Although governments are meant to protect their citizens, secular states in the 20th Century murdered over 169 million of their own citizens!
“Power kills; absolute power kills absolutely. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit Democide… totalitarian Communist governments slaughtered their people by the tens of millions: in contrast, many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute serial murderers.”
“In total, during the first 88 years of the 20th Century, almost 170 million men, women and children had been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, burned or killed in any other of the many ways that governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people… our species has been devastated by a modern black plague…a plague of power, not germs.”
“Stalin, by far, leads the list. He ordered the death of millions, knowingly set in train events leading to the deaths of millions others, and as the ultimate dictator, was responsible for still millions more killed by his henchmen…far above all is the Gulag - the Soviet slave labour system created by Lenin and built up under Stalin. In some 70 years it chewed up almost 40 million lives.”
“Some 40%, are from Asia and the Middle East.” The highest proportion of any regions population were “from the territory of the former Soviet Union.” The Soviet Union and Red China accounted for most of the deaths by government in the 20th Century. “That Stalin, Lenin and their successors murdered almost 62 million Soviet citizens and foreigners is little comprehended outside of the Soviet Union.”
Between 35 million and 105 million people were murdered by the Communist party of China from 1949 to 1987. Some other statistics include that the Japanese in the Second World War murdered 5,890,000 civilians. Tito’s Communist partisans murdered 600,000 in Yugoslavia. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge killed between 2 to 3 million Cambodians. Ottoman Turkey wiped out 1,7 million between 1909 and 1918. Idi Amin’s regime killed over 300,000 civilians in Uganda between 1971 and 1979. The MPLA wiped out 125,000 civilians in Angola (1975-1987). The Communist regime wiped out 1.5 million people in Poland just between 1945 and 1948.
“As the arbitrary power of a regime increases massively…as we move from democratic through authoritarian to totalitarian regimes, the amount of killing jumps by huge multiples.”
“Never has there been a war involving violent military action between stable democracies… democracies don’t, or rarely, make war on each other. To this I would add that the less democratic two states are, the more likely it is they will fight each other.”
Far from governments being the solution to crime and violence, historically governments have been the prime culprits for crime and violence. Far from governments being the solution, they are more often than not the problem. Most government policies to deal with crime and poverty are counter productive, creating more crime and more poverty. No where is this seen more clearly than in the state attempts to disarm civilians. Every genocide and Democide of the 20th Century was preceded by gun control and disarmament of civilians.
Just as criminals prefer unarmed victims, tyrants prefer disarmed citizens. A government that does not trust its citizens with weapons cannot be trusted with power. Freedom is when the government fears the people. Tyranny is when the people fear the government.
No government can be trusted with a monopoly of force. Decentralisation of power, the rule of law and armed citizens are essential foundation for freedom.
Prof. Rummel’s shocking research is presented in: Death By Government in which he coins the term “Democide” for mass murder by governments.
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