Never Again ?

Never Again Book 6

Never Again?

R.J. Rummel

Llumina Press

© 2005 Rudy Rummel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of this work should be mailed to Permissions Department, Llumina Press, PO Box 772246, Coral Springs, FL 33077-2246 ISBN: HC 1-59526-021-8 PB 1-59526-022-6 Printed in the United States of America by Llumina Press Library of Congress Control Number: 2005904509

Love’s dark enemy Power, like a deadly plague Infects, corrupts, kills

Acknowledgments I wish to give special thanks to Marg Gilks, who has been a most helpful editor on this novel and all the others in the series. She gave me frank evaluations of each novel, answered any questions I had with good cheer, provided me informative material on writing fiction, and carefully edited all my revisions. For much of whatever literary value there is in these novels I owe to her. Above all, I could not have written these books without my wife, the love of my life. She has provided me with the love, friendship, companionship, understanding, stable family and environment, tennis doubles partner, walking mate, and all enveloping support that made all these novels possible. Thanks Baby, and come here. I have no doubt that in our history, somewhere in the world, loving couples like John and Joy have fought for freedom and, courageous warriors to the end, died in each other’s arms. I’m sure they would have had it no other way. We do not know their names, but their spirits are all around us in the freedom we now enjoy. To all their souls, for myself and my wife and daughters, and for humanity, I give profound thanks. Although names and places in this book may have an uncanny similarity to what is real, this is a work of fiction, and they all are fictional facts. Any errors in such are mine alone.

Chapter 1

G

od does play dice with the universe. Well, at least that part of it that humans inhabit. Each second of each minute of each hour is a new throw of the dice, and this time we may win the lottery, be struck by lightning, or have a tornado hit our town on the same day three years in a row, as happened to Kodell, Mississippi in 1917, 1918, and 1919. By a throw of the dice we may have a stroke, meet the love of our life, or be hit by a car whose driver had a heart attack. A particular throw may save a man with a bullet wound from death, a man who will go on to become a dictator and be responsible for murdering millions, and killing millions more in the wars he wages. Or another throw may just have a doctor present at the right moment to save a boy from a lifethreatening disease, and more lucky throws may allow the boy to grow up into a man of sublime peace who, in the right place at the right time, creates a country and an influential philosophy of nonviolence. Of course, when history is written, its course seems so inevitable, so fixed, that the supreme role of chance is disguised. This is not to say that we have no role to play in our lives. We do. In the choices we make, we open or close our future to new lines of chance. Just moving to a new neighborhood, deciding to change jobs, or going to college is like going into one casino instead of another, or choosing a slot machine over the poker tables—a new world of chance is before us, and others are left behind. But when by chance a golden door of opportunity opens, by disposition, interest, education, and experience, we have to know the door is there. Of course, we may just be lucky and take advantage of the opportunity without knowing what we are doing. Maybe once in a thousand years, maybe once in a hundred thousand, maybe for the first time in all of human history, a particular opportunity may open to some person who just happens to be at the right time and place. And thus God’s throw of the dice favored Cyril Clement, one out of all the billions of human beings, with a power beyond our understanding.

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He was a nothing then, a poor kid, really a street urchin. His parents were divorced and he lived at his dad’s place—to Cyril, it was always his dad’s place, never home—a small, two-room apartment. His father was an off-and-on laborer who spent most of his earnings in saloons. What this boy would have become, had he not been made supremely special by chance, is impossible to know. He surely would have quit school as soon as he could. Which he did. He likely would have remained uneducated, poor, and possibly frustrated and unhappy for the rest of his life. He might have turned to crime. But maybe not. He might have lucked out in a stupid business venture, or turned out to be a well-adjusted, happy person. But in any case, as far as humanity is concerned, he would only have been a statistic, one more person added to the world’s and the American population. A throw of the dice opened to him the greatest of all opportunities, but he had to have a special disposition to grab it, or this one and possibly only chance might never appear again for anyone. He had to enjoy reading, so much so that he collected cast-off magazines and books. If he’d been illiterate, if he disliked reading, or if he read only by happenstance, humanity would have lost the absolutely profound, the absolutely incredible chance that the young boy could be a bridge from one universe—one dripping with the blood of hundreds of millions murdered, or killed in aggressive wars, one in which thug-regimes enslaved billions—to a parallel universe of peace and freedom.

March 1944, San Francisco Cyril Clement Cyril sat on his bunk staring at his father, asleep on the other side of the narrow bedroom. The room reeked of alcohol. Hunger had awakened him. He yawned, stretched, and looked at the alarm clock on one of the bookshelves next to his bunk. Past ten a.m.—he’d missed school again. He remembered hitting the alarm when it went off at seven a.m., but he had stayed up late last night reading all of one of his latest finds, a June 1938 Reader’s Digest, and he’d been too sleepy to heed the alarm. His hunger demanded attention. He had not eaten since lunch the previous day, and then only a cheap, half-plate of spaghetti from the restaurant below them. “I’m hungry,” Cyril yelled as loud as he could.

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His father lay twisted in the covers of the single bed beneath the room’s only window, snoring. It was a workday, but not for his drunken dad. He stirred and opened one bloodshot eye, then the other. He stared back at Cyril and mumbled something. “I haven’t eaten anything today, Dad. I’m hungry.” Amidst a series of wheezes and coughs, his father gasped, “Dammit, boy . . . go get a job . . . what’ya . . . want from me?” He turned his back on Cyril. Cyril crawled to the foot of his bunk, swung his feet to the floor, and put on his pants. He had worn them for months, and the fabric on the knees bowed out when he stood. His dad’s did the same, from constantly sitting in them. The overstretched fabric made him look like he had a knee deformity. He had worn his shirt to bed and didn’t change it. He wandered into what they called the living room, the only other room in his dad’s place. There was no kitchen, and they shared the bathroom at the end of the hall with the other occupants of the building’s second floor. He stood uncertainly by the door, his fingers unconsciously searching his pants pockets for crumbs from the bread he usually stored there to eat later—when he had it. A knock at the door made him jump. When he opened it, the school truant officer stood on the threshold, one hand on her hip, shaking her head at him. She was a big, stout woman dressed in black, with a heavy looking brown fabric bag slung over her shoulder, and her hair bundled on top of her head. “You missed school again, Cyril,” she said in a loud, harsh voice, but compassion softened her eyes. She shook her finger at him. “I’ve got to take you in to the principal. If you miss many more classes, Cyril, you are going to be held back in the sixth grade.” She stepped to one side of the door, obviously waiting for him to join her. He didn’t know what to say. He stood by the door, looking down at the worn edge of the room’s nondescript rug. Finally he muttered, “I got to go fishing. Catch some fish. Sell them. I’m hungry.” “When did you eat, Cyril?” “Yesterday. My dad gave me thirty cents and I ate lunch downstairs.” “You don’t have any money now?” “No.” She took a step into the room. There was no door between the living room and the bedroom, only a wide archway, so she could see Cyril’s dad lying twisted in the covers, now with one hairy leg hanging out. She sniffed, twitched her nose, and shook her head. Then she tilted

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it to look sadly at Cyril. He still wouldn’t look at her. She reached into the large brown shoulder bag and pulled out her change purse. She held fifty cents out to him. Cyril looked up at the money from under his brows. “What’s this for?” “Get yourself something to eat, Cyril. Go fishing, and I hope you catch something. But don’t you miss school tomorrow. Okay?” Cyril took the money, and finally looked up directly into her soft brown eyes. “Okay.” She nodded, then turned quickly and walked down the hall to the stairs. Cyril left the door open. He pocketed the fifty cent piece, and picked up his long bamboo fishing pole from the floor behind the tattered sofa. A length of fishing twine was already wrapped around it, with a hook at the end. A faint odor wafted from his tin bait can when he picked it up, so he cracked the lid and checked his collection of worms—night crawlers. He had punched small holes in the lid so that they would have air, as an old Chinese fisherman had taught him. Some of the worms were moving over the grass and leaves he’d placed inside, so he wouldn’t have to scrounge this time in the garbage cans behind the restaurant downstairs for something to use as bait. Pole and can in hand, he left his dad’s place. He would eat at Jimmy’s Delicatessen. Jimmy sometimes gave him something extra to eat. Then he would head for the Bay piers. If he was lucky, he would catch a few striped sea perch or rubberlip perch. If God was happy with him, he might even pull up a dozen or so crabs. But he’d settle for the poison-finned cabezon if he had to; he could sell even that in one of the saloons and bars along the edge of Chinatown or the Barbary Coast.

aaa Fishing was good, and by late afternoon Cyril had earned $1.63 selling what he caught. He dropped off his fishing pole and his worm can at his dad’s place—his dad was gone, no note saying where—and headed for the Used Books Mart on Merchant Street. It was a long walk from Steiner Street, but it was worth it. The door tipped an overhead bell when he opened it, and he looked around for the owner as he entered. The store was dusty and stuffy and crammed with books and magazines from ceiling to floor. A young woman emerged from between two stacks of books and greeted him cheerily. “Hi, Cyril. I’ve got a new Astounding Stories and a year-old Startling Stories. I hid them for you.”

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He always bought any science fiction that came in, if he had the extra money. Cyril gave her a little smile and said, “Thank you.” He never knew what to say to her, so he just said “thank you” to whatever she said or did for him. That seemed to work okay. When she handed him the magazines, he paid her the thirty cents and left with his new treasures. He would be up late again tonight. But he had one more thing to do, once he had his hands free. As he walked to his dad’s place with his purchase, he passed boxes of magazines and piles of newspapers stacked on the curb in front of some homes and businesses. He knew it was wartime; in school he liked drawing pictures of airplanes shooting at each other, with some falling from the sky, trailing smoke. A teacher had told him that it was his family’s patriotic duty to put out old newspapers, books, and magazines to be picked up by trucks. He didn’t understand how, but the discarded publications would help fight the war. The paper pickup was tomorrow morning, he’d learned. For Cyril, it was like having a gold mine next door. And he was going to search the mine again. After dropping off his new magazines, he began walking up and down the neighboring streets, rummaging through boxes along the curb. He picked up a few Reader’s Digest, Life, National Geographic, and The Saturday Evening Post, and had to return to his dad’s place to unload them. He hoped these would fill in the dates that were missing from his collection. There was hardly enough room in his dad’s place for all the magazines and the few books he’d collected, but he stole hollow tiles and old planks from a construction site and made himself a bookcase next to his bunk. He could only get into the bunk by crawling from the foot of the bed, but he had everything lined up by his head, so in the evening he could easily choose something to look at or read. He felt good and he had a full stomach, so he decided to go out again for one more search before dark. He tried several different streets, finding mostly newspapers and a lot of uninteresting magazines with food, cars and ships, or clothes on the cover. So he headed where he had not gone before—down Fillmore Street. He stopped in front of an imposing building bearing a sign that read Headquarters: Fire Commissioners and Chief Engineer. On the curb there waited a large collection of boxes and food cartons filled with old magazines, and strange bundles of papers, all either bound or clipped, with words like “Government,” “Official,” “Memos,” “Engine Houses,” and “Reports” on their covers. He shoved them aside, looking for interesting magazines and books.

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At the bottom of one box he found a thick, beat-up, bulging folder that looked like an accordion. It contained several sheaves of clippedtogether papers, what appeared to be a bound book, and several thick stacks of paper, tied with twine. The bound book looked similar to the Sears Roebuck Catalogue, six of which Cyril had picked up already, for different years. Deciding to take the interesting folder home with him, he set it aside and looked for more treasures, but there was nothing except what he thought was a book; he discarded it when he saw its title: The Official Manual on Fighting Fires.

aaa Over the days that followed, Cyril occasionally pulled the accordion folder from the milk carton full of other treasures that he kept under the end of his bunk, and looked through its contents. Clipped to the front of the folder was a form of some sort; he understood little of it, although he could read the title—“Official Investigative Report”—and the date—December 1938—and that there had been an apartment house fire. Its third page was typed and easy to read, if not completely understand: I conclude that the fire was caused by rats eating off the insulation of wires behind a kitchen wall in a first floor apartment, causing a sparking short circuit which set ablaze the sawdust and wood shavings there. A fuse should have blown before the short circuit sparked, but someone had replaced it in the fuse box with a copper penny. Science fiction had improved Cyril’s vocabulary, but “insulation,” “fuse,” “fuse box,” and “short circuit” were yet beyond him. There was a space on the report for a description of the contents of the folder. There, someone had typed: Partly burned papers titled “Remembrance” found by body; other documents found in safe when forced open. Crackpot. The last word had been circled twice. Cyril read it, shrugged, and went on to other papers in the file. Among three longer documents he found one headed “The Plan,” which he did not understand when he scanned it, and another titled “Chronology” with dates and events listed in small type underneath. This held no interest for him, but he kept it simply as part of the folder. He had yet to read carefully or even scan much of the three bound documents. He flipped through a few pages of one and then put it back in the file. A glance at their titles didn’t excite him. One, the partly burned, four-inch pile of paper, was titled “Remembrance.” Another, printed and bound with a hard cover, bore the title “Democracy, War,

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and Democide in the Twentieth Century,” under which was printed “Ph.D. Dissertation, May 2001, Yale University History Department.” The third pile of papers had been bound with twine, and had on its cardboard cover the same title as the dissertation, with a handwritten note scribbled above: Manuscript: dissertation academese translated into American English. Written as an alternative past and future history. Completed 1928. None of it made any sense to him. Most of the words were strange; they were not the words he’d picked up from reading science fiction, such as “spaceship,” “solar system,” “planet,” “ray gun,” “alien,” and “robot.” Something so ancient—from way back in 1928—couldn’t possibly contain anything interesting. And he didn’t recognize the name “John Banks” on each of the bound documents, either. Rather than waste his time reading such stuff, he preferred to reread his special treasures, such as the articles in Reader’s Digest on the Japanese Rape of Nanking, or how the German guards in concentration camps selected their sexual plaything for the night from a room full of naked women. He didn’t know what it all meant, but the thought of seeing a naked woman excited him far more than anything in the accordion folder.

Chapter 2 2001 John Banks

H

e had never seen a bloody body before, not to mention one without arms and legs. Oh, he had seen his dead mother in her casket during her funeral, but she looked so peaceful, as if she were just asleep, and that didn’t count—not like it did for so many people of the world, living through the violence of war or democide. And his father, some kind of agent for the CIA in Somalia, had been brought back in a closed casket that remained closed for the funeral. His mother had told him that was because “he didn’t look pretty.” She’d never disclosed how he died. Ironic, in a way, his not seeing what really happens to people in violence—the heads blown off, intestines hanging out, holes where shoulders, hips, or legs used to be, legs and arms themselves scattered about, bodies perforated by every sort of weapon or utensil, sometimes to the point where they looked like Swiss cheese, and blood, blood, and more blood, enough to form a Niagara of blood. Yet, this horror so abstract to him had been the subject of his dissertation. And he would now teach others about the most obscene violence of all, democide: the shooting, blowing up, live burial, knifing, gassing, and hanging; the death by torture and beating, by starvation, by exposure or by being infected with lethal germs, by being thrown off cliffs, decapitated, or crushed—death by any means within the creative imagination of monarchs, caliphs, kings, czars, emperors, and other absolute rulers and dictators of all kinds and their agents. Ironic in another way—he was twenty-six years old. World War Two, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War were distant history to him. When he came of draft age, there was no draft, no war in which he could volunteer. He knew no veterans who had killed in war, no murderers, no government agents who killed in the hundreds or thou-

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sands. Nor did he know anyone who had seen others killed or their loved ones exterminated, or who had faced the prospect of violent death and survived. Raised in a big city by a mother who was a tennis professional, he had no idea what violence looked, sounded, and smelled like—it was alien to him. He had no direct experience of the age’s killing weapons of choice: the gun, the bomb, the grenade, the bayonet or combat knife. He’d never even handled a BB rifle. He’d owned a penknife as a boy, but sliced himself when playing with it, and never opened it again. He did use kitchen knives when cooking, but they were for just that— preparing food. He never thought of using one as a weapon. This modern man, this supremely educated historian, this new university professor, was ignorant of the true feel and texture, the true essence of fear and terror faced by billions of human beings. In this, he was a typical American virgin. Yet, what did he teach? He taught about war, although the pile of mangled and bloody corpses generated by that was only a mound compared to the mountain murdered by governments. Because he recognized this, he centered his teaching on democide. And as a virgin in terms of these horrors, how did he know what to teach? Or rather, what did he teach? Why, the same things he had been taught, and in the same way. Words, tons of words, spoken and printed, and a gallery of pictures and paintings and drawings. All was theory to him. Abstract. A virgin teaching a class of virgins, who at the end of the semester would have their heads stuffed with words and flat, twodimensional, sterile images—no smell of blood, of fear, of a convulsing body’s waste; no sounds of screaming, moaning, crying . . . of dying. They would still be virgins. He was not dumb. He knew how limited his experience was of what he taught—he himself had likened it to writing and teaching about Japan without ever going there, speaking the language, or meeting a Japanese. But early on he told himself that one does not need to be a woman to be a gynecologist, nor visit the stars to be an astronomer; the study and prevention of diseases does not require a survivor of the Black Plague. He believed that the study of the history of war and democide was sufficient to find a cure for them. And he was so sickened by what he studied about war and democide that he had turned such study into his career. Professor Cyril Clement had convinced him that democratic peace provided a solution to war and democide, and he’d found confirmation of this in his own historical research. He’d written his Ph.D. dissertation on it.

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New Ph.D. in hand, John Banks had been lucky to get a tenuretrack assistant professorship to teach at Indiana University. He was on his way. Do his research, publish a book or two and some articles, keep his relations with the lovelies on campus discreet, and tenure— academic heaven—would be his. He had learned from his graduate advisor at Yale how the academic game was played. Publish, yes. But also get to know the greats in the field. Mingle with them, carry their books, show devotion to their ideas, attend their presentations, and ask softball questions that make them look good. Then, as flowers attract bees to produce honey, they’d help get his books and articles published, and help him win research grants. And where else does one meet such esteemed individuals than at conferences and seminars held by the central organizations of one’s field of study? He took this advice to heart. Only two weeks into the Fall semester at Indiana University, his department chairman, Sam Palmerton, approved an invitation for John to participate in a democratic peace seminar held by the International Studies Association at Rutgers. He must have played the game and showed his stuff. Afterward, he would no longer recall in detail what happened there. It all soon was compressed into a droplet of memory. For, within a day of the last session of the seminar, he was gruesomely, terrifyingly, shockingly devirginated.

Chapter 3 1950 Korean War Cyril Clement

B

y his mid-teens, Cyril had exhausted what interested him most in his magazine collection, and paper drives were long past. Idly flipping through the scorched and partly burned pages of Banks’ “Remembrance,” he came across some very explicit lovemaking. He didn’t understand all that was described, but what he did understand riveted him, and in following days he scanned through everything that had been in the folder, including the pages of the dissertation on the twentieth century. He did not much care for all the political stuff he read, and thought a lot of the dialogue in the “Remembrance” was stupid, but after he again put the full folder away, some of it stuck. In the late 1940s, Cyril’s interest in science fiction deepened, and he searched in one used bookstore after another for all the issues of the pulp science fiction magazines. He could afford them now. He had a part-time job setting pins in a bowling alley, and he often volunteered to do two alleys at once for the extra money and sometimes, even tips. Even so, he was not beyond stealing. Sometimes he carried his school books into drugstores that sold the magazines he wanted, and hid two or three between his textbooks, then walked out. He was particularly fascinated by the adventures of Captain Future, who would save planet Earth from some criminal, alien, or global threat. He also enjoyed reading about first contact between Earthmen and aliens, and often daydreamed of trying to communicate with aliens for the first time. Cyril thought that what was in the accordion folder was really science fiction written by Banks, which he had not been able to get published. What encouraged this view was the collection of rejection

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letters he found in the back of Banks’ “manuscript,” from the various presses to which it had been submitted. All were dated between 1928 and 1931. All of the readers’ evaluations called the manuscript simplistic, ignorant, or dumb. Nor did he pay attention to the futuristic chronology and its stock market predictions. As a teenager, he just was not into this stuff. As soon as he could legally quit school, which was right after his sixteenth birthday, he did so. Now he was only good for the most manual work. He had found a full-time job on the assembly line in a stove factory, doing nothing more than stuffing fiberglass insulation into the sides of stoves, riveting the sides together with a special machine, and piling the completed sides on a cart to be taken to the assembly line where the stoves were put together. He moved out of his dad’s place and rented a room with peeling plaster in a boarding house that was leaning so far from the vertical that the floor in his room sloped. Still, it had space for his wealth of magazines and his few books, it was cheap, and it was as far away from his dad as he could get and still be near enough to walk to work. He hated the work. He hated the slum where he lived. He wanted to escape, maybe even learn a trade, like operating a bulldozer. The Korean War began on June 25, 1950, with the invasion of South Korea by the North, and when President Truman committed American ground forces to war on June 30th, Cyril had his opportunity. On July 5th, he waited in a long line at the Army enlistment office on Hamilton Square to volunteer. And during the first week of his service he waited in another line, this one the most momentous of his life. A thin officer—he had one bar on his shoulder—took Cyril and his new barrack mates to an imposing wooden building bearing the sign Headquarters. Inside, the officer led them to a large room resembling a gym, where he pointed to a long line and directed them to wait in it. There were other new soldiers—he could tell they were new, since they all had their heads shaved almost to the scalp—standing in other lines, and moving around. Cyril leaned sideways, trying to see where his line was headed, and glimpsed another officer with single bars on his shoulders, seated behind a desk. He seemed to be asking questions of the soldiers who reached his desk. From time to time he consulted one of several thick books on the desk before him. “What is this line for?” Cyril asked the soldier in front of him. “I don’t know.” The soldier leaned over the man standing in front of him, and asked the same question. The question traveled down the line, and the answer eventually came back. “It’s for your MOS.”

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Cyril shook his head. “What’s that?” The question went back down the line and soon an answer returned with much laughter. “It’s your Army Morons Only Speciality, so they know how to screw you.” Later Cyril would find out it really stood for Military Occupational Specialty. Cyril had no idea that the officer, his books, and the upcoming interview would not only be another throw of the dice with which the gods decided his future, it would be the rarest of rare throws. It would decide not only whether he lived or died, and if he perchance lived, whether he would be poor or well-off, unknown and frustrated with his life or famous in his contributions to humanity. But that was only his future. What would soon happen at the table would determine whether the children of those around him, and especially their children’s children, would live or die, live horribly or prosper. In this one throw of the dice, again the whole nature of the future universe was at stake. The line was long, the wait interminable, so Cyril took out the new Astounding Stories he had picked up at the PX, and began reading it. Over two hours later, when it was Cyril’s turn to be interviewed, the officer slouched over the desk with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and the gray tin ashtray on the gray metal desk overflowed with butts and ash. “Name?” the officer asked in a tired, bored tone. “Cyril Peter Clement.” “Cyril P. Clement, what?” the officer asked, his voice hardly changing. “Ah . . . .” Somebody behind him whispered, “Sir.” “Cyril Peter Clement . . . sir,” Cyril responded. “RA?” This was the number by which all volunteers were identified. Along with his name, serial number, date of tetanus shot, blood type, and religion, it was stamped on the two brand-new aluminum dog tags hanging around his neck on two ball-chains. The corporal in charge of Cyril’s barracks had demanded that he and the others there memorize their numbers within one day, or clean the latrine and pull the weeds around the barracks. “Ah . . . RA15447721 . . . sir.” The officer wrote Cyril’s name and number on the top form of an inch-thick pile of forms, then looked up from under his brows, his pencil poised above the form. “Civilian job?” Cyril provided his overblown job title. “Stationary riveter . . . sir.”

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The officer said something under his breath, dropped the pencil, and began leafing through the thick books on his desk. Finally he muttered to himself, leaned back, looked at Cyril, and sighed. “Okay, you got me. Tell me what you did.” “I took these stoves . . . electric stoves . . . and I built in a wiring with insulation so that its molecular structure matched the design implications of the system . . . the electrons had to flow around it when the electricity passed through it . . . . then I riveted the sides together. Ah . . . sir.” “That’s all?” the officer asked, sounding a little more animated. “I had to make sure the atomic structure was stable when the electrons hit it . . . ah, when the stove was turned on,” he finished almost breathlessly. One of the science fiction stories he had just read in his Astounding Stories involved the repair of a spaceship that had been attacked by an alien fleet. Cyril just lifted a few of the words from it. Why not? No harm done, he thought. The officer stared blankly at him for a moment, then leaned over the form and wrote several sentences in a text block on the form, and also in the margin next to it. Then he looked up at Cyril again, but with more interest. He turned the form around and pointed with his pencil at the bottom of it. “Sign here.” Cyril did, and the officer pointed to another line. As Cyril moved off, the officer mumbled mechanically, “Next.”

aaa It was crazy. Despite having no knowledge of medicine, Cyril was attached to an ambulance unit at Fort Benning, Georgia, for his basic training. And when he arrived, they assigned him to the motor pool, even though he had never driven anything before. His first experience was driving a two and a half ton truck, with an officer sitting beside him and soldiers in the back. His was in a line of trucks, and he’d been told to follow the one ahead when they started up. Resting his hand on the gearshift, he asked the officer, “How do I shift this thing?” “Ha-ha,” the officer responded. When the truck ahead started up, Cyril turned to the officer and shouted above the revving of engines, “No, I really don’t know how to drive this thing.” “Shit, you kidding me, private?” “No, sir.”

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The officer jumped out of the truck. Minutes later, a sergeant showed up below the driver’s side door. He looked up at Cyril and screamed, “Get your ass down here.” Cyril did, and he was reassigned from the motor pool to permanent kitchen detail. He soon hated the cooks, the kitchen, the peeling of potatoes, the garbage cans he scoured, and the mess hall that he had to keep clean; he hated learning how to tie bandages, apply tourniquets, and give shots; he hated the instructional films on battle field medicine; he hated Fort Benning; and he hated Georgia and the atmosphere of overt racial prejudice and the existing segregation. As soon as he finished basic training in mid-August, he volunteered to be shipped to Korea. He was soon on his way by ship, as a medic. A medic, he thought often during the voyage across the Pacific to Japan on an old liberty ship converted into a troop carrier. Me, a medic. It must have something to do with the MOS that officer gave me, but I don’t understand it. Ha. For a tenth grade dropout, I’ve come up in this world. A medic. Jeeez.

aaa The first stop for individual soldiers was Camp Zama, Japan, where they were assigned to units in Korea. This period was the most dangerous for the American deployment in Korea, and the survival of South Korea was in doubt. The invading North Korean Army had pushed American and South Korean troops down the Korean peninsula until they were squeezed behind a perimeter of defenses they had hastily dug outside of the southern port of Pusan. Lose that, and South Korea was lost, at least until an invasion by sea could be put together. On September 1st, the North Korean Army launched an all-out offensive on the perimeter. To defend it, the Eighth Army was throwing into the battle poorly prepared, poorly armed American troops as soon as they arrived in Pusan from Japan. In this hell of exploding shells, mortars, and grenades, ripping machine guns, whizzing bullets, and charging hordes of North Koreans, medics counted their life span in days, at most. Cyril arrived in Japan on September 5th. Ten days later, the brilliant Inchon landing behind the bulk of the North Korean Army would take pressure off of Pusan, allowing the Eighth Army to punch its way out of the perimeter and, along with

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South Korean troops, drive up the peninsula to join American troops advancing from Inchon. As a medic, Cyril probably would not have survived in Pusan until then. But Cyril lucked out. Unbelievably so. He had just the right MOS at just the right time. Unknown to him, Cyril’s MOS labeled him “engineer, undesignated,” meaning he could fill the need for any engineer. So the Camp Zama Korean Consignment Task Force (CZKCTF—pronounced secsef) pulled Cyril out of the huge group being sent to Korea and kept him in Japan to fill a vacancy of which the 64th Engineering Battalion had just informed them by telephone. After all, Cyril’s MOS was “engineer.” The 64th was involved in taking reconnaissance aircraft tapes and, from them, making maps for United Nations forces in Korea. Very technical. Obviously engineering stuff—so CZKCTF thought. So Cyril was sent to the Isetan Department Store in the center of Shinjuku, a prime shopping and entertainment district (including a legal red light avenue) in Tokyo. Here, on the store’s fourth to seventh floors, the totally contained 64th Engineering Battalion lived and worked. Cyril’s bunk and locker on the fourth floor of the store were only sixteen steps from the windows overlooking the red light district. The district was off limits, patrolled by soldiers from the battalion to keep other soldiers out. This “duty” was routinely passed around the battalion, as was guard duty, and eagerly awaited—unlike guard duty. The battalion’s personnel officer first assigned Cyril to the motor pool repair shop in back of the department store. Hardly a job worthy of his “engineer” MOS, but the officer must have also looked into his record beyond that (something no one else seemed to have done), and saw that Cyril didn’t even have a high school diploma. What does one do with such a person in a highly technical battalion? It’s into the motor pool, of course. It took only a couple of days for the sergeant in charge to realize how totally ignorant Cyril was in repairing and servicing trucks and jeeps, and his near accidents while trying to maneuver a jeep around the motor pool showed that he couldn’t even drive. The sergeant exchanged words with the personnel officer, and Cyril was told to report to his new assignment in the battalion’s graphics department. He was supposed to work on the battalion yearbook, but he only drove the Japanese civilian responsible for this project into unJapanese, undiplomatic language. “Baka!—idiot! Baka!” the man yelled. “Photos not straight. Chikishou—damn. Block print bad—not lined.”

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“Aligned,” Cyril corrected. Within three weeks, Cyril was again reassigned. This time the personnel officer assigned him to the machine repair shop, presumably to oversee the work of Japanese technicians. He didn’t have to know anything or say anything, for the technicians did all the necessary repair work on the machinery. The personnel officer must have known this. All Cyril had to do was have pliers or a screwdriver in his hand when an officer was around. Otherwise, he read. It was a duty he handled well for over two years. With Cyril assigned to Japan in a place of safety, the vast changes in the universe for which Cyril would ultimately be responsible were still on track. It might seem as though there were a guiding hand, but no—just a chain of virtually impossible good throws of the dice for Cyril, and more for humanity. Again and again, chance favored Cyril’s apparently destined future. If anyone were to track it all, it would be like winning a state lottery several times in a row. But then, Cyril was not alone in this strange, coincidental run of incredible luck. There was also John Banks. And . . . one other.

Chapter 4

September 11, 2001 New York City John Banks

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he actual horror John Banks experienced for the first time, he would never forget. It would color his lectures, change his life, and author his dreams. He would never be the same. And in this horror, he joined the multitude of people throughout the world who had suffered through their own war and democide. Again, God threw the dice. On September 10th, Banks had no idea that every little step he took led him randomly to the monstrousness of the next day. It was not fated for him. A slightly different decision on this day, one appearing unimportant among all the unimportant decisions, would have led him to a different universe among his probable futures, perhaps even to death. But he made the decision, he behaved as he did, and his life’s and the world’s path would take on the inevitability that hindsight always gives it. He delayed his flight out to Chicago, and from there to Bloomington and Indiana University, until noon the next day—September 11— so he could visit his cousin, Pete Baxter. Pete, a bond broker for Tucker Brokerage in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, managed $43,000 in bonds that John had inherited. He wanted to discuss selling his bonds and moving into stocks. Besides, this was an opportunity to see Pete for the first time in years. That morning, he took the PATH train from New Jersey to the World Trade Center. He arrived at 8:50 a.m. and hopped on the escalator up to the concourse. It was empty of people, still and quiet—spooky. From outside came a faint rumble and the suggestion of distant sirens. The air felt sticky. A sour smell made him stop and look around; for the first time, he noticed the smoke hanging in the air, and the empty shoes, especially high heels, scattered over the floor.

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His heart began to pound. He felt the first stirring of fear. Something was very wrong. “Get out! Run!” He whirled to see a policeman gesturing frantically toward the concourse doors. Without thinking, he obeyed. Outside, glass, concrete, and papers of all kinds littered the street. Still more papers floated down from above. The stink of burning things and gasoline hung in the air. He couldn’t run, but had to step over and around the debris. He almost tripped over what he initially thought was a side of beef. As he dodged it, he realized it was a naked torso without arms or legs. He was too dazed to do anything but register the mangled torso and automatically look for its sex, without absorbing it at all. Further on, he passed a large tire and then a woman’s delicate hand with a wedding ring on one finger. It was severed at the wrist, lying palm upward, fingers slightly curled. Not one of the polished fingernails was broken. The owner would be happy about that. The stupid thought flitted across his mind like the CNN Headline news items that pass across the TV screen. By the time he got across the street, he felt sick and weak. Several people stood there, looking up at the tower. Some of them held their hands over their mouths—whether because of the stench or out of horror, he didn’t know. He leaned against a building and finally started thinking again. Yes—Jesus!—I saw a naked torso. A man’s. And I did see a woman’s severed hand. God, what is going on? Finally, he followed the gazes of the people standing around him. Clouds of smoke billowed from an inferno visible through a gaping hole in the tower, somewhere around the ninetieth floor. He stared. He couldn’t imagine what had happened. Above the flames, men and women stood at the windows. Some stood on the sills of broken windows with smoke rolling out from behind them. Suddenly, a man jumped from a window and twisted in the air as he fell more than ninety floors. A collective gasp of horror burst from the crowd around John. Another person jumped. And another. One landed nearby with a wet plunk. John leaned over and vomited. When he straightened, wiping his mouth, his eyes rose on their own to the burning building. Oh my God, he realized, my cousin is above the flames. His hand trembled as he took out his cell phone and called his cousin. “Honey?” Pete’s voice asked.

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“No,” John responded, surprised that Pete had answered so quickly, “this is John. I was about to come up when I saw the fire. What happened?” “A plane hit the building. I can’t get Julie. She’s not at work yet. Look, I’m going to try to keep calling her, but I don’t know how long—” John heard muffled coughing “—I think I’m going to die. I can’t get the door open, and smoke is coming in through a large crack in the wall. It’s hot. Too hot. I’m sitting under my desk. I can’t breathe.” Pete paused; for a moment, John thought something had happened to him. Then he said softly, “Please John, if I can’t get to her, tell her I love her . . . I love our children. I want her to be happy, to find someone—” more coughing “—who will make her and our children happy. Tell her that, John. Tell her that . . . ahh . . . we will meet again in heaven. . . . Goodbye.” The connection ended with a click. Tears filled John’s eyes. His heart thudding, he unconsciously shook the cell phone and beat it against his trembling hand. The connection was as dead as his cousin would be soon, he knew. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a low flying jet. Its engines grew to a scream. He jerked his gaze upward, and watched the plane fly into the South Tower. It disappeared inside for a half-second, and then the near and opposite sides of the building erupted in a huge, red and yellow mushroom cloud of burning aircraft fuel and debris. Concrete, metal, glass, unrecognizable construction materials and airplane parts, and bodies rained down on those below. John escaped injury, but he did not escape the cloud of concrete dust, ash, and particulate debris that enveloped all in the vicinity when the South Tower collapsed. Nor did he escape the bloody horror of more body parts, mangled dead, and bloodied, severely burned people around him. And as he helped some of the wounded to ambulances or police officers, he did not let himself escape what such terrible, trembling terror meant to those who must wait in fear over the fate of their loved ones. Somehow, John made it to Pete’s home to comfort his wife Julie. The living room was full of friends, many crying or with glistening eyes and drawn, haggard faces. No one talked. Some held hands. Two TVs tuned to different channels blared the news about the attack on the towers. He smelled coffee. Julie’s face was drawn, her eyes red, and her cheeks tear-streaked. John couldn’t even think to say hello. He just blurted out to Julie in a voice he didn’t recognize, “Did Pete get through to you?”

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“Yes. I was on the phone with him when the tower came down. His voice was cut off and then . . . I only heard static.” Sobbing now, she continued. “We saw it. We saw it and he’s not dead. I know he’s not dead.” Immediately, her friends rushed over and enveloped her in their arms. Pete’s little daughter Betty began crying hysterically, and his son Paul, his own eyes full of tears, tried to comfort her. John went to them, pulled them into his gray, sooty arms, and hugged them to him. He could do nothing but make soothing sounds and give them human comfort. And so for John, theory became empirical, the abstract real. From then on, when he lectured about war and democide, his voice held a deeper timbre, his specific examples of the human cost held a new quality of sadness, and he nurtured a fresh, almost fanatical dedication to the democratic peace. All this came from his heart and soul. But more, it affected his mind. So it seemed.

Chapter 5 1950–1953 Japan Cyril Clement

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ne of the lieutenants, Roger Spielman, who had a college degree in political science, thought it would be helpful to give Cyril’s battalion a lecture on the politics of the Korean War. They all gathered on the sixth floor, in the department store’s former exhibition hall. Cyril considered such information presentations a great opportunity to read, and brought Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot with him. He sat near the rear, where the battalion first sergeant who attended these sessions could not see him, and he could hide the book behind the back of the soldier seated in front of him. The lieutenant had ordered everyone to be at ease, and stood patiently at the front, waiting for them all to get comfortable on the floor. Then he began with some humor. “As you may have noticed, the Japanese have a little difficulty with English, but you can’t say they don’t try. Have you seen the latest Japanese advice for American military drivers? ‘When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.’ “Then there are the notices in hotels: ‘Please take advantage of the chambermaids.’” He waited for the chuckles to subside before continuing. “Or the one regarding the heater: ‘If you want just condition of warm in your room, please control yourself.’ “Or restaurants: ‘We reserve the right to serve refuse to anyone.’” This elicited some laughter throughout the room, especially in front. The lieutenant’s wide grin morphed into a hard line and he swung his eyes around the hall. “We are at war, as troops who may at any time be sent to Korea to fight . . . ”

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This met slight head shakes. Those gathered knew they were too important as technicians to be squandered in battle. None of them would be sent to fight. “ . . . so I want to make sure you understand the stakes involved. Although it is being fought against us, the Korean War is one of Stalin’s offensives against the West, and free countries. He is attempting to spread communism around the world by force, and our foreign policy of containment is attempting to stop him—to keep Soviet communism within its current borders. This is why President Truman committed us to fight this war. We cannot allow Stalin to succeed in his attempt to conquer countries around him.” A hand went up. These technicians, even though privates, or corporals, or especially sergeants, were not overwhelmed by rank. The lieutenant looked at the technician and nodded. “I thought that Kim What’s-his-name of North Korea ordered the invasion.” The lieutenant’s mouth hinted at a grin. “That’s what Stalin wants you to think. That’s why there are no Russian troops involved. Kim Il Sung is Stalin’s boy. He created him, put him in control of North Korea, and gave him all the military equipment he thought was more than necessary to defeat weak South Korea. He never expected that we would go to war to save South Korea. Before the invasion, our State Department—” his voice took on a touch of disdain “—told the world we wouldn’t.” Spielman had no notes and no lectern. He began pacing in front of the soldiers with one hand in his pants pocket and the other ready to occasionally emphasize his points. He described the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s power over the Soviet Union, World War Two, Hitler’s holocaust, and the rapid growth of communism after the Second World War, including the 1949 communist victory over the nationalist government of China. He then went into the history of communism in Korea. Cyril was into Asimov’s book, but did catch some of Spielman’s words now and then. When he heard China mentioned, he put down the book and focused on the lieutenant’s words. Wait, Cyril realized as he listened, isn’t all this in Banks’ manuscript? Didn’t Banks describe communist victories in eastern Europe and China? Then Cyril almost fell over. He’d remembered that Banks had described the defeat of the Chinese Nationalists and the Korean War, almost exactly as the lieutenant was describing it. Cyril had picked up the accordion file containing the book and manuscript in 1944. Yet, those pages seemed to precisely foretell the future. That can’t be. It’s impossible.

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The lieutenant, looking pleased, kept glancing his way; Cyril must have had a rapt expression on his face. Although Cyril still thought the manuscripts he had found were science fiction, they seemed, in his memory at least, to mirror what the lieutenant was saying about communism and the Korean War with incredible accuracy. There has to be an explanation for this, he thought, but it still excited his interest. Then he recalled some of the other things he’d read, things that had yet to happen, such as a Vietnam War, and a mass extermination in some African country in which nearly a million people were murdered in a few months. He now wanted to reread the manuscript in detail, and go through the stuff in the accordion folder again. Before joining the Army, he had put all his treasured books and magazines in storage. He didn’t trust his father to look after them, and he had been right. His father moved away from San Francisco with only a suitcase in hand, as best Cyril could find out. He could write to the Secure Storage Company and have them send him the Banks stuff, but he didn’t trust that they could find the accordion file, and if they did, that it would reach him without something getting lost. He had to wait until his discharge to read everything again. There was still one thing he could do, however. That night he started guard duty; for the next twenty-four hours, he would spend two hours on guard, four hours off. His favorite location was at the department store elevator, where with an unloaded rifle on his shoulder he stood watching the Japanese customers come and go. What he would have done if a Japanese had tried to use the elevator, he didn’t know. After he finished his shift, he asked around, hoping to find out where he could borrow history books. He was told he could borrow them from the military library at Army Headquarters in the Dai Ichi Building, on the other side of the street and across the moat from the Emperor’s Palace. There he found an impressive collection of history books, particularly on Asia, since the library was a prime resource for the American occupation authorities. He could not take books out, so he began spending most of his spare time there. Ted Richardson, who bunked next to him, asked one day, “Cyril, I don’t see you around anymore. You shacking up with some Japanese broad?” Like them all, Cyril had his share of the sex for the taking for a few cents, all within a few feet of the battalion. But he was tired, and wasn’t thinking. Rather than saying something like, “Yeah, she was a sixteenyear-old virgin,” which would probably have provoked laughter and the

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rejoinder, “There ain’t no such thing within fifty miles of here,” he made the mistake of saying the truth. “I’ve been going to the library at Headquarters almost every day.” Ted went wild with that, almost collapsing in laughter on his bunk. “Yeah, sure,” he finally got out. From then on, when he came into the bunk area late, one or more of the soldiers would laugh and yell, “Back from the library, Cyril? Got a hot book on the side?” They just didn’t believe him. He had to be shacking up; it was so easy to do. Cyril’s impatience to see the Banks stuff only grew as he found nothing different in the history of the twentieth century from that he hazily remembered from the manuscript and the “Remembrance.” But he was getting an education in history and, as more and more he followed the news and commentary on the American military radio station, political science. There was something else. Many of the technicians in his battalion who worked on the photographic and mapmaking machinery had college degrees, some with an M.A. Yet, to Cyril, they seemed no brighter or more intelligent than him. Indeed, because of his avid reading of science fiction, in some areas his vocabulary and knowledge seemed more extensive than theirs. That persuaded him to go to college. If they could do it, so could he, and moreover, he could finance it through the GI Bill that Congress had made available for Korean veterans. But he had quit school in the tenth grade. Without a high school diploma, he could hardly enter college. So he also began studying arithmetic and geometry, American history, elementary science, and English grammar in order to take the Graduate Record Examination the Armed Forces gave, which, if he passed, would give him the equivalent of a high school diploma. Some colleges would accept that in place of the normal diploma. One month before his discharge, he passed the exam. He also was promoted from private first class to corporal. It had taken him almost three years to achieve that exalted rank—not that he cared. In Korea, American forces had ceased offensive operations, and a military stalemate had ensued for well over a year as negotiations deadlocked over voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war. Dwight Eisenhower was elected president of the United States in November 1952, and in December he began a three-day tour of Korea. It was clear that the war was almost over, but for the settlement of the repatriation issue. In February 1953, with little mapmaking to do, Cyril’s battalion began thinning its personnel. Cyril, now with no vital MOS—it had been

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reclassified by the personnel officer—and due for discharge in less than half a year, was not reassigned. Instead, in March, at the age of twentyone, he received an honorable discharge and a check for back pay and a bonus totalling $872.23. The day he arrived in San Francisco, he paid the $173 he owed for storage and carried his things to his newly rented room. Anticipation nearly overwhelmed him as he sat with the heavy accordion folder on his lap for the first time in over three years. Now he would read, really read, more than the erotic hot spots that he had marked with a folded corner. He didn’t eat. He didn’t sleep. Not until he had read it all. He finished with his mind in chaos. I can’t believe it, but it makes sense, Cyril the science fiction fan concluded. But why me—why did I find the folder? I am the luckiest man alive. No, someone is playing tricks on me. But who? Maybe somebody replaced what was in the original folder. That’s stupid. Still, how can there be a solution to war? History says otherwise. This stuff is all story. Yet, what it says about the future I’m living through has been correct, absolutely. Now, wait a minute. If Banks and hot-stuff Joy went back to the past and changed the future, then I’m living in the changed future. So, his predictions based on the chronology he took back in time and his dissertation of the past written in 2001 could not predict the present, because the present is his future, which he changed. Cyril shook his head. Not right. No, it’s all incredible. But then, if what was in the folder is in the future of the universe he and Joy left—my universe—how did this folder get into my universe? He says that one can’t cross universes. . . . He rubbed his eyes. Christ, I got a headache.

Chapter 6 1953 San Francisco Cyril Clement

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xhausted after reading Banks’ stuff and trying to make sense out of it, Cyril tried to get some sleep. He tossed and turned, his mind returning again and again to the impossible implications of what he had read, to wondering if what Banks said about the future were true. Newly discharged from the Army, jobless, his future unplanned and uncertain, he knew one thing he would do at eight o’clock the next morning. When the San Francisco Library opened, he was there with Banks’ “Remembrance,” the chronology, and the manuscript in a doubled paper grocery bag. He asked a librarian for a chronology of current history. She gave him several books, and pointed him to the annual New York Times Index for specifics. He settled down to compare Banks’ stuff to what actually happened in the world from 1906, when John Banks and Joy Phim landed in the past, to the present, July 1954. The Index was most useful—pick a war, revolution, public figure, or event that Banks mentioned and look it up in the Index. They were all there. He finished late in the afternoon. Raw hunger drove him to a White City Diner, where he automatically ordered two twenty-five-cent hamburgers and ate them in a daze. Since everything checked in the manuscript for the years up to the present, and it was a revision of Banks’ 2001 dissertation, presumably the events it noted occurring after 1954 would be accurate also. With that and the chronology, he now had in his hands precise predictions of the future political world—who would be president of the United States, what wars, civil wars, uprisings, and mass killings would occur, what colonies would become independent and what their new names would be, and so on, up to the year 2000.

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Cyril’s confusion of the day before had disappeared by the time he reached his rented room. The library research and his science fiction background now made him virtually certain. In the many decades since H. G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895, time travel had been a rare plot device; now it was often used, although ridiculed by physical scientists. After devouring so much of this fiction, he now, finally, believed it. Logic about universes be damned. That’s unanswerable. However, this stuff fits history too well to deny. He felt like dancing around his room. He felt as though he had won a million dollars, tax free. Still, a sliver of caution remained. One more test. That’s all. Today is March 23, 1953. What’s the next big event that Banks predicts after today? He could find nothing in the manuscript for the rest of 1953. He checked the dissertation as well, to be sure. There was nothing until February 1956. “‘Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of USSR Communist Party, denounces Stalin’s excesses,’” he read aloud. “Judging by the emphasis on it, that will be a big event.” He consulted Banks’ chronology, and there he found, for the months of 1953 after his discharge from the Army: Monday, July 27, Korean armistice signed; Thursday, August 20, Moscow announces explosion of hydrogen bomb. His hand shook so badly that he struggled to write legibly, but he copied the dates and events down in large block letters on three-ring paper he’d found at the library. These two would be his test cases.

aaa Cyril was rapidly living through the money he’d received on his discharge from the army; he had to find a job. He started on the late night shift at the Coca-Cola Bottling Company in Oakland. It was an easy job—he checked the cartoons of empty bottles that came into the plant, making sure there was nothing solid inside the bottles, such as pencil stubs and ball point pens, and then he tossed the bottles upright into a slotted conveyor belt. The bottles passed through a high pressure cleaning machine, then through the machine that filled them with Coke and capped them. He got so he could throw eight bottles at a time into the slots. He also packed the filled bottles into cartons when he was needed. After work he slept most of the day, then ate at Barney’s Diner, the one with a fake biplane made to look as if it had crashed on the diner’s roof. With his stomach filled with a seventy-five-cent helping of meat

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loaf and mashed potatoes, he read whatever cheap and interesting pocket book was available from People’s Drugstore on the corner. That is, when he wasn’t rereading Banks’ stuff and daydreaming about the implications if the predictions he’d copied down came true. He was sure they would. Banks had already accurately predicted too much. But he had to make absolutely, undeniably certain. He applied for admission to San Francisco University. Because he was a veteran who had passed his GRE exam, he was accepted as a freshman for the Fall semester of 1953. The hours were days and the days months, and he thought each work shift would never end. Sunday, April 26 came. He had hardly slept the night before. He didn’t know how he’d survive another sleepless night and then the wait through the 27th until the Korean armistice was signed, if it was. He turned the radio on and tuned in to the KCBS hourly news station, and waited impatiently. The first news item was about Korea. “It looks like the Korean War is about to end, and Washington is buzzing with the forthcoming announcement that the armistice has been signed. But there is fear that there may be last minute nonsense by the North Koreans. Lieutenant General William Harrison, representing the UN Command, will meet today with General Nam Il of the Korea People’s Army at Panmunjom. Still, this is iffy. It is known that North Korean Premier Kim Il Sung will not show up for the signing; neither will General Mark Clark, head of UN forces. And there is some fear that the North will again make demands. The signing is scheduled for ten a.m., Korean time. “In San Francisco, the milkmen’s strike is in the third day, and the mayor’s office promised . . . ” Cyril looked again at his watch. The time had hardly changed. It was a little after eight a.m. So, the armistice meeting would be held about noon, local time. He had checked the time difference five times several days ago, in anticipation of today. Banks’ chronology was off by a day. Still absolutely incredible, to call the end of the Korean War so close—to even, in effect, predict a Korean War, as it had. So what, a day off. Cyril tried to read. No good. He went back into the Banks folder, but he was so agitated, so excited about testing his first prediction, that he hit the streets, walking in the rain with his umbrella, standing on corners, sitting on wet park benches, watching the people and cars passing by. At noon he walked back to his room. He turned on the radio at 12:20. He immediately heard the excitement in the announcer’s voice.

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“—Korean War is over. The UN and North Korean delegates signed eighteen copies of the armistice agreement, which took ten minutes. Throughout, the delegates did not speak to each other, and silently left the building through opposite exits when it was over. “In Washington . . . ” Cyril’s mind was in such turmoil, he heard nothing more, not even the honking horns and the siren of a passing ambulance on the street nearby. Elation made him useless for an hour or more; he could only sit with his mind in wondrous ferment, his heart beating rapidly. He got up and did a little jig, then sat down on the edge of his chair; he got up within minutes to pace around his room, then plump down in another chair. Unable to keep his hands still, he pounded them lightly on his legs. My God, the chronology is almost right on. Holy Christ, it is right on. How stupid can I get? I forgot the dateline, even after going over it myself, twice! On the way to and from Japan. It is the 27th in Korea. Jesus, the 27th. The chronology is right on. He almost jumped over to his bed, where he had left the chronology. Dropping down next to it, he looked again at the armistice date. “July 27, 1953. I still can’t believe it.” He rapidly leafed back in the chronology to the date the Korean War started: June 25, 1950. Jesus H. Christ! Banks’ stuff the fire department found in 1938—1938!— predicted the beginning and end of the Korean War. He did not need the other predictions for 1955 that he had written down. He was positive now that they would happen. He started to shake. “Holy Christ,” he blurted. He paced until his knees stopped shaking, but his thoughts still jerked in different directions. Moving mechanically, he left his room and went for a walk, practically skipping along to a little corner park nearby where he sat down on a bench—or floated above it, he was sure. He had the future in his hands—rather, in an accordion folder. He still did not realize the full implications of what he had, in terms of power and wealth. But he sensed enough of it. The chronology in the file ended in 1965, when John and Joy would be around seventy, and well retired from their mission. Still, that was more than ten years into the future. He had over ten years of precise predictions of what would happen politically, including the outcome of major elections, significant inventions, and other major events. Then, as what else he had hit him, his eyes opened wide and his jaw dropped. Holy Christ. The folder also has a chronology of major stock market events, and the annual prices of some companies. He smacked his head with the palm of his hand. I’m rich.

Chapter 7 October 22, 2001 Indiana University John Banks

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e had just finished lecturing his “Introduction to Contemporary History” class, his second class lecture of the day, and he was tired. As a first year assistant professor who had completed his Ph.D. only about five months ago, he spent virtually all his time preparing for these first class lectures, and had a million notes with him when he walked into the classrooms. Except for this next class: “The Democratic Peace.” It examined democracies as a method of nonviolence, and a way to end war and minimize violence. Since this had been the subject of his dissertation, he needed few notes for his lecture. He had been lecturing on genocide and mass murder—what he called democide—for about a month, since this was the most extensive and bloody form of violence, killing over four times the number that died in all domestic and foreign wars of the twentieth century. He intended to point out that liberal democracies committed virtually no democide of their people. He entered the classroom full of chattering undergraduates and placed his briefcase on the desk in front of the blackboard to open it. Taking out the one-page outline of what he was going to say, he set it on the lectern next to the desk, then looked up at the students. As if of their own volition, his eyes sought out the gorgeous oriental girl in the back—Joy Phim, as his class registration list identified her. She never asked questions and was registered for his class as an auditor—no credit. But, and he found this most exciting, her slanted almond eyes were always on him as he lectured. And they showed deep interest. Sometimes she would nod, her full lips parted to show her white teeth; sometimes she would lean forward and cup her chin in her hand, one finger on her cheek. Rarely did she take notes.

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He was a bachelor. He had been so busy studying and writing for his degree, and now preparing his first classes, that he simply did not have the time for more than an occasional, uncomplicated relationship. Now, he knew the dangers to his career of hooking up with a student, and available women on the faculty or in the administration were rare, but in spite of the risk, his disobedient eyes increasingly sought out that student in the rear. He couldn’t help himself. He caught himself lecturing to her as though no other student were present. And at the end of the class, when she was usually among the last students to leave, he just had to steal a glance. She always wore a sweatshirt and a tight denim skirt or jeans, and her straight black hair, tied back in a ponytail, swayed as she walked. No more that a few lectures had passed before his eyes sought the ring finger of her left hand and saw no engagement or wedding ring. Nothing. That had registered in a minor explosion of desire, and that evening he had difficulty keeping his mind on the rewriting of his dissertation into a book on the democratic peace. Well, there she was again, sitting forward in her seat, waiting, her eyes locked on him. He looked at his watch. It was time. “Good afternoon, students,” he began, as usual. He accompanied the greeting with his genuine, opening-lecture smile. He found he loved teaching. “Today, I want to begin with Vietnam. There is a map of this nation in your assigned reading and I suggest you turn to it. It is important that you have a good understanding of where Vietnam is in relation to China, Laos, and Cambodia for these lectures.” He paused a moment as the students complied. “Perhaps of all countries, democide in Vietnam, and by the Vietnamese, is the most difficult to understand. It is mixed in with six wars spanning forty-three years.” He raised his hand and lifted a finger to count off each. “The Indochina War, the Vietnam War, the Cambodian War, the subsequent guerrilla war in Cambodia, the guerrilla war in Laos, and the Sino-Vietnamese War. As some of you may know, one of them involved the United States.” He hesitated—that was a joke—but no student even smiled. “There was also a nearly twenty-one-year formal division of the country into two sovereign North and South nations; the full communization of the North; occupation of neighboring countries by both the North and South; defeat, absorption, and communization of the South; and the massive flight by sea of millions of Vietnamese—” A thud interrupted him. Miss Phim had dropped a book. This gave him an excuse to look at her, and he saw that she had covered her face with her hand, and was not moving to pick up her book. Strange, he thought.

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He continued, “As best as I can determine, through all this, close to 3.8 million Vietnamese lost their lives in political violence, or nearly one out of every ten men, women, and children. Of these, about 1.25 million, or nearly a third of those killed, were murdered. “Now, I want you all to understand that this is not only a complex history to unfold, but one beset with biases, misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and hidden agendas.” He stepped from behind the lectern and took a step toward the front row to gesture toward himself. “Before continuing, I should share my own biases with you. I am a fervent believer in human rights and freedom. And I believe that the best political structure for insuring this is democracy. Not just a democracy in which there are regular elections and everyone can vote, but a democracy, one we call a liberal democracy, which guarantees human rights and the rule of law. For all.” He was informal with the class, and sometimes joked with them, or made puns in his lecture. He never treated a question as wrong or dumb, and the students had grown increasingly relaxed throughout his lectures. One of the most relaxed of them in the second row asked, “Does that mean, Professor, that you will be giving us a biased lecture?” The class laughed, the students looking at him expectantly. In the back, Miss Phim shook her head. Banks rubbed his chin. He tried to look serious, but the dimples at the sides of his mouth gave him away. “Of course not, Mr. O’Reilly; my bias is the true bias.” More laughter. Banks waited for a moment, saw there were no more questions, and with a fleeting glance at Miss Phim, he started his lecture.

Chapter 8 1953 Cyril Clement

T

he stock market! Of course. Somewhere in Cyril’s diverse reading, he had learned that people bought and sold stocks, and that one could make a profit if one sold a stock at a higher price than it had cost to buy. Of course, one could also lose money by selling stock below the price at which it was bought. What stuck most in his mind was the huge fall in the stock market in 1929, in which many rich people had lost everything they owned, driving some to commit suicide. He rushed back to his room, bent over the beat-up cardboard box that he kept on the floor near his bed, and searched among the Banks stuff there for the “Printout of Historic Prices for a Few Notable Stocks, 1906–1965.” There were only fifteen stocks in the list, including American Telephone & Telegraph, General Electric, U.S. Steel, Western Union, and Westinghouse, followed by a chart covering many pages that gave their daily closings on the New York Stock Exchange. There also was supposed to be a listing of all stock closings on the New York Exchange from 1906 to 1965, but according to the “Remembrance,” that was on a CD, whatever that was. He had looked for something with that name, but could not find it among Banks’ stuff. Though his excitement was still at a high pitch, he went to work at the bottling plant that night. He had to. He was paid $1.10 an hour, and could not afford to lose the time or be fired. Every penny he earned now beyond his rent and food could go toward his savings. He thought happily of what he would do. When I have enough, whatever amount that is, I’ll begin buying and selling stocks. I’ll follow the technique Banks outlined in the “Remembrance.” When I’m so successful I might draw attention to myself, I will lose on one out of four stocks. Tomorrow, he decided, he’d go to the library to get books on how the stock market worked.

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He’d had Friday and Saturday night off; now, as he arrived for his Sunday night shift, his mind was in another world, one with a mansion on the coast, a yacht and a Cadillac, and a huge personal library. His body, drained by all the day’s waiting, then his exuberance, and lack of sleep, was on automatic. Working beneath the sign posted above the boiling-hot bottle washing and sanitizing machine that warned workers to keep their arms and heads bare, he was not even aware of the longsleeved shirt he wore, its sleeves unrolled. He had seen the sign so often, he no longer saw it. Going through the motions, Cyril picked up a bottle, turned it upside down and, if nothing fell out, shook it and listened, then looked inside before putting it back in the carton. Next bottle, then the next, until he’d checked all in the carton. Then he threw the bottles into the slots on the conveyor belt, stacked the empty carton on a pallet, and turned to the next carton, and the first bottle in that carton . . . one bottle after another . . . one carton after another . . . . He fell asleep on his feet, until— Wrenching, pulling, twisting; burning, searing pain! Awful, screaming pain. “Ooouuueeaaahhh!” Blackness.

aaa Pain . . . in my head . . . my shoulder . . .my hand. Burning hot; so thirsty. Cyril squinted through his left eye, saw a forest of tubes. Pain . . . too hot . . . something touching, pressing . . . pain. Can’t scream . . . .

aaa Pain in my shoulder . . .right one . . . less . . .head aches—throbs . . .can’t move— afraid to . . . something wrapped around my . . . voices. He opened his left eye. Fog filled the room. A dim light somewhere behind him barely illuminated a wispy woman in white and a bespectacled man in a long white coat. They seemed to be swimming among a clutter of bottles and tubes . . . . Nothingness.

aaa

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Wetness. A rag wiped over his flesh. He opened his eye, and saw a woman in white washing his bottom and genitals. He felt a different kind of heat and struggled to demand she cover him. It came out as a weak and strangulated stutter; there was a tube down his throat, strangling him. His heart started beating wildly, and his whole body shook. The nurse stopped what she was doing, stepped back, and looked up at his open eye. She rushed from the room. Cyril jerked and shuddered. He tried to shout for help, but could not. A man wearing a stethoscope around his neck entered, a hypodermic in his hand. He gave Cyril a shot of something, and almost immediately, soothing warmth spread through is body, and the world disappeared.

aaa Voices. He opened his left eye. Two doctors stood at the foot of the bed, chatting, but most of what they said was gibberish to Cyril. One glanced his way, then walked over to the side of the bed and said, “Hello. I’m Doctor Lundy, and I’m you primary doctor.” He leaned close to look into Cyril’s eye, and asked, his voice soft and professional, “How do you feel?” “Thirsty.” The tube was gone. “I’ll have the nurse bring you water in a few minutes. Could you tell me your name?” “Cyril Clement.” “Where do you live?” “At 261 Castro Street.” The doctor wrote the information down on a clipboard. “City?” “San Francisco.” “Job?” “Night shift, Coke Bottling Company.” “What year is it?” “Nineteen fifty-three.” Lundy nodded. He waved at the other man. “This is Dr. Harding. He is our burn specialist.” Harding nodded to Cyril. “Good to see you awake.” With a little wave at Lundy, he left the room. Doctor Lundy’s voice became conversational. “Do you have any memory of what happened to you?” “Just burning pain. That’s it.”

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“Well, your right shirtsleeve caught in a conveyor belt that carried empty bottles into the wash and sterilization chamber. You tried to wrench it loose but couldn’t, and your hand and arm were pulled into the chamber. The right side of your head was jerked against the protruding structure of the chamber above the conveyor belt. You would be dead if it weren’t for the safety switch that closed everything down because of the drag of your weight on the belt.” Panic made Cyril breathless. “Did I lose anything?” “I’m sorry, you lost two fingers of your right hand to the burns. But we were able to save your hand and arm, and we don’t think you lost any function in them. You lost part of your right ear, but your hearing should be okay. As to the right side of your face, you had third-degree burns and a few deep cuts, but we can fix all that. You may have a small scar or so, but nothing unsightly.” He paused. When Cyril said nothing, he asked, “What about your parents? We couldn’t locate them.” “They’re gone. I lost contact with them while I was in the Army. I have no brothers or sisters.” He swallowed. “I can’t pay for any of this.” “I don’t think you need worry,” Lundy said. “I guess Coca-Cola or their accident insurance will take care of it, including the skin grafts and whatever other surgery you need as a result of your accident. This happened to you on the job.” Cyril relaxed. Then it struck him. “My God, my stuff. How long have I been unconscious?” “About ten days. That was quite a bump on the head you got. Gave you a concussion, but there doesn’t seem to be any lasting effects. We want to run some tests, however.” Cyril opened his one eye wide. “Jesus,” he yelled, “I missed pay day. I missed my room rent. Shit, the manager will have rented the room to someone else. My stuff! I’ve got to get—” “I don’t know about that. If you know the manager’s name and telephone number, I can have my nurse call and tell him you’re here.” “Jim Aku is the manager. You have my address. I don’t have his telephone number. Check the telephone book, please. This is very, very important. Have your nurse tell him I will pay his rent as soon as I get out, and not to touch my stuff.”

aaa Cyril was released from the hospital three weeks later. He would still need outpatient care for his arm, and the right side of his face was a

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little mottled, with livid scars and a right eye that was droop-lidded and red-lined. But they assured him that would all go away in time. He’d be stuck with a badly scarred and discolored right arm, though. He’d had to keep after the doctors and nurses to get in touch with his rental manager; when after two weeks they finally did, his room had been rented, and its contents stored in boxes in the basement. He took a streetcar to the Coca-Cola plant to pick up his paychecks—his pay had continued while he was in the hospital, and he was expected back on the job in three days—and cashed them at the nearest bank. After finding himself a new room through the classified advertisements, he went to his old rooming house to pick up what had been boxed for him. The manager took one look at Cyril’s’ face and expressed his sorrow over the accident. He smiled on receiving the room rent Cyril owed, and apologized with a shrug for renting the room right away. “No word from you, you know,” he said. “Too many walk out on me, leaving junk in room. I still got to pay owner, you know. I sorry. I thought you walk out. Anyway, I pack up your things in two boxes. They in the basement.” The manager led Cyril down the basement steps to an area filled with cages, one for each room. He went to one wire door and unlocked the padlock securing the ends of a chain that held the door shut. Then he gestured inside, to two boxes—all Cyril owned in the world, except for the books and magazines he still in storage. Excited anew over the prospect of reading Banks’ stuff, feeling happier than he’d been since the accident, he picked up one box and told the manager, “I’ll have to come back for the other. I have to use the streetcar.” Cyril quickly tired during the trip; he had lost conditioning and his muscles had withered in the hospital. He was sweating and puffing by the time he got to his new room and dropped the box on the bed. He sat next to it, trying to recover some strength. Finally he opened the box and slowly took out his wrinkled clothes, army boots, shoes, and a crumpled hat—that was it. In hindsight, he realized the box had been too light to contain Banks’ stuff. He waited, trying to regain more of his strength, and then took the streetcar back to the rooming house, where the manager told him that he could get the remaining box himself. He hurried down to the basement and opened and checked the box. “What?” he yelled. “Goddamn it, where’s the Banks stuff?” He kicked the box and ran out of the cage, slamming its door so hard against the next cage that it bent off its hinges.

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He dashed up the stairs to the manager’s apartment and flung the door open without knocking. “My stuff—” He couldn’t get his breath. The manager scowled at him. Cyril leaned in the open doorway, gulping air. Finally he flung the words out. “Where is my stuff? My papers are missing.” The manager’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened into a hard line. Cyril yelled, “I had a whole box of very important stuff on the floor. Where is it?” The manager put both hands on his hips and glared at Cyril. “You disappear. Not my fault. I had janitor put your things in box. He then clean dirty room you left so I could rent it. You no pay, I must pay. I do not know what he do with junk. Maybe throw away.” Cyril gaped. He gripped the side of the door to hold himself up. “Thrown away? Thrown away!” In a pleading wheeze, he cried, “Wheeere?” The manager jerked his thumb toward the back of the house. “Garbage cans in rear. Garbage gone.” Cyril dashed out of the room and down the long hallway to the back door, then out to the beat-up tin garbage cans. He whipped the lid from one after another. Nothing but junk, rotten, half-eaten food, and waste paper. He kicked the last can, dropped down next to it, and beat the cinderstrewn ground with his fist. The full enormity of his loss hit him like a sledgehammer. He howled in despair, then broke down in body wrenching sobs. He lay there for hours, too wretched to move.

Chapter 9 John Banks

H

e stood with one hand resting on the lectern, on the one-page outline of his lecture. He looked around the classroom, stealing a quick glance at Miss Phim. He thought of his female students as “Miss,” the males as “Mister,” and addressed them that way. When a “Miss” from Australia asked him why he didn’t use their first names, he told the class, “It is to show you the respect you deserve as a student. After all, you are not forced to study in a university. You choose to be here at considerable cost to you and, most likely, your parents.” Then he’d given them his signature lopsided grin. “And also, I think I should honor your intelligence, prudence, and good sense in taking my class.” Some of the students chuckled, some laughed, some looked at him seriously—I wonder if they will put that in their notes, he’d thought as he waited for the class to settle down. Now, he began his lecture with a vertical wave of his hand. “In this lecture I will focus on Vietnam’s First Indochina War, which began in 1945 and ended in 1954, and which the Vietnamese called the War of Independence. First, a little background. France took over all of Indochina in the late nineteenth century, making Vietnam one of its colonies. There had been some rebellions against the French, most notably the 1930–31 communist-led uprising in which ten thousand Vietnamese were killed, but it was not until World War Two that the French lost their hold. When Germany defeated France, the remaining French Vichy regime was allowed nominal control over a French garrison of fifty thousand in Vietnam. The Japanese, allies of Germany, had applied military pressure to the French garrison for facilities and bases in Vietnam even before France fell, and in negotiations with the Vichy government, Japan later achieved control over Vietnam’s important airports and port facilities. “In December 1941, the day—” He stopped and asked the class, “What happened in December 1941 regarding the Japanese?”

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One of the students in the front row yelled, “They attacked Pearl Harbor.” “Where is that?” “Vietnam?” one of the second row students guessed. John’s mental jaw dropped, but before he had to struggle to keep sarcasm out of his voice, several students shouted out, “Hawaii. Pearl Harbor is in Hawaii.” “That’s right,” he said. “In December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and thus provoked war with the United States. At the same time, Japan surrounded French forces in Vietnam and gave them an ultimatum: cooperate or be destroyed. With no outside help possible, and with even the appearance of French control at stake, the French accepted full Japanese use of Vietnam as a base and staging area. In effect, the French and Japanese operated as co-colonists of the country. “In 1945, as the end of the war approached, Japan grew increasingly concerned about setting up an ‘impregnable defense’ of its empire, and became disenchanted with its relationship with France. In a surprise coup d’etat in March, Japan took over Vietnam by brutal force, massacring many French in the process. “Even before this coup it was obvious to many Vietnamese that Japan would eventually lose the war and have to leave Vietnam. Vietnamese nationalists and communists thus envisioned their country’s independence and worked toward that end. When the United States defeated Japan in August 1945, both groups maneuvered to take over Vietnam. The communists, or Viet Minh as they were called, were especially well organized. Although there were only about five thousand of them, they succeeded in dominating the major cities in the north. In September of 1945, their undisputed leader, Ho Chi Minh declared the independence and sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam while carrying out guerrilla warfare against French forces. “France was not about to allow a de facto breakup of its empire. It gradually mobilized its forces to recapture Vietnam, and reasserted authority over most of the south. Neither the Viet Minh in the north nor the French desired all-out war, however. Ho Chi Minh tried to negotiate some kind of autonomy in a French Union, and a preliminary agreement to that effect was signed in March 1946.” Banks saw some eyelids drooping. No good. He put his hands behind his back, leaned toward the class, and said, “I am absolutely certain that each one of you did your assigned reading for today. I’m positive that any one of you I call on can answer a simple question about this agreement. Let’s see.” He reached for his deck of note cards,

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each with the name and background of a student he had written on it. The one for Miss Phim was missing the corner he had cut off so that he could easily pull it out of the deck when he wanted. Not today. He shuffled the cards, looked at the top one, and said, “Mr. Baker?” He scanned the faces before him. A student put up his hand. “What happened to this agreement of March 1946?” John asked. “Ah . . . it was useless. War broke out.” “Yes, thank you. Negotiations to reach a final agreement could not bridge French colonial aims and Viet Minh communist aspirations. In December 1946, sixty thousand trained Viet Minh troops attacked French garrisons throughout Vietnam. All-out war began. “The war rallied Vietnamese around the Viet Minh, especially in the north. Having massacred the most important noncommunist nationalists, the Viet Minh remained the only coherent force fighting for Vietnam against foreign imperialism.” He glanced at his outline. “By the end of 1948, they had gained control over half the population and villages of Vietnam. By 1951, they were a huge communist organization of 760,000 activists and 350,000 regular troops and guerrillas. “This bloody war came to an end with the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954. France and the Viet Minh agreed to a cease-fire, and at the subsequent Geneva Conference attended by the Big Powers, France accepted the independence of Vietnam. This conference also negotiated a cease-fire line at the 17th Parallel. Look at your map—it’s that red line dividing the north from the south. This effectively partitioned the country into North and South Vietnam and later would define the demilitarized zone—the DMZ, for short— between them. This Geneva Agreement also allowed for three hundred days of two-way movement of pro- or anticommunist forces and other Vietnamese across the DMZ. And it called for elections throughout all of Vietnam in 1956, to unite the country.” He stopped and looked from one student to another until almost all were looking up at him. Then he moved close to the students in front without crowding them. Leaning toward them, gesturing with both hands and shaking his head as though incredulous, he said, “The human cost of the Viet Minh victory was enormous. Nearly 510,000—maybe even more than twice that number—died in battle or due to the fighting. Probably half of those killed were civilians. And this does not even take into account the horrendous democide launched by communist Viet Minh that I will discuss in the next lecture.”

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The lecture for this period complete, he turned the class into a seminar, as he always tried to do. He began with a comparison. “Keep in mind the approximately 510,000 soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians killed in the First Indochina War. Now, how many were killed overall, soldiers and civilians, in both the North and the South, in the American Civil War?” “A lot,” offered one student. “A million,” said another. “True, a lot; and a million is too high,” John responded, and waited. “About one hundred thousand?” suggested a girl in the back. “Too low,” John replied. “Half a million,” claimed a boy seated in the middle of the class. “Close enough,” John said. He checked his outline. “In the American Civil War, 558,052 soldiers and civilians died. What many people think of as just a little war somewhere in Asia was virtually as bloody and horrendous as our civil war. But you may be surprised to learn, as you will in the next lecture, that during this war and up to 1956, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians would be murdered by the Viet Minh, more than were killed in World War Two for the United States.” He perched on a nearby desk and waved his hands apart as though drawing a line with his fingertips. “Okay, students. Questions? Comments?”

Chapter 10 1953–1956 Cyril Clement

M

onths went by, and still Cyril had not completely recovered from his accident or the loss of the Banks documents. He called it his pauperization, after coming across that word in his reading. He tried to forget about it—it was past, over. Although he’d come to accept the unbelievable accuracy of Banks’ predictions, Cyril hadn’t written them down anywhere, and he didn’t remember them specifically. He tried to move on, but felt all the emotional misery of someone whose close relative had died, one everyone thought was filthy rich but, after the heirs spent months exulting over the forthcoming inheritance, whose gambling and business debts took every last cent in the estate. Thursday, August 20, 1953, came and went. When the news reported that Moscow had announced the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, Cyril thought it sounded familiar. He checked the paper he still had, the one on which he’d scrawled two of Banks’ predictions. Yes, Banks had also predicted this precisely. Again he fell into a stupor, and could barely call in sick to the bottling company. Three days went by before he could work again. His spirits rose only when he realized that classes at San Francisco University would soon begin. This would be new. It would be different. Despite all that he had lost—more than any human being had ever lost, he convinced himself—he still could make something of himself. He would not be an impoverished loser if he could help it. At least Banks’ stuff, though lost, had instilled in him that determination. Cyril entered San Francisco University on the GI Bill, which paid for his tuition and dormitory fee, but not much else—he still

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had to work part-time. He found such employment at Alfred’s Bookstore, on Fulton Street near the university. Much influenced by science fiction, he decided to major in physics. He didn’t realize, however, that while science fiction had created in him an awe of science, particularly physics, his heart was not in the actual discipline. Instead of doing the work required for his science courses, he read articles and books on Asia and on war—a reflection of what had heavily influenced him while stationed in Japan. While there, he’d become quite enamored of Japanese culture, and had spent what time he could spare from studying for the GRE test to learn Japanese. He had grown up during World War Two, absorbing all the wartime propaganda about the “buck-toothed,” “inscrutable,” and “evil” Japanese. In Japan, much to his surprise, he discovered that the Japanese could cry, love flowers, play with dogs, and laugh. They were like him fundamentally, and this ate at him. He was uneducated and naive, and could not understand why Japan and the United States had made war on each other. He became a pacifist who asked nasty questions during the occasional briefings given his battalion: “What did the North Koreans ever to do us?” He hated war and could see no justification in the killing and destruction it always caused. This, in spite of what Banks had written about democide—a word whose depths of horror he only gradually came to understand. It was war he really focused on, as did virtually every pacifistic social philosopher and historian of the time. Cyril’s college grades in his science and mathematics courses suffered from this lack of interest, so in his sophomore year he transferred to history, with a focus on Asia. But when he took a course from a visiting professor on peace, it radically changed his life. The professor’s readings were on war, and he drew his reading chapters primarily from Quincy Wright’s two-volume work, A Study of War. This was a revelation for Cyril. He saw that he didn’t have to grope for extra time beyond his regular studies and part-time work to read about war; he could study war as part of a regular discipline, especially political science. But there was more to the revelation. He read all of Wright’s two volumes within a couple of weeks, and launched himself at those major works Wright referenced. He haunted the library shelves that held books on war, often sitting in the aisle with his back against a bookcase, skimming through a pile of books, looking for their authors’ recommended or concluding solutions to war. He did two term papers, one on international law and organizations as a solution, the other on the balancing of power as a preventative.

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But he had not covered all that was available by any means, and in particular he still had to go through the sociological and psychological approaches, as well the empirical and mathematical ones just getting underway, which were much influenced by the pacifist Lewis Fry Richardson. Nevertheless, one thing became increasingly clear: there was no consensus on a solution, and no solution had so far worked to prevent, or even moderate, war. One day, as he sat amongst another pile of books, glancing occasionally at his watch as the time to go to work at the bookstore neared, he picked up the last book he would look at for the day. It was almost as thin and light as a pamphlet, and he didn’t think there would be much philosophical or scholarly weight to it, either. It was Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace. He found references to it in several places, which had prompted him to pull it from the shelf. By the time he was halfway through, he’d become so totally absorbed that he was late for work, and decided to miss work completely so he could reread Kant’s book. He didn’t hear the mental click as everything—everything, including what he’d read in Banks’ documents and all he’d read and studied since—suddenly came together. But his heart beat rapidly, and he felt a shiver run up his spine. He leaned against the book stacks, trying to catch his breath. It was like the confirmation of the chronology’s prediction of the end of the Korean War, all over again. “Jesus, I’ll be damned,” he exclaimed, his voice rising loud enough on the last word that a student at the end of the stack turned and stared at him. Then the perfect word came to him, and he looked up at the ceiling and whispered in a rush, “Eureka! There is a solution to war. Kant’s got it right. Universalize republics—that is, democracies.” If it hadn’t been for Banks’ stuff, he realized, this would have seemed just another solution among hundreds. “Christ, I would have ignored it!” Two students wandered into the stacks, stopped, and looked at him curiously. He tried to smile at them, but couldn’t. He was too wrapped up in his discovery. He looked sightlessly down at Kant’s book, still in his hand. I’ve lost the chance to get rich off the stock market; I won’t be a millionaire. But I haven’t lost my memory. I remember Banks’ mission—that Survivors’ Benevolent Society that sent him and Joy back to 1906 in a time machine. They were to prevent the century’s major wars and what Banks called democide, and promote democracy to keep the peace. Cyril remembered that Banks was a professor of history who was sure that universalizing democracy—Kant’s solution—would do it.

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He smiled as he recalled John calling Joy his assistant and translator—a martial arts and weapons expert! She claimed, “I am your muscle,” Banks had written. But Cyril remembered most how sexy and stunningly beautiful she was. For the thousandth time, the sex scenes with her that Banks had written about in the “Remembrance” tried to capture his mind with imagined images, and he waved his hand in front his face as though waving them away. Not now. He refocused by trying to remember Banks’ most favorite truth. Yes, I have it: “Democracies do not make war on each other and have far less violence than other governments.” And his conclusion and the reason for the time travel mission: “Democracy is a solution to war and democide.” He felt the truth of it deep inside. It was like a religious revelation. He just knew now that this was the solution. He shook his head in wonderment. Wright and a few others hinted at it, but except for Kant, no one else saw this as the solution. But, if Banks’ chronology could predict the beginning and end of the Korean War decades before it happened, and . . . yes, the Soviets exploding the hydrogen bomb—God, it didn’t even exist when Banks predicted that!— he had to be right about everything else. Cyril was too excited to question the logic of that. Nevertheless, it changed his life. Before reading Kant, he’d often suffered from deep depression lasting for several days at a time, days in which he had to drive himself to attend his classes and his job. But now, what Banks and Kant wrote changed his future, perhaps in better ways than being a millionaire would have. For the rest of the world, it would revolutionize international studies. It would change the study of war. It would create a new and dynamic American foreign policy. And it would change the universe.

Chapter 11

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he series of near-impossible chances that bestowed upon Cyril the one opportunity—denied to all other humans—to bridge universes, were themselves conditional. They depended on a chain of events in Vietnam that surrounded one family, in particular. Had any links in this chain been broken, there would have been no Joy Phim, and she and John Banks would not have embarked on their mission in time, and there would have been no accordion folder full of Banks’ documents for Cyril to find during that fateful World War Two paper drive. There would have been no bridge between universes. Instead, our foreseeable future would remain rife with merciless dictators enslaving billions and producing a Niagara of blood. At least, this is what would seem evident to an omniscient observer. But even, such an observer can be betrayed by the unknown. Let’s start at the most relevant beginning of this significant chain of events, which took place about seventy-three hundred miles away from where Cyril was attending college.

1956, Nong-cong, North Vietnam Hoang Loi He had murdered his son Trai. Now there was no turning back. In the little tool shed behind his three-room home, he grabbed the two coils of rope he had already prepared and waxed in just the right place. He had to hurry. Members of the People’s Brigade, assuming that he had already followed orders and deserted his home, could arrive at any moment to loot the place. He passed by the doorway of his home on the way to the tree. His wife Le Nogoc Bian stood swaying there, clutching the door jamb for support. The blood spattered when they’d killed their son stood out starkly on her white face. Her eyes, though glistening with tears, now showed only fierce determination and utter resignation, but anguish pulled at the muscles of her face and dug deep furrows into the flesh.

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He was proud of her. When the brigade’s courier had driven up to his door in an old Citroën, slammed the order into Loi’s hand, and left without a word, they’d sat next to each other at their big table to read it together. Only silence followed. They had no need of words. Finally they looked at each other. She nodded, rose heavily, and stumbled to the door. Trying vainly to control her tears, she had called her son Trai in from feeding their pigs. They had known they might be marked. They should have fled. But it was not easy to pull up roots, to leave the graves of their ancestors, to give up their friends, to throw away the small but successful farm Loi had inherited from his father, the farm his son would inherit from him. To go where? And to start over with nothing? They could not sell the farm—that was just the kind of evidence of capitalist greed that would get him shot. He swerved from his path to the tree and went to Bian to put his arm around her shoulders. She turned to hug him with all her strength. He stroked her hair and whispered, “Soon we will be free.” She began to shake and he held her tighter, trying to will his strength into her. She had done the hardest part. By the time her son came in, she had wiped the tears away, manufactured a plastic smile, and told him that this was a special day for prayer. She told Trai to get on his knees and pray with her. Then she led him in her favorite Buddhist prayer, timely for all their suffering in this land. May all beings everywhere plagued with sufferings of body and mind quickly be freed from their illnesses. May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound, be free. May the powerless find power, and may people think of befriending one another. May those who find themselves in trackless, fearful wilderness—the children, aged, the unprotected—be guarded by beneficial celestials, and may they swiftly attain Buddhahood. On the last word, Loi smashed his son’s head in with a sledgehammer—a fast and probably painless death. Then, heaving sobs, spewing vomit, he collapsed on the floor next to his son. That was over an hour ago. He had fought the pain and grief, the horror of what he had done. They did not have the time. Now, he gently

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pushed Bian to arms’ length, held her there for a moment to look into her eyes and relive their love and life together, then he kissed her on the lips—a gentle kiss that only saw their eleven years together, a gesture blind to the blood on her face. He had wanted to kill her as he had his son. She deserved a better death than hanging. But she had insisted that she die with him. Gritting his teeth, he took her hand and led her to the blooming shower tree. Two straight-backed woven bamboo chairs waited there, on either side of a rickety wicker table. After their hard work around the house and farm, they’d sometimes come here in the early evening, light incense to keep the mosquitoes away, and talk about their son, their future, their relatives, and village gossip. And the dangers that faced them all under this new revolutionary regime. He moved the table away, picked up one of the coiled ropes and, holding the newly waxed end, he threw the coils over a twelve foothigh limb so that the uncoiled rope would be cinched against one of its branches. He did the same with the second rope. Bian’s wide eyes glittered. She looked around—at their home, the pens for their livestock, the few goats and pigs they’d freed that remained nearby, and the small, neat fields of corn, sweet potatoes, and beans. Loi went to her. He took twine out of his pocket and she put her hands behind her. He tied them loosely together, just tight enough to keep them there for the brief time required. Loi did not know how to tie a hangman’s noose, but he tied a knot that would easily slip down the waxed part of the rope and hold her neck in its grip. He could not look at her face as he put the noose around her neck. She tilted her head forward so that he could pull her long black hair up through the noose to hang free. She had wanted to pin her hair up in a roll on her head, out of the way, but he’d insisted she leave it loose. He took her hand and helped her stand on the chair, and then he pulled the other end taut so the noose was tight around her neck, and tied the end to the tree trunk. He pulled up the noose on the other rope so that he would have to stand on tiptoe to put his head into it, and also tied its end to the tree. Then he stood on the other chair, fixed the noose around his neck, and took a glove from his pocket. He pulled it on, put that hand behind him, and forced his other hand into the glove as well, imprisoning both hands. The more he struggled to free his hands, the harder it would be.

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His body had known what needed to be done and had done it. Nothing remained. Except courage. He need only kick the back of the chair, but his instinct for self-preservation came alive. His wildly pumping heart shook his whole body; sweat poured from him. He tried to kill his instinct, tried to let his body do what was necessary, but it mutinied. He looked hopelessly at his wife, his lovely wife. She stared at the blue sky, watching the white puffs of cloud floating on the early afternoon breeze. A bulbul chased another across the sky, and she followed it with her eyes. His teeth began chattering. He fought for control, but now his body marched to a different master. It was about to slowly wriggle his right hand out of the glove behind his back when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bian move. He stared. She stood taller on the chair, tilted her head back, and looked at him. Her soothing voice caressed him with her last words: “Our souls will soar together, my loving husband. Shall we kick the chairs away together, so our souls will be one in time and can easily find each other?” She gave him the strength he sought. “I love you, my darling.” He took a deep breath. “On two,” he said. “One.” “Two.”

Wang Shihao His friend’s mother and father were doing something on the tree. Wang Shihao did not understand at first. They seemed to be playing with rope. Maybe they were climbing up the ropes, to pick the small, red-tinged yellow flowers from the branches? He would go and see, and ask them where his friend Trai was. As he drew closer, he saw the overturned chairs beneath their feet. They were standing on nothing. He ran to them, but stopped when he saw that their heads were twisted at odd angles, and their faces were white. They were not climbing the ropes; the ropes were twisted around their necks. Shihao gaped at them. He knew they were dead. He had seen the corpses of those everyone had to ignore as bad people, those who had starved to death. His teachers had even told him to throw stones at such people when they were alive. They were evil and deserved to

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die, his teachers said. He had attended meetings with his family, meetings where everyone shouted and waved fists as more evil people were shot. The door to his friend’s home was open. He ran inside. Maybe Trai could tell him what was going on with his parents. He stopped dead inside the door. His eyes bugged; his mouth fell open. Trai lay on his side in a fetal position with his hands clasped, as though he had toppled over while praying. The back of his head was crushed and clotted with blood. Blood was spattered everywhere. Shihao came to life and shuddered. He turned, screaming, and ran out the door. He ran the whole half a mile home and stumbled into the cassava field where his father lifted weeds with a hoe. He tried to get the words out, but he started crying hysterically, jabbing his finger in the direction of Trai’s home. Finally he got “dead” and “blood” out, and his father’s eyes opened wide. He dropped his hoe and headed in the direction Shihao pointed.

Wang Dewu Shihao’s father, Wang Dewu, had a good idea what had happened, but he had to verify it. Each death or murder was now input into his timing. He fought the driving urge to run toward Hoang Loi’s home and tried to walk normally. A communist or one of their sycophants might pass by on the road, and running could be seen as suspicious— everything, it seemed, was suspicious to the communists. From a distance, he saw Loi and his lovely wife, Le Nogoc Bian, hanging from the tree. Cold chills ran down his spine and his heart beat rapidly. The desire to rush to them and cut them down was almost overwhelming, but his fear was even stronger. Someone might see him. Someone might already be in their shack, watching him. He could be reported for aiding counterrevolutionaries. “Calm, be calm,” he told himself. But he could do nothing about his cold sweat. He suspected what had happened, and now, above all, he had to be sure. Loi was about as successful a farmer as Dewu, and they were equally independent. They not only survived, but even made a little extra dong they could use to occasionally give their family presents, to see the delighted smiles of their children.

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He approached the hanging bodies and studied them. Bian and Loi had been a loving couple, and not embarrassed about showing it in public. No one will even know what they said to each other when they were ready; what final words of love they exchanged before together—he assumed it had to be together—they kicked the chairs from beneath them. Holding back tears, Dewu entered the couple’s home. He blanched when he saw Trai on the floor. The bottom seemed to fall out of his stomach, and he let out a long groan. What had happened here was obvious. They had given their son no warning. Bian probably told Trai to pray with her, and Loi must have smashed his son’s head in with the bloody hammer lying on the floor nearby. He looked around and found the official order on the table. He picked it up and, as he read it, his free hand turned into a whiteknuckled fist. October 20, 1956 Hoang Loi and Family: You have been tried by the Revolutionary People’s Brigade and found to be an enemy of the proletariat and our glorious land reform. Your sentence is isolation. You are hereby ordered on pain of death to leave your home and everything in it by midnight this day, October 20. You are not to take any livestock or pets with you, nor food from your farm. All gold, jewels, money, and any other thing of value must be left in your home. You may take only the clothes you wear. Anyone who gives you shelter, clothes, transportation, money, or food is also an enemy of the proletariat and subject to ostracism. Secretary Pham Nam Nong-cong Revolutionary People’s Brigade He looked out all the windows to make sure the brigade’s cadre had not yet come. They would come soon, to make sure Loi and his family had left, and to loot the home and farm. He stuck his head out the door and looked around again before stepping out and walking as normally as he could back to his own home.

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His wife, Jiang Jia Li, held a weeping Shihao. Still in shock, the boy clutched her short vest with one hand and wrapped a handful of her cotton dress within the other. She looked up at Dewu when he came in the door, and silent words passed between them. Dewu went into the bedroom, squeezed between the wall and the end of the bed, and sat on the side of the bed near the window. For some reason, right now, he could not shut himself off from the sky. He put his head in his hands and let the tears flow. Like Hoang Loi, he had been nonpolitical, only concerned with his family, his farm, and his friends. He had avoided the entreaties of the nationalists to join them in the war against the French. Then, when the communists and not the nationalists won the war, and the communists under Ho Chi Minh eliminated all political competition by systematically purging and murdering leading nationalists, he had refused to join the communists. He’d been thankful for that later, when Ho began purging the party, imprisoning and executing party members whose enthusiasm for the revolution was questionable. He just wanted peace for his family, wanted to be left to work his farm. But recently he had heard of a directive from the party that required each town and village to find and eliminate through execution, imprisonment, or official isolation five landlords for every two hundred residents. Isolation—a terrible form of ostracism—was tantamount to slow death by starvation, since everyone feared providing the isolated family with any food or shelter. Dewu was not a landlord. Neither was he rich. His neighbor Hoang Loi had not been rich or a big landowner either. But Hoang Loi and he had done better than most of the other farmers, and that set them apart. So, when the Revolutionary People’s Brigade—made up mostly of the poorest of the farmers, the least successful ones—was given the order to rid the town of the “landlord scum,” they of course selected Hoang Loi and his family. Dewu was sure he would soon receive an isolation order as well. Jia Li came into the small room, shut the plank door behind her, and slithered across the narrow bed to sit next to him. She put her head on his shoulder and asked in a tremulous voice, “Was it that terrible order?” “Yes.” He heard her sob. “Will we be next?” Dewu released a long, ragged sigh. Her question forced him to face what, unconsciously, he had been trying to avoid. “Probably.” Her question and that simple word blasted into sharp focus all his chaotic thoughts, all the facts he had assimilated, and subdued the rag-

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ing emotions that had usurped his mind. He shook his head, swiped tears away from his eyes with both hands, and turned on the bed to face her. Putting his hand on her thin shoulder, he gave it a gentle squeeze. “What will happen will happen. It will be our fate.” Determination steeled his voice as he added, “But fate will have to find us.” Grief lined her face and she slumped in resignation. “We are escaping today,” Dewu said. “But . . . where?” she choked out. “South Vietnam.” “How?” She shuddered and looked out the window. “The border is too far to walk, and we could never get across. It is too guarded.” The hope in her voice betrayed her doubtful words. “We have to hurry now; there is not time to explain it all. I’ve heard rumors, and some of my dealers and suppliers in Thanh-hoa have been secretly listening to shortwave radios. Nhan Dan newspaper and Hanoi Radio have given out more information than they know. Many people are still escaping to South Vietnam, even after the end of that so-called population exchange with the South when the war of independence ended.” When she frowned, puzzled, he added in a rush, “The party suppressed information about the exchange. If I had known about it then, I would have tried to take us all south, even though the communists set up roadblocks in some places to prevent people from getting there. After that was when some people around here bought shortwave radios on the black market.” Dewu was speaking so fast, he was almost panting. “We will take our horse and cart the twenty miles to Sam-son. I will load the cart as though going to a market. In Sam-son we should find a fishing captain who will take our gold. I hear that, if given enough, they will motorboat escapees past the communist coast guard, into the Gulf of Tonkin, and south to the South China Sea. There, they hail any South Vietnamese fishing boat. Its captain will also demand gold, but if given enough, he will transfer us to his boat and return with us to his South Vietnam port. Then, my cherie, we will be free.” He held her shoulders. “The savings that you annually converted to gold—anyone would be do ngu—stupid not to do so in this country! Good thing you are a good Chinese wife who lorded over—ah, kept our family budget.” He tried to smile, but it came out a grimace. “I now have to admit you were right to save what you did when I wanted to spend all our extra income on tools and livestock. It has added up. With that and your family jewelry and heirlooms, I am sure we have enough to make it, and then some.”

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His tone turned to steel again. “No more time. Pack up one suitcase for you and one for Shihao. Put some food in a bag. Remember, we are going a good distance and may have nothing to eat or drink on the fishing boats but what we bring with us. I will pack my own case.” She stared at him wide-eyed, her faith in him spreading across her face. “But what about—” She waved her hand to encompass their house and farm. “We leave everything. Better to start over than be dead. Remember Loi and Bian and never forget them.” Suddenly, Jia Li put her hand over her mouth and gasped. “Our parents! Their bodies and spirits. We will desert them. Oh, Buddha!” She bent over, put her head in her hands, and cried hysterically. Dewu gently rubbed her back. Softly he said, “If we stay, we join them. We will make our last visit to their graves on the way, and explain to them why we are leaving. Their spirits will understand. We’ll take their photographs with us, and place them on their graves and pray to Buddha to invest the photographs with their spirits. We’ll put the pictures and some soil from their graves in our baggage, and they will travel with us to the south.” Jia Li stopped crying and turned her wet face to look at him. She stammered, “Yes. Yes . . . of course. My father was killed by communists. My mother died of heartbreak. They will be happy to leave this communist hell.” Dewu slid across the bed toward the door, saying, “As will my parents.” His mother and father, along with his older brother and sister, had died in the communist famine of 1945. “Enough. No more delay. Let’s pack what we must have and go.” She gripped his arm. “What if we are caught?” “They will kill us. With bullets. Or by torture. Or in prison. Let’s hope for bullets.”

Chapter 12 John Banks

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n extra cup of coffee gave John the caffeine push he needed. His dreams were beginning to bother him; they’d taken on a strange mix of horror and desire. He had awakened several times yelling something incoherently. The dreams had begun, oddly, with the start of this series of lectures on Vietnam—at least the ones he vaguely remembered did. But then, his sleep had been restless since he returned from the catastrophic 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers. He got to class a little early, before Miss Phim arrived, and watched in amusement as the other students’ eyes followed her progress from the side door to her usual seat in the rear of the classroom. He couldn’t help taking quick glances himself. He checked his watch. Time to begin “Good afternoon, students,” he said. “Good afternoon, Professor Banks,” some responded. “Any problems, issues?” he asked. No one spoke up, so with a look around the room that allowed a quick glance at Miss Phim, he said, “In this lecture I will cover the Viet Minh communists’ democide of their own people, including fellow Viet Minh. “As the Viet Minh struggled against the French, they also fought a vicious hidden war against their noncommunist nationalist competitors. They assassinated, executed, and massacred whole groups of nationalists, including relatives, friends, women, and children. Nationalists were not the only victims. ‘Class enemies’ were also ‘punished,’ and communist ranks were purified of Trotskyites and others who deviated from accepted scripture.” He looked around and asked, “What is a class enemy?” “Someone who gets all A’s,” drawled Mr. Simmons, still looking resentful over John’s insistence early in the semester that he remove the golf cap he habitually wore backward. He sat slouched in his seat, his legs sprawled under the seat in front of him.

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John grinned as the class laughed, and then said, “I guess, Mr. Simmons, you are destined to be no one’s class enemy.” More laughter and ohhhs. John waited. A student raised his hand. When John nodded at him, he answered, “The communists are supposed to represent the class of workers. So, anyone who is not a worker is a class enemy.” “Such as?” John asked, looking around the class. “The rich,” someone shouted. “Landowners,” said another. “Businessmen.” “Teachers.” When the laughter died down, John responded. “All true, even for teachers, who are often the first victims of democide. Technically, the class enemies are those who own the means of production and wealth, such as businessmen and landowners, and thus, by communist theory, exploit the working class. They are all called bourgeoisie. But actually, the class enemy is anyone who disagrees with the communist rulers, is a potential or actual competitor for power, such as a priest or monk, or has a noncommunist college education, such as those educated in French or American universities. Even communists are enemies, if they believe in ‘incorrect’ scripture, such as the Trotskyites. “Trotsky was a competitor to Stalin who believed that the revolution in Russia could only survive if it were spread to other nations without waiting for its consolidation in Russia. Stalin believed in Russia first, and Ho Chi Minh felt the same way about Vietnam. Thus, those who thought Trotsky was correct were enemies to be eliminated.” “Why?” one student shouted. Normally, John would have left this to the class to answer. But he had a longer lecture than usual and still wanted to leave some time for questions at the end. So he answered it himself. “As communists, Ho Chi Minh and those around him had an absolute, fanatical belief in the utopia promised by Marxist theory. Since they thought that Marxism was absolutely true, and that following this truth and implementing it would undoubtedly do away with war and poverty and make all men equal and free, they would not allow any disagreement with this noble goal, or any threat to it. They thought they were on the moral high road, and this justified their mass murder of those who might be in the way of this ‘glorious future.’” John swept his hand down: enough, time to move on. “Ho Chi Minh began a wave of assassinations of nationalists who opposed the communists in the 1930s and it continued more or less un-

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til 1945. Then he intensified it into a wide-scale terror from 1945 to 1947. Thousands of the most educated and brightest Vietnamese were wiped out. Truong Chinh, one of the top communists who became vice premier of North Vietnam in 1958, gave this rationale for this communist mass murder.” John leaned over to the lectern to read from his outline there. “‘For a newborn revolutionary power to be lenient with counterrevolutionaries is tantamount to committing suicide.’” Banks let that sink in for five seconds, and then continued. “In 1953, as the war with France for independence moved toward a clear victory and the communists controlled virtually all the countryside and many cities and towns in the north, they began their social revolution with what they called land reform. A nice term for what really was a transitional phase in nationalizing all farming—collectivization. “Do you all understand what nationalization means?” he asked the class. Some of the students shook their heads. “It means the government takes over farms, fields, livestock, and farming, and farmers become in effect employees of the government. It’s as though all farmers were drafted into the army, but in place of generals giving orders, there is a massive government bureaucracy that tells the farmers what to plant, when to plant it, and how much to grow, all according to a plan, and then takes all of what they produce. Their food and other necessities are then rationed. The idea is to make farming more efficient and to do away with the inequality between rich landowners and poor farmers.” He stopped and scanned the class. No hands. He continued. “However, in Vietnam, land ownership among the peasants was widespread. In the vital Red River Delta, ninety-eight percent of the peasants owned the land they worked; throughout the north, about two-thirds of them did. Moreover, few outside the Mekong Delta region owned more than two or three hectares—equivalent to nearly five acres and a little over seven acres. “But that didn’t matter. The real reason for this land reform was to consolidate communist power over the peasants by destroying their natural, centuries-old source of countervailing authority in the villages and hamlets, particularly that of the larger landowners and wealthier peasants. And to clear away potentially effective opposition to the ultimate collectivization of all land. “The technique followed the communist Chinese model. First, marshal the poor peasants, far greater in number, against their better-off neighbors, fewer in number but locally more powerful. How? By taking the land and property of the better-off and giving it to the poor peas-

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ants. This incentive rallies support for the revolution in the mass of poor peasants. Moreover, if many of these so-called landlords and rich are also killed, the remainder are terrorized into obedience. Then, once they’ve won this struggle against these actual or potential ‘enemies of the revolution’—John made the gesture for quotation marks—the communists can turn on the peasant mass and nationalize their newly gained land. Divided, without organization or leadership, the natural local leaders eliminated, and having seen what happened to those labeled landlords and rich, the peasants are too terrorized to resist. “As the Viet Minh communists carried it out, land reform involved two so-called sky-splitting and earth-shaking mass campaigns, one after the other. The first, the two-year Land Rent Reduction Campaign, began in 1953 in Viet Minh-controlled areas. It involved two successive population classification decrees, one in 1953 and the other, a more refined version, in 1955. Both required the rural folk to pigeonhole every member of every village into one of a hierarchy of classes, with the poorest, wage-earning or landless peasant class at the bottom and the landlords at the top, with the rich peasants right below them and the weak, average, and strong middle-level peasants forming three middle classes. “The communists then demanded that the poor peasants liquidate the landlords. Under the watchful eyes of communist cadre, they shot, imprisoned, or otherwise punished the landlords, sometimes by taking their land away. But apparently they didn’t find enough. Unhappy that so few ‘landlords’ had been liquidated in each village, the communists pointed out that the peasants should have found many more ‘exploiters.’ Reconsider the population classification decree, they told the peasants, and reclassify your neighbors. Now those classified as strong, middle-level, rich peasants had to be redefined as landlords, and they ended up with about five times as many exploiters to execute or otherwise eliminate. “The new classification, however, condemned not only the better-off peasants, but also the more productive and enterprising of them. The differences between landlords and rich, strong, middle-class peasants on the one hand, and those peasants who were poorer or smaller landowners on the other, was often a matter of fine distinctions. Sometimes the only difference was that some peasants were more hardworking and successful than others. This hardly fazed the communist cadre, however, since their goal was social revolution; whether class differences had to be forced or invented did not matter.

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“To make it even more likely that they find the requisite number of sacrificial victims, the communists then defined a new category: landlord mentality. This, incredibly, signified ‘evil by lineage.’ A person in this category was anyone whose ancestors had been landlords as the communists defined them, or who sometime in the past had possessed land or livestock. “Murder by classification was often made final with a bullet, but many died in prison, or by suicide, or as the result of an isolation policy. By demand of the state, whole families whose male head was classified as a landlord were ostracized and boycotted. No one could have anything to do with them. Even talking to them was prohibited, and children were encouraged to throw stones at them. They were not allowed to work. Quite simply and understandably, most died of starvation. A horrible death. “We can only guess at the overall toll of this pitiless campaign. Maybe one hundred thousand Vietnamese were thus murdered. Maybe many more.” John paused and slowly scanned the rows of students. Some looked shocked; some wrote notes; some looked sleepy. He said it again, louder. “Perhaps one hundred thousand human beings like you and me were murdered. That’s a statistic, a jumble of numbers, and its human meaning is hard to digest.’’ He walked to his briefcase and took out his deck of name cards, shuffled it, and picked the card on top. “Mr. Thompson?” A hand went up. “What is the population of our town of Bloomington?” John asked him. Ah . . . hmm . . . twenty-five thousand?” “No, it’s about sixty-five thousand. All these people in Bloomington do not even come near the number—they are only a little over half—of those who were possibly murdered by the communists in this land reform campaign.” Now he had them all looking at him, and even more had raised eyebrows, round eyes, and drooping jaws. John walked to one side of the room. Their eyes followed him. “To move on, the purpose of the Land Rent Reduction Campaign was to soften up the countryside for the radical seizure of the land of those who had, as the communists said, too much, and temporarily transfer it to those who had, in their words, too little. This prepared the way for collectivization. With the elimination of those considered landlords and rich, and after a delay to allow for the political and economic reorganization of the villages, the North now launched its Land Reform Campaign.

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“They brutally stripped land and other possessions from those with even moderate-sized plots, and gave it to peasants with either very little or nothing at all. But in North Vietnam, peasants with as much as an acre of land were few; even fewer, however classified by the population decree, fit the classic Marxist idea of landlord. Nonetheless, those who had survived and kept their land through the previous campaign now were forced to vacate their homes and abandon their land and possessions. “Those Vietnamese accused by the communists of being traitors, reactionaries, and cruel bullies also had their land and possessions confiscated. Ultimately this meant that anyone in communist disfavor could be robbed of all his possessions. “The expropriation of property and its transfer to the poorer peasants was often done with some ceremony. This might involve the beating of drums, a speech by some comrade announcing the evils of the victims and the confiscation of their property, shouting of the required ritualistic ‘Long live’ and ‘Down with,’ followed with removal of all the movable possessions—farm animals, pets, farm implements, household furniture and goods, pots and pans, and other cooking utensils. Distribution of the confiscated land might also involve great ceremony, with the usual flags, slogans, and shouting. Each peasant received a certificate of land ownership. If we can believe the communists, one-fifth of an acre thus went to each of 325,000 families.” John paced slowly to the other side of the room. “A particularly shocking device of these two savage campaigns was murder by quota.” He stopped and stared at the class for a moment. “Do you know what a quota under communism is?” One hand went up. “Yes, Miss Finch.” “It means that so much of something must be produced.” “Right,” Banks replied, “and in this case, so many killed had to be produced.” He raised his voice without realizing it. “A quota of murders.” He paused, trying to calm the rage rising within him. Lack of sleep made this a struggle; it sapped his control. He’d started pacing again; now he stopped and, as the class stared, fought down bile. He’d felt this way the first time he came across the murder quotas the Soviet KGB had telegraphed to villages and towns, and again when he discovered Mao Tse-tung’s. And again when he wrote about it in his dissertation, and when a member of his dissertation committee tried to cast doubt on anything so evil being done by an established government. And . . . now.

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He stepped back to the lectern and pretended to look over his outline. At first his hand shook, but he took a deep breath and tried to force his mind into recognizing where he was. Brrrr! . . . brrrr! Construction was underway one building down from this one, and the sound of a puffing compression engine came vaguely through the closed windows in the protracted silence. The room seemed overheated. He gained control. Stepping away from the lectern again, he glanced at Miss Phim. Was that a look of understanding? he wondered. He returned to his lecture. “Ah . . . in applying the population classification decree, the communists had demanded that at least one defined landlord be killed per village. But, as I mentioned, on first application, the poor peasants were insufficiently dedicated, and they didn’t exterminate enough ‘evil’ ones. So, during the Land Reform Campaign, the communist Central Committee raised the quota from one to five per village. That is, they ordered the peasants of each village in North Vietnam to define at least five so-called landlords for execution, even if the land in the village was already being shared communally. And five executions was a minimum. “The communist rulers believed that ninety-five percent of the land was owned by the wealthiest five percent of the people. Therefore, of course, five percent of the folk in each village and hamlet had to be eliminated, with five as a minimum: five in a village of one hundred, twenty-five in a village of five hundred, and fifty in a village of one thousand. I don’t know how they handled the numbers when five percent of a village of fifty yielded 2.5 people. I suspect that, since by communist theory it was better to kill the innocent than let the guilty go free, they always rounded upward. In any case, each village had its special ‘land reform’ team whose job it was to do the killing, once its report was approved by provincial party headquarters.” He was lecturing too loudly and rushing his words. He had to get better control. He went to his deck of names. “Mr. McLean?” When a hand went up, Banks asked, “If the population of Bloomington is sixty-five thousand, how many would be murdered by these communist calculations?” “What calculations?” “That five percent must die.” McLean bent over his notes and scribbled for a moment, then looked up with his brow furrowed and said, “Thirty-two hundred and fifty?”

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“Correct. A little over three thousand of the people that live here would have to be murdered because they might be landowners; they might be the wealthiest.” He let that sink in. “Those murdered by quota, however, made up only part of the overall dead. The casualties in these sky-splitting and earth-shaking Land Rent Reduction and Land Reform campaigns from 1953 to 1956 may have been extremely high. Some estimate five hundred thousand Vietnamese; even a high estimate of six hundred thousand has been mentioned. But there are also very low estimates, such as eight hundred, five thousand, or fifteen thousand dead, killed, or victimized. Given the minimum quota of five ‘landlords’ in each village, and considering those that committed suicide or families that died from official ostracism, probably the correct figure is more like 150,000 dead—over two times the population of Bloomington.” He glanced at his watch, and saw he was nearly out of time. He stopped, looked over the class, and ended with, “‘Land reform’ was not the only instrument of communist mass murder, but I’m going to stop here and continue this in the next session. Okay on this so far?” A few nodded; some looked at him blank- faced, and others stared down at their notes. “Class dismissed.” As the students filed out, he opened his briefcase with a jerk and threw his outline inside. He didn’t look up, not even as Miss Phim left the classroom.

