Talk:Democide

Gun Laws

Should the section on Gun Laws be in the article? I think it provides historical context on how democide evolved and guns were used. I am not an expert though so i'll yield to consensus? Diff of the section in debate -- Dane2007 ^talk 23:37, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

I strongly believe that that information should be in this article. For many reasons; one is, how was Hitler and Stalin able to kill so many of their own people? how were they able to put fear into their own population. Why couldn't the people fight back? To understand what affect Hitler and Stalin had on the WWII, an individual needs to know that their were certain guns laws in place in order to control the massive amount of people. If their wern't any guns laws, I don't know if the Holocaust would of happen or Stalin able to kill so many. If people were able to defends themselves against a radical/ternary government things would of been different. Also its a important piece of history to know about. i know that there are certain people out in this world who don't want me to talk about this but those are the facts, not myths. I'm not trying to sound rude or disrespectful.--Zielinski Auto Parts (talk) 05:00, 1 September 2016 (UTC)

If we have a reliable source for it, we could have a statement like "X has argued that wide gun ownership allows the populace to prevent democide, and that gun laws increase the likelihood of democide."

I don't think this article is a suitable place to give so much detail about the former penal codes of Germany and the Soviet Union. Indead, doing so, without a well-sourced statement along the above lines, appears to be an attempt at WP:SYNTH.

Yaris678 (talk) 12:09, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

I added this back in after an IP removed it. My question is...So do we rewrite this section? Leave it as is? The section is well sourced but I could see how it could be perceived as an attempt at WP:SYNTH, so how do we want to present the information? Obviously we want to balance both policy and information. -- Dane2007 ^talk 19:59, 13 November 2016 (UTC)

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A correct definition of democide is added

I added a new text describing democide based on a reliable scholarly source. The old link was dead, and the source does not look thustworthy.--Paul Siebert (talk) 18:43, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Good add, thanks. The article can definitely use scholarly sources.

There seems to be a bit of inconsistency in the descriptions given in the article prose. Some of the descriptions in the article seem to be specify "intentionality" and others don't, including the perhaps unintentional yet still clearly caused by state action. For example, the first paragraph seems to say a bit of both sides of that question, all tied to the same source:

[defined it as "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command".[2] According to him, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims; killings by "unofficial" private groups; extrajudicial summary killings; and mass deaths due to the governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines, as well as killings by de facto governments, i.e. civil war killings.[2] This definition covers any murder of any number of persons by any government.[2]] (emphasis added)

Thoughts? N2e (talk) 23:19, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

Alas, it seems inconsistencies are immanent to genocide studies. According to Anton Weiss-Wendt (Weiss-Wendt A. (2008) Problems in Comparative Genocide Scholarship. In: Stone D. (eds) The Historiography of Genocide. Palgrave Macmillan, London. DOI https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297),

"There is barely any other field of study that enjoys so little consensus on defining principles such as definition of genocide, typology, application of a comparative method, and timeframe. Considering that scholars have always put stress on prevention of genocide, comparative genocide studies have been a failure. Paradoxically, nobody has attempted so far to assess the field of comparative genocide studies as a whole. This is one of the reasons why those who define themselves as genocide scholars have not been able to detect the situation of crisis."

--Paul Siebert (talk) 14:25, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Neologism

How much coverage does "democide" specifically get as a neologism vs. the wider, ambiguously defined mass killings by states? Right now the article reads as a coat rack, starting with Rummel's definition and devolving into a broader discussion of the themes in his Death by Government. The full accounting of his views belongs in either his biographical article or a breakout article about the book itself, but is the reason this is catching extra material just because it has no where else to live? If "democide" is not popularized as a term, it's fine to use a more descriptive title, such as mass killings by states as a summary style split from mass killings? Something like that could resolve the tight overlap between our current democide and politicide/political cleansing of population articles.

Basically, per the above talk page messages seven years ago, if the article was scoped less to Rummel's neologism and more to the generally defined concept, there would be more room to merge in material and build out the concept. (not watching, please {{ping}}) czar 01:16, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: The term was coined by Rudolph Rummel, whose main contribution to science was application of factor analysis to social sciences. In particular, he discovered the "democratic peace" phenomenon, i.e. the fact that democratic countries are less prone to wage a war, and they kill less people. To do that, he needed to collect some uniform statistics of deaths caused by each state and find various correlations between the number of victims and the regime's traits. The two major categories of victims are people killed by another state (war deaths) and by their own state. For the later category Rummel proposed "democide". The main problem with that word as I see it is that "democide" looks like "genocide", but sounds even more scary. In reality, in contrast to genocide, it is not some specific type of killing of people by government, but any killing, direct or indirect, by the act of commission or by the act of omission. Thus, scholars continue to argue if the Great Chinese Famine was a result of poor management, bad weather, or intentional killing (most likely it was a combination thereof), but to Rummel, it was definitely the act of democide. I am pretty sure George Floyd death fits a definition of democide too.

