Understanding global security - Peter Hough

SOCIAL IDENTITY AS A THREAT TO SECURITY
enacted a law forbidding marriage to couples carrying genetic or infectious diseases
unless they first agreed to be sterilized.
Politicide
Strikingly absent from the UN definition of genocide (see Table 5.5) is the mass,
systematic killing of political and/or social opponents by radical governments or nongovernmental
forces. Since the targets of such action are not necessarily national,
ethnic or religious minorities the distinct category of politicide is necessary for
a complete understanding of the phenomenon of societal massacres. The omission
of politicide from the UN Convention is the result of the predictable opposition of
the USSR in the late 1940s to classifying their extermination of opponents and undesirables
alongside that of the Nazis. As Table 5.3 indicates, the USSR regime
represented at the UN drafting of the Convention on Genocide can claim the dubious
distinction of being history’s most brutal ever. Rummel estimates that some 62 million
political and social opponents were killed during the three-quarter century lifespan
of the USSR and the Stalin era, alone, can lay claim to having been the largest single
cause of human mortality bar the Black Death. Rummel observes that the average
Soviet citizen was more at risk of being killed by their own government than the
average smoker is from lung cancer (Rummell 2003: Table 1.3).
Politicide is very much a twentieth-century phenomenon owing to the polarization
of political ideologies in this period. Ruthless leaders have long slaughtered
opponents away from the battlefield in order to buttress their power or through the
paranoia that autocracy frequently brings, but, in the last century, this has blended
with ideological zeal in a deadly cocktail. As Table 5.3 indicates, major politicides
have invariably been carried out either by or against Communists/Marxists of various
Table 5.3 The top ten politicides in history
Perpetrators Victims Date Numbers killed
1 Stalinist USSR Class enemies, dissidents 1928–53 49.5 million a
2 Maoist China Class enemies 1949–76 35 million a, b
3 Nationalist China Communists, other
opponents 1927–49 10.2 million a
4 Chinese Communist
opposition Nationalists 1927–49 3.5 million a
5 Khmer Rouge Class enemies 1975–79 2 million a, b
6 North KoreaClass enemies 1949–present 2 million a
7 North Vietnam Class enemies 1954–75 1 million a, b
8 EthiopiaClass enemies 1974–79 750 000 a
9 Lenin’s USSR Class enemies, dissidents 1917–22 750 000 a
10 IndonesiaCommunists 1965 500 000 b
Sources: a Rummel (2003), b GenocideWatch (2003).
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