Chapter 13 1956 North Vietnam Wang Dewu

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ewu’s horse neighed and stamped its front hooves as a policeman in a baggy green uniform and sloppy cap approached their cart. A farm horse, it had always been sensitive to strangers, and this policeman stank of too much garlic and nuoc mam fish sauce. Two other policemen leaned on the roadblock, watching as the first lifted up a corner of the tarp covering the back of the cart. They were just outside of Sam-son. While holding up the tarp with one hand, the policeman used a long stick to probe beneath the heaped rice sacks filled with corn and potatoes, then slid it down alongside the gutted pig. Dewu relaxed the reins to give the horse a little freedom as the policeman came around the cart and looked up at Dewu. He felt Jia Li and Shihao tense beside him. “Your pa—” Shihao wailed loudly, “Why are we stopping? I want to eat. You promised we could eat!” Jia Li screamed at him, “Shut up! Brat.” She smacked him on the cheek. Shihao started jumping up and down on the cart’s spring seat. “Em ghet anh—I hate you! Em ghet anh!” Dewu stood up on the footrest, threw his papers at the policeman, and turned to Jia Li. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her close. “How dare you hit our son, cho cai—bitch!” He shook her. She screamed back at him, “You cho de—son of a bitch!” Upset by the loud screaming, the horse started throwing his head up and down. Its fidgeting shook the cart from side to side.

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The policeman did no more than glance at the papers before holding them up to Dewu, who had started hollering at his son. Jia Li looked at the policeman, her face distorted in anger, and then hid her face. She gave Dewu a look he immediately understood. Dewu turned to the policeman as if about to bark at him, but he saw his papers in the policeman’s hand and grabbed them with a loud, “Dip di tung ngo nay di—fuck this stupid kid.” The policeman shook his head. “You have been too easy on them. Use a stick on them once a week.” He demonstrated by whipping the stick into his hand with a swish! “I have peace in my household.” “Yeah,” Dewu replied, “I will use a bigger stick.” He jerked on the reins and loudly clicked his tongue. The horse took off almost at a gallop, and Dewu had to rein him in to a walk. As they passed the two other policemen, they waved at Dewu with sympathetic grins. Out of sight of the roadblock, Dewu stopped the cart. He put one arm around Jia Li to pull her close, and reached over her to draw Shihao to them. “Nicely done. But do not let it spoil you. If either of you ever do anything like that for real, I will take a stick to you.” Jia began to scowl, but she saw the twinkle in his eyes and the grin forming, and when he started to laugh, Jia Li laughed with him. Shihao joined them, at first nervously, and then wholeheartedly.

aaa In Sam-son, they went to the central market on Van Mieu Street, where they acted like any other farmers selling their produce while looking for Sino-Vietnamese buyers, for only they could be trusted. With each, Dewu initiated a short conversation. “Nice weather today.” When the other invariably agreed, Dewu asked, “Do you think the weather in the south is as nice?” The other could either end the conversation with a shrug or noncommittal answer, or say something like “Maybe” or “I would think so.” The next question was the dangerous one. Dewu scratched his nose as though unaware of the dong between his fingers. “Well, with such good weather, the sea can’t be too rough.” When it got to that, three Sino-Vietnamese merchants in a row just walked off. The fourth, the one who bought the gutted pig, wrote something on the receipt and immediately hauled the pig off in his own cart.

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Dewu looked at the receipt as if merely checking it, then whispered to Jia Li, “It says ‘Here, at 5:30 p.m.’” They sold everything, including the cart and horse. With an hour to spare, they slowly circulated around the market, as though they also had things to sell in the bags and cases they carried. At 5:30 they were back at the east end of the market where they had sold the pig. People bustled about, preparing to close up their stalls. The merchant who had bought the pig was nowhere around. Then a tall man with a leathery, deeply lined face made to walk past them, then seemed to think of something. He stopped, pulled a pack of Victory cigarettes from the bag he carried with one hand, flicked the pack so one stood out, and grabbed it with his lips. He looked around, and then walked up to Dewu. “Do you have a match?” he asked, the words making the cigarette bob up and down from the side of his mouth. “I’m sorry, I don’t smoke. But I have a long fire match you are welcome to have.” He looked at Jia Li. “Get me one of my fire matches.” While she bent over one of their bags for it, the man said, “Nice weather. Do you think it is like this in the south?” Dewu tried to keep the sudden excitement out of his voice. “I would think so. Do you think the sea will then be rough?” The man gave Dewu a long look. His dark, sunken eyes held a touch of fear. Then he looked at Jia Li, who had straightened and was holding out the match, and then at Shihao, who had drawn close to Jia Li and looked shyly up at the man. The man nodded, and seemed to gather himself together. He took the match, lifted his foot, and struck it on the sole of his dirty boot. He lit his cigarette, then held out to Dewu the bag he had been carrying, opening it to reveal an overripe papaya. As though saying something about the papaya, the man whispered, “Nine gold tael. You got?” That amount was currently worth about $400. “Yes.” The man continued to whisper, his words hurried and barely audible. “Be at pier 7B at one a.m., third fishing boat from the beginning of the pier. Come only if there is no moon. No flashlights. No talk. No light-colored clothing. Hide in the boat until I come at about five a.m. Fisherman’s clothes in pilothouse for both of you. Put them on.” The man closed the bag and shook his head as though disappointed, and ambled off, leaving a trail of swirling smoke behind him. The town’s small Chinatown was one street over, and there Dewu asked around for where a Sino-Vietnamese farmer could find

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cheap lodging for one or two nights. One such place was a home that rented rooms, and one room was available. Dewu registered his family for it with all the details required by law, including false information about the travel permit he was supposed to have from his village. The owner of the home, an old and shriveled woman whose bent back indicated she had worked most of her life on a farm, warned him in Chinese, “For staying overnight, you will have to register at the police station in the morning. Please do not forget, or I will get into trouble.” In barely remembered Chinese, Dewu replied, “Yes. It be bad for me. Worse.” He paid her for the room in advance, and she accepted the dongs without comment. He was convinced she knew they were escapees.

Gulf of Tonkin Dewu huddled in the boat’s small pilothouse, arms wrapped tightly around Jia Li and Shihao, as Captain Manh, the man they had met at the market, slipped his boat away from the pier and steered it out to sea. Dewu could not believe fleeing North Vietnam was this easy, and he expected to die at any moment. He did not take an easy breath until Manh yelled over the chugging motor, “We are in international waters.” By that time, the sky had cleared up and the moon provided enough light to see any boat within half a mile. The transfer from the North Vietnamese fishing boat to the one from the south would be a risk all around. If the North Vietnamese coast guard caught them, even in international waters, they would sink both boats and probably leave all aboard to drown. Dewu had heard that some pickups were merely tricks to lure South Vietnamese fishing boats into range for North Vietnamese police to machine-gun and sink. He wondered what would happen to them if no South Vietnamese boat ventured near. As if to calm his concern, a boat, barely visible, appeared in the moonlight. It slowly approached, bouncing as it rose and fell on the choppy swells. As it drew nearer, Dewu studied the craft. It was all poles, nets, and lines, in the midst of which was a small pilothouse. It flew no flag that Dewu could see, but Manh yelled out to him, “That’s a South Vietnamese fishing boat.”

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Dewu and Jia Li had changed back into their own clothes. Now as Manh instructed, they stood with Shihao, clearly visible in the bow of their boat. Dewu supported Jia Li, who was barely able to stand—the pills Dewu had bought on the black market before they departed only moderated her seasickness. The other boat stopped within hailing distance, and a man wearing a yellow boat hat that covered his neck and ears leaned out of the pilothouse and yelled, “Five taels. Nothing less.” Dewu shouted back, “We’ve got it.” The captain of the other boat kept his boat bobbing on the waves about ten feet away and held out a long bamboo mango picker with a melon-sized basket at the end. He yelled again, “Put the gold in the basket first.” But Dewu feared if he did that, the other captain might then pull away and be gone with the gold and his family’s future. Even if he put two or three taels in the basket now and offered the rest when they reached port, it would still be a big loss if the other boat took off without letting them board. Dewu hurried back to the pilothouse and asked Manh for a flashlight. Returning with it to the bow, he passed it to Jia Li. He held up his hand, opened it so the taels could be seen on his palm, and told Jia Li, “Shine the flashlight on my hand.” As the taels scintillated yellow in the light, he waited as the other captain steered his boat closer to see better the amount of gold in his hand. When the bobbing, surging boat was close enough that the rubber tire bumpers hanging over the side of each boat were only a foot or two away, Dewu fisted the taels. Timing the waves, he launched himself from the gunwale with his right foot and leaped over the gunwale of the other boat, almost lurching into the captain. The captain growled something and raised his fist, about to club him, but Dewu held up the taels for the captain to see, and then handed them over to him. As he counted and then pocketed them, Jia Li, clinging weakly to a lanyard and swaying to the boat’s erratic rhythm, handed their luggage and bags across the choppy waves to Dewu. She paused, sagged from the lanyard, and vomited into the ocean. Then, eyes streaming, she gripped the lanyard with one hand, grabbed Shihao’s shirt with the other, and helped him up onto the gunwale to jump across. He stood there shaking, his eyes wide with fear, looking at the hands his father held out, then back at his mother. “Jump!” she screeched. He did.

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Dewu caught him in both arms, stumbling as Shihao’s momentum threatened to topple them both backward. He set the boy down as Jia Li stepped onto the gunwale. He reached for her outstretched hand, trying vainly for several moments to capture it before their hands finally met, and he pulled her across. When he released her, she sat down hard on the deck next to Shihao, who had his back to the gunwale, gulped air, and then vomited again. The boats were now pitching against each other’s bumpers. Without even a wave to the other boat, the South Vietnamese captain immediately pulled away, as though moving away from a plague ship. Dewu finally relaxed. They had made it this far. He sat down between Shihao and Jia Li and put his arms around them and held them close. Jia Li finally wiped the vomit from her mouth, pushed her hair back from her face, and yelled above the noise of the boats and the sea, “You sure know how to keep your wife entertained.”

aaa Five day-long hours passed. Even Dewu felt nauseated as the increasingly choppy sea tossed the fishing boat around as if it were a child’s plaything. The captain of the boat had gruffly introduced himself as, “Nguyen, just Nguyen,” which was one of the most common names in Vietnam. He added, “We are going to my small fishing village of Cam-hoa. It is two miles inside the South.” He said not another word, which was just as well. Dewu found a place by the pilothouse that was protected from most of the sea spray and the breeze. He put his back against the pilothouse, pulled Jia Li and Shihao close to him, and then dragged a canvas that stank of fish around them. The moon had disappeared, and the sky was nearly black. Dewu gazed absently at the dark gray clouds barely visible in the inky sky ahead of the boat. Somewhere near the horizon, he saw a faint light reflecting off the clouds. It couldn’t be dawn, he thought. The glow was in the southwest, not the east. Gradually the light brightened and turned into a roiling red cloud. Something large was burning. Dewu tensed. They drew closer. Flames in coruscating red and yellow shot through billowing clouds of gray and black smoke to stain the whole horizon red. A village was burning. It had to be Cam-hoa. The cross nailed to the wall of his pilothouse proclaimed Nguyen a Catholic. That did not deter his use of language. Even above the engine noise and the loud slaps as the ship bucked through the waves, Dewu

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heard him yelling, “Cho de—son of a bitch,” to Dewu, or maybe to nobody. “The communist guerrillas are burning my village. I told that do ngu lo dit—stupid asshole to give them the fucking taxes they demanded, but no. That idiot bastard invited in a small South Vietnam Local Defense unit to protect the village. Four goddamned solders! Ha! Do ngu—stupid. He should have sent the communists an invitation.” There was a pause, and then Nguyen cried out, “Oh my God. My wife Thu Lan—my son Dung. Holy Mary, please let them live.” Dewu pushed aside the tarp and entered the pilothouse, dark but for the light from a few instruments. He put his hand on Nguyen’s shoulder, tried to say something optimistic about his family. But the captain slapped his hand away and turned his rage on Dewu. “If I had not gone out to pick you up, I would be with my family,” he hissed. “I could have protected them. It’s your fucking fault. When I get in closer, you had better jump out of the boat, or I’ll shoot you all.” Dewu was alert to just that possibility. From the beginning, Nguyen had been nervous. He’d acted as though he would throw them all overboard at the approach of any ship. Nguyen reached for something in a compartment next to the wheel, but before he could withdraw his hand, Dewu smashed him the face with his fist, driving him to his knees. One hand still holding the wheel, Nguyen tried to point a gun at Dewu with the other. Dewu grabbed the gun, twisted it free, and pointed it at the captain. “I am sorry,” Dewu yelled above the noise of the boat. “You saved us and I do not want to hurt you. But to save the lives of my family, I will shoot you dead if I have to. Just take the boat in, and let us off.” Nguyen had a bloody nose and a split lip. He used the wheel to pull himself up. Then he just leaned over the wheel and let the blood drip from his nose and lip. Finally he looked at Dewu through watery eyes, and nodded. Jia Li and Shihao had been watching at the door, and now they entered the pilothouse to stand next to Dewu. Jia Li looked better. “Thank you again for saving us,” she shouted to the captain. “I am so sorry for your village. I hope that your wife and son are safe.” Dewu motioned for Jia Li to stay back and not get too close to the captain. He pointed north with his free hand and said, his tone making it a question, “I thought that by fleeing south we would leave all those do ngu communists up north.” “This is . . .” Nguyen began, but his lip was swelling. He waved ahead, in the direction of the fires. And started crying. Jia Li moved toward him, and Dewu screamed at her, “No, Jia Li!”

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She jerked back. She looked away from Nguyen, reached out for Shihao’s shoulders, and turned him so that he faced away also. As they approached the coast, Nguyen turned off the instrument lights, probably too emotionally blinded to realize the boat was visible in the light of the flames. He throttled the motor down to its lowest notch and steered them slowly into a small harbor and toward a jetty. The boats that had been moored to it had been sunk; only the tops of their pilothouses and their masts showed above the water. Their boat was barely moving when it brushed the jetty, the old tires hanging from the side of the boat absorbing the impact. Before they could bounce more than a foot away, Nguyen jumped onto the jetty and tied the bow of the boat to a piling, then did the same at the stern. He jumped back into the boat, turned the motor off, and jiggled the ignition key from the lock. He did not even look at Dewu. “Go,” he bawled, and ran off toward the flames. “Quick,” Dewu told Jia Li, “we have to get away before someone comes.” He hopped onto the jetty and she handed the suitcases and bags up to him, then gripped his hand to be pulled with Shihao onto the jetty. They each picked up a suitcase and bag, Dewu tucking his bag under his arm to keep his right hand with the gun free. Dawn had yet to light up the sky, but the flames from the village cast just enough wavering light for them to see clearly. They hurried from the jetty and moved quickly along a path that led into an empty, rutted parking lot. On the other side they found a gravel road that ran along the coast. Dewu turned left on it, which had to be south. They kept to the forest side of the road. They soon encountered others on the road, going in the same direction. Some had suitcases, as they did; some pushed or pulled carts filled with their goods. In a mile or two, the road was almost crowded with people, horses, donkeys, oxen, carts, and wagons, all heading south. No one talked. Only grunts, wheezes, and coughs signaled life; only the flapping, scraping, jingling, and rattling that always accompanied a trudging caravan of humans and animals marked their passage. Nor did Dewu or his wife and son say anything. They merged with the refugees from the burned village, effectively hidden among them. The flames, and then the red and yellow clouds receded behind them into a smoky horizon. And when eventually the rising sun painted the trade wind clouds with a golden hue, it had no competition from the burning village.

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As they passed a field of huge boulders between the road and ocean, Dewu motioned that they should go down among them, as some refugees had already. They found a small, flat area on the sand between the boulders where they could rest. While first Dewu and then Jia Li guarded their bags and suitcases, they used an area behind some other boulders to relieve themselves. Then Jia Li distributed cold balls of sticky rice and cut vegetables among them, and Dewu passed around a water bottle with a cup screwed on top. “No more than a half-cup each,” he cautioned. Those were the first words among them since Dewu’s “Quick” at the jetty. When Shihao and Jia Li had drunk their water ration, Dewu filled the cup halfway for himself, and held it up to his wife and son. “This should be a happy moment. We made it to the south. I am sure we would have been dead soon, if we remained in the north. And we are protected here, within this crowd of refugees. To our new life.” He touched each of them with the cup and swallowed the water in two gulps. Then he rummaged in his suitcase and drew out a tattered school map of Vietnam. He laid it on the sand. “If we keep going on this road, I am sure we will end up in Hue, the former capital of this region. I hear there is a large Chinese community there, and many North Vietnamese Catholics who went there after the so-called exchange of populations between the North and South. So we should be able to get help, if we need it. We have our jewelry and remaining gold; maybe we can start a small business.”

Chapter 14 John Banks

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e felt much better this afternoon than he had in the morning. He had bought a sleeping bag yesterday, and after a quick lunch today, had closed and locked his office door, put the bag on the floor, and got into it with his computer’s alarm clock set for forty-five minutes. He knew nothing from the time he closed his eyes until the alarm went off with a repeated bong. He strode into his classroom just on time. A few students who had been talking in the hallway followed him in. Miss Phim sat in her seat, reading something. His eyes lingered on her for a moment. There was something about her besides her beauty and body, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He finally tore his eyes away self-consciously, wondering if the other students had caught him staring at her. “Good afternoon, students. Are you ready for the world’s greatest lecture?” “We’re having a visitor?” Miss Sneal asked, keeping her face bland. John gave an obvious, long sigh. “Another failing student,” he quipped, waving a hand at her. When the laughter died down, he began. “Last time I went into the Viet Minh Land Reform Campaign. Today I will deal with other communist campaigns during this period. “In 1953, the Communist Party carried out a Political Struggle Campaign. This was a very short-lived and explosive campaign of terror to prepare the way for their so-called land reform. Its aim was to eliminate those still remaining who had helped the French, as well as those who were anticommunist or not sympathetic enough, and unreliable or questionable communist cadre. In a replay of Stalin’s Great Terror—” John stopped his pacing, looked from one student to another, and said, “You have this in your reading. What was the Great Terror?”

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He ignored the hands and went to his note cards of student names. He made a show of shuffling them, then purposely picked out Miss Phim’s from near the top. “Miss Phim?” She lifted her hand so that he would know who she was, as though he needed that reminder. He had not heard her voice before, and was immediately surprised to hear her speak perfect English, with an exciting feminine sweetness to it. “In the Great Terror, Stalin purged the Communist Party at the top and mid-levels. This was in the late 1930s. About a million communists were executed.” Almost mesmerized by those slanted, single-lidded almond eyes looking at him and that voice, he had to give himself a mental shake. “Ah . . . correct. Although there is some controversy over the best estimates of those murdered, a million is the usual total given. Thank you.” He tore his eyes away from her. “As I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself,” he grinned, “Ho Chi Minh held his own mini Great Terror. People would be arrested for some excuse, such as not paying taxes, and then painfully tortured until they ‘confessed’ to membership in fictional anticommunist associations and plots with certain others, whose names the interrogators supplied. These in turn would be arrested and tortured. Of course, this typical communist technique provided the ‘legal’ foundation for finally arresting and executing the ‘reactionaries’ the party was after. “Such terror went on in every village, for if the social revolution was to proceed, those who did or might question it had to be liquidated. After about two weeks of this terror, as many as three to five people had been killed per village. But it was getting out of hand— peasants fled the villages, and the party itself was in danger. Since the Communist Party had achieved its purpose of eliminating possible opposition, it ended the worst excesses of the terror, but then only temporarily. “It lived on as a form of repression and social prophylaxis, and there were still periodic purges of communist cadre. Many of the cadre had joined the party in its early years and had bourgeois backgrounds; they or their families were eventually classified as landlords. And then the terror grew again, as land reform provided an excuse for a national purge of the Communist Party, of which the vanguard were the poor and landless peasants. Their denunciations often extended to the rank and file of the party. Anyway, local party officials had difficulty finding the requisite number of bodies to meet their quota for each village, so it helped to include objectionable party members.

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“Aside from these purges, the political repression and associated terror reached its peak in 1956, at the same time that land reform was ending. In this year, about seventy thousand Vietnamese may have been murdered from repression alone. No doubt, the Communist Party succeeded—through murder, suicides, and imprisonment—in eliminating all possible competition for power and opposition to Ho Chi Minh’s brand of communism. “Then, apparently concerned that the accelerating terror and killing might weaken or destroy the party’s hold on the country, it launched the Rectification of Errors Campaign. It confessed that mistakes had been made, and it fired many top officials and released many prisoners, including former communist cadre who, for the most part, had been arrested for deviationism, bourgeois tendencies, or landlordism. “Since those who had done the finger pointing were often new party cadre, the old cadre’s return to their villages triggered conflicts between them and these new, much more radical cadre—especially if they had replaced the former cadre or been responsible for their arrest and punishment. Untold numbers of communist cadre died in the settling of scores and exacting revenge.” A hand went up. “Yes, Mr. Fischer.” “If our government tried to do all that stuff here, everyone would revolt. How could the Vietnamese stand still for this cr—killing?” “Well, many of those who would lead such revolts had been murdered. But the peasants did revolt spontaneously, particularly during the deadly years from 1955 to 1957. For example, in November 1956, Ho Chi Minh’s home province of Nghe An saw open rebellion, and rioting and insurrection spread throughout much of the province. It took a whole division of troops almost a month to reimpose communist control. Rebellions also broke out elsewhere. The worst of these, near Vinh, involved protests by those who had been prevented from moving south during the three hundred-day window opened by the Geneva Agreements. The following year, armed rebellions took place in Phat Diem, Than Hoa, and near Hanoi; they were bloodily suppressed by the army. In the restoration of communist order, many peasants were killed, many executed, and many others deported. In the uprisings of November 1956, perhaps two thousand were executed, possibly six thousand killed or deported. Overall, from 1955 to 1956, those who lost their lives from rebellion may have numbered between ten and fifteen thousand.”

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John looked at his watch. He had better wind down. “To conclude about this deadly period of Vietnam’s history, the period from 1953 to 1956 was a politically tumultuous one for North Vietnam. It saw the end of the War of Independence and the signing of the Geneva Agreements, which established the independence of Vietnam and its separation into the North and South. It saw the mass exchange of populations between them, with some 727,000 to one million North Vietnamese refugees—about sixty percent Catholics—moving to the South, and nearly fifty thousand to one hundred thousand primarily communist guerrillas, families, and sympathizers moving to the North. And it saw the victorious communists socially and economically reconstruct the North, wiping out actual or potential opposition. The Political Struggle, Land Rent Reduction, and Land Reform campaigns were the major weapons in this social revolution.” John had walked to one side of the room while lecturing, and now walked back to the middle to lean over the lectern and check his outline. “All told, from 1953 to 1956, the communists likely killed 195,000 to 865,000 North Vietnamese. I conservatively estimate the toll as around 360,000 men, women, and children.” He looked around the classroom. “Incredible, isn’t it. This number did not die in war. These human beings were not killed in combat. They were murdered by their own communist government. And . . .” he hesitated, to make sure he had everyone’s attention, “this number is even more incredible when you realize that it is much greater than the 292,131 American soldiers, marines, airmen, and seamen killed in all of World War Two.” John slowly let out his breath. “Okay, class—questions, comments?” Several asked questions, which he deflected back to the class by using his deck of names to call on students for answers. This created some interesting exchanges among the students. When time was up, he said, “That’s it, folks. Next time we will cover South Vietnam and the North’s war against it. You have your assigned reading in Cyril Clement’s book on government murder listed in your syllabus. Dismissed.” Several students approached him as the classroom emptied. One said she had lost her syllabus, and asked for another; two others asked if the topics for their first term papers, due the following week, were okay. As he discussed their topics with them, he stole a glance at Miss Phim as she strode out of the classroom in Levis so tight, they would show a dimple on her well-rounded rear end.

Chapter 15 1956–1958 San Francisco Cyril Clement

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yril’s experience in Japan, his interest in Asia, and what he had read about Joy in Banks’ stuff disposed him toward oriental women. So, when he was a freshman at the university, he tried to increase his chances of meeting a desirable one by joining the Foreign Students’ Club and participating in their dances and other activities. He always wore long sleeves, and learned to do most things with his left hand. It was not that his right arm and missing fingers embarrassed him, but that he didn’t want to answer questions about the injury or have anyone express pity for him. He dated a number of foreign students from Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and a Filipino and a Malaysian. Nothing clicked, or, when he thought it might, it didn’t for his date. He was much too serious (perhaps boring was the better term) for many of them. In his senior year he met Alice Kwai Lee, a third generation Chinese girl from San Francisco, at a party. She was vivacious, and always ready with a smile and a laugh. With her long, ink-black hair, large, almond-shaped black eyes, and lips that were full and usually parted to show white teeth, she was his Joy. But he never thought of her this way. If he had, he would have squelched the thought immediately. He loved her for herself; at least he believed he did, and that was the important thing. She majored in mathematics, particularly mathematical statistics. She explained why to his question one day when they were eating at Berkeley House: “I love Chinese art and especially calligraphy. Have you ever noticed how mathematical symbols are like calligraphy?” And she went on to draw several on a napkin. Tapping the symbols for the

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summation, integral, and definite integral for emphasis, she said, “I get an aesthetic pleasure, not to mention an intellectual one, out of writing, reading, and working with such universal calligraphy.” He pursued her. Or maybe he pursued her until she caught him.

Alice Kwai Lee Cyril had a black beard. He had worn one before it became the recognized symbol of the beatnik culture and radical, and he would wear one when this fad passed. His nose was narrow and prominent, his face long, and his eyes deep and dark brown, overshadowed by bushy black eyebrows—all, perhaps, due to his part-Italian heritage. His hair, equally bushy and of course black, was not combed or cut enough for the times. Put a long, flowing white robe on him, and he would look the picture of a Confucian scholar. That caught Alice’s attention in the beginning, enough for her to accept his invitation to join him for supper at Peggy’s. At that first supper, Cyril’s qualities came through. He was much more mature than the college students she had dated. Without arrogance and without lecturing her, he told her he was dedicated to the cause of democracy and freedom. Not only was he serious; he seemed of a professional mind. He told her matter-of-factly that he wanted to get a graduate degree and become a professor. A good sense of humor balanced these qualities; he particularly liked to pun. Coming from a Chinese family, certain things rang a bell with her: confidence, dedication, professionalism. And his devotion to freedom—her grandparents had escaped from communist China into Hong Kong, where her grandfather then found it easy to immigrate to the United States. But Cyril also had certain qualities that were the opposite of those she would expect from a Chinese student, and they warmed her to him. He treated her as an equal, and respected her opinions and ideas. He especially seemed to have a sincere interest in her mathematical studies, and said he had briefly majored in physics, of which mathematics was part and parcel. Though she was impressed by him on the first date, close up and in the restaurant lighting, the Confucian scholar look gave way to that of a Jesuit priest—not very attractive to her mind. But his eyes sparkled sometimes, and he had a nice laugh, and a pleasant male voice. And

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there was a strong masculinity to him which, when she learned more about him, she attributed to his having to survive on his own, without parental guidance or help. He lacked two fingers on his right hand, and the hand itself was discolored and scarred, but he seemed oblivious to it. His activity was not crippled, and she saw no reason to ask about it. She was even more impressed on their third date. They talked easily, although she sensed a certain withdrawal when some subjects were brought up, such as how he became so dedicated to his cause. On their fifth date she knew she was falling in love with him. When he left her after their date, she felt empty and couldn’t wait for their next time together. On their sixth date they made love, her first time. He was so tender, so thoughtful, that the experience, as painful as it was in the beginning, was a sensual pleasure she didn’t think possible. From then on, each time was almost a new experience in erotic pleasure. He was her teacher, and for months she couldn’t get enough of him. “How did you learn all that?” she finally asked after one particularly acrobatic performance. “Not from books.” “When I was in Japan, I tried every day to get to the library across town, at military headquarters. But the Japanese prostitutes would block my way, and wouldn’t let me go unless I satisfied them. It was an exchange. They would teach me their tricks and I wouldn’t charge them for my body.” “You didn’t say—were they men or women?” “Damn,” he replied. “I never checked. Shucks, now the question will bother me.”

aaa When he applied to Berkeley for graduate study, she did also. They were both accepted. Before they both received their undergraduate degrees, Cyril proposed. She had counted on it, and accepted with the greatest happiness. But it wasn’t as she expected. They were in his dormitory room. She still lived with her parents. As soon as they’d entered the room, he asked her to sit on the bed while he brought up his desk chair to face her. She knew what was coming. Yes, he said it: “I want to marry you.” Not quite like the movies, but so what? Alice thought, ready to jump on him in her happiness, nonetheless. “Yes, yes, I ac—”

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He held up his hand. His voice low, with a touch of anxiety giving it a certain gruffness, he said, “After you hear what I have to say, you may not want to marry me. You may think I’m crazy. But, unless you believe me, you can’t be my wife. You see, what I am about to tell you will be the major factor in my life, and if we marry, yours also.” Her eyes opened wide and she leaned back. Then she looked at him, aghast. “Have you murdered someone?” “Of course not.” “Have you committed a crime, any crime, now or in the past?” “I stole books to read when I was a teenager. Otherwise, no.” “Are you a communist or a communist agent?” “No!” he involuntarily blurted. “There is a wife?” “Heavens, no.” She smothered a laugh. “Have you a dozen children scattered around?” He smiled. “The last time I counted, it was more like five hundred.” “Okay, nothing serious. I ac—” Hand again. The he threw the words out in a breathless, monotonic stream. “I was in possession of material from the past, written by time travelers, that precisely predicted the future.” The telephone for the floor was ringing at the end of the hallway. In the next room, people laughed. The phone stopped ringing; somebody yelled, “For Ed. Ed, you here?” “Huh?” Alice finally exclaimed, frowning. Her mind tried desperately to get a grip on what he had said. “I don’t understand.”

Cyril Clement How do you tell the one you love and want to marry what she must know, when the story is so crazy? No, more like cockeyed. So he said, “Please listen, and no questions until I’m through. I want to give you the complete story. Okay?” She nodded. So he started with the government’s paper drive in 1944. He left nothing out. He kept his voice steady and tried to keep the fear out of it. If she said he was crazy, absurd, she wanted to think about his proposal, then that was it. He would go on to his graduate study, but he

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would be heartbroken. He wanted her to be his wife. He loved her. He needed her. And he had spent a sleepless night trying to think through how to do this. When he came to the final moment, all he could do was go from A to Z. He told her why he was so dedicated, about his pacifism and hatred of democide. He told her about faculty’s lack of knowledge about not only the democratic peace, but also the amount of past and present democide, including the millions now being killed in China by the communists. And he told her what he planned for the future, after he got his Ph.D. Hours later, when he finished, he was mentally exhausted. He felt weak, weary, as though he had run for miles. He couldn’t look at her. He leaned back in his chair, looking down at his hands tightly clasped on his lap. He was so scared, he felt like vomiting. “Ah . . . ” she began slowly. Startled, fearing the worst, he looked up and into her . . . What? Dancing eyes? “You misled me.” Oh my God. Shit, he exclaimed to himself as his heart fell to the floor. “I thought this was serious, my love. I don’t deserve you if I can’t accept a little unusual experience. It’s not like being beamed up to a spaceship and impregnating an alien.” She gave him a serious look, belied again by her laughing eyes. “Have you confessed all and everything?” He nodded, too helpless now to say anything. “Now,” she said, “can I answer the proposal you made to me too many hours ago?” He nodded, or maybe that was his heart shaking his head. “You won’t raise you hand?” He shook his head. Tears sprang to his eyes. “I accept, you crazy man. Yes, and yes. I love you.” She grabbed his hands and pulled him onto the bed on top of her. They cried together with happiness.

aaa They had a big wedding, with Alice’s most distant relatives and closest friends in attendance. Her father had resisted the marriage at first, since Cyril was not Chinese, but he finally came around when he learned that Cyril would be a professor, a very prestigious profession for the Chinese.

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Of course, no word, not even the slightest hint, was ever mentioned to others about the Banks documents. That was now a secret locked in Cyril and Alice’s hearts and minds. And in the future, when the normal, everyday world and their different cultures and backgrounds caused some big fights between them, the Banks stuff, as they now both called it, was one of the strongest bonds between them.

Chapter 16 1960 Hue, South Vietnam Wang Dewu

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he slim, pretty young woman dressed in white silk dress and trousers walked into the Youde Drugstore in Hue, the sound of her clogs on the tiles lost amidst that of the outside traffic. She placed her heavy, fabric bag in a cart and pushed it down an aisle past the shelved goods and packaged food. Soon she had partially filled it with three large bags of potato chips from the United States, two plastic bags of dried squid from Japan, and a stuffed teddy bear from Taiwan. She looked around, apparently searching for something else to buy, and then reached into her fabric bag and flicked a toggle switch. She closed the bag, placed the potato chips, squid, and bear on top of it, and pushed the cart behind a stand of Vietnamese magazines near the counter, where the owner was talking to a customer. The corners of her full lips raised in the hint of a smile, she strolled out of the drugstore, and down the street. Precisely 123 seconds later, a thunderous explosion ripped the front of the drugstore apart, blowing out the front windows, and killing five people, including the owner and a pedestrian outside, and injuring twenty-three. Dewu’s Pho Shop was three stores down on Le Loi Street. The explosion sent a shudder through the foundation and rattled the plate glass window. Customers momentarily froze in shock, some with their flat-bottomed spoon halfway to their mouth. Then one overturned his chair as he pushed off it, whipped open the front door, and rushed out. Dewu ran from the kitchen and through the front door before it closed. In minutes, the street erupted into a chaos of shouts, screams, beeping horns, and straining motors. Dewu, his heart pounding, soon came

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back into the shop. He held up his hands to the customers and blared, “Youde Drugstore down the street has been bombed. No need to leave. We are safe here.” Most hurriedly finished their food and left anyway, some leaving money on their tables. Only two customers remained, one calmly spooning his noodle soup into his mouth. Dewu went into the kitchen, where Jia Li waited for him. She had a towel around one hand, burned when the explosion had startled her and she’d knocked over a bowl of hot pho. Dewu leaned against the server’s counter, his back to the tables so that he would not be heard. His shoulders slumped, he crossed his arms and looked down at the floor. “It was Mo Dawel’s store,” he said, his voice low and weary. “He’s dead. Head’s in shreds.” He led out a long, shuddering sigh. “The Viet Cong are hitting Hue now. I told you that they have assassinated the government’s representatives and heads of the Phong Dien, Dong Ha, and even Huong Thuy villages. Well, now they are hitting those they consider anticommunists here.” He looked into Jia Li’s worried eyes so that she could read his own anxiety. “Dawel is . . . was . . . a North Vietnamese escapee, like us. He was vehemently anticommunist, as we are.” The Viet Cong were the Viet Nam Cong San—Vietnamese Communists. Jia Li was squeezing the towel over her burnt hand and shaking her head. Dewu read panic in her eyes. All the lines in her face seemed to succumb to gravity, and her voice was a hiss as she tried to prevent it from reaching the two customers remaining in the restaurant. “Do ngu. He had to start that North Vietnamese Anticommunist Society. He was asking for it. And you. You should not have joined it. Oh, honey, they will target you—us—too.” “I know. In retrospect, it was stupid of Dawel. Stupid of me. But we never thought that the North would declare war on the South like this, a covert war carried out through their puppet Viet Cong. They will soon send their army south. I now do not doubt that.” Jia Li moved her eyes quickly to look beyond the counter. One of the remaining customers had been lingering, but when he saw he had been noticed, he put the two hundred piasters for his pho on the counter and walked out. The restaurant was empty, and the street outside had quieted down some. A siren sounded in the distance. “I’m selling the restaurant today for whatever I can get,” Dewu suddenly announced. “We’re leaving Hue.”

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Jia Li shuddered and shook her head. Tears flowed from her eyes. She stepped toward Dewu and put her arms around him and her head on his chest. “I know we must. Poor Shihao. He has made good friends and is doing well in school.” She squinted up at him through the tears, her brow furrowed. “Where can we go?” Dewu’s mind was working furiously. He had not expected they would hit Hue. It was, after all, the second largest city of South Vietnam, and the capital of Annam—the former kingdom of central Vietnam. “Now we must move fast. Again. We are going to Cholon, the Chinatown of Saigon. We will be unknown there; strangers can easily lose themselves in its crowded sections. We’ll start over again. Our North Vietnamese accent will always tell everyone where we are from, but we can just act as ordinary northerners who moved south in 1954 during the population exchange between the North and South.” He clapped his hands. “Okay, quick. Go home and get ready to move. Fortunately, we are only renting. I’m going downtown to the Business Exchange Group to see if I can get a buyer today for this restaurant, and everything it contains.” He took out his pocketknife and cut a flap off a cardboard box. He quickly wrote Out of Business on it and handed it to Jia Li. “Here. Hang this on the door. We leave by bus as soon as I sell the restaurant and buy new documentation.”

aaa Dewu was very uncomfortable on the bouncing, overcrowded, old French bus. It seemed little more than the addition of side walls with windows and a tin roof to a flatbed truck. His long legs were cramped, squeezed as they were around their baggage, and his knees kept knocking against the back of the seat ahead. Smaller Jia Li and Shihao, however, simply pulled their feet up on the seat. He had sold the restaurant for 54.3 million piasters—about $150,000, black market. He had converted it all to gold taels, except for a little over a million piasters that he converted to three thousand American dollars. He did not know what would happen during the trip. It was dangerous. They might be waylaid by Viet Cong, South Vietnamese troops, or even the renegade troops of one of the private armies that President Diem had defeated in unifying the South. So, Dewu had tightly rolled

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ten $100 bills together, forced the roll into a small plastic tube with a screw cover, and stuck it deep up his anus. He kept feeling as though he had to defecate. He had done the same to Shihao, who understood at eleven what was happening, and tried to be manly about his father shoving the tube up his anus. But his body was so stiff and his anal muscles so clenched that Jia Li had to sooth him into relaxing before his father succeeded. Jia Li had just inserted the tube into her vagina, and then wore a menstrual pad to deter a finger search. Dewu had watched as she had inserted it, and then blandly suggested that she could take all three tubes. Dewu had seen enough American movies to know that if he said that to an American woman, she would have hit him with the menstrual pad. Jia Li only reddened, covered her face with her hand, and giggled. Jia Li also had sewn their gold into the lining of their clothes and their bags and suitcases. No one would find it on a fast search, the kind carried out by bandits with sixty or more people to search, and worried about being discovered. The trip to Saigon would take almost a day and a half. They had made no reservations. They would find a cheap hotel in Cholon to house them temporarily, and then work through the Chinese business community services and classified advertisements. The road was in terrible condition; in places, the bus had to navigate muddy stretches strewn with leaves and branches. A couple of hours outside of Hue, the bus stopped abruptly. Dewu immediately stood to peer out the front window over the heads of the passengers in front of him. A semi truck had been pulled across the road; armed men stood beside it. One of them hammered on the bus door, and the bus driver had no choice but to open it. A man clad in black pajamas, a red neck scarf, a soft khaki hat, and rubber sandals entered the bus. Brandishing his Soviet Kalashnikov AK-47, he yelled, “We are fighting for the freedom and independence of South Vietnam from the capitalist puppets of the West. We are taxing you for our heroic struggle. As we come down the aisle, put all your money, jewelry, and watches into the bag. If you withhold anything, you will be shot. Also have your ID ready.” Two Viet Cong, one an old man with a long gray beard, the other a young girl wearing a conical hat, entered the bus. Each was accompanied by a Viet Cong carrying an AK-47 as they started slowly down the aisle, thrusting an empty rice sack toward each passenger in turn. One pair worked the right side, the other the left. Behind them, more Viet Cong entered with AK-47s and started checking IDs.

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As they did so, Red Scarf instructed the driver to pull the bus off the road onto a narrow side road. As soon as a curve in that road put a screen of jungle between the bus and the main road, Red Scarf told the driver to stop. Dewu had been sitting in an aisle seat, with little Shihao between him and petite Jia Li. He remained standing, carefully watching the approach of the Viet Cong woman and the armed man who were looting his side of the bus. Just before the pair reached him, there was a short Bbrrrpppp! of AK-47 fire, followed by a scream that stopped suddenly with a another Bbbrrrppp!. Dewu stood on tiptoes and craned his neck to see what had happened. A lifeless body slumped into the aisle, the fingers of one dangling arm touching the pitted and dirty floor. Standing in the haze of gun smoke, Red Scarf shouted from the front of the bus into the absolute silence, “Two less wicked tyrants.” Somewhere up front, a woman started gasping in loud sobs. A child began to cry. When the Viet Cong woman reached him, Dewu had ready his forged ID; it seemed well worth the thirty-six thousand piasters he had paid for it now. He flashed it to her, then motioned for her to lean closer. She did so, her partner holding his gun inches away from Dewu’s face. Emphasizing his Northern accent, Dewu hissed into her ear, “Get your sergeant.” The woman stared at him, frowning, and then turned to the man with the gun, who shrugged. “Now!” Dewu barked. The woman quickly handed the bag to her partner and rushed back to Red Scarf as Dewu watched. His heart was beating so hard, he thought the Viet Cong still holding the AK-47 on him would hear it. The woman said something to Red Scarf, who then turned his head quickly to stare at Dewu with narrow eyes. Keeping his AK-47 at the ready, he came slowly down the aisle, squeezing past the ID checkers and the other looter to stand in the aisle in front of Dewu. His AK-47 and that of the other Viet Cong were both pointed between Dewu’s eyes. Well, they can only kill me once, he unconsciously rationalized, nevertheless fearing what he planned to do next. Scowling at Red Scarf, Dewu flared his nostrils and curled his lip back. Red Scarf’s smirk turned into a frown. Then he raised his eyebrows, and the barrel of his AK-47 dipped. “What—”

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Dewu silenced the man with an abrupt chopping gesture. He looked disdainfully up and down the aisle, then wagged his finger and touched his mouth with it to indicate secrecy. He motioned for Red Scarf to give him his ear. When the man lowered the AK-47 and did so, Dewu emphasized his North Vietnamese accent and snarled barely loud enough for the other to hear, “You asshole. I gave an explicit command that this bus was to be left alone. You farmers! Dumb as pigs. You are blowing my cover. Get off this bus now, or I will cat me cu may di— cut off your dick.” “Who are you?” Red Scarf stammered, his eyes wide. “I am Nguyen Tan Khiem, military advisor to your People’s Liberation Armed Forces in South Vietnam and headquartered in Chu Chi.” He reached into a hidden flap Jia Li had sewn in his coat and pulled out a red-lined ID displaying Dewu’s photograph and the People’s Army of Vietnam seal over Commander-in-Chief General Vo Nguyen Giap’s signature, and waved it under Red Scarf’s nose. “Now, get out.” Dewu’s eyes bored into those of Red Scarf, who stepped back, holding his AK-47 loosely in one hand. Dewu’s ID plus his northern accent had quelled all doubt. Red Scarf shook his head and mumbled, “No one told us.” Dewu tilted his head back and pointed his chin at the man. He hoped that the anger he really felt showed in his eyes as ordered in a low, steely voice, “I am telling you now and for the last time. Get. Off. This. Bus.” Red Scarf turned, told the armed man next to him they were leaving, and moved down the aisle, telling the other Viet Cong they passed, as well. When some objected that they had not finished, he started pushing them toward the exit with the stock of his AK-47. In minutes, they were gone. With his keen young ears, Shihao had heard everything spoken between his father and the Viet Cong. He stared at his father, his eyes round, his mouth hanging open. Jia Li had missed most of what was said, but she’d caught enough to realize that Dewu was responsible for saving not only their valuables, but perhaps some lives. She waved at him to get his attention, then raised her eyebrows. He put a finger to his lips. “The next town,” he said. There was a long silence on the bus, then someone got up to check the two dead men, and that roused the bus driver from his shock. He slowly backed up the bus to the main road. The truck that had blocked it was gone. As the bus continued on its trip, loud chatter broke out among the passengers. Some cried; one woman

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screamed that she had lost all her money. Another passenger took up a collection among those the looters had not reached, to give to those who lost their travel funds. At Vinh, the dead passengers were removed from the bus by the police, who ordered that everyone else remain on the bus to be questioned by South Vietnamese security officers. When one of them asked an elderly, rotund man hugging a leather case to his chest what he saw, he pointed in Dewu’s direction and said, “The Viet Cong just stopped in the midst of their robbery and ID checking when they got to that family.” The officer stared at Dewu, and then approached him. The shiny visor of his officer’s hat almost hid the deep crease of suspicion running across his forehead, but not those framing his mouth. He gave Dewu a wary look, his hand on his holstered pistol, and asked him, “Can I see your identification?” All depended now on how Dewu handled this. He and his family could be arrested, doubtlessly tortured, and then imprisoned. He pulled out his South Vietnam driver’s license, and then out of the right inner pocket of his coat his bank card, Hue business registration, and house rental agreement. The officer carefully scanned the documents, then handed them back and asked, “Why did the Viet Cong stop with your family?” “It is hard to explain,” Dewu replied, watching the other’s eyebrows flit up and then down as he controlled his reaction to Dewu’s North Vietnamese accent. “When the Viet Cong sergeant heard my accent, he looked worried. He kept asking what I was doing here. I said I was a businessman, and had immigrated to the South in 1954 during the North-South population exchange. “I had been tortured by the communists; I have almost died in their northern prisons. The Viet Cong did not scare me, and I outstared him. Since I showed no fear and stood up to him, he must have thought I was some kind of agent. I sensed that, and so sharpened my accent and ordered him off the bus, or I would have them all executed. Merciful Buddha, he and all the others left. They are only ignorant farmers during the day, you know.” The officer gaped at him for a moment, and then burst out laughing. “Good story. I’m sure you will impress all your friends when you tell them that. So, you don’t know why they stopped at your family?” Dewu shrugged. “No, not really. I did notice that their sergeant glanced at his watch, and looked worried. He then turned around and they all left.”

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The officer tilted his head and, narrowing his eyes, asked, “Why did the one with the bag stop with you and go get his sergeant to talk to you?” “My northern accent. It seemed to spook them.” The officer nodded, and then questioned Dewu as to why he and his family were traveling to Saigon. Dewu frankly explained his family’s fear of the Viet Cong closing in on Hue, and the wish for a more secure location. He mentioned his family’s reaction to the drugstore near his own business being blown up. The officer seemed satisfied, wished him the best, and went on to other passengers, who were growing impatient. While that was going on, Dewu explained to Jia Li what he had done. She asked, “How much did that fake ID cost you?” “Two gold taels.” About seventy American dollars. “Well,” she said, a happy grin on her face, “they were worth more than their weight in gold.” “Yes. And you know, Zeng Jintao, who made those for me, could have counterfeited an American passport in three hours, he said.” “You are not thinking of—” “No, sweetheart, I never intend to leave Vietnam. It is my country.” Soon, a security officer shouted to the passengers that they could leave the bus for a half-hour while the blood from the dead men was cleaned up. Someone shouted, “The Viet Cong called them wicked tyrants. Who were they?” “Just low-level government officials,” the officer shouted back. Another passenger responded loudly, “Just as you are.” The officer made no reply. As they departed, Shihao cried in a voice shrill with panic, “I have to go—right away!” “Crap or pee?” Dewu asked. “Crap.” “Oh, shit,” Dewu swore. “I have to help. You know what you can’t lose, right?” Shihao looked even more panicked. The bus depot was nothing more than a long shed containing a waiting room and a bathroom at one end, its door ajar. Dewu could not understand why nobody was using it, until he and Shihao rushed into it and saw why. The toilet was a hole in the floor, with a small, rusty sink with one dripping faucet on one wall. There was no tissue or toilet paper. People must be using the side of the shed or the nearby jungle, he thought. Leaves were as good as toilet paper. That was probably what his wife was doing now, since she had disappeared.

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Looking at Shihao, Dewu knew they didn’t have time to do the same. Dewu tried to close the door, but it was stuck ajar. Shielding his son with his body, he told him, “Go on the floor. Quick.” The boy took down his shorts and underwear and, red-faced, he did so. Dewu watched carefully, and when he saw the plastic tube fall within a wet brown clump, he reached beneath his squatting son and extracted it. He took it to the sink and washed it and his fingers under the faucet. By that time his son had finished. “Shove it all in the hole,” Dewu ordered, “and then wash your hands. I’ll get something we can use to clean the floor.” He’d seen a garbage can near the bathroom. Dewu pulled a section of newspaper from the can and took it back to the bathroom. He wet it, and gave part of it to Shihao to wipe himself with while he used the rest to wipe the floor. Then he gave the plastic tube of money to Shihao, made sure he could not be seen from the outer room, and told him, “Back it goes.” After he’d inserted it, Dewu asked him, “Feel better now?” “No,” his son mumbled, pulling up his underwear and shorts.

Chapter 17 John Banks

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fter his lecture to his introductory class, several students had come up to John with questions. He had tried to answer them all, which only made him late for this class. His students were already in their seats, waiting, when he strode quickly into the classroom, put his briefcase down on the desk in front, and took out his lecture outline. He had been restless again last night, but he had taken another nap in his office, conquering the tiredness he’d felt all morning. At least for now. Everyone was quiet. He finally stepped to the lectern to face the class, glancing at Miss Phim, who sat leaning forward, hands clasped on her writing chair. For some reason, she now seemed much older to him than the rest of the students, and he felt a familiarity with her that he couldn’t possibly have. He scratched his head, frowned momentarily, and then turned to the class. “Good afternoon, students. Ah, how come you’re all here early?” “You’re late,” two shouted at him. “Late?” Another shouted, “Late. You’re late.” He stroked his chin and replied, “I don’t hate anyone. Well, maybe mass murderers.” That met smiles and some laughter. About a third of the students yelled out, “You are late.” “Oh, I’m great. Thank you. With that encouragement, let me start the lecture.” There was more laughter and a bustling among the students as they got their notebooks, pens or pencils, or laptops ready. Some recorded his whole lecture on DVDs or tapes. “Any questions before I begin?” One hand went up. “Yes, Mr. Edenfield.” “My grandfather was in the Vietnam War. I told him about your lecture and he says that there was not much killing in the North before the war. He says the South was worse.”

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“As I mentioned last time, there was propaganda from all sides, and beliefs about the North that followed along ideological lines. So, who do we believe? I tend to believe someone like Clement, who has done exhaustive research on all sides of the question. I also tend to believe what comes out of extensive interviews with refugees. And I tend to believe what the communists say themselves for internal consumption or communist ears only, if it goes against their foreign propaganda. All this leads me to say that your grandfather is most likely mistaken. I will hand out a bibliography on Vietnam at the end of the final lecture on this country’s wars and democide. You already have the references that Clement gives in his text. I suggest you ask your grandfather, with the respect due a veteran of that awful war, how he knows what he claims.” John looked around the classroom. “Any more questions?” There were none. “Okay, onward.” He moved away from the lectern and made a sweeping motion with his hand to encompass the class, the first of a hundred gestures to come during the lecture. “You should remember that the communists under Ho Chi Minh were engaged in democidal mass campaigns before, during, and after the War of Independence. You should also remember that the Geneva Agreements that ended the war also split Vietnam into an independent North and South. “Now, this is much misunderstood. Historically, there had never been one Vietnam. There were in fact three regions, kingdoms, or states. One was Tonkin, composed largely of what later became North Vietnam after the defeat of the French. Its capitol was Hanoi. The second was Annam, or central Vietnam, with Hue the capital and its major seaport at Da-nang. The third was Cochin China, the south of Vietnam, with its capital at Saigon, or what the communists now call Ho Chi Minh City. This region was once part of the Khmer—Cambodian— Empire. “When the French colonized Indochina, they made Tonkin and Annam semi-independent French protectorates, with native rulers. They made Cochin China, however, a French colony. Thus, Vietnam had already been split before the French took over Vietnam, and they continued this split. After World War Two and France’s reassertion of authority over Vietnam, and in opposition to Ho Chi Minh’s demands that all Vietnam be unified, the French made Cochin China an independent republic. Trying to end the War of Independence that absorbed more French soldiers and material that France, still recovering from World War Two, could ill afford, France tried to reach an agreement with the three regions that would unify them into an independent gov-

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ernment within the French Union. Tonkin—North Vietnam—rejected it, but the Annamite emperor Bao Dai and Cochin China accepted the proposal. France thereby proclaimed Bao Dai emperor of all Vietnam in 1949. “As I mentioned in a previous lecture, in 1954 the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam, which led to the Geneva Conference, and the formalization of the split between North and South Vietnam. I also mentioned that the Geneva Agreements resulting from the conference also called for Vietnam-wide elections in two years to unify Vietnam, but they were never held. Each side blamed the other. “Anyway, the communists under Ho Chi Minh now ruled the North by international agreement. And the political situation in the South was chaotic. Bao Dai’s government was bedeviled by warlords and autonomous sects. Its Premier Ngo Dinh Diem achieved several military victories against these divisive forces, and in April 1955 he then turned on Bao Dai himself. Through an extralegal assembly meeting, Diem had a new government declared, with himself as head. In October he held a sham referendum to endorse this bloodless coup d’etat; in one area he got ninety-eight percent of the vote. “With this coup and corrupt referendum, Vietnam now had an authoritarian government over the South, created by Diem. It was no less opposed than Ho Chi Minh’s totalitarian communist government over the North.” A hand. She’s a cutie. “Yes, Miss Smyth.” “What is the difference between these governments?” “A totalitarian government rules everything. There is no freedom of speech, religion, or association. It controls or owns all business. Its commands are the only laws. An authoritarian government is a dictatorship that monopolizes political power, but may allow freedom of religion, nonpolitical speech, and nonpolitical association. It may leave businesses largely alone as long as they stay out of politics. Okay?” When she nodded, he went on. “Events in the South were not what Ho Chi Minh had expected. The Bao Dai regime was supposed to disintegrate, but with the help of Diem, it appeared to be growing stronger, to be replaced through Diem’s coup with what seemed to be an even more effective and dedicated anticommunist government. Perhaps some nudging would help. So, as early as 1955, North Vietnam ordered those communist forces—Viet Minh—remaining in the South to carry out a low-level guerrilla war against the new regime. The North intended to expand their area of control and thwart Diem’s attempt to rid

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South Vietnam’s countryside of communist Vietnamese, whom he called Viet Cong. At the time, nothing more appeared necessary, since Ho Chi Minh still thought the regime unlikely to survive. “Once he had successfully extended and consolidated communist power in the North, he more seriously focused on the South. In late 1956, the North’s communist politburo reevaluated the likelihood of Diem’s collapse. It decided that more revolutionary techniques would have to be applied to bring him down and temporarily replace his regime with a congenial and transitional pro-unification government. There still remained violent discontent in the South. Those sects and regions striving to keep their autonomy still rebelled against government control. Diem’s own version of land reform alienated masses of peasants, who saw it only as a way for the rich to get richer. And attempts to win the support of mountain people only embittered them when Diem had them deported en masse for, as he said, their own protection. “But this discontent was disunited and lacking in direction. So the North moved to provide antigovernment rebels, dissidents, and guerrillas who had once fought against the French with organization and leadership, and particularly with the aim of overthrowing the so-called reactionary Diem. Thousands of former Viet Minh still remained inactive in the South, and had only to dig up their weapons. “During the following months, terrorism and related assassinations significantly increased in the South. Mainly under the North’s direction, anticommunist officials and civilians, or those who created trouble for the communists, were assassinated or abducted. Often these victims were simply the best officials, or civilians who were extraordinary in some way, and thus too good an example to the people. The communists preferred corrupt and incompetent officials; those who were dishonest and criminal created disaffection and an environment for communist proselytizing.” John stepped to the lectern to refer to his outline. “In 1957 alone, over seven hundred low-level officials were murdered this way, and around 3,750 were murdered in the following three years.” He took his outline with him when he stepped away from the lectern. “Beginning in 1958, the North also secretly returned to South Vietnam those military and political cadre who had been sent to the North after the Geneva Agreements. But the guerrilla war against the South was still at a relatively low level, and Diem appeared to be growing stronger. With U.S. advisors and military aid, Diem’s army would soon be a well-trained and equipped force of over 135,000

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men. For the U.S., this was a matter of containment—and underline that. Containment was the dominant American foreign policy throughout the Cold War. “Clearly, the North now had to undertake a full-scale armed struggle to, in its words, smash the Saigon regime. This decision was made during the communists’ Fifteenth Conference of the Central Committee meeting in Hanoi in January 1959. They soon issued the appropriate policies, underlined by Ho Chi Minh’s appeal in May to liberate South Vietnam. “The North then prepared for infiltration by its regular troops, and their supply. It moved to establish bases on the Cambodian border at Tay Ninh, northwest of Saigon, and east of Ratanakiri province, in the South’s Central Highlands. And it built the first leg of the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail through Eastern Laos and Cambodia and thence at several points into South Vietnam. Using the trail and its subsequent extensions and modifications, the communists built up their forces in the South. In 1960, the North’s killer squads increased the rate at which they were assassinating officials and village heads, killing nearly three thousand over the two years ending in 1961. By this time, the North had also infiltrated ten thousand regular soldiers and a substantial number of the forty thousand guerrillas then operating against the Diem regime.” John stopped for a moment to give the students a mental break. This was a lot to digest and he wanted to make sure they understood it. “Questions?” None, so he continued. “From July 1959 to June 1960, the North carried out the Concerted Uprising Campaign, with the goal of expanding direct communist control over southern territory. They planned to do this by breaking up what they called the machinery of oppression, that is, by disorganizing Diem’s strategic hamlet program, which aimed at separating villagers from communist agents, and assassinating South Vietnam’s real authorities outside the cities—the hamlet and village officials. In this way, the communists hoped to gradually spread their control over the countryside and eventually lay siege to the cities. “The start of North Vietnam’s war against the South, and therefore the Vietnam War, might therefore be set at 1959, or even 1958. I date it, however, as beginning in January 1960, when General Vo Nguyen Giap, head of North Vietnam’s army, unambiguously involved the North in war against the South.” “To quote Giap, the ‘North has become a large rear echelon of our army,’” John read from his outline. “‘The North is the revolutionary

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base for the whole country.’” He looked up. “By ‘whole country’ he meant North and South Vietnam. “The following September, the Communist Party’s Third Congress meeting in Hanoi decided to create a broadly defined political front, a façade for its war against the South. Several months later, the Saigon media reported the formation of the National Liberation Front. “The tempo and scale of war and terror from then on increased materially; by 1964, thirty to forty-five main-force battalions of North Vietnam troops, composed of thirty-five thousand guerrillas and eighty thousand irregulars, had gained control over most of the South. “One source claims that in 1964, the Viet Cong taxed the population in forty-one out of the South’s forty-four provinces and prevented government access to eighty percent of its territory. The National Liberation Front claimed it controlled eight million of the South’s thirteen million people, and three-fourths of the country. “With all these losses and its troops by then dispirited, it seemed only a matter of time before Saigon succumbed to the communists. Nor did extraordinary U.S. military aid and twenty-three thousand advisors, as they were called, prove enough to even stabilize government defenses. The collapse of the South that the North had been predicting since 1954 seemed imminent. “But wait. The U.S. rode to the rescue. Temporarily. That’s the next lecture.” He looked around. “Questions?” Several hands rose. “Yes, Mr. Williams.” “I’m confused.” “Oh, sorry, I have you on my class list as Williams.” That well-worn humor earned a few chuckles. “Forgive me, Mr. Williams. Go on.” “I’m taking a class in Asian history, and the professor says that the Viet Cong were independent freedom fighters fighting a guerrilla war against capitalist repression in the South.” John knew who the student was talking about: a tenured Marxist in the history department. Since John was a new professor without tenure, he knew he should be very careful in his answer. But screw it, he thought. It’s the fucking Marxists who have done most of the killing. “He’s wrong. It’s really not me saying that. It’s the leading generals of the North, such as Giap, who, after the end of the war in 1975, confessed that the Viet Cong had been an operating arm of the North Korean Army.”

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Williams followed up with, “Why doesn’t he know that?” Oh shit. I’m in it. He took a deep breath before answering. “He is a historian of the region, and I’m sure he knows that. But, you see, he’s a Marxist, and no doubt happy the North won, and it is . . . nice to say that the South was mainly defeated by its own people.” “Are you saying, professor, that he is lying?” If I say yes, I’ll be kicked out of the History Department. “As I said in the beginning, Mr. Williams, this is a contentious area where even the best scholars see things very differently. I suggest you do a search on the Internet and do your own reading on this question to determine what you should believe.” He looked at the class, and then slid his eyes to glance at Miss Phim. She was smiling. He ripped his eyes away, felt his face get hot, and quickly moved into the discussion part of the period. “Questions, comments?” If there were none, he would call on people randomly from his deck of student names. That is, except for one.

Chapter 18 1960–1963 Cholon, Saigon Wang Dewu

T

hey arrived at the An Dong bus station in Cholon early in the morning. Poor vendors hawked their food at several places in the station, and Dewu bought rice and fried fish cakes for all of them. He also asked the vendor if there was a cheap hotel nearby, and the man told Dewu to try the Dang Dinh Nam Hotel on the other side of Dung Street, across from the station. They walked the short distance, carrying their suitcases and other baggage. Once Dewu had Jia Li and Shihao settled in a room, he asked the hotel owner-receptionist for the location of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Cholon. He was directed to an office building on Le Van Duyer Street. When he got there, he climbed to the second floor and entered a small office with Chamber of Commerce lettered on the door in both Chinese and Vietnamese. Inside, a little counter held maps, forms, and pamphlets; at one of the two desks, an older, much shrunken man in an ill-fitting Western suit sat. A little sign on his desk said I am a volunteer businessman here to help you. The man looked up when Dewu entered, and motioned him over to take a seat. The man began his query with a hiss, as though he had a split tongue. “Hsss . . . can I help you? Dewu explained, “I sold my business in Hue and came to Cholon for fear of the Viet Cong. I eventually want to open another business here. But for now, I will have to take any kind of job to get started.” The man’s sympathetic expression looked forced. He clasped his hands in front of him and replied, “Hsss . . . we have so many refugees here from all over, and so many are former businessmen and executives like you, that there are no good jobs available.” He shook his head, now

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looking as if he’d eaten soap. Perhaps he intended to look sad. “Hssssuu . . . I will give you a list of restaurants, laundries, and shops that might need help. Hsss . . . I warn you, though, that you will be competing with all the unskilled labor that has flooded Cholon, and if you get a job, it will be hard work for almost nothing.” He leaned forward, looking hopeful. “Hssss . . . maybe there is something for you in our file. But it is so full that I really do not have the time to look carefully.” Dewu refused to pay the obvious bribe. He took the list, took a free map of Cholon and Saigon off the counter, and walked out. He didn’t return to the hotel; instead he started going from place to place, looking for work. One restaurant on the list, Cao’s Steak and Salad, had catered to Westerners. Dewu found it a burned-out ruin between two brick buildings—the work of Viet Cong, he was sure. Two restaurants later, he was lucky. The owner recognized Dewu’s accent, and revealed that he had also escaped from the North. After a brief conversation about the village he’d fled and why, the owner hired him as a dishwasher even though he needed no more help. When Dewu returned to the hotel and told Jia Li about his new job, she took the list, said simply, “My turn,” and left their hotel room. Three hours later she came back with a job in a Chinese laundry whose clientele was largely American military. She explained, “I kept going from one place to another, seeking managers or owners who looked like they were from the North, and then I judged by their accent whether they were from our district. When I—” Boooom! Brrrttt! Brrrttt! Boooom! Pop! Pop! Brrrttt! The sounds of the street battle were distant, but loud enough to be worrisome. Wailing sirens drew closer, and then stopped. Somebody ran down the hallway, their slippers clip-clopping. Then nothing. In the silence, Dewu felt he could hear them all breathing. Jia Li glanced toward their one window, and then at Dewu’s purposely calm expression, and raised her eyebrow for just a moment. Then she continued. “I found such a woman who had escaped over the border, and she hired me on the spot.” They now had work but, still not satisfied with their meager joint income, over the following days Dewu kept asking around for a second job. He happened to check the Tong Chinese Furniture store when their delivery truck driver had just been taken to the hospital, seriously ill with botulism, apparently from eating bad pork. When Dewu showed the store manager the license he carried with him that showed he had owned his own store in Hue, the manager decided he had to be a responsible person. And he was obviously Chinese. Dewu got the job.

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Next, they had to get out of the hotel. It cost them too much. As Jia Li kept saying indignantly, “It is wasted money.” So, Dewu and Jia Li, and even Shihao, spent their spare time and weekends building a small shack from plywood, bricks, and hollow tile on a tiny piece of rented land. Dewu had scavenged the tiles from a building that had burned down—he was there when the smoke was still rising from the debris, and fought with others for what he got. At the Cholon Binh Tay Market, he bought corrugated steel sheets obviously stolen from the Americans, and tarps and plastic sheets to help divide the bedroom from the rest of the house. For their toilet, he created a hole in one corner of their tiny bedroom, hung plastic sheeting around it, and dug a hole in the ground underneath big enough for a four gallon plastic bucket. It became one of Shihao’s odd jobs to empty the bucket into a water runoff sewer along a nearby street. The shack was not much, but it protected them from the weather, and one street over from them was a public spigot where they could get water—not the same street with the sewer. Dewu also paid “rent” to run an electrical line from the fuse box of a home down the street to his shack, and then bought an old electric stove and small refrigerator. Jia Li started to complain about wasting money for electricity, but Dewu shut her up by saying, “It is coming out of my humble allowance, my lovely budget sheriff.” Jia Li registered Shihao in school, and he settled in and started getting homework. Jia Li made sure he finished his homework before he did anything else. “Anything else” meant finding odd jobs around the neighborhood. He would knock on a door and say, as his father had taught him, “First job free. Second job at what you wish to pay. If you like my work, third job at my fee of one hundred piasters an hour.” This was about twenty-seven American cents at the black market rate.

aaa By 1963, they had saved enough in addition to what they had brought with them from Hue to buy a small rattan store, and its first inventory of furniture. They were in business again. Dewu was happy about that, until early one morning when he passed the bodies of two men and a woman while on the way to his store. They had been kneeling, and were shot in the back of the head. They must have been killed recently. He did not stop, nor did he try to contact the police. Not wise, he thought, to draw any attention to myself, my family, or our store.

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He hurried to the store and into his tiny office. It was like Hue all over again. But this time, there was nowhere to flee. Fortunately, this time he had been smart and stayed out of politics, joining no organization, even if it seemed benevolent. But he was no longer happy. The Viet Cong are gradually taking over South Vietnam, he realized, as his mind connected all the disparate information he had been getting in the news about the communist guerrilla war. It seems only a matter of time before we lose everything we have so hard worked for to the communists. Again. I just can’t sit back and let this happen. Oh Buddha, I just cannot.

Chapter 19 1958–1963 Cyril Clement

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ith his discovery of the relevance of the Banks mission to his studies, and that political science was really the discipline he should be in, Cyril transferred in his junior year. He concentrated on peace studies, a new field of study yet without a name. Every term paper he wrote in every course from then on was related in some way to war and violence, including the term paper titled “Can There Be a Science of War?” he wrote for a Philosophy of Science course. He graduated with an A in every course. He received a graduate assistantship at the University of California at Berkeley, where Alice was accepted as a graduate student in mathematics with a scholarship that paid fully for her tuition. They rented a tiny apartment in married student housing. It was cheap, an important consideration when their income barely covered food. If need be, they could turn to Alice’s parents, but Cyril would not tap that resource unless they were near starvation. Alice seemed to have acquired an extrasensory ability to read his thoughts, and never even hinted at asking her family for help. In two years, Cyril did his M.A. thesis on “What is Peace? Visions of Peace Through the Ages.” Alice did her M.S. thesis in mathematics on “A Characteristic Equation Approach to Significance in Factor Analysis.” She then got an off-campus job in a secret project aimed at improving nuclear missile accuracy. That’s all she could tell Cyril. “Anything legal I can do to fight communism, which destroyed my grandparents’ country, I will do,” she told Cyril. When he looked concerned, she added with a grin, “But you and your mission come first, love. Always.” “Our mission, sweetie.” “Of course.” She smiled.

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Yes. It is now a mission, he thought. He smiled at that. In their own way, they were now duplicating the John-Joy mission. He saw immediately all the oddities in that. Neither Joy nor John were yet born. Yet, he and Alice were engaged in a mission based on theirs. Oh, they could not intervene in nations’ machinations or bribe politicians with millions or fund massive lobbying efforts, but they could promote the democratic peace. He contemplated the time circuitry involved, but decided to leave alone the thought of how this all could be—how Banks’ stuff had ended up in this universe, from which John and Joy traveled to 1906 to create a peaceful alternate universe. It was in this alternate universe that Banks had written his “Remembrance.” Since the scientists that had built Banks’ time machine insisted one could not cross from one universe to another—the reason he and Joy could never return to this universe—how could the Banks stuff end up here? Someday, he promised himself, he would engage the philosophy and physics of this.

aaa In three years, Cyril got his Ph.D. with a dissertation on “The Balance of Power: A History of Suppositions, Speculations, and Surmises.” Graduate study had been contentious, and several times he had thought of dropping out and making his way as an independent scholar. But nonprofit research institutes and centers were rare, and he feared he might end up as a taxi driver. And he would refuse to live on Alice’s income or what her father might give them. So, with Alice’s constant encouragement and understanding, he persevered and swallowed his chagrin and frustration at the opposition he got from faculty over the simple proposition that democracies are the most peaceful form of government. He could not do his thesis or dissertation on it— his committee of faculty members that judged whether he passed or failed would not have approved of the topic. Not one faculty member agreed with him. They considered Cyril simplistic, right wing, or ignorant of history. Cyril learned something else during his graduate years. He remembered well Banks’ belief that democide—the term he used for government-initiated genocide and mass murder—was even bloodier than war. In his “Remembrance,” he had pointed out several times that about 174 million men, women, and children had been murdered by governments in this century—about four times the number killed in all domestic and foreign wars. But Cyril found virtually no literature on

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democide; in fact, the concept itself was unknown. And even though everyone knew of the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews, and genocide, the term invented by Raphael Lemkin in the early 1940s to apply to that and other such mass murders of people because of their group identity, even the most recognized and famous scholars did not know about the widespread democide occurring in the late 1950s in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere, particularly in the communist nations. Comparative genocide, or genocide studies, was not a field of study, and there were virtually no books written on it. Most political science faculty would not believe Cyril when he mentioned some of the major genocides and mass murders—he could not use the unknown word “democide”—he remembered from Banks’ writing. They believed him even less when he claimed that democracy was a solution to genocide and mass murder. By the time Cyril graduated with a Ph.D., he was absolutely determined to change the landscape of knowledge about war causation, avoidance, and prevention, and to teach the world about the incredible amount of democide that had—and still—occurred, and present democracy as its solution. He could not imagine a higher goal than to solve the problem of war and democide, and to educate the world into fostering a democratic peace—another concept borrowed from Banks.

Chapter 20 June 1965 Cholon, Saigon Wang Dewu

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y 1965, Dewu devoured the morning and evening daily newspapers and the hourly news with increasing fear for his family. He no longer slept well, and with his stomach more knotted than not, he had little appetite and was losing weight. He and Jia Li argued frequently over small things, and she asked him several times if something was wrong. But he refused to tell her about his deep anxiety. He felt he worried enough for both of them, and since she could do nothing about it, best she not realize their danger. The communists had virtually defeated South Vietnam. The previous December, the Viet Cong had taken over the anticommunist town of Binh Gia on the coast to display their power, even though it had a large population of six thousand. They all but destroyed ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—battalions that tried to retake the town. After four days, the Viet Cong abandoned it voluntarily. And this past February, a small force of Viet Cong attacked the American base at Pleiku, just to snub their nose at American power. But such newsworthy attacks did not tell the awful story, that of the gradual erosion of government and ARVN control over one village after another as the Viet Cong took over quietly, as other villagers disgusted with government corruption and instability shifted their loyalty to the communists. Like a spreading oil slick, the Viet Cong and PAVN—People’s Army of [North] Vietnam—gradually took over one region after another, as indexed by how dangerous it was for government officials or ARVN troops to travel there, and by the Viet Cong “tax” collections along their roads. Some cities and towns were like urban oases in a sea of armed communists.

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And the ARVN was falling apart. Hundreds of thousands of its soldiers seemed to be deserting, and although it had a stringent conscription law that made all male Vietnamese citizens from twenty to forty-five years subject to service in the military and civil defense establishment, it was poorly enforced, and an tien—bribery to avoid service was rampant. To make matters worse, the government was in political turmoil. President Diem had been deposed by a coup d’etat and murdered in 1963; General Minh, leading a Revolutionary Military Committee, took over, only to be overthrown by another coup in 1964 by a junta headed by General Nguyen Khanh. After months of political uncertainty and turmoil, Tran Van Juong became Premier. But there was a slim hope. North Vietnamese torpedo boats had attacked two American destroyers in August of last year, and the American congress had passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving President Johnson authority to do what he considered necessary to protect American forces and stop further aggression. So far, there were only about twenty to twenty-five thousand American military here, and although it seemed certain that that number would soon dramatically increase, he didn’t think the Americans knew how to fight the Viet Cong and the PAVN. Late last year, the government had launched a more strictly enforced campaign to induct men aged twenty to twenty-five into the military, and had followed that with a comprehensive recruiting campaign, including enlistment bonuses. For two years, Dewu had been on the verge of enlisting in the military. Only concern for his family held him back. They had a big mortgage on the rattan store he had bought, and sales barely covered the monthly payments. Shihao, near the top of his class in school, was almost assured of going to college. He was their pride, and Dewu did not want him to have to drop out to support his mother if Dewu were killed. Jia Li worked as a waitress at Kim Cafe, but she would have to quit that to run the rattan store if he enlisted, and again, Shihao would have to quit school and work to help with their expenses. And he didn’t want to leave them living in the dilapidated, one-room shed they still lived in among the shacks of other refugees—all their money went into the store, necessities, and savings. But now all that had changed. By way of a promised fifteen percent kickback to the Dong Tho consortium, he had succeeded in being added to a major contract among Saigon stores and producers to supply

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furniture to American bases being built and expanded in and around Saigon. That, the enlistment bonus, plus their savings would be just enough for them to buy a two-bedroom home. He knew what communism was like. He had no illusions about what the North’s victory would mean for South Vietnam, and his family. If (or more probably, when) the communists won, he could not live with himself if he’d done nothing. He and his family would not have long to live anyway. After all, he had fled the North, and he did not believe the North would forgive him for that. Such behavior showed the very antirevolutionary beliefs for which they had already executed thousands in the North, and assassinated many in the South in areas under their control. At thirty-seven, he was too old to be drafted into the regular army, although not for civil defense. But he was not too old to fight. He was not too old to be accepted as a volunteer. He would enlist today.

Chapter 21 June 1965 Ministry of National Defense, Hanoi, North Vietnam General Vo Nguyen Giap

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eneral Vo Nguyen Giap stared sightlessly out his clean first story window toward Hoang Dieu Street. He did not like it. He had thought victory would be theirs by spring, but the Americans had changed everything. Spies had reported that a battalion of marines came ashore at My Khe in the South in March, and that in April the American President Johnson approved sending two more marine battalions along with twenty thousand logistics troops. Now, intelligence had informed him that Johnson would likely approve that another 180,000 troops be sent, with probably another one hundred thousand in 1966. And they would be combat troops, willing and able to fight and take the offensive. Even now, twenty thousand troops a month poured into the South with all their incredible weapons to shore up its all but defeated American my nguy—puppet government. “Well, the good general knows when to change his strategy,” he told himself with a long sigh. The Dong Xuan—Winter-Spring Campaign had been a good plan. He had intended to infiltrate three PAVN divisions into South Vietnam’s highlands via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia. Then, in three phases, he would split South Vietnam in half. First he would conquer the Green Berets’ Special Forces camp at Plei Me, then the city of Pleiku, and finally the city of Qui Nhon on the major highway along the coast. A great plan, but now he had to cancel it. The damn Americans were not the French he’d defeated in 1954, ending the First Indochina War; judging by how they fought in the Korean and Second World Wars, they were a dangerous enemy. They had new fighter bombers, air-to-ground missiles, and many types of bombs.

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They had the ability to helicopter troops rapidly behind his lines. They had helicopters like giant cranes that could carry artillery to support these troops. He had to be honest. He did not know how to fight them. Yet. But he would. He would lure them into the battle of his choice, lure the tiger from the mountain, and study what they did. He pulled a cigarette from his pack of Chinese Kanghua cigarettes, thumping it end-first several times against his desk to compact the tobacco before putting it in his mouth. He lit it with his Taiyang lighter, blew out a puff of smoke, and turned back to his adjutant. General Hoang Phuong sat on the other side of the desk, looking at him with slightly furrowed brows. He reached forward to butt out his own Kanghua in a military tin ashtray. Giap shook his head, compressing his lips so that his broad features tightened into a grimace. “We have discussed this. I know you want to go ahead with the Dong Xuan campaign, as do most in the Central Committee and First Secretary Le Duan, but no. We now will have to confront the Americans, especially their air cavalry, and I am not sure how they will fight. By the time we have our divisions in place to begin the campaign in October, they may have a sufficient force, tactics, and weapons to destroy our divisions. Better we lure them into battle first and see what they do.” Phuong pursed his lips for a moment before replying, “You know what Duan will say: ‘Strike while they are weak. The Americans are training and better arming the ARVN, and giving them a spine. If you wait, it soon will be too late.’” Giap waved his cigarette at Phuong. “Since I am Vice Premier, Defense Minister, and Army Chief, he and the Central Committee will listen to me. They really have no choice. And I know that Ho Chi Minh will support me, not that I really need it.” Phuong took out another cigarette and lit it before making eye contact with Giap again. “I am disappointed. I thought that I would see my relatives in the South by next summer, and take the gift of communism to them. How long do you think you will have to postpone the Dong Xuan campaign?” “Maybe ten years. Maybe twenty. But don’t be so disappointed. Be patient. In time, we will learn how to fight them. In the meantime, we have agents and supporters in Europe who will work for us against American involvement. We will kill many Americans, and their deaths plus the demonstrations and agitation of our supporters will weaken American will and limit what they will do. Moreover, intelligence has been quite clear about Johnson’s fear of involving China, and his will-

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ingness to let us use Cambodia and Laos as our sanctuaries and marshalling areas for outflanking the South. This shows their resolve is already weak.” Puang took a long drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out slowly. “You are the world’s best general. We have the best battletested officers in the world. We beat the French.” He jabbed his finger up in the air as though pointing to the American planes already involved in bombing North Vietnam. “But the Americans have the best technology, the best weapons, and incredible resources.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward on his chair toward Giap. “I have the greatest confidence in you, myself, our general staff, and our soldiers, but it will not be easy to win this war on the battlefield. If our losses are great enough in the future, we may have to negotiate. We should also be prepared for that, and lay the political groundwork.” Giap leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. Talking around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he said, “The reason we have to learn how to fight them is to learn how to bleed them and make good news for us. We will not win this war on the battlefield,” he declared. “We will not win it through negotiation. We will win it in the hearts and minds of the American elite and politicians. And the do ngu—stupid students. Especially the do ngu students.”

Chapter 22 July 28, 1965 Da Nang-Chu Lai region, South Vietnam General Chu Huy Man

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AVN General Chu Huy Man’s headquarters was located in the former home of a French plantation owner. His office was on the second floor of the red brick house, in a small, whitewashed room with a colored picture of Ho Chi Minh taped to one wall; creases from its frequent folding and unfolding marred the subject’s brow. An old French map of the region had been tacked to the wall across from the picture and covered with thin plastic on which red and blue symbols had been written with a grease marker. A rectangular table with three rattan chairs around it dominated the corner of the room adjacent to the only door. On two sides of it were ammunition boxes loaded with files, a filing system that allowed headquarters to instantly flee an attack by American or ARVN forces. The glass and casing in the room’s only window had been removed and a 50mm machine gun emplacement set up; the same had been done to windows in the other rooms facing the other three sides of the house. The perimeter had been cleared of the plantation’s mango and papaya trees, their trunks and branches used to form a redoubt at the home’s columned entrance. All this was necessary, even though temporary, since General Man commanded the operations of the Viet Cong against the newly landed American marines in the Da Nang-Chu Lai region. The Americans and ARVN had increased small-scale sweep operations, more for purposes of training the Americans and ARVN to work together and initiating American troops to the alien countryside than to find and fight Viet Cong. Still, they might discover Man’s headquarters by chance, or from a traitor. Though he thought that very unlikely—his

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well-placed spies would warn him of any pending sweep that could head his way—every week he ran an escape drill. The headquarters could be emptied of everyone and all essential files, equipment, and weapons in four minutes. He was not happy with his assignment. The Viet Cong were poorly armed with old, hand-me-down French and Chinese weapons. Though that was changing as the PAVN brought new weapons from the Soviet Union and China down the Ho Chi Minh trail for the Viet Cong, these new weapons were still wielded by poor peasants, often farmers during the day and fighters at night. General Man thought of himself as a fighting soldier’s general, well prepared to command a division in combat. What he commanded now was more like hornets pestering a lion. For this reason, when his RTO radioman gave him the coded, red-flagged, level one message from General Giap, he immediately opened his small safe and took out his one-time code pad. From that he determined what manual to use. He went to one of the ammunition boxes and picked out the translated “American Artillery: Specifications and Tactics” and sat down at the table with it. Each sequence of numbers in the order gave him the page, line, and word count to a specific word in the manual. The code was laborious, but unbreakable, and in about two hours he had the full message decoded. It was the order for which he had hoped. Giap was sending him to the Western Highlands to set up what he called a B-3 headquarters. He would have tactical and administrative command of all Viet Cong and, what made this delicious, a PAVN division in the Highlands. He would launch a division-size attack on the Americans to see what they could do and, if that succeeded, seize Pleiku, the command center of the ARVN’s 2nd Corps. This would drive a dagger into South Vietnam’s defense of its central region, and open the door to resurrecting the Dong Xuan campaign to split the South. He did not need to reread the message. He would remember every detail. He tore it into narrow strips and the strips into thirds, then walked over to the disposal bag hanging on a nail by the door and threw them all into it—the contents would be burned before nightfall. He had action reports to complete and preparations for his replacement, who would be here in two days. But first, he had to do the most important thing. He pulled a sheet of plain paper from a folder in one of the

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ammunition boxes and sat down with it at the table. Taking a blunt pencil out of a pocket of his ordinary, olive-colored shirt, he began to write. My Dear Ba ZZ, You will be happy to read that this is my last letter from ZZ region. We talked about this possibility during my last leave—each night I think of our days together and they sometimes fill my dreams—and now the order has come from ZZ himself. I will assume command of ZZ action in ZZ. I know you wish me the greatest success and hope that the Red Flag will rise over these, our capitalist-enslaved countrymen, soon. Tell ZZ that I know he will do his best in school and honor us all. I worry about both of you all the time. American bombing can only get more intense and dangerous as the American jackals more and more fear losing to us. I know, you refuse to move out of Hanoi. “It is my duty to stay,” you say, and I must admit I am proud of you. But use the bomb shelters. It is also your duty to bring up a dedicated son of the revolution. I miss you, ZZ He carried in his pocket the personal code pad that he and his wife had prepared when he was ordered to South Vietnam. He pulled it out now and converted all the ZZs to the numerical codes for their proper names. He then folded the letter into a two-inch square, and lit a candle. When wax pooled around the wick, he dripped it along all the edges of the letter, and stamped them with his special seal. He went to the door and called for his Viet Cong dispatcher. When he arrived, General Man handed him the letter and said simply, “This is to my wife in Hanoi.” From then on, the letter would move through a well-oiled machine, passing from Viet Cong to Viet Cong and eventually through one of the many secret passages between North and South Vietnam to be delivered as though a posted letter to the home of General Man at 43 Quang Trung Street, Hanoi. The letter needed no address. All that need be said as the letter passed was, “This is to the wife of General Chu Huy Man.” Rank had its privileges.

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Late September Ho Chi Minh Trail, Cambodia General Man walked up the low hillock overlooking the Ho Chi Minh Trail terminus for the Western Highlands, and pointed to a rocky area where he wanted his orderly to unfold his tripod seat. He sat down, and left it to his headquarters staff to find their own seats. Most sat in the shade among the hillock’s scrub trees. He watched a 33rd Regiment battalion of his soldiers stagger into the terminus with a mixture of sadness, shame, and pride. Some were carried on pole-litters, some were supported by the arms and shoulders of others, some used makeshift canes, and many trudged in without aid, their food tube over one shoulder and worn, dirty packs on their backs, with their canvas hammocks rolled and tied on top. Almost all suffered from malaria despite the malaria pills they took daily. Each man who could carried a particular weapon, or part of the heavy ones, and ammunition—he saw AK-47s, Siminov carbines, Degtyarev automatic rifles, Maxim machine guns, 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine guns, various-sized mortars, and grenades in abundance. Porters came in looking exhausted, pushing their bicycles with the long poles attached to the frames that carried 350-pound loads of ammunition, supplies, and rice. The general knew the statistics. He knew what he did not see—the bodies of his dead soldiers. Over the two-month trek down the trail, out of each company of 120 men, three or four would die from American bombing, snake bites, malaria, and dysentery. But now the survivors were here. They would have time for rest and rehabilitation before he engaged them in combat against the Americans along with the two other regiments, altogether six thousand men. Those of the 66th were still strung out along the trail, separated into battalions with three days between them. All the battalions of the 32nd Regiment had arrived and were recuperating in the rest camp a mile away. He’d taken his Tay Nguyen—Western Highland plan, really General Giap’s plan that Man had modified to local conditions, from the first two phases of the cancelled Dong Xuan campaign to split the country. With this 33rd Regiment, he would encircle the Special Forces camp at Plei Me, a Montagnard village about thirty miles southwest of the strategically important city of Pleiku. Plei Me contained—Man smiled to himself at how thorough his spies were—Green Berets De-

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tachment A-217 under a Captain Moore, some ARVN Rangers, and over four hundred poorly armed and trained Jarai, Rhade, and Bahna tribal Civilian Irregular Defense Group personnel. The camp was only about twenty-five miles from the Cambodian border, close to where Man now sat. His goal in this attack would not be to seize the camp, but to besiege it and present the ARVN 2nd Corps commander headquartered at Pleiku, Brigadier General Vinh Loc, with a dilemma. If he did not send ARVN reinforcements, Plei Me would surely fall, striking a psychological blow to the puppet government, and leaving General Loc with enemy forces on his doorstep. If he did send reinforcements, he would deplete his forces at Pleiku of their reserves and leave Pleiku vulnerable to attack. Therefore, he surely would send his reinforcements, but also call on the Americans for help. This was the clever part of the plan. The relief force would have to come down highway QL-14, where Man would ambush and annihilate it with his 32nd Regiment. Afterward, the 32nd would join the 33rd Regiment and seize the camp at Plei Me. Then the final battle. General Man had mapped out almost every square inch of this. With Pleiku’s defenses weakened by the relief column made up of their reserve, he would surround Pleiku with his 66th Regiment, wait for the arrival of the 32nd and 33rd Regiments, and give Pleiku the coup de grace. And throughout all this, General Giap insisted, seek out battle with the Americans. After the seizure of Pleiku, he wanted a detailed report on how they fought and the significance of their air and ground weapons. General Man saw a platoon of young girls dressed in tattered, dark green pajamas, conical hats, and rubber sandals, and with packs on their backs, entering the terminus from the trail. He knew they were among the thousands of girls working as construction crew all along the trial to keep it clear for the soldiers. They had not received the hard military training and conditioning of the men before they entered the trail, and too many died. He was even more saddened by that than the death of his own men. These girls were the future mothers of the revolution, and each a blossom in her own right. Were his wife unmarried and much younger, he knew she would have volunteered to be among them. He stood and walked down the hillock to the small marshalling area set aside from that for the soldiers, where they girls were beginning to collect. He would give them a little speech and tell them how important their work was to the revolution and his upcoming battles. It was the least he could do.

Chapter 23 1963–late 1970s Los Angeles Cyril Clement

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yril’s first teaching position was at the University of California at Los Angeles. He had tried for available positions at Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago. With his graduate grades and completed dissertation, he though he stood a good chance. So much depends on recommendations, and he thought his were excellent. But years later, he had access to his department file, and found his dissertation chairman’s recommendation in it. To Whom This May Concern, As his dissertation chairman, one from whom Cyril Clement has taken several courses, and his advisor, I am writing this recommendation for him. He is a bright, thoughtful, and hardworking student who always went well beyond the requirements of his courses. Mention a study in class, and I could be sure that he would read it. He always earned an A grade on both term papers and final grades. As to his dissertation, this is an original and solid piece of research and shows excellent control of the related literature. He defended it very well. I bet that in several years of seasoning, he will be making significant contributions to his field. He tends, however, to be independent minded, sometimes dogmatically unwilling to accept advice or recognize the knowledge of his teachers. He has a tendency to push silly ideas.

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Nonetheless, I would place him in the top ten percent of all graduate students I have taught, and believe he would make an excellent teacher and colleague. Yours Sincerely, Jim Condi Professor of Political Science When he read the recommendation, he knew why he had not been offered a position at the other departments to which he had applied. The recommendation was lukewarm in what it said and, coming from a dissertation chairman, in its brevity. It was a wonder he had the position he did, but he found out by asking around that he’d been lucky—a faculty member’s sudden resignation had made a position available at the last minute, when many top-rated applicants had already accepted positions elsewhere. In the mid-1960s, the social sciences were rapidly expanding the use of statistics and mathematics, including in the study of war and violence. The basic idea was that the study of war could be made more scientific and quantitative, and this would help find a scientific solution to war. Cyril was aware of this, but did not have the statistical training to take advantage of it. Alice did. In secret collaboration, they put together a proposal for the National Science Foundation (NSF) that would involve a sophisticated statistical analysis of the factors in war causation from the beginning of the nineteenth century. The proposal fed into the ballooning popularity of these methods to the social science peer group evaluators of NSF proposals. His proposal was approved for two years at $25,000 each year, and Alice quit her job to be his only research assistant. They were off. He took a simple approach: exploit what ideas and facts he knew about war and democratic freedom, treat them as hypotheses, and test them by scientific empirical research. He was back to being scientific, an incurable itch given him by his voluminous consumption of science fiction. But the ideas were not his own; they were Banks’. From this time to decades in the future when they would be widely accepted, he acted as if he’d based them on Kant. He could hardly give credit to Banks’ future Ph.D. dissertation in the Yale University Department of History of 2001. “Too bad,” he told Alice with a smile. “It would be interesting to see who would blindly copy his footnoted references.” Over their years of empirical statistical research, Cyril supplied the scholarship and deep knowledge of war, while Alice provided the statistical method and, with growing access to high-speed computers, the

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computer programming and analysis. Cyril finally insisted that they jointly author the articles growing out of their research, and Alice finally agreed when he threatened to mix her favorite Egret brand Chinese rice with some cheap Californian variety. Because of the sophisticated research and careful scholarship shown in the articles they published in major professional journals or presented at major conventions, Cyril got more grants. And with Alice’s background in secret defense research, they got approval for their joint research proposals that they submitted to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense. Cyril, bringing in more research funds to his Political Science Department, was promoted to associate professor in four years. He got tenure in another two. Prior to that, he and Alice had been very careful. They knew what results they would get if they focused on democracy as an independent variable in analyzing war. But it was too early in his career. He had yet to develop the reputation to carry it. So, they analyzed hundreds of variables in unique studies, but always including some measures of democratic freedom. They always noted the results for democracy, of course, but in the context of the relationship of other variables to war. In an ego-sensitive profession, Cyril refused to treat any of his results as revolutionary. He always wrote them up as simply confirming or further clarifying the work or theories of such notables as Professors Quincy Wright, Karl Deutsch, and Hans Morgenthau. He knew how to play the academic game. Cyril soon became known in political science, especially in the subfield of international relations, and was widely quoted and referenced, even by those who disagreed with his conclusions. He, and sometimes Alice with him, frequently received invitations to give papers, and leading journals even asked him to be a reader for submissions. His grants, the solid research of the articles published almost every six months, and his humbleness with regard to the Big Names played a role. Perhaps most important, however, was that he was playing into the tremendous growth in the use of quantitative methods and mathematics in political science, and their growing dominance over other subfields of research. By the late 1970s, he and Alice thought it was time to reveal the importance of democracy to war. He wrote a book: Why War, How Peace? It was published by Yale University Press and became widely known, but not much used in classes. In it he covered the various theories and empirical work, including his own, on the causes and conditions of war and peace. He highlighted the findings on democratic

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freedom, and introduced Banks’ term democratic peace for the first time in his conclusion: Historical scholarship, empirical research, and scientific tests all show that a democratic peace has existed through history, and presently exists among nations. Democracies do not make war on each other; the more democratic two nations, the less severe whatever violence between them, and democracies have the least severe foreign violence. This suggests that the way of creating a peaceful world is through promoting democracy. In this time of the Cold War between communism and democratic freedom, some reviewers thought Cyril’s book was unconscionable flag-waving and others thought it a polemic, but some thought it provided a fresh look at war. As Cyril had hoped, some thought Cyril so wrong about democracy that they set out to disprove him. Some of them asked for his data; others generated their own. Some covered different time periods, and used different approaches and methods. This took years. But by the late 1980s, virtually all had come to accept Cyril’s conclusion, with slight modifications that did not detract from democracy as a solution to war. Indeed, a new article on the democratic peace came out saying it was the most substantiated and most solid proposition in the whole field of international relations. When a gleeful Cyril told Alice this, she observed, “I think now is the time to leave this area to others and do what you have always wanted to do: concentrate on democide. I’ve never really understood why you began with war rather than democide. The democratic peace applies to both, as you always insist.” Cyril nodded, but explained, “There is no such field for democide as there is for the study of war, and focusing on democide before I established my reputation in international relations would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to get grants. Even my tenure might have been in doubt, for two reasons. With my assertions about the amount of democide, I would have been considered an oddball. And, more important, Marxism and leftism are prevalent among the faculty, and they would hardly be happy with my pointing out that Marxist nations are the worst murderers by far. If my book presenting the democratic peace was called flag-waving and a polemic, consider what would be said about a book saying Marxism is guilty of most of the mass killing and genocide in the world—110 million murdered. No, tenure and a solid reputation for good scholarship and careful and sophisticated analysis had to come first.” He grinned. “I now have tenure and enough of a reputation. Let’s start on it.”

Chapter 24 October 19, 1965 Plei Me, South Vietnam

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t eleven p.m. on October 19, 1965, PAVN 82mm mortar fire and explosive-filled pipe sections blasted away the sound of night insects around the Special Forces camp at Plei Me. Then, two thousand PAVN infantry of the 33rd Regiment attacked the camp from three directions. They overwhelmed the defenders and fought through the barbed-wire perimeter on the south side, their 57mm recoilless rifle fire knocking out two of the three defense bunkers. The Americans and Civilian Irregular Defense Group fought back with machine guns and, in some places, hand-to-hand. Soon, A-1E Skyraider aircraft struck at the attacking PAVN infantry using missiles, bombs, and napalm, while other aircraft dropped parachute flares to illuminate targets for the Skyraiders. And during the night and into the day, American aircraft dropped ammunition and supplies to the beleaguered defenders. In spite of a vigorous defense with mortars, grenades, and a lethal wall of machine gun and rifle fire, the much larger PAVN force seized part of the camp. Their behavior puzzled the defenders, however. What had been an intense and deadly attack that looked like it would overrun the camp became restrained—the PAVN did not exploit their initial success. While some defenders credited the merciless, killing air bombardment they’d delivered for this, there was a simple strategic rationale. General Man had ordered Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Huu An, the commander of the 33rd Regiment, to encircle the camp, threaten it with annihilation, but not to seize it. With this threat, they’d lure a relief force to be sent from Pleiku, and the full American engagement. General Du Quoc Dong of the ARVN 2nd Corps headquartered in Pleiku was faced with depleting his reserve force to relieve Plei Me, or

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letting it fall. He communicated his dilemma to the ARVN Joint General Staff, who asked for American help. All as General Giap had hoped. General William Westmoreland, commander of all American military forces in Vietnam, ordered General Harry Kinnard to reinforce the ARVN 2nd Corps with his newly arrived 1st Cavalry Division. Generals Kinnard and Dong ended up with a plan to send in a 1st Calvary division to reinforce the defense of Pleiku, and strengthen the defense of Plei Me by dropping into the camp American-ARVN Special Forces and sending a large relief force from Pleiku to Plei Me, which they would protect with artillery batteries helicopter lifted into position in range of the highway they would travel. General Giap would have what he wanted—a divisional-level battle against the well-trained, well-armed American troops with all their air power and artillery behind them. But he had not realized what a hellish inferno he would be calling down on his troops.

October 20, 1965, Pleiku Wang Dewu Private Dewu and Corporal Nam climbed into the open M113 armored personnel carrier with the rest of their infantry squad. Dewu moved to stand in an open top hatch at the rear of the vehicle, as did three others. He waited, the stench of gasoline and diesel fuel exhaust almost overwhelming him. Sweat soaked his fatigues, and the reeking, hot, humid afternoon air almost made him retch. Or was it his fear? He rested his .30 caliber Browning automatic rifle (BAR) on the top of the ridged aluminum hatch. The World War Two weapon was heavy and prone to malfunction, but he felt lucky having it. If he had remained a foot soldier, he would have had to carry and use one of those clumsy, although less heavy, American M-1 semiautomatic rifles from World War Two. But he had been among those picked at random from the infantry as replacements for the 3rd ARVN Armored Cavalry Regiment, and issued the BAR as a result. He took a sip from his canteen to wet his dry lips. He stood shoulder to shoulder with his friend Nam, their web gear almost interlocked. Around them, sergeants barked orders, the treads of M-41 light tanks rattled, and the diesel engines of theirs and other M113 personnel carri-

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ers added to the cacophony as a squadron of M8 armored carriers got into position within the long column. “What is going on?” he yelled at Nam above all the noise. “Are we being attacked?” Pug-nosed Nam turned his round face to Dewu, his narrow eyes barely showing beneath his oversized American helmet. “I hear we are going to defend or retake some outpost the Viet Cong have attacked.” “Viet Cong?” Dewu took off his own American helmet to scratch absently at an insect bite on his head. He looked up and down the long, dusty line of armored vehicles and infantry that was forming. Then he saw Lieutenant Colonel Nguyen Trong Luat and his staff watching the column come together. “Look,” Dewu shouted, pointing to the colonel. “If he’s in charge, we must have our whole 3rd ARVN Armored Cavalry Regiment with us. This is no Viet Cong sweep. I think we are going to fight real troops from the North. I hope so. Enough of this fighting the Viet Cong—they are only the North’s peasant night shift.” Nam squinted at him. “Sure, and get our asses shot off. You admit that the PAVN bo dois—soldiers are better than the Viet Cong. But you know what the Viet Cong did near Bai Gia. They ambushed and wiped out one of our battalions in less than twenty minutes. Maybe the PAVN would have reduced that to ten minutes.” He turned away and fumbled with quivering fingers for his pack of Salem cigarettes, partly squashed in his pocket by one of the grenades hooked to his webbing. He managed to pull one out and stuck it in his mouth to light it with his Zippo. He took a deep drag, blew the smoke out slowly, then waved his cigarette at the forming column. “Look at us,” he shouted to Dewu. “Ready made meat for an ambush, as sure as chickens crap.” Dewu chuckled, and yelled, “You can’t kid me, Nam. I know how hot you are for your first battle.” “Not like you,” Nam hollered back. “Just remember. You toss a grenade forward, and not behind you. That’s where I’ll be.” An hour later, at 5:20 p.m., Dewu and Nam jostled against one another as, all along the Relief Force column, vehicles jolted into motion with the roar of clashing gears and howling motors, clacking, rumbling, and jangling equipment, and rattling metal sides. The armored Relief Force of three battalions of twelve hundred men, Dewu’s infantry company mounted on the M113 armored personnel carriers, six M41 light tanks, a squadron of M8 armored carriers, and two 105mm howitzers set off from Pleiku for Plei Me along highway QL-14.

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Within minutes, spies reported to the PAVN commander of the 32nd Regiment that the Plei Me Relief Force was on its way. His battalions were in place on the only route the column could take. They were ready. And the Relief Force would be utterly destroyed. Of that he had no doubt.

Chapter 25 October 23, 1965 Highway TL-6C, South Vietnam

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oving only during the day and with frequent stops for repairs, meals, and to allow RECON platoons to scout ahead for ambush, the Relief Force rumbled slowly down highway QL-14 until it met the junction with highway TL-6C about five miles from Plei Me. This was a heavily wooded area with elephant grass several feet high, even higher anthills, and stands of small ironwood trees, with an occasional palm tree towering above them all. Colonel Luat was worried. They were on the final stretch and had met no ambush. Surely the PAVN would not allow him to so strongly reinforce Plei Me without a fight. Worried about the trailing column of supplies, he brought the M8 armored carriers forward as a second column that could be better protected by the tanks and armored personnel carriers. Then with two RECON platoons forward and on the watch for an ambush, he ordered the Relief Force forward down the most dangerous stretch of highway TL-6C. Almost immediately, the forward platoons ran into concentrated rifle and machine gun fire, and radio contact with them was lost within minutes. The 635th Battalion of the PAVN 32nd Regiment attacked the main column, while its 344th Battalion attacked the other one.

Wang Dewu Dewu and his squad rode in the M113 with its rear door and hatches left open for air circulation. Although it was hot inside, even now, at six p.m., it was better than standing under the hot, slanting rays of the sun with weapon ready. But when they heard the distant thump of mortars and the pop of rifle fire, Dewu, Nam, and two others sprang into the open hatches with their BARs ready.

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Ratatatatat! Bugles and shouting. Brrrttt! Brrrttt! Crack! Rifle fire. Bullets rapped the M113’s aluminum sides and whizzed overhead. The M113 driver suddenly engaged his diesel engine and jerked the troop carrier about one hundred feet forward, close to two M41 tanks whose turrets moved back and forth, their 76 mm cannons banging away and their .30 caliber machine guns spewing bullets and smoke. The other personnel carriers and tanks also deployed into fighting positions. Except for Dewu and the others manning the hatches, the soldiers in the M113s rushed out their rear doors and into defensive positions alongside the road with the infantry. Dewu had no time to think. He reacted through instinct and training, trying to show as little of himself as he could above the hatch while he took aim and fired his BAR in spurts at where the gun smoke rose from among the trees and anthills. An 81mm mortar shell exploded in the dirt nearby with a whump! Kaboom! One hit the road, rocking the M113. Shrapnel clanged against its side and whizzed by Dewu’s head. The vehicle’s .50 caliber machine gun responded. Ratatatatat! Nearby, a tank’s canons boomed. Closer still, Dewu barely heard what sounded like a paddle hitting mud; he did not hear his friend’s gasp. The sun slid below the treeline. In the dimmer light, Dewu saw the enemy’s green tracers coming from around a nearby anthill. Brrrttt! Ratatatatat! Brrrrrrrttt! As he and others fired back, Dewu could see their own stream of red tracers as they shredded the anthill. He ejected his clip, shoved another load of twenty rounds into the BAR’s receiver, and pointed the weapon at the gray shapes emerging from the smoke almost obscuring a stand of scrub trees. Two of them went down; the others took cover in the tall grass and behind a tree, and continued firing at them. The M113’s gunner swung his machine gun around and opened up on them. Rattattatatat! As his red machine gun tracers crossed the tracks of the PAVN’s green, they looked like ethereal swords clashing. Twang! Something banged Dewu’s helmet and kicked his head sidewise. No pain. He ignored it. The bedlam of battle increased to an impossible staccato roar. Hisssuee! A rocket propelled RPG-7 antitank grenade flew by the rear of Dewu’s M113, missing by a few feet. It would have blown a huge hole in the side, and probably exploded Dewu and the others out hatches.

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Brrrttt! Brrrttt! Brrrrrppp! From a line of towering hardwood trees, a PAVN company launched an attack directly toward them, shooting their AK-47s and Chinese 56-1 assault rifles from the hip. Rattattat! Rattattat! The M113’s machine gun and that of the tank in front cut them down. Another 81mm mortar exploded with a whump! that shook the M113. Two infantrymen fighting from behind its protection screamed, their agony almost entirely lost in the roar of battle. Dewu used up another clip and another, and then the flashing, blinking darkness lit up as American planes dropped flares. American F-100 jets roared overhead. Then hissing, and kaaarrrruummpped! as napalm fell on PAVN positions. Whump! Whump! Whump! Helicopter gunships blasted troop pockets with rocket and cannon fire. Trees and brush burst into flame, adding a wavering, hot light to that of the cold white flares. Dewu could see dim shapes in the smoke, trying to escape the concentrated and deadly bombardment from the air and the tanks. Sprayed by M113 machine guns and bursts of fire from his and other BARs, the shadowy figures fell. A gunship flushed a group trying to sneak up on the M113 out of the elephant grass; rather than be killed in place, they attacked the M113 with rifle fire and grenades. A grenade clunked off the side; another landed between the hatches and bounced over the side before exploding and killing two ARVN soldiers firing from behind the vehicle. Dewu and the M113 machine gunner shot them all down. In about two hours the air attacks and heavy fire from the tanks and armored personnel carriers beat off the attack of the two PAVN battalions, and the horrific battle died down, leaving a greenish, smoky haze, brush fires, and bodies as far as one could see. An occasional pop! pop! and crack! of bullets punctuated the cries and screams of wounded. Dewu began to shake so violently that he put down his BAR and grabbed the edge of the hatch with sweaty hands to steady himself. He felt nauseous and exhausted, as though he had run five miles. When the reaction faded, he looked around. The M113’s machine gunner was taking out a cigarette. Dewu was the only one above the rear hatch. He dropped down into the vehicle and saw three bodies. One was Nam. Half his face was missing. Dewu dropped to his knees beside his friend, then jerked his head to one side and vomited. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and climbed unsteadily over the bodies and out the open rear door. A medic passed him, looking inside

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for wounded—all were dead. He asked Dewu to help him pull them out of the M113 and then join other infantry in carrying them to a collection area, where dead and badly wounded would be picked up by medivac helicopters. Of Dewu’s squad, six had survived. Supply trucks wove in and out of the columns, providing canned food and water and replenishing ammunition. The order came from Colonel Luat to set up a defensive perimeter of infantry and selected M113s and tanks around the two columns for the rest of the night.

3:00 a.m. October 24 Highway TL-6C The night was alive with the hum of mosquitoes, croaking tree frogs, and the sounds of crickets, cicadas, and geckos. Suddenly loud PAVN whistles signaled another attack. Whump! Ratatatat! Bangbang! Brrrttt! Brrrttt! Inside the M113, Dewu had been slumped over his BAR, asleep. He jerked awake and stood up in the hatch with two others as three company-sized prongs of the 966th Battalion attacked the Relief Force. Dewu fired at the gun flashes. Nearby, infantry fired off their flare guns to illuminate the attackers. Soon over a dozen flares floated slowly down, and the tanks and M113s all opened up on the running shadows and the sources of the green tracers. Then the American planes and helicopters roared in again with lethal napalm, killing missiles, and deadly cannon fire to devastate the attackers. Dewu saw many of the enemy turn and seek shelter behind anthills, brush, and trees, only to collapse under the spray of bullets and shells from the tanks and M-113s. Some, flaming torches, staggered in circles and fell. The enemy retreated into the far darkness, leaving only the sound of the American aircraft and again the howls and groans of the wounded. An occasional Pop! or Ratatat! from the defenders’ guns disturbed the sudden stillness.

Daytime, October 24 Highway TL-6C ARVN sergeants went from company to company and vehicle to vehicle, doing an accounting. A number of armored vehicles in the first column had been damaged, but none beyond repair. All could continue to the relief of Plei Me. The second column, however, had been hit

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hard. Trucks, gas tankers, and two M8 armored cars had been destroyed, and more were heavily damaged, including the two 105mm howitzers. Clearly, the Relief Force needed more help to continue on through another inevitable ambush. American helicopters placed artillery batteries in range to provide protection for the columns. In the afternoon, helicopters from Pleiku resupplied the Relief Force. Dewu, eating his meal of hot rice and vegetables and an American candy bar, trembled with excitement. Then he remembered his friend had been killed, and felt guilty about being excited. But he couldn’t help it. He had survived his first combat, and he had killed many enemy soldiers, he was sure. This was why he volunteered. He was fighting communism. And it now looked like they would relieve Plei Me, which, his sergeant had finally told the squad, was their task. He leaned on the edge of the hatch of his M113, watching the activity along the column as one vehicle after another pulled back into line or shifted position into a moving defensive perimeter. Sergeants barked orders to their platoons and lieutenants moved up and down the loosely dispersed columns of infantry, their radiomen always close behind. He looked back and saw Colonel Luat, whom he recognized by the cluster of officers and the two American advisors around him, getting into an indistinguishable M8 armored car in about the middle of the column. A few of his officers and an American advisor joined him. Within minutes, Dewu’s M113 jerked, the diesel engine growled and belched a cloud of exhaust, and the whole column began to move. In hours, all hell broke out again. PAVN bugles directed the most vicious PAVN attack yet. Mortars, grenades, tracers, chattering machine guns, and whizzing bullets seemed to be everywhere. The aluminum sides of the M113 rang and pinged from bullets and shrapnel as mortars whumped nearby. Except for those firing out of the rear top hatch, the rest of Dewu’s squad rushed out the rear door, preferring to fight in the open over being torn apart inside by a rocket propelled RPG grenade. Three of them sprawled into unmoving heaps as they exited. An enemy, his pith helmet and green uniform blending with his surroundings, had slithered through the elephant grass to within ten feet of the M113. He rose to throw a grenade at its machine gunner. Dewu sprayed him with his BAR. Brrrrrrrppppp! Brrrrrppp! Brrrppp! Brrrrrpppp! Two more rose and fired their AK-47s at the machine gunner.

