Death by Government

Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900

R. J. Rummel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351523479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is R. J. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.

Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, "The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom."

Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples, the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.

1
169,198,000 Murdered Summary and Conclusion

Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue.

—Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society

Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches.

—Shelley, Queen Mab III

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.

—Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Creighton

Power kills; absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war¹ and from this book on genocide and government mass murder — what I call democide — in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power,² totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions; in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.

These assertions are extreme and categorical, but so is the evidence accumulated here and elsewhere. Consider first war. Table 1.1 shows the occurrence of war between nations since 1816. Never has there been a war involving violent military action between stable democracies³ (although they have fought, as everyone knows, nondemocracies) — most wars are between nondemocracies. Indeed, we have here a general principle that is gaining acceptance among students of international relations and war: namely, that democracies don't or rarely make war on each other. To this I would add that the less democratic two states are, the more likely it is that they will fight each other.

This belligerence of unrestrained Power is not an artifact of either a small number of democracies nor of our era. For one thing, the number of democratic states in 1993 is about seventy-five, or, taking into account forty-eight related territories, about one-fourth of the world's population.⁴ Yet we have had no war — none — among them. Nor is there any threat of war. They create an oasis of peace.

Moreover, this is historically true of democracies as well. If one relaxes the definition of democracy to mean simply the restraint on

TABLE 1.1
Wars between Democracies and Nondemocracles, 1816-1991

Dyads ^a	Wars ^b
Democracies vs. democracies	0
Democracies vs. nondemocracies	155
Nondemocracies vs. nondemocracies	198
Total	353

^a Stable democracies. This only excludes the war between an ephemeral republican France and republican Rome in 1849.

^b Defined as any military action in which at least 1,000 persons are killed. From Small and Singer 1976, 1982; more recent estimates from the author.

Power by the participation of middle and lower classes in the determination of power holders and policy-making, then there have been many democracies throughout history. And whether considering the classical Greek democracies, the forest democracies of medieval Switzerland, or modern democracies, they did or do not fight each other (depending on how war and democracy are defined, some might prefer to say that they rarely fought or fight each other).⁵ Moreover, once those states that had been mortal enemies, that had frequently gone to war (as have France and Germany in recent centuries), became democratic, war ceased between them.⁶ Paradigmatic of this is Western Europe since 1945. The cauldron of our most disastrous wars for many centuries, 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 with central government institutions, moves toward a joint European military force by France and Germany, and zero expectation of violence between any of these formerly hostile states. Yet such has happened. All because they are all democracies.⁷

Even if all to be said about absolute and arbitrary Power was that it causes war and the attendant slaughter of the young and most capable of our species, this would be enough. But much worse, as the case studies in this book will more than attest, even without the excuse of combat, Power also massacres in cold blood those helpless people it controls — in fact, several times more of them. Consider table 1.2 and figure 1.1: the list and its graph of this century's megamurderers —those states killing in cold blood, aside from warfare, 1 million or more men, women, and children. These fifteen megamurderers have wiped out over 151 million people, almost four times the almost 38,500,000 battle dead from all this century's international and civil wars up to 1987.⁸ The most absolute Powers — namely, communist USSR, China, and preceding-Mao guerrillas; Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, and fascist Nazi Germany —account for nearly 128 million of them, or 84 percent.

Table 1.2 also shows the annual percentage democide rate (the percent of its population that a regime murders per year) for each megamurderer; figure 1.1 graphically overlays the plot of this on the total murdered. Massive megamurderers such as the Soviet Union and communist China had huge populations with a resulting small annual

TABLE 1.2
Twentieth-Century Democide

democide rate. Lesser megamurderers were far more lethal to their own populations.

Table 1.3 lists the fifteen most lethal regimes, and figure 1.2 bar graphs them. As can be seen, no other megamurderer comes even close to the lethality of the communist Khmer Rouge in Cambodia during their 1975 through 1978 rule. As will be described in chapter 9, in less than four years of governing they exterminated over 31 percent of their men, women, and children; the odds of any Cambodian surviving these four long years was only about 2.2 to 1.

FIGURE 1.l
Megamurderers and Their Annual Rates of Democide (From table 1.2)

Then there are the kilomurderers, or those states that have killed innocents by the tens or hundreds of thousands, such as the top five ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 169,198,000 Murdered: Summary and Conclusion
• I BACKGROUND
• II 128,168,000 VICTIMS: THE DEKAMEGAMURDERERS
• Index1
• Index2
• III 19,178,000 VICTIMS: THE LESSER MEGAMURDERERS
• IV 4,145,000 VICTIMS: THE SUSPECTED MEGAMURDERERS
• References
• Index