Democide

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Democide

Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel

R. J. Rummel

Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination....
for "the murder

Murder

Murder as defined in common law countries, is the unlawful killing of another human being with intent , and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide....
of any person or people by a government

Government

Government is the body within any organization that has the authority to make and the power to enforce laws, regulations, or rules. Typically, the government refers to a civil government -- local, provincial, or national -- but commercial, academic, religious, or other formal organizations are also administered by governing bodies....
, including genocide

Genocide

Politicide

Politicide has three related but distinct meanings. It can mean a gradual but systematic attempt to cause the annihilation of an independent political and social entity....
, and mass murder

Mass murder

Mass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations....
." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide

Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
has three different meanings. The ordinary meaning is murder by government of people due to their national, ethnic, racial, or religious group membership.

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Encyclopedia

Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel

R. J. Rummel

Murder

Government

Genocide

Politicide

Politicide has three related but distinct meanings. It can mean a gradual but systematic attempt to cause the annihilation of an independent political and social entity....
, and mass murder

Mass murder

Mass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations....
." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide

Genocide

Definition

According to Rummel, genocide

Genocide

Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951....
. This also includes nonlethal acts that in the end eliminate the group, such as preventing births or forcibly transferring children out of the group to another group. A generalized meaning of genocide is similar to the ordinary meaning but also includes government killings of political opponents or otherwise intentional murder. In order to avoid confusion over which meaning is intended, Rummel created the term democide for the third meaning.

Rummel defines democide as "The murder of any person or people by a government

Government

Genocide

Politicide

Politicide has three related but distinct meanings. It can mean a gradual but systematic attempt to cause the annihilation of an independent political and social entity....
, and mass murder

Mass murder

Mass murder is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations....
". For example, government-sponsored killings for political reasons would be considered democide. Democide can also include deaths arising from "intentionally or knowingly reckless and depraved disregard for life"; this brings into account many deaths arising through various neglects and abuses, such as forced mass starvation. Rummel explicitly excludes battle deaths in his definition. Capital punishment, actions taken against armed civilians during mob action or riot, and the deaths of noncombatants killed during attacks on military targets so long as the primary target is military, are not considered democide.

He has further stated: "I 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."

Some examples of democide cited by Rummel include the Great Purges carried out by Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....
in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
, the deaths from the colonial

Colonialism

Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over Territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler or exploitation colony in which Indigenous people populations are direct rule, Population transfers, or Genocide....
policy in the Congo Free State

Congo Free State

The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium through a dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine....
, and Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, agriculturalized and industrialized communist society....
resulting in a famine which killed millions of people. According to Rummel, these were not cases of genocide, because those who were killed were not selected on the basis of their race, but were killed in large numbers as a result of government policies. Famine is classified by Rummel as democide if it fits the definition above.

For instance, Rummel only recently classified Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a China military and politics dictator. Mao led the Communist Party of China to victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, and was the leader of the People?s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976....
's Great Leap Forward as democide. He believed that Mao's policies were largely responsible for the famine, but he was misled about it, and finally when he found out, he stopped it and changed his policies. Thus, according to Rummel, is not an intentional famine and thus not a democide. However, contradictory claims from Jung Chang

Jung Chang

Jung Chang is a China-born United Kingdom writer now living in London, best known for her family autobiography Wild Swans, selling over 10 million copies worldwide but censorship in the People's Republic of China in mainland China....
and John Halliday

John Halliday

John Halliday was an American actor of stage and screen, who often played suave aristocrats and foreigners.Despite his origins in Brooklyn, he often took on a British accent in his portrayals....
's controversial Mao: the Unknown Story
Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao: The Unknown Story , an eight hundred and thirty two page biography written by the husband and wife team, writer Jung Chang and historian Jon Halliday, depicts Mao Zedong , paramount leader of China and chairman of the Communist Party of China, as being responsible for more deaths in peacetime than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin....
allege that Mao knew about the famine from the beginning but didn't care, and eventually Mao had to be stopped by a meeting of 7,000 top Communist Party members. Based on the book's claims, Rummel now views the famine as intentional and a democide.

Research on democide

Accusations of mass killings by a government are relatively common. Less common are well-documented cases with enough evidence to support the accusation. Almost all accusations are disputed to some degree, although the evidence in some cases is stronger than in others.

