Democide: When your Government Kills You

February 23, 2012 Leave a Comment

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
February 23, 2012

When the books of history are written and those books cite the greatest threats ever faced by humankind, they usually mention, war, famine, natural disasters, and so on, but those who write history books always forget the largest threat that has endangered humans in the last 100 years or so. This threat is Democide. Democide is the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Democide is not necessarily the elimination of entire cultural groups but rather groups within the country that the government feels need to be eradicated for political reasons and due to claimed future threats. This term seems to have been coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel, although it was apparently used 40 years earlier by Theodore Abel.

Rummel coined the term and this helped to account for the explicit murder of people through methods that weren’t necessarily inherent to genocide as it was understood. This meant that people who were killed in democidal actions weren’t really counted as having been killed by government. What a useful creation has this been. The fact that society has a term to measure the brutality of the State throughout the past century or more, makes it even clearer to review why the writers of history did not set up a proper way to measure their own crimes. Apparently, the “scholarly classes”, who have been almost always riding along with governments — in all shapes and forms — weren’t able to properly identify murder in the hands of the State. It took a political scientist — the term is credited to Rummel — , or a writer if you attributed it to Abel’s book The Sociology of Concentration Camps, Social Forces Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1951), pp. 150-155, to help us quantify mas murder by the State.

As it turns out, neither disease not hunger nor war are the main causes of mass murder, although in many cases these situations are also caused by out of control States — more on this later — Democide is. So let’s take a look at history to see how powerful, out-of-control States have killed not millions, but hundreds of millions of their citizens just because they could and how this turns them into the number one threat to human society. No other threat, natural or man-made has ever killed more people in the last century.

No matter how carefully I think about my college years and the courses I took in two different countries, I can’t remember ever hearing about Democide. I never even heard about the main cause of human death in the history of society. Although the following accounting only shows human death by government in the last 100 years, ancient history shows that Democide, despite its lack of identification, has been present throughout human existence. I don’t know of any record that kept tabs on how many people were killed by their own kings or pharaohs back then. The term Democide is so new, that it isn’t even recognized by my spell check tool.

Conservatively, Democide is responsible for the death of at least 262 million people. This figures account for people killed mostly during the 20th century, but also includes some from the 21st century. I’ll leave it to each reader to find a way to put this number in perspective, context or to measure it in their own terms in order to make sense of it. Right now, let’s go case by case in order to add up the millions of people killed by their own governments.

China alone killed 76,702,000 of its people between the years of 1949-1987. The country has been for many decades under the rule of the Communist Party, which is directly responsible for the oppression and murder of all of these people. Some say the Chinese rulers even show pride for their crimes and admit to them. Before Mao arrived to power, the Chinese rulers had already killed around 3,468,000 people.

The USSR, in power over a region that includes what we know today as Russia is responsible for murdering 61,911,000 of its citizens between the years of 1917-1987.

Western colonialists in recent history do not escape murder of people by the millions. The powers that control most of the world today, which launched conquest campaigns all over the planet killing locals and later their own citizens, are responsible for a total of 50,000,000 murders. Most of these happened in the 20th century, although the way things are going, there is no reason to think that these powerful forces will outdo themselves in the 21st century.

In the case of Germany, while the country was under the rule of Adolf Hitler between the years of 1933-1945, the government murdered a total of 20,946,000 people, most of whom were not Jews. Depending on what book or encyclopedia is consulted, the number of Jews murdered by Nazi mandate was about 6.000,000. So as abhorrent as the Jewish genocide seems, an even greater genocide happened to non-Jewish people under Hitler.

In the case of Japan, the country saw most of its Democide during the years of the monarchy, which was responsible for the murder of 5,964,000 people between the years of 1935-1945.

Meanwhile in Cambodia, infamous Pol Pot and his accomplices from the Khmer Rouge, who were put in place and funded by the US government, were responsible for killing 2,035,000 people between 1975-1979. This number was back then about a third of the Cambodian population. Maybe this number should be put under the American tab.

Murder by the Turkish government now comes into view. Between 1909-1918, Turkey murdered 1,883,000 of its own as well as Armenian people.

Vietnam came just short, murdering 1,670,000 people between 1945-1987.

In Europe, Poland also has its own massacre record. The government in there killed 1,585,000 people between 1945-1948.

Pakistan does not escape murder by the millions either. The repressive regimes that have ruled the country killed 1,503,000 people between 1958-1987.

The nation of Yugoslavia mostly under dictator Josip Broz Tito killed at least 1,072,000 people as accounted between 1944-1987.

In the lower but not less murderous places of history appear countries like North Korea, with 1,663,000 murdered people, Mexico with 1,417,000 killed and Russia with 1,072,000 murders.

