finally changing their tune to how all this democide was really the work of right-wing North Koreans.

Freedom And Human Security

[First published March 22, 2005] Freedom Saves and Enriches Life

I have included the figure shown below [in the charts on the sidebar. Study it. It is one of the most important in the literature. For it shows, empirically, the consequences of freedom: purchasing parity per person goes up, as does overall wealth (development), and poverty goes down. Moreover, deaths from famine go down (none in democracies), democide goes down, as does the number killed in international and civil wars.

In other words, to sum up [the charts], to advance freedom is to advance human security. If this were widely known, there would be far more support for the [an] American foreign policy of promoting freedom and ending tyranny. Okay, you freedomists out there, we have our work cut out for us.

NOTE ON THE TABLES AND FIGURES:

I’ve tried to minimize the size of the tables and figures whenever I’ve presented them. Many visitors likely are working with a modem, and the more and larger the tables and figures in the blogs for a week, the more time it will take a blog to show. Patience among internet users, particularly students, is not a virtue.

Now, I’m working on a 17” Apple flat screen at resolution 1280×1024. However, what appears readable on my screen apparently is not on others, even at the same size (as Brian H informed me). The problem, I think, is that the Apple screen is so clear that what appears legible to me may not be on some CRT’s, even at the same resolution.

In any case, the bottom line is legibility. For that reason I near doubled the size of the figures I displayed in [a former] blog, as you see above, and enlarged the above table over what I normally would have shown.

Now, if you still have a problem reading the notes or numbers, reduce the resolution of your screen (monitor) until you can. Also, some computer systems now have the capability to enlarge a portion of the screen for the visually impaired.

Do let me know if you have any problem with whatever images I present. I am showing them because I think they are very important, and I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t want you to read, digest, and understand them. Cheers! RJR

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Link of Note

” A Free Market Economic Development Strategy” The Heritage Foundation

Abstract: economic assistance, whether from countries or through international financial institutions like the World Bank, has failed to help poor nations to develop. Countries that adopt good policies, including economic freedom, experience stronger economic growth than those that seek to thwart the market through regulatory hurdles and policy restrictions. Foreign aid cannot replace good policy. The only proven method for improving the economies of developing nations is not through blanket economic assistance, but through policies that encourage economic freedom and the rule of law. To achieve this goal, the United States must eliminate poorly performing organizations and programs such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and support aid programs like the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which require countries to demonstrate a commitment to good policies in order to qualify for assistance.

Political Freedom Vs. Economic Freedom and Wealth

….

[First published March 20, 2005] A natural question is about the relationship between democracy (as Freedom House rates freedom) and economic freedom, and this is shown in the chart below.

To create the chart, the ratings for each index were standardized before making the plot.

Obviously, there is a close relationship, as by theory there should be. One cannot dominate a free market with a government dictated economy without destroying freedom in the process. Note that even the so-called “people’s republic of Sweden” is indexed as being economically free in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal index. So is Denmark, and so-called “socialist” Israel is indexed as mostly economically free.

Then, what about the economic development, or what I prefer to call the wealth of a nation, and welfare of a people. The next chart shows the close relationship between the Freedom House ratings and various measure of wealth and welfare.

In the chart, HDI = the UN human development index (a measure of general welfare); HPI = UN human poverty index; GNP = gross national product; and PPP = purchasing power parity (currencies are normed such that they will buy the same goods from one country to the next).

There you have it. Political and Economic freedom not only go together, but also they are an engine of a people’s wealth and welfare. Add this to the fact the democratically free countries never have had a famine, virtually never murder their own people, have the least internal violence, and never any wars between them, and you have freedom as the closest thing to a general solution to humanity’s ills.

Three cheers for freedom. Okay, you freedomists out there, to work.

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Link of Note

”Testing Whether Freedom Predicts Human Security and Violence (2001) By R.J. Rummel, Appendix to Saving Lives, enriching Life: Freedom as a Right and a Moral Good

In this appendix, I did a variety of mathematical and statistical operations to test the hypothesis that freedom predicts to human security and violence. The 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 endure. This is to say:

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.

Kill Them All–Iran’s Mass murder of 30,000

Part of the problem in communicating the nature of our enemies and their depths of depravity is finding the right words to describe the horrors they inflict on people. The following from an article, “Khomeini fatwa ‘led to killing of 30,000 in Iran’” by the diplomatic correspondent Chrisina Lamb, helps (link here):

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, one of the founders of the Islamic regime. He was once considered Khomeini’s anointed successor . . . . 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. . . . 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) [regime opponents] are waging war on God and are condemned to execution.”

. . . . 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.

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Link of Note

”A 14 year old boy is sentenced to 85 lashes for breaking his Ramadan fast!” (11/16/04 )

A 14 year old boy died on Thursday, November 11th, after having received 85 lashes; according to the ruling of the Mullah judge of the public circuit court in the town of Sanandadj he was guilty of breaking his fast during the month of Ramadan.

But, we shouldn’t intervene in Iran, even to help the anti-regime, democratic movement. Right? Yes, tell that to the dead souls of the 30,000 (among hundreds of thousands) slaughtered, and the 14-year-old boy. And all their surviving loved ones.

If Not Stupid, Then What?

Below I give the link to the most recent libertarian attack by James Ostrowski on the idea of the democratic peace, and response by Colleague. If submitted by as a student term paper, it would be graded an F by both of us.

This raises the question as to what it is with the libertarian anti-interventionists that they cannot mount an even reasonable critique of the democratic peace. Is it that they are stupid? No, these are often intelligent people who have mastered a profession in their own right. Ostrowski, for example, is an attorney, and has written Political Class Dismissed. He also has an interesting and useful website at HYPERLINK “http://jimostrowski.com” http://jimostrowski.com. These people have to be taken seriously, and Colleague and I do so.

Then what? At the heart of their problem is that they are unfamiliar with the nuances of international relations, and in particularly, with the research on the democratic peace. In other words, they are largely ignorant of the field and idea on which they write.

