(11-02-2019, 10:19 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 01-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and crisis war deaths
mps92 Wrote:> John, that's one of the most brilliant arguments I've ever
> heard. Is that an original argument that you came up with
> yourself?
I stand on the shoulders of giants.
mps92 Wrote:> There is a tacit understanding among people who've studied history
> or biology - that disease is one of the natural mechanisms to
> avoid overpopulation. That's why there was no disease in America
> until the Euros arrived - the population density on this continent
> was too low to support an epidemic. Therefore, vaccinating and
> attempting to defeat disease is going against mother nature, and
> perhaps letting disease kill people is actually the moral
> solution. Frankly, I'm surprised that the first world hasn't had
> another epidemic (I guess the last one was HIV?). It's badly
> needed.
mps92 Wrote:> And perhaps mass suicide is necessary for the same
> reason. Although, I would add that wild animals do not commit
> suicide. Suicide hasn't always been one of nature's "tools" to
> reduce the population, just something that has emerged
> recently. But for every person that chooses to commit suicide,
> perhaps that saves one person from starving to death in the next
> famine. So in a way, suicide is actually the most reasonable way
> to reduce the population.
I'm sympathetic to this argument, though I'm not aware of any evidence
of human mass suicide like the lemmings.
Whether lemmings commit mass suicide is debated. Those who say that
they don't commit suicide claim that their migratory patterns just
happen to require them to jump off a cliff en masse and kill
themselves. I don't know how that differs in any significant way from
mass suicide, so decide for yourself.
Infamous camera footage that showed lemmings going off a cliff was staged, with people literally driving the lemmings to the cliff.
http://www.animalplanet.com/wild-animals...t-suicide/
Quote:But in a generational Crisis era, like today, even if there are no
human mass suicides ...err... was the Normandy landing a mass suicide?
Don't a lot of armies go into battle, knowing that most of them will
be killed? Isn't that mass suicide? I don't know.
Anyway, even if there aren't mass suicides today, there are plenty of
individual suicides in America, as the suicide rates are going up. A
lot of suicides are, of course, related to the economy. According to
reports, teens are increasingly committing suicide because they don't
want to be a financial burden on their parents, and Boomers are
committing suicide because they don't have enough money to live on, or
because they're terminally ill, or because young people consider them
more worthless than garbage. I don't see any reason why an older
person would want to stay alive today.
Effective suicides include drug abuse and some STDs. Such are often slow suicide by people who have little for which to live. Street drugs by hypodermic needle? That is something that nobody with something for which to live would do.
Note also that poor people have a far-lower survival rate into old age than do the non-poor. If the elderly seem to get more politically conservative with age, then it is because the people with the most stake in the economic order (which is usually conservative in politics) are more likely to see old age as a time for most fully enjoying life -- until their bodies give out. Poor people might be priced out of overpriced pharmaceuticals while the rich own pharmaceutical stocks. Such is the American way of medicine -- and medical neglect.
Quote:Tom Mazanec Wrote:> AFAIK, only the War of the Triple Alliance and the Thirty Years
> War significantly reduced population on even a national
> scale.
This highlights a puzzle that I've had for years. Generational
Dynamics theory clearly implies that generational crisis wars reduce
the population, but every time I mention this online, someone points
out that it's not true. This conflict has been puzzling me for years.
Simple explanation: the veterans who come back from Crisis wars have typically been denied the opportunity to imagine anything unconventional. The post-Crisis world has plenty of work to do, and even raw labor gets paid well in reconstructing a world that either neglected to build such basics as housing during the war or has experienced the destruction of urban properties that need to be rebuilt -- bigger and better, of course. WWII veterans came back without visionary ideas of how to make the world intellectually richer than it had been. The harsh reality of military life is incompatible with intellectual inquiry except on technical matters -- like building pontoon bridges. But even after the war, soldiers on occupation or defensive duty may get to hear the Vienna Philharmonic and visit the Rijksmuseum. In 1943 such was impossible; in 1947 such was easy. Such makes a difference between the GI and Silent generations.
