R. J. Rummel

[Kia]

Firstly I wasn't sure where to post this but since it seems to be viewing events in history and all his theories are based off of that..I thought history seemed best, please move the thread to the best suited area.
Secondly, I do not agree with this man's data or his theories. I've only been reading about them for the last hour or so; I'm just curious of what you think of this man's work, data, and the effects it has on communism.
Thirdly, I happened to have found this when looking for a UN article on what kills the most people...(specifically data on Malaria for another thread)...go figure...

How Many Did The Communist Regimes Murder? (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM)
by R. J. Rummel

I suggest reading the whole essay/article.


Few would deny any longer that communism--Marxism-Leninism and its variants--meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extrajudicial executions and show trials, and genocide. It is also widely known that as a result millions of innocent people have been murdered in cold blood. Yet there has been virtually no concentrated statistical work on what this total might be.


irst, however, I should clarify the term democide. It means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state--democide--as would parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure be murder. So would government forced labor that kills a person within months or a couple of years be murder. So would government created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing be murder. However, judicial executions for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses, such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials), are not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets.


With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over 1,000,000 murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Korea and Tito's Yugoslavia.

Obviously the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over 8 percent of the population murdered, or odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot's rule of slightly over just over 2 to 1.


But what connects them all is this. As a government's power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite have it, other causes and conditions can operated to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted.



R.J. Rummel came up with a term called: Democide to create a broader legal definition basically for genocide.
Wikipedia: Democide (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide) In case you want more info.

He also is one of the main researchers/contributors to the theory of Democratic Peace Theory.
Wikipedia: Democratic Peace Theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory)

Democratic Peace Theory states that democracies (liberal democracies) rarely ever or never go to war with each other. That these forms of governments are much less likely to engage in conflict then any other forms of government. Rummel contributed to this theory by noting that,

He finds that in the 1816-2005 period there were 205 wars between nondemocracies, 166 wars between nondemocracies and democracies, and 0 wars between democracies.


Wikipedia: R.J. Rummel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._J._Rummel). If you feel like reading up about him.


Opinions? Criticism?

[RNK]

He is partically correct. With today's modern capitalist system, imperialist nations no longer always need to engage in military conquests as often. They will engage in a more subtle form of invasion; "market" invasion, or however you want to call it. Of course, if they can not penetrate another nation's market, as in the case of Iraq, Iran, North Korea, etc, they will eventually invade. But imperialism is more and more becoming a dominance of capital with nations' economies and corporations battling one another and conquering new territory.

In the most direct instance, during the middle ages the European powers began massive colonial conquests to subjugate territories (and the markets and resources of those territories). Today, corporations can buy land and resources in foreign countries, import their own equipment and personel, and operate almost entirely independant of the people of that country, needing only to occasionally bribe that nation's officials.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

The elephant in the lobby is that liberal democracies aren't democracies either, and they still go to war with other nations.

[Intelligitimate]

Rummel is a joke. His numbers are fantastic nonsense. Literally nothing he says has any value whatsoever, and he is not a respected authority about any of these subjects.

I recommend going to the H-Net discussions and watching Grover Furr and Scott Laderman clean his clock. Here is just a sample:


First, I'd like to thank Prof. Rummel for replying to my request
for his sources on what he calls Vietnamese 'democide.'

Some months ago I posted to this list some critical remarks about Prof.
Rummel's estimates of Soviet 'mass murders', noting that the figures he
cites are far, far higher than even inveterate Cold Warriors cite, and those
are many times higher than can be sustained by recent scholarship
-- scholarship which, as I pointed out, Prof. Rummel did not cite at all.

The same thing is true of Prof. Rummel's assertions about Vietnamese
'democide'. I will make 3 points, briefly:

1. Prof. Rummel cites a study by Desbarats and Jackson, and then another by
Desbarats alone. This study has been thoroughly refuted by Porter and
Roberts, in _Pacific Affairs_ 61 (1988), 303-310. The validity of the
Porter/Roberts refutation of Desbarats and Jackson has been thoroughly
discussed on both the H-DIPLO and VWAR-L lists. But, in fact, one has only
to read both studies to see how -- not mistaken, but fraudulent -- the
Desbarats/Jackson study is.

_Pacific Affairs_ is available in most academic libraries, and also on
JSTOR, so it is easy to obtain the Porter/Roberts article.

2. Edwin Moise, one of the foremost scholars of Vietnam and especially of
North Vietnam's collectivization program of the mid-50s, has some incisive
and devastating criticisms of Prof. Rummel's research. See the posts on the
H-DIPLO list, numbers 2517, 2530, 13958.

3. Prof. Rummel's evidence is simply a list of figures. There is no attempt
at a critical examination of the sources. Therefore, his list is worthless
as an attempt to understand any reality. Anyone can compile a list of
allegations.

Sincerely,

Grover C. Furr

I'd also highly advise reading Silver and Anderson's Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR to get an idea of just how wildly off the mark Rummel's numbers are.

[ComradeOm]

Rummel can be safely dismissed as a nut. While some of his more moderate positions do receive attention from mainstream academia, the vast majority of his work has been discounted or, at the very least, viewed with extreme suspicion.

Which isn't to actually comment on his works themselves… these happen to be uniformly ludicrous and often factually suspect.

[вор в законе]

What our mentally depleted ''historian'' is unable to grasp is that when a nation-state engages a War, the likelihood of adopting authoritarian policies - a phenomenon that can be observed in the U.S. after the Imperialist invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan - or even the abolition of bourgeois democracies - end of Weimar Republic - increases. Furthermore a state must become authoritarian during a war, it must use propaganda and in order to do that it must increase the government.

The ''Liberal Democracies'' are in most cases advanced Capitalist States thus advanced Capitalist States don't attack each other not because of some moralistic reason but because such a thing would trigger a world war which would destroy the infrastructure of the bourgeois. Besides Capitalism has entered in a new face and the national bourgeois is whithering, instead the bourgeois is become Global, and a possible war between Liberal Democracies would hurt their investments.

I don't understand how this clown has become a Professor. What unscientific nonsense. Besides, 99% of the wars conducted during the last 200 years were wars triggered by Capitalist States.