Also, there is more to the idea of the democratic peace than just reading books about it. It comes out of the scientific study of international relations and war, so to get the best handle on it, one must have some familiarity also with quantitative methods, particularly statistics (although my approach is generally mathematical). So, for example, using multiple regression, reseachers have found that even holding many possible causes of violence constant, the more democratic a government, the less severe its foreign violence. This statement requires some understanding of the method of multiple regression, the meaning of “holding constant,” and the empirical content of “democracy” and “severe violence.” From one study to the next, these terms are defined by explicit data collections.

I want to be clear on this. I am not saying that the democratic peace is such an esoteric idea that only a specialist can understand and critique it. This is not quantum physics. It is most akin to quantitative economics. I am saying that one must familiarize themselves with the writing in this field to critique it adequately, and there are enough “common sense” reviews and summaries to do this (I will discuss a comprehensive bibliography this week— link here).

Because of the technical nature of this research on the democratic peace (within the field of quantitative international relations), even those trained in international relations, such as in national security studies, or diplomacy sometimes misunderstand the work on the democratic peace. But, there are good critiques, and there are those who have become knowledgeable in the research and disagree with it. Not one, however, is a libertarian.

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Link of Note

”The Myth of Democratic Peace: Why Democracy Cannot Deliver Peace in the 21st Century” (2/19/05) By James Ostrowski

From Colleague
Colleague is a PH.D, did his dissertation on the democratic peace, and teaches international relations.

Ostrowski’s essay was intensely frustrating :

He does not seem to understand the INTER-democraticness that is the core of the theory and empirical findings of no war between democracies.

He critiques “democratic pacifism” as distilled from a variety of sources, sketched out as:

democracies rarely if ever go to war against each other; democracies tend to be more peaceful than dictatorships; democracies tend to have less internal violence; and this tendency toward peacefulness is structural, that is, related to the nature of democracy, not an accident or coincidence.

This sounds like it might be “democratic peace,” and includes some of its propositions, but drags in others that really cloud things up, such as “democracies tend to be more peaceful,” and veers off into explanations of WHY the democratic peace is so. Why didn’t he undertake to critique the standard five propositions set forth in the very book by Rummel he attacks (Power Kills [link here]). I’d be much more willing to read his research if he walked me through why each of those five propositions were in error.

Some of his statements are flat-out ignorant. He says that the main threat to world peace is not war between two nation-states, but nuclear arms proliferation. Sounds smart, but consider that no democratic states with nukes feel threatened by other democratic states with nukes. And all states feel threatened by non-democratic states with nukes. Regime type matters. His second level of threat is terrorism. Yup. And what democracy is exporting terrorism? What terrorist group espouses democracy? None. Again, regime type matters. His final level of threat is internal ethnic-religious conflict. It sure is a problem, but what is the most reliable possible solution to such conflict — meaning how can such conflict be kept from breaking out in widespread violence? He cites Afghanistan — well, is sure seems like the arrival of democracy there (albeit in its infancy) has reduced the murderous type of violence practiced by the dictatorial Taliban. Again, he should repeat after me…Regime Type Matters.

His data is nonsensical and irrelevant.

Example 1: listing “Wars of the Democratic Powers” tells me absolutely nothing about whether democracies fight each other. He seems to have completely missed the very idea of regimes types and dyads. Also, where is the comparison list of “Wars of the Nondemocratic Powers”?

Example 2: listing nuclear powers by type of government tells me nothing. It’s like identifying a rapist and a chef as both having a knife in his hand. So what?

Example 3: “Recent Intrastate Conflicts” makes no mention at all of the severity of the internal conflict, nor of changes in government, nor of what years these conflicts occurred. I have no idea what I’m supposed to understand from this list.

Example 4: the chart of homicide rates that has only one “dictatorship” listed against which to compare many democracies. And that dictatorship — with the lowest rate on the list — is tiny little Singapore. What about the 80 some non-democracies in the world? What about the world’s most repressive regimes (Burma, China, Cuba, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Laos, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam….)? What the hell am I supposed to get from this chart?

Example 5: counting deaths of one’s own soldiers in war as democide. Conceptually this is like counting beans as steaks. It makes no sense, but even if we were to accept this definition, why only count U.S. war deaths? If what we are after is comparing kinds of governments, then even a modicum of intellectual integrity would call for looking at the own-soldiers deaths of other governments, especially non-democratic ones. Does Ostrowski not do this knowing that it will only show that democracies suffer fewer casualties that non-democracies? Gee, that is one of Rummel’s five propositions, unmentioned by Ostrowski.

Example 6: Ostrowski concludes with a nice little chart rank-ordering regimes by their peacefulness. We discover that “self-government” is the most peaceful, followed by “republics” then democracy. Nowhere in any of his data charts could I find ONE example of a “self-government” or a “republic.” What the hell are these things — in the real world where we try to get data to understand reality? The closest example I can think of to his definition of “self-government” is Somalia, where there is indeed no state with final authority, and each person governs himself…except that people also tend to govern anyone else they can wield power over. With nothing to prevent warlords, this isn’t exactly what I’d want to hold up as a “peaceful” society.

Lacking any data at all to support his assertions, I can only conclude that the essay is groundless, directionless, unrigorously speculative, lacking definitional integrity, etc. This isn’t even high-school level “research.”

I’m torn about these libertarians: I have an intense affinity for them because of their love of freedom…but I despair for them for their almost callous lack of scholarship, their arrogance, and their apparent inability to understand even basic points about international politics. For example, Ostrowski’s point about counting own-soldier deaths as democide. It has a certain appeal, from the perspective of an anti-statist. But the complete lack of comparative perspective (who kills more of their own soldiers by ordering them off to war?) negates even the possibility of scholarship. And ultimately their “project” fails because it is not practical. Not “impractical” in the sense of too hard to do, but impractical in the sense that it has an inaccurate view of humanity. In the long run, their work does not contribute to making anything better, whether that be understanding ourselves, or achieving peace. So, I keep asking myself every time I read their stuff, or visit their Web sites — why do I waste my time? Perhaps I hope they will see the light…. so far though, only murky darkness….

