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Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900
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.
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.
520 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
June 7, 2023
2023-06-07 Before you read any further - Which 20th Century regime do you think was the TOP killer of it's own people? Write that down before you read on to find out which one it really was... or how many others were also worse (higher on the list) than what you wrote down.
27 April 2017 - I read this important and too little read or referenced work about 10 years ago. I had bought the book 10 or so years before that, but never made the time to read it, though I had used it for looking up certain facts about death counts of various regimes during those years of wanting to read it but not making the time.
This book is invaluable to clearly show the order of magnitude of the horrors of various specific regimes/and general types of governments in the 20th century.
If you only check out the table of contents ordered by decreasing total deaths (and the #s are there, staring you in the face@ or any of numerous charts in the beginning of the book of the top murderous regimes of the 20th century, you will easily see the pattern and the REAL story of what types of organization of society (socialism/statism/authoritarianism vs. real democratic republics(not the fake ones that just use that term)/capitalism/freedom, are to be feared, and which not.
The book's exact numbers can certainly be disputed, no question. But their order of magnitude and approximate ranking seems to hold across a very wide range of scholarly study:
61+ million - Soviet Union
35+ million - Communist (Red) China ("The Black Book of Communism" basically flipped these top two)
20+ million - Nazi (National Socialist Workers Party - Hitler's) Germany
10+ million - Nationalist/Socialist China
The fourth one was a big surprise to me. I had always thought that the Chiang Kai-shek (Nationalist) regime was more democratic/pro-freedom than socialist/murderous Red China - BIG eye-opener. But still - a piker compared to Mao's communists or the Soviet Union's mass murderers.
Also, I recommend you check out the book, if only to see what other murderous regimes are on the "Top 10" list.
Edited/updated: 10 March 2019, 2022-05-03
27 April 2017 - I read this important and too little read or referenced work about 10 years ago. I had bought the book 10 or so years before that, but never made the time to read it, though I had used it for looking up certain facts about death counts of various regimes during those years of wanting to read it but not making the time.
This book is invaluable to clearly show the order of magnitude of the horrors of various specific regimes/and general types of governments in the 20th century.
If you only check out the table of contents ordered by decreasing total deaths (and the #s are there, staring you in the face@ or any of numerous charts in the beginning of the book of the top murderous regimes of the 20th century, you will easily see the pattern and the REAL story of what types of organization of society (socialism/statism/authoritarianism vs. real democratic republics(not the fake ones that just use that term)/capitalism/freedom, are to be feared, and which not.
The book's exact numbers can certainly be disputed, no question. But their order of magnitude and approximate ranking seems to hold across a very wide range of scholarly study:
61+ million - Soviet Union
35+ million - Communist (Red) China ("The Black Book of Communism" basically flipped these top two)
20+ million - Nazi (National Socialist Workers Party - Hitler's) Germany
10+ million - Nationalist/Socialist China
The fourth one was a big surprise to me. I had always thought that the Chiang Kai-shek (Nationalist) regime was more democratic/pro-freedom than socialist/murderous Red China - BIG eye-opener. But still - a piker compared to Mao's communists or the Soviet Union's mass murderers.
Also, I recommend you check out the book, if only to see what other murderous regimes are on the "Top 10" list.
Edited/updated: 10 March 2019, 2022-05-03
February 26, 2017
Death by Government might be one of the most underrated works of history and political theory out there. Which is a real pity, if you ask me. Rummel was the worlds leading scholar on democide, and his work on this topic is to this day unparalleled. He presents the most authentic, well-researched and honest narratives of democides that I have ever read, and I've read a lot of sources on them. The Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Great Leap Forward, all the big democidal events from 1900 to 1987 are included, with descriptions that are as horrifying as they are strangely enlightening. This book is not for those with a weak stomach, but if you can handle the perpetual bleakness and the vivid descriptions of torture methods you never dreamed of, then you get a great history book.
To see why Rummel is so polarizing, you have to look no further than the first few chapters. The book starts with some general statement about democide: Its history, scope, and the conditions that tend to underlie it. The last part is one of the reasons why Rummel took so much flak. On the one hand, he claims that a functioning democracy tends to prevent democide (good), but on the other, he blames communism (opposite of good) for most and for the worst democides. In mainstream political theory, communism is still seen as this quirky grandpa who can teach you a lot of wisdom if you look past his silly antics. He may be eccentric, but his heart is in the right place, isn't it? Enter Rummel, telling everyone at the family dinner that grandpa murdered over a hundred million people. Of course he won't be invited next time.
Not just that, this guy Rummel also likes to dig up dirt in all the wrong place. Claiming that the bombing of Dresden was a democide didn't get him a lot of love in America. Or in Germany. Everyone loves the narrative of the heroic Allies saving the day from the evil Nazis so much that they can't handle a little dent in it, everyone except Rummel. Nor do people like the idea that the Soviet Union and Maoist China killed more people than the Nazis, or that only a third of the victims of the Nazis were jews. These are all facts you gather from this book. By far the most interesting bit, however, was his account of the Vietnam War. Did you know that the aggressor in this war was North Vietnam, not the US? Or that the US did more to avoid collateral damage and outright murder than North or South Vietnam? Yet it's seen as the villain of this rotten war, when it was arguably the least villanous party. Rummel can tell you that the reason why these myths persist is communist subversion of the media and academic circles, which certainly didn't help his reputation, either. But such is Rummel, telling historical truths whether you want to hear them or not. This didn't get him many friends in academic circles, but he certainly earned me as an admirer.
If I have beef with this book, it's with Rummels theory of democratic peace. I can see where he's coming from, but I think his definitions are a bit off and his data seems handpicked, and in general, it's a little shallow. If that sentence was incredibly weak, then it's because the theory doesn't deserve a harsher critique. Rummel is on to something here, I just think he missed the mark a little, and the weaknesses of what he said do not detract from this otherwise great book.
To see why Rummel is so polarizing, you have to look no further than the first few chapters. The book starts with some general statement about democide: Its history, scope, and the conditions that tend to underlie it. The last part is one of the reasons why Rummel took so much flak. On the one hand, he claims that a functioning democracy tends to prevent democide (good), but on the other, he blames communism (opposite of good) for most and for the worst democides. In mainstream political theory, communism is still seen as this quirky grandpa who can teach you a lot of wisdom if you look past his silly antics. He may be eccentric, but his heart is in the right place, isn't it? Enter Rummel, telling everyone at the family dinner that grandpa murdered over a hundred million people. Of course he won't be invited next time.