Being a purely statistical category, "democide" has little explanatory power. By saying "that was an act of democide", we actually mean that the action of some government (or lack thereof) lead to the death of some people, and we even do not care if that action was intentional or not.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:41, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

I'm suggesting that we might be applying the term disproportionate to its wider adoption. Like if this article kept the same scope but was called something besides "democide", it could be less about Rummel's use in particular and more about the concept, with a section on politicide, on the definitional issues between the terms and lack of common vocabulary, on the research behind a causal link between concentrated power and mass killings (e.g., Rummel and the response to Rummel), with a prose-based comparison of events. Basically this is the article the others are dancing around but is restricted by the narrowness of its current title, i.e., the concept clearly has coverage but not necessarily as the neologism "democide" per se. czar 04:50, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

@Czar: Yes. In addition, it seems usage of that term somewhat correlates with political views of concrete authors. For example, there are two experts in Soviet history, Wheatcroft and Rosefielde. The former is more modest in his estimates of lethal consequences of Stalinist policy and in its intentionality, whereas the latter is more leaning to anti-Communist views. They have a long dispute about main aspects of the Great Purge, Soviet Famine, etc, and the former never applies the word "democide" to those events, whereas the latter does. In addition, there is a group of so called "genocide scholars" who, like Rummel, are studying general causes of mass killings. These authors seem to use various terms ("mass killing", "genocide", "politicide", "genopoliticide", and other "-cides") almost randomly, and apply them to the same or different events. Based on what I read, there is a serious definitional problem in this area of knowledge, and to create an impression that some universally accepted terminology exists would mean to mislead our readers.--Paul Siebert (talk) 05:25, 15 December 2020 (UTC)

I don't see the usage of the terms as random at all or definitional issues. The roots "geno", "politi" and "demo" obviously specify the type of -cide, just like "homi", "sui" and "insecti" do. The term "democide" has been in usage for more than thirty years, so I think it has moved beyond being a neologism, particularly since at least one main stream dictionary lists it. Google ngram gives an interesting comparison of the relative usage of the terms "democide", "politicide" and "mass killing". However the term "genocide" has significantly greater usage . --Nug (talk) 03:52, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

"democide" is definitely a neologism, and it is used very rarely as compared to "genocide", despite the fact that it is supposed to cover much broader range of events. And it is used much more rarely than "genocide" in scientific literature. It is a very technical term used by a narrow group of authors interchangeably with other terms.

In addition, "democide" is used mostly in context of Rummel (or by him himself, compare this and that, whereas "genocide" is less associated with the name of the author (compare the number of citations here and there.--Paul Siebert (talk) 04:32, 18 December 2020 (UTC)

• Are there other potential titles for this concept that could also incorporate the other overlapping stubs (politicide, mass killings)? Since it looks like no one neologism is suitable in this case (i.e., democide as a concept comes closest but as a title is a neologism for the wider idea), we'd also be looking at non-judgmental descriptive titles per the naming criteria. Perhaps something like state-led mass killings, killings by government, mass killings by states? Open to thoughts. czar 22:05, 20 December 2020 (UTC)

  Czar, according to Krain 1997, pp. 331–332: "1. The literatures on state-sponsored mass murder and state terrorism have been plagued by definitional problems." According to Valentino 2005, p. 9: "No generally accepted terminology exists to describe the intentional killing of large numbers of noncombatants." Are you saying this article's main topic should be killings by government, so Mass killings under Communist regimes would be moved here as part of the broader concept of killings by government? Mass killings by states and/or State-led mass killings could be the title of a subsection and summary-style of Mass killing from this. Davide King (talk) 10:33, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

  I'm not passing judgment on Mass killings under Communist regimes yet but I am recognizing that "Mass killings", as written, is mostly about Mass killings by states and thus is likely not the best name for that article scope. Let's not get ahead of ourselves with what is moved where, since that all requires discussion? The question is if democide was renamed to keep or slightly modify its scope to the broader concept (state-sponsored killings?) while dropping affiliation with the neologism, what could it be named? czar 15:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

czar, I see no problem here, because we already have Mass murder, so that article is complementary to Mass killing. Moreover, as far as i understand, the only reason to combine all state mass killing in one article would be to discuss theories that are trying to find some general rules predicting mass killing's onset. These theory belong to the discipline called "genocidal studies". All of them, including Rummel's "democide" theory, are minority views, so the articles about genocide studies theories must be devoted to the theories themselves, not to the facts they are describing.

