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SUPPLEMENT TO THE
NEVER AGAIN SERIES
Never Again
Ending War, Democide,

& Famine
Through Democratic Freedom
R.J. RUMMEL
Llumina Press
Copyright © 2005 R. J. Rummel
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, re-
cording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in
writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of this work should be mailed to
Permissions Department, Llumina Press, PO Box 772246, Coral Springs, FL 33077-
2246
ISBN: 1-59526-138-9
1-59526-131-0
Printed in the United States of America by Llumina Press

Relevant books by R.J. Rummel
Understanding Conflict and War (five volumes)
Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder
since 1917
China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder
since 1900
Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder
Death By Government
Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence
Saving Lives, Enriching Life: Freedom as a Right
and a Moral Good (online book)
Never Again Series (Alternative History)
War and Democide Never Again
Nuclear Holocaust Never Again
Reset Never Again
Red Terror Never Again
Genocide Never Again (forthcoming)
Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine
Through Democratic Freedom
The more power a government has, the more its foreign
violence, democide, and famine.
The more constrained the power of governments, the less
its foreign violence, democide, and famine.
At the extremes of power, despotisms kill, murder, and
starve people by the millions, while many democracies grow
surplus food, and refuse to execute even serial murderers.
Power kills.
Acknowledgements
Again, I owe many thanks to the editing of Marg Gilks. This was an
especially difficult book to edit, but she did it with good humor and
careful attention to details.
I owe more thanks than they know to my close colleagues Douglas
Bond, Harris-Cliché (Pete) Peterson, and Rhee Sang-Woo for their
many comments and suggestions over the years.
Many colleagues, students, and readers of my previous nonfiction
books have unknowingly contributed to this one through their ideas,
comments and suggestions, recommendation of sources, estimates, mate-
rial they passed on to me, data, and their own research. In particular, I
want to thank Rouben Adalian, Dean Babst, Yehuda Bauer, Israel
Charny, William Eckhardt, Wayne Elliott, Helen Fein, Paul Hollander,
Irving Louis Horowitz, Hua Shiping, Guenter Lewy, John Norton
Moore, J. C. Ramaer, James Lee Ray, Storm Russell, Bruce Russett,
Gregory H. Stanton, Robert F. Turner, Jack Vincent, and Spencer Weart.
This book is a summation of my research career. It is appropriate,
therefore, for me to note my profound obligation to those great scholars
and scientists who have had a fundamental impact on my ideas and re-
search: Bertrand de Jouvenel, Friedrich von Hayek, Immanuel Kant,
Karl Popper, Lewis F. Richardson, Ludwig von Mises, Pitirim Sorokin,
Quincy Wright, and Raymond Cattell.
I continue to be indebted to the many visitors to my website at
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ who commented on or questioned the mate-
rial there. They often had an impact on my research and writing.
And foremost, always, is the love of my life, my wife Grace. For
over forty years she has provided the love and supportive environment
that has enabled my research and writing. Come here, baby.
Finally, I must insist. This is my book, and all its errors, mistakes,
and misunderstandings are mine.
CONTENTS
PREFACE 1
Concordance Between Never Again Novels, This Book,
and Website
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 3
Human Security
What Themes Run Through This Book?
PART 1. ON FREEDOM AS A RIGHT 5
CHAPTER 1. Life Without Freedom 7
Table 1.1. How Many People Were Free in 2004?
Sudan
Saudi Arabia
Burma
China
North Korea
Some Other Antifreedom Nations
CHAPTER 2. Universal Human Rights 29
CHAPTER 3. Philosophical Justification of Freedom 35
CHAPTER 4. Freedom as a Social Contract 38
A Convention of Minds
The Global Evolution of Rights
Summary
PART 2. ON DEMOCRACY 48
CHAPTER 5. What Is Democracy? 49
CHAPTER 6. Electoral and Liberal Democracy 51
Table 6.1. Characteristics of Electoral and Liberal
Democracy
CHAPTER 7. An Example of Liberal Democracy: Presi- 54
dent William Jefferson Clinton
CHAPTER 8. About Liberal Democracy 68
CHAPTER 9. Extent of Democracy 71
Extent of Liberal Democracies
Extent of Illiberal Democracies
Conclusion
PART 3. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: WEALTH AND 75
PROSPERITY
CHAPTER 10. Freedom Is an Engine of Wealth and 76
Prosperity
The Moral Good of Wealth and Prosperity
The Example of Bill Gates’ Freedom
CHAPTER 11. The Power of the Free Market 81
Table 11.1. Human and Economic Development by
Level of Freedom, 1998
Figure 11.1. Plot of Standardized Values from Table
11.1
Figure 11.2. Plot of Freedom and Economic
Freedom Rating
CHAPTER 12. The Free Market, Greed, and the 86
Command Economy
CHAPTER 13. Scarcity and Famine: Lenin’s Command 91
Economy
Communism
Lenin’s Nationalization and Famine, 1920–1923
CHAPTER 14. Scarcity and Famine: Stalin’s Command 95
Economy
Collectivization, 1929–1935
Famine by Design, 1932–1933
CHAPTER 15. Scarcity and Famine: Mao’s Command 102
Economy
Murder of Traditional Agriculture: Land Reform
Collectivization: The Commune
Great Leap Downward
The World’s Greatest Famine Ever
CHAPTER 16. Democracy Means No Famine Ever 110
Table 16.1. 20th Century Famine Totals
PART 4. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: MINIMIZING 115
POLITICAL VIOLENCE
CHAPTER 17. The Mexican Revolution 117
Roots of Revolution
Revolution
CHAPTER 18. The Russian Revolution 125
Roots of Revolution
Revolution
CHAPTER 19. Freedom Minimizes Political Violence 135
within Nations
Table 19.1. Freedom and Violence Ratings: Observed
Frequencies
Figure 19.1. The Less Democratic a Regime, the More
Severe Its Internal Political Violence. Selected Sample,
1900–1987
Table 19.2. The Less Democratic a Regime, the More
Severe Its Internal Political Violence. Selected Sample,
1900–1987
PART 5. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: ELIMINATING 144
DEMOCIDE
CHAPTER 20. Democide 145
Table 20.1. Democide, 1900–1987
CHAPTER 21. The Rwandan Great Genocide 150
Background
The Great Genocide
CHAPTER 22. Death by Marxism I: The Khmer Rouge of 159
Cambodia
Background
Rule by Murder
Table 22.1. Conditions of Life Under the Khmer Rouge
CHAPTER 23. Death by Marxism II: Stalin’s Great Terror 172
Prelude to the Great Terror
The Great Terror
CHAPTER 24. Death by Marxism III: Mao’s Cultural 181
Revolution
CHAPTER 25. Power Kills 192
Deadly Communism
Table 25.1. Communist Democide, 1900–1987
Other Mega- and Kilo- Mass Murderers
The Unifying Cause of Democide: Power
PART 6. ON FREEDOM’S MORAL GOODS: ELIMINATING 197
WAR
CHAPTER 26. Battle of the Somme 198
CHAPTER 27. The Democratic Peace 208

Table 27.1. Democratic Versus Nondemocratic Wars,
1816–1991
CHAPTER 28. The Freer the People, the Greater the Peace 213
Figure 28.1. The Less Democratic Two Regimes, the
More Severe Their Wars, 1900–1980
Figure 28.2 The Less Democratic a Regime, the More
Severe Its Foreign Violence. Selected Sample, 1900–
1987
CHAPTER 29. Why the Democratic Peace? 218
PART 7. CONCLUSION 222
CHAPTER 30. Freedom is a Right and Creates Human Se- 223
curity
Table 30.1a. Wealth and Prosperity for 190 Nations by
Level of Freedom, 1997–1998
Table 30.1b. Deaths by Cause and Freedom Rating,
1900–1987
Preface
I wrote the original electronic version of this book for anyone inter-
ested in a solution to war, democide (genocide and mass murder),
famine, and poverty, or in freedom itself. It appears online and as a
pdf file at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE15.HTM. In this extensive
revision, I still have the general reader in mind, but now I also am writ-
ing it as a supplement to my novels in the Never Again Series.
Democratic freedom has an incredible power to solve our most im-
portant problems, and I have sought different ways of communicating
this, including publication of a number of hardcover books; Death By
Government (1994) and Power Kills (1997) are two. I built a large
website (www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) to provide the theory, data,
analyses, sources, and references for what I assert about freedom; on it,
I used photographs of democide and various techniques to make the
numbers dance, all in an effort to help visitors visualize the toll of de-
mocide.
Much impressed by the use of fiction to communicate a message
under the guise of entertainment, as George Orwell did in 1984, I
have now turned to writing novels to spread the word about freedom.
In my Never Again Series, two lovers are sent back in a time ma-
chine to 1906 by a fictitious society of the survivors of war and
democide. Their mission: to prevent the horrors that killed hundreds
of millions of people in the last century, and to promote democratic
freedom to assure a peaceful world. Although trained in martial arts
and provided with modern weapons and incredible wealth, the lovers
run into one difficulty after another in their attempt to change his-
tory. Not the least of their troubles is their naiveté about power, and
its effect on their own lives.
As readers of the series know, each novel in the series places the
characters in an actual historical episode, bent on preventing democide
or revolution, such as the mass murder by the Khmer Rouge in Cambo-
dia, the Cultural Revolution of Mao, and the Stalin-ordered starvation
of millions of Ukrainians. But fiction has to entertain above all, and I
could not weaken this with lectures on the how, why, and context of
what occurred. Nor could I give an extensive lecture on the value and
meaning of democracy and freedom, or, in our age of value relativity,
how one can rightfully promote freedom.
2 R. J. Rummel
So, for the readers of my novels, here is a factual supplement that

does all that. It answers the question: how could the Survivors’ Benevo-
lent Society be so sure that democratic freedom was a solution to the
twentieth century’s major evils—so sure that they nearly exhausted their
vast resources to send two people back to 1906 forever; so sure that the
Society’s head sent her own much-loved adopted daughter. And why
were these two time travelers, one a young professor of history, so con-
vinced of the truth of this solution that they gave up the comforts of the
modern age to live in the primitive past, never to return, and daily risk
their lives with little probability of complete success?
The reader of my novels might consider this a report to the Society
on the democratic solution—part of the documentation that persuaded
them to send the time travelers on a one-way mission to change history.
Moreover, if readers want to learn more about certain events too
briefly described in the novels, the Concordance below should be help-
ful for locating them in this book, or on my website.
Executive Summary
To promote freedom for everyone is to promote human
security for all.
Human Security
H
umanity now has a practical cure for foreign and civil war, de-
mocide (genocide and mass murder), famine and mass hunger,
mass impoverishment, and gross economic inequality. Our ac-
cumulated scientific and scholarly knowledge, and the results of vast
social and economic experiments involving billions of people over
three centuries, now enable us to claim, with the same confidence that
we can say that orange juice is nutritious, that we can create perpetual
peace, long and secure lives, abundant food, wealth, and prosperity.
This is no dream, no utopian claim. This is the well-established
fruit of the free market and human rights, of democratic freedom. The
knowledge of this exists among economists and political scientists
working on these problems. Even some of the highest officials, such as
former President Clinton and current President George W. Bush, know
of, and have acted on, the most surprising claim that fostering freedom
is the way to peace. However, as incredibly important as this knowl-
edge is, it is generally unknown by the public, including the major
media and most professionals outside the relevant research areas.
In Never Again: Ending War, Democide, & Famine Through De-
mocratic Freedom, I’m trying to communicate this knowledge in a way
that everyone can not only assimilate, but understand it. You have a
right to freedom, and it’s important that you know why freedom is so
powerful in saving lives and enriching life.
I have packaged the various threats to human life against which a
people’s freedom protects them by the idea of human security. Human
insecurity, then, involves:
• economic and gender inequality,

• malnourishment and famine,
• poor health and disease,
• domestic turmoil and civil war,
4 R. J. Rummel
• poor health and disease,

• domestic turmoil and civil war,
• foreign war,
• genocide and mass murder.
Freedom is a solution to all these threats—democratic freedom

produces human security. Throughout the various chapters of this
book, and its research links, including that to the results of a systematic
statistical analysis of 190 nations for over 70 variables, I will show this.
What Themes Run Through This Book?

Several themes are repeated throughout this book, and provide the
focus for the chapters. All concern the power of freedom to end or
lessen threats to human security, and to drive human and economic de-
velopment.
• Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United

Nations and international treaties; it is the heart of social
justice.
• Freedom—encompassing free speech and the economic and
social free market—is an engine of economic and human
development, and scientific and technological advancement.
• Freedom ameliorates mass poverty.
• Free nations do not suffer from and never have had famines;
by theory, they should not. Freedom is therefore a solution
to hunger and famine.
• Free nations have the least internal violence, turmoil, and
political instability.
• Free nations (liberal democracies) have virtually no domes-
tic government genocide and mass murder, and for good
theoretical reasons. Freedom is therefore a solution to geno-
cide and mass murder, and the only practical means of
making sure that it happens “never again!”
• Free nations do not make war on each other. The greater the
freedom within two nations, the less violence there is be-
tween them.
• Freedom is a method of nonviolence—the most peaceful na-
tions are those whose people are free.
PART 1
On Freedom As a Right
F
reedom is like your arm—you take it for granted until its loss
reveals its true value. Unfortunately, I do not have the power to
wave my hand and teleport free people to live for a month or so
under a tyranny where the ruling thugs totally repress freedom. The
next best thing is to exemplify what life would be like under such a re-
gime, and so in Chapter 1 we’ll look at Sudan, Burma, China, Saudi
Arabia, and North Korea.
After reading about life in these thugdoms, you may wonder how,
in our age of value relativity, I can condemn such countries. One per-
son’s freedom is another’s slavery, you might say, and we cannot judge
one as bad and the other as good. So, in Chapter 2, we’ll look at the
rights that all people have by virtue of being human beings—their hu-
man rights.
There has been much effort by nations to define what these rights
are and to foster their fulfillment. The United Nations and international
agreements now well describe everyone’s human rights, and in sum
mean that all have the human right to be free. This now has the force of
international law. And from this flows other rights, such as the freedom
of speech, association, and religion.
Though nations have agreed that freedom is a human right, can phi-
losophers justify this right? After all, by their practices and agreements,
nations once accepted slavery. Turning to philosophy in Chapter 3, I
point to several arguments that philosophers make to justify freedom:
legal positivism, natural rights, freedom as a self-evident right, and
utilitarianism.
In Chapter 4, I provide my own argument based on a hypothetical
social contract. We would find, I argue, that virtually all people, blind
to their personal benefits and acting through a hypothetical Convention
of Minds, would agree to a social contract giving each other the right—
the freedom—to choose how they live, and the freedom to leave any
community in which they live. And the circumstances of this decision
make these socially just rights. We also find that millennia of human
6 R. J. Rummel
evolution have produced similar rights among nations, specifically the

right any people have to sovereign self-determination and free immi-
gration.
In sum, these chapters will show that legally, morally, and by the
practice of nations, then, people should be free. And to further and
guard this freedom, a country should be democratic.
Chapter 1
Life Without Freedom
Power kills and impoverishes life.
B illions of people live without freedom, as shown in Table 1.1,

below. In the worst of these countries, they live in fear and inse-
curity. They are literally slaves, bought and sold, or effectively
the slaves of their governments. They are hungry, starving, or diseased.
They live in primitive refugee camps, suffer under torture or the imme-
diate threat of death, or soon die of untreated diseases. They are
prisoners, inmates of concentration camps, or internees in death camps.
They are soldiers subject to the most barbarous treatment or involved in
lethal combat. They are children performing dangerous forced labor.
They are civilians cowering under bombing and shelling. They are
women who, considered second-class citizens, cannot leave their
homes without the permission of their husbands, and then must com-
pletely cover themselves and be accompanied by a male relative. They
are the aged and infirm that barely subsist under dangerous environ-
mental conditions.
Table 1.1
How Many People Were Free in 2004?
World's population
Rating* Nations Total (Bil.) %
Free 88 2.78 44
Partially Free 55 1.32 21
Not Free 49 2.21 35
* From Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org)

8 R. J. Rummel
Even those who escape all this still live under the very real threat
that war, revolution, disease, famine, extreme poverty and deprivation,
or a dictator may destroy their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. So
they live in fear of arrest and prison, of disappearing forever, of forced
labor, genocide, mass murder, and an unnatural death.
Even in countries that are partially free, people still may be arbitrar-
ily arrested, subjected to torture, executed without a fair trial, spied upon,
and denied even basic rights because of their race, religion, or national-
ity. Criticize the government—especially its dictator or leader—and
death may follow.
Sudan
All this is abstract—simple words. Yet such abstractions are ulti-
mately personal. Sudan is a case in point. It is an Arab Muslim nation
larger than the United States, whose people make on the average $940 a
1
year (purchasing power parity ), have a life expectancy of fifty-seven
years, and are among the least free in the world. Witness what hap-
pened to Acol Bak, a member of the Dinka tribe who lived in the
southern village of Panlang.
Arabs attacked her village, killing her father, and though her mother
escaped, they seized her and her brother. They were forced to walk
north for three days to the village of Goos, carrying on their heads the
goods stolen by their captors. They were given no food, and were able
to drink only from filthy ponds along the way. Their captors then sepa-
rated Acol Bak and her brother and sold them separately to different
Arabs—yes, sold them, as people were sold in the sixteenth century
slave trade. She would never see her brother again.
Her Arab master had a wife and daughter who forced her to work
from morning to evening; in Acol’s words, “I was the only slave in that
house. If I said I was tired, I was beaten by all of them.” She bore the
scars of those beatings, and had her arm broken. Her accommodations
were simple—outside and without bedding. Though she was only eight
years old, her Arab master had her circumcised, in accord with Muslim
tradition, and with no anesthetic.
But unlike so many slaves, Acol was in luck. A foreign Christian
1 Purchasing power parity (ppp) equates the currencies in different countries so that
$1,000 will buy the same kind and amount of goods in each country. Thus, a purchas-
ing power parity of $940 ppp provides the same ability to buy goods and services in
Sudan as it does in the United States, Mexico, Japan, or any other country.
Never Again Supplement 9
group, who secretly entered the Sudan for this purpose, bought Acol
with 248 other slaves and set them free. Although this policy of buying
the freedom of slaves is controversial and may encourage more slavery,
she did not care. She was free. She could return to her village where her
2
mother was waiting.
This happened in our modern age—not in the seventeenth or eight-
eenth century, but in the 1990s.
Not all of the people forced into slavery were children. Soldiers
raped one forty-year-old woman, Akec Kwol, and took her north to a
slave market, where they sold her like an animal. Her slave owner also
tried to circumcise her, but she resisted and got herself slashed with a
knife and scarred. Had she not finally submitted, she later explained,
“They would have killed me. Because I was a slave, they had the right
3
to do whatever they wanted to me.”
And then among the thousands of other slaves, there was Victoria
Ajang, a Sudanese now living in the United States. She testified before
Congress regarding her escape from slavery: “On a summer night, the
government militia forces suddenly swooped in on our village. We
were at home relaxing, in the evening, when men on horses with ma-
chine guns stormed through, shooting everyone. I saw friends fall dead
in front of me. While my husband carried out our little daughter Eva, I
ran with the few possessions I could grab. All around us, we saw chil-
dren being shot in the stomach, in the leg, between the eyes. Against
the dark sky, we saw flames from the houses the soldiers had set on
fire. The cries of the people forced inside filled our ears as they burned
4
to death. Our people were being turned to ash.” She and her family
escaped by jumping into a nearby river.
Buying and selling slaves in the Sudan is, ironically, a free market.
There is no monopoly or government control over prices, which vary
according to supply. In 1989, for example, a slave cost $90, but within
a year, the increase in slave raids caused the price to plummet to $15.
This is about equal to the cost of pruning shears at my local hardware
store.
How can such slavery exist in this age of the Internet and space ex-
ploration? It is part of a civil war between the Arab Islamic North,
ruled by a fundamentalist Muslim dictator, and a majority black South.
2 Linda Slobodian, The Slave Trail, 1997. See:

www.vitrade.com/slave_trail/home.htm
3 Karin Davies, “Slave Trade Thrives in Sudan” at:
www.domini.org/openbook/sud80210.htm
4 Nat Hentoff, “A Sudanese Woman Tells Her Story: Our People Were Turned to
Ash” at: www.villagevoice.com/issues/0013/hentoff.php
10 R. J. Rummel
This war began in 1989 when Lt. General Umar Hassan Ahmad al-
Bashir and the Arab-led Sudanese People’s Armed Forces overthrew
the democratic government in power at that time and imposed strict
Muslim law and faith on the whole country. Sudan’s population is
about 35 million people, of which Sunni Muslims are about 70 percent,
mainly in the North. Some 5 percent of the population, mostly southern
blacks, is Christian. The rest of the 6 million living in the South are
animist, attributing conscious life to nature and natural objects. The
South had a protected and special constitutional status under the de-
mocratic government, but with its overthrow and especially with the
effort of the new regime to impose Muslim law throughout the country,
the South revolted and a bloody civil war resulted.
To defeat the South and motivate its Arab tribal militia to fight, the
North made slaves part of their compensation, along with whatever
they could loot, and gave Arab soldiers carte blanche to commit rape.
Of course, old people did not fit into this scheme, since they are good
neither as slaves nor for rape, so they were beaten up, if not killed.
Young men were usually marched off to slavery, unless for some rea-
son they were unsuitable, then they also were killed. According to the
Muslim faith, all non-Muslim southerners, whether man or woman, old
or young, are infidels. They have no rights, even to life. They may be
killed as a matter of course, enslaved, raped, and deprived of their pos-
sessions.
In this civil war, bombing from the air killed many living in heavily
populated areas of the South; even schools were bombed and children
killed. Hospitals did not escape. There were many bombing attacks on
the Samaritan’s Purse, the largest hospital in southern Sudan. Bombers
often attacked other medical facilities as well, sometimes with cluster
bombs. Even more monstrous, the North bombed the wells that pro-
vided southerners’ water, as well as the sites of foreign relief supplies
that included food for the starving southerners. All this, in addition to
the regime’s socialist economic policies, has contributed to a massive
famine.
But because they live under a fundamentalist Muslim regime, even
northern Sudanese far from the civil war enjoy few human rights. For
example, the government harasses and monitors women for correct
dress, forbidding even slacks. Women who dare to defy the law risk
arrest, conviction by an Islamic court of immoral dressing, and flog-
ging, as recently happened to nine women students. Women also
cannot hold any public office that would give them authority over Mus-
lim men, nor can they marry a non-Muslim.
Neither men nor women have freedom of speech or religion—all
must accept the Muslim faith. To further religious rule, the government
appoints only Muslims to the judiciary. Police can arrest and imprison
any commoner for up to six months without trial, and while detained,
suspects can expect officials to torture them as a matter of course.
Worst of all, a Muslim dare not convert to another religion, for the pun-
ishment for doing so is death.
By 1999, 20,000 to 40,000 Sudanese were enslaved and nearly 4
million displaced from their homes and villages—the largest number
for any country. Many more Sudanese simply gave up on the country.
Over 352,000 had fled, escaping the fate of some 1.5 to 2 million who
died as a result of the war, famine, or disease, or were murdered in cold
blood by Muslim forces or rebels.
As of this writing, a preliminary peace agreement has just been
signed between the regime and the southern-based rebels. There have
been a number of such attempts at peace, and whether this one will
succeed remains to be seen. Regardless, however, of its success or fail-
ure, the bloody and tyrannical regime of President Ahmad al-Bashir
will continue to exist in Khartoum and deny Sudanese even the most
basic human rights.
Now we have Darfur, a new democidal crises in the western region
of Sudan. Perhaps over 350,000 people have been murdered outright or
died as a result of the Muslim's dictator's war on those in Darfur alone,
and possibly at least 2,000 people are dying of famine and associated
diseases or being murdered there every day.
Saudi Arabia
Sudan was a country at war with itself, and afflicted with govern-
ment-created famine and disease. What about a country at peace, like
Saudi Arabia? It also is an Arab Muslim country, with 22 million people
who have a life expectancy of sixty-eight years, a much higher annual
income of $9,000 (purchasing power parity), and who live under the rule
of an absolute monarchy. Life is better than in Sudan in that there is no
war, rebellion, or famine killing hundreds of thousands of people. But as
in Sudan, Saudis still suffer one kind of repression or another.
There is no freedom of speech in Saudi Arabia. Police may arrest
Saudis for the most minor criticism of the ruling monarchy, the Saudi
king or any royal personage, or the Muslim religion. People live in fear
that something said or done in innocence will land them in prison and get
them tortured and flogged. The authorities might even cut off a person’s
head.
12 R. J. Rummel
Even trying to be honest can be dangerous. One poor fellow, Ab-

dul-Karim al-Naqshabandi, apparently refused to help his employer by
giving false testimony. In retaliation, his well-connected employer had
him framed and arrested for a crime he did not commit. To get a con-
fession, the police tied him up like an animal and beat and tortured him.
He finally signed a confession to end the misery, and to get someone
outside to hear his case. Even then, the police allowed no one to visit
him in prison. And although he could present considerable evidence
proving his innocence and provide the names of defense witnesses, the
court would not give him the right to defend himself. He was sentenced
to death and executed in 1996.
King Fahd Bin Abd Al-Aziz Al Saud’s power is absolute. There are
no national elections, no legislature, and no political parties. All are
illegal. The country’s constitution, by the king’s decree, is the Koran,
Islam’s holy book. Its precepts are law. What this means for average
Saudis is that they had better be Muslim and of a particular type, called
Sunni (minority Shiite Muslims are always at risk of arrest and deten-
tion), and that they must obey religious law. They dare not change their
Muslim religion or, by law, the courts can have them executed. They
must not question the Muslim religion or the monarchy.
Just consider the two Sunni Moslems, Sheikh Salman bin Fahd al-
’Awda and Sheikh Safr ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Hawali. To make them re-
pent for their “extremist ideas,” the police arrested them in September
1994. Security forces worked them over year after year, until a court
tried them in June of 1999, virtually five years later.
As long as they are careful over what they say and do, life is easier
for Muslim men. The country’s near totalitarian, religious rule espe-
cially enslaves women, who comprise roughly half the population. The
Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote Virtue, the Mutawaa’in, or
religious police, watch over every woman’s behavior for violations of
religious law, which they strictly enforce. This has created a harsh and
rigid apartheid system against women. In public, they must wear an
abaya, a garment that fully covers their body. It can be of any color, as
long as it is black. The religious police keep a close watch that women
also cover their head and face.
The unfortunate case of Nieves, a Filipina maid, provides one ex-
ample of how these religious police work. She accepted a married
couple’s invitation to a restaurant to celebrate a birthday. By chance, a
male friend of the couple also joined the celebration. The religious po-
lice happened by and, after spying on the group, arrested Nieves on
suspicion of being there to meet the male—a clear immoral act. While
under arrest she denied this, but since she could not read Arabic, au-
thorities tricked her into signing a confession she thought was a release
order. This gave the court enough excuse to convict her of an offense
against public morals and to sentence her to sixty lashes and twenty-
five days in prison.
Then there was the Filipina Donato Lama. The police arrested her
in 1995 for suspicion of committing the unpardonable crime of preach-
ing Christianity. In a revealing letter about her later beating and
confession, she wrote, “I was at my most vulnerable state when the po-
lice again pressured me to admit or else I would continue receiving the
beating. ‘We will let you go if you sign this paper. If not, you may as
well die here.’ Badly bruised and no longer able to stand another beat-
ing, I agreed to put my thumbmark on the paper not knowing what it
5
was I was signing.” The court sentenced her to seventy lashes plus
eighteen months in prison.
Women cannot travel abroad or even on public transportation with-
out the permission of a male relative. Even then, they must enter buses
by a separate rear entrance and sit in the women’s section. The govern-
ment forbids them to drive a car, or even walk outside by themselves.
Their husband or a male relative must accompany them, or for so “of-
fending public morals,” the religious police will arrest them. Nor can
women play any role in the king’s government.
Most important, the police ignore the violence frequently commit-
ted against women, especially that committed by their husbands. Even
harder to believe, severely injured women must still have the permis-
sion of a male relative to enter a hospital. The testimony of one man
in court is worth that of two women. Men can divorce women without
cause while women must give legal reasons. In school, women may
not study many subjects restricted to men, such as engineering and
journalism.
In the words of feminist Andrea Dworkin, writing in 1978 but still
applicable today,
Women are locked in and kept out, exiled

to invisibility and abject powerlessness
within their own country. It is women who
are degraded systematically from birth to
early death, utterly and totally and without
exception deprived of freedom. It is women
who are sold into marriage or concubinage,
often before puberty; killed if their hymens
5 Amnesty International at: www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/briefing/3.html

14 R. J. Rummel
are not intact on the wedding night; kept

confined, ignorant, pregnant, and poor,
without choice or recourse. It is women
who are raped and beaten with full sanction
of the law. It is women who cannot own
property or work for a living or determine
in any way the circumstances of their own
lives. It is women who are subject to a des-
6
potism that knows no restraint.
Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and non-Muslims, as well as

the enforcement of religious rule over male Muslims, is the norm
among the sheikdoms of the Middle East. We also saw this religious
absolutism in fundamentalist Sudan. Algeria and Iran share it to a cer-
tain extent. Even in nonfundamentalist Muslim countries such as Egypt
and Pakistan, governments deny human rights and women are second-
class citizens.
Before the American-led alliance defeated the Taliban regime of
Afghanistan in 2002, it even exceeded Saudi Arabia in its harsh and
barbaric application of the Koran, denial of human rights, and savage
suppression of women. The courts could even sentence women to death
for adultery, as was the woman simply identified as Suriya by Taliban-
run Radio. After convicting her of adultery in April 2000, officials took
her to a sports stadium and stoned her to death in front of thousands of
spectators. There are few other ways the Taliban could have picked to
execute a person that are more cruel, inhumane, and prolonged. There
was no word on what happened to the man involved in the affair, if
anything.
The best label for the lives of all women in these Muslim countries
is pseudo-slavery. Its only difference from real slavery is that the gov-
ernment does not allow men to buy and sell women. Otherwise, women
are under the complete control of the government, their fathers, and
their husbands.
Burma
While the fear, insecurity, and risk that common people experience
in daily life in the Sudan and Saudi Arabia exists in many other Muslim
countries, life can be even worse in some non-Muslim ones, such as
6 Andrea Dworkin, “Take Back The Day,” 1978. At:

www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIC.html
Burma (Myanmar). The 42.7 million people in this South Asian coun-
try are 89 percent Buddhist, have a life expectancy of fifty-five years,
and earn in purchasing power parity $1,200 a year. They are ruled by a
socialist military regime, which allows no freedom. Life here is hellish,
due to the military’s savage repression of dissent, and their barbaric
response to the rebellion of nearly a dozen ethnic minorities.
In the nine villages of Dweh Loh Township, northwest of Rangoon
and near the Thai border, the Karen ethnic group has long been fighting
for independence. During harvest time in March 2000, military forces
attacked the villages, burned down homes, and destroyed or looted pos-
sessions. By sheer luck, some of the villagers managed to flee into the
forest, leaving behind their rice and possessions and risking starva-
tion—starvation made almost inevitable by the military’s burning of
crops and rice storage barns. Soldiers even torched the cut scrub needed
to prepare the soil for planting. Those who remained in the village who
were not killed were seized for forced labor or portering, or pressed
into the military. That done, the soldiers mined all approaches to the
village to prevent the villagers from returning.
Soldiers kill any male suspected of being a rebel. These are not all
easy deaths. Sometimes soldiers gruesomely torture the victim and pro-
long death to cause as much agony as possible. Women or young girls
are only marginally better off—the soldiers “only” rape them. Then
they march them, along with the children and the village men left alive,
to work sites to build barracks, defensive works, roads, railroads, or
fences, or carry bamboo and firewood. Alternatively, the soldiers force
them to porter ammunition and military supplies like mules. This is the
most dangerous form of forced labor and many die from it.
Even the children do not escape. Soldiers routinely make them do
such arduous labor, or even soldier. Worse, the military sell the girls
into prostitution in Burma or into the Thai sex market across the border,
which already exploits the bodies of 40,000 Burmese girls. Worse still,
the military have forced children to walk ahead of soldiers to trigger
mines. No military have used human bodies to clear mines like this
since World War II, when the Soviets often compelled prisoners to
sweep minefields with their feet.
Even for those Burmese children not forced into labor and portering,
general conditions are disastrous for their future and that of the country.
Even children living outside the civil war zones are unlikely to go to
school. No more than one in five get so much as four years of primary
school. They are more likely to be working at some job to help their fam-
ily survive. According to UN estimates, about one-third of all children
six to fifteen years of age are doing so. Many children do not survive to
adulthood—half of all those that die each year are children.
16 R. J. Rummel
In the civil war zones, children and adults alike routinely live on the
edge of death. For example, anyone living in the township of Dweh
Loh that contained the nine villages I mentioned, had an equal chance
of doing forced labor, being looted, or suffering extortion by soldiers
on the one hand, or of fleeing into the forests on the other. Those living
in other townships throughout this area probably escaped to the forests
to barely survive there on whatever food they could grow. Were sol-
diers to find these refugees, they might shoot them or make them porter
under threat of death.
Life was no better for those living in the Nyaunglebin District to the
west, where handpicked execution squads of soldiers operated off and
on in the area, searching for rebels or their supporters. If these soldiers
suspected a villager of even the most minor contact with rebel forces, if
a villager was even seen talking to someone suspected of being a rebel,
they usually cut his throat. Sometimes the soldiers also decapitated the
victim and mounted the head on a pole as a warning to others.
This would have been an easy death compared to what soldiers
did to three men they captured in Plaw Toh Kee, as reported by a
7
villager there. No matter that these were simple farmers and cattle
breeders, thought good men by the villagers and the village head.
The soldiers suspected them of working for the rebels and that was
enough. They forced the three men to stand against trees for days
without food or water, beat them and punched them in the face be-
cause they could not answer any questions about the rebels, and then
systematically made one-inch slices all over their bodies. Then the
soldiers cut out their intestines, pushed the mess back into their
stomachs, and kept these poor souls in this condition until finally
killing them.
This is only one atrocity in many that I could recount as this civil
war takes its toll on unarmed and peaceful villagers living in one civil
war zone or another. There are around sixty-seven different ethnic
groups in Burma, each with its own language and culture, many of
which have rebelled and are fighting the military government.
With more or less ferocity, these rebellions have been going on
since 1948, with a death toll of 200,000 or even possibly 400,000 Bur-
mese. Both sides have also murdered outright an additional 100,000 to
200,000 Burmese. Moreover, rebellion, fighting, and brutal military
pressure on the Burmese people have caused 500,000 to 1 million of
them to be displaced within the country, many of whom the military
7 An Independent Report by the Karen Human Rights Group, March 31, 2000. At:
www.ibiblio.org/freeburma/humanrights/khrg/archive/khrg2000/khrg0002.html
have commanded to live in inhospitable forced location zones. Others

have escaped relocation for bare subsistence in the forests, bereft of
home or village. Still 215,000 others have fled abroad and are formally
listed as refugees by international refugee organizations. An added
350,000 Burmese are without refugee status and subsist in refugee-like
conditions in neighboring Thailand.
The vast majority of Burmese, however, live far away from the civil
war zones and are not members of the rebelling minority ethnic groups.
They have other things to fear. Burma is a military dictatorship, and
this regime is willing to use its weapons on unarmed people who pro-
test or demonstrate. When students demonstrated against the regime on
July 7, 1962, soldiers shot one hundred of them to death. On August
13, 1967, soldiers similarly shot over a hundred demonstrating men and
women, and even the children that accompanied them. And so on and
on, from demonstration to demonstration, until the worst of them all.
On August 8, 1988, doctors, students, teachers, farmers, musicians,
artists, monks, and workers took part in peaceful, pro-democracy dem-
onstrations in all major cities. The military demanded that the
demonstrators disperse, and when they would not, soldiers fired round
after round into the crowds. They massacred an incredible 5,000 to
10,000 unarmed people simply trying to express their desire for democ-
racy. Soldiers and police then arrested hundreds of those escaping this
bloodbath, and tortured them in prison. Many thousands escaped to
border areas, leaving their loved ones, homes, and possessions behind.
Those Burmese who stay home, avoid demonstrations, and arouse
no suspicion might still be conscripted by the military for forced labor
or porter duty. Socialist in mind and spirit, the military have been ambi-
tious in building railways, roads, airports, and so on. And to do so, they
simply draft civilians. For example, those who lived near the route of
the 110 mile e-Tavoy railway, built by the military in southern Burma,
were among the 200,000 people that soldiers forced to work on the pro-
ject for fifteen days a month without pay. Then there were the 30,000
the military conscripted for the Bassein Airport extension. Those who
missed this might have been among the over 920,000 the military com-
pelled to labor on the Chaung Oo-Pakokku Railroad.
For those living close to the soil, wholly dependent on what they
can grow to eat, time is food. When the military force these civilians to
work for days without pay, even bare survival is difficult. For many,
the only choice is to flee or shirk work. But then the military’s punish-
ment for not doing the work can be even worse, as reported by one
refugee.
Then the soldiers came to my house
and poked my wife in the side with a rifle
18 R. J. Rummel
butt. They kicked her hard in the stomach,

and she vomited blood. Then they kicked
my baby son down into the fire, and all the
hair on his head was burnt. They slapped
my seven-year-old son in the face and he
cried out. They beat them because I had
8
escaped.
Those who do the forced labor have to sleep at the work site,
guarded, and without much shelter—sometimes none. The ground is
their only bed. To go to the toilet they have to get permission from a
guard. Their only food is what the workers themselves can bring. And
they have to be sure not to be injured, because there is seldom any
medical care. They also can die, as many do, from sickness or ex-
haustion. If they try to escape from the work site and soldiers catch
them, if they are lucky, the soldiers will only severely beat them. Just
resting without permission can get them beaten and killed by guards.
This happened to Pa Za Kung, a man from Vomkua village in Chin
State’s Thantlang Township, doing forced labor on a road from
Thantlang to Vuangtu village.
But portering is even worse than forced labor. The military make
those living in war zones porter for them, but since as many as two por-
ters are needed for each soldier to move much of their supplies and
equipment, people living outside the war zones are also conscripted. Por-
ters suffer from hunger, malnutrition, disease, and exhaustion. Rebel fire
kills them, they step on mines, or soldiers shoot them because they can-
not force their bodies to work any longer. Or soldiers simply abandon
them with no medical care, no food, no help, no way home. All told, this
is another form of slavery suffered by millions of Burmese.
Burmese generally have no rights other than to serve the military.
This might have changed in 1990, when the military caved in to con-
siderable international pressure resulting from their 1988 massacre of
pro-democracy demonstrators, and held real democratic elections—
and were shocked when the democratic opposition, under the leader-
ship of 1991 Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, won 82 percent
of the seats in the new parliament. The military then refused to yield
power, and have held Aung San Suu Kyi under virtual house arrest
ever since. They also arrested and tortured thousands of her support-
8 “A Comprehensive Response To Burmese Refugee and Displaced People Problem,”