Not just that, this guy Rummel also likes to dig up dirt in all the wrong place. Claiming that the bombing of Dresden was a democide didn't get him a lot of love in America. Or in Germany. Everyone loves the narrative of the heroic Allies saving the day from the evil Nazis so much that they can't handle a little dent in it, everyone except Rummel. Nor do people like the idea that the Soviet Union and Maoist China killed more people than the Nazis, or that only a third of the victims of the Nazis were jews. These are all facts you gather from this book. By far the most interesting bit, however, was his account of the Vietnam War. Did you know that the aggressor in this war was North Vietnam, not the US? Or that the US did more to avoid collateral damage and outright murder than North or South Vietnam? Yet it's seen as the villain of this rotten war, when it was arguably the least villanous party. Rummel can tell you that the reason why these myths persist is communist subversion of the media and academic circles, which certainly didn't help his reputation, either. But such is Rummel, telling historical truths whether you want to hear them or not. This didn't get him many friends in academic circles, but he certainly earned me as an admirer.
If I have beef with this book, it's with Rummels theory of democratic peace. I can see where he's coming from, but I think his definitions are a bit off and his data seems handpicked, and in general, it's a little shallow. If that sentence was incredibly weak, then it's because the theory doesn't deserve a harsher critique. Rummel is on to something here, I just think he missed the mark a little, and the weaknesses of what he said do not detract from this otherwise great book.
June 29, 2016
R.J Rummel has gone to great lengths in order to provide case studies of some of histories most recent genocidal events. Events that are both well known and in other cases intentionally marginalised by contemporary politics.
Democide, a term coined by Rummel, has been the biggest killer of human beings in the past century. No doubt this will go on to being the biggest mass killer of human life in future decades.
Rummel has been accused by some of his critics for adding a few thousand here or there to some of his statistics, despite him using and citing extensive sources. This criticism perhaps illustrates a sad point. If a regime has mass murdered several million people, at what point does one seek to defend such a regime by attacking its detractors by claiming mass murder statistics were slightly over blown by a few thousand.
The book does cover the Democides at the hands of several regimes but also leaves out others. It covers particular periods but perhaps in my estimation could have explored the tragic murders in other time frames and regions. Perhaps politics intervened or Rummel had covered enough to prove his case. I shall not go on to mention what other eras and regimes that I felt could have been included . i perhaps feel that some nations democidal conduct was not included as it may either harm Rummels position in academia or not support is conclusion in praise of democratic governance.
It would be a cliche for me to say 'everyone should read this book' because even still its message would do little to resonate. The average person in most affluent societies is aware of genocide and the killings that occur during both war and 'peace'. Yet some how from within their mind exists the ability to either disregard or condone via justification that such mass killings are fine or acceptable. Fine so long as they are conducted far away and against those who are alien to themselves. And acceptable so long as the murdered are 'enemies' to their own State and that the killings were some how a means to a goal or end.
This is precisely one of the key ingredients a society needs in order to conduct and perpetuate such mass murder. Whether it happens to be National Socialist Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia or the Soviet Union it took individuals at every level of society to act upon policy and to commit this mass murder. Compliance and conduct goes beyond merely following orders. Loyalty to state, ideology or faith always allow one to do the most violent and vile acts with a clear and calculating conscience.
The reality is that this book, like many others on the subject shall find its pages mostly unopened. The blood of innocence will continue to spill the World over both now and later. Individuals will disregard the cries of agony at the hands of their or another Government and the policy makers will only further perpetuate it all with self serving disregard to the human condition.
Besides being some what over blown in some statistics the biggest flaw for me with this book is in the assumption that democracy brings peace and cures 'democide'. Omitted from this book are the democidal excesses of the great democracies. Rummel also suggests that democracy does not make war with democracy. And again this is not a wise place to find a conclusion.
Not an easy book to digest and nor should it be. Both statistical and empirical in its format. A solid reference material for the academic and humanist alike. Be cautious in citing some of the death count statistics as the numbers are highly debatable. Not to be read as an entertaining non fiction piece.
85 %
Democide, a term coined by Rummel, has been the biggest killer of human beings in the past century. No doubt this will go on to being the biggest mass killer of human life in future decades.
Rummel has been accused by some of his critics for adding a few thousand here or there to some of his statistics, despite him using and citing extensive sources. This criticism perhaps illustrates a sad point. If a regime has mass murdered several million people, at what point does one seek to defend such a regime by attacking its detractors by claiming mass murder statistics were slightly over blown by a few thousand.
The book does cover the Democides at the hands of several regimes but also leaves out others. It covers particular periods but perhaps in my estimation could have explored the tragic murders in other time frames and regions. Perhaps politics intervened or Rummel had covered enough to prove his case. I shall not go on to mention what other eras and regimes that I felt could have been included . i perhaps feel that some nations democidal conduct was not included as it may either harm Rummels position in academia or not support is conclusion in praise of democratic governance.
It would be a cliche for me to say 'everyone should read this book' because even still its message would do little to resonate. The average person in most affluent societies is aware of genocide and the killings that occur during both war and 'peace'. Yet some how from within their mind exists the ability to either disregard or condone via justification that such mass killings are fine or acceptable. Fine so long as they are conducted far away and against those who are alien to themselves. And acceptable so long as the murdered are 'enemies' to their own State and that the killings were some how a means to a goal or end.
This is precisely one of the key ingredients a society needs in order to conduct and perpetuate such mass murder. Whether it happens to be National Socialist Germany, Pol Pot's Cambodia or the Soviet Union it took individuals at every level of society to act upon policy and to commit this mass murder. Compliance and conduct goes beyond merely following orders. Loyalty to state, ideology or faith always allow one to do the most violent and vile acts with a clear and calculating conscience.
The reality is that this book, like many others on the subject shall find its pages mostly unopened. The blood of innocence will continue to spill the World over both now and later. Individuals will disregard the cries of agony at the hands of their or another Government and the policy makers will only further perpetuate it all with self serving disregard to the human condition.
Besides being some what over blown in some statistics the biggest flaw for me with this book is in the assumption that democracy brings peace and cures 'democide'. Omitted from this book are the democidal excesses of the great democracies. Rummel also suggests that democracy does not make war with democracy. And again this is not a wise place to find a conclusion.
Not an easy book to digest and nor should it be. Both statistical and empirical in its format. A solid reference material for the academic and humanist alike. Be cautious in citing some of the death count statistics as the numbers are highly debatable. Not to be read as an entertaining non fiction piece.
85 %
July 30, 2009
Every American should read this book.
It is a catalog of horrors. There’s no other way to say it. From macro to micro, horror horror horror. Political scientist Rummel is the world’s leading authority on the murder of unarmed people by governments—what most of us loosely refer to as genocide, but what he calls democide. (The difference: democide includes such murder for any reason—political, for example, or simply expediency—not merely for “ethnic cleansing.”) Here is Rummel’s nastylist (regimes with over a million democides) for the twentieth century:
Regime Years Democide Annual Rate (%)
USSR 1917-1987 61,911,000 .42
China (PRC) 1949-1987 35,236,000 .12
Germany 1933-1945 20,946,000 .09
China (KMT) 1928-1949 10,075,000 .07
Japan 1936-1945 5,964,000 nil
China (pre-PRC Mao) 1923-1949 3,466,000 .05
Cambodia 1975-1979 2,035,000 8.16
Turkey 1909-1918 1,883,000 .96
Vietnam 1945-1987 1,678,000 .10
Poland 1945-1948 1,585,000 1.99
Pakistan 1958-1987 1,503,000 .06
Yugoslavia (Tito) 1944-1987 1,072,000 .12
North Korea 1948-1987 1,663,000 (Suspected) .25
Mexico 1900-1920 1,417,000 (Suspected) .45
Russia 1900-1917 1,066,000 (Suspected) .02
Rummel has also put together a nastylist for earlier centuries, but of course the numbers are much shakier.