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The gunner’s steel shield deflected the bullets. He turned the gun on them. Rattattattattatt! They were cut almost in half. Bogged down, the Relief Force was in danger of being overrun. Responding to the urgent messages from Colonel Luat, the divisional command rushed artillery observers to them in a medivac helicopter. They heard the wopwopwop! of the Huey skimming the treetops before it swooped in close to the column and hovered three of four feet above the flattened grass just long enough for the observers to jump out. Then it rose straight up like an incredibly fast elevator. Guarded by infantry, the observers ran to the column’s leading vehicle, and from there directed artillery onto the massed PAVN. The Relief Force resumed its progress behind and alongside the artillery’s rolling bombardment. Boom! Kaboom! Boom! Shells sent towering showers of dirt, rocks, weapon fragments, and sometimes bodies into the air. In the evening, the Relief Force broke through the PAVN siege lines around the Special Forces camp at Plei Me, and then reinforced the defensive perimeter. It added its weight to the American 1st Cavalry infantry and artillery that had landed by helicopter within close support range. It was over for the PAVN. General Man’s plan to destroy the ARVN Relief Force, seize Plei Me, and then roll up Pleiku had failed. Leaving behind a reinforced battalion for cover, General Man ordered his 33d Regiment at Plei Me to withdraw to the west, back toward Cambodia, where they could rest and recover from the heavy losses they had sustained The defeat was worse than he’d feared possible and Dewu had hoped. Under the defensive fire of the Special Forces camp and three hundred air strike sorties conducted against its attacks, the 33rd Regiment had been reduced to only one company of effectives. The 32nd Regiment, which set up the ambushes, lost forty percent of its officers and men to the guns of the Relief Force, air strikes, and artillery. Two of three battalion commanders had been killed and the third one wounded.

November, Ia Drang Valley South Vietnam Highlands General Westmoreland, apprised of the victory at Plei Me, ordered the 1st Calvary division to pursue the retreating ARVN force, and

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committed a brigade to finding and destroying the PAVN battalions hidden in the Chu Pong Massif that ran along the Cambodian border. Among its peaks and ridges and double- or triple-canopied rain forests, the PAVN could rest and reform. The 1st Calvary first landed artillery support and then, with a huge complement of helicopters, landed the brigade to attack the PAVN where they least expected it, behind their lines near the Ia Drang River. In a bloody battle from November 14 to 19, the PAVN launched wave after wave of attacks on the brigade and the one that replaced it, and were defeated each time by concentrated fire from the M-16s, M-60 machine guns, and 81mm mortars of the American brigade, and the napalm, bombs, and missiles of American aircraft, including B-52s and helicopter gunships. By the end of the battle on November 18, the PAVN were forced to retreat toward Cambodia with the loss of about eighteen hundred men. That did not end it for the defeated PAVN battalions, however. A mass of helicopters transported an ARVN force of four airborne battalions commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ngo Quang Truong, assisted by the American Advisor Major Norman Schwarzkopf, to attack the fleeing PAVN north of the Ia Drang River. With the support of twentyfour 105 howitzers set up at two landing zones within range, they strove to prevent as many enemy as possible from reaching their Cambodian sanctuary. Skirmishes erupted as soon as they were dropped into their landing zones, and they pursued and badly cut up what remained of General Man’s battalions. The artillery was especially effective, killing at least 127 troops, while the remaining threw down their weapons and ran. Days later, the last survivors of General Man’s three battalions entered Cambodia. General Giap’s strategy to lay siege to Plei Me, draw out the Americans, and ambush the Relief Force from Pleiku, then roll over Plei Me and Pleiku, failed. Yes, they had “lured the tiger out of the mountains.” And they got mauled as a result. But he could live with that. For the first time, complete and fully armed PAVN battalions had fully engaged American forces in battle. They had learned much about how Americans fought, and their courage. Most especially, they had learned much about the deployment and tactical use of American artillery and air power. But Dewu knew nothing about this. He would not know about the success of his Relief Force. He would not cheer the great defeat of the communist battalions. As his M113 approached the defensive works

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surrounding the Special Forces camp at Plei Me, as it rumbled past the last remaining shrubs on the right side of the highway, he stood watch in the hatch with his BAR resting on the edge of the hatch. My first battles, he thought. Nothing can prepare you for them—not for the deafening sounds, the exhausting heat, the stench of fear and death. Not for the confusion, and especially not for what a grenade, mortar, or machine gun can do to the human body. The written description of combat or the special effects of a war movie are to real combat as an erotic book is to real lovemaking. Well, Jia Li, your worry about my early death in battle was needless. I survi— The sniper’s bullet entered Dewu’s right eye and ripped through his brain.

aaa Shihao had tried to comfort his mother when the government’s death notice came. She lay grief-stricken on her bed for days, alternatively sobbing and moaning and refusing to eat. He had tried to help her, to soothe her, to hold her, and only when he was alone did he quietly cry himself, until he had no tears. He missed his father terribly. He kept a much-treasured photo of him in his wallet, and he had it enlarged and framed. It was over his chest of drawers at the foot of his bed, where he could easily see it when he went to bed or got up in the morning.

Chapter 26 1968–1970 Saigon Wang Shihao

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anh was his age and a neighbor, living one house over from his. They had both graduated in 1968 with a baccalaureate, and went on to Saigon University, he to major in the School of Law, she in the School of Pharmacy. The university accepted anyone with a high school diploma. Shihao passed her on his bike as she rode her own, and he paid little attention to her. She was just another lovely student he occasionally saw on the Saigon University campus. With nods, hellos, and smiles, they simply acknowledged that they were neighbors. Then her bike chain broke in a way that could not easily be fixed. She walked over to his house wearing a robin’s egg blue shirt over blue jeans, her long black hair pulled back tightly along the side of her head by ivory combs. “Can I have a ride to school on your bicycle?” she asked him. No shyness. Unusually direct for a young Vietnamese girl. He liked that, and he was happy to help her, and also take her back home on his bike after she’d finished her work in the university library for the day. Neither of their schools required attendance in class and the professors sold their lecture notes. Her closeness on the bike, her sweet jasmine smell, her soft voice in its South Vietnamese accent, especially when interspersed with French, the language in which pharmacy was taught at Saigon University, all sparked his interest. It deepened when they arrived at her house and she invited him to have tea with her, even though her parents were at work—a heretical thing to do. It had a rebellious, almost erotic tinge to it. He liked that even more. For some reason, the repair of her bicycle took much longer than it should have, and the two of them riding to and from school on his bi-

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cycle became commonplace. So did their afternoon discussions and increasing intimacy. Still, it was not love for him until she suddenly yelled for him to stop the bike one day, jumped off, and went over to an old lady sitting on the curb with two big bags on each side of her. She wore a shawl over her head, with a tuft of gray hair sticking out, and two denim shirts and black pants, and her bruised toes stuck out of her slippers at the bottom. Everything was meticulously clean. Hanh sat down on the curb next to the old woman, put one arm around her shoulders, and asked with compassion in her voice, “How are you today, Tam?” “Oh, okay.” She gave a hacking chuckle, then reached beneath her shirt and pulled out a folded dollar bill. She waved it in front of Hanh, and exclaimed in a surprisingly firm and feminine, though scratchy, voice, “I get from Yankee soldier. See? He good soldier. Feel sad for Tam.” She barked out another chuckle that bounced her body up and down. Hanh motioned Shihao over with her free hand, and said, “Tam, I want you to meet my friend Shihao.” Tam looked up, and he almost gasped. Her face was deeply lined, and her mouth hung askew, with gaps where some teeth should be. One eye was barely open and seemed to look in another direction, while the other was yellow-rimmed and bloodshot. Its depths seemed to reflect all the misery the poor woman must have been put through. “I’m happy to meet you,” Shihao said, unconsciously giving her a slight bow. Hanh gently rubbed the woman’s back, and asked, “Would you sell the dollar to me? I’ve always wanted one, you know, as a souvenir.” Tam held the dollar close to her chest, tilted her head at Hanh, and replied, “Oh, this is valuable. I don’t know if I can sell it to you.” Hanh opened her purse and looked in her wallet. She took out a handful of piasters and asked Shihao, “Can I borrow what you have?” Shihao opened his own wallet and took out all the piasters he had, and handed them to Hanh. She took them, quickly counted them, and added them to her own. She held them all out to Tam. It all was four or fives times the near 360 piasters the dollar was worth. “Here you are, Tam. This is for your dollar. Please hold the dollar for me for now, okay?” Tam took the money and crushed it and the dollar to her chest with another body shaking chuckle. “I will keep dollar for you. Do not forget that I have. Okay?” Tears trickled down Hanh’s cheeks as she stood, leaned over, and kissed Tam on the cheek. She took Shihao’s hand.

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As she led him back to the bike, he looked over his shoulder at Tam. “Goodbye, Tam.” She didn’t appear to hear him. She seemed to be chuckling to herself. At the bike, Hanh put her elbows on the seat, her head in her hands, and cried silently into them while Shihao held her to him with one arm. Finally she looked at him, her tears still flowing, and mourned, “She was a beautiful and very talented violinist. She is . . . oh Shihao, she is only forty-two years old. Her husband was killed in the army. So was her oldest son. Her younger son joined the Viet Cong and was captured, tortured, and died in prison. She was then picked up by the security police and tortured for information about her son’s friends. During that her only daughter was raped and then disappeared— she thinks she’s in a brothel somewhere, serving American soldiers. Now, nobody wants to have anything to do with her. It’s not fair, Shihao, it’s not fair.” She shuddered, stood straight, and looked at the woman sitting on the curb, humming to herself. “This can’t go on,” Hanh declared. Shihao never remembered what he said in return, or the bike ride to her home, or what they had discussed that evening. Not even whether it was about Tam. He just remembered it as when he knew, like sunlight bursting through the clouds, that he loved her. And somehow it became accepted that they would get married. They announced to their families their intent to get married during the summer semester break. Her father was an international tradesman and her mother kept his company’s books. He had no objection to their marriage. Even though Southern Vietnamese believed themselves superior to Chinese, Cambodians, Malaysians, and other Asians, his international trade had given him an unusual tolerance of ethnic and national differences. Except for the Americans, whom he condemned for coarsening Vietnamese culture with their jukeboxes, Coca-Cola, incredible wealth, and the beer parlors and prostitutes they spawned. It was Shihao’s mother who expressed unhappiness over the marriage proposal. “She is southern Vietnamese,” she lamented. They are too easygoing, undisciplined, and lazy.” “Not Hanh,” Shihao insisted. “She is going to the university to become a professional pharmacist. She works hard at her studies.” Jia Li stood staring at him. Finally she held out both hands palm down, crossed them, and quickly swished them to each side, creating a temporary vacuum in the air while she shouted, “Pham Hanh is not Chinese.”

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Shihao put his hands on his hips and leaned toward her. Barely controlling his voice, he reminded her, “You are more Vietnamese than Chinese. You are third generation Vietnamese. I am fourth. You love Vietnam, as you told me. So, is it not time for us to share our heritage with the Vietnamese?” She threw up her hands and cried, “What can I do? You are of a new generation. You are hardly Sino-Vietnamese now. You have been debauched by American movies, television programs, and perverted magazines.” She sighed, and a tear rolled down her cheek. Shihao remembered that tear above all. It mesmerized him as she said, her voice on the edge of quavering, “I gave up the tradition of picking your wife for you as soon as I realized what the Saigon urban culture and its Americanization has done to you. That, and your father’s independent spirit. I love you, my son. Your happiness and success mean more to me than an old woman’s old beliefs. So, I will accept Hanh.” He hugged her and thanked her, and she gripped him tightly for a moment, then stepped back and waved her finger at him. “When she moves in with us after the wedding, I will try to make her at home— that is, when she shows due respect to her mother-in-law.”

aaa Hanh’s active concern for welfare and human rights soon led her to consider joining the Student Union, which to her eyes often demonstrated for such causes. But to Shihao, the School of Pharmacy was riddled with students who supported the procommunist National Liberation Front (NLF), or were communist, and Shihao felt certain that they had misled her about the Student Union. “Why do you want to join with those communists?” he demanded. Her face turned to iron, eyes narrowed and chin thrust at him, which was so much a part of their arguments. “They are not communists. You see ‘communist’ everywhere. The leaders of the Student Union are trying to find a third way, a solution to this damnable war that is neither communist nor that of our corrupt government. Why don’t you understand that?” He shot back, “You can’t be so naïve. You will help the communists win. Don’t you understand what that means?” They had been eating lunch in the university cafeteria. Even though Hanh had not finished eating, she stood, her eyes tearing, and snapped, “Thousands of people are being killed while our government officials

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grow fat on bribes; many more are dying from disease and poverty while these officials get drunk in their rich houses. The American puppet masters, with their corrupt culture, lord it over us while our officials bow to them. I am not a communist, but there has to be an alternative, and I will work for it. Get that through your thick head.” She turned, knocking over a water glass with her swinging purse, and walked away from the table, her head high. She joined the Student Union. Afterward, she told him—rather, declared—that she would participate in the Student Union mass demonstrations against the government. He was ready with information on the union’s leaders. “They are communists, or NLF sympathizers.” And he briefly described their backgrounds. “So what,” Hanh said, “even if true. But that is government propaganda that you accept without question. If communists were going to demonstrate against raping children, you would not participate because the leaders are communists? That’s stupid.” “We are talking about these demonstrations. They will weaken the government, and provide more ammunition for those working for the communists who want to bring down the government. This is not an issue of raping children. It is whether you support the communist war on us or not.” “You are brainwashed,” she hissed. He could not get through to her. She actively participated in the demonstrations, holding up a sign that said Third Way! American Puppets Resign, and screaming it out at the police who blocked the demonstrators from marching on Tu Do Street. She pumped her fist in the air for the large number of foreign reporters and photographers. He had no sympathy for these NLF and procommunist people she not only consorted with, but aided. He remembered his youth too well, and still often thought of his friend Trai and his parents, Hoang Loi and Bian, whom the communists had sentenced to isolation. But most of all he remembered his father, Dewu. He would still be alive and doing well in Cholon, were it not for his fear of the communists taking over South Vietnam. He had volunteered for the army when he would never have been drafted, not for combat anyway. Now his fiancée was getting deeply involved in the student antigovernment movement and demonstrations and, as he saw it, in effect aiding the communist cause. At first he had been appreciative that Hanh’s social consciousness extended into politics. He liked that she had an interest in the world outside of pharmacy and social welfare and, unlike most Vietnamese women, was becoming actively involved in

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university and national political issues. But as her activism became more and more associated with the radicals in the Student Union, he became more and more concerned by the direction it was taking. As they argued about it more and more, her accusations almost became a mantra. “You are blind to the corruption of the Ngyen Van Thieu regime, and his bureaucrats from top to bottom. The whole edifice has to be overturned and a new, independent and free South Vietnam put in its place.” He replied with his own mantra. “Better the corruption than rule by the communists. You get corruption then also, along with total repression and death.” Recently, she was adding something far more dangerous to her argument. “Come on, so you had a bad childhood in North Vietnam. Those who mistreated you were bad communists. Bad people exist under any system. But we are promised by Radio Hanoi and the NLF Radio Giai Phong that we will have our freedom and independence if the communists win. And has not the NLF made this their reason for existence? Are they not promoting our independence at every opportunity? And are they not respected by the North?” When he heard her openly favoring a communist victory, he replied, “We are free and independent now. You and the Buddhist monks can demonstrate. They can burn themselves to death to protest government policies, and all the gory details and pictures appear in the newspapers. Do you think the communists would allow such reporting? You can even meet with and be seen on the streets with those communist students Huynh Tan Man and Nguten Tron Quang Nghi. Why do you say we are not free?” “Because the military and regime thugs control voting and everything else outside of Saigon, and only in Saigon is the press free. It’s the Americans. They have taken over the country and swamped us with their crude culture, and they control our government. It is colonialism again. We have never been free. We fought the French for independence and got the Americans. I agree with the NLF’s program of Hoa Binh, Tu Do, Doc Lap, Trung Lap, Hanh Phuc—Peace, Freedom, Independence, Neutrality, Social Welfare. Even Ho Chi Minh has said we should all have, ‘Independence, Freedom, Happiness.’ Sure, he’s a communist, but he was first a Vietnamese.” In spite of her seduction by the communists, he tried to accept it. He loved her. When there was a huge increase in the price of paper and the Student Union accused the government of trying to suppress freedom of speech by making it difficult to publish, she joined their protests and

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demonstrations without telling him. When he found out from one of their friends, he objected, but did not make a big point of it. But when she went out on that crazy, month-long student strike engineered by the Student Union after Mam and other students were arrested as communists, he opposed the strike. They had a screaming fight over it. When she wrote an article for the pro-NLF student newspaper Tu Quyet —Self-Determination, calling for American troops to go home, and supporting the Third Way between the current regime and communism, that same “Third Way” called for by the NLF, she didn’t show it to him until it was published. “What’s this?” he asked when she handed it to him. “An article I wrote. Congratulate me. I’m a published writer now.” Shihao began reading it while Hanh stood nearby, clearly hoping for his approval. He read only halfway through and skimmed the rest. He put it down gently and tried to control his temper, but he felt the anger building up. He lost control and smashed his fist down on the table. “How could you?” he hissed. He picked up her article, crumpling it between his fingers, and slapped it down on the table. “You . . . you have gone over to the other side. This is do khung—crazy. You condemn our government, you condemn the Americans who are helping us. But you don’t condemn the communists. You favor overthrowing our government. All in favor of your fucking Third Way. Third Way? Communist way!” As he ranted, her eyes grew large and she covered her mouth with one hand. Then she screamed at him, “Capitalist pig!” and ran out. That was the beginning of Shihao’s awareness of the decision he eventually would have to make.

Chapter 27 April 1970 Saigon Wang Shihao

S

hihao pushed away uneaten his bowl of tiny green eggplants soaked in chilies, a few garlic cloves, and nuoc mam—fish sauce. Trembling, nauseous, he also ignored his French coffee. He put his elbow on the waxed tablecloth, leaned his head into his hand, and stared out the window of the Givral Cafe at the neoclassical building of the National Assembly across Tu Do Street. He looked over at the table where sat the pro-National Liberation Front (NLF) Student Union leaders Nguyen Van Thang, more a nationalist than an NLF or communist supporter Shihao guessed, and that very vocal favorite of the international journalists, pro-NLF activist Doan Van Toai. Hanh had not informed him of what was about to occur, nor how Thang and Toai were directing it from their table here. Shihao noted the young people his age who came in, talked briefly with the two organizers, and left. He waited for Hanh now. He had picked this time and place so she would be less harsh if she chose to refuse his demand, which he now thought she would do, but fervently hoped she would not. What he at first had found attractive—her enthusiasm, her desire to help others and improve the lives of those around her, her social consciousness—had taken a course that was now destroying him. Lately, as what she was doing became too glaring to deny, he had lost his appetite and had difficulty sleeping. A sudden “Chau—hello” broke through his reflections. A waitress stood next to his table. She looked down at his uneaten food, looked up at him curiously, and asked, “Is something wrong?”

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“No,” he answered lamely. Then he sat up straighter and strengthened his voice. “No. I am not as hungry as I thought. Please bring me a bottle of Ba-Mui-Ba—Thirty-three beer.” He hoped the beer would settle his stomach. When the waitress placed the bottle of beer with a glass in front of him, he tipped the bottle to his mouth and took a mouthful of the beer, then held the cold bottle against his cheek. He resumed staring out the window, remembering his happy moments with Hanh, and then the bitter arguments. I cannot help it, his anguished thoughts confessed. I love her. I hope there is still some way to— He saw her coming toward the cafe’s glass door with Nguyen Tuan Kiet, who Shihao was sure was an NLF agent. They came in together; Kiet went to the table where the two Union leaders sat, while Hanh came to his table. Shihao’s heart beat rapidly as he watched her walk toward him. He loved her no less now than he did when they got engaged. She had a beautiful, heart-shaped face with luminous eyes, and her long, lacquer-black hair, clasped to the side of her head as usual, fell to her waist. She wore a white silk shirt and black pants. Before she sat down, she glanced over at the leaders’ table where Thang and Toai sat staring at her. She nodded at them and sat in the chair closest to Shihao. She looked at him, eyes wide, brows slightly raised, and asked in her soft South Vietnamese voice, “Darling, I have to leave shortly. Why do you want to see me here, at this time?” He broke eye contact, gulped his beer, and then slowly put the bottle down. She did not know he knew, but word got around among students, especially for what was being planned. Yes, even among anticommunists. She and hundreds of other students were about to invade the National Assembly to stage a sit-in. Once he found that out, he had gone directly to one of the leaders and, evincing interest in participating himself, had asked what their demands would be. They wanted the Assembly to commit itself to an unconditional peace, immediate withdrawal of American forces, and South Vietnamese self-determination. As Shihao saw it, a communist victory. University students were among the elite, highly regarded in Vietnamese culture, more respected as students than they would be when they entered their professions. Therefore, this sit-in and the leaders’ demands would be an event for the world media. He knew opposition forces and the NLF would make a huge thing about it. It would be devastating to the government, and influence American public opinion. He knew that this was why the communists were behind it.

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He finally looked into her eyes. She stared at him, her lips slightly parted, her eyebrows raised higher. He knew what he had to say. He had agonized over it for weeks, and now, with what she was about to do, the moment had come. He felt like vomiting again. He’d begun to shake. But he could accept her activism—her procommunism—no more. “Did you join the NLF?” After so many years, he was surprised that his voice reverted to the northern accent of his youth. She looked down at the flowery waxed tabletop, then straightened and tilted her head back. “Yes.” She made it sound like a declaration. Then suddenly, her voice turned soft again. “But you must unders— “You are going to go across the street and participate in the sit-in, right?” She hesitated, and then narrowed her eyes. “How did you know that?” “You are going to do this even though it will seriously embarrass the government in the eyes of the world, and help the communists take over South Vietnam?” “The communists do not intend to take over. They guarantee our indepen—” “I love you as much as I ever did.” His voice had risen; it sounded to him like one long squeak as he threw at her the words he had to tear from his heart. “I want to marry you and have children by you. But you cannot be my wife and help the communists. If you walk across the street . . . .” He tried to stop his lip from quivering. He raised his hand, and as she jerked her head back as though expecting him to smack her, he pointed at the Assembly building. “If you walk across the street and join that do ngu sit-in, I never want to see you again.” His eyes were wet, but he held his head high, and waited. Her eyes opened wide and she tilted her head, momentarily covering her mouth with her hand. She visibly shuddered before gaining control and putting both hands on her lap. Leaning toward him, she replied firmly, “Darling. You cannot mean that. I love you. But I also love my country and freedom. You must understand.” He shook his head, suddenly feeling stronger. He stood and told her in a steady voice, “I’m leaving. Come with me to the university now. Me or joining the sit-in. Choose!” Her face hardened and she crossed her arms. “Go,” she said. “I guess I’ve known deep down all along that you and your corrupt government and your corrupt Americans are all that stand in the way of a truly free and independent Vietnam. Go, and my love be damned.” She looked away.

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He quickly strode to the cafe door. There he had to stop and look back. She had got up and was walking toward the organizers’ table, where the three seated there were smiling a welcome to her.

aaa The student sit-in was all the organizers had hoped and what Shihao had feared. From then on he avoided the Pharmacy School, he avoided Hanh’s home, he avoided any student events that she might attend. When he told his mother, she surprised him with her response, although he should have expected it. She gave him the same stern look she had when she’d scolded him as a boy for some misdeed. “I did a little investigation of her, and found out what you just told me about her months ago.” Taken aback, he blurted, “You never told me that.” The corners of her mouth lifted slightly to hint at a grin. “Then it would have taken you much longer to break from that procommunist. You are like your father. Stubborn and intelligent. I had to let him find out for himself truths obvious to me. Same with you, my son.” “And if I still planned on marrying her, regardless?” Across her face flashed an animal look he had rarely seen before. It was almost as though she were pulling her lips back to bare her fangs and warn off a threat to her young one, which in a split second morphed into a ghastly grin, and then morphed again into a slight smile. He caught it all, and a chill swept through him as she said, “You did not. End of story.”

Chapter 28 John Banks

H

e was, as he put it to himself, dragging ass this afternoon. Because of two committee meetings, one in the Department of History over changes in department undergraduate courses, and another in the College of Arts and Sciences over student demands for more representation on faculty committees, he had no time for a nap, and barely time to wolf down his lunch. And the last class lecture had not gone well. He had misspoken several times and had to consult his outline, and actually went to his notes in his briefcase more than once. He sighed. The trouble with taking naps is that the body gets used to it, and so when one doesn’t nap . . . . Hell with it. I’ll do my best, and if I get too wooly headed, I’ll turn the class into a seminar and let the students argue among themselves. “Good afternoon, students,” he announced with false enthusiasm. “Any questions about your reading?” There were none. “Okay, the United States to the rescue. Last time I concluded that South Vietnam was unable to defend itself against the North’s overt and covert war against it. Defeat and the communization of all Vietnam seemed inevitable. Clearly, then, only massive U.S. involvement held hope of saving the South from communism. And so it appeared to President Johnson’s administration. If the American foreign policy of containment—containing communism in its then current boundaries—meant anything, if U.S. defense treaty commitments were to be credible, the United States must save the South. “In August of 1964, they got their excuse. North Vietnam patrol boats allegedly attacked two U.S. destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. What actually happened is controversial, for what was called an attack may have been mistaking radar blips of the ships’ wake for torpedo boats. In any case, torpedo boats had clearly launched an attack against one of the same destroyers in those waters two days before.

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“President Johnson moved swiftly. While launching retaliatory air attacks against the boats’ bases, he also presented Congress with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Although falling short of a declaration of war, it would give the President a blank check to fully join the Vietnam War in defense of the South. With President Johnson and much of the elite establishment in Washington leading the charge and with strong public support shown by the polls, Congress promptly passed the resolution. “The result was that in the following years, the President poured hundreds of thousands of American troops and massive supplies of light and heavy military equipment into South Vietnam.” He stopped and reached for his outline. He was pleased that this subject—the war and democide that he had studied for his dissertation and now made the center of his career—had an excitement to it that cleared his mind. Still, he had to consult his outline for exact figures. Periodically glancing at it, he continued. “This formidable American effort, which reached its peak of 543,400 troops in April 1969, shored up the South Vietnam government and achieved a military victory on the ground. The Viet Cong were badly defeated after their abortive countrywide Tet Offensive of January to February 1968, in which they lost thirty-two thousand guerrillas. More important, the Viet Cong revolutionary infrastructure that had been built up in the villages and urban areas surfaced during the Tet Offensive in many places and was virtually destroyed. Overall, possibly some fifty thousand National Liberation Front cadre were killed. Moreover, by 1968 South Vietnam’s military was considerably restrengthened by U.S. aid and training, and numbered around 819,000 personnel. It regained control over a considerable portion of the country’s population. “The year 1968 was the turning point in the war, but not in the direction one might suppose. By then, the propaganda of communist front groups in the West, particularly in the United States, was pervasive, especially when recycled by the North’s sympathizers and those opposed to the war, often in the press and through mass demonstrations and political theater. With two hundred to nearly three hundred U.S. dead returning home from Vietnam in body bags every week, deep schisms already had appeared in U.S. public and particularly elite opinion. “Before 1968, what held the war’s support base together in the United States was the administration’s promise that the war was being won, that there was light at the end of the tunnel, that America needed only to stay the course. But the rosy assurances looked like lies with the Viet Cong’s obvious ability to launch the 1968 countrywide Tet Offensive.”

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Good, a hand. “Yes, Miss Shaeffer.” “What is Tet?” “Tet is the Vietnamese New Year celebrations taking place during the first seven days of a new year’s new moon, which may be in January or February. It is the most important holiday in many Asian countries, including China. Okay?” When Miss Shaeffer nodded, John hesitated and then asked the class, “Where was I?” “Tet,” a student yelled out. “Thanks,” John replied, grinning along with the students. “Our response to the Tet Offensive,” a student in front said with a smile. “Ah yes,” John said. His excitement over teaching this subject collapsed with his forgetfulness. Jesus, he thought, I’ve got to do something about my sleep. “To go on, while few Americans saw the magnitude of the Viet Cong’s defeat, what they did see, as universally displayed in the news media, was the Viet Cong’s bloody street-by-street occupation of the large city of Hue and the battle to evict them, the battles in the streets of many other cities, and the attack on the American Embassy in Saigon. That was it. This offensive, coupled with the North’s largely successful struggle for the hearts and minds of American intellectuals, won the only battle that mattered—the political one. The elite establishment’s support for the war, and that of Congress, was finally and irretrievably shattered. To the American people, the war now appeared unwinnable, or in any case unsustainable. “From that time on, it was only a matter of when and how the United States would withdraw from the war. President Nixon, whose election was partly due to his promise to bring the war to an end, gradually withdrew U.S. troops, and redoubled efforts to reach a political settlement with North Vietnam. The resulting Paris Peace Agreement and cease-fire was signed with the North in January 1973, and the last U.S. troops were withdrawn the following March. “This peace agreement in which, among other things, the North recognized the sovereignty of South Vietnam, turned out to be merely a fig leaf for the American defeat. Despite the promises the United States had made to the South about not letting it fall, or threats to the North about violations of the agreement, the United States not only withdrew militarily but in spirit, as well. While the North openly violated the agreement and prepared its forces for the final offensive against the South, the U.S. Congress voted in June to deny President Nixon any

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funds for use of the military in or around or over Indochina. And Congress reduced military aid to Saigon’s forces from $2.27 billion in fiscal year 1973 to $700 million in fiscal year 1975. “Ironically, for a war that was fought so much in the shadows by guerrillas and unconventional forces, by assassination and abduction, by subversion and terror, and by front groups and propaganda, it was ended by a massive, conventional military offensive. When an attack on the Central Highlands in early March 1975, intended as only part of a two-year strategy to defeat the South, ended in the rout of Southern forces, the North immediately deployed additional forces east to the coast and then south toward Saigon. The South’s forces saw whole divisions disintegrating through lack of coordination and incompetent leadership, at the very top and in the field. With their forces in disarray, the South could put up only spotty resistance. Saigon fell in April 1975. “So this Vietnam War ended with defeat for the United States and South Vietnam, and victory for North Vietnam. It would not mean peace for these poor people. Vietnam, now totally ruled by the North, would soon go to war against Cambodia, and consequently would be invaded by China. And most important in the number killed, there would be a war of the North against the South Vietnamese people after their defeat. But that is a future lecture. The next ones will be on the democide committed by the North, the South, and the Americans against the South Vietnamese people during the Vietnam War.” John looked at his watch. He felt too tired to continue. “I’ll have to leave a little early today. You have your assigned reading in Clement. It is especially important for the next lecture, and I may ask you some questions on it. Dismissed.” He had not even stolen a glance at Miss Phim.

Chapter 29 April 30, 1975 Saigon Jiang Jia Li

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he knew Saigon was in danger. The booming sounds of battle had been close for days. Then last night, as she, Shihao, and his new wife Hua Jue Yan were discussing how and whether to protect their rattan store if the PAVN tried to take Saigon itself, the television that had been on in the background suddenly drew their attention. Following notice of a special announcement, Minister of Information Ly Qui Chung came on and read an official government communiqué. It ordered all ARVN units to stop fighting and lay down their weapons. Defeat! The communists had won. Soon the dark streets filled with the sounds of cars, trucks, motor bikes, bicycles, and crowds of people carrying what they could as all tried to escape Saigon and move south. She hardly slept afterward. Even now, in the light of midday, she could not believe what had happened. The communists were about to take over, with all the fear and horror that would surely follow. She heard the wopwopwop! of American helicopters flying overhead, ferrying escaping American civilians and Vietnamese government and military personnel out to American carriers at sea; she heard the boom! boom! and ratatatat! of the fight at the Saigon airport between PAVN troops and the ARVN paratroopers who refused to surrender. These should have dispelled her disbelief. But Jia Li registered none of it. She had drawn into herself. This morning, as she did six days a week, she had come to work in her rattan store. She now sat at one of her new rattan tables with Shihao and Yan with a radio between them, tuned to a Saigon news station. They heard only a continual repetition of the order by General Duong

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Van Minh that all ARVN troops lay down their arms. Finally, in late morning a government official announced that PAVN troops would be entering the city, and that they should be welcomed peacefully. The streets outside had grown as silent as the store. Jia Li fought with herself to accept this terrible truth. She had been sure that as Qui Non, Hue, Da-nang, then Phan Rang had surrendered north of Saigon, the United States would return and again save the South from this awful danger. She could not understand how they could have fought the communists for so many years only to let South Vietnam fall to them now. Yes, she and Shihao and Yan could have fled the country. But although she was of Chinese descent, Vietnam was her country; she had been born here, her roots were here, her parents were buried here. And where would they flee, anyway? Neighboring Cambodia was in the midst of a civil war with the communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, and it looked as if they would soon take over that country, if they had not already, just like North Vietnam was taking over the South. Laos also seemed ready to fall to the communists. Fleeing to communist China was ridiculous. And it had been too late for months to try to get a passport from the collapsing South Vietnamese government, even if they could afford the bribes by selling their store. Even visas from the United States or France were impossible. They had not been associated with the American military in any way except selling them furniture. They had no skills other countries would want. They would be poor refugees with an unknown future in an alien land whose language they could not understand. Hua Yan had also refused to leave. Shihao thought they were dangerously wrong even in 1972. Then when the Americans finally withdrew all their troops last year, he had insisted, “We must leave. We can sell everything and bribe officials to get a passport to fly out. We must. When the communists take over it will be hell.” Jia Li and Yan refused to consider it. Yan exclaimed, “Vietnam is my home. Like you, I may be Sino-Vietnamese, but I’m Vietnamese in my soul.” Yan’s family stayed. Her father, a small producer of nuoc mam fish sauce, insisted, “I produce the sauce everybody uses. What are the communists going to do to me, take my sauce away? Then what are they going to use on their food?” So, although one semester away from graduation in 1972, Shihao had quit law school when it became obvious to him that the United States planned to withdraw all its troops and end its military aid. He said then that it was only a matter of time before the North’s conquest

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of South Vietnam, and he believed that all who became professionals under the so-called American lackey South Vietnam regimes would be subject to arrest and especially harsh treatment. He took over from Jia Li the management of their rattan store and the pick up and delivery of furniture, using the small three-wheeled Lambretta truck he bought for that purpose. Jia Li continued to work in the store and Yan helped when necessary, although her main responsibility was cooking their meals and taking care of their house, which was within walking distance of the store. Jia Li became aware of the strange stillness that had settled on the street. She sat absolutely still, ignoring the tears running down her cheeks and the pain of her eyes, which she knew were swollen and red. She looked at Shihao, and saw only a blur shaped by her tears. She asked rhetorically in a voice that sounded rasping and broken, “Our country, our freedom, our lives—they are over, aren’t they?” Wiping his own eyes, Shihao gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Not our lives. We are nobodies. We just have to learn to live a new life.” He looked at her carefully, moved to hold one of her hands in both of his, and said softly, “I know you do not want to watch the North Vietnamese soldiers march in. I know how much you hate the communists, as I do. I will never forget my friend Trai.” He stood, looked out the window at the nearly empty street, and continued. “But I’m curious to see what they look like. We’ll be back right afterward.” He nodded to Yan, who rose and moved to give Jia Li a little hug. Then she headed to the door with Shihao.

Wang Shihao Once they were on Le Van Duyer Street next to the store, heading for broad Thong Nhut Boulevard in front of the President’s Palace, down which the victorious communist soldiers were sure to come, Yan scolded him. “Is this not a little cruel at this moment, leaving her alone like that to grieve over what happened? I bet she is thinking of the death of your father, whom I know she loved very much.” “You do not understand my mother as I do. In certain moments she wants to be alone with her grief. I know what she will do while we are gone—something she would not have done if we stayed. She will close the store and go home to her bedroom and talk to my father’s picture. I wanted to leave so she could do this. So we might as well also see the communist con khi—monkeys make their entrance.”

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Yan was quiet for awhile as they walked, sometimes dodging around ARVN uniforms and weapons discarded on the sidewalk. Then she asked, a glimmer of hope in her voice, “Are the communists really that bad? Their radio programs from Hanoi always talk about peace and freedom and uplifting the people. And especially about independence for the South and a ‘Third Way’ between North and South. And we have had a lot of South Vietnamese politicians, journalists, and professors—” she pronounced the last word with respect “—who say the same thing.” Shihao looked at her uneasily. She reminded him of his former fiancée, who had been in Chi Hoa prison for the last year because of her procommunist activism, which sometimes had turned violent. Yan was a typical southern Sino-Vietnamese girl. Thin, with the fashionably long, lustrous black hair and large, velvety eyes with long lashes; she had a graceful, willowy way about her, like a cat. By contrast he was swarthy looking, tall, and barrel-chested—unusual for SinoVietnamese, since they usually had migrated from southern China. He had the strong face and body characteristic of Manchurian or northern Chinese. As he grew older his father Dewu had been amazed by their different physiques, blaming it on his great grandfather, who had been an imperial officer from the north serving in Canton before defecting to join the Boxers during the Boxer Rebellion, then fleeing with the whole Wang family to Vietnam. Shihao said again what he had been telling her since their fist discussion about the war. “Don’t believe anything the communists say. It’s all lies. I’ve told you what I remember about my life in the North, about my friend Trai, and then what my father told me.” “I know, sweetheart, but I find it hard to believe that everything the communists say would be such lies.” She looked at him askance and put her hand in his. “Soon we’ll find out the truth. In any case, we are nothing to them. There is no reason for them to do anything to—” She stopped, distracted, as they passed a store obviously being looted—its plate glass windows were broken, and people ran out carrying goods. Shihao pulled her across the street and they walked in silence for several blocks. They heard the distant rumble of trucks and the clanking of tanks before they saw them They were the PAVN trucks and T-54 tanks of the 203rd Armored Brigade, accompanied by soldiers of the 116th Regiment, some riding in the back of trucks with their rifles ready, some on the tanks, some marching in with their AK-47s, RPGs, and Type 56 assault rifles on their shoulders. The soldiers wore green uniforms and pith helmets.

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Among them all bobbed a mixture of NLF, Viet Cong, and North Vietnam flags. Also marching in columns were soldiers in the black pajamas and soft, floppy hats of the NLF and Viet Cong. The soldiers soon reached Doc Lap Palace, where they raised a Viet Cong flag. There were few people to greet them, although communist flags were appearing in front of some buildings. As the dust and exhaust from the passing vehicles and soldiers enveloped them, Shihao sat down on the curb and vomited between his legs. “Oh am bo tat—the merciful Buddha,” he moaned, “how could this happen?” Yan immediately moved to crouch in front of him and shield him from the view of the soldiers. She pulled on his arm. “Quick, let’s go before they see you.” He rose, turning his back on the soldiers as he did so, and with head high and Yan’s arm in his, he walked down a side street. All he could mumble was “Cho de—son of a bitch, Cho de, cho de.”

Jiang Jia Li “Nam do a di da phat—may god protect us,” she cried to the empty store. There would be no business today and she wanted to be at home—their home, Dewu’s home—at an atrocious time like this. So she left a note for Shihao, closed and locked the store, and walked to their two-bedroom house. It was smaller than the home she and Dewu had in the North, but it was substantial enough, with electricity and cold and hot running water from a heater in a corner of the kitchen. It was a mansion compared to the shacks and cardboard boxes on Phan Van Khoe Street, near the Binh Tay Market, where many SinoVietnamese refugees from the cities and towns overrun by the North Vietnamese army lived, and where they had lived when they first came to Cholon. Where they had all lived, until the government informed her that Dewu had been killed in action. Images and thoughts tumbled through her mind. No, no, I could not allow that to happen to my son, too. . . I had to save him . . . . When he became of draft age, Jia Li had spent some of her secret savings and bribed the draft official to exempt Shihao. It was a selfish thing, very selfish. She never told Shihao what she’d done; she knew he would go into the army willingly and fight like his father had. But she had sacrificed her husband in defending this country; she would not sacrifice her son as well.

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She entered their home, Dewu’s home, and went to her bedroom. She took Dewu’s framed picture down from the wall and sat on the bed where they had slept together. Holding his picture to her cheek, she grieved. “Oh Dewu, my love, I miss you so much. But I am glad you are not alive to live under them again. You tried to stop them. You fought for our freedom. It is not your fault that our government failed us, that the Americans failed us. You tried, my love, and I hope with that your spirit will find peace.” She hugged the picture tightly to her chest and collapsed on her side in a fetal position around it, her tears wetting the bed.

Chapter 30 John Banks

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e had forgotten to set his computer alarm and the extra halfhour he’d slept made him late for his last class. The nap didn’t make him feel any better. He entered his class to lecture on Vietnam wishing he could go back to his apartment and sleep. He now was certain that he had to do something about this. Fortunately what he wanted to say was all nicely packed into his mind for unloading. This lecture and the next one were the core of his interest in Vietnam, and he didn’t want to screw it up He entered the classroom just on time, with students again straggling in after him. “Good afternoon, students.” “Good afternoon, Professor Banks,” the usual ones replied, which didn’t include Miss Phim. But she wouldn’t, he thought, being in the back. “Last time I dealt with the combat, the military aspect of the Vietnam War. It was deadly, cruel, and often savagely fought. Overall, including the pre-Vietnam War guerrilla period and the war itself, it ended in 1975 with about 2.9 million killed on all sides. That was war as we know it historically and traditionally—gun against gun, shell against shell, general against general. However, there was also a different kind of war going on. That was fought against civilians trying to go about their ordinary lives. That is, a war whose prime weapon was democide—outright mass murder. It was fought as though the various Hague and Geneva Conventions defining the laws of war were never signed and ratified by nations. And they were not signed by North or South Vietnam.” John had a three-page outline this time, typed in a very small ninepoint font. He picked up the outline and held it in one hand to consult for place names and figures—and to wave like a weapon when punctuating a point. He glanced at it before continuing. “During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese forces or their Viet Cong front continued their terror campaign against South Vietnamese

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civilians, amounting to 24,756 incidents just from 1965 to 1972. This number covers terrorist executions, as when the Viet Cong entered a government village at night, rounded up officials and civilians on a list, brutally tortured and murdered them, and then disappeared into the jungle. But it does not take into account the continuous, day-by-day terror in the Southern provinces they controlled. The Viet Cong arrested people even for such crimes as having close relatives who worked for the government or who were unsympathetic to the communists.” He glanced at his outline. “Note one captured Viet Cong roster of those arrested from 1965 to early 1967 in seven villages of the Duc Pho district, Quang Ngai province. Among those labeled government agents, spies, policemen, soldiers, and the like were people characterized as distorting communism; sympathizing with the enemy; spreading rumors to belittle, speaking evil of, or attacking revolutionary policy; opposing the denunciation campaign; opposing cadre; being the wife of an enemy soldier; having a husband who is an enemy tyrant or a son who joined the enemy army, and the like. Many of these people faced execution, along with others tagged as tyrants and spies. “One list of such executed from 1963 to 1964 in Phu Yen province included members of South Vietnam political parties, a number one cruel village policeman, an individual who had left the liberated area and who was cruel and stubborn, and a district agent who had incited Catholics to counter the revolution. “Even the wives or relatives of South Vietnamese soldiers were sometimes assassinated. A captured Viet Cong document, for example, revealed that in Binh Tan district the wives of two government officials were murdered; murdered also in Duc Hoa district, according to another captured report, were the dependents of two South Vietnamese military men. “The Viet Cong carried out a particularly gruesome massacre when they temporarily occupied the old city of Hue during the Tet Offensive. They brought with them prepared lists of victims that they sought out and arrested. In short time the victims were shot, beheaded, buried alive, or tortured to death. Hundreds of such victims were found in nineteen mass graves around Hue. The communists themselves estimated they murdered in this way around three thousand people. “Throughout the war, all such murder was planned and systematically conducted by North Vietnam. As part of its own organization and through its operatives placed in key positions, its Ministry of Public Security ran the Viet Cong Security Service, whose members in the years around 1968 reached over twenty-five thousand. It was this or-

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ganization that determined who would be assassinated, executed, murdered, and otherwise punished throughout the South, and then carried out the dirty work. “Aside from those assassinated or arrested and executed, many civilians were also killed by North Vietnamese or Viet Cong mines or booby traps. In Thua-Thien province in 1968, for example, a water buffalo tripped a booby trap and killed the twelve-year-old boy walking alongside; another killed a civilian clearing the area around a grave site. As for mines, special ones made to only explode at the weight of a bus were placed on civilian bus routes. This was no little matter, since buses were a major means of transportation between villages. In one case, for example, twenty-five civilians were killed and five wounded when a bus hit a mine. “Moreover, civilians were fired upon directly. Buses and other civilian vehicles were often raked by automatic fire or mortared from the roadside. Civilians were murdered indiscriminately in ambushes, or died when cities, hamlets, and villages in government areas were shelled and mortared. Twice in March 1969, rockets attacked civilian areas in Saigon, killing fifty-five people and wounding 117. “Then there was the Viet Cong practice of swimming in a civilian sea. They would set up their bunkers in villages and attack from the midst of helpless civilians. Using innocent civilians for protection is in itself a war crime, and makes the Viet Cong and thus the North criminally responsible for the resulting civilian dead. It is a form of democide. “They would also directly attack villages and hamlets and murder the inhabitants, including children, to create panic and social chaos in the area that the communists then could exploit. A particularly gruesome example was their December 1967 attack with flame throwers on Dak Son, a Montagnard hamlet. They murdered 252 Montagnards. In a similar attack in June the next year against the Son Tra hamlet in Quang Ngai province, they murdered seventy-eight civilians. I could spend the rest of our session mentioning one such attack after another. “To show that the government could not provide protection, the Viet Cong even attacked refugee camps or columns of refugees fleeing battle areas. They practiced this particularly criminal policy throughout the war. In one such attack on the Kon Horing highlander refugee camp in Kontum province, they left sixty-eight dead refugees. All this murdering of refugees was by order of Communist Party high officials. For the early 1969 attacks, for example, the party’s Decision No. 9 directed that refugee camps be the main targets for attack.

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“When the communists attacked civilian areas or population centers, it was their policy to leave wounded civilians to die from their wounds, no doubt often slowly and painfully. “As morally reprehensible as all this was, even more abominable was the use of quotas. Again. As the North did over its own people in its deadly land reform. As an example, consider a secret 1969 Viet Cong directive for the Can Duoc District Unit, Subregion 3, which specified for the month of June the following quotas for the units it covered.” John read the quote from his outline: “‘kill at least one chief or assistant chief in each of the following: Public Security Service, District National Police Service, Open Air Service, Information Service, Pacification Teams, and a District Chief or an Assistant District Chief, and exterminate three wicked tyrants living in district seats or wards. As to village units, they must kill three enemy.’ “Captured Viet Cong documents revealed that quotas played a role even in military operations. In capturing and taking over the capital of Ben Tre province, such a document ordered that they must, and I quote—” he read from his outline again “—‘kill from three to five and put out of action from five to ten others on each street, in each block of houses.’” He looked up and clarified that. “Those to be killed were called reactionary elements.” Eyes back to his outline. “To quote further, ‘Loosen the enemy’s oppressive control machinery, destroy seventy percent of the inter-family chiefs and one hundred percent of the administrative personnel in the area.’ “Other documents and sources reveal quotas as well. In the Quang Da Special Zone, a sapper unit was ordered to kill one hundred tyrants; another force in Thua Thien province had to completely destroy two hundred tyrants. “Often, such quotas were imposed at the village and hamlet level. Note the targets assigned by the command committee of the Chau Duc District Unit of Ba Bien province for the upcoming Tet Offensive: ‘Break the enemy grip. Destroy the three village administrative personnel in Phu My, Phuoc Thai, and Phuoc Hoa Villages along Highway No. 5. Kill the ten hamlet administrative personnel, three people’s council members and others of the reactionary political organizations.’ “In some cases the quota to be murdered per village was as high as twenty-five, particularly regarding the government personnel to be exterminated. Sometimes the quotas were even given in the aggregate for whole areas. Just for the coast in the Viet Cong’s Subregion 5, higher authority instructed them to ‘kill 1,400 persons, including 150 tyrants, and annihilate . . . four pacification groups.’”

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John looked around the class. “For those of you ignorant of communist terms, tyrant means government officials.” He could see that some students’ eyes were glazing. Not Phim’s— she leaned forward, her eyes seemingly intent on him. He waved his hand at the class. “Hello. You all with me?” Some nodded. “Take a five minute break. Stretch, tell your neighbor how awed you are by my lecture, but stay in the classroom.” He sat on the corner of his desk and reviewed his outline. Then he heard a very familiar voice say, “Professor Banks, I have a question.” He knew immediately that it was Miss Phim. Not only was her voice more familiar than it should be, given she had spoken in class only once, but when he looked at her so close, he felt . . . . Ah, how to put it . . . a sexual intimacy. He felt as though he could put his arm about her and his hand on her bottom and she would lean into him, as though they were lovers. He almost jumped off the corner of his desk to stand facing her, and must have communicated his confusion, for she hesitated, her eyebrows slightly raised and her full lips parted to show her white teeth. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to recover, “you caught me in midthought. You have a question?” God, those black almond eyes. “Yes. Do you know of any cases where the North or South murdered Sino-Vietnamese because they were Chinese? I have in mind what the Khmer Rouge did in Cambodia in murdering SinoCambodians.” This is a mature woman, much older than the other students, he knew immediately. Aloud he replied, “No, not during this period. That came later, after the war, and was one of the reasons for the massive exodus of the boat people.” “I know,” she said, her voice low and tinged with an odd sadness. “Thank you, Professor Banks.” Before he could respond, she turned and went back to her seat. John refused to look her way, but he felt so excited that his mind was mush. He knew his five minutes were well gone, but he needed time. He held his outline up and looked at it unseeingly until his mind surmounted his emotions. He looked up at the class. “Okay, everyone.” He waited a moment for the students to get back into their seats or get comfortable. Then he resumed his lecture with, “So far I’ve empha-

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sized the Viet Cong democide, always under the direction of the North, it should be remembered. But it did not leave all this dirty work to its Viet Cong front. One example should nail this down.” John went to his lectern and picked up a book he had put there. He waved it to the class. “This is Victims and Survivors by Louis Wiesner. In Clement’s text it is listed among his references. I have also placed it on reserve for this class at the library.” He opened the book to a page that had a slip of paper sticking out. “This is in regard to the North’s Easter offensive in 1973, when North Vietnam’s 711th Division took the Hoai-An and Tam-Quan districts of Binh-Dinh. Then government,” and he started reading from the book, “‘officials were hunted down and tried in kangaroo courts. A hundred village and hamlet cadres in Hoai-An were summarily executed. In Tam Quan forty-eight people were buried alive. Able-bodied inhabitants were taken for forced labor into the jungle, where an estimated eighty died. Younger women were permitted to volunteer “for promotion of soldiers’ morale.” By the time the 22nd Division liberated the area three months later, all the goodwill with which the Communists had been received was gone; the lesson of northern Binh Dinh was not lost in Saigon and elsewhere.’” John put the book down, took a few steps closer to the front row, and returned to his lecture with a halfhearted wave back to the book on the lectern. He was surprised at how tired he felt. He had to finish this. “A count of the total number of civilians, government officials, or South Vietnam soldiers captured as POWs that were murdered is, of course, impossible. South Vietnam, however, did keep some record for part of the war of civilians and officials that were assassinated in the countryside. From this and other sources, I estimate that from nineteen thousand to 113,000 were so assassinated, probably around sixty-six thousand civilians and officials. “Keep in mind that these were noncombatants. They were South Vietnamese who, possibly because of the good job they were doing in a village, their honesty, industriousness, or leadership, or because of their beliefs or outspokenness, were murdered—sometimes with the greatest cruelty and pain. When this number is added to those killed by communist mines, shelling, and in other ways, the total democide by the North in the South was possibly around 164,000 South Vietnamese. Over the course of the guerrilla and Vietnam War this would be about one out of every ninety-eight South Vietnamese men, women, and children. “The various South Vietnamese regimes also murdered civilians and captured guerrillas and North Vietnamese. But that is the next lec-

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ture.” Much to his embarrassment, he heard his voice running down at the end. Then he felt himself slouching in front of the class. Shit. He scanned the class from left to right and back again, and finally had an excuse to look at Miss Phim. She seemed to be staring at him with an eyebrow raised. He straightened up and quickly asked, louder than he intended, “Questions, comments?” After the discussion and an argument between two male students about whether the Vietnam War was a civil war or not, he dismissed the class with a sigh of relief. Miss Phim seemed to take her time leaving and was almost the last one out. Did she hesitate before she left? He couldn’t really tell. A student co-opted his attention by asking for an extension of the due date on her term paper because her computer had crashed and she lost all that she had written. He felt like telling her, “Tough shit, you should have anticipated that.” But he just lifted both hands palm up in a shrug, and then extended her due date by a week.

Chapter 31 2001 Ralph Nieman

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r. Ralph Nieman finished up with the hypochondriac, not of her own health, but that of her daughter. She kept taking the girl to the emergency room at the hospital next door every few weeks with one alleged illness or another. Finally a doctor had the nerve to insist she see a psychiatrist, and recommended Nieman. It had become clear in a short time that the woman craved the attention that a sick daughter would give her from sympathetic relatives and friends. The problem was how to cure her sufficiently enough to protect her daughter. Otherwise he would have to turn the case over to social services. Maybe he would just tell her bluntly to stop using her daughter for her own social life. His nurse stuck her head into the office. “Ready for the next patient, a Professor Banks?” “Give me one moment.” When she closed the door, he picked up the report he had from Banks’ medical doctor and scanned it, then rubbed his chin a few times as he reflected on it. Finally he buzzed his secretary. “Please send Professor Banks in.” When Banks entered, Nieman was immediately stuck by the man’s presence. His eyes were large and frank and looked out from under full, straight eyebrows that contributed to a strong, well-structured face. All this sharply contrasted with his unruly, carrot-colored hair. Slim but well-built and about six feet tall, he carried himself well, but in a relaxed way, not like somebody with a military or executive background. Put a cowboy hat on him and he would be perfect for a cigarette advertisement, Nieman thought. Nieman stood to shake hands with him. Good grip. “Hello, I’m Ralph Nieman, Professor Banks. My pleasure.”

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“I’m John Banks. Nice to meet you.” Pleasant and well-modulated voice, Nieman observed. “Please sit down.” “Ah, on the couch or the chair?” Nieman chuckled as he sat down. “Let’s start with the chair. I’ve set aside two hours for our first meeting, and then for future meetings, we’ll see how it goes. Let’s begin with you telling me what the problem is. Would you mind if I recorded all of this?” “Not as long as I get copies.” “Of course.” Nieman switched on the tape machine on his desk, which had two sensitive microphones located at different places in his office. He moved his lined yellow legal pad by his right hand and picked up a pencil, and looked at Banks and slightly raised his eyebrows in anticipation. Banks described more fully what was in the report that Nieman had received from his doctor. “I’m often awakened with headaches, and they stay with me throughout the day. They’re not blinding headaches. I can function and teach, but they are still distracting and uncomfortable. I take a nap midday that sometimes helps, sometimes not. I know something is wrong with me because of my restlessness at night. I wake up in the middle of the night sweating, my heart pounding, and I have the strangest dreams—at least I sense they’re really strange, but I can recall only crazy snatches. Until a couple of months ago, I was a sound sleeper—usually got a good eight hours straight. Now, I’m not only restless, I am increasingly wetting my jockey shorts with nocturnal emissions.” Banks grinned. “Whatever dreams have been causing that I especially want to remember, but can’t. “Of course, it might all be natural. I have not been with a woman since 9/11, and I’m new to Bloomington. It being a university town, I’m wary of trying to find a prostitute. And being a new professor, you know, there is a wall between me and the female students that is too dangerous for my future to climb. In this age, a misunderstood pat on the back could elicit a harassment complaint, so I’ve kept my distance from the female students.” Nieman noted, No embarrassment, all matter of fact, no gestures, face relaxed, but set. Probably a very boring lecturer. Banks concluded, “Anyway, I went to the university doctor, who gave me all sorts of tests, even a finger to feel my prostrate, and then sent me to a neurologist. After more tests, he referred me to you.”

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“Do you have any specific problems, fears, worries?” Nieman asked. “IRS, stocks going down, relatives, tenure, screwing up a lecture, anything like that?” “Well, screwing up a lecture would be a nightmare. But I don’t think my dreams are about that.” “Okay, just relax and tell me about your background, notable events in your life, and so on.” For the next forty-five minutes, Nieman took few notes as he listened to Banks’ unexceptional life story—except for his awful experience during 9/11. Nieman speculated that it had burned deeply into Banks’ psyche, especially since Banks had no prior experience with the mutilated bodies of men and women, violence, or even death. He simply wrote down “9/11” in his notes, and circled it. This may be easy, he thought. Nieman asked just to be certain, “You say that you can’t remember your dreams.” “Snatches that don’t hang together and are crazy, as I said. I hate guns, but in one dream I’m shooting one. I know nothing of martial arts, but I’m throwing somebody over my shoulder as though it’s the most natural thing to do. I’m dressed funny, as though I’m living far in the past. I make love to a beautiful Asian woman, but I can’t make out her face or body—don’t ask me how I know she is beautiful and Asian. She just is.” “Okay,” Nieman said. “Are you familiar with hypnosis as a psychiatric method?” Banks shook his head. “I’m going to use it to uncover what is in your dreams. I’ll put you into a hypnotic state and then ask you questions about your dreams. If I can uncover their content, then maybe we’ll also uncover what your problem is.” Banks shrugged. “Whatever. If it helps, good. Just tell me about the sex, okay?” Nieman smiled. “I will tape the whole thing and you’ll get copies when I reach my conclusions. Please, lie down on the couch and put your head on that soft pillow on one side.” Banks did so, and then suddenly sat up and started taking his shoes off. “What are you doing,” Nieman asked. “Taking off my shoes.” “Yes. Why?” “I don’t know. I just feel it’s not right to put my feet on the couch with my shoes on.”

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“Were you taught that? Something your parents didn’t allow?” “No, I just felt it wrong now, never before.” Hmm, Nieman thought. Maybe a white coat reaction—one to me being a psychiatrist. With his shoes off, Banks lay back down on the couch. “Oh, this is great. I may fall asleep on you.” Nieman circled the air with his finger. “In a way, I will be putting you to sleep, a hypnotic sleep.” Nieman sat down in the chair near Banks’ head and leaned over him, holding a finger before his eyes. “Now, look at the end of my finger, and only at the end of my finger. Try to clear your mind of everything but my finger.” Nieman waited a moment. “Take a very full breath and let it out slowly. . . . Do it again . . . again. “You are getting sleepy, very sleepy. You are sitting on a warm rock overlooking a placid lake. The sun is shining on your back, and you can feel its warmth. You are relaxed, so sleepy . . . . You leave the rock and stretch out on the short grass under a nearby tree.” Banks’ eyes closed. He breathed softly and regularly. “Can you hear me?” Nieman asked. “Yes.” “Are you asleep?” “Yes.” Nieman began by asking him a few personal questions that he knew the answers to, and then moved to questions about the dreams, slowly trying to reveal their content. He succeeded. In fact, he succeeded well beyond his expectations. In snatches, and then with greater coherence, and finally in full paragraphs, Banks described what Nieman soon understood was one dream: “It’s 9/11. I am horrified by the body parts and people jumping from the burning building and my cousin dying in the collapsing building. I try to provide emotional support to my cousin’s wife, and finally after a week make it back to teach my class. “It’s awful teaching about mass murder and war when I only want to forget about it. Joy is in my class, and I want her. After my last lecture she invites me to a party given by her mother, Tor, for me. The other guests are people who suffered through one war or democide or another, and they have gathered to convince me to join Joy in one-way time travel back to 1906 on a mission to end war and democide and promote a global democratic peace. Joy seduces me into accepting.

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“It will be a dangerous trip. Joy is the martial arts and weapons expert, while I’ll provide the historical information and knowledge about the democratic peace. In preparation for our very risky mission in the past, she tries to teach me her skills so I can protect myself. We make delicious love for the first time during one such session. “We travel back in time and succeed in preventing the Mexican Revolution and World Wars I and II. We democratize China and Japan and spread democracy through much of the world. “But Joy begins to use her power to eliminate rapists and muggers on the streets. I hate her acting as judge, jury, and executioner. It becomes a source of much conflict between us, but it finally seems to be resolved. Then, in the late 1930s, Joy tries to assassinate the American presidential candidate Norman Thomas because she thinks he’s a communist. I stop her and with her help I suffocate her with a pillow to prevent her from ever killing again. Then I write a remembrance of Joy, the love of my life, my best friend, and commit suicide while clutching it to me.” Nieman waited for a few moments, but Banks was silent. What an unusual dream, Nieman thought. It’s coherent, logical and, if you leave the time travel aside, it could be an actual story. It has none of the fantastic or impossible happenings of dreams, such as being chased by a two-headed green man. But, he murdered his lover, no matter the reason. And he committed suicide. Not good. Let’s see if there is anything else to it. Nieman looked at his notes where he had recorded the turning points in the dream, and began to probe at those points. “What was this society that sent you into the past?” “The Survivors’ Benevolent Society. It’s made up of survivors of war and democide, who have devoted all their wealth to the society. Its purpose is to end war and democide.” He went on about the members and then about their backgrounds, with surprising detail. And so on for other questions. When Nieman decided it was time to end the session, he sat for a moment reflecting on what he had heard. Incredible detail for a dream. It was as though he was simply recalling part of his life or . . . something he read. We’ll see. Nieman sat back and told Banks, “I’m going to count to three. When I reach three, you will forget about what you told me about your dream, wake up, and feel good. One. Two. Three.” Banks turned his head to look at Nieman, his eyes wide open. “Did I fall asleep?” “Yes, you fell into a hypnotic sleep. You can sit up.”

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As Banks did so, Nieman asked, “Tell me, Professor Banks, do you know anything about a Survivors’ Benevolent Society? Maybe from something you read?” “No, never heard of it.” Nieman asked other questions, and got the same answer. Then, without any lead up, he asked, “Have you ever felt so depressed that you thought of suicide?” Banks seemed started by the question, and then answered, No, never,” as though he had been asked if he peed in public. “Have you ever hated someone enough to want to murder them?” Banks narrowed his eyes, and shook his head as he blurted “Christ, no.” Hmm. He’s either a good actor or being honest. I’ll go for honesty at this stage, Nieman thought. He gave Banks a few moments, then he asked what he suspected would give him a different answer. “What about a Joy Phim?” Banks eyebrows shot up, and he licked his lips. “I have a Joy Phim in my class. A true beauty. Asian. Is she the one I made love to?” Nieman noted that he actually looked hopeful, and smiled to himself. He answered, “She’s in your dream, but at this point, that’s all I want to reveal. Okay?” Banks nodded. Nieman stood and Banks followed suit. “That’s all for now,” Nieman said. “I think we made progress. I want to set up another appointment, an hour this time. Please do so with my nurse.” They shook hands. On the way out Banks said, “If I’m making love to her in my dreams, that’s great. No fear of sexual harassment, no fear of the relationship souring—it’s a real no-problem hookup.” Nieman smiled and waved goodbye. After the door closed, he wrote down on his yellow pad, Joy is critical.

Chapter 32 2001 John Banks

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e had gone without lunch to fit in his appointment with Ralph Nieman. He hoped the psychiatrist could find the source of his problem. Whatever it was, it was beginning to affect his teaching and writing. Especially his writing. He was in the process of converting his dissertation into something readable—a book on the democratic peace. As it was now, with all the verities demanded by his dissertation committee, the compromises with one or another member, the heavy footnoting, and the references to everyone who had even mentioned the democratic peace over their morning coffee, his dissertation was hardly fit for the educated mind. But when he sat down in the evening to work on it, his mind felt mushy and his concentration wavered. He entered the class a few minutes early. As he was opening his briefcase to take out his outline, Miss Phim came in and stopped at his desk. “Good afternoon, Professor Banks,” she said in her soft, feminine voice. She stood about five feet, eight inches tall to Banks’ six feet, so she tipped her head up as she talked to him. From this new angle, he admired her beautifully oval face and the full lips that she lightly emphasized with lipstick. But it was her remarkable black eyes that again captured him. They were large, almond-shaped, fringed with long black eyelashes, and tipped up at the corners. Jesus, no wonder she’s in my dreams. I could dream about her every night. “This is for you.” She held out a folded note to him. Her eyes and that voice . . . no more than four words, but from then on the memory of her voice and her eyes would attack him with their declaration, “I am woman. I am feminine.” They would never fail to melt him.

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He took the note too rapidly, hoping she did not see his hand shake. With a little smile—almost, it seemed to him, an acknowledgement of what she was doing to him and happiness over the personal note she’d passed to him—she turned to walk to her seat. He stood stunned. Open it. No, later. Now! No, when I can enjoy it. Now. No, I won’t be able to lecture then. His heart was fluttering; his imagination was wild with conjectures: Her telephone number. An invitation of some sort. A tentative opening line. Then it hit him. Goddamn it, she is my student. I can’t have anything to do with her outside of this class. Shit! Ah, but she is in my dream. His mind was out of control. He stood with his briefcase open, staring down into it as though looking at something, the note hanging in one hand. I’ll let her down easy. He began to compose how he would do it. He would say—no, rather write on the note and return it, I’m sorry, but you are my stu—Jesus, the class. He looked up see the students staring at him. He gently laid the note in his briefcase, took out his outline and placed it on the lectern. His headache felt worse. “Good afternoon, students.” he began. “Sorry for the delay. My mind was simply blasted by this incredible insight I had.” He let a few seconds go by as they stared at him. “Did you know . . .” and he let a few more seconds go by, “that the more the North Vietnamese murdered—” his voice took on the quality of a fundamentalist preacher concluding his sermon “—the greater the death toll!” Silence at first and then chuckles sputtering into outright laughter. Still, some looked at him and the other students in confusion, and some appeared to be writing in their notes. He looked at Miss Phim, and saw her shaking her head and laughing. “Absolutely brilliant,” he added. The headache was still there, but he had forgotten it. Humor always helped him. “Well, ready for more brilliance?” With the smiles and groans spreading throughout the class, he began. “The last time I was concerned with the democide by North Vietnam. The South also committed democide, although not as methodically, nor planned at the highest levels, or done under quotas. Still, it was democide nonetheless. “In the early years of the war, the Diem regime tried to resettle and relocate people, euphemisms for forcefully deporting entire villages and regional populations to more secure parts of the country. The os-

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tensible purpose was to better protect these people from the communists and to set up fire-free areas where anyone who moved could be assumed a communist. Presumably, these deportees would also be provided better homes and fields to plant, and be won over to the government’s side. None of this proved true. But in any case, these deportations, often brutally and hastily carried out, killed many people, either in the process or as a result of the relocation itself.” John consulted his outline. “For one minority group of Montagnards, for example, about 208 of the 2,050 people moved to Plei De Groi camp and fifty-six of the 760 relocated to Plei Bang Ba camp died in the next four or five months. “Consider also that out of six thousand Roglai, a minority ethnic group that had lived in the mountains and was deported in 1959, some six hundred died in the next few years. Since the total number of Vietnamese deported throughout the war runs well over one million, the associated deaths must have been in the tens of thousands. These deaths, and that the peasants were forced to leave their precious lands and graves, in some cases even their possessions and animals, hardly endeared the government to them. When the new areas were more difficult to live in, the fields to farm a much greater distance to walk, and above all, not even more secure, one can understand the failure of these relocation programs. “Moreover, the Diem regime, and those that forcefully succeeded it in rapid succession after he was assassinated in the 1963 coup d’etat, carried out their own terror campaigns against communists and procommunists. They arrested thousands, many of whom died in prison or were executed. In an attempt to unify government control in the early years, military and police sweeps were made of semiautonomous religious sects or locally independent militias or armies. Political opponents and nonconformists were murdered. “I have to be very careful when estimating the number of communists or political opponents killed in such operations or in South Vietnam’s prisons. Condemning the South for its massacres, atrocities, allegedly huge prison populations, and prison torture and deaths—and the United States for atrocities—was a communist industry during the war, with many communist agents posing as responsible critics. “For example, a Paris-educated Redemptorist priest in Saigon, Father Chan Tin, made many charges against the government, including that it had 202,000 political prisoners. He claimed to be part of a ‘third force’ that could negotiate an end to the war and an independent South free of the United States and the communist North. He created an or-

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ganization called the Committee to Investigate Mistreatment of Political Prisoners, and his charges were actually presented to an American congressional committee, and doubtless played a role in the increased reluctance of the American Congress to support the South. At the end of the war, it turned out that Chan Tin was a secret agent for the North. “Nonetheless, it is also clear that throughout the war the South Vietnam military treated captured communist soldiers or guerrillas with little respect. They were often, if not usually in the early years, tortured for information and then killed or, if wounded, simply left to die. While perhaps this order did not originate at the top, such killing must have been done with the acquiescence, if not nodding agreement, of the South’s high command. As the war progressed, the United States brought considerable pressure to bear on the government to more humanely treat its prisoners, and it apparently complied to a degree. “Nor were noncombatants immune to democide by the South Vietnamese military. Villages were often bombed and shelled indiscriminately and soldiers made little distinction when civilians were mixed in with enemy guerrillas.” Again a glance at his outline. “For example, in February 1964, the Viet Cong captured Ven-Cau village in Tay Ninh province. Even though the village had a population of six thousand people, government forces still bombed and shelled it. They killed forty-six civilians, wounded sixty more, destroyed 670 homes, caused two thousand refugees to flee, and killed eleven Viet Cong. Although occurring a few months after the anti-Diem coup, such indiscriminate military action reflected an attitude toward civilian lives all too common in the Diem years. “In such ways and in other forms of democide I’ve mentioned, the Diem regime probably murdered thirty-nine thousand Vietnamese. The successor regimes were little better. Executions, torture, the killing of POWs, and indiscriminate bombing and shelling continued. Through American pressure, public opposition, and the recognition that much of this killing was counterproductive, such democide lessened over the years of the war. Nonetheless, these post-Diem regimes themselves probably murdered some fifty thousand Vietnamese.” Another glance, but this time also at Miss Phim. His heart skipped. “Ah . . . when the democide of all South Vietnamese governments is added up from 1954 to the fall of Saigon in April 1975, the toll comes to fifty-seven thousand to 284,000 Vietnamese—likely eighty-nine thousand. While this number is fifty-four percent of the North Vietnamese democide in the South, during the war both the North and the South were in the same murderous league.”

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He had lots of time, but didn’t feel up to lecturing anymore, and this was a natural break. “Next time I will deal with the most contentious of all for Americans, which is American democide in Vietnam. What I will have to say about American democide is hated by the left as far too few and the right as far too many. But as with all my lectures, you can take it as the absolute, undeniable truth.” A big smile. I just want to get the hell out of here. “Questions, comments?” He sat on the desk, used his deck of names, and barely heard the discussions he stimulated among the students. Miss Phim seemed to have her eyes riveted on him, and he knew she was hoping for a positive response to her note. It was now like a rare delicacy to be prized, something over which his anticipation should build until unbearable, and then he’d consume it with the utmost joy. Oh, a pun. Ha-ha. I’ll open it in my faculty apartment. When he dismissed the class and several students came up to him, he tried to position himself so that he could sneak glances at Miss Phim. She left the classroom without a return glance at him. Maybe upset at my not responding, he thought, now worried that maybe he had missed his chance

aaa After the last lecture, he rushed back to his faculty apartment with Miss Phim’s note and increasing anticipation. He placed it on his little secretarial desk, got himself a cold beer, and sat down at the disk, beer in hand. He set the bottle down near the note. Then with his anticipation and the note’s sensual mystery now unbearable, he finally opened it. Professor Banks—there is a problem getting the Wiesner book in the reserve room. Betty Swartz, the reserve librarian, asked me to have you call her at x2143. That was it. All the air went out of him. He collapsed into a teenage boy’s slouch, hands hanging over the side of his chair, head downcast, chin resting on his chest. This was too passive a reaction for him, and soon he sat up, leaned over the desk, and knocked his head on the desktop several times, confessing, “Dumb, dumb, dumb.”

Chapter 33 1975–1976 Wang Shihao

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ay by day, through carefully listening to the communist news (the only news available now), talking to his friends from his university days, and picking up the stories and rumors flying around the city, Shihao made it his primary business to keep track of what the North was doing with its victory. He felt that ultimately their lives were at stake. “Better to anticipate than be surprised” was his new motto. And he was not surprised when, even before the sound of the communist T-54 tanks entering the city had died down, the communists set up a new Military Management Committee. Nor was he surprised when one of its first communiqués ordered the “temporary” suspension of publication of newspapers, books, magazines, pamphlets, and all other printed material, or when teams went block by block to confiscate all “reactionary” printed material. Jia Li had told him to expect the loudspeakers. They were set up everywhere, every twenty buildings or so, to carry all the new government’s— really the Communist Party’s—announcements and propaganda. From his knowledge of communism elsewhere, Shihao expected what the communists did seven days after the fall of Saigon—they renamed it Ho Chi Minh City. And since he expected nationalization of some sort, he was not surprised when the communists announced that the new government, and not private individuals, owned all foreign currency and metals. Nor was he surprised when they gradually imposed total rationing, or at the inflation that set in as a result of their control over food and prices—the price of a kilo of rice increased about seven hundred percent. This did not hit Shihao and his family too hard. Since they’d expected the rationing and resulting inflation, they had secreted canned

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food, rice, corn, and potatoes, and established a black market bartering arrangement with several sellers at the market—good rattan furniture for food when they needed it. But Shihao was surprised by the clever trick the communist pulled two months after their victory. In mid-May the communists ordered all former ARVN enlisted troops to attend three-day “reeducation camps.” Some former soldiers that he and Jia Li knew through their store did so fearing for their lives. Two of them wrote their wills beforehand. But the communists let them all return in three days, after attending lectures and group meetings led by communist officials, and writing their biographies. So, when on June 11 they ordered all officers and middle to high government officials to attend “reeducation” camps for a month, many were only concerned about the lost time from their work or families. Before going, Vo Dinh Nam, a former education official, told Jia Li, “Shihao is ridiculous about his warnings—the communists are really not that bad.” Shihao laughed ruefully to himself when he heard about it much later. They were all fooled. The communists imprisoned most in miserable concentration camps. If the communists did not immediately execute them or kill them from overwork, disease, or malnutrition, they refused to tell them when they would be released to see their loved ones again. The new underground had been very good at spreading the word about these so called “reeducation” camps, in reality deadly concentration camps. “Those prisoners should have known what would happen, and tried to disappear beforehand,” Shihao told Yan. “But people will believe what they want to believe, especially if it’s constantly repeated over the radio stations, TV channels—and the only existing ones are communist—and those pig–ass, universal, unavoidable loudspeakers. Soon we will not be able to pee without the communists knowing when, and how long it took.” Still, Shihao did not feel that he or his family were at risk, even though, as time went on, it seemed less and less a joke. And then the announcement came over the loudspeakers, to be repeated on radio and TV: “In each neighborhood, the government has set up a democratic People’s Committee. Now, by law, every family must register each of its members with its neighborhood committee. The committee will issue each family member a registration paper upon registration. This is a very important document and you must not lose it. You must show this paper to get rations or fabrics, and if you do not have it when a policeman asks to see it, he will arrest you.

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“Any family member who wishes to travel must apply to the committee for a permit. If you leave the city without a permit, the police will arrest you. You must record with the committee any and all guests in your home. It is illegal to have unrecorded guests. “Listen carefully for the address of the committee in your neighborhood . . . .” Because of the long lines for the first registration and the demand for one personal document or another, it took Shihao, Jia Li, and Yan three trips to register their family. Shihao made sure each of them smiled throughout. “But, of course,” Jia Li said, when she found out that the communists had also set up a Public Security Force composed of local toughs and youths who wanted to ingratiate themselves with the communists. They were supposed to spy on families, check registration papers, and look for unrecorded guests or homes that remained unoccupied overnight. These the communists then seized and looted. They were like gangsters given a free pass. With them on the prowl, low-level fear became a daily companion for Shihao and his family. “You know,” Yan told Shihao, “I think they will actually know when we pee.” The first great shock resulting from communist control was not experienced by Shihao’s family, nor the average citizen, but by all those who had bought the propaganda of an independent Viet Cong and NLF fighting for the independence and freedom of South Vietnam from both the North and the Americans. Shihao learned from friends that the communists purged the university of the Third Way by arresting its members in the faculty and student body. He could not help the glee that crept into his voice when he told his mother and Yan about it. “The communists completely fooled all those Third Way activists. They suckered even those leading the NLF. Since our defeat, they have squashed all attempts of Viet Cong and NLF officials to be independent, arresting those who insisted on what was promised, even those they see as a potential danger. They have even executed those rebelling against the North’s absolute rule—oops, I should say the North’s Glorious Revolution.” Jia Li nodded. “Good that I saved you from that do ngu—stupid Hanh.” Shihao looked wide-eyed at her for a moment, and then said humbly, “Of course.” But he felt his old feelings for Hanh welling up from his heart, and saw her again in his mind, approaching his table for their

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final meeting. I hope she survived . . . I bet she didn’t submit. He took a deep breath and tried to push the thought and accompanying emotions away. “Ah, yeah . . . .” The North had totally taken over. The government in Hanoi now dictated everything; the South had become little better than the North’s colony, and was treated as such. Shihao could not help wondering what those suffering in one reeducation camp or prison after another thought now—all those Third Way opposition delegates in the former National Assembly, or all those Buddhist monks, some of whom had actually committed suicide by dousing themselves in gasoline and burning for that cause. And Hanh? He forced his mind back on track and shook his head. “All those do ngu students demonstrating for a change in the political system, and for the independence and freedom of the South from the corrupt South Vietnam government and the United States—they must be realizing how do ngu they were.” He couldn’t help it. His mind again revolted and he saw Hanh as she sat across from him, telling him about her love for him. And how she’d looked when he glanced back at her while he walked away. He bit his lip. The pain helped. He took a deep breath, and tried to return to his verbal musings over what the communists had done.

aaa “Get rid of it,” Shihao demanded. “I do not want you to bring a child into this miserable world. It will be awful for the child, and will make life worse for us. How could you be so do ngu, to get pregnant?” he yelled. Then he realized what he had said, when Yan’s shocked expression collapsed into tears. Before he could apologize, Jia Li came into the room, put her hands on her hips, and barked at him, “It takes two, my son. You are the do ngu one.” Yan drew close to Jia Li. Looking at Shihao, she declared in a tremulous voice, “I’m having my baby. Your baby, Shihao. I love you and want your child.” Jia Li clasped her arm and said in a softer tone, “I support her, Shihao. I want grandchildren. I want our line, Dewu’s line, to continue.” “How long?” Shihao asked Yan, his voice still husky with irritation. “About five months.” Then she stood up straight, jutted her chin out at him, and rubbed her hand over her stomach. “I was afraid to tell you, but I’m beginning to show.”

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Shihao smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand, and muttered something about being blind as a rock. He sighed deeply, and then shrugged. I am only one man.

aaa In July 1975, Shihao and his family got hammered. No one expected it. No one had prepared for it. Suddenly, the established currency would be no good. A new currency would replace it. But only so much of the old currency could be converted to the new by an individual. Fortunately Jia Li, ever prudent with the business and family budget, had been converting as much as she could into gold every month. “How much will we lose?” Shihao asked her. “Too much. Not my fault. We had to keep so much in cash for our day-to-day business operations. We’ll lose most of it, unless we buy something with it.” They left immediately for the market, which was jammed full of people trying to spend their money. The prices of all goods soared. A riot threatened to erupt, as people pushed and fought to buy things while accusing sellers of trying to rob them. But soon nothing more could be bought with the old currency, for then the sellers would also be unable to convert all of their money. After the conversion, the economy was near collapse; one business after another folded. “We still have our business,” Jia Li said. “Also, the black market is becoming very good for us. And we can bribe the communists, I was told, to get some hard-to-find things that we need. Several people are acting as intermediaries.” “Yeah,” Shihao responded bitterly. “Soon, I bet that will be the only way to get something done.” He soon realized how prophetic he was. Corruption among the communists became universal. “The communist officials have so much more power, and power breeds corruption,” he told Yan. “With the absolute power communist officials and agents have over everyone’s daily lives, bribery has become their way of life.” He mentally shook his head at that, and remembered how upset Hanh had been at the corruption of the South Vietnamese government. Buddha, it hardly compares to what is going on now. Shihao kept hearing rumors of worse things to come. Now he was scared—frightened for their welfare and even for their lives, and fright-

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ened for the life of the infant on the way. But when he brought up fleeing Vietnam, neither Yan nor Jia Li would agree. “Do khung—crazy, do khung, staying here,” he admonished them. “We’ve got to leave. I’m telling you, things can only get worse.” Yan shook her head sadly. “You are always saying that. But it’s not as bad as that. We have the store—” “And our house, Dewu’s house,” Jia Li broke in. “I don’t want to leave it.” Then she stared down at her hands and said softly, “You two go. I will stay.” “I’m not going,” Yan insisted, staring at Shihao and crossing her arms. “You go, if you really want to.” “Sure, and leave you here pregnant.” That ended it for a while, but the communists gradually increased their control. Not even Jia Li, who had lived under communism in the North, had anticipated how bad it would get.

aaa Again, the same news over the communist loudspeakers. He must have heard it a dozen times in two days: “When the Chinese puppet Khmer Rouge marched into Cambodia’s capitol of Phnom Penh, they began the deadly evacuation of the whole city and dispersed the whole population into villages, where they were forced to labor in the fields from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. Hundreds of thousands died in the evacuation. Now, more hundreds of thousands are dying of starvation. The Khmer Rouge have also murdered former members of the government and military, professionals and Buddhist monks, and anyone disobeying them . . . they have been particularly vicious in killing Vietnamese Cambodians; within the last week, they have murdered several thousand. They have attacked our towns and villages near the border . . . .” He felt like putting his hands over his ears, but he couldn’t trust that somebody wouldn’t see him through the window of his house and report him. Jia Li seemed not to be listening. When the speakers turned to announcing the next levy of public service work teams, Shihao asked her, “What do you make of this sudden and continual interest in Cambodia?” “They want to turn our attention from what they are doing here. ‘See,’ they are saying, ‘we are not so bad.’ And I think they are beginning to prepare for war against the Khmer Rouge. That is the only explanation for what they are saying about fellow communists.”

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Shihao nodded glumly. “I have to give our communist rulers credit. They have not made the same mistake the Khmer Rouge did in being so public about their executions, and in such a hurry. Our own glorious North Vietnamese communists have tightened their control gradually, arresting people out of sight, killing them quietly, and setting up a positive-sounding campaign of reeducation for former government and military officials as a cover for imprisoning them in concentration camps—where many soon die or are executed.”

aaa Several months after the defeat, two low-ranking Northern communist officials barged into Shihao’s family home without notice, announcement, or knocking. They looked around inside and outside as though looking to buy the house. Yan was at home. At first she was afraid that the men were burglars, but they were polite to her, and showed no weapons. After about an hour of looking around, poking at things, and opening doors and drawers, they put it nicely to Yan: “Would you lend your refrigerator, TV set, camera, and binoculars to the government?” She knew the consequences of refusing, and Jia Li had instructed her in how to act toward communist demands. Placing her hand on her round belly, she gave both men a wan smile—she could do no better. Bowing her head slightly, she replied in a wavering voice, “Yes, of course. My family and I would be most happy to lend you these things.” One of the men started to write out a receipt for her, but she waved it away. “I trust the government,” she said, trying to sound indignant that they thought she needed a receipt. They gave her big smiles before carrying everything to a small Volkswagen minibus they must have “borrowed” from some other home, and driving off. Closely following this was the inventory of their home, which Yan knew was far more dangerous to them. She had been warned by a friend down the street who had it done to her that it would happen to everyone, and she passed the warning on to Shihao and Jia Li. District by district, home by home, security agents searched even the remotest corners, looking for anything antirevolutionary and now illegal, such as foreign currency, Western books, guns, incriminating photos, and so on. If they found any such items, the family was arrested immediately. Yan’s warning gave them time to thoroughly cleanse the house of anything dangerous.

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Security agents walked into the house while Shihao and Yan were home. With a nod to both, they began their search. Shihao smiled, offered to help, or tried to stay out of the way as they lifted things, emptied drawers, and moved furniture, stopping only to sip the jasmine tea Yan made for them. After a couple of hours, the home looked as if it had been ransacked by burglars. The agents found nothing. When the agents left, and both were certain they’d not be heard, Yan broke down into shuddering tears while Shihao held her tight.

aaa The yell of the midwife, following Yan’s final, tired screech, told Shihao all he needed to know. He ran into the bedroom where Yan was birthing, but Jia Li, seeing him enter out of the corner of her eye, waved him into a corner. Shihao stood there with his arms crossed, grinding his teeth in frustration over what would happen to them now. An infant . . . an infant. Oh, Buddha. Ngu Nhu Heo—you are as dumb as a pig, he told himself. He clenched his fist and began hitting his leg with it. Just an abortion. An abortion . . . that’s all. There would have been none of the problems we now will have with an inf— “It is a girl,” the midwife announced as she snipped the umbilical cord. Then she slapped the infant’s behind, and the infant began crying. She handed her to Jia Li, who wiped her dry and then covered her with towels. Yan was still gasping, but she managed to moan, “See her,” and held out her arms. Jia Li gently put the infant into her arms, and then motioned for Shihao to join her. For Yan’s sake, Shihao smiled at the baby as he stroked Yan’s hair. She cooed to the infant and kissed its ruddy cheek. He leaned over and kissed Yan’s wet lips, and then, when Yan held out the infant to him, he faked a happy grin as he took the child and held her. What else can I do? They had discussed names beforehand, and he and Yan had consented to his mother’s desire to name the infant Jy-ying after her honored mother. He handed the infant back to Yan with the admonition, “You bring up Jy-ying well, now. I want her to be just like her mother.” Her eyes sparkled with happiness. Well, Shihao thought as he kissed her again, I’ll be a good father. But I still should not have made Yan pregnant.

Chapter 34 2001 Ralph Nieman

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hen Banks entered Nieman’s office for his second visit, he wasn’t looking good. He appeared as though he was just getting over a cold. After greeting him, Nieman asked him if he was sick. Banks shook his head. “Bad night?” Nieman asked. Banks slowly nodded. “Remember anything about it?” “I had a gun and shot somebody who was throwing a knife at me,” he blurted. “There was a woman with indistinct features who seemed to have a double. I was tortured. I woke up screaming. That’s about it.” Nieman had already turned on the recorder, but he also made notes as Banks spoke. He lifted a brow in mute acknowledgment of the other’s bad night, then he asked, “Do you have anything to add to what you said at our last meeting?” Banks again nodded and rubbed his hand across his face. “Damn note,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry,” Nieman said, “what did you say?” “It’s nothing.” Banks shrugged. “Just a note I got from a student.” Nieman caught the underlying tone of disgust. “Do you want to put this off?” When Banks shook his head vigorously, Nieman pointed to the couch, and waited to see if Banks would take off his shoes before lying back on the couch. He did. Nieman noted it. When Banks was comfortable, Nieman used the trigger he had implanted in Banks’ memory during the previous hypnotic trance: “P, R, ti.” It was a meaningless phrase that Banks would never hear by accident. Banks immediately went into a trance. After the initial questions to gauge the depth of Banks’ hypnosis, Nieman asked him about his dream. In a wooden monotone, Banks described it haltingly at first, and then as though he were reading it.

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“An Islamic fundamentalist . . . Sabah was his name . . .seized power in Uighuristan in Middle Asia . . . . He eventually did the same in China, spreading his fundamentalist Islamic creed. When too old to rule . . . he passed his power on to his fanatical son . . . his son exploited China’s resources to build nuclear bombs. He hid them in New York and the other major cities of the democracies. Oh my God . . . my God, he set them off! Jesus, how horrible! Over a billion killed . . . . “The democracies have surrendered to the threat to set off more of them, and Sabahism rules the world . . . . “But . . . before they die from radiation sickness, survivors— actually survivors of an institute that my money sets up before I commit suicide—send a message downtime to Joy and me—me, with that beauty Joy again in 1906. Wow.” Nieman had to smile at the “Wow,” since the exclamation was stated in the same monotone in which the rest of the dream was delivered. “The message asks us to stop Sabah. We plan to assassinate him when he is a child in 1914 . . . . Followers of Sabah in China find out about the message, but they don’t know who received it. They fear that Sabah will be killed, and send back to 1906 a female Chinese warrior . . . Jy-ying . . . to assassinate the recipient of the message. “Jy-ying discovers that Joy and I received the message, and plans to kill us eventually . . . . First she goes along with our mission to set up the democratic world in which Sabah will thrive and world victory for Sabahism will be possible. But she soon falls in love with me . . . of course.” Banks chuckled. “She plans to kill only Joy . . . but she finds out that she and Joy are the same person from separate universes. “God, how stupid this is . . . . “Jy-ying confronts Joy with this . . . before she loses her own motivation, she sets up a fight to the death between them . . . . She badly injures Joy, and is ready to deliver the death blow to her when I rush into the gym where they are and shoot her. “My God, I killed her with a gun . . . . My God.” Nieman waited, but the silence continued. He asked, “Is that the end of your dream?” “No,” Banks whispered. “Then please continue.” “I don’t want to. It’s horrible. Again.” Nieman then resorted to the questions he often used when his client had trouble relating a bad dream. Banks’ eyes had grown misty, but he stuttered, “Joy and I travel to Uighuristan to . . . kill baby Sabah . . . we buy him from his parents to

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do so . . . . We can’t do it . . . can’t murder a baby. We decide to adopt him. And I propose marriage to Joy . . . . Oh, she’s so happy to accept. It’s what she always wanted. We celebrate by making great love . . . . And then we and baby Sabah are killed by an Islamic terrorist bomb— by terrorists upset at non-Muslims buying a Muslim child . . . . “Holy Christ.” Tears flooded Banks’ eyes. He began shaking. Nieman quickly brought him out of the hypnosis, and calmed him down with a series of easy biographical questions. Then he asked Banks how he’d felt after these dreams, and he answered as before. “Lousy, tired, sometimes headachy.” Nieman then asked Banks to set up another appointment. “I think that we are making progress,” he said. “Your dream has given me a lot to think about.” After Banks left, Nieman wrote down his impression of the dream. It was as coherent as the one he’d heard Banks describe during the last meeting, and this amazed him. The dream was not spotty and disconnected, with often implausibly fantastic segments, but a continuous story. One that would continue, it seemed. A nuclear war, and a Joy from another universe sent back in time to assassinate John and Joy . . . it was like Banks under hypnosis was reading out the story from a science fiction book. Hmm, and what to make of his feeling uncomfortable lying on the couch with his shoes on?

Chapter 35 1976–1977 Wang Shihao

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hihao parked their cart for delivering furniture and rushed into the store, looking for Jia Li. She was in the back repairing a chair. “I think our store is going to be taken from us,” he blurted. “What are you talking about?” Jia Li exclaimed. “The news is all over town. The communists will be taking over farms, plantations, and businesses through a tax trick. They are going to claim taxes are owed, or impose a tax that will be impossible for most businesses to pay. Then the communists will seize them for nonpayment of taxes.” “Is that all?” Jia Li asked, looking at him stone-faced. “No. They are also going to force farmers to join ‘cooperatives,’ which in effect will give the government control over what farms produce, and the prices of that produce.” Still Jia Li stood there. “Is that all? Yet?” “I hate to say it, but no. They will take over all fishing boats, and set the government prices for all fish sold.” “Are you done?” “Yes.” Jia Li slowly put away her tools, leaving the chair and debris from her repair work on the floor. She looked at Shihao, her head high, but her lower lip trembled. In a quavering voice Shihao could barely hear, she said, “We know what to do . . . don’t we.” Then she stopped and put her head in her hand. “I’m sorry, Dewu,” she murmured. They prepared for the tax bill by selling or bartering off their inventory of furniture, and even what was on the floor, including light fixtures, counters, window shades, curtains, and throw rugs. They converted the resulting cash to gold. They disobeyed the new law that all

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savings had to be in the government’s banks, which could only be withdrawn with government approval. They hid their gold temporarily underneath a large root of the tamarind tree behind their house. Their store’s tax bill soon came, addressed to “Owner.” Jia Li opened it and laughed, waving it in the air. Shihao had to see it. He snatched it out of her hand and looked at the amount. He broke out in laughter also. It was three times their rattan store’s gross annual receipts. Using their delivery cart, they transported to their home what items remained, locked the completely empty store’s door, and never returned. At home, Shihao again begged, “Please. We must leave this do khung country and find freedom for Jy-ying. For ourselves.” Yan shook her head vigorously. “No, Jy-ying is too young. And we still have our home. What more can they do to us.?” “They” had become a universal reference to the communists. Jia Li said simply, “I will not leave my country. I love Vietnam.” Yan added, “If you want to go so badly Shihao, go.” Her irritated tone carried its own message, “No, sweetheart, I will never leave you and my daughter. And my mother. That is no option. Period.” Shihao felt the heat rising in his face. “Never suggest it again,” he shouted at Yan. Jia Li stepped in. “Maybe things will get better. It cannot go on like this. People will rebel throughout the country. They are now rebelling in the south.” Everyone had heard the rumor that Viet Cong and NLF troops south of Saigon were in open rebellion, attacking PAVN units and government facilities. Shihao hated to squash such hope, but he knew the truth would make them better prepared. And maybe get them to flee, eventually. He calmed down enough to control his voice. “That such rebellion would spread, or be successful for long, is impossible, Mom. The control of the North Vietnamese is too absolute, too totalitarian. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.”

aaa It came as an absolute shock to the family, catching them unprepared. They’d heard no rumors about it. Communist preparations for the announcement must have been done by a small, tight group. The loudspeakers broadcast it while Shihao was playing with Jy-ying, and Yan was sewing Jy-ying little shorts. Jia Li was napping.

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“Special announcement. Special announcement,” the loudspeakers blared. “The rich and greedy capitalists who live in mansions and big houses have secured them on the sweating backs of the working class and poor of Ho Chi Minh City, while these people who are the backbone of the revolution can only cover themselves with tin roofs. The mansions and big houses are the people’s, and as their democratic representative, the government now will take ownership so that we can fairly allocate living room for everyone. “Henceforth, according to deadlines the People’s Committee will hand out, no one needs more than seventy-eight square feet of living space or, for a family, the number of members times this space. Those whose homes exceed this amount must find living space that meets this standard. Those who refuse to leave their mansions or big houses will be arrested for opposing the people’s rights. “Once this standard has been met, everyone will have fair and equitable living space. Long live the Revolution.” Shihao grabbed a paper bag, found a pencil, and sat on the floor to calculate what their maximum living space would be under the new rules. “We are only allowed 234 square feet,” Yan said. Shihao finished his calculation, looked at her askance, and said, “You are right.” He then went into their bedroom to get the title for their home. It was in a locked metal box they hid behind a loose board in the closet. The document said their home was 946 square feet. “Incredible! Inhumane! Typical!” Shihao swore. “We will have to move out and give up the land we own underneath as soon as they set our deadline.” It was finally too much. He slouched in his place on the floor, put his head in his shaking hands, and cried. “We should have fled. We should have fled,” he kept moaning as he rocked back and forth. Yan knelt next to him, put her arm around his shaking shoulders, and murmured, “We have each other. We are still a family and they cannot change that. We will find a place.” Jia Li came out of her bedroom, and Yan told her the awful news. She turned white, turned around without a word, and returned to her bedroom. The door shut with a soft click. Yan guessed that she was hugging Dewu’s picture.

aaa The deadline came. They had two weeks to turn their house over to the communists.

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Instantly, with the announcement, there were too many families looking for too few places to live. One-room shacks now cost in gold what a good three-bedroom house had before the defeat. Shihao found a tin-roofed hut downwind of the stench of Cholon’s Ben Tai Market, where they sold fish. It cost almost sixty gold taels. “Good Buddha,” he exclaimed to Yan, “that is almost twelve thousand dollars at the current price of gold. It’s making a big dent in our savings.” They moved what little furniture and appliances they could from their home, and hung up sheets to divide the shack into two tiny bedrooms and a cooking and eating area. There was no electricity for the shack, so they bought a little woodstove, and Shihao made a hole for its stovepipe in the wall of discarded wood behind it. Nor was there a toilet, so he cut a hole in the floor in a corner, and underneath dug a hole so he could put a bucket there for their waste. He dug the hole deeper than needed so that there was room underneath the bucket for all their gold and jewelry. They were no sooner settled than they heard by rumor and announcements of the so-called New Economic Zones. The communists were shipping whole families, especially refugees or those questionable in some of the many ways possible, to remote areas to drain swamps, clear forests, build dams, dig irrigation systems, and the like. Jia Li told Shihao that she would try to get as much information as possible at the market. A week later, she reported what she’d found out to Shihao and Yan. She did not try to keep the concern out of her voice. “It is awful, what is being done to the people being sent there. They labor without electricity or potable water. They have to build their own dwellings. And they must grow their own food. I heard that many are dying from disease and malnutrition, or overwork.” She stopped. With furrowed brow and tight lips, she looked over at Jy-ying sleeping on a blanket placed on the dirt floor. She sighed, and after a few seconds continued. “Those unwilling to work hard, or who try to escape, are likely to be executed.” No one spoke. It was a hot and humid day, and the stench from the market was especially bad. Yan reached for a small towel and held it over her nose. “Okay,” Shihao finally said. “We have been trying to keep to the rules, and we will have to be especially careful now. We must be friendly with communist functionaries. We will do however many days of ‘community service’ they demand with ready bow and smile. And if they ask us to wipe their ass, we will respond, ‘How good-looking it is!’”

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From then on, their fear of being sent to a New Economic Zone was a shuddering presence in all family discussion and activity, and even when they went to bed at night. But what they feared the least was the terror that befell them. Months later, in the early evening, three security agents walked into their shack while Yan was cooking on their little woodstove and Shihao was trying to make a chair with cast-off wood. Jia Li was at the market. One of them pointed his American military .45 at Shihao. “Are you Wang Shihao?”

Chapter 36 2001 John Banks

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e entered the classroom determined not to look Miss Phim’s way, even if she danced naked on her seat. He had been so dumb, so painfully dumb, about her note. He was still embarrassed; he felt like one of those old men who interpreted a young thing’s smile as a come-on. That morning, first thing before his appointment with Nieman, he had called the reserve librarian, who asked him if he minded having the Wiesner book cross-reserved. Another professor had reserved it for his class also. John could only say, “Okay.” He was not up to giving another lecture today, and had been tempted to cancel the class. But that would force him to omit some material from his lectures later, and he didn’t want to do that. He opened his briefcase, took in hand his outline, and turned to the class, consciously avoiding the slightest glance at Miss Phim. “Good afternoon, students,” he said. After the usual responses, he began his lecture. “I have dealt with the democide of North and South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Now, let’s look at what the United States did. Although much lesser in extent and different in nature, the democide by U.S. forces in South Vietnam must be recognized. “Unlike the communists, and to a much greater degree than the South Vietnamese army, the Americans did in general try to make a distinction between combatants and noncombatants. This is evident, for example, in the treatment of wounded enemy soldiers, guerrillas, and civilians. Whereas communist forces would leave enemy wounded to die from their wounds, including civilians who had not given allegiance to them, U.S. forces generally made an effort to treat and evacuate to hospitals any wounded, regardless of what side they were on.

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“There were charges by the antiwar, pro-North Vietnam, and American communists and leftist propagandists that the United States carried out a systematic violation of the laws of war and the Geneva Convention. The evidence does not back this up. On the other hand, there are many isolated cases of the American military violating the laws of war. Much of the problem lies with the American command, which was, in the initial years of war, lax in educating its troops in proper conduct, and in enforcing such conduct on the part of its troops. “This is especially true with regard to democide. The My Lai massacre, in which about 347 innocent peasant women and children were massacred by U.S. soldiers, is well known. Other massacres probably occurred as well. Also, it cannot be doubted that U.S. soldiers killed North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong who were trying to surrender. When Lieutenant James B. Duffy was court-martialed and found guilty for ordering that a prisoner be killed, the evidence showed that there was a ‘no prisoner’ policy from higher-ups governing the ground action of many soldiers. “This and other testimony, letters, and news reports, reveal that some American soldiers did torture and kill prisoners, shoot communists trying to surrender, machine-gun from hovering helicopters peasants running away, disproportionately bomb and shell villages suspected of helping the Viet Cong or from which some sniper fire may have come, and so on. There were hundreds of cases reported of villages destroyed from the air or by ground troops because of snipers firing from them, or on mere suspicion that the Viet Cong or North Vietnam troops were in them. In some cases, American troops shot down people because they were acting oddly or running away. Moreover, some American soldiers admitted that they had killed civilians or committed atrocities. “A measure of such killing of noncombatants is the number of weapons captured as a ratio of the enemy killed in action. The normal ratio killed to weapons captured was three to one. In one seven-month operation begun in December 1968 and focused on the densely populated provinces in the upper delta, the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division reported killing . . . ” John took a quick glance at his outline, “10,883 enemy. These killings occurred mainly in small-scale ground and air actions, such as by helicopter gunships. However, they captured only 748 weapons, or a ratio of killed to weapons of 14.5 to one. In some actions the ratio was as high as fifty to one. Observers of these actions verified what is obvious from such ratios—not all killed were active Viet Cong.”

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John stopped to give the students a chance to absorb what he had said. “Okay so far?” “That’s awful,” volunteered one female student. A boy asked, “How could they do that?” John was amused that North Vietnam’s much more massive and inhumane democide during the war had not received the same reaction. “Let me try to answer that,” he responded. “You cannot picture this war in the same way that the movies portray World War Two—soldier fighting soldier, tank fighting tank, and so on. The Vietnam War was a dirty war; guerrillas fought in the midst of civilians. Alleged atrocities were committed in the heat and fog of battle. When one’s buddies were killed by grenades tossed in the open door of a medical helicopter by civilians, for example, respecting civilian immunity appeared stupid and dangerous. “Also, civilians did plant mines, prepare booby traps, and willingly or unwillingly carry supplies and help build Viet Cong bunkers, which were often built under villages. The Viet Cong often used villages as protective cover when firing on American troops or aircraft. By the international conventions defining the laws of war, those specifically involved in such activities can become military targets, even though civilians. “Of course, it usually was impossible to tell which civilians helped the enemy and which did not. But this did not make all civilians fair game. Note that such excuses could have been given by the German soldiers in Yugoslavia or the Ukraine during World War Two, or by Japanese soldiers in the Philippines or North China. “When they killed civilians recklessly or wantonly, however, and I can show that this was the case, I count it as democide. And such actions by Americans should be democide if they were conducted with the explicit or implicit approval or knowledge of the high command, as was the case of the Germans or Japanese. However, this killing usually exceeded or occurred in spite of orders to the contrary. “Now, the person in overall command for much of this action was General William C. Westmoreland. He had issued explicit rules of warfare based on the applicable treaties and conventions governing it, such as the Geneva Conventions. These rules covered the treatment of prisoners and the rules of engagement established to protect noncombatants. But although they were republished every six months, they were not well distributed to lower levels, and battalion and company officers had different ideas about the rules. According to a senior embassy official investigating alleged excesses, one battalion commander even admitted that—” John

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quoted from his outline “—‘he had never read any such rules and wasn’t certain that there were copies of written instructions on the subject at his headquarters.’ “Declaratory policy is one thing, getting it understood down the chain of command is another, and applying it in the rapid action, noise, confusion, fear, and reflex shooting of combat is still something else. When, in the heat of battle, your life and those of your friends is at stake, fine distinctions are difficult to remember, never mind apply. Moreover, the rules covering specific situations were not always clear, such as how to handle a Viet Cong unit hiding among a group of refugees, a grenade lobbed from a bus at U.S. soldiers along the road, or civilians hiding in a Viet Cong bunker. “This notwithstanding, in the first years of U.S. involvement, the rules meant to protect noncombatants were often and blatantly violated by some lower-level U.S. officers and their men. Simply, the rules were inadequately communicated, those fighting on the front line were inadequately trained in them, and they were inadequately enforced. This was a High Command failure. “Such a violation raises the question of the High Command’s culpability in Vietnam, including General Westmoreland. It is clear that High Command was unaware of the My Lai massacre and would not have approved of it. However, it must have known of the many cases of excessive killing, and the severe problems soldiers in the field faced in this dirty war. “After My Lai and the questioning of American actions in the war, High Command did issue new training manuals dealing with the problems mentioned above, and explicitly stated that soldiers who disobeyed the rules of engagement or violated the laws of war would be held responsible, tried, and punished. “To be clear about democide: if, contrary to the rules of engagement, a soldier massacres civilians, and his superiors are unaware of it, this is murder by an individual, but not democide.” John looked around the class, still avoiding that one corner in the rear. He picked up his deck of names from the lectern, selected a card, and asked, “Mr. Ilalio, what is democide?” “Government murder.” He picked another card. “Miss Ne, could you fill in Mr. Ilalio’s definition?” She had been rapidly leafing through her notes before he called on her, and she took a few seconds more. Then she started to read, “It’s—” “Look at me, Miss Ne.” When she did, he said, “Now elaborate.”

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“Well, the government has to intentionally do it. Ah . . . it’s ordered at the top; it’s government policy.” “Good,” John said. “With that understood, did the United States commit democide in the Vietnam War? Now, My Lai did not occur as a result or in line with High Command policy or commands. It was an on-the-spot atrocity, actually contrary to rules of engagement. It was murder. Even when it was covered up by low-level officers in the field whose command responsibilities were minor, they were accessories to murder and this was a dereliction of duty, but it was not democide. “Generally, if command authorities, those giving orders from secure headquarters and responsible for major military operations in the field, cover it up or give orders resulting in atrocities or massacres, it is democide. Of course, there is an area of ambiguity between murder and democide. But it should also be clear that lieutenants commanding a platoon, or captains a company, and who act on their own initiative in combat, are not committing democide. The decisions, or lack of them by generals who command large operations, carry significant responsibility for a state, and directly represent its policies on the battlefield, can result in democide. “These distinctions for a war such as the one fought in Vietnam are critical. But they are also critical for similarly dirty combat, such as what took place in the Philippine War at the beginning of this century, when the U.S. High Command methodically carried out democide, and U.S. soldiers surely murdered tens of thousands of Filipinos. The same is true for a more conventional war like World War Two, in which American area bombing of German and Japanese cities killed hundreds of thousands of noncombatants. “To be sure, there are many publications available that describe U.S. atrocities in the Vietnam War. Some are communist, or sympathetic to North Vietnam or its façades, such as the National Liberation Front, the Alliance of National, Democratic, and Peace Forces, or the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. And there are many more publications on the other side that mention no atrocities, except perhaps for the notorious My Lai massacre. There have been ‘international tribunals’ set up by those who were more inclined to question the war aims and behavior of the United States than those of the North Vietnamese or Viet Cong, but their publications sometimes provide helpful clues to what kind of murder may have been committed, especially in the testimonies of former U.S. officers and soldiers.

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“One thing gradually emerges from the communist literature and from that sympathetic to the communists. Even though they were all attempting to display or, in the case of North Vietnam’s organs, exaggerate or misinform, the full extent of U.S. atrocities, massacres, and indiscriminate bombing of civilians, they provided virtually no overall estimates of those murdered. And, although the ‘massacres’ they list are outrageous in themselves, if true, the accumulated totals from their examples are relatively small compared to the intensity and blanketing nature of the accusations, and to the numbers murdered by the Vietnamese themselves. “Even then, what many of these sources label as atrocities or massacres may, by the Geneva Conventions and other accepted rules of warfare, be legitimate military actions or accidents of war. For example, burning down a village if in fact it sits on top of Viet Cong bunkers, or attacking civilian river junks that are actually carrying Viet Cong supplies, or bombs that hang up on their rack and then fall on a North Vietnam hospital near antiaircraft batteries. In fact, a communist ploy was to place some of these batteries close to sensitive civilian buildings or on river dikes that, if destroyed, would drown tens of thousands of civilians. “Now, it is true that the Americans heavily bombed Vietnam during the war. About fourteen million tons of bombs and shells were dropped on Vietnam, or six times the bomb tonnage the United States dropped in World War Two. However, those that were dropped on North Vietnam must be distinguished from the bombing in the South. In the former case, the impression during the war was that the United States was carpet bombing civilians and purposely attacking hospitals, schools, and other civilian targets. This impression was influenced by the North’s propaganda, which was widely disseminated by its friends, but it was not so. “The most important fact of this bombing was the scrupulous care with which targets were selected and bombed. Indeed, these matters were not left to local commanders. They were determined by the Pentagon and White House, and even President Johnson carefully orchestrated the bombing’s what, when, and how. Those who planned these attacks strove to limit them to purely military targets, even when it endangered the lives of U.S. pilots. I should note that pilots were even shot down because the angle and height of attack to protect civilians increased the risk from antiaircraft guns. True, civilians were killed, possibly sixty-five thousand of them, but these deaths were collateral to bombing military targets and often resulted from pilots trying to dodge the North’s vigorous air defenses, including missiles.