The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia Joint Standing Committee of For-
eign Affairs, Defense and Trade, October 5, 1994.
ers and members of other political parties, and have killed or disap-
peared thousands more. They even arrested hundreds of those elected
to parliament, some of whom died under the harsh prison conditions.
Member-elect Kyaw Min, for example, died of hepatitis caused by his
imprisonment.
Having learned their lesson about the power of the democratic idea,
the military no longer allow political activity or criticism. There is no
freedom of speech or association. In this Buddhist country, the military
keep a watch on Buddhist monks and prevent their involvement in po-
litical activity. They also restrict the leaders of other religions. There
can be no unions. Just having a computer modem can lead to arrest, tor-
ture, and a fifteen-year prison sentence. Having a fax machine may
even mean death, as it did for the Anglo-Burmese San Suu Kyi, who
was honorary Consul for the European Union. No independent courts
exist, and the law is what the military command. The military monitor
the movements of common citizens, search their homes at any time,
and take them forcibly from their homes to be relocated, without com-
pensation or explanation.
Nor are Burmese free to start a business or invest. Since 1962,
when the military overthrew the democratic government, the military
have pursued a “Burmese Way to Socialism.” This has left little room
for private businesses and a free market, and companies run by the
military dominate many areas of the economy, leaving as the most vig-
orous sector of the economy the heroin trade. This alone may account
for over 50 percent of the economy.
The result is what one would expect. Among all countries, Burma
has plummeted to near the bottom in economic freedom, possibly better
than only communist North Korea. And the country is nearly bankrupt.
However, perhaps having learned from this economic disaster, the mili-
tary are now trying to liberalize their economic control and have invited
foreign investment.
China
Burma is a small country, tucked beneath the mass of China to the
north. China has more than 1.26 billion people, about 20 percent of the
world’s population, living under a communist dictatorship. They have a
life expectancy of seventy years, and a purchasing power parity of
$3,800 (1999 estimate). Is life any better than in Burma, Saudi Arabia,
or Sudan? This depends on when in the twentieth century one was born
there. If a decade or so ago, yes. But anytime before then, no.
Before then, many Chinese died from disease or starvation, or were
killed by soldiers in one of the hundreds of battles fought between war-
20 R. J. Rummel
lords. And with the communist takeover of the whole country in 1949,
tens of millions of Chinese were murdered in cold blood during the
Communist Party’s national campaigns, such as Land Reform, Sup-
pression of Counterrevolutionaries, Three and Five Antis, Collectivi-
zation, and the Cultural Revolution.
Those who survived this monstrous bloodbath could well have
starved to death in the famine caused by the Party’s “Great Leap For-
ward” industrialization campaign, and the collectivization of all
peasants into communes for factory-like farming. This famine occurred
in the late 1950s and continued into the early 1960s; it was the world’s
worst ever. As many as 40 million Chinese might have starved to death
or died from related diseases. This alone is over twice the 15 million
killed in combat during World War II, including combatants from
Germany, the Soviet Union, Japan, China, the United States, and Great
Britain. All this I have detailed in my book on China’s Bloody Century.
Life is better now for the average Chinese. Relatively. The Com-
munist Party now largely leaves peasants alone to farm as they see fit
and to sell their food. There is more freedom, especially, to pursue a
business or invest. The Party is trying to liberalize the economy and
give greater reign to private ambition and foreign investment. What
was a deeply impoverished country in the 1960s, possibly even worse
than Burma, is now rapidly developing its economy. Moreover, Chi-
nese are freer from Party controls, rules, intervention, and especially
Party attempts to remake their lives and culture.
Though it does so with a milder and more tolerant hand, the Com-
munist Party still controls all aspects of government—it is the
government. It is supreme; it shares power with no legislative body, no
courts, no military, nor any other group. No one elects high Party lead-
ers; they rise through power struggles within the Party. And except for
those parts of the economy, culture, and family over which its policy is
being liberalized, there still is little that Chinese can do without Party
permission. It allows virtually no freedom of speech or association. Nor
does it permit the Chinese to protest or demonstrate. And whatever
their religious faith, the Party tightly controls it or makes it illegal.
Look at what happened to practicing members of the Jesus Family,
a Protestant sect of which the Party does not approve. In 1992, police
surrounded and arrested sixty-one members attending a monthly com-
mune service in Duoyigou, Shandong Province. The police destroyed
their village and confiscated all church belongings. A court eventually
sentenced some of the members to between one and twelve years in
prison for, among other things, taking part in an “illegal” religious
meeting. The court gave the sect’s leader and his sons the heaviest sen-
tence of all for “swindling,” because they were so bold as to collect
contributions for the church’s annual Christmas celebration. Even if

church members avoided prison, the police might harass them years
later. After these people rebuilt their village, police sealed it off and
those entering or leaving had to pay five yuan. Yuan Hongbing and
Wang Jiaqi, two legal scholars, believed this was unjust and tried to
help the sect take legal recourse, which only resulted in the police ar-
resting them as well.
Even Catholics have suffered repression; many can only practice
their religion underground. The Party considers Catholicism a “for-
eign, imperialist” import and has tried to keep it under tight control,
arresting bishops and priests and burning their churches. In some
places, churches are disguised as factories so that Catholics can pray
at secret services.
As part of Party persecution of the Falun Gong sect (to members, it
is not a religion), police are likely to arrest any Chinese who practice its
combination of Taoism and Buddhism, and the meditation and martial
arts techniques that lead members to a spiritual melding of mind, spirit,
and body. There are as many as 100 million adherents in China, though
the Party claims that no more than 2.1 million belong. Clearly, how-
ever, sect leaders can bring together many members quickly. On April
25, 1999, for example, a mass of 10,000 followers stood quietly in front
of the compound housing the top Party leaders in Beijing.
Police have already arrested over a hundred sect leaders and thou-
sands of its adherents for what, until recently, the Party labeled a
“counterrevolutionary crime,” and has renamed in less political terms a
“crime disturbing social order.” The Party recently held over 35,000
Falun Gong members in detention or in prison, and has tortured many.
It has sent some 5,000 additional members to labor camps without trial.
At least eighty-nine Falun Gong have died due to Party mistreatment.
Though this number is small and seems irrelevant in such a huge
country, for each of the eighty-nine and those who loved them, it was
terribly real. Sixty-year-old Chen Zixiu is a case in point. She traveled
to Beijing to request that the Party lift its restrictions on the Falun
Gong. The police arrested her, then beat and tortured her. Her aging
body could not take it, and she was dead in four days. When her fam-
ily collected her corpse, they found bruises all over her body, broken
teeth, and dried blood in her ears.
Another woman, Zhao Xin, a professor at Beijing’s Industry and
Commerce University, died from a beating she received after her arrest
for practicing Falun Gong breathing exercises in a Beijing park.
The Party cannot leave alone even that which most people regard
as superstitions or simply good health exercises. In a crackdown on
a group of Qi Gong practitioners, for example, over 21,000 have
22 R. J. Rummel
been arrested for nothing more than fostering breathing and medita-
tion exercises.
Action against unapproved sects or religious groups is simply an
example of the Party’s continuous campaign to suppress anything of
which it does not approve—be it association, speech, unions, or move-
ments. In China, there can be no association without Party permission,
no nonprofit organization without registration. The Party must license
all newspapers, magazines, and other publications, and no book can be
published without Party approval. Censorship is common. There are
even Party guidelines for publications, such as requiring that newspaper
stories be 80 percent positive, 20 percent negative.
Disseminating or selling unapproved literature can lead to a long
prison sentence. For example, police arrested two Beijing bookstore
owners, sisters Li Xiaobing and Li Xiaomei, for selling Falun Gong
publications, and a court sentenced them to six or seven years. The po-
lice even arrested the environmental journalist Dai Qing, who
justifiably criticized a mammoth dam-building project on the Yangtze
River, which will create the world’s largest hydroelectric dam and dis-
place one to two million people. A court sentenced him to ten months
in prison and forbade him to publish in the future. Even for simply
making a list of those convicted of protest-connected offenses—just a
list—a court sentenced one fellow, Li Hai, to nine months in prison.
After all, convictions are a “high-level state secret.”
Arrest and incarceration in prison, a labor camp, or a psychiatric
hospital, forced drugging, brainwashing, psychological torture, physical
torment, execution, a simple beating—all are Party tools. Their purpose
is to control the Chinese population, advance Party policies, and main-
tain Party power through fear. There is no humanity in any of this. Note
how the prison authorities treated the forty-two-year-old woman Cheng
Fengrong. They handcuffed her to a tree and beat her, made her stand in
the snow barefoot while they kicked her, and finally poured cold water
over her head, which ran down her body and turned to ice at her feet.
Aside from the Party’s great concern over what Chinese say and
whom they associate with, there is still more reason why one would not
want to be born in China. The Party also deems restricting population
growth to be vital. It therefore forcibly intrudes into the core of a fam-
ily’s soul—the desire to have children. Since 1979, the Party has dictated
who will have no more than one child, a policy largely applied to Han
Chinese (comprising 92 percent of the population) living in urban areas.
To prevent women from having a second child, the Party might sterilize
them or, if they’re pregnant, force them to undergo an abortion. If there
are many pregnant women in an area, or just to ensure that there are no
second children, Party officials might enforce a local “Clean Out the
Stomach Campaign” involving house-to-house examinations and forced
abortions. If a woman still somehow manages to have a second child, the
couple would likely be fined, and the child would be discriminated
against and not allowed to attend the better schools.
What happened to the owner of a small clothing store is an example
of the trouble a second pregnancy might cause. I will name her Woman
X, since she is now a refugee and fears harm if the Party knows her
name. After she had her first child, officials ordered her to use an in-
trauterine device to prevent another pregnancy. She did so for a while,
but because of connected health problems, secretly removed it—and
got pregnant. When they found out about this, Party officials fined her
and forced her to undergo an abortion. The fine was too much for her
meager resources to cover, and she could not pay it. Officials then
seized her store. Penniless and distraught, she borrowed what money
she could from relatives and fled alone, deserting her husband, child,
and mother.
The result of the Party’s one-child policy was predictable in an
Asian, male-oriented society. If a Chinese woman believed her first fe-
tus to be female, she might well abort it. The second try might yield a
male. If a female were born, the mother or her husband might murder
or abandon it. Infanticide was naturally prevalent, and sometimes even
encouraged by Party authorities. The result was that there were about
119 males born for every 100 females. It has led to playgrounds filled
with masses of boys, few girls, and no siblings.
For traditional Chinese families, the end result is even worse. Who
will take care of the aged parents? This has led to a Party reconsidera-
tion of the policy. One resulting reform is to permit families to have
two children, if both parents are from single-child families.
With the liberalization of some controls, a much freer market, and
less emphasis on remaking the society and culture, the Party now exe-
cutes far fewer people than it did decades ago. Still, the numbers are
very high by international standards. As expected, how many people
the Party executes or otherwise kills without a fair trial and for political
or religious “crimes” is unknown and difficult to estimate. Going by
what the outside world knows, however, in just the one year of 1996
the Party executed at least 4,367 people. With a little more than 20 per-
cent of the world’s population, and going only by documented
executions, the Party performs about 75 to 80 percent of all known ju-
dicial executions in the world.
Nor can Chinese expect a decent burial if executed. As the still-
warm body lies on the ground after being shot in the back of the head,
doctors brought for this purpose will likely cut out the organs and rush
24 R. J. Rummel
these to a hospital, without the prior consent of the executed or the fam-
ily. At the hospital, doctors will transplant the organs into well-paying
foreigners or the elite, or prepare the organs for shipment, so the Party
can sell them in the international transplant market for much-needed
hard currency. An American Chinese-language newspaper even adver-
9
tised such organs for sale—one negotiated price was $30,000.
Executions are the result of official court sentences, but Chinese
also die “off the record” from beatings, torture, or other mistreatment
by authorities in prisons or labor camps. Even the Chinese press some-
times reports these deaths, as it did of a worker who, suspected of
embezzlement, died after being beaten and tortured for twenty-nine
hours. Chinese who simply demonstrate for democracy can be killed.
During the nonviolent, pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen
Square in Beijing in 1989, soldiers, armored vehicles, and tanks slaugh-
tered 2,000 to 10,000 demonstrators.
Those who escape execution or prison might still be sentenced to a
forced labor or re-education camp. Life in either case can be worse than
that in prison, however, and even death might seem preferable. It did
for human rights leader Chen Longde. Beaten by guards with clubs and
electric batons, tortured by other inmates who were promised reduced
sentences if they got him to confess, and suffering from associated kid-
ney damage, he finally jumped from a window. He survived, perhaps
unfortunately, with two hips and a leg broken.
The Party forces inmates to fulfill a work quota or meet certain “re-
form” standards. Failure to meet a quota or spout communist dogma
can be lethal. Camp officials may simply deny them benefits, or they
may impose a more deadly punishment—they may beat them, starve
them, or put them in painfully tightened leg irons or handcuffs for long
periods. The quotas are not easy for inmates to fill, and could require
them to work overtime with little sleep—sometimes no more than three
or four hours. Moreover, camp authorities might combine work with
required communist study, making it even harder to meet quotas. In
some camps, guards routinely beat and harass inmates to force them to
do more work. Of course, guards beat prisoners in other countries as
well. But in China these beatings are not the idiosyncratic behavior of
sadistic camp guards. They are the Party’s method to ensure work out-
put and proper brainwashing. Overall, the Party admits to keeping 1.2
million prisoners, including detainees. This total is probably far under
the actual number.
9 The Laogai Research Foundation at: www.laogai.org/reports/profit.htm

North Korea
Then consider North Korea, surely the worst place in the world in
which to be born. Its communist dictator Kim Jong-il rules a population
of 22.5 million with an iron hand, most of whom he is starving or
weakening with malnutrition. Perhaps as many as 3 million North Ko-
reans have died of starvation or associated diseases, not to mention
those that Kim’s regime has summarily executed. Even as I write this,
people are dying by the hundreds, sometimes the thousands, every day,
due to the long famine and poor rations caused by Kim’s fanatical de-
votion to communism itself.
Consider what these people face just in their human need for food
10
and health, leaving aside their enslavement. North Korea’s population
requires about 6 million tons of food a year for each person to have a
minimum diet. The regime controls all farming, all agriculture, and can
only produce about 4 million tons. There is a food shortfall of 2 million
tons, or an amount 33 percent below what is minimally required.
Kim has imposed rationing, and his handouts are the only legal way
to obtain food. There are no independent channels of distribution, ex-
cept for the black market. This means that people get food as Kim and
his thugs desire. Kim’s food distribution system is highly unequal.
Food is put aside first as “patriotic rice” and “military rice.” This has
resulted in a 22 percent cut in food consumption, from 700g a day per
person to 400g a day—well below the minimum rice requirement set by
the World Food and Agricultural Organization.
Kim uses the very food people need to live as a tool to reward and
punish his subject slaves. In this “classless” communist society, the re-
gime has divided North Koreans into a rigid hierarchy of three classes
and fifty-one subdivisions, determined by their status within the com-
munist North Korean Workers’ Party and the military, their perceived
faithfulness to communism, and their family backgrounds. Thus, vast
numbers of people whose loyalties are questioned or who are deemed
useless to the regime do not receive enough food to live long. The
worst off are those people and families incarcerated in Kim’s concen-
tration or forced labor camps. They receive the lowest food allowance
of all, despite being forced to work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Attempts by South Korea, the United Nations, and the United States
(the major provider) to supply food aid have not worked well. In 2002,
10 I have taken many of the following specifics from the exceptional report of Seong
Ho Jhe’s article in Korea and World Affairs (Summer 2003) on the food crisis in Ko-
rea. It is available at:
www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/NKHR_new/inter_conf/Seong_Ho_Jhe.pdf
26 R. J. Rummel
food aid was 62 percent under its target, but even meeting the target
would not substantially improve the food available to the average Ko-
rean, even were it equally distributed. It is not. The regime will not
guarantee that food reaches those who need it most, it does not allow
aid givers to carefully monitor who gets the food and, in some cases, it
has redirected the food to its favorite classes or to the military.
Kim himself enjoys the best food the world can offer. Often this
food is not merely imported, but gathered by his personal chef, sent
from one country to another to buy the special food he desires. In his
book Kim Jong Il’s Chef (published in Japanese in 2003), written under
a pseudonym after he escaped to Japan, Kim’s chef described the coun-
tries he was sent to and for what food:
x Urumqi (in northwestern China) for fruit, mainly hamigua

melons and grapes
x Thailand for fruit, mostly durians, papayas, and mangoes
x Malaysia for fruit, mostly durians, papayas, and mangoes
x Czechoslovakia for draft beer
x Denmark for pork
x Iran for caviar
x Uzbekistan for caviar
x Japan for seafood
This while most of Kim’s people were starving, many to death.

There are no hospitals, doctors, or medical distribution and supply
companies independent of the regime. All are nationalized. As with
food, medical treatment and medicine is distributed as reward and pun-
ishment. Not surprisingly, medicine is in short supply and not available
everywhere. An indicator of this situation is that only half of the popu-
lation is now inoculated for such diseases as infantile paralysis and
measles. Thus, the diseases associated with famine and malnutrition
often receive no medical treatment at all. Under such conditions, even a
cold can be fatal.
North Korea is one of the few countries in which population mortal-
ity rates have been increasing. The life expectancy has fallen to 66.8
years from 73.2; the newborn mortality rate has increased from 14 to
22.5, and the rate for those under five years of age has increased from
27 to 48 per thousand.
Aside from the daily accumulation of dead, the effects on the liv-
ing have been disastrous. Long-term malnutrition has affected about
half the living, and caused excessive underdevelopment in chil-
dren—they are stunted in growth and excessively thin. There is
wide-scale dwarfishness and, most important from any humanitarian

point of view, brain development has been retarded. Moreover, mal-
nutrition has fostered rickets, scurvy, nyctalopia, hepatitis, and
tuberculosis, among other diseases.
And all this without even recounting the regime’s terror, repression,
executions, and absolute violations of what those living in liberal de-
mocracies take for granted, such as the freedom of religion and speech,
of opportunity and association, fair trials, rule of law, sanctity of the
person, and freedom from fear. I can only describe this nation as a hor-
rid, border-to-border slave labor camp, as I detailed in my Death By
Government.
Some Other Antifreedom Thugdoms

There are many other thugdoms—nations—whose dictators allow no
or little freedom, and daily commit abuses against human rights, including
mass executions. For example, east of Burma and to the south of China is
Laos, in which the treatment of its people by the Laotian Communist Party
that controls the country can be best described as Stalinist.
Then in East Africa is the nation of Rwanda, where in 1994 Hutu
soldiers and armed civilians killed hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, and
armed Tutsi retaliated by murdering Hutu. By the end of this genocidal
slaughter, Hutu and Tutsi had massacred as many as 1 million Rwan-
dans within a few months, as Chapter 6 will report in full detail (and
which I fictionalized in my novel War & Democide Never Again).
Iraq’s former dictator Saddam Hussein (now held in prison by the
newly sovereign Iraqi government under Prime Minister Iyad Allawi)
gassed Kurdish women and children and destroyed over 3,000 of their
villages in Iraq’s north, and massacred Shiite men, women, and chil-
dren in the south. Overall, his regime may have murdered 750,000 or
even a million Iraqis.
And in 1971, as I also detailed in Death By Government, the West
Pakistan military murdered Bengalis and Hindus by the hundreds of
thousands in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
There are tens of millions more whose murder by one government or
another I will discuss in Chapter 6. Here I mention this only to make the
point clear. In such countries, and in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, China,
and North Korea, the lives of the people have been filled with disease,
starvation, forced labor, slavery, beatings, torture, and death. Their rulers
have absolute or near-absolute power. And for those with absolute power,
their whim is law, their fantasy a command, their wish a campaign. They
do not see people as living human beings, each a self-conscious person
28 R. J. Rummel
with a human soul. Such rulers see their citizens as bricks and mortar for
building a paradise on earth, expendable pawns with which to fight a war,
or robots to be programmed with a religious text.
Still, by what right can one criticize the lack of freedom in these
countries? Why should one be free? Is one’s personal enjoyment or de-
sire for freedom sufficient to justify it for others? Really, what do we
mean by freedom? And what are the consequences of such freedom for
people or society as a whole?
Chapter 2
Universal Human Rights
A free society is a most socially just one.
I f a people want to be free, should they be? Should those living in

Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, and China be free? Why? There are
two ways of answering this. One is to prove that the benefits of
freedom so overshadow any negative consequences as to be justified.
This is what I will show in later chapters. The second way is to show
that everyone has a right to be free regardless of the consequences, that
freedom is moral and just in itself, and that it is immoral and unjust to
deprive people of freedom.
That this is so may seem obvious, but it is not in much of the world.
We saw in the previous chapter that the dictators of many nations obey
no law. The law is what they command it to be, and their subjects must
obey or suffer severe consequences. The people have no way of voting
these dictators out of power, and to demonstrate or protest against them
is to risk imprisonment, torture, and death. Their life is one of fear. Yet
these dictators and their supporters often justify their rule as moral, or
as socially or religiously just.
This belief is why some dictatorships come into existence in the
first place. Large and powerful groups believe that this way of govern-
ing is necessary, as was true for Lenin and his Bolsheviks when they
overthrew the pro-democratic provisional government of Russia in
1917. They may have such faith in their own ideology or religion and
its teachings, as many do in Muslim countries, that they militantly de-
mand that their church and government should be one. They may think
their nation needs a dictatorship that can deal with its poverty and pro-
mote economic growth. They may be convinced that government must
assure the economic right of the people to a job, social security, and
health, before concerning itself with so-called Western human rights.
They may be traditional monarchists who embrace a hereditary, au-
thoritarian government that would maintain the great traditions and
customs of their people.
Even those who know what life is like for the people who have no
freedom in Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, and North Korea might
30 R. J. Rummel
still claim that believing they should be free is intolerant of different

values, morally wrong, unfair, or ungodly. And fascists and commu-
nists are still around, though in the last half-century what we have
learned about life under these isms has virtually discredited them. In
my teaching I have known professors and students, for instance, who,
persuaded by the Marxism-Leninism that provides the philosophical
foundations of twentieth century communism that it is more socially
just, were willing to replace their democratic freedoms with communist
totalitarianism.
If people wish to live under a dictatorship, that is their choice. But
what about people who have no choice, the people dictators deprive of
any freedom with the force of their guns? Do we have a right to say that
Burmese or Chinese rulers, or those of any other nondemocratic coun-
try, should free their people and democratize? Do those trumpeting
such freedom ignore an Asian or African way, for example? What
about God’s way? Are not the holy teachings of the Bible or Koran
above the selfish desire for freedom?
To answer, we must recognize that freedom is a general term, like
liberty, independence, autonomy, and equality. In reality, freedom can-
not be absolute; no one can be completely free. A person’s talents,
family situation, job, wealth, cultural norms, and laws against murder,
incest, burglary, and so on limit their choices. And then there is the
freedom of others that necessarily limits one’s own freedom.
Broadly speaking, a person’s rights, whatever they may be, define
the limits to their freedom. In the Western tradition of freedom, these
are their civil and political rights, including their freedom of speech,
religion, and association. Some philosophers see these not only as mor-
ally justified rights in themselves, but also as means for fulfilling other
possible rights, like happiness. The opposing position is that such rights
have no special status unless granted by government to maintain tradi-
tion, as does an absolute monarchy like Saudi Arabia; to pursue a just
society, as the Communist Party of China claims; to protect a holy so-
ciety, as does a Muslim government like that in Sudan; or to
economically develop a country, as attempted by a military government
like that in Burma.
The internationally popular justification for a people’s freedom is
by reference to human rights, those due them as a human beings. The
term “human rights” is recent in origin: President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt first used it in a 1941 message to the United States Congress,
when he declared that everyone has four human rights—freedom of
speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear. Since 1941, there
has been a vigorous international affirmation of these and other human
rights. Many a nation’s constitution has included them, and they now
are part of an International Bill of Rights. The latter comprises Articles

1 and 55 of the 1945 United Nations Charter, the 1948 Universal Dec-
laration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations General
Assembly, and the two international covenants passed by the General
Assembly in 1966, one on civil and political rights and the other on
economic, social, and cultural rights. There is now a United Nations
Human Rights Commission that can investigate alleged violations of
human rights, and receive and consider complaints. In our nation-
centered international system, this is a momentous advance for the hu-
man rights of all people.
The conventions and declarations of regional organizations have
further strengthened these human rights. To mention a few examples,
the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention on Human
Rights, and European nations now have the European Court of Human
Rights and the European Commission on Human Rights. The Organiza-
tion of American States adopted the American Declaration on Human
Rights, and the American states have created the Inter-American Con-
vention and Court on Human Rights. The Organization for African
Unity has created the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights.
Moreover, there have been many formal conferences among states and
interested international government organizations on human rights,
such as the 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights involv-
ing 183 nations.
Human rights have also been the concern of many private organiza-
tions. These have sought to further define and extend human rights
(such as the right to a clean environment), observe the implementation
of human rights in all nations, publicize violations of human rights by
governments (for instance, the right against torture and summary exe-
cution), or pressure governments to end their violations. Some of the
many such organizations include the International Committee of the
Red Cross, the Anti-Slavery Society, Amnesty International, the Inter-
national League for Human Rights, and the International Commission
of Jurists.
Even warfare or rebellion is no excuse for dictatorships such as Su-
dan or Burma to torture or arbitrarily kill their people. Nations have
agreed to moderate their warfare to preserve certain human rights, as
exactly defined in the 1949 Geneva Convention, its 1977 Additional
Protocols, and now the International Court of Justice.
All this international activity on human rights has multiplied the list
of rights. People now have at least forty rights listed in the basic interna-
tional documents on human rights, which are the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights, that on Civil and Political Rights, and that on Eco-
32 R. J. Rummel
nomic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The most basic of all these rights are
those defining what governments cannot do to their people. From those
stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these include eve-
ryone’s right to
x life, liberty, and personal security;

x recognition as a person before the law, equal protection of
the law, remedy for violation of their rights, fair and public
trial, and the presumption of their innocence until proven
guilty if charged with a penal offense;
x leave any country and return, and seek asylum from perse-
cution;
x the secret ballot and periodic elections, and freely chosen
representatives;
x form and join trade unions, equal access to public service,
and participation in cultural life;
x freedom of movement and residence, thought, conscience
and religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and
association, and as a parent to choose their children’s educa-
tion;
x freedom from slavery or servitude, torture, degrading or in-
human treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest or detention
or exile, arbitrary interference with privacy or family or
home or correspondence, deprivation of nationality, arbi-
trary deprivation of property, and being compelled to join an
association.
In effect, these human rights define what I mean by democratic

freedom. A people’s freedom of thought, expression, religion, and as-
sociation is basic, as are the secret ballot, periodic elections, and the
right to representation. In short, these rights say that people have a right
to be free.
Therefore, those condemning the lack of freedom in, for instance,
Sudan, are not imposing their values on another culture. This is not a
matter of value relativity. Demanding human rights, and thus freedom,
for the slaves in the Sudan—or Chinese political prisoners, or the
women in Muslim countries, or Burmese forced laborers—is simply
demanding that their rulers obey international law, itself based on gen-
eral treaties, international agreements, and practices.
This law is universal. Every Arabian, Chinese, Rwandan, and all
the world’s peoples have the internationally defined and protected hu-
man rights listed above. No rulers can violate these rights of their
people without risking mandated sanctions by the United Nations Secu-

rity Council. Many nations now even include human rights monitors or
representatives within their foreign ministries so that a foreign dictator
who denies the human rights of his people can be publicly exposed and
diplomatically pressured to recognize them. For example, the United
States Department of State has a Bureau of Human Rights and Humani-
tarian Affairs run by an Assistant Secretary of State. The bureau
publishes an annual review of human rights around the world.
True, there is much hypocrisy here and with so many dictatorships
in the world, the skeptic may feel that these rights are just words. Even
some of the governments that signed the human rights documents allow
few rights to their people. Note, however, that they felt compelled to
sign them. This shows the sheer power and legitimacy of the idea of
human rights.
These human rights documents lay down a marker. They define
what should be, what is right, the moral high ground. Those who deny
such rights now must defend their policies, not those who grant these
rights. Indeed, any violation of a people’s human rights by their rulers,
as when the Chinese police arrest and torture people for practicing their
creed or religion, is now a breach of international law. Unfortunately,
the United Nations cannot automatically command sanctions or mili-
tary intervention against governments for this. It is no longer a problem
of what a people’s human rights are, but of international and domestic
politics, power, and interests.
Again, consider Sudan. Slavery and genocide against the southern
black Christians continued without foreign intervention to stop it. This
is because Sudan is a distant country, with little trade, few foreign em-
bassies, hardly any foreign journalists, almost no tourists, and no
cultural affinity with the world’s most powerful countries. Moreover,
intervention probably would disrupt sensitive diplomatic arrangements
within the region, including the relations of the Muslim countries with
Israel. It also might mean a local war, perhaps with Libya or even Iran
providing the Sudanese rulers with military aid, which the democratic
peoples of the world lack the interest and will to fight. However, if
every day they were to see televised images of the starving children and
the scars of slavery, and hear the stories of those tortured, then they
would demand that their leaders do something.
Such was the case with the United Nations-supported, American-
led military coalition that intervened in Somalia. The Somali govern-
ment had collapsed into clan wars, and people were starving by the
millions, with about 500,000 already dead. When the world’s television
screens and newspapers showed picture after picture of starving Somali
34 R. J. Rummel
children, the horrified American public demanded action, and finally