Case Years Democide
China 221 B.C.-19th C A.D. 33,519,000
Mongols 14th-15th C 29,927,000
African Slavery 1451-1870 17,267,000
American Indians 16th-19th C 13,778,000
30 Years’ War 1618-1648 5,750,000
India 13th-19th C 4,511,000
Iran 5th-19th C 2,000,000
Ottoman Empire 12th-19th C 2,000,000
Japan 1570-19th C 1,500,000
Russia 10th-19th C 1,007,000
Christian Crusades 1095-1272 1,000,000
Aztecs Centuries 1,000,000
Spanish Inquisition 16th-18th C 350,000
French Revolution 1793-1794 263,000
Albigensian Crusade 1208-1249 200,000
Witch Hunts 15th-17th C 100,000
Because of the paucity of source material, Rummel devotes only one chapter to the period before the twentieth century. But to each of the malefactors in the twentieth century he devotes a full chapter, breaking down the numbers in greater detail and elaborating on the historical circumstances. He also hammers us with not-for-the-squeamish microhorrors.
*Croatia. “During a visit in Zagreb to Ante Pavelic, president of the Ustashi government…[Italian author Curzio:] Malaparte noticed a wicker basket on Pavelic’s desk, with the lid slightly raised. It looked like it was full of mussels, or shelled oysters. Malaparte asked if in fact these were Dalmatian oysters. Then, according to Malaparte, ‘Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jellylike mass, and he said, smiling with that good-natured smile of his, “It is a present from my loyal Ustachis. Forty pounds of human eyes.”’”
*Croatia. After WWII started going against the Nazis and their Croatian allies, the Serbs turned the tables, torturing and slaughtering their age-old enemies: “One Ustashi was skinned alive and hung from a tree with his own skin.”
*Turkey. In exterminating their Armenian minority, the leaders of the Young Turks met nightly to discuss new ways of inflicting pain. “…they even delved into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there…common reputation throughout Armenia gave pre-eminent infamy [in the new-methods-of-torture competition:] to Djevdet Bey…who had invented what was perhaps the masterpiece of all—that of nailing horseshoes on the feet of his Armenian victims.”
*Cambodia. In Lon Nol’s anti-guerilla campaign of 1952, troops would move into a village and “kill the men and women who had not already fled, and then engage in individual tests of strength which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and pulling them apart.”
Enough. Of course I knew a lot about Hitler and Stalin and Mao, and I knew that Stalin and Mao had considerably outstripped Hitler in democide, but I didn’t realize that Stalin had so far exceeded Mao (61 versus 35 million). Other enlightenments:
*Poland. I had underestimated the extent and ferocity of the post-WWII Polish (and also Czech) atrocities against ethnic Germans, including Germans thoroughly assimilated into the culture. Many testified that the Polish concentration camps for ethnic Germans were worse than the Nazi camps for Poles.
*Yugoslavia. The Balkans being what they are, during WWII the Germans were only one among many adversaries: it seemed that everyone was out to kill everyone else: communists vs. non-communists, Christians vs. Moslems, Croations vs. Bosnians vs. Serbs, etc. What I hadn’t been aware of was the British complicity in some of the killings: after the war, thousands on the losing side (Croatians, non-communists, etc.) tried to escape into Austria, but the British turned them back—to certain annihilation by the communists. And earlier, during the war, the Brits were conned by communist moles within their intelligence service (including Guy Burgess) into backing not Mihailovic’s non-communist Chetniks but (before British support, the weaker) Tito and his kill-anything-that-moves communists.
*Vietnam. We Americans vilified ourselves over atrocities such as the My Lai massacre—atrocities in the anxiety of battle by individuals and low-level officers operating on their own, with at most the tacit approval of field commanders. However, for the North Vietnamese such atrocities were a matter of national policy, promulgated not by bureaucrats but by the country’s top leaders. And in scale, U.S. atrocities were trivial by comparison. Ho Chi Min and his “poor, put-upon” North Vietnamese were every bit as brutal and ruthless as Stalin and his soviets or Mao and his peasant communists. We Americans are so stubbornly naïve.
What lesson does Rummel draw from his catalog of horrors? A very simple one: Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely. And the solution? Democracy. According to Rummel, in all of history no democracy has waged war against another democracy—it just doesn’t happen. The structural checks and balances and internal dissent within democracies tend to diffuse power and diminish aggressiveness. By contrast, the leaders in authoritarian and totalitarian governments tend toward more and more paranoia and tighter and tighter control because of course just as they seized power from their predecessors, someone could seize power from them—and enemies are everywhere (for a good example of this power-and-paranoia mentality, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin).
I’ll conclude with a few choice quotes from non-democratic leaders:
It has been previously communicated that the government by the order of the Assembly (Jemiet) has decided to exterminate entirely all the Armenians living in Turkey. Those who oppose this order can no longer function as part of the government. Without regard to women, children and invalids, however tragic may be the means of transportation, an end must be put to their existence.
—Telegram from Turkish Minister of the Interior (Talaat)
It is better to kill ten innocent people than to let one enemy escape.
—Dr. Nguyen Manh Tuong, Speech to the National Congress of the Fatherland Front, Hanoi, October 1956
Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.
—Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan
It is a catalog of horrors. There’s no other way to say it. From macro to micro, horror horror horror. Political scientist Rummel is the world’s leading authority on the murder of unarmed people by governments—what most of us loosely refer to as genocide, but what he calls democide. (The difference: democide includes such murder for any reason—political, for example, or simply expediency—not merely for “ethnic cleansing.”) Here is Rummel’s nastylist (regimes with over a million democides) for the twentieth century:
Regime Years Democide Annual Rate (%)
USSR 1917-1987 61,911,000 .42
China (PRC) 1949-1987 35,236,000 .12
Germany 1933-1945 20,946,000 .09
China (KMT) 1928-1949 10,075,000 .07
Japan 1936-1945 5,964,000 nil
China (pre-PRC Mao) 1923-1949 3,466,000 .05
Cambodia 1975-1979 2,035,000 8.16
Turkey 1909-1918 1,883,000 .96
Vietnam 1945-1987 1,678,000 .10
Poland 1945-1948 1,585,000 1.99
Pakistan 1958-1987 1,503,000 .06
Yugoslavia (Tito) 1944-1987 1,072,000 .12
North Korea 1948-1987 1,663,000 (Suspected) .25
Mexico 1900-1920 1,417,000 (Suspected) .45
Russia 1900-1917 1,066,000 (Suspected) .02
Rummel has also put together a nastylist for earlier centuries, but of course the numbers are much shakier.
