[Dean's World] Rudy Rummel: WHAT IS THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE AND WHY PURSUE IT?

[notify at powerblogs.com]

Posted by Rudy Rummel:
WHAT IS THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE AND WHY PURSUE IT?
http://www.deanesmay.com/posts/1143833112.shtml


   Research on the democratic peace, the idea that democracies do not
   make war on each other, has become a dominant finding in the field of
   international relations.

   What is the democratic peace? In the literature on or referring to the
   democratic peace, this means the idea or fact that democracies do not
   (or virtually never) make war on each other. I will call this the war
   version.

   Although this understanding of the democratic peace is extremely
   important--after all, it implies the end of war--I believe that
   focusing only on this version is fundamentally misleading. It is as
   though we had scientifically established that a drug would generally
   cure or minimize all cancer, while only focusing the drug on lung
   cancer in our medical advice.

   This analogy is not strained, for democracies have not only not made
   war on each other, but they also have, by far, the least foreign
   violence, domestic collective violence, and democide (a much greater
   killer than war by several orders of magnitude). That is, democracy,
   or to be more precise, democratic freedom is a general cure for
   political or collective violence of any kind--it is a method of
   nonviolence. This is truly a democratic peace. I call this
   understanding of the democratic peace, which is supported by the
   theory, evidence, and analyses on my web site at
   www.hawaii.edu/powerkills, the general version.

   To be clear, then:

   The War Version of the Democratic Peace is that:

     democratically free countries do not or virtually never make war on
     each other.

   The General Version of the Democratic Peace is that:

     (1) Democracy is a general method of nonviolence. Democracies:

     =E2=A2 Do not make war on each other; =E2=A2 minimize the severity of
     foreign violence and war; =E2=A2 minimize domestic (collective)
     violence; =E2=A2 don=E2t murder their own people.

     (2) And power kills. Totalitarian regimes (the power opposite of
     democracies):

     =E2=A2 make war on each other; =E2=A2 have the most severe foreign vio=
lence
     and war =E2=A2 have the most severe domestic (collective) violence =E2=
=A2
     murder their own people.

   Most of the world's people have been robbed of their freedom by one
   dictatorship or another. Some, like the regimes of Burma, Cuba, Libya,
   North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, and Turkmenistan, are more
   than just dictatorships. Their tyrannical dictators are slave masters
   ruling their people by the their slightest whims and desires and those
   of their henchmen. These poor people live in constant fear for
   themselves and their loved ones. And they are murdered by hundreds of
   millions. In the last century alone 272,000,000 of them were shot,
   burned, stabbed, tortured, beaten, starved to death, blasted to death,
   buried alive, or whatever other ways of murdering their slaves these
   thugs could imagine. This horrific and evil toll of bodies could
   head-to-toll circle the earth over ten times. It as though a
   catastrophic nuclear war had happened, but its mountain of deaths
   spread over each day of the last century.

   The existence of these ruling thugs creates an unbridgeable chasm in
   the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term
   "government," and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their
   guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and
   mass famines. On the other side are democratic countries where people
   are free, secure, and need never fear mass impoverishment, death at
   the hands of government agents, and killing famine.

   This chasm between life and death, security and fear, on the same
   planet and at the same time, must no longer be tolerated.
   Dictatorships, even if benign, are by their very existence a crime
   against humanity, and must be eliminated peacefully, if possible; by
   force if they are murdering their people. However, the intellectuals,
   commentators, analysts, academics, and reporters of the democracies
   have identified power with greatness, thugs with statesmen, and
   propaganda with results; we have let moral and cultural relativism
   silence our outrage, while conceding the moral high ground to the
   utopian dreamers; we have refused to recognize evil as evil; and we
   have ignored the catastrophic human cost of such confusions, and the
   natural and moral right to freedom.

   What is so often ignored is that all people, everywhere, want to be
   free, to exercise their human rights that are theirs by natural and
   international law, and by an implicit social contract. Were this the
   only justification for freedom, it would be sufficient to make
   spreading freedom the ultimate policy.