pressured the first President Bush into doing something.
Acting under a United Nations Security Council resolution, the
United States intervened in December 1992 with 25,500 American
troops. Their goal was to protect international famine relief efforts and
end the political chaos. But soon after the Clinton Administration came
into power in January 1993, its support for this intervention collapsed
when the Somalis killed eighteen Army Rangers trapped into a fire-
fight. President Clinton then reduced American forces, and the whole
operation was handed over to a United Nations force of 22,000, which
finally withdrew in March 1994.
Journalists and politicians believe the operation was a failure. It did
not produce a pro-democratic government, assure the human rights of
Somalis, or end the civil war. Still, it did save possibly a million people
from starvation, which may be justification enough.
Even if international sanctions and intervention to protect human
rights are difficult, the international community has moved more than
one step forward. It has clearly articulated the law protecting every-
one’s rights. It does pinpoint the behavior of a government that is
morally wrong. And if the international community cannot impose
sanctions on the dictators who trample on their subjects’ rights, or in-
tervene to stop them, at least now the United Nations and international
organizations can subject them to moral pressure. The preamble to the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, makes this clear
by stating that human rights are “a common standard of achievement
for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and
every organ of society . . . shall strive by teaching and education to
promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive
measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effec-
tive recognition and observance . . . .”
In sum, a people’s human rights well define their freedom. Regard-
less of how others may want people to live because of their ideology,
religion, or moral code, wherever people live, no matter their culture,
no matter what government they live under, the following principle ap-
plies to all.
A people’s freedom—their human rights—is justi-

fied by United Nations certification, international
treaties, agreements, and international law.
Chapter 3
Philosophical Justification of Freedom
Nothing . . . is unchangeable but the inherent and un-
alienable rights of man.
– Thomas Jefferson
D oes agreement on human rights, even the international consensus

shown above, define just rights? Because a majority, even an
overwhelming majority, says something is a right, is it a moral,
just right? Few philosophers would agree to this. Being philosophers,
they still must ask why a right is a right. And there are many answers.
For one, there is the philosophical school called legal positivism,
much influenced by the seminal work of John Austin (1790–1859), that
does not accept internationally defined human rights as fundamentally
moral or just. These philosophers separate law from morality, and ar-
gue that the rights of all people are only those that the world com-
munity has agreed to in their international deliberative assemblies, or-
ganizations, and by their treaties. Although for international law the
positivist position is dominant among lawyers, judges, and academics,
among philosophers it is a minority position. By this standard, human
rights are international legal rights, as described, although not necessar-
ily moral or ethically right.
Philosophers have debated much about how to justify rights, espe-
cially about what used to be called natural rights or the rights of man.
These rights are a particularly Western idea that grew out of the medie-
val concern for the rights of lords, barons, churchmen, kings, guilds, or
towns. One of the great documents promoting the rights of all subjects
was the Magna Carta signed by King John of England in 1215. He
promised thereby to govern according to the law, that all have a right to
the courts. It established that no person, not even the king, was above
the law.
With the eighteenth century Enlightenment and a growing faith in
human reason, philosophers began to grapple with the meaning of “a
right” and whether people generally had any. What emerged was the
idea that all people have natural rights. These are what people think,
36 R. J. Rummel
with reason and without emotional prejudice or personal bias, are the
rights everyone should have as human beings. For example, two such
rationally grounded natural rights that all people share with each other
are their rights to life, and to equal freedom.
This philosophical conception of natural rights has been one of the
most powerful ideas in history. It has been the force behind many revo-
lutions and constitutions. For example, the philosopher John Locke, in
his influential Second Treatise of Government (1690), wielded this idea
like a sword, claiming that every human being has a natural right to
freedom, equality, and property. He directly influenced the American
Declaration of Independence, which almost a century later (1776) de-
clared that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unal-
ienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of
Happiness.”
Some years later the French National Assembly approved the Dec-
laration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in 1789, which
proclaimed that the purpose of political association is the preservation
of one’s natural and inalienable rights to liberty, private property, per-
sonal security, and resistance to oppression.
The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution of
the United States, further defined everyone’s natural rights, among
them the freedom of speech, religion, and assembly. Nations now rec-
ognize these rights as human rights, as I have pointed out, and they
have become part of the constitution of one nation after another.
A variant of this natural rights approach is to claim that each person
has only one natural right, and it is self-evident: each person exists,
each is human, and therefore, each has an absolute right to equal free-
dom with all other humans. No more, no less. Then, treating this like an
axiom in Euclidean geometry, no other right exists unless it is a deriva-
tion of, or implicit in, a person’s right to equal freedom. This thereby
establishes the right to freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech. But,
it denies the status of a right to what people want or need, but which
can’t be derived from that of equal freedom, such as the right to a job,
welfare, or clean air. Moreover, people do not have a right to what
other people are compelled to secure for them.
Regardless of approach, philosophers can only justify these natu-
ral rights by their abstract reason, as though doing a mathematical
proof. Nonetheless, using their logic and reason, they still disagree on
what rights people have—for instance, to abortion, social security,
and a minimum wage. This problem of defining what is reasonable is
universal, and has encouraged philosophers to chase less subjective
justifications of rights.
One favored solution among thinkers, such as the eighteenth cen-

tury British theologian William Paley, jurist and philosopher Jeremy
Bentham, and philosophers James Mill and John Stuart Mill, is their
appeal to utility—what promotes the greater happiness of all is good.
According to the utilitarians, the only rights that can be justified are
those that assure the greatest happiness of the largest number of people.
Utilitarians argue that this criterion provides an empirical measuring
rod for what will be a right—overall, does it cause more happiness than
pain? If so, then it is a right. If not, then it is not a right. I believe that in
their hearts, this utilitarian argument has been the dominant justifica-
tion for human rights by activists, and especially by diplomats from the
democracies who negotiated the human rights agreements. They be-
lieved that by promoting human rights they were furthering human
happiness in the world.
Chapter 4
Freedom As a Social Contract
One man’s justice is another’s injustice;
One man’s beauty is another’s ugliness;
One man’s wisdom another’s folly;
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
A Convention of Minds
F inally, I will give my own argument for human rights. It’s

based on a hypothetical social contract, a favorite conceptual
tool of political philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke,
Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Baron de Montesquieu. They used this idea
to define a just society, and the power and limits of government.
Imagine, as Hobbes did in his Leviathan (1651), that in the origi-
nal state of nature life was primitive, brutal, and short. People,
therefore, saw the absolute need to secure their lives and property,
and therefore all (hypothetically) agreed to participate in a social
contract that would ensure this. They implemented it by forming a
central government, and granting it the power to protect their lives
and property in exchange for a pledge that each member would obey
its laws. This social contract then defined the reciprocal duties of
citizen and government. Violate the contract, and government may
justly punish the violator; conversely, if the government violates the
contract, for example by not protecting its people’s lives from crimi-
nals or if the government itself is preying on its people, then they
may justly overthrow it.
This idea of an implicit social contract between the people and their
government contributed to the writing of the American Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And it has
much in common with that of the positivists, who stress international
agreements as the source of human rights. After all, if universal in
scope, thereby defining the rights of everyone, these agreements are
akin to a general social contract.
To be clear, when philosophers use a hypothetical social contract to

justify rights in a state of nature, they are trying to determine those
rights that all people would agree should be guaranteed by government.
To make this social contract objective and unbiased, philosophers as-
sume that in their agreement on it, people are ignorant of their wealth,
status, race, talents, or other attributes. They therefore have no idea
how their choice of a social contract—of rights—would benefit them
personally, which makes these rights just.
As I did in Part 2 of my The Just Peace, I will use a revised version
of this social contract approach to more fully explore whether people
would generally, regardless of their religion, ideology, or culture, agree
on certain rights. I also want to broaden this contract to consider the
connected principles of governance. Rights do not exist in a vacuum.
Some possible rights, in their very definition, assume that government
will or will not have certain powers. For example, among the human
rights mentioned above are those to free association (one-party gov-
ernments are then out), freedom of religion (so much for government
based on the Koran or Bible), and the freedom to vote in free elections
(which assumes a democratic-type government). However, this is not a
one-to-one relationship between rights and governance. Monarchies
and some dictatorships, for example, may allow freedom of religion,
domestic movement, and immigration. But there is a close relationship
between the rights people might want and how they should be governed
to assure those rights, and I want to make this association clear.
It is also critical that rights agreed to in the social contract and asso-
ciated principles of governance be just—that is, they should define
what is social justice. This demands that the social contract satisfy cer-
tain requirements.
First, for the rights and principles to be morally just, they must be
universal. It is hardly just if one person has the right to be a Buddhist
while another person is not free to practice Judaism. Therefore, what-
ever people agree to in their social contract applies to all people,
anywhere, at anytime.
Second, to be morally just, the rights and principles must be practi-
cal. People must be able to live by them. A person can hardly judge
another immoral for not doing something that is impossible to do. We
could not obey, for example, a moral injunction against sexy dreams, if
they were deemed immoral. Preventing these dreams is beyond our
ability.
Finally, a just right or just principle also means that it is fair, even-
handed. Two more requirements can assure this. One is that nearly
everyone has a chance to discuss, debate, and finally agree upon the
40 R. J. Rummel
rights all will have and on their associated principles of governance.

The other requirement is that the agreement is objective. This can be
achieved by making everyone hypothetically blind to his or her self-
interests. A good example of this is the sculpture of a Greek goddess
(possibly Themis) holding a scale of justice in the left hand and a sword
in the other, which is found on the wall of many courthouses in the
United States. So that her judgment will be uncorrupted and unbiased,
she is blindfolded to hide from her whether the defendant is rich or
powerful, young or old, man or woman, black or white.
The rights these requirements define should not only be just, but
also well considered and vital. To achieve this, people must have the
strongest motivation to seek, propose, and weigh such rights and the
related powers of government. It would be easy enough for a person to
say that another should have a right not to be discriminated against, but
is this a right that the person would passionately support, even at the
risk of death?
If a right can be agreed upon that meets the above requirements,
then it is truly a basic and just right. Those rights and related principles
meeting all these requirements will define social justice and just gov-
ernance.
Now to have a little fun: suppose all people suddenly hear a voice
inside their head. They look around for the source of the voice, but no
one is talking—or if anyone is, the inner voice overrides what is being
said. Some get anxious, wonder if they are going crazy.
But the voice has a soothing quality, and soon it tells everyone what
is happening:
People of earth, what you hear is being

sent to you telepathically from a spaceship
near earth. We are galactic conservation-
ists from another star system here to give
you the following message.
All your lives are at risk. Your planet
will be passing through a lethal galactic
warp storm in two years, and the resulting
radiation will exterminate all life on earth.
As conservationists we are dedicated to
protecting all intelligent life forms in the
galaxy. We are here to save your species
from death.
To do this, we have found a habitable
planet orbiting a distant sun. It has no com-
peting intelligent life, and we can teleport all

of you to it. However, according to the laws
of our galactic federation, we can make such
a transfer of intelligent life forms only if vir-
tually all of you agree among yourselves on
what rights you will have in your new
world, and the related principles of govern-
ment under which you will live. If you reach
a strong consensus on this, we will then
teleport you to this new world.
But our galactic federation also com-
mands us to inform you of one
technological problem. Our teleportation
equipment for transferring alien life forms
is not perfect, and we cannot promise that
our equipment can keep your mind and
body together—some or many of your
minds may end up in different bodies, but
without physical harm or loss of intelli-
gence or faculties.
So that you may debate and agree on
your rights and the principles governing
your new world, in two months we will set
up, telepathically, a Convention of Minds.
In the convention all of you will be able to
propose the guiding principles and human
rights of your new world, debate them, and
vote upon them.
This hypothetical Convention of Minds and possible transfer to a

new world meets the requirements set out for defining just rights. First,
all people would take part and the resulting rights and principles, on
which if they get a consensus vote, would be universal. Second, since
people would not know what body their mind would end up in after the
teleportation, they would have to make their judgments independent of
their race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, handicaps, and other physical
characteristics and skills, as well as their wealth, power, and prestige.
This will assure their objectivity. And the fact that everyone—all hu-
mankind—would be wiped out unless nearly all agree on the principles
provides the important motivation to reach a universal solution.
Imagine now that the aliens convene the Convention of Minds, peo-
ple make proposals, and the debate begins. What will be the patterns of
42 R. J. Rummel
these proposals? Surely, they will reflect the full range of the world’s
ideologies, religions, and cultures. Democratic individualists, democratic
socialists, state socialists, fascists, militarists, monarchists, and the few
remaining Marxists and Maoists will offer their idea of rights and gov-
ernance, as will Buddhists, Catholics and Protestants, Shiite and Sunni
Muslims, Confucians, and pantheists. And surely, all secular humanists,
nonpolitical atheists, advocates of nonviolence, environmentalists, femi-
nists, gay activists, and many, many others will make their views known.
Then there are the cultural differences between races, ethnicities, and
nationalities that surely would influence, if not predetermine, the choice
of rights and government.
Could everyone agree on one set of rights and principles? I do not
believe so, and simulations of this convention that I have set up in my
classes over the years have all confirmed this. Even if the survival of our
species were at stake, people across the globe would not be able to agree
on their rights and the associated principles of governance. They hold
their beliefs so deeply, and for some so fanatically, that they would be
willing to die for them. Thus, human history has seen people volunteer
for suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, for fighting and possibly dy-
ing in guerrilla, civil, and international wars, and in violent revolutions.
To therefore expect, for example, a practicing Catholic to accept that all
Christians should have only the right to obey the Koran, and live under a
Muslim’s principles of governance, is unreasonable. Nor do I believe a
liberal democrat would accept communist principles, nor a communist or
socialist, capitalist ones.
The Convention of Minds would achieve no agreement on rights and
governing principles. It would be deadlocked. But there would still be a
solution.
The debate at first would be over the rights everyone would have to
live by, and the principles governing all. Each would assume, naturally,
that if everyone agreed on the socialist principles of government owner-
ship of the means of production and its enforcement of relative equality
in wages, benefits, advantages, and goods for all, these would have to be
the principles operating universally and at all levels of government. Lib-
ertarians, however, surely would not agree to this.
When their beliefs prevent agreement, a large majority of people in
the Convention would be like a watermelon seed squeezed between two
fingers. They would be squeezed hard on one side by the prospect of not
only their own death and that of their loved ones, but of all humankind.
Pressing hard from the other side would be their logical and emotional
inability to agree on proposed rights and principles. These opposing
mental forces would likely pop the debate to a higher, transcendent level.
At this higher level, a metasolution would break the convention’s

stalemate.
Before I go into this metasolution, three examples may help clarify
what “metasolution” means. If someone has a leak in his plumbing, he
and his mate can debate how they should fix the plumbing, or they can
hire a plumber to fix the plumbing as they see fit. The choice of
plumber is a metasolution to the leak. As another example, imagine try-
ing to divide farmland equally between two sons, but no matter how
you divide the land, nothing is ever equal, and one or both will believe
the division to be unfair. So, a metasolution: let one son divide the land
and the other choose which half he wants. Finally, rather than continu-
ally trying to choose which of your two children gets what goodie or
does what chore, alternate weeks—assign one child to take his bath
first one week, and the other child the next. Then, simply give the child
taking a bath first the goodie. Who gets to sit next to the window in the
car on this trip? Why, the one taking their bath first this week. Another
metasolution.
And the convention would propose such a metasolution, and even
the fanatics of one principle or another would see the advantage of
agreeing on it. This metasolution would follow the well-known argu-
ment, “well, if we can’t agree, let’s agree to disagree and do our own
thing.” That is, the metasolution upon which there would be a consen-
sus would involve two simple rights. The first, a free choice right,
would be that:
People have a right to form their own communities.
And the second, the free exit right, would state that:
People have a right to leave any community.
Together, these rights would give everyone the right to organize

with each other a community governed by their own principles and
with whatever rights they want, as long as they do not force this com-
munity on others and anyone is free to leave it.
Surely everyone in the convention would realize that in the new
world, these two rights would need to be enforced, and the resulting
communities protected from aggression by their neighbors; therefore I
believe the metasolution would also involve a single principle of gov-
ernance.
A limited, democratic federation of all communities

would govern the new world.
44 R. J. Rummel
Its basic job would be to administer, guarantee, and protect the Free
Choice and Free Exit rights.
By demand, no doubt, the convention would give each future com-
munity an equal vote in the federation’s legislature. But also, those who
see that their community might be one of the larger ones would equally
demand that the convention protect them against rule by a majority of
tiny communities. They would argue for a second legislative chamber
of the world federation that would give each community votes propor-
tional to its population. Moreover, even the most confirmed
authoritarians or absolutists would settle for some mechanism to check
the domination of this world government so that it does not unduly in-
tervene in the affairs of their community, and so on.
However these articles of the future constitution would work out,
the basic principle and associated government is clear. It would be a
liberal democracy, as defined in the next chapter, except that the de-
mocratic civil liberties and political rights would refer to communities
and not individuals. All communities would have a right to vote for
their representative to the world government in fair and periodic elec-
tions, all would be equal before the law, all would have the freedom to
organize, the freedom of speech, and so on. And the convention would
realize the necessity, I am sure, of limiting the power of the federal
world government to guaranteeing and protecting the Free Choice and
Free Exit rights. This would be the only type of government that would
allow everyone to do their own thing consistent with all having the
same right.
Finally, if a vote of all people in the world were to be taken in the
convention on just the Free Choice and Free Exit rights and democratic
principle, then I believe that a huge majority of the world’s people
would adopt them. For if any monarchist, fascist, communist, liberal
democrat, Muslim, or whatever could find enough others to agree to
form their own community, then they would have the right to do so.
People can live, therefore, under whatever government they want, even
an utterly totalitarian one. Just one qualification: they must allow any
of their community members to leave if they wish.
In short, people would be free to be unfree, and this is part of what
democratic freedom means. Indeed, I would argue that the human or
natural right to be free implies the Free Choice right. Free speech does
not mean that you have to speak out. You can say nothing if you wish,
or join a group in which this freedom is strictly circumscribed or even
totalitarian in governance, such as the military or a monastery. Freedom
of religion means that if people so desire, they can form a group in
which only one religion is legitimate, and keep out those of other relig-
ions, as in a Catholic nunnery. And within liberal democracies today,
people usually can support and participate in antidemocratic political

parties and movements. The communist party, for example, is legal in
the United States and most other democracies.
We will get into this more in the next chapter, but here I might note that:
Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of

diversity.
It provides a way of uniting under one government people who are

vastly different socially, culturally, and philosophically. And as in the
Convention of Minds, democracy solves this problem by saying “gov-
ern yourself, but do so in a manner consistent with the same right of
others.” Democracy does not lay down a template for each person’s
life, as do other types of government. Rather, as a metasolution it is a
method of governance that prevents possible bloody conflicts over
rights and principles for the greater society.
The Global Evolution of Rights

Yes, people have moral, just rights. They are universal, and what
people would choose to live under, were they given the chance. And
they are socially just. But all this is justified through a bizarre science
fiction tale. Quite rightly, you might want a real-world example of the
Free Choice and Free Exit rights. So let’s look at the evolution of
international relations and its legal principles.
Throughout eons of human history, through the growth and collapse
of clans and cities, nations and states, civilizations and empires; through
the many human disasters and catastrophes, wars and revolutions;
through the growth and decay of religions and creeds, philosophies, and
ideologies; and through the countless day-by-day interactions of billions
of people, a system of world governance has evolved based, in effect, on
the two hypothetical rights emerging from the Convention of Minds.
The most basic right people have in the modern international sys-
tem is that of self-determination for their country or national group,
with its allied international legal principle of state sovereignty. The idea
of self-determination has had tremendous power in international rela-
tions. In the twentieth century it was the force behind demands for
independence by the former British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and
Spanish colonies. Against the cries for self-determination, these nations
could no longer justify their undemocratic and remote imperial rule. In
a few decades after World War II, much of the world was decolonized,
and by the end of the Soviet empire in 1991, no more than a few small
and scattered colonies remained.
46 R. J. Rummel
A corollary to the principle of sovereignty is that no other nation

has a right to intervene in a nation’s domestic affairs. The principle,
really a metaprinciple, of sovereignty legally allows a community to
govern itself with great freedom. Although by their agreements and
treaties nations have placed certain restrictions on this sovereignty,
such as restricting the right to carry out genocide or slavery, and obli-
gating all governments to respect certain human rights, each nation still
is nearly free to govern itself.
Why, for example, has the United Nations or a powerful coalition
of democratic countries not invaded Burma, Sudan, or Saudi Arabia to
stop their killing and denial of human rights? Of course, it is partly a
matter of the costs involved and the apathy or ignorance of democratic
peoples about what life is like in these countries. It is partly that the
media does not constantly pound us with images of the horrors going
on in these countries, as already noted. But more important, the sover-
eignty of these countries protects them. It is a very high legal and
political hurdle to jump over for those who want intervention. Each
country that might approve such an intervention especially has to won-
der whether it is setting a precedent for itself.
Nonetheless, such intervention has happened—in Bosnia and Kosovo
and, as I mentioned before, in Somalia. And now there are the interven-
tion-invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the American-led coalition in
its war against Muslim terrorists and their state supporters. But for this
intervention to occur, the terrorists first had to hijack commercial jets
loaded with passengers and fly them full throttle into the World Trade
Center Towers and the Pentagon, killing nearly 3,000 people overall.
And, although this is not respected by all countries, international law
gives everyone the right to immigrate and, particularly, to request political
asylum of another nation. This is, in effect, the Free Exit principle.
Finally, the United Nations has become a very limited global, fed-
eral government. It has a head of government, a legislature, an admin-
istration, and a judicial system. It only lacks a monopoly of force over
the world, but such monopoly is not a defining characteristic of gov-
ernment. In operation, the United Nations meets the constitutional
principles needed to guarantee and administer the Free Choice and Free
Exit rights. The greatest remaining difference from what the hypotheti-
cal convention would decide is that since it has no military force of its
own, the United Nations must depend on military contributions from
member nations for its peacekeeping operations or to implement a Se-
curity Council resolution. But the direction of change is toward a
stronger and more capable United Nations and even, eventually, its
own very limited military capability.
So, through many millennia of civilizations, empires, city-states,

nations, alliances, wars, and revolutions, the world’s peoples have
slowly evolved a metasolution to their vastly different societies and
cultures, as a species evolves in response to its environment. This real-
world metasolution has globally institutionalized the Free Choice and
Free Exit rights, along with a federal, world government.
A final argument supports the outcome of the hypothetical Conven-
tion of Minds. Even before the Holocaust that began in 1941, the Nazi
government increasingly discriminated against Jews living in Germany
in the 1930s; many had relatives or friends imprisoned in Nazi concen-
tration camps. Although immigration was legal and Jews could thereby
escape from the Nazis, most still wanted to live in Germany. After all,
it was where their ancestors were born, and where their friends and
relatives lived. They could not easily pull up their roots and leave, and
anyway, many knowledgeable Jews argued that the Nazi regime would
change for the better or that, at least, things would get no worse. So
they stayed—and most died.
Before this horror happened, however, some perceptive Jewish
families who did not want to take any chances with their children de-
cided to send them to school abroad. But where? In what country would
they have the greatest opportunity to realize their potential? Generally
they chose a democratically free country, such as Great Britain, Can-
ada, or the United States.
These families made their choice under circumstances similar to
those of the hypothetical Convention of Minds. They sent their children
off to a different world, not knowing what their children would be like,
ultimately, and therefore how they would benefit. They chose a nation
in which their children would have the greatest freedom of choice,
which was under a democratic government.
Summary
Virtually all people, blind to their personal benefits, and acting
through a hypothetical Convention of Minds, would agree to a social
contract giving each other the right to choose how they live, and the
right to leave any community in which they live. And the circum-
stances of this decision make these socially just rights. We also find
that millennia of human evolution have produced similar rights among
nations, specifically the right to sovereign self-determination and free
immigration.
Legally, morally, and by the practice of nations, then, people should
be free. And to further this freedom and guard it, their country should
be democratic. This raises the question: what is democracy itself?
PART 2
On Democracy
H
uman rights and the core idea of freedom are defining charac-
teristics of a people. Their level of freedom can be measured on
a scale. For instance, in Denmark, Japan, or South Africa, peo-
ple have freedom; in Russia, Bolivia, and Burundi, they have partial
freedom; in Algeria, Vietnam, and Cuba, they have no freedom. For a
people to have freedom, they must live under a form of government
that guarantees and protects their freedom. Such is liberal democracy.
This part of the book describes this form of government in theory and
in action.
Chapter 5 begins with the meaning of democracy, and in particular
discusses the modern meaning of democracy in contrast to the idea of a
republic and pure democracy. Chapter 6 clarifies the characteristics of
democratic institutions, separating those marking an electoral from a
liberal democracy, with due attention to the often confusing term “lib-
eral.”
To give life to these abstract concepts, Chapter 7 describes the two
presidential terms of President Clinton and his impeachment, a crisis
period in the American democracy. The next chapter explains what the
Clinton years tell us about how democracy operates, and why it should
be valued. The final Chapter 9 shows that democracies are neither rare
nor limited to Europe and a few other nations, but encompass a major,
growing, and diverse proportion of the world’s population.
Chapter 5
What Is Democracy?
Liberal democracy is the institutionalization of human
rights—it is the most practical solution to the freedom of
each being compatible with the freedom of all.
W hatever freedoms people have cannot exist in a political vac-

uum. There must be some way of assuring and protecting
their rights—their freedom—and government is the answer.
Even libertarians, although they are the most ardent proponents of the
maximum freedom, and believe that government is evil, generally ac-
cept that it is necessary or inevitable.
But not just any government will do. It must be one that not only
commands obedience to its laws, but in its very organization embod-
ies what being free means. This is democracy. As a concept, demo-
cracy has developed many meanings since its first use by the ancient
Greeks, and even its well-established meanings have changed.
We can define democracy by its inherent nature and by its empiri-
cal conditions. As to its nature, Aristotle defined democracy as rule by
the people (Greek demokratia: demos meaning “people” + -kratia, -
cracy, meaning “rule” or “governing body”) and this idea that in some
way the people govern themselves is still the core meaning of democ-
racy. In the ancient Greek city-states and the early Roman Republic,
democracy meant that people participated directly in governing and
making policy. This was possible because of the small populations of
these cities—hardly ever more than 10,000 people—and the exclusion
of women and slaves from participation. Although limited to free
males, this idea of direct participation of the people in government
was the essence of democracy up to modern times; now it is usually
known as pure or direct democracy.
Many philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Immanuel Kant and
John Locke, disliked direct democracy, although otherwise they favored
freedom. For one thing, it was impractical for nations of millions of peo-
ple, or even for cities of hundreds of thousands. Clearly, a representative
system was necessary. For another, they felt that direct democracy, as it
50 R. J. Rummel
was understood, was mob rule—government by the ill-informed, who

would simply use government to their own advantage.
This distrust was evident in the eighty-five essays of The Federalist
(1787–1788) written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John
Jay on the proposed Constitution of the United States. They assumed that
people behave to fulfill their self-interest and are generally selfish, mak-
ing a direct democracy as a means to achieve justice and protect natural
rights dangerous. Nonetheless, they believed strongly in the “consent of
the governed,” and argued for a republican form of government in which
elected representatives would reflect popular will. This was a general
view among the authors of the Constitution, who believed that by estab-
lishing a republic they would institutionalize the central ideas of their
Declaration of Independence (1776):
. . . We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these
rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed. . . .
Constitutionally, therefore, the founders of the United States estab-

lished a republic, not a democracy—as political philosophers then
defined democracy. A republic is based on the consent and will of the
people, but implemented through a buffer of elected representatives and
indirect election, as by the president and vice president of the United
States. These representatives are elected by an electoral college, with
the electors chosen by the voters of each state and their number de-
pendent upon the number of senators and representatives each state
sends to Congress.
That the United States was created as a republic and that we now
call it a democracy has caused considerable confusion. My references
to the United States as a democracy on my website have earned me
well over a dozen emails informing me that it was not a democracy, but
a republic. The problem is that, in the twentieth century, the under-
standing of democracy as the direct participation of citizens has been
transformed to mean any government in which the people elect their
representatives. Democracy now generally means a republican or repre-
sentative government.
Chapter 6
Electoral and Liberal Democracy
Freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of
person under the protection of habeas corpus, and trial
by juries impartially selected. These principles form the
bright constellation which has gone before us, and guided
our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.
– Thomas Jefferson
W
ith this contemporary understanding of the term democracy,
what are its characteristics? One necessary and sufficient set
of characteristics involves the electoral system through
which people choose their representatives and leaders, and thus give
their consent to be governed and to have those representatives commu-
nicate their interests. The manner in which democracies conduct their
elections varies from one to another, but all share these characteristics:
regular elections for high office, a secret ballot, a franchise that in-
cludes nearly the whole adult population, and competitive elections.
Having a near-universal franchise is an entirely modern addition to
the idea of democracy. Not long ago, governments that were called de-
mocratic excluded from the franchise all slaves and women, as did the
United States through much of its history (male, black American for-
mer slaves got the right to vote after the Civil War; women did not get
this right until 1920, when Congress passed the Nineteenth Amend-
ment), as well as all non-slave males who did not meet certain property
or literacy requirements. We now consider it perverse to call democ-
ratic any country that so restricts the vote, as did the apartheid regime
in South Africa that limited voting to the minority population of whites.
Real competition in the elections is a key requirement. Many com-
munist nations exhibited all the electoral characteristics mentioned in
their periodic election of legislators handpicked by the Communist
Party, who then simply rubber-stamped what the Party wanted. “Com-
petitive” means that those running for office reflect different political
beliefs and positions on the issues. If they do not, as in the communist
nations, then the government is not democratic.
52 R. J. Rummel
Besides its electoral characteristics, one kind of democracy has

characteristics that, while neither necessary nor sufficient for democ-
racy to exist, are crucial to freedom. These involve the recognition of
certain human rights discussed in the previous chapter. One is the free-
dom to organize political groups or parties, even if they represent a
small radical minority, that then nominate their members to run for
high office. Another right is that to an open, transparent government—
in particular, the right to know how one’s representatives voted and de-
bated. There are also the rights to freedom of speech, particularly the
freedom of newspapers and other communication media to criticize
government policies and leaders; freedom of religion; and the freedom
to form unions and organize businesses.
One of the most important of these is the right to a fair trial and rule
by law. Above the state there must be a law that structures the govern-
ment, elaborates the reciprocal rights and duties of the government and
the people, and which all governing officials and their policies must
obey. This is a constitution, either created as a single document like
that of the United States, or a set of documents, statutes, and traditions,
such as that of Great Britain.
If a democracy recognizes these rights, we call it a liberal democ-
racy. If it does not, if it has only the electoral characteristics but
suppresses freedom of speech, possesses leaders that put themselves
above the law and representatives that make and vote on policies in se-
cret, then we can call it a procedural, or better, an electoral democracy.
For American readers particularly, there is conceptual confusion over
the term “liberal.” In the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries,
political philosophers emphasized the root meaning of liberal, which is
from the Latin liberalis for “free man” and the French liber for “free.” It
stood for an emphasis on individual liberty—on the freedom of a people
versus their government. A liberal slogan of the time was “the govern-
ment that governs least governs best.” It was hammered out in England’s
Glorious Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution, and the American
Revolution, and articulated in the works of John Locke, Adam Smith,
and John Stuart Mill. This emphasis on freedom from government regu-
lation and controls we now call classical liberalism, and presently is
reflected best in the political philosophy of American conservatives.
Libertarians also trace their philosophy back to classical liberalism,
but this is true only regarding the classical liberal emphasis on eco-
nomic freedom and human rights. Classical liberals, unlike modern
libertarians and liberals, believed that the government had a strong
moral role. Conservatives show their affinity for this moral role by
supporting laws against dope, prostitution, and gambling.
In modern times “liberal” has evolved to mean a belief that gov-

ernment is a tool to improve society and deal with the problems of
poverty, discrimination, and monopolies, among others, and to improve
public health, education, social security, the environment, and working
conditions. There is no less an emphasis on human rights, a dedication
that is shared by Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and mod-
ern liberals, but today’s liberals no longer accept minimum
government, nor do they see in the government the danger that classical
liberals attributed to it.
In liberal democracy, however, the root definition of “liberal” is
meant, not its modern sense. A liberal democracy means that a people
rule themselves through periodic elections in which nearly all adults
can participate; they elect their highest leaders to the offices for which
they are eligible, and they are governed under the rule of law that guar-
antees them certain human rights.
So democracy now means a republican form of government, which
may be only electorally representative in its characteristics, or liberal.
Table 6.1, below, summarizes these two kinds of democracies.
Chapter 7
An Example of Liberal Democracy:
President William Jefferson Clinton
Just as a large segment of liberal political opinion never
could accept Nixon as a “legitimate” president, neither
can a large segment of conservative political opinion to-
day accept Clinton’s legitimacy in the Oval Office . . . .
– Jim Hoagland
S
o far, all I have written about democracy is in the form of con-
cepts and abstractions that may roughly connect to real-life
experience. It’s time for an example that well illustrates the na-
ture of liberal democracy in action: the 1998 to 1999 impeachment and
trial of William Jefferson Clinton, the president of the United States.
The Clinton impeachment was a deeply divisive, partisan political
battle, and most Americans developed strong opinions supporting or
opposing it. After all, this was a matter of determining whether the na-
tionally elected president of the United States would be fired. As I
review the events leading up to the impeachment and the impeachment
itself, my only interest is in what Clinton’s presidency says about lib-
eral democracy, not in arguing for or against the president, the
impeachment, or his two campaigns for the office.
To begin at the beginning, Clinton was born in Hope, Arkansas, in
1946, a few months after his father died. When he was two years old,
he lived with his grandparents in Hope while his mother studied nurs-
ing in New Orleans. Two years later his mother married a car salesman,
and Clinton joined the new family. His stepfather was hardly a good
role model for the young boy; he was an alcoholic who physically mis-
treated Clinton’s mother.
At fourteen, Clinton joined a youth program to learn about govern-
ment, and was a delegate in a group that went to Washington, D.C.
There, President John F. Kennedy invited the group to meet with him in
the White House. This was an unforgettable experience for teenage
Clinton, who was very much impressed by Kennedy; he even shook his
hand. More important for the future was the fact that the experience
decided young Clinton on politics as a profession and sparked his am-

bition to be president.
Clinton was an excellent student, and much involved in student
politics. He completed high school, got a degree in international affairs
from Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and won a two-year
Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University in England. On his return to
the United States, he attended Yale Law School and received his law
degree in 1973.
During this whole period, from the time he attended Georgetown to
getting his law degree, he tried to learn politics firsthand. He worked in
the office of Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, and in the presi-
dential campaign of Senator George McGovern in 1972. He also took
part in demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
Note several things about Clinton’s rise so far. The first is that his
humble beginnings did not prevent him from actually meeting and
shaking hands with the president of the United States—not only the
highest office of the country, but also the most powerful in the world.
Second, he could obtain work in the office of an American senator and
take part in the lawmaking of America’s highest legislative body. And,
without fear of retribution or any negative consequences, he was also
able to help Senator McGovern wage his election campaign to defeat
that of the incumbent, President Richard M. Nixon.
Most revealing about liberal democracy, Clinton felt free to join
public demonstrations, even in England, against a war his country was
conducting. As exemplified in the first chapter by Sudan, Saudi Arabia,
Burma, and China, in many parts of the world such demonstrators
could be arrested, tortured, and even executed by the regime on their
return to their country; as well, the regime could retaliate against their
family, even kill them. In other countries, demonstrators could be har-
assed by authorities, and perhaps forfeit any possibility of holding a
future political office. But living in a liberal democracy, Clinton had
nothing to fear from secret police. He could learn the art of politics
from personal experience and prepare himself to run for political office
while also exercising his right to public protest.
After receiving his law degree, Clinton worked on the staff of the
U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. Then in 1974 the
University of Arkansas appointed him to their Law School faculty, and
he also began his formal political career by running for Congress as a
Democrat. He lost, but in 1976, he decided that he would be more suc-
cessful if he worked up from a lower rung on the political ladder, and
successfully campaigned for the office of the Attorney General of Ar-
kansas. He then used this position to run for the highest state office, and
the people of Arkansas elected him governor at age thirty-two.
56 R. J. Rummel
However, he had yet to learn the democratic limits of this high of-
fice. Because of his reform policies and a tax he had imposed,
Arkansans kicked Clinton out of office in the 1980 elections. But he
had learned well how to manage democratic politics. After Clinton
showed public remorse for his “mistakes” in office (and after running a
carefully calculated campaign), Arkansans returned him to the gover-
norship in 1982. They also reelected him three more times.
To Clinton, this was all preparation to run for president. He had
passed up the opportunity to do so in 1988 because of rumors about his
womanizing, but in 1992, he felt that he stood a good chance of being
nominated by the Democratic Party. Much stronger candidates for the
nomination had refused to run, believing that the huge popularity of
President George Bush resulting from his victory in the 1990–1991
Gulf War made his reelection to the presidency certain. Clinton
thought, however, he could stress poor economic conditions, the
“Reagan-Bush deficit,” and the need for change. And to the surprise of
many who did not see him as a national figure, he did win the nomina-
tion. Then, with the motto “It’s the economy, stupid,” he won the
presidential election with 43 percent of the vote.
Both sides in this election used their freedom of speech to the full-
est extent, with Clinton’s opponents focusing on his womanizing, his
participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations while in England,
and his alleged draft dodging along with a subsequent cover-up.
What is also noteworthy about this election is that out of nowhere, a
wealthy business executive, H. Ross Perot, was able to capture public
attention as an independent, even running ahead of President Bush and
Governor Clinton in popularity at one point in the campaign. He finally
got 19 percent of the presidential vote. Had he not made several mis-
steps in his campaign and been politically inexperienced, he might even
have won the three-way election.
Since democratic campaigns are a running test of a candidate’s
character, experience, strength, and capacity for office, those who try to
run for the highest offices without prior political experience seldom
succeed. Nonetheless, sometimes they do, as did Jesse Ventura, a pro-
fessional wrestler, actor, and talk show host who, on less than
$400,000, won a three-way election campaign for governor of Minne-
sota. In liberal democratic elections, outsiders are a constant threat to
established parties and candidates, as it should be when the consent of
the governed rules.
Who people elect is a matter of their perception and interest, how
well off they are in their job and income, and their judgment of the
candidate’s character and promises. And they are free to exercise their
judgment, no matter how biased, anywhere along the campaign trial,
whether in voting for the candidates in caucuses or party conventions,

or in voting for the final nominee, or in running themselves as a party
nominee or an independent.
During President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign, economic
conditions were good, and Clinton and his supporters ran an excellent
public relations and political campaign against Republican Senator
Robert Dole and independent candidate Perot. Fearing a voter backlash
over excessive negative campaigning, and thinking that the public al-
ready was upset by several scandals surrounding Clinton and his White
House, Republicans did not capitalize on them. Near the end of the
campaign, public opinion polls made it clear that these scandals would
have little impact in the coming election, making Dole cry out in frus-
tration, “Where’s the outrage?”
Moreover, Republicans made some disastrous political mistakes,
the worst of which was allowing Clinton and his supporters to establish
in the public mind that the Republican-dominated House of Representa-
tives had shut down the government in an argument with the president
over the budget. They also allowed the Democrats to convince the pub-
lic that the Republicans had no compassion for working families,
children, and the elderly. Clinton easily won reelection in 1996 with 49
percent of the vote.
While the Clinton story gives us insight into the nature of liberal
democratic elections and the public’s participation in, and determina-
tion of, who governs them, it is President Clinton’s second term that
provides a key understanding of this kind of government. This term
would be a tumultuous and most historic one for the country.
Even in his first term, President Clinton’s opponents forced him to
respond to allegations of wrongdoing committed while he was governor
of Arkansas, involving investments that he and First Lady Hillary
Rodham Clinton had made in the Whitewater Development Corpora-
tion, an Arkansas real estate development firm. Revelations and
questions about this, and associated affairs having to do with the sav-
ings and loans firm Madison Guaranty, eventually led to an official
federal investigation by an independent counsel, Robert Fiske. Con-
gress had established the office of Independent Counsel as a result of
the Nixon Watergate scandal. Presumably, the independent counsel
would be free from the assumed conflict of interest a Justice Depart-
ment would have in investigating the president or members of his
cabinet, since the president appointed the top people at Justice. Besides
the Fiske investigation, the House and Senate Banking committees also
held hearings on the Whitewater affair.
Notice that democratic leaders cannot escape the law, even regard-
ing what they might have done before being elected or appointed to
58 R. J. Rummel
office. Prosecutors may investigate their past and present activities,

force them to testify before a grand jury, indict them, and even bring
them to trial. This contributes to what keeps democracies limited,
which is their checks and balances system. This means that the execu-
tive leaders, legislature, and courts are in constant competition against
each other for power and influence, and they watch each other for op-
portunities to gain advantage or weaken one another. This balancing is
particularly true when there are political parties close in power. If the
opposing party controls the legislature, as it did during all but two years
of the Clinton presidency, it acts as an ever-vigilant watchdog over the
executive. Scandals play a major role in this, and provide the opposi-
tion with ammunition to weaken their opponents—which became
particularly clear in the impeachment of the president. All this contrib-
utes to keeping democratic leaders responsible, prudent, and limited in
their power.
When one political party dominates a state, controls the legislature,
executive, and courts, and has a sympathetic media, then there is usu-
ally political corruption. When there is a strong opposition party to
exploit the corruption of the governing party for electoral gain, incum-
bents will be more careful about obeying the letter and spirit of the law.
Moreover, when democratic states have a dominant party controlling
all government bodies, with only a weak opposition to appeal to public
outrage over high taxes and government intervention, they tend toward
Big Government. Such had been the case in Hawaii, for example,
which Democrats wholly governed in the four decades before finally
electing a Republican governor in 2002.
Clinton did not have it so easy. He always faced a strong Republi-
can Party, and in all but two of the years of his two terms, they
controlled both the House and Senate.
As mentioned, there were several scandals involving the president
and his White House during his first term. Although these did not pre-
vent his reelection, they helped create a dominant view among
conservatives that he and his administration were politically corrupt,
and that he was engaged in a systematic abuse of power.
The first White House scandal occurred when his aides suddenly
fired seven long-term employees of the White House travel office in
1993. This firing was done in a rush, with unjustified and later dis-
proved accusations of fraud made against the White House employees,
and the FBI was used to investigate them. Apparently, these accusa-
tions and the investigation were only an excuse to cover the wish to
replace them with Clinton friends and supporters. The First Lady offi-
cially denied any involvement in this, although there was evidence to
the contrary.
Because of the possibility that she was lying and that the presiden-
tial aides had misused the FBI, Attorney General Reno requested that a
three-judge panel appoint an independent counsel to investigate. This
turned out to be Republican Kenneth Starr, whose name in a few years
would become almost as well-known as President Clinton’s. Judge
Starr had served in President Reagan’s Justice Department, had been a
federal judge, and had served as solicitor general under President Bush.
A three-judge panel had already appointed him to replace Independent
Counsel Fiske in the investigation of Whitewater. Years later, he would
clear both the president and First Lady of indictable wrongdoing in this.
Another scandal involved the apparent suicide of the Clintons’
close friend, Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster, who had han-
dled the Clintons’ taxes and Whitewater matters. Upon his suicide,
Clinton’s aides removed files from Foster’s office before police could
search and seal it. This raised the question of a serious cover-up of
Whitewater wrongdoing. As if Independent Counsel Starr did not have
enough to investigate, the three-judge panel asked him to also deter-
mine whether Foster’s death was a suicide and whether White House
aides illegally removed files from his office. In his report to Congress
on his investigation, Starr affirmed that Foster had committed suicide
and that the president and First Lady had not carried on a cover-up.
Yet another scandal was the discovery that the White House had re-
quested from the FBI, and had been holding without official
justification, as many as a thousand secret FBI files, many on top Re-
publicans and opponents. Controversy, especially in 1996, swirled
around how the White House used these files and who was responsible
for this. A three-judge panel also turned the matter over to Independent
Counsel Starr to investigate. After several years, he cleared the presi-
dent and First Lady of any responsibility for this matter. Nonetheless,
that these files were under White House control and that aides might
have exploited them in their campaign against President Clinton’s op-
ponents helped feed the outrage that would later lead to Clinton’s
impeachment.
Further scandals intensified the feeling among conservatives that
the White House was corrupt, but the one that finally led to impeach-
ment involved Paula Jones, a former clerk in the Arkansas State
government. Encouraged and surrounded by President Clinton’s oppo-
nents (called “Clinton-haters” by President Clinton’s supporters), she
alleged that while he was the governor of Arkansas in 1991, one of his
state troopers invited her up to the governor’s hotel room, and that
when she was alone in the room with the governor, he dropped his
pants and asked her for oral sex. The White House and Clinton sup-
porters responded aggressively to these charges, and tried to undermine
60 R. J. Rummel
her credibility. James Carville, a Democrat political consultant credited

with guiding Clinton’s presidential election campaign to victory in
1992, and his chief defender against all accusations of abuse of power,
called Jones “Arkansas trailer trash.”
Angered by such personal attacks, Jones filed a civil suit of sexual
harassment against President Clinton, and demanded $700,000 and a
personal apology. Working through his lawyers, Clinton appealed the
suit, and asked for a delay until after his term was over. But the Su-
preme Court ruled that the suit should go ahead. After more legal twists
and turns and appeals, including Paula Jones upping her demand to a
million dollars, President Clinton settled the case in 1999 by sending
her a check for $850,000, with no apology.
Notice first that no matter how powerful the president is, no matter
how much support he has, a lowly citizen can sue him in court. Just as
important, despite the president’s power, the White House sources at
his disposal, his small army of lawyers, his broad support in the media,
and his popularity, the courts can force the president to defend himself
in court according to the law. Keep in mind that in military terms, he
was the most powerful head of any country in the world. Moreover, he,
his lawyers, and his supporters used the major media that supported
him, every technical legal device ever written into the law, and any
possible wayward interpretation of the law to claim that Jones had no
right to sue him—an expected reaction from any high official caught in
such a sexual sandal. The absolutely critical point here is not what Clin-
ton and his supporters did, but that it all was to no avail. In a liberal
democracy the law rules. In this case, no matter his twists and turns, the
law sided with an unknown clerk from Arkansas against the president
of the United States.
While this suit was underway, Clinton began an eighteen-month af-
fair in the White House and his Oval Office with twenty-two-year-old
Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Although President Clinton
disputes that he had sexual relations with Lewinsky, she did give him
oral sex, a fact later proved by a DNA test of the semen on a blue dress
she wore during one of these meetings.
Lewinsky confided details of this affair to a friend, Linda Tripp,
who began secretly taping their telephone conversations. Tripp later
explained that she did this because Lewinsky had asked her to lie in a
deposition for which Tripp had been subpoenaed in the Jones suit.
Jones’ lawyers were trying to show that what allegedly happened to
Jones was but a pattern of sexual misconduct by President Clinton, and
had subpoenaed Lewinsky, who told Tripp she would lie to protect her
lover. Tripp had worked in the White House, and there had seen Kath-
leen Willey, a White House volunteer, shortly after Willey left an Oval
Office appointment with Clinton in 1993. Willey told Tripp that Clin-
ton had kissed and fondled her, and therefore Tripp was important to
the Jones defense; but if she told the truth in the deposition, she be-
lieved, the White House would try to ruin her credibility.
After she’d gathered twenty hours of taped conversations with
Lewinsky, Tripp turned them over to Independent Counsel Starr, whose
investigative load was already heavy. Judge Starr took this information
to Attorney General Janet Reno, who then asked the three-judge panel
responsible for appointing independent counsels to appoint Judge Starr
to investigate the Lewinsky affair. There is nothing in the law against
sexual affairs in the White House, but the President might have broken
several laws on other matters, including possible sexual harassment of
Lewinsky, asking her to lie in court, and bribing her to keep quiet.
By decision of the Supreme Court, President Clinton also had to
give a pretrial videotaped deposition in the Jones suit. In January of
1998, with Jones sitting across from him, Jones’ lawyers then ques-
tioned Clinton for six hours. He had no idea that they knew about his
affair with Lewinsky, and was quite surprised when they brought it up.
Given a broad definition of sexual relations, approved by the judge sit-
ting in on the deposition, President Clinton denied under oath that he
had sexual relations as so defined with Lewinsky, and claimed that he
did not remember ever being alone with her in the White House.
Within days, news of the Lewinsky affair and the deposition swept
the country. For weeks commentators, analysts, and politicians of all
flavors discussed, argued, and dissected the news. Some top commenta-
tors thought President Clinton would have to resign within a week or
so. The media exploited the slightest rumor, and bit players in the scan-
dal, no matter how remotely involved, had their fifteen minutes of fame
before television cameras. No two lawyers seemed to agree on the law
covering this affair or the possible impeachment, and sometimes di-
rectly contradicted each other. It seemed that the law was a mess. But
the law allows interpretation, and often the expertise of different law-
yers varies.
All of this was subject to partisanship, and nothing arouses partisan
passions more in a democracy than a dispute over whether the head of
government should resign or the people should fire him.
Meanwhile, President Clinton denied to his supporters and White
House staff that there had been any sex with Lewinsky. And of course
Clinton’s defenders, especially those in the major media, tried to mud-
dle the investigation by constantly claiming this was an investigation of
sex, rather than of perjury or abuse of power. Within days Clinton tried
to defend himself on television; wagging his finger, he made the now
famous declaration that we all have seen a thousand times: “But I want
62 R. J. Rummel
to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m
going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman,
Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time—never.
These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the
American people.”
In July the independent counsel finally gave Monica Lewinsky full
immunity for testifying against President Clinton, and she gave him her
blue dress with President Clinton’s semen stains. Before Judge Starr’s
grand jury, she provided details about her sexual relations with President
Clinton, but also claimed that he had not asked her to lie, or to keep quiet
about their relationship.
Shortly thereafter, President Clinton also had to answer questions
before the grand jury. Independent Counsel Starr did this with a closed-
circuit television hookup to the White House, which he also video-
taped. President Clinton answered many questions on the Lewinsky
affair and information she had provided, but would not answer any
questions about sex. However, after President Clinton finished his tes-
timony, he went on national television and admitted an “inappropriate
relationship” with Lewinsky, and that his comments and silence had
given a “false impression.” Then, in lieu of an apology, he said, “I
deeply regret that.”
In September of 1998, Independent Counsel Starr gave his report on
this scandal to the House of Representatives, as required by law. It was,
in effect, a 453-page indictment of President Clinton, listing eleven al-
legedly impeachable offenses. The House almost immediately released
the full report to the public, as well as thousands of pages of evidence
soon thereafter. Within days, the House Judiciary Committee also made
public the full videotape of President Clinton’s testimony before the
grand jury.
This openness illustrates well the transparency of a liberal democ-
racy. Opponents or proponents will disclose all that is politically
important, including dirty laundry, about some politician, legislation, or
policy. This is a crucial role of the opposition, and the reason why hav-
ing a strong opposition is a basic ingredient of liberal democracy. They
want to embarrass and weaken the party in power so that they can turn
into law their favored legislation and win the next election. Even sup-
posedly secret testimony, conversations, and reports are exposed this
way—as is a mass of trivia. Surely partisans on all sides will spin
whatever is disclosed to show its best or worst side. But it is public, and
people are free to make of it what they will.
The public release of the Starr Report, as it became known, was a
serious blow to President Clinton’s prestige. It changed a partisan po-
litical conflict into a super-charged political fight over President Clin-

ton’s future. Over a hundred newspaper editorials eventually called for
his resignation; television and the Internet covered the affair day and
night. He was publicly mocked; cartoonists never had it so good, late-
night comedians constantly made fun of him, and Clinton joke after
joke made the rounds through email and the Internet.
Political humor has an important function in a democracy. Al-
though meant to be funny, the jokes express public dismay and pinpoint
special concerns about high officials’ behavior. In a democracy it is
better for a politician to be criticized by professors of political science
than have well-known comedians earn their popularity at his expense.
What saved President Clinton was the loyalty of Democrats, who cir-
cled Party wagons around him, and a politically astute offensive by the
president and White House aides. Judge Starr became a target of constant
demonizing attacks. He was accused of being “sex crazed, and an ex-
treme right-wing zealot.” Legal action against him for leaking grand jury
testimony was later dismissed by the courts. While polls gave the presi-
dent a job rating above 60 percent, Judge Starr’s was in the twenties.
Other opponents, such as Linda Tripp, were no less demonized.
President Clinton’s supporters were vehement: “It’s only about sex,
and nobody’s business,” “President Clinton told the truth; this is a con-
spiracy of Clinton haters,” and so on. It was all, the First Lady claimed,
a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Meanwhile, the other side claimed that
“Clinton always lies, and is deceitful,” “what he did in the Oval Office
is a disgrace to the presidency; he has systematically abused power”
while in office, and so on. President Clinton’s previous scandals were
revisited, and even Arkansas state troopers were brought out of obscu-
rity for interviews regarding their claims of helping in his sexual
escapades while governor.
The president’s supporters also made a concerted effort to uncover
sexual affairs of major Republicans in the House who were supporting
impeachment, perhaps for revenge, but surely to show that “everyone
does it.” They forced Speaker-designate Bob Livingston to confess to an
extramarital affair and resign, even as the full House was about to begin
deliberations on the articles of impeachment. They also made public a
decades-old affair by Representative Henry Hyde, chairman of the very
House Judiciary Committee set to consider the president’s impeachment.
When the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee began con-
sideration of a resolution calling for a formal impeachment inquiry, the
fight was now formally joined and in deadly earnest, but still con-
strained by the Constitution and House rules. This began the long,
complex political process for removing President Clinton from office.
64 R. J. Rummel
Other than wartime, this legal process of removing a democratically

elected chief executive in midterm is the most dramatic theater people
in democracies experience. Everyone soon knows almost everything
public and private about the cast of characters; the acting is superb, the
speeches and exhortations moving, and the appeals to mind and heart
well studied. Each day is a new scene, the plot is clear, and only the
end is in doubt.
A successful impeachment by the House is like an indictment
brought by a prosecutor before a court. It describes the particulars of an
alleged wrongdoing. Then, before a judge, a court holds the trial on the
indictment, with both prosecutors and defense lawyers presenting evi-
dence and arguments. For impeachment, the court is the Senate.
The Constitution specifies “treason, bribery, or other high crimes
and misdemeanors” as the grounds for impeachment, but what high
crimes and misdemeanors are is subject to considerable legal interpreta-
tion. Only a majority vote of the House is enough to approve articles of
impeachment, and this had only happened once before, in 1868 against
President Andrew Johnson. Impeachment was also considered in 1974
when the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of im-
peachment against President Richard Nixon, but before the full House
could debate them, the audiotapes of President Nixon’s conversations
in the Oval Office were released. They were the “smoking gun” evi-
dence that he had participated in the cover-up of the Watergate affair;
soon his support collapsed in the House, and he resigned.
Once the House votes on impeachment, the Senate holds a trial on
the impeachment articles, as noted. All senators sit as the jury, and the
chief justice of the Supreme Court presides over the trial. The senators
hear witnesses and can ask them questions, and at the end of the trial,
they vote regarding removal of the president. Two-thirds of the senators
must approve removal for it to occur. Were this to happen, the chief jus-
tice would swear in the vice president as the new president. The Senate
vote on Andrew Johnson’s removal was one vote short of two-thirds.
The House Judiciary Committee reported to the full House on its
recommendation to investigate the impeachment of President Clinton,
and in October 1998 the Republican House voted to conduct this inves-
tigation. Hearings by the House Judiciary Committee on impeachment
began soon afterwards and were fully televised.
A variety of witnesses gave testimony before the committee, in-
cluding Independent Counsel Starr. He came down hard on President
Clinton, claiming he intentionally deceived. Opposition to impeach-
ment came from a variety of sources, most of them claiming that what
Clinton did was not impeachable, though morally reprehensible. Many
legal and constitutional scholars argued that his behavior did not meet
the Constitutional basis for impeachment. Some argued that yes, he lied
in his civil deposition, and yes, the independent counsel could (and
some said should) indict him for this after he left office, but that it was
not an impeachable offense. Chairman Hyde also sent President Clinton
eighty-one questions to answer in place of direct testimony.
At the end of the hearings, the Republican members presented the
committee with four articles of impeachment, claiming that the presi-
dent committed perjury before the grand jury, committed perjury and
obstruction of justice in the Jones case, and provided false responses to
the eighty-one questions. The committee approved the articles on De-
cember 11 and 12. All Republicans voted for three of the articles and
all but one voted for a fourth; no Democrat voted for any. The commit-
tee then passed the approved articles to the full House for debate and a
final vote.
This American drama did not paralyze international relations and
foreign adversaries, in particular Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq
against whom an American-led coalition fought the 1990 Gulf War.
Possibly seeing a weakened president, Saddam refused to allow any
further weapons inspections by the UN in his country, inspections he
had agreed to when he was defeated in the Gulf War. Coincidentally or
not, President Clinton launched air strikes against Iraq in retaliation just
when the full House scheduled the opening debate on his impeachment.
Republicans questioned the timing of this, and the Democrats de-
manded that the House put off considering impeachment until the
president ended military action. But the Republicans were in control,
and the continuing raids did no more than delay House proceedings for
a day.
On December 18, the full House began an acrimonious debate on the
impeachment of President Clinton. The next day, the House passed 228
to 206 the first article of impeachment, perjury before Independent
Counsel Starr’s grand jury. It also passed the third article, obstruction of
justice related to the Jones case, with a vote of 221 to 212. The other two
articles failed to pass. It was now up to the Senate to determine whether
these two articles were enough to remove the president from office.
The Senate trial began on January 7, 1999, and was televised
throughout. As dictated by the Constitution, the Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court, William H. Rehnquist, presided over the trial. The trial
started with a reading of the charges, and then the chief justice swore in
the senators, who went one at a time to the front of the chamber to sign
an oath book promising to do “impartial justice.” There were fifty-five
Republican and forty-five Democratic senators. If all Republicans
voted for removal, twelve Democrats would have to join them to get
the sixty-seven votes required.
66 R. J. Rummel
Thirteen Republican House members, headed by Chairman Henry

Hyde, prosecuted the case for removal. In sum, they accused President
Clinton of “willful, premeditated, deliberate corruption of the nation’s
system of justice through perjury and obstruction of justice.”
Charles Ruff, main White House counsel, led President Clinton’s
defense with a team of seven lawyers. Their main argument was that
the Republicans provided no more than “an unsubstantiated, circum-
stantial case that does not meet the constitutional standard to remove
the president from office.”
Both sides presented their arguments and evidence in three days,
and the senators had two more days to ask questions. As the trial pro-
gressed, Democrats and Republicans used one partisan maneuver after
another, although with less bitterness than in the House debate. The
Democrats tried unsuccessfully to dismiss the case, and both sides
fought over whether there would be witnesses, how many witnesses
there would be, and who they would be. They argued over whether the
witnesses would give testimony in the Senate chamber or by deposi-
tion. Most important, this partisan struggle ended in a Senate vote not
to hear Monica Lewinsky’s testimony in person, but by video clips of a
deposition she gave under questioning by House prosecutors. They also
voted to question other witnesses by deposition.
Finally, on February 8, this twelve-month, historic crisis in Ameri-
can politics was almost over. Each side had three hours in which to
present their closing arguments, then for three days the senators de-
bated behind closed doors. On February 12, in the Senate chamber and
before television cameras, the Senate voted. All Democrats and ten Re-
publicans voted President Clinton not guilty on alleged perjury, 55 to
45. On alleged obstruction of justice the vote was split, 50 to 50. Presi-
dent Clinton would remain in office.
The national day by day, twenty-four hour discussion and debate
over the fate of the president cannot be isolated from the House im-
peachment and the Senate trial. All this provided representatives and
senators with an amazing input of knowledge, insights, legal opinions,
and interpretations that made witnesses almost redundant. Most impor-
tant, as the impeachment approached conclusion in the House, and then
as the Senate trial progressed, public opinion not only continued to
support President Clinton, but his numbers actually improved. During
Senate deliberations, some polls showed over 70 percent support for the
president. Moreover, polls showed that the people wanted to get this
over with as quickly as possible; they felt that the Republicans were
unnecessarily delaying the proceedings, and intended to punish Repub-
licans in the next election if they removed President Clinton.
Generally, answers to specific questions in the polls showed that

arguments supporting President Clinton persuaded more people than
arguments demanding his removal. The senators were, after all, politi-
cians, and doubtless were influenced in their votes by public opinion.
Indeed, David P. Schippers, chief investigative counsel for the House
Judiciary Committee for the impeachment, claimed in his book Sell Out
that, due to the overwhelming public support for Clinton, the Republi-
can Senate leadership had decided against trying to fire Clinton, and
had organized the trial to get it over with as soon as possible.
Chapter 8
About Liberal Democracy
Democracy is not so much a form of government as a set
of principles.
– Woodrow Wilson
W
hat do the campaigns, scandals, and the impeachment of
President Clinton tell us about the nature and workings of lib-
eral democracy? It is self-government. Throughout the history
of the Clinton presidency, adult Americans could have campaigned and
voted for Clinton or his opposition in the presidential elections of 1992
and 1996. Americans could also have campaigned and voted for the rep-
resentatives and senators who voted on his impeachment and removal.
Americans could make their voices heard regarding his scandals and im-
peachment by writing letters to the editors of newspapers, telephoning
radio talk shows, or by posting their opinions for or against him on the
Internet via chat groups or on their own web page. And Americans could
organize demonstrations or participate in them, build organizations to
work for or against him, and contribute money to one side or the other.
Note also that there is a democratic culture involved. This dictates
that compromise and negotiation will settle disputes with a tolerance
for differences. If the conflict is profound and the stakes very high, if
there is no solution other than one side losing and the other side win-
ning, then democratic procedures must be used that are within or
dictated by the law. Such was the impeachment and trial of President
Clinton. But, consider. The president had vast public and secret re-
sources at his disposal, such as the secret service, the FBI, and the CIA.
As commander-in-chief of all American military forces, he had them at
his command. Could he not have used this power, if he so desired, to
have the army surround Congress and the Supreme Court and dictate
the outcome of their impeachment proceedings? That this was not even
considered by anyone in the media, that there was not the slightest ru-
mor of this, that even his most extreme political enemies never thought
this a possibility, shows the strength of this liberal democracy.
But let’s say that the president did issue such orders. What would
happen? There is no doubt about the answer: he would be disobeyed.
His orders would have to go through the military Joint Chiefs of Staff
and the secretary of defense, and then down the command structure.
The respect for the Constitution is so deeply ingrained in the military
and those who are appointed to high office, democratic norms and cus-
toms are so unconsciously held that, instead of being obeyed, the
president’s very attempt to use the military unconstitutionally would be
reported to Congress and become an article of impeachment.
Alternatively, suppose that he had secretly plotted with a group of
generals or colonels to use their troops in a coup against the Constitu-
tion. If anything like this had been launched, it would have been
soundly defeated for three reasons. First, this junta could only be a very
small group, and thus militarily outgunned. Second, even ordinary sol-
diers would not obey the commands of their officers, because this
would too clearly be a treasonous, antidemocratic action. And third,
even if this were successful, the people would rise up in rebellion
against such a totally antidemocratic usurpation of power.
One more example is the outcome of the year 2000 American
presidential election. The Democratic candidate, Vice President Albert
Gore, got a majority of the national vote and came within a couple of
hundred votes of winning Florida’s electors, which would have given
him the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. As it was, with
Florida’s slim margin giving the Republican candidate, Governor
George Bush, its electoral votes, he won the presidency by only 271
electoral votes. Because of the importance of the Florida electors and
the very slight margin of victory for Bush, Gore refused to concede the
election and he, his supporters, and the Democratic Party waged a pub-
lic relations and legal onslaught on the ballots cast in Florida,
particularly in highly Democrat counties. They argued that all the bal-
lots had not been counted, the voting machines had malfunctioned, or
that the ballots were too complex for many voters.
I need not go into the legal and political victories and defeats in this
campaign to overturn Bush’s victory, except to note that we all learned
a new vocabulary about machine ballots, including chads, pregnant
chads, tri-chads, hanging chads, swinging chads, dimples, and so on.
Suffice it to say that after two Florida Supreme Court victories for Vice
President Gore and two United States Supreme Court decisions vacat-
ing or overturning them, Gore finally lost hope of getting the recount of
ballots that he wanted. Over a month after the election, Gore finally and
graciously conceded the election to Bush.
This was the closest election in American history. And yet—and
this is the point to this example—in spite of the heated partisan rheto-
ric and the claims that the election had been stolen, there was no
70 R. J. Rummel
violence. There were no violent demonstrations, no riots, no necessity

to call out the army, and no coup. The decision of the Supreme Court
was accepted; law triumphed over the desire for power. This is almost
unbelievable, considering that this election was to determine who
would be the most powerful leader in the world, and which economic
and social policies would dominate the country. But it is the way lib-
eral democracy functions.
This type of government stands in sharp contrast to the alternatives,
such as rule by a king, as in Saudi Arabia; by a dictator, as in Sudan; by
the military, as in Burma; or by an elite, as in China. It is inconceivable
that any of these rulers would be questioned by a court, undergo ex-
amination by the people’s representatives over some scandal, stand trial
while in office, or stand aside and let another person rule because of a
court decision. In these countries or others like them, people would not
be able to criticize or demonstrate against their rulers without serious
and possibly lethal repercussions. They and their families might be ar-
rested and tortured if documents—even letters or emails—criticizing
the government are found in their homes. In such countries, when the
people threaten the power of their dictators, those dictators could, and
do, use tanks and machine guns against them.
Chapter 9
Extent of Democracy
There are 88 liberal democracies scattered all over
the world.
A
ll this being understood, so what? Are there not only a small
number of democracies? Are there not even fewer liberal democ-
racies like the United States, almost all being in western Europe?
In fact, is not my characterization of liberal democracy too Western,
hardly fit for nations in Asia, South America, and Africa?
Extent of Liberal Democracies