Case Years Democide
China 221 B.C.-19th C A.D. 33,519,000
Mongols 14th-15th C 29,927,000
African Slavery 1451-1870 17,267,000
American Indians 16th-19th C 13,778,000
30 Years’ War 1618-1648 5,750,000
India 13th-19th C 4,511,000
Iran 5th-19th C 2,000,000
Ottoman Empire 12th-19th C 2,000,000
Japan 1570-19th C 1,500,000
Russia 10th-19th C 1,007,000
Christian Crusades 1095-1272 1,000,000
Aztecs Centuries 1,000,000
Spanish Inquisition 16th-18th C 350,000
French Revolution 1793-1794 263,000
Albigensian Crusade 1208-1249 200,000
Witch Hunts 15th-17th C 100,000
Because of the paucity of source material, Rummel devotes only one chapter to the period before the twentieth century. But to each of the malefactors in the twentieth century he devotes a full chapter, breaking down the numbers in greater detail and elaborating on the historical circumstances. He also hammers us with not-for-the-squeamish microhorrors.
*Croatia. “During a visit in Zagreb to Ante Pavelic, president of the Ustashi government…[Italian author Curzio:] Malaparte noticed a wicker basket on Pavelic’s desk, with the lid slightly raised. It looked like it was full of mussels, or shelled oysters. Malaparte asked if in fact these were Dalmatian oysters. Then, according to Malaparte, ‘Ante Pavelic removed the lid from the basket and revealed the mussels, that slimy and jellylike mass, and he said, smiling with that good-natured smile of his, “It is a present from my loyal Ustachis. Forty pounds of human eyes.”’”
*Croatia. After WWII started going against the Nazis and their Croatian allies, the Serbs turned the tables, torturing and slaughtering their age-old enemies: “One Ustashi was skinned alive and hung from a tree with his own skin.”
*Turkey. In exterminating their Armenian minority, the leaders of the Young Turks met nightly to discuss new ways of inflicting pain. “…they even delved into the records of the Spanish Inquisition and other historic institutions of torture and adopted all the suggestions found there…common reputation throughout Armenia gave pre-eminent infamy [in the new-methods-of-torture competition:] to Djevdet Bey…who had invented what was perhaps the masterpiece of all—that of nailing horseshoes on the feet of his Armenian victims.”
*Cambodia. In Lon Nol’s anti-guerilla campaign of 1952, troops would move into a village and “kill the men and women who had not already fled, and then engage in individual tests of strength which consisted of grasping infants by the legs and pulling them apart.”
Enough. Of course I knew a lot about Hitler and Stalin and Mao, and I knew that Stalin and Mao had considerably outstripped Hitler in democide, but I didn’t realize that Stalin had so far exceeded Mao (61 versus 35 million). Other enlightenments:
*Poland. I had underestimated the extent and ferocity of the post-WWII Polish (and also Czech) atrocities against ethnic Germans, including Germans thoroughly assimilated into the culture. Many testified that the Polish concentration camps for ethnic Germans were worse than the Nazi camps for Poles.
*Yugoslavia. The Balkans being what they are, during WWII the Germans were only one among many adversaries: it seemed that everyone was out to kill everyone else: communists vs. non-communists, Christians vs. Moslems, Croations vs. Bosnians vs. Serbs, etc. What I hadn’t been aware of was the British complicity in some of the killings: after the war, thousands on the losing side (Croatians, non-communists, etc.) tried to escape into Austria, but the British turned them back—to certain annihilation by the communists. And earlier, during the war, the Brits were conned by communist moles within their intelligence service (including Guy Burgess) into backing not Mihailovic’s non-communist Chetniks but (before British support, the weaker) Tito and his kill-anything-that-moves communists.
*Vietnam. We Americans vilified ourselves over atrocities such as the My Lai massacre—atrocities in the anxiety of battle by individuals and low-level officers operating on their own, with at most the tacit approval of field commanders. However, for the North Vietnamese such atrocities were a matter of national policy, promulgated not by bureaucrats but by the country’s top leaders. And in scale, U.S. atrocities were trivial by comparison. Ho Chi Min and his “poor, put-upon” North Vietnamese were every bit as brutal and ruthless as Stalin and his soviets or Mao and his peasant communists. We Americans are so stubbornly naïve.
What lesson does Rummel draw from his catalog of horrors? A very simple one: Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely. And the solution? Democracy. According to Rummel, in all of history no democracy has waged war against another democracy—it just doesn’t happen. The structural checks and balances and internal dissent within democracies tend to diffuse power and diminish aggressiveness. By contrast, the leaders in authoritarian and totalitarian governments tend toward more and more paranoia and tighter and tighter control because of course just as they seized power from their predecessors, someone could seize power from them—and enemies are everywhere (for a good example of this power-and-paranoia mentality, see Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Young Stalin).
I’ll conclude with a few choice quotes from non-democratic leaders:
It has been previously communicated that the government by the order of the Assembly (Jemiet) has decided to exterminate entirely all the Armenians living in Turkey. Those who oppose this order can no longer function as part of the government. Without regard to women, children and invalids, however tragic may be the means of transportation, an end must be put to their existence.
—Telegram from Turkish Minister of the Interior (Talaat)
It is better to kill ten innocent people than to let one enemy escape.
—Dr. Nguyen Manh Tuong, Speech to the National Congress of the Fatherland Front, Hanoi, October 1956
Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.
—Yahya Khan, President of Pakistan
Read
September 28, 2013This book--about just what the title says--is possibly the most depressing I've ever read. An opening section deals with early megamurderers (Rummel's term) such as Genghis Khan. This section was unsatisfying to me since this historical material could make a book in itself, so I ended up thinking maybe Rummel should have stuck to the modern era. And God knows there's plenty of 20th-century horror for him to work with: I enjoyed, if that's the word, the chapters about Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho, Tito....Rummel's political views are not entirely clear but seem to lean toward the far right. He blames "Communist front groups" for the increased public opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 60s (whatever you say, RJ baby) and, intriguingly, suggests the Cong were losing and that the Tet Offensive, though a PR disaster for LBJ, was a failure for the VC from a strictly military point of view. Rummel has obviously devoted lots of time and energy to studying genocide and his work pays off here.
November 3, 2025
From the twentieth century’s smoking ruins, *Death by Government* rises like a data-slicked Book of Lamentations. R.J. Rummel’s 1994 work is not merely a historical study; it’s a moral accounting that quantifies what most of us can barely name without trembling — the murder of citizens by their own governments.
