August 15, 2003

A Framework to answer the Question

AWhy do People kill Each Other?@

In 2004, when the world=s nuclear arsenal was such that it could kill each human 32 times

And people realized that 300 million persons, one out of every 10 inhabitants

Had died in the last century from war and its companions B famine, exile and oppression

Some planetary citizens, part of a rapidly growing grass-roots peace movement

Decided to research once and for all why they killed each other with such gusto.

I pass on to you here some of the thinking regarding the framework of their study

Since democide (the killing by a government of its own citizens) is highly correlated

With international war (the killing by this same government of other citizens)

These researchers thought that a more appropriate phrasing of the question would be

AWho owns death?@ B that is, who can with impunity, impose death on another

How is it that a government has the power to control life and kill at will, whether

Its own people (arbitrarily or through the death penalty), or others across a border?

The unit of measurement was to be the human race B not individual countries.

Since the human race was presently at risk of extinction by its own actions

The human race as a whole would have to take responsibility for its own behavior.

Thus, all humanity would take responsibility for the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The World Wars, the Vietnam War, the genocides in Armenia, Indonesia and Rwanda

And the murderous regimes of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, Hitler and Chiang Kai-shek

The definition of violence would include not only overt violence

But also covert, institutional violence. Thus, for instance, if life expectancy at birth

In the 20 most privileged countries was over 77 years

And that in the 20 least fortunate countries was 45 years

The difference B 32 years B would be considered a theft of life

From the inhabitants of the poor countries

Similarly, if for instance, the United States could give as compensation

For the accidental death of citizens of Italy, the sum $2,000,000 per death

Then the sum of $150,000 per death which it gave to citizens of Yugoslavia

And that of $100 per death which it gave to citizens of Afghanistan

Under similar circumstances, would be interpreted as containing

Not only humiliation but major institutional violence in the latter two cases

The definition of terrorism was to be according to its dictionary definition,

Coercion by threat or violence, whether inflicted by individuals B

As when a woman walking alone at night in the streets of Los Angeles fears rape

Or a girl in Thailand is abducted from her family to be used as sex worker B

Or inflicted by governments B as when AIDS strikes, an inmate awaits execution

An Iraqi mother waits to be bombed or an Afghan orphan has just stepped on a mine

The reference point in the study was to be only and exclusively human beings.

All statistics on numbers of weapons, arms races and disarmament were to be omitted.

On the basis that box-cutters, penknives and cold anger can put a country into mourning

Phrases such as Acollateral damage,@ Aescalation dominance,@ Apre-emptive strikes@

ATaking out,@ Aclean surgical strikes,@ Astrategic stability,@ Asub-holocaust engagements@

ALiberation,@ Aattacks@ and Aoperations,@ were to be de-sanitized to their reality B slaughter

Since wars have the purpose of silencing Athe other,@ a great part of the study

Was to be devoted to bringing the dead back to life, hearing their voice

Re-humanizing them B Did they want to die? What were their dreams?

What would they have done, had they not been killed? Biographies were to be written

For each of the dead, wounded and traumatized, with an accompanying account of how

They would probably have lived the rest of their life, had this been allowed them

Women, from whose body all B every single one B of the war dead were brought forth

And in whose body the great majority sought sustenance during their early, vulnerable years

Were to be represented for research policy decisions, in the reverse of the proportion

To which they were represented in all governments. Thus, an average would be calculated B

In the East Timor congress, 27 percent women, in the United States congress, 14 percent...

The world average was almost nil and hence most of the research directors were women

The indices on which the study was to rely consisted principally of non-measurables B

Love, cooperation, solidarity, tranquility, meaning in life, the work of raising children...

