Murder by government, of anyone. The word drops the group and the purpose the genocide treaty requires and keeps the seat that does the killing. Its coiner then offered the cure on the axis the word had just stepped off.
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R. J. Rummel made the word from demos, the people, and defined it as the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide and mass murder. Citizens or foreigners. Government taken broadly, to include whoever governs in fact. And murder taken to include deaths from what he called knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life: the camp, the forced march, the deportation, the famine in which the authorities withhold the relief.
His count for the first eighty-eight years of the twentieth century was almost 170,000,000 men, women and children.
The word's subject is the government acting in its authoritative capacity, and it does not require the dead to have been killed for being anything.
[See GENOCIDE · THE ESTABLISHMENT · GOVERNANCE]
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WHERE GENOCIDE SITS INSIDE IT
Genocide is one of democide's three named parts, and the other two are what the 1948 Convention left out.
Politicide is the killing of political groups, which the Convention excluded at the drafting table.
Mass murder is killing that selects no group at all.
And the standard of reckless and depraved disregard reaches the killing that runs on a ledger rather than a purpose: the famine administered by men who believed in the market, the deaths entered as the cost of a policy aimed at something else. The Convention's as such lets that killing answer the charge by naming what it was really after. Democide does not ask.
So democide restores two of the Convention's exclusions. It does not restore the third, and the third is the one Lemkin began with: the imposition of the occupier's pattern on the people who remain, or on the land alone after they are removed. Democide counts deaths. The second phase is built to outlast them, and on the ground where it is completed nobody is left to be counted.
Democide restores what the treaty cut from the killing and nothing of what it cut from the occupation, because it counts bodies, and the second phase leaves none.
[See AN GORTA MOR · CLEARANCE LOGIC · THE LEDGER]
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ONE STEM, TWO ENDINGS
The stem Rummel chose is the one democracy is built on. The people killed and the people ruling: demos with -cide, demos with -kratia.
He drew the conclusion that the stem invites. Power kills, he wrote; absolute power kills absolutely. The more power a regime holds, the more it kills, and the remedy is less of it, held by the people. That is a finding on the axis of more authority against less, and the cure it prescribes is the other pole of the same axis.
His own ledger shows what the axis cannot see. He found the democracies responsible for some democide, and said almost all of it was foreign and in war, the bombed cities of Germany and Japan, with the massacres of the American colonization of the Philippines beside them. His headline count begins in 1900, by which time the continental clearings of the settler democracies were largely behind them, and it counts deaths, which is the one thing the land alone does not produce.
A measure that counts bodies from 1900 onward finds the settler democracies comparatively clean, and the cleanness is the instrument's finding, not the record's.
[See THE PREFIX DECIDES · ANARCHY · THE POLARITY CONFIGURATION · ON BEING COUNTED]
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THE FIGURES
His totals are contested, some of them heavily, and his Soviet figure, among others, sits far above what historians working from the archives opened after 1991 have found. They are not repeated here as findings.
What survives the contest is the definition. It holds the killing to the office and not to the motive, and it does not let the office escape by pleading that it wanted something else. The number can be wrong and the question the word puts can still be the right one: not who was aimed at, but who sat in the chair from which the order, or the withholding, came.
[See THE THREE SEATS · THE NAZIS]
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The treaty asks what the killer meant. The count asks how many. Neither asks what was built where the dead had lived, or who holds it now, and both are paid for by the same people, twice: once in the killing, and again in the instrument that sets the sum.
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