Democide

RJ's warning

Writing this essay is very difficult for me. It is sometimes hard to know where to start. So I will start in 1995.

I am in Houston Texas and the phone rings. It's long distance. You could hear as soon as you picked up. The long distance trunk lines had a sort of hiss. It's hard to explain.

The phone was on my desk. It was one of the company phone handsets from Space Travel Services. I was holding this black u-shaped hunk of plastic to my face with my shoulder. The number looked familiar and I had this feeling.

“Hello. Jim Davidson here.”

“Hi. It's RJ Rummel. You gave me your phone number on email.”

“Oh, right. The death by government project. Thanks for calling.”

“I read what you wrote about the victims at Waco. And the ones killed in the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia. You really care about them, don't you?”

I looked at my reflection in the cathode ray tube monitor on my desk. My hands had moved quickly to call up the web browser with my local copy of the ezez.com web site. I clicked through to the image of skulls, swastika, hammer and sickle, blood… Death by Government was the h1 heading at the top of the page. Then the date which I render here as Anno Domini 1993 04 19. The burning buildings at Mount Carmel. A summary of the event.

And the names. Who they were. What I could learn about them. How they were murdered. Murdered by the corrupt fbi for the corrupt Clinton administration. Choked on cyanide gas from the fires and the CS gas. Detonated by the shaped charge atop the church “vault” where all the women and children huddled while the fbi “hostage rescue team” slaughtered them. Shot down as they tried to flee.

Further down the page the MOVE bombing. City of Philadelphia and the fbi made a bomb, dropped it on a building, set a neighborhood on fire. They killed a family of people who cared about their home. You can look it up.

I hadn't gotten any farther back. I knew from history classes and my family that many more were dead. I thought I could write them up. Make a memorial. Name them. All the murdered by government all the way back to the beginning. The beginning of the country? Of the century? I didn't know. But there was some scope to it.

“Yes. I care,” I said.

There was a long silence. Long as calls in those days went, since we paid for every portion of a minute the call lasted. Then RJ talked me out of it. He asked about my work, about my family, about what it was like. About how hard it is.

To make the connexion. To know there was a person. To create a biography. Maybe include a picture? And go on to the next one and the next and the next. Day after day putting lived experiences into perspective in the context of betrayal.

Betrayal by people who were supposed to love their neighbours but killed them. Sometimes with fire and gas and bombs, sometimes with rifles, ropes, torture chambers. Was it even realistic to catalogue them by event and names? How many pages of names would there be?

That was sort of the point, I said. So many deaths. People wouldn't be able to ignore them or stand the injustice. Scrolling through doom.

Professor Rummel asked, “What would prevent death by government?” I thought for a few seconds.

“Not having a government,” was my answer. Well, that went over not at all.

At the end of the call, I promised to think about whether I should do this work, how it would affect me. He agreed to email me a few thoughts. And that was all. We never spoke again.

He wrote books on the work he did. He published at the University of Hawai'i the definitive work on governments murdering their own people. He looked at every group of deaths, every report of a set of bodies found. He counted 262 million murdered by government in the 20th Century and 55 million killed in combat.

I have a sense that it gnawed at his soul. He wanted to document what was done. He wanted people to stop doing it.

They have not. This part is also hard.

Sitting at the dinner table in 1977. My dad is talking. How it was for him. Occupied France. Occupied Germany. Being in the Army signal corps because his uncle Bert had insisted my dad take typing class in high school.

There were photos of the liberated camps. Lots of photos.

Photos of bodies. Walking skeletons starved nearly to death. Dead bodies. Mass graves. Ovens with, well, parts…

The reports he encoded. Of nearby townspeople marched at gunpoint to see what was being done nearby. Prisoners breaking loose and tearing apart guards. Other prisoners dying from eating too much too soon.

Later it would come out that his mom, my grandma, had corresponded with friends and family in Germany. All her life. Her grandparents had left Hamburg in 1870. Bismarck looked like a good reason to emigrate.

So they took a ship around Cape Horn. Arrived at Long Beach. Built a hotel in Glendale. And kept in touch with friends and family back in Prussia by writing letters. People wrote blogs but called them newspaper columns, had instagrammes but they were only still photos, shades of grey, and you mailed them. They had email but it was all handwriting. You would like to look at the penmanship.

After 1933 it was bad. You see, my grandma was Istalia Rhine. Her family were Jewish. Bismarck's government was not good to Prussian Jews, so they left. After 1933 there was an even worse government. People disappeared.