Global Peace And Human Security Are Not Hopeless

[First published February 17, 2005.] Yes, There is Hope. Great Hope

With all the mass murder by thug dictators in such countries as North Korea, Burma, Sudan, Congo, Iran, and the like, with terrorists murdering people wholesale, and with the apparent inability to stop or prevent most of it, the post-World War II exclamation, “Never Again,” seems hopeless. Such is the feeling I get from reading news items on the latest democide (murder by government) and murder bombing, and some of the email I receive. And, I must admit, I have contributed to this pessimism with my country-by-county, year-by-year estimates of the world’s democide. Clearly, as I’ve pointed out, a slow motion nuclear war has taken place, with my conservative estimate of 262,000,000 murdered by governments in the 20th Century.

And it continues into this century.

But, it is not hopeless. We are not faced, nor are our children faced with such democide in perpetuity. We do have the ability to turn “Never Again” into reality for all.

We should recognize some facts. One 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 liberties and political rights) provides the long run hope for the elimination of democide. Second, that the world is progressively becoming more democratic, with from 22 democracies in 1950 to something like 121 democracies today (about 89 of them liberal democracies), gives substance to this hope. A third is that democracies don’t make war on each other, and the more democratic government, the less its foreign and domestic violence, AND DEMOCIDE. And fourth, the democratic peace and the fostering of democracies worldwide is now the core organizing principle of American foreign policy.

Already, the growth in the number of democracies has decreased the amount of international war and violence (see my, “Democracies Increase and Ipso Facto, World Violence Declines,” “Democracies Up, Violence Down Again, Media Still Blind”). And this will continue. Eventually, at some point in the future, virtually the whole world will be democratic. Then, perhaps, in the presence of the world’s major presidents, and prime ministers, the President of the Global Alliance of Democracies can uncover a statue of Irene, the Greek Goddess of peace, in Geneva, with these words on its base:

“Now, Never Again”

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Link of Note

”Ending Slavery” (2/12/05) By Thomas Sowell

To me the most staggering thing about the long history of slavery — which has encompassed the entire world and every race in it — is that nowhere before the 18th century was there any serious question raised about whether slavery was right or wrong. In the late 18th century, that question arose in Western civilization, but nowhere else.

It seems so obvious today that, as Lincoln said, if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong. But no country anywhere believed that three centuries ago.

Many pessimists feel about ending democide as humanists in the 16th and 17th centuries felt about ending slavery. It always has been and always will be. Moreover, while we now see democide as horrible, a black mark on humanity, and what must be stopped, like slavery, this is only a modern view. Historically, democide has been accepted as an inevitable aspect of war, and a necessity of governance.

Sowell’s article is a good reminder of how we once viewed slavery, and how what we once thought was as natural to society as a division of labor, was virtually eliminated in a century.

Genocide Versus Democide

[February 4, 2005] I want to comment on the UN report denying genocide in Darfur. But, first I want to clarify the difference between genocide and democide. Often in this blog I use the latter term democide for murder by government, as do some of my links. But the more popular term is genocide, as in the aforementioned UN report.

What are the differences and similarities between democide and genocide? As defined, elaborated, and qualified in my Death By Government). Democide is any murder by officials acting under the authority of the central government. That is, they act according to explicit or implicit government policy or with the implicit or explicit approval of the highest officials. Such was the burying alive of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers, the shooting of hostages by German soldiers, or the starving to death of Ukrainians by communist cadre.

Genocide, however, is a confused and confusing concept. It may or may not include government murder, refer to wholly or partially eliminating some group, or involve psychological damage. If it includes government murder, it may mean all such murder or just some. Boiling all this down, genocide can have three different meanings (on this, see my encyclopedia entry here).

One meaning is that defined by international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This makes genocide a punishable crime under international law, and defines it as:

any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Note that only the first clause includes outright killing, while the other clauses cover non-killing ways of eliminating a group. I will call this definition the legal meaning of genocide, since it is now part of international law.

Regardless of this definition and doubtlessly influenced by the Holocaust, ordinary usage and that by students of genocide have tended to wholly equate it with the murder and only the murder by government of people because of their nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion. This equating of genocide with the killing of people because of their indelible group membership I will label the common meaning of genocide.

What about government murdering people for other reasons than their indelible group membership? What about government organized death squads eliminating communist sympathizers, simply fulfilling a government death quota (as in the Soviet Union under Stalin), or the murder of those who criticized government policy? None of such murders are genocide according the legal and common meanings. To cover such murders, some students of genocide have stretched its meaning to include all government murder, regardless of group identity. This may be aptly named the generalized meaning of genocide. In this meaning, genocide = democide.

As obvious, the problem with the generalized meaning of genocide is that to fill one void it creates another. For if genocide refers to all government murder, what are we to call the murder of people because of their nationality, race, ethnicity, or religion? It is precisely because of this conceptual problem that the concept of democide is useful.

For understanding and research, the legal view of genocide is too complex and subsumes behavior too different in kind. I argue, therefore, that genocide should ordinarily be understood as the government murder of people because of their indelible group membership (let the international lawyers struggle with the legal meaning), and democide as any murder by government, including this form of genocide.

This understood, governments murdered about 170,000,000 people in the last century, 1900-1987. Around 38,000,000 of that was genocide. For what governments committed what and when, see Tables 16A.1 of my Statistics of Democide (link here).

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Link of Note

”20th Century Democide” By R.J. Rummel

A narrative and statistical overview.

Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely . . . . The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.

The EMP Threat

[First published June 27, 2005] During the Cold War, I was intensely focused on the Soviet -American nuclear balance and our deterrence strategies versus a possible Soviet first strike capability. I’ve carried over to our time this focus on city attacks, almost completely forgetting about a fear that a Sovieet EMP nuclear attack was a major danger. I should not have, for now in this era of rogue nuclear states, an EMP attack is the most likely and dangerous, since it requires just one weapon and little accuracy.

On exploding, a nuclear weapon produces a blast of x-and gamma-rays that if triggered high above the United States would devastate the whole country’s infrastructure, disabling power grids, computers, microchips, electronic and electrical systems of information, including cell phones, and components of airplanes, and cars. For an important article on this, read Frank J. Gaffney’s “EMP: America’s Achilles’ Heel “. He is President of the Center for Security Policy and former assistant secretary of defense for international security policy. He says:

The emerging threat environment, characterized by a wide spectrum of actors that include near-peers, established nuclear powers, rogue nations, sub-national groups, and terrorist organizations that either now have access to nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles or may have such access over the next 15 years, have combined to raise the risk of EMP attack and adverse consequences on the U.S. to a level that is not acceptable.