In other words, instead of discussing "democide" as a phenomenon, we should discuss (i) That "democide" was proposed by Rummel to find statistical dependencies between regime's traints and its lethality; (ii) That Rummel found some correlations between totalitarianism and the number of deaths caused by each regime; (iii) That that theory has some support; (iv) that "second generation of genocide scholars" proposed different theories; (v) That all these views are essentially ignored by historians (can provide sources). --Paul Siebert (talk) 17:18, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

This is getting off-topic from democide as a neologism but in brief, mass murder and mass killing would have their own cases/discussion for independent notability, though I don't see the case for keeping mass killing, democide, and politicide separate based on current sourcing, and I would want to see what sourcing separates a concept of "mass killing" distinct from "mass killing by states". Again, that discussion would warrant a dedicated thread and as I said above, would be premature. What I asked from this discussion was alternative titles for what would potentially combine the topical overview of killings by states/governments (scantly known as democide).

Entertaining the idea of genocide studies as the home for that proposed Rummel paragraph, what sources make a connection between Rummel's theory and the field of genocide studies? In general such field overview articles would not be the place to delve into (as you called it) minority views (see film studies, media studies, Holocaust studies, etc.) That would be the purview of an article about the majority topic itself (mass killings by states) of which Rummel and others have "minority views". As editors, we then balance those minority views as due weight when explaining the overall concept. czar 17:54, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

czar, I agree. Various "-cides" were proposed to describe some nuances of mass killings, but most of them (except "genocide") are being used by the author of each term + few other authors. In reality, some authors openly say that any attempt to propose some universally accepted terminology was a complete failure, so all that terminology is a minority views. Therefore, it would be correct to merge them to Mass killing.

With regard to "mass killing", that term has two meanings, one of them (colloquial, or commonsensusl meaning) is just "killing of many people", and the second is "killing of more than N non-combatants during the period of not more than M years" ("N" and "N" may be different in different definitions), and that definition can be found in Valentino's words, although it was proposed earlier (don't remember the author, need to check it).

With regard to "majority topic itself", the very topic (mass killings by states) is a minority view. Yous "mass killing by states" is a subject of so called "genocide studies", and that school is a minority school of thought dedicated to researching and preventing genocide. This field is developing in parallel with work on other areas of political violence. They organise topic-specific conferences and journals like "Genocide Studies and Prevention" and the "Journal of Genocide Research", but not mainstream political science journals. They rely on methodological approaches that have had little resonance in mainstream political science, and dominant political science journals and book publishers usually show little interest to them. I know sources that support all my statements, but I need some time to find them.--19:03, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

I'd be interested in the sources that would link and justify moving the entirety of the democide commentary under discussion into genocide studies. I find it more likely that mass killing would better house that information, but as I said above, I don't think that article's title is specific enough to justify the contents currently found there. As an encyclopedia for a general audience, Wikipedia should have at least one place that discusses the various types of "mass killings" that have occurred throughout history and their various groupings as backed by reliable source discussion. Genocide studies would be about the academic field's history, not about the history of genocides/mass killings. czar 19:41, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Ernesto Verdeja, The Political Science of Genocide: Outlines of an Emerging Research Agenda, Perspectives on Politics , June 2012, Vol. 10, No. 2 (June 2012), pp. 307-321 doi:10.1017/S1537592712000680

--Paul Siebert (talk) 20:05, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Czar, perhaps this article should be about Death by Government, which redirects here, while most of the content should be moved at Mass killing, especially Mass killing by (Communist) states, which should not actually be reduced to Communist states alone. Thoughts? Davide King (talk) 07:12, 25 December 2020 (UTC)

Catching up on pings. Regarding handling this article, I recommend merging the content that summarizes Rummel (in specific) to Death by Government if about his book. I recommend merging any secondary analysis about mass killing and genocide studies to those articles. I imagine democide should ultimately redirect to mass killing if definitionally covered there (like politicide). czar 07:47, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

I agree.--Paul Siebert (talk) 19:04, 1 January 2021 (UTC)

Why dont the FBI and CIA have an entire section detailing their democides the way theres one dedicated to "communist states"?

There are a LOT of instances of FBI and CIA murdering entire groups of people and individuals for being freedom fighters and revolutionaries. Whether through COINTELPRO and false framings or funding deaths squads to kill communists around the world...that all fits the definition of democide. The section should be added. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 41.46.123.173 (talk) 02:06, 12 July 2021 (UTC)

It really doesn't matter what happens in the nominal nation states, large scale democide is a decision made by the owners of the Global Leaders. The FBI and CIA have to comply with the Global mandates passed down to them by their paymasters. OttomanBath35mm (talk) 18:33, 5 March 2022 (UTC)