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“One prime example of restraint was the dikes that held back the waters in the Red River Delta. Had these been targeted, not only would the North’s economy have been thoroughly disrupted, but the resulting flood might have wiped out nearly one million innocent North Vietnamese. The North had put antiaircraft guns on top of the dikes, but High Command as far up as the president ordered pilots not to bomb the dikes, even though the gun emplacements made them lawful military targets. “American bombing of South Vietnam was quite different. It was often tactical rather than strategic, and frequently done under local command. Ground troops could call in air strikes on supposed enemy concentrations or movements and direct the bombing of villages and hamlets that presumably contained enemy bunkers or camps, or serviced the enemy in some way. These attacks received limited overview, and command authorities allowed considerable discretion. In many cases, innocent and helpless noncombatants were indiscriminately killed. Such bombing, apparently disproportionate to any expected military gains, was the direct responsibility of command authorities. “Of course, mortar and artillery shelling of villages and hamlets received even less supervision from the top. Although the published rules of engagement were supposed to govern, some of this shelling was also excessive, some out of all proportion to the military significance or target involved, and some out of whimsy. How many civilian casualties this shelling caused is unknown, of course. Overall, in each of the four years from 1966 to 1970, some forty-three, thirty-eight, thirty-one, and twenty-two percent of all civilian casualties admitted to South Vietnam’s Ministry of Health hospitals were due to shelling and bombing. “American democide in this war is most difficult to calculate. No source estimates such a toll; as I mentioned, not even the communists or those who pointed out atrocities and accused the United States of war crimes gave an overall accounting that I could find. Nor are such estimates available in the sources of information on Allied bombing and shelling in the South. From what qualitative information is available, and from figures on hospital admissions and causes of civilian casualties, I calculate that Allied bombing and shelling most likely caused ninety thousand to 180,000 civilian deaths. It appears that five to ten percent of this was likely democidal, and that of this, the United States was responsible for ten to twenty-five percent. This means that democidal U.S. bombing—that is, bombing consistent with orders from High Command, or known to be indiscriminate by High Command and allowed to continue, likely killed from five hundred to five thousand Vietnamese civilians.

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“Treating the scanty and suspect statistics on U.S. massacres, atrocities, and other kinds of democide in the same way, and adding the resulting calculation to the estimated number killed because of bombing and shelling, I must conclude that the U.S. democide in Vietnam seems to have killed at least four thousand Vietnamese civilians, POWs, or enemy seeking to surrender, maybe as many as ten thousand Vietnamese. A prudent figure may be fifty-five hundred overall.” John made a section break in his lecture by holding his hand up and putting his outline on the lectern. He turned back to the class. “To conclude, there was one more source of democide during the Vietnam War. Over a twelve year period, South Korea contributed a little more than three hundred thousand men to fight for South Vietnam, the second largest force next to the Americans. The Koreans became known for their brutal thoroughness, a reputation partly gained from their treatment of captured guerrillas or those trying to surrender, and their reckless and sometimes intentional killing of civilians. Taking all these and other possible cases into account, I estimate the Korean democide as at least three thousand Vietnamese civilians and enemy POWs.” He glanced at the clock. He had used up practically all his time. “There is time for just a few questions. Any?” One student near the rear shouted, “Was Hiroshima democide?” “Yes, the city of Hiroshima was targeted as a whole. This is indiscriminate urban bombing of civilians. It was bombing ordered at the highest level. It was intentional, obviously. It was illegal, even by the international law of the time. It was democide.” He looked around. “Any questions on today’s lecture?” A student in the front asked, “Why don’t we hear more about all the killing by the North? We keep hearing My Lai. You know, it’s like the North didn’t do anything like that.” John sighed. Perfect question, and with so little time. “We are Americans and American soldiers committed that atrocity. It should be held up to the light. It should tell us that we too can commit barbarous atrocities unless properly controlled and educated, with punishments for those who commit violations. But also, there is a virulent communist and left wing in the United States that wants to hold our nose to such atrocities as a way of proving how awful, to use their words, the ‘imperialist, capitalist, and corrupt’ America is.” More hands went up, but students were starting to collect at the door for the next class. “Sorry, folks,” John said. “Class dismissed.” Not once did he look at Miss Phim. That pleased him.

Chapter 37 Ho Chi Minh City Wang Shihao

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hihao sat in the back of the old Renault car, sandwiched between two armed security agents. He contemptuously thought of them as cho vang—yellow dogs, because of the yellow uniforms they wore. Another one rode in the front with the driver. It was late at night, but they passed some familiar buildings, so he thought they were taking him to the Hoa Hoa police station in Giadinh, on the outskirts of the city—the worst of them all. Even though some of his friends had been arrested for some reason or other, he never worried that the police or security agents would come for him. He had scrupulously obeyed the rules, and never let a criticism of the communists be heard outside his home. He leaned his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. If only I could have persuaded my mother and wife to leave . . .if only I’d said no . . . I do not understand it . . . a happy life is important, not the misery we all suffer now. Buddha, now the worst has happened to me. In his mind, he went through each level of the deterioration in their welfare and security under the new North Vietnamese government of the South. He grimaced inwardly. So many . . . so do khung—crazy many bought the propaganda of an independent Viet Cong and NLF fighting for the independence and freedom of Vietnam from the North and the Americans . . . a Third Way, Hanh called it. His heart started beating rapidly and he tried to push the thought and emotion away. It wouldn’t submit, instead bringing up her outrage at the South Vietnamese government’s corruption. If she is still alive, I would like to know her reaction to the communist corruption. He was getting a tick under one eye. No good. No good. Stop it. To distract himself, he looked out the car window and saw two security Renaults parked on the lawn in front of a home. They had driven

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over a flower bed. Somebody else being arrested, he thought. That returned his mind to his fear and the terror of their lives. Before the defeat . . . so hard to understand totalitarianism personally, so hard to prepare for it. Still, damn it, Mom and Yan would not flee the country with me; they put their faith in rebellion. Shihao released a long sigh. He was getting a tension headache. After more than a year, they were confident of their power . . . none of us were prepared . . . . Shihao shook his head slowly and did not realize how tightly he had his arms folded across his chest until he felt the pain from his fingers digging into each arm. He tried to relax but could not, so he simply put his hands on his lap and clenched them together. Shihao’s attention was jerked to the present when the Renault swerved suddenly to avoid a rickshaw that had cut in front of them, throwing Shihao against the agent on his left side. The agent pushed him off with a grunt as the driver slowed the Renault, perhaps thinking that he would be ordered to arrest the rickshaw man. But the security agent beside him barked something, and the driver resumed his normal speed. Shihao slouched further down in the seat, grinding his teeth in frustration over what was happening to him now. Unconsciously, he again crossed his arms and clenched his fists over his utter idiocy. I made Yan pregnant. So, I now have a daughter. And now a new horror . . . always a new horror . . . the New Economic Zones. He sank further in the seat, jamming his knees against the seat in front, and screwing up his face with the anguish of it all. I am sorry, Mom . . . very sorry . . . but you and Yan were so foolish. We should have left the country. We are fleeing when I get out of this. He glanced at the security agent on his right. We are fleeing if I have to tie you both up and carry you and Jy-ying to a boat.

Chi Hoa Prison The Renault carrying Shihao entered an alley and parked in a lot with many other such cars, some with flashers on top. They took him around to the front of the building. I was wrong, he thought as they passed under a sign. This is Chi Hoa, Saig—Ho Chi Minh City’s central prison. One in front and two behind, the three security agents who had arrested him took him inside to a room where a PAVN officer sat at a

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huge mahogany desk. They stopped Shihao well back from the desk and one of the security agents went up to it, exchanged a few words with the officer, and signed a document of some sort that the man shoved toward him. The officer shouted at two armed soldiers standing near the desk, “Take him to K-23.” As the security agents left, one of the soldiers moved up to him and said, “Follow me,” and walked toward the open door. As Shihao followed him, the other soldier fell in behind. He was led through two locked and barred doors and down a hallway to a door guarded by another soldier. Passing through that door, they moved down an aisle between little cement cells, each with a large, barred, metal door. Shihao could see that the cells were stuffed with prisoners sleeping head to toe in fetal positions on the narrow concrete slab in each cell. In some of them there wasn’t enough room on the slab, and prisoners slept on the concrete floor. Shihao saw no blankets, sheets, or pillows. With a bang and a rattle of metal, the soldier opened a barred door near the end of the aisle and pushed him into a small, gray cement cell containing four other prisoners, three of whom were asleep on the cement slab, one on the floor. There was no window and only a dim, screened lightbulb in the center of the ceiling. The aisle between the cells that they had walked down had stunk, but the stench in the cell blasted him; he immediately felt like retching. Most of the smell must have come the hole in the corner, where the yellowish wetness around it and the brown cake on its edge announced its purpose. One of the soldiers ordered Shihao, “Strip everything.” He pointed to the concrete floor near the slab and ordered, “Sleep there.” Then he pointed to a bare corner of the slab. “During the day you must sit there with your feet on the floor, and your hands in view of the door. Look straight ahead. You cannot sleep or close your eyes for more than a second. You must think about your sins against the Glorious Revolution.” Both soldiers left, one carrying the stack of Shihao’s shoes, brown pants, white shirt, and underwear. Everything was still in the pockets, including his wallet. They banged the door closed with the intrinsic metal ring of all prison doors, and slammed its bolt home. He lay down on the concrete where the soldier had pointed. It was cold. Rolling over on his side and bringing his knees up and his arms across his chest, he tried to huddle into a ball for warmth. To distract himself from his discomfort, he focused on the snoring and muttering

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of the other men in his cell and those nearby, but when that no longer worked he again thought about what the “Glorious Revolution” had done to the South and him personally. His face was toward the cell door. At random intervals, as far as he could tell, a guard walked up and down the aisle between the cells. He had on soft shoes, and came without warning. About an hour later, a guard shoved clothes through a slot under the door and, not caring whether he woke the other prisoners, he yelled, “For Shihao. Put these on, and go back to sleep on the floor. You must get up at five a.m.” Shihao lifted the garments—threadbare khaki pants that were almost too small, and a baggy black t-shirt. Once he’d dressed and got down on the concrete floor again, the man near him on the floor, apparently awakened by the guard, whispered, “Come close. We can share our body warmth. I am Nguyen Cam. The three on the slab are Le van Na, Ly Bien, and somebody we only know as Chi. Who are you and why were you arrested?” “Wang Shihao. I wish I knew why I was arrested.” “Well, join the crowd. More in the morning. Now go to sleep, if you can.” They were all awakened in the morning by North Vietnamese patriotic music broadcast over a loudspeaker in the ceiling outside the cell. He did what his cell mates did. After using the hole in the corner, they sat four in a row on the concrete slab, staring straight ahead. Cam had warned him that the order he received must be strictly followed—that they must sit straight, stare straight ahead, and not talk. While sitting like that, Cam whispered, “As the guard said, we are to contemplate how glorious was Ho Chi Minh and the communist revolution.” Shihao snickered. Bien heard him and warned, “They are serious. Never doubt they will execute you if they believe you think anything different.” Then he looked scared for a moment, and his face turned flat and inscrutable. Shihao guessed that he feared Shihao might be a communist plant, hoping the prisoners would reveal their antirevolutionary thoughts. He knew then that he could not trust any of them either. Hours later their breakfast was slid under the door. On a sheet from a communist newspaper rested four compressed balls of cold, stale rice and four small bowls of almost clear soup, with some rotten-looking vegetables and tiny pieces of fish floating in it. “Hey, Shihao,” Bien whispered, “bon appetit—enjoy. This is your breakfast and your supper will be no different.”

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aaa A month later, actually thirty-three days by Shihao’s count, and the complete turnover—twice—of his cell mates, two soldiers came for him early in the morning. He was so happy at that, he didn’t care why they wanted him. He had run out of things to think about as he sat almost motionless on the slab day after day, and felt that he was on the verge of losing his mind. He had heard the screams and shouts, some of anticommunist slogans, of those who went crazy in the other cells. Then again, he thought, maybe they’re the smart ones, inviting execution rather than prolonging their misery. The whispered discussion with his cell mates only went so far, and after a while there was only silence. Everyone feared that one of the others might be a stooge, or reveal what was said to the soldiers for special privileges. He got no exercise, and slept fitfully, even though, with the turnover of prisoners in his cell, he now had the best part of the concrete slab next to the cell door on which to sleep. He no longer felt hungry, even though the pants that had been almost too tight when he’d arrived were now very loose and he had to double over the top hem to keep them up. He thought he might have dysentery, and seemed to be squatting way too many times over the hole in the cell floor. During his fitful sleep at night he was waking up with a dry cough. In the morning, he coughed out rust-colored phlegm. He could only walk slowly, and finally both soldiers took him by the elbows and half carried him. They took him from the cell area into a small room, obviously an interrogation room. A gray-haired woman wearing narrow wire glasses and a green officer’s uniform sat at an American Army-issue gray metal desk; her visored cap rested upside down on its cluttered top, almost touching a half-full tin ashtray. She had her hands clasped together on top of a pile of papers, and smiled at him when the soldiers brought him in. She nodded at the soldiers, who moved to the back of the room, and then nodded at a hard-backed chair facing the desk. Shihao plunked down with relief. The wood was softer than the concrete slab. The woman removed her hands from the paper before her, and said, “I am Dai Uy—Captain Tran That Ky. I will determine how you will be reeducated so that you see the glory of our revolution.” Then she looked down at the paper and read, “You are Wang Shihao. Your family is composed of your mother Jiang Jia Li, your wife Hua Jue Yan, and your child Jy-ying.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Is this correct?”

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Her soft and friendly South Vietnamese voice shocked him, and he could not respond at first. He did not recognize her name, but he did her face, with its unusual plump, double chin. Her picture had often appeared in the papers. She had been one of the opposition members of the National Assembly. It was obvious now that she had been one of the North’s agents, and her name then must have been an alias. She leaned toward him and asked, “Can you speak?” He shook himself mentally and tried to regain control. Not having spoken above a whisper in thirty-three days, his voice was hoarse when he replied, “Yes. I am Shihao.” She picked up a lined tablet and a pencil from her desk and signaled a soldier, who came and took them from her and handed them to Shihao. She leaned back and smiled again. “Write your autobiography. Do not exclude anything. This is very important.” She nodded at the soldiers. They took him to a small room nearby. It contained two tables, one with two chairs, and the other with one. One of the soldiers waved at the table with one chair, and after he sat down and put the tablet on the table to write, both soldiers leaned their American M-16 rifles against the wall and sat down at the other table. They both lit Camel cigarettes. One pulled a portable game of Go from his large shirt pocket and began to set it up. Many hours later, with his hand cramping almost uncontrollably and his body beginning to ache, and after the soldiers had been relieved twice, he gave the twenty-one page autobiography to one of the soldiers, and they took him back to his cell. Two days later, they came for him again. He stumbled along with the soldiers on each side, holding him up. He felt hot, and now his legs and arms had started throbbing. When he entered the interrogation room, the same captain sat at the desk. She did not offer him the chair, but scowled at him. He felt too sick to care. Waving his autobiography at him, she hissed in a voice that had lost any hint of softness, “You lied in your autobiography. I warn you, you had better not lie again. Write it over.” She tossed another tablet at him. Again he was taken to the same room, where he tried to write everything he could think of into the autobiography. He had to put less thought into it this time and it went faster, but it was harder nonetheless. Several times he had to put his head on the table to rest. Each time, the soldiers pulled up his head by his hair and demanded that he continue to write.

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When they took him back to his cell, he saw that one of his cell mates had been replaced by another prisoner. When he turned to look at him, he was surprised to recognize Hoang Manh Tuan, a member of the former Saigon University Student Union who had been a close friend of his former fiancée. Though forbidden to say anything, they greeted each other with a grin. With one fewer in the cell temporarily, the three prisoners could sleep together on the concrete slab. Shihao and Tuan lay down with their heads close together and whispered to each other. Shihao explained between coughs that left him wiping his mouth that “I am here for no good reason I know. What about you?” Tuan sighed. “I know the horrible crime I committed. When I was interrogated at Dai Loi Hotel, which has been converted into a prison, I found out that the communists already knew much about me, no doubt from those autobiographies. They knew especially that, while I had been a member of the pro-NLF Student Union, I had not joined the NLF. I had to write my own autobiography maybe ten times—I did not count—until my interrogator was satisfied that it corresponded with what they knew about me, including my sin. Now, as to why I am in this particular paradise, I guess that it is because prisoners are periodically moved from one prison and reeducation camp to another so they can’t form rebellious groups, or work together to escape.” Shihao asked, “What happened to my former fiancée, Pham Hieu Hanh?” Tuan leaned closer to hear him. He was quiet for a long moment, until Shihao said louder, “Do you know?” Tuan seemed to moan before softly replying, “One of the prisoners in my cell at Dai Loi also had participated in student demonstrations. Before he was arrested, he knew this woman—Duong Chi, a journalist—who had been imprisoned because of the articles she wrote during the war. She was sent to Reeducation Camp K41. There she was kept in a large cell with about thirty-two other women. Pham Hieu Hanh was in the cell with her. They knew each other and talked together frequently.” Shihao had a fit of coughing. His voice broke up, but he managed to ask, “Why was Hanh arrested?” “For insufficient enthusiasm for the revolution, which made her suspect. She did not join the NLF, even though she was such a proThird Way activist.” Shihao forgot himself and croaked too loudly, “She did not? She told me she did.”

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“Shhh! Lower your voice,” Tuan hastily whispered. Then he moved closer so that his mouth was an inch away from Shihao’s ear. “I know she lied to you. We all knew it. Everyone but you. She did that to test your love for her. She never quite got over the break between you, you know. She did not date after that. Her politics became everything.” Shihao tried to clear his throat several times. Tuan sighed deeply, then continued in a whisper that wavered through quivering lips. “Anyway, the cell she was in adjoined a men’s cell . . . they were separated by a brick wall the prisoners could not see over, with barbed wire from the top of the wall to the cell roof. There was a . . . sexual trade between the two cells. Much prized among all the prisoners was the ration of boiled manioc. So the men used to save their manioc, form it into balls, and toss the balls over the wall to the women. In return, the older and stronger women forced the young girls to strip and climb onto the wall where, supported by hands below and a grip on the barbed wire, they positioned themselves so that the men could see and play with their lon—pussy. If they refused . . . they were beaten.” Tuan hesitated, and Shihao could hear him crying softly. Now, already devastated by a terrible agony as he suspected what had happened, he hissed in a strangled voice, “Continue, dammit.” Tuan groaned, “You sure?” Shihao broke into another a fit of coughing. He wiped the phlegm away from his mouth and sobbed, “Yes.” Tuan whispered very fast, as though the words burned his lips, “It was her turn to go on the wall . . . she refused . . . three of them punched and kicked her . . . did something to her insides . . . she died three days later.” Tuan moved his head away, trying to stifle his weeping. Shihao lay as if frozen. A cold chill ran up and down his spine, despite his fever. Finally he gasped, and wailed so softly no one could hear it, “Oh Buddha, poor Hanh . . . poor Hanh . . . she only wanted to improve humanity, the downtrodden. Poor Hanh . . . .” Tuan turned back to Shihao and raised his hand to squeeze Shihao’s hot shoulder. They cried together, their tears wetting the concrete slab. In the morning, Shihao could not sit up on the slab. His whole body ached, and he felt as though he was burning up. His coughing was worse, and with each cough, globs of stinking green phlegm flew or oozed out of his mouth. Tuan banged on the cell door to draw the attention of a guard, and when he came and saw Shihao curled up on the slab, red-faced and

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wracked by coughs that left phlegm running from his mouth, he reported it. Three soldiers soon came with a stretcher, lifted a semiconscious Shihao onto it, and carried him to the prison’s small clinic. After a near three-hour wait in a room crowded with sick prisoners, a doctor appeared, looked Shihao over, tapped his chest, then pressed a stethoscope against it to listen to the sound of his breathing between coughs. He held a cup up to Shihao’s mouth when he coughed, and inspected the phlegm he collected. Finally he told the nurse hovering nearby, “He has pneumonia. Give him a shot of penicillin. I’ll take another look at him later.” Shihao’s pneumonia was viral; it did not respond to the penicillin, in spite of several shots. His condition worsened. He lay semiconscious throughout the day and night. The next day, he mumbled something as the nurse was giving him the last shot of his quota. She bent down to hear him. He could barely speak; all she could make out was, “Poor Hanh . . . Yan . . . love . . . Jyying.” Then he seemed to gather all of his strength to clearly whisper, “Ho Chi Minh du mai—Ho Chi Minh was a motherfucker,” before sagging into unconsciousness. He died hours later.

Captain Tran That Ky When a soldier reported Shihao’s death to Captain Ky, she took his two handwritten autobiographies from the stack on her desk and wrote a note on them. Pulling a form out of a drawer in the desk, she filled it in, then clipped it and the autobiographies together. She put it on a corner of her desk, where her orderly would make copies for security headquarters. They had to have a record of every death so they did not go around trying to arrest the dead. She looked through another pile of autobiographies. She pulled out one, then another from near the bottom of the pile. She put them side by side on her desk and thought of Shihao. She had looked forward to confronting him with Dinh Hieu Hanh and Pham Hao Quang’s autobiographies. Hanh had tried to protect him, saying that Shihao did not object to her supposedly joining the NLF, but Quang was quite clear about how Shihao had objected and made antirevolutionary statements. They had obtained Quang’s autobiography first and had verified it with others.

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Then came Hanh’s, and in each rewriting of her autobiography, she had continued to protect Shihao. So they had gone hard on her. She would never have been let out of the reeducation camps until she told the truth. Her lie was a sure sign of the anticommunist attitude she shared with Shihao. Well, they are all dead now. Good riddance, the captain thought. She leaned over the desk and put the autobiographies on top of Shihao’s.

Chapter 38 1980s–1996 Cyril Clement

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yril and Alice spent a year collecting the most available statistics on democide around the world, and then made that part of a proposal to the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). The institute then approved a two year, $50,000 grant for a thorough collection of data on democide and their analysis to determine its causes. It took two more grants in succession from USIP and six years to do the data collection, and another two years for the complex statistical analysis. They came up with a total democide estimate for 1900–1987 of nearly 170 million—in effect, Banks’ estimate for that period. Cyril and Alice published their findings in a 1990 book titled Murder by Government: Extent, Causes, and Conditions. Aside from the statistics, the book covered a number of case studies, including democide by the Soviet Union, communist China, Nazi Germany, militarist Japan, and communist Vietnam. In the analysis section of the book, they showed that democide was highly correlated with the extent of ongoing civil or international war, and the degree to which a country was nondemocratic. But war was also related to the degree a country was nondemocratic, meaning there was an indirect causal relationship between nondemocracy and democide through war, and a direct relationship whether war was occurring or not. In sum, the democratic peace also applied to democide. This was Cyril and Alice’s core book on democide. From then on, they wrote books dealing specifically with the democide in the Soviet Union, communist China, and Nazi Germany. The books were read and received good reviews, but they did not grab the minds of those working in the new field of genocide studies. Genocide had become a big thing. A voluminous literature centered on the Holocaust had developed, but while a number of books dealt with genocide in history, democide was yet too new a concept to catch on. It would.

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aaa Alice died of colon cancer in late 1994, leaving Cyril devastated. They had no children, but friends helped him through his first weeks alone. He took a semester’s leave of absence without pay and used Alice’s inheritance from her rich family to travel around the world on one cruise ship after another. Though one widow after another chased him, he only wanted Alice back. But the cruises did distract him from the pain of her death and helped him make the transition to a life without her. When he returned to teaching, he could not rise above routine. He stopped doing research and professional writing. The democratic peace and democide were now well known, and there was really nothing new he could add to them. He returned to reading science fiction, and particularly alternative history. He had read all the science fiction there was in his youth, but when he started college, he gave it up—too much to study, too many fascinating books on Asia, war, and politics. Now, picking up science fiction again, he found it had evolved into a new form that recognized that women exist as sensual and intelligent partners, a form with a far greater scope that went well beyond the natural sciences to envelop psychology, sociology, and even sometimes politics, as did George Orwell’s book 1984. In late 1996, as he sat in his campus office during his office hours, making himself available to students, he doodled on a notepad as his mind focused on John Banks, as it had thousands of times. He wondered what John and Joy were doing now. He wrote down “2002, time travel” to give himself a base for working backward. Nothing serious. Just a way to spend time. He then wrote “Ph.D. end of Spring Semester, 2001, Yale” He was sure of that because the 9/11/2001 terrorist attack played a large role in Banks’ “Remembrance,” and Banks had prominently mentioned his new Ph.D. Let’s see, Cyril reasoned, he could not have gotten a Ph.D. there in less than four years as a full-time graduate student. Was he fulltime? Was he a teaching assistant? I don’t remember him writing anything about that. In any case, he most likely spent at least four years as a graduate student, which means . . . he was there in at least the Fall Semester of 1997 . . . or a year earlier. Which would mean . . . he is there now. “Now!” Cyril sat up straight in his chair. “My God, I can’t believe it. I could talk to John Banks, if he’s there.” That was easy to determine. He turned to his computer and brought up the search engine on his browser. He typed in Yale University His-

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tory Department. Among the many listed Web sites, he found the one that gave the department’s telephone number, which he then called. He asked the woman who answered if she was the department secretary, and when she said she was, he said, “I am Professor Cyril Clement at the University of California. I am trying to locate a former student of mine, a Mr. John Banks. He may be a graduate student in your department. Is he?” “What was the name?” He repeated the name slowly, then waited while the secretary checked. Several minutes later she came back on the phone. “Yes, he is here.” Cyril was almost speechless. He could feel his heart racing. “Ah . . . is this his first semester there?” More waiting, which gave him a chance to calm down a little. “Yes it is. Would you like to leave a message for him? We have a graduate student mailbox.” His was still having difficulty with his voice. “Ah . . . well . . . no, but thanks for checking.” He hung up, then jumped off his chair and did a little jig around his office, clapping his hands. Not caring who heard him through his open door, he yelled, “Jesus H. Christ, I can talk to Banks! To the John Banks.” He hit his head with the palm of his hand. “My God!”

Chapter 39 1978 Cholon Jiang Jia Li

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an’s screams tore through their shack again and again. She had been in labor for almost a full day, and exhaustion slowed the hired midwife’s normally efficient bustle and Jia Li’s footsteps as she moved back and forth with towels, hot water, and wet rags. Her mother’s screams and the strange activity frightened little Jyying, who had no idea what was going on, and no place she could go to escape. She clung to Jia Li or hovered very close, probably as tired as they. Then the final scream came from Yan, and the midwife yelled for Jia Li to help her. The baby was coming out of Yan properly, headfirst, but still this was not right. The placenta had not come out first. Nothing seemed wrong with the infant, however. The midwife held the bloodied infant girl in a towel and gently tweaked her foot. She started crying, and with that the midwife handed the baby to Jia Li. Yan, utterly exhausted, lay unmoving, eyes closed, legs splayed. She was bleeding heavily. The midwife tried to wipe and inspect her vaginal area, but it bloodied almost immediately. She kept wiping Yan, putting clean towels underneath her pelvis, and muttering to herself. Finally, almost in tears, she yelled at Jia Li, “We must take her to a hospital. Her placenta is still inside, and she is hemorrhaging. She needs surgery to remove the placenta and I don’t have the necessary equipment.” Jia Li hurriedly wrapped the infant in a clean towel and, holding the baby to her chest, she ran into the street and headed toward the taxi stands at Ben Tai Market. She did not know how long an ambulance would take if she called the hospital.

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She found a taxi sitting at one of the stands and yelled breathlessly at the driver, “Quick, I’ll pay you anything. I have to rush my daughter to the hospital. Her life is in danger from a bad birth.” The driver followed her directions to her shack, and went inside with her to help the midwife support Yan, wrapped in a sheet and a blanket, to the taxi. Jia Li followed, holding the infant in one arm and clutching Jy-ying’s hand with her other hand. They sat in front while the midwife sat in the rear with Yan’s head on her shoulder. Soldiers stopped the taxi as it turned into the emergency entrance of Cho Ray Hospital. Jia Li and the midwife had to show their neighborhood registration papers, even though Jia Li kept screaming, “My daughter is bleeding to death.” Finally, the soldiers let them through to the emergency entrance, where the taxi driver ran in for a doctor. Two nurses came out with a gurney, and helped Yan out of the taxi to lie down on it, then trundled her inside. “Please, get three dong out of my purse and give it to the taxi driver,” Jia Li told the midwife, turning so the woman could reach the bag hanging on her shoulder. The driver gave her a toothy smile in thanks. It was the equivalent of a day’s pay for most workers. The midwife and Jia Li stood by Yan’s gurney, waiting for a doctor to show. Yan opened her eyes wide, as though suddenly realizing she had birthed a live infant, and reached out her hands. Jia Li put the infant in her arms and kissed her forehead. “She’s a beautiful child. Congratulations, my dear.” Within minutes a nurse with a clipboard joined them and took down essential information, including what the midwife saw as a problem. Another brought towels to replace the ones now soaked in blood. Both the sheet and blanket were bloody where they had been around Yan’s middle. Half an hour later a doctor came, read the nurse’s report, and immediately yelled at a nearby nurse, “Call Doctor Day. He has another one.” He turned to a nurse’s aide and said, “Rush the patient to S-5.” As the aide prepared to push the gurney off, Yan kissed the infant’s forehead and reluctantly handed her back to Jia Li. There were tears in her eyes. “I wish Shihao were here.” The words lingered in the air as the aide pushed the gurney through the double doors. The doctor then pointed to a room off the entry area and told them, “You can wait there. Doctor Day is our obstetrician. He will take her placenta out and make sure she is okay. Then he will check the infant to see if he—” “She.”

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“—is okay also.” Then he asked, “She wears a wedding ring. Where is her husband?” “Dead. Eight months ago.” The doctor nodded as though it was an everyday occurrence, and walked off. The waiting room was comfortable. A table piled with communist magazines from Hanoi and the Soviet Union, the Soviet ones in English, was surrounded by three easy chairs and a couch. In a corner, a TV set blared a report on Cambodia’s continuing expulsion of ethnic Vietnamese, its attacks across the border on Vietnamese villages, and the secret help the Cambodians were supposedly getting from China. Jia Li sat down in one of the chairs and held the infant on her lap, while Jy-ying squeezed in next to her. “We will name you Ting,” Jia Li told the infant. It had been one of Shihao’s favorite names. Hours went by. Jia Li had no way of telling how many; she had no watch and there was no wall clock in the room. She told the midwife several times that she need not wait, but the woman insisted. For the hundredth time, Jia Li dammed herself for persuading Yan to have a midwife help her in the birth. But she had heard rumors about the disorganization of the hospitals, and how those going in with relatively minor problems like a broken finger contracted serious infection or disease and died. She’d also heard that poor people, unlike communists and high officials, received shoddy treatment. Besides, having a baby is so routine, Jia Li thought. A midwife aided my birth of Shihao with no problems, and Jy-ying was born that way. So she’d sought a midwife. The one who had helped in Jy-ying’s birth had disappeared, but she found one with good references and more than twenty-five births to her credit. Oh Buddha, who would have thought Yan’s placenta would not be ejected by her body? “I’m sorry, Shihao,” she murmured. Jy-ying and the infant were asleep when a doctor appeared in the doorway. He wore a somber expression. He looked from the midwife to Jia Li; seeing that Jia Li held the infant, he came over to her. “Are you Yan’s mother?” Her lips began to quiver. “Yes,” she replied. The doctor stood before her, his head slightly bent to look down at her, his arms hanging aimlessly at his sides. In a low but firm voice, he said, “I am Doctor Day. We operated on your daughter and got her placenta out, but we could not stop her bleeding, and she soon had a total kidney failure. I am very sorry. She went into shock and died.”

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Jia Li sat speechless. The bottom fell out of her stomach with the doctor’s words, and her mind felt shattered. She tried to pull herself together enough to speak, but could not. The doctor put out his hands. “Can I see her child? I want to make sure he will survive.” She heard him, but for a second did not know what he asked, and then what to do. But something within her held out her arms and handed the child to the doctor. “I’ll be back in about fifteen minutes. I just want to check him out.” Jia Li did not think to correct him about the infant’s sex as he left the room. She heard a strange sound that gradually became familiar. She automatically turned her head toward it. Leaning over her thin legs, the midwife keened into her hands. That stopped Jia Li’s descent into the ugly, self-flagellating world of “What if,” and “If I only.” She sat up straight, wiped her eyes with her hands, and gently got out of the chair so as not to wake Jy-ying. She knelt down on one knee next to the midwife, and put her hand on her arm. “This was not your fault. You could not help an accident, nor could you do anything once it happened. You did your best, and infant Ting will survive, thanks to you.” The midwife looked up at Jia Li, her face lined with grief, and wiped her eyes with one of the extra towels she had brought with her. She gripped Jia Li’s hand, and said, “I want to make sure . . . Ting?” Jia Li nodded. “Ting is healthy.” “Then I’ll go home with you, and help clean up.” Jia Li shook her head vigorously. “No, I want to do this myself. I hope you understand.” The doctor soon returned with Ting. “She is in fine condition, but hungry. We have a list of milk-women, ones whose infants died in or near birth. I suggest you contact one, and begin the infant’s feeding.” She nodded, but that was not her way. As soon as she got home, and saw the mess of bloody towels and fluids on the bed, she took Jy-ying into the tiny, screened-off kitchen and sat down with her back to the cold wood stove. She told Jy-ying, “Sit here, next to me.” She opened her blouse and took out her breast, and offered her nipple to Ting to suck on. It must be true . . . all the old women mentioned it. And they had heard it from their mothers, that women will soon produce milk for a suckling child that is not their own if it persists, even if they’ve not recently been pregnant. It should work . . . I’m forty-seven, and not into menopause.

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The suckling was painful at first, then sensual, and finally she thought she might be producing some milk. Jy-ying watched wide-eyed at first, but soon got bored and went to sleep next to Jia Li’s leg. As the suckling went on and on, tears freely flowed down Jia Li’s cheeks, and she used the time to control her heartbreak and grief, and shape her thoughts. Nothing can be the same. Everything must change. My family is gone . . . I’ve lost a loving husband, my precious son, a daughter-in-law I’d grown to love. She choked up and her body tried to convulse with sobs. She held it rigid, pinching her leg painfully as distraction, and as the tears rolled down her cheeks, she tried to tilt her head so that they would not fall on Ting as she suckled. She shuddered as she fought nausea and growing panic. She tried to focus on the children. I have their children now to nurture and educate. I will not bring them up under this communist tyranny. Escape—we must escape, not for my future . . . for theirs. She felt her control returning. Her body grew still, but her tears still flowed. Their children must be free, to become what they want, to do everything they are capable of. If she was the only one, she would stay. This was the only country she knew. She loved its culture, its smells, its tastes, its sounds . . . Neither the French nor the Americans could change what is dear to me about my country, she reminded herself. The communists won’t change it, either. She looked down at Ting, still suckling, and then spoke loud enough for anyone in the shack to hear. “Yes, my dear Shihao, I will take your children and finally escape Vietnam. Your spirit should be happy with this.”

Chapter 40 2001 John Banks

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is visits to the psychiatrist didn’t seem to be helping. I’ve been hypnotized twice, and I know I said something or other about my dreams. I know that it’s no longer an “if”—something is not right, and I’m sure it’s in my head. But he doesn’t seem to be helping. He was still restlessness, waking at odd hours and having difficulty getting back to sleep. He’d catch hazy images, and often had the crazy feeling that he was shooting a gun. Me, the near pacifist, shooting a gun. I don’t even know where the trigger is on one. And the evening before, he had made vigorous, delicious love to someone so indistinct, he only knew she was a woman. That he would make love he could understand, but the gun? He sighed as he entered his class, barely on time. He was over his chagrin at his stupidity with the note. Not Miss Phim’s fault. He looked her way to see her looking back. He quickly averted his eyes. He pulled his outline from his briefcase. He hadn’t reviewed it; he hadn’t tried to impress on his memory the figures he would use to demonstrate his command of the material to the class. He didn’t need to. They were seared into his memory. “Good afternoon, students.” After their murmured response, he launched immediately into his lecture. “So, the war ended with the withdrawal of the American forces, by withdrawal of American military aid from South Vietnam, and by outright military victory of the North over a dispirited, collapsing South Vietnamese army. Obviously, the Vietnamese on both sides suffered grievously during the war, which can only be partially measured by the overall death toll through democide and war casualties. Nevertheless, on these scales alone, the human cost was horrendous. Slightly over 2.1 million North and South Vietnamese were killed or murdered: ap-

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proximately one out of every seventeen. From 1954 to the end of the Vietnam War, the democide in the South by its own regimes, or by the North Vietnamese, Americans, or Koreans, probably accounts for 261,000 of the total dead—slightly over twelve percent. Most of this democide, over sixty-two percent, likely was committed by the North and its guerrilla front, the Viet Cong. “After the South surrendered to the North in April 1975, and the North had consolidated its military control over Saigon—now Ho Chi Minh City—and the most vital sections of the South, the North moved to disband and absorb the most important personnel of the Viet Cong, the National Liberation Front, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, whose pronouncements and declarations had been credible to so many in the West as an independent third force. If there is any doubt about the true nature of such groups, consider that the Northern party historian Nguyen Khac-Vien said the Provisional Revolutionary Government was always a group emanated from the North.” John read from his outline. “He said further that ‘If we had pretended otherwise for such a long period, it was only because during the war we were not obliged to unveil our cards.’ End quote.” He looked up and scanned the class. “Although the American antiwar demonstrators, as they were mislabeled in the press, and their pro-North Vietnam supporters chanted, ‘Stop the Killing,’ or ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’—LBJ were President Johnson’s initials—once the United States withdrew and the war ended, the killing did not end. Not in Cambodia. Not in Laos. Not in Vietnam. Vietnamese armies fought in Laos to consolidate their control. They fought against the Khmer Rouge army in Cambodia and, with victory in January 1979 and the installation of a puppet regime in Phnom Penh, they fought a nearly decade-long war against both the Cambodian Khmer Rouge and anticommunist guerrillas. This alone cost 150,000 Vietnamese lives. “In 1979, they fought a border war against China, which had invaded Vietnam across its northern border in order to ‘teach it a lesson’ over its colonization of Cambodia. This probably cost at least another eight thousand Vietnamese lives, and perhaps another five hundred died in postwar border clashes and artillery duels with China. They also fought internal rebellions in the South, where perhaps twelve thousand to fifteen thousand insurgents mined roads, laid booby traps, threw grenades in Ho Chi Minh City, and possibly fought pitched battles against communist troops. And they fought armed remnants of the National Liberation Front, many of whom believed that they had been betrayed by the North’s complete and utter takeover of the South after victory.

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“In these post-Vietnam years, over 160,000 more Vietnamese likely died from war and rebellion. This is no small number. It is over three times the 47,321 U.S. battle dead from the Vietnam War. In no way, then, did peace come to the Vietnamese people, nor to Laos and Cambodia. And neither did democide end in Vietnam or her neighbors.” John stopped to let what he’d said so far sink in. Then he raised his voice. “The number murdered after—after the Vietnam War, I say again—was about 3.5 million in these three countries.” Then he enunciated clearly and slowly, “The mass murder after the Vietnam War exceeds by over one million those killed during the war. Part of this incredible toll—I estimate 528,000—were those murdered by the triumphant communist North when it took over the South and erased it as a separate social, cultural, and political system. From then on there was only Vietnam, that is, North Vietnam extended over all the land formerly comprising the South. “After victory, under the pretense of giving them lectures, the communists rounded up former South Vietnamese government officials, military officers, party leaders, police, and supporting intellectuals and imprisoned them in what were called reeducation camps. Presumably they were all to be indoctrinated in communist thoughts and ways, and to discover the errors of their old behavior and beliefs. In reality, these were concentration camps whose purpose was to systematically weed out of the new society true enemies of the people—that is, potential critics and opposition—and to take the victor’s revenge on the communists’ die-hard enemies. “But the camps were not limited to those the communists called the South Vietnam government’s henchmen and puppets. Former South Vietnam ‘antiwar’ or antigovernment opponents, or ‘Third Way’ activists who were arrested after the war also ended up in the camps. No such independent thought could be allowed. More tragic still were the common folk the communists sent to the camps simply for joking about communism, idly criticizing the new regime, showing insufficient sympathy for Northern rule, or otherwise displaying ‘improper’ attitudes. At any one time in the early years, some 150,000 to five hundred thousand Vietnamese apparently suffered in these camps. Like the Stalinist gulag, living conditions in these camps were so poor that the inmates’ health rapidly deteriorated. They were weakened by malnutrition, and many soon died. “But inhumane conditions and constant thought reform— brainwashing—were not all the prisoners had to worry about. The

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communists viciously punished prisoners for minor violations or insufficient obedience, or for inadequate dedication to changing one’s beliefs. Many were simply executed. “The poet Nguyen Chi Thien, who by 1980 had spent over sixteen years in prison camps, must also have been expressing the feelings of reeducation camp inmates in a poem he called “From Ape to Man” that was smuggled out of the camps to the West.” John had clipped the poem to his outline, and read it to the class: From ape to man, millions of years gone by. From man to ape, how many years? Mankind, please come to visit The concentration camps in the heart of the thickest Jungles! Naked prisoners, taking baths together in herds, Living in ill-smelling darkness with lice and mosquitoes, Fighting each other for a piece of manioc or sweet potato, Chained, shot, dragged, slit up at will by their captors, Beaten up and thrown away for the rats to gnaw at their breath! This kind of ape is not fast but very slow in action, indeed Quite different from that of remote prehistory. They are hungry, they are thin as toothpicks, And yet they produce resources for the nation all year long. Mankind, please come and visit! John introduced a moment of silence after that by slowly removing the poem from his outline and dropping it in his briefcase. Then he returned to where he had been standing and said, “In sum, reeducation was a label for revenge, punishment, and social prophylaxis.” A hand up. “Yes, Mr. Svestka.” “What is social prophylaxis?” “In this context, it is the communists purging society of people, ideas, thought, and elements that might oppose or threaten them.” He waited a moment for a follow-up question. When none came, he continued. “The communists cleverly and at first successfully hid their

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mass murder from the outside world. They claimed that reeducation was a humane alternative to a bloodbath. But in private they boasted about their bloodletting to those they trusted. This was pointed out by Nguyen Cong Hoan, a member of the Buddhist antiwar opposition in South Vietnam during the war and of the postwar Vietnam National Assembly until his defection.” John again referred to his outline. “‘The party leaders themselves have told me,’ Nguyen said, ‘that they are very proud of their talent for deceiving world opinion. “We’ve been worse than Pol Pot,” they joke. “But the outside world knows nothing.”’” He went to his deck of student names. “Miss Bauernfeind, who was Pol Pot?” “A former dictator of Cambodia.” “And what can you add to that, Mr. Reantillo?” “Ah . . . a communist dictator. He led the Khmer Rouge.” “And . . . ” oh, it’s her card “ . . . ah, Miss Phim?” “The Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot murdered about two million Cambodians, about a third of the population.” John nodded. “Thank you.” He returned to his lecture. “To repeat, the North was committing massive democide in the South, but hiding it well. Much of the killing took place out of sight, in prisons and reeducation camps. Many notables and famous artists, politicians, government officials, high military officers, teachers and professors, and other professionals met their end in the camps. Based on a 1985 statement by Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, the communists may ultimately have imprisoned 2.5 million people in these reeducation camps. One estimate is that of these, at least two hundred thousand of them died or were murdered. This is probably high, however. Taking account of the death toll in the similar Stalinist and Maoist gulags, a more likely figure is around ninety-five thousand. “For those who were less than an actual or potential threat to the regime, who were just excess population in the cities or had committed minor infractions, the New Economic Zones—a nice term for wildernesses—waited. Accepting the blandishments of the regime or wishing to escape the deteriorating conditions of the cities, some also volunteered for these zones. Most, however, were forcibly sent. Work in these zones was hard and living conditions harsh—in some places, deadly. But the only choices one had were to work or try to escape. If caught, though, one faced an even worse fate: prison, a reeducation camp, or execution. No numbers are available on the resulting deaths in

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these zones. Judging from their description and the toll at forced labor camps in the Soviet Union and China, possibly forty-eight thousand Vietnamese lost their lives, maybe even 155,000. “One could be sent for reeducation and die there from the abysmal treatment; one could be sent to a New Economic Zone and possibly perish there from the labor, exposure, or disease. Or one could be marked for execution on some communist list, or summarily executed for anticommunist behavior. “Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson carried out a survey of Vietnamese refugees in the United States and unexpectedly found that about one-third had seen executions or had detailed information on them. Thinking that they might be dealing with a biased sample of refugees, the two researchers traveled to France to interview refugees there. They found the same story. From the refugee reports, they calculated that at least sixty-five thousand South Vietnamese had been executed. Desbarats believes that these strictly extrajudicial executions might even have been as many as one hundred thousand. “Nguyen Cong Hoan, a former official of the new postwar government of Vietnam, estimates that in perhaps one year after the war, from fifty thousand to one hundred thousand people were executed outright. Others put the toll at around 250,000. Many of these estimates may include those executed in the reeducation camps. Then there were the pick-them-up-and-shoot-them type of executions; the various reports and estimates suggest that some one hundred thousand people were killed overall. In the months after South Vietnam’s defeat, the victims were most commonly high officers of the previous regime; after 1975, they were usually those characterized as antigovernment resisters, which could mean nothing more than not registering for reeducation. “I want to stop here, and pick up on what were called the ‘boat people’ in the next lecture. They are an incredible aspect of this truly terrible and fearsome period of Vietnam’s history, and twentieth century democide.” He looked around. “Questions, comments?” “Professor Banks.” “Yes, Mr. Lyons.” “There were all these antiwar demonstrators that opposed the war and . . . ah, sided with the North. What do they think of all this killing by the North when it won? And about taking away all rights?” “It seems most don’t care. Some protested as an opposition to the possibility of being drafted. To some it was a social and fun thing to do with friends, something involving drugs, booze, and sex. For some it was an expression of their anti-Americanism, or procommunism.

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“Keep in mind that the true repressive and murderous nature of communism was shown by Ho Chi Minh in the North against his own people, by China under Mao, and by the Soviet Union under Stalin, and their examples should have been an even greater warning of what would happen in the South once the communists took over. After such blatant examples, these antiwar demonstrators were either supremely ignorant and only doing their anti-draft or social thing, or procommunist to begin with. In either case, what happened in the South after the war hasn’t touched many of these people.”

Chapter 41 1978–1979 Cholon Jiang Jia Li

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eliable information about escaping Vietnam was as easily available in Cholon as the price of black market rice. And Jia Li had thought it through. The best time for our escape on the ocean is ocean is the dry season, January to August. So, it will be July of 1979 . . . almost a year after poor Yan’s death. This will give Jy-ying and especially infant Ting a chance to grow some, and better withstand whatever they will face on the ocean or . . . whatever. She had the gold and jewels that Shihao had hidden underneath the toilet pot, and she hoped that would be enough. It all depends on the secret syndicate or boat procurer . . . . But I will not be stopped. She hired a fourteen-year-old girl to watch Jy-ying and Ting while she carried or dragged her furniture, piece by piece, to Cholon’s Ben Tai Market to sell. Last to be sold was her precious heirlooms, and most of her jewelry. The North Vietnamese soldiers, officers, and officials frequented the market. Ho Chi Minh City’s wealth still amazed them, compared to the cities and towns in the North, even glorious revolutionary Hanoi. So they were always on the lookout for something they could “borrow,” “requisition,” steal, or buy to take home with them when they left the “capitalist-raped” South. Her wedding ring with Dewu’s love engraved inside the band, her mother’s old wedding ring, and her father’s sapphire ring, she kept. All money she converted to gold taels. Finally, in May 1978, sitting in her empty shack and checking her list of all the taels she had hidden, she told herself, “Enough. I have enough.” Sino-Vietnamese were still being driven out of the country by the North Vietnamese. It had begun in 1977 when tension with China developed over Cambodian attacks across Vietnam’s border. The

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Vietnamese communists, believing that the Sino-Vietnamese were proChinese and would support them in the event of a war, began expelling them from the Communist Party and government positions. They also discriminated against them in jobs, rations, and in all the approvals everyone had to get from communist officials for personal activities, such as travel. As a result, Sino-Vietnamese were fleeing into China, or taking boats to other countries. Earlier in the year, the communists had regularized these escapes to make money off them. They contracted with foreign syndicate operations to buy ships, loaded them up with Sino-Vietnamese while offering no guarantee that the ship would reach some foreign shore or sink, and unofficially charged around ten gold taels for an adult and five for a child. The old cargo ship Tung An alone carried twenty-two hundred escapees, some of whom had paid three ounces of gold for forged papers that documented they were Sino-Vietnamese. But that unofficial communist escape operation was over. SinoVietnamese, like all escapees, now had to take the risk of being caught and sent to a reeducation camp or prison, shot by shore security patrols, or drowned when their boat was sunk by the Coast Guard, storms, or pirates. Many died of starvation or exposure on the open ocean. Jia Li knew all this. She had asked around in Cholon, the Chinatown of Ho Chi Minh City, where close attention was given to the potential for escape. One could buy very good information, including where in Vietnam it was best to escape by sea, what captains were available, and how much it all would cost. For those willing to pay, there was even a register for notification of the next boat leaving. Bribes provided the best intelligence, but bribes cost money. So Jia Li had to dig into her accumulated escape funds for what information she got. Finally, after all her payments, all her secret work through intermediaries, all her careful weighing of this boat or that, this captain or another, this escape route or some other, she had made her decision, and she and the children had been accepted. She now often talked to Jy-ying, who understood very little, but that didn’t matter. So now, as Jy-ying ate her small portion of cold rice and wilted vegetables, Jia Li told her, “We will be included on a boat leaving in two weeks. Two weeks, and we will be gone. I cannot believe it, but it’s all set. Passage cost me nine taels. Then I had to bribe the Cong An Bien Phong—frontier police, and Cong An Noi Chinh—security police. And I had to pay the organizer of the boat escape. He is not going himself, but makes these escapes his business. Overall, Jy-ying, everything cost me eighteen gold taels. I had that and then a little more.”

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At the prevailing world price of gold, $11,000 in American dollars. She was almost ready. She had to catch the boat from the coastal town of Vung Tau, about seventy-eight miles southeast of Saigon, as she would always call that city. She would take a bus there in one week, to allow herself time to survey the area. The organizer had promised that there would be enough food and water aboard for ten days, more than enough to reach the Philippines. They would not head toward Thailand because the Gulf of Thailand was infested with Cambodian and particularly Thai pirates. Even heading south toward Indonesia risked the same danger, and Malaysia was forcing Boat People back into the ocean when they arrived on its shores, even if it meant their death. Two days before leaving, she prepared their food for the trip. She mixed sugar with lemon juice and dried the mixture in the sun until it coagulated into slabs. About two pounds would keep her and the children going for a day; she made six pounds. She made hard cookies out of powdered milk with sugar that she poured into molds, then dried over a fire she risked lighting next to the shack. She bought hard biscuits, and four half-pound bags of rice. She scoured Cholon and bought seasickness pills from a trusted black marketer. And she had bought three military canteens for their water. She would fill them just before she left her hotel for the boat. She packed a large, broken suitcase—she would tie a rope around it to hold it together—with everything, including what clothes she thought Jy-ying and Ting would need. They would be on the ocean in the hot summer sun, so to protect them from the sun she also included three umbrellas of a type that she could turn upside down when it rained, to capture rain water and funnel it into a container through a hole in the top nib. At three years of age, Jy-ying was able to carry a small case. Jia Li put her favorite stuffed animal into it, a furry, cuddly bear, and toiletries for them all, including a big bottle of aspirin. And in her purse she carried her most prized possessions of all. Tightly wrapped in cellophane to protect them against moisture, she carried colored photographs of Dewu and their wedding, her parents, Shihao, Yan, and their wedding picture. She had paid much to have them all copied, and she sewed the copies into the hem of her one summer coat. There she also inserted a little tube with the ashes of her parents. Over these many years, she had kept the little plastic container with a screw lid that Shihao had given her to hide some of their money inside her vagina. She would do that again with her most precious jewels, and wear her menstrual pad to keep it in and discourage a finger search.

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There was still a high demand for living space in the city. She easily sold her shack with its remaining contents for one tael. The day came. Before heading for the An Dong Bus Station, she prayed to Buddha. She was not religious. It was for her own comfort rather than divine intervention.

Chapter 42 1996 Cyril Clement

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is thoughts came in explosive exclamations after he found out that Banks was a graduate student at Yale. He could not sit still and had to bounce and jiggle around his office, almost colliding with his bookcases. He was not even aware that he was in motion. Several times he just smacked his forehead with the heel of his palm. Holy Christ. Finally, finally, after all these years, I’ll meet the Banks of the Banks folder . . . the Banks who may have saved my life, the Banks who made my career. For sure. the Banks who gave me the two greatest ideas—the democratic peace and democide—the Banks who gave mankind the solutions to war and democide. Holy Christ, I’m going to meet him. And shake his hand. Cyril could hardly eat that evening. The next morning, he called his travel agency and had them make reservations for a round tip to New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale University was located. He told them, “This is rush.” Then he taught his graduate seminar on war and peace almost mechanically, and tried to control his impatience when he met several students to go over their term paper grades. Afterward he called the travel agency to find out if he had reservations yet. He did, for arrival in the Tweed New Haven Airport late Tuesday night the following week, and departure very early the following Saturday morning. He then emailed a colleague in Yale’s Political Science Department with whom he had often corresponded about his research: I will be New Haven from Tuesday night to very early Saturday morning. While I’m there, would you like to set up a university or department presentation

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for me, any day or time, Wednesday through Friday, to talk about the history of democide, especially in our century? Academic departments jumped on an offer of a free presentation, since it usually cost them a couple of thousand dollars plus all expenses paid to bring in somebody as well known as he was to give a talk about his research. He got a return email the next day. Yes, his colleague had discussed it with the department chairman, who would arrange a two-hour, oneday seminar for faculty and students on the Thursday at two p.m. Cyril immediately responded to confirm the day and time. Next he called the secretary in the History Department again and asked her, “Would you please pass on a note to graduate student John Banks, asking him to contact Professor Clement by phone, collect, ASAP? It’s about meeting him when I visit Yale University next week. It’s important, so if he is in class, can someone please make sure he gets the message when the class is over?” Cyril then gave her his phone number and email address, and thanked her. Cyril waited at his desk, leaning over a biography of Peter the Great with his chin in his hand, unable to absorb a paragraph. Every minute or so, his eyes flicked up to his phone. He even picked up the phone once to make sure he got a dial tone. Many hours later—at least it seemed that long—the phone rang. Cyril jumped in his chair, and then waited, poised in anticipation, through four rings. Then he whipped the receiver off its cradle and almost crushed it against his ear. “He . . .llo,” Cyril squeaked. He cleared his throat, swallowed, and tried again. “Hi. I’m sorry. I had something in my throat.” “Hello. This is John Banks speaking.” He had a pleasant and masculine voice, which Cyril noted even through his initial nervousness. But once he heard “Banks,” he would not have noticed if Banks sounded like a choir boy. Oh my God, it’s him. “Thanks for calling, Mr. Banks. Ah . . . I will be at Yale next week beginning Tuesday evening, and would like to get together with you for a chat.” He felt his voice firm up. “Ah, I’m giving a seminar Thursday afternoon, and I hope that you’ll be free to see me before then, someplace in the history department.” Can’t make this too friendly in the beginning, he decided. “Yes,” Banks responded. “Just a minute, please.”

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Cyril heard him asking the secretary about the availability of the department conference room, which received a vague response Cyril couldn’t hear well. He realized that he was pressing the phone so hard against his ear, it was beginning to hurt. Banks came back on the phone. “We can meet at nine a.m. on Wednesday in the History Department office, and then we can go to an empty conference room nearby to talk. That okay?” “Yes, fine. I’ll see you then. Goodbye.” “Goodbye.” Cyril’s heart was beating hard. The phone shook in his hand as he replaced it on its stand. He stared at it, and then slowly shook his head. Oh my God, I talked to John Banks. Oh . . . poor Banks . . . he must be scratching his head, trying to remember where he met me—especially a professor well known enough to be giving a seminar at Yale! No problem, I can handle that when we meet . . . it will be handling me that’s the problem.

Chapter 43 1979 Vung Tau town Jiang Jia Li

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he two hour bus trip to Vung Tau was uneventful. Jia Li expected the bus to be checked by security guards, and she’d prepared for the worst of all—her suitcase being searched, which would make her intentions obvious. She’d planned to offer a bribe, and had the gold ready in innocent-looking packets in her large purse. She stayed at the Saigon Hotel on Thuy Van Road. It had been recommended by her contact in Cholon. She had a week to settle in, inspect the beach area from which the boat would leave at night, and make herself conspicuous in case the town’s security police were watching for strangers staying for just a day or so before trying to flee Vietnam by boat—only those security police who patrolled the beach or shore had been bribed. For six days she went everywhere with a baby in her arms and a child tugging along, fingers wrapped in the hem of her long white shirt. “I feel so free,” she told Jy-ying while they walked on a beach. “I feel as though we are on a vacation.” She explored, she ate in a variety or cafes and restaurants, and she enjoyed standing on the beach, letting the trade winds blow through her hair. She played in the sand with Jy-ying and made Ting giggle. In the evening she took out the photos of Dewu, Shihao, and Yan and propped them against a lamp on the chest of drawers. Their love kept her company during the night. On July 14th, as instructed, she asked the registration desk clerk the key question: “Do you think that Vung Tau is as beautiful as Hanoi?” She got back the answer recognizing her as an escapee: “Yes, I have been there many times.” He prechecked her out for the next day.

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She waited the rest of the day in her room, playing with Jy-ying and Ting, or keeping them busy until they got tired and fell asleep. Then she watched the do khung—crazy soap operas and TV movies from Hanoi. I can’t believe it. I’ll never see such propaganda crap again . . . never. At one a.m., she went to the front entrance of the hotel carrying her suitcase in one hand and Ting in the other arm, and a confused and sleepy Jy-ying tagging along with her little case. The Peugeot 203 she’d been told to expect, modified to hold about a dozen passengers, waited there. Three couples were already seated inside. Jia-Li took her seat with Ting on her lap, and Jy-ying huddled next to her with her feet on their suitcase and bags. The Peugeot drove a short distance and picked up a man at another hotel. Then it headed for Bai Dau—Mulberry Beach, a narrow, sandy beach at the foot of a steep hill, tucked between rocky beaches and the cliffs of Truong Ky and Tao Phung, two mountains forming a peninsula jutting into the ocean southwest of the city. The Peugeot discharged them by a narrow, brush-strewn path down to the beach. Men with dim, half-lidded flashlights directed them onto the beach, which seemed awfully crowded. The waves were small; Jia Li thought this must be because the ocean was shallow here for quite a distance out. Then she saw the shape of a boat offshore, darker than the night. Men were ferrying people out to it in a rowboat; the two oarsmen rowed slowly, just dipping their oars into the water so they wouldn’t create telltale white foam. A man came up to Jia Li, pointed the dim flashlight in her face, and whispered, “Ho Chi Minh.” She responded with the password: “Stalin.” Then she gave her name and those of the children. The man checked the names against a list he held under his flashlight, then took her by the elbow and Jy-ying by the hand and led them to a line of escapees waiting to be taken to the boat. Their organization surprised her. She had heard many stories about fights and even shootings as people tried to get on boats already too full, or when their forged papers were discovered, or they had not paid in full for the escape. After all her family’s bad luck, she felt it was about time something went right. She did not realize how lucky she really was. For once, those fleeing had found an honest arranger and an honest captain. The boat, VT 473, was well provisioned, as promised. It was eleven feet wide by forty-five feet long, and fitted with two forty-horsepower engines. It also had a mast, with a folded boom and sail, so although clumsy, the

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boat could still be navigated if the engines quit. They had sufficient fuel to reach the Philippines, unless they raced their engines or ran into a bad storm from the east. The night air chilled Jia Li, and she was shivering by the time their turn came to be rowed out to the boat. There, men helped her up and over the gunwale; since she had a baby and child, they directed her to sit down inside the small pilothouse. In the dim light cast by an instrument panel, she found a place where she could sit out of the way with her back to a cold metal wall. She took her coat out of her suitcase and put it on, and put a child’s wool blanket around Jy-ying. She cuddled Ting under the coat, close to her breast, and sat down, then motioned for Jy-ying to sit next to her. What a good little child, Jia Li thought, putting her arm around the little girl. She has suffered through the worst of our life in the last year, yet I’ve seen almost no tears or temper tantrums. But Jia Li had seen the fear in her eyes. Maybe she knows all this is very serious and she must be good—she is very intelligent. Jia Li smiled down at the somber child. Anyone who doesn’t know she can already speak some Vietnamese would think she is retarded, she’s so quiet. Jia Li sniffed. The pilothouse smelled of fish, oil, and salt. A good smell—the smell of escape. She kept hearing the thumping, scraping, and chattering of people arriving, and more couples with their children and babies came into the pilothouse. Occasionally a baby cried, the sound quickly muffled. Then she heard grunting and scraping and then a loud thump, which she thought might be the anchor. Three men squeezed into the pilothouse. One inserted a key in the ignition, turned it, and the engines started up with a low rumble. He adjusted a knob that was lit internally, and gripped the steering wheel. Jia Li could not feel the ship moving, but it had to be, for the man was turning the big wheel. Shihao! Shihao my loving son, she yelled in her mind. Your wish is granted. We are leaving. Your children will be free. She leaned forward to look out the pilothouse entrance. People on deck blocked the view, but she glimpsed shore lights. The pilot still moved the boat slowly away from the lights, evidently feeling he was too close to shore to attract attention with the sound of his engines. She kept her eyes on what lights she could see as they gradually receded. The rumble of the engines got louder as the boat speeded up. The lights now looked like stars in the distant blackness. “Goodbye my ancestors,” she murmured. “Goodbye Vietnam . . . goodbye my country. Vietnam, muon nam—long live Vietnam.” She hunched over, put her head in her hand, and quietly cried.

Chapter 44 2001 Ralph Nieman

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alph Nieman was looking forward to Banks’ third visit. He was more than professionally curious about the man’s unusual dreams, and made some preliminary notes about what he might expect this third time. He predicted that the dreams formed a loop and that about now, or by the next session, his dreams would begin to repeat the terror he experienced on 9/11, and his sex with the beautiful woman he called Joy, and his personal horror over killing another human being. If Banks was indeed locked into such a loop, this would explain much. When Banks arrived, Nieman led him through the same routine as the previous session, and his answers were similar. Not much had changed; he still had his dreams, and he felt physically down. So Nieman put him under hypnosis—after Banks took off his shoes and lay back on the couch—took in hand his yellow notepad, and began to probe. Soon, in the same wooden monotone as before, John began describing his dream. “Joy and I . . . ” Nieman noted the smile that touched Banks’ lips as he said that “. . . have become well known and honored in the future democratic world we’ve created . . . dictatorships still exist in a few isolated countries. Everyone in the future knows they will soon disappear, to be replaced by democratic governments. “One Islamic dictator fears what this will mean for the future of Islam . . . he seeks a way to return it to its former glory, when it conquered half the known world. He’s . . . impressed by what Joy and I were able to do for democracy . . . believes he can do that same thing for Islam—create an Islamic world. The technology of time travel is a closely guarded secret among a few democracies, but his well-paid spies are able to uncover enough about it that his own scientists are able

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to build a time machine for him. He sends back to 1906 a pair of warriors . . . Carla and Hadad . . . to kill Joy and me with their modern weapons. Once they have accomplished that, they are to promote Islam throughout the world using the incredible wealth they brought with them. “Stupid choice of warriors . . . these two never get along, not like Joy and me.” Banks startled him by barking out a sharp laugh that made his body jump. A smile lingered on Banks’ face as he continued. “Their various assassination schemes fail; Joy and I are alerted to their attempts.” “Jy-ying, whose ultimate goal is still to save Sabah and kill Joy, has joined us to protect our mission from the two assassins.” Jy-ying? Nieman quickly leafed to his list of characters in Banks’ dreams. Oh yes, Joy from another universe. “Finally, Carla and Joy have one battle in which Joy is wounded . . . Carla contrives to set up a second battle between them that Joy will not survive. However, a time policewoman . . . Jill . . . intervenes to save Joy . . . she arrests Carla and sends her to the future for trial . . . I capture Hadad and turn him over to Jill.” Banks stopped and remained still. His face contracted in remembered anguish. After a moment, Nieman asked, “What happened?” “Jy-ying is killed in a trap that Joy set up to kill Carla if Joy did not survive their battle, and thus save me from her . . .poor Jy-ying . . . I think we had won her over.” John let out a shuddering sigh. “Shit happens,” he mumbled. After a moment, he continued. “Well, anyway . . . Joy asks Jill for a favor . . . to bring her forward in time to see her mother Tor, so she can tell her about our success. Jill says she will ask permission from the authorities of her time. She also tells us that the new universe created by Carla and Hadad’s appearance in 1906 will have to be reset back to the point of Joy’s and my arrival. Otherwise the future will have been changed in unpredictable ways. “Jill leaves for the future . . . another time policeman named Jomo appears in her place. He tells us Jill has been killed while trying to arrest the Islamic dictator who sent Carla and Hadad to 1906. Jomo has permission for Joy to visit her mother. He takes her to the future, when Tor is about to die in a hospital . . . the only way this intervention can be done without changing the subsequent future. “After her visit, Joy returns to the past, and Jomo resets the universe.” Nieman scratched his head. I can’t believe this. He must be getting these dreams out of some book. In response to his questions about the

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dream, Banks provided more details. A contemporary police detective pursuing these Carla and Hadad characters . . . a little dog that saves Jy-ying from suicide? Nieman shook his head. But the more he pressed, the more Banks told him. By the time the appointment was over and a somewhat dazedlooking Banks had left, Nieman’s thoughts were no clearer. Another coherent dream. In fact, a sequence . . . it builds on the last dream, just as that built on the one before. This must be something he read . . . he is putting himself into the story as one of the characters. Except maybe for 9/11. Maybe that was added. I’ll go in that direction next time he’s here . . . and I’ll ask him about his reading material. What he’s read may be the clue that unravels all this.

Chapter 45 Day 4, August 1979 South China Sea Jiang Jia Li

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here is a boat behind us,” somebody yelled. Soon everyone saw it, and the yelling and crying began. “Is it the pirates?” “They are going to catch us. What are we going to do?” “Buddha, please help us.” Jia Li felt the boat speed up as the captain went to full power, but after half an hour at full throttle, their boat had not outdistanced the other; in fact, they could all see that the other boat was catching up. Jia Li watched the boat approach from the gunwale. As it gradually drew closer, she could see that it was a large fishing boat, with many men standing in the bow, waving rifles, machetes, fish-gutting knives, and handguns. Pirates! She picked up the suitcase that was never more the an inch away from her leg, told Jy-ying to hang onto her pants to keep the child with her, and toted Ting into the pilothouse. It was practically empty except for the captain and one other, and they were arguing about what to do. Setting Ting gently on the floor, she took out of her purse her little plastic tube, which still had her small jewels and rings inside, wet it with her mouth, and turned her back to the men. She slipped her hand inside her pants and inserted the tube into her vagina. She then put on a menstrual pad. She’d noticed a narrow door in one corner. Glancing back at the arguing men, she quickly opened it. A little closet, as she’d hoped, containing a storm slicker and hat, what she guessed were manuals, and some bottles. She put her purse and the remaining gold from her suitcase on its floor amidst some bottles, and then dropped the coat

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and hat on top of them. She shut the door, picked up Ting, and grabbed Jy-ying’s hand. They moved to a corner and waited. Brrrttt! Brrrttt! Automatic rifle fire zinged across their bow. Someone yelled in a foreign language. The captain must have understood, for he slowed their boat down. The man with whom he had been arguing tried to grab the wheel. The captain slugged him, knocking him to the floor. Jia Li looked out the door. Men from the other boat were jumping aboard, brandishing their weapons. She sat with her back to the corner and drew her knees up to her chest. She held Ting tight to her with one hand; her other clutched Jy-ying’s hand. The child’s eyes were wide, her lips puckered with fear. More yelling. Screams. Several more sharp reports as the pirates fired their guns. Three men burst into the pilothouse. Two brandished knives; the third pointed a handgun at the captain, who flung up his hands. The one with the handgun barked something at him and held out a bucket. The captain emptied his pockets, throwing everything into the bucket. His watch followed. The two with knives stood in front of Jia Li. She stared down at their black boots, struggling to keep calm. Then she gasped as one of them jerked her to her feet by her hair. Eyes watering from the pain, she looked into a deeply lined, bewhiskered face that leered crookedly at her. She stared at a black gap where one front tooth should have been. The other man was young, bearded, his face ruddy from sun and wind. Straight black hair poked out below a Yankees baseball cap. Gap-tooth made motions for her to strip. The other threw open her suitcase and began rifling through its contents. Jia Li gently put Ting down next to the metal wall. She pushed down her pants and pulled her underpants aside sufficiently to show her menstrual pad. Gap-tooth took a step back, his face screwed up in disgust. Then he unzipped his pants, wiggled to work out his erection, and then pushed her down on her knees and pointed to it. She looked away. He picked up Ting and shook her at Jia Li; the baby writhed in his hands and began screaming as only a baby can. Jy-ying began to cry herself and quickly crawled underneath a tarp jumbled in another corner. The boat had erupted in a cacophony of gunfire, screams and wails, cries and moans, the piercing cries of children yelling for their mothers, and the deep, demanding shouts of the pirates.

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Jia Li did what the man wanted while he held onto Ting, whose panicked screaming added to the roar of terror and death throughout the boat. When he arched is back and released himself with a loud grunt, he pushed her head away, left his penis hanging out, and yelled something to the young man. The younger pirate, still kneeling over the dumped contents of Jia Li’s suitcase, rose and unbuttoned his thick oiled pants in front of Jia Li. The stench of rotting fish made her gag. While Gap-tooth held the screaming Ting, she also did Yankee-cap. He ejaculated and stepped back. Jia Li spit everything out, then held out her hands for Ting. Gap-tooth laughed. Shoving his limp penis into his pants with three fingers, he strode out of the pilothouse, gripping the crying, wildly shaking baby by one arm. Sobbing, Jia Li stumbled after him, weaving through the unmoving bodies and the naked women and girls being either raped or sodomized. Their husbands, fathers, and brothers huddled together to one side, their backs turned. Jia Li screamed, “No! Please no! Give her to me. I have gold.” The man did not understand. He stood at the gunwale and tossed the screaming infant into the ocean. She shrieked, “Ting!” and hit him full body with her shoulder, knocking him over the side. She fell in after him. She could barely swim, but she managed to flail to the surface. Her sodden hair covered her face, half blinding her as she swung her body around, searching frantically for Ting. She could not see the baby in the waves. But she did see Gap-tooth as he swam past her toward the boat. She arched her body toward him, stretching out her arm as far as she could. Her fingers sank into his hair, and she pulled them together and wrapped her other arm around his neck. Twisting and turning under her, he tried to beat her off with his fists, but the water hampered him. She climbed up on his head, put her full weight on him, and held him under the waves with all her strength. His arms flailed above the water as he tried to punch her, but he could not reach a vital place. His struggling grew weaker and weaker. And then he was still. When his body started pulling her down, Jia Li released him. She paddled desperately on the ocean’s surface, gasping for air. She was now so weak, and she had gulped so much seawater, that she could hardly keep her head above water. She vomited, spewing out water, and started thrashing around in a circle, looking for Ting again. She was nowhere.

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Jia Li jerked her head toward her boat as the horrible screams, shouts, shrieks, and gunfire escalated. The pirates had tied the hands of some of the naked girls and were pulling them onto their fishing boat. One of the girls twisted free and threw herself into the waves. Other pirates were shoving overboard the men and older women, some unmoving and bloody. They threw shrieking children after them. All around the boat, heads bobbed in the water and outstretched hands pleaded mutely for help. Jia Li squeezed her eyes shut. Never before had she heard such pitiful cries. She knew it was hopeless for her, for Ting, and for poor Jy-ying, still alone somewhere on the boat. She turned her head to look up at the beautiful, baby-blue sky, where cottony clouds floated effortlessly, and seabirds coasted back and forth on the wind currents. The captain had been on a watch for them. He’d said they were a sign that land was close. She thought of Dewu and Shihao, and caressed their images in her mind, and told them of her love. She cried for Ting and Jy-ying, her tears mingling with the lapping sea. She remembered a few of the Buddhist psalms and hymns her mother had taught her, and then only parts of them. As she tried to keep her head just above the water, she made part of one into her death poem: All passion have I put away, and all Illusion utterly has passed from me; Cool am I now. Gone all the fire within. Only love remains. She gave her mother and father a mental kiss. Then she let herself sink into the water, breathing it in. At first her body convulsed, trying to cough the flood out of her lungs, but that soon stopped. She felt a great quiet. She sank into the peaceful embrace of the ocean, and the darkness slowly came. And then the light. “Hello my love.” “Hello, Mom. Is that you, Dewu? Shihao?” Their arms were open for her. She ran to them, and then the light dimmed. And went out.

Chapter 46 2001 John Banks

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e was tired, more tired than usual. Again he considered calling in sick to the History Department, but today’s lecture was one he had looked forward to and for which he had prepared well. He did get his nap, and that helped. As he walked to his class, he tried to make sense of last night’s dream, for what felt the hundredth time. I’ve gone through this one before. A number of times, I’m certain. And again I woke up screaming “No!” and wet with sweat, my heart beating like a drum in my ears. My teeth hurt . . . must have ground them together. Again, a gun in my hand . . . the smell of smoke, men rushing me with knives . . . . I was running with someone in my arms . . . something about medicine . . . a heart monitor? I can’t put it together. Can’t understand. Why the gun in so many dreams? I’m a gangster? I have a repressed desire to shoot someone? Hope Nieman is making something of it all. John didn’t remember much of what he said during the hypnosis sessions. He was glad Nieman was taping it all. It’s like I’ve been sleeping through the hypnosis. He’d been so upset by that damn dream that he couldn’t sleep afterward, no matter how he tried. He’d spent the remainder of the night tossing and turning, and again rose with a headache to swallow three aspirins. At least that helped. He’d sagged onto his couch and watched with drooping eyelids the old movie The Girl Who Had Everything. He’d been unable to fall asleep during the movie, or even after it. Shit. He got to class barely in time. And everyone was there for a change. He took his outline out of his briefcase and stood alongside the lectern, one hand resting on it. “Good afternoon, students.” And then he began. “Throughout the Indochina and Vietnam wars, with all the associated killing and democide, Vietnamese generally re-

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fused to leave their country. Not even when many were forced to flee for their lives from vicious battles, as did 417,300 such refugees in 1974 alone. Even then, they returned to their home villages when they could. Vietnamese are loath to give up their family, their ancestral roots, their traditional customs. But after the North seized the South, they were faced with a new terror—that of the reeducation camps and the New Economic Zones; of torture and execution for who knows what, or formal isolation and a slow death from starvation, exposure, or disease; of being conscripted to fight another of Vietnam’s wars. “As the communists tightened their hold on the South, they intervened more and more in all aspects of life, imposed and enforced more rules. Totalitarianism became another kind of war the North inflicted upon the Southern people. In this new police state, the North controlled everything, including when and where one could move or visit, employment, production, prices and wages, education, food rations, personal consumption, entertainment, speech, associations, and religion. The North abolished all private trade in the South, and took over or abolished all private firms.” Banks looked from one student to another. “Class, when I use the term, ‘the North,’ to what am I referring?” He shuffled his name cards and pulled one out. “Miss Garfield.” A girl near the front put up her hand to identify herself. “North Vietnam.” “True, but ordinarily it refers to both a geographical area and a political division. There is a more specific meaning when I say, for example, ‘the North eliminated all private trade.’ In that example, the North means what?” He looked around. “Miss Stanton.” “The government of North Vietnam?” “True. And who was the government of North Vietnam? Mr. Wong?” “Hmm . . . Ho Chi Minh?” “He died in 1969. When I refer to the North doing such and such, I’m referring to its Communist Party, which in effect is the government of North Vietnam, and with the capture of the South, the government of all Vietnam. “To go on—the alarm, dismay, and dread, the trembling fear the North created in the South with its imposition of totalitarian communism, was already the lot of Northerners. However, in 1976, the communists began to focus particularly on those of Chinese ethnicity in the North. It began expelling thousands of Sino-Vietnamese, calling them ‘fifth columnists,’ a rhetoric that forecasted more serious conse-

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quences. Indeed, as relations with China soured, this soon became a label used to indict all such Chinese, North or South. In the North, Sino-Vietnamese living in the provinces, especially in important areas bordering China, were deported, while their homes were burned and property stolen. Others in the cities suddenly found themselves without jobs and subject to sharp discrimination. “Understandably, more and more Vietnamese, including SinoVietnamese and other minorities, began to seriously consider escaping the country. But there were few options. China to the North was also communist and, in any case, refugees who were not Sino-Vietnamese could be forcibly returned to Vietnam. Laos was a Vietnamese satellite. From 1975 through 1978, Cambodia was under rule of a Khmer Rouge that hated and killed Vietnamese; after the short 1978–79 Cambodian-Vietnamese War, Cambodia also became Vietnam’s colony. “That left trying to get across at least several hundred miles of open ocean to reach Hong Kong, the Philippines, Malaysia, or Indonesia, or hoping that some passing ship would pick them up. “I want you to take a moment to look at the map of Southeast Asia in your text, and note particularly the countries to which the Vietnamese could flee by boat.” Banks gave them a moment so he wouldn’t have to compete with the clatter of books and the rustling of pages, and the whispers to neighbors of those who’d forgotten their texts. He grinned at the mild chaos that occurred whenever he unexpectedly asked students to do something with their texts. “Okay. Aside from the problem of finding someone with a boat, and the risk of being swindled out of one’s life savings, being turned in to the communists, or captured while trying to escape, few seaworthy boats were available. And not many knew how to navigate the open ocean. Some of this risk was alleviated when, for an often-quoted amount of $2,000 in gold or hard currency, government officials or quasi-government organizations secretly aided those Vietnamese, especially Sino-Vietnamese, seeking to escape. “Getting out of the country was only part of it. The primary danger lay on the ocean. Once out in the South China Sea, often in old, unseaworthy, and overloaded boats, some simply not constructed for deep ocean travel, these escapees—whom I will henceforth call Boat People—were subject to deadly storms. And they were prey for Cambodian and Thai fishermen turned savage pirates. Typically, these pirates would pull alongside a boat, brandish their weapons, forcibly board it, rob the escapees of their valuables, selectively rape the women and

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girls, kill those who tried to interfere, and take a few of the women with them when they left. Sometimes they would allow those still living to continue. Sometimes they would kill everyone or sink the boat and leave all on it to drown. “This piracy went on day after day, week after week, and year after year. In 1989, these pirates were still operating. For example, the UN high commissioner for refugees in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, reported in May 1989 that . . .” Banks read from his outline, “‘seven pirates armed with shotguns and hammers killed 130 Vietnamese refugees and set fire to their boat off the Malaysian coast . . . . The attackers shot and bludgeoned refugees to death after raping several women . . . . Other boat people died of exhaustion after floating in the sea clinging to bodies of fellow refugees.’ “If the—” A sudden thump from the rear stopped him. He and most of the students turned to stare at Miss Phim, who had knocked her book off her chair. She had her shaking head in her hands, and looked to be sobbing. He didn’t know what to do. This had never happened in any class he had been in, or those to which he had lectured. Then his male instincts took over and he quickly walked to the rear of the room where she sat. He could tell that she was trying to keep her sobbing quiet, but it seemed otherwise out of control. He put his arm around her shoulder—it felt so right— and asked quietly, “What is it? Is there anything I can do?” Miss Chisholm, a student who sat nearby, came up on the other side of her and put a hand on her arm. She soon gained some control and stopped shaking. She dropped her hands and looked at him. Her face was wet with tears that still trickled from red eyes. She almost shuddered with some kind of grief. Lips trembling, she tried to whisper something, but it wouldn’t come out. Then she set up straight, raised her chin, and stammered, “When I was maybe four . . . they didn’t know my age . . . I was . . . on one of those boats. . . . Pirates killed everyone.” She shook her head as though to clear away the pain. “They missed me . . . but must have killed my mother and father . . . I was alone.” John stood and looked at the class. “Miss Phim has had a terrible experience that has devastated her, as you can see. I don’t want to say any more without her permission. Class is dismissed. I’ll catch up next time.” The class broke out in agitated whispers. Chairs scraped, books thumped. The students left the classroom, accompanied by an unusual amount of chatter.

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Banks looked at Miss Chisholm on the other side of Miss Phim. “Could you take her to the restroom and help her . . . whatever—you know. I’ll wait outside. I would like to talk to her and try to help her afterward.” He told Miss Phim, “Take your time. When you are ready, Miss Chisholm can take you to the restroom to . . . ah, refresh yourself.” She nodded, the grief still in her eyes, but her tears had stopped. “I’m alright now. Thank you both. I don’t need to go to the restroom.” She started to put her things into her backpack, and then took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes and face. John glanced at the other student and said, implying by his tone that he wanted to be alone with Miss Phim, “Thanks for helping her.” Chisholm replied, “Glad to help.” Then she leaned over Joy Phim and said, “Hope you feel better soon,” and left. They were alone in the classroom. John pulled up a chair so that he could sit down facing her. “I caused you grief, and I’m sorry. I didn’t know your background. If I had, I would have suggested you skip this lecture.” She looked at him with swollen eyes, the only residual of her grief. Her tilted head was so familiar; he must have seen it a million times. His heart began skipping—no, impossible. He found himself struggling to control his own emotions. She said, her voice almost normal in its smooth femininity, “I thought I could handle it. I was ready for your lecture. But the example of what the pirates did to the one boat . . . .” She let out a wavering sigh. “I was found alone, barely alive, in a boat off the Philippines. It got into the local newspapers, was picked up by The New York Times, and when a Cambodian refugee in the United States read about it, she crashed through the United Nations refugee bureaucracy to adopt me. Her name is Tor Phim, and she is like a real mother to me. I love her very much.” She paused and sniffled. “I am sorry to bother you with all this personal—” “It’s no bother. I teach this, you may remember.” He let the dimples begin to form at the sides of his mouth—all his past female friends had commented on them, and she seemed to appreciate them, as well. Her eyes opened wider, and she gave him a hint of a return grin. “Would you mind if I ask you some questions?” he asked. “After I busted up your class—please do.” It started out as questions, but turned into a conversation as she asked her own, and before either of them knew it, students were beginning to come into the room for the next class.

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“Would you like to come to my office so that we can continue?” John asked. “If you don’t have another class, that is.” “I would be happy to,” she answered. “I am only taking— auditing—your class.” John felt his eyebrows shoot up. “No other class?” “No. I wanted to hear what you had to say about the democratic peace. I already have a BA in political science and an MA in computer science.” John imagined his jaw making a loud thump as it hit the floor. He rapidly recovered and started to say, “I don’t under—” “Hello,” a heavy, middle-aged man yelled at him. “We have a class starting in this room.” John yelled back, “Sorry.” As they got up to leave, John wondered, Why was I so surprised? It felt like I could have completed her sentence when she told me that . . . but I couldn’t have known that . . . . Crazy. He led her to his office, where he motioned her in first, then left the door open behind him—he never closed the door with a female student in his office. His desk faced the wall, since he hated to put a desk between him and a student. He offered his own cushioned captain’s chair to her, took the desk chair, and turned it to face her. They picked up the conversation where they’d left off. He found out that her mother owned Nguon Industries and was very rich—he was not told this, but surmised it—and Joy worked on computers at her godmother Gu Yaping’s company, Peng Magnetics and Propulsion. Her mother had her trained at a very early age in karate and judo. He told her about his mother the top-ten tennis pro, and the father he hardly saw as he grew older, and who died mysteriously while working for the CIA. Then he told her about his growing interest in doing something about war and democide, and that the democratic peace seemed the solution, the more he studied it. Totally lost in her eyes and manner, her tilted head, her caressing voice, he couldn’t recall where in the discussion they started calling each other Joy and John. But he did remember that she had said, “I’m Joy—that Miss Phim is a turnoff,” and emphasized it by jabbing a delicate finger into his shoulder. He had resisted. “You are my student. I can’t call you Joy.” “I am an auditor, not really a student,” she countered. “Besides, as I told you, I have already completed college and graduate school. And I am almost as old as you are. You’re twenty-six, and a fresh Ph.D. from Yale. I’m twenty-five. Call me Joy or henceforth I will forever call you Dr. Professor Banks.”

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He stared at her. That’s right . . . political science? Computer science? Holy Christ. He threw his hands up and replied, “I’m John. Nice to meetcha.” He hesitated, trying to get his mental feet under him. “Ah . . . why are you taking my class? With, ah, your degrees and all?” “It’s not strange at all, John. Some of my courses at Berkeley went into the democratic peace as an idealistic alternative view to the realist emphasis on diplomacy and the balance of power, and in my course on international relations from Professor Schuman, I wrote a term paper on it. Then I heard a speech by the former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in which he emphasized the democratic peace. That stimulated my interest all over again. Here, it seemed, was a solution to war and what you call democide. Amazing. So, I wanted to know more about it. I talked to some professors in the area at the American Political Science Association meeting, including, it turned out, your dissertation chairman at Yale. He was highly complimentary about your dissertation, and said you would be teaching it here. “So I asked my mother to investigate you. She is as interested as I am in the democratic peace. You passed her scrutiny, so I took time out from my computer work, got an apartment here in Bloomington, and here I am in the office of the very person I wanted to hear lecture about it.” Investigated? Jesus. He shook his head over that. But he wasn’t insulted, or even shocked, as he would have been normally. “You must know so much more about me than I do about you.” “Well,” she said, giving him a beautiful smile, “I’ll have to change that.” Wow, he thought. Outside his window, daylight was fading, but he didn’t want this to ever end. He was more than smitten. He was overcome. But he liked so much about her, was so comfortable around her, that he knew it wasn’t love at first sight. And it went beyond the familiarity that grew from seeing her in class. It was like déjà vu, as though he had gone through this before and he was rediscovering his love. That couldn’t be. No way. But the feeling was, mysteriously, there. “Would you like to join me for supper? We would have to eat in the cafeteria, which is the only legitimate place I can be seen with you. This is a college town, you know.” “John, I am an auditor, as I said. You are not grading me.” “Afraid of the grade I would have given you, eh?” That lilt to her voice, her “don’t you dare contradict me” way of asserting something, and his reaction—too comfortable, like a well-used easy chair.

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Her eyes narrowed briefly and her lips tightened, then she looked at him askance before seeming to relax. “I have never been afraid of any grade I would get.” Oops. Then she added, strangely, “Are you afraid of the grade I will give you?” John’s response just came out without his thinking. “I have never been afraid of any grade I would get from a beautiful, intelligent woman.” She laughed. “Does that include me?” “Don’t know, do you.” She hadn’t accepted his invitation to supper yet. He just assumed it, and said, “Let’s eat.” “Since you’re so sensitive about me being a student, you’re welcome to eat at my place. I’m not a good cook, but I have pizza in the freezer and beer in the refrigerator. I could sneak you in with a blanket over your head.” “Well now, that is very friendly of you, but the blanket might slip and I could be recognized. And then there is my moral reputation to uphold. It would appear that I’m sneaking into a student’s apartment for immoral purposes, and then where would I be?” Joy’s eyebrows disappeared into her bangs, and she gawked at him. He added, “Anyway, I don’t go to a woman’s place until the tenth date. I keep track.” He tried to keep his face straight, but he felt the dimple forming at the corner of his mouth. She looked into his eyes, then at his dimples, and finally studied his overly bland expression. And burst out laughing. “I’ll get you for that.” She hesitated, obviously thinking of something. Then she admitted, “I’ve never invited a man over to my place like this. We really haven’t dated. Except for seeing you teach and hearing you make corny jokes, you are a perfect stranger. But for some reason, it feels as though I know you . . . . ” She shook her head. “Enough of that. Should I get the blanket?”

Chapter 47 1996 Cyril Clement

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hen Cyril walked into the History Department’s office, aflame with excitement over the upcoming meeting, a young man was standing by the secretary’s desk. Cyril almost stopped at the door and gawked. That’s him. That’s Banks. He doesn’t look like an ordinary student—too rugged-looking and masculine. More like he should be training horses. Cyril felt weak in the knees. His heart fluttered as he walked up to Banks and put out a hand that he was sure was moist and trembling. Struggling to keep his voice calm and straightforward, he said, “Hi . . . John. Great seeing you again.” John? Christ. Ever since I found his stuff, he has always been Banks. Banks . . . John shook Cyril’s hand firmly, his eyebrows slightly raised, his forehead slightly wrinkled. “Glad . . . good to see you again.” He quickly recovered himself and led a shaky Cyril to the conference room. Cyril sat down at the head of the table, and John pulled out the nearest chair and sat down. Cyril had to use every trick he knew to control his exhilaration and awe. Here, sitting by me, is John Banks! The John Banks who wrote the “Remembrance” . . . the John Banks who traveled back in time to 1906 . . . the great John Banks whose mission was to end war and democide and foster the democratic peace. One of the world’s greatest peacemakers, along with Joy. They prevented the bloody Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the War Lord period in China, World Wars I and II, and democratized China, Russia, and Japan— Jesus. Cyril mentally shook his head. Banks . . . he personally shot Hitler dead.

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A shiver ran up and down his spine. Damn, my heart’s beating so rapidly, he must see it thumping in my throat and shaking my body. If only Alice were alive . . . . Oh, how she would love this moment. Cyril mentally shook himself. He finally spoke up when Banks began to frown, seeking a topic that wouldn’t reveal they’d never met. “So, aah . . . John, how are your studies coming?” The frown deepened for a second, and then disappeared. Banks seemed to settle himself comfortably in his chair. “Well, this is my first semester here, and I’m just beginning to get a feel for the different specialties the History Department offers. Every one here is so respected and such experts in their fields, it’s hard to pick a course to take. I want to take them all.” Cyril was relaxing. The small talk did it. He was able to wave his hand and say, “I bet you signed up for twice as many courses as you could take, so that after week or two you could drop those that were the least interesting.” John nodded. Cyril couldn’t delay any longer. He had to ask, “Do you have any particular interest?” “I’m especially fascinated by the Spanish Inquisition. I can read Spanish, and might focus on its genesis and toll. But I’m also interested in the history of pacifism, particularly in the United States.” No wonder he did his dissertation on the democratic peace and democide . . . the basic interest is already there. Aloud he asked, “Do you know anything about my research?” I’ll bet he did research on me before this meeting. “Of course,” John answered. “I know your work on democide and the democratic peace.” “Does it interest you?” Cyril could see the fascination in John’s eyes. “Well, your research provokes a lot of questions.” Cyril made a point of looking at his watch. “I have some time. Go ahead, ask away.” For the next hour Cyril answered whatever questions troubled John, trying to be as provocative as possible but also suggesting possible areas needing research, particularly historical scholarship. Finally Cyril said, “I have to leave for other appointments,” which he did, with Political Science faculty. “I’m giving a faculty-student seminar on my research tomorrow, as you know, and I hope that you can attend. Afterward, perhaps you could join me for supper.” Banks seemed startled by the invitation. “Ah, I’d be glad to . . . and to also attend your seminar.”

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When they shook hands and parted, Cyril could see the deep confusion in the other’s eyes. He had no better idea how Cyril knew him, or especially why Cyril took such interest in him. Cyril floated through the rest of the day, stuck in a mental and emotional loop. I met the John Banks . . . I shook hands with him. My God, I talked to him . . . he’s coming to my seminar. The man to whom I owe my life and career. He was barely able to function when he met several faculty members in their offices. He answered their questions almost by rote, and hoped they put it down to jet lag.

aaa That evening, after a supper with the chairman of the Political Science Department, he stretched out on his hotel bed, eyes unfocused on the CNN programming on the TV, ears deaf to the parade of commentators. All he could think about at first was his meeting with Banks. Then, almost with a mental click, the image of Banks’ partner, Joy, popped into his mind. Joy? My God, Joy? She was half the Banks mission. She’s alive now somewhere. God, do I want to meet her face to face—to see this beautiful . . . warrior in person. Let’s see, where could I find her? I know she was a member of the Survivors’ Benevolent Society, but that society is secret . . . no address or phone number. He’d checked. I know that Joy’s mother, Tor, named her industrial conglomerate after her husband . . . can’t remember the name, though, nor Joy’s last name. Goddamn it, I can’t even remember where she got her BA in political science and MS in computer science . . . He did know that afterward, she worked for her godmother from China. Gu something or other. . . but I can’t recall that company name, either, if it was ever there. He sighed. I’m getting too damn old for this memory mining. I give up. But there will be an opportunity to meet her in the future. Until then, after I return home . . . He didn’t know what more to do with his life. Maybe I’ll just learn to write HTML and build a Web site to display my—Banks’ future research. Cyril had to laugh at that. And try to educate people about the democratic peace and democide. Yes, that’s what I’ll do. After all, it’s still part of Alice and my mission . . . and Banks’ . . . John and Joy’s.

aaa

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Banks attended Cyril’s seminar; in fact, he was there well before Cyril and most of the attending faculty had arrived. When Cyril walked in and saw him there, he gave him a little wave and a smile, and tried to ignore him the rest of the time. Cyril thought he had his emotions under control, but when he started to explain the democratic peace, the very idea he had taken from Banks’ stuff, he stammered and chewed up his words, and had to fake a cough to cover the awkwardness. “I must have caught a slight cold somewhere,” he apologized with a strained smile. He fumbled again when he introduced the idea of democide. He stopped, turned away from everyone, and faked a cough, then took out his handkerchief and wiped his nose and mouth to buy more time. Again he turned back and apologized for the interruption. He hoped his act would explain why his voice wavered slightly as he continued with his presentation, defining democide and then detailing the great extent to which such murder by government had been practiced. This was after all a seminar; with a mental sigh of relief, Cyril ended his presentation and allowed almost thirty minutes for questions and discussion. Banks left all the questions and interaction to others, either out of shyness in such a group of esteemed faculty or, more likely, Cyril thought, because he’d have what he must perceive as the privilege of asking questions privately when they met for supper. Truly, the privilege is mine. When they met for dinner at CO Jones Restaurant, John was now clearly into the subject. At first he expressed doubt, as so many historians did, and tried one argument after another to deny the truth of the democratic peace. By the time their Kendra’s Dip & Chips came to be picked at by both of them, Banks had moved from “can’t be true,” to “doubtful,” to “maybe.” Maybe is enough, thought Cyril. That will get him going into his own research and the dissertation I know he will do. When they discussed what Cyril had said about democide during his seminar, Banks was truly into it. “Its like the Inquisition,” he said, “but bloodier and more pervasive than any historian knows.” “That’s right,” Cyril said. “Historians have little chunks of it, depending on their specialty; one might know of the democide in Russia as part of his studies in Russian history, another as part of her Islamic studies, another through research into the Christian Crusades, or the Middle Ages, or the Roman Empire, and so on. No one, until I did my research . . . ” based on your mission, Cyril mentally added, hoping that he was not blushing, “has tried to put all these chunks into one whole.”

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Banks was even more skeptical of the relationship of democracy to democide, and offered a number of common arguments, which Cyril answered in each case. “I will be here until very early Saturday morning. If you have any more questions or simply want to discuss this, let me know,” Cyril said when they parted. “Anyway, you have my email address—write me whenever. And if you need any help or encouragement if you make this your focus, I would be more than willing to help.” As Cyril watched this incredible man of the future and the past and of a new peaceful universe walk away, “how could this be?” no longer troubled him. That he had read Banks’ stuff as a young man and discovered the ideas of the democratic peace and democide that he’d now introduced to Banks had happened. This was the way it was. And reality trumps doubt. When he returned to his hotel room at the Branford-Days Inn, he took a photograph of Alice out of his wallet with a trembling hand and kissed her face. “I wish you had been there,” he told her in a quavering voice, and then he held her to his heart, and cried.

Chapter 48 2001 John Banks

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oy’s one-bedroom apartment had a small kitchen off the dining room, itself simply an extension of the living room. When John followed Joy into her apartment—no blanket—she asked him to take off his shoes at the door, and then invited him to take a seat on the couch. “I’m going to change into something more comfortable. It’ll take a moment. Meanwhile, there are things you can look at on the coffee table.” She then headed for what must be the bedroom. One eye on her bottom as it disappeared through the door, John sat down. He stared at the closed bedroom door, head tilted, one finger rubbing his chin. What’s she doing? I don’t understand. Her usual gray sweatshirt and Levis seem as comfortable as she could get. He lingered on the thought of the tight Levis: Those would heat up a eunuch. Then: Unless . . . no, impossible. Don’t be stupid. He ripped his eyes from the bedroom door and looked around the apartment. Neat . . . not fussy. Comfortable. A place where I could relax. On the coffee table she had a pile of journals, news magazines— some dated months previous—and a little stack of folded newspapers. He looked through the stack. The New York Times, Washington Post, and the Washington Times. All current. A Mac laptop computer sat off by itself; though closed, its light told him it was active. He heard the bedroom door open, and she came back into the room. She had changed into a pink blouse with a V-neck that plunged down to her cleavage, and a tight denim skirt. Does she ever wear anything that isn’t tight around her hips? But what took his breath away was her hair. She had unleashed it from the ponytail she always wore to class into a black waterfall that fell with a slight curve to her hips. It emphasized her beauty and her figure both. He could only stare.

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She curtsied and said, “Ta-da. I got tired of my class uniform.” The hours went by in minutes. He knew he had eaten pizza and drank two bottles of beer, for the empty bottles and the pizza box were sitting on the kitchen counter when he happened to come up for air and see them. Afterward, he could not track what they talked about specifically, as their voices slid imperceptibly from conversation, to closeness, to comfortable intimacy; nor was he really aware of Joy going back and forth with the pizza and beers and cleaning up, for they kept communicating at all levels right through it. As the distance between them decreased, each assumed an unconscious physical openness to each other. He was soon drowning in Joy’s pheromones. The only break came when he had to use the bathroom, but then his mind was full of her and he could only hope afterward that he hit the toilet bowl. At some semiconscious level, he felt this was impossible. Many hours ago, before she’d emotionally broken down over the merciless death of her parents, she was the gorgeous, untouchable student sitting in the back of his class—free to desire, but forever unattainable. Now, in the same day, he was in her apartment, besotted by her, with all his quivering instincts telling him that she wanted him, too. Women found him attractive, and he’d had many relationships over the years. He had honed the choreography from “Hello, my name is . . . ” to “Your place or mine?” The sequence had never been as rapid as now. He felt the heat, he felt his partial erection, he felt his mind losing control to his desire and tried to stop it. Too fast . . . too fast, stupid . . . I’m letting my desire misinterpret the situation. If I try to kiss her she’ll slap my face and yell, “Go!” Slow this down . . . don’t ruin a possible future. Or am I over-intellectualizing what is naturally progressing? Boy, this one is beyond my experience . . . but then, there is that curious sense of familiarity. He fought his lust, and the time to put his arm around her came and went. The time to kiss her disappeared into what might have been. Yes, if it had been another woman, but not this one. They were both leaning against the back of the sofa, nearly facing each other. Joy had her legs drawn up under her and her arm resting along the sofa’s back cushion, almost touching John’s shoulder. She had been smiling invitingly, her voice soft and silky. Finally she tilted her head, looked sidelong at him with half-lidded eyes, her lips parted in a wanton, almost feral look. It was unmistakably female in heat. She stood and walked toward the bedroom. Oh my God, I’ve done it. I’ve turned her off. No, worse—alienated her. Oh, shit.

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Joy turned at the bedroom door, thrust out her right hip and put her hand on it, let the other arm fall across her other hip, and tilted her head. “Let yourself out,” she said evenly. Shit, shit, I screwed this up, John’s dejection screamed at him as he started to get up. “Or . . . ” an I-got-you grin slowly lit up her face, and her voice took on a sensual tone that suggested he had died and entered Paradise “ . . . you can join me in bed.”

Chapter 49 2001 Ralph Nieman

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ieman’s appointment book was half empty, so he had asked his secretary to schedule Banks on alternate days. He looked forward to seeing him in a few minutes. He had listened to the tapes of the last three dreams with an increasing insight into what was troubling the young professor. He had written down what he expected to hear in Banks’ recollection of the next dream, if in fact there was a new one. When Banks arrived, Nieman asked him the usual questions about how he felt, what he was thinking about his problem, and what he read in his spare time. No mention of science fiction, or anything similar. When he asked about the dreams, Banks replied, “I know that some of my dreams are repeating themselves, but I don’t know whether it is one dream or if they get mixed up. Guns always seem to be part of my dreams . . . and using them in a fight. And I seem to be learning, or . . . I don’t know, using martial arts—which is funny. I think I’m being taught, if that’s what it is, by some small woman. It’s damn annoying, not to remember.” He automatically moved over to the couch. “Anyway, they seem not to bother me as much. Last night my sleep was not as fitful, and the dreams seem almost ordinary in how they affected me. You know, I woke up when my alarm when off, and then as I was shaving and later eating breakfast, I hazily recalled patches of the dream, as I’d do with normal dreams. No waking up with screams in the middle of the night, no sweating. My face and pillow were wet for some reason, however.” “Has anything changed in your life that might account for this?” “Ah . . . hmm. Well, since you’re my psychologist and I can trust you to keep this secret, I’ve developed a relationship with the beautiful Asian student in my class.” Banks immediately held up his hand as

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though warding off an objection. “She’s twenty-five, and not taking any other class, and only auditing mine. So, I don’t see a facultystudent relationship problem.” “What’s her name?” Nieman asked. “Joy Phim.” Nieman tried to prevent his eyebrows from flicking up and down; before Banks could see his eyes widen, he dropped his head and started writing on his yellow pad. A key. He had just been given a key to this young professors’ psychological problem. He leaned back to his desk and pressed the button on his phone for his secretary. “Sandra here,” she responded. “Sandra, please . . . oh, just a moment.” He looked at his patient. “John, do you have an extra hour this morning? It’s important.” Banks nodded. Nieman again spoke into the phone. “Please reschedule my next meeting with Mrs. Hargrave with my apologies. Tell her an emergency has come up. If she gives you trouble, say the next meeting is halfprice.” Then Nieman turned to Banks. Keeping his voice professional, he said, “Please tell me all that you know about this woman . . . ah, Joy Phim.” Banks did so for the next forty-five minutes. Then Nieman suggested hypnosis. Banks took up his position on he couch, minus his shoes, and Nieman pronounced the phrase “P,R,ti” that put him under. At first, Nieman asked a series of questions about Joy to see if anything about her was hidden from Banks in his subconscious. He was straightforward about Joy; it’s clear that he is already deeply in love with her. He looked at his watch. Okay, time to move on. Let’s see about his dreams. In response to his questions, Nieman learned that the dreams he’d thought might repeat were indeed almost identical to the last dreams Banks had recounted. Then he asked, “Did you have a new dream?” “Yes,” came the wooden response. “Can you recall it?” “Yes, I think so.” “Please describe it to me.” “A strange man killed Stalin in 1903, and then helped Trotsky successfully revolt against the Russian Czar in 1905.” Nieman was surprised. Banks’ usually wooden tone under hypnosis had melted into a well-modulated storytelling voice. Hmm, what other surprises does he have in store for me? Not his shoes, he took them off again.

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“When Joy and I arrive in 1906, the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, and the anticommunist Civil War is eating up lives. This socalled Russian Revolution should not have taken place until 1917. But now, in 1906, the Red Terror and associated famine are killing millions of Russians! And Lenin isn’t leading the revolution this time. Trotsky is. “When Jy-ying—Joy’s double—Joy, and I discover this horror taking place in Russia, we have to believe a time traveler from the future is trying to change the past . . . we can only assume that his goal is to communize the world. We have to defeat him. Since we don’t know who he is, we decide to lure him to us. “In the meantime, Jy-ying and Joy discover they aren’t just doubles, they’re the same person, from separate universes. Joy also discovers that Jy-ying is as much in love with me as she is. And since they are one and the same, although from different universes, Joy invites Jyying to enter into a ménage à trois—a three-person sexual relationship—with Joy and me . . . . She accepts, and I’m . . . seduced into it.” Nieman waited, but Banks only started squirming on the couch. Finally he instructed, “Please go on.” “It was a wet dream. Then, when I woke up, I made love to the real Joy lying next to me in bed. It was a twofer.” Banks was actually grinning, and so was Nieman. “Was there more to your dream?” “Well, after I made love to the real Joy, I went back to sleep and the dream continued . . . . “The time traveler—we learn later it’s one man, a rogue time policeman—wants to change the universe, make communism triumphant. To lure him into revealing himself, we publish a book about the development of communism in the future, including references to Stalin, and use the nom de plume Adolph Hitler—a name only someone from the future would recognize. That gets him searching for us. Like us, he knows only other time travelers could have this information, and from the history he learned in the future, the history in which we are famous for what we did for democracy, he realizes the time travelers have to be us. “He finds us, as we planned. But we didn’t realize what powerful weapons he would have. He uses a device to teleport himself into our bedroom when only Joy is there. He partially paralyzes her and . . . rapes her. “A little dog Jy-ying adopted warns us of an intruder . . . we rush to the bedroom. Jy-ying springs into the bedroom from a side door with her dog, which distracts him long enough for her to shoot him dead.

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“But . . . he had . . . k-killed . . . Joy. Joy was dead. My Joy . . . was deeaad!” Tears flooded from Banks’ eyes to run down the sides of his face. He lay rigid on his back, the hands at his sides clenched into fists so tight, his knuckles were white. Nieman waited. He didn’t want to interrupt what might be a necessary, purging grief. Soon the tears stopped and Banks’ body relaxed, as did his hands. Nieman asked softly, “Can you continue?” “Yes.” A long pause. “Our mission, that of Joy and I, now becomes that of Jy-ying and I. As the months pass, my love for Jy-ying grows . . . but I cannot physically return her love for me, which is as great as was Joy’s. Until . . . Joy appears in a dream, to give my love for Jy-ying her spiritual blessing. With that, Jy-ying and I become true loving partners.” Nieman waited, and then asked, “Is that the end of the dream?” John’s eyes opened, and he turned his head to look Nieman in the eye. A dimple formed at the corner of his mouth, and he waved his hand across his body, as if including somebody invisible next to him. “Well, other than that,” he said, “we defeated the Russian Revolution, eventually democratized Russia, and still succeeded in promoting peace and democracy as Joy and I did in my first dream. But no biggie. What was most important was that Joy came back to me in my dream within a dream.” Nieman hid his chuckle, and then sat back and stared at the other man. Extraordinary. Is he still under? Maybe it’s his natural personality asserting itself. Nieman asked him, “Are you still asleep?” “Yes.” Nieman brought John out of hypnosis on the count of three, and studied him for a moment. “Do you remember what you said under hypnosis?” “Not really.” He brought a hand up and slid it across one cheek. “But, could you tell me why my face and hair are wet?” “You cried while describing part of your dream.” “I cried?” He paused in thought. “My dream must have been about what I’ve been teaching in class—the Vietnamese Boat People and what happened to them on the open ocean.” He hesitated. “I bet I cried about Joy Phim, who miraculously survived while everyone else on her boat was killed by pirates.” Almost gleeful over the success of this session, Nieman said without thinking, “It was about Joy.”