As someone rightfully put it, Government is winning the war against humanity.

It is important to explain that the conservative total of 262,000,000 murders by government does not include the deaths of people who were direct victims of military actions — military casualties. Those would amount to some 88,000,000, taking the total to about 350 million deaths by Government action.

It is also extremely important to say that all of these murders by government happened under the premise that such action — Democide — was illegal. No government had ever claimed that Democide, under any circumstance was correct, moral or legal. Except that now the United States government has done such a thing. Under the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, the US government has given itself the legal prerogative to murder any and however many of its citizens under the excuse of National Security.

If illegal Democide was able to end the lives of between 262,000,000 and 350,000,000 people in just a century or so, can you imagine what legalized Democide will be able to accomplish in the next 100 years?

If you are not shocked by now, please let me try one more time. The previous accounting of murder by government does not include secret government operations such as false-flag terror, sterilization campaigns, poisoning with chemicals in the food and water, laboratory-created disease and so on. That we’ll leave for another time.

By the way, the source for this article is called history.

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European Union Suspends ACTA Ratification

February 22, 2012 Leave a Comment

RussiaToday
February 22, 2012

The EU has suspended the ratification of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and referred the text to the European Court of Justice to investigate possible rights breaches.

The European Commission decided on Wednesday to ask the EU’s top court “to clarify that the ACTA agreement and its implementation must be fully compatible with freedom of expression and freedom of the internet.”

The ACTA debate “must be based upon facts and not upon the misinformation or rumor that has dominated social media sites and blogs,” says EU Trade Commissioner Karel De Guch. The EU will not ratify the international treaty until the court delivers its ruling, he added.

De Guch insists the treaty will change nothing in the bloc, but help protect the creative economy.

European countries were quick to sign US- and Japan-lobbied ACTA agreement in Tokyo just a month ago. Ratification of the controversial agreement, however, is not going so smoothly.

ACTA faced fierce opposition by the Europeans, who saw it as an anti-democratic move. People took their anger to the streets in a synchronized protest, saying it violates their rights. About 200 cities participated in an anti-ACTA march on February 11.

The initial goal authorities pursued was to protect intellectual property and copyright, but human rights activists fought to prove its bias in favor of those in power. They argue it violates freedom of expression on the internet and allows unprecedented control of people’s personal information and privacy.

Some critics have been saying ACTA is a somewhat-disguised SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act).

ACTA has so far been signed by the EU as a bloc, 22 EU members as individual states, and also by the USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, South Korea and some other countries. The total number of signatories to the treaty is 31.

The European Parliament is set to vote on ACTA in June. In parallel, the accord has to be ratified by all the 27 EU member states. Germany, the Netherlands, Cyprus, Estonia and Slovakia have not put individual signatures under the treaty as such and, in the wake of the mass anti-ACTA protests in Europe, are not eager to proceed with it. Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and Latvia suspended the ratification process, while Poland on the second thought refused to ratify the accord all together.

Wednesday’s decision means ACTA’s ratification in the EU could be delayed for months.

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U.S. Government Program Injected Citizens with Plutonium,Uranium

February 22, 2012 Leave a Comment

by Anthony Gucciardi
Natural Society
February 22. 2012

In a secret program that is now admitted to be true, the United States government injected unknowing human ‘participants’ with highly toxic plutonium. It sounds like a bizarre torture scenario that you’d expect to see blamed on illegal terror organizations, but the individuals behind this crime are actually doctors working for the United States government. Disregarding the health of innocent citizens, the government testers were eager to see how unknowing participants suffered as a result of secret plutonium injection.

It began in 1945, when an employee at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility was in a car accident. Ebb Cade survived, but was taken in as a human participant in a disturbing study he did not consent to. It is important to note that this man was a fifty-three-year-old African American, as previous government trials have singled out African Americans and other minorities. The racist sterilization programs occurred between 1929 to 1974 under an admitted eugenics programs that officials claimed were ‘creating a better society’. Most victims were poor, black women who were ‘deemed unfit to be parents’. Individuals as young as 10 were sterilized simply for not getting along with schoolmates or being promiscuous, and many parents were misled into sterilizing their children.

 Ebb Cade was taken and bound to a bed with a broken arm and leg, where doctors interviewed him regarding his current state of health. After determining he was in a state of proper health, doctors secretly injected him with 4.7 micrograms of plutonium on April 10th. It is still unknown who exactly ordered the program within the U.S. government, as they have managed to disassociate themselves with the entire nefarious program. At the time of the injection, scientists were perfectly aware of the negative effects associated with radiation. With cancers and radiation sickness on the rise, these scientists knew exactly what they were doing — examining the effects of plutonium isotopes on living beings.