Rummel's sources include scholarly works, refugee reports, memoirs, biographies, historical analyses, actual exhumed body counts, records kept by the murderers themselves, and so on. In short his data are all estimates available in English for all nations over a period of a century, and available in the libraries he worked in, including the Library of Congress

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is the de facto national library of the United States and the research arm of the United States Congress. Located in three buildings in Washington, D.C., it is the largest library in the world by shelf space and holds the largest number of books....
.

He provides the most probable death toll along a low and a high count that are meant to be the most unlikely low and high number of deaths, and thus to bracket the probable true count. It is to determine these lows and highs that he includes what some others might consider absurd estimates. His published books do not include new research and new sources available after the publication date.

Rummel's counts 43 million deaths due to democide during Stalin's regime inside and outside the Soviet Union. This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million. Rummel has responded that this is based on a figure from Robert Conquest

Robert Conquest

Dr. George Robert f Ackworth Conquest , United Kingdom historian, became a well known writer and researcher on the Soviet Union with the publication, in 1968, of his account of Joseph Stalin Great Purge of the 1930s, The Great Terror....
's book The Great Terror
The Great Terror

The Great Terror is a book by United Kingdom writer Robert Conquest, published in 1968. It gave rise to an alternate title of the period in Soviet Union history known as the Great Purge....
from 1968 and that Conquest's qualifier "almost certainly too low" is usually forgotten. Conquest's calculations excluded camp deaths after 1950, and before 1936; executions 1939–53; the vast deportation of the people of captive nations into the camps, and their deaths 1939–1953; the massive deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities 1941–1944 and their deaths; and those the Soviet Red Army and secret police executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during 1944–1945. Moreover, the Holodomor

Holodomor

The Holodomor refers to the famine of 1932?1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into Collectivization in the Soviet Unions....
that killed 5 million in 1932–1934 is not included.

His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government caused deaths, Rummel estimates that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the inflictions of people working for governments than have died in battle.

One of his main findings is that liberal democracies have much less democide than authoritarian regimes. He argues 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. According to Rummel, "The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom." Rummel concludes: "Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth."

Several other researchers have found similar results. "Numerous researchers point out that democratic norms and political structures constrain elite decisions about the use of repression against their citizens whereas autocratic elites are not so constrained." "Once in place, democratic institutions — even partial ones — reduce the likelihood of armed conflict and all but eliminate the risk that it will lead to geno/politicide."

For books, articles, data, and analyses regarding democide, see . In particular, he has FAQ

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQs are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be frequently asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic....
. He has also made his many sources and the calculations used, from a pre-publisher manuscript of his book Statistics of Democide, . Researchers often give widely different estimates of mass murder. They use different definitions, methodology, and sources. For example, some include battle deaths in their calculations. has compiled some of these different estimates.

Numbers

The numbers of people killed in democides are often hard to certify and there are often debates of how many people were actually killed, like the highest and lowest amounts for these dictators, for instance :

Mao Zedong 20 million to 75 million

Joseph Stalin 15 million to 45 million

Adolf Hitler 6 million to 20 million.

The reality is often roughly halfway between the highest and lowest estimates. Also some dictators democides are more widley publiciesed than others, such as the Holocaust which some (but very few) Germans have said has been over exaggerated because they were on the loosing side in the war. Some dictators have been more murderous by population of the country which they ruled such as: Mao Zedong's massive 70 million was about 10% of China's population at the time, while Pol Pott, belived to be the most murderous dictator in proportion to the population killed roughly 2.5 million people believed to be a massive 40% of Cambodia's population.

