by

Morgan Reynolds

ABC just quoted Syrian president (tyrant) Bashar Assad as saying, “We don’t kill our people … no government in the world kills its people, unless it’s led by a crazy person.”

Talk about a hopelessly wrong argument!  This one is often pulled out of thin air to “diss”  9/11 “conspiracy nuts” who reject the (absurd) official conspiracy theory of events about that murderous day.  Yet governments have routinely attacked and harvested their own citizens by the millions.  Genocide and government mass murder is unspeakably familiar.  Professor R.J. Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, documents much of it in his book, Death by Government (1994).  Rummel puts the 1900-1987 government total at 169 million murders.  The top 15 “megamurderer” regimes, led by the USSR, China (PRC), Germany and China (KMT), “wiped out over 151 million people” (p. 3), and each of the 15 regimes murdered more than 1 million of its subjects.  That was “almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle dead from all this century’s international and civil wars up to 1987” (p. 3).

Modern propaganda tells us that the state is an institution of social service, and more happy talk, the state is all of us!  This is obvious nonsense on stilts.  A couple of economists might wise us up.  As Murray Rothbard clarifies it for the naive: “Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion.”  And who is likely to head up such an organization?  “The probability of the people in power being individuals who would dislike the possession and exercise of power is on a level with the probability that an extremely tender-hearted person would get the job of whipping master in a slave plantation” (Frank H. Knight (1938), quoted in F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 152.).