Chapter 50 2001 John Banks

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e walked toward his classroom with a buoyant step, happy over the way his and Joy’s relationship was going. They had spent almost the whole weekend together, and during each hour, he felt his feelings for her deepen. He was falling in love with her. I still can’t believe my day-by-day, almost hour-by-hour discoveries about her. He thought about their lovemaking. It had bothered him at first that she was extraordinarily good, and inventive; he was convinced that such skills could only be acquired in the practice of the world’s oldest profession. But then she’d told him that, at the age of seventeen, her mother Tor had enrolled her in a secret Three Pillows Art Academy in Chinatown to learn the arts of love. Just in time. I almost proved to her how stupid I am. He almost walked into a student cutting in front of him. “Oops, sorry.” He wondered how this afternoon would go. He’d told her that he would like to learn karate and judo from her, so after class she was taking him to the dojo she had found in Bloomington. “Not very good,” she’d said, “but adequate to begin your training.” He’d learned she was also an expert with weapons, particularly the knife. When she discovered that he’d never so much as held a BB gun, she’d volunteered to train him in weapons, as well. “Then you could be my backup when I clean the streets of muggers and rapists,” she said. Ha! Me, shoot a gun . . . not until pigs fly. Just to be extra sure, add horses to that. It hadn’t sounded like she was joking, so he’d hurriedly admitted, “No, I don’t like guns.” Then she’d revealed another of the million or so facets of her personality. She had stood back and stared at him as though he’d said he didn’t like puppies and kittens, or roses. She sighed loudly, and com-

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mented, “Well, good thing you have other upstanding virtues.” And then she leered at . . . my crotch, of all things. He was speechless. He felt the heat rising in his face. He had never been subjected—Yes, that’s the word . . . subjected to that kind of humor from a woman before, not by one so beautiful and desirable. She’d seen his expression and started laughing from the belly up, and after trying to look insulted, he gave up and joined her. He had told her about his dreams, about his inability to get a good night’s sleep, that a psychiatrist was trying to help him determine what the problem was. Now I know what the problem was. No lovemaking. Ha-ha. That first night with Joy had been . . . joyous. When they finally did go to sleep in each other’s arms, exhausted, he’d slept soundly for ten hours and woke up in the afternoon. It was Saturday, fortunately. He’d also slept well Saturday night, with Joy’s naked body against his, and woke up feeling rested, without the usual headache, not even a mild one. But there’d been one episode on Sunday night, when he awoke too early to get up, and his tossing woke Joy. “Did you have one of your dreams?” she asked. When he said he didn’t remember, she had been sympathetic, and tried to help him remember. All I could recall was shooting guns again, and people being killed, but I didn’t tell her that. A cluster of his students stood outside his classroom, sharing notes, and he nodded to them before entering the room. He was a few minutes early. Half the students waited in their seats. Just as he opened his briefcase to take out his outline, he saw Joy come in the door—in pigtails, sweatshirt, and tight denim jeans. Without looking at him, she took her usual seat in the rear. A number of students watched her, their curiosity obvious. Miss Chisholm, who sat next to her, struck up a conversation. He guessed that she’d asked Joy if she was alright. The rest of the students slowly filed in. John checked his watch. Time. “Good afternoon, students. I have Miss Phim’s permission—” Still using her surname like that . . . delicious “— to explain what happened to her during our last class. When I described to you what happened to some of those fleeing Vietnam when their boat was attacked by pirates, this is close to what probably happened to her. At the age of about four, she was on such a boat when it must have been attacked by pirates. They may have kidnapped into sexual slavery some of the younger women and murdered the rest, or murdered everyone. No way of knowing. But somehow, they missed Miss Phim. She may have been hidden somewhere on the boat by her parents before they were murdered. For

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whatever reason, the pirates overlooked her, and a Filipino fisherman finally found her on the boat, hungry, sunburned, and near death from thirst.” “Oh no,” one student exclaimed. Miss Chisholm put her hand on Joy’s arm, and some of the students close by turned to say something to her. Prepared this time, Joy maintained her composure; her face looked strained, but she thanked them graciously. John gave it a moment, and then continued. “This is the first time I’ve had someone in class who experienced the democide or killing episode I was lecturing about. I normally would ask them to talk to you about their experience, but in Miss Phim’s case, it is too personal and too sensitive. Also, I ask you, please respect her privacy on this. I’ve told you as much as she feels up to revealing. Now, to move on. Regarding the Boat People—” He walked to his briefcase and took out his deck of names. He shuffled it. “Miss Carden?” When she put up her hand, he asked, “What are Boat People?” “I think they are Vietnamese who tried to flee Vietnam by boat.” John nodded. “Thank you.” He strode back to the center of the room. He leaned forward, one hand holding his outline behind him while he gestured to the class with the other hand. “Those Boat People died in prisons or reeducation camps when caught in the process of fleeing Vietnam, or they were executed outright; they died on the ocean when their boat was shot out from under them by the communist Coast Guard; they died in storms, from thirst, or from starvation; they died at the hands of pirates. “Those refugees who did make it to another shore might be forced again out into the ocean in a rickety boat, perhaps to die this time. This is what Malaysia did; this practice may have been responsible for the death of seventy-six thousand Boat People. “If allowed to remain where they landed, they faced life in squalid refugee camps until maybe, eventually, some country whose culture and land was alien accepted them. “Yet at first thousands, then tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of these Boat People fled their homes, relatives, friends, and country. And they fled largely during a time of peace. They truly used their bodies and lives as testimony against the kind of life the communists imposed on them.” John let that hang there as he raised his outline to glance at his figures. “In 1978 and 1979, this flight reached incredible numbers. In just

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one month in 1979, over sixty thousand Vietnamese risked pirates, storms, and other causes of death on the high seas, often in ridiculous boats, to reach Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Macao, the Philippines, and even Japan. According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, as of 1984, a total of 929,600 Vietnamese were actually given refuge by the first nation they reached. The American Department of State estimates that from 1975 to 1985, one million Vietnamese fled Vietnam. That number may be a minimum. No one knows for sure. But judging from the variety of estimates, it seems that probably 1.5 million attempted the dangerous escape from Vietnam by sea, possibly even two million. “The toll on the ocean is, of course, unknown. There are percentage estimates of these dead, however, which vary from twenty to seventy percent of the Boat People, the latter from an official of Ho Chi Minh City. Many refugee officials believe that up to 50 percent died on the ocean, the figure given by the Australian Immigration Minister Michael MacKeller. Some give actual numbers of dead. One source claims that three hundred thousand to one million died in the period from 1975 to about 1979. One ranking American official believed the toll was thirty thousand to fifty thousand per month up to 1979. For the period up to April 1988, the United States Committee for Refugees estimates that five hundred thousand died. “Such figures and other estimates of the percentage that died suggest that from one hundred thousand to 1.4 million Vietnamese drowned at sea or died of other unnatural causes. A prudent estimate seems to be five hundred thousand. If, of this number, we only count those fleeing for their lives under communist pressure, which I conservatively calculate at about half of them, then the deaths of 250,000 Boat People constitute democide.” Some of the students seemed overwhelmed; a few seemed to be going to sleep. He picked up his deck of names, shuffled it, and said, “Let me pick a name out randomly. I want this to be truly random so that my biases don’t influence my choice.” Trying to look very serious, he picked out a card, held it up and looked at the name, then shook his head. “Not this one.” He ostentatiously put it on the bottom of the pack. He picked out another and did the same thing. Some students caught on; they chuckled. Finally, a third card. “Ah, yes, Miss Asing,” No answer; no hand went up. He put an X at the top of her card to indicate her absence, and pulled out another one. “Miss Mahoney.” A hand went up.

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“Could you tell me how many Vietnamese fled Vietnam in boats?” She looked down at her notes. “One and a half million.” “Don’t forget the ‘probably.’ We don’t know for sure, and even the probability is a subjective judgment on my part.” Another card and name: “Mr. Sosa.” “Yes, sir.” “How many of the Boat People did I estimate probably died while fleeing?” “About half a million, sir.” “Yes; thank you.” John put his hands behind him and looked over the class. Joy was looking at him with her head propped on her hand. Probably can’t wait to get me in bed tonight, he thought with a mental laugh. Then he swallowed it. That was a hell of a thing to think in this context. Jesus, what she must be going through, listening to all this. He took a few more seconds to emphasize by his silence the section break in his lecture. Then, gesturing with his hand as though opening his mind to them, he began his conclusion. “Now, I want to sum up my lectures on Vietnam by providing an overall picture of the killing that took place from 1945 on. But first, I should mention Vietnam’s democide in neighboring countries. Vietnam fought alongside the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia until their takeover of the country in 1975, and then in 1979, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied the country. During all this, Vietnam appears responsible for the death of 461,000 Cambodians. “It fought in Laos to establish a Vietnam-controlled puppet government and murdered another eighty-seven thousand. “Adding these to the figures for the post-Vietnam War democide in Vietnam, the Communist Party of Vietnam likely murdered about 1,040,000 people. Just this post-Vietnam War toll makes Vietnam one of this century’s megamurderers.” John took the top card off his pack, looked at it, and asked, “Mr. Stein, what does mega mean?” “Huge.” “Right. That is one of its meanings. But what does it mean in the way I use it for Vietnam? That is, that communist Vietnam is a megamurderer?” “Ah . . . it murdered . . . a million or more?” “Yes, very good.” He continued. “Vietnam is already a megamurderer even before we add those it murdered during the Indochina and the Vietnam Wars. Including this number, this Communist Party is

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probably responsible for the murder of almost 1.7 million people, nearly 1.1 million of them Vietnamese. The figure might even be close to a high of 3.7 million dead, with Vietnamese around a likely 2.8 million. This means that from 1945 to 1987, the Vietnamese communists probably murdered about one out of every seventy-five Vietnamese men, women, and children. On an annual basis, this was about one out of every one thousand Vietnamese per year for each of slightly more than forty-four years.” A hand. “Yes, Mr. Watson?” “I still don’t understand why they did so much killing.” “They were communists, Mr. Watson. They killed for the same reasons that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist dictators murdered their people. It was the Marxist imperative. The revolution had to move forward, the utopia had to be realized. This required, in communist eyes, that actual and potential opponents be eliminated and that, like cogs in a machine, those that remained obeyed commands from the Communist Party, absolutely. No competing power structure could remain; not religious leaders, not village and hamlet leaders, not alternative voices. Nor could land or productive machinery be allowed to remain in private hands, for these might be used in a way contrary to the communist restructuring of society. Capitalists were seen as evil. “And for a whole society of millions of individuals, each with different interests and values, none of the most fundamental social engineering and reconstruction envisioned by the communists could be carried out without corpses. After all, this was a war on exploitation, poverty, and inequality, and in wars, people are killed. As the communist saying goes, ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ “As for democide in the Vietnam War, this was after all a revolutionary war, a war ultimately for utopia. And, as in the war on domestic capitalism and feudalism, whatever is expedient, whatever is necessary to win the war, must be done no matter the number of civilians sacrificed. “And certainly the imperatives of power played their role. History teaches that power aggrandizes itself. Those who have power seek more power, and more power demands even more to protect itself. Nor can one deny that envy of the rich and productive, or individual greed, played a role, especially among lower cadre. But among the top communists it is clear that Marxism, as it became interpreted by the Soviets and Chinese, and the dynamics of power set in motion by the Vietnamese communists, were paramount. “In sum, the Vietnamese have suffered through horrible wars and horrible democide. Probably nearly 3.8 million of them were killed

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over forty-three years. Of these, 1.25 million of them were murdered by South Vietnamese regimes, by Frenchmen, Americans, Koreans, and Khmer Rouge, and particularly by the Vietnamese communists ruling in North Vietnam—they alone wiped out about 1.1 million Vietnamese.” Silence. He looked around at a room full of somber faces. Good.

Chapter 51 2001 Ralph Nieman

N

ieman thought that the upcoming session with Banks would be the last. He closely studied the first four tapes, did an analysis, and predicted what the fifth tape would record about Banks’ dreams. Now he could take Joy into account, the new element in Banks’ life, and the expectations he’d had about the fourth dream were pretty much on the mark. So, if this fifth session further verified his analysis, the rest would be up to Banks. This was an easy one. Some of his clients had dragged on for many months—he never let it go beyond six. When Banks arrived, he started off with the usual questions. Banks responded, “I’m much better. In fact, I think I’m back to normal. I sleep soundly now, and although I still have dreams, they don’t upset me. No headaches. No fatigue.” “Are you still involved with Joy Phim?” “Oh yes, the more I’m with her, the more I like her.” Nieman mentally grinned at that. Probably doesn’t want to seem too hasty in falling in love with the woman. He asked more questions just to be sure that the only recent change in his Banks’ life was his new relationship. Then he put him under hypnosis. “Have any of your dreams repeated themselves since last I saw you?” he asked Banks. “No.” “Have you had any new dreams?” “Yes, one.” “Please tell me about it.” “When that damn rogue policeman changed the universe by killing Stalin and helping launch an early Russian Revolution, he produced waves of change throughout the world. The history we know was no longer the same in that universe. One big change was in the Balkan

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Wars involving Turkey. They were far more intense and far-reaching in their effects, especially in when the Young Turks began their genocide of millions of Armenians.” Nieman raised his eyebrows and asked, “Was there such a genocide of the Armenians in our history?” “Yes, over a million were murdered by the Young Turks.” “Please continue your dream.” “When Jy-ying and I—oh, God, that’s right, Joy was killed . . .” Nieman waited. A few tears squeezed from beneath Banks’ closed eyelids, but his body remained relaxed. In a moment he continued without prompting. “When Jy-ying and I find out about the ongoing Young Turk genocide, we aim to stop it. We make preparations . . . hire a Turkish immigrant to help us learn about Turkey and the language . . . the bastard tells his wife, a Turkish patriot . . . she informs her nephew, who is actually a Turkish agent in Britain. “So when Jy-ying and I travel to London to request that the editor of The Times help us stop the genocide, we are assassinated by the Turks. We are killed. Jy-ying and I are dead . . . like Joy. “The twosome became a threesome became a twosome, and then a zero-some. Ha-ha.” Nieman frowned and looked sharply at Banks, but Banks’ tightly furrowed brow and down-turned mouth told him that the laughter was the same as a sigh of emotional pain. He waited, and then softly said, “Please go on.” Banks returned to his dream and his face gradually relaxed. “Those three young men that Joy and I hired in 1906 for our import and export company . . . we used it as cover . . . had become close friends. When we finally had to tell them about our mission, they became as dedicated to it as we were. “One of the young men, Hands, was engaged to a German actress named Kate—oh, what a fearless one! Her brother and his wife were killed in a pro-democracy demonstration, and she was arrested . . . my God, how she was tortured. Now she has her own mission—to execute those who carry out democide, especially against pro-democratic activists . . . . She had already executed four or five of them when Hands tells her about the murder of Jy-ying and me. “Kate becomes the leader of the others as they seek to revenge our deaths, and to stop the slaughter of the Armenians. They travel to Turkey to do so . . . actually assassinate the five top Young Turks with a missile launcher that Joy and I had brought with us from the future. But

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their intentions were suspected by a Turkish general . . .had them followed . . . lets them proceed with the assassination, so he can take over the government. When they do succeed, his troops attempt to arrest them . . . firefight . . . all killed. Holy Christ, everybody’s dead . . . . My God, nobody’s left. Oh my . . . God.” Banks’ face turned white as his emotional pain twisted and pulled it into a grotesque mask. He began to thrash about on the couch, and Nieman was just about to bring him out of the hypnosis when he suddenly relaxed, and his face showed immediate relief. “No, wait a minute. Ah, yes. “Can you beat that . . . a time policewoman from the future decides . . . against the laws of her time . . . to reset this universe back to the point just before Jy-ying and I are assassinated. As a result of our deaths, and then the deaths of the five others who tried to continue our mission . . . the universe proceeds on a bloody course with a future where not only billions are murdered, but almost all democracies are eliminated. The time policewoman cannot allow this. “When she resets the universe, Jy-ying and I protect ourselves in a different way . . . we survive the assassination attempt. “In the future . . . in her own time . . .the policewoman is tried for breaking the law against resetting a universe . . . convicted . . . conviction vastly unpopular . . . threatens the reelection of the president of the interplanetary government. She’s pardoned, with the stipulation that she resign from the time police . . . .” The sound of a fire truck’s siren and hooting horn came through the window, then gradually got lost in the muted sounds of traffic. Nieman waited, watching Banks’ relaxed expression. Finally he asked, “Is that it?” “Ah . . .yeah, I guess so.” Nieman thought this story must continue. Banks had not said anything about whether he and Jy-ying succeeded in stopping the genocide, or if, in that changed universe, they were able to prevent World War One or the major democides of the world. He asked again, “That was the end of it?” “Yes.” Nieman was surprised that he felt disappointed, a feeling that he immediately tried to squelch. He predicted this would be Banks’ last dream of this kind, but his “mission” came to no conclusion. So what? They are dreams, he chided himself. He brought Banks out of the hypnosis, and waited while the young man sat up and put his shoes on. “I think I need only one more ses-

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sion,” he told Banks. “Before then, I want to analyze your latest dream, and confirm my analysis. I think I can now provide you with an explanation of your problem.” He wagged his finger at him. “So don’t get restless again, don’t have anymore dreams that give you headaches and leave you fatigued, or I’ll have to take a lot more of your money and charge you for wearing out my couch.”

Chapter 52 2001 John Banks

C

yril Clement had emailed John that he would be in Bloomington and asked if he would like Cyril to give a presentation to his class. Since John was using his book on the democratic peace as a text, he was more than happy to set up the presentation. And to spend an evening discussing it and democide research afterward. Besides, John owed him. They had remained in close touch after Cyril’s fateful visit to Yale. Yet again, John thought of that after responding to Clement’s email. Amazing, how, out of the blue, this renowned professor asked to meet me . . . and as a result I discovered an interest that deepened and ultimately became my Ph.D. dissertation and life’s mission. After that first meeting, he’d tried to remember Cyril, who seemed to know him well enough to contact him personally when he came to Yale. John had gone through all the possibilities—a meeting at someone’s dinner party; a chance meeting when he was an undergraduate or otherwise? After their first meeting, it didn’t matter, of course, but it always bothered him. So, when he felt he knew Cyril well enough, he simply asked by email: How did we first meet? I don’t recall. Cyril emailed back: At someone’s dinner party. I don’t remember whose anymore, but I remembered you because of the story you told me about your mother as a tennis pro, how she would take you into the women’s locker room with her, and that once you saw a famous woman tennis player coming out of the shower naked. That kind of thing sticks in the mind. I knew your major was history and you had mentioned you might be going to Yale for graduate work, so when I knew I was going to New Haven, I called the department and asked if you were there. Banks scratched his head at that. I didn’t think I had ever told anyone but Joy that story . . . but how else would he know? Well, I must have drunk a little too much alcohol that night.

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aaa John picked up Cyril at the little Bloomington-Normal Airport and drove him to his room at Days Inn. There they talked about John’s dissertation, his awful experience in the 9/11 terrorist attack, and his future plans. The next day, Cyril gave his talk on the democratic peace to John’s class, and allowed time for questions. The students were obviously in awe of him, since it was his book they were reading for the class. Joy asked no questions, John noticed. After the class she came up to Cyril and said sweetly, “Thank you for your talk. I am especially impressed by your book. I hope that it is used by many professors.” Cyril had stepped back when she approached him, and as she thanked him his brow shot up and his mouth fell open. He seemed to have difficulty replying, and finally got out, “Ah . . . thank you, Miss . . . ah?” “Joy Phim,” she replied, and dipped her head a moment before turning to leave. What’s wrong with Cyril? Why so tongue-tied? John wondered, then smiled. But, nothing odd about how closely he watched Joy as she left the classroom. John had also noticed him glancing frequently her way during his lecture. Well, what healthy male wouldn’t, he told himself.

Chapter 53 2001 John Banks

J

ohn entered Nieman’s office with a certain trepidation. He was feeling good, his sleep had been solid, and he no longer felt tired and headachy in the morning. Indeed, I couldn’t be happier. There’s now a Joy in my walks. Ha-ha. He smiled to himself. Joy would have kicked me for that pun—no sense of humor. Nieman got up from his desk, shook John’s hand, and motioned for him to sit in the upholstered chair by the desk. He sat on the corner of the desk facing John. “Well John, I almost hate to say it, but we’re through. I’m sorry, but I’m breaking off our relationship.” He laughed. He put both hands on the edge of his desk and leaned toward John to say, “I’ll give you the tapes of your fascinating dreams when you leave. After you listen to them, you might consider using them as the plots for a series of novels.” He straightened. “Anyway, what they indicate, as do your answers to my questions before and under hypnosis, is that your problem is . . . was . . . being subconsciously tormented by three psychological tensions and their interplay. They worked their way into your dreams and emotions at night, fully stressing your bio-chemical balance in a flight or fight reaction, and sometimes drenching your body in adrenaline. Your headaches, tight chest, nausea, sweating, and so on were you body’s natural reaction to this, and your extreme fatigue was the postadrenaline letdown.” Nieman lifted three fingers in front of him and touched one with the forefinger of his other hand. “Your extreme inner tension was similar to battle fatigue. You lived a normal life. You were never involved in violence, and you never saw a dead person before. Then, suddenly, without warning, you saw not only dead people for the first time, but

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bloody human body parts, people committing suicide by jumping out of windows to escape being burned alive, and all the other horrors of 9/11. That devastated your psyche. “Since then, you had been in a state of continual, deep emotional shock. You just could not walk away from it, nor, I think, could I have. And like an injury for which you may not feel the pain for days, the psychological injury of 9/11 did not make its way into your dreams for many weeks.” Nieman touched his forefinger to the second of the three fingers. “I read a copy of your dissertation, and your notes that you loaned me. All that democide—the burying alive, the burning alive, the torturing to death, the shooting, the blowing people up by the millions—is bad enough to read once. But you have researched on this every day for years. You have read many horrible stories from refugees and escapees, observers and participants. You have written about it. You teach it.” Nieman shook his head, rubbed one hand across his chin, and rocked back and forth for a moment. “As a normal human being, that affected you deeply, and created a profound tension—even a terror— within you. The horror ate at you. And you developed a fanatical desire to stop the democide, to save those people. It became an imperative that was given an extra psychodynamic push by your terrible experience during 9/11. These two sources of psychic tension came together in your dreams.” Nieman stopped and let that sink in. Then he held up one finger, and added, “Finally, you had in your class a beautiful student who inflamed your passion, and entered your dreams as a transitional element. With your passionate study of democide and 9/11 bursting out of your subconscious into your dreams, this woman, Joy Phim, served as both a transitional element and moderating influence. She served to move your dreams from conflict to crises to resolution, and as a tension release that sex and love provide. “The subconscious is very clever at this kind of thing, and is superb at great theater. I think you’re lucky. Without Joy in your dreams, you might have developed a severe psychosis that could have prevented you even from teaching, and might have required institutionalization until cured. “But those tensions within you from the democide research and 9/11 did not accept Joy in your dreams. She was an intruder and they fought her, and contrived to have you kill her or that she be killed. But you kept bringing her back, and finally you just invented a second Joy from another universe to fill her place, to satisfy your sexual desire for her, to moderate your tension.”

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John gaped at Nieman. “Jesus, I did all that—my dreams were full of all that—and it was Joy I was making love to? Wait . . . what? I killed her?” Nieman held up his hand. “It was a dream, John. And Joy is now real in your life. And she resolved these tensions for you both in your dream and now in real life.” “She did? Oh, of course, I knew she would. That’s why I developed a relationship with her, you know. Can’t be any other reason.” He gave Nieman a huge grin. Nieman laughed. “Of course.” Then he continued. “As your relationship with her developed, her effect on your dreams decreased. First, you satisfied your sexual desire for her—” “Satiated,” John interrupted. “—and then you developed a loving relationship. This being loved and loving in return was just what you needed to emotionally release you from the deep emotional horrors you had suffered and dealt with in your research and teaching. You see, we are very social animals, and consciously and subconsciously, emotionally and biochemically, we need to love and be loved, to have a mate and to mate. Those tensions of yours are now much alleviated by your loving relationship with Joy, and your subconscious has redirected those that remain into your drive to study, understand, teach, and do something about democide and war.” “You mean I’m cured.” “That’s too strong a word, John. You have been . . . remodeled, and that’s what a truly profound love will do to a person. Also, keep in mind that something might happen in your relationship with Joy, something might happen to you, to recreate the tensions you have felt. But, I doubt it. Once these kinds of tensions are redirected, they tend to stay that way. So, John, that’s it.” John spent the next fifteen minutes asking questions, until Nieman stood, walked behind his desk, and took five tapes out of a drawer. He walked up to John and held them out to him. “Your dreams.” John accepted them, and as he stared down at them, Nieman said, “Oh, one more thing. I could not figure out why you kept taking off your shoes before lying back on the couch. No one else has ever done that, and it would not occur to me. That was never mentioned in your dreams, and I could get no answer from you under hypnosis.” John shrugged. “I don’t know. I can say that Joy will not allow me into her apartment unless I take my shoes off just inside the door. It’s an oriental custom, she says: ‘Dirty bottomed shoes are for outside. Clean slippers are for inside.’”

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Nieman looked puzzled. “But you were doing that before you got together with Joy.” He shrugged. “Well, no biggie.” He slapped John on the back. “Be good, now, and give me a call if this problem reasserts itself. The first minute is free.” John chuckled. As he opened the door to leave, Nieman called, “Enjoy yourself.” John’s groan lasted all the way to the elevator.

Chapter 54 December 11, 2001 John Banks

J

ohn entered his classroom for the last lecture of the semester on the democratic peace. He’d arrived early again, and pretended to read his outline while he mused happily over the diagnosis he had received that morning from Ralph Nieman. But within minutes, he felt uncomfortable and took off his sport coat. Many of the students had removed their own coats and sweaters. The building’s heating system was not working properly and the classroom was overheated. Joy came in just in time, and avoided looking at him. They treated their relationship with the utmost prudence. Last night she had asked him how he was going to sum up the semester. He had shrugged. For this final lecture he had worried over the same questions he’d asked himself when he began the class: How can I make my students feel in their gut what ten million or one hundred million bodies mean in human terms . . . that people died in agony, often for nothing but their ethnicity, religion, or political views, or sometimes only to meet their ruler’s death quota. This frustrated him. He had lectured much about democide, he had given many examples. I’m still not sure that I’ve been able to convey the true horrors of democide. But, I also want to show them that there is hope, that by fostering democratic freedom throughout the world, we could end war and the terrorism, genocide, and democide. Finally, at the last minute, he had decided to relate one awful democide to them, to try to communicate the feeling of it, and how inhumane government—nondemocratic governments—could be. It was a new episode, not one they had read about for his class or that he had mentioned in detail. So, he had outlined it, and had typed relevant quotations on a separate page. It would serve as the introduction to his summation. Okay, time to begin. My first summation.

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“Good afternoon, students. As some of you may realize, this is my last lecture of the semester.” Some of the students looked at him blankly; some grinned. “I have given you a lot of information about democide and war, and their solution. Some of the figures may have stuck in your minds. No matter. I’m not after you remembering an abstract statistic; I’d rather have you remember that there has been such horrible killing in unbelievable, indigestible numbers. Now, before my summation, I want to give you one final real-life example that sums up the democide that has stolen the lives of over a hundred million people. This example is not unique; it exemplifies the sheer, coldblooded nature of much of it. And it demonstrates how much of this democide is unknown—not hidden, but put away like all unwanted memories, and in the particular case I will relate, for political reasons. I’m going to tell you what Pakistan’s military rulers did—not the present government, but a previous one. Its genocide is still unmentionable, since Pakistan is an ally of the United States and a part of its coalition in the war against terrorism.” John stopped and looked over the class. “Please put up your hand if you’ve heard about the mass murders and genocide carried out by Pakistan in 1971.” No hand went up, except for Joy’s. “That’s not surprising, since even in the many books on genocide, few mention this particular one. Now, open Clement’s text to page 126, and there you will find a map of South Asia. Look at it.” Banks scanned his outline while students got out their books, flipped pages, or tried to look over somebody’s shoulder. When they settled down, he continued. “Pakistan is India’s neighbor on the left. Squeezed into the lower right side of India is Bangladesh. Until 1971, that country was part of Pakistan, and was called East Pakistan. Its major ethnic group was Bengali, and their religion, as in West Pakistan, was Islam, although a slightly different variant. “Leading up to 1971, East Pakistan had been working politically and nonviolently toward independence from West Pakistan—look at the map again and you can see why, with that distance of almost one thousand miles between the two parts. And it was on the verge of success after the 1969 national election, when the Bengali Awami League gained an absolute majority in the Pakistan legislature. “However, the ruling generals of Pakistan were absolutely opposed to East Pakistan gaining independence, so in 1971 General Agha Mohammed Yahya Khan, the self-appointed president of Pakistan and

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commander-in-chief of the army and his top generals prepared a careful and systematic military operation against East Pakistan. They planned to murder that country’s Bengali intellectual, cultural, and political elite. John stopped, leaned toward the students, and shook both hands in front of him for emphasis as he repeated, “At the highest level of this regime, the rulers planned, prepared, and executed the cold-blooded murder of the best and brightest Bengalis in East Pakistan, and murdered indiscriminately many of its Hindus, driving the rest into India. This despicable and cutthroat plan was outright genocide.” He paused and looked into the eyes of one student after another. He had their attention. “After months of military preparation, the generals launched their genocidal campaign at night. And what was one of their first civilian targets? Students like you. “Now, imagine that you were a student there, as you are here. Before going to bed one night, you may have been in the library studying, working on your term paper, or doing a lab assignment. You may have written home or been out in Dacca with some friends. You may have given your friend a secret kiss before parting, already looking forward to seeing each other the next day. You go to bed that night with a future for which you are studying hard, with a future of loved ones and children, with a future of hope and bright dreams. You have not the slightest hint that the next day will be any different than the last; you close your eyes without any thought that you will be lucky to see the dawn, or if you do, that you will not live through the day. “So students the world over have gone to bed, to be destroyed there by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, tornadoes, and fire. But these are nature’s doings. What would happen this night was done by fellow human beings. Intentionally. In the middle of the night, with no warning, West Pakistani tanks began shelling the dormitories of the University of Dacca, where students like you were sleeping. Visualize it: you are blasted awake by tank shells suddenly bursting through the dorm walls and windows to explode throughout the dorm amongst your beds, your study rooms. Red-hot shrapnel flies, randomly seeking out those who will die, lose a leg or arm, or have their belly slit open so wide, their guts tumble out. Then the trembling fear, wild panic, and screaming; the mute dead, the crying wounded, the smoke and fire, destruction and blood, everywhere.” John dropped his voice. “And the forever unknown courage and heroism as you and others help the wounded and try to escape the flames and explosions.

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“You try to run or crawl out of the dorm, and help others to escape. You’re shaking. Your heart is beating wildly. You can’t get your breath. But you finally climb over smoking debris and make it outside. “But outside, the West Pakistan troops are waiting, and you are rounded up at bayonet point to stand or sit in trembling shock. You don’t know what happened or what they will do to you. You can’t believe it. You think this must be a nightmare as you watch the dormitories burn down with your fellow students still screaming inside or jumping from windows. If you have only minor injuries or none at all, you may try to help the crying, moaning wounded on the ground around you. “Dawn slowly shows through the smoke, and soldiers begin pushing and prodding all of you through the haze toward a grassy area near a parking lot. The soldiers bayonet those who resist, or who are too wounded to move. You are stunned and trembling—you cannot believe what you just saw. Students are being murdered, some you know, and as they are repeatedly bayoneted their screams and pleas for mercy rip through your mind. “Self-preservation takes over and you allow yourself to be herded along with the other survivors toward the grassy area, where you see a pile of shovels, hoes, and digging sticks that a small truck nearby has dumped. You are jabbed and shoved toward the pile and then the soldiers form a tight ring around all of you. An officer shouts, ‘Dig a trench. Dig it deep. Or be tortured to death.’ “Your knees are almost knocking together, your heart thudding in your ears, and tears drip from your face as, in utter, mind-devastating terror, you pick up a hoe and begin hacking at the ground where one soldier is pointing. Through your fear, through your shock, through the terror, you have only one impossible realization—this trench is for you. For your dead body. You are going to be killed.” “You hack away; you pull the loose dirt out with the hoe; you hack again and again. You stop crying. You don’t hear the cannon in the distance or the shooting nearby. You hear but barely recognize the scream of the girl who was digging near you, but made a break for it. She is tripped by one of the soldiers, and then is stabbed in the leg—you refuse to look as she writhes on the ground and shrieks and screeches while being stabbed in the other leg, and then in one arm, then the other, and finally in the stomach. It’s a calculated lesson for you, which you dimly recognize, and you blank out the girl’s moans and cries for her mother.

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“Now you’re resolute and focused. You hurry up your digging. You want to get it over with. Your body has grown cold. You shiver. Your mind closes down as you hack and pull the dirt, and deepen the trench with the others. Your soft hands, used to books and pencils, are bleeding and sore; your body is getting heavy and fatigued. But you feel nothing. “You and the others have dug three feet down. You are on automatic. Four feet. Then five. Several of the girls and two of the boys have collapsed in heaps at the edge from the unaccustomed labor, or have fainted from fear. “Someone yells, ‘Stop. Enough. Get out of the trench and line up on the edge.’ This is it, but your mind refuses to recognize it. Your body obeys and lines up with the others. You see soldiers standing about twenty feet away with automatic rifles, but it means nothing. “You stand. You think of nothing. There is no passing time. You don’t see that the fire in the dormitories has nearly burned out, or that the smoke is drifting away, leaving the beautiful morning to prize. You don’t see the robin’s egg-blue of the sky, the gentle white clouds; you do not register the sound of birds chattering. You don’t even think of your loved ones, of your lost future, of your lost hopes, of your dead dreams. Of all your wasted study and effort. “Then, Brrrttt! Brrrttt!” Several of his students jumped. “Your body twitches from the impact of bullets ripping across your chest, blowing your last breath out the holes in a red mist. Now your body is as dead as your mind; you fall backward into the trench to be covered with dirt.” John held up his hand to stop questions, and waited for a few moments. The classroom was absolutely silent. He continued. “And how was your death received? The actual messages between the soldiers that killed you and army headquarters were intercepted. We know what was said. Your soul might be happy to know that you contributed to a prized well done.” Lifting his outline, John read the entire quote to the class: “‘What do you think would be the approximate number of casualties at the university—just give me an approximate number in your view. What will be the number killed or wounded or captured. Just give me the rough figures’.

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“‘Wait. Approximately three hundred.’ “‘Well done. Three hundred killed? Anybody wounded or captured?’ “‘I believe in only one thing—three hundred killed.’ “‘Yes. I agree with you that is much easier. No, nothing asked. Nothing done, you do not have to explain anything. Once again well done. Once again I would like to give you shabash and to tell all the boys . . . for the wonderful job done in this area. I am very pleased.’” John finished softly, “You and other students were not alone in being murdered at the university. Soldiers searched for leading department heads and professors, murdering thirty-two of them in the following two days.” He had immersed himself emotionally into the tale he told, mentally living the awful images and pain of these Bengali students as he tried to convey what this horror meant in human terms. He’d lost all contact with his own students. Now, he came back mentally to the classroom, breathless and sweating profusely in the hot room. He looked back at the students. The room remained utterly hushed. Some of the students looked dazed, staring at him wide-eyed, their mouths hanging open. Several dabbed at their eyes with their sleeves or handkerchiefs. Some leaned over their notebooks, eyes intent on the pages as they wrote intensely; others appeared frozen. He could only see the top of Joy’s head; she’d buried her face in one hand. John cooled his emotions by pacing back and forth a couple of times. Finally he stopped. He had much more to say about this genocide, more awful stories, some as moving. And more quotes. But his sense for timing told him that this was the place to end it. Into the dead silence of the room, in a tone so low and sad that it sounded as though he were playing taps with his voice, he concluded, “The Pakistan military ultimately went on to murder about 1.5 million Bengalis and Hindus. Only India’s invasion stopped them. The Indian army rapidly defeated them, and midwifed the formal independence of East Pakistan, which promptly named itself Bangladesh.” Maybe thirty seconds passed and then the class suddenly broke out in chatter, thumping, scraping chairs, and other noises of students coming alive. John waited. Just to be doing something, he strolled to his briefcase and dropped his outline inside and slowly closed it. He

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needed this break. Finally, when the class quieted down, he walked to the center of the room, close to the students in front, and began his general conclusions of the semester. He gestured, making figures in the air to shape his points. He paced back and forth, every so often writing a crucial word on the blackboard. He slapped his hand on the lectern for emphasis. He was an actor no longer playing out terror and death, but hope. From the horror and terror of democide and war, he would bring them into the sunlight to see the bright future within humanity’s grasp. He reviewed the major wars and democides, and the attempts over the centuries to do something about such killing. He sketched the peace plans, and the different international agreements to limit or prevent war and democide, all of which failed. Then he paused and stood still. He said, emphasizing each word, “This need not be. There is hope and a solution. Democracies do not make war on each other and, as a historian,” he said bluntly, wagging his finger as though each word hung at the end of it, “I say, they . . . never . . . have.” He took two steps to the lectern and folded his hands on top. “But what about genocide and mass murder, what we call democide— murder by government—such as what the Pakistan army did to the students?” he asked in a low voice. He waited as though expecting a student to throw him the answer. No one did. They all seemed mesmerized. He deserted the lectern and stepped as close to the front row of students as he could get. Leaning forward, pointing with both fingers toward the class, he answered, “Democracies not only don’t make war on each other; modern democracies, with their civil rights and political liberties, commit almost no domestic democide.” He returned to the lectern, leaned over it with his hand on each edge, and asked, “Is democracy a practical solution? Yes. Democratization is practical and in fact is being aided by many current democracies.” He hesitated, as though turning a page. “Is it desirable for reasons other than ending war and democide? Yes, it is desired by all those enslaved by autocracies around the world. Freedom is their most basic human right.” Now, a longer hesitation for the most important point of all. He looked over the class before he asked, “Is universalizing democratic freedom possible? Yes. Oh, yes. If we work to foster universal democracy, we—can—do—it.”

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He stopped, dropped his hands. Nothing remained. Emotionally and mentally exhausted, he realized he was still sweating; his armpits beneath his flannel shirt and t-shirt underneath were wet, and he imagined that he smelled. This was the first time he’d tried to communicate this horror and humanity’s hope to students, this was his first summation, this was now his life and the beginning of his career, and he came close to choking up. His voice nearly broke as he ended his class and the semester with a simple, “Thank you. Have a good future. All of you.” No one moved for several seconds, and then, almost with a gasp, students began to clap. They continued, getting louder and louder. Some of them stood and clapped. John’s eyes grew misty and he shook his head in wonderment. He began to clap for the class in return. Slowly, the students departed, some coming up to shake his hand and share their feelings before leaving. “You’ve changed my life.” “I’m changing my major.” “Thank you, Professor Banks. I’ll never forget this class.” Dressed in her gray sweatshirt—she actually had several—and her tight Levis, Joy hovered in the back until the last student left, and then she came up to him. Her eyes were still teary, but her smile belied sadness. She looked around to make sure all the other students were gone, and then said, “First you drive me to tears over that horrible genocide, and then you drive me to tears with happiness over the hope you give these students. And then you create even more tears over your success as a teacher and in getting across the democratic peace. I know how much both mean to you.” She stood straight and cocked her head, her eyes gleaming. “Thank you for your class, Professor Banks. You were. . . stimulating, and often deeply engaged my feelings.” She rubbed her nose to display the engagement ring he had given her. “Now that I’m no longer your student, if anything comes up, do give me a call. Goodbye.” And she glided out. Students walking by the open door of the classroom must have wondered at the professor standing alone in the classroom, crying and laughing at the same time.

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hey were in Joy’s apartment, where he now practically lived. He still refused to take a chance on her being seen entering his faculty apartment. He had the tapes stacked on the coffee table and the tape machine next to it. Each tape had been numbered. The psychiatrist had said that there was a rough chronology to his dreams, but they were not sequential. So he had put them in their chronological order, regardless of when he told them under hypnosis They had eaten the stuffed chicken wings and Singapore noodles they had picked up at Mark Pi’s China Gate, and each had a bottle of Bloomington’s Vision Weiss beer in hand. “Well,” John said, putting the first of the five tapes in the machine, “I hope you’re not embarrassed by the high praise I give you in my dreams, or by the undreamed-of lovemaking positions I force on you.” “Ha!” Joy exploded. “Probably all missionary positions, and I bet it’s with some young bitch you dreamed up.” For a moment, he was actually worried that might be true. Too late now. He started the machine. He heard himself speaking in a monotone, almost as though he were reading a boring book. “It’s 9/11 . . . I’m horrified by the body parts and people jumping from the burning building. . . . “Joy is in my class, and I want her . . . .The Society had gathered to convince me to join her in one-way time travel back to 1906 . . . mission is to end war and democide . . . promote a global democratic peace. Joy seduces me into accepting.” John stopped the tape. “It’s just like when you seduced me in your apartment, that first night.” He imitated her voice. “‘Oh, I’m going to

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get into something more comfortable.’ I bet you straightened out the bed at the same time.” Joy frowned, her eyes narrowed, and her lips collapsed into a thin line. “Do I understand, Professor Banks, that you are . . . complaining?” The last word came out ten decibels higher. John felt the end of his nose freezing. “Heavens no, baby. I’m a historian you know, and just want to keep the record straight. You seduced me. But no complaint. I understand how irresistible I was, and to be truthful, I let the evening run on to build up your anticipation—” Whack! “Ouch!” John grabbed his shoulder and rubbed the spot where she had hit him. He joined in her laughter. She shook her head. “You’re impossible, dearest.” He restarted the tape. “We travel back in time. . . . Joy begins using her power to eliminate rapists and muggers on the streets. I hate that she acts as judge, jury, and executioner . . . source of much conflict between us . . . . It’s the late 1930s; Joy tries to assassinate the American presidential candidate . . . I stop her . . . suffocate her with a pillow to prevent her from ever killing again . . . I write a remembrance of Joy, hold it to my heart as I commit suicide . . . . ” The voice on the tape droned on. John finally clicked it off and looked at Joy. Her face had lost some of its color. She sat with her mouth open, her hand seemingly fastened to her cheek. “God, what an awful dream,” she said. “Where did you get that stuff from?” “Come on, baby. It was only a dream. I think I was dreaming my favorite thesis. We were sent back in time to fight power. But we were given tremendous power to do so, and that corrupted us. Power kills.” He hurriedly took out the tape and inserted the second one. “An Islamic fundamentalist named Sabah seized power in Uighuristan in Middle Asia . . . eventually does the same in China. . . . and Sabahism rules the world . . . . Survivors send a message downtime to Joy and I in 1906, asking us to stop Sabah . . . .

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“Followers of Sabah in China . . . send back a female Chinese warrior, Jy-ying, to assassinate whomever received the message . . . . She falls in love with me, plans to kill only Joy. “Jy-ying finds out, however, that she and Joy are the same person from separate universes . . . . Tries to kill Joy, but I shoot her just when she is ready to deliver the death blow. “We travel to Uighuristan to kill little boy Sabah . . . decide to adopt him . . . finally, after eight years, I propose marriage to Joy . . . she accepts . . . . As we celebrate, we and baby Sabah are killed by a terrorist bomb.” The tape rolled on. “Holy Christ,” John breathed. “I dreamt all that?” Joy’s hand was hanging from her cheek again. “Do you have a death wish? And for me, too? I’m going to keep the kitchen knives away from you.” “Now aren’t you glad I didn’t go to the range with you to fire those evil guns?” John quipped. “‘Oh, what fun they are,’ you said, trying to seduce me into going with you. ‘And we will be doing it together. If I go alone, I’ll be gone for half a day, or more.’ And your clincher: ‘I hope Charlie is there. He likes to help me with my guns. He’s so goodlooking.’” Joy wasn’t laughing. Or smiling. “Play the next tape. I can’t wait to see how you kill me in this one.” John shut up and complied. “An Islamic dictator, impressed by what we’re able to do for democracy, sends back to 1906 a pair of mismatched male-female warriors . . . Carla and Hadad . . . to kill Joy and I and. . . . promote Islam. “Their various assassination schemes fail . . . . Jyying , whose ultimate goal is still to save Sabah and kill Joy, joins us in protecting our mission against the two assassins . . . . Carla and Joy have one battle in which Joy is wounded, and Carla contrives to set up a second battle between them that Joy will not survive . . . . Joy is saved by a time policewoman who . . . arrests Carla and sends her to the future for trial . . . . I capture Hadad . . . .

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Joy taken uptime to see her mother . . . . Universe is disrupted by Carla and Hadad’s appearance in 1906 . . . . A time policeman resets it back to Joy’s and my arrival.” John shut off the machine and removed the tape. Joy frowned, lips pursed. Finally she looked up at the ceiling and murmured, “Hey, how about that? He didn’t kill me.” John thrust out his chin and glared at her. “Okay, enough of that. These are dreams. Dreams, damn it.” “Yes, John, and they reveal hidden desires.” “What, that you be dead? Isn’t that stupid?” “Play the next tape, John.” “No.” He reached for tape #4, but Joy grabbed it. She whisked the machine to her side of the sofa where he couldn’t easily reach it without going over her, and thrust the tape in with a loud clack. She punched the start button with her rigid finger and, stone-faced, she crossed her arms to listen. “A strange man killed Stalin in 1903, and then helped Trotsky successfully revolt against the Russian Czar in 1905 . . . . Joy and I, and then Jy-ying discover this . . . . The one from the future is a rogue time policeman, a procommunist, who wants to change the universe and make communism triumphant . . . . Uses a device to enter our bedroom while Joy is there . . . paralyzes her, rapes her, and finally kills her before he is killed by Jy-ying . . . mission now becomes that of me and Jy-ying, who is completely in love with me . . . with Joy’s spiritual blessing, I return her love. “The Russian Revolution is defeated . . . .” Joy let the tape run. She said nothing; she just sat next to the machine, her face frozen in disbelief. Out in the small kitchenette, the refrigerator chugged to life as its cold sensor restarted it. John couldn’t stand it. “Baby . . . .” When she looked at him, he saw the tear rolling down her cheek, saw the hurt in her eyes. “How can you love me when in your dreams

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you kill me again and again?” she asked. “And that . . . other woman— you . . . you love her when I’m dead. You don’t really love me.” She put her head in her hands and sobbed. John was stunned by the dreams, and by Joy’s understandable reaction. Jesus. For asking her to listen with me, I’m the missing village idiot. He tried to put his arms around her, but she shrugged him off. He tried to put a hand on her arm. She withdrew it. His voice exploded from his heart. “Sweetheart, I love you more than anything. I want to spend our lives together. I want you to be my wife. Forever—you and me, baby.” “You only think so, John. And you’ll only think so until that other woman comes along. Then, ‘Goodbye Joy.’” Her crying developed a frantic edge. He lost it temporarily. “Goddamn it, Joy, will you cut this fucking shit out.” The shock of his own words cooled him down. He had an idea. “Baby, don’t you ever have nightmares where something you hate, something you fear, something you would never want happens to you? Haven’t you ever dreamed about,” he was guessing now, but he knew something about oriental culture, “losing face or failing your mother? Does such a dream mean deep down that you want to do this to yourself, or does it mean that this is your fear? That you die in my dreams can only mean that this is something I terribly fear. This part of my dreams is a nightmare, baby. It’s a nightmare, not something I really want, no more than you want to fail your mother.” Joy took her wet face out of her hands and looked at him, her eyebrows raised, her puffy eyes questioning. Then she lifted her sweatshirt and wiped her eyes and face. “You think you’re so clever, don’t you?” “Well, now that you mention it, I—” “I’m sorry. I love you, dearest.” He leaned over a gave her a long kiss, which she returned with increasing enthusiasm. “However,” she said with the first hint of a grin, “I warn you. I’m a light sleeper. And I will have my magnum under my pillow. Shall we continue?” The tape had run to the end, and automatically rewound. She took it out and put in #5. “The rogue policeman had changed the universe . . . . the Young Turks begin their genocide of millions of Armenians . . . . Jy-ying and I aim to stop it. We make

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preparations, including hiring a Turkish immigrant . . . . his wife informs her nephew, who is actually a Turkish agent in Britain . . . . We . . . . are assassinated by the Turks. “Now the three young men we hired in 1906 . . . . Hands’ fiancée Kate . . . becomes the leader . . . . They actually assassinate the five top Young Turks . . . . Their general intent was known by a Turkish general, who let them proceed . . . . His troops attempt to arrest them . . . all are killed. “A time policewoman from the future resets this universe back to just before Jy-ying and I are assassinated . . . otherwise the universe would proceed on a bloody course . . . . After the reset, Jy-ying and I protect ourselves in a different way and survive. “The policewoman is tried for breaking the law in resetting a universe . . . . Her conviction is vastly unpopular . . . . She is pardoned . . . . ” The psychiatrist added his voice to the tape. “This is the last sequence of dreams. This and the previous ones provided sufficient information for a preliminary diagnosis of your problem. I’ll be more detailed when we meet for the last time. “Of special note is that, in these dreams, you risked your life to travel one way into a primitive past, one without any modern conveniences, to do away with war and democide. This is your way of redirecting the terror you suffered in the 9/11 attack, which remained in your subconscious to bedevil you. But not only that; you also were doing something about the horror you have been living with as a result of your research on democide for your dissertation, and your teaching of this topic. Another source of tension is your subconscious. You felt you knew how to stop all this evil, to use your word, and you were acting this out in your dreams. “Finally, you had this not unusual lust for Joy, a student of yours, and you acted this out by including her in your dreams as your partner, through both Joy and her surrogate, Jy-ying. “I must say, John, that these are the most interesting dreams I’ve come across in a long time. If I’m traumatized by some horror, I hope my dreams are as engaging, especially with regards to your Joy. “Let me know how you are doing from time to time.”

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hey were married in the New York headquarters of Tor’s Nguon Industries. John invited Cyril to be his best man, and Cyril gave a heartwarming speech at the wedding reception. He took an exceptional interest in both of them, although he had seemed befuddled for some reason when John called him, told him about the wedding, and asked him to be best man. He kept asking, “Is that it? You and Joy are just getting married?” John had to finally ask, “What do you expect, that we are going to fly to the Moon?” “Something like that,” Cyril mumbled in reply. Throughout the preparations for the wedding, the wedding itself, and the reception, Cyril really acted as though he were John’s father. Joy was taken with him, as he seemed to be with her, and most important, he and Joy’s mother Tor got on famously. He visited her constantly in New York, and seemed to stay over weekends. Joy commented on it happily: “I’m glad Mom still has it in her.” “Really, Joy—‘has it in her’? What a gutter mind.” Joy looked at him blankly for three seconds, and then yelled, “Beast,” and dragged him off the chair by one foot. She jumped on him and tickled him until he apologized. Joy told him that, “I expect great news about the Tor-Cyril relationship anytime now.” As a wedding present, Tor gave them a million-dollar bank balance to do with as they pleased. She let them know that much more was available when they needed it, adding that, in due course, they would inherit her business anyway. They set up a Democratic Peace Institute with the money. Joy was John’s full partner and officially copresident, but he sometimes jokingly referred to her as his assistant and translator. He didn’t know why.

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John quit teaching to devote all of his time to the institute. He was happy to thumb his nose at the Marxist professor in the History Department and the bevy of leftist faculty who supported him, but he felt guilty that the students would not have a strong voice countering his propaganda with examples of Marxist democide. He knew the other historians treated democide lightly, if at all. But he told Joy, “I can do more good through our institute than by teaching and suffering the limitations that involves. Teaching four hundred students a year is not the same as reaching thousands and possibly millions through the institute and its links to the Internet. And if we do this right, many teachers will use our material.”

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’m home,” Joy yelled as she came in the front door of their San Francisco house, kicked off her shoes by the shoe bench by the door, and slid her feet into the slippers waiting there. “Welcome home, baby. I’m in the study.” She entered the study and leaned over John as he wrote on his new Mac G4 computer. She gave him a little kiss on the cheek. “What’s my hubby doing?” “Hi wifie,” John replied. He reached back and pulled her head down across his shoulder so he could bury his face in her hair. It smelled of the gun range she’d just left, but he didn’t care. He kissed her cheek. “You smell of gun smoke.” “And you smell of man. What were you doing?” “Oh, I was doing some karate exercises in our gym before sitting down here. Anyway, before that I was listening again to the tapes of my dreams, and a eureka hammer smacked me in the head. I realized that I could write them up as alternative history novels. It’s a good way of getting the idea of the democratic peace out to the larger public, and maybe the novels will be entertaining, as well. I even have a name for them: the Never Again Series.” Joy grinned. “Why not call them The Death of Joy Series?” John answered straight-faced, “I thought of that, but too many would interpret that series as being about the end of booze, drugs, sex, or whatever people think brings them happiness.” He continued briskly, “It will be five novels, like the five tapes, I think. But I’m concerned about one thing. If I do this over my or our name, this will become associated with the institute in its early, most important years. No good. The institute should be known for solid empirical and historical research that people can consult and depend on.

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When the institute publishes on the Internet and in hardcover that there is a solution to war and democide, and that is democratic freedom, then it has to be backed up with the best, most thorough research possible. Which we are now doing. “If the institute’s first books, authored by me, are a series of novels, who will take the subsequent publications of the institute seriously? And I can’t use a pseudonym. They are always leaked.” He paused. Joy regarded him. “You have a solution to this, I bet.” John smiled. “I already emailed Cyril about the series. I included a synopsis of the books, and asked if he would publish them under his name, all royalties to go to his research and his Web site. He emailed me back within an hour—he’s really excited about it. He understands our problem and would be happy to go along. One stipulation he mentioned: he will revise and edit to his liking. I agreed. It doesn’t matter who gets credit, if any is due. What is important is that the word gets out to the largest number of people possible that freedom is a solution to the horrors of war and democide. Since he is now retired and his reputation is so well established, that he’s published novels won’t subtract from his reputation at all.” Joy kneaded the muscles of his neck. “Maybe he’ll save the Joy in your dreams.” “Oh yes, one thing. I think I’ll have to rename the major characters. Too easy to connect them to us.” Joy looked at him, her brows furrowed. “No, I don’t agree, dearest. If anyone connects them to us, you or Cyril only need say that you gave Cyril the tapes of your dreams with permission to write them up as novels, if he wished. If anything, the novels may help draw more attention to the institute, our Web site, and especially the democratic peace. Anyway, since the Joy of your dreams is so much like the Joy that is me, I want the world to know, even in fiction, my joy over the wonderful woman who adopted me; my joy in how she brought me up; my joy in taking your class. And my joy in our love.” “Okay,” John conceded, “but I don’t know how I will stand the sheer envy of my friends and colleagues who read the novels. Why—” Joy quietly put her finger to her lips, then touched his mouth with it. Gently shaking her head, she left the room. John returned to the opening pages he’d written of his first novel, War and Democide Never Again: Joy had a body to die for. That’s why the deaths of over 200 million people—the vast majority murdered—

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never happened. Joy’s body . . . and the roar of a 110story building collapsing before my eyes. Just thinking about it brings back the suffocating stench of death . . . God, how could I, an ordinary Ph.D. in history from Yale, have ever smelled death? It began with good advice . . . . John wrote far into the night. Finally, when his mind wouldn’t work anymore, he went to bed. Joy was lying on her back, the covers pulled up to her shoulders. He slid under the covers and leaned over her and gave her a gentle kiss on the lips. She murmured something and reached out to touch him in her sleep. His restless nights had disappeared, as had his headaches and fatigue. He stretched out and put one hand on her naked hip. He was asleep in seconds. A breeze caressed his cheek. Hello, my dearest. It was Joy, the Joy of his dreams, in her gray sweatshirt and white shorts, with her hair in a ponytail. What are you doing in my dream? I thought I was over all that. She gave him a broad smile, her eyes alight. I came to tell you how happy you have made me. You finally married me; I am now your real wife, what I always really wanted. And now we can have children and grow old together and merge our souls when we die. How can that be, Joy? he asked. You were a figment of my imagination, an object of my desire that I satisfied through my dreams. The real Joy sleeps right beside me. That is true, my darling, but you don’t understand and you cannot, fixed in your three-dimensional universe of this time as you are. The me that you see now is of another place and time, of other universes, of those inhabited by such good people as our dearest friends Hands Reeves, Dolphy Docker, and Sal Garcia; the great humanitarians Edmund Morel and his secret time-traveling wife Janet; the “I see” detective Lieutenant Gary Ryan; the courageous time policewoman Captain Jill Halverson; the “White Knight” actress Kate Kaufmann; and the time policewoman Mari Demirchyan, who knew humanity was more important than the rules. There is also Jy-ying, the me from another universe. And her Little Wei and Prince Wei. You know them all, my love. These wonderful people and little dogs were in your dreams. The dream John narrowed his eyes and looked at her askance. Were my dreams of time travel and you, of our mission, of those people, your doing?

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She smiled. Maybe a little, but at their heart they were you—your fears, your hopes, your humanity, your conviction, and your love. And now you will make me live again through the Joy that sleeps beside you. We will be with each other, banter and joke, and make love to each other through your novels. And our mission, dearest, our mission that we fought together and died for in the past and in other universes, our mission to foster democracy will not die in this one. Others will pick this up, and there will be many Joys, Jy-yings, and Johns fighting for freedom. It is the most basic human right that ultimately cannot be denied. She came very close. Her almond eyes were shining, her lips slightly parted to show her white teeth, and there was a glow to her face. She touched her lips and blew him a kiss. John felt a slight wetness on his lips, and tried to put his arm around her, but it only went through her. She gave him a long, happy look. She said finally, caressing him with her voice, I will now leave you. This is the last time I will visit you in your dreams, but you now have the me of this time and place beside you. Eventually, my dearest, all our souls will meet, and we will joyously talk about our different lives. Before then, Jy-ying and I of different universes will live and love you through your novels. Now sleep well, my dearest, and make the love we all feel for each other defeat the power that will challenge us, and has challenged humanity.

Praise for books by Nobel Peace Prize finalist

R. J. Rummel "26th in a Random House poll on the best nonfiction book of the 20th Century" Random House (Modern Library) “. . . the most important . . . in the history of international relations.” John Norton Moore Professor of Law and Director, Center for National Security Law, former Chairman of the Board of Directors of the U. S. Institute of Peace “. . . among the most exciting . . . in years.”

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“. . . bound to be become a standard work . . . .” James Lee Ray, Professor of Political Science “. . . major intellectual accomplishment . . .will be cited far into the next century” Jack Vincent, Professor of Political Science.”

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SUPPLEMENT TO THE NEVER AGAIN SERIES

Never Again Ending War, Democide, & Famine Through Democratic Freedom

R.J. RUMMEL

Llumina Press

Copyright © 2005 R. J. Rummel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of this work should be mailed to Permissions Department, Llumina Press, PO Box 772246, Coral Springs, FL 330772246

ISBN: 1-59526-138-9 1-59526-131-0 Printed in the United States of America by Llumina Press

Relevant books by R.J. Rummel

Understanding Conflict and War (five volumes) Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder since 1917 China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder Death By Government Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence Saving Lives, Enriching Life: Freedom as a Right and a Moral Good (online book) Never Again Series (Alternative History) War and Democide Never Again Nuclear Holocaust Never Again Reset Never Again Red Terror Never Again Genocide Never Again (forthcoming) Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine Through Democratic Freedom

The more power a government has, the more its foreign violence, democide, and famine. The more constrained the power of governments, the less its foreign violence, democide, and famine. At the extremes of power, despotisms kill, murder, and starve people by the millions, while many democracies grow surplus food, and refuse to execute even serial murderers. Power kills.

Acknowledgements Again, I owe many thanks to the editing of Marg Gilks. This was an especially difficult book to edit, but she did it with good humor and careful attention to details. I owe more thanks than they know to my close colleagues Douglas Bond, Harris-Cliché (Pete) Peterson, and Rhee Sang-Woo for their many comments and suggestions over the years. Many colleagues, students, and readers of my previous nonfiction books have unknowingly contributed to this one through their ideas, comments and suggestions, recommendation of sources, estimates, material they passed on to me, data, and their own research. In particular, I want to thank Rouben Adalian, Dean Babst, Yehuda Bauer, Israel Charny, William Eckhardt, Wayne Elliott, Helen Fein, Paul Hollander, Irving Louis Horowitz, Hua Shiping, Guenter Lewy, John Norton Moore, J. C. Ramaer, James Lee Ray, Storm Russell, Bruce Russett, Gregory H. Stanton, Robert F. Turner, Jack Vincent, and Spencer Weart. This book is a summation of my research career. It is appropriate, therefore, for me to note my profound obligation to those great scholars and scientists who have had a fundamental impact on my ideas and research: Bertrand de Jouvenel, Friedrich von Hayek, Immanuel Kant, Karl Popper, Lewis F. Richardson, Ludwig von Mises, Pitirim Sorokin, Quincy Wright, and Raymond Cattell. I continue to be indebted to the many visitors to my website at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ who commented on or questioned the material there. They often had an impact on my research and writing. And foremost, always, is the love of my life, my wife Grace. For over forty years she has provided the love and supportive environment that has enabled my research and writing. Come here, baby. Finally, I must insist. This is my book, and all its errors, mistakes, and misunderstandings are mine.

CONTENTS PREFACE

1

Concordance Between Never Again Novels, This Book, and Website EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

3

Human Security What Themes Run Through This Book? PART 1. ON FREEDOM AS A RIGHT CHAPTER 1. Life Without Freedom

5 7

Table 1.1. How Many People Were Free in 2004? Sudan Saudi Arabia Burma China North Korea Some Other Antifreedom Nations CHAPTER 2. Universal Human Rights

29

CHAPTER 3. Philosophical Justification of Freedom

35

CHAPTER 4. Freedom as a Social Contract

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A Convention of Minds The Global Evolution of Rights Summary PART 2. ON DEMOCRACY

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CHAPTER 5. What Is Democracy?

49

CHAPTER 6. Electoral and Liberal Democracy

51

Table 6.1. Characteristics of Electoral and Liberal Democracy CHAPTER 7. An Example of Liberal Democracy: President William Jefferson Clinton

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CHAPTER 8. About Liberal Democracy

68

CHAPTER 9. Extent of Democracy

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Extent of Liberal Democracies Extent of Illiberal Democracies Conclusion PART 3. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: WEALTH AND PROSPERITY CHAPTER 10. Freedom Is an Engine of Wealth and Prosperity

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The Moral Good of Wealth and Prosperity The Example of Bill Gates’ Freedom CHAPTER 11. The Power of the Free Market

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Table 11.1. Human and Economic Development by Level of Freedom, 1998 Figure 11.1. Plot of Standardized Values from Table 11.1 Figure 11.2. Plot of Freedom and Economic Freedom Rating CHAPTER 12. The Free Market, Greed, and the Command Economy

86

CHAPTER 13. Scarcity and Famine: Lenin’s Command Economy

91

Communism Lenin’s Nationalization and Famine, 1920–1923

CHAPTER 14. Scarcity and Famine: Stalin’s Command Economy

95

Collectivization, 1929–1935 Famine by Design, 1932–1933 CHAPTER 15. Scarcity and Famine: Mao’s Command Economy

102

Murder of Traditional Agriculture: Land Reform Collectivization: The Commune Great Leap Downward The World’s Greatest Famine Ever CHAPTER 16. Democracy Means No Famine Ever

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Table 16.1. 20th Century Famine Totals PART 4. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: MINIMIZING POLITICAL VIOLENCE CHAPTER 17. The Mexican Revolution

115 117

Roots of Revolution Revolution CHAPTER 18. The Russian Revolution

125

Roots of Revolution Revolution CHAPTER 19. Freedom Minimizes Political Violence within Nations Table 19.1. Freedom and Violence Ratings: Observed Frequencies Figure 19.1. The Less Democratic a Regime, the More Severe Its Internal Political Violence. Selected Sample, 1900–1987 Table 19.2. The Less Democratic a Regime, the More Severe Its Internal Political Violence. Selected Sample, 1900–1987

135

PART 5. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: ELIMINATING DEMOCIDE CHAPTER 20. Democide

144 145

Table 20.1. Democide, 1900–1987 CHAPTER 21. The Rwandan Great Genocide

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Background The Great Genocide CHAPTER 22. Death by Marxism I: The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia

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Background Rule by Murder Table 22.1. Conditions of Life Under the Khmer Rouge CHAPTER 23. Death by Marxism II: Stalin’s Great Terror

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Prelude to the Great Terror The Great Terror CHAPTER 24. Death by Marxism III: Mao’s Cultural Revolution

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CHAPTER 25. Power Kills

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Deadly Communism Table 25.1. Communist Democide, 1900–1987 Other Mega- and Kilo- Mass Murderers The Unifying Cause of Democide: Power PART 6. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: ELIMINATING WAR

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CHAPTER 26. Battle of the Somme

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CHAPTER 27. The Democratic Peace

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Table 27.1. Democratic Versus Nondemocratic Wars, 1816–1991 CHAPTER 28. The Freer the People, the Greater the Peace

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Figure 28.1. The Less Democratic Two Regimes, the More Severe Their Wars, 1900–1980 Figure 28.2 The Less Democratic a Regime, the More Severe Its Foreign Violence. Selected Sample, 1900– 1987 CHAPTER 29. Why the Democratic Peace? PART 7. CONCLUSION CHAPTER 30. Freedom is a Right and Creates Human Security Table 30.1a. Wealth and Prosperity for 190 Nations by Level of Freedom, 1997–1998 Table 30.1b. Deaths by Cause and Freedom Rating, 1900–1987

218 222 223

Preface

I

wrote the original electronic version of this book for anyone interested in a solution to war, democide (genocide and mass murder), famine, and poverty, or in freedom itself. It appears online and as a pdf file at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE15.HTM. In this extensive revision, I still have the general reader in mind, but now I also am writing it as a supplement to my novels in the Never Again Series. Democratic freedom has an incredible power to solve our most important problems, and I have sought different ways of communicating this, including publication of a number of hardcover books; Death By Government (1994) and Power Kills (1997) are two. I built a large website (www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) to provide the theory, data, analyses, sources, and references for what I assert about freedom; on it, I used photographs of democide and various techniques to make the numbers dance, all in an effort to help visitors visualize the toll of democide. Much impressed by the use of fiction to communicate a message under the guise of entertainment, as George Orwell did in 1984, I have now turned to writing novels to spread the word about freedom. In my Never Again Series, two lovers are sent back in a time machine to 1906 by a fictitious society of the survivors of war and democide. Their mission: to prevent the horrors that killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century, and to promote democratic freedom to assure a peaceful world. Although trained in martial arts and provided with modern weapons and incredible wealth, the lovers run into one difficulty after another in their attempt to change history. Not the least of their troubles is their naiveté about power, and its effect on their own lives. As readers of the series know, each novel in the series places the characters in an actual historical episode, bent on preventing democide or revolution, such as the mass murder by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution of Mao, and the Stalin-ordered starvation of millions of Ukrainians. But fiction has to entertain above all, and I could not weaken this with lectures on the how, why, and context of what occurred. Nor could I give an extensive lecture on the value and meaning of democracy and freedom, or, in our age of value relativity, how one can rightfully promote freedom.

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So, for the readers of my novels, here is a factual supplement that does all that. It answers the question: how could the Survivors’ Benevolent Society be so sure that democratic freedom was a solution to the twentieth century’s major evils—so sure that they nearly exhausted their vast resources to send two people back to 1906 forever; so sure that the Society’s head sent her own much-loved adopted daughter. And why were these two time travelers, one a young professor of history, so convinced of the truth of this solution that they gave up the comforts of the modern age to live in the primitive past, never to return, and daily risk their lives with little probability of complete success? The reader of my novels might consider this a report to the Society on the democratic solution—part of the documentation that persuaded them to send the time travelers on a one-way mission to change history. Moreover, if readers want to learn more about certain events too briefly described in the novels, the Concordance below should be helpful for locating them in this book, or on my website.

Executive Summary To promote freedom for everyone is to promote human security for all.

Human Security

H

umanity now has a practical cure for foreign and civil war, democide (genocide and mass murder), famine and mass hunger, mass impoverishment, and gross economic inequality. Our accumulated scientific and scholarly knowledge, and the results of vast social and economic experiments involving billions of people over three centuries, now enable us to claim, with the same confidence that we can say that orange juice is nutritious, that we can create perpetual peace, long and secure lives, abundant food, wealth, and prosperity. This is no dream, no utopian claim. This is the well-established fruit of the free market and human rights, of democratic freedom. The knowledge of this exists among economists and political scientists working on these problems. Even some of the highest officials, such as former President Clinton and current President George W. Bush, know of, and have acted on, the most surprising claim that fostering freedom is the way to peace. However, as incredibly important as this knowledge is, it is generally unknown by the public, including the major media and most professionals outside the relevant research areas. In Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine Through Democratic Freedom, I’m trying to communicate this knowledge in a way that everyone can not only assimilate, but understand it. You have a right to freedom, and it’s important that you know why freedom is so powerful in saving lives and enriching life. I have packaged the various threats to human life against which a people’s freedom protects them by the idea of human security. Human insecurity, then, involves: • • • •

economic and gender inequality, malnourishment and famine, poor health and disease, domestic turmoil and civil war,

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• • • •

poor health and disease, domestic turmoil and civil war, foreign war, genocide and mass murder.

Freedom is a solution to all these threats—democratic freedom produces human security. Throughout the various chapters of this book, and its research links, including that to the results of a systematic statistical analysis of 190 nations for over 70 variables, I will show this.

What Themes Run Through This Book? Several themes are repeated throughout this book, and provide the focus for the chapters. All concern the power of freedom to end or lessen threats to human security, and to drive human and economic development. • • • • • •

• •

Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United Nations and international treaties; it is the heart of social justice. Freedom—encompassing free speech and the economic and social free market—is an engine of economic and human development, and scientific and technological advancement. Freedom ameliorates mass poverty. Free nations do not suffer from and never have had famines; by theory, they should not. Freedom is therefore a solution to hunger and famine. Free nations have the least internal violence, turmoil, and political instability. Free nations (liberal democracies) have virtually no domestic government genocide and mass murder, and for good theoretical reasons. Freedom is therefore a solution to genocide and mass murder, and the only practical means of making sure that it happens “never again!” Free nations do not make war on each other. The greater the freedom within two nations, the less violence there is between them. Freedom is a method of nonviolence—the most peaceful nations are those whose people are free.

PART 1 On Freedom As a Right

F

reedom is like your arm—you take it for granted until its loss reveals its true value. Unfortunately, I do not have the power to wave my hand and teleport free people to live for a month or so under a tyranny where the ruling thugs totally repress freedom. The next best thing is to exemplify what life would be like under such a regime, and so in Chapter 1 we’ll look at Sudan, Burma, China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. After reading about life in these thugdoms, you may wonder how, in our age of value relativity, I can condemn such countries. One person’s freedom is another’s slavery, you might say, and we cannot judge one as bad and the other as good. So, in Chapter 2, we’ll look at the rights that all people have by virtue of being human beings—their human rights. There has been much effort by nations to define what these rights are and to foster their fulfillment. The United Nations and international agreements now well describe everyone’s human rights, and in sum mean that all have the human right to be free. This now has the force of international law. And from this flows other rights, such as the freedom of speech, association, and religion. Though nations have agreed that freedom is a human right, can philosophers justify this right? After all, by their practices and agreements, nations once accepted slavery. Turning to philosophy in Chapter 3, I point to several arguments that philosophers make to justify freedom: legal positivism, natural rights, freedom as a self-evident right, and utilitarianism. In Chapter 4, I provide my own argument based on a hypothetical social contract. We would find, I argue, that virtually all people, blind to their personal benefits and acting through a hypothetical Convention of Minds, would agree to a social contract giving each other the right— the freedom—to choose how they live, and the freedom to leave any community in which they live. And the circumstances of this decision make these socially just rights. We also find that millennia of human

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evolution have produced similar rights among nations, specifically the right any people have to sovereign self-determination and free immigration. In sum, these chapters will show that legally, morally, and by the practice of nations, then, people should be free. And to further and guard this freedom, a country should be democratic.

Chapter 1 Life Without Freedom Power kills and impoverishes life.

B

illions of people live without freedom, as shown in Table 1.1, below. In the worst of these countries, they live in fear and insecurity. They are literally slaves, bought and sold, or effectively the slaves of their governments. They are hungry, starving, or diseased. They live in primitive refugee camps, suffer under torture or the immediate threat of death, or soon die of untreated diseases. They are prisoners, inmates of concentration camps, or internees in death camps. They are soldiers subject to the most barbarous treatment or involved in lethal combat. They are children performing dangerous forced labor. They are civilians cowering under bombing and shelling. They are women who, considered second-class citizens, cannot leave their homes without the permission of their husbands, and then must completely cover themselves and be accompanied by a male relative. They are the aged and infirm that barely subsist under dangerous environmental conditions. Table 1.1 How Many People Were Free in 2004?

Rating* Free Partially Free Not Free

Nations 88 55 49

World's population Total (Bil.) % 2.78 44 1.32 21 2.21 35

* From Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org)

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Even those who escape all this still live under the very real threat that war, revolution, disease, famine, extreme poverty and deprivation, or a dictator may destroy their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. So they live in fear of arrest and prison, of disappearing forever, of forced labor, genocide, mass murder, and an unnatural death. Even in countries that are partially free, people still may be arbitrarily arrested, subjected to torture, executed without a fair trial, spied upon, and denied even basic rights because of their race, religion, or nationality. Criticize the government—especially its dictator or leader—and death may follow.

Sudan All this is abstract—simple words. Yet such abstractions are ultimately personal. Sudan is a case in point. It is an Arab Muslim nation larger than the United States, whose people make on the average $940 a 1 year (purchasing power parity ), have a life expectancy of fifty-seven years, and are among the least free in the world. Witness what happened to Acol Bak, a member of the Dinka tribe who lived in the southern village of Panlang. Arabs attacked her village, killing her father, and though her mother escaped, they seized her and her brother. They were forced to walk north for three days to the village of Goos, carrying on their heads the goods stolen by their captors. They were given no food, and were able to drink only from filthy ponds along the way. Their captors then separated Acol Bak and her brother and sold them separately to different Arabs—yes, sold them, as people were sold in the sixteenth century slave trade. She would never see her brother again. Her Arab master had a wife and daughter who forced her to work from morning to evening; in Acol’s words, “I was the only slave in that house. If I said I was tired, I was beaten by all of them.” She bore the scars of those beatings, and had her arm broken. Her accommodations were simple—outside and without bedding. Though she was only eight years old, her Arab master had her circumcised, in accord with Muslim tradition, and with no anesthetic. But unlike so many slaves, Acol was in luck. A foreign Christian 1 Purchasing power parity (ppp) equates the currencies in different countries so that $1,000 will buy the same kind and amount of goods in each country. Thus, a purchasing power parity of $940 ppp provides the same ability to buy goods and services in Sudan as it does in the United States, Mexico, Japan, or any other country.

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group, who secretly entered the Sudan for this purpose, bought Acol with 248 other slaves and set them free. Although this policy of buying the freedom of slaves is controversial and may encourage more slavery, she did not care. She was free. She could return to her village where her 2 mother was waiting. This happened in our modern age—not in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, but in the 1990s. Not all of the people forced into slavery were children. Soldiers raped one forty-year-old woman, Akec Kwol, and took her north to a slave market, where they sold her like an animal. Her slave owner also tried to circumcise her, but she resisted and got herself slashed with a knife and scarred. Had she not finally submitted, she later explained, “They would have killed me. Because I was a slave, they had the right 3 to do whatever they wanted to me.” And then among the thousands of other slaves, there was Victoria Ajang, a Sudanese now living in the United States. She testified before Congress regarding her escape from slavery: “On a summer night, the government militia forces suddenly swooped in on our village. We were at home relaxing, in the evening, when men on horses with machine guns stormed through, shooting everyone. I saw friends fall dead in front of me. While my husband carried out our little daughter Eva, I ran with the few possessions I could grab. All around us, we saw children being shot in the stomach, in the leg, between the eyes. Against the dark sky, we saw flames from the houses the soldiers had set on fire. The cries of the people forced inside filled our ears as they burned 4 to death. Our people were being turned to ash.” She and her family escaped by jumping into a nearby river. Buying and selling slaves in the Sudan is, ironically, a free market. There is no monopoly or government control over prices, which vary according to supply. In 1989, for example, a slave cost $90, but within a year, the increase in slave raids caused the price to plummet to $15. This is about equal to the cost of pruning shears at my local hardware store. How can such slavery exist in this age of the Internet and space exploration? It is part of a civil war between the Arab Islamic North, ruled by a fundamentalist Muslim dictator, and a majority black South. 2 Linda Slobodian, The Slave Trail, 1997. See: www.vitrade.com/slave_trail/home.htm 3 Karin Davies, “Slave Trade Thrives in Sudan” at: www.domini.org/openbook/sud80210.htm 4 Nat Hentoff, “A Sudanese Woman Tells Her Story: Our People Were Turned to Ash” at: www.villagevoice.com/issues/0013/hentoff.php

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This war began in 1989 when Lt. General Umar Hassan Ahmad alBashir and the Arab-led Sudanese People’s Armed Forces overthrew the democratic government in power at that time and imposed strict Muslim law and faith on the whole country. Sudan’s population is about 35 million people, of which Sunni Muslims are about 70 percent, mainly in the North. Some 5 percent of the population, mostly southern blacks, is Christian. The rest of the 6 million living in the South are animist, attributing conscious life to nature and natural objects. The South had a protected and special constitutional status under the democratic government, but with its overthrow and especially with the effort of the new regime to impose Muslim law throughout the country, the South revolted and a bloody civil war resulted. To defeat the South and motivate its Arab tribal militia to fight, the North made slaves part of their compensation, along with whatever they could loot, and gave Arab soldiers carte blanche to commit rape. Of course, old people did not fit into this scheme, since they are good neither as slaves nor for rape, so they were beaten up, if not killed. Young men were usually marched off to slavery, unless for some reason they were unsuitable, then they also were killed. According to the Muslim faith, all non-Muslim southerners, whether man or woman, old or young, are infidels. They have no rights, even to life. They may be killed as a matter of course, enslaved, raped, and deprived of their possessions. In this civil war, bombing from the air killed many living in heavily populated areas of the South; even schools were bombed and children killed. Hospitals did not escape. There were many bombing attacks on the Samaritan’s Purse, the largest hospital in southern Sudan. Bombers often attacked other medical facilities as well, sometimes with cluster bombs. Even more monstrous, the North bombed the wells that provided southerners’ water, as well as the sites of foreign relief supplies that included food for the starving southerners. All this, in addition to the regime’s socialist economic policies, has contributed to a massive famine. But because they live under a fundamentalist Muslim regime, even northern Sudanese far from the civil war enjoy few human rights. For example, the government harasses and monitors women for correct dress, forbidding even slacks. Women who dare to defy the law risk arrest, conviction by an Islamic court of immoral dressing, and flogging, as recently happened to nine women students. Women also cannot hold any public office that would give them authority over Muslim men, nor can they marry a non-Muslim. Neither men nor women have freedom of speech or religion—all

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must accept the Muslim faith. To further religious rule, the government appoints only Muslims to the judiciary. Police can arrest and imprison any commoner for up to six months without trial, and while detained, suspects can expect officials to torture them as a matter of course. Worst of all, a Muslim dare not convert to another religion, for the punishment for doing so is death. By 1999, 20,000 to 40,000 Sudanese were enslaved and nearly 4 million displaced from their homes and villages—the largest number for any country. Many more Sudanese simply gave up on the country. Over 352,000 had fled, escaping the fate of some 1.5 to 2 million who died as a result of the war, famine, or disease, or were murdered in cold blood by Muslim forces or rebels. As of this writing, a preliminary peace agreement has just been signed between the regime and the southern-based rebels. There have been a number of such attempts at peace, and whether this one will succeed remains to be seen. Regardless, however, of its success or failure, the bloody and tyrannical regime of President Ahmad al-Bashir will continue to exist in Khartoum and deny Sudanese even the most basic human rights. Now we have Darfur, a new democidal crises in the western region of Sudan. Perhaps over 350,000 people have been murdered outright or died as a result of the Muslim's dictator's war on those in Darfur alone, and possibly at least 2,000 people are dying of famine and associated diseases or being murdered there every day.

Saudi Arabia Sudan was a country at war with itself, and afflicted with government-created famine and disease. What about a country at peace, like Saudi Arabia? It also is an Arab Muslim country, with 22 million people who have a life expectancy of sixty-eight years, a much higher annual income of $9,000 (purchasing power parity), and who live under the rule of an absolute monarchy. Life is better than in Sudan in that there is no war, rebellion, or famine killing hundreds of thousands of people. But as in Sudan, Saudis still suffer one kind of repression or another. There is no freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia. Police may arrest Saudis for the most minor criticism of the ruling monarchy, the Saudi king or any royal personage, or the Muslim religion. People live in fear that something said or done in innocence will land them in prison and get them tortured and flogged. The authorities might even cut off a person’s head.

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Even trying to be honest can be dangerous. One poor fellow, Abdul-Karim al-Naqshabandi, apparently refused to help his employer by giving false testimony. In retaliation, his well-connected employer had him framed and arrested for a crime he did not commit. To get a confession, the police tied him up like an animal and beat and tortured him. He finally signed a confession to end the misery, and to get someone outside to hear his case. Even then, the police allowed no one to visit him in prison. And although he could present considerable evidence proving his innocence and provide the names of defense witnesses, the court would not give him the right to defend himself. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1996. King Fahd Bin Abd Al-Aziz Al Saud’s power is absolute. There are no national elections, no legislature, and no political parties. All are illegal. The country’s constitution, by the king’s decree, is the Koran, Islam’s holy book. Its precepts are law. What this means for average Saudis is that they had better be Muslim and of a particular type, called Sunni (minority Shiite Muslims are always at risk of arrest and detention), and that they must obey religious law. They dare not change their Muslim religion or, by law, the courts can have them executed. They must not question the Muslim religion or the monarchy. Just consider the two Sunni Moslems, Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al’Awda and Sheikh Safr ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Hawali. To make them repent for their “extremist ideas,” the police arrested them in September 1994. Security forces worked them over year after year, until a court tried them in June of 1999, virtually five years later. As long as they are careful over what they say and do, life is easier for Muslim men. The country’s near totalitarian, religious rule especially enslaves women, who comprise roughly half the population. The Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote Virtue, the Mutawaa’in, or religious police, watch over every woman’s behavior for violations of religious law, which they strictly enforce. This has created a harsh and rigid apartheid system against women. In public, they must wear an abaya, a garment that fully covers their body. It can be of any color, as long as it is black. The religious police keep a close watch that women also cover their head and face. The unfortunate case of Nieves, a Filipina maid, provides one example of how these religious police work. She accepted a married couple’s invitation to a restaurant to celebrate a birthday. By chance, a male friend of the couple also joined the celebration. The religious police happened by and, after spying on the group, arrested Nieves on suspicion of being there to meet the male—a clear immoral act. While under arrest she denied this, but since she could not read Arabic, au-

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thorities tricked her into signing a confession she thought was a release order. This gave the court enough excuse to convict her of an offense against public morals and to sentence her to sixty lashes and twentyfive days in prison. Then there was the Filipina Donato Lama. The police arrested her in 1995 for suspicion of committing the unpardonable crime of preaching Christianity. In a revealing letter about her later beating and confession, she wrote, “I was at my most vulnerable state when the police again pressured me to admit or else I would continue receiving the beating. ‘We will let you go if you sign this paper. If not, you may as well die here.’ Badly bruised and no longer able to stand another beating, I agreed to put my thumbmark on the paper not knowing what it 5 was I was signing.” The court sentenced her to seventy lashes plus eighteen months in prison. Women cannot travel abroad or even on public transportation without the permission of a male relative. Even then, they must enter buses by a separate rear entrance and sit in the women’s section. The government forbids them to drive a car, or even walk outside by themselves. Their husband or a male relative must accompany them, or for so “offending public morals,” the religious police will arrest them. Nor can women play any role in the king’s government. Most important, the police ignore the violence frequently committed against women, especially that committed by their husbands. Even harder to believe, severely injured women must still have the permission of a male relative to enter a hospital. The testimony of one man in court is worth that of two women. Men can divorce women without cause while women must give legal reasons. In school, women may not study many subjects restricted to men, such as engineering and journalism. In the words of feminist Andrea Dworkin, writing in 1978 but still applicable today, Women are locked in and kept out, exiled to invisibility and abject powerlessness within their own country. It is women who are degraded systematically from birth to early death, utterly and totally and without exception deprived of freedom. It is women who are sold into marriage or concubinage, often before puberty; killed if their hymens 5 Amnesty International at: www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/briefing/3.html

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are not intact on the wedding night; kept confined, ignorant, pregnant, and poor, without choice or recourse. It is women who are raped and beaten with full sanction of the law. It is women who cannot own property or work for a living or determine in any way the circumstances of their own lives. It is women who are subject to a des6 potism that knows no restraint. Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and non-Muslims, as well as the enforcement of religious rule over male Muslims, is the norm among the sheikdoms of the Middle East. We also saw this religious absolutism in fundamentalist Sudan. Algeria and Iran share it to a certain extent. Even in nonfundamentalist Muslim countries such as Egypt and Pakistan, governments deny human rights and women are secondclass citizens. Before the American-led alliance defeated the Taliban regime of Afghanistan in 2002, it even exceeded Saudi Arabia in its harsh and barbaric application of the Koran, denial of human rights, and savage suppression of women. The courts could even sentence women to death for adultery, as was the woman simply identified as Suriya by Talibanrun Radio. After convicting her of adultery in April 2000, officials took her to a sports stadium and stoned her to death in front of thousands of spectators. There are few other ways the Taliban could have picked to execute a person that are more cruel, inhumane, and prolonged. There was no word on what happened to the man involved in the affair, if anything. The best label for the lives of all women in these Muslim countries is pseudo-slavery. Its only difference from real slavery is that the government does not allow men to buy and sell women. Otherwise, women are under the complete control of the government, their fathers, and their husbands.

Burma While the fear, insecurity, and risk that common people experience in daily life in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia exists in many other Muslim countries, life can be even worse in some non-Muslim ones, such as 6 Andrea Dworkin, “Take Back The Day,” 1978. At: www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIC.html

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Burma (Myanmar). The 42.7 million people in this South Asian country are 89 percent Buddhist, have a life expectancy of fifty-five years, and earn in purchasing power parity $1,200 a year. They are ruled by a socialist military regime, which allows no freedom. Life here is hellish, due to the military’s savage repression of dissent, and their barbaric response to the rebellion of nearly a dozen ethnic minorities. In the nine villages of Dweh Loh Township, northwest of Rangoon and near the Thai border, the Karen ethnic group has long been fighting for independence. During harvest time in March 2000, military forces attacked the villages, burned down homes, and destroyed or looted possessions. By sheer luck, some of the villagers managed to flee into the forest, leaving behind their rice and possessions and risking starvation—starvation made almost inevitable by the military’s burning of crops and rice storage barns. Soldiers even torched the cut scrub needed to prepare the soil for planting. Those who remained in the village who were not killed were seized for forced labor or portering, or pressed into the military. That done, the soldiers mined all approaches to the village to prevent the villagers from returning. Soldiers kill any male suspected of being a rebel. These are not all easy deaths. Sometimes soldiers gruesomely torture the victim and prolong death to cause as much agony as possible. Women or young girls are only marginally better off—the soldiers “only” rape them. Then they march them, along with the children and the village men left alive, to work sites to build barracks, defensive works, roads, railroads, or fences, or carry bamboo and firewood. Alternatively, the soldiers force them to porter ammunition and military supplies like mules. This is the most dangerous form of forced labor and many die from it. Even the children do not escape. Soldiers routinely make them do such arduous labor, or even soldier. Worse, the military sell the girls into prostitution in Burma or into the Thai sex market across the border, which already exploits the bodies of 40,000 Burmese girls. Worse still, the military have forced children to walk ahead of soldiers to trigger mines. No military have used human bodies to clear mines like this since World War II, when the Soviets often compelled prisoners to sweep minefields with their feet. Even for those Burmese children not forced into labor and portering, general conditions are disastrous for their future and that of the country. Even children living outside the civil war zones are unlikely to go to school. No more than one in five get so much as four years of primary school. They are more likely to be working at some job to help their family survive. According to UN estimates, about one-third of all children six to fifteen years of age are doing so. Many children do not survive to adulthood—half of all those that die each year are children.

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In the civil war zones, children and adults alike routinely live on the edge of death. For example, anyone living in the township of Dweh Loh that contained the nine villages I mentioned, had an equal chance of doing forced labor, being looted, or suffering extortion by soldiers on the one hand, or of fleeing into the forests on the other. Those living in other townships throughout this area probably escaped to the forests to barely survive there on whatever food they could grow. Were soldiers to find these refugees, they might shoot them or make them porter under threat of death. Life was no better for those living in the Nyaunglebin District to the west, where handpicked execution squads of soldiers operated off and on in the area, searching for rebels or their supporters. If these soldiers suspected a villager of even the most minor contact with rebel forces, if a villager was even seen talking to someone suspected of being a rebel, they usually cut his throat. Sometimes the soldiers also decapitated the victim and mounted the head on a pole as a warning to others. This would have been an easy death compared to what soldiers did to three men they captured in Plaw Toh Kee, as reported by a 7 villager there. No matter that these were simple farmers and cattle breeders, thought good men by the villagers and the village head. The soldiers suspected them of working for the rebels and that was enough. They forced the three men to stand against trees for days without food or water, beat them and punched them in the face because they could not answer any questions about the rebels, and then systematically made one-inch slices all over their bodies. Then the soldiers cut out their intestines, pushed the mess back into their stomachs, and kept these poor souls in this condition until finally killing them. This is only one atrocity in many that I could recount as this civil war takes its toll on unarmed and peaceful villagers living in one civil war zone or another. There are around sixty-seven different ethnic groups in Burma, each with its own language and culture, many of which have rebelled and are fighting the military government. With more or less ferocity, these rebellions have been going on since 1948, with a death toll of 200,000 or even possibly 400,000 Burmese. Both sides have also murdered outright an additional 100,000 to 200,000 Burmese. Moreover, rebellion, fighting, and brutal military pressure on the Burmese people have caused 500,000 to 1 million of them to be displaced within the country, many of whom the military 7 An Independent Report by the Karen Human Rights Group, March 31, 2000. At: www.ibiblio.org/freeburma/humanrights/khrg/archive/khrg2000/khrg0002.html

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have commanded to live in inhospitable forced location zones. Others have escaped relocation for bare subsistence in the forests, bereft of home or village. Still 215,000 others have fled abroad and are formally listed as refugees by international refugee organizations. An added 350,000 Burmese are without refugee status and subsist in refugee-like conditions in neighboring Thailand. The vast majority of Burmese, however, live far away from the civil war zones and are not members of the rebelling minority ethnic groups. They have other things to fear. Burma is a military dictatorship, and this regime is willing to use its weapons on unarmed people who protest or demonstrate. When students demonstrated against the regime on July 7, 1962, soldiers shot one hundred of them to death. On August 13, 1967, soldiers similarly shot over a hundred demonstrating men and women, and even the children that accompanied them. And so on and on, from demonstration to demonstration, until the worst of them all. On August 8, 1988, doctors, students, teachers, farmers, musicians, artists, monks, and workers took part in peaceful, pro-democracy demonstrations in all major cities. The military demanded that the demonstrators disperse, and when they would not, soldiers fired round after round into the crowds. They massacred an incredible 5,000 to 10,000 unarmed people simply trying to express their desire for democracy. Soldiers and police then arrested hundreds of those escaping this bloodbath, and tortured them in prison. Many thousands escaped to border areas, leaving their loved ones, homes, and possessions behind. Those Burmese who stay home, avoid demonstrations, and arouse no suspicion might still be conscripted by the military for forced labor or porter duty. Socialist in mind and spirit, the military have been ambitious in building railways, roads, airports, and so on. And to do so, they simply draft civilians. For example, those who lived near the route of the 110 mile e-Tavoy railway, built by the military in southern Burma, were among the 200,000 people that soldiers forced to work on the project for fifteen days a month without pay. Then there were the 30,000 the military conscripted for the Bassein Airport extension. Those who missed this might have been among the over 920,000 the military compelled to labor on the Chaung Oo-Pakokku Railroad. For those living close to the soil, wholly dependent on what they can grow to eat, time is food. When the military force these civilians to work for days without pay, even bare survival is difficult. For many, the only choice is to flee or shirk work. But then the military’s punishment for not doing the work can be even worse, as reported by one refugee. Then the soldiers came to my house and poked my wife in the side with a rifle

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butt. They kicked her hard in the stomach, and she vomited blood. Then they kicked my baby son down into the fire, and all the hair on his head was burnt. They slapped my seven-year-old son in the face and he cried out. They beat them because I had 8 escaped. Those who do the forced labor have to sleep at the work site, guarded, and without much shelter—sometimes none. The ground is their only bed. To go to the toilet they have to get permission from a guard. Their only food is what the workers themselves can bring. And they have to be sure not to be injured, because there is seldom any medical care. They also can die, as many do, from sickness or exhaustion. If they try to escape from the work site and soldiers catch them, if they are lucky, the soldiers will only severely beat them. Just resting without permission can get them beaten and killed by guards. This happened to Pa Za Kung, a man from Vomkua village in Chin State’s Thantlang Township, doing forced labor on a road from Thantlang to Vuangtu village. But portering is even worse than forced labor. The military make those living in war zones porter for them, but since as many as two porters are needed for each soldier to move much of their supplies and equipment, people living outside the war zones are also conscripted. Porters suffer from hunger, malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Rebel fire kills them, they step on mines, or soldiers shoot them because they cannot force their bodies to work any longer. Or soldiers simply abandon them with no medical care, no food, no help, no way home. All told, this is another form of slavery suffered by millions of Burmese. Burmese generally have no rights other than to serve the military. This might have changed in 1990, when the military caved in to considerable international pressure resulting from their 1988 massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, and held real democratic elections— and were shocked when the democratic opposition, under the leadership of 1991 Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won 82 percent of the seats in the new parliament. The military then refused to yield power, and have held Aung San Suu Kyi under virtual house arrest ever since. They also arrested and tortured thousands of her support8 “A Comprehensive Response To Burmese Refugee and Displaced People Problem,” The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia Joint Standing Committee of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade, October 5, 1994.

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ers and members of other political parties, and have killed or disappeared thousands more. They even arrested hundreds of those elected to parliament, some of whom died under the harsh prison conditions. Member-elect Kyaw Min, for example, died of hepatitis caused by his imprisonment. Having learned their lesson about the power of the democratic idea, the military no longer allow political activity or criticism. There is no freedom of speech or association. In this Buddhist country, the military keep a watch on Buddhist monks and prevent their involvement in political activity. They also restrict the leaders of other religions. There can be no unions. Just having a computer modem can lead to arrest, torture, and a fifteen-year prison sentence. Having a fax machine may even mean death, as it did for the Anglo-Burmese San Suu Kyi, who was honorary Consul for the European Union. No independent courts exist, and the law is what the military command. The military monitor the movements of common citizens, search their homes at any time, and take them forcibly from their homes to be relocated, without compensation or explanation. Nor are Burmese free to start a business or invest. Since 1962, when the military overthrew the democratic government, the military have pursued a “Burmese Way to Socialism.” This has left little room for private businesses and a free market, and companies run by the military dominate many areas of the economy, leaving as the most vigorous sector of the economy the heroin trade. This alone may account for over 50 percent of the economy. The result is what one would expect. Among all countries, Burma has plummeted to near the bottom in economic freedom, possibly better than only communist North Korea. And the country is nearly bankrupt. However, perhaps having learned from this economic disaster, the military are now trying to liberalize their economic control and have invited foreign investment.

China Burma is a small country, tucked beneath the mass of China to the north. China has more than 1.26 billion people, about 20 percent of the world’s population, living under a communist dictatorship. They have a life expectancy of seventy years, and a purchasing power parity of $3,800 (1999 estimate). Is life any better than in Burma, Saudi Arabia, or Sudan? This depends on when in the twentieth century one was born there. If a decade or so ago, yes. But anytime before then, no. Before then, many Chinese died from disease or starvation, or were killed by soldiers in one of the hundreds of battles fought between war-

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lords. And with the communist takeover of the whole country in 1949, tens of millions of Chinese were murdered in cold blood during the Communist Party’s national campaigns, such as Land Reform, Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries, Three and Five Antis, Collectivization, and the Cultural Revolution. Those who survived this monstrous bloodbath could well have starved to death in the famine caused by the Party’s “Great Leap Forward” industrialization campaign, and the collectivization of all peasants into communes for factory-like farming. This famine occurred in the late 1950s and continued into the early 1960s; it was the world’s worst ever. As many as 40 million Chinese might have starved to death or died from related diseases. This alone is over twice the 15 million killed in combat during World War II, including combatants from Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, China, the United States, and Great Britain. All this I have detailed in my book on China’s Bloody Century. Life is better now for the average Chinese. Relatively. The Communist Party now largely leaves peasants alone to farm as they see fit and to sell their food. There is more freedom, especially, to pursue a business or invest. The Party is trying to liberalize the economy and give greater reign to private ambition and foreign investment. What was a deeply impoverished country in the 1960s, possibly even worse than Burma, is now rapidly developing its economy. Moreover, Chinese are freer from Party controls, rules, intervention, and especially Party attempts to remake their lives and culture. Though it does so with a milder and more tolerant hand, the Communist Party still controls all aspects of government—it is the government. It is supreme; it shares power with no legislative body, no courts, no military, nor any other group. No one elects high Party leaders; they rise through power struggles within the Party. And except for those parts of the economy, culture, and family over which its policy is being liberalized, there still is little that Chinese can do without Party permission. It allows virtually no freedom of speech or association. Nor does it permit the Chinese to protest or demonstrate. And whatever their religious faith, the Party tightly controls it or makes it illegal. Look at what happened to practicing members of the Jesus Family, a Protestant sect of which the Party does not approve. In 1992, police surrounded and arrested sixty-one members attending a monthly commune service in Duoyigou, Shandong Province. The police destroyed their village and confiscated all church belongings. A court eventually sentenced some of the members to between one and twelve years in prison for, among other things, taking part in an “illegal” religious meeting. The court gave the sect’s leader and his sons the heaviest sentence of all for “swindling,” because they were so bold as to collect

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contributions for the church’s annual Christmas celebration. Even if church members avoided prison, the police might harass them years later. After these people rebuilt their village, police sealed it off and those entering or leaving had to pay five yuan. Yuan Hongbing and Wang Jiaqi, two legal scholars, believed this was unjust and tried to help the sect take legal recourse, which only resulted in the police arresting them as well. Even Catholics have suffered repression; many can only practice their religion underground. The Party considers Catholicism a “foreign, imperialist” import and has tried to keep it under tight control, arresting bishops and priests and burning their churches. In some places, churches are disguised as factories so that Catholics can pray at secret services. As part of Party persecution of the Falun Gong sect (to members, it is not a religion), police are likely to arrest any Chinese who practice its combination of Taoism and Buddhism, and the meditation and martial arts techniques that lead members to a spiritual melding of mind, spirit, and body. There are as many as 100 million adherents in China, though the Party claims that no more than 2.1 million belong. Clearly, however, sect leaders can bring together many members quickly. On April 25, 1999, for example, a mass of 10,000 followers stood quietly in front of the compound housing the top Party leaders in Beijing. Police have already arrested over a hundred sect leaders and thousands of its adherents for what, until recently, the Party labeled a “counterrevolutionary crime,” and has renamed in less political terms a “crime disturbing social order.” The Party recently held over 35,000 Falun Gong members in detention or in prison, and has tortured many. It has sent some 5,000 additional members to labor camps without trial. At least eighty-nine Falun Gong have died due to Party mistreatment. Though this number is small and seems irrelevant in such a huge country, for each of the eighty-nine and those who loved them, it was terribly real. Sixty-year-old Chen Zixiu is a case in point. She traveled to Beijing to request that the Party lift its restrictions on the Falun Gong. The police arrested her, then beat and tortured her. Her aging body could not take it, and she was dead in four days. When her family collected her corpse, they found bruises all over her body, broken teeth, and dried blood in her ears. Another woman, Zhao Xin, a professor at Beijing’s Industry and Commerce University, died from a beating she received after her arrest for practicing Falun Gong breathing exercises in a Beijing park. The Party cannot leave alone even that which most people regard as superstitions or simply good health exercises. In a crackdown on a group of Qi Gong practitioners, for example, over 21,000 have

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been arrested for nothing more than fostering breathing and meditation exercises. Action against unapproved sects or religious groups is simply an example of the Party’s continuous campaign to suppress anything of which it does not approve—be it association, speech, unions, or movements. In China, there can be no association without Party permission, no nonprofit organization without registration. The Party must license all newspapers, magazines, and other publications, and no book can be published without Party approval. Censorship is common. There are even Party guidelines for publications, such as requiring that newspaper stories be 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative. Disseminating or selling unapproved literature can lead to a long prison sentence. For example, police arrested two Beijing bookstore owners, sisters Li Xiaobing and Li Xiaomei, for selling Falun Gong publications, and a court sentenced them to six or seven years. The police even arrested the environmental journalist Dai Qing, who justifiably criticized a mammoth dam-building project on the Yangtze River, which will create the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and displace one to two million people. A court sentenced him to ten months in prison and forbade him to publish in the future. Even for simply making a list of those convicted of protest-connected offenses—just a list—a court sentenced one fellow, Li Hai, to nine months in prison. After all, convictions are a “high-level state secret.” Arrest and incarceration in prison, a labor camp, or a psychiatric hospital, forced drugging, brainwashing, psychological torture, physical torment, execution, a simple beating—all are Party tools. Their purpose is to control the Chinese population, advance Party policies, and maintain Party power through fear. There is no humanity in any of this. Note how the prison authorities treated the forty-two-year-old woman Cheng Fengrong. They handcuffed her to a tree and beat her, made her stand in the snow barefoot while they kicked her, and finally poured cold water over her head, which ran down her body and turned to ice at her feet. Aside from the Party’s great concern over what Chinese say and whom they associate with, there is still more reason why one would not want to be born in China. The Party also deems restricting population growth to be vital. It therefore forcibly intrudes into the core of a family’s soul—the desire to have children. Since 1979, the Party has dictated who will have no more than one child, a policy largely applied to Han Chinese (comprising 92 percent of the population) living in urban areas. To prevent women from having a second child, the Party might sterilize them or, if they’re pregnant, force them to undergo an abortion. If there are many pregnant women in an area, or just to ensure that there are no

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second children, Party officials might enforce a local “Clean Out the Stomach Campaign” involving house-to-house examinations and forced abortions. If a woman still somehow manages to have a second child, the couple would likely be fined, and the child would be discriminated against and not allowed to attend the better schools. What happened to the owner of a small clothing store is an example of the trouble a second pregnancy might cause. I will name her Woman X, since she is now a refugee and fears harm if the Party knows her name. After she had her first child, officials ordered her to use an intrauterine device to prevent another pregnancy. She did so for a while, but because of connected health problems, secretly removed it—and got pregnant. When they found out about this, Party officials fined her and forced her to undergo an abortion. The fine was too much for her meager resources to cover, and she could not pay it. Officials then seized her store. Penniless and distraught, she borrowed what money she could from relatives and fled alone, deserting her husband, child, and mother. The result of the Party’s one-child policy was predictable in an Asian, male-oriented society. If a Chinese woman believed her first fetus to be female, she might well abort it. The second try might yield a male. If a female were born, the mother or her husband might murder or abandon it. Infanticide was naturally prevalent, and sometimes even encouraged by Party authorities. The result was that there were about 119 males born for every 100 females. It has led to playgrounds filled with masses of boys, few girls, and no siblings. For traditional Chinese families, the end result is even worse. Who will take care of the aged parents? This has led to a Party reconsideration of the policy. One resulting reform is to permit families to have two children, if both parents are from single-child families. With the liberalization of some controls, a much freer market, and less emphasis on remaking the society and culture, the Party now executes far fewer people than it did decades ago. Still, the numbers are very high by international standards. As expected, how many people the Party executes or otherwise kills without a fair trial and for political or religious “crimes” is unknown and difficult to estimate. Going by what the outside world knows, however, in just the one year of 1996 the Party executed at least 4,367 people. With a little more than 20 percent of the world’s population, and going only by documented executions, the Party performs about 75 to 80 percent of all known judicial executions in the world. Nor can Chinese expect a decent burial if executed. As the stillwarm body lies on the ground after being shot in the back of the head, doctors brought for this purpose will likely cut out the organs and rush

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these to a hospital, without the prior consent of the executed or the family. At the hospital, doctors will transplant the organs into well-paying foreigners or the elite, or prepare the organs for shipment, so the Party can sell them in the international transplant market for much-needed hard currency. An American Chinese-language newspaper even adver9 tised such organs for sale—one negotiated price was $30,000. Executions are the result of official court sentences, but Chinese also die “off the record” from beatings, torture, or other mistreatment by authorities in prisons or labor camps. Even the Chinese press sometimes reports these deaths, as it did of a worker who, suspected of embezzlement, died after being beaten and tortured for twenty-nine hours. Chinese who simply demonstrate for democracy can be killed. During the nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, soldiers, armored vehicles, and tanks slaughtered 2,000 to 10,000 demonstrators. Those who escape execution or prison might still be sentenced to a forced labor or re-education camp. Life in either case can be worse than that in prison, however, and even death might seem preferable. It did for human rights leader Chen Longde. Beaten by guards with clubs and electric batons, tortured by other inmates who were promised reduced sentences if they got him to confess, and suffering from associated kidney damage, he finally jumped from a window. He survived, perhaps unfortunately, with two hips and a leg broken. The Party forces inmates to fulfill a work quota or meet certain “reform” standards. Failure to meet a quota or spout communist dogma can be lethal. Camp officials may simply deny them benefits, or they may impose a more deadly punishment—they may beat them, starve them, or put them in painfully tightened leg irons or handcuffs for long periods. The quotas are not easy for inmates to fill, and could require them to work overtime with little sleep—sometimes no more than three or four hours. Moreover, camp authorities might combine work with required communist study, making it even harder to meet quotas. In some camps, guards routinely beat and harass inmates to force them to do more work. Of course, guards beat prisoners in other countries as well. But in China these beatings are not the idiosyncratic behavior of sadistic camp guards. They are the Party’s method to ensure work output and proper brainwashing. Overall, the Party admits to keeping 1.2 million prisoners, including detainees. This total is probably far under the actual number.

9 The Laogai Research Foundation at: www.laogai.org/reports/profit.htm

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North Korea Then consider North Korea, surely the worst place in the world in which to be born. Its communist dictator Kim Jong-il rules a population of 22.5 million with an iron hand, most of whom he is starving or weakening with malnutrition. Perhaps as many as 3 million North Koreans have died of starvation or associated diseases, not to mention those that Kim’s regime has summarily executed. Even as I write this, people are dying by the hundreds, sometimes the thousands, every day, due to the long famine and poor rations caused by Kim’s fanatical devotion to communism itself. Consider what these people face just in their human need for food 10 and health, leaving aside their enslavement. North Korea’s population requires about 6 million tons of food a year for each person to have a minimum diet. The regime controls all farming, all agriculture, and can only produce about 4 million tons. There is a food shortfall of 2 million tons, or an amount 33 percent below what is minimally required. Kim has imposed rationing, and his handouts are the only legal way to obtain food. There are no independent channels of distribution, except for the black market. This means that people get food as Kim and his thugs desire. Kim’s food distribution system is highly unequal. Food is put aside first as “patriotic rice” and “military rice.” This has resulted in a 22 percent cut in food consumption, from 700g a day per person to 400g a day—well below the minimum rice requirement set by the World Food and Agricultural Organization. Kim uses the very food people need to live as a tool to reward and punish his subject slaves. In this “classless” communist society, the regime has divided North Koreans into a rigid hierarchy of three classes and fifty-one subdivisions, determined by their status within the communist North Korean Workers’ Party and the military, their perceived faithfulness to communism, and their family backgrounds. Thus, vast numbers of people whose loyalties are questioned or who are deemed useless to the regime do not receive enough food to live long. The worst off are those people and families incarcerated in Kim’s concentration or forced labor camps. They receive the lowest food allowance of all, despite being forced to work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m. Attempts by South Korea, the United Nations, and the United States (the major provider) to supply food aid have not worked well. In 2002, 10 I have taken many of the following specifics from the exceptional report of Seong Ho Jhe’s article in Korea and World Affairs (Summer 2003) on the food crisis in Korea. It is available at: www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/NKHR_new/inter_conf/Seong_Ho_Jhe.pdf

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food aid was 62 percent under its target, but even meeting the target would not substantially improve the food available to the average Korean, even were it equally distributed. It is not. The regime will not guarantee that food reaches those who need it most, it does not allow aid givers to carefully monitor who gets the food and, in some cases, it has redirected the food to its favorite classes or to the military. Kim himself enjoys the best food the world can offer. Often this food is not merely imported, but gathered by his personal chef, sent from one country to another to buy the special food he desires. In his book Kim Jong Il’s Chef (published in Japanese in 2003), written under a pseudonym after he escaped to Japan, Kim’s chef described the countries he was sent to and for what food: x Urumqi (in northwestern China) for fruit, mainly hamigua melons and grapes x Thailand for fruit, mostly durians, papayas, and mangoes x Malaysia for fruit, mostly durians, papayas, and mangoes x Czechoslovakia for draft beer x Denmark for pork x Iran for caviar x Uzbekistan for caviar x Japan for seafood This while most of Kim’s people were starving, many to death. There are no hospitals, doctors, or medical distribution and supply companies independent of the regime. All are nationalized. As with food, medical treatment and medicine is distributed as reward and punishment. Not surprisingly, medicine is in short supply and not available everywhere. An indicator of this situation is that only half of the population is now inoculated for such diseases as infantile paralysis and measles. Thus, the diseases associated with famine and malnutrition often receive no medical treatment at all. Under such conditions, even a cold can be fatal. North Korea is one of the few countries in which population mortality rates have been increasing. The life expectancy has fallen to 66.8 years from 73.2; the newborn mortality rate has increased from 14 to 22.5, and the rate for those under five years of age has increased from 27 to 48 per thousand. Aside from the daily accumulation of dead, the effects on the living have been disastrous. Long-term malnutrition has affected about half the living, and caused excessive underdevelopment in children—they are stunted in growth and excessively thin. There is

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wide-scale dwarfishness and, most important from any humanitarian point of view, brain development has been retarded. Moreover, malnutrition has fostered rickets, scurvy, nyctalopia, hepatitis, and tuberculosis, among other diseases. And all this without even recounting the regime’s terror, repression, executions, and absolute violations of what those living in liberal democracies take for granted, such as the freedom of religion and speech, of opportunity and association, fair trials, rule of law, sanctity of the person, and freedom from fear. I can only describe this nation as a horrid, border-to-border slave labor camp, as I detailed in my Death By Government.

