The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,204

Levi were published in the 1960s, and today Frank’s Diary and Wiesel’s Night are among the world’s most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. Soon other survivors—Armenians, Ukrainians, Gypsies—began to add their stories, joined more recently by Bosnians, Tutsis, and Darfuris. These memoirs are a part of a reorientation of our conception of history. “Throughout most of history,” Chalk and Jonassohn note, “only the rulers made news; in the twentieth century, for the first time, it is the ruled who make the news.”147

Anyone who grew up with Holocaust survivors knows what they had to overcome to tell their stories. For decades after the war they treated their experiences as shameful secrets. On top of the ignominy of victimhood, the desperate straits to which they were reduced could remove the last traces of their humanity in ways they could be forgiven for wanting to forget. At a family occasion in the 1990s, I met a relative by marriage who had spent time in Auschwitz. Within seconds of meeting me he clenched my wrist and recounted this story. A group of men had been eating in silence when one of them slumped over dead. The others fell on his body, still covered in diarrhea, and pried a piece of bread from his fingers. As they divided it, a fierce argument broke out when some of the men felt their share was an imperceptible crumb smaller than the others’. To tell a story of such degradation requires extraordinary courage, backed by a confidence that the hearer will understand it as an accounting of the circumstances and not of the men’s characters.

Though the abundance of genocides over the millennia belies the centuryof-genocide claim, one still wonders about the trajectory of genocide before, during, and since the 20th century. Rummel was the first political scientist to try to put some numbers together. In his duology Death by Government (1994) and Statistics of Democide (1997) he analyzed 141 regimes that committed democides in the 20th century through 1987, and a control group of 73 that did not. He collected as many independent estimates of the death tolls as he could find (including ones from pro- and antigovernment sources, whose biases, he assumed, would cancel each other out) and, with the help of sanity checks, chose a defensible value near the middle of the range.148 His definition of “democide” corresponds roughly to the UCDP’s “one-sided violence” and to our everyday concept of “murder” but with a government rather than an individual as the perpetrator: the victims must be unarmed, and the killing deliberate. Democides thus include ethnocides, politicides, purges, terrors, killings of civilians by death squads (including ones committed by private militias to which the government turns a blind eye), deliberate famines from blockades and confiscation of food, deaths in internment camps, and the targeted bombing of civilians such as those in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.149 Rummel excluded the Great Leap Forward from his 1994 analyses, on the understanding that it was caused by stupidity and callousness rather than malice.150

Partly because the phrase “death by government” figured in Rummel’s definition of democide and in the title of his book, his conclusion that almost 170 million people were killed by their governments during the 20th century has become a popular meme among anarchists and radical libertarians. But for several reasons, “governments are the main cause of preventable deaths” is not the correct lesson to draw from Rummel’s data. For one thing, his definition of “government” is loose, embracing militias, paramilitaries, and warlords, all of which could reasonably be seen as a sign of too little government rather than too much. White examined Rummel’s raw data and calculated that the median democide toll by the twenty-four pseudo-governments on his list was around 100,000, whereas the median death toll caused by recognized governments of sovereign states was 33,000. So one could, with more justification, conclude that governments, on average, cause three times fewer deaths than alternatives to government.151 Also, most governments in recent periods do not commit democides at all, and they prevent a far greater number of deaths than the democidal ones cause, by promoting vaccination, sanitation, traffic safety, and policing.152

But the main problem with the anarchist interpretation is that it isn’t governments in general that kill large numbers of people but a handful of governments of a specific type. To be exact, three-quarters