Rummel’s term *democide* became his intellectual trademark, a category broad enough to include genocide, politicide, and mass killing, and terrifying enough to suggest that the most dangerous predator in modern history is not famine or war but the organized state itself. This isn’t an easy book to “read” in the literary sense; it’s a slow dissection of the twentieth century’s collective nightmare, conducted with the antiseptic precision of a statistician and the haunted conscience of a theologian.
Rummel’s premise is chillingly simple: in the span of a single century, governments killed approximately 169 million of their own people. Not in war, not by accident, but systematically—through purges, forced famines, concentration camps, and state terror. The book becomes a cemetery of numbers: the Soviet Union under Stalin (62 million dead), Mao’s China (35 million), Nazi Germany (21 million), and lesser but still staggering atrocities from Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Rwanda. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Each page feels like a tally of absences, a cold index of extinguished lives.
Rummel’s style — mathematical, methodical, even obsessive—mirrors the bureaucratic rationality of the very regimes he studies. The data are so clinical that they begin to take on a surreal power, as though the reader were staring into a spreadsheet that has become a scripture of despair.
Yet beneath the numerical armor, *Death by Government* is a profoundly moral document. Rummel is not simply chronicling state atrocities; he is building a theory of human freedom and its annihilation.
His argument, drawn from decades of comparative research, can be distilled to a single, almost aphoristic claim: *the more power a government has, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.* Tyranny, he insists, is not a deviation from governance — it’s governance unrestrained. Democracy, for Rummel, isn’t just a political ideal; it’s a life-saving technology. His graphs become moral cartographies: as state power expands, the curve of death rises; as political freedom grows, the line flattens.
What’s eerie is how prophetic Rummel’s framework remains. Written before the full digitalization of the surveillance state, *Death by Government* still feels like it’s describing our century’s latent potential for total control. His warning is mathematical and metaphysical at once — that evil doesn’t always appear in monstrous form but in the mundane accumulation of authority, secrecy, and obedience.
He treats ideology as a kind of algorithm that transforms utopian dreams into administrative murder. Stalin’s collectivisation, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism — each begins as a blueprint for paradise and ends as a field of bones.
Rummel’s writing has been criticised for its lack of emotional affect, but that coldness feels deliberate, almost strategic. He writes as one who refuses to aestheticise horror. In a way, his restraint functions as an ethical stance: he refuses to turn genocide into spectacle. The precision of his tables, the relentless cross-referencing of archival estimates, is his way of saying, “This is not metaphor. These are the dead.” The book becomes an act of remembrance through quantification, a kind of mathematical elegy.
And yet, there’s a paradox at the heart of it: numbers console no one. They clarify but do not heal. The magnitude of 169 million victims is beyond imagination; it collapses into abstraction. Rummel seems aware of this and occasionally lets the mask slip — his prose tightens, and a flicker of horror leaks through the empiricism.
When he describes the Khmer Rouge forcing mothers to kill their infants or Stalin’s guards counting the corpses stacked like cordwood, his sentences suddenly burn with suppressed anguish. In those moments, *Death by Government* stops being a book of statistics and becomes a dark psalm to human cruelty.
But Rummel’s purpose isn’t only to horrify; it’s to warn. His political theory is starkly libertarian: freedom is not just desirable; it’s the only known antidote to state murder.
Democracies, he argues, don’t commit democide because power is dispersed, accountability is institutionalised, and violence cannot be centralised without consent. To modern readers, this sounds almost quaint — a late–Cold War faith in liberal democracy as humanity’s safety mechanism.
Yet history since 1994 has made his thesis feel disturbingly relevant. From Myanmar to Syria, from the Uyghur camps of Xinjiang to the algorithmic coercions of authoritarian tech regimes, Rummel’s logic remains unbroken: where the individual vanishes before the state, so does life.
What makes *Death by Government* resonate even beyond political science is its existential undertone. Rummel may be working in the idiom of data, but the anxiety pulsing beneath is theological. His repeated use of words like “evil”, “sin”, and “conscience” gives the book an almost Augustinian texture. Evil, for Rummel, is not a metaphysical force but a structure of control — the will to absolute power institutionalised.
The modern state becomes a kind of inverted God: omnipotent, omniscient, but entirely devoid of mercy. His implicit question — “How much power should any human institution possess?” — turns into a meditation on the limits of human trust.
One could argue that *Death by Government* is also Rummel’s attempt to redeem the Enlightenment through empiricism. He seeks to turn moral horror into quantifiable knowledge, as though by measuring atrocity we might inoculate ourselves against it. But that’s also the book’s tragic irony: knowledge does not guarantee morality. The same data that warns us against tyranny could also be used by tyrants to perfect their control. His rationalism trembles at its own shadow.
The book’s narrative structure mirrors a descent — from ideology to annihilation. Each case study begins with revolutionary optimism and ends in slaughter. The Bolsheviks’ promise of equality becomes the Gulag archipelago; Mao’s people’s revolution mutates into famine; the Nazis’ vision of national purity culminates in mechanised genocide.
What unites these episodes isn’t ideology but the architecture of domination: censorship, dehumanisation, and the erasure of individuality. Rummel’s genius is in seeing that these are not historical aberrations but recurring mechanisms.
In a postmodern light, *Death by Government* reads almost as a meta-text about the impossibility of narrating mass death. There are no protagonists, no catharsis, no closure. The “story” is structure itself — the way power organises life and death.
The book becomes an anti-narrative, a statistical simulacrum of apocalypse. Foucault might have recognised in Rummel’s graphs the same biopolitical logic he diagnosed in the modern state — the conversion of life into data, the governance of populations rather than persons. But Rummel flips the Foucauldian script: where Foucault sees discipline as productive, Rummel sees it as lethal.
There’s also a spectral aesthetic to *Death by Government*. The absent voices of the victims haunt every chart. The text is haunted not only by the dead but also by the silence surrounding them. In this sense, Rummel’s book stands alongside works like Primo Levi’s *If This Is a Man* or Hannah Arendt’s *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, though its language is less literary and more forensic. Arendt’s “banality of evil” finds its statistical twin in Rummel’s “magnitude of evil”. Both insist that atrocity is not born of madness but of systems.
By the end, Rummel’s argument returns to a radical simplicity: liberty or death — literally. The more absolute the state, the more absolute its capacity to annihilate. His proposed remedy is equally simple: 'democracy, openness, decentralisation'.
Yet what lingers is not his optimism but the haunting suspicion that freedom is always provisional, always eroding. History, after all, is cyclical; power consolidates, fear justifies control, and sooner or later, the old arithmetic resumes.
Reading *Death by Government* in the twenty-first century feels like reading a prophecy that has already begun to fulfill itself. Surveillance capitalism, digital propaganda, and the weaponisation of information hint at a new, subtler form of democide — not of bodies, but of minds. Rummel’s warnings echo in every algorithmic manipulation, every state-enforced silence, and every dehumanizing act justified as “order”. His book becomes a mirror held up to our century’s face, and the reflection isn’t flattering.