Some Other Antifreedom Thugdoms There are many other thugdoms—nations—whose dictators allow no or little freedom, and daily commit abuses against human rights, including mass executions. For example, east of Burma and to the south of China is Laos, in which the treatment of its people by the Laotian Communist Party that controls the country can be best described as Stalinist. Then in East Africa is the nation of Rwanda, where in 1994 Hutu soldiers and armed civilians killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, and armed Tutsi retaliated by murdering Hutu. By the end of this genocidal slaughter, Hutu and Tutsi had massacred as many as 1 million Rwandans within a few months, as Chapter 6 will report in full detail (and which I fictionalized in my novel War & Democide Never Again). Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein (now held in prison by the newly sovereign Iraqi government under Prime Minister Iyad Allawi) gassed Kurdish women and children and destroyed over 3,000 of their villages in Iraq’s north, and massacred Shiite men, women, and children in the south. Overall, his regime may have murdered 750,000 or even a million Iraqis. And in 1971, as I also detailed in Death By Government, the West Pakistan military murdered Bengalis and Hindus by the hundreds of thousands in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). There are tens of millions more whose murder by one government or another I will discuss in Chapter 6. Here I mention this only to make the point clear. In such countries, and in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, and North Korea, the lives of the people have been filled with disease, starvation, forced labor, slavery, beatings, torture, and death. Their rulers have absolute or near-absolute power. And for those with absolute power, their whim is law, their fantasy a command, their wish a campaign. They do not see people as living human beings, each a self-conscious person

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with a human soul. Such rulers see their citizens as bricks and mortar for building a paradise on earth, expendable pawns with which to fight a war, or robots to be programmed with a religious text. Still, by what right can one criticize the lack of freedom in these countries? Why should one be free? Is one’s personal enjoyment or desire for freedom sufficient to justify it for others? Really, what do we mean by freedom? And what are the consequences of such freedom for people or society as a whole?

Chapter 2 Universal Human Rights A free society is a most socially just one.

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f a people want to be free, should they be? Should those living in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, and China be free? Why? There are two ways of answering this. One is to prove that the benefits of freedom so overshadow any negative consequences as to be justified. This is what I will show in later chapters. The second way is to show that everyone has a right to be free regardless of the consequences, that freedom is moral and just in itself, and that it is immoral and unjust to deprive people of freedom. That this is so may seem obvious, but it is not in much of the world. We saw in the previous chapter that the dictators of many nations obey no law. The law is what they command it to be, and their subjects must obey or suffer severe consequences. The people have no way of voting these dictators out of power, and to demonstrate or protest against them is to risk imprisonment, torture, and death. Their life is one of fear. Yet these dictators and their supporters often justify their rule as moral, or as socially or religiously just. This belief is why some dictatorships come into existence in the first place. Large and powerful groups believe that this way of governing is necessary, as was true for Lenin and his Bolsheviks when they overthrew the pro-democratic provisional government of Russia in 1917. They may have such faith in their own ideology or religion and its teachings, as many do in Muslim countries, that they militantly demand that their church and government should be one. They may think their nation needs a dictatorship that can deal with its poverty and promote economic growth. They may be convinced that government must assure the economic right of the people to a job, social security, and health, before concerning itself with so-called Western human rights. They may be traditional monarchists who embrace a hereditary, authoritarian government that would maintain the great traditions and customs of their people. Even those who know what life is like for the people who have no freedom in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, and North Korea might

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still claim that believing they should be free is intolerant of different values, morally wrong, unfair, or ungodly. And fascists and communists are still around, though in the last half-century what we have learned about life under these isms has virtually discredited them. In my teaching I have known professors and students, for instance, who, persuaded by the Marxism-Leninism that provides the philosophical foundations of twentieth century communism that it is more socially just, were willing to replace their democratic freedoms with communist totalitarianism. If people wish to live under a dictatorship, that is their choice. But what about people who have no choice, the people dictators deprive of any freedom with the force of their guns? Do we have a right to say that Burmese or Chinese rulers, or those of any other nondemocratic country, should free their people and democratize? Do those trumpeting such freedom ignore an Asian or African way, for example? What about God’s way? Are not the holy teachings of the Bible or Koran above the selfish desire for freedom? To answer, we must recognize that freedom is a general term, like liberty, independence, autonomy, and equality. In reality, freedom cannot be absolute; no one can be completely free. A person’s talents, family situation, job, wealth, cultural norms, and laws against murder, incest, burglary, and so on limit their choices. And then there is the freedom of others that necessarily limits one’s own freedom. Broadly speaking, a person’s rights, whatever they may be, define the limits to their freedom. In the Western tradition of freedom, these are their civil and political rights, including their freedom of speech, religion, and association. Some philosophers see these not only as morally justified rights in themselves, but also as means for fulfilling other possible rights, like happiness. The opposing position is that such rights have no special status unless granted by government to maintain tradition, as does an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia; to pursue a just society, as the Communist Party of China claims; to protect a holy society, as does a Muslim government like that in Sudan; or to economically develop a country, as attempted by a military government like that in Burma. The internationally popular justification for a people’s freedom is by reference to human rights, those due them as a human beings. The term “human rights” is recent in origin: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt first used it in a 1941 message to the United States Congress, when he declared that everyone has four human rights—freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear. Since 1941, there has been a vigorous international affirmation of these and other human rights. Many a nation’s constitution has included them, and they now

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are part of an International Bill of Rights. The latter comprises Articles 1 and 55 of the 1945 United Nations Charter, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, and the two international covenants passed by the General Assembly in 1966, one on civil and political rights and the other on economic, social, and cultural rights. There is now a United Nations Human Rights Commission that can investigate alleged violations of human rights, and receive and consider complaints. In our nationcentered international system, this is a momentous advance for the human rights of all people. The conventions and declarations of regional organizations have further strengthened these human rights. To mention a few examples, the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention on Human Rights, and European nations now have the European Court of Human Rights and the European Commission on Human Rights. The Organization of American States adopted the American Declaration on Human Rights, and the American states have created the Inter-American Convention and Court on Human Rights. The Organization for African Unity has created the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights. Moreover, there have been many formal conferences among states and interested international government organizations on human rights, such as the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights involving 183 nations. Human rights have also been the concern of many private organizations. These have sought to further define and extend human rights (such as the right to a clean environment), observe the implementation of human rights in all nations, publicize violations of human rights by governments (for instance, the right against torture and summary execution), or pressure governments to end their violations. Some of the many such organizations include the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Anti-Slavery Society, Amnesty International, the International League for Human Rights, and the International Commission of Jurists. Even warfare or rebellion is no excuse for dictatorships such as Sudan or Burma to torture or arbitrarily kill their people. Nations have agreed to moderate their warfare to preserve certain human rights, as exactly defined in the 1949 Geneva Convention, its 1977 Additional Protocols, and now the International Court of Justice. All this international activity on human rights has multiplied the list of rights. People now have at least forty rights listed in the basic international documents on human rights, which are the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that on Civil and Political Rights, and that on Eco-

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nomic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The most basic of all these rights are those defining what governments cannot do to their people. From those stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these include everyone’s right to x life, liberty, and personal security; x recognition as a person before the law, equal protection of the law, remedy for violation of their rights, fair and public trial, and the presumption of their innocence until proven guilty if charged with a penal offense; x leave any country and return, and seek asylum from persecution; x the secret ballot and periodic elections, and freely chosen representatives; x form and join trade unions, equal access to public service, and participation in cultural life; x freedom of movement and residence, thought, conscience and religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association, and as a parent to choose their children’s education; x freedom from slavery or servitude, torture, degrading or inhuman treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest or detention or exile, arbitrary interference with privacy or family or home or correspondence, deprivation of nationality, arbitrary deprivation of property, and being compelled to join an association. In effect, these human rights define what I mean by democratic freedom. A people’s freedom of thought, expression, religion, and association is basic, as are the secret ballot, periodic elections, and the right to representation. In short, these rights say that people have a right to be free. Therefore, those condemning the lack of freedom in, for instance, Sudan, are not imposing their values on another culture. This is not a matter of value relativity. Demanding human rights, and thus freedom, for the slaves in the Sudan—or Chinese political prisoners, or the women in Muslim countries, or Burmese forced laborers—is simply demanding that their rulers obey international law, itself based on general treaties, international agreements, and practices. This law is universal. Every Arabian, Chinese, Rwandan, and all the world’s peoples have the internationally defined and protected human rights listed above. No rulers can violate these rights of their

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people without risking mandated sanctions by the United Nations Security Council. Many nations now even include human rights monitors or representatives within their foreign ministries so that a foreign dictator who denies the human rights of his people can be publicly exposed and diplomatically pressured to recognize them. For example, the United States Department of State has a Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs run by an Assistant Secretary of State. The bureau publishes an annual review of human rights around the world. True, there is much hypocrisy here and with so many dictatorships in the world, the skeptic may feel that these rights are just words. Even some of the governments that signed the human rights documents allow few rights to their people. Note, however, that they felt compelled to sign them. This shows the sheer power and legitimacy of the idea of human rights. These human rights documents lay down a marker. They define what should be, what is right, the moral high ground. Those who deny such rights now must defend their policies, not those who grant these rights. Indeed, any violation of a people’s human rights by their rulers, as when the Chinese police arrest and torture people for practicing their creed or religion, is now a breach of international law. Unfortunately, the United Nations cannot automatically command sanctions or military intervention against governments for this. It is no longer a problem of what a people’s human rights are, but of international and domestic politics, power, and interests. Again, consider Sudan. Slavery and genocide against the southern black Christians continued without foreign intervention to stop it. This is because Sudan is a distant country, with little trade, few foreign embassies, hardly any foreign journalists, almost no tourists, and no cultural affinity with the world’s most powerful countries. Moreover, intervention probably would disrupt sensitive diplomatic arrangements within the region, including the relations of the Muslim countries with Israel. It also might mean a local war, perhaps with Libya or even Iran providing the Sudanese rulers with military aid, which the democratic peoples of the world lack the interest and will to fight. However, if every day they were to see televised images of the starving children and the scars of slavery, and hear the stories of those tortured, then they would demand that their leaders do something. Such was the case with the United Nations-supported, Americanled military coalition that intervened in Somalia. The Somali government had collapsed into clan wars, and people were starving by the millions, with about 500,000 already dead. When the world’s television screens and newspapers showed picture after picture of starving Somali

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children, the horrified American public demanded action, and finally pressured the first President Bush into doing something. Acting under a United Nations Security Council resolution, the United States intervened in December 1992 with 25,500 American troops. Their goal was to protect international famine relief efforts and end the political chaos. But soon after the Clinton Administration came into power in January 1993, its support for this intervention collapsed when the Somalis killed eighteen Army Rangers trapped into a firefight. President Clinton then reduced American forces, and the whole operation was handed over to a United Nations force of 22,000, which finally withdrew in March 1994. Journalists and politicians believe the operation was a failure. It did not produce a pro-democratic government, assure the human rights of Somalis, or end the civil war. Still, it did save possibly a million people from starvation, which may be justification enough. Even if international sanctions and intervention to protect human rights are difficult, the international community has moved more than one step forward. It has clearly articulated the law protecting everyone’s rights. It does pinpoint the behavior of a government that is morally wrong. And if the international community cannot impose sanctions on the dictators who trample on their subjects’ rights, or intervene to stop them, at least now the United Nations and international organizations can subject them to moral pressure. The preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, makes this clear by stating that human rights are “a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society . . . shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance . . . .” In sum, a people’s human rights well define their freedom. Regardless of how others may want people to live because of their ideology, religion, or moral code, wherever people live, no matter their culture, no matter what government they live under, the following principle applies to all. A people’s freedom—their human rights—is justified by United Nations certification, international treaties, agreements, and international law.

Chapter 3 Philosophical Justification of Freedom Nothing . . . is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man. – Thomas Jefferson

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oes agreement on human rights, even the international consensus shown above, define just rights? Because a majority, even an overwhelming majority, says something is a right, is it a moral, just right? Few philosophers would agree to this. Being philosophers, they still must ask why a right is a right. And there are many answers. For one, there is the philosophical school called legal positivism, much influenced by the seminal work of John Austin (1790–1859), that does not accept internationally defined human rights as fundamentally moral or just. These philosophers separate law from morality, and argue that the rights of all people are only those that the world community has agreed to in their international deliberative assemblies, organizations, and by their treaties. Although for international law the positivist position is dominant among lawyers, judges, and academics, among philosophers it is a minority position. By this standard, human rights are international legal rights, as described, although not necessarily moral or ethically right. Philosophers have debated much about how to justify rights, especially about what used to be called natural rights or the rights of man. These rights are a particularly Western idea that grew out of the medieval concern for the rights of lords, barons, churchmen, kings, guilds, or towns. One of the great documents promoting the rights of all subjects was the Magna Carta signed by King John of England in 1215. He promised thereby to govern according to the law, that all have a right to the courts. It established that no person, not even the king, was above the law. With the eighteenth century Enlightenment and a growing faith in human reason, philosophers began to grapple with the meaning of “a right” and whether people generally had any. What emerged was the idea that all people have natural rights. These are what people think,

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with reason and without emotional prejudice or personal bias, are the rights everyone should have as human beings. For example, two such rationally grounded natural rights that all people share with each other are their rights to life, and to equal freedom. This philosophical conception of natural rights has been one of the most powerful ideas in history. It has been the force behind many revolutions and constitutions. For example, the philosopher John Locke, in his influential Second Treatise of Government (1690), wielded this idea like a sword, claiming that every human being has a natural right to freedom, equality, and property. He directly influenced the American Declaration of Independence, which almost a century later (1776) declared that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Some years later the French National Assembly approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, which proclaimed that the purpose of political association is the preservation of one’s natural and inalienable rights to liberty, private property, personal security, and resistance to oppression. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, further defined everyone’s natural rights, among them the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Nations now recognize these rights as human rights, as I have pointed out, and they have become part of the constitution of one nation after another. A variant of this natural rights approach is to claim that each person has only one natural right, and it is self-evident: each person exists, each is human, and therefore, each has an absolute right to equal freedom with all other humans. No more, no less. Then, treating this like an axiom in Euclidean geometry, no other right exists unless it is a derivation of, or implicit in, a person’s right to equal freedom. This thereby establishes the right to freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. But, it denies the status of a right to what people want or need, but which can’t be derived from that of equal freedom, such as the right to a job, welfare, or clean air. Moreover, people do not have a right to what other people are compelled to secure for them. Regardless of approach, philosophers can only justify these natural rights by their abstract reason, as though doing a mathematical proof. Nonetheless, using their logic and reason, they still disagree on what rights people have—for instance, to abortion, social security, and a minimum wage. This problem of defining what is reasonable is universal, and has encouraged philosophers to chase less subjective justifications of rights.

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One favored solution among thinkers, such as the eighteenth century British theologian William Paley, jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham, and philosophers James Mill and John Stuart Mill, is their appeal to utility—what promotes the greater happiness of all is good. According to the utilitarians, the only rights that can be justified are those that assure the greatest happiness of the largest number of people. Utilitarians argue that this criterion provides an empirical measuring rod for what will be a right—overall, does it cause more happiness than pain? If so, then it is a right. If not, then it is not a right. I believe that in their hearts, this utilitarian argument has been the dominant justification for human rights by activists, and especially by diplomats from the democracies who negotiated the human rights agreements. They believed that by promoting human rights they were furthering human happiness in the world.

Chapter 4 Freedom As a Social Contract One man’s justice is another’s injustice; One man’s beauty is another’s ugliness; One man’s wisdom another’s folly; – Ralph Waldo Emerson

A Convention of Minds

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inally, I will give my own argument for human rights. It’s based on a hypothetical social contract, a favorite conceptual tool of political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Baron de Montesquieu. They used this idea to define a just society, and the power and limits of government. Imagine, as Hobbes did in his Leviathan (1651), that in the original state of nature life was primitive, brutal, and short. People, therefore, saw the absolute need to secure their lives and property, and therefore all (hypothetically) agreed to participate in a social contract that would ensure this. They implemented it by forming a central government, and granting it the power to protect their lives and property in exchange for a pledge that each member would obey its laws. This social contract then defined the reciprocal duties of citizen and government. Violate the contract, and government may justly punish the violator; conversely, if the government violates the contract, for example by not protecting its people’s lives from criminals or if the government itself is preying on its people, then they may justly overthrow it. This idea of an implicit social contract between the people and their government contributed to the writing of the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And it has much in common with that of the positivists, who stress international agreements as the source of human rights. After all, if universal in scope, thereby defining the rights of everyone, these agreements are akin to a general social contract.

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To be clear, when philosophers use a hypothetical social contract to justify rights in a state of nature, they are trying to determine those rights that all people would agree should be guaranteed by government. To make this social contract objective and unbiased, philosophers assume that in their agreement on it, people are ignorant of their wealth, status, race, talents, or other attributes. They therefore have no idea how their choice of a social contract—of rights—would benefit them personally, which makes these rights just. As I did in Part 2 of my The Just Peace, I will use a revised version of this social contract approach to more fully explore whether people would generally, regardless of their religion, ideology, or culture, agree on certain rights. I also want to broaden this contract to consider the connected principles of governance. Rights do not exist in a vacuum. Some possible rights, in their very definition, assume that government will or will not have certain powers. For example, among the human rights mentioned above are those to free association (one-party governments are then out), freedom of religion (so much for government based on the Koran or Bible), and the freedom to vote in free elections (which assumes a democratic-type government). However, this is not a one-to-one relationship between rights and governance. Monarchies and some dictatorships, for example, may allow freedom of religion, domestic movement, and immigration. But there is a close relationship between the rights people might want and how they should be governed to assure those rights, and I want to make this association clear. It is also critical that rights agreed to in the social contract and associated principles of governance be just—that is, they should define what is social justice. This demands that the social contract satisfy certain requirements. First, for the rights and principles to be morally just, they must be universal. It is hardly just if one person has the right to be a Buddhist while another person is not free to practice Judaism. Therefore, whatever people agree to in their social contract applies to all people, anywhere, at anytime. Second, to be morally just, the rights and principles must be practical. People must be able to live by them. A person can hardly judge another immoral for not doing something that is impossible to do. We could not obey, for example, a moral injunction against sexy dreams, if they were deemed immoral. Preventing these dreams is beyond our ability. Finally, a just right or just principle also means that it is fair, evenhanded. Two more requirements can assure this. One is that nearly everyone has a chance to discuss, debate, and finally agree upon the

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rights all will have and on their associated principles of governance. The other requirement is that the agreement is objective. This can be achieved by making everyone hypothetically blind to his or her selfinterests. A good example of this is the sculpture of a Greek goddess (possibly Themis) holding a scale of justice in the left hand and a sword in the other, which is found on the wall of many courthouses in the United States. So that her judgment will be uncorrupted and unbiased, she is blindfolded to hide from her whether the defendant is rich or powerful, young or old, man or woman, black or white. The rights these requirements define should not only be just, but also well considered and vital. To achieve this, people must have the strongest motivation to seek, propose, and weigh such rights and the related powers of government. It would be easy enough for a person to say that another should have a right not to be discriminated against, but is this a right that the person would passionately support, even at the risk of death? If a right can be agreed upon that meets the above requirements, then it is truly a basic and just right. Those rights and related principles meeting all these requirements will define social justice and just governance. Now to have a little fun: suppose all people suddenly hear a voice inside their head. They look around for the source of the voice, but no one is talking—or if anyone is, the inner voice overrides what is being said. Some get anxious, wonder if they are going crazy. But the voice has a soothing quality, and soon it tells everyone what is happening: People of earth, what you hear is being sent to you telepathically from a spaceship near earth. We are galactic conservationists from another star system here to give you the following message. All your lives are at risk. Your planet will be passing through a lethal galactic warp storm in two years, and the resulting radiation will exterminate all life on earth. As conservationists we are dedicated to protecting all intelligent life forms in the galaxy. We are here to save your species from death. To do this, we have found a habitable planet orbiting a distant sun. It has no com-

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peting intelligent life, and we can teleport all of you to it. However, according to the laws of our galactic federation, we can make such a transfer of intelligent life forms only if virtually all of you agree among yourselves on what rights you will have in your new world, and the related principles of government under which you will live. If you reach a strong consensus on this, we will then teleport you to this new world. But our galactic federation also commands us to inform you of one technological problem. Our teleportation equipment for transferring alien life forms is not perfect, and we cannot promise that our equipment can keep your mind and body together—some or many of your minds may end up in different bodies, but without physical harm or loss of intelligence or faculties. So that you may debate and agree on your rights and the principles governing your new world, in two months we will set up, telepathically, a Convention of Minds. In the convention all of you will be able to propose the guiding principles and human rights of your new world, debate them, and vote upon them. This hypothetical Convention of Minds and possible transfer to a new world meets the requirements set out for defining just rights. First, all people would take part and the resulting rights and principles, on which if they get a consensus vote, would be universal. Second, since people would not know what body their mind would end up in after the teleportation, they would have to make their judgments independent of their race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, handicaps, and other physical characteristics and skills, as well as their wealth, power, and prestige. This will assure their objectivity. And the fact that everyone—all humankind—would be wiped out unless nearly all agree on the principles provides the important motivation to reach a universal solution. Imagine now that the aliens convene the Convention of Minds, people make proposals, and the debate begins. What will be the patterns of

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these proposals? Surely, they will reflect the full range of the world’s ideologies, religions, and cultures. Democratic individualists, democratic socialists, state socialists, fascists, militarists, monarchists, and the few remaining Marxists and Maoists will offer their idea of rights and governance, as will Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants, Shiite and Sunni Muslims, Confucians, and pantheists. And surely, all secular humanists, nonpolitical atheists, advocates of nonviolence, environmentalists, feminists, gay activists, and many, many others will make their views known. Then there are the cultural differences between races, ethnicities, and nationalities that surely would influence, if not predetermine, the choice of rights and government. Could everyone agree on one set of rights and principles? I do not believe so, and simulations of this convention that I have set up in my classes over the years have all confirmed this. Even if the survival of our species were at stake, people across the globe would not be able to agree on their rights and the associated principles of governance. They hold their beliefs so deeply, and for some so fanatically, that they would be willing to die for them. Thus, human history has seen people volunteer for suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, for fighting and possibly dying in guerrilla, civil, and international wars, and in violent revolutions. To therefore expect, for example, a practicing Catholic to accept that all Christians should have only the right to obey the Koran, and live under a Muslim’s principles of governance, is unreasonable. Nor do I believe a liberal democrat would accept communist principles, nor a communist or socialist, capitalist ones. The Convention of Minds would achieve no agreement on rights and governing principles. It would be deadlocked. But there would still be a solution. The debate at first would be over the rights everyone would have to live by, and the principles governing all. Each would assume, naturally, that if everyone agreed on the socialist principles of government ownership of the means of production and its enforcement of relative equality in wages, benefits, advantages, and goods for all, these would have to be the principles operating universally and at all levels of government. Libertarians, however, surely would not agree to this. When their beliefs prevent agreement, a large majority of people in the Convention would be like a watermelon seed squeezed between two fingers. They would be squeezed hard on one side by the prospect of not only their own death and that of their loved ones, but of all humankind. Pressing hard from the other side would be their logical and emotional inability to agree on proposed rights and principles. These opposing mental forces would likely pop the debate to a higher, transcendent level.

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At this higher level, a metasolution would break the convention’s stalemate. Before I go into this metasolution, three examples may help clarify what “metasolution” means. If someone has a leak in his plumbing, he and his mate can debate how they should fix the plumbing, or they can hire a plumber to fix the plumbing as they see fit. The choice of plumber is a metasolution to the leak. As another example, imagine trying to divide farmland equally between two sons, but no matter how you divide the land, nothing is ever equal, and one or both will believe the division to be unfair. So, a metasolution: let one son divide the land and the other choose which half he wants. Finally, rather than continually trying to choose which of your two children gets what goodie or does what chore, alternate weeks—assign one child to take his bath first one week, and the other child the next. Then, simply give the child taking a bath first the goodie. Who gets to sit next to the window in the car on this trip? Why, the one taking their bath first this week. Another metasolution. And the convention would propose such a metasolution, and even the fanatics of one principle or another would see the advantage of agreeing on it. This metasolution would follow the well-known argument, “well, if we can’t agree, let’s agree to disagree and do our own thing.” That is, the metasolution upon which there would be a consensus would involve two simple rights. The first, a free choice right, would be that: People have a right to form their own communities. And the second, the free exit right, would state that: People have a right to leave any community. Together, these rights would give everyone the right to organize with each other a community governed by their own principles and with whatever rights they want, as long as they do not force this community on others and anyone is free to leave it. Surely everyone in the convention would realize that in the new world, these two rights would need to be enforced, and the resulting communities protected from aggression by their neighbors; therefore I believe the metasolution would also involve a single principle of governance. A limited, democratic federation of all communities would govern the new world.

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Its basic job would be to administer, guarantee, and protect the Free Choice and Free Exit rights. By demand, no doubt, the convention would give each future community an equal vote in the federation’s legislature. But also, those who see that their community might be one of the larger ones would equally demand that the convention protect them against rule by a majority of tiny communities. They would argue for a second legislative chamber of the world federation that would give each community votes proportional to its population. Moreover, even the most confirmed authoritarians or absolutists would settle for some mechanism to check the domination of this world government so that it does not unduly intervene in the affairs of their community, and so on. However these articles of the future constitution would work out, the basic principle and associated government is clear. It would be a liberal democracy, as defined in the next chapter, except that the democratic civil liberties and political rights would refer to communities and not individuals. All communities would have a right to vote for their representative to the world government in fair and periodic elections, all would be equal before the law, all would have the freedom to organize, the freedom of speech, and so on. And the convention would realize the necessity, I am sure, of limiting the power of the federal world government to guaranteeing and protecting the Free Choice and Free Exit rights. This would be the only type of government that would allow everyone to do their own thing consistent with all having the same right. Finally, if a vote of all people in the world were to be taken in the convention on just the Free Choice and Free Exit rights and democratic principle, then I believe that a huge majority of the world’s people would adopt them. For if any monarchist, fascist, communist, liberal democrat, Muslim, or whatever could find enough others to agree to form their own community, then they would have the right to do so. People can live, therefore, under whatever government they want, even an utterly totalitarian one. Just one qualification: they must allow any of their community members to leave if they wish. In short, people would be free to be unfree, and this is part of what democratic freedom means. Indeed, I would argue that the human or natural right to be free implies the Free Choice right. Free speech does not mean that you have to speak out. You can say nothing if you wish, or join a group in which this freedom is strictly circumscribed or even totalitarian in governance, such as the military or a monastery. Freedom of religion means that if people so desire, they can form a group in which only one religion is legitimate, and keep out those of other religions, as in a Catholic nunnery. And within liberal democracies today,

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people usually can support and participate in antidemocratic political parties and movements. The communist party, for example, is legal in the United States and most other democracies. We will get into this more in the next chapter, but here I might note that: Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity. It provides a way of uniting under one government people who are vastly different socially, culturally, and philosophically. And as in the Convention of Minds, democracy solves this problem by saying “govern yourself, but do so in a manner consistent with the same right of others.” Democracy does not lay down a template for each person’s life, as do other types of government. Rather, as a metasolution it is a method of governance that prevents possible bloody conflicts over rights and principles for the greater society.

The Global Evolution of Rights Yes, people have moral, just rights. They are universal, and what people would choose to live under, were they given the chance. And they are socially just. But all this is justified through a bizarre science fiction tale. Quite rightly, you might want a real-world example of the Free Choice and Free Exit rights. So let’s look at the evolution of international relations and its legal principles. Throughout eons of human history, through the growth and collapse of clans and cities, nations and states, civilizations and empires; through the many human disasters and catastrophes, wars and revolutions; through the growth and decay of religions and creeds, philosophies, and ideologies; and through the countless day-by-day interactions of billions of people, a system of world governance has evolved based, in effect, on the two hypothetical rights emerging from the Convention of Minds. The most basic right people have in the modern international system is that of self-determination for their country or national group, with its allied international legal principle of state sovereignty. The idea of self-determination has had tremendous power in international relations. In the twentieth century it was the force behind demands for independence by the former British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Spanish colonies. Against the cries for self-determination, these nations could no longer justify their undemocratic and remote imperial rule. In a few decades after World War II, much of the world was decolonized, and by the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, no more than a few small and scattered colonies remained.

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A corollary to the principle of sovereignty is that no other nation has a right to intervene in a nation’s domestic affairs. The principle, really a metaprinciple, of sovereignty legally allows a community to govern itself with great freedom. Although by their agreements and treaties nations have placed certain restrictions on this sovereignty, such as restricting the right to carry out genocide or slavery, and obligating all governments to respect certain human rights, each nation still is nearly free to govern itself. Why, for example, has the United Nations or a powerful coalition of democratic countries not invaded Burma, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia to stop their killing and denial of human rights? Of course, it is partly a matter of the costs involved and the apathy or ignorance of democratic peoples about what life is like in these countries. It is partly that the media does not constantly pound us with images of the horrors going on in these countries, as already noted. But more important, the sovereignty of these countries protects them. It is a very high legal and political hurdle to jump over for those who want intervention. Each country that might approve such an intervention especially has to wonder whether it is setting a precedent for itself. Nonetheless, such intervention has happened—in Bosnia and Kosovo and, as I mentioned before, in Somalia. And now there are the intervention-invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the American-led coalition in its war against Muslim terrorists and their state supporters. But for this intervention to occur, the terrorists first had to hijack commercial jets loaded with passengers and fly them full throttle into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people overall. And, although this is not respected by all countries, international law gives everyone the right to immigrate and, particularly, to request political asylum of another nation. This is, in effect, the Free Exit principle. Finally, the United Nations has become a very limited global, federal government. It has a head of government, a legislature, an administration, and a judicial system. It only lacks a monopoly of force over the world, but such monopoly is not a defining characteristic of government. In operation, the United Nations meets the constitutional principles needed to guarantee and administer the Free Choice and Free Exit rights. The greatest remaining difference from what the hypothetical convention would decide is that since it has no military force of its own, the United Nations must depend on military contributions from member nations for its peacekeeping operations or to implement a Security Council resolution. But the direction of change is toward a stronger and more capable United Nations and even, eventually, its own very limited military capability.

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So, through many millennia of civilizations, empires, city-states, nations, alliances, wars, and revolutions, the world’s peoples have slowly evolved a metasolution to their vastly different societies and cultures, as a species evolves in response to its environment. This realworld metasolution has globally institutionalized the Free Choice and Free Exit rights, along with a federal, world government. A final argument supports the outcome of the hypothetical Convention of Minds. Even before the Holocaust that began in 1941, the Nazi government increasingly discriminated against Jews living in Germany in the 1930s; many had relatives or friends imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. Although immigration was legal and Jews could thereby escape from the Nazis, most still wanted to live in Germany. After all, it was where their ancestors were born, and where their friends and relatives lived. They could not easily pull up their roots and leave, and anyway, many knowledgeable Jews argued that the Nazi regime would change for the better or that, at least, things would get no worse. So they stayed—and most died. Before this horror happened, however, some perceptive Jewish families who did not want to take any chances with their children decided to send them to school abroad. But where? In what country would they have the greatest opportunity to realize their potential? Generally they chose a democratically free country, such as Great Britain, Canada, or the United States. These families made their choice under circumstances similar to those of the hypothetical Convention of Minds. They sent their children off to a different world, not knowing what their children would be like, ultimately, and therefore how they would benefit. They chose a nation in which their children would have the greatest freedom of choice, which was under a democratic government.

Summary Virtually all people, blind to their personal benefits, and acting through a hypothetical Convention of Minds, would agree to a social contract giving each other the right to choose how they live, and the right to leave any community in which they live. And the circumstances of this decision make these socially just rights. We also find that millennia of human evolution have produced similar rights among nations, specifically the right to sovereign self-determination and free immigration. Legally, morally, and by the practice of nations, then, people should be free. And to further this freedom and guard it, their country should be democratic. This raises the question: what is democracy itself?

PART 2 On Democracy

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uman rights and the core idea of freedom are defining characteristics of a people. Their level of freedom can be measured on a scale. For instance, in Denmark, Japan, or South Africa, people have freedom; in Russia, Bolivia, and Burundi, they have partial freedom; in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, they have no freedom. For a people to have freedom, they must live under a form of government that guarantees and protects their freedom. Such is liberal democracy. This part of the book describes this form of government in theory and in action. Chapter 5 begins with the meaning of democracy, and in particular discusses the modern meaning of democracy in contrast to the idea of a republic and pure democracy. Chapter 6 clarifies the characteristics of democratic institutions, separating those marking an electoral from a liberal democracy, with due attention to the often confusing term “liberal.” To give life to these abstract concepts, Chapter 7 describes the two presidential terms of President Clinton and his impeachment, a crisis period in the American democracy. The next chapter explains what the Clinton years tell us about how democracy operates, and why it should be valued. The final Chapter 9 shows that democracies are neither rare nor limited to Europe and a few other nations, but encompass a major, growing, and diverse proportion of the world’s population.

Chapter 5 What Is Democracy? Liberal democracy is the institutionalization of human rights—it is the most practical solution to the freedom of each being compatible with the freedom of all.

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hatever freedoms people have cannot exist in a political vacuum. There must be some way of assuring and protecting their rights—their freedom—and government is the answer. Even libertarians, although they are the most ardent proponents of the maximum freedom, and believe that government is evil, generally accept that it is necessary or inevitable. But not just any government will do. It must be one that not only commands obedience to its laws, but in its very organization embodies what being free means. This is democracy. As a concept, democracy has developed many meanings since its first use by the ancient Greeks, and even its well-established meanings have changed. We can define democracy by its inherent nature and by its empirical conditions. As to its nature, Aristotle defined democracy as rule by the people (Greek demokratia: demos meaning “people” + -kratia, cracy, meaning “rule” or “governing body”) and this idea that in some way the people govern themselves is still the core meaning of democracy. In the ancient Greek city-states and the early Roman Republic, democracy meant that people participated directly in governing and making policy. This was possible because of the small populations of these cities—hardly ever more than 10,000 people—and the exclusion of women and slaves from participation. Although limited to free males, this idea of direct participation of the people in government was the essence of democracy up to modern times; now it is usually known as pure or direct democracy. Many philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Immanuel Kant and John Locke, disliked direct democracy, although otherwise they favored freedom. For one thing, it was impractical for nations of millions of people, or even for cities of hundreds of thousands. Clearly, a representative system was necessary. For another, they felt that direct democracy, as it

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was understood, was mob rule—government by the ill-informed, who would simply use government to their own advantage. This distrust was evident in the eighty-five essays of The Federalist (1787–1788) written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay on the proposed Constitution of the United States. They assumed that people behave to fulfill their self-interest and are generally selfish, making a direct democracy as a means to achieve justice and protect natural rights dangerous. Nonetheless, they believed strongly in the “consent of the governed,” and argued for a republican form of government in which elected representatives would reflect popular will. This was a general view among the authors of the Constitution, who believed that by establishing a republic they would institutionalize the central ideas of their Declaration of Independence (1776): . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . . Constitutionally, therefore, the founders of the United States established a republic, not a democracy—as political philosophers then defined democracy. A republic is based on the consent and will of the people, but implemented through a buffer of elected representatives and indirect election, as by the president and vice president of the United States. These representatives are elected by an electoral college, with the electors chosen by the voters of each state and their number dependent upon the number of senators and representatives each state sends to Congress. That the United States was created as a republic and that we now call it a democracy has caused considerable confusion. My references to the United States as a democracy on my website have earned me well over a dozen emails informing me that it was not a democracy, but a republic. The problem is that, in the twentieth century, the understanding of democracy as the direct participation of citizens has been transformed to mean any government in which the people elect their representatives. Democracy now generally means a republican or representative government.

Chapter 6 Electoral and Liberal Democracy Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation. – Thomas Jefferson

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ith this contemporary understanding of the term democracy, what are its characteristics? One necessary and sufficient set of characteristics involves the electoral system through which people choose their representatives and leaders, and thus give their consent to be governed and to have those representatives communicate their interests. The manner in which democracies conduct their elections varies from one to another, but all share these characteristics: regular elections for high office, a secret ballot, a franchise that includes nearly the whole adult population, and competitive elections. Having a near-universal franchise is an entirely modern addition to the idea of democracy. Not long ago, governments that were called democratic excluded from the franchise all slaves and women, as did the United States through much of its history (male, black American former slaves got the right to vote after the Civil War; women did not get this right until 1920, when Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment), as well as all non-slave males who did not meet certain property or literacy requirements. We now consider it perverse to call democratic any country that so restricts the vote, as did the apartheid regime in South Africa that limited voting to the minority population of whites. Real competition in the elections is a key requirement. Many communist nations exhibited all the electoral characteristics mentioned in their periodic election of legislators handpicked by the Communist Party, who then simply rubber-stamped what the Party wanted. “Competitive” means that those running for office reflect different political beliefs and positions on the issues. If they do not, as in the communist nations, then the government is not democratic.

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Besides its electoral characteristics, one kind of democracy has characteristics that, while neither necessary nor sufficient for democracy to exist, are crucial to freedom. These involve the recognition of certain human rights discussed in the previous chapter. One is the freedom to organize political groups or parties, even if they represent a small radical minority, that then nominate their members to run for high office. Another right is that to an open, transparent government— in particular, the right to know how one’s representatives voted and debated. There are also the rights to freedom of speech, particularly the freedom of newspapers and other communication media to criticize government policies and leaders; freedom of religion; and the freedom to form unions and organize businesses. One of the most important of these is the right to a fair trial and rule by law. Above the state there must be a law that structures the government, elaborates the reciprocal rights and duties of the government and the people, and which all governing officials and their policies must obey. This is a constitution, either created as a single document like that of the United States, or a set of documents, statutes, and traditions, such as that of Great Britain. If a democracy recognizes these rights, we call it a liberal democracy. If it does not, if it has only the electoral characteristics but suppresses freedom of speech, possesses leaders that put themselves above the law and representatives that make and vote on policies in secret, then we can call it a procedural, or better, an electoral democracy. For American readers particularly, there is conceptual confusion over the term “liberal.” In the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, political philosophers emphasized the root meaning of liberal, which is from the Latin liberalis for “free man” and the French liber for “free.” It stood for an emphasis on individual liberty—on the freedom of a people versus their government. A liberal slogan of the time was “the government that governs least governs best.” It was hammered out in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution, and the American Revolution, and articulated in the works of John Locke, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. This emphasis on freedom from government regulation and controls we now call classical liberalism, and presently is reflected best in the political philosophy of American conservatives. Libertarians also trace their philosophy back to classical liberalism, but this is true only regarding the classical liberal emphasis on economic freedom and human rights. Classical liberals, unlike modern libertarians and liberals, believed that the government had a strong moral role. Conservatives show their affinity for this moral role by supporting laws against dope, prostitution, and gambling.

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In modern times “liberal” has evolved to mean a belief that government is a tool to improve society and deal with the problems of poverty, discrimination, and monopolies, among others, and to improve public health, education, social security, the environment, and working conditions. There is no less an emphasis on human rights, a dedication that is shared by Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and modern liberals, but today’s liberals no longer accept minimum government, nor do they see in the government the danger that classical liberals attributed to it. In liberal democracy, however, the root definition of “liberal” is meant, not its modern sense. A liberal democracy means that a people rule themselves through periodic elections in which nearly all adults can participate; they elect their highest leaders to the offices for which they are eligible, and they are governed under the rule of law that guarantees them certain human rights. So democracy now means a republican form of government, which may be only electorally representative in its characteristics, or liberal. Table 6.1, below, summarizes these two kinds of democracies.

Chapter 7 An Example of Liberal Democracy: President William Jefferson Clinton Just as a large segment of liberal political opinion never could accept Nixon as a “legitimate” president, neither can a large segment of conservative political opinion today accept Clinton’s legitimacy in the Oval Office . . . . – Jim Hoagland

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o far, all I have written about democracy is in the form of concepts and abstractions that may roughly connect to real-life experience. It’s time for an example that well illustrates the nature of liberal democracy in action: the 1998 to 1999 impeachment and trial of William Jefferson Clinton, the president of the United States. The Clinton impeachment was a deeply divisive, partisan political battle, and most Americans developed strong opinions supporting or opposing it. After all, this was a matter of determining whether the nationally elected president of the United States would be fired. As I review the events leading up to the impeachment and the impeachment itself, my only interest is in what Clinton’s presidency says about liberal democracy, not in arguing for or against the president, the impeachment, or his two campaigns for the office. To begin at the beginning, Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, in 1946, a few months after his father died. When he was two years old, he lived with his grandparents in Hope while his mother studied nursing in New Orleans. Two years later his mother married a car salesman, and Clinton joined the new family. His stepfather was hardly a good role model for the young boy; he was an alcoholic who physically mistreated Clinton’s mother. At fourteen, Clinton joined a youth program to learn about government, and was a delegate in a group that went to Washington, D.C. There, President John F. Kennedy invited the group to meet with him in the White House. This was an unforgettable experience for teenage Clinton, who was very much impressed by Kennedy; he even shook his hand. More important for the future was the fact that the experience

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decided young Clinton on politics as a profession and sparked his ambition to be president. Clinton was an excellent student, and much involved in student politics. He completed high school, got a degree in international affairs from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and won a two-year Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. On his return to the United States, he attended Yale Law School and received his law degree in 1973. During this whole period, from the time he attended Georgetown to getting his law degree, he tried to learn politics firsthand. He worked in the office of Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, and in the presidential campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972. He also took part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Note several things about Clinton’s rise so far. The first is that his humble beginnings did not prevent him from actually meeting and shaking hands with the president of the United States—not only the highest office of the country, but also the most powerful in the world. Second, he could obtain work in the office of an American senator and take part in the lawmaking of America’s highest legislative body. And, without fear of retribution or any negative consequences, he was also able to help Senator McGovern wage his election campaign to defeat that of the incumbent, President Richard M. Nixon. Most revealing about liberal democracy, Clinton felt free to join public demonstrations, even in England, against a war his country was conducting. As exemplified in the first chapter by Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, and China, in many parts of the world such demonstrators could be arrested, tortured, and even executed by the regime on their return to their country; as well, the regime could retaliate against their family, even kill them. In other countries, demonstrators could be harassed by authorities, and perhaps forfeit any possibility of holding a future political office. But living in a liberal democracy, Clinton had nothing to fear from secret police. He could learn the art of politics from personal experience and prepare himself to run for political office while also exercising his right to public protest. After receiving his law degree, Clinton worked on the staff of the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Then in 1974 the University of Arkansas appointed him to their Law School faculty, and he also began his formal political career by running for Congress as a Democrat. He lost, but in 1976, he decided that he would be more successful if he worked up from a lower rung on the political ladder, and successfully campaigned for the office of the Attorney General of Arkansas. He then used this position to run for the highest state office, and the people of Arkansas elected him governor at age thirty-two.

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However, he had yet to learn the democratic limits of this high office. Because of his reform policies and a tax he had imposed, Arkansans kicked Clinton out of office in the 1980 elections. But he had learned well how to manage democratic politics. After Clinton showed public remorse for his “mistakes” in office (and after running a carefully calculated campaign), Arkansans returned him to the governorship in 1982. They also reelected him three more times. To Clinton, this was all preparation to run for president. He had passed up the opportunity to do so in 1988 because of rumors about his womanizing, but in 1992, he felt that he stood a good chance of being nominated by the Democratic Party. Much stronger candidates for the nomination had refused to run, believing that the huge popularity of President George Bush resulting from his victory in the 1990–1991 Gulf War made his reelection to the presidency certain. Clinton thought, however, he could stress poor economic conditions, the “Reagan-Bush deficit,” and the need for change. And to the surprise of many who did not see him as a national figure, he did win the nomination. Then, with the motto “It’s the economy, stupid,” he won the presidential election with 43 percent of the vote. Both sides in this election used their freedom of speech to the fullest extent, with Clinton’s opponents focusing on his womanizing, his participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations while in England, and his alleged draft dodging along with a subsequent cover-up. What is also noteworthy about this election is that out of nowhere, a wealthy business executive, H. Ross Perot, was able to capture public attention as an independent, even running ahead of President Bush and Governor Clinton in popularity at one point in the campaign. He finally got 19 percent of the presidential vote. Had he not made several missteps in his campaign and been politically inexperienced, he might even have won the three-way election. Since democratic campaigns are a running test of a candidate’s character, experience, strength, and capacity for office, those who try to run for the highest offices without prior political experience seldom succeed. Nonetheless, sometimes they do, as did Jesse Ventura, a professional wrestler, actor, and talk show host who, on less than $400,000, won a three-way election campaign for governor of Minnesota. In liberal democratic elections, outsiders are a constant threat to established parties and candidates, as it should be when the consent of the governed rules. Who people elect is a matter of their perception and interest, how well off they are in their job and income, and their judgment of the candidate’s character and promises. And they are free to exercise their judgment, no matter how biased, anywhere along the campaign trial,

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whether in voting for the candidates in caucuses or party conventions, or in voting for the final nominee, or in running themselves as a party nominee or an independent. During President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, economic conditions were good, and Clinton and his supporters ran an excellent public relations and political campaign against Republican Senator Robert Dole and independent candidate Perot. Fearing a voter backlash over excessive negative campaigning, and thinking that the public already was upset by several scandals surrounding Clinton and his White House, Republicans did not capitalize on them. Near the end of the campaign, public opinion polls made it clear that these scandals would have little impact in the coming election, making Dole cry out in frustration, “Where’s the outrage?” Moreover, Republicans made some disastrous political mistakes, the worst of which was allowing Clinton and his supporters to establish in the public mind that the Republican-dominated House of Representatives had shut down the government in an argument with the president over the budget. They also allowed the Democrats to convince the public that the Republicans had no compassion for working families, children, and the elderly. Clinton easily won reelection in 1996 with 49 percent of the vote. While the Clinton story gives us insight into the nature of liberal democratic elections and the public’s participation in, and determination of, who governs them, it is President Clinton’s second term that provides a key understanding of this kind of government. This term would be a tumultuous and most historic one for the country. Even in his first term, President Clinton’s opponents forced him to respond to allegations of wrongdoing committed while he was governor of Arkansas, involving investments that he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had made in the Whitewater Development Corporation, an Arkansas real estate development firm. Revelations and questions about this, and associated affairs having to do with the savings and loans firm Madison Guaranty, eventually led to an official federal investigation by an independent counsel, Robert Fiske. Congress had established the office of Independent Counsel as a result of the Nixon Watergate scandal. Presumably, the independent counsel would be free from the assumed conflict of interest a Justice Department would have in investigating the president or members of his cabinet, since the president appointed the top people at Justice. Besides the Fiske investigation, the House and Senate Banking committees also held hearings on the Whitewater affair. Notice that democratic leaders cannot escape the law, even regarding what they might have done before being elected or appointed to

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office. Prosecutors may investigate their past and present activities, force them to testify before a grand jury, indict them, and even bring them to trial. This contributes to what keeps democracies limited, which is their checks and balances system. This means that the executive leaders, legislature, and courts are in constant competition against each other for power and influence, and they watch each other for opportunities to gain advantage or weaken one another. This balancing is particularly true when there are political parties close in power. If the opposing party controls the legislature, as it did during all but two years of the Clinton presidency, it acts as an ever-vigilant watchdog over the executive. Scandals play a major role in this, and provide the opposition with ammunition to weaken their opponents—which became particularly clear in the impeachment of the president. All this contributes to keeping democratic leaders responsible, prudent, and limited in their power. When one political party dominates a state, controls the legislature, executive, and courts, and has a sympathetic media, then there is usually political corruption. When there is a strong opposition party to exploit the corruption of the governing party for electoral gain, incumbents will be more careful about obeying the letter and spirit of the law. Moreover, when democratic states have a dominant party controlling all government bodies, with only a weak opposition to appeal to public outrage over high taxes and government intervention, they tend toward Big Government. Such had been the case in Hawaii, for example, which Democrats wholly governed in the four decades before finally electing a Republican governor in 2002. Clinton did not have it so easy. He always faced a strong Republican Party, and in all but two of the years of his two terms, they controlled both the House and Senate. As mentioned, there were several scandals involving the president and his White House during his first term. Although these did not prevent his reelection, they helped create a dominant view among conservatives that he and his administration were politically corrupt, and that he was engaged in a systematic abuse of power. The first White House scandal occurred when his aides suddenly fired seven long-term employees of the White House travel office in 1993. This firing was done in a rush, with unjustified and later disproved accusations of fraud made against the White House employees, and the FBI was used to investigate them. Apparently, these accusations and the investigation were only an excuse to cover the wish to replace them with Clinton friends and supporters. The First Lady officially denied any involvement in this, although there was evidence to the contrary.

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Because of the possibility that she was lying and that the presidential aides had misused the FBI, Attorney General Reno requested that a three-judge panel appoint an independent counsel to investigate. This turned out to be Republican Kenneth Starr, whose name in a few years would become almost as well-known as President Clinton’s. Judge Starr had served in President Reagan’s Justice Department, had been a federal judge, and had served as solicitor general under President Bush. A three-judge panel had already appointed him to replace Independent Counsel Fiske in the investigation of Whitewater. Years later, he would clear both the president and First Lady of indictable wrongdoing in this. Another scandal involved the apparent suicide of the Clintons’ close friend, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, who had handled the Clintons’ taxes and Whitewater matters. Upon his suicide, Clinton’s aides removed files from Foster’s office before police could search and seal it. This raised the question of a serious cover-up of Whitewater wrongdoing. As if Independent Counsel Starr did not have enough to investigate, the three-judge panel asked him to also determine whether Foster’s death was a suicide and whether White House aides illegally removed files from his office. In his report to Congress on his investigation, Starr affirmed that Foster had committed suicide and that the president and First Lady had not carried on a cover-up. Yet another scandal was the discovery that the White House had requested from the FBI, and had been holding without official justification, as many as a thousand secret FBI files, many on top Republicans and opponents. Controversy, especially in 1996, swirled around how the White House used these files and who was responsible for this. A three-judge panel also turned the matter over to Independent Counsel Starr to investigate. After several years, he cleared the president and First Lady of any responsibility for this matter. Nonetheless, that these files were under White House control and that aides might have exploited them in their campaign against President Clinton’s opponents helped feed the outrage that would later lead to Clinton’s impeachment. Further scandals intensified the feeling among conservatives that the White House was corrupt, but the one that finally led to impeachment involved Paula Jones, a former clerk in the Arkansas State government. Encouraged and surrounded by President Clinton’s opponents (called “Clinton-haters” by President Clinton’s supporters), she alleged that while he was the governor of Arkansas in 1991, one of his state troopers invited her up to the governor’s hotel room, and that when she was alone in the room with the governor, he dropped his pants and asked her for oral sex. The White House and Clinton supporters responded aggressively to these charges, and tried to undermine

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her credibility. James Carville, a Democrat political consultant credited with guiding Clinton’s presidential election campaign to victory in 1992, and his chief defender against all accusations of abuse of power, called Jones “Arkansas trailer trash.” Angered by such personal attacks, Jones filed a civil suit of sexual harassment against President Clinton, and demanded $700,000 and a personal apology. Working through his lawyers, Clinton appealed the suit, and asked for a delay until after his term was over. But the Supreme Court ruled that the suit should go ahead. After more legal twists and turns and appeals, including Paula Jones upping her demand to a million dollars, President Clinton settled the case in 1999 by sending her a check for $850,000, with no apology. Notice first that no matter how powerful the president is, no matter how much support he has, a lowly citizen can sue him in court. Just as important, despite the president’s power, the White House sources at his disposal, his small army of lawyers, his broad support in the media, and his popularity, the courts can force the president to defend himself in court according to the law. Keep in mind that in military terms, he was the most powerful head of any country in the world. Moreover, he, his lawyers, and his supporters used the major media that supported him, every technical legal device ever written into the law, and any possible wayward interpretation of the law to claim that Jones had no right to sue him—an expected reaction from any high official caught in such a sexual sandal. The absolutely critical point here is not what Clinton and his supporters did, but that it all was to no avail. In a liberal democracy the law rules. In this case, no matter his twists and turns, the law sided with an unknown clerk from Arkansas against the president of the United States. While this suit was underway, Clinton began an eighteen-month affair in the White House and his Oval Office with twenty-two-year-old Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Although President Clinton disputes that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, she did give him oral sex, a fact later proved by a DNA test of the semen on a blue dress she wore during one of these meetings. Lewinsky confided details of this affair to a friend, Linda Tripp, who began secretly taping their telephone conversations. Tripp later explained that she did this because Lewinsky had asked her to lie in a deposition for which Tripp had been subpoenaed in the Jones suit. Jones’ lawyers were trying to show that what allegedly happened to Jones was but a pattern of sexual misconduct by President Clinton, and had subpoenaed Lewinsky, who told Tripp she would lie to protect her lover. Tripp had worked in the White House, and there had seen Kathleen Willey, a White House volunteer, shortly after Willey left an Oval

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Office appointment with Clinton in 1993. Willey told Tripp that Clinton had kissed and fondled her, and therefore Tripp was important to the Jones defense; but if she told the truth in the deposition, she believed, the White House would try to ruin her credibility. After she’d gathered twenty hours of taped conversations with Lewinsky, Tripp turned them over to Independent Counsel Starr, whose investigative load was already heavy. Judge Starr took this information to Attorney General Janet Reno, who then asked the three-judge panel responsible for appointing independent counsels to appoint Judge Starr to investigate the Lewinsky affair. There is nothing in the law against sexual affairs in the White House, but the President might have broken several laws on other matters, including possible sexual harassment of Lewinsky, asking her to lie in court, and bribing her to keep quiet. By decision of the Supreme Court, President Clinton also had to give a pretrial videotaped deposition in the Jones suit. In January of 1998, with Jones sitting across from him, Jones’ lawyers then questioned Clinton for six hours. He had no idea that they knew about his affair with Lewinsky, and was quite surprised when they brought it up. Given a broad definition of sexual relations, approved by the judge sitting in on the deposition, President Clinton denied under oath that he had sexual relations as so defined with Lewinsky, and claimed that he did not remember ever being alone with her in the White House. Within days, news of the Lewinsky affair and the deposition swept the country. For weeks commentators, analysts, and politicians of all flavors discussed, argued, and dissected the news. Some top commentators thought President Clinton would have to resign within a week or so. The media exploited the slightest rumor, and bit players in the scandal, no matter how remotely involved, had their fifteen minutes of fame before television cameras. No two lawyers seemed to agree on the law covering this affair or the possible impeachment, and sometimes directly contradicted each other. It seemed that the law was a mess. But the law allows interpretation, and often the expertise of different lawyers varies. All of this was subject to partisanship, and nothing arouses partisan passions more in a democracy than a dispute over whether the head of government should resign or the people should fire him. Meanwhile, President Clinton denied to his supporters and White House staff that there had been any sex with Lewinsky. And of course Clinton’s defenders, especially those in the major media, tried to muddle the investigation by constantly claiming this was an investigation of sex, rather than of perjury or abuse of power. Within days Clinton tried to defend himself on television; wagging his finger, he made the now famous declaration that we all have seen a thousand times: “But I want

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to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people.” In July the independent counsel finally gave Monica Lewinsky full immunity for testifying against President Clinton, and she gave him her blue dress with President Clinton’s semen stains. Before Judge Starr’s grand jury, she provided details about her sexual relations with President Clinton, but also claimed that he had not asked her to lie, or to keep quiet about their relationship. Shortly thereafter, President Clinton also had to answer questions before the grand jury. Independent Counsel Starr did this with a closedcircuit television hookup to the White House, which he also videotaped. President Clinton answered many questions on the Lewinsky affair and information she had provided, but would not answer any questions about sex. However, after President Clinton finished his testimony, he went on national television and admitted an “inappropriate relationship” with Lewinsky, and that his comments and silence had given a “false impression.” Then, in lieu of an apology, he said, “I deeply regret that.” In September of 1998, Independent Counsel Starr gave his report on this scandal to the House of Representatives, as required by law. It was, in effect, a 453-page indictment of President Clinton, listing eleven allegedly impeachable offenses. The House almost immediately released the full report to the public, as well as thousands of pages of evidence soon thereafter. Within days, the House Judiciary Committee also made public the full videotape of President Clinton’s testimony before the grand jury. This openness illustrates well the transparency of a liberal democracy. Opponents or proponents will disclose all that is politically important, including dirty laundry, about some politician, legislation, or policy. This is a crucial role of the opposition, and the reason why having a strong opposition is a basic ingredient of liberal democracy. They want to embarrass and weaken the party in power so that they can turn into law their favored legislation and win the next election. Even supposedly secret testimony, conversations, and reports are exposed this way—as is a mass of trivia. Surely partisans on all sides will spin whatever is disclosed to show its best or worst side. But it is public, and people are free to make of it what they will. The public release of the Starr Report, as it became known, was a serious blow to President Clinton’s prestige. It changed a partisan po-

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litical conflict into a super-charged political fight over President Clinton’s future. Over a hundred newspaper editorials eventually called for his resignation; television and the Internet covered the affair day and night. He was publicly mocked; cartoonists never had it so good, latenight comedians constantly made fun of him, and Clinton joke after joke made the rounds through email and the Internet. Political humor has an important function in a democracy. Although meant to be funny, the jokes express public dismay and pinpoint special concerns about high officials’ behavior. In a democracy it is better for a politician to be criticized by professors of political science than have well-known comedians earn their popularity at his expense. What saved President Clinton was the loyalty of Democrats, who circled Party wagons around him, and a politically astute offensive by the president and White House aides. Judge Starr became a target of constant demonizing attacks. He was accused of being “sex crazed, and an extreme right-wing zealot.” Legal action against him for leaking grand jury testimony was later dismissed by the courts. While polls gave the president a job rating above 60 percent, Judge Starr’s was in the twenties. Other opponents, such as Linda Tripp, were no less demonized. President Clinton’s supporters were vehement: “It’s only about sex, and nobody’s business,” “President Clinton told the truth; this is a conspiracy of Clinton haters,” and so on. It was all, the First Lady claimed, a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Meanwhile, the other side claimed that “Clinton always lies, and is deceitful,” “what he did in the Oval Office is a disgrace to the presidency; he has systematically abused power” while in office, and so on. President Clinton’s previous scandals were revisited, and even Arkansas state troopers were brought out of obscurity for interviews regarding their claims of helping in his sexual escapades while governor. The president’s supporters also made a concerted effort to uncover sexual affairs of major Republicans in the House who were supporting impeachment, perhaps for revenge, but surely to show that “everyone does it.” They forced Speaker-designate Bob Livingston to confess to an extramarital affair and resign, even as the full House was about to begin deliberations on the articles of impeachment. They also made public a decades-old affair by Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the very House Judiciary Committee set to consider the president’s impeachment. When the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee began consideration of a resolution calling for a formal impeachment inquiry, the fight was now formally joined and in deadly earnest, but still constrained by the Constitution and House rules. This began the long, complex political process for removing President Clinton from office.

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Other than wartime, this legal process of removing a democratically elected chief executive in midterm is the most dramatic theater people in democracies experience. Everyone soon knows almost everything public and private about the cast of characters; the acting is superb, the speeches and exhortations moving, and the appeals to mind and heart well studied. Each day is a new scene, the plot is clear, and only the end is in doubt. A successful impeachment by the House is like an indictment brought by a prosecutor before a court. It describes the particulars of an alleged wrongdoing. Then, before a judge, a court holds the trial on the indictment, with both prosecutors and defense lawyers presenting evidence and arguments. For impeachment, the court is the Senate. The Constitution specifies “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” as the grounds for impeachment, but what high crimes and misdemeanors are is subject to considerable legal interpretation. Only a majority vote of the House is enough to approve articles of impeachment, and this had only happened once before, in 1868 against President Andrew Johnson. Impeachment was also considered in 1974 when the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, but before the full House could debate them, the audiotapes of President Nixon’s conversations in the Oval Office were released. They were the “smoking gun” evidence that he had participated in the cover-up of the Watergate affair; soon his support collapsed in the House, and he resigned. Once the House votes on impeachment, the Senate holds a trial on the impeachment articles, as noted. All senators sit as the jury, and the chief justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial. The senators hear witnesses and can ask them questions, and at the end of the trial, they vote regarding removal of the president. Two-thirds of the senators must approve removal for it to occur. Were this to happen, the chief justice would swear in the vice president as the new president. The Senate vote on Andrew Johnson’s removal was one vote short of two-thirds. The House Judiciary Committee reported to the full House on its recommendation to investigate the impeachment of President Clinton, and in October 1998 the Republican House voted to conduct this investigation. Hearings by the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment began soon afterwards and were fully televised. A variety of witnesses gave testimony before the committee, including Independent Counsel Starr. He came down hard on President Clinton, claiming he intentionally deceived. Opposition to impeachment came from a variety of sources, most of them claiming that what Clinton did was not impeachable, though morally reprehensible. Many legal and constitutional scholars argued that his behavior did not meet

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the Constitutional basis for impeachment. Some argued that yes, he lied in his civil deposition, and yes, the independent counsel could (and some said should) indict him for this after he left office, but that it was not an impeachable offense. Chairman Hyde also sent President Clinton eighty-one questions to answer in place of direct testimony. At the end of the hearings, the Republican members presented the committee with four articles of impeachment, claiming that the president committed perjury before the grand jury, committed perjury and obstruction of justice in the Jones case, and provided false responses to the eighty-one questions. The committee approved the articles on December 11 and 12. All Republicans voted for three of the articles and all but one voted for a fourth; no Democrat voted for any. The committee then passed the approved articles to the full House for debate and a final vote. This American drama did not paralyze international relations and foreign adversaries, in particular Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq against whom an American-led coalition fought the 1990 Gulf War. Possibly seeing a weakened president, Saddam refused to allow any further weapons inspections by the UN in his country, inspections he had agreed to when he was defeated in the Gulf War. Coincidentally or not, President Clinton launched air strikes against Iraq in retaliation just when the full House scheduled the opening debate on his impeachment. Republicans questioned the timing of this, and the Democrats demanded that the House put off considering impeachment until the president ended military action. But the Republicans were in control, and the continuing raids did no more than delay House proceedings for a day. On December 18, the full House began an acrimonious debate on the impeachment of President Clinton. The next day, the House passed 228 to 206 the first article of impeachment, perjury before Independent Counsel Starr’s grand jury. It also passed the third article, obstruction of justice related to the Jones case, with a vote of 221 to 212. The other two articles failed to pass. It was now up to the Senate to determine whether these two articles were enough to remove the president from office. The Senate trial began on January 7, 1999, and was televised throughout. As dictated by the Constitution, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, William H. Rehnquist, presided over the trial. The trial started with a reading of the charges, and then the chief justice swore in the senators, who went one at a time to the front of the chamber to sign an oath book promising to do “impartial justice.” There were fifty-five Republican and forty-five Democratic senators. If all Republicans voted for removal, twelve Democrats would have to join them to get the sixty-seven votes required.

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Thirteen Republican House members, headed by Chairman Henry Hyde, prosecuted the case for removal. In sum, they accused President Clinton of “willful, premeditated, deliberate corruption of the nation’s system of justice through perjury and obstruction of justice.” Charles Ruff, main White House counsel, led President Clinton’s defense with a team of seven lawyers. Their main argument was that the Republicans provided no more than “an unsubstantiated, circumstantial case that does not meet the constitutional standard to remove the president from office.” Both sides presented their arguments and evidence in three days, and the senators had two more days to ask questions. As the trial progressed, Democrats and Republicans used one partisan maneuver after another, although with less bitterness than in the House debate. The Democrats tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the case, and both sides fought over whether there would be witnesses, how many witnesses there would be, and who they would be. They argued over whether the witnesses would give testimony in the Senate chamber or by deposition. Most important, this partisan struggle ended in a Senate vote not to hear Monica Lewinsky’s testimony in person, but by video clips of a deposition she gave under questioning by House prosecutors. They also voted to question other witnesses by deposition. Finally, on February 8, this twelve-month, historic crisis in American politics was almost over. Each side had three hours in which to present their closing arguments, then for three days the senators debated behind closed doors. On February 12, in the Senate chamber and before television cameras, the Senate voted. All Democrats and ten Republicans voted President Clinton not guilty on alleged perjury, 55 to 45. On alleged obstruction of justice the vote was split, 50 to 50. President Clinton would remain in office. The national day by day, twenty-four hour discussion and debate over the fate of the president cannot be isolated from the House impeachment and the Senate trial. All this provided representatives and senators with an amazing input of knowledge, insights, legal opinions, and interpretations that made witnesses almost redundant. Most important, as the impeachment approached conclusion in the House, and then as the Senate trial progressed, public opinion not only continued to support President Clinton, but his numbers actually improved. During Senate deliberations, some polls showed over 70 percent support for the president. Moreover, polls showed that the people wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible; they felt that the Republicans were unnecessarily delaying the proceedings, and intended to punish Republicans in the next election if they removed President Clinton.

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Generally, answers to specific questions in the polls showed that arguments supporting President Clinton persuaded more people than arguments demanding his removal. The senators were, after all, politicians, and doubtless were influenced in their votes by public opinion. Indeed, David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the House Judiciary Committee for the impeachment, claimed in his book Sell Out that, due to the overwhelming public support for Clinton, the Republican Senate leadership had decided against trying to fire Clinton, and had organized the trial to get it over with as soon as possible.

Chapter 8 About Liberal Democracy Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set of principles. – Woodrow Wilson

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hat do the campaigns, scandals, and the impeachment of President Clinton tell us about the nature and workings of liberal democracy? It is self-government. Throughout the history of the Clinton presidency, adult Americans could have campaigned and voted for Clinton or his opposition in the presidential elections of 1992 and 1996. Americans could also have campaigned and voted for the representatives and senators who voted on his impeachment and removal. Americans could make their voices heard regarding his scandals and impeachment by writing letters to the editors of newspapers, telephoning radio talk shows, or by posting their opinions for or against him on the Internet via chat groups or on their own web page. And Americans could organize demonstrations or participate in them, build organizations to work for or against him, and contribute money to one side or the other. Note also that there is a democratic culture involved. This dictates that compromise and negotiation will settle disputes with a tolerance for differences. If the conflict is profound and the stakes very high, if there is no solution other than one side losing and the other side winning, then democratic procedures must be used that are within or dictated by the law. Such was the impeachment and trial of President Clinton. But, consider. The president had vast public and secret resources at his disposal, such as the secret service, the FBI, and the CIA. As commander-in-chief of all American military forces, he had them at his command. Could he not have used this power, if he so desired, to have the army surround Congress and the Supreme Court and dictate the outcome of their impeachment proceedings? That this was not even considered by anyone in the media, that there was not the slightest rumor of this, that even his most extreme political enemies never thought this a possibility, shows the strength of this liberal democracy. But let’s say that the president did issue such orders. What would happen? There is no doubt about the answer: he would be disobeyed.

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His orders would have to go through the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and the secretary of defense, and then down the command structure. The respect for the Constitution is so deeply ingrained in the military and those who are appointed to high office, democratic norms and customs are so unconsciously held that, instead of being obeyed, the president’s very attempt to use the military unconstitutionally would be reported to Congress and become an article of impeachment. Alternatively, suppose that he had secretly plotted with a group of generals or colonels to use their troops in a coup against the Constitution. If anything like this had been launched, it would have been soundly defeated for three reasons. First, this junta could only be a very small group, and thus militarily outgunned. Second, even ordinary soldiers would not obey the commands of their officers, because this would too clearly be a treasonous, antidemocratic action. And third, even if this were successful, the people would rise up in rebellion against such a totally antidemocratic usurpation of power. One more example is the outcome of the year 2000 American presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Albert Gore, got a majority of the national vote and came within a couple of hundred votes of winning Florida’s electors, which would have given him the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. As it was, with Florida’s slim margin giving the Republican candidate, Governor George Bush, its electoral votes, he won the presidency by only 271 electoral votes. Because of the importance of the Florida electors and the very slight margin of victory for Bush, Gore refused to concede the election and he, his supporters, and the Democratic Party waged a public relations and legal onslaught on the ballots cast in Florida, particularly in highly Democrat counties. They argued that all the ballots had not been counted, the voting machines had malfunctioned, or that the ballots were too complex for many voters. I need not go into the legal and political victories and defeats in this campaign to overturn Bush’s victory, except to note that we all learned a new vocabulary about machine ballots, including chads, pregnant chads, tri-chads, hanging chads, swinging chads, dimples, and so on. Suffice it to say that after two Florida Supreme Court victories for Vice President Gore and two United States Supreme Court decisions vacating or overturning them, Gore finally lost hope of getting the recount of ballots that he wanted. Over a month after the election, Gore finally and graciously conceded the election to Bush. This was the closest election in American history. And yet—and this is the point to this example—in spite of the heated partisan rhetoric and the claims that the election had been stolen, there was no

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violence. There were no violent demonstrations, no riots, no necessity to call out the army, and no coup. The decision of the Supreme Court was accepted; law triumphed over the desire for power. This is almost unbelievable, considering that this election was to determine who would be the most powerful leader in the world, and which economic and social policies would dominate the country. But it is the way liberal democracy functions. This type of government stands in sharp contrast to the alternatives, such as rule by a king, as in Saudi Arabia; by a dictator, as in Sudan; by the military, as in Burma; or by an elite, as in China. It is inconceivable that any of these rulers would be questioned by a court, undergo examination by the people’s representatives over some scandal, stand trial while in office, or stand aside and let another person rule because of a court decision. In these countries or others like them, people would not be able to criticize or demonstrate against their rulers without serious and possibly lethal repercussions. They and their families might be arrested and tortured if documents—even letters or emails—criticizing the government are found in their homes. In such countries, when the people threaten the power of their dictators, those dictators could, and do, use tanks and machine guns against them.

Chapter 9 Extent of Democracy There are 88 liberal democracies scattered all over the world.

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ll this being understood, so what? Are there not only a small number of democracies? Are there not even fewer liberal democracies like the United States, almost all being in western Europe? In fact, is not my characterization of liberal democracy too Western, hardly fit for nations in Asia, South America, and Africa?

Extent of Liberal Democracies The answer is no to each of these questions. As listed on the Freedom house website (www.freedomhouse.org/), out of 192 nations in 2003, 121 are democracies. Of these, 89 are electoral democracies, accounting for 44 percent of the world population. They include the European and North American democracies, as well as such diverse nations as Andorra, Bahamas, Belize, Cape Verde, Chile, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominica, Grenada, Iceland, Japan, Kiribati, Mali, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, South Africa, South Korea, Suriname, and Taiwan. This variety of cultures, races, ethnicities, and geography should dispel the notion that liberal democracy is a peculiarly Western type of government that the West is trying to push on the rest of the world. I should also mention that there are a number of more or less socialist economic systems among the liberal democracies, such as those in Denmark, Norway, India, and Israel. Their governments still protect human rights. Consider the socialist policies of Sweden, for example, which sometimes is called “The People’s Republic of Sweden,” a play on what communist parties call their own nations. Like the United Kingdom, Sweden is a constitutional monarchy, with a democratically elected parliament. The people also elect its prime minister to parliament, and he is usually the head of whichever

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party gets the most parliamentary seats. King Carl Gustaf XVI has no formal political power and only a ceremonial role. Sweden has extensive and comprehensive national welfare and health insurance systems. Doctors work for the government and hospitals are government run, with health care covered by taxes. If people are sick or must stay home to take care of sick children, the government will make up for most of the income lost. Bear a child, and get a year of government mandated leave from work, with pay. People also get government allowances for their children and support if their children continue their education after they are sixteen years old. Workers and their employers also must contribute to worker retirement benefits, which they receive when they turn sixty-five, and which are supplemented by added employee fees. Sweden has an industrial policy that sees the government as necessarily involved in and in some ways directing the economy. There are stiff laws covering the hiring and rejection of job applicants and, if hired, their firing. Government closely regulates, subsidizes, and sets price ceilings on home purchases or rentals, and strictly enforces regulations on home building. It stimulates investment, and provides special tax benefits to steer businesses in the direction desired by government. Also, as part of its industrial policy, the Swedish government favors and encourages very strong unions and large, centralized business associations. This has led to the economic dominance of large corporations and unions. To support government welfare policies and involvement in the economy, people pay over an average of 50 percent of their income in taxes, while businesses can pay as much as 65 percent. One measure of the cost of government regulation, and the opportunities people and businesses lose because of it, is that about 35 percent of all workers were working for the government in 1992. An even better measure is that the government alone creates one-third of the market value of all Sweden’s goods and services. Another third of the value results from government redistribution of income, through such channels as the national welfare policies and national health program mentioned previously. This shrinks the private economy’s value to only a third of all Sweden’s products and services. By contrast, this value is about two-thirds for the United States. Regardless of Sweden’s welfare statism and its reputation for socialist policies, as a liberal democracy the government protects the freedom of its people—their human rights—to speak out, protest, demonstrate, organize against these policies, and vote out of power those who support them. Swedes even enjoy a fair amount of economic freedom. Among 123 countries whose economic freedom was ranked for 1999 by the

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Economic Freedom Network, Sweden ranked in economic freedom about 22 out of 111 nations, and the Network rates it with 8 out of 10 possible points. The United States is ranked 4, with 9.1 out of 10 points. In further comparison, of the countries I described in Chapter 1, the Network ranks China 87, and places Burma at the bottom among all 111 countries in economic freedom. The Network did not rank Sudan, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea, but surely they must be near the bottom. As to the 89 liberal democracies, this number is a sharp increase from the 44 that existed in 1973, and the total lack in 1900 (the democracies that existed, such as the United States, were electoral but illiberal) and shows well that the world is becoming increasingly democratic. Democracy is now the world’s dominant form of government, and with the death of fascism through World War II, and of communism with the end of the Cold War, democracy has no real competitors for hearts and minds. When all 121 electoral and liberal democracies are considered, the odds of a person being born in a democracy today are slightly greater than 61 percent.

Extent of Illiberal Democracies In 2003 there were thirty-two nations that were electoral illiberal democracies—that is, their people were only partially free, some so marginal as to make it a toss-up whether we should call them democracies. These included such nations as Armenia, Colombia, and Turkey. All restrict some of the people’s basic rights against government that characterize a liberal democracy. An impeachment like that of President Clinton might still take place in most of them, but not with the same vigor, concern for the law, and intimate involvement of the public. In these countries, freedom of speech or religion or association may be under pressure or even compromised. Just to mention some of the problems regarding human rights in these countries, in Columbia the courts tend to be corrupt, and extortion is common. Colombian drug lords have considerable influence, and may even have dictated some of the laws. Violence is endemic; all sides commit atrocities, including the murder of officials and activists. In Turkey the military has undue influence, and security forces have often killed those suspected of terrorism or of supporting a Kurdish rebellion. The government limits freedom of speech. Turks may not, for example, insult government officials. Government-organized groups or sympathizers have attacked and threatened human rights activists. They may even be responsible for the disappearance or murder of journalists

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and newspaper owners. Appeal to the highest court over politically sensitive judgments may be useless, and the courts themselves seem to be under military control. And in the Ukraine government corruption is widespread as well, and bribery is a way of getting or preventing government action. Consistently, political pressure on the courts and intervention in their process is common. Starting and running a business is often difficult, since businessmen must compete with an in-group of present and former members of the political establishment. The government limits freedom of speech. Ukrainians cannot, for example, attack the honor and dignity of the president. Nonetheless, aside from the serious human rights problems of the illiberal electoral democracies, a citizen of any of them can vote regularly by secret ballot in competitive national elections. They can vote the top leadership out of power. This is why these countries are still democracies, although only electoral ones.

Conclusion Overall, the case for democratic freedom is strong, as I have tried to show in this and the previous chapter. But I can make an even stronger case. In the following chapters, we’ll see that freedom is not only a human or natural right, certified by international agreements and supported by moral reasoning, that it is not only a socially just metasolution to human diversity, but that it is also a moral good. This means that the social and political consequences of freedom make it a supreme value in itself.

PART 3 On Freedom’s Moral Goods: Wealth and Prosperity

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eople who are free to go about their business and interests create, innovate, take risks, do what is important to them, and spend long hours pursuing their dreams. Especially, they soon find out that they can often gratify their own desires by satisfying the interests and dreams of others. Such is the free market. Such is the power of freedom. Such is this force for wealth and prosperity. This does not mean that all free people are wealthy. It means, however, that economic well-being, good health, education, and opportunity are spread across the population. It is no accident that the most economically developed, technologically and scientifically advanced nations, the most healthful nations, the nations with the best systems of education, communication, and transportation, are those that are democratically free. I’ll illustrate the power of freedom with the example of Bill Gates who, with his partner Paul Allen, created Microsoft and the computer operating system that enables the vast majority of desktop and laptop computers to work. Then we’ll examine why freedom is so powerful, and discover that economic freedom is not a system of selfishness and greed, as the most prevalent myth claims, but that it reflects in practice the utopian ideal of people seeking, and often sacrificing to discover and then pursue, ways of fulfilling the interests and desires of others. Freedom’s power to create wealth and prosperity is best understood by contrast with its opposite, the command economy of communism. In Chapter 12 I describe this system and then in the next three chapters show what this political economic system did to the Soviet Union under Lenin and then Stalin, and China under Mao Tse-tung. Pure and simple, their tyrannical rule over their economies by absolute command, fear, and murder created monumental deprivation and starvation and the world’s worst famines, killing in total over the three regimes around 45 million Russians and Chinese—almost double all the combat deaths in World Wars I and II. And Chapter 16 reveals that, in stark contrast to the consequences of a command economy and nondemocratic types of governments, no democracy has ever had a famine.

Chapter 10 Freedom Is an Engine of Wealth and Prosperity What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class. – Alexis de Tocqueville

The Moral Good of Wealth and Prosperity

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emocratic freedom is a right everyone has, as previous chapters have established. This in itself is just, and to deny people their freedom would be unjust. And as a just right, no one can morally deny people their freedom for whatever end, as has happened to billions of people. For example, some rulers and their supporters deny their people freedom by arguing that doing so is necessary to develop the country economically, achieve national glory, promote racial or ethnic purity, or create a communist paradise. This is to make of freedom a tool that those in power can manipulate or ignore, depending on the ends they seek. This is a destructive premise that, for too long, intellectuals have allowed dictators and their supporters to assume. Freedom is not a tool; it does not have a utility attached to it that justifies government granting it or taking it away. In this sense, democratic freedom is a moral good, something that is to be sought or held for its intrinsic moral value, and for no other reason. Yet, amazingly, there are actually consequences to freedom that are also important moral goods. When we compare what happens to an economy and society when people are free and democratic versus unfree, the results of freedom are often the very ends that some dictators try to fulfill by repressing freedom. So stressing that freedom is a moral good is not erecting a firewall against any negative consequences, for the consequences are not only positive, but moral goods in themselves. It’s like eating fruit, which is tasty and filling and inherently good, but which also reduces the probability of getting cancer or suffering a stroke or heart attack.

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One of freedom’s desirable consequences is to promote unrivaled wealth and prosperity; it is an unbeatable engine of technological and economic growth. As an example of how freedom can produce this miraculous result, consider the life of William (Bill) Gates, who could not have created the computer software he did other than in a free society—software that has contributed greatly to our prosperity.

The Example of Bill Gates’ Freedom Gates was born into an upper middle-class family in 1955; his mother taught school and was a regent of the University of Washington, and his father was a prominent lawyer. Gates went to public elementary school, then to the private Lakeside High School in Seattle, where he learned about computers and soon became fascinated by them. By the time he was thirteen, he and his best friend, Paul Allen, were already programming computers, and spent as much of each day as they could on the school’s mainframe computer—playing with it, causing it to crash, rewriting its programs, and writing new ones themselves. In those days, computer time was costly and had to be rationed; because of their excessive use of it, the school finally had to ban them from the computer for short periods. Gates and Allen had become so good at using it, however, that a computer business, the Computer Center Corporation, hired them and two other hackers from the school to solve some problems with their computer, paying them for their services with unlimited computer time. Now Gates and Allen could work on a computer day and night, while also reading computer manuals and picking the brains of other employees. This ideal life did not last, however, for in 1970 the company went out of business. Gates and Allen’s next break came when Information Sciences hired them to program the company’s payroll. Again they were given free computer time—probably more important to them than whatever money they made. The company also paid them royalties for any of their programs it sold. Encouraged by all this, Gates and Allen made their own small computer for measuring traffic flow, and started a little company, Traf-OData, to sell it. This earned them about $20,000. Though he was still only a high school student, Gates’ computer skills were becoming more widely recognized. His school asked him to program a scheduling system for them, and he and Allen wrote the program together. While they were seniors, company officials at the defense corporation TRW, impressed by what they heard about Gates and Allen’s

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successes, hired them to debug TRW computer programs. This was another big break for the two. The job not only helped them further refine their software writing skills, it started them thinking about setting up their own software company. In 1973 they graduated from Lakeside. Because of Gates’ excellent grades, recommendations, and achievements, he was able to get into Harvard University, where he chose to study pre-law. After all, his father was a lawyer and the field of computer sciences didn’t exist then. But he soon discovered Harvard’s computer center, and all else was lost. He would work at night at the center and sleep through his classes. Allen moved close to Gates so that they could continue to develop and work on their ideas. After Gates finished his freshman year, he and Allen got programming jobs at Honeywell Information Systems. They still were working for others, however, and Allen particularly wanted to set up their own company. Gates was reluctant to drop out of Harvard to do this. Then, in December of 1974, a chance event led to the start of Microsoft. Accounts disagree on how this event came about, but a popular version is that on his way to see Gates, Allen happened to stop to look over some magazines. On the cover of Popular Electronics he saw a picture of the new MITS Altair 8080, the first microcomputer. He bought the magazine, took it to Gates and, after both had read it, they saw what an opportunity the Altair was. This was a most propitious time to be interested in computers. The IBM room-sized mainframe dominated the computer market and most computer specialists were interested in mainframe hardware or programs. Microcomputers (also to be called desktop or personal computers) for the general market had yet to be made, but Gates and Allen recognized that small personal computers were the future for businesses and home computing. And all of these computers would need system software to run them, as well as software for specific needs. Stories also vary as to what happened next. One version is that Gates called MITS and claimed that he and Allen had written a program they called BASIC for the Altair. The company expressed interest and wanted to see it, but Gates had lied—there was no such program. Encouraged by the company’s interest, he and Allen raced to write one. One problem: they had no Altair at hand. So, while Gates focused on the writing of BASIC, Allen developed a way of simulating the Altair chip using one of Harvard’s computers, the PDP-10. In about eight weeks they finished, and Allen flew to MITS to demonstrate their new BASIC on the Altair, a computer he had yet to see or touch. The gutsy test was a success on the second try, and MITS bought the rights to the program. This victory finally convinced Gates that the personal com-

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puter market was set to explode and, more important, that they had the skills to share in it. In 1975, Micro-soft—later to be Microsoft—was born, and Gates soon dropped out of his junior year at Harvard to devote himself to the new business. Its initial product was the BASIC system Gates and Allen had written, and several large companies were eager customers. At the time, I was also writing computer programs for my research, and can attest to one overwhelming principle of computer life. It is cheaper to buy a good program than to write one or hire programmers to do it. This was one of the main reasons for Microsoft’s early success. By 1979, Microsoft had sixteen employees, and Gates moved the company from Albuquerque, its first home, to Seattle, Washington. The company continued to grow and create new products. It produced a spreadsheet program, which later would become the MS-Excel spreadsheet we know today. And it produced the first version of what is now the overwhelmingly popular MS-Word. Paul Allen, who had been instrumental in so much of Gates’ early work and then in the growth of Microsoft, had to resign in 1983 because of Hodgkin’s disease. Eventually he successfully fought off the disease and, made a very rich man with his Microsoft shares, went on to form his own software companies. He also bought the Portland Trailblazers basketball team. What made Microsoft so dominant in the computer market, and what has mainly contributed to Gates’ wealth, was a deal he made with IBM in 1981, when Microsoft had only grown to about thirty people. With great foresight, Gates had bought an operating system, which he rewrote into what he called MS-DOS (Microsoft disk operating system). The operating system is the software that runs a computer. It interfaces between the computer hardware, such as the computer processor, memory chips, hard disks, floppy drives, CDs, monitor, and so on, and the applications, such as word processing or spreadsheet programs. At that time IBM, the dominant force in the computer market, was preparing a new line of personal computers, and needed a good operating system for them. They were in negotiation with a more established company, but Gates impressed them, and Microsoft got the job to write the operating system for IBM’s new computers. This was an amazing deal for his small company. Within years IBM began to turn out personal computers like McDonald’s turns out hamburgers, and each one started up with a rewritten MS-DOS. This was not enough for Gates, however. He had always been interested in making the computer more graphically oriented so that users could clearly see on their monitor what they were doing with the computer, such as when trashing a file or transferring a file out of one

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folder to another, and he began the development of such a program in 1982. This evolved into a graphically-oriented, pseudo system program that operates on top of MS-DOS. Finally shipped in 1985, it was the first version of Windows. Its latest incarnation as Windows XP, or an earlier version, is now used on virtually all IBM computers and compatibles in the world. In 1986, Microsoft successfully went public with its stock offering of $21 a share, and by 1995 Microsoft had 17,801 employees. Gates had realized his dream. He has played a dominant role in making personal computing available to everyone, and his products have continued to dominate the field. I do my work on a Macintosh computer with an Apple Corporation operating system 10.3 that competes with Windows— and personally I think Apple’s system software is better. Yet because of their quality, I use Microsoft’s Word and Excel programs. In recognition of his contributions, President Bush Senior awarded Bill Gates the National Medal of Technology in 1992. Bill Gates also has been more than amply rewarded financially. On May 22, 2000, his wealth, tied partly to the near 141 million shares of Microsoft that he owns, was $72,485,700,000. This made him the richest man in the world. Not even the wealthiest of monarchs, with jewels and gold bars piled at their feet, can beat Bill Gates’ worth. According to one rumor, he is so rich that when he got the bill for his $50 million manor built on Lake Washington, he turned to his wife Melinda and asked her to get his wallet. If he had worked ten hours a day, every day of the year, since the founding of Microsoft in 1975, I calculate that he earned about $1.3 million per hour. How can one man become so rich? Surely, Gates was lucky in being in the right place with the right friends at the right time when the personal computer revolution was just beginning. Supportive and affluent parents played a role in his success, as did his naturally deep interest in computers, a proclivity for the mathematics of it, and a willingness to work hard. But most important, he was free to follow his star. He needed no government approval. Personal computers and related hardware and software were a new market, and there were virtually no government regulations telling Gates what programming he could and could not do. Of course, Gates and Allen had to satisfy certain government registration requirements when they set up Microsoft, and there were more regulations covering Microsoft going public in the stock market. But it was entirely up to Gates how hard he worked, what he produced, and what he charged for his products.

Chapter 11 The Power of the Free Market The more freedom a people have, the greater their health, wealth and prosperity; the less their freedom, the more their impoverishment, disease, and famines.

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or the world as a whole, there is a very strong, positive correlation between democratic freedom and the economic wealth and prosperity of nations, as Table 11.1 and Figure 11.1 show. Much of this is due to the close association between civil liberties and political rights and economic freedom, as shown in Figure 11.2. (I am tempted to call this the Bill Gates Effect.) And this positive correlation goes far beyond economic matters to include the social and physical welfare of a people, as well. The more freedom people have, the greater their nation’s technological growth and scientific contributions, and the availability of railroads, paved roads, and airports. The more freedom people have, the better their health services, hospitals, doctors, and life expectancy. The more freedom a people have, the higher the instance of literacy, high school and college graduates, universities, and books published; and so on. To adopt a current term for all this, the more freedom, the more human security. But why should freedom be so productive? One reason is that people like Bill Gates can follow their interests and fully realize their inherent capabilities and talents. But also, they have an incentive to work and produce what people want because they are rewarded—and handsomely so, if they can satisfy the desires of millions. There is something more here, however, than simply following personal interests and getting material rewards. People naturally take care of what they own. It is like driving a rented automobile versus their own car—in subtle and perhaps even in some extreme ways, they are probably rougher on the rented car. After all, they lose nothing when they rapidly start and stop a rented car, corner it at high speed, screech its tires, grind its gears, ignore potholes, and let it get filthy. The rental cost is the same either way.

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This is like the commons, or common areas of a neighborhood. People take care of their house and yard. It is personal property and a reflection of their inner self, a matter of personal pride. But the commons, such as a public park, is owned by the public and therefore by no one. Government bureaucrats are the stewards over such property, and by law must manage it. But this is not their personal property, and therefore they do not have a primary motivation to take care of it and improve it. Usually, their personal motivation is to do the least amount of work at the best wage, and even if they do the best job possible, they do not do more than needed. So I see trees and flowers planted along newly built public roads withering and dying for lack of water, and I walk in parks whose grassy areas are overgrown with weeds and littered with paper cups, beer cans, and all the debris of people who use facilities they do not own. And I dare not think about using a public restroom! The incentives of private ownership versus the commons gives us an understanding of why plantation owners often took good care of

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slaves they bought, though the owners might punish them severely for trying to escape or refusing to work. By comparison, the biggest slavelike establishment of modern times, the Soviet gulag—the forced labor camp system—took little care of its laborers. Camp managers often worked them to death or allowed them to die of malnutrition and exposure. The life expectancy in some camps, especially the mining camps in Kolyma, was a matter of months. Why? The incentive for the camp managers was to get the most out of the workers for the least cost, then pocket the extra funds—not to take care of the prisoners. These people were not personal property, but public property. This was the very worst of the commons. Besides the joys of freedom, the prosperity it creates, and the incentives of private ownership, there is the individualization of choice and behavior. While people share much with their neighbors, friends, and loved ones, each person is different. Each has values, perceptions, and experience that no economic and social planners can know, or usually

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even guess at; in no way can each become data in some planner’s computer, because the path through life for each is unique. This means that only the individuals can best judge what they value, desire, want, and can do. To borrow a useful cliché, each alone knows where their shoe pinches. This is more basic than it may at first seem. In the free market, everyone is free to buy and sell, to create and build, as did Bill Gates. This freedom enables everyone to best adjust to the world around them and apply their unique values and experience. Therefore, a farmer who has learned from his parents and his own direct experience how to till the soil unique to northeastern Ohio, to read the local weather patterns, and to plant and fertilize the seeds that will grow well in the rocky soil, will best know how to make his farm productive. No government official far away at the state capital in Columbus or the national capital in Washington, D.C., can do as well. And really, were they to command him how to farm, they would destroy his incentive to produce, and the farm’s productivity. The loss of this freedom to farm is a loss of personal experience, knowledge, and values that government commands cannot replace. History has shown the catastrophic results of this in communist nations, as I will detail in Chapters 13 to 15.

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Moreover, in a free market, buyers and sellers automatically balance the cost and amount of goods. This means it is often more profitable to sell many items at a small profit than a few at a high profit. This encourages lower prices and cheaper goods to meet the mass demand of poorer people. Some producers will specialize in building yachts and make a profit at it, but many others will find it most profitable to market cheap clothes, fast food, games, and thousands of devices that make life easier. And in this way, businesses are encouraged to produce more items, more cheaply, and of better quality. We have seen this regarding computers. Note also, as free market economists like Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and F. A. Hayek have stressed, free market prices are an economy-wide message system. They communicate shortages, where things are cheap, and where production might be profitable enough for a business to move into the market; they also communicate where demand is slack and businesses might cut back production. Prices in a free market tell businesses what to put on the supermarket shelves, where, when, and at what price. Therefore, the free market is equally a massive distribution system. Think about this for the moment, about the miracle of the thousands of goods on the supermarket shelves, many from faraway countries and other states. Who decides this? What great mind or computer figures out what is to be sold in what market for how much, when? And all without shortages, and long lines waiting for a supply truck to arrive, as is often the case in command economies. How is this done without the economic planners that socialists believe necessary? Automatically and spontaneously, by the decisions of hundreds of thousands of free producers, suppliers, truckers, and market managers, all responding to different prices and demand. This is why the command market and government intervention fail to improve prices and allocation over the free market. Instead, it creates economic dislocations, hardship, privation, and, as we will see, famine. No government officials, no social scientists, no central computer program, can possibly figure out what each person wants, when, and where, and how all this can be balanced for tens of millions of people. A government cannot improve the free market price mechanism, even at the minimum by antitrust, antimonopolistic laws; it can only distort or destroy.

Chapter 12 The Free Market, Greed, and the Command Economy Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. – Milton Friedman

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ou may believe that I am exaggerating the role of freedom, and that for Gates’ success detailed in Chapter 10, his talent and initiative were most important. Then consider what his life would have been like in a country that allowed no freedom, such as the former Soviet Union. The Communist Party that ruled this country placed the strongest emphasis on economic and technological development, and it is natural to believe that someone with Bill Gates’ abilities and interests would prosper there. First, however, for Gates simply to survive without going to a labor camp or to his death, he and his parents could not question the Party line, and both his parents and grandparents could not have been connected to the previous czarist government, or be bourgeoisie. Presuming, then, that Gates was clean of any such “counterrevolutionary” taint, he might have succeeded as a scientist or engineer. But he could not have produced any great jump in software development. The Party strictly limited the use of computers, all of which it owned. For over a decade it kept computers under lock and key, to be used only with Party permission. Gates, therefore, would not have had the free use of computers that enabled him to develop his programming ability and to eventually write the programs he did. And, since all private businesses were illegal, there could be no Microsoft to design personal computers or write software. Such could only be done within some Party-run shop. If, in such a shop, Gates had written useful software, it would be the property of the Party, to dispose of as the Party bureaucracy wished. There is a slight hint of such a statist attitude in the American Justice Department taking Microsoft to court in 1997 for monopolistic practices. Specifically, it accused Microsoft of making its Internet Explorer part of Windows 95, and thus stifling competition with other

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Internet browsers, such as Netscape. In April of 2000, a federal judge ruled that Microsoft did violate antitrust laws, and in June issued a final judgment ordering the dissolution of Microsoft. However, this order was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, while the court did hold that Microsoft had an illegal monopoly on computer operating systems. With a new Republican administration in 2001 that brought a new Secretary to the Justice Department, its plan to split up Microsoft was dropped. This case reflects an anti-free market attitude toward competition, big business, and success—and likely some envy of Gates’ wealth. More important, this action by the previous Clinton administration probably shows the power of political contributions or their lack. Gates had naively refused to make any large contributions to the Democratic Party or President Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, while Microsoft’s chief competitors had done so. It was their complaints about Microsoft that brought action. Many of the commentaries on this case saw capitalist greed as Microsoft’s, and especially Gates’, primary motivation. Indeed, this view reflects a general criticism of free-market capitalism itself as the incarnation of greed. These critics see entrepreneurs and business people as being out only to make a profit, and economic competition as nothing more than capitalists climbing over each other to profit from the poor. Such critics want an economic system wherein each tries to help others and provide for their needs, rather than people trying to get rich at each other’s expense—a view that lies at the root of much leftist and socialist thought today. Even many that strongly support a free market see greed as its driving force. This not only gives ammunition to the enemies of this freedom, but also mischaracterizes it altogether by reference to something that is an aspect of the system and not its central, psychological dynamic. Imagine a utopia where people are highly motivated to provide services and fulfillment to others, usually total strangers. They see this as being in their own self-interest. Many of these people also spend sixty to seventy hours a week trying to provide such services. Also imagine—unbelievable as it may seem—that in this utopia some of these people spend their life savings and borrow huge sums of money to discover or provide new things that they believe other people might want. That is, in this society the chief preoccupation of people is to satisfy the wants of others, or to determine how they might do this, and do so with the least expense to those getting the services or goods. Such an unbelievable other-directed society does seem utopian. But if we could have such a society, would it not be inherently moral? Is this not the dream of many communitarians, philosophers, and theolo-

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gians—that people spend their time, energy, and resources to provide others with what they need and want? This utopia does exist. It is the free market. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, intellectuals, writers, authors, journalists, computer programmers like Bill Gates, movie stars, business owners, financiers, stock owners, and all other individuals making up the whole population comprise the free market, as do all large and small businesses. The automobile repair shop, the computer discount house, the Italian restaurant, the Chinese laundry, the small Catholic college, the mom and pop grocery store, and so on and so on, exist to give people a particular service. If this service is unwanted or the business charges too high a price, then it goes bankrupt. Moreover, entrepreneurs are constantly trying to invent new businesses or services that will fill some need or want not yet recognized by others. If no such want exists, or its fulfillment is not worth the cost, the businesses fail. Such working and striving to satisfy others is a moral ideal. That this is the essence of the free market is unappreciated. Again consider what Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. They spent unbelievable hours of their own time learning about computers and how to program them. This they were doing out of sheer interest, not because of greed. When they had learned enough, they began to satisfy the needs of others, particularly in helping to debug mainframe computer programs, and in writing their own programs to fill needs that others had expressed. When they started Microsoft, they wanted to sell software and make money, to be sure. But to do this, they had to speculate on what kind of software would most benefit the users of computers, and they had to make an initial investment of time and resources in writing it. If they were wrong, they lost what they put into the program. If they’d struck out enough times, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt. Microsoft succeeded, however, more than anyone dreamed possible, and the simple reason for this is that Gates and Allen, and then Gates alone, saw what people needed most, and worked to satisfy that need. Years ago I wanted a good word processor to use in writing my books, and a spreadsheet program with which to do my analyses. Microsoft foresaw my need with very good software, and I bought their Word and Excel. I thereby contributed to Gates’ wealth, to be sure, but I did this freely and received in return two programs I could not write, and which have made me far more productive. Bill Gates and Microsoft are participants in a technological revolution that began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one that was really a revolution in freedom. As government loosened its stranglehold on national economies and foreign trade, as it allowed creative and en-

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terprising people to produce new things, there was a surge in new inventions, new businesses, and the earnings and wages of the poor. Before this revolution, laws tied workers to a farm or manor and forced them to live the most basic and poorest of lives. They often faced the threat of starvation if a harvest was meager, if they lost or broke their tools, or if they were dispossessed of their land by the government or feudal lords. They wore the most basic and plainest of clothes and ate the simplest and cheapest food. The revolution of freedom liberated the poor from this kind of servitude, assured them of a basic wage, and enabled them to improve their consumption. Much to the complaint of the upper classes, who saw this as “putting on airs,” the poor began to dress in better, more colorful clothes, and to eat a greater variety of foods. All of us are the inheritors of this freeing of the market and the resulting technological revolution. The automobiles people drive, the televisions they watch, the movies they see, the cell phones they answer, the planes they fly, and—exemplified by Microsoft—the computers they use, all owe their development and availability to the free market. At a more basic level, we can best see the operation of the free market in the availability of an amazing variety of cheap foods for the poor and lower middle class. An American supermarket is a cornucopia of agricultural wealth, with choices of fruits, vegetables, meats, cereals, breads, wines, and so on from many areas of the United States and countries of the world. Similarly, department and hardware stores shelve, hang, and display a wide variety of goods. To see the results of freedom, you need only shop in any of democracy’s stores. Let’s look at new inventions and innovations. Freedom promotes a continuous reduction of the cost of goods compared to the average wage, such that even the most complex and advanced products are available to the common person. An example of this is the rapid evolution of the handheld calculator. When I was a graduate student working on my M.A. thesis in 1960, I had to calculate statistics on a large Monroe mechanical desktop calculator. I had to punch the numbers into it, move some switches to do a specific calculation, and physically crank it (like starting an old car) to get the results. By computer standards today, this Monroe was painfully slow and clumsy, but it was still better than doing the arithmetic by hand. I could calculate sums, cross products, and correlations, but it took me about two months and a sore arm to do all the necessary calculations. My university paid about $1,100 for the machine then, or about $6,408 in current money. By the early 1970s, I could pick up a handheld Hewlett Packard electronic calculator that would do all these calculations and many more, such as logarithms and trigonometric functions, store one figure

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or calculation in memory, and function on a small battery. It cost about $400, or about $1,709 in today’s dollars. Now I can get such a handheld calculator for $10; paying slightly more will get me a calculator that will do much more than the obsolete Hewlett Packard. And for about $900 I now can buy a personal computer—for example an iMac with monitor, keyboard, modem, CD drive, and an internal hard disk—that has a capability undreamed of a mere decade ago and on which I could have done all the necessary calculations for my M.A. thesis in seconds, not months. This is comparable to the free market, through innovation and competition, bringing the price of a new automobile in 1960 down to the cost of a new shirt today—which makes one wonder what the price of an automobile now would be without any government regulations on its production and quality. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the Northwestern University mainframe, a central IBM computer worth tens of millions of dollars in current money. It had a memory of 36 kilobytes and filled a huge, airconditioned room with its blinking lights, spinning tapes, massive central processor, very slow printer, batch punch-card input, and bustling attendants. The whole atmosphere of computer, lights, air conditioned room, and all the rest created a feeling of almost spiritual mystery. To use this monster, I had to learn to write my own computer programs, and to change some of its functions I had to rewire part of the computer. That was in 1962 and 1963. Today I sit before a flat seventeen-inch color monitor connected to a new Macintosh G5 that has one gigabyte of memory (nearly 28,000 times the memory on the mainframe), a 28.5-gigabyte hard disk, a DVD-rewritable drive, a modem, and a color printer. The total cost of all this was about $3,500. Incredible power at an unbelievably low cost compared to what I could have bought only one human generation ago. This is the fruit of freedom. But still, while many may accept this productivity of the free market, they may believe that a command economy with the best and the brightest scientists and technicians doing the planning, and a focus on producing the most goods for the most people—on providing for the needs of all people—can be even more successful. Especially for the poor. Government is then seen as the best engine of wealth, prosperity, and equality for all. This idea has a solid grip on the minds of too many intellectuals and academics, and so in the next chapters I will describe what happened in the Soviet Union and communist China when this idea ruled each.

Chapter 13 Scarcity and Famine: Lenin’s Command Economy [I]t is necessary to . . . distribute the food provisions . . . with the view of cutting down on the number of those who are not absolutely necessary and to spur on those who are really needed. – Lenin

Communism

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his idea of a free market was the cornerstone of classical liberalism, whose bible in the eighteenth century was British philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. He argued that wealth is best created when government keeps its hands off the economy and there is free trade. This free, or laissezfaire, market is, however, only one political-economic model. The major competing model in the twentieth century was that based on the economic and historical analysis presented in Das Kapital, written by the nineteenth century German political philosopher Karl Marx. Along with Friedrich Engels, Marx established the “scientific” socialism that we now call communism. In his many works, including his influential pamphlet What Is To Be Done, Russian revolutionary and philosopher Vladimir Ilich Lenin then showed how Marx-Engel’s politico-economic theory could be put into effect—how a communist revolution could be induced and a communist nirvana achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Scholars now think his work is such a basic addition to Marxism that they make Marxism-Leninism synonymous with communism. Communism has been the most influential politico-economic theory of the twentieth century. With its claims of empirical proof and a scientific theory of history, and its utopian plan to rid the world of poverty, exploitation, economic greed, and war (all of which it claims are due to capitalism), it captured the minds of many intellectuals and workers. And through revolution, invasion, and war, these believers took over one country after another: Russia, China, Mongolia, North

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Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, East Germany, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen. This is an impressive roster indeed. The communist politico-economic model explicitly claims that while the free market will lead to the impoverishment of the worker and its own destruction, communism will create socio-economic equality and a society in which abundance will reign and provide “from each according to their ability, and to each according to their need.” This abstract model seems ideal and has misled many a compassionate person. But let’s look at what this model really meant in practice—what such a command economy in the former Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, and in communist China under Mao Tse-tung, accomplished compared to a free market.

Lenin’s Nationalization and Famine, 1920–1923 I will discuss in detail the 1917 Bolshevik (communist) coup against the Russian Kerensky government in the next chapter. Here, however, as a precursor to Stalin’s collectivization of the peasant and his intentional famine in the Ukraine described in the next section, I want to note the severe famine that Lenin created as a result of his command policies in the Soviet Union soon after he seized power. After the Red Army had won control over much of Russia, the Communist Party—in effect, the new government of the Soviet Union—issued a Decree on Land that encouraged peasants to seize large estates, thus depriving cities and towns of food. This created much local disorder, as did the Party establishing committees of peasants to “assume the responsibility for repression,” and the decree that in all small, grain-producing districts, officials should pick twenty-five to thirty “wealthy” hostages to be killed if the peasants did not deliver their “excess” grain. In practice, excess grain often turned out to be any grain—even the peasants’ reserve and seed grain was expropriated by detachments of workers ignorant of farming. The Party sent tens of thousands from the cities to uncover the peasants’ “excess,” which resulted in more disarray hardly conducive to good harvests. As Lenin himself confessed, “Practically, we took all the surplus grain—and sometimes even not only surplus grain but part of the grain the peasant required for food.” By 1920, in what was sometimes called ‘War Communism,’ thirty percent of what the peasant produced was being requisitioned. It was

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no longer necessary that Lenin requisition supplies for the Red Army’s conflict with the anticommunist White armies, which no longer posed a serious threat. Rather, Lenin’s purpose was to move from a capitalist free market to a socialist one—to a command economy, as he declared. He wanted to nationalize the peasant, although not in the total way that Stalin would do a decade later through collectivization. Nationalization and its attendant forced requisitions was Lenin’s solution to the problem of paying for peasants’ grain when funds were not available. And it prevented peasants from keeping their grain and other crops from the Party. The Party also made many new laws to assure this. It set low prices for the peasants’ produce, banned private trade, and established a system of rationing. Unlike a free market, this provided little motivation to produce—notwithstanding the likelihood of new detachments of workers coming through to expropriate or loot whatever was in a field or house. Understandably, the harvest of 1921 was only 40 percent that of 1913, before the revolution. This disastrous harvest, coupled with the loss (or consumption due to hunger) of the reserve food supplies necessary for peasants to survive periodic droughts, had human costs far beyond the hundreds of peasant rebellions it caused. In 1921, a drought that in some Russian provinces formerly would have created no more than a minor famine instead triggered one of the worst ones in modern times: over 30 million people faced starvation. Faced with a calamity that could threaten the survival of communism, the Party began providing some aid to the starving while urgently requesting international help. International relief, particularly from the United States through the American Relief Administration (ARA), was soon forthcoming. But even in the face of this historic disaster, Lenin wielded aid and food as a socialist weapon. Said Lenin, without an iota of compassion for the victims, “it is necessary to supply with food out of the state funds only those employees who are actually needed under conditions of maximum productivity of labor, and to distribute the food provisions by making the whole matter an instrumentality of politics, used with the view of cutting down on the number of those who are not 11 absolutely necessary and to spur on those who are really needed.” The Party requested foreign aid for the Russian Republic, but mentioned nothing about the counterpart famine in the Ukraine. The Party must have known as early as August of 1921 that the southern Ukraine 11 Quoted in G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (Data and Documents). Chicago: The Chicago Section of the Alexander Berkman Fund, 1940, p. 149.

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was verging on famine, but Lenin refused to allow a transfer of food from the north to the south. Indeed, the Soviets tried to feed Russia with Ukrainian grain, justifying this by exaggerating its grain production. In effect, many Ukrainians were starved to death to feed hungry ethnic Russians. The Party allowed no aid from the outside until American relief officers forced the issue, and even then the Party hindered the aid effort. Lenin was using starvation to pacify Ukrainian nationalism and defeat the many rebellions there—to crush peasant resistance, a goal that Stalin would also tackle with famine in the early 1930s. Then, in the summer of 1922, irrationally (unless one has firmly in mind the communist obsession with building socialism), the Party resumed large-scale grain exports. This, even though the Party had to starve part of the population to get the grain. But it wanted capital for industrial heavy equipment. So it asked the ARA to continue aid so that some of these people could be fed. Thus, the picture that displayed the heartlessness of communism versus the apolitical compassion of democracies: in the port of Odessa, Russians saw the SS Manitowac unloading American famine relief supplies while nearby the SS Vladimir was loading Ukrainian grain destined for Hamburg. Although there were agricultural dislocations caused by civil war, Lenin and the Communist Party were mainly responsible for some 5 million people starving to death or dying from associated diseases. The toll would have been much higher had not the ARA provided about $45 million in aid (about $474 million in 2002 dollars) to keep alive about 12 10 million people. But this was not yet the worst that the Russian people would suffer. That would be the fruit of Stalin’s tyranny.

