who do the killing ....
<<R.J. Rummel has written a book called "Death by Government" in which he attempts to sum up the total number of (noncombatant) people killed worldwide by their own or a foreign government in the twentieth century. Actually, the book appeared in 1996, so the total will be somewhat short of the final figure for the century. There is a site where an attempt has been made to compare the rate of this government murder with the U.S. murder rate. However the methodology employed is so completely wrong as to find the annual governmental murder rate to be one-fourth the U.S. rate in the last years of the 20th century when in fact it is almost 10 times that rate.
Rummel introduces a notion that he calls democide - for killing by government. He characterizes it (p. 36) as follows:
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… it is restricted to intentional killing of people and does not extend to attempts to eliminate cultures, races, or peoples by other means. Moreover, democide is not limited to the killing component of genocide, nor to politicide, mass murder, massacre, or terror. It includes them all and also what they exclude, as long as the killing is a purposive act, policy, process, or institution of government.
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He follows that general characterization with a list of specific examples which he considers to qualify as democide by his definition. I won't include this at this time.
Rummels' count of democide for the 20th century, and the book is devoted to a detailed list, is 169 million. Now, I wish to compare this with the U.S. homicide rate in the last years of the 20th century. That rate is typically reported as the number of homicides per one hundred thousand of population. That number in recent years has been around 6.7 or around 20,000 in total.
To compare that rate with Rummel's number (which we will take as holding for the entire 20th century), we must convert Rummel's number to an annual rate. But this is an elementary computation. We must first establish an annual average world population for the 20th century.
From this site we have the following world population figures (in millions)
1900 1650
1910 1750
1920 1860
1930 2070
1940 2300
1950 2400
1960 3020
1970 3700
1980 4430
1990 5260
2000 6070
Using the trapezoid rule this gives the annual average world population for the 20th century as 3,065 million. Assuming population growth to be exponential, we should expect this to err on the high side.
The average annual number of democides in the century, as tabulated by Rummel, is 1.69 million. Dividing that by 3,065 million gives approximately .00056 or 56 per hundred thousand - nearly 10 times the private murder rate in the U.S. >>
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Product Details
ISBN: 1560009276
ISBN-13: 9781560009276
Format: Paperback, 496pp
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
From the Publisher
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 1 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 nondemocratic societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history, including the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World, among many other examples. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.
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Louise Cate (hcate2@pacbell.net), A reviewer, 02/26/2003
TEN Totalitarian Governments Kill Total of 142,000,000!
Death by Government examines democides (definition below) of one million or more in the 20th century and before. The author, R. J. Rummel, shows that totalitarian regimes commit most of the democides. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less violence. Rummel says, "The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom." DEMOCIDE: the intentional government killing of an unarmed person or people, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. The rest of this review will identify the ten worst democides in the 20th century. We all know the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews. Most American do NOT know that the ten worst totalitarian governments murdered more than 136 million OTHER people during the 20th century. The following is a list of the ten governments responsible for all those deaths. 1.- Soviet Gulag (1917-87): 61,911,000. 2.- Communist Chinese State (1949-87): 35,236,000. 3.- Nazi State (1933-45): 20,946,000. 4.- Chinese Nationalist (1928-49): 10,214,000. 5.- Japan's military (1936-45): 5,964,000. 6.- Khmer Rouge (1975-79): 2,035,000. 7.- Turkey's Young Turks (1909-18): 1,883,000. 8.- N. Vietnamese (1945-1987): 1,670,000. 9.- Poland killed ethnic Germans: 1,585,000. 10.- West Pakistan (1958-87): 1,503,000. TOTAL # Murdered by top ten totalitarian governments = 142,000,000+.
Louise Cate (hcate2@pacbell.net), A reviewer, 11/06/2002
Why write a review? You don't post it!
Why write a review? You don't post it! I would appreciate hearing why you didn't post it. |