The answer is no to each of these questions. As listed on the Free-
dom house website (www.freedomhouse.org/), out of 192 nations in
2003, 121 are democracies. Of these, 89 are electoral democracies, ac-
counting for 44 percent of the world population. They include the
European and North American democracies, as well as such diverse
nations as Andorra, Bahamas, Belize, Cape Verde, Chile, Costa Rica,
Cyprus, Dominica, Grenada, Iceland, Japan, Kiribati, Mali, Malta,
Marshall Islands, Mongolia, Nauru, Palau, Panama, Saint Kitts and Ne-
vis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, San Marino, South
Africa, South Korea, Suriname, and Taiwan. This variety of cultures,
races, ethnicities, and geography should dispel the notion that liberal
democracy is a peculiarly Western type of government that the West is
trying to push on the rest of the world.
I should also mention that there are a number of more or less social-
ist economic systems among the liberal democracies, such as those in
Denmark, Norway, India, and Israel. Their governments still protect
human rights. Consider the socialist policies of Sweden, for example,
which sometimes is called “The People’s Republic of Sweden,” a play
on what communist parties call their own nations.
Like the United Kingdom, Sweden is a constitutional monarchy,
with a democratically elected parliament. The people also elect its
prime minister to parliament, and he is usually the head of whichever
72 R. J. Rummel
party gets the most parliamentary seats. King Carl Gustaf XVI has no
formal political power and only a ceremonial role. Sweden has exten-
sive and comprehensive national welfare and health insurance systems.
Doctors work for the government and hospitals are government run,
with health care covered by taxes. If people are sick or must stay home
to take care of sick children, the government will make up for most of
the income lost. Bear a child, and get a year of government mandated
leave from work, with pay. People also get government allowances for
their children and support if their children continue their education after
they are sixteen years old. Workers and their employers also must con-
tribute to worker retirement benefits, which they receive when they turn
sixty-five, and which are supplemented by added employee fees.
Sweden has an industrial policy that sees the government as neces-
sarily involved in and in some ways directing the economy. There are
stiff laws covering the hiring and rejection of job applicants and, if
hired, their firing. Government closely regulates, subsidizes, and sets
price ceilings on home purchases or rentals, and strictly enforces regu-
lations on home building. It stimulates investment, and provides special
tax benefits to steer businesses in the direction desired by government.
Also, as part of its industrial policy, the Swedish government favors
and encourages very strong unions and large, centralized business asso-
ciations. This has led to the economic dominance of large corporations
and unions.
To support government welfare policies and involvement in the
economy, people pay over an average of 50 percent of their income in
taxes, while businesses can pay as much as 65 percent. One measure of
the cost of government regulation, and the opportunities people and
businesses lose because of it, is that about 35 percent of all workers
were working for the government in 1992. An even better measure is
that the government alone creates one-third of the market value of all
Sweden’s goods and services. Another third of the value results from
government redistribution of income, through such channels as the na-
tional welfare policies and national health program mentioned
previously. This shrinks the private economy’s value to only a third of
all Sweden’s products and services. By contrast, this value is about
two-thirds for the United States.
Regardless of Sweden’s welfare statism and its reputation for social-
ist policies, as a liberal democracy the government protects the freedom
of its people—their human rights—to speak out, protest, demonstrate,
organize against these policies, and vote out of power those who support
them. Swedes even enjoy a fair amount of economic freedom. Among
123 countries whose economic freedom was ranked for 1999 by the
Economic Freedom Network, Sweden ranked in economic freedom

about 22 out of 111 nations, and the Network rates it with 8 out of 10
possible points. The United States is ranked 4, with 9.1 out of 10 points.
In further comparison, of the countries I described in Chapter 1, the Net-
work ranks China 87, and places Burma at the bottom among all 111
countries in economic freedom. The Network did not rank Sudan, Saudi
Arabia, or North Korea, but surely they must be near the bottom.
As to the 89 liberal democracies, this number is a sharp increase
from the 44 that existed in 1973, and the total lack in 1900 (the democ-
racies that existed, such as the United States, were electoral but
illiberal) and shows well that the world is becoming increasingly de-
mocratic. Democracy is now the world’s dominant form of
government, and with the death of fascism through World War II, and
of communism with the end of the Cold War, democracy has no real
competitors for hearts and minds. When all 121 electoral and liberal
democracies are considered, the odds of a person being born in a de-
mocracy today are slightly greater than 61 percent.
Extent of Illiberal Democracies

In 2003 there were thirty-two nations that were electoral illiberal
democracies—that is, their people were only partially free, some so
marginal as to make it a toss-up whether we should call them democra-
cies. These included such nations as Armenia, Colombia, and Turkey.
All restrict some of the people’s basic rights against government that
characterize a liberal democracy. An impeachment like that of Presi-
dent Clinton might still take place in most of them, but not with the
same vigor, concern for the law, and intimate involvement of the pub-
lic. In these countries, freedom of speech or religion or association may
be under pressure or even compromised.
Just to mention some of the problems regarding human rights in
these countries, in Columbia the courts tend to be corrupt, and extortion
is common. Colombian drug lords have considerable influence, and
may even have dictated some of the laws. Violence is endemic; all
sides commit atrocities, including the murder of officials and activists.
In Turkey the military has undue influence, and security forces have
often killed those suspected of terrorism or of supporting a Kurdish re-
bellion. The government limits freedom of speech. Turks may not, for
example, insult government officials. Government-organized groups or
sympathizers have attacked and threatened human rights activists. They
may even be responsible for the disappearance or murder of journalists
74 R. J. Rummel
and newspaper owners. Appeal to the highest court over politically sen-
sitive judgments may be useless, and the courts themselves seem to be
under military control.
And in the Ukraine government corruption is widespread as well,
and bribery is a way of getting or preventing government action. Con-
sistently, political pressure on the courts and intervention in their
process is common. Starting and running a business is often difficult,
since businessmen must compete with an in-group of present and for-
mer members of the political establishment. The government limits
freedom of speech. Ukrainians cannot, for example, attack the honor
and dignity of the president.
Nonetheless, aside from the serious human rights problems of the
illiberal electoral democracies, a citizen of any of them can vote regu-
larly by secret ballot in competitive national elections. They can vote
the top leadership out of power. This is why these countries are still
democracies, although only electoral ones.
Conclusion
Overall, the case for democratic freedom is strong, as I have tried to
show in this and the previous chapter. But I can make an even stronger
case. In the following chapters, we’ll see that freedom is not only a
human or natural right, certified by international agreements and sup-
ported by moral reasoning, that it is not only a socially just
metasolution to human diversity, but that it is also a moral good. This
means that the social and political consequences of freedom make it a
supreme value in itself.
PART 3
On Freedom’s Moral Goods:
Wealth and Prosperity
P eople who are free to go about their business and interests cre-
ate, innovate, take risks, do what is important to them, and spend
long hours pursuing their dreams. Especially, they soon find out
that they can often gratify their own desires by satisfying the interests
and dreams of others. Such is the free market. Such is the power of
freedom. Such is this force for wealth and prosperity.
This does not mean that all free people are wealthy. It means, how-
ever, that economic well-being, good health, education, and oppor-
tunity are spread across the population. It is no accident that the most
economically developed, technologically and scientifically advanced
nations, the most healthful nations, the nations with the best systems of
education, communication, and transportation, are those that are de-
mocratically free.
I’ll illustrate the power of freedom with the example of Bill Gates
who, with his partner Paul Allen, created Microsoft and the computer
operating system that enables the vast majority of desktop and laptop
computers to work. Then we’ll examine why freedom is so powerful,
and discover that economic freedom is not a system of selfishness and
greed, as the most prevalent myth claims, but that it reflects in practice
the utopian ideal of people seeking, and often sacrificing to discover
and then pursue, ways of fulfilling the interests and desires of others.
Freedom’s power to create wealth and prosperity is best understood
by contrast with its opposite, the command economy of communism. In
Chapter 12 I describe this system and then in the next three chapters
show what this political economic system did to the Soviet Union un-
der Lenin and then Stalin, and China under Mao Tse-tung. Pure and
simple, their tyrannical rule over their economies by absolute com-
mand, fear, and murder created monumental deprivation and starvation
and the world’s worst famines, killing in total over the three regimes
around 45 million Russians and Chinese—almost double all the combat
deaths in World Wars I and II.
And Chapter 16 reveals that, in stark contrast to the consequences
of a command economy and nondemocratic types of governments, no
democracy has ever had a famine.
Chapter 10
Freedom Is an Engine of Wealth and Prosperity
What is most important for democracy is not that great
fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should
not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich
men, but they do not form a class.
– Alexis de Tocqueville
The Moral Good of Wealth and Prosperity
D emocratic freedom is a right everyone has, as previous chapters

have established. This in itself is just, and to deny people their
freedom would be unjust. And as a just right, no one can mor-
ally deny people their freedom for whatever end, as has happened to
billions of people.
For example, some rulers and their supporters deny their people
freedom by arguing that doing so is necessary to develop the country
economically, achieve national glory, promote racial or ethnic purity,
or create a communist paradise. This is to make of freedom a tool that
those in power can manipulate or ignore, depending on the ends they
seek. This is a destructive premise that, for too long, intellectuals have
allowed dictators and their supporters to assume. Freedom is not a tool;
it does not have a utility attached to it that justifies government grant-
ing it or taking it away. In this sense, democratic freedom is a moral
good, something that is to be sought or held for its intrinsic moral
value, and for no other reason.
Yet, amazingly, there are actually consequences to freedom that are
also important moral goods. When we compare what happens to an
economy and society when people are free and democratic versus un-
free, the results of freedom are often the very ends that some dictators
try to fulfill by repressing freedom. So stressing that freedom is a moral
good is not erecting a firewall against any negative consequences, for
the consequences are not only positive, but moral goods in themselves.
It’s like eating fruit, which is tasty and filling and inherently good, but
which also reduces the probability of getting cancer or suffering a
stroke or heart attack.
One of freedom’s desirable consequences is to promote unrivaled

wealth and prosperity; it is an unbeatable engine of technological and
economic growth. As an example of how freedom can produce this mi-
raculous result, consider the life of William (Bill) Gates, who could not
have created the computer software he did other than in a free soci-
ety—software that has contributed greatly to our prosperity.
The Example of Bill Gates’ Freedom

Gates was born into an upper middle-class family in 1955; his
mother taught school and was a regent of the University of Washington,
and his father was a prominent lawyer. Gates went to public elementary
school, then to the private Lakeside High School in Seattle, where he
learned about computers and soon became fascinated by them.
By the time he was thirteen, he and his best friend, Paul Allen,
were already programming computers, and spent as much of each day
as they could on the school’s mainframe computer—playing with it,
causing it to crash, rewriting its programs, and writing new ones
themselves. In those days, computer time was costly and had to be
rationed; because of their excessive use of it, the school finally had to
ban them from the computer for short periods.
Gates and Allen had become so good at using it, however, that a
computer business, the Computer Center Corporation, hired them and
two other hackers from the school to solve some problems with their
computer, paying them for their services with unlimited computer time.
Now Gates and Allen could work on a computer day and night, while
also reading computer manuals and picking the brains of other employ-
ees. This ideal life did not last, however, for in 1970 the company went
out of business.
Gates and Allen’s next break came when Information Sciences
hired them to program the company’s payroll. Again they were given
free computer time—probably more important to them than whatever
money they made. The company also paid them royalties for any of
their programs it sold.
Encouraged by all this, Gates and Allen made their own small com-
puter for measuring traffic flow, and started a little company, Traf-O-
Data, to sell it. This earned them about $20,000. Though he was still
only a high school student, Gates’ computer skills were becoming more
widely recognized. His school asked him to program a scheduling sys-
tem for them, and he and Allen wrote the program together.
While they were seniors, company officials at the defense corpora-
tion TRW, impressed by what they heard about Gates and Allen’s
78 R. J. Rummel
successes, hired them to debug TRW computer programs. This was an-
other big break for the two. The job not only helped them further refine
their software writing skills, it started them thinking about setting up
their own software company.
In 1973 they graduated from Lakeside. Because of Gates’ excellent
grades, recommendations, and achievements, he was able to get into
Harvard University, where he chose to study pre-law. After all, his fa-
ther was a lawyer and the field of computer sciences didn’t exist then.
But he soon discovered Harvard’s computer center, and all else was
lost. He would work at night at the center and sleep through his classes.
Allen moved close to Gates so that they could continue to develop
and work on their ideas. After Gates finished his freshman year, he and
Allen got programming jobs at Honeywell Information Systems. They
still were working for others, however, and Allen particularly wanted to
set up their own company. Gates was reluctant to drop out of Harvard
to do this.
Then, in December of 1974, a chance event led to the start of Mi-
crosoft. Accounts disagree on how this event came about, but a popular
version is that on his way to see Gates, Allen happened to stop to look
over some magazines. On the cover of Popular Electronics he saw a
picture of the new MITS Altair 8080, the first microcomputer. He
bought the magazine, took it to Gates and, after both had read it, they
saw what an opportunity the Altair was.
This was a most propitious time to be interested in computers. The
IBM room-sized mainframe dominated the computer market and most
computer specialists were interested in mainframe hardware or pro-
grams. Microcomputers (also to be called desktop or personal
computers) for the general market had yet to be made, but Gates and Al-
len recognized that small personal computers were the future for
businesses and home computing. And all of these computers would need
system software to run them, as well as software for specific needs.
Stories also vary as to what happened next. One version is that
Gates called MITS and claimed that he and Allen had written a pro-
gram they called BASIC for the Altair. The company expressed interest
and wanted to see it, but Gates had lied—there was no such program.
Encouraged by the company’s interest, he and Allen raced to write one.
One problem: they had no Altair at hand. So, while Gates focused on
the writing of BASIC, Allen developed a way of simulating the Altair
chip using one of Harvard’s computers, the PDP-10. In about eight
weeks they finished, and Allen flew to MITS to demonstrate their new
BASIC on the Altair, a computer he had yet to see or touch. The gutsy
test was a success on the second try, and MITS bought the rights to the
program. This victory finally convinced Gates that the personal com-
puter market was set to explode and, more important, that they had the
skills to share in it.
In 1975, Micro-soft—later to be Microsoft—was born, and Gates
soon dropped out of his junior year at Harvard to devote himself to the
new business. Its initial product was the BASIC system Gates and Al-
len had written, and several large companies were eager customers. At
the time, I was also writing computer programs for my research, and
can attest to one overwhelming principle of computer life. It is cheaper
to buy a good program than to write one or hire programmers to do it.
This was one of the main reasons for Microsoft’s early success.
By 1979, Microsoft had sixteen employees, and Gates moved the
company from Albuquerque, its first home, to Seattle, Washington. The
company continued to grow and create new products. It produced a
spreadsheet program, which later would become the MS-Excel spread-
sheet we know today. And it produced the first version of what is now
the overwhelmingly popular MS-Word.
Paul Allen, who had been instrumental in so much of Gates’ early
work and then in the growth of Microsoft, had to resign in 1983 be-
cause of Hodgkin’s disease. Eventually he successfully fought off the
disease and, made a very rich man with his Microsoft shares, went on
to form his own software companies. He also bought the Portland Trail-
blazers basketball team.
What made Microsoft so dominant in the computer market, and
what has mainly contributed to Gates’ wealth, was a deal he made with
IBM in 1981, when Microsoft had only grown to about thirty people.
With great foresight, Gates had bought an operating system, which
he rewrote into what he called MS-DOS (Microsoft disk operating sys-
tem). The operating system is the software that runs a computer. It
interfaces between the computer hardware, such as the computer proces-
sor, memory chips, hard disks, floppy drives, CDs, monitor, and so on,
and the applications, such as word processing or spreadsheet programs.
At that time IBM, the dominant force in the computer market, was
preparing a new line of personal computers, and needed a good operat-
ing system for them. They were in negotiation with a more established
company, but Gates impressed them, and Microsoft got the job to write
the operating system for IBM’s new computers. This was an amazing
deal for his small company. Within years IBM began to turn out per-
sonal computers like McDonald’s turns out hamburgers, and each one
started up with a rewritten MS-DOS.
This was not enough for Gates, however. He had always been inter-
ested in making the computer more graphically oriented so that users
could clearly see on their monitor what they were doing with the com-
puter, such as when trashing a file or transferring a file out of one
80 R. J. Rummel
folder to another, and he began the development of such a program in

1982. This evolved into a graphically-oriented, pseudo system program
that operates on top of MS-DOS. Finally shipped in 1985, it was the
first version of Windows. Its latest incarnation as Windows XP, or an
earlier version, is now used on virtually all IBM computers and com-
patibles in the world.
In 1986, Microsoft successfully went public with its stock offering of
$21 a share, and by 1995 Microsoft had 17,801 employees. Gates had
realized his dream. He has played a dominant role in making personal
computing available to everyone, and his products have continued to
dominate the field. I do my work on a Macintosh computer with an Ap-
ple Corporation operating system 10.3 that competes with Windows—
and personally I think Apple’s system software is better. Yet because of
their quality, I use Microsoft’s Word and Excel programs.
In recognition of his contributions, President Bush Senior awarded
Bill Gates the National Medal of Technology in 1992. Bill Gates also
has been more than amply rewarded financially. On May 22, 2000, his
wealth, tied partly to the near 141 million shares of Microsoft that he
owns, was $72,485,700,000. This made him the richest man in the
world. Not even the wealthiest of monarchs, with jewels and gold bars
piled at their feet, can beat Bill Gates’ worth. According to one rumor,
he is so rich that when he got the bill for his $50 million manor built on
Lake Washington, he turned to his wife Melinda and asked her to get
his wallet. If he had worked ten hours a day, every day of the year,
since the founding of Microsoft in 1975, I calculate that he earned
about $1.3 million per hour.
How can one man become so rich? Surely, Gates was lucky in be-
ing in the right place with the right friends at the right time when the
personal computer revolution was just beginning. Supportive and afflu-
ent parents played a role in his success, as did his naturally deep
interest in computers, a proclivity for the mathematics of it, and a will-
ingness to work hard. But most important, he was free to follow his
star. He needed no government approval. Personal computers and re-
lated hardware and software were a new market, and there were
virtually no government regulations telling Gates what programming he
could and could not do. Of course, Gates and Allen had to satisfy cer-
tain government registration requirements when they set up Microsoft,
and there were more regulations covering Microsoft going public in the
stock market. But it was entirely up to Gates how hard he worked, what
he produced, and what he charged for his products.
Chapter 11
The Power of the Free Market
The more freedom a people have, the greater their

health, wealth and prosperity; the less their freedom,
the more their impoverishment, disease, and famines.
F or the world as a whole, there is a very strong, positive correla-

tion between democratic freedom and the economic wealth and
prosperity of nations, as Table 11.1 and Figure 11.1 show.
Much of this is due to the close association between civil liberties and
political rights and economic freedom, as shown in Figure 11.2. (I am
tempted to call this the Bill Gates Effect.) And this positive correlation
goes far beyond economic matters to include the social and physical
welfare of a people, as well.
The more freedom people have, the greater their nation’s techno-
logical growth and scientific contributions, and the availability of
railroads, paved roads, and airports. The more freedom people have, the
better their health services, hospitals, doctors, and life expectancy. The
more freedom a people have, the higher the instance of literacy, high
school and college graduates, universities, and books published; and so
on. To adopt a current term for all this, the more freedom, the more
human security.
But why should freedom be so productive? One reason is that peo-
ple like Bill Gates can follow their interests and fully realize their
inherent capabilities and talents.
But also, they have an incentive to work and produce what people
want because they are rewarded—and handsomely so, if they can sat-
isfy the desires of millions. There is something more here, however,
than simply following personal interests and getting material rewards.
People naturally take care of what they own. It is like driving a rented
automobile versus their own car—in subtle and perhaps even in some
extreme ways, they are probably rougher on the rented car. After all,
they lose nothing when they rapidly start and stop a rented car, corner it
at high speed, screech its tires, grind its gears, ignore potholes, and let it
get filthy. The rental cost is the same either way.
82 R. J. Rummel
This is like the commons, or common areas of a neighborhood.

People take care of their house and yard. It is personal property and a
reflection of their inner self, a matter of personal pride. But the com-
mons, such as a public park, is owned by the public and therefore by no
one. Government bureaucrats are the stewards over such property, and
by law must manage it. But this is not their personal property, and
therefore they do not have a primary motivation to take care of it and
improve it. Usually, their personal motivation is to do the least amount
of work at the best wage, and even if they do the best job possible, they
do not do more than needed. So I see trees and flowers planted along
newly built public roads withering and dying for lack of water, and I
walk in parks whose grassy areas are overgrown with weeds and lit-
tered with paper cups, beer cans, and all the debris of people who use
facilities they do not own. And I dare not think about using a public
restroom!
The incentives of private ownership versus the commons gives us
an understanding of why plantation owners often took good care of
slaves they bought, though the owners might punish them severely for
trying to escape or refusing to work. By comparison, the biggest slave-
like establishment of modern times, the Soviet gulag—the forced labor
camp system—took little care of its laborers. Camp managers often
worked them to death or allowed them to die of malnutrition and expo-
sure. The life expectancy in some camps, especially the mining camps
in Kolyma, was a matter of months. Why? The incentive for the camp
managers was to get the most out of the workers for the least cost, then
pocket the extra funds—not to take care of the prisoners. These people
were not personal property, but public property. This was the very
worst of the commons.
Besides the joys of freedom, the prosperity it creates, and the incen-
tives of private ownership, there is the individualization of choice and
behavior. While people share much with their neighbors, friends, and
loved ones, each person is different. Each has values, perceptions, and
experience that no economic and social planners can know, or usually
84 R. J. Rummel
even guess at; in no way can each become data in some planner’s com-
puter, because the path through life for each is unique. This means that
only the individuals can best judge what they value, desire, want, and
can do. To borrow a useful cliché, each alone knows where their shoe
pinches.
This is more basic than it may at first seem. In the free market, eve-
ryone is free to buy and sell, to create and build, as did Bill Gates. This
freedom enables everyone to best adjust to the world around them and
apply their unique values and experience. Therefore, a farmer who has
learned from his parents and his own direct experience how to till the
soil unique to northeastern Ohio, to read the local weather patterns, and
to plant and fertilize the seeds that will grow well in the rocky soil, will
best know how to make his farm productive. No government official
far away at the state capital in Columbus or the national capital in
Washington, D.C., can do as well. And really, were they to command
him how to farm, they would destroy his incentive to produce, and the
farm’s productivity. The loss of this freedom to farm is a loss of per-
sonal experience, knowledge, and values that government commands
cannot replace. History has shown the catastrophic results of this in
communist nations, as I will detail in Chapters 13 to 15.
Moreover, in a free market, buyers and sellers automatically bal-

ance the cost and amount of goods. This means it is often more
profitable to sell many items at a small profit than a few at a high
profit. This encourages lower prices and cheaper goods to meet the
mass demand of poorer people. Some producers will specialize in
building yachts and make a profit at it, but many others will find it
most profitable to market cheap clothes, fast food, games, and thou-
sands of devices that make life easier. And in this way, businesses are
encouraged to produce more items, more cheaply, and of better quality.
We have seen this regarding computers.
Note also, as free market economists like Milton Friedman, Ludwig
von Mises, and F. A. Hayek have stressed, free market prices are an
economy-wide message system. They communicate shortages, where
things are cheap, and where production might be profitable enough for
a business to move into the market; they also communicate where de-
mand is slack and businesses might cut back production. Prices in a
free market tell businesses what to put on the supermarket shelves,
where, when, and at what price. Therefore, the free market is equally a
massive distribution system.
Think about this for the moment, about the miracle of the thousands
of goods on the supermarket shelves, many from faraway countries and
other states. Who decides this? What great mind or computer figures
out what is to be sold in what market for how much, when? And all
without shortages, and long lines waiting for a supply truck to arrive, as
is often the case in command economies. How is this done without the
economic planners that socialists believe necessary? Automatically and
spontaneously, by the decisions of hundreds of thousands of free pro-
ducers, suppliers, truckers, and market managers, all responding to
different prices and demand.
This is why the command market and government intervention fail
to improve prices and allocation over the free market. Instead, it creates
economic dislocations, hardship, privation, and, as we will see, famine.
No government officials, no social scientists, no central computer pro-
gram, can possibly figure out what each person wants, when, and
where, and how all this can be balanced for tens of millions of people.
A government cannot improve the free market price mechanism, even
at the minimum by antitrust, antimonopolistic laws; it can only distort
or destroy.
Chapter 12
The Free Market, Greed, and the
Command Economy
Underlying most arguments against the free market is a
lack of belief in freedom itself.
– Milton Friedman
Y
ou may believe that I am exaggerating the role of freedom, and
that for Gates’ success detailed in Chapter 10, his talent and ini-
tiative were most important. Then consider what his life would
have been like in a country that allowed no freedom, such as the former
Soviet Union.
The Communist Party that ruled this country placed the strongest
emphasis on economic and technological development, and it is natural
to believe that someone with Bill Gates’ abilities and interests would
prosper there. First, however, for Gates simply to survive without going
to a labor camp or to his death, he and his parents could not question
the Party line, and both his parents and grandparents could not have
been connected to the previous czarist government, or be bourgeoisie.
Presuming, then, that Gates was clean of any such “counterrevolution-
ary” taint, he might have succeeded as a scientist or engineer. But he
could not have produced any great jump in software development.
The Party strictly limited the use of computers, all of which it
owned. For over a decade it kept computers under lock and key, to be
used only with Party permission. Gates, therefore, would not have had
the free use of computers that enabled him to develop his programming
ability and to eventually write the programs he did. And, since all pri-
vate businesses were illegal, there could be no Microsoft to design
personal computers or write software. Such could only be done within
some Party-run shop. If, in such a shop, Gates had written useful soft-
ware, it would be the property of the Party, to dispose of as the Party
bureaucracy wished.
There is a slight hint of such a statist attitude in the American Jus-
tice Department taking Microsoft to court in 1997 for monopolistic
practices. Specifically, it accused Microsoft of making its Internet Ex-
plorer part of Windows 95, and thus stifling competition with other
Internet browsers, such as Netscape. In April of 2000, a federal judge

ruled that Microsoft did violate antitrust laws, and in June issued a final
judgment ordering the dissolution of Microsoft. However, this order
was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Colum-
bia, while the court did hold that Microsoft had an illegal monopoly on
computer operating systems. With a new Republican administration in
2001 that brought a new Secretary to the Justice Department, its plan to
split up Microsoft was dropped.
This case reflects an anti-free market attitude toward competition,
big business, and success—and likely some envy of Gates’ wealth.
More important, this action by the previous Clinton administration
probably shows the power of political contributions or their lack. Gates
had naively refused to make any large contributions to the Democratic
Party or President Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, while Micro-
soft’s chief competitors had done so. It was their complaints about
Microsoft that brought action.
Many of the commentaries on this case saw capitalist greed as Mi-
crosoft’s, and especially Gates’, primary motivation. Indeed, this view
reflects a general criticism of free-market capitalism itself as the incar-
nation of greed. These critics see entrepreneurs and business people as
being out only to make a profit, and economic competition as nothing
more than capitalists climbing over each other to profit from the poor.
Such critics want an economic system wherein each tries to help others
and provide for their needs, rather than people trying to get rich at each
other’s expense—a view that lies at the root of much leftist and social-
ist thought today. Even many that strongly support a free market see
greed as its driving force. This not only gives ammunition to the ene-
mies of this freedom, but also mischaracterizes it altogether by
reference to something that is an aspect of the system and not its cen-
tral, psychological dynamic.
Imagine a utopia where people are highly motivated to provide ser-
vices and fulfillment to others, usually total strangers. They see this as
being in their own self-interest. Many of these people also spend sixty
to seventy hours a week trying to provide such services. Also imag-
ine—unbelievable as it may seem—that in this utopia some of these
people spend their life savings and borrow huge sums of money to dis-
cover or provide new things that they believe other people might want.
That is, in this society the chief preoccupation of people is to satisfy the
wants of others, or to determine how they might do this, and do so with
the least expense to those getting the services or goods.
Such an unbelievable other-directed society does seem utopian. But
if we could have such a society, would it not be inherently moral? Is
this not the dream of many communitarians, philosophers, and theolo-
88 R. J. Rummel
gians—that people spend their time, energy, and resources to provide

others with what they need and want?
This utopia does exist. It is the free market. Lawyers, doctors,
teachers, intellectuals, writers, authors, journalists, computer program-
mers like Bill Gates, movie stars, business owners, financiers, stock
owners, and all other individuals making up the whole population com-
prise the free market, as do all large and small businesses. The
automobile repair shop, the computer discount house, the Italian restau-
rant, the Chinese laundry, the small Catholic college, the mom and pop
grocery store, and so on and so on, exist to give people a particular ser-
vice. If this service is unwanted or the business charges too high a
price, then it goes bankrupt. Moreover, entrepreneurs are constantly
trying to invent new businesses or services that will fill some need or
want not yet recognized by others. If no such want exists, or its fulfill-
ment is not worth the cost, the businesses fail. Such working and
striving to satisfy others is a moral ideal. That this is the essence of the
free market is unappreciated.
Again consider what Bill Gates and Paul Allen did. They spent un-
believable hours of their own time learning about computers and how
to program them. This they were doing out of sheer interest, not be-
cause of greed. When they had learned enough, they began to satisfy
the needs of others, particularly in helping to debug mainframe com-
puter programs, and in writing their own programs to fill needs that
others had expressed. When they started Microsoft, they wanted to sell
software and make money, to be sure. But to do this, they had to specu-
late on what kind of software would most benefit the users of
computers, and they had to make an initial investment of time and re-
sources in writing it. If they were wrong, they lost what they put into
the program. If they’d struck out enough times, Microsoft would have
gone bankrupt. Microsoft succeeded, however, more than anyone
dreamed possible, and the simple reason for this is that Gates and Al-
len, and then Gates alone, saw what people needed most, and worked to
satisfy that need.
Years ago I wanted a good word processor to use in writing my
books, and a spreadsheet program with which to do my analyses. Mi-
crosoft foresaw my need with very good software, and I bought their
Word and Excel. I thereby contributed to Gates’ wealth, to be sure, but
I did this freely and received in return two programs I could not write,
and which have made me far more productive.
Bill Gates and Microsoft are participants in a technological revolu-
tion that began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one that was
really a revolution in freedom. As government loosened its stranglehold
on national economies and foreign trade, as it allowed creative and en-
terprising people to produce new things, there was a surge in new in-
ventions, new businesses, and the earnings and wages of the poor.
Before this revolution, laws tied workers to a farm or manor and forced
them to live the most basic and poorest of lives. They often faced the
threat of starvation if a harvest was meager, if they lost or broke their
tools, or if they were dispossessed of their land by the government or
feudal lords. They wore the most basic and plainest of clothes and ate
the simplest and cheapest food. The revolution of freedom liberated the
poor from this kind of servitude, assured them of a basic wage, and en-
abled them to improve their consumption. Much to the complaint of the
upper classes, who saw this as “putting on airs,” the poor began to dress
in better, more colorful clothes, and to eat a greater variety of foods.
All of us are the inheritors of this freeing of the market and the re-
sulting technological revolution. The automobiles people drive, the
televisions they watch, the movies they see, the cell phones they an-
swer, the planes they fly, and—exemplified by Microsoft—the
computers they use, all owe their development and availability to the
free market. At a more basic level, we can best see the operation of the
free market in the availability of an amazing variety of cheap foods for
the poor and lower middle class. An American supermarket is a cornu-
copia of agricultural wealth, with choices of fruits, vegetables, meats,
cereals, breads, wines, and so on from many areas of the United States
and countries of the world. Similarly, department and hardware stores
shelve, hang, and display a wide variety of goods. To see the results of
freedom, you need only shop in any of democracy’s stores.
Let’s look at new inventions and innovations. Freedom promotes a
continuous reduction of the cost of goods compared to the average
wage, such that even the most complex and advanced products are
available to the common person. An example of this is the rapid evolu-
tion of the handheld calculator.
When I was a graduate student working on my M.A. thesis in 1960,
I had to calculate statistics on a large Monroe mechanical desktop cal-
culator. I had to punch the numbers into it, move some switches to do a
specific calculation, and physically crank it (like starting an old car) to
get the results. By computer standards today, this Monroe was painfully
slow and clumsy, but it was still better than doing the arithmetic by
hand. I could calculate sums, cross products, and correlations, but it
took me about two months and a sore arm to do all the necessary calcu-
lations. My university paid about $1,100 for the machine then, or about
$6,408 in current money.
By the early 1970s, I could pick up a handheld Hewlett Packard
electronic calculator that would do all these calculations and many
more, such as logarithms and trigonometric functions, store one figure
90 R. J. Rummel
or calculation in memory, and function on a small battery. It cost about

$400, or about $1,709 in today’s dollars.
Now I can get such a handheld calculator for $10; paying slightly
more will get me a calculator that will do much more than the obsolete
Hewlett Packard. And for about $900 I now can buy a personal com-
puter—for example an iMac with monitor, keyboard, modem, CD
drive, and an internal hard disk—that has a capability undreamed of a
mere decade ago and on which I could have done all the necessary cal-
culations for my M.A. thesis in seconds, not months. This is
comparable to the free market, through innovation and competition,
bringing the price of a new automobile in 1960 down to the cost of a
new shirt today—which makes one wonder what the price of an auto-
mobile now would be without any government regulations on its
production and quality.
I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the Northwestern University main-
frame, a central IBM computer worth tens of millions of dollars in
current money. It had a memory of 36 kilobytes and filled a huge, air-
conditioned room with its blinking lights, spinning tapes, massive cen-
tral processor, very slow printer, batch punch-card input, and bustling
attendants. The whole atmosphere of computer, lights, air conditioned
room, and all the rest created a feeling of almost spiritual mystery. To
use this monster, I had to learn to write my own computer programs,
and to change some of its functions I had to rewire part of the com-
puter. That was in 1962 and 1963.
Today I sit before a flat seventeen-inch color monitor connected to
a new Macintosh G5 that has one gigabyte of memory (nearly 28,000
times the memory on the mainframe), a 28.5-gigabyte hard disk, a
DVD-rewritable drive, a modem, and a color printer. The total cost of
all this was about $3,500. Incredible power at an unbelievably low cost
compared to what I could have bought only one human generation ago.
This is the fruit of freedom.
But still, while many may accept this productivity of the free mar-
ket, they may believe that a command economy with the best and the
brightest scientists and technicians doing the planning, and a focus on
producing the most goods for the most people—on providing for the
needs of all people—can be even more successful. Especially for the
poor. Government is then seen as the best engine of wealth, prosperity,
and equality for all. This idea has a solid grip on the minds of too many
intellectuals and academics, and so in the next chapters I will describe
what happened in the Soviet Union and communist China when this
idea ruled each.
Chapter 13
Scarcity and Famine:
Lenin’s Command Economy
[I]t is necessary to . . . distribute the food provisions . . .
with the view of cutting down on the number of those
who are not absolutely necessary and to spur on those
who are really needed.
– Lenin
Communism
T
his idea of a free market was the cornerstone of classical liber-
alism, whose bible in the eighteenth century was British
philosopher and economist Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations.
He argued that wealth is best created when government keeps its
hands off the economy and there is free trade. This free, or laissez-
faire, market is, however, only one political-economic model.
The major competing model in the twentieth century was that
based on the economic and historical analysis presented in Das Kapi-
tal, written by the nineteenth century German political philosopher
Karl Marx. Along with Friedrich Engels, Marx established the “scien-
tific” socialism that we now call communism. In his many works,
including his influential pamphlet What Is To Be Done, Russian revo-
lutionary and philosopher Vladimir Ilich Lenin then showed how
Marx-Engel’s politico-economic theory could be put into effect—how
a communist revolution could be induced and a communist nirvana
achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Scholars now
think his work is such a basic addition to Marxism that they make
Marxism-Leninism synonymous with communism.
Communism has been the most influential politico-economic the-
ory of the twentieth century. With its claims of empirical proof and a
scientific theory of history, and its utopian plan to rid the world of
poverty, exploitation, economic greed, and war (all of which it claims
are due to capitalism), it captured the minds of many intellectuals and
workers. And through revolution, invasion, and war, these believers
took over one country after another: Russia, China, Mongolia, North
92 R. J. Rummel
Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, East Germany, Poland, Hun-

gary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ethiopia,
Angola, Mozambique, Grenada, Nicaragua, and South Yemen. This is
an impressive roster indeed.
The communist politico-economic model explicitly claims that
while the free market will lead to the impoverishment of the worker
and its own destruction, communism will create socio-economic equal-
ity and a society in which abundance will reign and provide “from each
according to their ability, and to each according to their need.” This
abstract model seems ideal and has misled many a compassionate per-
son. But let’s look at what this model really meant in practice—what
such a command economy in the former Soviet Union under Lenin and
Stalin, and in communist China under Mao Tse-tung, accomplished
compared to a free market.
Lenin’s Nationalization and Famine, 1920–1923

