A Real Gift for Humanity: The U.S. Abandonment of Hegemony as a Foreign Policy Goal
“The United States must return to a human rights-centered foreign policy or risk its prestige and respect in the world community.” — Samantha Power, former US Ambassador to the United Nations.
Any humanitarian replacement for hegemony as a foreign policy goal must be attractive and perhaps indistinguishable from hegemony, especially when dealing with tyrants, governments, including our policymakers, and institutions everywhere, the principal difference being avoiding unnecessary violence and human suffering.
The US can still do its part to help save the world without clinging to hegemony as a foreign policy goal, but we must have something better to offer US policymakers in its place. And we have that something.
The worst acts of cowardice are when governments kill their citizens for political reasons. Yet, more people were murdered by their governments in the last century than died in all the wars combined.
In trying to describe the magnitude of the mass killings where 500,000 primarily innocent people were killed in 1965, that year of dangerous living in Indonesia, out of a total population of around 100 million, in describing the tragedy, a particular author did not think genocide was the right word. Indeed, we need a new word to describe the political mass killings by governments of their people. —
It’s called democide, the murder of civilians by governments.
It turns out democide is a bigger killer than war or genocide.
Humanity needs to work towards ending both with equal zeal. I am hoping a roadmap for ending the age of genocide and democide emerges from the current Ukrainian and other conflicts happening right now. This challenge is an extraordinary opportunity for humanity. The first step in that emerging roadmap will be the US abandoning hegemony as a foreign policy goal.
Many have little faith in humanity changing enough before we destroy ourselves. Our history to date is wrought with violence, destruction, genocide, narcissism, selfishness, democide, slavery, abuse, greed, control, and the list goes on. I can’t entirely agree with that attitude. It is simply defeatist. I have far more faith in humanity than governments. We must always hold a glimmer of hope for ourselves and humanity to become better than our baseness. Courage is calling us.
I like the term, democide. It needs to become a part of US policymakers’ vocabulary. The mass killings under the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia are probably the best example of democide.
I like to think humanity is evolving and that this current crisis also presents us with an opportunity to evolve even further. But, it requires moral courage. Rummel’s central message is power kills. Anytime, with any system, regardless of ideology, when power becomes concentrated in the hand of a few without checks or balances on that power, it becomes dangerous. That can happen anywhere.
Does one have to accept Rummel’s premise that promoting liberal democracy and freedom is the best way to prevent democide? Perhaps there is some middle ground or path that will not provoke authoritarians to violence and war. We must rely on something other than the Sergio Vieira De Mellos of the world or the UN Human Rights Commission. Such interventions are often too little too late.
Fighting tyranny and prevention of democide go together hand in hand. Democide is the penultimate form of tyranny. Resisting such tyranny requires constant vigilance and as much participation as possible — Timothy Snyder has compiled one of the best and simplest straightforward guides on fighting tyranny — “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” — On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
Opponents of the argument against the need for the word “democide,” say thing like killing someone for being a communist after a revolution they lost, however, is not genocide. In this case, it was politics, as usual, taken to the ugly extreme. Well, humanity can no longer afford politics as usual anymore.
More on why we need a new word -
Critics of the need for a new term cite civil war and that there is no need for new words. That one side was unprepared to “fight” in a military sense. This argument is an exception, relying on imagined human intentions and judgment. Civil wars have combatants. Democide is the government-sponsored killing of civilians or non-combatants. Another term used by political scientists and researchers is similar: politicide. Except for politicide applies to members of political movements. Victims of democide may be apolitical. Of course, there is going to be some overlap.
What Rummel was driving at when coining the term “democide” was scale and prevention, similar to the utility and usefulness of the word “genocide.” Murder by the government of millions of people needs a better term than politicide or civil war to stop or prevent it. How can we get a grip on the problem without a fitting name, again, as we have for genocide?
And if we are going to end both the age of genocide and the age of democide, we will need a more applicable term that can function as a tool similar to “genocide.”
Rummel dedicated his life to studying and quantifying this problem. Rummel and his colleagues’ work on this issue was extensive and exhaustive. The heavy lifting has already been done for us. Rummel left us the tools and a road map to prevention and elimination. We have to study Rummel’s roadmap.
On democide, some critics say we are making a big deal about semantics, a bigger deal of what to call it than of the actual acts. I beg to differ. We have no concept of murder as an aim of public policy. Nations kill a lot of people. Like genocide, we must invent new ideas and tools to grasp and solve the problem’s scale.
Rummel’s work is based on extensive research and statistics from the 20th century. He concluded that the “preeminent fact about government” is that “some murder millions in cold blood,” more than in all the wars combined from the last century. Inconceivable. I will bet your average person on the street is unaware of that.
How can we tackle the problem of genocide without the concept of genocide? In a similar light, the same applies to democide. We need a new vision for the seemingly inconceivable if we are ever to solve the problem of democide. How can we change US foreign policy if we lack the words to accomplish that? How can we offer an alternative vision or goal in exchange for hegemony if what we are offering has no name?
I am not asking US policy makers to suddenly drop hegemonic gains any more than I would ask them to do the same with nuclear weapons. But I would ask them to consider hegemony as a foreign policy goal in a similar light as nuclear weapons and work towards eliminating the dangers imposed by both.
Adversaries, like with nuclear weapons and related treaties, would need to also reciprocate when it comes to pursuing hegemony.
Multi-polarity where everyone is pursuing hegemony or a violent transition to that state means almost certain chaos. We do need to think of hegemony like we think of nuclear weapons in avoiding violence and unnecessary human suffering.
Those demanding multi-polarity feel they are sitting at the children’s table of power. While the US does not sit alone at the adult power table as many authoritarians like to imagine. The US sits with many other partners at the table of civilized men, a table at which many authoritarians are not welcome.
And why are they, many of these authoritarians, not welcome at our table, the table of civilized men? Because they murder civilians on a massive scale. And what new word did we learn to describe such behavior? That’s right! – Democide.
References:
Nils Petter Gleditsch’s review of Rummels work -
“R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions,” — Springer 2017-R.J. Rummel: An Assessment of His Many Contributions | SpringerLink,especially the chapter on “Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence” byErica Chenoweth
“Non-Violent Resistance (Satyagraha),” by M.K. Gandhi, Dover, 2001
Samantha Power’s TED page — Samantha Power | Speaker | TED
The writings of R.J. Rummel on the Powerkills website maintained by the University of Hawaii, where he taught — https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills.
“On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” — by Timothy Snyder, February 28, 2017 — On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.
