We all know the term genocide, which the New Oxford defines as
The deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation
and the United Nations Genocide Commission defines as
Acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.
In light of the left’s atrocities in the 20th century, however, a new term was needed—one that included intentional acts by government to kill large numbers of their own citizens (more appropriately, their own subjects). The National Socialists in Germany targeted a number of groups—the largest among them the Jews, who were a religious and mostly ethnic identity group. This is rightly called a genocide. But other leftist monstrosities targeted different sorts of groups, including economic classes such as successful farmers, landlords, business owners, and others. Because “genocide” doesn’t cover murder based on class, or murder for political and ideological reasons, in 1994, R. J. Rummel gave us a new term, democide, and defined it as
The intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.
To its great shame, the Oxford English dictionary does not have a definition of democide, and many spell checkers do not recognize the word, even though it is a quarter-century old and offers a useful refinement of the language. (Democide is largely an activity of the left, but it would be a “conspiracy theory” to wonder aloud if leftist academics and tech professionals might not want to see broader use of the term…so I’ll just set that thought aside and assume it is an oversight.)
Rummel provides a detailed explanation of the concept of democide here. His definition is the gold-standard, and the word is provides an excellent way to encapsulate the mass-murder that socialism engages in when it is allowed to go to its logical extreme. However, I am compelled to think that we need a more specific term—one that correctly places the blame for virtually all the government-perpetrated slaughter in modern history where it belongs.
In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of the term “Arkancided,” which essentially means to be murdered for having been politically inconvenient to, or an enemy of, Bill and Hillary Clinton—a result of the disturbing number of suspicious deaths of people who fit this description. (In the 1990s, this was the solely the province of conspiracy theorist on the fringes of the right, but since the number of deaths has continued to rise—culminating with the “suicide” of Jeffrey Epstein—more people became aware of it, to the point where even barely political meme-culture has sat up and taken notice.)
In keeping with this zeitgeist, I suggest the term socialicided.
In addition to correctly assigning guilt, it serves another purpose . . .
Some on the left attempt to circle their ideological wagons by suggesting that the mass starvations in socialist countries don’t count because they were not intentional murders. As I will indicate below, Rummel’s definition may allow them that loophole. But we must not allow them to weasel out in this way.
Stalin and his goons murdered all the land-owning peasants (and then, with a wink and a nod, essentially told their neighbors that they could go rape their daughters and take their stuff). It didn’t take long for mass starvation to begin— which is inevitable whenever you kill all the people who actually know how to farm. Then, they started killing anyone who collected any scraps of remaining grain (either to eat or to try to plant new crops). Then more people starved. The total starved and murdered was 7–10 million human souls. And yet we’ve had nearly 100 years of Holodomor-denial by the left. (It’s not just Walter Duranty; I have had the Holodomor denied to my face.)
Sorry, but you don’t get to get away with that. You don’t get to do it, or hide it, or downplay it, or brush it under the rug. Not even if your professors control the universities and can revise history however they want. We’re not going to let you.
The same goes for China’s 70 or so million murders in the “Great Leap Forward.” Communism hates productive people, and generally tends to murder them first. That is what the Chinese did: in the first few years of the “revolution,” they killed an unknown, but definitely seven-digit, number of their political and “class” enemies. Predictably, starvation began. Then they came up with a series of cockamamie ideas on how to grow food. It didn’t work, and in the end, tens of millions starved. But leftists will still say, as they do with the Holodomor, that it was mostly a starvation incident rather than intentional killing, and thus assert that it doesn’t count.
In part 2 of his detailed definition of democide, Rummel discusses famine:
(2) that cause death by virtue of an intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life (which constitutes practical intentionality), as in
2.5) a famine or epidemic during which government authorities withhold aid, or knowingly act in a way to make it more deadly; (emphasis added)
I believe that Rummel would have included the Stalinist forced collectivization and the Maoist Great Leap Forward. They did take specific actions that made things worse. They did withhold aid. (In the Holdomor, grain was sent to loyal communists in the cities while the rural peasants were left to starve.) But the leftist can always wriggle out and say that these were simply failures; that they were not “knowingly act[ing] in a way to make it more deadly.”
This is a distinction without a difference, and they must not be allowed to slink their way out of this. If it is allowed to proceed to its ultimate conclusions, socialism and government meddling in the economy will always lead to mass starvation. If we didn’t know it before (and we should have), we know it now. Venezuela is the proof. Venezuela was no backwater—it was one of the strongest economies in the Western hemisphere. Now, people are eating garbage and shoe leather.
A market economy is like an ecosystem. if you leave it alone, it will grow and thrive. It is resilient and self-correcting. It can even handle a small amount of meddling. But if too much damage is done, it can take years to recover.
An economy can handle small amounts of socialist-style government intrusion. But large amounts are catastrophic. What happens next—the dislocation, bankruptcies, failures, misery, and starvation—are not the market’s fault. They are the government’s fault. Always.
And if this coronavirus shutdown goes on for too long, we’re going to experience this phenomenon firsthand.
This is what socialism and government meddling does. Every time. A term like socialicided helps make that clearer. We can work on detailed definitions later. For now . . .
Killed by socialist government, or as a result of socialist policies
. . . will suffice.
No one knows exactly how many people the socialists killed. 100 million is at the low end—it may be 200 million or more. Every one of those people lost their lives, their dreams, their future. So many victims: war, civil war. dissidents, starvation, suicide, crime victims of hungry people, and more. The beautiful families they would have built. We’ve lost them too.
We’ve also lost their friendship and contributions. Which one of them would have been the next Beethoven? Which one of them, or the children they never got to have, would have cured a dread disease or invented a new form of propulsion to take us to the stars? We’ll never know.
Because socialism.
Update: I looked to see if anyone had already coined this term. I found one example in a book by Yuri and Eiiurii Druzhnikov. Wherever it originally came from, we should use it. We should popularize it.