This, of course, was much in contrast to measurements such as the gross national product

Which focuses on the exchange of money between people, and hence reflects as positive

The manufacture of weapons, the sale of food by persons who are themselves starving

The development of treatment-resistant pathogens and the testing of nuclear bombs

On the basis of previous research showing that democracies do not initiate war on each other

And the reasoning that it takes work, learning and skill to relate to other human beings

On a footing of equality and dignity, the study was to include an assessment of the time

People spent within a democratic environment. Employment by tyrannies

(Such as corporations) and time relating to machines (such as computers) did not count.

Like the Luddites, the researchers= focus was control over one=s fate, not only money

There were other aspects to the study, such as why learning was considered competitive

Whether poverty or poor people are killed in a Awar on poverty@

Whether drugs or drug growers are killed in a Awar on drugs@

Whether some wars would ever be called Ajust@ by their victims

Why the massive extinction of plant and animal species is not called a war against them

And why the younger generation obeys when the older one tells it to go kill and be killed

But there is one aspect of the study which I must not omit to tell you B

Their accounting of the debt one generation owes the next generation as compensation

For the value of the older generation=s footprint on the earth, in terms of fresh water

Clean air, species diversity, climate change, deadly sun rays, land mines, toxic chemicals

Nuclear radiation, probability of earthquakes, contamination of outer-space

Resource depletion and sick or disease-producing genetically-engineered life forms

The synergy of all these with war impressed the researchers

They realized they might not have the chance to finish the study

Omnicide B the death of everything on earth, was at hand

This is the reason for my message to you today...

References and Notes

The world=s nuclear arsenal was such that it could kill each human 32 times

Caldicott, Helen, The New Nuclear Danger B George W. Bush=s Military-Industrial Complex (The New Press, New York, N.Y.), 2002, p. 3.

AIn total there is now enough explosive power in the combined nuclear arsenals of the world to >overkill= every person on earth 32 times.@

Gioseffi, Daniela, Women on War B An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present (The Feminist Press, City University of New York, New York, N.Y.), Second Edition, 2003, p. xxxv.

To Rummel=s figure of 205,702,000 killed during the 20^th century, Gioseffi adds those killed by the Acompanions@ of war B torture, famine and exile, arriving at a figure of 300,000,000 killed. Out of a mid-century world population of 2.9 billion, this number gives a 1:10 chance of being killed by these scourges.

Rummel, R.J.,APower kills, Absolute Power kills Absolutely,@ in Charny, Israel ( Ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volumes 1 and 2 (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA), 1999, pp. 24-25.

A total of 205,702,000 people were killed during the 20^th century B 36,500,000 in batlte and 169,202,00 by their own state. Out of a mid-century world population of 2.9 billion, this number gives a 1:14 chance of being killed by these scourges

United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001, New York, N.Y. 2001. p. 157.

In 1999, the total population of the world was 5.863 billion.

Democide

Rummel, R.J.

AThe New Concept of Democide,@ in Charny, Israel ( Ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volumes 1 and 2 (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA), 1999 (by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem), p. 18.

ADemocide B The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.@

APower kills, Absolute Power kills Absolutely,@ idem, pp. 23-34.

From 1900 to 1987, the number of dead in battle from all international and civil wars totaled 36,500,000. The number of people massacred by their own government totaled 169,202,000 B 4.6 times, or almost five times as many.

Power kills B Democracy as a Method of Non-violence (Transaction, New Brunswick, N.J.), 1997, pp. 1-10.

1. Well-established democracies do not make war on each other.

2. The more democratic a dyad of two nations, the less likely a war between them.

3. The more democratic a nation:

a. The less severe its foreign violence.

The less its democide.

The less the likelihood of domestic collective violence.

AWho owns death@

Lifton, Robert and Greg Mitchell, Who owns Death? B Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions (Perennial/Harper/Collins, New York, N.Y.), 2000, p. 238.

A>Gunism= B by holding a loaded gun in one=s hand, one takes possession of life and death.@

The unit of measurement

Rummel, R.J., APower kills, Absolute Power kills Absolutely,@ in Charny, Israel ( Ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volumes 1 and 2 (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA), 1999 (by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem), p. 29.

