American schools have been unwilling to teach about the superiority of democracy as a form of government. One reason has been a desire to appear open-minded. Since ours is a democratic system teaching the superiority of democracy seemed like patting ourselves on the back. This attitude led to some extreme relativism in teaching--things like, "Well, we think democracy is superior, but it's our system. The Chinese and the Soviets have their systems, and they like them just as much as we like ours." In other words, we saw some precursors of the kind of multiculturalism that considers everything equally valid. Other educators have played down the superiority of democracy because they believed that wars often resulted from pushing ideas about the superiority of one system over another, and they were eager, above all, to avoid the bloodshed that accompanies war.
Much of this has changed. With the dismantling of the Soviet empire and the raising of a Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square, it became evident that we were not the only ones who favored the democratic system. Where democracy doesn't exist, it's not because the people prefer their form of government but because they are not free to raise their voices. Those who still talk about being open-minded should be open-minded enough to compare the war records of democracies and nondemocracies. And those who believe that we can save lives by considering all political systems equally valid need to realize that war has not been the only or indeed the major cause of killing in this century.
"Power Kills; Absolute Power Kills Absolutely," a study by R.J. Rummel, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, compares the number of wars fought by democratic and nondemocratic governments since 1816 and the number of people killed in wars. But the starkest contrast between democratic and nondemocratic governments is in the number of people in their control that nondemocratic governments kill.
Democracies are more likely to settle their differences at the conference table than on the battlefield. In fact, Rummel finds no example of a democracy waging war on another democracy between 1816 and 1991. Even now, when democracies include perhaps 40 percent of the world's people, there is no threat of war among them. And when former enemies become stable democracies, they stop making war on each other.
Rummel cites France and Germany since 1945 and Western Europe in general: "In 1945 one would not find an expert so foolhardy as to predict not only forty-five years of peace, but that at the end of that time there would be a European community ... and zero expectation of violence between any of these formerly hostile states. Yet such has happened. All because they are all democracies."
Continuing the scorecard of wars between 1816 and 1992, Rummel calculates that there were 155 wars between democracies and nondemocracies and 198 between nondemocracies. "The less democratic two states," he says, "the more likely that they will fight each other."
However, what nondemocracies do to their own citizens and others in their control is far more shocking than anything that happens on the battlefield. Since 1900, Rummel estimates that there have been about 37 million battlefield casualties. In the same period, "democide," as he calls this murder of people by national governments, has taken 149 million lives. Between 1917 and 1987, the U.S.S.R. murdered 61,911,000 people; between 1949 and 1987, the Peoples' Republic of China murdered 35,326,000; and between 1934 and 1945, Germany murdered 20,946,000. Democracies, as Rummel points out, are often unwilling to execute even serial murderers.
How can we account for the horror perpetrated by these nondemocracies on innocent people? Power is concentrated in nondemocratic governments so it is not subject to any check or discipline. As a result, the holders of power are free to do what they like. In a democracy, power is spread thinly among many different people and groups and institutions, and they must learn to talk to each other and compromise and cooperate in order to accomplish anything.
Rummel does not claim that power is never abused in democracies. In wartime, especially, power can be concentrated and "freed from many institutional restraints" so that things like the internment of American citizens, who happened to be of Japanese ancestry, can easily happen. Nevertheless, these are aberrations, not part of the basic design. Those who want to save lives ought to be as concerned about people being murdered by nondemocratic governments as about those being killed in wars--perhaps more concerned since there are so many more of them. We can show this concern by educating our students in an understanding of and commitment to democracy and by encouraging the growth of democracy--not by pretending that every form of government is as valid as every other.