Ultimately, *Death by Government* isn’t just about the death caused by governments. It’s about the death within governments—the death of empathy, the death of restraint, and the death of moral imagination.
It’s about how ordinary people, through obedience and fear, become instruments of annihilation. In Rummel’s meticulous accounting, we glimpse something larger than history: the eternal human struggle between freedom and control, memory and erasure, and the living and the dead.
Try it out.
Rummel’s term *democide* became his intellectual trademark, a category broad enough to include genocide, politicide, and mass killing, and terrifying enough to suggest that the most dangerous predator in modern history is not famine or war but the organized state itself. This isn’t an easy book to “read” in the literary sense; it’s a slow dissection of the twentieth century’s collective nightmare, conducted with the antiseptic precision of a statistician and the haunted conscience of a theologian.
Rummel’s premise is chillingly simple: in the span of a single century, governments killed approximately 169 million of their own people. Not in war, not by accident, but systematically—through purges, forced famines, concentration camps, and state terror. The book becomes a cemetery of numbers: the Soviet Union under Stalin (62 million dead), Mao’s China (35 million), Nazi Germany (21 million), and lesser but still staggering atrocities from Cambodia, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and Rwanda. The cumulative effect is overwhelming. Each page feels like a tally of absences, a cold index of extinguished lives.
Rummel’s style — mathematical, methodical, even obsessive—mirrors the bureaucratic rationality of the very regimes he studies. The data are so clinical that they begin to take on a surreal power, as though the reader were staring into a spreadsheet that has become a scripture of despair.
Yet beneath the numerical armor, *Death by Government* is a profoundly moral document. Rummel is not simply chronicling state atrocities; he is building a theory of human freedom and its annihilation.
His argument, drawn from decades of comparative research, can be distilled to a single, almost aphoristic claim: *the more power a government has, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens.* Tyranny, he insists, is not a deviation from governance — it’s governance unrestrained. Democracy, for Rummel, isn’t just a political ideal; it’s a life-saving technology. His graphs become moral cartographies: as state power expands, the curve of death rises; as political freedom grows, the line flattens.
What’s eerie is how prophetic Rummel’s framework remains. Written before the full digitalization of the surveillance state, *Death by Government* still feels like it’s describing our century’s latent potential for total control. His warning is mathematical and metaphysical at once — that evil doesn’t always appear in monstrous form but in the mundane accumulation of authority, secrecy, and obedience.
He treats ideology as a kind of algorithm that transforms utopian dreams into administrative murder. Stalin’s collectivisation, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s agrarian socialism — each begins as a blueprint for paradise and ends as a field of bones.
Rummel’s writing has been criticised for its lack of emotional affect, but that coldness feels deliberate, almost strategic. He writes as one who refuses to aestheticise horror. In a way, his restraint functions as an ethical stance: he refuses to turn genocide into spectacle. The precision of his tables, the relentless cross-referencing of archival estimates, is his way of saying, “This is not metaphor. These are the dead.” The book becomes an act of remembrance through quantification, a kind of mathematical elegy.
And yet, there’s a paradox at the heart of it: numbers console no one. They clarify but do not heal. The magnitude of 169 million victims is beyond imagination; it collapses into abstraction. Rummel seems aware of this and occasionally lets the mask slip — his prose tightens, and a flicker of horror leaks through the empiricism.
When he describes the Khmer Rouge forcing mothers to kill their infants or Stalin’s guards counting the corpses stacked like cordwood, his sentences suddenly burn with suppressed anguish. In those moments, *Death by Government* stops being a book of statistics and becomes a dark psalm to human cruelty.
But Rummel’s purpose isn’t only to horrify; it’s to warn. His political theory is starkly libertarian: freedom is not just desirable; it’s the only known antidote to state murder.
Democracies, he argues, don’t commit democide because power is dispersed, accountability is institutionalised, and violence cannot be centralised without consent. To modern readers, this sounds almost quaint — a late–Cold War faith in liberal democracy as humanity’s safety mechanism.
Yet history since 1994 has made his thesis feel disturbingly relevant. From Myanmar to Syria, from the Uyghur camps of Xinjiang to the algorithmic coercions of authoritarian tech regimes, Rummel’s logic remains unbroken: where the individual vanishes before the state, so does life.
What makes *Death by Government* resonate even beyond political science is its existential undertone. Rummel may be working in the idiom of data, but the anxiety pulsing beneath is theological. His repeated use of words like “evil”, “sin”, and “conscience” gives the book an almost Augustinian texture. Evil, for Rummel, is not a metaphysical force but a structure of control — the will to absolute power institutionalised.
The modern state becomes a kind of inverted God: omnipotent, omniscient, but entirely devoid of mercy. His implicit question — “How much power should any human institution possess?” — turns into a meditation on the limits of human trust.
One could argue that *Death by Government* is also Rummel’s attempt to redeem the Enlightenment through empiricism. He seeks to turn moral horror into quantifiable knowledge, as though by measuring atrocity we might inoculate ourselves against it. But that’s also the book’s tragic irony: knowledge does not guarantee morality. The same data that warns us against tyranny could also be used by tyrants to perfect their control. His rationalism trembles at its own shadow.
The book’s narrative structure mirrors a descent — from ideology to annihilation. Each case study begins with revolutionary optimism and ends in slaughter. The Bolsheviks’ promise of equality becomes the Gulag archipelago; Mao’s people’s revolution mutates into famine; the Nazis’ vision of national purity culminates in mechanised genocide.
What unites these episodes isn’t ideology but the architecture of domination: censorship, dehumanisation, and the erasure of individuality. Rummel’s genius is in seeing that these are not historical aberrations but recurring mechanisms.
In a postmodern light, *Death by Government* reads almost as a meta-text about the impossibility of narrating mass death. There are no protagonists, no catharsis, no closure. The “story” is structure itself — the way power organises life and death.
The book becomes an anti-narrative, a statistical simulacrum of apocalypse. Foucault might have recognised in Rummel’s graphs the same biopolitical logic he diagnosed in the modern state — the conversion of life into data, the governance of populations rather than persons. But Rummel flips the Foucauldian script: where Foucault sees discipline as productive, Rummel sees it as lethal.
There’s also a spectral aesthetic to *Death by Government*. The absent voices of the victims haunt every chart. The text is haunted not only by the dead but also by the silence surrounding them. In this sense, Rummel’s book stands alongside works like Primo Levi’s *If This Is a Man* or Hannah Arendt’s *Eichmann in Jerusalem*, though its language is less literary and more forensic. Arendt’s “banality of evil” finds its statistical twin in Rummel’s “magnitude of evil”. Both insist that atrocity is not born of madness but of systems.
By the end, Rummel’s argument returns to a radical simplicity: liberty or death — literally. The more absolute the state, the more absolute its capacity to annihilate. His proposed remedy is equally simple: 'democracy, openness, decentralisation'.