Oh, some knew some of the events. Neighbours heard. Sometimes they would write. But often grandma would simply never hear back. By 1938 she was very sick. The doctors said it was cancer. But I know her heart was heavy. It gnaws at the soul to know what happened. Can you imagine how it gnawed not knowing?

Put your thoughts in a letter. Answer their questions. Address an envelope. Get it mailed off. Think fondly of your friends a few weeks later. But they had not written back. Look at newspapers. Never know. Loved ones. Gone.

They haven't stopped. Xi killed 78 million Falun Gong and carved them up for organ transplants. It all came out in 2016. Bally's here in Las Vegas has a few of their bodies on display as a look at how the insides of people are. Xi has killed millions of people in Western China and tens of millions of dissidents and protesters all over the place. He's received enthusiastic cooperation setting up police stations in many cities in the USA, Canada, and Europe. And people have been murdered by the Chinese government all over the world.

Now your government is killing people. There's the war virus, the poison jabs, the massacre in Las Vegas in 2017, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Mali, Kurdistan, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

Tom Clancy once wrote that government is good at two things. Killing people and taking away freedom. And you in the United States should now know that the cia killed president John F Kennedy and the fbi killed his brother Bobby, killed Martin Luther King Jr, and killed thousands more to keep power.

I have been designing a meme. John Podesta says, “Tens of millions of people know the truth about the children we torture and murder. We can't kill them all.”

In the next frame Hillary smiles and says, “Can't we?”

Behind her the calendar says it is Anno Domini 2019 10 20. Wuhan flu is no longer in a lab. The church of Saint Mary in Rome has been defiled with an abomination. And you know some of the rest of the story.

Do you know why I was sent? Part of my mission is to find a people worth saving. And you are all so wonderful. Your paintings, your symphonies, your rock operas, your mosh pits and thrash metal, your cathedrals and chants, monuments and homes, your cuisine and caring.

Why won't you stop delegating power to maniacs? Why won't you stop paying them to “take care of that governing stuff” and pretend it is all ok? Why do you insist on serving them in military and police functions? Why won't you look at the abuse of power? The money, the greed, the rapes, tortures, prisons, scandals.

They want you to consent to have your infant children injected with dozens of inoculations. They want you to be jabbed again and again. They want to murder anyone they choose, torture Julian Assange, exile Edward Snowden, and take in trillions in corrupt money. I know what they get out of it: money, power, respect of other killers.

But what do you get out of it? Peace? Were 2020 and 2021 your idea of peace? Orderly transfer of power through legitimate elections? Are you fkm?

You do not need them. They are parasites. They cannot live without your cooperation. So please please please.

For the love of God, for all that is sacred and holy, for the love of your neighbour as yourself, for your family, for your children, would you please stop cooperating? Please?

There's one more experience to share. I was in Dayton Ohio. I had a spiritual home at the Dayton Friends meeting. Friends. Fellowship. Service at the community shelter. A home. A garden. A sense of well-being. It was 2019 10 20.

My friend Al McGrew came by to pick me up. He drove us to Waynesville Ohio. There is an old and large Quaker meeting house there. We were the Dayton representatives to the Miami quarterly meeting. Which is Quaker speak for a regional gathering to talk about budgets and business.

Al wanted to attend the adult day school before the meeting for worship. So we arrived a bit before 0900. I did try to sit there but, well, it was boring. My spirit was restless. I needed to see the place.

So I walked upstairs. Downstairs. Into the meeting hall big enough for 200 friends. There were 7 of us for day school and there would be around 24 for worship service. I tried the little room with Al and 5 other friends. Nope. Not for me. So I stood at the door thinking.

Where was the library? A meeting house as old (built in 1810, expanded when the slave owners in North Carolina got tired of Quakers telling slaves that God loves them and “bought out” a dozen families who moved to Ohio in 1820) and large as this one must have a library. And up three steps from the day school room, there it was.

My soul longed for a Bible. Here was one. Nice leather binding. Red ribbon page markers. Turn to the New Testament… yes! The words of Jesus are printed in red ink to set them apart and to remind us of the blood he shed at the scourging, with the crowning with thorns, on the path to Calvary, on the cross.

I sat in the main meeting room. It was Autumn. There were no open windows. No furnace blowing. No fans. Huge old pews. No people. I sat on the aisle a few pews back. Quakers are all equal so we sit in a rectangle or circle depending on the room. And I was happy. I felt peace. I was where I was supposed to be, near the people I was to be good to during that day, and doing my third favourite thing: reading.

