|
Government Is Not Compassion, Part 1 by Glen Allport
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. 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," 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 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 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 |
