As defined, elaborated, and qualified in Chapter 2 of Death By Government, democide is any murder or population reduction by government, by officials acting under the authority of government. That is, they act according to explicit or implicit government policy or with the implicit or explicit approval of the highest officials.

Such was the burying alive of Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers, the starving to death of Russians and Ukrainians by Bolsheviks, or the burning alive of German and Japanese civilians purposely fire-bombed from the air by Allied air forces during World War II.

Genocide, however, is a confusing concept. It may or may not include government murder, refer to wholly or partially eliminating some group, or involve psychological damage. If it includes government murder, it may mean all such murder or just some. Boiling all this down, genocide can have three different meanings.

One meaning is that defined by international treaty, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This makes genocide a punishable crime under international law, and defines it as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Note that only the first clause includes outright killing, while the other clauses cover non-killing ways of eliminating a group.

These will include ethnocide, the destruction of particular ethnic groups by coerced race-mixing, family planning for the purpose of family elimination or reduction, promotion of non-productive sex (homosexuality), contrived economic failure, societal change resulting in high rates of suicide, the contrived crisis in health management which hastens needless deaths, genocide by jab as in Covid-19.

Regardless of definition and doubtlessly influenced by the Soviet and Allied holocausts, ordinary usage and that by students of genocide have tended to wholly equate it with the murder and only the murder by government of people due to their national, ethnical, racial or religious or group membership.

In some usage and especially among some students of genocide, the concept has been redefined to fill a void. What about the government murdering people for other reasons than their group membership?

What about government-organized death squads eliminating communists or groups promoting ethnic nationalism, assassinating political opponents, or cleansing the population of anti-revolutionaries. Incitement to wage population-reducing conflicts, forced migration, what about simply fulfilling a government death quota (as in the Soviet Union under Stalin).

None of such murders is genocide according to the legal and common meanings. Therefore, some students of genocide have stretched its meaning to include all government murder, whether or not because of a group membership. This may be aptly named the generalised meaning of genocide.

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It is believed that both genocides in its common meaning and democide have an important role in understanding government murder. For example, soldiers lining up civilians against a wall and shooting them to death without a fair trial is manifestly government murder. The same applies to Allied armies who after forcing civilians to lie in groups used army trucks to crush under the wheels thousands of civilians to death.

And in its common meaning, most cases of genocide can be equally discriminated, as in the murder of 66.7 million Christians by the American-sponsored Communists, the reduction of the German population by 14 million after World War II as a means of government policy, and so on.

The conclusion is that genocide should ordinarily be understood as the government murder of people because of their indelible group membership (let the international lawyers struggle with the legal meaning) and democide as any murder by the government, including this form of genocide.