Democide? And why the second global bloodbath?

The following is a response to an essay I read on the Democratic Peace Blog by Rudy Rummel, who advocated that the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan were necessary. He calls its a "Just Democide Doctrine." For the life of me, I can't understand how the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people can be called just, but he did it. Furthermore, our ideas of democide differ slightly. I look at democide as the systematic murder of a people by their own government. Perhaps I should not argue with the man who coined the term and spent most of his life studying it, but here it goes anyway:

Why does America have to fight them at all? Why did we have to drop the bomb? Yes, obviously the Japanese preemptively struck us at Pearl Harbor, murdering over 2,000 people and shaking American confidence to the point that our people actually allowed the central government to enslave thousands of people of Japanese ancestry indefinitely and put them in camps on the West coast, without the benefit of due process, which every living soul on this earth is entitled to by his or her creator.

But America made a lot of mistakes prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, one of them being the fact that the United States government froze all Japanese assets in the United States. These “mistakes” were part of a strategy emphasized by Henry Stimson, the secretary of war at the time (he had previously been secretary of state), who wrote in his diary at one point in 1941 about “how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves.” (Cumings, Bruce: “Parallax Visions: Making Sense of American-East Asian Relations” Duke 1999 p. 47) Stimson was referring of course as to how the United States could manipulate the Japanese into striking America, thereby conjuring up a war frenzy throughout the nation that would not have been possibly without a preemptive Japanese strike. The American people wanted nothing of another global war - just as they wanted nothing of the first global war until the despicable and tyrannical Woodrow Wilson revved up his propaganda machines and instituted slavery once again, this time in the form of conscription.





It is also true that Roosevelt was extremely sympathetic to Churchill and Britain’s plight and related to him on multiple occasions that it was his intention to involve the United States in the conflict. The British people’s plight however, is soley a consequence of their and the United State’s previous involvement in the even more incredibly unnecessary global bloodbath of the previous generation, in which the downtrodden German people later searched desperately for a cure for their ills. That cure came in the form of true democidal maniacs such Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and Adolph Hitler.


Furthermore, Hitler and his regime of maniacs ruthlessly murdered approximately 20.5 million people, more than a quarter of them being murdered simply because of their millenia old religious beliefs. This though was only half of the number that Josef Stalin, the democidal maniac of the Soviet Union, killed during his tenure. Stalin invaded Poland with Hitler (not that your high school history book will tell you that), and also invaded Finland in the same year (The Finns fought incredibly bravely and intelligently, but were eventually pushed back by the massive numbers Stalin could put into the war - not that your hs history book will tell you that either).




Meanwhile Roosevelt met with Stalin many times and called him “Uncle Joe.” Nevermind the fact that Stalin had already killed more people by the time of these conferences than Hitler would ever kill and had tens of millions more hard at work in the Gulag. Clearly the conflict in Europe should have been ignored by the United States, who eventually suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties during that war and dropped more megatons of explosives on German cities than both the Japanese atomic bombs combined. The reason we should not have fought a war with the Japanese are in adherence mostly with Judeo-Christian principles. First, America was woefully unprepared for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Once Americans were attacked though, the militia of America referred to in the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights should have been called out to defend the continental United States should the Japanese continue on and invade it.


However, as Admiral Yamamato of the Japanese Imperial Navy noted, had the Japanese invaded the mainland United States, “there would have been a rifle behind every blade of grass,” much the same as if America had invaded the Japanese mainland. The full scale invasion of the United States would have been an absolute massacre for the Japanese.



This is the secondary reason for the 2nd Amendment (so the militia of the several states can defend themselves, their family, and their land against outside attack from another country or people); the founders probably thought that the republic they had just created would never venture toward fascism or the increasing totalitarianism that has developed very quickly since the Second Great War. But that increasing totalitarianism is the primary reason of the 2nd amendment: the ability of the people to defend themselves against a tyrannical and out of control government, much like the one they faced in 1861, 1898, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc. (this is by no means an exhaustive list), and today. There was absolutely no danger of the Japanese conquering the United States. And fortunately for the United States, none of its vital aircraft carriers were destroyed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, as this was absolutely crucial to the success of the attack for the Japanese. Why was it necessary for America to fight the Japanese all the way across the Pacific, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and maimed, both physically and psychologically, and eventually dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities?



Furthermore, it could not be considered democide because the United States and Japan were at war with one another (nevermind how unnecessary it was), and because a people’s own government must murder them in order for it to be considered democide (at least as I understand it). Was it democide when America bombed the Germans and Italians? Or when they bombed Cambodia and Vietnam? What about Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq again? What about Iraq the third and most consequential time? What about Pakistan now? Are these all democide? I do not believe so, and Rummel has never categorized them as such. As to what they should be categorized as, I will think on that and get back to you.


Update 7/10/09: after thinking about the last paragraph above and what all those exercises in bloodletting should be labeled, I have come to the simple conclusion that it is pure murder.

We can use the Clinton regime's bombing and killing of between 1,000 and 2,500 people in the former Yugoslavia as our example.

Say that there are two families living in a duplex next to me. Each family has 5 members, 2 parents and 3 children each. The parents of each of these families are constantly fighting because they root for opposing Big 12 football teams, in this case the Oklahoma Sooners and the Texas Longhorns. The children are perfectly innocent. During the latest football season, the parents fighting escalates from verbal abuse to a few punches being thrown to outright brawling. After Oklahoma was awarded entry into the Big 12 championship even though they lost to Texas, the S really hit the fan. I hear terrible fighting noises coming from my neighbors home, so I grab my pistol and run there and I see the woman from one family about to knife the man from another family, so i discharge my weapon and shoot the woman, but in the process two totally innocent children are shot and killed.

It does not matter what good I was trying to accomplish that day, I killed innocent human beings.

It does not matter what good William Jefferson Clinton was trying to accomplish when he ordered the cluster bombs to be dropped that killed thousands of innocent people, it was still murder.

"To be more concrete, if Jones finds that his property being stolen by Smith, he has the right to repel him and try to catch him; but he has no right to repel him by bombing a building and murdering innocent people or to catch him by spraying machine gun fire into an innocent crowd.
If he does this, he is as much (or more of) a criminal aggressor as Smith is."

- Murray Rothbard