Yet what lingers is not his optimism but the haunting suspicion that freedom is always provisional, always eroding. History, after all, is cyclical; power consolidates, fear justifies control, and sooner or later, the old arithmetic resumes.
Reading *Death by Government* in the twenty-first century feels like reading a prophecy that has already begun to fulfill itself. Surveillance capitalism, digital propaganda, and the weaponisation of information hint at a new, subtler form of democide — not of bodies, but of minds. Rummel’s warnings echo in every algorithmic manipulation, every state-enforced silence, and every dehumanizing act justified as “order”. His book becomes a mirror held up to our century’s face, and the reflection isn’t flattering.
Ultimately, *Death by Government* isn’t just about the death caused by governments. It’s about the death within governments—the death of empathy, the death of restraint, and the death of moral imagination.
It’s about how ordinary people, through obedience and fear, become instruments of annihilation. In Rummel’s meticulous accounting, we glimpse something larger than history: the eternal human struggle between freedom and control, memory and erasure, and the living and the dead.
Try it out.
October 18, 2023
An exciting book that takes us on a journey of democide in the 20th century. Democide is defined as the purposeful killing of civilians by governments for no other reason than to kill them. Democide excludes anything that might have covariance with variables independent of intentional government action, such as war. The book is very data-focused and the author has collected a broad range of data across time and geography. Death by Government holds a lot of promise but, unless you're interested in history, the only chapter you really need to read is chapter one.
The first chapter is both the summary and the conclusion. It looks at the data in aggregate and has a surplus of interesting insights. For example:
(1) If you compare deaths as a result of war or democide caused by regimes of each type (democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian), democratic regimes are the only type with fewer deaths caused by democide than by war. Authoritarian regimes have a score of 2:1, democide to war. Totalitarian regimes? About 9:1. If you extract communist regimes from the previous types, their score is 11:1.
(2) If you plot aggregate deaths by regime type for democide and war on two separate graphs, you'll see that the slope of the democide curve becomes steeper as you move from democracy to totalitarianism. Whereas, with war, the curve becomes less steep.
(3) When you segment democide by domestic vs. foreign civilians (with respect to the regime in question), democracies score close to zero in terms of aggregate democide. The shape of the curve is also steeper as you move away from democracy. Whereas, when democracies commit democide, it tends to be against foreign populations (e.g. U.S. strategic bombing of civilian targets in major cities), and although the curve is still steep as you move away from democracy, it's clear that authoritarian and totalitarian regimes prefer to kill their own people over foreigners — although, they're happy to do both.
(4) Democracies have committed about 3% of all civilian deaths, including democide and war. More than 82% of civilian deaths are a result of democide committed by nondemocratic regimes.
It's an incredibly interesting start to the book!
Don't get excited. That's the only aggregate analysis.
The next chapter is a discussion on what democide is and then it goes into a series of case studies. These case studies are histories of democide starting with the "dekamegamurderers"(USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany, and Nationalist China), then the "lesser megamurderers" (Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Turkey, Communist Vietnam, Post-WW2 Poland, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia), and finally the "suspected megamurderers" (North Korea, Mexico, and Feudal Russia).
All of these chapters have data. I found them all interesting and insightful, and a number of them especially so. For example, I found the chapters on Mexico and Pakistan educational because I didn't know much about either the slave trade in Mexico between 1890 and 1920 or the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. The discussion of Nationalist China was also educational. Did you know that the Nationalists killed more Chinese civilians than Japan during WW2? And Japan killed quite a few. For all their brutality, the CCCP was well-matched by their Nationalist enemies. There's a ton of anecdotal facts spread throughout and the data is great.
I wish there was more discussion on the aggregate trends. The "summary and conclusion" does a great job of introducing us to some great insights. Why not go deeper into these concepts?
Beyond the big ideas that don't get enough coverage, I also think the book would profit from a chapter on democide among democracies. The democracy v. authoritarianism v. totalitarianism comparisons in chapter 1 are great. The rest of the chapters then dig into the historical context for all the major demociders. They are all either authoritarian or totalitarian. I get it, democracies haven't committed enough democide to get on the top 11 list. But I think the idea of democracies not being big civilian murderers is more controversial than one might assume. The images of carpet bombing cities in Germany, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam suggest high death counts. Digging into this data would be useful as a means of clearing up these alleged misconceptions.
Anyway, the book is easy to read. Rich in data. And the lessons are important.
With what's going on in the Middle East, Ukraine, the tension in E. Asia, etc., it's important to realize that the world has always been an ugly place. It's interesting to think that how we view the world has changed, at least in the United States and W. Europe. Since the fall of the USSR, we've had large-scale democide in Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Yemen, Myanmar, W. China, etc. We see these as issues isolated in the most backward parts of the world, and to some extent that's true. It's absolutely insane to realize that large parts of Europe were dictatorships only 30 years ago. Spain was a dictatorship until 50 years ago. E. Europe has seen democide and genocide as lately as the 90s. Pluralism, or at least the move towards it, has spread to a larger part of the world than ever before.
But whatever justice this spread of pluralism has brought with it, it's anecdotal, an outlier in the time series of history. The world is a very dark place. Murder, rape, torture of men, women, children, and the elderly is common. It has been common. And it's easier than you think for a government to kill a million or more of their people within months or years.
This is where the aggregate analysis cut short deprives us of a deeper understanding of what the data is saying. Take Pakistan, for instance. We can argue that the regime was authoritarian. Pakistan has been beset by military coups, virtual dictators, etc., since the country's independence. But the genocide was triggered by the loss of a democratic election. This reminds me of the situation in E. Europe. Consider the arguments in books like From Voting to Violence and The Light That Failed. Democracy and pluralism is more complicated than the label. It's not difficult to slip out of democracy.
So, the big lesson of "don't take your democracy for granted" and "avoiding democide requires purposeful metapolitics" gets lost in the case studies.
There is one theme that transcends all the chapters and that's that the real analysis is not between discrete regime types. The analysis is over a domain of power concentration. And that is deep. But it's just hinted at or lost within the historical discussion.
Anyway, it's a good book. Like I said, easy to read and interesting. I recommend it. After I read chapter 1, I was ready to score it 5 stars. I ended up giving it 4 because of the weaknesses I think exist in the book. But maybe we shouldn't see them as weaknesses. They are just opportunities for a better, updated version of this book that takes us through to 2020.
The first chapter is both the summary and the conclusion. It looks at the data in aggregate and has a surplus of interesting insights. For example:
(1) If you compare deaths as a result of war or democide caused by regimes of each type (democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian), democratic regimes are the only type with fewer deaths caused by democide than by war. Authoritarian regimes have a score of 2:1, democide to war. Totalitarian regimes? About 9:1. If you extract communist regimes from the previous types, their score is 11:1.
(2) If you plot aggregate deaths by regime type for democide and war on two separate graphs, you'll see that the slope of the democide curve becomes steeper as you move from democracy to totalitarianism. Whereas, with war, the curve becomes less steep.