**Genocides and Politicides from 1955 to 2001** From , Barbara Harff, 2003.
Location	Dates	Est. Deaths
Sudan	10/56–3/72	400,000–600,000
South Vietnam	1/65–4/75	400,000–500,000
China	3/59–12/59	65,000
Iraq	6/63–3/75	30,000–60,000
Algeria	7/62–12/62	9,000–30,000
Rwanda	12/63–6/64	12,000–20,000
Congo-K	2/64–1/65	1,000–10,000
Burundi	10/65–12/73	140,000
Indonesia	11/65–7/66	500,000–1,000,000
China	5/66–3/75	400,000–850,000
Guatemala	7/78–12/96	60,000–200,000
East Pakistan (Now Bangladesh)	3/71–12/71	1,000,000–3,000,000
Uganda	2/72–4/79	50,000–400,000
Philippines	9/72–6/76	60,000
Pakistan	2/73–7/77	5,000–10,000
Chile	9/73–12/76	5,000–10,000
Angola	11/75–2001	500,000
Cambodia	4/75–1/79	1,900,000–3,500,000
Indonesia	12/75–7/92	100,000–200,000
Argentina	3/76–12/80	9,000–20,000
Ethiopia	7/76–12/79	10,000
Congo-K	3/77–12/79	3,000–4,000
Afghanistan	4/78–4/92	1,800,000
Burma	1/78–12/78	5,000
El Salvador	1/80–12/89	40,000–60,000
Uganda	12/80–1/86	200,000–500,000
Syria	4/81–2/82	5,000–30,000
Iran	6/81–12/92	10,000–20,000
Sudan	9/83–2003	2,000,000
Iraq	3/88–6/91	180,000
Somalia	5/88–1/91	15,000–50,000
Burundi	1988	5,000–20,000
Sri Lanka	9/89–1/90	13,000–30,000
Bosnia Bosnian Genocide This article refers to genocide during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. Other cases of genocide in the same region during World War II are covered in other articles....	5/92–11/95	225,000
Burundi	10/93–5/94	50,000
Rwanda Rwandan Genocide The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by Hutus under the Hutu Power ideology....	4/94–7/94	500,000–1,000,000
Serbia	12/98–7/99	10,000

**20th century democides causing more than one million deaths.** From , Rummel, 1987. Several estimates have been revised after this date: , the , .
Location	Dates	Est. Deaths
Cambodia	1975–1979	2,035,000
China (KMT)	1928–1949	10,075,000
China (PRC)	1949–1987	77,277,000
China (Mao Soviets)	1923–1949	3,465,000
Colonialism Colonialism Colonialism is the extension of a nation's sovereignty over Territory beyond its borders by the establishment of either settler or exploitation colony in which Indigenous people populations are direct rule, Population transfers, or Genocide....	1900–Independence	50,000,000
Congo Free State Congo Free State The Congo Free State was a corporate state privately controlled by Leopold II of Belgium through a dummy non-governmental organization, the Association Internationale Africaine....	1885–1908	est C20th 3,480,000 total of 10,000,000
Germany	1933–1945	20,946,000
Japan	1936–1945	5,964,000
Pakistan	1958–1987	1,503,000
Poland	1945–1948	1,585,000
Mexico	1900–1920	1,417,000
North Korea	1948–1987	1,563,000
Russia	1900–1917	1,066,000
Turkey	1909–1918	1,883,000
Vietnam	1945–1987	1,670,000
Yugoslavia (Tito)	1944–1987	1,072,000
U.S.S.R.	1917–1987	61,911,000

**Selected pre-20th century democides.** From *Death by Government*, Rummel, 1987 .
Events	Dates	Est. Deaths
Christian Crusades Crusades The Crusades were a series of religious war waged by much of Christian Europe against external and internal opponents. Crusades were fought mainly against Muslims, though campaigns were also directed against Paganism Slavic peoples, Jews, Eastern Orthodox Church, Mongols, Catharism, Hussites, Waldensians, Old Prussians, and political enemi...	1095–1272	1,000,000
Albigensian Crusade Albigensian Crusade The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade was a 20-year military campaign initiated by the Roman Catholic Church to eliminate the Cathar heresy in Languedoc....	1208–1249	200,000
By Mongols Mongols The name Mongol specifies one or several ethnic groups, now mainly located in Mongolia, China, and Russia....	14th–15th Century	29,927,000
By Aztecs	Centuries	>1,000,000
Thirty Years' War Thirty Years' War The Thirty Years' War was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history. The war was fought primarily in Germany and at various points involved most of the countries of Europe....	1618–1648	5,750,000
Witch Hunt	15th–17th Century	100,000
Spanish Inquisition Spanish Inquisition The Spanish Inquisition was an ecclesiastical tribunal established in 1478 by Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile....	16th–18th Century	350,000
In China	221 BC–19th Century	33,519,000
In Iran	5th–19th Century	>2,000,000
In Russia	10th–19th Century	>1,007,000
In Ottoman Empire Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire , also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey , was an empire that lasted from 1299?1923. It was Treaty of Lausanne by the Republic of Turkey, which was officially proclaimed on October 29, 1923....	12th–19th Century	>2,000,000
In India	13th–19th Century	>4,511,000
Slavery of Africans	1451–1870	17,267,000
In Japan	1570–19th Century	>1,500,000
Native Americans Indigenous peoples of the Americas The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Americas, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who identify with those peoples....	16th–19th Century	13,778,000
French Revolution French Revolution The French Revolution was a period of political and social upheaval and radical change in the history of France, during which the French governmental structure, previously an absolute monarchy with feudalism for the aristocracy and Roman Catholic Church clergy, underwent radical change to forms based on Age of Enlightenment principles of cit...	1793–1794	263,000

