George Rebane

[This was recorded as my regular commentary on KVMR FM 85.9 for broadcast on 16 April 2010.]

Nuclear zero has a nice ring to it.  That great philosopher Rodney King poignantly asked, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’  With this aim, many of the world’s leaders met last week in Washington to see if doing away with all nuclear weapons in the world would be a good goal that we should now try to achieve.  That this goal is beyond silly, and has a snowball’s chance in hell of being achieved, will occupy us for the next couple of minutes.

This is George Rebane, here to convince you that the atom bomb has been one of the greatest protectors of human life since the invention of the club, and I’ll throw in penicillin just to sweeten the argument.  Most of us are immediately hypnotized by the mushroom shaped cloud and Hiroshima’s devastation when we think of nuclear weapons.  But let’s take a step or two back from any hip level hysteria here.

Public schools don’t teach kids that throughout history governments have been the greatest killers of their own people.  And we’re not talking about the millions killed when countries get into wars with each other.  Consider that during the 20th century WW1 caused about 16 million deaths, and WW2 ended at least 50 million lives.  But these deaths are dwarfed by how many people were intentionally killed by their governments in non-war related holocausts.

Through various pogroms, forced relocations, death camps, etc, that 20th century governments sponsored, these killed over 170 million people more than the war-related figures.  These mass murders have a name – they are called democides.  The 170 million figure does not include China’s mass deaths brought about by Mao’s ten-year Cultural Revolution.  The extent of this democide alone is now quietly estimated at an additional 120 million deaths.

Who did all the killings?  Primarily autocratic and totalitarian regimes with weak economies.  A study by Dr Gerald Scully of the University of Texas directly correlated a country’s economic strength to its propensity to kill its own citizens.  Government leaders have always set up institutional programs to kill their own in bad economic times.  You can get into the gory details by googling ‘death by government’, which is also the name of a scholarly book on the subject by R.J. Rummel.

So let’s get back to nuclear zero.  Great wars between nations ended in 1945 with the atomic bomb.  America and the communist super-powers devised mutual assured destruction or MAD to keep everyone’s missiles in their silos during the Cold War.  After the USSR collapsed, America’s nuclear umbrella and the promise to use it against aggressive rogue states, has kept the peace.

But now, while continuing to cut back on our remaining warheads, Obama has started to disarm the US with a non-reprisal policy against non-nuclear powers.  Russia is a willing partner in this as it cannot afford to maintain its strategic missiles.  Instead Russia continues to increase its vast stockpile of tactical nukes to support its policy of dominating the so-called ‘near-abroad’ countries.  Russia’s tactical nukes are not negotiable, and China is not even a part of the ‘let’s all just get along’ charade.

Which brings us to last week’s loss of the Polish leaders as they flew to observe the first official commemoration of Stalin’s 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of 22,000 Poles comprising most of Poland’s intelligentsia and all of its officer corps.  But nowhere in the reports on this crash is the real message of ‘death by government’ being brought to the world’s attention.  As Stalin said, ‘A few deaths are a notable tragedy, a million deaths is merely a statistic.’

I sincerely hope that you will look into this history on your own to see if somewhere in there is a message for us.

I am George Rebane, and I expand these and other themes in my Union column, and on georgerebane.com.  The opinions here are mine and not necessarily shared by KVMR.