Prior to the tests on Cade, the scientists injected animals with plutonium and noted the severe adverse effects. In some cases, animals were even fed radioactive waste. In fact, one scientist received a face full of gas and required his stomach to be pumped along with a full face scrub in an attempt to eliminate the threat. The scientists made sure that they were given the full treatment after the exposure. Meanwhile, they were injecting individuals with plutonium.

Scientists took excretions from Cade over the next five days to see how much plutonium retained in his body. They also refused to set his broken bones until April 15th, and cut samples from the bone before doing so to examine the plutonium content in his bone tissue. Fifteen of his teeth were pulled for testing. After all of this, they never informed Cade what they were doing. One nurse said that the tortured Cade escaped in the middle of the night, and he was later found to die in 1953 of heart failure.

Sadly, Cade was not the last test experiment.

Three human experiments followed, all cancer patients seeking treatment. Instead of treatment, the patients were injected with deadly plutonium in order for government scientists to see the effects. A man in his sixties with lung cancer, a woman in her fifties with breast cancer, and a “young man” with Hodgkin’s lymphoma were all given the poison. Conveniently, the third patient’s records are not available. He was injected with fifteen times more than any other individual, at 95 micrograms.

What followed is further widespread testing. The University of Rochester joined the program, injecting patients with not only plutonium but radioactive isotopes like polonium and uranium. Other institutions like the University of California soon followed suit.

Perhaps most concerning is the fact that this disgusting disregard for human health is not an isolated incident. The Tuskegee syphilis experiment is but one example of secret government human experiments that have run rampant throughout recent history. Taking place between 1932 and 1972,  Tuskegee, Alabama, the U.S. Public Health Service knowingly infected poor black men with syphillus in order to test the effects. These men thought that they were receiving free healthcare by the U.S. government.

The list goes on, targeting minorities and the disabled in particular. From forced sterilizations to incognito injections, there is a lengthy history of government testing that shows the blatant disregard for your health by the United States government and elsewhere. With this in mind, is it any wonder why the FDA keeps toxic substances like mercury unregulated among the food supply?

Filed under North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , ,

FBI Plans to Shutdown Internet on March 8th

February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

Russia Today
February 21, 2012

Millions of computer users across the world could be blocked off from the Internet as early as March 8 if the FBI follows through with plans to yank a series of servers originally installed to combat corruption.

Last year, authorities in Estonia apprehended six men believed responsible for creating a malicious computer script called the DNSChanger Trojan. Once set loose on the Web, the worm corrupted computers in upwards of 100 countries, including an estimated 500,000 in America alone. The US Federal Bureau of Investigation later stepped up by replacing the rogue Trojan with servers of their own in an attempt to remediate the damage, but the fix was only temporary. Now the FBI is expected to end use of those replacement servers as early as next month and, at that point, the Internet for millions could essentially be over.

When functioning as its creators intended, the DNSChanger Trojan infected computers and redirected users hoping to surf to certain websites to malicious ones. Traditionally, DNS, or Domain Name System, servers translate alphabetical, traditional website URLs to their actual, numeric counterpart in order to guide users across the World Wide Web. Once infected by the DNSChanger Trojan, however, websites entered into Internet browsers were hijacked to malicious servers and, in turn, directed the user to an unintended, fraudulent site.

In coordination with the arrests in Estonia, the FBI shut down the malicious DNSChanger botnet network, and, additionally, replaced them with surrogate servers to correct the problem. Those servers, however, were installed “just long enough for companies and home users to remove DNSChanger malware from their machines,” according to the court order that established them. That deadline is March 8, and those surrogate servers are expected to be retired then. At that point, computers still infected with the Trojan will be essentially unable to navigate the Internet.

Who, exactly, will be affected? Security company IID (Internet Identity) believes that half of all Fortune 500 companies and more than two dozen major government entities in the US are still currently infected with the worm as of early 2012. Unless they take the proper steps to eradicate the Trojan from their systems, millions of users worldwide will be left hog-tied, helplessly attempting to navigate to nonexistent servers and, in effect, without the Web.

“At this rate, a lot of users are going to see their Internet break on March 8,” Rod Rasmussen, president and chief technology officer at Internet Identity, cautions Krebs On Security.

Currently, both the computer industry and law enforcement are working together through a coalition they’ve established called the DNSChanger Working Group. That group has been tasked with examining the options in phasing out the surrogate servers set up by the feds, but unless an alternative plan is agreed on, a great port of the Web will go dark next month.

“I’m guessing a lot more people would care at that point,” Rasmussen adds. While infected users are cautioned to correct the problem now, millions internationally are still believed to be infected. “It certainly would be an interesting social experiment if these systems just got cut off,” he adds.