**Bloodiest dictators for the millennium.**Rummel, .
Dictator	Dates	Est. Deaths
Qing Dynasty Qing Dynasty The Qing Dynasty , also known as the Manchu Dynasty, followed the Ming Dynasty in History of China, and was the last ruling Chinese Dynasties of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912 .... , mainly Empress Dowager Cixi Empress Dowager Cixi Empress Dowager CixiEmpress Dowager Cixi#Names of Empress Dowager Cixi , popularly known in China as the West Dowager Empress , was from the Manchu Yehe Nara Clan....	1859-64, Tai Ping Rebellion	12,000,000
Genghis Khan Genghis Khan Genghis Khan , born , was the founder, Khan and Khagan of the Mongol Empire, the World's largest empires contiguous empire in history....	1215–1233	4,000,000
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born Germany politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , popularly known as the Nazi Party....	1933–1945	21,000,000
Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek Chiang Kai-shek , Order of the Bath , served as Generalissimo of the Nationalist Government of the Republic of China from 1928 to 1948. He was sometimes referred to simply as "the Generalissimo"....	1921–1948	10,000,000
Kublai Khan Kublai Khan Sorry, no overview for this topic	1252–1279	19,000,000
Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and also known by the pseudonyms V.I. Lenin and N. Lenin, was a Russians revolutionary, a Bolshevik Communism politician, the principal leader of the October Revolution and the first head of the USSR....	1917–1924	4,000,000
Leopold II of Belgium Leopold II of Belgium Leopold II was King of the Belgians. Born in Brussels the second son of Leopold I of Belgium, he succeeded his father to the throne in 1865 and remained king until his death....	1885–1908	10,000,000
Pol Pot Pol Pot Saloth Sar , widely known as Pol Pot, was the leader of the Cambodian communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge and was Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976–1979....	1968–1987	2,000,000
Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin Joseph Stalin was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1953....	1929–1953	43,000,000
Hideki Tojo Hideki Tojo Hideki Tojo was a general in the Imperial Japanese Army and the 40th Prime Minister of Japan during much of World War II, from 18 October 1941 to 22 July 1944....	1941–1945	4,000,000
Mao Zedong Mao Zedong Mao Zedong was a China military and politics dictator. Mao led the Communist Party of China to victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, and was the leader of the People?s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976....	1923–1976	77,000,000

Update on democides

In May 2005, Rummel guessed the number for Darfur Conflict

Darfur conflict

The War in Darfur is a conflict that is in the Darfur region of western Sudan. Unlike the Second Sudanese Civil War, the current lines of conflict are seen by some reporters to be ethnic and tribal, rather than religious....
to be

In November 2005, he estimated the alleged democide in Mao

Mao Zedong

People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the List of countries by population in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population....
(1949–1975) at 73,000,000.

In December 2005, he raised his estimate for colonial democide to 50,000,000 and estimated the democide in the Congo Free State

Congo Free State

External links

- by R.J. Rummel, from his book Death by Government.
- international genocide prevention group; organized 2004 Rwanda Forum at the Imperial War Museum in London.
- Rummel's website.
- Genocide Watch

Democide

Definition

Research on democide

Numbers

Update on democides

See also

External links