(3) When you segment democide by domestic vs. foreign civilians (with respect to the regime in question), democracies score close to zero in terms of aggregate democide. The shape of the curve is also steeper as you move away from democracy. Whereas, when democracies commit democide, it tends to be against foreign populations (e.g. U.S. strategic bombing of civilian targets in major cities), and although the curve is still steep as you move away from democracy, it's clear that authoritarian and totalitarian regimes prefer to kill their own people over foreigners — although, they're happy to do both.
(4) Democracies have committed about 3% of all civilian deaths, including democide and war. More than 82% of civilian deaths are a result of democide committed by nondemocratic regimes.
It's an incredibly interesting start to the book!
Don't get excited. That's the only aggregate analysis.
The next chapter is a discussion on what democide is and then it goes into a series of case studies. These case studies are histories of democide starting with the "dekamegamurderers"(USSR, Communist China, Nazi Germany, and Nationalist China), then the "lesser megamurderers" (Japan, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Turkey, Communist Vietnam, Post-WW2 Poland, Pakistan, and Yugoslavia), and finally the "suspected megamurderers" (North Korea, Mexico, and Feudal Russia).
All of these chapters have data. I found them all interesting and insightful, and a number of them especially so. For example, I found the chapters on Mexico and Pakistan educational because I didn't know much about either the slave trade in Mexico between 1890 and 1920 or the Pakistani genocide in Bangladesh. The discussion of Nationalist China was also educational. Did you know that the Nationalists killed more Chinese civilians than Japan during WW2? And Japan killed quite a few. For all their brutality, the CCCP was well-matched by their Nationalist enemies. There's a ton of anecdotal facts spread throughout and the data is great.
I wish there was more discussion on the aggregate trends. The "summary and conclusion" does a great job of introducing us to some great insights. Why not go deeper into these concepts?
Beyond the big ideas that don't get enough coverage, I also think the book would profit from a chapter on democide among democracies. The democracy v. authoritarianism v. totalitarianism comparisons in chapter 1 are great. The rest of the chapters then dig into the historical context for all the major demociders. They are all either authoritarian or totalitarian. I get it, democracies haven't committed enough democide to get on the top 11 list. But I think the idea of democracies not being big civilian murderers is more controversial than one might assume. The images of carpet bombing cities in Germany, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam suggest high death counts. Digging into this data would be useful as a means of clearing up these alleged misconceptions.
Anyway, the book is easy to read. Rich in data. And the lessons are important.
With what's going on in the Middle East, Ukraine, the tension in E. Asia, etc., it's important to realize that the world has always been an ugly place. It's interesting to think that how we view the world has changed, at least in the United States and W. Europe. Since the fall of the USSR, we've had large-scale democide in Rwanda, Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Yemen, Myanmar, W. China, etc. We see these as issues isolated in the most backward parts of the world, and to some extent that's true. It's absolutely insane to realize that large parts of Europe were dictatorships only 30 years ago. Spain was a dictatorship until 50 years ago. E. Europe has seen democide and genocide as lately as the 90s. Pluralism, or at least the move towards it, has spread to a larger part of the world than ever before.
But whatever justice this spread of pluralism has brought with it, it's anecdotal, an outlier in the time series of history. The world is a very dark place. Murder, rape, torture of men, women, children, and the elderly is common. It has been common. And it's easier than you think for a government to kill a million or more of their people within months or years.
This is where the aggregate analysis cut short deprives us of a deeper understanding of what the data is saying. Take Pakistan, for instance. We can argue that the regime was authoritarian. Pakistan has been beset by military coups, virtual dictators, etc., since the country's independence. But the genocide was triggered by the loss of a democratic election. This reminds me of the situation in E. Europe. Consider the arguments in books like From Voting to Violence and The Light That Failed. Democracy and pluralism is more complicated than the label. It's not difficult to slip out of democracy.
So, the big lesson of "don't take your democracy for granted" and "avoiding democide requires purposeful metapolitics" gets lost in the case studies.
There is one theme that transcends all the chapters and that's that the real analysis is not between discrete regime types. The analysis is over a domain of power concentration. And that is deep. But it's just hinted at or lost within the historical discussion.
Anyway, it's a good book. Like I said, easy to read and interesting. I recommend it. After I read chapter 1, I was ready to score it 5 stars. I ended up giving it 4 because of the weaknesses I think exist in the book. But maybe we shouldn't see them as weaknesses. They are just opportunities for a better, updated version of this book that takes us through to 2020.
April 22, 2023
“Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.”
March 9, 2018
Death by Government is a book of numbers. Author Rummel defines "democide" as the intentional killing of people by government, and goes into detail on what this includes. His study is filled with statistics and charts and graphs and is well documented. In addition, he gives a summary of the situation or the war that the numbers address. These summaries will be more valuable to the reader who has an in-depth understanding of each of these situations as the massacres by government are too complicated to explain adequately in just a summary no matter how well-written. As the co-author of Spare Them? No Profit. Remove Them? No Loss, an autobiography of a teen who spent four years under the Khmer Rouge, much of that time in the infamous work groups, I found the chapter on Cambodia to be sketchy. Nevertheless, Rummel's comments throughout the summary were interesting and insightful. This book is not for the casual reader, but is rather for someone who is interested in how many people have been slaughtered by governments that have gone rogue.
June 2, 2023
Rummel coined the term Democide! (death by government.) Sound familiar? You bet. It turns out there are no good guys in the war and that the instances of democide have increased dramatically since the turn of the last century. A lot of the book is composed of charts and graphs with the remainder of the text containing Rummel's analysis of the various governmental regimes. Many have questioned the death numbers quoted by the author, but you'll find the book is extensively researched.
November 29, 2007
This book was an eye-opening read. It is frightening to consider the sheer amount of innocent civilians killed by governments in the past hundred years. There are valuable lessons about the nature of the practice of communism and related totalitarian ideologies.
May 15, 2009
A tough book to read--one you have to walk away from and take a deep breath from time to time...
April 2, 2016
Everyone should know this information, and it's an easy read.
October 15, 2022
Should be compulsory reading in high school basic history classes.
The evident connection between absolute power and mass murder is made irrefutable in this simple book detailing only the most serious cases of the XX century.
The evident connection between absolute power and mass murder is made irrefutable in this simple book detailing only the most serious cases of the XX century.
December 7, 2024
Probably the definitive book on the subject.
January 11, 2008
Mostly a gruesome cataloguing of mass atrocities committed by governments (who have the most capability for such things) in the 20th century. Morbidly entertaining. There is also some stuff about democracy being the key to world peace, which is undoubtedly inspiring to those who have confidence in democracy.
July 9, 2016
Democide is the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder. Although many of the incidents included in this book are familiar, to read them as a whole, with statistics showing the staggering number being killed by governments, is truly frightening.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews