The book's exact numbers can certainly be disputed, no question.

democratic republics/capitalism/freedom), are to be feared, and which not. If you only check out the table of contents ordered by decreasing total deaths 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. This book is invaluable to clearly show the order of magnitude of the horrors of various regimes in the 20th century. 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 riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.Ģ7 April 2017 - I read this important and too little read or referenced work about 10 years ago. 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. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history.

The course of action is to foster freedom.” Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. Thus, as Rummel says, “The problem is power. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence the more freedom, the less the violence. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. He also writes about areas of suspected North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. 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. 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. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide.

Death by Government by R.J. Rummel