I was, as I recall, reading Luke chapter 7. Mostly just the red ink. And I had gotten quite into the reading from the start of St Luke's gospel. God blessed me with the ability to read really fast. So maybe ten or fifteen minutes had gone by and the friends were coming in. None came near me. I looked up several times. Perhaps my expression conveyed my preference for solitude.

As I was reading, the meeting for worship began. One of the elder friends said, “Let's settle in for meeting.” We meet in silence. When the Holy Spirit moves someone to speak, and that person discerns it is Spirit and not ego, they stand up and speak. But first we get quiet for five or ten minutes, or longer.

There I was with the Bible open and my two hands under its two covers and resting on my thighs. So I closed my eyes. In my mind I recited the prayer I would always say at the start of meeting for worship. I became a Quaker in 2017 and was accepted as a convinced Quaker in 2018. So it was a long prayer. My lips did not move but my mind went over the words. And since I had a Bible at the end of my prayer, I prayed,

“And God if there is a Bible verse I should read aloud at this meeting, please show it to me.” And I opened my eyes.

What I saw was not Luke chapter 7. It was the cover page for the New Testament on the right and the final verses of the Book of Malachi on the left. I was surprised. This had never happened to me before.

When I would pray for a Bible verse previously, I would run my thumb along the closed book until I felt an impulse to open the book. Sometimes it was a spine jangling impulse. And whatever page my hand opened to, I would read. If the chapter began on the page before, I would turn back to start at the beginning of that chapter. And I would read through to the end of the chapter, turning forward as needed. The words fresh in my mind I would know what passage stood out. Then I would stand and read that part.

This time was different. I felt blessed and I felt this minor miracle was meant to get my attention. Believe me, I attended!

I first put my hand to the cover page for the new testament. I turned it, thinking I was being guided to the first chapter of Matthew. No. It was cold. Not that way.

So I read the last chapter of the last book of the last prophet in the Old Testament. Here it is.

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch. But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall. And ye shall tread down the wicked; for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet in the day that I shall do this, saith the Lord of hosts. Remember ye the law of Moses my servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb for all Israel, with the statutes and judgments. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord: And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

In the years since then, I have been told to leave Dayton. I was led on a spiritual journey. I spent months alone in the wilderness of the Ozark Mountain rainforest in Northwest Arkansas in a tent, under an overhang, next to a waterfall. My path continued from there to other places. I encountered a demon and banished it by speaking the name of Jesus Christ.

If you want to know what I believe it is: that we are seeing a great spiritual shift. The servile have been misled to obey bad people. Bad people have worshipped demons. And we are at the precipice, the cusp.

God promises in Isaiah 30 and Ezekiel 22 and Malachi 4 and Revelation 18 to burn up the wickedness. When? When we face the demonic powers, when we face spiritual darkness in high places, and when the only path of righteousness is for God to burn the Earth with fire.

You have only this one other possible set of paths. Turn your hearts to the children. Stop those who exploit them, as Elon Musk has begun doing on Twitter. Ask Eliza Bleu about how many child exploitation profiles and hashtags have been removed. Do more.

Help children learn and grow and thrive. Keep them from harm. Keep them safe from exploiters and mutilators and sterilisers and torturers and murderers. You are not safe from the fbi but you can keep the children safe from the fbi forever by making a world without the fbi.

Think of the children and end these wars. And turn your hearts to your parents. Stop these evil hospitals that prevent family from seeing their elderly family members. You know who kept you from visiting grandma as she lay dying. Make them go out of business.

And stop putting your parents in “managed care” facilities. Care for them. In their own home. Please. Please stop having it be that the mom and dad who raised and loved you are hauled away to nursing care to be confused and neglected. If it costs you more, pay more.

I cared for my parents in their own home in the last years of their lives. I helped them get groceries, cook meals, took them to doctor visits, made sure they came home from hospital and from physical therapy. I did the things people do for the weak who need help being cleaned and dressed. You can too.

You have other priorities? Change them. You don't like your parents? Love them. Each of my parents beat me bloody. Mom once, dad more than once. I forgave them and loved them and cared for them.

So, that's all. Make a world you want your children to grow up in. Make a world your parents can grow old in. Show, this is key, show your children what it looks like to love your parents.

You have time. Enough time to turn your hearts to the children and to the parents. Please.