Worse yet, the [EMP Threat] Commission observed that “some potential sources of EMP threats are difficult to deter.” This is particularly true of “terrorist groups that have no state identity, have only one or a few weapons, and are motivated to attack the U.S. without regard for their own safety.” The same might be said of rogue states, such as North Korea and Iran. They “may also be developing the capability to pose an EMP threat to the United States, and may also be unpredictable and difficult to deter.” Indeed, professionals associated with the former Soviet nuclear weapons complex are said to have told the Commission that some of their ex-colleagues who worked on advanced nuclear weaponry programs for the USSR are now working in North Korea.

Even more troubling, the Iranian military has reportedly tested its Shahab-3 medium-range ballistic missile in a manner consistent with an EMP attack scenario. The launches are said to have taken place from aboard a ship—an approach that would enable even short-range missiles to be employed in a strike against “the Great Satan.” Ship-launched ballistic missiles have another advantage: The “return address” of the attacker may not be confidently fixed, especially if the missile is a generic Scud-type weapon available in many arsenals around the world. As just one example, in December 2002, North Korea got away with delivering twelve such missiles to Osama bin Laden’s native Yemen. And Al Qaeda is estimated to have a score or more of sea-going vessels, any of which could readily be fitted with a Scud launcher and could try to steam undetected within range of our shores.

Given how one nuclear weapon exploded high above the United States would be a catastrophe as well as disable our ability to respond to the attack, this puts North Korean and Iranian nuclear developments in a new and more dangerous light.

Link of Note

“Will Bush’s Idealism Lead U.S. To Lose ‘War With Islam’?” (6/7/05) Book Review by Mort Kondracke

Kondracke says:

It certainly is no summer beach read, but you’ll be edified – and lots of people will be angered – by Robert Merry’s new book, “Sands of Empire,” a rich and deep critique of President Bush’s alleged “Crusader State” foreign policy.

I think that Merry, president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, is far too pessimistic in saying that Bush is leading the country toward “calamity” by pursuing a policy of “humanitarian imperialism.” But Merry not only argues his case forcefully, he also bases it on intellectual history dating to the 17th century.

Colleague says: The book — Robert Merry — Sand of Empire — argues that Bush is going to undermine the US because he is in the tradition of utopian idealists who try to impose values, which as any good conservative can tell you, can’t be done…

Kondracke does the review, and notes the author has a core view centered on two schools of history: Progress vs. Cycles. Bush is a Progress guy, while “reality” is more Cycles (as with Huntington)….

The book seems most flawed in its apparent utter lack of understanding about democracy — that democracy is not an imposition of values, but the very antithesis. In fact, democracy is the only form of government that is explicitly anti-utopian: there is no state imposition of values; rather the state is a mechanism by which people can work out the inherent conflicts about values, peacefully.

Why can’t these otherwise bright people remember basic civics-govt 101 lessons? Maybe because they never really learned them. Maybe because the book is really a front for the more important agenda: hate – defeat Bush. Maybe because even though the author of the book is the publisher of Congressional Quarterly, he can’t see what is in front of him: peaceful resolution of an endless series of conflicts, without utopian value impositions by the state. Maybe because the guy is really not too bright after all….

Graphical experiments on visalizing democide

Democide Vs. Other Causes of Death

[First published February 1, 2005] A question I often get is how all the murder committed by governments, virtually all by criminal dictatorships (sorry, that was redundant—I need only say dictatorships) compares to other causes of death, such as war and diseases. So, below I present such a comparison chart for the world’s average annual democide rate 1900-1987 to the world’s annual death rate from other causes (this is one of a number of my attempts to visualize the world’s democide toll— link here).

Note that governments murdered more people than all deaths combined due to traffic accidents, war, homicide, and alcohol.

The total murdered by governments over 1900-1987 was 170,000,000; a less systematic update of the toll brings it to 174,000,000 for 1900-1999. [I have had to update this democide to 262,00,000] Shocking, yes? Now, think about how little is said about democide in textbooks and the media. Even more astounding, isn’t it?

For a chapter long dissection of the meaning and definition of democide, see this link.

And so, democide goes on in North Korea, Sudan, the Congo, China, Laos, Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and dozens and dozens of other dictatorships, mainly not some big episode of murder that would make the news, but as the day-by-day operation of government agencies. In other words, murder is a normal daily operation of these thugdoms.

How do we account for this continuing carnage? In these post-Cold War years, it’s the bloody success of immoral noninterventionism and obsolete realpolitiks.. Stability trumps stopping the murderous thugs, you know.

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Link of Note

”Congo death toll up to 3.8m” (12/10/204) Guardian Unlimited Special Report

“Six years of conflict in Congo have claimed 3.8 million lives – half of them children – with most victims killed by disease and famine in the still largely cut-off east, the International Rescue Committee said yesterday.

“More than 31,000 civilians die each month as a result of the conflict despite peace deals, the group said, citing mortality surveys prepared with the aid of on-site medical teams. The association has for years produced the most widely used estimate of deaths in the country.”

Much of this is democide. And it goes on. And on. And on.

Idealism vs. Realism

[First published January 24, 2005] Enough time has gone by since president Bush’s inauguration speech that called for fostering democracy everywhere to appreciate the major media’s reaction, including commentators and foreign policy experts. One of the most frequently used characterizations is that the speech was idealistic: John F. Harris writes in The Washington Post: “The immediate question, presidential scholars and foreign policy experts say, is the same in Washington as it is in other capitals around the world: What to make of such idealistic and uncompromising language from an incumbent president? (link here) As used currently, “idealistic” is what one says about an idea while rolling one’s eyes skyward. It means, in effect, that one has a good heart, good intentions, but is naïve or simplistic about the real world.

A little history. After World War I, there was a concerted effort among the nations to create a lasting peace such that another world war like that would never happen again. The best way of doing this was thought to be through international organizations like the League of Nations that would serve as a forum for negotiation of international differences, act to prevent the escalation of conflict to violence, and even sanction aggression. Democracies also thought that an emphasis on international law, and especially disarmament treaties would also serve the peace. It all failed, profoundly, with the outbreak of the SinoJapanese war in 1937, and Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939.

