Reviewing his bibliography on democide, Rudolph  Rummel explains that he teaches a university course, “Introduction to Political Science,” and each semester reviews and considers books for an introductory text (the best measure of the state of a particular academic discipline) to use.

Rummel “shakes his head” at what he finds in the political science textbooks. The views presented in these standard texts appear “grossly unrealistic.” They do not fit or explain—and are even contradictory to—the existence of a “hell-State like Pol Pot’s Cambodia and a Gulag-state like Stalin’s Soviet Union, or a Genocide State like Hitler’s Germany.”

One textbook, Rummel says, spends a chapter describing the functions of government, among which are maintaining “law and order, individual security, cultural maintenance, and social welfare.” Political scientists write like this, Rummel says, in face of the fact of numerous examples of governments that “kill millions of their own people, and enslave the rest.”

Presented through the lens of these standard textbooks, politics is a matter of “inputs and outputs, citizen inputs, aggregation by political parties, government determining policy, and bureaucracies implementing it.” There is especially the common and fundamental justification of government—that it "exists to protect citizens against the anarchic jungle that would otherwise threaten their lives and property.”

Such sterile views, Rummel says, show no appreciation of "democide’s existence and all its related horrors and suffering.” Rummel concludes that we have “no concept for murder as an aim of public policy, determined by discussion among the government elite in the highest councils, and imposed through government bureaucracy.” What is needed is a reconceptualization of politics consistent with what we now know about democide.

In examining textbooks on political science and government, Rummel says that he found in the indexes of these books “barely a single reference to genocide, mass-murder, killed, dead, executed or massacred.” Most of these texts even omit index references to “concentration camps or labor camps or gulags” (although they may have a paragraph or two on these topics).

Reiterating Rummel’s conclusion, it is fair to state that a preeminent fact about governments (focusing especially on the 20th century) is that many of them “murdered millions in cold blood.” What’s more, tens of millions of additional human beings were slaughtered by governments as a result of foreign aggression and intervention (“war”).

Why spoil the minds of young people, one might say, by conveying unpalatable facts in introductory texts? Which is another way of saying: Why tell the truth?

At the core of the discipline of political science lies the mechanism of denial: refusal to look at the reality of human existence within the framework of the modern nation-state.

I once put together a symposium on collective forms of violence and presented a paper on World War I. A fine young scholar attended. I pointed out the obvious--that nations perpetually sent young men to run (or walk) into machine-gun fire and artilerry shells--where they were slaughtered, he suddenly declared, "I don't believe it. I don't believe it."

It happened, but we don't believe it. Nation-states murder their own young men (and men from other nations), yet we don't want to believe it. 

What would happen if we faced the truth? What benefits would accrue?

With regards,
Richard Koenigsberg

— Richard A. Koenigsberg, PhD. (718) 393-1081
     rak@libraryofsocialscience.com