#Resource R. J. Rummel (21 October 1932, Cleveland – 2 March 2014) was the statistician of what governments do to their own people — an American political scientist (Indiana, Yale, then Hawaiʻi from 1966 to retirement in 1995) who spent a career compiling data on collective violence in order to argue one thesis: political power kills. He started as a democratic socialist and ended as a libertarian anti-communist, and wrote twenty-four scholarly books plus some 100 articles. ## Democide Genocide, he thought, was too narrow a word — it captures only the killing of groups as groups. Rummel coined **democide**: *"the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder."* He deliberately used the civil definition of murder, so deaths count when a government is recklessly responsible for them — imprisonment in camps where people starve or sicken, deportation into wastelands, famine enforced or exploited as policy (the Holodomor counts). He separately coined **mortacide** for deaths caused not by intent but culpable indifference: corruption and incompetence that grind down a population's life expectancy. ## The Numbers His estimates for the twentieth century: about **212 million people killed by their own governments**, of which roughly 148 million by Communist regimes, 1917–87. His reference for scale, and the number worth remembering in any debate: all domestic and foreign wars of the century killed around **41 million in combat** — the states killed the rest in peacetime, unarmed, at home. In his last book he revised upward to over **272 million**, calling that his prudent floor and suggesting it "could be over 400,000,000". ## The Argument The correlation mattered more to him than any estimate: democide rises with unconstrained power and vanishes where power is diffuse, checked and balanced — *"concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth."* He was, after Dean Babst, a founder of **democratic peace theory**: 1816–2005, 205 wars between non-democracies, 166 between non-democracies and democracies, **none between established democracies** — and he traced the mechanism honestly back to Kant (citizens who pay for wars don't vote for them; free societies build cultures of negotiation). No famine has ever occurred in a democracy — an argument he credited to Amartya Sen. ## Caveats — carry these into any use - **Methodology is contested.** His estimates lean on sources and extrapolations that specialists distrust: his Tito figures were built on émigré propaganda (Dulić 2004); he once claimed the Spanish Inquisition killed 350,000 Jews — more than Spain's Jewish population (Butler); a Swedish research review called his Soviet arithmetic "speculative and sweeping". Yehuda Bauer's defence is the usable one: even 20–30 percent lower, his general conclusions stand. **Debate use: orders of magnitude, not digits.** - **His later politics are not part of the package.** The late Rummel supported the Iraq War, attacked Wilson, Kennedy and Obama as tyrants-in-waiting, and called anthropogenic global warming "a scam for power". Take the democide data — it was peer-awarded work (Susan Strange Award 1999; APSA lifetime achievement 2003) — and leave the blog-era contrarianism (worked example: [[The Critic's Blind Spot]]). Worth knowing before someone else mentions it to you. ## Books - *Death by Government* (1994) — the synthesis; start here. - *Statistics of Democide* (1997) — the full workings, sources and calculations. - *Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence* (1997) — the thesis in one argument. - Period studies: *Lethal Politics* (Soviet, 1990), *China's Bloody Century* (1991), *Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder* (1992). - Most of it is **free as PDF** at his old site, hawaii.edu/powerkills (University of Hawaiʻi still hosts it). ## In the Forest The scale card of [[Capital Punishment.canvas]] and section 4 of [[The State Was Not a Party]] rest on this shelf: the ordinary murderer is small fry beside the state, and the through-line — *the more power a regime has, the likelier people are killed* — is Rummel's empirical version of [[Statism and Anarchy|Bakunin]]'s refusal. Neighbours: [[Structural Violence]] (deaths by arrangement rather than bullet), [[How States Think]] and [[Seeing Like a State]] — Scott's legibility is democide's precondition seen from inside the bureaucracy — and [[Violence]]. His Kant note is a nice knot: the same Kant who supplies the retribution case for capital punishment supplies the peace case against concentrated power. source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._J._Rummel `Concepts:` [[Violence]] · [[Structural Violence]] `Knowledge Base:` [[The State Was Not a Party]]