After World War II, nations created the United Nations in a way they believed avoided the mistakes of the League of Nations, and emphasized collective security. However, a new school of thought arose among students of international relations and specialists in foreign relations, which still dominates thinking today about national security and peace. And that is, peace is best assured by a balancing of power between actual and potential adversaries, and good diplomacy. This is called realpolitik. Practitioners of this art—called realists—emphasize real assessments of other nation’s capabilities and intentions, and what can be done in practical terms to improve the balance of power, and maintain stable international relations.

One of the fantastic applications of this was during the 1960s when the United States actually held back developing its nuclear capability, such as furthering the accuracy of its ICBMs, to let the Soviets catch up. Then, the idea was, we would have a balance of power (of terror), and better stability in Soviet-American relations. This was realism at work.

Now, the bete noir of the realist is the idealist. The idealist is a nice fellow, but unrealistic about the real world. The idealist has all these marvelous ideas and plans, these solutions to war, these beliefs about the natural good behavior of states, the belief in democracy, but you know, he hasn’t yet been mugged by reality.

Today, the major intellectual conflict is not between libertarians and Bushites, or what I will now call freedomists, on democracy and peace. The libertarians simply don’t count. Both realists and freedomists see them as irrelevant, a cult of isolationists. Nor are the leftists in the ring. They are seen as, you know . . . leftists. They will side with anyone they see as anti-American. The realists see the freedomist’s emphasis on democracy as unrealistic and dangerous, as creating an unstable world in which more war may be the outcome, and our national interests endangered. The freedomist see the realist as adhering to dogma that no longer applies to the new post-Cold War world, and that fostering freedom is the best way to protect the nation in the long run, and promote a peaceful world.

Most of the media people and commentators have been educated into realism—it is the dominant set of ideas in political science and international relations—and to be suspicious of any highflying proposals. They naturally see the call for ending tyranny as idealistic. Thus when you read that Bush is idealistic, understand that this is a complement with the back of the hand.

However, the most thorough research that any idea in international relations has ever received shows that the realistic one is Bush and his forward Strategy of Freedom, and that the realists if they have their way, will not free us for the historical cycle of war and peace. Realism, which has been practiced in Europe since 1648 and the creation of the modern state system and up until all Europe became democratic and unified, was in practice nothing but war by other means until the next round of war.

Realists much come to understand. The real realists are the so-called idealists, and the real idealists are the realists. You know, the realists have their heart in the right place, but . . . (eyes rolling skyward). In other words, get real.

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Link of Note

”Debate on the ‘Democratic Peace’—A Review” (3/3/04) By Steven Geoffrey Gieseler

Introduction by AmericanDeplomacy.org: “Democracies do not make war on each other, and the more democratic, the less violent nations are in general.’ This theory of war avoidance is the subject of much peace literature published in recent years. The author provides an overview of the field and addresses the question of its continued validity in light of the war in Iraq.”

Gieseler’s conclusion is that, “There will always be honest and well-meaning scholars, indifferent moral relativists, and self-interested tyrants who will for different reasons dismiss the idea that democracy is inherently just and peaceful. Adherents to the ‘Democratic Peace’ in whatever future incarnation it might take must not give the floor, so to speak, but dictate the terms of the debate.”

So, this blog.

It’s Only Mass Murder, Not Like A Disaster

Reuters (link here)—“The global death toll from the Asian tsunami shot above 226,000 Wednesday after Indonesia’s Health Ministry confirmed the deaths of tens of thousands of people previously listed as missing.. . . The Staggering death count . . . .

”Darfur Mortality Update: January 18, 2005” by Eric Reeves— “[E]vidence strongly suggests that total mortality in the Darfur region of western Sudan now exceeds 400,000 human beings since the outbreak of sustained conflict in February 2003. In other words, human destruction is more than twice that of the recent tsunami—and has now surpassed the half-way mark for the most commonly cited total for deaths in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994 (800,000).
“Moreover, as international humanitarian aid continues to stream abundantly toward the various areas devastated by the tsunami, the threat of massive secondary death from health-related causes has begun to diminish. By contrast, in Darfur the current mortality rate from genocide by attrition is approximately 35,000 per month and poised to grow rapidly. . . .
“Simply to juxtapose these two human catastrophes is to raise implicitly a series of deeply troubling questions about the priorities of news coverage, the commitments of the international political community, the responsibilities of humanitarian organizations, and the nature of our response to distant human suffering and destruction.”

Yes, what about Sudan? In 1989, Lt. General Umar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir and the Arab-led Sudanese People’s Armed Forces overthrew the democratic government in power at that time and imposed strict Muslim law and faith on the whole country. The South had a protected and special constitutional status under the democratic government, but with its overthrow and especially with the effort of the new regime to impose Muslim law throughout the country, the South revolted and a bloody civil war resulted with the thug regime murdering tens of thousands, outright enslvement, widespread rape, and refugees in the hundreds of thousands, with an overall death toll of possibly 2,000,000 people.

Because they live under a fundamentalist Muslim regime, even northern Sudanese far from the civil war or Darfur enjoy no human rights. For example, the government harasses and monitors women for correct dress, forbidding even slacks. Women who dare to defy the law risk arrest, conviction by an Islamic court of immoral dressing, and flogging, as recently happened to nine women students. Women also cannot hold any public office that would give them authority over Muslim men, nor can they marry a non-Muslim.
All must accept the Muslim faith. To further religious rule, the government appoints only Muslims to the judiciary. Police can arrest and imprison any commoner for up to six months without trial, and while detained, suspects can expect officials to torture them as a matter of course. Worst of all, a Muslim dare not convert to another religion, for the punishment for doing so is death.

But, of course, Sudan is a member in good standing of the international community (you know, the “community” we must consult and get approval from), the United Nations, and the UN Human Rights Commission.

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Link of Note

” Abu Gharib: Inexplicable Arab Silence” (5/4/04)

By Linda S. Heard

This journalist was asking why there is not more outrage in the Arab world over . . . not what Sudan was doing to its people, not the mass murder, slavery, and deaths . . . but, the way Abu Gharib prisoners were treated by American guards. But then, it was the Arabnews.com that published this piece.