12 For the overall toll of mass murder during the civil war and deaths from this manmade famine amounting to murder, see the estimates, calculations, and sources in Table 2A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990). The table is also on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB2A.GIF. For other tables and a summary chapter of the book, see: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

Chapter 14 Scarcity and Famine: Stalin’s Command Economy You [Party activists] must find the grain . . . . It is a challenge to the last shred of your initiative and to your Chekist spirit . . . . Comrade Stalin expects it of you. –Hatayevich (Central Committee member)

Collectivization, 1929–1935

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fter Lenin’s death from a stroke in 1924, there was a struggle for Party rule between Leon Trotsky, commissar for war and Lenin’s heir apparent, and Josef Stalin, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Party. By 1928 Stalin had won the battle and had full control over the Red Army, secret police, and communist cadre. He could now carry out his plans to fully socialize what was now known as the Soviet Union. He especially intended to go much further than Lenin had dared go with the peasants, and nationalize—without compensation—independent farms, their livestock, and land, and consolidate them all into huge farm factories run by the Party. Each farmer was to become an employee earning a daily wage for his work. It was to be total collectivization of the peasantry. Theoretically, the idea has a certain appeal: turn “inefficient” small plots on which farmers could not use modern farming equipment (equipment they also could not afford) into large, factory-like farms, each with its own tractors, each efficiently allocating farmers to specialized tasks. Of course, this required persuading farmers to give up their land, livestock, tools, and often their homes to the communes, and to become workers with regular wages, hours, and tasks. The peasants resisted, of course. They killed their animals rather than give them up, burned down their homes, fled to the cities, shot at the troops who came to enforce the Party’s commands, and committed suicide. This Peasant War destroyed and depopulated whole villages. Even nomadic herdsmen were not exempt, as Stalin decreed that the Party also must settle them into communes, and collectivize their wan-

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dering herds. By March 1, 1930, 14,264,300 peasant holdings had been collectivized throughout the Soviet Union. As it turned out, once they “voluntarily” turned all they owned over to a collective farm, the peasants found it more like a penal colony. Party functionaries in Moscow commanded commune work and activity, usually from thousands of miles away. They regimented the life and daily routine of each commune member, although they knew nothing of local conditions and farming. Peasants, now commune “workers,” had to obey orders without question, or communist agents, spies, or their supervisors would report them. In words that a peasant living under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia could have uttered, Myron Dolot pointed out: We were always suspected of treason. Even sadness or happiness were causes for suspicion. Sadness was thought of as an indication of dissatisfaction with our life, while happiness, regardless of how sporadic, spontaneous, or fleeting, was considered to be a dangerous phenomenon that could destroy the devotion to the communist cause. You had to be cautious about the display of feelings at all times, and in every place. We were all made to understand that we would be allowed to live only as long as we followed the Party 13 line, both in our private and social lives. This Peasant War was the largest and most deadly war fought between World Wars I and II. The Party fought the war by “persuading” peasants to “voluntarily” join the communes using lies, false promises, peer pressure, coercion, and finally naked force. A massive, coordinated propaganda barrage extolled the manifold virtues of collectivization and condemned those “rich” peasants—or kulaks—who were systematically and selfishly sabotaging this humanitarian Party effort to spread the benefits of communism to the poor peasant. Stalin also formally declared war on kulaks. Party activists and even everyday workers became convinced that these kulaks were wholly responsible for the resistance to collectivization and its associ13 Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust. New York: W. W. Noton & Co., 1985, p. 92.

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ated violence. Party officials throughout the Soviet Union spewed hate propaganda and consistently harangued activists on kulak evil-doing. Whipped into a frenzy of hostility, activists and cadres who were sent out to the countryside in waves of collectivization unleashed their pentup rage on any assumed kulaks. The kulaks were not only scapegoats, they were the focus of attack. Stalin pursued collectivization through a campaign to eliminate the kulaks as a class, and decreed the liquidation of all kulaks and their families, even extended families. This meant execution for many, or slow death in labor camps for many more. Others were barely more fortunate to be deported to forced settlements in remote regions like Siberia, which in some ways were worse than camps. Kulaks were regarded more as vermin than people. This kind of scapegoating, deception, propaganda, and use of naked force is intrinsic to a command economy. To command an economy means just that, to use commands that subjects absolutely must obey— or else face prison, camp, or death—to get done what is planned. Since human beings have their own interests and are unwilling to be used as the bricks and mortar to construct a utopia, they have to be persuaded or pushed, and as communist cadres everywhere have seemed to say, “If some die in the process, so be it—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” In actuality, those liquidated “kulaks” were mainly the peasants who had been more successful farmers—they owned fatter cows, they built better houses or barns, and they earned more than their neighbors. They were not the rich (the average kulak earned less than the average factory worker, or the rural official persecuting him), or the exploiting landlord. They were simply the best farmers. And they paid for their success. The Peasant War consumed their lives and the country. Speaking with Churchill during a World War II summit, Stalin admitted that this Peasant War was worse than that against the Nazis; it “was a terrible struggle . . . . It was fearful.” After saying that he had to deal with 10 million kulaks, Stalin claimed that “the great bulk was very unpopular and was wiped out by their laborers.” Stalin’s estimate was not far off. From 1929 to 1935, the Party deported to labor camps or resettlements, usually to a slow death, possibly 10 million, maybe even 15 million “kulaks” and their families. Even infants and children, and the old and infirm. Apparently even they stood in the way of progress, of Stalin’s collectivization. The cost in lives? The Soviets themselves admitted that their collectivization and dekulakization campaigns might have killed 5 million to 10 million

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peasants. This was mass murder, a hidden Holocaust that few in the world outside the former Soviet Union know about. All to apply an untested, theoretical economic model of a command economy—MarxismLeninism. And did collectivization work? No, this greatest of experiments in scientific, social engineering utterly failed. It denied the laws of economics and human nature, of the free market; and so, the communes never did produce enough food for even the Soviet table. The Party had to resort to massive food imports and to giving the communes some freedom, but to no avail. Stalin helped agricultural productivity most when he permitted peasants, during their time off, to plant food on a little plot of land the Party gave them near their collective. As one might expect, these little plots became highly productive, and eventually accounted for most of the food produced in the Soviet Union, strongly vindicating the free market model.

Famine by Design, 1932–1933 Incredibly, the horror of collectivization was only the beginning. The Peasant War and the resulting communes totally disrupted the agricultural economy. By 1932, famine again threatened, but there was the Peasant War, and the Party could not give aid to the enemy. In fact, Stalin saw the famine as positive—it would encourage peasants to join the collectives, particularly if that were their only source of food. But Stalin perceived another potential benefit from a famine. He could use it to squash Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainians, even top communists, were becoming more assertive about strictly-Ukrainian interests: music, language, literature, and interest in Ukrainian history were undergoing a renaissance. Stalin could not allow this to continue, since Ukrainian nationalism, at the heart of which was the peasant, was inherently an opposing force to communism. Destroy the Ukrainian peasant, and Russian immigration into the Ukraine and collectivization would easily follow. So in 1932, Stalin launched a new and differently fought assault in the Peasant War by ordering an impossible grain delivery target of 7.7 million tons out of a Ukrainian harvest already reduced by a third from 14 For the overall toll of collectivization, see the estimates, calculations, and sources in Table 4A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990). The table is also on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB4A.GIF. For other tables and a summary chapter of the book, see: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

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that of 1930. After much argument, Ukrainian officials got this reduced to 6.6 million tons, but when the Party apportioned quotas among the villages, said one survivor, “Our village was given a quota that it couldn’t have fulfilled in ten years!” In effect, the quotas were a sentence to death by starvation for Ukrainian peasant families. Stalin’s war strategy on this front was simple yet imperial in scope: force the unwilling peasants into communes, while also destroying the spiritual resources and cultural achievements that supported their nationalism. Although collecting and exporting more grain than ever, the Party showed the starving peasants no mercy. It took even warm baked bread off the peasants’ tables. It marshaled detachments of workers and activists to seize every last bit of produce or grain, including the seed grain needed for planting. They went through peasant homes with rods, pushing them into walls and ceilings, seeking hidden stores of food or grain; they dug up or poked around yards with rods, searching for hidden food; they brought in special animals to sniff out the food, much as trained dogs now sniff for drugs in travelers’ suitcases. To the Party officials and activists, peasants had to have food hidden somewhere, since they were still alive. To survive, the peasants ate roots; they boiled bark and the soles of their boots for the broth. But at each grasp for food, the authorities stepped on their hands. When the peasants started eating their dogs and cats, the Party ordered village officials to bag a “certain quota of dog and cat skins,” and they went through the village shooting these animals. When the peasants tried to eat birds and their eggs, communist activists organized systematic bird hunts, shooting birds out of the trees with shotguns. Finally, the peasants ate horse manure; they fought over it, sometimes finding whole grains in it. Emaciated, enfeebled, near the end they sometimes ate their own children and those of their neighbors that they could kidnap—as North Koreans have during their communist-made famine. The Party left the peasants with nothing. It ordered the military and police to seal Ukrainian borders to block the import of food. It blacklisted some villages with especially stubborn peasants, totally isolating them from the outside, and it forbade the sale of any food or other products—even soap. The starving peasants died by the millions in the winter of 1932–33. Stalin prevented any aid until he was sure that the Ukraine would no longer resist collectivization or be a threat to communism. About eighteen months of famine did it. With whole villages lifeless, highways and fields dotted with the dead, the survivors too weak to work, with the Ukraine prostrate and even workers in the cities now threatened, Stalin

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ended quotas in March 1933; in April some army grain reserves were released for distribution to the dying peasants. The result? The Ukraine was like a huge Nazi death camp, with about a fourth of all peasants dead or dying, and the rest so weak and debilitated that they were unable to bury the dead. On Stalin’s orders, about 5 million Ukrainians had been murdered through starvation, 20 to 25 percent of the Ukrainian farm population. Another 2 million probably starved to death elsewhere; 1 million died in the North Caucasus alone. While Stalin intended the Ukrainian deaths, those elsewhere were the unintended by-products of the war on the peasants— collectivization. Still, the Party did learn a little from this famine. It loosened its controls and, as mentioned, allowed the peasants to operate small, free market plots. But this was not enough to prevent famines. There were some local famines in the next decade, and another major one occurred in the Ukraine and Byelorussia from 1946 to 1947. This time only 500,000 to 1 million people starved to death. Regardless of these famines, no matter the costs of collectivization, some Western intellectuals claimed that the communist-induced, rapid industrialization had brought a better life to the average citizen. It’s hard to believe now, but there were Western books and articles extolling Soviet progress, and pointing to this as the wave of the future that all our politico-economic systems should emulate. One such work, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, was written by the English socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb during the worst of the collectivization and the Ukrainian famine. Even years later, when details of the cost of Soviet communism and the famine and the nature of the Party’s dictatorship were much better known, they would write that the country was a “full-fledged democracy.” And the very influential British playwright and socialist George Bernard Shaw called the Soviet Union “a really free country.” In the eyes of these writers, the Soviets now had national health care, guaranteed housing, social security, no unemployment, and a “democratic government” that marshaled all society’s resources to create a better future, unlike the dictatorship of the rich in the West where greedy capitalists climbed over each other to impoverish the worker. This stuff could only have been written by utterly ignoring the reality of Stalin’s mass murder, his enslavement of his people, and his famines. It is as though these Western supporters had visited a Nazi concentration camp and emerged claiming that the camp’s government guaranteed that their subjects would have food, work, a place to live, and the democratic right to elect the head of their barracks.

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Even some thirty years after Stalin’s death in 1953, even after some seventy years of Party command over the economy, even after life in the Soviet Union had markedly improved since the collectivization and famine years of the early 1930s, the Soviet citizen hardly lived better than in czarist times. As is typical of communist countries, shopping in Soviet cities was often a long hassle, with days spent just to find toilet paper, sausages, or shoes. To buy scarce goods, people waited in line to be given a ticket to buy an item, waited in line to pick up the item, and waited in yet a third line to pay for it. The communist elite were too important to waste such time and deserved better, to be sure; they had their own restaurants, their own stores in which to buy the best goods, their chauffeured cars, and their Party-owned villas or retreats. On the rise was one of the best indicators of public health, infant mortality; it was not decreasing, as it does in all free market democracies. Such was the result of a command economy.

Chapter 15 Scarcity and Famine: Mao’s Command Economy [The famine] resulted mainly from the massive intervention of ignorant zealots in the agricultural process and from the tendency of the Central Plan itself to become an inexorable trap. – Miriam and Ivan D. London and Lee Ta-ling

Murder of Traditional Agriculture: Land Reform

“W

ell,” some with a sense of Russia’s long history under the czars might say, “this really is Russia, and you know the Russians; they are barbarians compared to Western Europeans.” Then consider a country that is far different culturally, one whose people have a reputation for intelligence and industriousness. In 1949, the Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung won the Civil War against the Nationalist government, and gained control over mainland China. Immediately, Mao moved to consolidate and centralize power, destroy any source of opposition, and make communist authority supreme throughout the land. Acceptance, if not outright loyalty, had to be assured to apply the communist economic model, especially among the mass of peasants. With actual or potential resistance liquidated, Mao then could command nationalization, collectivization, and forced industrialization. In hammering out this transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,” Mao and his henchmen in the Party murdered many millions of Chinese, sent them to forced labor camps to die, or caused them to commit suicide. Often, simply being a more prosperous peasant, a simple businessman, a minor member of the former government, a humble priest, or a Westerner’s friend was enough to merit such a fate. Any resistance to the Party or criticism of Mao or communism was reason for a bullet in the back of the head. This terrorism soon reached into the smallest villages and farthest reaches of China. This preparatory softening up and totalization of Chinese society took almost four years. It involved many movements and campaigns,

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each an effort by the new rulers to define specific goals and identify enemies, to name these and assign suitable tactics and perhaps quotas to the lowest cadres, and to mobilize the masses through slogans, giant mass meetings, required political and orientation sessions, and often outright incitement to violence against the class enemy. Some of these movements were meant to improve economic growth or social welfare, such as the “Increase Production and Thrift,” “Patriotic Cleanliness and Health,” and “Elimination of Illiteracy” movements. Perhaps the best known of these movements was that of “Land Reform.” China was and still is a land of farming villages. Traditionally, much power in the village rested with the gentry and the relatively rich landowners. They were a largely independent power base, historically moderating between the peasants and the local and central governments. This was not a feudal, peasant-landlord class system as had existed in Europe. The Chinese peasant was independent and often owned his own small piece of land. Acting through the Party’s organization, officials, and cadre, the method Mao used to destroy this free agricultural market was simple: make the peasants hate their landlords and the “rich” and then give him their land and wealth. If the Party also could incite the peasant to kill or participate in killing the landlord, he would support the Party out of fear of revenge or of losing his new land. Therefore the Party’s directive to cadres: Adopt every possible measure to rouse the hatred of the people and excite them into frenzy and hysterical animosity against the landlords. The high-ranking cadres responsible for the Land Reform Movement must not hesitate to allow the Land Reform Squads a free hand in exe15 cuting landlords . . . . The technique was for a group of activists to occupy a village, and then within a few days to select the victims and arrange a “trial.” The cadre would then haul the victims out of their beds at night, beat, humiliate, insult, and spit upon them, and eventually bring them before a table at which sat a “tribunal” composed of Party activists, one or two local sympathizers and, if possible, someone with some judicial experience to lend legal color to the proceedings. Then there would be the 15 Quoted in Ching-wen Chow, Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Communist Regime in China. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winsten, 1960, p. 101.

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“jury,” a crowd of local peasants whom the activists had already aroused against the victims. Fear conjured manufactured hatred on peasant faces—the cadre was watching them for compassion for the victims or lack of enthusiasm for the proceedings. Amid cries of “enemy of the people,” or “counter-revolutionary jackal,” or “imperialist lackey,” the cadre would force the victim to face his “jury” with his hands tied and, with prompting from the “tribunal,” recite his crimes against the revolution. Then a member of the “tribunal” would say that the victim’s punishment should be death, at which the coached “jury” would shout, “Death!” Then the cadre would immediately shoot the victim, or wait until after he’d dug his own grave. The Party officially ended “Land Reform” in 1953. According to the Party, the movement affected around 480 million of about 500 million peasants; almost 114 million acres forcibly changed hands. Under this guise of redistributing land to the peasants, the party destroyed the power base of the gentry and rich peasants, and got the acquiescence, if not the support, of the poorer peasants. How many landowners and their relations the Party murdered or caused to commit suicide in this vast and bloody campaign, we can never know. A reasonably conservative figure is that about 4.5 million landlords and relatively rich and better-off peasants were murdered. As fantastic as this human toll may seem, the words of the highest Party rulers give it credibility. In official 1948 study materials about “agrarian reform,” for example, Mao instructed cadres that “one-tenth of the peasants [about 50 million] would have to be destroyed.” This would have to be “30 million landlords and rich peasants” according to a speech in the 16 same year by Jen Pi-shih, a Party Central Committee member.”

Collectivization: the Commune With power now tightly centralized, society totally under control, and all possible countervailing forces destroyed or weakened, and now with a true command economy to work with (and having learned nothing from Stalin’s horrible agricultural debacle), Mao put collectivization into effect. After some preliminary collectivization of the peasants into cooperatives, in April of 1958 Mao began the forced collectiviza16 For a breakdown of China’s democide by period, see Table II.A of my China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991). The table is also on my website in two parts at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.1.GIF and www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.2.GIF. For other tables and a summary chapter of the book, see: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM

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tion of peasants into communes with the establishment of the Sputnik commune in Honan Province. With unintentional irony, Beijing’s China Youth News described what it was like to live in this commune: At dawn the bugles sound and whistles blow to gather the population of the commune . . . . A quarter of an hour later the peasants are drawn up in a line. At the orders of their brigade and company commanders they now move off in military step to the fields, carrying their banners. Here you no longer see the small groups of peasants, two or three at a time, smoking and making their way leisurely to the fields. Instead you hear the measured tramp of many feet and the sound of marching songs. The age-old habit of living haphazardly has now disappeared forever with the Chinese peasants. What an enormous change! In order to adapt itself better for modern life and collective labor the commune has launched a movement for the shifting and reunification of the villages. The peasants now move together in groups to spots nearer to their place of work. What an astonishing change! From the days of antiquity the peasants have regarded the home as their most precious possession, handed down to them by their ancestors. But now that the little patches of land, the small houses and the livestock have become the property of the commune, and now that the bonds which attached the peasants to their villages have been severed so that there is nothing left of their former home which they could still desire, they feel at peace. Now they say: “The place where we live doesn’t matter to us; we are at 17 home anywhere.” 17 Quoted in Suzanne Labin, The Anthill: The Human Condition In Communist China. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. New York: Praeger, 1960, p. 101.

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The “success” of this “model” commune, so the Party reported, led to a “spontaneous demand” by the peasants throughout China for communes of their own. Acceding to this, the Party ordered communes set up everywhere. Then the newly acquired land, and all else the peasants owned, such as farming tools of all sizes and types, and even houses, became the property of the communes. Virtually all that hundreds of millions of peasants owned was nationalized in one titanic gulp. By the end of 1958, the Party had organized into 26,000 communes over ninety percent of the population—about 450 million Chinese. The peasants were now the property of the commune, to labor like a factory workers in teams and brigades at whatever the Party commanded, to eat in common mess halls, and often to sleep together in barracks. In an instant, for about one-seventh of humanity, Mao had destroyed family lives, traditions, personal property, privacy, personal initiative, and individual freedom. Mao and Party functionaries now dictated every condition of peasant lives, truly creating a command agricultural economy. Mao still found time for even more movements to remove any possible critics or opponents to Party policies and ideology. One example was the “Anti-Rightist” Movement, which was notable for assigning quotas. Mao gave educational institutions, from primary and middle schools to technical schools and universities, quotas of between five and ten percent of their staffs to be delivered to the state as “rightists.” Those selected would then be imprisoned, tortured, and possibly executed. And because the quotas for rightists were often higher than institutions had legitimately qualified rightists to fill, rightists had to be invented. To understand this system is to know that some institutions would enthusiastically overfill their quotas.

Great Leap Downward But the Anti-Rightist Movement was a diversion from the main line. Even as Mao was displaying the first model commune and planning to modernize agriculture, he was also undertaking to catch up with the West in industrialization, particularly with Great Britain in steel production. Indeed, Mao considered collectivization and industrialization the two legs of China’s socialism, necessary for China’s “walking on two legs,” as he put it. Beginning in May 1958, slogans, exhortations, and drum-beating mass meetings mobilized the whole country in a “Great Leap Forward.” The Party hastily built workshops and factories—reportedly half a million in Hopei Province alone, in less than two months. It erected iron

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smelters throughout the countryside—1 million by October, involving 100 million Chinese. It ordered the communes, and “encouraged” millions of urban families to contribute pots, pans, cutlery, and other iron and steel possessions for smelting. Peasants had to work day and night, fourteen or sixteen hours or more, on these projects. Production statistics zoomed, but top Party officials soon realized that local authorities had falsified the statistics. What factories and workshops produced was often worthless junk; much of the iron produced in backyard furnaces was impure and unusable slag. All of this demolished Chinese living conditions. In a pre-1937 survey of 2,727 households in 136 different areas of China, an adult male consumed an average 3,795 calories a day. In 1956, official sources reported the daily individual food consumption as less than 2,400 calories—an astounding 37 percent drop. In 1957, according to official statistics, rice production was 82 million tons. This reduced to 340 grams (12 ounces) per person per day, and considering the better rations of officials, soldiers, and agents, the ordinary person got less than 320 grams, as refugees reported, or under half the normal daily calories needed. Although there were nearly 150 million fewer people in 1936, the rice production then was about the same as in 1957. Predictably, in 1956 and 1957 there was famine in certain districts. Then there were the many Chinese the Party murdered during this collectivization period. As best as we can estimate, the collectivization and the “Great Leap Forward,” as well as the campaigns against “rightists,” probably cost an additional 5,550,000 Chinese lives.

The World’s Greatest Famine Ever This was not all this economic model, supposedly vastly superior to the free market, cost the Chinese people. The worst was yet to come. The effects of collectivization and the “Great Leap” were disastrous. Already in 1959, the negative effects on public welfare evident in previous years were multiplying. For example, Honan Peasant’s Daily, a provincial newspaper, disclosed that many peasants died from overwork or malnutrition that summer. During two summer weeks, 367,000 collapsed and 29,000 died in the fields. Other papers revealed that over a similar period, 7,000 died in Kiangsi, 8,000 in Kiansu, and 13,000 in Chekiang.18 18 Valentin Chu, Ta Ta, Tan Tan: The Inside Story Of Communist China. New York: W. W. Norton, 1963, p. 74.

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Trapped by these conditions, with the Party forbidding peasants from leaving their commune or workplace, they could only rebel. From 1959 to 1960, peasants rose up in arms in at least five of China’s provinces, in rebellions that the military could not subdue for over a year. Reports from Honan and Shantung stated that “members of the militia stole weapons, set up roadblocks, seized stocks of grain, and engaged in widespread armed robbery.” In 1959, rebellions took place over a large area in Chinghai, Kansu, and Schechwan; during the same year Chinese, Hui, and Uighur forced laborers rebelled together and destroyed trucks, mines, bridges, and tunnels. All this was part of the buildup to the worst famine in world history. According to the demographer John Aird in a U.S. Bureau of the Census study, during the late 1950s and early 1960s possibly as many as 40 million people starved to death. However, the demographer Ansley Coale, using official Chinese data and adjusting for underreporting of vital statistics, concluded that 27 million died. More recent research now suggests that the toll was 30 million Chinese. As a comparison to this massive mountain of dead, it’s as though every person residing in Texas and Virginia in 2002 starved to death. This famine was largely the result of failed communist policies and the grandest, most ambitious, most destructive social engineering project ever: the total communization and nationalization of an agriculture system involving over half a billion human beings, its reduction to military-like central planning and administration, and the vast and hurried “Great Leap Forward.” A wide-scale drought affected 41 percent of the farmland in 1959, and 56 percent from 1960 to 1961. This doubtlessly triggered the Great Famine. It might have caused a million or so deaths, had it happened in the 1930s under the corrupt Nationalist regime. But now the agricultural system was in such disarray and social policies were so counterproductive that the greatest of all famines was inevitable. Famine added to privation was enough for some people. More so than in 1959 and 1960, peasants resorted to armed rebellion. During 1961 and the following year in southern China, there was continuous guerrilla warfare, and Fukien Province, across from Taiwan, also saw a serious armed uprising. Colonel Chung, a former army officer, led some 8,000 peasants to attack the militia and loot granaries in Wuhua. Official sources admit that, during 1961 alone, resistance included 146,852 granary raids, 94,532 arsons, and 3,738 revolts. In addition, according to General Hsieh Fu-chih, the minister of security, there were 1,235 assassinations of party and administrative cadres. As with the Soviet Union, many Western intellectuals were under the spell of Chinese communism, and particularly that of Mao, and ar-

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gued that he had greatly improved the lot of the average Chinese. Here also, if we ignore all the mass murder, total deprivation of freedom, and resulting Great Famine, we still must find these arguments naïve or illinformed. Life for the city dweller was better under the previous fascist Nationalist regime than under the communists. After more than twenty years of communism, the average Chinese standard of living had fallen below what it was before the Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937. Need I say more about the consequences for human life of a command economy versus a free market? Yes, and that is to make explicit that there never has been a famine in a democratic nation. Never.

Chapter 16 Democracy Means No Famine Ever . . . famines do not occur in democracies.

– Amartya Sen

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o further prove that to deny people freedom is to produce an economy of scarcity, famine, and death, note the wide-scale famines that communist parties also have made elsewhere. In Chapter 1, I mentioned the famine in communist North Korea and the Party’s bankrupting of the country. In an entirely different part of the world, communist Ethiopia put in place controls over agricultural production in the 1980s, and 1 million Ethiopians starved to death or died from connected diseases—this is out of a population of 33.5 million people, which made this famine nearly as large as China’s, proportionally. These empirical economic experiments with an alternative theoretical model to the free market, this incredibly bloody rebuilding of whole societies and cultures to match utopian plans, this forced fitting of people into one job or another, and this effort to do better by dictator’s command what free people can do for themselves has totally failed. Think of the marketplace in any liberal democracy compared to the shortages, long lines, limited choices, massive famines, and bloody repression that prevailed in these command economies. Better yet, just think of the success of Gates and Microsoft. There is a joke Eastern Europeans made about the command economy when they lived under communism: were a communist country to take over the great Sahara Desert, we would hear nothing for ten years, after which there would be a shortage of sand. Famines have also happened in authoritarian and fascist nations, although they were not even close in deaths to those under communism. By contrast, no democratically free people have ever had a famine. None. This is so important that I will put an even sharper point on it. By the very nature of freedom, a free people are immune to one of humanity’s worst disasters, a famine.

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This can be seen in Table 16.1. This is not because nature is kinder to democracies. Note, for example, that in 1931 the worst drought ever to hit the United States began in the Midwestern and southern plains states and centered on Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. By 1934 the drought had spread to twenty-seven states and covered over 75 percent of the country. Without rain, farmlands that had been over-plowed and over-grazed became powder dry, resulting in huge dust storms called “black blizzards.” Drought took out of cultivation about 35 million acres of farmland, and dust storms were removing topsoil from 225 million acres more. In 1935 alone, 850 million tons of topsoil probably blew off the southern plains. As the drought and dust storms continued year after year, whole farm families fled in caravans, wagons and carts piled high with belongings, leaving behind vacant homes and farm machinery partly buried in dusty soil. Through a variety of relief, cultivation, and conservation projects and programs, Congress and the Roosevelt Administration acted to help farmers survive the drought, saving what land, crops, and livestock they could. Finally, in 1939, the rains came and the drought was over. While even lesser droughts had caused many tens of millions to starve to death where governments forbade a free market, I could not find a reference to even one American starving to death during the Dust Bowl. Some Americans did die of suffocation in the dust storms, however, and some died of related diseases. The worst famine to hit a European country in the last two centuries was the Irish famine from 1845 to 1849, which is sometimes blamed on a free market. A fungus attacked and destroyed the potato, the major 19 The list of countries with famines and the death toll is on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF4.TAB4.3A.GIF

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crop of Ireland’s peasants, causing massive famine throughout the country and the death of perhaps 1 million people, almost 13 percent of the population. Now, Great Britain had united Ireland with her by the 1801 Act of Union, and before that had ruled Ireland as, in effect, a colony. Over the previous centuries the British had tightly controlled the development of the Irish economy through many repressive laws, such as those inhibiting world and British trade with Ireland. In particular, various British governments were intent on suppressing Roman Catholicism, the religion of virtually all Irish peasants. Dating from 1695 and not fully repealed until 1829, laws to this end had a disastrous effect on Ireland’s agriculture. For example, the British forbade Irish Catholics to receive an education, engage in trade or commerce, vote, buy land, lease land, rent land above a certain worth, reap any profit from land greater than a third of their rent, and own a horse worth more than a certain value. This code so distorted Ireland’s agricultural system, so impoverished the peasants, and made them so dependent on their landlords that any natural disaster wiping out their crops could only mean a major famine. Moreover, because of limits on the franchise, the secret ballot, and the manner of representation and legislative voting, Great Britain was not even an electoral democracy at the time of the famine. It did not become a democracy until it democratized its electoral system later in the century. But there is even more to freedom than just avoiding disaster. It is no accident that democratically free people are the most economically advanced, technologically developed, and wealthiest in the world, as shown in Figures 11.1 and 11.2 of Chapter 11. Nor is it by chance that the poorest nations are those in which their dictators allow no or little open economic competition, prevent people from buying and selling goods freely, and encourage bribes of government bureaucrats or their relatives. Then look at the economic miracles in Germany and Japan. The Allied bombing of these countries in World War II thoroughly destroyed their economies and infrastructures. Germany and Japan also had to absorb millions of returning soldiers and civilians, which for West Germany alone was about 8 million ethnic and Reich Germans, most homeless and hungry. How did these countries recover as fast as they did, going from being among the most devastated of nations in 1945 to being among the most economically powerful states in the early 1990s? In each case, it was the effects of freedom, particularly a free market. Of course, when the Allies occupied these countries after the war, they provided aid to relieve starvation, but this would have been only a

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short run solution had they not also broken up monopolistic government-big business cartels, encouraged private enterprise, freed the marketplace of many government controls, assured the rule of law, and democratized the political systems. It is to the credit of the Japanese and West German postwar leaders that when given their nation’s independence, they maintained and enhanced their people’s democratic freedom. Both Japan and Germany are now liberal democracies. For further proof, note the rapid economic growth and modernization of now-democratic South Korea. A good measure of this growth is in its annual total of goods and services, or gross domestic product. This averaged a growth rate of 5.3 percent annually, 1950 to 1985, despite the devastating Korean War during the first three years. For the world as a whole, the average was less than half that, or 2.3 percent. In 1998, South Korea’s growth rate was even higher at 6.8 percent, and it is now becoming a close competitor to Japan. Compare this to North Korea, with the same ethnicity, culture, and traditions, and with a more developed industrial base before the communist takeover. While the southern half of Korea is prospering, the north under a command economy is bankrupt and economically ravaged, with its people suffering under a severe famine and dying in the millions. There is also the example of now-democratic Taiwan, whose economy from 1950 to 1985 grew at a rate of 7 percent, leveling off in 1998 to 4.8 percent. Taiwan now is among the industrially developed nations. Then there is the “Asian tiger” that is Singapore, whose authoritarian government has allowed the market to be free; it has become an economic jewel of southeast Asia. From 1950 to 1985 it grew at an average annual rate of 7.9 percent, making it then the economically fastest growing country in the world. Hong Kong, formerly under British colonial rule, was another free market, economic jewel; since communist China took it over from Britain by treaty in 1997, it remains to be seen how long this will last. Located on a series of small islands and a small strip of mainland China, it comprises only 397 square miles. In 1945 it had a population of fewer than 600,000, but through natural population growth and by absorbing millions of refugees fleeing communist China, its population swelled to over 6 million. Despite the many people on this small bit of land, there was little unemployment; it had a bustling, productive, and continually growing economy, and an annual growth rate of 6.9 percent up to 1997, which was only slightly behind Singapore and Taiwan at the time. Now compare the results of the freedom in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong to what happened in mainland China when

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Mao deprived its people of any freedom: total economic disaster, rebellions, economic retrogression, and tens of millions of people starving to death. With the death of Mao in 1976, the new Party dictators began to liberalize its economy and introduced a semi-controlled free market in many areas of the country, as described in Chapter 1. Total Party control had so devastated the economy that once the Party lifted many of its controls, China’s economy leaped forward at or near a double-digit rate. In 1998, it was growing at 7.8 percent. The Chinese people are rebuilding their cities, a new class of Chinese investors and businesspeople is competing with businesses from abroad, and for the first time in decades, the Chinese now have plenty of food. The signs of economic vigor and growth now astound a visitor returning to China after thirty years’ absence. Of course, I have only given examples here and not a systematic analysis of the consequences of freedom for all nations. That has been 20 done elsewhere and proves in general what the above examples show: the evidence overwhelmingly supports freedom as a means to the economic betterment of society and the fulfillment of human needs. Quite simply, freedom produces wealth and prosperity. These are moral goods of freedom, a moral reason for people to be free. Part 1 established that people have an inherently moral right to be free, regardless of the consequences of freedom—its utility. Now we can say that freedom does have very desirable, moral consequences for humanity: wealth and prosperity. We have known for nearly two centuries this result of freedom, and its teaching by classical liberals of previous centuries did much to free Western economies from the heavy hand of government regulation and control. This may be the most important moral good of freedom, but it’s not the only one. Freedom has yet other moral goods, and of these not many people are aware.

20 See the appendix at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM

PART 4 On Freedom’s Moral Goods: Minimizing Political Violence

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he daily news always seems to be about internal (or domestic) political violence somewhere in the world. People are constantly trying to replace their ruler by violence, revolt against their government, rebel against some government policy, or fight a civil war to achieve independence. In July of 2000, these violent political confrontations were occurring in about forty nations. I’ve briefly discussed the civil wars in Sudan and Burma, Somalia’s clan wars, the Civil War in Russia after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, and the numerous rebellions against Mao’s collectivization and “Great Leap Forward.” The question naturally follows: why do human beings constantly kill each other in this way? Before answering this, I want to provide an understanding of how violent this internal political conflict can be. Readers may not realize that such violence has been more destructive of human lives than international war. The probability of a person being killed in an international war is less than that of dying in a revolution, guerrilla warfare, rebellion, civil war, or riots. This is not even taking into consideration government democide—genocide and mass murder—such as that of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, which itself has totaled more dead than all internal and international wars together. That is so important that I will devote the whole of Part 5 to it. China has lost tens of millions of people in her own civil wars—her Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century alone might have killed as many as 40 million Chinese, and the Chinese Civil War between the Nationalist government and the communists left almost 2 21 million battle dead.

21 For the sources, estimates, and calculations, see Table 1.A of my China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991) and on my website at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TAB1.A.GIF

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Of the twelve wars the United States has fought, including World 22 War II, none killed more Americans than died in its Civil War. In Chapter 17, we’ll look at the Mexican Revolution, which killed many times the number that died in the American Civil War. In the next chapter I try to untangle the many threads of the Russian Revolution and Civil War, one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century. This close look at the Mexican and Russian revolutions should show why people who share citizenship can kill each other on such a massive scale. The explanation for their excessive violence and that in other nations? Their undemocratic governments’ suppression of their people’s freedom. We’ll examine that in detail in Chapter 19.

22 For the Federal armies in the American Civil War 359,528 were killed in combat or otherwise died; for the Confederate forces the number was about 258,000 dead. The total dead in the war was near 617,528.

Chapter 17 The Mexican Revolution Said a Valle Nacional police officer of Mexican forced laborers: “They die; they all die. The bosses never let them go until they’re dying.” – John K. Turner

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he roots of Mexico’s revolution lie in the rule of Porfirio Díaz, a former general who in 1876 rebelled against President Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada and seized power. Mexicans later elected him to the presidency and, except for one term, consistently reelected him, sometimes without opposition, until revolutionaries forced his exile in May of 1911. While Mexico therefore had elections, they usually were a façade. Competition for office was not free and open, political opponents were assassinated, and the fear of government officials and their supporters limited political speech. Díaz tried to conciliate various groups, such as the Catholic Church, landed interests, and big business, and he was particularly committed to the economic growth of Mexico. He promoted foreign investments and ownership, eased the transfer of public lands to private hands, and helped concentrate the ownership of land for more efficient usage. He caused some one million families to lose their land, including the ancestral lands of some 5,000 Indian communities. By 1910, when the revolution broke out, fewer than 3,000 families owned almost all of Mexico’s inhabitable land, with over 95 percent of the rural population owning no land at all. Nearly half of these landless lived on large, privately owned farming or ranching estates or plantations, called haciendas. These sprawled across much of Mexico, containing about 80 percent of the rural communities. Some were huge; one was so large that a train took a day to cross its six million acres. Deprived of their land, impoverished and unemployed, the mass of Indians and peons (the unskilled laborers or farm workers of Latin America), were a huge pool for authorities and landowners to exploit. And so they did. Under Díaz, profiteering police and government officials protected greedy landowners and pitiless labor contractors. This

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enabled the venal, corrupt, and ruthless to ensnare Indians and peons in a nationwide system of chattel slavery and indebted labor. One of the main methods used to enslave peons on haciendas was to advance them money. While it was usually a small amount, the peon found it almost impossible to repay. His wages were abysmal because of the ready availability of impoverished peons in the countryside, and living costs were, by hacienda contrivance, high. For example, a peon usually could buy his necessities only at the company store, since he was paid in coupons or metal disks that only the company store would accept. Running away from this forced labor was not an option. If he did, the police would search for him, usually catch him, and return him to the hacienda. Then, as a lesson to others, he would be whipped publicly, sometimes even to death. Moreover, debt was by law inherited— passed down to a peon’s sons on his death—so his sons also could become indebted slaves through no fault of their own. But the peon could become indebted in ways other than through the hacienda. He was enmeshed in a system of Mexican customs and laws that encouraged, if not required, that he spend more money than he had. For example, baptism demanded a fiesta, a priest, and liquor, the cost of which the peon could only cover by pledging his future wages. This was also true for the cost of a wedding, a baby’s birth, and even tools. Whether they were on the hacienda or not, to the poor and landless a debt was usually forever, and once in debt, the peon had no rights. By law, the debt holder had all the power, which on the hacienda was power over life and death, as surely as though these peons were slaves in ancient Rome. Besides indebted peons, haciendas had other sources of such slaves. Hacienda bosses would entice impoverished and landless Indians and other peons into signing contracts to work on plantations about which the workers knew nothing; upon arrival, they would discover that there was no escape. The police would arrest and jail the poor and those dispossessed of land for trivial or trumped-up charges, and then sell them to hacienda owners. Yet another source was a police roundup of such people, as though they were cattle, followed by their deportation to a hacienda to work until they died. In some areas, these roundups were the routine—even a matter of government policy. Local officials would contract with a hacienda to supply so many peons per year, and the district political boss, or jefe politico, often fulfilled his contract by kidnapping and selling young schoolboys for fifty pesos each. There were some comparatively good haciendas, to be sure. There, owners still forced the peons to work, and would whip to maintain discipline and order, but they treated them with the paternalistic civility

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accorded to personal slaves. These haciendas were the exception, however. Normally, they were hellish for the peon, whose life on them was usually short and miserable. The owners had them whipped when their work slowed for any reason, and for the slightest infraction. They were sometimes whipped to death. After all, they were cheap to replace, and the police showed no concern over their murder. On many haciendas, the peon’s misery went far beyond whipping. Hacienda bosses would often rape the peon’s wife and daughters, and would force the prettier ones to be their concubines. Nor did all the haciendas provide enough nutritional food for their peons in the field, or changes of clothing, bath facilities, or toilets. Because of this ill treatment, many soon died from disease, exposure, and exhaustion, deaths that can only be classed as murder. In some places, such as Valle Nacional, the forced labor system became at least as deadly as that in the Soviet gulags and the Nazi labor camps at their worst, but the victims died within guarded haciendas instead of work camps surrounded by guns and barbed wire. The bosses especially mistreated the Indians enslaved on the haciendas, and they often were among the first to die. Two-thirds of Yaqui Indians on haciendas died in the first year; on some haciendas, a few would survive for two years. And haciendas were killing Mayans, members of another Indian nation, at a greater rate than they were being born. Bosses also badly mistreated non-Indian peons. In three months on one large hacienda near Santa Lucrecia, they killed more than half of three hundred new workers. In the Valle Nacional hacienda, out of some 15,000 new workers taken on in one year, bosses killed about 14,000 within seven or eight months. I would doubt this incredible death rate, were it not for the words of Antonio Pla, general manager of a large portion of the tobacco lands in Valle Nacional: “The cheapest thing to do is to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from.” Said one of the police officers of the town of Valle Nacional, “They die; they all die. The bosses never let them go until they’re dying.” Even the process of deportation to the haciendas was lethal, particularly for Indians. Soldiers seized and deported five hundred Yaqui Indians a month to work on haciendas as slaves. This was even before Díaz decreed that the War Department must capture and deport to the Yucatán every Yaqui Indian found, regardless of age. As many as 10 to 20 percent died during deportation, especially if the trip was a long one, and involved the military herding the deportees over mountains on foot. Sometimes whole families would commit suicide rather than endure the deportation and the slave labor that lay at the end.

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Out of a rural population of nearly 12 million in 1910, it’s possible that 750,000 unknowingly contracted themselves into slavery on haciendas in southern Mexico, and over 100,000 on the Yucatán peninsula. The far more prevalent debt bondage may have enslaved an additional 5 million peons—nearly 41 percent of the total population of Mexico. These numbers far exceed those of Sudan’s outright slavery and Burma’s forced labor. Compare this to American slavery in 1860 just before the Civil War, where there were 3,951,000 slaves, or 12 percent of the population. What was in effect slavery in Mexico is most comparable to the slavery of ancient times, yet it happened in our time, during the youth of some people alive today. This lethal slavery alone would be enough to condemn this reprehensible government and justify the coming revolution. But there is more. This slave system necessarily depended on a certain amount of terror and resulting fear. Each of the states of Mexico had attached to it an acordada, a picked gang of assassins. They quietly murdered personal enemies of the governor or jefe politicos, including political opponents, critics, or alleged criminals, no matter how slight the evidence against them. For example, officials gave the son of a friend of Díaz, a member of the acordada, two assistants and the instructions to “kill quietly along the border” any person he thought connected to the opposing Liberal Party. But much killing was also done publicly, and carried out directly by officials. In 1909, they summarily executed sixteen people at Tehuitzingo, and on a street at Velardena, officials shot several people for holding a parade in defiance of the jefe politico. They forced twelve to thirty-two others to dig their own graves with their bare hands before shooting them. In the state of Hidalgo, a group of Indians who had resisted government takeover of their land were buried up to their necks, then officials rode horses over them. From 1900 to 1910, this government probably murdered more than 30,000 political opponents, suspects, critics, alleged criminals, and other undesirables. Díaz’s policies obviously provided opportunity for the venal and corrupt, and offered security and assistance to the rich and well placed. As long as they went along with the system, bureaucrats, officials controlling government largesse, and the upper middle class and wealthy profited from Díaz’s rule. Nonetheless, his policies also created an explosive atmosphere. Many of the well-off Mexicans were still angered that he encouraged foreigners to exploit the country’s resources. Now, also, intellectuals were promoting among the lower class a sense of being enslaved. And Díaz’s army, the muscle he needed to back up his policies, was small, corrupt, and inefficient.

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Revolution Given all this, rebellion was inevitable, and it did happen, several times. The first successful rebellion was led by Francisco Madero in 1910; it launched the Mexican Revolution. A member of the upper middle class, as most revolutionary leaders are, Madero believed in a liberal constitutional government. Indians and peons understandably supported him. With the former bandit chief Pancho Villa as his leading general, Madero won major victories against government forces and encouraged other rebellions throughout the country. In May of 1911, the government collapsed, Díaz fled into exile, and Madero took over the presidency. Leading a revolution is one thing; rebuilding a government is quite another. In office, Madero turned out to be ineffective, especially in promoting changes to the system. He did, however, give peons and workers free rein to air their grievances and seek change. This did not sit well with the Mexican elite, who saw this freedom, added to the disorders still plaguing the country, as endangering their property. In early 1913, Victoriano Huerto, the general commanding the Mexican army in Mexico City, rebelled against Madero and, joining with other rebel groups, forced him to resign. General Huerto then made himself president, and in a few days, someone assassinated Madero. Huerto’s presidency was even worse than Madero’s. He was disorganized, repressive, and dictatorial, and instigated the most violent phase of the revolution. Separate rebel forces, Villa’s among them, took violent action to restore constitutional government in three northern states. In the south, Emiliano Zapata organized and generated a peon rebellion demanding land reform. President Wilson of the United States tried to help these rebellions by embargoing arms to General Huerto, resulting in the American Navy’s temporary takeover of Veracruz to stop a shipment of German arms, while allowing the rebel constitutionalists to buy them. Eventually, constitutionalist forces closed in on Huerto, and he escaped into exile in July 1914. Still, even the constitutionalists could not establish a stable government, nor could they agree among themselves on what was to be done and by whom. Civil war again broke out in December of 1914. Finally, by the end of 1915, the rebel leader Venustiano Carranza won control over most of Mexico. Despite the refusal of Zapata (assassinated in 1918) and Villa and some of the other rebel leaders to accept terms, Carranza took over the government and held control until 1920.

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Carranza never brought about the reforms he had promised, and in 1920, Alvaro Obregón, one of Carranza’s most effective generals during the civil war, threw him out of power and eventually had himself elected president. Though dictatorial, Obregón brought relative stability, order, and change to Mexico. What I left out of this sketch of the Mexican Revolution is the violence, ruthlessness, and cruelty on all sides. In the north in the opening years of this rebellion, for example, government forces simply shot all captured rebels, showing no mercy. In later years of the war, when President Carranza ordered General González to destroy the Zapatista “rabble” in Morelos, his troops burned down whole villages, destroyed their crops, marched women and children into detention camps, looted factories, devastated the local sugar industry, and hanged every male they could find. They left a wasteland behind them. Rebels were equally vicious and often extended their butchery to top government officials and supporters. A case in point was their seizure of the town of Guerrero. They murdered all captured federal officers, along with the town’s top Díaz supporters and officials, including the judge, jefe politico, and postal inspector. The rebels raped at will; in Durango, the U.S. ambassador reported that fifty women “of good family” killed themselves after rebels raped them. Villa himself forced “his attentions on a Frenchwoman,” creating an international incident. When rebels captured and held Mexico City in 1914, they pillaged homes and businesses, shot police officers and political opponents, and hung those they suspected of crimes. In one case, they hung three people outside a police station, with signs announcing their crimes. One was a “thief,” a second a “counterfeiter,” but the sign on the third said, “This man was killed by mistake.” From the beginning of the revolution, the forces of the Villistas and Zapatas showed disregard for human life. When Pancho Villa captured the town of Torre in 1910, he killed two hundred Chinese, a nationality he and his followers much despised. Nor did he have any high regard for the lives of his own troops. Once, when an American journalist was interviewing him, a drunken soldier yelling nearby disturbed Villa. Without interrupting his conversation, he pulled out his gun, looked out the window, and shot the man. Their officers were no better, but among them Rodolfo Fierro stands out. It is said that he once personally executed three hundred prisoners, pausing only when he had to massage his bruised trigger finger. Often, these rebels were simply bandits and murderers legitimized by a cause. In one especially heinous case, a rebel leader captured a coal train in a

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tunnel, burned it, and then waited for a passenger train to run into the wreckage so that he could loot the train of gold and rob passengers of their valuables. With the collapse of the Díaz regime, many state governors and federal generals no longer obeyed the central government. During the Carranza presidency, they in effect became warlords, some levying their own taxes, some refusing to turn over federal revenues, some ignoring federal laws and orders they did not like. Some became bandits, looting territory or states under their control; some bandits became generals controlling little states of their own. High military officers would loot and kill as they wished, even in Mexico City. Over all of Mexico for as long as a decade, all these warlords and rebel armies may have slaughtered at least 400,000 people in cold blood, perhaps even over 500,000—more than have died in combat in all American foreign wars. Before and during the revolution, the government used a detestable conscription system. With the choice of who would be drafted left to the local jefe politico, graft and bribery were endemic. If a man had the money, he could buy himself out of the draft or bribe officials. Even worse, those who criticized the regime, those who tried to strike, or those who otherwise annoyed officials found themselves drafted. The army served the function of a forced labor camp for the poor and undesirables, and so became known as “The National Chain Gang.” The government used press-gang methods extensively during the revolution. In one case, seven hundred spectators at a bullfight were grabbed for the army; in another case, one thousand spectators were abducted from a big crowd watching a fire, including women that they forced to work in ammunition factories. In Mexico City, people were afraid to go out after dark, even to post a letter, since it literally could result in “going to the cannon’s mouth.” Soldiers so conscripted received little training, and officers threw them into combat as so much expendable equipment—there were always replacements, including criminals, vagabonds, beggars, and, of course, Indians and peons. Rebels and Indians easily killed them all. Because of the graft among their officers, these soldiers often got little medical care and little food. Some would die of starvation, many of disease. One example of this was in the territory of Quintana Roo where, before the revolution, an army of 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers was in the field, continuously fighting the Maya Indians. These soldiers were almost all political suspects and therefore really only armed political prisoners. According to a government physician who served as the chief of sanitary service for the army in this territory, all the soldiers—over 4,000— died of starvation over a two-year period while General Bravo, their

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commanding officer, stole their unit’s commissary money.23 This is murder. And from 1900 through the first year of the revolution, aside from combat deaths, the army’s treatment of its conscripts murdered nearly 145,000 of them. In total, the battles, massacres, executions, and starvation during the revolution probably killed 800,000 Mexicans. Nearly 1.2 million more probably died from influenza, typhus, and other diseases. In fact, the overall toll from all causes might even be closer to 3 million, given the 23a population decrease for these years.

23 John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969, p. 123. 23a For a breakdown of the toll, see Table 16.1 in my Death By Government (1994). The table is also available on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB16.1.GIF

Chapter 18 The Russian Revolution When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism. – Lenin

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he Russian Revolution that began while that in Mexico was still going on was no less bloody, and like the one in Mexico, to understand it we will have to begin several years before it took place. With the death of his father Alexander III in 1894, the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, came into power. He was a dedicated autocrat opposed to any liberal tendencies in Russia, a view strongly shared by his wife, Princess Alexandra. He was also an absolute Russian nationalist who imposed a policy of Russification throughout the empire, which included Poland and Finland in the west. As were many of his officials and Russians in general, he was anti-Semitic, and he overtly supported anti-Semitic activity. Russians economically and culturally discriminated against their 5 to 7 million Jews, and government anti-Semitism encouraged and helped legitimize the periodic pogroms that swept Russian cities and towns. Officials allowed incendiary anti-Jewish propaganda to be published on government printing presses, and just stood by while gangs attacked Jews and their property. From 1900 to the abdication of the czar and the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, at least 3,200 Jews were murdered throughout Russia. In line with its general suppression of freedom, officials killed and massacred others as well, such as shooting two hundred demonstrating workers in the Lena gold field. The most important massacre of these years occurred in January of 1905 in St. Petersburg, when soldiers shot down 150 to 200 peaceful demonstrators. This “Bloody Sunday,” as it became known, catalyzed what was a revolutionary situation into outright revolution.

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In the years leading up to Bloody Sunday, Russia had been in turmoil. Strikes, student demonstrations, and peasant disturbances were frequent. Several revolutionary movements were violently seeking reform, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats, who organized protests and tried to incite the masses. Because of Bloody Sunday, student demonstrations became almost continuous, revolutionary groups organized huge strikes, and in many regions, peasants rebelled. Bombings and assassinations were widespread. This culminated in a massive general strike that finally persuaded Nicholas II and his officials to compromise. They issued the so-called October Manifesto that promised civil liberties, a new duma— legislature—with actual power to pass and reject all laws, and other reforms. The manifesto went far toward turning the government into a constitutional monarchy. It split the opposition into moderates willing to accept it and radicals believing it hardly went far enough. The radicals fought on—in the next year alone, terrorism by the Battle Organization of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Socialist Revolutionaries Maximalists caused 1,400 deaths and, in the year following that, still another 3,000 deaths. But the Manifesto ended the 1905 revolution. Throughout the years leading up to and following this revolution, the monarchy fought the revolutionaries in one district or another with harsh regulations, newspaper closings, arrests of editors, and, for six months, even summary court martials with almost immediate execution. The records of overall executions tell the story of these tumultuous years and the monarchy’s response. From 1866 to 1900, officials executed no more than 94 people, perhaps as few as 48; from 1901 to 1904 it executed nearly 400 people; from 1905 through 1908, the number rose to 2,200; and from 1908 through the remaining years of the monarchy, executions might have reached 11,000. Nonetheless, considering the revolutionary activity and the bombings, assassinations, and disturbances involved, the violent deaths would have been surprisingly low for an empire this huge and diverse and with an already bloody history, had it not been for World War I, its treatment of ethnic Germans and POWs, and the massacre or extermination of rebellious nations and groups in the empire’s southern periphery. In 1915, the Duma expropriated all the property of the 150,000 to 200,000 Germans living in Zhiton-tir Gubernia and deported as many as 200,000 to the east under conditions so harsh, anywhere from 25,000 to almost 140,000 died. The worst killing took place in the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy. Following Russian orders, local authorities murdered Turkish-speaking Central Asian nomads outright, or, after robbing them of their animals

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and equipment, drove them into the winter mountains or desert to die. Except for some who escaped across the border into China, authorities may have murdered as many as 500,000 nomads. Then there were the Armenian volunteers who wore Russian uniforms, but served as irregulars with the Russian army. When Russia invaded the eastern provinces of Turkey during the war, these Armenian irregulars quite possibly murdered hundreds of thousands of Kurds between 1915 and 1916, as revenge for Kurd murders of Armenians in Turkey. It’s unclear whether the Russian army was responsible for this, but it at least bears some onus for these deaths. Worst of all, the Russian monarchy bears full responsibility for its treatment of 2.3 million German, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, and Turkish prisoners of war. Surely the Russian people suffered greatly during the war. There were wide-scale shortages of necessities and resulting localized famines; medical services that had always been poor deteriorated during the war, resulting in the spread of disease. Moreover, Russian soldiers themselves suffered from hunger, poor medical care, and unsanitary conditions, with perhaps 1.3 million dying of disease. Russia was in no shape to give POWs the same treatment that Britain, for example, could give them. Nonetheless, even taking this into account, Russian-held POWs were abysmally mistreated and died in transit to camps and in the camps themselves by the tens of thousands. Just consider that during the transportation of POWs to camps, they might be locked in railroad cars or wagons for weeks. In one case, officials kept two hundred Turkish POWs suffering from cholera in sealed wagons for three weeks until they reached their destination, where they found sixty scarcely alive in the filth; 140 had died. Already weakened by hunger and sickness during the long trip, prisoners then might have to plod ten to thirty miles to their final camp; some died on the way. Reaching camp provided no security, since the conditions in many were lethal. During the winter of 1914–15, in just one camp 1,300 men died—over half of the camp’s POWs. When the doctors complained about the number of deaths to a general who came on a tour of inspection, his answer was that still more men died in the trenches. During this same winter in the Novo Nikolayevsk camp, the prisoners were lucky even to have rotten straw to sleep on, and especially lucky to get a blanket. Camp doctors had no medicines or surgical appliances; they did not even have soap. Sick and healthy lay together indiscriminately. Often water was not to be had for days, or it would drip from icicles onto their straw beds. No wonder that when typhus

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broke out, it spread rapidly and prisoners died in huge numbers. Only when these epidemics threatened the Russians themselves did they finally allow captive officers to help their men. The Russian monarchy probably was responsible for the deaths of 400,000 POWs altogether. Since officials knew about the conditions in the camps and could have done much to alleviate them, this was as much murder as the death of 3 million Soviet POWs in Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Revolution By 1917, the war was going so badly for the Russians that many troops refused to fight and whole units were deserting, while on the home front there was continuous turmoil, including general strikes and massive demonstrations against the war and the monarchy. On March 8 alone, 30,000 people were on the streets, demonstrating. Nicholas II’s cabinet tried to dismiss the Duma it had called into session to deal with the crisis, which it thought responsible for much of the unrest, but instead of dissolving, some members set up a provisional cabinet—in effect, a rebel provisional government. Nicholas II and his cabinet had lost all power to affect events—the Russian Revolution had begun. Events moved fast as one military unit after another joined the rebels, including the czar’s own guards who, under orders from the provisional government, took the empress and her children into custody. On March 14, France and England, Russia’s allies in the war, recognized the provisional government as the legal government of all Russia. Under tremendous pressure, having lost the crucial support of the aristocracy, his troops, and foreign powers, and no longer able to control the streets, Nicholas II abdicated. The day before the abdication, the provisional government formed a new government to be headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. This government and the subsequent one of Aleksandr Kerensky, a democratic socialist who took over as prime minister in July, inherited a country in economic and political chaos, with a near-total breakdown in government authority and military morale, frequent strikes, plots, and the opposition of diverse, radical revolutionary groups. Not the least of these were the Bolsheviks, founded and led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin, who already in July had organized an unsuccessful uprising in Petrograd. Kerensky’s government itself was disorganized, feared a coup from the right, and was quite unable to move against those openly plotting to seize power from the left.

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Originally the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were a small, uncompromising, and militant group of dedicated Marxist communists. Their incredibly small number, considering subsequent events, was clear when the first all-Russian Congress of Soviets was held, and only 105 out of 1,090 delegates declared themselves as Bolsheviks. In November of 1917, with the powerful Petrograd garrison remaining neutral, Lenin seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Since this was the seat of Kerensky’s shaky government, and he had only 1,500 to 2,000 defenders, the 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards Lenin’s Bolsheviks had thrown together easily overthrew the government. Widely unpopular, however, and faced with strong political opposition, Lenin at first made common cause with the Left Social Revolutionaries, a militant socialist group, in order to survive, centralize power, and consolidate this communist revolution. In 1919, Lenin adopted the name “Communist Party” for the Bolsheviks and their political allies. To fight this forceful takeover of the government, generals throughout the Russian empire created whole armies—some led by anti-Russians and nationalists, some by anti-communists, some by promonarchists or pro-authoritarians, some by advocates of democracy. These so-called White armies were a direct threat to the new Communist Party and its so-called Red Army. Moreover, in the areas the communists controlled, the clergy, bourgeoisie, and professionals opposed them. The urban workers, who had been communist allies at first, also soon turned against them when they saw that the communists had taken over the soviets (elected governing councils) and would not yield power to worker unions or representatives. Peasants, who had also been especially supportive when the communists began to divide among them land taken from rich landowners and the aristocrats’ estates, turned to outright rebellion when the communists began forcibly requisitioning their grain and produce. In the first year and a half of Lenin’s rule, in twenty provinces alone, there were 344 peasant rebellions. Up to early 1921, there were about fifty anti-communist rebel armies. For example, in August of 1920, the starving peasants of the Kirsanov District, Tambov Province, rebelled against further communist extortion of grain. The rebellion soon spread to adjoining districts and destroyed Party authority in five of them. Under the command of Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov, the rebellion became a full-scale armed insurrection. He created two armies composed of Red Army deserters and revolting peasants; by February 1921, he had as many as 50,000 fighting men, including internal guard

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units. Until his defeat in August of 1921, he controlled Tambov Province and parts of the provinces of Penza and Saratov. Many such rebellions broke out throughout the Soviet Union, as it was now named, although few were as dangerous to Communist Party control. (In 1921, the Cheka—secret police—admitted to 118 uprisings.) This Peasant War, which could just as well be called a Bread War, continued even after the White armies were defeated. It was so serious that in 1921, one Soviet historian noted that the “center of the [Russian Republic] is almost totally encircled by peasant insurrection, from Makno on the Dnieper to Antonov on the Volga.” White armies and peasant rebellions aside, even in the urban industrial areas, communist control was precarious, at best. What saved Lenin and the Party was their “Red Terror.” By 1918, Lenin had already ordered the wide use of terror, including inciting workers to murder their “class enemies.” According to Pravda, the Party organ, workers and poor should take up arms and act against those “who agitate against the Soviet Power, ten bullets for every man who raises a hand against it . . . . The rule of Capital will never be extinguished until the last capitalist, nobleman, Christian, and officer draws his last breath.” Understandably, there was a wave of arbitrary murders of civil servants, engineers, factory managers, and priests wherever the communists controlled the country. Mass shootings, arrests, and torture were an integral part of covert communist policy, and not simply a reaction to the formation of the White armies. Indeed, the Red Terror preceded the start of the Civil War. After an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Lenin in August of 1918, he legalized the terror, and directed it against “enemies of the people” and “counter-revolutionaries,” defined primarily by social group and class membership: bourgeoisie, aristocrats, “rich” landowners (kulaks), and clergy. The Party’s organ Pravda helped launch this expanded Red Terror with this cry for blood: “Workers, the time has come when either you must destroy the bourgeoisie, or it will destroy you. Prepare for a mass merciless onslaught upon the enemies of the revolution. The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction. All the bourgeois gentlemen must be registered, as has happened with the officer gentlemen, and all who are dangerous to the cause of revolution must be exterminated . . . . Henceforth the hymn of the working class will be a hymn of hatred and revenge.” Lenin’s Red Terror operated through a variety of official organs, including the People’s Courts for “crimes” against the individual, the Revolutionary Courts, and the various local Chekas for “crimes” against the state. Lenin also gave the right of execution to the Military

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Revolutionary Tribunals, Transport Cheka, Punitive Columns, and the like. Communists jailed actual or ideologically-defined opponents, tortured many barbarously to force them to sign false confessions, and executed large numbers. For example, communists executed a butcher in Moscow for “insulting” the images of Marx and Lenin by calling them scarecrows (a clear “enemy of the people”) and threatened to shoot anyone in Ivanovo-Vornesensk who did not register their sewing machines (obvious “counter-revolutionaries”). A communist functionary issued an order in Baku that local officials should shoot any telephone operator who was tardy in response to a call (doubtless “sabotage”). With information that an Aaron Chonsir in Odessa was engaging in “counterrevolutionary activities,” the Cheka looked through the street directories to find his address. Finding eleven people with the same name, they arrested them all, interrogated and tortured each several times, narrowed it down to the two most likely “counter-revolutionaries” and, since they could not make up their minds between the two, had both shot to ensure getting the right one. Obviously the revolution was still immature—in the late 1930s, Stalin would have had all eleven shot. And so communists shot vast numbers of men and women out of hand: 200 in this jail, 450 in that prison yard, 320 in the woods outside of town; even in small outlying areas, such as the small Siberian town of Ossa Ochansk, they massacred 3,000 men in 1919. This went on and on. As late as 1922, the communists executed 8,100 priests, monks, and nuns. This alone is equivalent to one modern jumbo passenger jet crashing, with no survivors, each day for thirty-two days. Moreover, the communists showed no mercy to prisoners taken in clashes with the White armies, and often executed them. They even shot the relatives of defecting officers, as when the 86th Infantry Regiment went over to the Whites in March of 1919—the communists killed all the relatives of each defecting officer. Places reoccupied after the defeat of one White army or another suffered systematic bloodbaths as the Cheka screened through the population for aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and supporters of the Whites. When the Red Army captured Riga in January of 1919, communists executed over 1,500 in the city and more than 2,000 in the country districts. When defeated White General Wrangel finally fled with his remaining officers and men from the Crimea, the Red Army and Cheka may have slaughtered from 50,000 to 150,000 people during reoccupation. Undeniably, the Whites themselves carried out massacres, killed prisoners, and were guilty of numerous atrocities. But these were either the acts of undisciplined soldiers or ordered against individuals by sa-

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distic or fanatical generals. Lenin, however, directed the Red Terror against entire social groups and classes. Then there was the Peasant War, which, although it tends to be ignored in the history books, was no less vicious than the Civil War. Under the guise of requisitioning food, communists tried to plunder village after village, which understandably resulted in pitched battles, massacres, and frequent atrocities. Just in July of 1918, twenty-six major uprisings began; in August, forty-seven; and in September, thirtyfive. The communists fiercely fought the Peasant War over the full length and breadth of the new Soviet Union from 1918 through 1922, and at any one time, there were apparently over one hundred rebellions involving thousands of peasant fighters. If, of course, any “enemies of the people” were captured or surrendered, the communists were likely to kill them out of hand; they also massacred those who had helped the rebels, provided them with food and shelter, or simply showed sympathy. They leveled some villages “infected with rebellion,” slaughtered inhabitants, and deported remaining villagers north, with many dying in the process. About 500,000 people were killed in this Peasant War, half in combat and the other half murdered by the communists. The effect on food production was catastrophic and, as described in Chapter 13, was a partial cause of a severe famine in which 5 million people starved to death or died of associated diseases. The number of combat deaths in the Civil and Peasant Wars— rather than those resulting from mass murder—was likely about 1,350,000 people. Although a fantastic toll by normal standards, this was a fraction of the total killed during this period. With the growing strength and improved generalship of the Red Army, and the lack of unity and a common strategy and program among the opposing White armies and peasant rebels, by 1920 Lenin and the Communist Party had surely won the Civil War. And through the Red Terror, they also had secured the home front. The terror eliminated or cowed the opposition and enabled Lenin to stabilize the Party’s control, assure its continuity and authority, and, above all, save communism. Lenin bought the success of the Red Terror at a huge cost in lives. Not only did the communists shoot political opponents, class “enemies,” “enemies of the people,” former rebels, and criminals, but they shot citizens guilty of nothing, fitting under no label but “hostage.” For example, in 1919 the Defense Council commanded the arrest of members of the Soviet executive committees and Committees of the Poor in areas where snow clearance of railway lines was unsatisfactory, to be shot if the snow was not soon cleared away.

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The number murdered throughout Soviet territory by the Red Terror, the execution of prisoners, and revenge against former Whites or their supporters, as a conservative estimate, was about 500,000 people, including at least 200,000 officially executed. All these are added to the probable 250,000 murdered in the Peasant War. Don’t dismiss all the communist executions during these years as the traditional Russian way of handling opposition. Czarist Russia executed an average of seventeen people per year in the eighty years preceding the revolution—seventeen! From 1860 to 1900, Soviet sources give only ninety-four executions, although during these years there were dozens of assassinations. And in 1912, after years of revolts, assassinations of high officials, bombings, and anti-government terrorism, there was a maximum of 183,949 imprisoned, including criminals—less than half the number executed, not imprisoned, by the communists during the Civil War period. Lenin and his henchmen did not shrink from their carnage. They not only accepted this incredible blood toll; they proclaimed the need for one many times higher. In his speech in September 1918, Grigory Zinoviev, Lenin’s lieutenant in Petrograd, said, “To overcome our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.” To those killed in the Red Terror and the Peasant War, we must add those that died from the brutal regime in the new concentration and labor camps, or in transit to them. Lenin created these camps in July of 1918, with a Party decree that officials must compel inmates capable of labor to do physical work. This was the beginning of the communist forced labor system—gulag—which we could as well call a slave labor system, and which became as deadly as some of the most lethal haciendas for forced laborers in pre-revolutionary Mexico. Within a year, Party decrees established forced labor camps in each provincial capital and a lower limit of three hundred prisoners in each camp. The communists established the first large camps on the far north Solovetsky Islands. In an August 1919 telegram, Lenin made the criteria for imprisonment in such camps clear: “Lock up all the doubtful ones in a concentration camp outside the city.” Note the word “doubtful,” rather than “guilty.” From the beginning, the communists intentionally made the conditions in some of these camps so atrocious that prisoners could not expect to survive for more than several years. If prisoners were not executed, they often died from beatings, disease, exposure, and fatigue.

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The communists occasionally emptied camps by loading inmates on barges and then sinking them. With all this misery, one would think that a court had tried and sentenced these prisoners, but no. A simple bureaucratic decision sent people to these camps. By the end of 1920, official figures admitted to eighty-four such camps in forty-three provinces of the Russian Republic alone, with almost 50,000 inmates. By October of 1922, there were 132 camps with about 60,000 inmates. During this revolution period, 1917–1922, the communists probably murdered 34,000 inmates in total. Overall, in the Red Terror, the Peasant War, the new concentration and labor camps, and the famine reported in Chapter 13 (of which, conservatively estimated, the communists are responsible for half the deaths), Lenin and his Party probably murdered 3,284,000 people, apart from battle deaths. When these are included, this revolution cost about 24 4.7 million lives, or about 3 percent of the population. This is almost twice the death toll from all causes in the American Civil War—1.6 percent. How do we account for such violence in the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, and other such violence in Sudan, Burma, Iran, Pakistan, China, Congo, Nigeria, and wherever else people by the hundreds and even millions have been killed? That is the subject of the next chapter.

24 I give the estimates, calculations, and sources for this Russian Civil War toll in Table 2A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990). The table is also on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB2A.GIF. For other tables and a summary chapter of the book, see: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM

Chapter 19 Freedom Minimizes Political Violence within Nations The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is perpetually to be conquered. – Edmund Burke

A

lthough few have been as violent as the Mexican and Russian, twentieth century revolutions, civil wars, violent coups, and re25 bellions number in the hundreds. What sense can we make out of all these? Does the fact that the Mexican and Russian people were not free have anything to do with the revolutions? To answer these questions, I looked at those nations that experienced political violence 26 during 1998 and 1999. Table 19.1 provides a contingency count of the level of a nation’s freedom versus its violence, almost all internal. To determine the table, I divided 190 nations into four groups in terms of their level of freedom, and similarly, but independently, in terms of their level of violence. The results show how the level of a nation’s freedom matches up with its level of violence. Out of the fortyseven nations that had extreme violence, thirty-one of them, or 66 percent, were unfree. No free nations had any high violence. Then consider the nations that had low or no violence—mainly the free nations. Of the forty-seven nations with low or no violence, 74 percent were free. All unfree nations had some sort of violence, none at the low level. To see especially the relationship between freedom and violence, look at the count of nations in the diagonal cells from the low for free nations to the high for unfree. By far, the highest count is in the di-

25 For a list of present conflicts, those concluded since WWII, and a conflict map, see www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html. I provide some links to data sources on conflict and war on my links page at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM 26 The list is available on my website as a freedom versus violence table at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.TAB.A.19.GIF

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agonal, as it should if there is the close relationship between freedom and violence pointed out in this chapter. Of course, all this may be by chance. But this is tested by the chi square statistic at the bottom of the table, which shows that the odds of getting these results by chance is greater than 10,000 to 1. By now, it seems obvious. The one common ingredient for bloody internal violence is that the people who usually suffer from it also must endure being partially or totally enslaved. Liberal democracies had little internal political violence. But, you may object, these results were only for two years, and these could have been odd years. To answer this objection, I have collected internal conflict statistics for 214 governments (regimes) from 1900 to 1987, selected to best represent the variation among nations in their development, power, culture, region, and politics. Then I calculated the average number killed for democracies, authoritarian regimes (where people are partly free), and totalitarian ones (where there is no freedom), and listed the results in Table 19.2. The results are plotted in Figure 19.1. As we can see, the stark difference in average internal violence between democracies and those nations whose people have no freedom holds up even over these eighty-eight years. For internal violence, therefore, there is this very important correlation:

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The more democratic freedom a people have, the less severe their internal political violence. 27 This is a statistical fact. That freedom minimizes such violence does not necessarily mean that freedom ends it, however. Some rioting, civil strife, terrorism, and even civil war might still occur. Freedom is no guarantee against this. In the world at large, with all the issues people and governments may fight over, we have no proven and useful means of ending every kind of internal political violence forever, everywhere, even for democracies. But we now know that we can sharply reduce such violence, on the average, to the mildest and smallest amount possible, and that is through freedom. 27 For the tests of the general relationship between internal political violence and democracy, see Chapter 35 in my Understanding Conflict and War, Vol. 2: The Conflict Helix (1976; at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/TCH.CHAP35.HTM); “Libertarianism, Violence Within States, and the Polarity Principle,” Comparative Politics, 16 (July 1984), 443–462 (at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP84.HTM); “Libertarian Propositions on Violence Within and Between Nations: A Test Against Published Research Results,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 29 (September 1985), 419–455 (at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP85.HTM); Chapter 5 in Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (1997); and Appendix: “Testing Whether Freedom Predicts Human Security and Violence,” on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM

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How do we understand this power of democratic freedom? Many believe that the answer to this is psychological and personal. They think that free societies educate people against the mass killing of their neighbors; that free people are not as belligerent as those elsewhere; that they have deep inhibitions against killing others as people were killed in Mexico, Russia, Burma, and Sudan, for example; and that free people are more tolerant of their differences. There is much truth in all this, but commentators often neglect the social preconditions of this psychological resistance to political violence. The answer is that: The social structure of a free, democratic society creates the psychological conditions for its greater internal peace. Where freedom flourishes, there are relatively free markets, and freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech. Corporations, partnerships, associations, societies, leagues, churches, schools, and clubs

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proliferate. Through free people’s interests, work, and play, they become members of these multiple groups, each a separate pyramid of power, each competing with the others and with government for their membership, time, and resources. We can liken these pyramids to what we might see from a low flying plane, looking across the downtown core of a city and out to the suburbs. Some buildings are very tall, some short, and others, away from the downtown area, are close to the ground. Imagine each building standing for some group’s power in a free society, and we have a good analogy of how a free people disperse power. In contemporary societies, the government will be the tallest and largest building of all, with some other buildings close in size. One might be a church, as in Israel or in a Catholic democracy; another big building might be some corporation, like Microsoft in the United States. Others might be some powerful political party, a wealthy and influential family, or a group like a labor union. While each group is distinct and legally separate, their memberships overlap and crosscut society. As stockholders, political party members, contributors to an environmental group, workers, tennis players, churchgoers, and so on, people belong to many of these groups. Friends and coworkers probably belong to some of the same groups, but also to some different ones. Similarly, in a free society the critical social distinctions of wealth, power, and prestige are subdivided in many ways. Few people are high on all three. More are low on all three, but these people are not close to a majority. Most people have different amounts of wealth, power, and prestige. Even Bill Gates, while the highest on wealth, does not have the prestige of a top movie actor or a popular musician, or the power of the judge that decided to break up his Microsoft because of its “monopolistic practices.” Even the president of the United States, despite his great power and prestige, is only moderately high on wealth. And the adored movie actor will be high in prestige and moderately high on wealth, but low on power. All this pluralism in their group memberships and in wealth, power, and prestige cross-pressures people’s interests and motivations. That is, their membership in separate groups cuts up into different pieces what they want, their desires, and their goals; each is satisfied by a different group, such as their church on Sunday, bowling or tennis league on Tuesday night, the factory or office for forty weekday hours, the parent-teacher association meeting on Wednesday, and family at home. These interests differ, but overlap, and all take time and energy. Moreover, each person shares some of these interests with others, and which others will differ depending on the group. For all free people across a society, there is a constantly changing crisscross of interests and differ-

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ences. So, for a person to satisfy one interest requires balancing it against other interests. Does one take the family on a picnic this weekend, play golf with friends, do that extra work that needs to be done around the house, or help a political party win its campaign? This cross-pressuring of interests is true of a democratic government as well. After all, a democratic government is not some monolith, a uniform pyramid of power. Many departments, agencies, and bureaus make up the government, each staffed with bureaucrats and political appointees, each with their own official and personal interests. Between all are many official and personal connections and linkages that serve to satisfy their mutual interests. The military services, for example, coordinate their strategies and may even share equipment with other departments and agencies. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects with the military, and provide health supplies when needed. So multiple shared and cross-pressured interests sew together a democratic government itself. And these interests are shared with nongovernmental interest and pressure groups, and will be cross-pressured by them as well. Because of all these diverse connections and linkages in a democratic society, politicians, leaders, and groups have a paramount interest in keeping the peace. And where a conflict might escalate into violence, as over some religious or environmental issue, people’s interests are so cross-pressured by different groups and ties that they simply cannot develop the needed depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to any interest at stake, except perhaps to their families and children. Keep in mind that for a person to choose, along with others in a group, to kill people or destroy their property demands that they have an almost fanatic dedication to the interest—the stakes—involved, almost to the exclusion of all else. Yet there is something else about democratically free societies that is even more important than these violence reducing links and crosspressures. This is their culture. Where people are free, as in a free market, exchange dominates and resolves conflicts. “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” “You give me that, and I’ll give you this.” Money is often the currency of such exchange, but exchanged also are privileges of one sort or another, benefits, positions, and so on. Except where such exchange is so standardized that there is little room for bargaining, as in buying a hamburger at the local fast food restaurant, in a democracy people soak up certain norms governing their conflicts. These are that they tolerate their differences, negotiate some compromise, and in the process, make concessions. From the highest government official to the lowest worker, from the consideration of bills

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in a legislature to who does the dishes after dinner, there is bargaining of one sort or another going on to resolve an actual or potential conflict. Some of this becomes regularized, as in the bargaining of unions and management in the United States as structured by the Labor Relations Board, or the tradition in some families that dictates that the wife will always wash the dishes. But so much more involves bargaining. Therefore, in a free society, a culture of bargaining—what one might call an exchange or democratic culture—evolves. This is part of the settling in that takes place when a nation first becomes democratic. Authoritarian practices, doing things through orders, decrees, and commands sent down a hierarchy, gradually gets replaced by many hierarchies of power and the use of bargaining and its techniques of negotiation and compromise to settle conflicts. Free people soon come to expect that when they have a conflict, they will negotiate the issues and resolve it through concessions and the splitting of differences. The more years a democracy exists, the more its people’s expectations become hardened into social customs and perception. No matter the conflict, people who have long been democratically free do not expect revolution and civil war. For, most important, they see each other as democratic, as part of one’s in-group, one’s moral, democratic universe. They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in culture. This structure of freedom, this “spontaneous society,” as F.A. Hayek called it in his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, serves to inhibit violence, as shown, and to culturally dispose people to cooperation, negotiation, compromise, and tolerance of others. Just consider the acceptance and application of the Constitution of the United States and Congressional rules in settling that most serious of political conflicts in 1999—whether President Clinton would be fired from office—and the even more potentially violent, month-long dispute over the outcome of the 2000 American presidential election. These supremely contentious disputes, these most potentially violent issues, were decided with no loss of life, no injuries, no destruction of property, no disorder, no political instability. These two examples, more than any others, show the sheer power of a democratic institution and culture to peacefully resolve social and political conflicts. But this is, so to speak, one end of the stick. This spontaneous society explains why a free people are most peaceful in their national affairs, but why should those societies in which people are commanded by absolute dictators, where people are most unfree, be most violent? The worst of these dictators rule their people and organize their society according to ideological or theological imperatives. Be it Marxism-Leninism and the drive for true communism as in the Russian Revolution, socialist egali-

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tarianism as in Burma, racial purity as in Nazi Germany, or the realization of God’s will as in Sudan, the dictators operate through a rigid and society-wide command structure. And this polarizes society. First, the competing pyramids of power—church, schools, businesses, and so on—that discipline, check, and balance each other and government in a free society do not exist. There is one solid pyramid of power, with the dictator or ruling elite at the top, with various levels of government in the middle and near the bottom, and with the mass of powerless subjects at the bottom. Second, where in a free society separate cross-cutting groups service diverse interests, there is now, in effect, only one division in society: that between those in power who command, and those who must obey. In the worst of these nations, such as Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Kim Chong-il’s North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, the people can only work for the Party, buy food from its stores, read newspapers it publishes, see only its movies and television programs, go to its schools, study its textbooks, and pray at a church it controls, if it allows a church at all. These restrictions sharply divide society into those in power and those out of power—into “them” versus “us.” This aligns the vital interests of us versus them along one conflict fault line traversing society, as a magnet aligns metal filings along its magnetic forces. Any minor gripe about the society or politics is against the same “them,” and when one says “they” are responsible for a problem or conflict, friends and loved ones know exactly whom is meant—the whole apparatus of the dictator’s rule: his henchmen, police, officials, spies, and bureaucrats. Since this regime owns and runs nearly everything, any minor issue therefore becomes a matter of the dictator’s power, legitimacy, or credibility. A strike in one small town against a government-owned factory is a serous matter to the dictator. Such a strike may be symbolic for the people, a display of resistance they should support, and if the dictator shows weakness in defense of his policies, no matter how localized, the strike can spread along the us versus them fault line and crystallize a nationwide rebellion. So the dictator must use major force to put it down. The regime cannot afford to let any resistance, any display of independence, anywhere in the country by anybody, go unchallenged. Even a peaceful demonstration, like those in Burma and China, must be violently squashed, with leaders arrested, tortured for information, and often killed. So, rule is by the gun; violence, a natural accompaniment. But there is more to this. As a culture of accommodation is a consequence of freedom, a culture of force and violence is a consequence of dictatorial rule. Where such rule is absolute, this is also a culture of fear—the re-

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sult of not knowing when another might perceive something one is doing as wrong, and report it to the police; not knowing whether authorities will consider one’s ancestry or race or religion reason for persecution; and not knowing about the safety of one’s loved ones, who may be dragged off to serve in the military, disappear because of something they said, or be made some sexual plaything. The fear exists up and down the dictator’s command structure, as well. The secret police may shoot a general because of his joke about the “Great Leader,” or they may jail and torture top government functionaries because of a rumored plot. The dictator himself must always fear that his security forces will turn their guns on him. Where power becomes absolute, massive killing follows, and rebellion is a concomitant. There also are partly free regimes, such as a monarchy ruled according to tradition and custom, as in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia; or an authoritarian one, as in Mexico before its revolution, where arranged elections and compliant military, police, and rich landowners kept the dictator in power. Power in this case is more dispersed, and some freedoms do exist. And therefore, the violence, on average, is less than in those nations in which the people have no freedom. If, however, the authoritarian rule is especially unjust and despicable, as it was in Mexico and Russia before their revolutions, the resulting violence can be quite bloody. Regardless, the correlation holds. The less free a society and the more coercive the commands that dominate it, the greater the polarization and culture of fear and violence, and the more likely extreme violence will occur. In Part 3, I showed that by promoting wealth and prosperity, freedom is a moral good. Here, I have pointed out that freedom also promotes nonviolence and peace within a nation. This is also a moral good of freedom. It is another moral reason why people should be democratically free. Political violence within nations is only one form of violence, however. There is another form, far more deadly than any other, and that is democide—genocide and mass murder. I need a separate part of this book to deal with this.

PART 5 On Freedom’s Moral Goods: Eliminating Democide

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y shooting, drowning, burying alive, stabbing, beating, and crushing, with torture, suffocation, starvation, exposure, poison, and other countless ways that lives can be wiped out, governments have killed unarmed and helpless people. Intentionally. With forethought. This is murder. It is democide. Few people seem to know about democide, and for this reason Chapter 20 provides a description of democide, its massive accumulation of corpses, and where it has occurred. But these are all statistics— abstract, remote, cold; they do not touch the heart and mind. Therefore, in the four chapters following, I try to provide a deep human understanding of democide in Rwanda, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China. The explanation for all this killing is theoretically solid. It is empirically grounded. It is historically recognized. It speaks to the essence of democide. And, it is simple. Namely: Power kills. Absolute power kills absolutely. We’ll see this in Chapter 25.

Chapter 20 Democide In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a prudent estimate, 174 million men, women, and children. It could be over 340 million.

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he absolutely incredible number of murders governments have carried out, often as policy decided by ruling thugs, is largely unknown. Were people, even the most educated, asked to guess at the number governments murdered in the last century, they probably would suggest 10 million. Maybe even 20 million. This is much too low. The more popularly understood term for government murder is 28 genocide, but there is a difference between democide and genocide that must be understood. In short: x democide is a government’s murder of people for whatever reason; x genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language. The most infamous example of genocide was Nazi Germany’s coldblooded murder of nearly 6 million Jews during World War II. Men, women, and children died simply because they were ethnic Jews. Many people incorrectly believe that was the only major case of government murder. But as we’ve learned, there has also been the Burmese military genocide of the Karen minority, the Sudanese Muslim regime’s genocide of the southern black minority, the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide of the Falun Gong (Chapter 1), and the Mexican government’s genocide of Indians (Chapter 17). Nongenocidal democides include the Chinese Communist Party’s Land Reform (Chapter 15), Burma’s military murders of pro-democracy demonstrators (Chapter 1); the Mexican and Saudi Arabian governments’ murders of political op28 Described in my “Democide versus Genocide: Which is What?” at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/GENOCIDE.HTM

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ponents (Chapter 17 and Chapter 1 respectively), and the deadly famine Stalin imposed on the Ukraine (Chapter 14). Those who have been living in a democracy all their lives may find it difficult to accept the truth that governments murder people by the thousands and millions. Even some of my political science colleagues have resisted the thought. I could see them wince when, at a conference or meeting, for example, I said outright that Kim Il-sung, the deceased dictator of North Korea, was responsible for the murder of something like 1.7 million people. We can easily call someone who kills people in cold blood a murderer, such as London’s famous “Jack the Ripper,” who killed six or seven people in 1888, or the “Boston Strangler,” Albert DeSalvo, who killed thirteen people in 1962–1964. But we may resist calling a “government leader” a mass murderer, even when speaking of Uganda’s Idi Amin, who physically took part in some of the murders carried out by his regime, and who was responsible for the violent deaths of some 300,000 of his subjects. Part of this reluctance to call a government or its ruler a murderer comes from the fact that to do so is a new and strange thought. Democide is a black hole in our textbooks, college teaching, and social science research. Few people know the extent to which governments murder people. In the twentieth century, the age of great advances in technology, medicine, wealth, and education, governments nonetheless probably murdered around 174 million people. The worst of these mur29 derous governments are listed in Table 20.1. This is more than four times those killed in combat in all international and national wars, including World Wars I and II, Vietnam, Korea, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War. The toll could even be more than 340 million. This is as though we’d had a nuclear war, but with its deaths and destruction spread over a century. Yet, few know about this obscene slaughter. There is a good reason why. The authoritarian and totalitarian governments that do most of this killing usually control who writes their histories, and what appears in them. Also, democratically free people project onto the rest of the world their own democratic cultural biases. They see governments as largely doing good things for people. Some policies may be wrong, some stupid, but the idea of murdering people because of their politics, religion, or ethnicity, or by quota, is alien— except, of course, for what those evil Nazis did to the Jews. And our 29 For the genocidal component and the democide as a percent of the population, see Table 1.2 in my Death By Government (1994). This is also available on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.2.GIF

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political science textbooks tell us that governments have positive functions, such as national defense, welfare, and security—that they provide a legal framework within which people can achieve their own interests. With this background, it is difficult to conceive of nondemocratic governments as many are: a gang of thugs holding a whole nation cap-

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tive with their guns, enslaving the people to their whims, and looting, raping, and killing at will. Moreover, democratic culture predisposes liberal democracies to avoid conflict and seek cooperation with other nations, even those ruled by despots. Democratic governments do not seek to arouse public opinion against other countries that will destabilize diplomatic arrangements and create pressure for hostile action. Seldom do democratic governments point their fingers at those guilty of democide, unless already in conflict with them and therefore in need of public support. Even then, they often will avoid doing so until the proof is overpowering (as in Rwanda, as discussed below), and even then, democracies will avoid the terms murder or genocide. Even in the American war against the Taliban and then Saddam Hussein, and subsequently the Iraqi and foreign terrorists and insurgents, the argument for these wars was not that these thugs murdered people wholesale, but that the wars were justified as part of a war on terror and in defense of American national security. Such reluctance to term foreign rulers or nations guilty of genocide is also illustrated by the many decades-long refusal on the part of the U.S. State Department to admit, despite the evidence from its own ambassador and other diplomats at the time, that the Turkish government planned and launched a genocidal campaign against its Armenian citizens during World War I, murdering as many as 1.5 million of them. Turkey is a member of NATO, refuses to admit the genocide, and has taken strong diplomatic action against those who make this claim. Yet Turkey perpetuated the first large-scale act of genocide in the twentieth century, not Russia or Germany. Although I have mentioned democide in previous chapters, I have not focused on it to show the nature and extent of this abominable and utterly inhumane practice. Now I will, beginning with Rwanda’s Great Genocide of 1994. This involved the plotted murder in four months of over 600,000, perhaps 800,000, even possibly as many as 1 million Tutsi and Hutu—at least 14 percent of the population. In the number of people killed within such a short period of time, it is one of the twentieth century’s worst acts of democide. Second we will look at the largely non-genocidal democide committed by the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia, 1975–1979. This killer regime murdered about 2 million Cambodians in four years, or a little less than one-third of the population. Many more were killed than in Rwanda, but over a much longer time. I also will give examples from Stalin’s democide, unmatched historically in the 42.7 million he

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murdered, and Mao’s vast democide of 37.8 million, second only to Stalin. The various totals I will present, such as 100,000 or 200,000 murdered, in terms of human beings killed is hard to grasp. To feel what 100,000 dead means, think of laying 100,000 corpses head to toe, in a line alongside a straight road. Assume, since many were babies, young children, and short adults, that each corpse averages a little more than five feet long. Now, to drive a car down this road along these 100,000 bodies, you would have to drive almost one hundred miles to reach the last corpse. This provides a simple multiplier—200,000 murdered would stretch head to toe nearly two hundred miles, and a million murdered would be almost a thousand miles. Maybe now you can feel how incredible, how horrible it is that 100,000 or even 1,000 human beings (end to end, a little less than a mile), each a separate soul, each with a unique personality and emotions, each a thinking, feeling human being, would have their precious lives wiped out. Each death also leaves countless heartbroken loved ones, thus multiplying the toll. This human misery is not in the numbers, but numbers are necessary for recounting the sad tale of such gargantuan crimes.

30 This figure is based on the estimates, sources, and calculations summarized in Table 1.A of my Lethal Politics: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991). The table is also given on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF 31 Includes the Civil War period. The figure is based on the estimates, sources, and calculations summarized in Table 1.1 of my China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990). The table is also given on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TAB1.1.GIF

Chapter 21 The Rwandan Great Genocide For innocents on both sides this was a historically unprecedented catastrophe. Over 1 million might have died, and around 2 million Hutu were forced to flee their homes, with possibly some 1.2 million ending up in Zaire alone.

Background

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he Rwandan Great Genocide of 1994, though by far the largest in the country’s history, was only one of many acts of genocide carried out by different Rwandan governments in the decades before 1994, and that have continued since. Located in the south-central region of Africa and bordered by Burundi, Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania, Rwanda is smaller than the state of Maryland. In 1999, its population was about 7.2 million, making it one of the most densely populated countries, and one of the poorest. One important ethnic group was the small minority of Tutsi, who made up 15 percent of Rwandans, and who tended to be tall and thin. The overwhelming majority of Rwandans, over 80 percent, were ethnic Hutu, more likely to be short and stocky. The Western media have greatly misunderstood the 1994 genocide as a tribal meltdown, as ethnic hatred and intolerance run amok. The mental picture is of a Hutu running wildly down a street, swinging a machete at any Tutsi he can catch. This is largely a myth. Rather, the genocide was a well-calculated mass murder planned by Hutu government leaders. Surely individual Hutu who hated Tutsi, or had grievances against certain Tutsi, joined in the bloodfest, and undoubtedly, sadistic Hutu saw this genocide as an excuse to kill. But we should not overlook the many Hutu who refused to kill, and protected Tutsi even at the risk of their lives. This genocide was, pure and simple, part of a political struggle to maintain power, as was the “ethnic cleansing” that happened later in Bosnia and Kosovo. It exemplified the iron law of human behavior: power kills.

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Centuries ago, the Tutsi migrated from the north to Rwanda and proceeded to dominate the Hutu with a feudal system, but without the strict tribal or ethnic divisions one sees in Rwanda today. At the time, “Hutu’ and “Tutsi” distinguished social and political groups, rather than ethnic. Generally, Tutsi were cattle owners and members of the court, while Hutu were farmers, but these were not indelible distinctions: Hutu could become Tutsi, and vice versa. Nor was Tutsi political domination absolute. Hutu chiefs became part of the hierarchy, and custom required Tutsi governors to recognize certain obligations to the Hutu. In many ways there was a sharing of power, and eventually, both Tutsi and Hutu spoke the same language, generally were Catholic in religion, and shared the same culture. Then came colonization. Germany first took Rwanda in the nineteenth century, and then after the defeat of Germany in World War I, the victors turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a protectorate. As Germany had, Belgium tried to rule at a distance by indirectly governing through existing Rwandan political institutions, which largely meant working through the Tutsi. Certainly colonial authorities thought the Tutsi to be more intelligent and vigorous, more like Caucasians, and therefore favored them in government, education, and business. In effect, Belgium promoted a more rigid and pervasive Tutsi rule over the Hutu. Since the difference between Tutsi and Hutu was not always readily evident, the colonial authorities defined a Tutsi as anyone who owned ten or more cows, and a Hutu as anyone with less. Moreover, Christian missionaries, particularly of the Roman Catholic Church, taught that the Tutsi were Hametic rather than Negroid in origin, possibly from Ethiopia, and with Christian roots. Where the difference between Tutsi and Hutu had been unclear before colonization, hardly stressed in social affairs and interaction, it now became a precise government and social matter. In 1926, Belgium introduced identity cards indicating whether the holder was Tutsi or Hutu. After the end of World War II, there was much talk about equality and freedom. Western intellectuals began spreading the word about the benefits and justice of democracy, and Christian missionaries joined in this new ideological wave, promoting democracy and equality among the Hutu. Yet for all the teaching about social justice, the Hutu were still required to carry ethnic identity cards; and behind the scenes, the colonial authorities continued to support Tutsi control over all governmental functions. All this did much to aggravate Hutu and Tutsi differences, therefore, while encouraging the wish for self-government among the great majority of Hutu. Independence and self-determination were the irresistible cry during the 1950s, and Belgians came to see Rwandan independence as

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inevitable. This raised the question of what kind of government an independent Rwanda would have. Being members of a democracy themselves, colonial authorities wanted to give more power to the Hutu majority and prepare free elections and a democratic government. So they changed colonial policy and began to prepare the Hutu for a large role in government by encouraging their education, and phasing them into more numerous and more important official positions. This further encouraged the belief among Hutus that by right, the government belonged to them. In 1959 this rising sentiment culminated in a Hutu rebellion against both Belgium and the Tutsi government and elite. The Hutu massacred about 10,000 Tutsi, and the next year forced 100,000 to 200,000 to flee the country with their king. The Hutu then declared a republic, and in 1962 Belgium granted Rwanda full independence. Over the next decades, Tutsi would continually invade one border area of Rwanda or another to overthrow the Hutu government. In the years between 1961 and 1967 alone, they tried this ten times. The resulting fighting and genocide over the years forced Tutsi from their homes, and increased the number of refugees to about 600,000, among whom the men became ready fighters in new Tutsi incursions. In 1963 they launched the most serious of these invasions, this one from Uganda, and for the first time threatened to bring down the government. But they were soon defeated, and only succeeded in provoking another Hutu massacre of Tutsi who had remained in the country. Also, during this and other invasions of this period, Tutsi carried out their own genocide, murdering some 20,000 Hutu. Despite their unsuccessful attempts to defeat the Hutu government, the Tutsi refugees would not give up. Under German and then Belgian colonial rule, they had come to believe that they were superior to Hutu in all-important ways, and that it was only right that they, and not the Hutu, rule the country. Among themselves, the Hutu were split between the north and south, as shown in 1973, when Defense Minister General Juvenal Habyarimana overthrew the president, accusing him of favoritism for southern Hutu, and made himself president. His new power was not secure either, but he did defeat a coup against him in 1980, and remained in power until the beginning of the Great Genocide. Added to the political difficulties of his rule was the collapse in the international market for coffee, the principal crop of Rwanda, which led to famine in some areas. Moreover, President Habyarimana drove the government deeply into debt, forcing him to turn to the World Bank for aid. This he got in return for the promise to liberalize the economy

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from government controls, but he spent the money on building up the army, and ignored the World Bank’s stipulations. President Habyarimana’s government allowed Rwandans virtually no freedom. He created a strict one-party state with the intention of controlling and quickly mobilizing the population. The government divided people into communes, and any citizen who wanted to move in or out of an assigned commune had to report to the police. All citizens had to register, and, as in Burma, the government forced everyone to do a certain amount of forced labor: building roads, clearing brush, digging ditches, and so on. They also had to participate in weekly propaganda meetings to glorify the party. Rwandans have been among the least free in civil and political 32 rights. On a scale of 2 (free) to 14 (unfree), Freedom House rated the Rwandan people as 13 in lack of freedom for 1993, and a bottom 14 for the following year, when the Great Genocide occurred. In 1990, in the midst of Rwanda’s economic troubles, Tutsi refugees again invaded the country. With the help of the Ugandans, they had formed a political and military force they named the Front Patriotique Rawndais (FPR, sometimes called the RPF), but were again defeated, this time with the help of Belgian and French troops. The FPR tried to hold onto parts of the country and periodically resumed its offensive until the government launched the Great Genocide in 1994. While this civil war was devastating part of the country, economic troubles increased. Inflation, along with personal and government debt, rose sharply. Coffee prices dropped so low that the government destroyed coffee plants and replaced them with other crops. The World Bank responded to another request for aid, and provided more funds toward overcoming Rwanda’s huge national debt. By this time, Hutu extremists had resurrected the old nonblack, Ethiopian theory about Tutsi origins that Belgium had once used to justify Tutsi rule, only now, the Hutu used this myth to their advantage. Extremists claimed that the Tutsi did not belong in Rwanda, that they were outsiders who had invaded the country and subjugated the Hutu. They argued for the total expulsion of all Tutsi. Government anti-Tutsi propaganda also made much of the genocide of Hutu by the Tutsi in neighboring Burundi. There, the ethnic division was about the same as in Rwanda, but the Tutsi were in control. In 1972, the Burundi government responded to a Hutu uprising by massacring about 150,000 Hutu, and after another Hutu uprising in 1988, the Tutsi massacred as many as 200,000 of them. The Hutu Rwandan government regularly cited this 32 At: www.freedomhouse.org

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genocidal slaughter by the Burundi Tutsi as a reason why they could not allow the Tutsi within their own borders to take or share power. However, the United Nations, United States, Belgium, and other African nations were applying considerable pressure to President Habyarimana to come to terms with the FPR and end the civil war. Badly in need of more foreign aid, in 1992 he agreed to form a coalition government with all political parties, and to share power with Tutsi leaders until he could hold an election. This hardly sat well with the Hutu political and military elite and extremists, but in any case, President Habyarimana found one reason or another to delay fulfilling this agreement—perhaps in order to prepare for the Great Genocide. Also, the United Nation’s mandate for overseeing this accord was to expire in April of 1994; then UN troops would have to withdraw. Meanwhile, Tutsi FPR forces, helped by Ugandan military, continued the civil war, broken by only occasional cease-fires. By April of 1994, events had prepared the way for the Great Genocide. The economy was a mess, and tensions between Hutu and Tutsi were at a boiling point due to the continuing FPR assaults. The country was so beleaguered that it began to look as though Habyarimana would finally surrender to foreign pressure and allow the Tutsi to share power. Radical Hutu elite and top governmental leaders, however, had other plans.

The Great Genocide In April of 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundian President Ndadaye crashed under mysterious circumstances. The prevailing theory was that Habyarimana’s own Presidential Guard shot it down. Whether radical Hutu planned this assassination or not, it triggered the Great Genocide. There was bloodlust in the air, and some Hutu and Tutsi now felt free to settle scores and kill those they resented. However, the government—that is, President Habyarimana’s wife, a few close advisors, and three brothers-in-law—had prepared for the Great Genocide before Habyarimana’s death. Their middle-level organizers numbered about three to five hundred officials and bureaucrats. The police, with a special Hutu militia (interhamwe) of 7,000 to 14,000 Tutsi-haters at their command, did the dirty work. Officials in on the plan had specifically organized the militia to murder Tutsi, and they succeeded very well: some may well have killed as many as two to three hundred people. Militia killers also encouraged—and sometimes ordered at gunpoint—Hutu civilians to kill their

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Tutsi friends and neighbors. Hutu who refused, or who showed reluctance, were themselves murdered. Insiders had also trained a Palace Guard of about 6,000 Hutu to help the militia and exterminate Hutu and Tutsi political opponents and their supporters. Even Hutu moderates did not escape death. Meanwhile, every day a radio station from the capital exhorted Hutu, as their patriotic duty, to grab whatever weapon they had and kill Tutsi without mercy. Note that this was not an act of massacre by the uneducated, undisciplined masses, ordinary folk easily misled and aroused. As with the Holocaust, when Nazi killing squads were often led and composed of Ph.D.s and other professionals, the claims of the powerful and authoritative easily swayed the well-educated to murder. In the Great Genocide, Hutu lawyers, teachers, professors, medical doctors, journalists, and other professionals made their contribution to the methodical annihilation of the Tutsi or defiant Hutu. Since most Rwandans were Christians, the country had many churches in which the Tutsi sought refuge. Not to be deterred, the Hutu killers simply surrounded the churches and set them on fire, or forced their way in and systematically butchered all inside. Hospitals were also a favorite target, since they not only hired many Tutsi, but also were places where the Hutu killers could easily find and kill wounded or sick Tutsi. For example, on April 23 militia and soldiers from the Rwandan army killed 170 patients and medical personnel at the Butare Hospital. Dr. Claude-Emile Rowagoneza, a Tutsi, gave testimony on what he saw happen in and outside the hospital: The massacres were delayed until April 20th. That day everyone was asked to stay at home except those working in the hospital. Medical staff was transported to the hospital. Nurses had to walk and many were stopped at the checkpoint, asked to show their identity cards, and killed if they were Tutsi. There were 35 doctors at the hospital of which four were Tutsi. Because of the danger all four Tutsi stayed at the hospital, as did some nurses. Drs. Jean-Bosco Rugira and JeanClaude Kanangire are known to have been killed, and the fate of Dr. Isidore Kanangare who was hiding in the hospital and may have been evacuated by the French, is unknown. In mid-May injured

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soldiers from the Kanombe barracks started being brought to Butare Hospital and no more civilians were being admitted. They also started deciding who were Tutsi on the basis of their features, looking at the nose, height, and fingers because the identity cards were no longer accurate. Some of the doctors at the hospital risked their lives by helping threatened staff by hiding and feeding them . . . . When the patients’ wounds had healed some of the doctors—the “bad” doctors—expelled the Tutsi although everyone knew they would be killed outside. At night, the interhamwe and the soldiers came in but these doctors were colluding willingly. If people refused to go, they were taken out at night. They could be seen being killed by the interhamwe waiting at the gates. Later the Prime Minister came down to Butare . . . and while here he had a meeting with medical staff. They all said peace had returned and told the patients that it was safe to return home . . . . Those who did were then killed . . . . My wife was taken twice by interhamwe but neighbors insisted that she was Hutu . . . . My sister, mother, and father fled to Burundi but all my aunts, uncles, and in-laws were killed except for my mother-in-law. In other words, more than 40 of my relatives were killed. By June 6, eight weeks later, this deliberate Great Genocide had already taken some 500,000 Rwandan lives, mostly Tutsi. Whole families were massacred, including babies. As the Great Genocide progressed, the United Nations, Belgium, and particularly the United States showed extreme caution in calling this genocide a genocide. Nor could they decide whether to remain engaged in the country. In the first few days, Belgium withdrew completely when Hutu killed ten of its soldiers. Not understanding what was going on, the UN reduced its peacekeeping soldiers from 4,500 men to 270, and fully restricted the

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action of even this small contingent. As UN troops retreated from one base after another, waiting Hutu militia set upon and massacred the Tutsi families that had huddled under the UN flag for protection. It took the Clinton Administration three weeks—by which time hundreds of thousands had already been massacred—to declare a state of disaster in Rwanda. Even then, they characterized the situation as one of tribal killings, with crazed Hutu civilians roaming the streets with machetes hacking away at any Tutsi within reach. In actuality, this genocide was no less planned than the Holocaust or Turkey’s World War I genocidal slaughter of their Armenians. The American declaration provided unintended cover for the Hutu government to continue its Great Genocide. Even when the deliberate nature of the government’s action became too blatant to ignore, the Clinton Administration refused to call it genocide. To do so would have required foreign signatories of the Genocide Convention, including the United States, to immediately get involved. The Clinton Administration also continued to delay agreeing to the details of a UN dispatch of troops, and prevented any foreign action until June 8, nearly three months into the Great Genocide. Then, the Security Council finally received U.S. agreement, and authorized troops to enter Rwanda and prevent further genocide. These troops backed the Tutsi FPR, helped defeat the Hutu conspirators, and caused their government to collapse. An FPR-backed government then took power, and installed a dictatorship as severe as the one it replaced. At this point I should stress that the Tutsi were not blameless in the Great Genocide. In retaliation for the government’s actions against them, Tutsi civilians and the FPR killed Hutu, sometimes at random. For innocents on both sides, this was a historically unprecedented catastrophe. As mentioned, over 1 million might have died, and around 2 million Hutu were forced to flee their homes, with as many as 1.2 million ending up in Zaire alone. All would live miserable lives in refugee camps, suffering from hunger and disease, and often in danger from attacks by armed gangs of Tutsi. Localized cholera epidemics were frequent; just one of these killed 20,000 refugees. Still, Hutu were unwilling to leave the camps, fearing Tutsi reprisals—with good reason. When the new Tutsi government tried to close one camp in southwestern Rwanda, troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of Hutu protesters, an act which the United Nations claimed killed 2,000. Overall, perhaps one-third of a 1993 population around 7.3 million died or fled the country during the Great Genocide and the subsequent fighting. Though foreign troops and the FPR had ended the Great Genocide itself, the killing was not over. Several thousand Hutu rebelled against the new government, and with the support of the local

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Hutu population, they continued to attack and murder Tutsi. To deny these rebels cover, soldiers cleared rebel areas of banana plantations, particularly in the northwest, all but destroying the local economy. From May 1997 to March 1998, these hostilities killed about 10,000 Tutsi and Hutu in this region alone. These are just numbers, of course. At the personal level, we can more easily feel what these facts mean for one Tutsi small businessman, Immanuel Sebomana. He was on a bus in northwestern Rwanda when Hutu rebels stopped it. Sebomana immediately jumped from a window and ran for his life into the bush. Behind him, the rebels surrounded the bus, set it on fire, and killed any of the remaining passengers who tried to escape. Meanwhile, Hutu civilians joined the soldiers gathered around the bus, cheering and singing while thirty-five passengers died.

Chapter 22 Death by Marxism I: The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human catastrophe unequaled by any other country in the twentieth century.It probably lost slightly less than 4 million people to war, rebellion, manufactured famine, and democide—genocide, nonjudicial executions, and massacres—or close to 56 percent of its population.

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wanda represents a clear case of genocide by a government trying to maintain power. The incredible killing that took place in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 is different. First, it is an example of large-scale, nongenocidal mass murder, and only secondarily one of genocide. Second, this democide was part of an attempt by communists to impose a revolution on the country. They tried to abolish its religion, eradicate its culture, totally remodel its economy, communize all social interaction, and control all speech, writing, laughing, and loving. They exterminated anyone with any ties to Western nations, or to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, and eliminated everyone who had any connections to the previous government or military. Because of all this, it is necessary to focus on the intended revolution itself to explain how and why this one government, in four years, could and did murder more than one-quarter of its population. A little smaller than Oklahoma, Cambodia is located in southeast Asia, bordered by Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and the Gulf of Thailand. Cambodia’s population in 1970 was about 7.1million, slightly smaller than Rwanda’s. It was almost wholly Buddhist. The devastating history of Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s is intimately bound up with the Vietnam War. Communist North Vietnamese provided military aid and soldiers to Cambodia’s own communist guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge, or Red Cambodians. Cambodia was an avenue for war supplies from North Vietnam to their army and Viet Cong guerrillas fighting under their command in South Vietnam against South Vietnamese and American troops. As a result, the

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United States systematically bombed Khmer Rouge guerrillas and Viet Cong supply routes and, in a final attempt to destroy these routes, invaded Cambodia from South Vietnam. But American congressional and public opinion hostile to the invasion soon compelled American forces to retreat back to South Vietnam. In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human ca33 tastrophe unequaled by any other country in the twentieth century. It probably lost slightly less than 4 million people to war, rebellion, manufactured famine, and democide—genocide, nonjudicial executions, and massacres—or close to 56 percent of its 1970 population. Successive governments and guerrilla groups murdered almost 3.3 million men, women, and children, including 35,000 foreigners, between 1970 and 1980. Most of these, probably as many as 2.4 million, were murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge, both before and (to a much greater extent) during their takeover of Cambodia after April 1975. The United States had supported and supplied the Cambodian military government of General Lon Nol, but the American Congress ended all aid to him with the withdrawal of the United States from the Vietnam War in 1973. After successive retreats, Lon Nol could no longer even defend the capital, Phnom Penh, against the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. The Cambodian army declared a cease-fire and laid down its arms. On April 17, 1975, a ragtag bunch of solemn teenagers clad in black pajamas, red scarves, and Mao caps, and carrying arms of all descriptions, walked or were trucked from different directions into Phnom Penh. They were part of an army of 68,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas that had achieved victory for a Communist Party of only 14,000 members against an army of about 200,000 men.