I will discuss in detail the 1917 Bolshevik (communist) coup
against the Russian Kerensky government in the next chapter. Here,
however, as a precursor to Stalin’s collectivization of the peasant and
his intentional famine in the Ukraine described in the next section, I
want to note the severe famine that Lenin created as a result of his
command policies in the Soviet Union soon after he seized power.
After the Red Army had won control over much of Russia, the
Communist Party—in effect, the new government of the Soviet Un-
ion—issued a Decree on Land that encouraged peasants to seize large
estates, thus depriving cities and towns of food. This created much lo-
cal disorder, as did the Party establishing committees of peasants to
“assume the responsibility for repression,” and the decree that in all
small, grain-producing districts, officials should pick twenty-five to
thirty “wealthy” hostages to be killed if the peasants did not deliver
their “excess” grain. In practice, excess grain often turned out to be any
grain—even the peasants’ reserve and seed grain was expropriated by
detachments of workers ignorant of farming. The Party sent tens of
thousands from the cities to uncover the peasants’ “excess,” which re-
sulted in more disarray hardly conducive to good harvests. As Lenin
himself confessed, “Practically, we took all the surplus grain—and
sometimes even not only surplus grain but part of the grain the peasant
required for food.”
By 1920, in what was sometimes called ‘War Communism,’ thirty
percent of what the peasant produced was being requisitioned. It was
no longer necessary that Lenin requisition supplies for the Red Army’s
conflict with the anticommunist White armies, which no longer posed a
serious threat. Rather, Lenin’s purpose was to move from a capitalist
free market to a socialist one—to a command economy, as he declared.
He wanted to nationalize the peasant, although not in the total way that
Stalin would do a decade later through collectivization.
Nationalization and its attendant forced requisitions was Lenin’s so-
lution to the problem of paying for peasants’ grain when funds were not
available. And it prevented peasants from keeping their grain and other
crops from the Party. The Party also made many new laws to assure
this. It set low prices for the peasants’ produce, banned private trade,
and established a system of rationing. Unlike a free market, this pro-
vided little motivation to produce—notwithstanding the likelihood of
new detachments of workers coming through to expropriate or loot
whatever was in a field or house. Understandably, the harvest of 1921
was only 40 percent that of 1913, before the revolution.
This disastrous harvest, coupled with the loss (or consumption due
to hunger) of the reserve food supplies necessary for peasants to sur-
vive periodic droughts, had human costs far beyond the hundreds of
peasant rebellions it caused. In 1921, a drought that in some Russian
provinces formerly would have created no more than a minor famine
instead triggered one of the worst ones in modern times: over 30 mil-
lion people faced starvation.
Faced with a calamity that could threaten the survival of commu-
nism, the Party began providing some aid to the starving while urgently
requesting international help. International relief, particularly from the
United States through the American Relief Administration (ARA), was
soon forthcoming. But even in the face of this historic disaster, Lenin
wielded aid and food as a socialist weapon. Said Lenin, without an iota
of compassion for the victims, “it is necessary to supply with food out
of the state funds only those employees who are actually needed under
conditions of maximum productivity of labor, and to distribute the food
provisions by making the whole matter an instrumentality of politics,
used with the view of cutting down on the number of those who are not
11
absolutely necessary and to spur on those who are really needed.”
The Party requested foreign aid for the Russian Republic, but men-
tioned nothing about the counterpart famine in the Ukraine. The Party
must have known as early as August of 1921 that the southern Ukraine
11 Quoted in G. P. Maximoff, The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in

Russia (Data and Documents). Chicago: The Chicago Section of the Alexander
Berkman Fund, 1940, p. 149.
94 R. J. Rummel
was verging on famine, but Lenin refused to allow a transfer of food

from the north to the south. Indeed, the Soviets tried to feed Russia
with Ukrainian grain, justifying this by exaggerating its grain produc-
tion. In effect, many Ukrainians were starved to death to feed hungry
ethnic Russians. The Party allowed no aid from the outside until
American relief officers forced the issue, and even then the Party hin-
dered the aid effort. Lenin was using starvation to pacify Ukrainian
nationalism and defeat the many rebellions there—to crush peasant re-
sistance, a goal that Stalin would also tackle with famine in the early
1930s.
Then, in the summer of 1922, irrationally (unless one has firmly in
mind the communist obsession with building socialism), the Party re-
sumed large-scale grain exports. This, even though the Party had to
starve part of the population to get the grain. But it wanted capital for
industrial heavy equipment. So it asked the ARA to continue aid so that
some of these people could be fed. Thus, the picture that displayed the
heartlessness of communism versus the apolitical compassion of de-
mocracies: in the port of Odessa, Russians saw the SS Manitowac
unloading American famine relief supplies while nearby the SS Vladi-
mir was loading Ukrainian grain destined for Hamburg.
Although there were agricultural dislocations caused by civil war,
Lenin and the Communist Party were mainly responsible for some 5
million people starving to death or dying from associated diseases. The
toll would have been much higher had not the ARA provided about $45
million in aid (about $474 million in 2002 dollars) to keep alive about
12
10 million people.
But this was not yet the worst that the Russian people would suffer.
That would be the fruit of Stalin’s tyranny.
12 For the overall toll of mass murder during the civil war and deaths from this man-
made famine amounting to murder, see the estimates, calculations, and sources in
Table 2A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917
(1990). The table is also on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB2A.GIF. For other tables and a summary
chapter of the book, see: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE4.HTM
Chapter 14
Scarcity and Famine:
Stalin’s Command Economy
You [Party activists] must find the grain . . . . It is a
challenge to the last shred of your initiative and to your
Chekist spirit . . . . Comrade Stalin expects it of you.
–Hatayevich (Central Committee member)
Collectivization, 1929–1935
A
fter Lenin’s death from a stroke in 1924, there was a struggle
for Party rule between Leon Trotsky, commissar for war and
Lenin’s heir apparent, and Josef Stalin, general secretary of the
Central Committee of the Party. By 1928 Stalin had won the battle and
had full control over the Red Army, secret police, and communist
cadre. He could now carry out his plans to fully socialize what was now
known as the Soviet Union. He especially intended to go much further
than Lenin had dared go with the peasants, and nationalize—without
compensation—independent farms, their livestock, and land, and con-
solidate them all into huge farm factories run by the Party. Each farmer
was to become an employee earning a daily wage for his work. It was
to be total collectivization of the peasantry.
Theoretically, the idea has a certain appeal: turn “inefficient” small
plots on which farmers could not use modern farming equipment
(equipment they also could not afford) into large, factory-like farms,
each with its own tractors, each efficiently allocating farmers to spe-
cialized tasks. Of course, this required persuading farmers to give up
their land, livestock, tools, and often their homes to the communes, and
to become workers with regular wages, hours, and tasks.
The peasants resisted, of course. They killed their animals rather
than give them up, burned down their homes, fled to the cities, shot at
the troops who came to enforce the Party’s commands, and committed
suicide. This Peasant War destroyed and depopulated whole villages.
Even nomadic herdsmen were not exempt, as Stalin decreed that the
Party also must settle them into communes, and collectivize their wan-
96 R. J. Rummel
dering herds. By March 1, 1930, 14,264,300 peasant holdings had been

collectivized throughout the Soviet Union.
As it turned out, once they “voluntarily” turned all they owned over
to a collective farm, the peasants found it more like a penal colony.
Party functionaries in Moscow commanded commune work and activ-
ity, usually from thousands of miles away. They regimented the life and
daily routine of each commune member, although they knew nothing of
local conditions and farming. Peasants, now commune “workers,” had
to obey orders without question, or communist agents, spies, or their
supervisors would report them. In words that a peasant living under Pol
Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia could have uttered, Myron Dolot
pointed out:
We were always suspected of treason.

Even sadness or happiness were causes for
suspicion. Sadness was thought of as an
indication of dissatisfaction with our life,
while happiness, regardless of how spo-
radic, spontaneous, or fleeting, was
considered to be a dangerous phenomenon
that could destroy the devotion to the
communist cause. You had to be cautious
about the display of feelings at all times,
and in every place. We were all made to
understand that we would be allowed to
live only as long as we followed the Party
13
line, both in our private and social lives.
This Peasant War was the largest and most deadly war fought be-
tween World Wars I and II. The Party fought the war by “persuading”
peasants to “voluntarily” join the communes using lies, false promises,
peer pressure, coercion, and finally naked force. A massive, coordi-
nated propaganda barrage extolled the manifold virtues of collecti-
vization and condemned those “rich” peasants—or kulaks—who were
systematically and selfishly sabotaging this humanitarian Party effort to
spread the benefits of communism to the poor peasant.
Stalin also formally declared war on kulaks. Party activists and
even everyday workers became convinced that these kulaks were
wholly responsible for the resistance to collectivization and its associ-
13 Miron Dolot, Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust. New York: W. W.

Noton & Co., 1985, p. 92.
ated violence. Party officials throughout the Soviet Union spewed hate
propaganda and consistently harangued activists on kulak evil-doing.
Whipped into a frenzy of hostility, activists and cadres who were sent
out to the countryside in waves of collectivization unleashed their pent-
up rage on any assumed kulaks.
The kulaks were not only scapegoats, they were the focus of attack.
Stalin pursued collectivization through a campaign to eliminate the ku-
laks as a class, and decreed the liquidation of all kulaks and their
families, even extended families. This meant execution for many, or
slow death in labor camps for many more. Others were barely more for-
tunate to be deported to forced settlements in remote regions like
Siberia, which in some ways were worse than camps. Kulaks were re-
garded more as vermin than people.
This kind of scapegoating, deception, propaganda, and use of naked
force is intrinsic to a command economy. To command an economy
means just that, to use commands that subjects absolutely must obey—
or else face prison, camp, or death—to get done what is planned. Since
human beings have their own interests and are unwilling to be used as
the bricks and mortar to construct a utopia, they have to be persuaded
or pushed, and as communist cadres everywhere have seemed to say,
“If some die in the process, so be it—you can’t make an omelet without
breaking eggs.”
In actuality, those liquidated “kulaks” were mainly the peasants
who had been more successful farmers—they owned fatter cows, they
built better houses or barns, and they earned more than their neighbors.
They were not the rich (the average kulak earned less than the average
factory worker, or the rural official persecuting him), or the exploiting
landlord. They were simply the best farmers. And they paid for their
success. The Peasant War consumed their lives and the country. Speak-
ing with Churchill during a World War II summit, Stalin admitted that
this Peasant War was worse than that against the Nazis; it “was a terri-
ble struggle . . . . It was fearful.” After saying that he had to deal with
10 million kulaks, Stalin claimed that “the great bulk was very unpopu-
lar and was wiped out by their laborers.”
Stalin’s estimate was not far off. From 1929 to 1935, the Party de-
ported to labor camps or resettlements, usually to a slow death, possibly
10 million, maybe even 15 million “kulaks” and their families. Even
infants and children, and the old and infirm. Apparently even they
stood in the way of progress, of Stalin’s collectivization. The cost in
lives? The Soviets themselves admitted that their collectivization and
dekulakization campaigns might have killed 5 million to 10 million
98 R. J. Rummel
14
peasants. This was mass murder, a hidden Holocaust that few in the
world outside the former Soviet Union know about. All to apply an un-
tested, theoretical economic model of a command economy—Marxism-
Leninism.
And did collectivization work? No, this greatest of experiments in
scientific, social engineering utterly failed. It denied the laws of eco-
nomics and human nature, of the free market; and so, the communes
never did produce enough food for even the Soviet table. The Party had
to resort to massive food imports and to giving the communes some
freedom, but to no avail. Stalin helped agricultural productivity most
when he permitted peasants, during their time off, to plant food on a
little plot of land the Party gave them near their collective. As one
might expect, these little plots became highly productive, and eventu-
ally accounted for most of the food produced in the Soviet Union,
strongly vindicating the free market model.
Famine by Design, 1932–1933

Incredibly, the horror of collectivization was only the beginning.
The Peasant War and the resulting communes totally disrupted the ag-
ricultural economy. By 1932, famine again threatened, but there was
the Peasant War, and the Party could not give aid to the enemy. In fact,
Stalin saw the famine as positive—it would encourage peasants to join
the collectives, particularly if that were their only source of food.
But Stalin perceived another potential benefit from a famine. He
could use it to squash Ukrainian nationalism. Ukrainians, even top
communists, were becoming more assertive about strictly-Ukrainian
interests: music, language, literature, and interest in Ukrainian history
were undergoing a renaissance. Stalin could not allow this to continue,
since Ukrainian nationalism, at the heart of which was the peasant, was
inherently an opposing force to communism. Destroy the Ukrainian
peasant, and Russian immigration into the Ukraine and collectivization
would easily follow.
So in 1932, Stalin launched a new and differently fought assault in
the Peasant War by ordering an impossible grain delivery target of 7.7
million tons out of a Ukrainian harvest already reduced by a third from
14 For the overall toll of collectivization, see the estimates, calculations, and sources
in Table 4A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917
that of 1930. After much argument, Ukrainian officials got this reduced
to 6.6 million tons, but when the Party apportioned quotas among the
villages, said one survivor, “Our village was given a quota that it
couldn’t have fulfilled in ten years!” In effect, the quotas were a sen-
tence to death by starvation for Ukrainian peasant families. Stalin’s war
strategy on this front was simple yet imperial in scope: force the un-
willing peasants into communes, while also destroying the spiritual
resources and cultural achievements that supported their nationalism.
Although collecting and exporting more grain than ever, the Party
showed the starving peasants no mercy. It took even warm baked bread
off the peasants’ tables. It marshaled detachments of workers and activ-
ists to seize every last bit of produce or grain, including the seed grain
needed for planting. They went through peasant homes with rods, push-
ing them into walls and ceilings, seeking hidden stores of food or grain;
they dug up or poked around yards with rods, searching for hidden
food; they brought in special animals to sniff out the food, much as
trained dogs now sniff for drugs in travelers’ suitcases. To the Party
officials and activists, peasants had to have food hidden somewhere,
since they were still alive.
To survive, the peasants ate roots; they boiled bark and the soles of
their boots for the broth. But at each grasp for food, the authorities
stepped on their hands. When the peasants started eating their dogs and
cats, the Party ordered village officials to bag a “certain quota of dog
and cat skins,” and they went through the village shooting these ani-
mals. When the peasants tried to eat birds and their eggs, communist
activists organized systematic bird hunts, shooting birds out of the trees
with shotguns. Finally, the peasants ate horse manure; they fought over
it, sometimes finding whole grains in it. Emaciated, enfeebled, near the
end they sometimes ate their own children and those of their neighbors
that they could kidnap—as North Koreans have during their commu-
nist-made famine.
The Party left the peasants with nothing. It ordered the military and
police to seal Ukrainian borders to block the import of food. It black-
listed some villages with especially stubborn peasants, totally isolating
them from the outside, and it forbade the sale of any food or other
products—even soap.
The starving peasants died by the millions in the winter of 1932–33.
Stalin prevented any aid until he was sure that the Ukraine would no
longer resist collectivization or be a threat to communism. About eight-
een months of famine did it. With whole villages lifeless, highways and
fields dotted with the dead, the survivors too weak to work, with the
Ukraine prostrate and even workers in the cities now threatened, Stalin
100 R. J. Rummel
ended quotas in March 1933; in April some army grain reserves were
released for distribution to the dying peasants.
The result? The Ukraine was like a huge Nazi death camp, with
about a fourth of all peasants dead or dying, and the rest so weak and
debilitated that they were unable to bury the dead. On Stalin’s orders,
about 5 million Ukrainians had been murdered through starvation, 20 to
25 percent of the Ukrainian farm population. Another 2 million proba-
bly starved to death elsewhere; 1 million died in the North Caucasus
alone. While Stalin intended the Ukrainian deaths, those elsewhere
were the unintended by-products of the war on the peasants—
collectivization.
Still, the Party did learn a little from this famine. It loosened its
controls and, as mentioned, allowed the peasants to operate small, free
market plots. But this was not enough to prevent famines. There were
some local famines in the next decade, and another major one occurred
in the Ukraine and Byelorussia from 1946 to 1947. This time only
500,000 to 1 million people starved to death.
Regardless of these famines, no matter the costs of collectivization,
some Western intellectuals claimed that the communist-induced, rapid
industrialization had brought a better life to the average citizen. It’s
hard to believe now, but there were Western books and articles extol-
ling Soviet progress, and pointing to this as the wave of the future that
all our politico-economic systems should emulate. One such work,
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, was written by the English
socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb during the worst of the collectivi-
zation and the Ukrainian famine. Even years later, when details of the
cost of Soviet communism and the famine and the nature of the Party’s
dictatorship were much better known, they would write that the country
was a “full-fledged democracy.” And the very influential British play-
wright and socialist George Bernard Shaw called the Soviet Union “a
really free country.”
In the eyes of these writers, the Soviets now had national health
care, guaranteed housing, social security, no unemployment, and a
“democratic government” that marshaled all society’s resources to cre-
ate a better future, unlike the dictatorship of the rich in the West where
greedy capitalists climbed over each other to impoverish the worker.
This stuff could only have been written by utterly ignoring the real-
ity of Stalin’s mass murder, his enslavement of his people, and his
famines. It is as though these Western supporters had visited a Nazi
concentration camp and emerged claiming that the camp’s government
guaranteed that their subjects would have food, work, a place to live,
and the democratic right to elect the head of their barracks.
Even some thirty years after Stalin’s death in 1953, even after some
seventy years of Party command over the economy, even after life in
the Soviet Union had markedly improved since the collectivization and
famine years of the early 1930s, the Soviet citizen hardly lived better
than in czarist times. As is typical of communist countries, shopping in
Soviet cities was often a long hassle, with days spent just to find toilet
paper, sausages, or shoes. To buy scarce goods, people waited in line to
be given a ticket to buy an item, waited in line to pick up the item, and
waited in yet a third line to pay for it.
The communist elite were too important to waste such time and de-
served better, to be sure; they had their own restaurants, their own
stores in which to buy the best goods, their chauffeured cars, and their
Party-owned villas or retreats.
On the rise was one of the best indicators of public health, infant
mortality; it was not decreasing, as it does in all free market democra-
cies. Such was the result of a command economy.
Chapter 15
Scarcity and Famine: Mao’s Command Economy
[The famine] resulted mainly from the massive interven-
tion of ignorant zealots in the agricultural process and
from the tendency of the Central Plan itself to become
an inexorable trap.
– Miriam and Ivan D. London and Lee Ta-ling
Murder of Traditional Agriculture: Land Reform
“W
ell,” some with a sense of Russia’s long history under
the czars might say, “this really is Russia, and you
know the Russians; they are barbarians compared to
Western Europeans.” Then consider a country that is far different cul-
turally, one whose people have a reputation for intelligence and
industriousness.
In 1949, the Communist Party under Mao Tse-tung won the Civil
War against the Nationalist government, and gained control over
mainland China. Immediately, Mao moved to consolidate and central-
ize power, destroy any source of opposition, and make communist
authority supreme throughout the land. Acceptance, if not outright loy-
alty, had to be assured to apply the communist economic model, espec-
ially among the mass of peasants. With actual or potential resistance
liquidated, Mao then could command nationalization, collectivization,
and forced industrialization.
In hammering out this transitional “dictatorship of the proletariat,”
Mao and his henchmen in the Party murdered many millions of Chi-
nese, sent them to forced labor camps to die, or caused them to commit
suicide. Often, simply being a more prosperous peasant, a simple busi-
nessman, a minor member of the former government, a humble priest,
or a Westerner’s friend was enough to merit such a fate. Any resistance
to the Party or criticism of Mao or communism was reason for a bullet
in the back of the head. This terrorism soon reached into the smallest
villages and farthest reaches of China.
This preparatory softening up and totalization of Chinese society
took almost four years. It involved many movements and campaigns,
each an effort by the new rulers to define specific goals and identify
enemies, to name these and assign suitable tactics and perhaps quotas
to the lowest cadres, and to mobilize the masses through slogans, giant
mass meetings, required political and orientation sessions, and often
outright incitement to violence against the class enemy. Some of these
movements were meant to improve economic growth or social welfare,
such as the “Increase Production and Thrift,” “Patriotic Cleanliness and
Health,” and “Elimination of Illiteracy” movements.
Perhaps the best known of these movements was that of “Land Re-
form.” China was and still is a land of farming villages. Traditionally,
much power in the village rested with the gentry and the relatively rich
landowners. They were a largely independent power base, historically
moderating between the peasants and the local and central govern-
ments. This was not a feudal, peasant-landlord class system as had
existed in Europe. The Chinese peasant was independent and often
owned his own small piece of land.
Acting through the Party’s organization, officials, and cadre, the
method Mao used to destroy this free agricultural market was simple:
make the peasants hate their landlords and the “rich” and then give him
their land and wealth. If the Party also could incite the peasant to kill or
participate in killing the landlord, he would support the Party out of
fear of revenge or of losing his new land. Therefore the Party’s direc-
tive to cadres:
Adopt every possible measure to rouse

the hatred of the people and excite them
into frenzy and hysterical animosity
against the landlords. The high-ranking
cadres responsible for the Land Reform
Movement must not hesitate to allow the
Land Reform Squads a free hand in exe-
15
cuting landlords . . . .
The technique was for a group of activists to occupy a village, and

then within a few days to select the victims and arrange a “trial.” The
cadre would then haul the victims out of their beds at night, beat, hu-
miliate, insult, and spit upon them, and eventually bring them before a
table at which sat a “tribunal” composed of Party activists, one or two
local sympathizers and, if possible, someone with some judicial experi-
ence to lend legal color to the proceedings. Then there would be the
15 Quoted in Ching-wen Chow, Ten Years of Storm: The True Story of the Commu-
nist Regime in China. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winsten, 1960, p. 101.
104 R. J. Rummel
“jury,” a crowd of local peasants whom the activists had already

aroused against the victims. Fear conjured manufactured hatred on
peasant faces—the cadre was watching them for compassion for the
victims or lack of enthusiasm for the proceedings.
Amid cries of “enemy of the people,” or “counter-revolutionary
jackal,” or “imperialist lackey,” the cadre would force the victim to face
his “jury” with his hands tied and, with prompting from the “tribunal,”
recite his crimes against the revolution. Then a member of the “tribunal”
would say that the victim’s punishment should be death, at which the
coached “jury” would shout, “Death!” Then the cadre would immedi-
ately shoot the victim, or wait until after he’d dug his own grave.
The Party officially ended “Land Reform” in 1953. According to
the Party, the movement affected around 480 million of about 500 mil-
lion peasants; almost 114 million acres forcibly changed hands. Under
this guise of redistributing land to the peasants, the party destroyed the
power base of the gentry and rich peasants, and got the acquiescence, if
not the support, of the poorer peasants.
How many landowners and their relations the Party murdered or
caused to commit suicide in this vast and bloody campaign, we can never
know. A reasonably conservative figure is that about 4.5 million land-
lords and relatively rich and better-off peasants were murdered. As
fantastic as this human toll may seem, the words of the highest Party rul-
ers give it credibility. In official 1948 study materials about “agrarian
reform,” for example, Mao instructed cadres that “one-tenth of the peas-
ants [about 50 million] would have to be destroyed.” This would have to
be “30 million landlords and rich peasants” according to a speech in the
16
same year by Jen Pi-shih, a Party Central Committee member.”
Collectivization: the Commune

With power now tightly centralized, society totally under control,
and all possible countervailing forces destroyed or weakened, and now
with a true command economy to work with (and having learned noth-
ing from Stalin’s horrible agricultural debacle), Mao put collectiviza-
tion into effect. After some preliminary collectivization of the peasants
into cooperatives, in April of 1958 Mao began the forced collectiviza-
16 For a breakdown of China’s democide by period, see Table II.A of my China’s

Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991). The table is also on
my website in two parts at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.1.GIF and
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.2.GIF. For other tables and a summary
tion of peasants into communes with the establishment of the Sputnik

commune in Honan Province. With unintentional irony, Beijing’s
China Youth News described what it was like to live in this commune:
At dawn the bugles sound and whis-

tles blow to gather the population of the
commune . . . . A quarter of an hour later
the peasants are drawn up in a line. At the
orders of their brigade and company
commanders they now move off in mili-
tary step to the fields, carrying their
banners. Here you no longer see the small
groups of peasants, two or three at a time,
smoking and making their way leisurely
to the fields. Instead you hear the meas-
ured tramp of many feet and the sound of
marching songs. The age-old habit of liv-
ing haphazardly has now disappeared
forever with the Chinese peasants. What
an enormous change! In order to adapt it-
self better for modern life and collective
labor the commune has launched a move-
ment for the shifting and reunification of
the villages. The peasants now move to-
gether in groups to spots nearer to their
place of work. What an astonishing
change! From the days of antiquity the
peasants have regarded the home as their
most precious possession, handed down
to them by their ancestors. But now that
the little patches of land, the small houses
and the livestock have become the prop-
erty of the commune, and now that the
bonds which attached the peasants to
their villages have been severed so that
there is nothing left of their former home
which they could still desire, they feel at
peace. Now they say: “The place where
we live doesn’t matter to us; we are at
17
home anywhere.”
17 Quoted in Suzanne Labin, The Anthill: The Human Condition In Communist

China. Translated by Edward Fitzgerald. New York: Praeger, 1960, p. 101.
106 R. J. Rummel
The “success” of this “model” commune, so the Party reported, led

to a “spontaneous demand” by the peasants throughout China for com-
munes of their own. Acceding to this, the Party ordered communes set
up everywhere. Then the newly acquired land, and all else the peasants
owned, such as farming tools of all sizes and types, and even houses,
became the property of the communes. Virtually all that hundreds of
millions of peasants owned was nationalized in one titanic gulp.
By the end of 1958, the Party had organized into 26,000 communes
over ninety percent of the population—about 450 million Chinese. The
peasants were now the property of the commune, to labor like a factory
workers in teams and brigades at whatever the Party commanded, to eat
in common mess halls, and often to sleep together in barracks. In an
instant, for about one-seventh of humanity, Mao had destroyed family
lives, traditions, personal property, privacy, personal initiative, and in-
dividual freedom. Mao and Party functionaries now dictated every
condition of peasant lives, truly creating a command agricultural econ-
omy.
Mao still found time for even more movements to remove any pos-
sible critics or opponents to Party policies and ideology. One example
was the “Anti-Rightist” Movement, which was notable for assigning
quotas. Mao gave educational institutions, from primary and middle
schools to technical schools and universities, quotas of between five
and ten percent of their staffs to be delivered to the state as “rightists.”
Those selected would then be imprisoned, tortured, and possibly exe-
cuted. And because the quotas for rightists were often higher than
institutions had legitimately qualified rightists to fill, rightists had to be
invented. To understand this system is to know that some institutions
would enthusiastically overfill their quotas.
Great Leap Downward

But the Anti-Rightist Movement was a diversion from the main
line. Even as Mao was displaying the first model commune and plan-
ning to modernize agriculture, he was also undertaking to catch up with
the West in industrialization, particularly with Great Britain in steel
production. Indeed, Mao considered collectivization and industrializa-
tion the two legs of China’s socialism, necessary for China’s “walking
on two legs,” as he put it.
Beginning in May 1958, slogans, exhortations, and drum-beating
mass meetings mobilized the whole country in a “Great Leap Forward.”
The Party hastily built workshops and factories—reportedly half a mil-
lion in Hopei Province alone, in less than two months. It erected iron
smelters throughout the countryside—1 million by October, involving

100 million Chinese. It ordered the communes, and “encouraged” mil-
lions of urban families to contribute pots, pans, cutlery, and other iron
and steel possessions for smelting. Peasants had to work day and night,
fourteen or sixteen hours or more, on these projects.
Production statistics zoomed, but top Party officials soon realized
that local authorities had falsified the statistics. What factories and
workshops produced was often worthless junk; much of the iron pro-
duced in backyard furnaces was impure and unusable slag.
All of this demolished Chinese living conditions. In a pre-1937 sur-
vey of 2,727 households in 136 different areas of China, an adult male
consumed an average 3,795 calories a day. In 1956, official sources
reported the daily individual food consumption as less than 2,400 calo-
ries—an astounding 37 percent drop.
In 1957, according to official statistics, rice production was 82 mil-
lion tons. This reduced to 340 grams (12 ounces) per person per day,
and considering the better rations of officials, soldiers, and agents, the
ordinary person got less than 320 grams, as refugees reported, or under
half the normal daily calories needed. Although there were nearly 150
million fewer people in 1936, the rice production then was about the
same as in 1957. Predictably, in 1956 and 1957 there was famine in
certain districts.
Then there were the many Chinese the Party murdered during this
collectivization period. As best as we can estimate, the collectivization
and the “Great Leap Forward,” as well as the campaigns against “right-
ists,” probably cost an additional 5,550,000 Chinese lives.
The World’s Greatest Famine Ever

