Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club posts about a subject close to home — about a document called the Melo Report released yesterday in the Philippines. It’s the result of a fact-finding investigation conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo into extrajudicial killings committed by both the military and communist rebels. The result is interesting, but my historical standards, not too surprising. By and large, the communists have killed far more people than their right-wing adversaries.

There is evidence that the military “allowed, tolerated and even encouraged” political assassinations, and that retired Maj. Gen. Jovito Palparan was among those who justified the killings, according to the report of a special commission.

The report ???????? made public only yesterday ???????? of the fact-finding commission headed by former Supreme Court Justice Jose Melo, also stated that those killed by the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People????????s Army (CPP-NPA) far outnumber the victims of summary executions carried out by “a small military group.”

It urged President Arroyo to take the lead to stop the killings.

“The Armed Forces is not a state within a state,” it said. “If extrajudicial executions are to be stopped … it must start with the President.”

The Melo Commission said it is not “ignorant or unmindful of the crimes committed” by the communist rebels or the benefits of having “a decent military to defend our freedom and way of life.”

But it also urged the military not to stoop to the level of communist rebels “with their lawless, treacherous methodologies” but to respect the rule of law in running after enemies of the state.

“To be sure, those slain by rebels and insurgents far outnumber the killings attributed by the leftist (groups) to the government. Many of our sons, husbands, and fathers have been slain or injured in encounters with the NPA, or have been assassinated by dreaded hitmen and mowed down in other acts of terrorism of the CPP-NPA,” the 86-page report said.

The conclusion of the report is not at all surprising. Historically, communist governments have resulted in more deaths than have military governments. Their left-wing insurgent counterparts, even without absolute power, are more willing to kill their own people.

The respected political scientist of democracy and democide, Rudy Rummel, has documented these trends extensively. According to his research, the number of deaths attributed to the killing of internal persons by their own governments far outweighs those caused by the great wars of the 20th century. While acknowledging the other great human losses of this time, communism by and far outweighs the rest, reaching a total death toll of over 100,000,000 people. In the following excerpt, he explains how this came to be:

How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with the absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. They believed that they knew through Marxism what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government–the Communist Party–was thus above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world.

Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And thus this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as 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 their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921-23 and 7,000,000 from 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959-61). In total almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. And that something like 35,000,000 people fled communist countries as refugees, as though the countries of Argentina or Columbia had been totally emptied of all their people, was an unparalleled vote against the utopian pretensions of Marxism-Leninism.

But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this world view and even with some of the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that. . . . In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusade against nonbelievers.

What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state’s instrument of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. The result is what we see in Table 1.

But communism does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 20,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslaves, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others during world War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide.

But what connects them all is this. As a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.

Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have the greatest extreme of democide. Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin’s reign or the height of Mao’s power) has taken place when they have been in their own history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply.

By contrast, military governments are rarely in absolute control. One could argue that they have the monopoly on force, but they generally do not have a monopoly on action like communist governments do. Military governments rarely institutionalize themselves throughout all aspects of society like communist ones do, meaning that there must be significant precedent by society itself for the coup. Cracks in this support usually lead to its downfall. That’s why military governments kill more politically precisely rather than indiscriminately.

Unfortunately for the apologists of communist governments, there is no solid evidence to show that military governments are worse than their own breed of despotism. In fact, military governments usually favor pro-growth economic policies, so once the transition is made to democracy, there is already a free market in place that provides for the greater prosperity o the people. Communist countries, on the other hand, have to make the tumultuous transition to both a market economy as well as democracy. The result is likely relapse and greater internal conflict.

These facts are usually ignored when there is an ideological struggle involved. As Richard notes, human rights organizations should play it fair. The Filipino military should get the blame it deserves while the communist insurgents should get what it deserves as well. They should acknowledge that human rights violations and extrajudicial killings are far worse on the communist side without pardoning the military. In a perfect world, such fairness of judgment would be the right thing to do.

Yet it is unlikely. Leftist activists for decades have rebuked military governments while apologizing for the communist ideology — if not the system. Changing the rules of the game at this point would be an admission of fault that cannot be allowed. This means that despite the horrendous actions committed by military regimes, people who understand the gross horrors of communism are forced to the other side in order to defend the indefensible. Just as I did above, military governments have to be defended to a degree in order to counter the arguments of leftist apologists, forcing myself and others to be a something of a rightist apologist. The Left still speaks today of the military overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected communist government in Chile, saying that he never got a chance. But what they don’t say is that inflation had eroded the working man’s savings, food was scarce, and that a majority of the people supported the overthrow. They say that this new government was evil because 3000 people were killed and many were tortured, but that forces me to apologize for Pinochet by pointing out the obvious: that perhaps 100 or 1000 times that many would have died under Allende’s tyranny.

It is this very predicament that has precipitated the continued discrediting of the international Left, but in that wake there is an empty void created by the polarization. Even in an age where the desirability of liberal democracy is paramount, in this void is the impossibility of either side being able to play it fair with the crimes of the past. What happened, happened, and whether on the left or right, those who committed crimes against humanity should be condemned roundly by anyone who cares about human rights. It is the ideological tug-o-war that excuses certain means in order to achieve certain ends. As long as the recognition of human rights is divided ideologically, the totalitarians of the world have and will continue to conquer. Their power rests on the excuses made for them.