Rule by Murder At first, the people hardly knew what to make of these victorious guerrillas. After all, the war was over, the killing had stopped, and people who had chafed under the Lon Nol government were relieved and happy. Many intellectuals and middle-class Cambodians, disgusted with the everyday corruption of the government, were willing to try anything that brought change, even communism. The Khmer Rouge was cheered, and there were public and private celebrations. 33 See Figure 1.2 of my Death By Government (1974), which is also available on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.FIG1.2.GIF. I provide estimates, calculations, and sources of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM

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But before the people could settle down and enjoy a few days of peace, the Khmer Rouge did the unimaginable: they turned their weapons on the 2 to 3 million inhabitants of the capital. Shouting threats of immediate death, waving their arms angrily, and actually shooting inhabitants, they demanded that everyone leave the city. In Phnom Penh and all other newly-occupied cities and towns, their order to evacuate was implacable. The Khmer Rouge kicked nearly 4,240,000 urban Cambodians and refugees, even the sick, infirm, and aged, out of the cities and towns into a largely unprepared countryside. Even for those on the operating table or in labor during childbirth, the order was absolute: “Go! Go! You must leave!” Families evacuated any way possible, carrying what few possessions they could grab. The wealthy and middle classes rode out in cars that were soon abandoned or stolen from them by the Khmer Rouge. Some left on heavily loaded motor scooters or bicycles, which were also soon confiscated. This vast multitude of urbanites and refugees, with only their feet to move them, formed barely moving lines that extended for miles. Some ill or infirm hobbled along; others, thrown from the hospitals, crawled along on hands and knees. According to a British journalist who watched the slowly moving mass of evacuees from the safety of the French embassy, the Khmer Rouge was “tipping out patients [from the hospitals] like garbage into the streets . . . . Bandaged men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of human misery I have seen.” Failure to evacuate meant death. Failure to begin evacuation promptly enough meant death. Failure of anyone to obey Khmer Rouge orders meant death. Failure to give the Khmer Rouge what they wanted—whether a car, motor scooter, bicycle, watch, or whatever— meant death. The direction from which people exited the city depended on their location at the time they received the evacuation order. The Khmer Rouge told refugees to return to their home villages, but particularly for the urbanites, where they went after evacuation and what village the Khmer Rouge eventually settled them in depended on the whim of the soldiers and cadres along the way. People were jumbled together, trudging along for days or weeks, usually with only the clothes, coverings, and provisions they had snatched at the last moment. Many had minimal supplies, since they had believed the Khmer Rouge who, to minimize disorder, had told them that the evacuation would be for only

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a few days. The very young and the old, and those already sick, injured, or infirm soon died on the roads or trails. One of these trudging millions, a medical doctor named Vann Hay, said that every two hundred meters, he saw a dead child. And, as the pitiful evacuees reached their homes or assigned villages, there was usually no relief from the horrors they’d already suffered. The situation was just different in kind. The toll from this outrageous and bloody evacuation, including those killed outright, is in dispute. Whether 40,000 to 80,000 evacuees were murdered or died, as one scholar sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge claimed, or 280,000 to 400,000 died, as the CIA estimated, the sheer horror of this urban expulsion is undeniable. Primarily, this was done as a matter of ideology. The Khmer Rouge saw the cities as the home of foreign ideas, capitalists, and their supportive bourgeoisie intellectuals; they were thoroughly corrupt, and required a thorough cleansing. And those the Khmer Rouge believed the city had corrupted—its professionals, businesspeople, public officials, teachers, writers, and workers—must either be eliminated or reeducated and purified. To the Khmer Rouge, the best way to remake those “corrupted minds” that they allowed to survive was to make them work in the fields alongside pure peasants. Consider the slogans broadcast over Radio Phnom Penh and spoken at meetings at the time: “what is infected must be cut out . . . . What is rotten must be removed . . . . What is too long must be shortened and made the right length . . . . It isn’t enough to cut down a bad plant, it must be uprooted.” This inhuman expulsion was an opening salvo in the Khmer Rouge campaign to utterly remake Cambodian culture and society, and to construct pure communism forthwith. Pol Pot and a few henchmen, who organized and loosely commanded the Khmer Rouge, planned all this. Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who had received his higher education and radical ideas in France, and helped found the Khmer Workers party—Khmer Rouge—in 1960, which he then headed. He subsequently organized and led the guerrilla attacks on Prince Sihanouk’s Western-oriented government in the 1960s, and against the American-supported General Lon Nol government that overthrew it in 1970. It should be noted that under Khmer Rouge rule, Cambodia was not one totalitarian society dictated by one set of doctrines or rules, except at the most abstract and general level. How the Khmer Rouge applied such abstractions, under what rules, and with what punishment for violations, varied from one district or region to another. This is why I write that Pol Pot “loosely” commanded.

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Conditions of Life Under the Khmer Rouge Civil/Political no freedom to travel abroad or from village to village no freedom to choose employment no freedom of speech no freedom of organization no freedom of religion—no religion allowed no courts, judges, or appeals no codified law or rules Social/Cultural no public or private worker rights no independent work or living (all in collectives) no skilled private or public medical care no foreign medicines no mail or telegrams no radio, television, or movies no international telephones or cables no newspapers, journals, or magazines no books or libraries no general schooling no holidays or religious festivals Economic no money (all money eliminated) no banks no wages or salaries no markets no businesses no restaurants or stores Personal no independent eating (all cooked and ate collectively) no personal food no regional gastronomic specialties (all ate the same) no private plots to grow food no personal names (all personal names had to be given up) no independent family life no sexual freedom no music no freedom from work after the age of five no personally owned buses, cars, scooters, or bicycles no personal clothes, pots, pans, watches, or anything no freedom to cry or laugh no private conversation

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Nonetheless, Pol Pot and his henchmen managed to hold the initiative, establish control throughout the country, and create the surprising uniformity in most regions shown here in Table 22.1. Take a moment and study the table. It shows that, with the Khmer Rouge seizure of power over Cambodia, its people were plunged into a border-to-border prison with rigid rules that made their lives worse, more controlled, and more dangerous than those of slaves. The Khmer Rouge collectivized peasants everywhere—95 to 97 percent of the population was eventually forced into collective farms— and expected evacuees and peasants to work solely for the communist revolution. They forbade all political, civil, or human rights. They prohibited travel without a pass from village to village. They forced Cambodians to eat and sleep in communes, and ordered even young children to work in the fields. In some regions, they made peasants work from about 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 or 10:00 p.m., with time off only for “political education.” They closed permanently all primary, secondary, and technical schools, as well as colleges and universities. They shut down all hospitals and automatically murdered Western-trained medical doctors. They prohibited sex between the unmarried and, in some places, they threatened boys and girls with death for as little as holding hands. Unauthorized contact was forbidden even between those who were married, also at risk of death. The Khmer Rouge allowed no appeals, no courts, no judges, no trials, and no law. They eliminated all money, businesses, books, and newspapers. They banned music. They eliminated practicing lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists, and all other professionals, because whatever truths these professions possessed, “the peasant could pick up through experience.” This is all incredible; some details may help its digestion. Just consider how the Khmer Rouge controlled personal relations. They made showing love to relatives or laughing with them dangerous, often perceiving this as showing less dedication to, or poking fun at, the Great Revolution. It was even dangerous to use some term of endearment, such as “honey,” “sweetheart,” or “dearest,” for a loved one. When a spy overheard the doctor Haing Ngor referring to his wife in this manner, the spy reported him for both this and eating food he picked in the forest, instead of bringing it into the village for communal eating. The local cadre interrogated him about these sins, and told him, “The chhlop [informers] say that you call your wife ‘sweet.’ We have no ‘sweethearts’ here. That is forbidden.” Soldiers then took him to a prison where cadre members severally tortured him, cut off his finger, and sliced his ankle with a hatchet. He barely survived.

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This deadly communist revolution created pitiful human dilemmas. Think about what this same doctor, Haing Ngor, went through when his wife suffered life-threatening complications during childbirth. To help her deliver her baby would mean death, since the Khmer Rouge forbade husbands from delivering their wives’ babies. In any case, to use his medical skills to save her would in effect tell the cadre that he was a doctor, and would result in not only his death, but possibly that of his wife and newborn child. To do nothing might mean their death anyway; still, if he did nothing, the wife might pull through. He chose to do nothing—perhaps he could do nothing anyway, since he had no proper medical instruments. Both mother and baby soon died, leaving a gaping wound in his heart that never healed. (Haing Ngor subsequently came to the United States after the defeat of Vietnam, became an actor, and received an Academy Award for his performance in The Killing Fields, the movie about the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. In 1996 he was murdered for money as he arrived home in Los Angeles, for which three members of the Oriental LazyBoyz street gang were subsequently tried and convicted.) But even if Ngor’s child had been born, he could not have kept it for long The Khmer Rouge took children away from their parents and made them live and work in labor brigades. If the children died of fatigue or disease, the cadre was good enough to inform their parents; then, what emotion the parents showed could mean their life or death. If they wept or displayed extreme unhappiness, this showed a bourgeois sentimentality—after all, their children had sacrificed themselves for the Great Revolution and the parents should be proud, not unhappy. Similarly, a wife expressing grief over an executed husband—an enemy of the Great Revolution—was explicitly criticizing the Khmer Rouge. This unforgivable act of bourgeois sentimentality could mean her death. Throughout Cambodia, fear was a normal condition of life. The Khmer Rouge systematically massacred people because of past positions, associations, or relatives. Top military men under a previous government, former government officials or bureaucrats, business executives or high monks, when discovered by the cadre, were murdered along with their whole families (including babies), sometimes after extended torture. This root-and-branch extermination of the tainted even reached down to cousins of cousins of former soldiers—when Khmer Rouge cadres came to believe that the villagers of Kauk Lon really were former Lon Nol officers, customs officials, and police agents, troops forced every villager (about 360 men, women, and children) to march into a nearby forest. As they walked among the trees, waiting soldiers ambushed and machine-gunned them all down.

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Similar slaughter often awaited those who had had any relations with the West or Vietnam, even sometimes with the Soviet Union, or with those who had ever opposed the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge were even known to execute those found with Western items, such as books, or those who spoke French or English, or who had been schooled beyond the seventh grade. In some areas, even wearing glasses was a capital offense. Then there was the killing of people for laziness, complaining, wrong attitudes, or unsatisfactory work. I will give only one example of this, but for me, as a teacher, it is the most hideous of all the accounts I read. This is the Buddhist monk Hem Samluat’s description of an execution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy: It was. . . of Tan Samay, a high schoolteacher from Battambang. The Khmer Rouge accused him of incompetence. The only thing taught the children at the village was how to cultivate the soil. Maybe Tan Samay was trying to teach them other things, too, and that was his downfall. His pupils hanged him. A noose was passed around his neck; then the rope was passed over the branch of a tree. Half a dozen children between eight and ten years old held the loose end of the rope, pulling it sharply three or four times, dropping it in between. All the while they were shouting, “Unfit teacher! Unfit teacher!” until Tan Samay was dead. The worst was that the children 34 took obvious pleasure in killing. The scale of these murders can be gauged from the admission of Chong Bol, who claimed that, as a political commissar at the end of 1975, he had participated in the killing of 5,000 people. Think about this for a moment. If this murderer had been a citizen of a democracy and had admitted killing even one-tenth this many people in cold blood, historians would record him as history’s most monstrous mur34 John Barron and Anthony Paul, Peace with Horror: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia. London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 148–149. American Edition titled Murder of a Gentle Land. New York: Reader’s Digest Press—Thomas Y. Crowell.

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derer. As an officer of a government, as with the Nazi SS soldiers, Soviet death camp managers, and Chinese commissars, who also exterminated thousands, his murders will be noted as acts of his regime, and history will forget the individual murderer. Such heinous crimes are depersonalized, their horror lost among general abstractions. They are just statistics. Not only did the Khmer Rouge run amok massacring their people, they also tried to destroy the very heart of peasant life everywhere. Hinayana Buddhism had been a state religion, and the priesthood of monks with their saffron robes was a central part of Cambodian culture. Some 90 percent of Cambodians believed in some form of Buddhism. Many received a rudimentary schooling from the monks, and many young people became monks for part of their lives. The Khmer Rouge could not allow so powerful an institution to stand and therefore set out to destroy it. They exterminated all leading monks and either murdered or defrocked the lesser ones. One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks, only 800 to 1,000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2,680 monks in eight monasteries, only seventy were alive in 1979. As for the Buddhist temples that peppered the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amazingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarnation, its institutions. This was an act of genocide within the larger Cambodian democide, and it was not the only one. In most if not all of the country, simply being of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Lao ancestry meant death. As part of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong Xiem, for example, they demolished five Cham hamlets and reportedly massacred 20,000 people living there; in the district of Koong Neas, only four Cham apparently survived out of some 20,000. The cadre threw the Cham Grand Mufti, their spiritual leader, into boiling water and then hit him on the head with an iron bar. They beat another leader, the First Mufti, to death, tortured and disemboweled the Second Mufti, and imprisoned and murdered by starvation the Chairman of the Islamic Association of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Overall, the Khmer Rouge annihilated nearly half—about 125,000—of all the Cambodian Cham. The Khmer Rouge also slaughtered about 200,000 ethnic Chinese, almost half of those in Cambodia—a calamity for ethnic Chinese in this part of the world unequaled in modern times. They murdered 3,000 Protestants and 5,000 Catholics, around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese (over

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half), and 12,000 out of 20,000 ethnic Thai. One Cambodian peasant, Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his wife but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen of his wife’s relatives. In this genocide, the Khmer Rouge probably murdered 541,000 Chinese, Chams, Vietnamese, and other minorities, or about 7 percent of the Cambodian population. As though this was not enough, by threat of death the Khmer Rouge forced ordinary Cambodians to labor to the point of life-endangering exhaustion, and fed them barely enough to keep them alive while further weakening their bodies through extreme malnutrition. The Khmer Rouge fed their hard laborers an average of 800 to 1,200 calories per day—for even light labor, a worker requires an average minimum of 1,800 calories. Nor did the Khmer Rouge provide them with protection against exposure and disease. Even Pol Pot admitted in 1976 that 80 percent of the peasants had malaria. In many places, people died like fish in a heavily polluted stream. People are not fish. They are thinking, feeling, loving human beings. As one would expect, in this hell the Khmer Rouge did not spare each other the fear of death either, but often executed their soldiers and cadres for infractions of minor rules. More important, as the Pol Pot gang maneuvered to consolidate its rule over Cambodia, the struggle for power at the top, and the paranoia of top leaders, increased. Not only was there the usual despot’s fear of an assassin’s knife in the night, there was also an intensifying fear that dissident Khmer Rouge might destroy the communist revolution. Increasingly, the Pol Pot gang saw sabotage, and CIA, KGB, or Vietnamese operatives behind all production failures and project delays. Purge after purge of high and low Khmer Rouge followed. They increasingly filled the cells of Tuol Sleng, the major security facility in Phnom Penh, with communist officials and cadre members. Pol Pot’s gang had these people tortured until they fingered collaborators among higher-ups, who were then executed. Confessions were the aim of most torture, and the gang would even arrest, with all the lethal consequences, interrogators who were so crude as to kill their victims before getting a confession. On the suffering of the tortured, one such interrogator reported, “I questioned this bitch who came back from France; my activity was that I set fire to her ass until it became a burned-out mess, then beat her to the point that she was so turned around I couldn’t get any answer 35 out of her; the enemy then croaked, ending her answers . . . .” 35 Arch Puddington, “The Khmer Rouge File,” The American Spectator (July 1987): pp. 18–20.

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The sheer pile of confessions forced from tortured lips must have further stimulated paranoia at the top. The recorded number of prisoners admitted to Tuol Sleng was about 20,000, suggesting how many were tortured and made such confessions. Only fourteen of them survived this imprisonment—fourteen. And this was only one such torture/execution chamber, albeit the main one in the country. In summary, the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge was a giant forced labor and death camp, in which all suffered the torments of hell. In foreign relations, Pol Pot and his people hated their neighboring communist Vietnamese and felt no fraternal loyalty to them. They saw the Vietnamese as racially inferior, and as the foremost danger to the Khmer Rouge revolution. Even before their victory over Lon Nol, the Khmer Rouge had tried to purge their ranks of those trained in Hanoi, and had carried out the pogrom against ethnic Vietnamese described above. It was not long after their victory that they began to attack Vietnamese territory across the border. In many of these incursions they fought pitched battles with Vietnamese units, attacked and burned Vietnamese villages, and murdered their populations. These attacks grew in intensity and became, in effect, a war against Vietnam. The Vietnamese first responded vigorously to these attacks; then, apparently to buy time for war preparations, they tried to negotiate Khmer Rouge border complaints, and to find a basis for cooperative relations. This phase lasted until December of 1979, when Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Her heavily armed troops, backed with gunships and tanks, easily rolled over the fewer, more lightly armed Khmer Rouge defenders. In the next month, the invading forces occupied Phnom Phen. As Vietnamese troops approached one village after another, most peasants rebelled against the local Khmer Rouge cadre and troops, killing them with their own weapons, with farm tools, and sometimes with their own hands. Surviving Khmer Rouge, along with possibly 100,000 people they forced to move with them (vengefully killing many on the way), retreated to a mountainous region along the Thai border. From there and from refugee camps they soon controlled in Thailand, they carried out a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese and their puppet Samrin regime, and then against the government Vietnam established when it completely withdrew from the country. Only in the last decade would they finally be defeated. The human, social, and cultural cost to Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge years is incalculable. In democide alone, the Khmer Rouge probably murdered 600,000 to 3 million Cambodians by execution, torture or other mistreatment, malnutrition, famine, exposure, and dis-

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ease. A most prudent estimate is 2 million dead, or about one-third of the 1975 population. Some 352,000 refugees escaped the country. As wholesale murderers, the Khmer Rouge are in a class with the Rwandan Hutu government. For rapidly killing a high proportion of their population, they have no competitors. Not even Stalin or Mao could come close. Even Hitler might be shamed by the poor performance of his killers compared to Pol Pot’s gang or the Hutu government. And, yes, the Khmer Rouge were racists—they believed in the racial superiority of the dark-skinned Khmer over the Vietnamese, Chinese, Moslem Cham, and others. This racism underlay the genocide they committed against these minorities, but it also played a role in their vicious incursions into Vietnam and the massacre of its citizens. This being noted, the basic motive behind much of their democide was ideological. The Khmer Rouge were fanatical adherents to a new variant of communism, one that combined the Maoism of the destructive Great Leap Forward and communes, the Stalinism of the Soviet collectivization period in the early 1930s and the later Great Terror (Chapter 23), and an obsessive and deadly nationalism. To create their revolution, the Khmer Rouge were willing to kill millions of Cambodians—even, they said, until no more than a million remained—as long as they were able to do three things in a few short years. One, to totally reconstruct Cambodia; to fully collectivize it and exterminate all class enemies, capitalists, monks, former power-holders, and anything foreign. All others would work and eat communally, and the Khmer Rouge would satisfy their every need. All would be equal; all would be happy. Two, the Khmer Rouge wanted to immediately create a thoroughly independent and self-sufficient Cambodia. For the Khmer Rouge, the key idea was “independence-sovereignty.” They wanted to end any dependence on other nations for anything, whether food or newsprint or machinery. As crazy as it was—all nations depend on trade—this was a basic, constantly repeated fixation. And three, they wanted to recover the ancient glory of the Khmer Kingdom. Part of this glory, they felt, lay in the pure soul of the Khmer that existed then, a soul that modern life and Western influence had corrupted. The Khmer Rouge believed that by emptying the cities and ordering the millions of urbanites to work like oxen in the fields to absorb the simple peasant life, they were purifying the people and the nation. During the evacuation of Phnom Penh, a political official explained to the French priest François Ponchaud, “The city is bad, for there is money in the city. People can be reformed, but not

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cities. By sweating to clear the land, sowing and harvesting crops, men will learn the real value of things. Man has to know that he is born from a grain of rice!” Yes, ideas do have consequences, as the Cambodian death toll under these ideologues well attests.

Chapter 23 Death by Marxism II: Stalin’s Great Terror What is so hard to convey about the feeling of Soviet citizens through 1936–38 is the similar long-drawn-out sweat of fear, night after night, that the moment of arrest might arrive before the next dawn . . . [J]ust as in the mud-holes of Verdun and Ypres, anyone at all could feel that he might be the next victim. – Robert Conquest

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ther governments have murdered many more of their citizens than did the Rwandan Hutu government and the Khmer Rouge, but over a longer period and with a much larger population. The most murderous of these have also, like the Khmer Rouge, been communist governments, as I’ve already shown in Chapters 13 to 15. Here I will focus on Stalin’s democide alone, and Mao’s in the next chapter, in order to further illustrate the shocking consequences of their absolute power on human life. During this period, as I described in Chapter 14, Stalin also forced mass starvation upon Ukrainian peasants as a means to defeat their nationalism and opposition to collectivization, thus murdering around 5 million of them within a couple of years. It is as though the American Federal Government purposely starved to death or killed by associated diseases everyone in Maryland, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Yet Stalin was not satisfied with this; he also struck at Ukrainian nationalism in other ways, such as directly murdering those who communicated the Ukrainian culture—he ordered shot Ukrainian writers, historians, composers, and even itinerant, blind folksingers. The following, from the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, contains its own chilling horror. Since time immemorial, folk singers have wandered along the roads of the Ukraine . . . . they were always blind and defenseless people, but no one ever

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touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind man—what could be lower? And then in the mid thirties the First All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and Banduristy [folk singers] was announced, and all the folk singers had to gather and discuss what to do in the future. “Life is better, life is merrier,” Stalin had said. The blind men believed it. They came to the congress from all over the Ukraine, from tiny, forgotten villages. There were several hundred of them at the congress, they say. It was a living museum, the country’s living history. All its songs, all its music and poetry. And they were almost all shot, almost all those pathetic blind men killed. Why was this done? . . . Here were these blind men, walking around singing songs of dubious content. The songs weren’t passed by the censors. And what kind of censorship can you have with blind men? You can’t hand a blind man a corrected and approved text and you can’t write him an order either. You have to tell everything to a blind man. That takes too long. And you can’t file away a piece of paper, and there’s no time anyway. Collectivization. Mechanization. It was easier to shoot them. And so they 36 did.

The Great Terror As bad as this democide was, the worst was yet to come. By 1934 the Peasant War was over. But it left an aftertaste. Some activists and 36 Quoted in Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz, and James E. Mace, Famine in the Soviet Ukraine 1932–1933: A Memorial Exhibition. Widener Library, Harvard University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 53–54.

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party officials in the field could not quite accept the horrors of the previous years with ideological equanimity. Shooting children as kulaks? Starving to death helpless old women? Was this what Marxism meant? Moreover, many old Bolsheviks in the Party who could contrast Bolshevik ideals with the present still had the old rebellious spirit. Then there were the top contenders for Stalin’s power, each with his own followers, each willing to criticize Stalin’s policies and argue alternatives. Stalin ruled, but with an increasingly shaky party beneath him and the real possibility of a palace coup, he did not rule securely. This was underlined in January 1934 at the Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Most delegates had decided to replace Stalin; some wanted as his replacement Sergei Kirov, a popular member of the Politburo, head of the Leningrad Party, and a Russian, unlike Stalin. Obviously a major purge was needed, and Stalin was a man of action. He met this early challenge by directly confronting his opponents, in effect launching a coup d’état against the Communist Party. First he had Kirov assassinated; then, under the guise of exposing the perpetrators of this abominable deed, he set up special staffs of NKVD in every district executive committee of Leningrad to uncover all those involved in the assassination (which turned out to be almost the whole Leningrad Party, of course). The “conspirators” were shot or sent to labor camps. None could appeal. A quarter of Leningrad was purged—cleaned out— in 1934–1935. This bloody purge was extended to other major cities and eventually to the whole country. It reached its zenith with Stalin’s appointment of a supreme headhunter, Nikolai Yezhov, as chief of the NKVD in 1936. Immediately justifying Stalin’s faith in him, Yezhov inaugurated his reign by having all the NKVD People’s Commissars in the Union republics, and usually their deputies as well, shot. And no NKVD officer who had served under the former head, Yagoda, was safe either. In 1937 alone, 3,000 were shot. As the murderous purge embraced one Party bureau and then another, one government agency and then another, and one social institution and then another, its nature, extent, and scope began to defy reason and belief. Yet, we can see a rationale in it. Stalin may have wanted to go beyond simply exterminating the opposition, and create a new party in abject fear of him, one that would work in lockstep to achieve his utopia. Now consider these aspects of what came to be called the Great Terror, and see if this is not the only way in which they can be understood. Throughout the vast country, “top and middle echelons of the Party and government were executed or sent to camps to die. Their replace-

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ments, and sometimes even their replacements again, also were subsequently murdered or sent to labor camps. In 1938 in Tbilisi: . . . the Chairman of the City Executive Committee, his first deputy, department chiefs, their assistants, all the chief accountants, all the chief economists were arrested. New ones were appointed in their places. Two months passed, and the arrests began again: the chairman, the deputy, all eleven department chiefs, all the chief accountants, all the chief economists. The only people left at liberty were ordinary account37 ants, stenographers, charwomen, and messengers . . . .” Many old Bolsheviks and other top communists were given show trials during which they confessed to spying, “counter-revolutionary” plotting, and other “crimes”; they were sentenced to death. In August 1936, after a dramatic public trial, sixteen top Party leaders, including Lev Kamemev, Ivan Smirnov, and Grigori Zinoviev, were executed as Trotskyites. In January 1937, another public trial of seventeen more top communists, including Karl Radek, was held; all but four were later executed. In March of 1938, more top Party members, among them Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Genrikh Yagoda, were tried and executed. Many Westerners, including the American ambassador, were completely duped by these trials. They thought them legitimate, and these top Party men guilty; they could not believe that all the confessions of these high officials were false. But they were, as the Soviets in later decades admitted. The chief of Soviet military intelligence was also shot. Military intelligence agents serving abroad were brought home and shot. Major Soviet officers and diplomats who had played a role in the Spanish Civil War were shot. The top military echelons of the Red Army and Navy were shot. Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, the Chief of Staff, was shot along with seven high-ranking generals for plotting against the country (the marshal was posthumously exonerated in 1956). Overall, about half of those in the Red Army officer corps were shot or imprisoned—35,000 men. These included three of the five marshals, thirteen out of fifteen commanders, all eight admirals, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders, seventy-five out of the eighty sitting on the supreme military council, all military district commanders, and all eleven vice-commissars of war. Heroes of the Soviet Union many were, unto their death. There is no evidence that they plotted against Stalin, Party, or country, or even tried to use their military forces to save themselves. 37 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation I–II. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 68–69.

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Not only were the officers, officials, and workers in Party or government executed or sent to labor camps, often with an impossible twenty-five year sentence, but so were their wives, parents, and children, and often, associates and friends. It was assumed that all those arrested and interrogated had to be part of a plot or conspiracy. NKVD interrogators labored over each prisoner (interrogators themselves could and were arrested for “wrecking” if they seemed insufficiently dedicated) to uncover names and dates, often supplied by the interrogators themselves. But this was a vicious cycle. A prisoner was forced to confess to at least two coconspirators; these in turn were arrested and each confessed to at least two more, and in turn came more new names. It was a mathematical certainty that the NKVD would eventually interrogate every adult in the Soviet Union except for themselves and Stalin. The countrywide scope of these arrests, the sheer mass of those raked in, is unimaginable. Even race and ethnicity were bases for arrest. Greeks were arrested throughout the nation in 1937. Chinese were arrested en bloc. National minorities in Russian towns were all but eliminated. All Koreans from the Far East were arrested; all those in Leningrad with Estonian family names were arrested; all Latvian Riflemen and Chekists were arrested. Sometimes, the NKVD would murder people on no pretext at all— simply to meet a quota. This is so incredible to a person born and raised in freedom that I will repeat it. This communist government—really the Communist Party, which was the de facto government— would set up a quota for the number of people its lower officials had to murder. How could this be? Top communists believed that a certain percentage of the population opposed the Communist Party, and therefore had to be eliminated. But in typical communist fashion, this was not something that could be left to the discretion of a low-level cadre. After all, to ensure that lower level cadres were correctly guided in their work, the Party had to put a production quota on iron, steel, pigs, wheat, and virtually everything else of an economic nature. It followed that officials should also be given quotas of people to murder. Furthermore, it was consistent with the communist idea of central planning and control. From Moscow NKVD headquarters, the order would go out to officials or the communist cadre in a village or town to kill so many “enemies of the people,” and soon enough, the NKVD would receive word that it had been done. That such orders would be given is incredible enough, but that the local official would obey them is also unbelievable. Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, ques-

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tioned why “quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal hatred of injustice and cruelty” would carry out these merciless purges and executions. The answer was simple: sweating, trembling, fear. They related what a friend they called M— said of his experience as an NKVD official in a country town in the Novosibirsk region: The number of victims demanded by Moscow from this town was five hundred. M— went through all the local dossiers, and found nothing but trivial offenses recorded. But Moscow’s requirements were implacable; he was driven to desperate measures. He listed priests and their relatives; he put down anyone who was reported to have spoken critically about conditions in the Soviet Union; he included all former members of Admiral Kolchak’s White Army [an anti-Communist force in the Civil War of 1918 to 1922]. Even though the Soviet Government had decreed that it was not an offense to have served in Kolchak’s Army, since its personnel had been forcibly conscripted, it was more than M—’s life was worth not to fulfill his quota. He made up his list of five hundred enemies of the people, had them quickly charged and executed and reported to Moscow: “Task accomplished in accordance with your instructions.” M— . . . detested what he had to do. He was by nature a decent, honest, kindly man. He told me the story with savage resentment. Years afterwards its horror and injustice lay heavy on his conscience. But M— did what he was ordered. Apart from a man’s ordinary desire to remain alive, M— had a mother, a father, 38 a wife, and two children. 38 Vladimir and Evodkia Petrov, Empire of Fear. New York: Praeger, 1956, pp. 75– 76.

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Indeed, the whole country also came under an arrest quota: “Orders were . . . issued to arrest a certain percentage of the entire popula39 tion.” How many were arrested? About 8 million people just between the middle of 1936 and the end of 1938. Possibly as many as 14 million people were under NKVD detention, or about 9 percent of the population. These were not all Party members or officials; most were simple peasants and workers. They had nothing to do with the Party, or with Stalin’s power over the Party and thus the country. They had done nothing wrong. Yet they were arrested by the millions. Why? Only one answer is plausible. There was a growing labor shortage, and needing more forced laborers for its enterprises, the NKVD had developed a quota system to arrest and collect its slaves. This becomes even more plausible when those whose camp terms were expiring— those who, against the odds, had managed to survive the deadly camp conditions—were given another ten, fifteen, or twenty-five year sentence. This, without interrogation or hearing, for nothing the prisoner had done, was disclosed to the prisoners as they stood in brigades called up to the administration building for the purpose, and for which they were even made to sign their names. The millions and millions of arrests during 1937 and 1938 got out of hand. Interrogators were swamped, prison cells were stuffed with new arrivals, and the system was breaking down by the end of 1938. In some places, faced with finding space for the daily crowd of newly arrested, officials had holes dug in the ground, a roof put over the top, and prisoners herded in. Small prisons teemed with thousands—a prison in Kharkov built for around 800 held about 12,000 prisoners. Not at all unusual, Butyrka Prison in Moscow had 140 men squeezed into a cell for twenty-four. The Great Terror had to end. His purpose accomplished, Stalin purged Yezhov, the top purger himself, and replaced him with Lavrenti Beria. Yezhov was given a token position and soon disappeared. Then, arguing that NKVD fascists had been responsible for the terror, and like Yezhov before him, Beria had nearly all senior officers of the NKVD executed, and sent most of the others to the camps (many camp inmates briefly enjoyed seeing their former interrogators and torturers joining them). As told by a former official in the Secretariat of the Politburo, Beria had his own methods: He invited the Ministers of the Interior of all the republics and all the higher 39 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, History of Russia. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 559.

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Cheka officials who had especially distinguished themselves during the purges to a conference in Moscow. Having been asked to leave their weapons in the cloakroom, they were received in the banqueting hall with lavish hospitality. Everybody was in excellent spirits when Beria appeared. Instead of the expected address he uttered just one sentence: “You are under arrest.” They were led from the hall and shot in the cellar the 40 same night. Executions during the Great Terror were not limited to those purged; there still was an absolute requirement to liquidate “enemies of the people,” party members with insufficient revolutionary consciousness, independent thinkers, and the like. Of those arrested, the number executed cannot be known confidently. While the Great Terror focused on the Party, it still fell hardest on peasants, workers, intellectuals, and the religious. Evidence of this terror was uncovered during the 1943 Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. In Vinnitsa, a mass grave was discovered that contained over 9,000 bodies, more than 13 percent of Vinnitsa’s prewar population. The Nazis invited an international commission of medical experts to examine the bodies. Almost all were found to have been shot in the back of the neck, all apparently in 1938. A number of those murdered had been sentenced to forced labor “without the right of correspondence,” an apparently normal deception. The result of the Great Terror was a whole new Communist Party. Of 139 candidates and members of the Party’s central committee, 98 were shot. Only 59 of 1,966 delegates to the Party Congress in 1934 were alive to attend the Congress in 1939. In total, the purge eliminated 850,000 members from the Party, or 36 percent. Throughout the country, extravagant adulation of Stalin became common, while the population learned silence and obedience, fear and submission. It was a revolution not in structure, but in personnel. Virtually all the old guard and Party faithful who lived through the Bolshevik Revolution were murdered. Stalin had liquidated the old Party; the new Party was totally terrorized into obeying his slightest whim or command. Stalin’s power was 40 Bernard Roeder, Katorga: An Aspect of Modern Slavery. Translated by Lionel Kochan. London: Heinemann, 1958, pp. 205–6.

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absolute. He needed to obey no laws, no customs, no tradition. He feared no man under him. With no competing vision, he was free to achieve his own version of utopia, unhindered by any norms, traditions, or ethics. How many were killed overall during this terror? The probable 1 million people executed does not cover camp and transit deaths. In 1936, the camp population was largely generated by the collectivization campaign. When these camp deaths are included, along with an estimated 65,000 dying from deportation, and with the number shot, the total murdered in the Great Terror years is probably 4,345,000. This is a prudent estimate. The democide could be as high as 10,821,000 or as 41 low as 2,044,000. Even this very conservative, absolute low is not to be taken lightly. If it alone were the only estimate for democide in the Soviet Union in this century, it would still be terribly significant. It is over twice the number of Armenians the Turks probably murdered during World War I; it likely exceeds the number of Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge during their brief reign; it is over twice Japan’s battle dead in all of World War II, almost twice the overall battle dead in the Vietnam War, and much greater than the total battle dead in the Korean War. Yet, this low is probably too low by over 2 million lives. And even the more likely figure of 4,345,000 is less than one-third the probable democide of the previous collectivization period!

41 For my estimates, calculations, and sources on this toll, see Table 5.A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. The table is also available on my website at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB5A.GIF

Chapter 24 Death by Marxism III: Mao’s Cultural Revolution There is no construction without destruction. – Mao Tse-tung I think this is a civil war!

– Mao Tse-tung

T

he Great Famine that the Chinese Communist Party caused from the late 1950s to the early 1960s that I described in Chapter 15 helped split the Party. Many communists militantly and fervently supported Chairman Mao’s desire to continue his Glorious Revolution. Opposed to him were powerful pragmatists, the “capitalist roaders,” who wished to liberalize the economy. Mao now wanted to purge his Communist Party as Stalin had in his Great Terror. But when he began the purge, he created one of the most violent civil wars of the last century instead. Mao’s purge began in May 1966, when he launched a written public attack on P’en Chen, mayor of Beijing and member of the Politburo. He put it in the form of a circular of the Central Committee and disseminated it throughout the Party and the army. It concluded that: The whole Party must follow Comrade Mao Tse-tung’s instructions; hold high the great banner of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution; thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so-called ‘academic authorities’ who oppose the Party and socialism; thoroughly criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic work, education, journalism, literature and art, and publishing; and seize the leadership in these cultural spheres. With this end in view, it is at the same time necessary to criticize and repudiate those

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representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and all spheres of culture, to clear them out or transfer some of them to other positions. Above all, we must not entrust these people with the work of leading the Cultural Revolution. In fact many of them have done and are still doing such work, and this is extremely dangerous. Those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and the various spheres of culture are a bunch of counterrevolutionary revisionists. When conditions are ripe, they would seize power and turn the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Some of them we have already seen through, others we have not. Some we still trust and are training as our successors. There are, for example, people of the Krushchev [sic] brand still nestling in our midst. Party committees at all levels 42 must pay full attention to this matter. Many reasons have been offered for Mao’s mobilization and unleashing of forces that probably consumed millions of lives in countrywide terror, mass murder, and battles, and almost destroyed the Party. What stands out, however, is that Mao was losing power over the Party and that basic policies he favored were being ignored or overridden. He wanted the commune, forced industrialization, tighter economic controls, more mass movements. The central Party, however, under Liu Shao-ch’i (vice chairman of the Party and since 1956, apparent successor to Mao) was for further dismantling the commune, more decentralization, and some liberalization. An obvious “capitalist roader,” as Mao called such pragmatists in comparison to those in favor of his strict communist policies. 42 Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 16 May 1966, Chung Fa no. 267 (66), translated in American Consulate General, Hong Kong. Current Background, no. 852.

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Mao’s purpose in organizing and exciting the Cultural Revolution, therefore, was to discredit and overthrow his party opponents (the “capitalist roaders”), train through struggle a whole new generation of proletarian revolutionaries, and to create an ideological revolution among the masses—to replace old ideas with Mao’s thought. It was to be the communist revolution all over again. Thus aiming to regain supreme power and to put China back on track toward true communism—to again reinforce the Party with the “spirit of the masses”—Mao used the army to promote, direct, and support the idealism and energy of millions of high school and college students in a student rebellion against those who were now treated as Mao’s enemies. Massive meetings were held involving millions of “Red Guards,” as these students soon became known. They were encouraged to uncover “capitalist roaders” or “counterrevolutionaries,” in every organization, to attack and even torture and murder such suspects in and out of the Party. Throughout August and September of 1966, Red Guards conducted a reign of terror. People thought to be bourgeois or counterrevolutionaries were beaten, in homes and on the street; houses were invaded at will and ransacked; belongings that Red Guards thought unnecessary for a proletarian family were destroyed or confiscated. Having Western books, records, or goods was sufficient to be accused of spying. And as Chou En-lai later admitted, “the police and soldiers were under orders 43 not to interfere.” Even Central Committee members, mayors, and other prestigious officials were not exempt. The China News Agency admitted that there “was a special prison [apparently Qin Ching] outside of Peking where thirty-four senior leaders were tortured to death, twenty maimed, and 44 sixty went insane during the Cultural Revolution.” It secretly held at one time about five hundred of China’s leaders, each isolated in a small cell, forbidden to talk to anyone, and known to guards only by a number. No word was allowed out about their imprisonment, even to families. Soon this revolution deteriorated into the murder of anyone who disagreed with how one faction or another defined Mao’s thought or policies. Red Guard fought Red Guard, “leftist” military units fought “leftist” military units, and “conservative” workers and peasants fought both. According to a report by Minister of Security Hsieh Fu-chih, dur43 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 257. 44 Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982, p. 354.

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ing the first ten days of May 1967, Beijing saw 130 “bloody incidents” 45 involving 63,000 people. Throughout China many such “incidents” went well beyond fists and knives. There were savage pitched battles with machine guns, grenades, and mortars. In fact: Serious clashes, and in some places heavy fighting, reportedly broke out, during July and August [1967], in every one of China’s twenty-six provinces and autonomous regions . . . . In Szechwan, possibly in consequence of a split within the armed forces stationed in the province, heavy fighting broke out in which even gunboats, tanks 46 and artillery were involved. Parts of cities and even whole towns and villages were destroyed. In Wuhan in July 1967, a unit of the army mutinied, occupied key points, and led an “anti-left” uprising. In the wake of this, struggles broke out in Canton and spread to other parts of the military region and were fought with great violence. One large wall poster put up in Canton in 1974 claimed that in “Guangdong Province alone nearly 40,000 revolutionary masses and cadres were massacred and more than a mil47 lion were imprisoned, put under ‘control’ and struggled against.” Fighting continued intermittently throughout the year and into the next, and then broke out with renewed ferocity in the spring of 1968. There were “very serious” engagements, with army units involved on both sides of the battling factions. The deputy commander of the Wuhan Military Region declared “that the ammunition they had fired within the preceding several days would have sufficed ‘to fight several 48 battles in the war against Japan.’” From the first comprehensive account of this period published in China, we learn that elsewhere

45 Jÿrgen Domes, The Internal Politics of China 1949–1972. Translated by Rÿdiger Machetzki. New York: Praeger, 1973, p. 183. 46 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 408. 47 Quoted in Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China After Mao. New York: McGrawHill, 1981 p. 104. 48 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 450.

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several tens of thousands of militia troops surrounded Wuzhou and took the city after three weeks. Both sides suffered untold casualties; some areas were razed to the ground. The “Allied Command” took up to a thousand prisoners among the “April 22” faction, whom they treated with inhuman cruelty. For instance, they would randomly pick out prisoners on forced marches to shoot on the spot. Family members, including children of prisoners, were mercilessly slaughtered. The brutality matched the Japanese massacre in Nanjing. Liuzhou and Guilin were subject to similar holocausts, except that the latter, being the stronghold of “April 22” power, never fell to the “Allied Command.” In some localities on the island of Hainan, whole villages had joined the “Banner” faction. These localities were designated as “bandit areas” where military troops were sent to reduce them to a shambles. Survivors described massacres as “worse than the time of the Japanese 49 invasion.” In the countryside and the major cities of Kwangsi Province, violent battles went on for weeks, and even involved tanks, artillery, and anti-aircraft guns. Large urban areas were destroyed, and “gas shells or explosives were used to flush out those who were fighting from sewer 50 ducts.” This also happened in other provinces. In the cities of Suchou and Liuchou there were over 50,000 battle dead from military-like clashes between Red Guards and the army. Such revolutionary engagements went on for a third year. In the spring of 1969 there was a resurgence of violence in Szechwan, Kweichow, Shansi, Sinkiang, Tibet, and elsewhere. A July Central 49 Liu Guokai. A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1987, pp. 121, 123. This analysis of the Cultural Revolution was originally published in China. 50 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p. 451.

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Committee directive claimed that in Shansi “‘a small handful of class enemies and evil people,’ . . . had ‘infiltrated’ mass organizations, staged armed attacks on units of the [army] and seized their arms; destroyed railways, roads, and bridges and carried out armed seizures of trains; forcefully occupied state banks and warehouses; and used armed force to occupy territory and set up bases for counterrevolutionary pur51 poses.” All these battles, clashes, and military-like operations notwithstanding, it would be a misunderstanding of the Cultural Revolution to conceive of its violence only or mainly in terms of violent engagements. The violence against the individual by one fanatical faction or another continued everywhere. Incarceration, torture, and death were readily meted out to supposedly rich peasants, landlords, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, leftists, spies, or alleged sympathizers of opposing factions. For example, the minister of Public Security in 1968 cited what the leaders of production brigades in one rural county alone had done about people with “bad” personal or family backgrounds—in ten brigades, he said, all “the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists and their children, including babies, 52 were killed in one day.” According to an authorized book on the Cultural Revolution, the socalled “East-Hebei Wrong Case” in Tangshan accounted for 84,000 people purged, 2,955 of them to death; in Yunan Province during the 1968 53 “Zhao Jianmin Wrong Case,” 14,000 people were purged and killed. In this regard, the official, post-Cultural Revolution indictment of the “Gang of Four” (Mao’s wife and three other top leaders during this period) is revealing. They were accused of being personally responsible for wrongfully persecuting 750,000 people, of whom 34,380 died or were killed, including six mayors or deputy mayors of Beijing and Shanghai. In one case, over 346,000 cadres and others had been wrongfully accused of membership in a secret party—16,222 of them were then killed. The “Gang of Four” were also accused of persecuting 142,000 cadres and teachers of the Ministry of Education, 53,000 scientists and technicians of the Academy of Sciences, and over 500 of 674 professors in China’s medical schools, some of whom subsequently died. During the trial of the “Gang of Four” it came out that in a forty-day wave of terror 51 Ibid., p. 473. 52 Ibid., p. 460. 53 Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, The Ten Year History of the Cultural Revolution. [in Chinese] Tianjin: People’s Republic of China, 1986, p. 287. Translated for the author by Hua Shiping

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in Beijing in 1966 started by the minister of Public Security, “1,700 people were beaten to death, 33,600 households were searched and 54 ransacked, and 85,000 people were driven out of the capital.” Just two personal examples of the fate suffered by millions should suffice. Three reporters of the New China News Agency related that “a contingent of government officials went to the Shanghai home of the mother of a young woman named Lin Zhao, who had been jailed for keeping a diary critical of the Party. The officials told Lin’s mother that her daughter had been executed three days earlier as a counterrevolutionary. But the money spent on the execution had been a waste, the officials added sardonically, and they demanded that the mother pay five fen—a little more than three cents—to cover the cost of the bullet 55 they had put through the back of her daughter’s head.” Then there is the story of Yu Luoke, whose parents were called rightists. He tried to offer a reasoned refutation of the so-called “theory of the blood line” that decreed him, because his parents were counterrevolutionaries, a rotten egg . . . . Yu Luoke argued that the connection between the class from which an individual was descended and an individual’s political behavior was minimal, that the influence exerted on young people by the social environment far outweighed the influence of the family. Yu Luoke thought the children of rightists should be treated the same as children of parents from “good” class backgrounds. In the summer of 1967, Yu Luoke was arrested for those views. During the nearly three years he spent in prison, Yu Luoke was given the opportunity to repudiate the opinions he had earlier expressed, offered a chance to confess that the argument he had made was a crime. Yu Luoke refused. 54 Quoted in Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982, p. 349. 55 Ibid., pp. 17–18.

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On March 5, 1970, at the age of twenty-eight, because he continued to refuse to recant . . . . [i]n Peking’s Workers’ Stadium, before a crowd of tens of thousands, little red books waving, revolutionary slogans filling the air, Yu Luoke 56 was shot. As indicated in the above indictment of the “Gang of Four,” intellectuals and scientists, the educated and talented were also victims. At least in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s bloody fist, science, learning, and expertise were not attacked per se. But, as in Cambodia under the murderous Khmer Rouge, those Chinese intellectuals “who survived or escaped physical torment, were, at best, forced into a state of intellectual suspension or paralysis.” No intellectual or scientist of any sort was to be trusted, especially in governing any organization. Instead, it was customary in these years to put fanatical radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or poor knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific institutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations. Consider the following experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fanatic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of most prestigious of China’s institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision Instruments in Changchun. Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named Peng Jiamu, a name, unfortunately, that also belonged to a real scientist working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng was, in fact, the real-life version of the spy in the book. So, it being fully understandable in the context of the Cultural Revolution, Shan had 166 scientists at the Institute arrested as spies, along with local accountants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some were beaten to death; others committed suicide. The existence of a radio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign language was considered sufficient proof of spying. Shan was eventually promoted to a provincial Party committee. And then there were the peasants. They had survived the Great Famine and were now confronted with civil anarchy and bloodshed. They 56 Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, p. 111.

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were harangued by different factions, often caught in the factional cross fire, and watched their sons and daughters marching to one drummer or another, sometimes to battle and death. And they rebelled. During 1967 alone, there were peasant uprisings in twenty-one provinces. Tibet as well saw several revolts. Tibet had suffered severely from the Great Famine, and now the Cultural Revolution had also been exported to the colony. Fighting between Red Guard factions disrupted “Tibet’s delicate system of food distribution [that] abruptly fell apart. By the end of January [1968], subsistence conditions—which had prevailed since the easing of the famine in 1963—gave way; once more, starvation reappeared. This time, it was not to depart for a full five years—until 1973—with isolated regions thereafter continuing to expe57 rience famine until l980.” Caught in the Cultural Revolution, Tibetans were subject to a ruthless terror. One report claimed that over seventeen days in 1966, in and 58 around Lhasa, 69,000 people were executed. This seems much too high an estimate, but there are other reports of “tens of thousands” killed and imprisoned in 1966. By the end of 1968, a number of revolts forced Chinese troops to concentrate their forces in the capital, leaving isolated garrisons in the countryside with their communications cut. In 1970, rebels in southwestern Tibet killed over 1,000 Chinese soldiers and continued fighting into 1972. The largest revolt during these years covered sixty of seventy-one districts, and cost 12,000 Tibetan lives. During the Cultural Revolution in China itself, the Party was being destroyed at the center and the very authority and power of communist rule was endangered. By 1969, seven out of seventeen members of the Politburo were kicked out and declared enemies of the Party; also purged were fifty-three of ninety-seven members of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, four out of six regional first party secretaries, and twenty-three out of twenty-nine provincial first party secretaries. In the country as a whole, claimed Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, from 1957 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, 100 million people were persecuted, politically harassed, or ended up 59 victims. (By 1980, 2.9 million of them had been officially rehabili57 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, p. 299. 58 Phuntsog Wangyal, “Tibet: A Case of Eradication of Religion Leading to Genocide” in Israel W. Charny (Ed.). Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984, pp. 119–126 p. 123. 59 Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982, p. 349.

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tated; by 1981, over 300,000 of the 1.2 million cases formally tried and through which people had been sentenced were officially declared “un60 just,” “frame-ups,” or “wrong.” ) But Mao had won the battle; opposing party leaders had been destroyed or shaken out of power. Having destroyed the “right,” he could now move on the “left” that was out of control in many areas. He called upon loyal army units to restore order. The country was gradually brought under control, at the cost of much greater military involvement and dictation in Party affairs and decisions. Scholars agree that the revolution ended in April of 1969, with the Ninth Party Congress. While scattered bloody clashes and local anarchy were soon eliminated, reconstruction of the Party, cleansing of residual Party “rightists” and “leftists,” and dampening the violent, chanting enthusiasm of Red Guard factions preoccupied Mao until his death in 1976. About 17 million youths were sent to the countryside after 1967 to be disciplined, and by about 1975, it was conservatively estimated that a total of 70 million educated youth were deported to labor in the countryside and border regions. Moreover, executions continued apace. For example, those assigned to work in the countryside who returned to the city without permission were executed; so were those helping refugees to escape the country. But ultimately, Mao failed. For after his death, in a “right-wing” coup, the “Gang of Four” were arrested and imprisoned. Deng Xiaoping, the “capitalist roader” who had been maltreated and dragged from power by the Red Guards, eventually took over the Party and country. During the following years, economic and social pragmatism and liberalization—the line that Mao fought against so bloodily—was pursued and institutionalized. And Mao’s “revolutionary masses” hardly remained so after his death, if they existed at all. Indeed, judging from the massive Beijing Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1976 and especially in 1989, rather than becoming infused with communist revolutionary spirit, the masses increasingly demanded bourgeois democracy, Mao’s bête noire. Mao won the revolution, all right, and lost the hearts and minds of China. At what human cost? As mentioned, the Party itself admits that some 100 million human beings—one out of every eight Chinese!—suffered some kind of harassment or persecution during the revolution. This does not even count their loved ones, relatives, and friends who shared their pain and suffering, and grieved over their death or imprisonment. 60 China: Violations of Human Rights: Prisoners of Conscience and the Death Penalty in the People’s Republic of China. London: Amnesty International Publications, 1984, p. 6.

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But leaving this inestimable misery aside, what was the revolution’s death toll? Estimates vary widely, and there can be no sure accounting after such a chaotic revolution. On the high side, estimates exceed 10 million killed. One estimate of 18.1 million dead (which includes those killed in the so-called “Four Cleanup” Movement) is based on sources collected by the Republic of China. A communist “restricted internal 61 publication.” reported an estimate of 20 million unnatural deaths dur62 ing those years. Still another estimate claims 15 million were killed. In evaluating these and many other estimates in China’s Bloody Century,63 I calculated it most likely that both sides in the revolution murdered about 7,731,000, including those who died from mistreatment and malnutrition in prisons and concentration camps, “leftists” and “rightists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” the “bourgeoisie,” “spies,” Party officials and cadres, government officials and workers, and the more successful peasants, scientists, writers, teachers, students, and those unlucky enough to be around—and, of course, sometimes their husbands and wives, and even children. In addition, nearly 563,000 army troops, members of Red Guard factions, and rebelling peasants may have died in battle. Then there also was a famine aggravated by the revolution that killed around 1 million people. Adding it all together, this revolution cost about 9,292,000 million lives, more than the cost in lives of World War I. All in one nation. And all to determine one thing: which dictators would rule.

61 Richard L. Walker, The Human Cost Of Communism In China. A study of the Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1971, p. 16. 62 Maria Hsia Chang [Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada-Reno], Speech to the Ethics and Public Policy Panel on "China in Transition." Washington, D.C., May 22, 1989. 63 See Appendix II in the book. Appendix II is also available in two parts on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.1.GIF; and www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.2.GIF

Chapter 25 Power Kills Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue. – Edmund Burke

Deadly Communism

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ew would deny any longer what the previous bloody examples attest: communism—Marxism-Leninism and its variants— meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison camps and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, outright mass murder, and genocide. 62 In total, as Table 25.1 shows, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspective on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 35 million. Communists, when in control of a nation, have murdered over three times the number that have been killed in combat in all wars, including the world wars. And what did this greatest of human social experiments, communism, achieve for its poor citizens at this most bloody cost in lives? Nothing. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social, and cultural disaster. The Khmer Rouge example provides insight into why communists believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow humans. Their absolutist ideology was married to absolute power. They believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal 62 See my “How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder?” on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM

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or capitalist order and culture and then totally rebuild a communist society. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was above any law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. The communists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality—and as in a real war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle, and there were necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capital-

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ists, “wreckers,” intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, the rich, and landlords. In a war millions may die, but these deaths may well be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II. To many communists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made living conditions worse than before the revolution. As we’ve seen, it is not by chance that the greatest famines have happened within the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921–23 and 7 million from 1932–3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist China (about 30 million dead from 1959–61). Overall, in the last century almost 55 million people died in various communist famines and associated epidemics—a little over 10 million of them were intentionally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of communist collectivization and agricultural policies. This is as though the whole population of the American New England and middle Atlantic states, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around 35 million people escaped communist countries as refugees was an unequaled vote against communist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings. There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology: No one can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or decree the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives and welfare will be sacrificed.

Other Mega- and Kilo- Mass Murderers Certainly, communism does not stand alone in such megamurders (see the list in Table 20.1 of Chapter 20). We have the example of totalitarian-socialist Nazi Germany, which exterminated some 21 million Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and 64 other nationalities. Then there is the fascist Nationalist government of 64 See my Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1993). A summary chapter and most of the statistics are on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM

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China under Chiang Kai-sheik, which murdered nearly 10 million Chi65 nese from 1928 to 1949, and the fascist Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6 million Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, 66 Filipinos, and others during World War II. There also are the 1 million or more Bengalis and Hindus murdered in East Pakistan (now Bangla67 desh) in 1971 by the fascist Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from eastern Europe at or after the end of World War II, particularly by the authoritarian, pre-communist Polish government, which murdered perhaps over a 68 million of them as it seized the German Eastern Territories.69 In Chapter 17, I outlined the democide before and during the Mexican Revolution, and I mentioned the democide by the governments of Burma and Sudan in Chapter 1. I could go on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide, as I did in Death By Government, and more comprehensively in Statistics of Democide.

The Unifying Cause of Democide: Power What connects all these cases of democide is this: as a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of culture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal wishes, or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted. 65 See my China’s Bloody Century: China’s Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991). A summary chapter and most of the statistics are on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM 66 See my chapter on Japanese democide in my Statistics of Democide (1994) on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM 67 See my chapter on Pakistan’s democide in my Statistics of Democide (1994) on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM 68 See my chapter on Poland’s ethnic cleansing in my Statistics of Democide (1994) and on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.HTM. Some Poles have written me irate emails about this chapter. My response is at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.ADDENDA.HTM 69 The total number of Reichdeutsch and Ethnic Germans murdered in these expulsions from Eastern Europe at or after the end of the war is about 1,863,000 out of about 15 million expelled.

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All this provides a solid, life oriented argument for freedom: Freedom preserves and secures life. That which preserves and protects human life is a moral good. And, as I have shown, freedom is already a moral good for promoting human welfare and minimizing internal political violence. I now will add to this list the moral good of saving human lives. I have saved a discussion of another moral good until the next chapter. It may be even more surprising than the life-preserving aspect I have described here.

PART 6 On Freedom’s Moral Goods: Eliminating War

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lthough it is sometimes the lesser evil, as in the war against Hitler, war is always a horror. It consumes human lives and property with the most savage appetite. Humanists, idealists, and pacifists have focused on it as the supreme human problem that mankind must solve. Stacks of library books provide histories of war, analyses of its causes and conditions, and solutions. Now, finally, a well researched, well studied solution is at hand. It is practical. It is much desired for itself. It is consistent with human rights. It is supported by clear theory. It is based on two facts: democracies throughout history have never, or virtually never, made war on each other. And the odds of this fact being a matter of chance are millions to one. The solution, therefore, is to spread democracy throughout the world. Histories, and often analyses of war, are dry discussions or descriptions of what generals, commanders, and national leaders or rulers did, the mechanics, strategies, and tactics of battles, and the consequences of lost lives, territory, and equipment. They are too often removed from the human side of it—from the slogging misery, pain, and death in combat for the soldier. In Chapter 26, I try to provide some understanding of what war can be like for the soldier in just one battle, for just one side, in just one war. With that understanding, we’ll move on to discuss the nature of the democratic peace, the idea that democracy is a solution to war and violence, and its sources. This is not an either-or solution, but the degree to which nations are democratic also makes a difference in the severity of their wars. Why is democracy so potent in preventing war? Democracies share their institutions and culture, and are bonded by the governmental, societal, and economic threads that sew them together.

Chapter 26 Battle of the Somme From its beginning in 1914 to its end in 1918, World War I combat ate up about 5,500 lives per day, to total by its end at least 9 million combat dead—both men and women.

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uly 1 had finally come. Now, at 7:25 a.m., an incredible, all-out bombardment was ending the weeklong shelling of German trenches. The roar of continuous explosions sent fountains of rock and soil, and sometimes whole tree trunks, into the air. What few trees remained were little more than shredded trunks. Some 50,000 British and French artillery gunners had shot 1.5 million shells—21,000 tons of explosive material of all descriptions—onto the Germans. They even fired some gas shells at them, sending a cloud of gas seeping downward into the German trenches, all the way to the lowest bunkers. The British and French commanding generals were confident that this shelling would leave few of the enemy capable of fighting in their front trenches, and would destroy much of the barrier of barbed wire protecting them. The noise had been deafening but reassuring to the young British volunteers waiting in their trenches to attack the Germans. Fresh from home and hardly trained, they were apprehensive, nervous, feeling the suspense after waiting over a week for the battle. They had prayed, made out their wills, written home, and shaken hands with their friends. Some were sweating; some were slightly intoxicated, or drunk outright on army-issue rum. Above all, they were optimistic. They knew they were going to win a great victory. After all, they were the volunteer regiments—the British “Pals” who had enthusiastically enlisted with their friends, coworkers, and neighbors to be formed with those same fellows into regiments. Clerks and workers from a single commercial company composed whole platoons. And their officers had told them how easy it would be. In any case, they had been hearing the thunderous shelling from their own artillery for seven days, and watching the stupendous explosions just a thousand or more yards in front of them.

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Finally, it was 7:30 a.m. The shelling stopped. Utter silence engulfed the front. Suddenly the British officers blew their whistles, waved their polished sticks—many thought it beneath them to carry guns or to personally kill—and yelled for their troops to follow them. Along a front twenty miles long, nearly 100,000 young men crowded up the trench ladders and across the parapet in the first wave of this mighty offensive. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked in the morning light toward what remained of the German trenches, redoubts, and fortified villages. They could not run if they wanted to, since each carried sixty-six to ninety pounds of ammunition and equipment. Besides, several days of heavy rain had turned the clay soil into deep and slippery mud; in some areas, it was marshland. In many places along the line, the advancing soldiers were preceded by a walking barrage of friendly shells timed to keep German troops hunkered down in their trenches. Since the gunners had a strict rate of advance for their shells, however, the barrages were often too far ahead of the men. These soldiers did not know they were marching 1,000 to 2,000 yards toward their death; most would not reach the parapet of the German trenches. The Germans had survived the barrage deep within their trenches, sometimes thirty or forty feet down, within well-fortified dugouts; some were actually concrete bunkers. Few of the shells that exploded above or around them had been the type of heavy artillery that could reach or bury their fortifications. Once the shelling stopped and the Germans heard the British whistles, they scrambled for what remained of the parapet of their trenches. Physically, the Germans were in sad shape. They had been under a continuous rain of shells. Day after day, they’d faced the prospect of being blown up or entombed in their trenches. They’d had little sleep; they were mentally exhausted by the bombardment and a week’s wait; they were scared. They knew they were going to be attacked and possibly shot or bayoneted. Still, many were first to the top, with time to set up their machine guns and arrange themselves along the parapet. They couldn’t believe what they saw. Walking toward them shoulder to shoulder were thousands of British men, often with their unarmed officers in front. German soldiers opened fire with their rifles. Machine gunners triggered the lethal chatter of their guns, not aiming but simply moving their barrels left to right, right to left, spraying bullets back and forth into the line of oncoming men. Then the German artillery opened up. They’d known weeks before that an attack was coming, though they had thought, because the preparations were so clearly visible from the high

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ground they held, it could only be a diversion, and not a full-scale attack. So German headquarters had not reinforced them. Nonetheless, they had sighted their artillery beforehand, and now their shells fell among the advancing British soldiers. The explosions flattened whole sections of the oncoming wall, throwing men violently aside or heaving them up in the air in a fountain of mud—full bodies here, parts of bodies there. The air was a maelstrom of whizzing bullets, buzzing shrapnel, exploding shells. British officers could not make their commands heard above the noise, nor could their men hear the yells or cries of pain from a friend only three feet away. Miraculously, some reached the wire in front of the German trenches, but shelling had done little to destroy it. Those who tried to go over it were caught in the barbs, becoming easy targets for the Germans only feet away. Soon the bodies of British soldiers hanging at all angles along miles of wire formed a grotesque line. Other British soldiers found the few openings the shelling had cut in the wire, but as they funneled through, the Germans found a concentrated target, and slaughtered them. Some of the attackers who did reach the German trenches were burned to death with flamethrowers Within minutes, no-man’s land was a dead man’s land of human bodies, body parts, scraps of uniform, helmets, destroyed equipment, metal fragments, shrapnel, shredded wood, and shell holes. Before the morning was over, the body count of British soldiers had mounted to nearly 20,000 dead and 38,000 wounded or missing. Nor was this the end of it for the wounded. Since the German soldiers could not risk someone crawling up to throw a grenade into their trench, they shot any wounded that moved. Enemy shelling had partly buried some British wounded in the mud, and some had fallen or been blown into slippery-sided shell holes, soon to die of their wounds or drown in the sludge at the bottom. Many bodies were so deeply buried in the mud, or so badly disintegrated, they were never found. At 10:00 a.m., despite the carnage, the general order came down from British Army Headquarters to continue the attack. This only threw many more lives away. By noon, the trenches from which the British soldiers had launched the offensive were in chaos. They were full of dead, wounded, and the terrified and exhausted men of the first waves who had managed to make it back to the trenches. Mingling with them were horror-stricken soldiers fresh from the rear, ordered forward by their officers. But there was a blessing to this confusion: further efforts to breach the German trenches died away as local officers became increasingly reluctant to send more men to their deaths. Meanwhile, the British soldiers’ initial exuberance and confidence had sunk to a dull expectation of death. At best, they hoped for a wound

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that would take them to the rear—a shot through the hand, a shredded leg, even a lost arm would do, if they could then escape the almost certain death of no man’s land. Some even wounded themselves to avoid battle. Some—but not as many as one would think—tried to run away. The British army had positioned soldiers behind front trenches for just this possibility, and these “battle police” either turned these men around to return to battle and probable death, or shot them then and there. Reported British Lieutenant Alfred Bundy on his part in leading this first day’s attack: Went over top at 7.30 a.m. after what seemed an interminable period of terrible apprehension. Our artillery seemed to increase in intensity and the German guns opened up on No Man’s Land. The din was deafening, the fumes choking and visibility limited owing to the dust and clouds caused by exploding shells. It was a veritable inferno. I was momentarily expecting to be blown to pieces. My platoon continued to advance in good order without many casualties and until we had reached nearly half way to the [German] front line. I saw no sign of life there. Suddenly however an appalling rifle and machine-gun fire opened against us and my men commenced to fall. I shouted “down” but most of those that were still not hit had already taken what cover they could find. I dropped in a shell hole and occasionally attempted to move to my right and left but bullets were forming an impenetrable barrier and exposure of the head meant certain death. None of our men was visible but in all directions came pitiful groans and cries of pain . . . . I finally decided to wait till dusk and about 9.30 I started to crawl flat on my stomach. At times I made short wild dashes and finally came to our wire. The [Germans] were still traversing our front line trenches and as I lay waiting for strength to rush

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the final few yards sparks flew from the wire continuously as it was struck by bullets. At last the firing ceased and after tearing my clothes and flesh on the wire I reached the parapet and fell over in our trench now full of dead and wounded. I found a few of my men but the majority were still out and most were dead. Came across my Company Commander Hunt who was almost insane. Took charge of 69 ‘C’ company of about 30 men. a Throughout the night, the cries and groans of the British wounded never stopped. Sometimes someone would cry for his mother. Wounded and unwounded managed to walk or crawl back to their trenches, and stretcher-bearers brought in what casualties they could find. In the rear medical stations, nurses made those wounded sure to die as comfortable as possible, while those standing a chance of survival were rushed to hospitals in the rear for immediate treatment. Clare Tisdall, who worked as a British nurse at a Casualty Clearing Station during the battle, described her experience. [W]e practically never stopped. I was up for seventeen nights before I had a night in bed. A lot of the boys had legs blown off, or hastily amputated at the front-line. These boys were the ones who were in the greatest pain, and I very often used to have to hold the stump up in the ambulance for the whole journey, so that it wouldn’t bump on the stretcher. The worst case I saw—and it still haunts me—was of a man being carried past us. It was at night, and in the dim light I thought that his face was covered with a black cloth. But as he came nearer, I was horrified to realize that the whole lower half of his face had been completely blown off and what had appeared 69a Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme. Trans-Atlantic Publications, 1997.

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to be a black cloth was a huge gaping hole. It was the only time I nearly fainted.70 This was war, and luck and the natural variations in geography, leadership, weapons, and experience assured different outcomes from one section of the front to another. In a few places, German trenches were overrun; in other places, the British bombardment destroyed German trenches—yet attacking the second line of trenches was often no less deadly than attacking the first line had been in other places. Why did the British commanding generals order these men to walk across no man’s land toward the higher German trenches, in full daylight, putting them for five to six minutes in easy range of machine gunners, snipers and riflemen, and artillery? Simple—since British Pal battalions of “citizen soldiers” were poorly trained and lacked combat experience, the battle plan gave them the easiest and strictest of commands: “Go up the ladder, stand up, hold your rifle across your breast pointed at the sky (so that no one would be accidentally shot), walk in a line abreast to the Germans’ trenches, shoot or bayonet any Germans in the trench, and occupy it.” They gave no room for initiative; the battle plan was rigid and finely detailed in pages of orders given to the front line officers. Above all, the British commanding generals believed in the ability of massed artillery to conquer infantry. They thought the artillery would more than compensate for the lack of surprise and the vulnerability of their men. They had planned on a massive six-day bombardment (extended to seven days because of rain) that would be so devastating it would destroy the German trenches and fortifications and cut the frontal barbed wire. Then the British soldiers need only stroll to the Germans’ wrecked trenches and occupy them. In other words, these generals did not understand the limits of their artillery and the resources of the Germans to strengthen their trenches against the rain of shells. Not only did they spread the shelling evenly across the whole front, despite the variations in fortifications their soldiers faced, they did not understand the killing power of the machine gun. And they did not have any contingency plans for failure. Nor did the first day’s military catastrophe deter the British generals. They saw it as only a setback, not a defeat. After all, their reasoning went, the offensive had weakened the Germans. So they turned the battle into one of attrition, intending to make the Germans lose so 70 From www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWcasualties.htm

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many lives and so much material, they must finally retreat. No matter the dead, the British launched offensive after offensive and chewed up more human lives. Four months later, the British finally ended the battle after an unbelievable 1,120,000 casualties: 620,000 on their side, and 500,000 Germans. And the winnings? The offensives had gained at most sixteen miles of moonscape littered with the debris of battle, all of which the Germans soon recovered in later battles anyway. As for those British soldiers who day after day climbed the trench ladder and, as though moving against a stiff wind or rain, walked toward the Germans through a hail of bullets and shells, one might wonder how they could do this. The usual characterizations come to mind. Patriotism, duty, hatred of the enemy—all surely played a role. Mostly, however, it was loyalty to fellow soldiers, friendship, the desire not to let anyone down—even the inspiring heroism of their officers. The latter were often the first up and over the parapet, unarmed yet standing up fearlessly, knowing they would likely die, and still leading their men onward. Then why did the British officers do what they did? Unlike their men, who had just joined the service and were from the working classes, the officers had attended the finest schools, and had usually been acculturated into a military role that they accepted without question. They were “gentlemen.” They looked after their men, helped them with their problems, and showed them compassion—but also tough discipline. Their job was to lead men into battle and to win the objective, and to do so calmly and fearlessly. As a result, their life expectancy was no more than a few weeks, compared to a few months for their men. This battle was the Battle of the Somme in World War I, an engagement named after a French river that flowed to the south. The British Expeditionary Force in France launched this battle in 1916 against the German front lines. The French, far more experienced and much better trained for this type of warfare, manned the southern part of the front. By making better use of their artillery, the French largely achieved their first day’s objectives against weaker German fortifications. The French commander-in-chief, Joseph Jacques Cèsaire Joffre, conceived the offensive, which Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, newly appointed commander of the British Expeditionary Force, then put into action. Joffre hoped the offensive would break through German defenses, create chaos in the rear, and enable the encircling of the Germans in northern France. At the very least, Joffre wanted to take German pressure off French troops holding fast against the Ger-

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man offensive at Verdun 150 miles away, but by the time the Battle of the Somme was launched, the Germans had already been defeated at Verdun—another bloody meat grinder that created some 1.2 million casualties for the two sides before it ended. Not only was the Battle of the Somme a military failure and a human disaster, but also, not launching it could have saved Russia from defeat. Had the British and French transferred the guns and ammunition used in the Somme to help the Russians, they might have defeated the Germans and thereby forestalled or prevented the Russian Revolution that turned Russia into a communist state in 1917, which then withdrew from the war. British support for war has not been as robust and enthusiastic as before the toll and nature of the Battle of the Somme became public. Those killed in just the first day of this battle exceeded that of any other day of war in British history, before or since. Even during the first day of the D-Day invasion of Normandy twenty-eight years later, the English and Canadians suffered only 4,000 casualties, compared to the 58,000 for the first day of the Somme offensive. Since the British army kept those enlisting from a neighborhood or town together, whole communities were devastated by the death of most of their young men. In the first hours of the offensive, for example, the Ulster division from Northern Ireland lost 5,600 men, all from a relatively small community. For the British, this battle became symbolic of the horrors and uselessness of war, and decades later, when the threat of Hitler was clear, the British people and especially British intellectuals recoiled from the thought of rearmament and another war. No one could forget the useless death of Britain’s best and brightest in the Battle of the Somme. Yet, as bloody and stupid as this battle was, it was only one in the war. From its beginning in 1914 to its end in 1918, World War I combat ate up about 5,500 lives per day, to total by its end at least 9 million combat dead—both men and women. Of all the soldiers’ correspondence I have read, one exchange touched me most deeply, and shows the misery and horror of war not only for the soldiers in combat, but for their loved ones as well. This letter is from Private William Martin to his fiancée Emily Chitticks, written while he was fighting in France with the Devonshire Regiment. It is dated March 24, 1917. My dearest Emily Just a few lines dear to tell you I am still in the land of the living and keeping well, trusting you are the same dear. I

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have just received your letter dear and was very pleased to get it. It came rather more punctual this time for it only took five days. We are not in the same place dear, in fact we don’t stay in the same place very long . . . . we are having very nice weather at present dear and I hope it continues . . . . Fondest love and kisses from your loving Sweetheart Will Martin was killed in action three days after writing it. Unaware of this, Emily continued to write, even when receiving no reply. Finally, the army returned five of her letters with “killed in action” marked on them. This March 29, 1917 letter was one of those returned. My Dearest Will I was so delighted to get your letter this morning and know you are quite alright. I am pleased to say I am alright myself and hope dear this will find you the same. I was so pleased to hear darling that you had such a nice enjoyable evening, It was quite a treat I am sure. I don’t suppose you do get much amusement. I am glad you are getting my letters dear, I am not waiting until I get your letters dear now before I write because it would make it so long for you to wait for a letter, and I guess you are pleased to get as many as possible. I can understand darling your not being able to write as frequently. I shall get used to waiting for your letters soon I guess, but at first it seems so strange after being used to having them so regularly. Well darling I don’t know any more to say now and I am feeling sleepy. Oh I wish you were here darling, but its no good wishing.

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Fondest love and lots of kisses from your ever-loving little girl 71 Emily. William Martin’s grave was never found. Emily was so heartbroken by his death that she never married. When she died in 1974, Martin’s letters were buried with her, as she requested.

71 From an October 1998 British Broadcasting Corporation Special Report on World War I.

Chapter 27 The Democratic Peace The absence of war between democracies comes as close as anything we have to an empirical law in international relations. – Jack Levy

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hat can we do about war? Most wars, like World War I, should never have been fought. It was the result of flagrant political and diplomatic errors. The lesson so many learned from this war, however, was not that avoiding such errors would prevent future conflicts, but that we must never fight another war, and that armaments and arms races cause wars. This was the wrong lesson, and it led to World War II. When Great Britain and France could have stopped Hitler cheaply—when a strong military showing by them would have avoided World War II—the awful memory of the bloody cost of the battles of the Somme and Verdun proved too strong. Finally, Great Britain and France drew the line against Hitler in Poland in 1939, but it was too late to avoid a war. And with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and Hitler’s declaration of war against the formerly neutral United States, it more truly became a world war. As hellish and bloody as war is, I believe that we had to fight this war. Just think of what it would mean in lives and misery if the Nazis had controlled all of Europe, including Great Britain and Russia. Add to this the control of all of Asia and the western Pacific by the Japanese military. The butchery that these murderers would have unleashed on both sides of the world would undoubtedly far exceed the human cost of World War II. Even before their defeat in 1945, remember, the Nazis already had murdered about 21 million people—many more than the 15 million killed in battle in all of World War II for all countries involved. The Japanese militarists murdered an additional 6 million people. Dictators of all kinds have killed several times more people than has combat in all the wars, foreign and domestic. As horrible as it was, the Hutu rulers of Rwanda killed more people in four months than did the Battle of the Somme during the same length of time. And this was only one murderous government in a fairly small country.

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Virtually all proposals to prevent war have suffered from this defect: they ignore how dictators and dictatorships differ from democratic leaders and democracies. There have always been those who, when they inherit or seize power, forcefully fill their army with unwilling soldiers, and then grind them to death in a war to grab more power and control over others. The rogues’ gallery of these murderers and aggressors is long, and surely at the top would be, for the twentieth century alone, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Mao Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Tojo Hideki, and Pol Pot. When there are such people controlling large armies, the solutions to war, such as pacifism, unilateral disarmament, or disarmament treaties, do not work. Worse, these solutions weaken or disarm democracies and make the world safe only for such tyrants. Now, finally, we have the proven knowledge to avoid both wars and the aggression of dictators. This solution was proposed in the latter part of the eighteenth century and recent social science research has shown its veracity. In his Perpetual Peace, written in 1795, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the way to universal peace lay in creating republics, or what today we would call representative democracies. Kant wrote, “The republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin (having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law), also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace. The reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decree72 ing for themselves all the calamities of war.” Note two things about this solution. First is that, where people have equal rights and freely participate in their governance, they will be unlikely to promote a war in which they or their loved ones might die and their property be destroyed. And second, where leaders are responsible to their people as voters, they will be unwilling to fight. Then when both leaders of two nations are so restrained, war between them should not occur. The idea that democracies are therefore inherently peaceful was not lost to others. It became part of a more general philosophy of governance that Kant shared with liberals of the time, a system of belief we now call classical liberalism, which I dealt with in Chapter 6 with regard to democracy and in Chapter 11 on the free market. Adam Smith, 72 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace.Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York: The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957, pp. 12–13. It is online at http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm

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John Stewart Mill, and John Locke, among other influential thinkers of the time, argued for the maximum freedom of the individual. They believed in minimal government. They also supported free trade between nations and a free market within. Such freedom, they argued, would create a harmony among nations, and promote peace. As Thomas Paine—who like most of America’s founding fathers was a classical liberal—wrote in his influential Rights of Man in 1791–1792, “Government on the old system is an assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself; on the new [republican form of government as just established in the United States], a delegation of power for the common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a system of war; the latter promises a system of peace, as the true means 73 of enriching a nation.” Full proof of this point had to wait, however, until scientists such as Bruce Russett, Zeev Maoz, James Lee Ray, and I could develop research 74 methods to document it. We did related research throughout the 1970s, thanks in part to the growth of new statistical models made possible by the advent of the computer, and in the 1980s we, and scholars who followed our lead, proved Kant correct. By then we had collected data on all wars that had occurred over the last several centuries, and by applying various statistical analyses to these data, we established that there never (or virtually never) has been a war between well-established democracies. Moreover, through these techniques, we also proved that there was not a hidden factor accounting for this, such as a lack of common borders, or geographic distance between democracies. Nor was this democratic peace attributable to the wealth of democracies, or their international power, education levels, technology, resources, religion, or population density. Our findings are straightforward: Well-established democracies do not make war on each other. 75

Table 27.1 provides some evidence on this. It gives a simple count of wars between democracies, wars between democracies and nondemocracies, and those between nondemocracies from 1816 to 1991. As the table shows, in all the wars during this period, 353 nations fought 73 Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978, p. 29. 74 For links to such work on the Internet, see the link page on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM. For much of my research results on this, see my theme page at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MIRACLE.HTM 75 This is Table 1.1 in my Death By Government at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.1.GIF

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each other. The numbers refer to pairs of nations (dyads) violently engaged in war against each other. For example, in the brief 1979 war between Cambodia and Vietnam, there was only one pair of nations at war. In the Six Day War of 1967, Israel fought Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, thus making it three pairs at war (Israel vs. Egypt, Israel vs. Jordan, and Israel vs. Syria). The table presents the result of adding all pairs at war for all wars from 1816 to 1991. In no case did a democracy clearly fight another democracy, which is also true since 1991. There never has been a Battle of the Somme between free people. No battle has come even close. In fact, there has been no lethal military action between liberal democracies, as they are defined in Chapter 6, ever. But one might still ask whether this is owed to chance. Since in the twentieth century democracies were a minority among nations, and in previous centuries there were only a handful of democracies at any given time, is not it likely that this lack of war is by chance—luck? Statistical analysis enables us to calculate the probability of such events taking place. True, statistics can be misused and have been, but this is true of any scientific method. Virtually all the medical drugs deemed safe for us to take today are based on statistical tests, not unlike those used to test whether democracies not making war on each other is a chance occurrence. If we are going to be cynical about statistics, then we should also be very wary of taking any modern drugs for an illness or disease. This issue is really not about statistics but how well they have been applied, and whether the data meet the assumptions of the statistical model used.

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Different researchers have tested the lack of war between democracies in different ways for different years, the definitions of democracy, and the ways of defining war, and in those studies using tests of significance, the positive result has been statistically significant in each 76 case. Thus, the overall significance of this absence of war is really a multiple (or function, if some of these studies are not independent) of these different significant probabilities, which would make the overall probability (subjectively estimated) of the results occurring by chance 77 alone surely at least a million to one.

76 An annotated bibliography on the earlier work on the democratic peace is at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MTF.ANNOTBIBLIO.HTM. See also the “Democracy and War” links at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM 77 Readers may have many other questions about this lack of relationship between democracy and war, often called the democratic peace. I have tried to answer a number of them in an Appendix Q&A to my Power Kills. The appendix is on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PK.APPEN1.1.HTM. See also my article on “What is the Democratic Peace?” at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.IS_WHAT.HTM

Chapter 28 The Freer The People, the Greater the Peace There is a near perfect correlation between the lack of freedom in two nations and the number killed in wars between them.

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t is not just a free, democratic populace that inhibits war, but also the degree to which people are free. To understand this, we must stop thinking about war as a single event that happens or does not happen. Rather, we should think of war as embodying different amounts of killing, just as a yardstick embodies different degrees of length. A war may be as vast in scope as World War I or World War II, in which the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union alone took more than 7.5 million lives. But the severity of a war may only be in hundreds killed, not millions—as was the war between India and China in 1962, at a cost to each of around 500 dead, or the Gulf War, when the United States lost 148 people from battle and 35 from friendly fire. All are wars, but the relevant distinction among them here is one of magnitude. Imagine a yardstick of freedom, with at one end democracies like Canada, New Zealand, and Sweden, and at the other end the least free countries like North Korea, Sudan, Burma, Cuba, and Laos. Toward the middle would be such authoritarian countries as Egypt, Bangladesh, and Malaysia. Then, for any two countries, the closer the government of each is to the democratic end of the yardstick, the more likely it is that there will be fewer killed in any war between them. Thus we can establish a correlation between the degree of freedom and the degree of intensity in war. Figure 28.1 graphs this correlation for governments divided into democratic, authoritarian (people are partly free), and totalitarian (people 77 have no freedom) subgroups. This shows a near-perfect correlation between nonfreedom and war dead over the years 1900–1980. At one end of this correlation we have two nations that are both democratically free 77 This is from Figure 3.1 in my Power Kills (1997) at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PK.FIG3.1.GIF

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(labeled “demo” in the figure) that have fought no wars and have experienced, if any at all, very minor violence between the most marginal (electoral) of the democracies. At the other end, we have nations in which there are no civil rights and political liberties, and a dictator commands all politically relevant activity and groups. Such totalitarian governments (labeled “tot” or “total”), as the figure illustrates, are most likely to have the bloodiest wars. The part of World War II involving totalitarian Germany and the Soviet Union is a case in point. In fighting against each other, the Soviet Union lost 7.5 million in battle, and Nazi Germany lost most of its 3.5 million battle dead. No two nations have ever, before or since, inflicted such massive bloodshed on each other.

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Authoritarian nations (labeled “aut” or “author”) are between democratic and totalitarian ones in their degree of freedom and, as should be true empirically, their violence is more or less, depending on whether they fight against democracies or totalitarian nations. To the iron law that democracies do not make war on each other, we can now add: The less democratically free any two nations are, the more likely is severe violence between them. There are many other kinds of international violence besides war. There is violence short of war, such as American jets shooting down Iraqi fighter planes that violated the United Nations-defined no-fly zone over southern Iraq in the late 1990s; the blowing up of a South Korean passenger jet by North Korean agents; or military action by Cuban forces against Somalia during the Ethiopia-Somalia War over the Ogaden (1976–1983). And despite this absence of violence between democracies, democracies overall can be violent and aggressive. Democracies direct violence only at nondemocracies. However, when one considers the explanation for why democracies are peaceful—that democratic peoples are acculturated into negotiation and compromise over violence—one should expect that democracies overall would have the least severe foreign violence and war, the least dead in all their violence fighting other countries. Another way of putting this is that, the more freedom a nation has, the less its leaders squander the lives of their people in foreign violence 79 and war. And this is true, as I show in Figure 28.2. The less democratic a country is, the more intense its foreign violence. This is not to say that democracies are generally pacifist. They have engaged in bloody wars, usually to fight aggression and defend themselves and other democracies. And certainly democracies have also been the aggressors, as was the United States in the Spanish-American 79 This is from Figure 4.2 in Power Kills (1997).

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War, the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902, the Grenada and Panama interventions, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. On the average, however, democratic leaders are more careful about the lives of their citizens and, therefore, they fight less severe wars. There also are exceptions to this, as in the Battle of the Somme during which the British commanding generals continued to throw troops into battle even after its bloody losses and lack of success. However, it should be pointed out again that the repercussions of this on British public opinion were so great as to make British foreign policy naively pacifist for a full generation. Totalitarian regimes have no such negative feedback. Their dictators can, time after time, in war after war, use their people as mass instruments of war, like bullets and shells, throwing them at the enemy in human waves, for whatever purpose. As a species, we have been killing ourselves by the millions in war after war throughout history. Now, finally, we have the power of knowledge to end forever—or at the very least drastically reduce—all this human slaughter. Freedom gives us the answer.

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We must foster democratic freedom for all humanity to end this bloody scourge. Until all people everywhere enjoy this freedom, we must foster at least some freedom where none exists to lessen the mass killing by war. War is an evil, and the fact that it has necessarily been fought by free people to preserve their freedom makes it no less so. What would eliminate this evil must be a moral good. Therefore, lessening and potentially ending war is another moral good of freedom.

Chapter 29 Why the Democratic Peace? [Democracies] have other means of resolving conflicts between them and therefore do not need to fight each other . . . and . . . they perceive that democracies should not fight each other . . . By this reasoning, the more democracies there are in the world, the fewer potential adversaries we and other democracies will have and the wider the zone of peace. – Bruce Russett

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hy is it that free and democratic peoples do not make war on each other? Remember Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis that, since people generally do not want to bear the cost of war, they would, if they could, restrain their leaders. On the surface, this seems a good explanation, and it does help to explain why democracies do not make war on each other. Yet democratic people have also been jingoistic. They have favored war and encouraged their leaders to fight. For instance, the public outcry in 1898 over the explosion aboard the American battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor and its sinking with a loss of 260 men pressured Congress and President McKinley into intervening militarily in Cuba. Spain then reluctantly declared war on the United States. American public opinion also strongly favored President Truman’s commitment of American troops to the defense of South Korea against the North Korean invasion in 1950, and similarly favored President Johnson’s request to Congress for a blank check—the Tonkin Gulf resolution of 1964—to come to the defense of South Vietnam, then near collapse under the weight of North Vietnam’s aggression. Clearly, then, there is something much deeper than simply a democratic people’s fear of death and destruction at work in preventing wars among democracies. This peacekeeping factor is analogous to what inhibits democratic nations from internal political violence, as I described it in Chapter 19. Where democratic freedom flourishes in two countries, where there are free markets and freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech, then societies of mutual interest such as corporations, partnerships, associations, societies, churches, schools, and clubs proliferate in and between the countries. Examples of these are the

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the Boy Scouts, and the Association of Tennis Professionals. These cross-national groups become separate pyramids of power, competing with each other and with governments. As a result, both democratic nations then are sewn together into one society, one crosscut by these multifold groups, with multiple bonds between them. Moreover, between democratic governments there are many official and unofficial connections and linkages made to achieve similar functions and satisfy mutual interests. Their militaries freely coordinate strategies, and may even share equipment in line with their mutual defense arrangements and perceived common dangers. An example is nuclear weapons and military equipment shared by Great Britain and the United States. Intelligence services will share some secrets and even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their studies, undertake common projects, and provide health supplies when needed. Such multiple shared interests bond these societies together. Politicians, leaders, and groups, therefore, have a common interest in keeping the peace. And where conflict might escalate into violence, such as over some trade issue or fishing rights, interests are so cross-pressured by different groups and ties that the depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to the interest at stake is simply not there. Keep in mind that for democratic leaders to choose to make the huge jump to war against another country, there must be almost fanatical dedication to the interests— the stakes—involved, almost to the exclusion of all else. There is also something about democracies that is even more important than these links, bonds, and cross-pressures. This is their democratic culture. Democratic peoples see one another as willing to compromise and negotiate issues rather than fighting violently over them. More important, they see one another as the same kind—part of one’s in-group, one’s moral universe. They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in political culture. Americans and Canadians, for example, have no expectation of fighting each other over trade restrictions and disputes. Both see each other as similarly free, democratic, and willing to bargain. And therefore, they have a totally unarmed 5,525-mile border between them. Similarly, with the development of a solid liberal democracy in Japan since the end of World War II, there is now no expectation of war between Japan and any other democracy, including the United States and democratic South Korea. Finally, credit should be given to the ideology of democratic liberalism itself. Democratic liberals believe in the right of people to make their voices heard, to have a role in government, and to be free. Such liberals, who in domestic policy may be conservative, progressive, so-

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cial democrat, Democrat, or Republican, greatly oppose any violence against other democracies. Even if those in power would consider such actions, democratic liberals—who compose the vast majority of intellectuals, journalists, and politicians—would arouse a storm of protest against them. To summarize, there is no war between democracies because their people are free. This freedom creates a multitude of groups that produce diverse linkages across borders and cross-pressured interests, and make for an exchange culture of negotiation and compromise. Free people see each other as being of the same kind, as morally similar, as negotiators instead of aggressors, and therefore have no expectation of war; and there is a prevalent ideology of democratic liberalism that believes in democratic freedom and opposes violence between democracies. Then why do nondemocracies—or rather, the dictators who control them, since by definition the people have little say—make war on each other? Do the dictators not see each other as being of the same kind, sharing the same coercive culture? Yes, and that is exactly the problem for them. They live by coercion and force. Their guns keep them in power. They depend on a controlled populace manipulated through propaganda, deceit, and fear. Commands and decrees are the working routine of dictators; negotiations are a battleground in which one wins through lies, subterfuge, misinformation, stalling, and manipulation. A dictator’s international relations are no different. They see them as war fought by other means. They will only truly negotiate in the face of bigger and better guns, and they will only keep their promises as long as those guns remain pointed at them. This is also how one dictator sees another—and, incidentally, how they see democracies. This is not to say that war necessarily will happen between two countries if one or both is not democratic. They may be too far away from each other, too weak, or too inhibited by the greater power of a third country. It is only to say that the governments of such countries lack the social and cultural inhibitions that would prevent armed conflict between them, and that their dictatorial governments inherently encourage war. War may not happen, but it can, and the more undemocratic the governments, the more likely it will. There are two beliefs about democracy as a possible solution to war that I should address. One is the belief that what we have always done throughout our history is an inevitable force of our nature. Since we always have had war, we always will. Note, however, that down through the ages, almost all the world lived under absolute monarchs, be they kings, queens, emperors, czars, or whatever. Monarchs inherited their rule and commanded without question. There were exceptions for his-

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torically brief periods, such as in the classical Greek city-states, ancient Rome, and Switzerland during the Middle Ages. But so dominant was monarchism that just three centuries ago, in most of the world, it would have seemed natural to our species, unchangeable. Now, absolute hereditary rule only exists in a few small countries such as Saudi Arabia, and should be gone entirely within a generation or so. Another example of an institution that once seemed inevitable was the ownership of slaves. Slavery was even more universally accepted and practiced than absolute monarchies. Yet now it is virtually ended except in some small backwater countries like Sudan, and there only as an adjunct to its civil war. As a species we may kill and murder each other, but also as a species we have the mental freedom, will, and creativity to eliminate that which we collectively despise or which endangers us. We need only the knowledge to do so, and we now have this knowledge about war. The second belief that inhibits accepting freedom as a solution to war is its simplicity. My social science colleagues often rave about this. “The social world is too complex,” they say, unaware that this statement itself is not a proven truth, but only a hypothesis. “You can’t reduce human behavior to one variable like this,” they say. “War must be the result of many factors interacting in complex ways—diplomatic, political, military, social, cultural, and so on. I cannot believe you would simply reduce all this to freedom. How can you ignore the balance of power, historical grievances, religious conflict, territorial conflicts, and the like?” I do not. In relations between democratic and nondemocratic nations, or among nondemocratic nations themselves, all these complex factors beloved of the historian and political scientist may indeed cause war. It is just that the less freedom the people of these countries have, the more likely it is that war will result. Only between democracies does freedom create the conditions to override these factors.

PART 7 Conclusion

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n the last sentence in the final Volume 5 of my Understanding Conflict and War (1981), I wrote what could as well sum up this book: To eliminate war, to restrain violence, to nurture universal peace and justice, is to foster freedom.80

80 These books are also on my website. The page with the quote is at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/TJP.CHAP13.HTM

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Chapter 30 Freedom is a Right and Creates Human Security We have identified power with greatness, thugs with statesmen, and propaganda with results; we have let moral and cultural relativism silence our outrage, while conceding the moral high ground to the utopian dreamers; we have refused to recognize evil as evil; and we have ignored the catastrophic human cost of such confusions, and the natural and moral right to freedom.

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he best way to sum up this book is by reference to Table 30.1. In Table 30.1a at the top, we can clearly see the difference that freedom makes in the wealth and prosperity of a people. The greater their freedom, the more their purchasing power compared to other nations, the less their poverty, and the greater their human development. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social human security. There is more to human security than wealth and prosperity. There is also the security of knowing that one’s life and the lives of loved ones are safe from lethal repression, genocide and mass murder, and deadly famines. Here Table 30.1b could not be more consistent—the more freedom people have, the fewer their deaths due to famine, genocide and mass murder, and international and civil war. From this table and the analyses and statistical tests done else80 where, I can assert with considerable confidence that freedom is in fact what it appears to be in Table 30.1, and what I have claimed for it in the previous chapters, which is that:

80 Because of the technical nature of the appendix to my online Saving Lives, I have omitted it from this revision. It tests the relationship of freedom to human security (a people’s wealth, prosperity, health and the absence of a threat to their lives by genocide and mass murder, war, and political turmoil and instability) for 190 nations over 70 variables through the use of factor analysis, analysis of variance, and multiple and curvilinear regression. The results further confirm the conclusions of this book. The appendix is at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM

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The freedom of a people is the cause of their greater wealth and prosperity, of human development, and of security from violence. But as important as such statistics are, they are still only statistics; they miss the sheer misery, pain, and horror of the unfree. They can only imperfectly reflect what is a wretched and bloody hell: in the world today, billions of human beings are still subject to absolute privation, exposure, starvation, disease, torture, rape, beatings, forced labor, genocide, mass murder, executions, deportations, political violence, and war. These billions live in fear for their lives, and for those of their loved ones. They have no human rights, no liberties. These people are only pieces on a playing board for the armed thugs and gangs that oppress their nations, raping them, looting them, exploiting them, and murdering them. We hide the identity of the gangs—we sanctify them—with the benign concept of “government,” as in the “government” of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany. The gangs that control these so-called governments oppress whole nations under cover of international law. They are like a gang that captures a group of hikers and then does with them what it wills, robbing all, torturing and murdering some because gang members don’t like them or they are “disobedient,” and raping others. Nonetheless, the thugs that rule nations “govern” by the right of sovereignty: the community of nations explicitly grants them the right by international law to govern a nation when they show that they effectively control the national government, and this right carries with it the promise that other nations will not intervene in their internal affairs. International law now recognizes that if these gangs go to extremes, such as massive ethnic cleansing or genocide, then the international community has a countervailing right to stop them. However, this area of international law is still developing, and as we saw in the current examples of Sudan, Burma, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and China (and one could include Cuba, Pakistan, Iran, and Syria, among others), the thugs still largely have their way with their victims. This is unconscionable. As I showed in Chapter 2, citizens of all countries—a Chinese peasant, a Sudanese black, a Saudi Arabian woman, a Burmese Karen, and all of the 6 billion other people—have the right to freedom of speech, religion, organization, and a fair trial, among other rights, and all these civil and political rights are sub-

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sumed by one overarching right to be free. This right overrules sovereignty, which is granted according to tradition based on a system of international treaties, not natural law. Freedom, by contrast, is not something others grant. It is a right due every human being. It can only be taken from a people and denied them by force of arms, by power. For too many intellectuals, however, it is not enough to point out that a people have a right to be free. They will counter by arguing that freedom is desirable, but first people must be made equal, given food to eat, work, and health care. Freedom must be limited as a means to good ends, such as the public welfare, prosperity, peace, ethnic unity, or national honor. Sometimes the intellectuals who go about creating such justifications for denying people their freedom are so persuasive that even reasonable people will accept their convoluted arguments. Need I mention the works of Marx and Lenin, for example, who provided “scientific” excuses for the tyranny of such thugs as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot? There even were many now-forgotten, or now-excused, intellectuals and other influential figures who praised the economic efficiency and progressiveness of Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. And one should not ignore the large number of Western intellectuals, academics, and students who fell in love with Mao Tse-tung, some even carrying around his Red Book of Mao quotations, while this absolute, tyrannical dictator murdered millions of people, created the world’s greatest famine through his policies, and caused a civil war—the Cultural Revolution, among the bloodiest in history. To many compassionate people, such intellectuals, arguing that freedom must be sacrificed for a better life, have had the best of the argument and the moral high ground. These intellectuals have tried to show that freedom empowers greed, barbaric competition, inefficiency, inequality, the debasement of morals, the weakening of ethnic or racial identity, and so on. In spite of the international certification of freedom as a human right by the United Nations, and treaties and agreements among nations, those defending freedom often feel guilty, as though they somehow lack sympathy for the poor and oppressed. For example, some say of communist Castro’s barbaric rule over the Cuban people, “After all, the Cubans have free medical care, a good educational system, and a right to work.” Never mind that Castro is responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Cubans, the torture and beating of many more, and the imprisonment of vast numbers of those who have only protested their lack of rights. To be defensive about freedom in the face of such justifications is morally wrong-headed. No moral code or civil law allows that a gang

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leader and his followers can murder, torture, and repress some at will as long as the thugs provide others with a good life. But even were it accepted that under the cover of government authority, a ruler can murder and repress his people so long as it promotes human betterment, the burden of proof is on those who argue that therefore those people will be better off. There is no such proof. Quite the opposite: in the twentieth century, we have had the most costly and extensive tests of such arguments, involving billions of people. The Nazis, Italian fascists under Mussolini, Japanese militarists, and Chinese Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek have tested fascist promises of a better life. Likewise, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have tested the utopian promises of communism, to mention the most prominent communist experiments; and Burma, Iraq, and Syria, among others, have also tested state socialism. All these vast social experiments have failed, utterly and miserably, and they have done so at the vast human cost that has included global social upheaval, the displacement of millions, the impoverishment of billions, and the death of tens of millions from famine, extreme internal violence, and the most destructive wars—not to mention the many tens of millions more murdered outright. These social experiments carried out by force against billions of people have produced a vast nation of the dead which, if it were a sovereign country, would be among the world’s top ten in population. In sharp contrast, there are the arguments for freedom, which is, as I have shown in previous chapters, not only a right, but a supreme moral good in itself. The very fact of a people’s freedom creates a better life for all, as shown in Table 30.1. Free people create a wealthy and prosperous society. When people are free to go about their own business, they put their ingenuity and creativity in the service of all. They search for ways to satisfy the needs, desires, and wants of others. The true utopia lies not in some state-sponsored tyranny, but the free market in goods, ideas, and services, whose operating principle is that success depends on satisfying others. As described in Chapter 10, Bill Gates of Microsoft did not become a billionaire by stealing people’s money, looting

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their possessions, taxing them and secreting money away in Switzerland, or by using public funds to build himself mansions. No one had to buy Gates’ products or invest in his company. He became the world’s richest man by providing people with computer software that they wanted, that made their life or work easier. People rarely do things for others because they are completely selfless—we set apart and admire those rare Mother Theresas who are. Rather, almost all act out of self-interest, and it is therefore better to create a society in which self-interest leads to mutual betterment, rather than one in which a small coterie of fanatics exert their own selfinterest at the expense of the lives and welfare of others. What underlines this moral good of freedom even more is the independence and incentives farmers have to best use their land to produce crops and food that people need to live. The result is that, in a democratically free country like the United States, farmers produce a surplus of food that the government then buys, stores, and grants in aid to poor countries. At the same time, in many of those countries where the rulers have denied their farmers any freedom in order to achieve some utopian future, where they order farmers what to grow, where, and how, and at what prices to sell the resulting crops, famines have killed tens of millions of people. The roll call of these famines is long, but must include the Soviet Union, China, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, and North Korea. It is not by chance, as shown in Table 30.1, that: No democratically free people have suffered from mass famine. It is extraordinary, how little known this is. There are plenty of hunger projects and plans to increase food aid for the starving millions, all of which is good enough in the short run. A starving person will die before the people can kick out their rulers or make them reform their policies. Yet simply feeding the starving today is not enough. They also have to be fed tomorrow and every day thereafter. However, free these people from their rulers’ commands over their farming, and soon they will be able to feed themselves and others as well. There is an adage that applies to this: “Give a starving person a fish to eat and you feed him only for one day; teach him how to fish, and he feeds himself forever.” Yet teaching is no good alone, if people are not free to apply their new knowledge—yes, teach them how to fish, but also promote the freedom they need to do so. Surprisingly, the incredible economic productivity and wealth produced by a free people and their freedom from famines are not the only moral goods of freedom, nor, perhaps, even the most important moral

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goods. When people are free, they comprise a spontaneous society the characteristics of which strongly inhibit society-wide political violence, as shown in Table 30.1. Freedom greatly reduces the possibility of revolutions, civil war, rebellions, guerrilla warfare, coups, violent riots, and the like. Most of the violence within nations occurs where thugs rule with absolute power. There is a continuum here: The more power the rulers have, and the less free their people, the more internal violence these people will suffer. Keep in mind that throughout the world, people are essentially the same. It is not that the people of any culture, civilization, or nation are by nature any more bloodthirsty, barbaric, power-hungry, or violent than those of another. What makes for peace within a nation is not national character, but social conditions that reduce tension and hostility between people, lessen the stakes of conflict, cross-pressure interests, and promote negotiation, tolerance, and compromise. Such are the conditions created by democratic freedom. The more a people are free, the greater such conditions inhibit internal violence. Surely that which protects people against internal violence, that which so saves human lives, is a moral good. And this is freedom. Then there is mass democide, the most destructive means of ending human lives of any form of violence. Except in the case of the Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, few people know how murderous the dictators of this world have been, and could be. Virtually unknown is the fact that the number of non-Jewish Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and others murdered by Hitler surpasses by two or three times the Jews he killed. Then there are the shocking tens of millions murdered by Stalin and Mao, and the other millions wiped out by Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il-sung, and their kind. Just omitting foreigners, who are most often murdered during a war, such thugs murdered about 123 million of their own people from 1900 to 1987. Adding foreigners and including the whole twentieth century raises the toll they have killed to an incredible nearly 174 million. Even now, in the twenty-first century, these mass murders still go on in Burma, Sudan, North Korea, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Congo, just to mention the most glaring examples.

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It should be clear, then, why I refer to the rulers of these murderous regimes as thugs. I am not a diplomat or a government official and do not have to worry about the delicate sensitivities of these rulers. I can call these thugs the thugs they are. As should be clear from this book, they often murder people by carefully thought-out plans, they set up a bureaucracy to do so, they train people for this purpose, and then they order the killing. Sometimes they murder people because of their race, ethnicity, or religion; sometimes for their parents’ or other relative’s political activities or beliefs or speech; sometimes for their lack of proper enthusiasm for their glorious rulers. Sometimes they establish a murder quota to fill, or kill people randomly to set an example. While we can approximate how many these thugs have killed, we cannot even guess at the heartbreak and misery these deaths have caused their surviving loved ones, and how many of these poor people have died of a broken heart or committed suicide. Moreover, the term murder hardly carries the full weight of the pain and misery of the victims. Some lucky ones died quickly with a shot to the back of the head, or by decapitation. Most died quite wretchedly, in pain from torture or beatings, by drowning or being buried or burned alive, or in agony from wounds. Many died from intentionally administered starvation, thirst, exposure, or disease. Some died horribly as the result of repeated human medical experiments. We have no pain/misery index to measure all this except for the incredible pile of corpses these thugs have created in one century. We must assume that a penumbra of pain and misery, of love and hope squashed, of a future stolen surrounds each of these millions of corpses. What is true about freedom and internal violence is also so for this mass democide: The more freedom a people have, the less likely their rulers are to murder them. The more power the thugs have, the more likely they are to murder their people. Could there be a greater moral good than to end or minimize such mass murder? This is what freedom does and for this it is, emphatically, a moral good. There is still more to say about freedom’s value. While we now know that the world’s ruling thugs generally kill several times more of their subjects than do wars, it is war on which moralists and pacifists generally focus their hatred, and devote their resources to ending or moderating. This singular concentration is understandable, given the hor-

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ror and human costs, and the vital political significance of war. Yet it should be clear by now that war is a symptom of freedom’s denial, and that freedom is the cure. Three points bear repeating from Chapter 27. First: Democratically free people do not make war on each other. This is so important that some scientists have made this historical fact the subject of whole books, such as Bruce Russett’s Grasping the Democratic Peace, James Lee Ray’s Democracy and International Conflict, and Spencer R. Weart’s Never At War. Chapter 29 gives a very good explanation for why democracies do not make war on each other, and it is the same as that for why there is by far the least internal violence and democide within democracies. The diverse groups, cross-national bonds, social links, and shared values of democratic peoples sew them together; and shared liberal values dispose them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each other. It is as though the people of democratic nations were one society. This truth that democracies do not make war on each other provides a solution for eliminating war from the world: globalize democratic freedom. This solution is far in the future, however. It may only kick in when most nations are democratized. Therefore the second point: The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the wars between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars become. And third, as seen in Table 30.1: The more freedom the people of a nation have, the less bloody and destructive their wars. What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost all nations to become liberal democracies to reduce the severity of war. As we promote freedom, as the people of more and more nations gain greater human rights and political liberties, as those people with-

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out any freedom become partly free, we will decrease the bloodiness of the world’s wars. In short: Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be a moral good. And this is freedom. The implications of this for foreign policy and international activism are profound. Since peace, national security, and national welfare are the paramount concerns of a democratic nation’s foreign policy, clearly the overriding goal should be to peacefully promote human rights and democratic freedom. This should be the bottom line of international negotiations, treaties, foreign aid, and military action (if necessary for defense or humanitarian reasons, as in Kosovo or Bosnia). As to defense policy, military planning is based on assessments of intentions and capability. What is clear is that the less free the people of a nation are, the more we should beware of the intentions of their rulers. In other words, it is not the democracies of the world that we need to defend against. Moreover, think about what the peace-creating power of freedom means for nuclear weapons. Many people are justly worried about the ultimate danger to humanity—nuclear war. They protest and demonstrate against nuclear weapons. Some cross the line into illegal activities, such as destroying military property, and risk prison to draw public attention to the danger of such weapons. Were these dedicated people to spend even half this effort on promoting freedom and human rights for the people of the most powerful dictatorships that have or may soon have such weapons—for instance, China, North Korea, and Iran—they would be striking at the root cause for the risk of nuclear attack. The power of freedom to end war, minimize violence within nations, and eradicate genocide and mass murder almost seems magical. It is as though we have a single-drug cure for cancer. Had I not actually done much of the research myself over more than forty years, I would have doubted all this. Yet, my work and that of other social scientists and scholars have proven it true. Our knowledge of the peace-creating and peacemaking effects of freedom now gives us a nonviolent way to promote a nonviolent world. As should now be clear:

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Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence. Enhancing, spreading, and promoting human rights and democracy are the way to enhance, spread, and promote nonviolence. Proponents of nonviolence have worked out many peaceful tactics for opposing dictators, such as sit-down strikes, general strikes, mass demonstrations, refusal to pay taxes, underground newspapers, sabotage by excessive obedience to the rules, and the like. Much thought has gone into how a people can nonviolently promote human rights. Overall, however, nonviolence works best among a free people. And: Freedom itself promotes a nonviolent solution to social problems and conflicts. In conclusion, then, we have wondrous human freedom as a moral force for the good. Freedom produces social justice, creates wealth and prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solution to war. In two words, it creates human security. Moreover, and most important: People should not be free only because it is good for them. They should be free because it is their right as human beings. In opposition to freedom is power, its antagonist. While freedom is a right, the power to govern is a privilege granted by a people to those they elect and hold responsible for its use. Too often, however, thugs seize control of a people with their guns and use them to make their power total and absolute. Where freedom produces wealth and prosperity, such absolute power causes impoverishment and famine. Where freedom minimizes internal violence, eliminates genocide and mass murder, and solves the problem of war, such absolute power unleashes internal violence, murders millions, and produces the bloodiest wars. In short, power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. Now, to summarize this whole book, why freedom? Because it is every person’s right. And it is a moral good—it promotes wealth and prosperity, social justice, and nonviolence, and preserves human life.