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The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom

February 21, 2012 Leave a Comment

by Robert McDowell
WSJ
February 20, 2012

On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said last June, his goal and that of his allies is to establish “international control over the Internet” through the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a treaty-based organization under U.N. auspices.

If successful, these new regulatory proposals would upend the Internet’s flourishing regime, which has been in place since 1988. That year, delegates from 114 countries gathered in Australia to agree to a treaty that set the stage for dramatic liberalization of international telecommunications. This insulated the Internet from economic and technical regulation and quickly became the greatest deregulatory success story of all time.

Since the Net’s inception, engineers, academics, user groups and others have convened in bottom-up nongovernmental organizations to keep it operating and thriving through what is known as a “multi-stakeholder” governance model. This consensus-driven private-sector approach has been the key to the Net’s phenomenal success.

In 1995, shortly after it was privatized, only 16 million people used the Internet world-wide. By 2011, more than two billion were online—and that number is growing by as much as half a million every day. This explosive growth is the direct result of governments generally keeping their hands off the Internet sphere.

Net access, especially through mobile devices, is improving the human condition more quickly—and more fundamentally—than any other technology in history. Nowhere is this more true than in the developing world, where unfettered Internet technologies are expanding economies and raising living standards.

Farmers who live far from markets are now able to find buyers for their crops through their Internet-connected mobile devices without assuming the risks and expenses of traveling with their goods. Worried parents are able to go online to locate medicine for their sick children. And proponents of political freedom are better able to share information and organize support to break down the walls of tyranny.

The Internet has also been a net job creator. A recent McKinsey study found that for every job disrupted by Internet connectivity, 2.6 new jobs are created. It is no coincidence that these wonderful developments blossomed as the Internet migrated further away from government control.

Today, however, Russia, China and their allies within the 193 member states of the ITU want to renegotiate the 1988 treaty to expand its reach into previously unregulated areas. Reading even a partial list of proposals that could be codified into international law next December at a conference in Dubai is chilling:

• Subject cyber security and data privacy to international control;

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for “international” Internet traffic, perhaps even on a “per-click” basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as “peering.”

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

Many countries in the developing world, including India and Brazil, are particularly intrigued by these ideas. Even though Internet-based technologies are improving billions of lives everywhere, some governments feel excluded and want more control.

And let’s face it, strong-arm regimes are threatened by popular outcries for political freedom that are empowered by unfettered Internet connectivity. They have formed impressive coalitions, and their efforts have progressed significantly.

Merely saying “no” to any changes to the current structure of Internet governance is likely to be a losing proposition. A more successful strategy would be for proponents of Internet freedom and prosperity within every nation to encourage a dialogue among all interested parties, including governments and the ITU, to broaden the multi-stakeholder umbrella with the goal of reaching consensus to address reasonable concerns. As part of this conversation, we should underscore the tremendous benefits that the Internet has yielded for the developing world through the multi-stakeholder model.

Upending this model with a new regulatory treaty is likely to partition the Internet as some countries would inevitably choose to opt out. A balkanized Internet would be devastating to global free trade and national sovereignty. It would impair Internet growth most severely in the developing world but also globally as technologists are forced to seek bureaucratic permission to innovate and invest. This would also undermine the proliferation of new cross-border technologies, such as cloud computing.

A top-down, centralized, international regulatory overlay is antithetical to the architecture of the Net, which is a global network of networks without borders. No government, let alone an intergovernmental body, can make engineering and economic decisions in lightning-fast Internet time. Productivity, rising living standards and the spread of freedom everywhere, but especially in the developing world, would grind to a halt as engineering and business decisions become politically paralyzed within a global regulatory body.

Any attempts to expand intergovernmental powers over the Internet—no matter how incremental or seemingly innocuous—should be turned back. Modernization and reform can be constructive, but not if the end result is a new global bureaucracy that departs from the multi-stakeholder model. Enlightened nations should draw a line in the sand against new regulations while welcoming reform that could include a nonregulatory role for the ITU.

Pro-regulation forces are, thus far, much more energized and organized than those who favor the multi-stakeholder approach. Regulation proponents only need to secure a simple majority of the 193 member states to codify their radical and counterproductive agenda. Unlike the U.N. Security Council, no country can wield a veto in ITU proceedings. With this in mind, some estimate that approximately 90 countries could be supporting intergovernmental Net regulation—a mere seven short of a majority.

While precious time ticks away, the U.S. has not named a leader for the treaty negotiation. We must awake from our slumber and engage before it is too late. Not only do these developments have the potential to affect the daily lives of all Americans, they also threaten freedom and prosperity across the globe.

Mr. McDowell is a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.

Filed under Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, Special Reports, World Tagged with , , , ,

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