Quote:However, a month ago, Aeden posted something that actually solved
the problem:
aeden Wrote:> The often quoted University of Hawaii Democide Project makes is
> very clear that when the government goes after the guns of its
> citizens, genocide happens and has happened 16 times in the 20th
> century.
> http://hawaii.edu/powerkills
> In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915-1917, 1.5
> million Armenians, unable to defend themselves against their
> ethnic-cleansing government, were arrested and exterminated.
> 2. In 1929, the former Soviet Union established gun control as a
> means of controlling the “more difficult” of their citizens. From
> 1929 to the death of Stalin, 40 million Soviets met an untimely
> end at the hand of various governmental agencies as they were
> arrested and exterminated.
> 3. After the rise of the Nazi’s, Germany established their version
> of gun control in 1938 and from 1939 to 1945, 13 million Jews,
> gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill, and others, who were
> unable to defend themselves against the “Brown Shirts”, were
> arrested and exterminated. Interestingly, the Brown Shirts were
> eventually targeted for extermination themselves following their
> blind acts of allegiance to Hitler. Any American military and
> police would be wise to grasp the historical significance of the
> Brown Shirts’ fate.
> 4. After Communist China established gun control in 1935, an
> estimated 50 million political dissidents, unable to defend
> themselves against their fascist leaders, were arrested and
> exterminated.
> 5. Closer to home, Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From
> 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayans, unable to defend themselves against
> their ruthless dictatorship, were arrested and exterminated.
> 6. Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979,
> 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves from their
> dictatorial government, were arrested and exterminated.
> 7. Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977,
> one million of the “educated” people, unable to defend themselves
> against their fascist government, were arrested and exterminated.
> 8. In 1994, Rwanda disarmed the Tutsi people and being unable to
> defend themselves from their totalitarian government, nearly one
> million were summarily executed. The total numbers of victims who
> lost their lives because of gun control is approximately 70
> million people in the 20th century. The historical voices from 70
> million corpses speak loudly and clearly to those Americans who
> are advocating for a de facto gun ban. Governments murdered four
> times as many civilians as were killed in all the international
> and domestic wars combined. Governments murdered millions more
> people than were killed by common criminals and it all followed
> gun control. Historically, American gun control legislation has
> been imitating Hitler’s Nazi Germany gun control legislation for
> quite some time. Consider the key provisions of the Nazi Weapons
> Act of 1938 and compare it with the United States Gun Control Act
> of 1968. The parallels of both the provisions and the legal
> language are eerily similar.
> Only fools and corpses follow -them-.
The "democide" concept resolves the issue because it makes clear that
the majority of war-related deaths do not occur during the war, but
occur because of government action after the war.
This is like a jigsaw puzzle piece that completes the puzzle, because
it ties together so many other theoretical issues.
The web site claims that higher democide rates occur in societies that
are "not free," but that falls apart in many cases.
For example, in one place the web site is clearly puzzled why France,
which is a free society and did not have large massacres after WW II,
but then massacred tens of thousands of Algerians. The reason for the
difference is that for France, WW II was an external war, fought
between armies, while the Algerian war was a civil war.
As I've written many times, the behavior of a society is very
different from "normal" behavior when the generational crisis war was
an ethnic, racial, tribal or class civil war, rather than an
"external" war. The reason is that when an external war ends, the
invading armies leave, and there's no interactions between the two
populations. But after a civil war, the two populations have to
continue to live with each other, in the same country, in the same
cities, and sometimes on the same streets. It's not a pleasant
situation when you know that you're neighbor down the street raped and
killed your wife, then killed your children.
In the latter case, when the war ends and a member of the winning
tribe and his tribal cronies take control of the government, they
discriminate against people of the losing tribe in many ways,
sometimes simple economic depravation, and sometimes democide.
Aeden points out that there is also evidence that guns are confiscated
in societies where democide occurs, and that makes sense when you
realize that the tribe that won the civil war doesn't want the losing
tribe to have guns.