Blog Republication Completed

I have now republished all the old blogs that were destroyed. See the introductory explanation ”Why A New “Democratic Peace” Blog?”. The list of all destroyed blogs is in the Universal Archive. Republished ones are in green and linked.

Dated blogs or those irrelevant to current events have not been republished. If you wish to see any of them here, please email me (Rummel at Hawaii.edu) with the title .

I also have another blog ”A Freedomists View” that deals with the international and domestic perils to freedom.

I will add to this Democratic Peace Blog if I have something more to say about a democratic peace foreign policy and the progress of democracy in the world. Stay tuned.

Progress in Global Democracy

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We now have a clear enough understanding of the Obama foreign policy so that I can critique it from the perspective of the democratic peace. To do so, I must return to the question of global democracy, and the democratic peace. As you should know if you had followed my democratic peace blog (an outline of the content is here), I believe that by theory and its historical tests, democracy is a road to global peace and human security. Democracies have not made war on each other; have minimal domestic violence; commit the least democide by far. Democracies have no famines. All this may shock some of you, but see the proof on my website and the above mentioned democratic peace blog.

However, this theory and its tests have been applied generally to previous centuries and were done a decade ago by many researchers (see the bibliography of this research here.). More recent research has produced arguments calling the democratic peace wrong or a myth. I shall go over all this and report on it here and on the democratic peace blog.

For now, I just want to link you to the best sites on the progress of democracy and globalization. One to check is Freedom House. It tracks and evaluates political changes in all countries, and rates each country as free (liberal democracies), partially free (which include electoral democracies), or not free. Its count for liberal and electoral democracies in 2008 (labeled for 2009, and mapped above) is 119. Of these, 89 are free—liberal democracies. This exceeds the critical number of democracies required to reduce violence and war in the world .

For ten years now there has been among the democracies, a top level World Movement for Democracy that includes democratic, activists, practitioners, academics, policy makers, and funders. It has biennial global assemblies of all these members, the last held in Kyiv, Ukraine. Most important, its major purpose is the promotion of democracy. It has its own website, and also a monthly DemocracyNews.

Finally, the most significant journal in this area is the Journal of Democracy. It says of itself:

The Journal of Democracy is far and away the most important forum for current debates about the nature and spread of liberal democracy around the world. It is an indispensable tool for anybody interested in comparative politics or international relations. A model for how to present serious intellectual content in a clear and accessible way, a standing rebuke to both the slop that often passes for political journalism and the irrelevant gibberish that often passes for social science.

Was The Democratic Peace Killed–Part I, Bibliographies

Before the election of Barack Obama, much was written about the democratic peace, pro and con. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush based their foreign policies on it—as one of its pillars for Clinton, and as the core of Bush’s policy. But now, you hear almost nothing of it. In this and in subsequent blogs, I will try to determine what has happened to the democratic peace.

First, what is the democratic peace? There are the narrow and broad versions. The narrow one, being most well known and researched, simply says that democracies have never made war on each other. This is the most scholarly and scientifically researched idea of international relations, and as a result many students of the field now consider it a political law of the international system. Therefore, promoting democracy in the world is a way to peace, which Bush and Secretary Rice said many times.

The broad version includes the narrow and adds that democracies have the least internal violence and almost no domestic democide. Thus, by fostering human security, democracies serve as a way to peace and human betterment. There is also much research on this version, although discussants of the democratic peace usually have the narrow one in mind.

What are my sources for this? I have two bibliographies of democratic peace research and commentary, one for those published <A HREF=”http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/BIBLIO.HTML”>before 2000</A>, and the other, just completed, <A HREF=”http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.BIBLIO.2009.HTM”>2000 and after</A>. My interest is in the latter, since this will help answer the question about the current status of the democratic peace. To those to whom the democratic peace is an extraordinary idea, and in terms of peace, an unbelievable, idealist one, the earlier bibliography will be very useful. It presents the birth, replication, and early attempts to falsify the idea. Moreover, see my <A HREF=”http://democraticpeace.wordpress.com/”>Democratic Peace Blog</A>, which includes many <A HREF=”http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/Z.BLOG.ARCHIVE.HTM”>analyses of the studies listed in this bibliography.</A>

On balance, the bibliographies show that despite the negative critiques, attempts to falsify it, and assertions about negative cases, the democratic peace still provides a well researched and verified solution to war, democide, domestic violence, and human insecurity.

In Part II on the democratic peace, I will treat the idea within a foreign policy framework (such as Obama’s). The death of this solution to war and human security then will be easier to understand.

Was The Democratic Peace Killed–Part II, International Relations

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To understand alternative foreign policies and that of the democratic peace requires understanding their context, which is international relations, also known as world politics, transnational relations, global society. What is the essence of this arena of empires, international organizations, states, nations, governments, groups and individuals –this sphere of diplomacy and war, treaties and alliances, aid and trade, migration and tourists?

To understand this greatest human theater, we must recognize first that international relations compose our largest society. As a society (as do all societies), it has two faces. One is of conflict, change, a struggle and dialectic of power. The other is of an equilibrium in international norms and structures which describe, at any one time, this society. Indeed, without a conflict view of international society, the normal state of affairs is stability, of functions maintaining the society and adjusting states to it. Indeed, within this snapshot view, international conflict appears deviant — an aberration. Consensus and equilibrium rather than conflict would be the defining characteristics of this society.

International society also can be seen as changing configurations of power and balancing. International states continuously enter into new power balances, behaving within existing structures of expectations undergirded by previous balances. These structures exist through time and can become increasingly crystallized, and develop a rule-inertia, which is the sociological counterpart of habit. Some structures of expectations (like the UN Charter) formalize law norms, which define the membership in the structure, the rights and obligations of members, and authoritative roles (positions).

International society is then a complex of informal (one should not lie or aggress) and formal expectations (treaties), involving both general social norms and the official law. It has a defined membership (states), law norms delimiting rights (sovereignty) and obligations (as defined in system wide multilateral treaties, like the UN Charter), and authoritative roles (the Secretary-General of the United Nations; the five permanent members of the Security Council).