   But there is more to freedom than this. Much more. It provides the
   most important Moral Goods that humanity can desire. First:

     The more people are free, the greater their human development and
     national wealth. In short, freedom is the way to economic and
     social human security.

   Still, human security involves more than wealth and prosperity. There
   is the security of knowing that one=E2s life and the lives of loved ones
   are safe from deadly famines. Therefore, second:

     Free people never have famines.

   But as important as these Moral Goods are, they do not deal with the
   worst hell to which billions of human beings are still subject --
   torture, rape, beatings, forced labor, genocide, mass murder,
   executions, deportations, political violence, and war. With no human
   rights, these billions live in fear for their lives, and for those of
   their loved ones. There is a third Moral Good of freedom:

     Where people are free, political violence is minimal.

   Where people are not free, as in Burma, Sudan, and North Korea, people
   are only pieces on a playing board for the armed thugs and gangs that
   oppress them, rape them, loot them, exploiting them, and murdering
   them.

   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=E2t
   like them or they are =E2disobedient,=E2 and raping others. And they
   murder their slaves by whim, by hatred, by quota, and sometimes for no
   reason at all. The worst of these gangs are megamurderers with their
   victims reaching into the tens of millions. Such murder is democide,
   and its elimination as one of humanity's plagues is the greatest of
   all Moral Goods.

   Then, fourth:

     The more freedom a people have, the more unlikely their government
     will murder them. Democratically free governments commit no
     democide.

   This huge moral split in the world between governing thugs that murder
   their slaves wholesale, and free people that fear no such personal
   disaster for them or their loved ones, is unconscionable and
   unacceptable. It is time for concerted nonviolent action to eliminate
   these criminal thugs and free their slaves.

   However, there is still one more Moral Good that even more strengthens
   this moral imperative. Finally:

     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. Free people do not make
     war on each other.

   What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost all
   nations to become 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=E2s 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 the
     greatest moral good. And this is freedom.

   The implications of all these Moral Goods of freedom for foreign
   policy and international activism are profound.

     To promote global human security, to do away with famine, mass
     impoverishment, democide, and war, and to minimize internal
     violence, promote freedom.

   Since peace, national security, and national and global welfare are
   the paramount concerns of a democratic nation=E2s foreign policy, its
   overriding goal should be to peacefully promote human rights and
   democratic freedom. This should be the bottom line of international
   negotiations, treaties, foreign aid, and military action (if necessary
   for defense or humanitarian reasons, as in Kosovo, Bosnia,
   Afghanistan, or Iraq). As to defense policy, military planning usually
   is based on assessments of the intentions and capability of others.
   What is clear is that the less free the people of a nation are, the
   more we should beware of the intentions of their rulers. In other
   words, it is not the democracies of the world that we need to defend
   against.

   Moreover, consider what the peace-creating power of freedom means for
   nuclear weapons. Many people are justly worried about the ultimate
   danger to humanity=E2nuclear war. They protest and demonstrate against
   nuclear weapons. Some cross the line into illegal activities, such as
   destroying military property, and risk prison to draw public attention
   to the cataclysmic danger of such weapons. Were these dedicated people
   to spend even half this effort on promoting freedom and human rights
   for the people of the most powerful dictatorships that have or may
   soon have such weapons=E2for instance, China, North Korea, and Iran=E2th=
ey
   would be striking at the root cause of the risk of nuclear war.

   The power of freedom to end war, minimize violence within nations, and
   eradicate genocide and mass murder almost seems magical. It is as
   though we have a single-drug cure for cancer, but in the case of
   freedom, it is all true and well established.

   Our knowledge of the peace-creating and peacemaking effects of freedom
   now gives us a nonviolent way to promote a nonviolent world. The
   ultimate conclusion of all this is:

     Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

   And

     Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence.

                            [BAR.RED.BLACK.GIF]

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References

   1. http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/