To: Scoobah who wrote (4693 ) 10/13/2001 1:10:13 AM From: Michael Watkins Respond to 80,000,000 murdered by governments around the world since WWII. Let us stop a moment to think about this likely 80,000,000 murdered since WWII. This is a statistic impossible to grasp. Only twelve countries in the world have a population larger than this number of killed. It is as though the total Philippine population of 79,000,000 were murdered; or that all the people living in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Belgium, Portugal, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, and Norway were wiped out together--not in some natural catastrophe that kills quickly, but for most of the victims a painful and slow death at the hands of a government. To look at this toll another way, it is over five times the number of combat deaths for all the nations that fought in WWII alone. Add those killed in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the two most deadly major wars since WWII, and the democide 1946-1999 is still almost three times these total combat dead. However, as pointed out, democide has been declining sharply. What accounts for this? As should be clear from the above, the first reason is that the deadly totalitarian version of communism is all but dead. It now only exists in North Korea. And China and Cuba have moved to a more authoritarian, less-totalitarian, version. A second reason is that democracy--the regime least prone to commit democide, especially against its own citizens--has grown throughout the world. From perhaps a dozen or so countries in 1946 the number of democracies had grown to 114 out of 191 states in 1995. The age of totalitarianism is over and that of democracy is upon us. To my knowledge no liberal democratic government has committed democide since 1987 (in terms of civil and political rights, neither Russia nor Turkey is yet a liberal democracy), which is predictable from the this web site's theme: power kills--the less power, the less the democide. hawaii.edu