To sort out the democide categories, you don't separate them into
free/non-free. You separate them into three groups:
- Democide deaths after a generational crisis war which is an
external war.
- Democide deaths during a generational crisis war which is an
ethnic, tribal or class civil war.
- Democide deaths during the Awakening and Unraveling eras following
a generational crisis war which is an ethnic, tribal or class civil
war.
Whether a society is free or non-free, or whether a society
confiscates guns, depends on whether the preceding crisis war was a
civil war. Once those distinctions are made, then much of the web
site narrative falls into place.
Returning now to the original theoretical point, that theory implies
that generational crisis wars reduce the population, that might
actually be true when you include democide deaths related to
generational crisis civil wars. This is a good subject for more
research.
The tyrants who take away guns (as opposed to non-tyrants... an arch-conservative like Margaret Thatcher did not undo the strict gun laws of the UK) also flood society with propaganda that demonizes the pariahs of the society, whether kulaks in Russia, Jews in the Third Reich, or people not Sunni Muslims in ISIS territory. Persons become vermin -- loathsome rats, flies, and cockroaches, among others. Think of the scene in Der ewige Jude in which a small Jewish population spreads throughout the world is shown as arrows as if military conquests which cuts quickly to a scenes of hordes of rats.
The late Rudolph J. Rummell coined the word democide, mass murder of people for military, economic, and political reasons. He correlated democide to the absence of political freedom and hence to responsible government. The most criminal regimes were among the least free -- like Stalin's Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Thug Japan, NDH Croatia, Mao's China, the "Democratic People's Republic" of Korea (and absolute monarchy, for all practical purposes), Ethiopia under the Derg, the Ottoman Empire during WWI, Imperial Russia, Warlord China, and "socialist" regimes in Vietnam and Yugoslavia. Also notable was the horribly-misnamed "Congo Free State", the personal fief of the Belgian king who tried to turn that fief into one horrible concentration camp-plantation.
Famines? India has had a nearly-solid record of democratic government, and despite remaining poor, has never had a famine during independence. The last famine in Europe was in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, a country that was typically a net exporter of foodstuffs before the war. Famine shows not so much crop failures as it does the decision of leaders that some things, like an ideology, are more precious than human life.
Stalin's Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were far from gun-free societies. People in good standing with the ruling Party could keep its guns. Oh, so the Nazis took away the right of gun ownership from Jews? They also outlawed other things for Jews
- religious services
- membership in such professions as law, teaching, and journalism
- ownership of newspapers of any kind
- access to broadcasting
- ownership of cars, bicycles, or horse-drawn vehicles
- use of public transit
- patronage of theaters. live or cinematic
- the practice of medicine except for a Jewish clientele
- education for Jewish children
- being out and about without badges that drew attention to their membership of a discredited 'race'
- marriage and sexual liaisons with "Aryans"
- living anywhere other than restricted ghettos
- ownership of private businesses
- ownership of dogs
Let's go to the last one. Dogs. Dogs defend loved ones as if they were defending their puppies... and dogs defend their human partners as ferociously as bears and Big Cats defend theirs. Dogs may be Man's Best Friend, but they are one of the last animals that I would want to make into enemies. Multiple dogs? If you misbehave among multiple dogs you might as well be facing a tiger, for multiple dogs attack as if one giant predator. Good behavior -- canine and human -- is all that keeps medium-to-large dogs from being man-eaters. Power, speed, agility, strength, cunning, voracity, keen senses, and sharp claws and teeth? I know the rules that keep Canis lupus familiaris from becoming Canis leo , Canis tigris, or Canis ursus.
Add to that, the Nazis flooded the airwaves and public space with incessant demonization of Jews, and with enough of that people start to normalize the nasty things done to them -- but of course, out of sight and out of mind from the ghetto to the gas chamber. It would have taken little for Jews to make their case that they were not the ogres that the Nazis depicted.
Whether the horror is done in the effort to get super-cheap labor (the Atlantic slave trade) or to steal the assets of a model minority (German Jews), contempt for human life is far more likely to become a norm where the government treats the exercise of conscience as a crime.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
