Government Is Not Compassion, Part 1
Indeed, a hellish artifice was invented there, a horse of death, clattering in the finery of divine honors. Indeed, a dying for many was invented there, which praises itself as life: verily, a great service to all preachers of death! ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, on the state1
The
single most damaging error of the modern age is the
misperception of government as an agency of compassion. As
a replacement for the "divine right of kings," this
misperception has, for those in power, been an astonishing
success. For the rest of mankind, it has frequently been a
disaster beyond imagining.
Government
is nothing more than structured, widespread coercion, and the
idea that it can implement compassion for us by force is
simply a vile and cunning lie. It is cunning because people are
primed and willing, even desperate, to believe it. It is vile
because government allows, facilitates, and encourages mass
murder, widespread torture, needless famine, and every form of
tyranny. No other tool than coercive government does this.
Everything
people truly want and need can be provided without government
coercion--and the market is far better at providing it. For
instance, Yugo vs. Toyota. Bread lines (or starvation) vs. any
American supermarket. Not a tough choice, one would think.
But
again: for mass murder, widespread torture, needless famine,
and systematic tyranny--for THOSE, one absolutely needs a
government. The difference between not
having a government to inflict power and having one, is
literally the difference between Adolph Hitler as a
nearly-insane, anti-Semitic housepainter, and Adolph Hitler as a
nearly-insane, anti-Semitic German Chancellor. It's the difference
between Charles Manson as the murderer of a handful, and Pol Pot as
the murderer of perhaps two million.
Socialists
and other statists have been wildly successful at selling
government as a kind, caring, and protective parent figure,
which provides for the citizens/children in response to their
need. Statists have done this by constantly repeating the lie
that coercive government's reason for taking people's money and running people's lives is to exercise compassion in one way or another.
Despite
academic details and differences--alleged and real--among
various forms of large, centralized government, much of the
public apparently now sees large federal programs of any type in
the same light that professing socialists see socialism--as
expressions of concern and compassion, which no caring or
sensible person could oppose. The bottom line is that if "government = compassion," then more government must be better--it must, in fact, be more compassionate--than less government.
One needn't be an Einstein to see where that puts libertarians in the public mind. For that matter, Einstein himself was a socialist,
despite having fled the National Socialist regime in
Germany--which illuminates a point we shall consider in another
essay.
The socialist (or Democrat, or compassionate conservative, or Green, or whatnot) believes that where there is need, government must provide.
In turn, this requires that government grow ever-larger, and
for an obvious reason: We care about people. We care about
children and the sick and the elderly. We care about endangered
species. We care about the environment. We care about the poor.
Of
course, with so much to care about, perhaps socialism isn't
such a bad idea. Government clearly isn't large enough to help
everyone now, and--it's halfway socialist already! So
perhaps we should quit worrying about labels, stop being
McCarthyites, have the courage to quit being shills for big
business and the rich, and finally make the stretch to a
progressive, truly compassionate form of government.
Don't laugh. Many of your neighbors are in full agreement with that paragraph.
My first thought for this essay was to simply reproduce the Contents page from Dr. R. J. Rummel's Death by Government
(Transaction Publishers, 1994). For example, [Chapter 9]
"2,035,000 murdered: The Hell State: Cambodia Under the Khmer
Rouge."
Professor
Rummel estimates, based on more research into the subject than
most human beings could probably withstand, that over
169,000,000 murders were perpetrated by governments in the first
87 years of the 20th century. Rummel has coined the term
"democide" to describe any form of government murder, including
genocide, politicide, murder of dissidents, murder for
entertainment, etc.2 One hundred
sixty-nine million is more than the total democide Rummel could
find in all of previous human history, which he estimates at
133,147,000. The many millions of battlefield dead are not included in
either number. Note to "World Government" supporters: Bad as
war is, it pales in comparison to the number of deaths inflicted by
governments against their own helpless, unarmed citizens. Not,
of course, that "World Government" would actually put a stop to
war.
Back
to government's primary historical function of mass murder: For
the entire 20th century, Rummel believes governments may have
murdered as many as 180 million or more--possibly many more. It
is worth mentioning that he is not the only researcher to find
such astonishing levels of mass murder by government; a group of
Marxist researchers came to an estimate of roughly 100 million
murders just by Communist governments in the 20th century; see The Black Book of Communism
(Harvard University Press, 1999), page 4. The book's forward,
titled "The Uses of Atrocity," makes clear that an almost
incomprehensible level of cruelty was the major tool by which
every Communist regime brought itself to power and worked to
maintain that power. This cruelty was purposeful, calculated, and savage
beyond anything resembling sanity, much less compassion.
Rummel's estimate of 180 million total government murders for the 20th century is:
· About the current population of England, France, and Germany combined
· Roughly three times the total 1999 population of California, the most populous state in the Union
· More than 134 times the current population of San Francisco
· Nearly 30 million more people than the total population of the United States in 1950
I don't
believe such a number can be understood in human terms. Here is
another try, however: A typical Super Bowl crowd is about 75,000;
governments thus murdered the equivalent of 2,400 Super Bowl
crowds in the past century (180,000,000/75,000)--or almost 5,000
murders, on average, every single day.
Whatever
else we say about those numbers, we must also say this: They are
real. They are well-documented, if necessarily imprecise--they may
be high or low by several million souls. They represent actual
human beings, murdered in cold blood.
Pause here a moment, please. Think about one
person being murdered--hanged, shot in the back of the head,
buried alive, or otherwise killed. Now try, really, to wrap your
mind around this:
* One hundred million murders by Communist governments. Or this:
* One hundred and eighty million murders, by governments of all types.
In a future essay, we will consider why
such an engine of mass murder could ever be seen as the
wellspring of compassion, and how we might begin changing that
perception.
Government is not compassion. Pass it on.
Notes
1 "On the New Idol" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 1, translation by Walter Kauffmann.
2 Dr. Rummel's website, with over 5,000 pages of searchable documentation, is at http://www2.hawaii.edu/powerkills/
There is much reference material available on this topic, not that anyone wants to see it. A single example: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
by Iris Chang, Penguin Books, 1997. From the Introduction: "The
Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for the number of
people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in which many met
their deaths. Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in
decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000 - 80,000 Chinese women
were raped." (Page 6) That paragraph continues at some length, and
in horrendously graphic detail.
The
carnage at Nanking was compressed into the space of only a few
months: "Years later experts at the International Military
Tribunal of the Far East (IMTFE) estimated that more than 260,000
noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking in
late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts have placed the
figure at well over 350,000." (ibid, Page 4) Iris Chang is not the
only author to have written about the Nanking slaughter. A search
at Amazon.com for "Nanking" will bring you several other books to
choose from on the topic.
Portions of this essay appeared previously in the July 2001 Libertarian Party News and at the author's website, http://paradise-paradigm.org
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