The twentieth century=s bloodiest megamurderers and the number they murdered, are as follows:

Joseph Stalin (1929-53) 42,672,000 (citizens only)

Mao Tse-tung (1923-76) 37,828,000

Adolf Hitler (1933-45) 20,946,000

Chiang Kai-shek (1921-48) 10,214,000

The definition of violence

United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001, New York, N.Y. 2001. pp. 141 and 143-144.

In 1999, the 20 most privileged countries were Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States. Life expectancy at birth was 76.1 - 80.8 years. See the map of these countries on page 12.

The 20 least fortunate countries were Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Cote d=Ivoire, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal and Zambia. Life expectancy at birth was 38.3 - 53.6 years. See the map of these countries on page 12.

The United States could give as compensation

Cited by James Ridgeway, The Village Voice, August 2002. Marc Herold, professor at the University of New Hampshire, compared the compensation given to victims of the U.S. military in various countries. The United States paid $2,000,000 in compensation for each of the Italian citizens killed in 2001, after a U.S. military plane accidentally destroyed a tramway at a ski resort. The NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade resulted in $150,000 in compensation for each victim. For each of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan, the price tag is $100.

The definition of terrorism

Webster=s New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Co., Springfield, MA. 1975.

Terrorize: To coerce by threat or violence.

A woman walking alone at night

Rosen, Ruth, ABlind, Unpredictable Terror,@ in Gioseffi, Daniela, Women on War B An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present (The Feminist Press, City University of New York, New York, N.Y.), Second Edition, 2003, pp. 261-262.

AThe night, I am reminded, belongs to those who terrorize women with rape.@

A girl in Thailand is abducted

Bales, Kevin, Disposable People B New Slavery in the Global Economy (University of California, Berkeley, CA), 1999, pp. 34-79.

The author estimates that conservatively, there are perhaps 35,000 girls enslaved in Thailand (p. 43).

When AIDS strikes

United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001, New York, N.Y. 2001, pp. 162-165.

AIDS is an eminently preventable disease. Condoms had been known for years when the HIV epidemic started in 1981, are extremely cheap and provide almost 100 percent protection. Yet, as Gioseffi points out, the Bush administration bans funds for international family planning. The United States has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), despite the fact that women need some sense of equality in order to demand condom use by men. In the United Nations Human Rights Commission, the United States has stood virtually alone in opposing resolutions supporting lower-cost access to HIV/AIDS drugs. See a list of the twenty countries with the highest rate of HIV/AIDS on page 13, and the map of these countries on page 14.

An Afghan orphan has just stepped on a mine

Roy, Arundhati, Power Politics (South End), Cambridge, MA), 2001, p. 112.

The Afghan countryside is littered with ten million land mines. The country has 500,000 maimed orphans.

Gioseffi explains, AThe Land Mine Treaty..., signed in Ottawa in December 1997 by 122 nations, was refused by the United States... Land mines kill and maim thousands of children, farmers and other civilians worldwide every year. President Bill Clinton rejected the treaty, claiming that mines were needed to protect South Korea against North Korea=s >overwhelming military advantage.= He stated that the United States would >eventually= comply, in 2006, but this idea was disavowed by President Bush in August 2001.@

The reference point

Roy, Arundhati, Power Politics (South End), Cambridge, MA), 2001, p. 106.

ABox cutters, penknives, and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged.@

Cohn, Carol, ASex and Death and the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,@ in Gioseffi, Daniela, Women on War B An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present (The Feminist Press, City University of New York, New York, N.Y.), Second Edition, 2003, pp. 56-68.

