Death by Government by R. J. Rummel – an excerpt with comments in blue
I purchased this book some time back and finally got around to reading it. I did not know at the time of purchase exactly what it was about. Even before finishing the book I was incensed at what I was reading. The short excerpt below hopefully gives you an idea of how governments work and have worked since their beginning and how POWER becomes addictive. This is where we are today. The rage that built up inside of me caused me to write this in an effort to let others know just how cruel, mean, vindictive, and murderous government can be against its own people. Rummel spent years of research on his book. He writes about kings, rulers, dictators, that I have never heard about. He tells about the millions and millions of citizens killed by the POWER OF GOVERNMENT. Sure, I got mad at what I was reading but it’s knowledge that I, and we need to know. Keeping our head in the sand or remaining silent is not the answer. We must know how our “enemy” thinks and how they work so we can combat them at every level. When you read the numbers of those that were murdered by all these regimes think about it. Think long and hard about all those bodies – those lives of men, women, and children that had nowhere to run. Think about how they were murdered and try to rationalize why they were murdered and by whom. Yes, government included. It’s a sad fact of life. Accept it…………………deal with it.
The depth of horrors committed by communist regimes on ordinary humanity is unconscionable (my word). The numbers are so grotesque at this level that we must actually revise our sense and sensibilities about the comparative study of totalitarianisms to appreciate that of the two supreme systemic horrors of the century, the communist regimes hold a measurable edge over the fascist regimes in their life-taking propensities. From the Forward by Irving Louis Horowitz.
Democracies commit less democide than other regimes. (But they do commit democide and have done so. Joe) The less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. I offer this proposition here as the Power Principle: power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely. This book presents the primary results – in tables and figures – as well as (most important) a historical sketch of the major cases of democide – those in which 1 million or more people were killed by a regime. It argues that democide is for the killing by government definitionally similar to the domestic crime of murder by individuals, and that murderer is an appropriate label for those regimes that commit democide. …democide has been very much a part of human history and that in some cases, even without the benefit of modern killing technology and implementing bureaucracy, people were beheaded, stabbed, or sliced to death by the hundreds of thousands within a short duration.
Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Edmund Burke.
Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches. – Shelley, Queen Mab III
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely – Lord Acton
In total, during the first eighty-eight years of this century, almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivable be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by a modern Black Plague. And indeed it has, but a plague of POWER, not germs.
POWER will achieve its murderous potential. It simply waits for an excuse, an event of some sort, an assassination, a massacre in a neighboring country, an attempted coup, a famine, or a natural disaster,to justify the beginning of murder en masse. Most democides occur under the cover of war, revolution, or guerrilla war, or in their aftermath.(Think about Columbine, Boston Marathon, Jonesboro Arkansas, Littleton, CO, Springfield OR. 9/11 and others. Who did we go after? Who did we attack? Who did we retaliate against? Was it a country? Was it a group? Was it an individual? Joe)
Murder as public policy becomes part of the new social order. Consider the social orders of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and their henchmen.
In sum, then, where absolute POWER exists, interests become polarized, a culture of violence develops, and war and democide follow. In this century alone, by current count, absolute – totalitarian – POWER has murdered nearly 138 million people. (This number is staggering. Joe)
Few are aware of the sheer democide that has been inflicted on our fellow human beings. Hitler murdered over 21 million Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, Frenchmen, Balts, Czechs, and others. Stalin , murdered tens of millions, but Stalin, Lenin, and their successorsmurdered almost 62 million Soviet citizens and foreigners. Mao Tse-tung’s China, Chiang Kai-shek’s China, the militarist’s Japan, Yahya Khan’s Pakistan, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and others killed more than 16 million in genocide and politicide since World War II. This number does not include the 35 million likely murdered by just the Communist Party of China from 1949 to 1987.
The Nazis during WWII murdered around 20 million civilians and prisoners of war. The Japanese 5,890,000, The Chinese nationalists 5,907.000, the Chinese communists 250,000. The Nazi satellite Croatians 655,000, the Tito Partisans 600,000, and Stalin 13,053,000.
Democide is committed by ABSOLUTE POWER; its agency is government.A preeminent fact about government is that some of them murder millions in cold blood. This is where ABSOLUTE POWER reigns.
“Genocide”: The destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. The origin was created in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Since this time, it has evolved with many inclusions. Thus the writing of Rummel’s book. Rummel included this excerpt from “Axis Rule…”;
“…made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing),…” “It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
The quote above from Lemkin struck a nerve in me. If you really think about it and focus on every word does something strike you? Read the quote again and think about everything that is happening in the world around us today. Does something sound familiar? Are you able to connect dots between the quote and current events? Do you see any similarities? I would hope so. Joe
Joe Grisafi
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