DEATH BY GOVERNMENT

Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power
Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on
the causes of war1 and this book on genocide and government
mass murder--what I call democide--in this century. The more
power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily
according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will
make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic
subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the
more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will
aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of
Power2, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their
people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can
barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.

These assertions are extreme and categorical, but so is the
evidence accumulated in this book, Death By Government, and
its complement Statistics of Democide. Consider first war. Table
1.1 shows the occurrence of war between nations since 1816. In
no case has there been a war involving violent military action
between stable democracies3, although they have fought, as
everyone knows, non-democracies. Most wars are between
nondemocracies. Indeed, we have here a general principle that
is gaining acceptance among students of international relations and war. That is that democracies
don't make war on each other. To this I would add that the less democratic two states the more
likely that they will fight each other.

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