Therefore, international relations form an exchange society. It is dominated by bargaining power, which involves international trade, treaties, agreements, tourist and student movements, migration, technical aid, capital flows, exchange rates, and so on. All these activities usually manifest some individual, group, or state giving up something they value for something else they want more.

This does not deny the role of coercion in international society, as in Obama’s demand that Israel freeze its expansion of settlements in the disputed West Bank or else (unspecified), or American use of sanctions to punish North Korea for testing potential nuclear missiles and Iran for continuing development of nuclear weapons,

In this international exchange society, states are generally free to pursue their own interests; social behavior is normally cooperative and contractual. Rewards and promises are the basis of the society. Treaties, commercial contracts, and written agreements provide its explicit framework.

This international society is governed by the United Nations, a libertarian government. The secretary General is its executive, and the General Assembly and Security Council, its lower and upper legislative bodies. The International Court of Justice is its judiciary; and the various international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Meteorological Organization, are its administrative structure. Sanctions are applied, as when the Security Council voted an embargo on Iraq due to its support for terrorism and WMDs. The UN may even support a major war as it did to defend South Korea from North Koreans aggression in 1950. Nonetheless, states can ignore UN resolutions. By international law, states are guaranteed the rights of sovereignty, independence, and equality. These rights take precedence over this world government.

International relations is therefore a confederation, the weakest form of federation, in which each constituent-member state retains sovereignty and a monopoly of force is denied the central government. Its functions are janitorial, meeting international crises when called upon by states; resolving international conflicts when requested; providing judicial judgments upon appeal; and above all, through the network of international governmental and non- governmental organizations, providing an administrative structure for international transactions among states, groups, and individuals.

In essence, international relations is an exchange society with a libertarian political system. No government monopolizes force, no empire encompasses all of international relations.

Contrary to the intuition of many, international violence does not distinguish international relations. It is more peaceful than many states. Some states and those areas under their control are governed by terror and repression, where arrests, beatings, torture, and possibly death at the hands of the government are a constant threat. Such was the case under Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao. In the last century, states murdered about 262,000,000 people, while international and domestic wars accounted for about 55,000,000 war-dead.

Many believe international relations to be a state of nature: the relations between states are seen as though states were so many people living in a condition of anarchy, where each preys on the other and life is brutish and short. Each state is presumed to be insecure, all in a state of war, violence is the norm, and individual morality is alien to that of states. Coercive power is therefore supposed the regulator of international relations and diplomacy and war, its two faces. And therefore, a world government that monopolizes force, a global leviathan, is thought necessary to provide security and prevent violence. Many do not recognize that this state of nature is a fiction.

Just consider relations among Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland where there is simply no expectation of or disposition to violence. They are democracies. Problems arise in their relations, conflicts do occur, but none prepares for or entertains the possibility of violence against the other. They benefit, as do other democracies, from the democratic peace.

Indeed, the expectation of and disposition to violence between states is limited to very few bilateral relations, all involving nondemocracies, the most important of which today are the United States versus separately Iran, North Korea, and Russia; North versus South Korea; India versus Pakistan; Greece versus Turkey; Israel versus her neighbors and Iran; and Ethiopia versus Somalia. In a world of over 8,000 pairs of states, this propensity to violence is remarkably limited. In fact, because of the greater extent of transactions between nations and their contractual relations, international relations could better be characterized as a state of peace. This, especially in contrast to what goes on in many states.

Now, clearly, statesmen find the future essentially chaotic and unpredictable. They believe themselves governed by the “chain of circumstance.” But as with violence, this unpredictability covers only certain relations for particular times. Much of international relations comprise clear expectations, high predictability, strong patterns. Conditions and patterns of trade, tourist regulations and flows, communications and transportation, diplomatic rules and principles, alliances and even the behavior that would cause a war, are known. We could hardly travel to another country or interact were it otherwise. Or does anyone doubt that at least a local war is most likely if the U.S. bombs Iran’s growing nuclear capacity?

International relations are no more chaotic than affairs within states. They are not anarchic. They are not normless, ruleless, nor lawless. They are not a state of war and violence is not the norm. States are not universally insecure. Coercion is not the rule. Rather, international relations comprise a global society and world culture with a limited government. Relations are generally harmonious, contractual. Bargaining power dominates. Reciprocity is the rule. Antagonism, conflicts, and violence exist, but generally less in intensity than within many states. Yes, states conflict, but it is astonishing that they do not conflict more often and more violently than they do.

In summary, in essence, international relations is an exchange society based mainly on bargaining power, not coercion or force, with a limited, libertarian world government.

Was The Democratic Peace Killed?–Part III, Foreign Policies

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I want to compare the democratic peace foreign policies of Presidents G.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to that of President Obama, which is uniquely his. I am not interested in particular policies or actions, but rather in specifying the paradigm underlying these policies, its operating procedures, and its world view.

In the last two centuries, Europe and the United States have gone through three foreign policy paradigms. Each was a measured way to keep the peace and deal with crises and threats to the major Powers that could lead to war. After the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, European Powers met in numerous conferences and congresses, in addition to consulting with each other, to first establish a new status quo, and subsequently to settle their issues (colonialism, freedom of the seas, navigation, new inventions, and the balance of world power). This is the jaw-jaw diplomacy paradigm. Possible antagonists should talk to each other to settle their differences. Thus, they had conferences on sanitary matters, statistics, maritime issues, free navigation of the Scheld, weights and measures, marine signaling, monetary questions, telegraphic signaling, metric system, railroad transportation, the slave trade, and so on.

When World War I bloodied Europe and reached into remote corners of the world, with nine thousand combat dead, it destroyed any intellectual pretentions that the meeting and talking paradigm led to a stable peace. In the global wreckage, even before the war was over, a new paradigm emerged. Irregular diplomatic gatherings were not enough. There must be a permanent international organization involving all nations and meeting regularly to deal with international issues and conflicts, help settle them, and above all, prevent violence — a League of Nations. Also, it seemed, international law must be refined and developed further to establish the universal rules of international relations and the use and morality of power. Major Powers must pursue disarmament through all means. And diplomacy has to be structured and directed through international organizations and in accord with international law. The goal was a lasting peace.