Cohn explains, AThe language and the mode of thinking [of defense intellectuals] are not neutral containers of information. They were developed by a specific group of men, trained largely in abstract theoretical mathematics and economics, specifically to make it possible to think rationally about the use of nuclear weapons... I suggest that techno-strategic discourse [rather than articulating

criteria and reasoning strategies], functions more as a gloss, as an ideological patina that hides the actual reasons these decisions are made. Rather than informing and shaping decisions, it far more often legitimizes political outcomes that have occurred for utterly different reasons@ (pp. 67 and 68).

Bringing the dead back to life

A counter force to the demonization of the enemy.

Women, from whose body all B every single one B of the war dead were brought forth

Schreiner, Olive, AFrom Women and Labour: Women and War,@ in Gioseffi, Daniela, Women on War B An International Anthology of Writings from Antiquity to the Present (The Feminist Press, City University of New York, New York, N.Y.), Second Edition, 2003, pp. 221-222.

AMen have made boomerangs, bows, swords, or guns with which to destroy one another; we have made the men who destroyed and were destroyed! We have in all ages produced, at an enormous cost, the primal munition of war, without which no other would exist... We pay the first cost on all human life...@ (p. 222).

The high proportion of women elected to the East Timor congress when the country won its independence in 2002, reflects the work of United Nations non-governmental agencies in the discovery of women community leaders.

The indices

These ideas have been particularly well articulated by Marilyn Waring

Democracies do not wage war on each other

Rummel, R. J.,

APower kills, Absolute Power kills Absolutely,@in Charny, Israel ( Ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volumes 1 and 2 (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA), 1999 (by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem), p. 24. (The data are a combination of those of the author and those of Small, M. and Singer, J., 1976 and 1982). War is defined as any military action in which at least 1,000 persons are killed.

Wars between democracies and non-democracies, 1816-1991:

Democracies vs. democracies 0

Democracies vs. non-democracies 155

Non-democracies vs. non-democracies 198

TOTAL 353

Power kills B Democracy as a Method of Non-violence (Transaction, New Brunswick, N.J.), 1997, pp. 51-61.

The Democracy/Dyadic Violence Proposition states that the more democratic two regimes are, the less severe is their violence against each other.

The Inter-democratic Peace Proposition is the democratic-democratic end of the Democracy/Dyadic Violence Proposition and states that democracies do not make war on each other. This has become an established fact in international relations.

Employment by tyrannies

See Rummel=s data above. Democracy is a method of non-violence. Corporations are hiearchically organized, with authority flowing from top to bottom. They have a history of anti-union ideology and activities.

Time relating to machines

Boal, Iain, AA Flow of Monsters: Luddism and Virtual Technologies,@ in Brook, James and Iain Boal, Eds., Resisting the Virtual Life B The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, San Francisco, CA), 1995, pp. 3-15.

AThe Luddites [at the onset of the industrial revolution] targeted machinery that was being ganged up in batteries or was being automated for operation by children@ (p. 4).

AThe cyborgs on the virtual screen are then an allegory of the fear of social death and incorporation into the machine... So one primary candidate effect of the virtual technologies is the production of new monstrous viewers, who are incomplete, lacking, overwhelmed inside. Its corollary is a politics of resentment and a resentment of politics... The real virtual operation is to split open the subject and make it incomplete... All interiority and psychological depth are either effaced or reappear in the guise of >the irrational= and >the subjective.=@ (pp. 9-10).

Learning

Public school students are ranked, as if the amount of information they have acquired is the only aspect of learning. In fact, learning is a broadening experience made much more productive and meaningful, if shared with others.

Increasingly, with the corporate funding of university research projects, researchers are prevented from sharing their findings with colleagues, as this would jeopardize the corporation=s chance of obtaining a lucrative patent from the research.

AWar on poverty@

Huffington, Arianna, Pigs at the Trough B How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are undermining America (Crown, New York, N.Y.), 2003, pp. 13-14.

