From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (edited by Richard Koenigsberg)
Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014)[1] was an American political scientist and professor at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination.
Contrasting genocide, Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government, such as the genocide of indigenous peoples and colonialism, Nazi Germany, the Stalinist purges, Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, and other authoritarian, totalitarian, or undemocratic regimes, coming to the conclusion that democratic regimes result in the least democides.[2]
Rummel estimated that a total of 212 million people were killed by all governments during the 20th century,[3] of which 148 million were killed by Communist governments from 1917 to 1987.[4] To give some perspective on these numbers, Rummel stated that all domestic and foreign wars during the 20th century killed in combat around 41 million.
In his last book, Rummel increased his estimate to over 272 million innocent, non-combatant civilians who were murdered by their own governments during the 20th century.[12] Rummel stated that his 272 million death estimate was his lower, more prudent figure, stating that it "could be over 400,000,000."[13]
Rummel came to the conclusion that a democracy is the form of government which is least likely to kill its citizens because democracies do not tend to wage wars against each other.[2] This latest view is a concept, which was further developed by Rummel, known as the democratic peace theory.[14]
Rummel was the author of twenty-four scholarly books, and he published his major results between 1975 and 1981 in Understanding Conflict and War (1975).[15] He spent the next fifteen years refining the underlying theory and testing it empirically on new data, against the empirical results of others, and on case studies. He summed up his research in Power Kills (1997).[16]
Rummel coined democide, which he defined as "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel further stated to "use the civil definition of murder, where someone can be guilty of murder if they are responsible in a reckless and wanton way for the loss of life, as in incarcerating people in camps where they may soon die of malnutrition, unattended disease, and forced labor, or deporting them into wastelands where they may die rapidly from exposure and disease."[5]
In his work and research, Rummel distinguished between colonial, democratic, and authoritarian and totalitarian regimes,[25] and found a correlation with authoritarianism and totalitarianism,[26] which he considered to be a significant causative factor in democides.[5][27] Rummel posited that there is a relation between political power and democide.
Political mass murder grows increasingly common as political power becomes unconstrained. At the other end of the scale, where power is diffuse, checked, and balanced, political violence is a rarity. For Rummel, "[t]he more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom."[28] He wrote that "concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth."[29] This correlation is considered by Rummel to be more important than reliability of estimates.[30]
Notes
- Rummel considered communism to be a significant causative factor in democides.[5] According to Rummel, the killings committed by Communist states can best be explained as the result of the marriage between absolute power and the ideology of Marxism, which he also considered to be absolutist. Rummel wrote that "communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and its chief interpreters.
It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state's instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family."
- Rummel said that Communists saw the construction of their utopia as "though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths."[27]
- Rummel wrote: "What if there were a solution to war and genocide? What if a secret society sent back to 1906 two lovers, Joy Phim, a gorgeous warrior, and John Banks, a pacifist professor of history, and gave them the incredible wealth and weapons necessary to create a peaceful alternative universe—one that never experienced the horrors of world war, the Holocaust, and the other atrocities of the twentieth century? And what if, at great personal cost, they succeed too well and create a peaceful world of complacent democracies?
- In Book 2, the clock is turned back to their arrival in 1906. They receive a message from the future of the universe they will create – Islamic fundamentalists have attacked the unarmed democracies with nuclear weapons and enslaved them. It is now up to these lovers to prevent this horrible future.[72]
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