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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bilow who wrote (204173)	9/24/2006 1:28:19 AM
From: bacchus_ii	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

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: Quote: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- … 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. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. >> libertyforum.org More About Death by Government Product Details From the Publisher Customer Reviews 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. Customer Reviews Number of reviews: 2 Average Rating: Write your own review! > Showing 1-2 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.

To: Bilow who wrote (204173)	9/24/2006 12:17:23 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The point of the discussion, in my opinion, isn't broad generalities about war and peace, religion and atheism, but whether there is something irreduceable about Islam that promotes religiously motivated violent conflict. Of course, it's Politically Incorrect to mouth anything but platitudes about how "everybody is the same under the skin" (mostly true) and therefore "every religion has its virtues and failings" (mostly true) and therefore "Islam is the religion of peace" (not true) and "jihad means inner struggle" (so misleading as to be false, for purposes of this discussion). The PC-ness gets so fatuous that recently I heard an Islamic scholar sputtering that "only one tenth of one percent" of Muslims believe in jihad as conquest by the sword. I wish he hadn't been on the radio, I would have liked to have asked him personally, for example, about the Islamic Revolution in Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini and now, and the Taliban, and their support for jihad by the sword in other countries, and the support in other countries for them. A sizeable number of Muslims support this concept, perhaps ten percent more or less actively, and another 30 percent sympathize (one estimate). Ten percent of a billion and a half is a lot of people. But for some reason, the people who are satisfied with the argument that "Islam is the religion of peace" and "jihad means inner struggle" never actually bother to check by reading the Koran and commentary by actual Muslims living in Muslim countries, they latch on to things said by Westerners who are sympathetic to Islam.

To: Bilow who wrote (204173)	9/24/2006 1:15:01 PM
From: GPS Info	Respond to of 281500

…I think that individually, humans tend to be inclined towards peace. To convince them to kill requires a lot of socialization. That was another good post, Carl. I don’t have much time to post, but I scan as many posts on this board as I can squeeze in. After about 10K posts on Lebanon and 5K posts on Iran, they tend to blur together, but I can still make out some of the basic themes. I have wondered for many years about how our different societies reshape our basic instincts. Are some more warlike than others? Are charismatic leaders needed to manipulate the instinctive or nationalistic tendencies of their followers? Fundamentally, are we socialized toward peace or toward war, or both? As I understand it, American Indian tribes planned raids on neighboring tribes, and these created tit-for-tat exchanges of hostilities. I would image that the tribes maintained their cohesion by fighting and hunting together. Joseph Campbell suggested that tribal hunting ceremonies were meant to relieve some of the guilt associated with killing animals. If so, then a “war party” might be an attempt to prepare the warriors for battle and the eventual loss of life on both sides. The modes of guilt after a battle could be many. But, how would this guilt have emerged from our evolution? And, how do cold-blooded murders avoid their guilt? Is it through socialization or brain chemistry? Jttmab once suggested that Saddam’s testosterone overrode his reasoning concerning possible US responses. I suggested that that’s what testosterone is for. I also think that testosterone is very helpful when hunting large game with pointy sticks (versus rifles) – a method of hunting used for more than 50K years. We still have these survival instincts: we kill to eat and to defend ourselves when threatened – and sometimes when the threat is only imagined. From a survival standpoint, it’s better to be safe than sorry; that is, alive rather than dead. For myself, I can become testy after two missed meals. After a few days in the wild, I will probably find my hunter instincts and find something to munch on, or die of starvation. In our history when civilizations fail, we have fallen back on the tried and true methods of existing in the jungle. If we create societies that do not require aggression for day-to-day survival, we would need to re-socialize or recondition our soldiers to be brutal when necessary. In the US we don’t offer much in the way of ceremonies to assuage the anguish of soldiers who have killed or who have had friends killed in battle. Our values for other people collapse around our own societies – families, cities and country. We have yet to see the human population as one entity for political purposes. Is it any wonder that we see our local politics as either Republican or Democratic? BTW, I’m jealous of Republicans because I know that when all is done, they will have all the money from this poker game.