So, after the war the victors, excepting the U.S., formed the League of Nations. They paid much attention to formulating the international law of war and peace, and creating functional international organizations to meet general international needs. Disarmament conferences met and established the proper or proportional arms permitted the major powers. All this was just the right process to achieve permanent peace, or peace in our time. That intellectual illusion – the political idealist paradigm of international organizations, law, and disarmament — was blown apart by the bombs and 15 million combat dead of World War II.
Then a new paradigm emerged, a rigorous and systematic version of what has existed throughout the history of relationships between independent groups, whether tribes, city-states, or nation-states. This was the emphasis on power as the moderator of these relations, and on the balance of power as the critical instrument for diplomacy to work with. To see how old this idea is, read Thucydides’ History of The Peloponnesian War (perhaps published shortly after 411 B.C.). But after World War II the old idea of power and its balancing was refurbished and systematized in a paradigm called political realism. The primary source of this was the writings of Hans Morgenthau on international relations theory.
His book Politics Among Nations in 1948 was a revelation to many and a basic textbook among diplomats and students (it was mine). It was a paradigm change. Morgenthau claimed that objective laws govern international politics. At the heart, a nation’s interests are defined by power. The realistic diplomat must think in terms of power—of other nations alone or in combination, and how such power affects one’s own nation. With that in view, power must be balanced and diplomacy is the way to do so and to keep the peace. This is now the major paradigm of the American foreign policy establishment, but not necessarily Barack Obama’s.
How then does the democratic peace fit in? It is an opposing paradigm, seen as a return to idealism by the realists and in conflict with their view of foreign policy. More on this in Part IV.

Was The Democratic Peace Killed—Part IV, Prs. Clinton’s Foreign Policy

To characterize Obama’s foreign policy, I must first examine those Clinton and G. W. Bush policies which he has discarded. Obama’s policy is new and revolutionary in philosophy and in details, best seen in comparison and contrast to what has gone before.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the demise of the Soviet Union (1991) during President George H. W. Bush’s Administration, made obsolete our half century old grand strategy of Containment (containing communism in its present borders). But what was to replace it? G.H.W. Bush provided no clear answer. Rather than articulating a new grand strategy of foreign policy, he preferred to follow several foreign policy principles. These were the traditional ones of collective security and defense, multilateralism (working with our friends and allies to achieve a common goal), opposing aggression, and protecting global oil sources from monopolization by an aggressive dictator. All these were involved in the 1992 Gulf War—the American led effort to defeat Iraq’s invasion and occupation of Kuwait and its oil fields. Another foreign policy principle was that of nonproliferation which, to this day, underlies American pressure on North Korea to open its nuclear facilities to international inspection.
But relevantly here, in the last years of this Bush Administration high officials were making comments clearly showing appreciation of the relationship between democracy, international cooperation, and peace. Promoting democracy was an operating principle. Thus, we saw a variety of American attempts to help democratization in Eastern Europe and especially, in reborn Russia as well as in Latin America. Bush clearly linked aid for Russia to democratic peace. Still, while fundamentally realist in policy, this Bush Administration articulated no overall strategy within which these ideas had more than an ad hoc life. Perhaps it is unfair to demand one, for this, after all, was the Administration that saw and was partially responsible for negotiating the end of the Cold War. Clearly, however, they were moving toward a general policy of democratic peace, and might have articulated one if they had won a second term. But it was left to Bush’s successor, President William Clinton, to finally conceptualize such a policy.

From day one, the Clinton Administration had a firm overall foreign policy goal of democratization—to help other nations become democratic and to help solidify the newly democratic ones. The reason was a belief in the democratic peace. Clinton himself was aware that democracies do not make war on each other. In one of his speeches during the 1992 election campaign he said, “Democratic countries do not go to war with one another. They don’t sponsor terrorism or threaten one another with weapons of mass destruction.” As President he expanded on this, as in his 1994 address to the UN General Assembly, “Democracies, after all, are more likely to be stable, less likely to wage war. They strengthen civil society. They can provide people with the economic and political opportunities to build their futures in their own homes, not to flee their borders.” The foreign policy consequence of this view was made plain in his 1994 State of the Union address: “the best strategy to ensure our security and to build a durable peace is to support the advance of democracy elsewhere.” It was the democratic peace.

This idea was a foreign policy principle shared by virtually all top officials in his administration. In foreign policy speech after speech, the basic understanding that democracies do not make war on each other was reiterated and the cooperative nature of democracies underlined. From this belief flowed a doctrine of democratization, called a guiding concept of (democratic) enlargement.

Moreover, this overall foreign policy goal was being implemented through a variety of organizations, many of which were specifically created during the Cold War to further democracy and some of which have changed their fundamental policies to put democratization front and center. Such have been the Agency for International Development (AID), the US Information Agency, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute of International Affairs, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the Free Trade Union Institute.

To foster democracy, such agencies and organizations provided economic aid, helped to establish sound constitutions and the rule of law. They worked to improve civil-military relationships and especially the subordination of the military to elected civilian authorities; strengthen and democratize local governments, give decision and rule making and material aid (like computers) to elected legislatures. They furthered an independent and neutral judiciary and politically neutral police; improve the fairness, openness, credibility, and effectiveness of elections; and further civil and political rights and the rights of women and minorities, and much more.

As required by Section 603 of the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, in July 1994 Clinton submitted his report elaborating A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement. This not only laid out his new national security strategy but also his foreign policy. In the signed preface the President defines the three goals of this strategy as

• To credibly sustain our security with military forces that are ready to fight.

• To bolster America’s economic revitalization.

• To promote democracy abroad.

He believed

that our goals of enhancing our security, bolstering our economic prosperity, and promoting democracy are mutually supportive. Secure nations are more likely to support free trade and maintain democratic structures. Nations with growing economies and strong trade ties are more likely to feel secure and to work toward freedom. And democratic states are less likely to threaten our interests and more likely to cooperate with the U.S. to meet security threats and promote sustainable development.

So, Clinton’s foreign policy did not give up a basic concern for power and attention to diplomacy. It departed from realism in foreign policy in recognizing the importance of whether a nation’s regime is democratic. The democratic peace, although one of three goals, was a major guide to the Clinton foreign policy.