The gap between rich and poor in the United States has considerably widened since the United States government announced a Awar on poverty.@ Huffington gives the following statistics:

1. Average Pay Rise, 1990-2000:

CEO=s B 571 percent

Average worker B 37 percent

2. Percent of the Nation=s Income earned:

By the richest 20% of Americans B 50 percent

By the poorest 20% of Americans B 5 percent

3. Percent of the Value of All Stocks owned:

By 1% of owners B 48 percent

By 80% of owners B 4 percent

Take-home Pay:

By the average CEO B more in one day than the average worker for the whole year.

By 25% of workers B less than poverty-level wages.

AWar on drugs@

The aid of the United States to the government of Columbia against indigenous rebellious forces is now almost no longer disguised as a Awar on drugs@ B as it was when the United States government first announced its policy.

Some wars would ever be called Ajust@

deMause, Lloyd, The Emotional Life of Nations (Karnac Books), 2002, Chapter 4, AThe Psychogenic Theory of History,@ (40 pages total), p. 16 of manuscript.

The history of the Ajust war@ is long. However, as Lloyd deMause has clarified, the idea that killing is moral, is a delusion B akin to other delusions, such as that leaders are to blame, that suffering is deserved, that punishment reforms, that some people are not human, that sacrifice brings renewal or that violence is liberating.

The massive extinction of plant and species

Anderson, Luke, Genetic Engineering, Food, and Our Environment (Chelsea Green White River Junction, Vermont), 1999/2000, p. 52.

AWith widespread deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction, it is estimated that at least 30,000 species worldwide are becoming extinct every year.@

The younger generation obeys

deMause, Lloyd, The Emotional Life of Nations (Karnac Books), 2002, Chapter 4, AThe Psychogenic Theory of History,@ (40 pages total), pp.12-16 of manuscript.

AAlthough few people are diagnosed with dissociate disorders, most people nevertheless have organized, dissociated persecutory personalities whose function it is to punish themselves, or substitutes for themselves, as Aobject lessons@ B in order to remind them that growth, pleasure and success are dangerous and might precipitate trauma or rejection... As [children] grow up, these dissociated parts of their psyche are organized into persecutory social scenarios that are shared with others and which could be thought of as social alters... Depersonalization is experienced whenever we are in our social alters B and enter into a trance-like state. What happens in Asociety@ has a feeling of unreality or strangeness of self, a loss of affective response...

It is only when one realizes that we all carry around with us persecutory social alters that become manifest in groups, that such unexplained experiments as those described in Stanley Milgram=s classic study, Obedience to Authority, become understandable...

Nations have a central persecutory task... In truth, most members of most nations participate in one way or another in the torture and killing of others and in economic and political domination... It is because we so often switch into our social alters... that we cannot understand [this] B our real emotions are dissociated and therefore unavailable to us... Even when we find a leader to blame events on, we are helpless to explain why anyone followed him...

Omnicide

Markusen, Eric, AOmnicide,@ in APower kills, Absolute Power kills Absolutely,@in Charny, Israel ( Ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide, Volumes 1 and 2 (ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, CA), 1999 (by the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem), p. 451.

AThe concept of >omnicide= was coined by philosopher John Somerville, in 1979, to convey the new dimension of mass killing inherent in nuclear weapons.@

AOmnicide:@ homicide with suicide B the compete destruction of all life on earth.

The Twenty Countries with the Highest rate of HIV/AIDS (a)

Burundi 11.3

Botswana 35.8

Cameroon 7.7

Central African Republic 13.8

Congo 6.4

Cote d=Ivoire 10.8

Djibouti 11.8

Ethiopia 10.6

Kenya 14.0

Lesotho 23.6

Malawi 16.0

Mozambique 13.2

Namibia 19.5

Rwanda 11.2

South Africa 19.9

Swaziland 25.3

Tanzania 8.1

Uganda 8.3

Zambia 20.0

Zimbabwe 25.1

_______________________

Percent of the population ages 15-49 infected, in 1999.

United Nations Human Development Programme, Human Development Report 2001, New York, N.Y. 2001., pp. 162-165.

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