This was not all this economic model, supposedly vastly superior
to the free market, cost the Chinese people. The worst was yet to
come. The effects of collectivization and the “Great Leap” were disas-
trous. Already in 1959, the negative effects on public welfare evident
in previous years were multiplying. For example, Honan Peasant’s
Daily, a provincial newspaper, disclosed that many peasants died
from overwork or malnutrition that summer. During two summer
weeks, 367,000 collapsed and 29,000 died in the fields. Other papers
revealed that over a similar period, 7,000 died in Kiangsi, 8,000 in
Kiansu, and 13,000 in Chekiang.18
18 Valentin Chu, Ta Ta, Tan Tan: The Inside Story Of Communist China. New York:
W. W. Norton, 1963, p. 74.
108 R. J. Rummel
Trapped by these conditions, with the Party forbidding peasants

from leaving their commune or workplace, they could only rebel. From
1959 to 1960, peasants rose up in arms in at least five of China’s prov-
inces, in rebellions that the military could not subdue for over a year.
Reports from Honan and Shantung stated that “members of the militia
stole weapons, set up roadblocks, seized stocks of grain, and engaged
in widespread armed robbery.” In 1959, rebellions took place over a
large area in Chinghai, Kansu, and Schechwan; during the same year
Chinese, Hui, and Uighur forced laborers rebelled together and de-
stroyed trucks, mines, bridges, and tunnels.
All this was part of the buildup to the worst famine in world his-
tory. According to the demographer John Aird in a U.S. Bureau of the
Census study, during the late 1950s and early 1960s possibly as many
as 40 million people starved to death. However, the demographer An-
sley Coale, using official Chinese data and adjusting for underreporting
of vital statistics, concluded that 27 million died. More recent research
now suggests that the toll was 30 million Chinese. As a comparison to
this massive mountain of dead, it’s as though every person residing in
Texas and Virginia in 2002 starved to death.
This famine was largely the result of failed communist policies and
the grandest, most ambitious, most destructive social engineering pro-
ject ever: the total communization and nationalization of an agriculture
system involving over half a billion human beings, its reduction to mili-
tary-like central planning and administration, and the vast and hurried
“Great Leap Forward.”
A wide-scale drought affected 41 percent of the farmland in 1959,
and 56 percent from 1960 to 1961. This doubtlessly triggered the Great
Famine. It might have caused a million or so deaths, had it happened in
the 1930s under the corrupt Nationalist regime. But now the agricultural
system was in such disarray and social policies were so counterproduc-
tive that the greatest of all famines was inevitable.
Famine added to privation was enough for some people. More so
than in 1959 and 1960, peasants resorted to armed rebellion. During
1961 and the following year in southern China, there was continuous
guerrilla warfare, and Fukien Province, across from Taiwan, also saw a
serious armed uprising. Colonel Chung, a former army officer, led
some 8,000 peasants to attack the militia and loot granaries in Wuhua.
Official sources admit that, during 1961 alone, resistance included
146,852 granary raids, 94,532 arsons, and 3,738 revolts. In addition,
according to General Hsieh Fu-chih, the minister of security, there were
1,235 assassinations of party and administrative cadres.
As with the Soviet Union, many Western intellectuals were under
the spell of Chinese communism, and particularly that of Mao, and ar-
gued that he had greatly improved the lot of the average Chinese. Here
also, if we ignore all the mass murder, total deprivation of freedom, and
resulting Great Famine, we still must find these arguments naïve or ill-
informed. Life for the city dweller was better under the previous fascist
Nationalist regime than under the communists. After more than twenty
years of communism, the average Chinese standard of living had fallen
below what it was before the Sino-Japanese War that began in 1937.
Need I say more about the consequences for human life of a com-
mand economy versus a free market? Yes, and that is to make explicit
that there never has been a famine in a democratic nation. Never.
Chapter 16
Democracy Means No Famine Ever
. . . famines do not occur in democracies.
– Amartya Sen
T
o further prove that to deny people freedom is to produce an
economy of scarcity, famine, and death, note the wide-scale fam-
ines that communist parties also have made elsewhere. In
Chapter 1, I mentioned the famine in communist North Korea and the
Party’s bankrupting of the country. In an entirely different part of the
world, communist Ethiopia put in place controls over agricultural pro-
duction in the 1980s, and 1 million Ethiopians starved to death or died
from connected diseases—this is out of a population of 33.5 million peo-
ple, which made this famine nearly as large as China’s, proportionally.
These empirical economic experiments with an alternative theoreti-
cal model to the free market, this incredibly bloody rebuilding of whole
societies and cultures to match utopian plans, this forced fitting of peo-
ple into one job or another, and this effort to do better by dictator’s
command what free people can do for themselves has totally failed.
Think of the marketplace in any liberal democracy compared to the
shortages, long lines, limited choices, massive famines, and bloody re-
pression that prevailed in these command economies. Better yet, just
think of the success of Gates and Microsoft. There is a joke Eastern
Europeans made about the command economy when they lived under
communism: were a communist country to take over the great Sahara
Desert, we would hear nothing for ten years, after which there would be
a shortage of sand.
Famines have also happened in authoritarian and fascist nations, al-
though they were not even close in deaths to those under communism.
By contrast, no democratically free people have ever had a famine.
None. This is so important that I will put an even sharper point on it.
By the very nature of freedom, a free people

are immune to one of humanity’s worst disasters,
a famine.
19
This can be seen in Table 16.1.
This is not because nature is kinder to democracies. Note, for ex-
ample, that in 1931 the worst drought ever to hit the United States
began in the Midwestern and southern plains states and centered on
Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma. By 1934 the
drought had spread to twenty-seven states and covered over 75 percent
of the country. Without rain, farmlands that had been over-plowed and
over-grazed became powder dry, resulting in huge dust storms called
“black blizzards.” Drought took out of cultivation about 35 million
acres of farmland, and dust storms were removing topsoil from 225
million acres more. In 1935 alone, 850 million tons of topsoil probably
blew off the southern plains.
As the drought and dust storms continued year after year, whole
farm families fled in caravans, wagons and carts piled high with be-
longings, leaving behind vacant homes and farm machinery partly
buried in dusty soil.
Through a variety of relief, cultivation, and conservation projects
and programs, Congress and the Roosevelt Administration acted to help
farmers survive the drought, saving what land, crops, and livestock
they could. Finally, in 1939, the rains came and the drought was over.
While even lesser droughts had caused many tens of millions to starve
to death where governments forbade a free market, I could not find a
reference to even one American starving to death during the Dust
Bowl. Some Americans did die of suffocation in the dust storms, how-
ever, and some died of related diseases.
The worst famine to hit a European country in the last two centuries
was the Irish famine from 1845 to 1849, which is sometimes blamed on
a free market. A fungus attacked and destroyed the potato, the major
19 The list of countries with famines and the death toll is on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF4.TAB4.3A.GIF
112 R. J. Rummel
crop of Ireland’s peasants, causing massive famine throughout the

country and the death of perhaps 1 million people, almost 13 percent of
the population. Now, Great Britain had united Ireland with her by the
1801 Act of Union, and before that had ruled Ireland as, in effect, a
colony. Over the previous centuries the British had tightly controlled
the development of the Irish economy through many repressive laws,
such as those inhibiting world and British trade with Ireland. In particu-
lar, various British governments were intent on suppressing Roman
Catholicism, the religion of virtually all Irish peasants. Dating from
1695 and not fully repealed until 1829, laws to this end had a disastrous
effect on Ireland’s agriculture.
For example, the British forbade Irish Catholics to receive an educa-
tion, engage in trade or commerce, vote, buy land, lease land, rent land
above a certain worth, reap any profit from land greater than a third of
their rent, and own a horse worth more than a certain value. This code so
distorted Ireland’s agricultural system, so impoverished the peasants, and
made them so dependent on their landlords that any natural disaster wip-
ing out their crops could only mean a major famine. Moreover, because
of limits on the franchise, the secret ballot, and the manner of representa-
tion and legislative voting, Great Britain was not even an electoral
democracy at the time of the famine. It did not become a democracy until
it democratized its electoral system later in the century.
But there is even more to freedom than just avoiding disaster. It is
no accident that democratically free people are the most economically
advanced, technologically developed, and wealthiest in the world, as
shown in Figures 11.1 and 11.2 of Chapter 11. Nor is it by chance that
the poorest nations are those in which their dictators allow no or little
open economic competition, prevent people from buying and selling
goods freely, and encourage bribes of government bureaucrats or their
relatives.
Then look at the economic miracles in Germany and Japan. The
Allied bombing of these countries in World War II thoroughly de-
stroyed their economies and infrastructures. Germany and Japan also
had to absorb millions of returning soldiers and civilians, which for
West Germany alone was about 8 million ethnic and Reich Germans,
most homeless and hungry. How did these countries recover as fast as
they did, going from being among the most devastated of nations in
1945 to being among the most economically powerful states in the
early 1990s? In each case, it was the effects of freedom, particularly a
free market.
Of course, when the Allies occupied these countries after the war,
they provided aid to relieve starvation, but this would have been only a
short run solution had they not also broken up monopolistic govern-
ment-big business cartels, encouraged private enterprise, freed the
marketplace of many government controls, assured the rule of law, and
democratized the political systems. It is to the credit of the Japanese
and West German postwar leaders that when given their nation’s inde-
pendence, they maintained and enhanced their people’s democratic
freedom. Both Japan and Germany are now liberal democracies.
For further proof, note the rapid economic growth and moderniza-
tion of now-democratic South Korea. A good measure of this growth is
in its annual total of goods and services, or gross domestic product.
This averaged a growth rate of 5.3 percent annually, 1950 to 1985, de-
spite the devastating Korean War during the first three years. For the
world as a whole, the average was less than half that, or 2.3 percent. In
1998, South Korea’s growth rate was even higher at 6.8 percent, and it
is now becoming a close competitor to Japan.
Compare this to North Korea, with the same ethnicity, culture, and
traditions, and with a more developed industrial base before the com-
munist takeover. While the southern half of Korea is prospering, the
north under a command economy is bankrupt and economically rav-
aged, with its people suffering under a severe famine and dying in the
millions.
There is also the example of now-democratic Taiwan, whose econ-
omy from 1950 to 1985 grew at a rate of 7 percent, leveling off in 1998
to 4.8 percent. Taiwan now is among the industrially developed na-
tions. Then there is the “Asian tiger” that is Singapore, whose
authoritarian government has allowed the market to be free; it has be-
come an economic jewel of southeast Asia. From 1950 to 1985 it grew
at an average annual rate of 7.9 percent, making it then the economi-
cally fastest growing country in the world.
Hong Kong, formerly under British colonial rule, was another free
market, economic jewel; since communist China took it over from Brit-
ain by treaty in 1997, it remains to be seen how long this will last.
Located on a series of small islands and a small strip of mainland China,
it comprises only 397 square miles. In 1945 it had a population of fewer
than 600,000, but through natural population growth and by absorbing
millions of refugees fleeing communist China, its population swelled to
over 6 million. Despite the many people on this small bit of land, there
was little unemployment; it had a bustling, productive, and continually
growing economy, and an annual growth rate of 6.9 percent up to 1997,
which was only slightly behind Singapore and Taiwan at the time.
Now compare the results of the freedom in South Korea, Taiwan,
Singapore, and Hong Kong to what happened in mainland China when
114 R. J. Rummel
Mao deprived its people of any freedom: total economic disaster, rebel-
lions, economic retrogression, and tens of millions of people starving to
death.
With the death of Mao in 1976, the new Party dictators began to
liberalize its economy and introduced a semi-controlled free market in
many areas of the country, as described in Chapter 1. Total Party con-
trol had so devastated the economy that once the Party lifted many of
its controls, China’s economy leaped forward at or near a double-digit
rate. In 1998, it was growing at 7.8 percent. The Chinese people are
rebuilding their cities, a new class of Chinese investors and business-
people is competing with businesses from abroad, and for the first time
in decades, the Chinese now have plenty of food. The signs of eco-
nomic vigor and growth now astound a visitor returning to China after
thirty years’ absence.
Of course, I have only given examples here and not a systematic
analysis of the consequences of freedom for all nations. That has been
20
done elsewhere and proves in general what the above examples show:
the evidence overwhelmingly supports freedom as a means to the eco-
nomic betterment of society and the fulfillment of human needs. Quite
simply,
freedom produces wealth and prosperity.
These are moral goods of freedom, a moral reason for people to be

free.
Part 1 established that people have an inherently moral right to be
free, regardless of the consequences of freedom—its utility. Now we
can say that freedom does have very desirable, moral consequences for
humanity: wealth and prosperity. We have known for nearly two centu-
ries this result of freedom, and its teaching by classical liberals of
previous centuries did much to free Western economies from the heavy
hand of government regulation and control. This may be the most im-
portant moral good of freedom, but it’s not the only one. Freedom has
yet other moral goods, and of these not many people are aware.
20 See the appendix at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM

PART 4
Minimizing Political Violence
T
he daily news always seems to be about internal (or domestic)
political violence somewhere in the world. People are con-
stantly trying to replace their ruler by violence, revolt against
their government, rebel against some government policy, or fight a civil
war to achieve independence. In July of 2000, these violent political
confrontations were occurring in about forty nations. I’ve briefly dis-
cussed the civil wars in Sudan and Burma, Somalia’s clan wars, the
Civil War in Russia after the Bolshevik coup of 1917, and the numer-
ous rebellions against Mao’s collectivization and “Great Leap
Forward.” The question naturally follows: why do human beings con-
stantly kill each other in this way?
Before answering this, I want to provide an understanding of how
violent this internal political conflict can be. Readers may not realize
that such violence has been more destructive of human lives than inter-
national war. The probability of a person being killed in an interna-
tional war is less than that of dying in a revolution, guerrilla warfare,
rebellion, civil war, or riots. This is not even taking into consideration
government democide—genocide and mass murder—such as that of
Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, which itself has totaled more dead than all in-
ternal and international wars together. That is so important that I will
devote the whole of Part 5 to it.
China has lost tens of millions of people in her own civil wars—her
Taiping Rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century alone might have
killed as many as 40 million Chinese, and the Chinese Civil War be-
tween the Nationalist government and the communists left almost 2
21
million battle dead.
21 For the sources, estimates, and calculations, see Table 1.A of my China’s Bloody
Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991) and on my website at:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TAB1.A.GIF
116 R. J. Rummel
Of the twelve wars the United States has fought, including World
22
War II, none killed more Americans than died in its Civil War.
In Chapter 17, we’ll look at the Mexican Revolution, which killed
many times the number that died in the American Civil War. In the
next chapter I try to untangle the many threads of the Russian Revolu-
tion and Civil War, one of the bloodiest of the twentieth century. This
close look at the Mexican and Russian revolutions should show why
people who share citizenship can kill each other on such a massive
scale. The explanation for their excessive violence and that in other na-
tions? Their undemocratic governments’ suppression of their people’s
freedom. We’ll examine that in detail in Chapter 19.
22 For the Federal armies in the American Civil War 359,528 were killed in combat
or otherwise died; for the Confederate forces the number was about 258,000 dead.
The total dead in the war was near 617,528.
Chapter 17
The Mexican Revolution
Said a Valle Nacional police officer of Mexican forced
laborers: “They die; they all die. The bosses never let
them go until they’re dying.”
– John K. Turner
Roots of Revolution
T
he roots of Mexico’s revolution lie in the rule of Porfirio Díaz, a
former general who in 1876 rebelled against President Sebastián
Lerdo de Tejada and seized power. Mexicans later elected him
to the presidency and, except for one term, consistently reelected him,
sometimes without opposition, until revolutionaries forced his exile in
May of 1911. While Mexico therefore had elections, they usually were
a façade. Competition for office was not free and open, political oppo-
nents were assassinated, and the fear of government officials and their
supporters limited political speech.
Díaz tried to conciliate various groups, such as the Catholic Church,
landed interests, and big business, and he was particularly committed to
the economic growth of Mexico. He promoted foreign investments and
ownership, eased the transfer of public lands to private hands, and
helped concentrate the ownership of land for more efficient usage. He
caused some one million families to lose their land, including the an-
cestral lands of some 5,000 Indian communities. By 1910, when the
revolution broke out, fewer than 3,000 families owned almost all of
Mexico’s inhabitable land, with over 95 percent of the rural population
owning no land at all. Nearly half of these landless lived on large, pri-
vately owned farming or ranching estates or plantations, called
haciendas. These sprawled across much of Mexico, containing about 80
percent of the rural communities. Some were huge; one was so large
that a train took a day to cross its six million acres.
Deprived of their land, impoverished and unemployed, the mass of
Indians and peons (the unskilled laborers or farm workers of Latin
America), were a huge pool for authorities and landowners to exploit.
And so they did. Under Díaz, profiteering police and government offi-
cials protected greedy landowners and pitiless labor contractors. This
118 R. J. Rummel
enabled the venal, corrupt, and ruthless to ensnare Indians and peons in
a nationwide system of chattel slavery and indebted labor.
One of the main methods used to enslave peons on haciendas was
to advance them money. While it was usually a small amount, the peon
found it almost impossible to repay. His wages were abysmal because
of the ready availability of impoverished peons in the countryside, and
living costs were, by hacienda contrivance, high. For example, a peon
usually could buy his necessities only at the company store, since he
was paid in coupons or metal disks that only the company store would
accept. Running away from this forced labor was not an option. If he
did, the police would search for him, usually catch him, and return him
to the hacienda. Then, as a lesson to others, he would be whipped pub-
licly, sometimes even to death. Moreover, debt was by law inherited—
passed down to a peon’s sons on his death—so his sons also could be-
come indebted slaves through no fault of their own.
But the peon could become indebted in ways other than through the
hacienda. He was enmeshed in a system of Mexican customs and laws
that encouraged, if not required, that he spend more money than he had.
For example, baptism demanded a fiesta, a priest, and liquor, the cost
of which the peon could only cover by pledging his future wages. This
was also true for the cost of a wedding, a baby’s birth, and even tools.
Whether they were on the hacienda or not, to the poor and landless a
debt was usually forever, and once in debt, the peon had no rights. By
law, the debt holder had all the power, which on the hacienda was
power over life and death, as surely as though these peons were slaves
in ancient Rome.
Besides indebted peons, haciendas had other sources of such slaves.
Hacienda bosses would entice impoverished and landless Indians and
other peons into signing contracts to work on plantations about which
the workers knew nothing; upon arrival, they would discover that there
was no escape. The police would arrest and jail the poor and those dis-
possessed of land for trivial or trumped-up charges, and then sell them
to hacienda owners. Yet another source was a police roundup of such
people, as though they were cattle, followed by their deportation to a
hacienda to work until they died. In some areas, these roundups were
the routine—even a matter of government policy. Local officials would
contract with a hacienda to supply so many peons per year, and the dis-
trict political boss, or jefe politico, often fulfilled his contract by
kidnapping and selling young schoolboys for fifty pesos each.
There were some comparatively good haciendas, to be sure. There,
owners still forced the peons to work, and would whip to maintain dis-
cipline and order, but they treated them with the paternalistic civility
accorded to personal slaves. These haciendas were the exception, how-

ever. Normally, they were hellish for the peon, whose life on them was
usually short and miserable. The owners had them whipped when their
work slowed for any reason, and for the slightest infraction. They were
sometimes whipped to death. After all, they were cheap to replace, and
the police showed no concern over their murder.
On many haciendas, the peon’s misery went far beyond whipping.
Hacienda bosses would often rape the peon’s wife and daughters, and
would force the prettier ones to be their concubines. Nor did all the ha-
ciendas provide enough nutritional food for their peons in the field, or
changes of clothing, bath facilities, or toilets. Because of this ill treat-
ment, many soon died from disease, exposure, and exhaustion, deaths
that can only be classed as murder. In some places, such as Valle Na-
cional, the forced labor system became at least as deadly as that in the
Soviet gulags and the Nazi labor camps at their worst, but the victims
died within guarded haciendas instead of work camps surrounded by
guns and barbed wire.
The bosses especially mistreated the Indians enslaved on the haci-
endas, and they often were among the first to die. Two-thirds of Yaqui
Indians on haciendas died in the first year; on some haciendas, a few
would survive for two years. And haciendas were killing Mayans,
members of another Indian nation, at a greater rate than they were be-
ing born.
Bosses also badly mistreated non-Indian peons. In three months on
one large hacienda near Santa Lucrecia, they killed more than half of
three hundred new workers. In the Valle Nacional hacienda, out of some
15,000 new workers taken on in one year, bosses killed about 14,000
within seven or eight months. I would doubt this incredible death rate,
were it not for the words of Antonio Pla, general manager of a large por-
tion of the tobacco lands in Valle Nacional: “The cheapest thing to do is
to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from.” Said one
of the police officers of the town of Valle Nacional, “They die; they all
die. The bosses never let them go until they’re dying.”
Even the process of deportation to the haciendas was lethal, particu-
larly for Indians. Soldiers seized and deported five hundred Yaqui
Indians a month to work on haciendas as slaves. This was even before
Díaz decreed that the War Department must capture and deport to the
Yucatán every Yaqui Indian found, regardless of age. As many as 10 to
20 percent died during deportation, especially if the trip was a long one,
and involved the military herding the deportees over mountains on foot.
Sometimes whole families would commit suicide rather than endure the
deportation and the slave labor that lay at the end.
120 R. J. Rummel
Out of a rural population of nearly 12 million in 1910, it’s possible

that 750,000 unknowingly contracted themselves into slavery on haci-
endas in southern Mexico, and over 100,000 on the Yucatán peninsula.
The far more prevalent debt bondage may have enslaved an additional
5 million peons—nearly 41 percent of the total population of Mexico.
These numbers far exceed those of Sudan’s outright slavery and
Burma’s forced labor. Compare this to American slavery in 1860 just
before the Civil War, where there were 3,951,000 slaves, or 12 percent
of the population. What was in effect slavery in Mexico is most compa-
rable to the slavery of ancient times, yet it happened in our time, during
the youth of some people alive today.
This lethal slavery alone would be enough to condemn this repre-
hensible government and justify the coming revolution. But there is
more. This slave system necessarily depended on a certain amount of
terror and resulting fear.
Each of the states of Mexico had attached to it an acordada, a
picked gang of assassins. They quietly murdered personal enemies of
the governor or jefe politicos, including political opponents, critics, or
alleged criminals, no matter how slight the evidence against them. For
example, officials gave the son of a friend of Díaz, a member of the
acordada, two assistants and the instructions to “kill quietly along the
border” any person he thought connected to the opposing Liberal Party.
But much killing was also done publicly, and carried out directly by
officials. In 1909, they summarily executed sixteen people at Tehuitz-
ingo, and on a street at Velardena, officials shot several people for
holding a parade in defiance of the jefe politico. They forced twelve to
thirty-two others to dig their own graves with their bare hands before
shooting them. In the state of Hidalgo, a group of Indians who had re-
sisted government takeover of their land were buried up to their necks,
then officials rode horses over them. From 1900 to 1910, this govern-
ment probably murdered more than 30,000 political opponents,
suspects, critics, alleged criminals, and other undesirables.
Díaz’s policies obviously provided opportunity for the venal and
corrupt, and offered security and assistance to the rich and well placed.
As long as they went along with the system, bureaucrats, officials con-
trolling government largesse, and the upper middle class and wealthy
profited from Díaz’s rule. Nonetheless, his policies also created an ex-
plosive atmosphere. Many of the well-off Mexicans were still angered
that he encouraged foreigners to exploit the country’s resources. Now,
also, intellectuals were promoting among the lower class a sense of be-
ing enslaved. And Díaz’s army, the muscle he needed to back up his
policies, was small, corrupt, and inefficient.
Revolution
Given all this, rebellion was inevitable, and it did happen, several
times. The first successful rebellion was led by Francisco Madero in
1910; it launched the Mexican Revolution. A member of the upper
middle class, as most revolutionary leaders are, Madero believed in a
liberal constitutional government. Indians and peons understandably
supported him. With the former bandit chief Pancho Villa as his lead-
ing general, Madero won major victories against government forces
and encouraged other rebellions throughout the country. In May of
1911, the government collapsed, Díaz fled into exile, and Madero took
over the presidency.
Leading a revolution is one thing; rebuilding a government is quite
another. In office, Madero turned out to be ineffective, especially in
promoting changes to the system. He did, however, give peons and
workers free rein to air their grievances and seek change. This did not
sit well with the Mexican elite, who saw this freedom, added to the dis-
orders still plaguing the country, as endangering their property. In early
1913, Victoriano Huerto, the general commanding the Mexican army in
Mexico City, rebelled against Madero and, joining with other rebel
groups, forced him to resign. General Huerto then made himself presi-
dent, and in a few days, someone assassinated Madero.
Huerto’s presidency was even worse than Madero’s. He was disor-
ganized, repressive, and dictatorial, and instigated the most violent
phase of the revolution. Separate rebel forces, Villa’s among them, took
violent action to restore constitutional government in three northern
states. In the south, Emiliano Zapata organized and generated a peon
rebellion demanding land reform.
President Wilson of the United States tried to help these rebellions
by embargoing arms to General Huerto, resulting in the American
Navy’s temporary takeover of Veracruz to stop a shipment of German
arms, while allowing the rebel constitutionalists to buy them. Eventu-
ally, constitutionalist forces closed in on Huerto, and he escaped into
exile in July 1914.
Still, even the constitutionalists could not establish a stable gov-
ernment, nor could they agree among themselves on what was to be
done and by whom. Civil war again broke out in December of 1914.
Finally, by the end of 1915, the rebel leader Venustiano Carranza won
control over most of Mexico. Despite the refusal of Zapata (assassi-
nated in 1918) and Villa and some of the other rebel leaders to accept
terms, Carranza took over the government and held control until 1920.
122 R. J. Rummel
Carranza never brought about the reforms he had promised, and in

1920, Alvaro Obregón, one of Carranza’s most effective generals dur-
ing the civil war, threw him out of power and eventually had himself
elected president. Though dictatorial, Obregón brought relative stabil-
ity, order, and change to Mexico.
What I left out of this sketch of the Mexican Revolution is the vio-
lence, ruthlessness, and cruelty on all sides. In the north in the opening
years of this rebellion, for example, government forces simply shot all
captured rebels, showing no mercy. In later years of the war, when
President Carranza ordered General González to destroy the Zapatista
“rabble” in Morelos, his troops burned down whole villages, destroyed
their crops, marched women and children into detention camps, looted
factories, devastated the local sugar industry, and hanged every male
they could find. They left a wasteland behind them.
Rebels were equally vicious and often extended their butchery to
top government officials and supporters. A case in point was their sei-
zure of the town of Guerrero. They murdered all captured federal
officers, along with the town’s top Díaz supporters and officials, in-
cluding the judge, jefe politico, and postal inspector. The rebels raped
at will; in Durango, the U.S. ambassador reported that fifty women “of
good family” killed themselves after rebels raped them. Villa himself
forced “his attentions on a Frenchwoman,” creating an international
incident.
When rebels captured and held Mexico City in 1914, they pillaged
homes and businesses, shot police officers and political opponents, and
hung those they suspected of crimes. In one case, they hung three peo-
ple outside a police station, with signs announcing their crimes. One
was a “thief,” a second a “counterfeiter,” but the sign on the third said,
“This man was killed by mistake.”
From the beginning of the revolution, the forces of the Villistas and
Zapatas showed disregard for human life. When Pancho Villa captured
the town of Torre in 1910, he killed two hundred Chinese, a nationality
he and his followers much despised. Nor did he have any high regard
for the lives of his own troops. Once, when an American journalist was
interviewing him, a drunken soldier yelling nearby disturbed Villa.
Without interrupting his conversation, he pulled out his gun, looked out
the window, and shot the man.
Their officers were no better, but among them Rodolfo Fierro stands
out. It is said that he once personally executed three hundred prisoners,
pausing only when he had to massage his bruised trigger finger. Often,
these rebels were simply bandits and murderers legitimized by a cause.
In one especially heinous case, a rebel leader captured a coal train in a
tunnel, burned it, and then waited for a passenger train to run into the
wreckage so that he could loot the train of gold and rob passengers of
their valuables.
With the collapse of the Díaz regime, many state governors and fed-
eral generals no longer obeyed the central government. During the
Carranza presidency, they in effect became warlords, some levying their
own taxes, some refusing to turn over federal revenues, some ignoring
federal laws and orders they did not like. Some became bandits, looting
territory or states under their control; some bandits became generals con-
trolling little states of their own. High military officers would loot and
kill as they wished, even in Mexico City. Over all of Mexico for as long
as a decade, all these warlords and rebel armies may have slaughtered at
least 400,000 people in cold blood, perhaps even over 500,000—more
than have died in combat in all American foreign wars.
Before and during the revolution, the government used a detestable
conscription system. With the choice of who would be drafted left to
the local jefe politico, graft and bribery were endemic. If a man had the
money, he could buy himself out of the draft or bribe officials. Even
worse, those who criticized the regime, those who tried to strike, or
those who otherwise annoyed officials found themselves drafted. The
army served the function of a forced labor camp for the poor and unde-
sirables, and so became known as “The National Chain Gang.”
The government used press-gang methods extensively during the
revolution. In one case, seven hundred spectators at a bullfight were
grabbed for the army; in another case, one thousand spectators were
abducted from a big crowd watching a fire, including women that they
forced to work in ammunition factories. In Mexico City, people were
afraid to go out after dark, even to post a letter, since it literally could
result in “going to the cannon’s mouth.”
Soldiers so conscripted received little training, and officers threw
them into combat as so much expendable equipment—there were always
replacements, including criminals, vagabonds, beggars, and, of course,
Indians and peons. Rebels and Indians easily killed them all. Because of
the graft among their officers, these soldiers often got little medical care
and little food. Some would die of starvation, many of disease.
One example of this was in the territory of Quintana Roo where, be-
fore the revolution, an army of 2,000 to 3,000 soldiers was in the field,
continuously fighting the Maya Indians. These soldiers were almost all
political suspects and therefore really only armed political prisoners.
According to a government physician who served as the chief of sani-
tary service for the army in this territory, all the soldiers—over 4,000—
died of starvation over a two-year period while General Bravo, their
124 R. J. Rummel
commanding officer, stole their unit’s commissary money.23 This is

murder. And from 1900 through the first year of the revolution, aside
from combat deaths, the army’s treatment of its conscripts murdered
nearly 145,000 of them.
In total, the battles, massacres, executions, and starvation during the
revolution probably killed 800,000 Mexicans. Nearly 1.2 million more
probably died from influenza, typhus, and other diseases. In fact, the
overall toll from all causes might even be closer to 3 million, given the
23a
population decrease for these years.
23 John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969,
p. 123.
23a For a breakdown of the toll, see Table 16.1 in my Death By Government (1994).
The table is also available on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB16.1.GIF
Chapter 18
The Russian Revolution
When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how
people can forget the most elementary Marxism.
– Lenin
Roots of Revolution
T
he Russian Revolution that began while that in Mexico was still
going on was no less bloody, and like the one in Mexico, to under-
stand it we will have to begin several years before it took place.
With the death of his father Alexander III in 1894, the last Russian
czar, Nicholas II, came into power. He was a dedicated autocrat op-
posed to any liberal tendencies in Russia, a view strongly shared by his
wife, Princess Alexandra. He was also an absolute Russian nationalist
who imposed a policy of Russification throughout the empire, which
included Poland and Finland in the west. As were many of his officials
and Russians in general, he was anti-Semitic, and he overtly supported
anti-Semitic activity.
Russians economically and culturally discriminated against their 5
to 7 million Jews, and government anti-Semitism encouraged and
helped legitimize the periodic pogroms that swept Russian cities and
towns. Officials allowed incendiary anti-Jewish propaganda to be pub-
lished on government printing presses, and just stood by while gangs
attacked Jews and their property. From 1900 to the abdication of the
czar and the end of the Romanov dynasty in 1917, at least 3,200 Jews
were murdered throughout Russia.
In line with its general suppression of freedom, officials killed and
massacred others as well, such as shooting two hundred demonstrating
workers in the Lena gold field. The most important massacre of these
years occurred in January of 1905 in St. Petersburg, when soldiers shot
down 150 to 200 peaceful demonstrators. This “Bloody Sunday,” as it
became known, catalyzed what was a revolutionary situation into out-
right revolution.
126 R. J. Rummel
In the years leading up to Bloody Sunday, Russia had been in tur-

moil. Strikes, student demonstrations, and peasant disturbances were
frequent. Several revolutionary movements were violently seeking re-
form, such as the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Social Democrats,
who organized protests and tried to incite the masses. Because of
Bloody Sunday, student demonstrations became almost continuous,
revolutionary groups organized huge strikes, and in many regions,
peasants rebelled. Bombings and assassinations were widespread.
This culminated in a massive general strike that finally persuaded
Nicholas II and his officials to compromise. They issued the so-called
October Manifesto that promised civil liberties, a new duma—
legislature—with actual power to pass and reject all laws, and other re-
forms. The manifesto went far toward turning the government into a
constitutional monarchy. It split the opposition into moderates willing to
accept it and radicals believing it hardly went far enough. The radicals
fought on—in the next year alone, terrorism by the Battle Organization
of the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Socialist Revolutionaries Maxi-
malists caused 1,400 deaths and, in the year following that, still another
3,000 deaths. But the Manifesto ended the 1905 revolution.
Throughout the years leading up to and following this revolution, the
monarchy fought the revolutionaries in one district or another with harsh
regulations, newspaper closings, arrests of editors, and, for six months,
even summary court martials with almost immediate execution. The re-
cords of overall executions tell the story of these tumultuous years and
the monarchy’s response. From 1866 to 1900, officials executed no more
than 94 people, perhaps as few as 48; from 1901 to 1904 it executed
nearly 400 people; from 1905 through 1908, the number rose to 2,200;
and from 1908 through the remaining years of the monarchy, executions
might have reached 11,000.
Nonetheless, considering the revolutionary activity and the bomb-
ings, assassinations, and disturbances involved, the violent deaths
would have been surprisingly low for an empire this huge and diverse
and with an already bloody history, had it not been for World War I, its
treatment of ethnic Germans and POWs, and the massacre or extermi-
nation of rebellious nations and groups in the empire’s southern
periphery. In 1915, the Duma expropriated all the property of the
150,000 to 200,000 Germans living in Zhiton-tir Gubernia and de-
ported as many as 200,000 to the east under conditions so harsh,
anywhere from 25,000 to almost 140,000 died.
The worst killing took place in the Kirghiz Kazak Confederacy.
Following Russian orders, local authorities murdered Turkish-speaking
Central Asian nomads outright, or, after robbing them of their animals
and equipment, drove them into the winter mountains or desert to die.
Except for some who escaped across the border into China, authorities
may have murdered as many as 500,000 nomads.
Then there were the Armenian volunteers who wore Russian uni-
forms, but served as irregulars with the Russian army. When Russia
invaded the eastern provinces of Turkey during the war, these Arme-
nian irregulars quite possibly murdered hundreds of thousands of Kurds
between 1915 and 1916, as revenge for Kurd murders of Armenians in
Turkey. It’s unclear whether the Russian army was responsible for this,
but it at least bears some onus for these deaths.
Worst of all, the Russian monarchy bears full responsibility for its
treatment of 2.3 million German, Austro-Hungarian, Czech, and Turk-
ish prisoners of war. Surely the Russian people suffered greatly during
the war. There were wide-scale shortages of necessities and resulting
localized famines; medical services that had always been poor deterio-
rated during the war, resulting in the spread of disease. Moreover,
Russian soldiers themselves suffered from hunger, poor medical care,
and unsanitary conditions, with perhaps 1.3 million dying of disease.
Russia was in no shape to give POWs the same treatment that Britain,
for example, could give them.
Nonetheless, even taking this into account, Russian-held POWs
were abysmally mistreated and died in transit to camps and in the
camps themselves by the tens of thousands. Just consider that during
the transportation of POWs to camps, they might be locked in railroad
cars or wagons for weeks. In one case, officials kept two hundred Turk-
ish POWs suffering from cholera in sealed wagons for three weeks
until they reached their destination, where they found sixty scarcely
alive in the filth; 140 had died.
Already weakened by hunger and sickness during the long trip,
prisoners then might have to plod ten to thirty miles to their final camp;
some died on the way. Reaching camp provided no security, since the
conditions in many were lethal. During the winter of 1914–15, in just
one camp 1,300 men died—over half of the camp’s POWs. When the
doctors complained about the number of deaths to a general who came
on a tour of inspection, his answer was that still more men died in the
trenches.
During this same winter in the Novo Nikolayevsk camp, the prison-
ers were lucky even to have rotten straw to sleep on, and especially
lucky to get a blanket. Camp doctors had no medicines or surgical ap-
pliances; they did not even have soap. Sick and healthy lay together
indiscriminately. Often water was not to be had for days, or it would
drip from icicles onto their straw beds. No wonder that when typhus
128 R. J. Rummel
broke out, it spread rapidly and prisoners died in huge numbers. Only
when these epidemics threatened the Russians themselves did they fi-
nally allow captive officers to help their men.
The Russian monarchy probably was responsible for the deaths of
400,000 POWs altogether. Since officials knew about the conditions in
the camps and could have done much to alleviate them, this was as
much murder as the death of 3 million Soviet POWs in Nazi concentra-
tion camps during World War II.
Revolution
By 1917, the war was going so badly for the Russians that many
troops refused to fight and whole units were deserting, while on the
home front there was continuous turmoil, including general strikes and
massive demonstrations against the war and the monarchy. On March 8
alone, 30,000 people were on the streets, demonstrating. Nicholas II’s
cabinet tried to dismiss the Duma it had called into session to deal with
the crisis, which it thought responsible for much of the unrest, but in-
stead of dissolving, some members set up a provisional cabinet—in
effect, a rebel provisional government.
Nicholas II and his cabinet had lost all power to affect events—the
Russian Revolution had begun.
Events moved fast as one military unit after another joined the re-
bels, including the czar’s own guards who, under orders from the
provisional government, took the empress and her children into cus-
tody. On March 14, France and England, Russia’s allies in the war,
recognized the provisional government as the legal government of all
Russia. Under tremendous pressure, having lost the crucial support of
the aristocracy, his troops, and foreign powers, and no longer able to
control the streets, Nicholas II abdicated.
The day before the abdication, the provisional government formed a
new government to be headed by Prince Georgy Lvov. This govern-
ment and the subsequent one of Aleksandr Kerensky, a democratic
socialist who took over as prime minister in July, inherited a country in
economic and political chaos, with a near-total breakdown in govern-
ment authority and military morale, frequent strikes, plots, and the
opposition of diverse, radical revolutionary groups. Not the least of
these were the Bolsheviks, founded and led by Vladimir Ilich Lenin,
who already in July had organized an unsuccessful uprising in Petro-
grad. Kerensky’s government itself was disorganized, feared a coup
from the right, and was quite unable to move against those openly plot-
ting to seize power from the left.
Originally the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor

Party, Lenin’s Bolsheviks were a small, uncompromising, and militant
group of dedicated Marxist communists. Their incredibly small num-
ber, considering subsequent events, was clear when the first all-Russian
Congress of Soviets was held, and only 105 out of 1,090 delegates de-
clared themselves as Bolsheviks.
In November of 1917, with the powerful Petrograd garrison remain-
ing neutral, Lenin seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd. Since this was
the seat of Kerensky’s shaky government, and he had only 1,500 to
2,000 defenders, the 6,000 to 7,000 soldiers, sailors, and Red Guards
Lenin’s Bolsheviks had thrown together easily overthrew the govern-
ment. Widely unpopular, however, and faced with strong political
opposition, Lenin at first made common cause with the Left Social
Revolutionaries, a militant socialist group, in order to survive, central-
ize power, and consolidate this communist revolution. In 1919, Lenin
adopted the name “Communist Party” for the Bolsheviks and their po-
litical allies.
To fight this forceful takeover of the government, generals
throughout the Russian empire created whole armies—some led by
anti-Russians and nationalists, some by anti-communists, some by pro-
monarchists or pro-authoritarians, some by advocates of democracy.
These so-called White armies were a direct threat to the new Commu-
nist Party and its so-called Red Army.
Moreover, in the areas the communists controlled, the clergy, bour-
geoisie, and professionals opposed them. The urban workers, who had
been communist allies at first, also soon turned against them when they
saw that the communists had taken over the soviets (elected governing
councils) and would not yield power to worker unions or representa-
tives. Peasants, who had also been especially supportive when the
communists began to divide among them land taken from rich land-
owners and the aristocrats’ estates, turned to outright rebellion when
the communists began forcibly requisitioning their grain and produce.
In the first year and a half of Lenin’s rule, in twenty provinces
alone, there were 344 peasant rebellions. Up to early 1921, there were
about fifty anti-communist rebel armies. For example, in August of
1920, the starving peasants of the Kirsanov District, Tambov Province,
rebelled against further communist extortion of grain. The rebellion
soon spread to adjoining districts and destroyed Party authority in five
of them. Under the command of Aleksandr Stepanovich Antonov, the
rebellion became a full-scale armed insurrection. He created two armies
composed of Red Army deserters and revolting peasants; by February
1921, he had as many as 50,000 fighting men, including internal guard
130 R. J. Rummel
units. Until his defeat in August of 1921, he controlled Tambov Prov-

ince and parts of the provinces of Penza and Saratov.
Many such rebellions broke out throughout the Soviet Union, as it
was now named, although few were as dangerous to Communist Party
control. (In 1921, the Cheka—secret police—admitted to 118 upris-
ings.) This Peasant War, which could just as well be called a Bread
War, continued even after the White armies were defeated. It was so
serious that in 1921, one Soviet historian noted that the “center of the
[Russian Republic] is almost totally encircled by peasant insurrection,
from Makno on the Dnieper to Antonov on the Volga.”
White armies and peasant rebellions aside, even in the urban indus-
trial areas, communist control was precarious, at best. What saved
Lenin and the Party was their “Red Terror.”
By 1918, Lenin had already ordered the wide use of terror, includ-
ing inciting workers to murder their “class enemies.” According to
Pravda, the Party organ, workers and poor should take up arms and act
against those “who agitate against the Soviet Power, ten bullets for
every man who raises a hand against it . . . . The rule of Capital will
never be extinguished until the last capitalist, nobleman, Christian, and
officer draws his last breath.” Understandably, there was a wave of ar-
bitrary murders of civil servants, engineers, factory managers, and
priests wherever the communists controlled the country. Mass shoot-
ings, arrests, and torture were an integral part of covert communist
policy, and not simply a reaction to the formation of the White armies.
Indeed, the Red Terror preceded the start of the Civil War.
After an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Lenin in August of
1918, he legalized the terror, and directed it against “enemies of the
people” and “counter-revolutionaries,” defined primarily by social
group and class membership: bourgeoisie, aristocrats, “rich” landown-
ers (kulaks), and clergy. The Party’s organ Pravda helped launch this
expanded Red Terror with this cry for blood: “Workers, the time has
come when either you must destroy the bourgeoisie, or it will destroy
you. Prepare for a mass merciless onslaught upon the enemies of the
revolution. The towns must be cleansed of this bourgeois putrefaction.
All the bourgeois gentlemen must be registered, as has happened with
the officer gentlemen, and all who are dangerous to the cause of revolu-
tion must be exterminated . . . . Henceforth the hymn of the working
class will be a hymn of hatred and revenge.”
Lenin’s Red Terror operated through a variety of official organs,
including the People’s Courts for “crimes” against the individual, the
Revolutionary Courts, and the various local Chekas for “crimes”
against the state. Lenin also gave the right of execution to the Military
Revolutionary Tribunals, Transport Cheka, Punitive Columns, and the

like. Communists jailed actual or ideologically-defined opponents, tor-
tured many barbarously to force them to sign false confessions, and
executed large numbers.
For example, communists executed a butcher in Moscow for “in-
sulting” the images of Marx and Lenin by calling them scarecrows (a
clear “enemy of the people”) and threatened to shoot anyone in
Ivanovo-Vornesensk who did not register their sewing machines (ob-
vious “counter-revolutionaries”). A communist functionary issued an
order in Baku that local officials should shoot any telephone operator
who was tardy in response to a call (doubtless “sabotage”). With in-
formation that an Aaron Chonsir in Odessa was engaging in “counter-
revolutionary activities,” the Cheka looked through the street directo-
ries to find his address. Finding eleven people with the same name,
they arrested them all, interrogated and tortured each several times,
narrowed it down to the two most likely “counter-revolutionaries”
and, since they could not make up their minds between the two, had
both shot to ensure getting the right one. Obviously the revolution
was still immature—in the late 1930s, Stalin would have had all
eleven shot.
And so communists shot vast numbers of men and women out of
hand: 200 in this jail, 450 in that prison yard, 320 in the woods outside
of town; even in small outlying areas, such as the small Siberian town
of Ossa Ochansk, they massacred 3,000 men in 1919. This went on and
on. As late as 1922, the communists executed 8,100 priests, monks, and
nuns. This alone is equivalent to one modern jumbo passenger jet
crashing, with no survivors, each day for thirty-two days.
Moreover, the communists showed no mercy to prisoners taken in
clashes with the White armies, and often executed them. They even
shot the relatives of defecting officers, as when the 86th Infantry Regi-
ment went over to the Whites in March of 1919—the communists
killed all the relatives of each defecting officer. Places reoccupied after
the defeat of one White army or another suffered systematic bloodbaths
as the Cheka screened through the population for aristocrats, bourgeoi-
sie, and supporters of the Whites. When the Red Army captured Riga in
January of 1919, communists executed over 1,500 in the city and more
than 2,000 in the country districts. When defeated White General
Wrangel finally fled with his remaining officers and men from the
Crimea, the Red Army and Cheka may have slaughtered from 50,000
to 150,000 people during reoccupation.
Undeniably, the Whites themselves carried out massacres, killed
prisoners, and were guilty of numerous atrocities. But these were either
the acts of undisciplined soldiers or ordered against individuals by sa-
132 R. J. Rummel
distic or fanatical generals. Lenin, however, directed the Red Terror

against entire social groups and classes.
Then there was the Peasant War, which, although it tends to be ig-
nored in the history books, was no less vicious than the Civil War.
Under the guise of requisitioning food, communists tried to plunder
village after village, which understandably resulted in pitched battles,
massacres, and frequent atrocities. Just in July of 1918, twenty-six ma-
jor uprisings began; in August, forty-seven; and in September, thirty-
five. The communists fiercely fought the Peasant War over the full
length and breadth of the new Soviet Union from 1918 through 1922,
and at any one time, there were apparently over one hundred rebellions
involving thousands of peasant fighters.
If, of course, any “enemies of the people” were captured or surren-
dered, the communists were likely to kill them out of hand; they also
massacred those who had helped the rebels, provided them with food
and shelter, or simply showed sympathy. They leveled some villages
“infected with rebellion,” slaughtered inhabitants, and deported remain-
ing villagers north, with many dying in the process.
About 500,000 people were killed in this Peasant War, half in com-
bat and the other half murdered by the communists. The effect on food
production was catastrophic and, as described in Chapter 13, was a par-
tial cause of a severe famine in which 5 million people starved to death
or died of associated diseases.
The number of combat deaths in the Civil and Peasant Wars—
rather than those resulting from mass murder—was likely about
1,350,000 people. Although a fantastic toll by normal standards, this
was a fraction of the total killed during this period.
With the growing strength and improved generalship of the Red
Army, and the lack of unity and a common strategy and program
among the opposing White armies and peasant rebels, by 1920 Lenin
and the Communist Party had surely won the Civil War. And through
the Red Terror, they also had secured the home front. The terror elimi-
nated or cowed the opposition and enabled Lenin to stabilize the
Party’s control, assure its continuity and authority, and, above all, save
communism.
Lenin bought the success of the Red Terror at a huge cost in lives.
Not only did the communists shoot political opponents, class “ene-
mies,” “enemies of the people,” former rebels, and criminals, but they
shot citizens guilty of nothing, fitting under no label but “hostage.” For
example, in 1919 the Defense Council commanded the arrest of mem-
bers of the Soviet executive committees and Committees of the Poor in
areas where snow clearance of railway lines was unsatisfactory, to be
shot if the snow was not soon cleared away.
The number murdered throughout Soviet territory by the Red Ter-

ror, the execution of prisoners, and revenge against former Whites or
their supporters, as a conservative estimate, was about 500,000 people,
including at least 200,000 officially executed. All these are added to the
probable 250,000 murdered in the Peasant War.
Don’t dismiss all the communist executions during these years as
the traditional Russian way of handling opposition. Czarist Russia exe-
cuted an average of seventeen people per year in the eighty years
preceding the revolution—seventeen! From 1860 to 1900, Soviet
sources give only ninety-four executions, although during these years
there were dozens of assassinations. And in 1912, after years of revolts,
assassinations of high officials, bombings, and anti-government terror-
ism, there was a maximum of 183,949 imprisoned, including
criminals—less than half the number executed, not imprisoned, by the
communists during the Civil War period.
Lenin and his henchmen did not shrink from their carnage. They
not only accepted this incredible blood toll; they proclaimed the need
for one many times higher. In his speech in September 1918, Grigory
Zinoviev, Lenin’s lieutenant in Petrograd, said, “To overcome our
enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry
along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s
population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must
be annihilated.”
To those killed in the Red Terror and the Peasant War, we must add
those that died from the brutal regime in the new concentration and la-
bor camps, or in transit to them. Lenin created these camps in July of
1918, with a Party decree that officials must compel inmates capable of
labor to do physical work. This was the beginning of the communist
forced labor system—gulag—which we could as well call a slave labor
system, and which became as deadly as some of the most lethal hacien-
das for forced laborers in pre-revolutionary Mexico. Within a year,
Party decrees established forced labor camps in each provincial capital
and a lower limit of three hundred prisoners in each camp. The com-
munists established the first large camps on the far north Solovetsky
Islands. In an August 1919 telegram, Lenin made the criteria for im-
prisonment in such camps clear: “Lock up all the doubtful ones in a
concentration camp outside the city.” Note the word “doubtful,” rather
than “guilty.”
From the beginning, the communists intentionally made the condi-
tions in some of these camps so atrocious that prisoners could not
expect to survive for more than several years. If prisoners were not
executed, they often died from beatings, disease, exposure, and fatigue.
134 R. J. Rummel
The communists occasionally emptied camps by loading inmates on

barges and then sinking them.
With all this misery, one would think that a court had tried and sen-
tenced these prisoners, but no. A simple bureaucratic decision sent
people to these camps. By the end of 1920, official figures admitted to
eighty-four such camps in forty-three provinces of the Russian Repub-
lic alone, with almost 50,000 inmates. By October of 1922, there were
132 camps with about 60,000 inmates. During this revolution period,
1917–1922, the communists probably murdered 34,000 inmates in to-
tal.
Overall, in the Red Terror, the Peasant War, the new concentration
and labor camps, and the famine reported in Chapter 13 (of which, con-
servatively estimated, the communists are responsible for half the
deaths), Lenin and his Party probably murdered 3,284,000 people, apart
from battle deaths. When these are included, this revolution cost about
24
4.7 million lives, or about 3 percent of the population. This is almost
twice the death toll from all causes in the American Civil War—1.6
percent.
How do we account for such violence in the Russian and Mexican
Revolutions, and other such violence in Sudan, Burma, Iran, Pakistan,
China, Congo, Nigeria, and wherever else people by the hundreds and
even millions have been killed? That is the subject of the next chapter.
24 I give the estimates, calculations, and sources for this Russian Civil War toll in
Table 2A in my Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917
Chapter 19
Freedom Minimizes Political Violence
within Nations
The use of force alone is but temporary. It may subdue
for a moment; but it does not remove the necessity of
subduing again: and a nation is not governed, which is
perpetually to be conquered.
– Edmund Burke
A
lthough few have been as violent as the Mexican and Russian,
twentieth century revolutions, civil wars, violent coups, and re-
25
bellions number in the hundreds. What sense can we make out
of all these? Does the fact that the Mexican and Russian people were
not free have anything to do with the revolutions? To answer these
questions, I looked at those nations that experienced political violence
26
during 1998 and 1999. Table 19.1 provides a contingency count of
the level of a nation’s freedom versus its violence, almost all internal.
To determine the table, I divided 190 nations into four groups in
terms of their level of freedom, and similarly, but independently, in
terms of their level of violence. The results show how the level of a na-
tion’s freedom matches up with its level of violence. Out of the forty-
seven nations that had extreme violence, thirty-one of them, or 66 per-
cent, were unfree. No free nations had any high violence.
Then consider the nations that had low or no violence—mainly the
free nations. Of the forty-seven nations with low or no violence, 74
percent were free. All unfree nations had some sort of violence, none at
the low level.
To see especially the relationship between freedom and violence,
look at the count of nations in the diagonal cells from the low for free
nations to the high for unfree. By far, the highest count is in the di-
25 For a list of present conflicts, those concluded since WWII, and a conflict map, see
www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/index.html. I provide some links to data
sources on conflict and war on my links page at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM
26 The list is available on my website as a freedom versus violence table at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.TAB.A.19.GIF
136 R. J. Rummel
agonal, as it should if there is the close relationship between freedom

and violence pointed out in this chapter.
Of course, all this may be by chance. But this is tested by the chi
square statistic at the bottom of the table, which shows that the odds of
getting these results by chance is greater than 10,000 to 1.
By now, it seems obvious. The one common ingredient for bloody
internal violence is that the people who usually suffer from it also must
endure being partially or totally enslaved. Liberal democracies had lit-
tle internal political violence.
But, you may object, these results were only for two years, and these
could have been odd years. To answer this objection, I have collected
internal conflict statistics for 214 governments (regimes) from 1900 to
1987, selected to best represent the variation among nations in their de-
velopment, power, culture, region, and politics. Then I calculated the
average number killed for democracies, authoritarian regimes (where
people are partly free), and totalitarian ones (where there is no freedom),
and listed the results in Table 19.2. The results are plotted in Figure 19.1.
As we can see, the stark difference in average internal violence be-
tween democracies and those nations whose people have no freedom
holds up even over these eighty-eight years. For internal violence,
therefore, there is this very important correlation:
The more democratic freedom a people have, the less severe their
internal political violence.
27
This is a statistical fact. That freedom minimizes such violence
does not necessarily mean that freedom ends it, however. Some rioting,
civil strife, terrorism, and even civil war might still occur. Freedom is no
guarantee against this. In the world at large, with all the issues people
and governments may fight over, we have no proven and useful means of
ending every kind of internal political violence forever, everywhere,
even for democracies. But we now know that we can sharply reduce such
violence, on the average, to the mildest and smallest amount possible,
and that is through freedom.
27 For the tests of the general relationship between internal political violence and
democracy, see Chapter 35 in my Understanding Conflict and War, Vol. 2: The Con-
flict Helix (1976; at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/TCH.CHAP35.HTM);
“Libertarianism, Violence Within States, and the Polarity Principle,” Comparative
Politics, 16 (July 1984), 443–462 (at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP84.HTM);
“Libertarian Propositions on Violence Within and Between Nations: A Test Against
Published Research Results,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 29 (September 1985),
419–455 (at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP85.HTM); Chapter 5 in Power Kills:
Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence (1997); and Appendix: “Testing Whether
Freedom Predicts Human Security and Violence,” on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM
138 R. J. Rummel
How do we understand this power of democratic freedom? Many

believe that the answer to this is psychological and personal. They
think that free societies educate people against the mass killing of their
neighbors; that free people are not as belligerent as those elsewhere;
that they have deep inhibitions against killing others as people were
killed in Mexico, Russia, Burma, and Sudan, for example; and that free
people are more tolerant of their differences. There is much truth in all
this, but commentators often neglect the social preconditions of this
psychological resistance to political violence. The answer is that:
The social structure of a free, democratic so-

ciety creates the psychological conditions for its
greater internal peace.
Where freedom flourishes, there are relatively free markets, and

freedom of religion, association, ideas, and speech. Corporations, part-
nerships, associations, societies, leagues, churches, schools, and clubs
proliferate. Through free people’s interests, work, and play, they be-
come members of these multiple groups, each a separate pyramid of
power, each competing with the others and with government for their
membership, time, and resources.
We can liken these pyramids to what we might see from a low flying
plane, looking across the downtown core of a city and out to the suburbs.
Some buildings are very tall, some short, and others, away from the
downtown area, are close to the ground. Imagine each building standing
for some group’s power in a free society, and we have a good analogy of
how a free people disperse power. In contemporary societies, the gov-
ernment will be the tallest and largest building of all, with some other
buildings close in size. One might be a church, as in Israel or in a Catho-
lic democracy; another big building might be some corporation, like
Microsoft in the United States. Others might be some powerful political
party, a wealthy and influential family, or a group like a labor union.
While each group is distinct and legally separate, their member-
ships overlap and crosscut society. As stockholders, political party
members, contributors to an environmental group, workers, tennis
players, churchgoers, and so on, people belong to many of these
groups. Friends and coworkers probably belong to some of the same
groups, but also to some different ones.
Similarly, in a free society the critical social distinctions of wealth,
power, and prestige are subdivided in many ways. Few people are high
on all three. More are low on all three, but these people are not close to
a majority. Most people have different amounts of wealth, power, and
prestige. Even Bill Gates, while the highest on wealth, does not have
the prestige of a top movie actor or a popular musician, or the power of
the judge that decided to break up his Microsoft because of its “mo-
nopolistic practices.” Even the president of the United States, despite
his great power and prestige, is only moderately high on wealth. And
the adored movie actor will be high in prestige and moderately high on
wealth, but low on power.
All this pluralism in their group memberships and in wealth, power,
and prestige cross-pressures people’s interests and motivations. That is,
their membership in separate groups cuts up into different pieces what
they want, their desires, and their goals; each is satisfied by a different
group, such as their church on Sunday, bowling or tennis league on
Tuesday night, the factory or office for forty weekday hours, the par-
ent-teacher association meeting on Wednesday, and family at home.
These interests differ, but overlap, and all take time and energy. More-
over, each person shares some of these interests with others, and which
others will differ depending on the group. For all free people across a
society, there is a constantly changing crisscross of interests and differ-
140 R. J. Rummel
ences. So, for a person to satisfy one interest requires balancing it

against other interests. Does one take the family on a picnic this week-
end, play golf with friends, do that extra work that needs to be done
around the house, or help a political party win its campaign?
This cross-pressuring of interests is true of a democratic govern-
ment as well. After all, a democratic government is not some monolith,
a uniform pyramid of power. Many departments, agencies, and bureaus
make up the government, each staffed with bureaucrats and political
appointees, each with their own official and personal interests. Between
all are many official and personal connections and linkages that serve
to satisfy their mutual interests. The military services, for example, co-
ordinate their strategies and may even share equipment with other
departments and agencies. Intelligence services will share some secrets
and even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their stud-
ies, undertake common projects with the military, and provide health
supplies when needed. So multiple shared and cross-pressured interests
sew together a democratic government itself. And these interests are
shared with nongovernmental interest and pressure groups, and will be
cross-pressured by them as well.
Because of all these diverse connections and linkages in a democ-
ratic society, politicians, leaders, and groups have a paramount interest
in keeping the peace. And where a conflict might escalate into violence,
as over some religious or environmental issue, people’s interests are so
cross-pressured by different groups and ties that they simply cannot
develop the needed depth of feeling and single-minded devotion to any
interest at stake, except perhaps to their families and children. Keep in
mind that for a person to choose, along with others in a group, to kill
people or destroy their property demands that they have an almost fa-
natic dedication to the interest—the stakes—involved, almost to the
exclusion of all else.
Yet there is something else about democratically free societies that
is even more important than these violence reducing links and cross-
pressures. This is their culture. Where people are free, as in a free mar-
ket, exchange dominates and resolves conflicts. “You scratch my back,
I’ll scratch yours.” “You give me that, and I’ll give you this.” Money is
often the currency of such exchange, but exchanged also are privileges
of one sort or another, benefits, positions, and so on.
Except where such exchange is so standardized that there is little
room for bargaining, as in buying a hamburger at the local fast food res-
taurant, in a democracy people soak up certain norms governing their
conflicts. These are that they tolerate their differences, negotiate some
compromise, and in the process, make concessions. From the highest
government official to the lowest worker, from the consideration of bills
in a legislature to who does the dishes after dinner, there is bargaining of

one sort or another going on to resolve an actual or potential conflict.
Some of this becomes regularized, as in the bargaining of unions and
management in the United States as structured by the Labor Relations
Board, or the tradition in some families that dictates that the wife will
always wash the dishes. But so much more involves bargaining.
Therefore, in a free society, a culture of bargaining—what one might
call an exchange or democratic culture—evolves. This is part of the set-
tling in that takes place when a nation first becomes democratic.
Authoritarian practices, doing things through orders, decrees, and com-
mands sent down a hierarchy, gradually gets replaced by many
hierarchies of power and the use of bargaining and its techniques of ne-
gotiation and compromise to settle conflicts. Free people soon come to
expect that when they have a conflict, they will negotiate the issues and
resolve it through concessions and the splitting of differences. The more
years a democracy exists, the more its people’s expectations become
hardened into social customs and perception. No matter the conflict,
people who have long been democratically free do not expect revolution
and civil war. For, most important, they see each other as democratic, as
part of one’s in-group, one’s moral, democratic universe.
They each share not only socially, in overlapping groups, functions,
and linkages, but also in culture.
This structure of freedom, this “spontaneous society,” as F.A.
Hayek called it in his Law, Legislation, and Liberty, serves to inhibit
violence, as shown, and to culturally dispose people to cooperation,
negotiation, compromise, and tolerance of others. Just consider the ac-
ceptance and application of the Constitution of the United States and
Congressional rules in settling that most serious of political conflicts in
1999—whether President Clinton would be fired from office—and the
even more potentially violent, month-long dispute over the outcome of
the 2000 American presidential election. These supremely contentious
disputes, these most potentially violent issues, were decided with no
loss of life, no injuries, no destruction of property, no disorder, no po-
litical instability. These two examples, more than any others, show the
sheer power of a democratic institution and culture to peacefully re-
solve social and political conflicts.
But this is, so to speak, one end of the stick. This spontaneous society
explains why a free people are most peaceful in their national affairs, but
why should those societies in which people are commanded by absolute
dictators, where people are most unfree, be most violent? The worst of
these dictators rule their people and organize their society according to
ideological or theological imperatives. Be it Marxism-Leninism and the
drive for true communism as in the Russian Revolution, socialist egali-
142 R. J. Rummel
tarianism as in Burma, racial purity as in Nazi Germany, or the realiza-

tion of God’s will as in Sudan, the dictators operate through a rigid and
society-wide command structure. And this polarizes society.
First, the competing pyramids of power—church, schools, busi-
nesses, and so on—that discipline, check, and balance each other and
government in a free society do not exist. There is one solid pyramid of
power, with the dictator or ruling elite at the top, with various levels of
government in the middle and near the bottom, and with the mass of
powerless subjects at the bottom.
Second, where in a free society separate cross-cutting groups ser-
vice diverse interests, there is now, in effect, only one division in
society: that between those in power who command, and those who
must obey. In the worst of these nations, such as Pol Pot’s Cambodia,
Kim Chong-il’s North Korea, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and Mao’s China,
the people can only work for the Party, buy food from its stores, read
newspapers it publishes, see only its movies and television programs,
go to its schools, study its textbooks, and pray at a church it controls, if
it allows a church at all.
These restrictions sharply divide society into those in power and
those out of power—into “them” versus “us.” This aligns the vital in-
terests of us versus them along one conflict fault line traversing society,
as a magnet aligns metal filings along its magnetic forces. Any minor
gripe about the society or politics is against the same “them,” and when
one says “they” are responsible for a problem or conflict, friends and
loved ones know exactly whom is meant—the whole apparatus of the
dictator’s rule: his henchmen, police, officials, spies, and bureaucrats.
Since this regime owns and runs nearly everything, any minor issue
therefore becomes a matter of the dictator’s power, legitimacy, or
credibility. A strike in one small town against a government-owned
factory is a serous matter to the dictator. Such a strike may be symbolic
for the people, a display of resistance they should support, and if the
dictator shows weakness in defense of his policies, no matter how lo-
calized, the strike can spread along the us versus them fault line and
crystallize a nationwide rebellion. So the dictator must use major force
to put it down. The regime cannot afford to let any resistance, any dis-
play of independence, anywhere in the country by anybody, go
unchallenged. Even a peaceful demonstration, like those in Burma and
China, must be violently squashed, with leaders arrested, tortured for
information, and often killed.
So, rule is by the gun; violence, a natural accompaniment. But there
is more to this. As a culture of accommodation is a consequence of
freedom, a culture of force and violence is a consequence of dictatorial
rule. Where such rule is absolute, this is also a culture of fear—the re-
sult of not knowing when another might perceive something one is do-
ing as wrong, and report it to the police; not knowing whether
authorities will consider one’s ancestry or race or religion reason for
persecution; and not knowing about the safety of one’s loved ones, who
may be dragged off to serve in the military, disappear because of some-
thing they said, or be made some sexual plaything.
The fear exists up and down the dictator’s command structure, as
well. The secret police may shoot a general because of his joke about
the “Great Leader,” or they may jail and torture top government func-
tionaries because of a rumored plot. The dictator himself must always
fear that his security forces will turn their guns on him.
Where power becomes absolute, massive kill-

ing follows, and rebellion is a concomitant.
There also are partly free regimes, such as a monarchy ruled ac-
cording to tradition and custom, as in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia; or an
authoritarian one, as in Mexico before its revolution, where arranged
elections and compliant military, police, and rich landowners kept the
dictator in power. Power in this case is more dispersed, and some free-
doms do exist. And therefore, the violence, on average, is less than in
those nations in which the people have no freedom. If, however, the
authoritarian rule is especially unjust and despicable, as it was in Mex-
ico and Russia before their revolutions, the resulting violence can be
quite bloody. Regardless, the correlation holds.
The less free a society and the more coercive the

commands that dominate it, the greater the polariza-
tion and culture of fear and violence, and the more
likely extreme violence will occur.
In Part 3, I showed that by promoting wealth and prosperity, free-

dom is a moral good. Here, I have pointed out that freedom also
promotes nonviolence and peace within a nation. This is also a moral
good of freedom. It is another moral reason why people should be de-
mocratically free.
Political violence within nations is only one form of violence, how-
ever. There is another form, far more deadly than any other, and that is
democide—genocide and mass murder. I need a separate part of this
book to deal with this.
PART 5
Eliminating Democide
B
y shooting, drowning, burying alive, stabbing, beating, and
crushing, with torture, suffocation, starvation, exposure, poison,
and other countless ways that lives can be wiped out, govern-
ments have killed unarmed and helpless people. Intentionally. With
forethought. This is murder. It is democide.
Few people seem to know about democide, and for this reason
Chapter 20 provides a description of democide, its massive accumula-
tion of corpses, and where it has occurred. But these are all statistics—
abstract, remote, cold; they do not touch the heart and mind. Therefore,
in the four chapters following, I try to provide a deep human under-
standing of democide in Rwanda, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet
Union, and Mao’s China.
The explanation for all this killing is theoretically solid. It is em-
pirically grounded. It is historically recognized. It speaks to the essence
of democide. And, it is simple. Namely:
Power kills. Absolute power kills absolutely.
We’ll see this in Chapter 25.

Chapter 20
Democide
In the twentieth century, governments murdered, as a
prudent estimate, 174 million men, women, and children.
It could be over 340 million.
T
he absolutely incredible number of murders governments have
carried out, often as policy decided by ruling thugs, is largely
unknown. Were people, even the most educated, asked to guess
at the number governments murdered in the last century, they probably
would suggest 10 million. Maybe even 20 million. This is much too low.
The more popularly understood term for government murder is
28
genocide, but there is a difference between democide and genocide
that must be understood. In short:
x democide is a government’s murder of people for whatever

reason;
x genocide is the murder of people because of their race, eth-
nicity, religion, nationality, or language.
The most infamous example of genocide was Nazi Germany’s cold-

blooded murder of nearly 6 million Jews during World War II. Men,
women, and children died simply because they were ethnic Jews. Many
people incorrectly believe that was the only major case of government
murder.
But as we’ve learned, there has also been the Burmese military
genocide of the Karen minority, the Sudanese Muslim regime’s geno-
cide of the southern black minority, the Chinese Communist Party’s
genocide of the Falun Gong (Chapter 1), and the Mexican govern-
ment’s genocide of Indians (Chapter 17). Nongenocidal democides
include the Chinese Communist Party’s Land Reform (Chapter 15),
Burma’s military murders of pro-democracy demonstrators (Chapter 1);
the Mexican and Saudi Arabian governments’ murders of political op-
28 Described in my “Democide versus Genocide: Which is What?” at:

www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/GENOCIDE.HTM
146 R. J. Rummel
ponents (Chapter 17 and Chapter 1 respectively), and the deadly famine

Stalin imposed on the Ukraine (Chapter 14).
Those who have been living in a democracy all their lives may find
it difficult to accept the truth that governments murder people by the
thousands and millions. Even some of my political science colleagues
have resisted the thought. I could see them wince when, at a conference
or meeting, for example, I said outright that Kim Il-sung, the deceased
dictator of North Korea, was responsible for the murder of something
like 1.7 million people. We can easily call someone who kills people in
cold blood a murderer, such as London’s famous “Jack the Ripper,”
who killed six or seven people in 1888, or the “Boston Strangler,” Al-
bert DeSalvo, who killed thirteen people in 1962–1964. But we may
resist calling a “government leader” a mass murderer, even when
speaking of Uganda’s Idi Amin, who physically took part in some of
the murders carried out by his regime, and who was responsible for the
violent deaths of some 300,000 of his subjects.
Part of this reluctance to call a government or its ruler a murderer
comes from the fact that to do so is a new and strange thought. Demo-
cide is a black hole in our textbooks, college teaching, and social
science research. Few people know the extent to which governments
murder people. In the twentieth century, the age of great advances in
technology, medicine, wealth, and education, governments nonetheless
probably murdered around 174 million people. The worst of these mur-
29
derous governments are listed in Table 20.1.
This is more than four times those killed in combat in all interna-
tional and national wars, including World Wars I and II, Vietnam,
Korea, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chi-
nese Civil War. The toll could even be more than 340 million. This is
as though we’d had a nuclear war, but with its deaths and destruction
spread over a century. Yet, few know about this obscene slaughter.
There is a good reason why. The authoritarian and totalitarian gov-
ernments that do most of this killing usually control who writes their
histories, and what appears in them. Also, democratically free people
project onto the rest of the world their own democratic cultural biases.
They see governments as largely doing good things for people. Some
policies may be wrong, some stupid, but the idea of murdering people
because of their politics, religion, or ethnicity, or by quota, is alien—
except, of course, for what those evil Nazis did to the Jews. And our
29 For the genocidal component and the democide as a percent of the population, see
Table 1.2 in my Death By Government (1994). This is also available on my website
at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.2.GIF
political science textbooks tell us that governments have positive func-

tions, such as national defense, welfare, and security—that they provide
a legal framework within which people can achieve their own interests.
With this background, it is difficult to conceive of nondemocratic
governments as many are: a gang of thugs holding a whole nation cap-
148 R. J. Rummel
tive with their guns, enslaving the people to their whims, and looting,
raping, and killing at will.
Moreover, democratic culture predisposes liberal democracies to
avoid conflict and seek cooperation with other nations, even those ruled
by despots. Democratic governments do not seek to arouse public opin-
ion against other countries that will destabilize diplomatic arrangements
and create pressure for hostile action. Seldom do democratic govern-
ments point their fingers at those guilty of democide, unless already in
conflict with them and therefore in need of public support. Even then,
they often will avoid doing so until the proof is overpowering (as in
Rwanda, as discussed below), and even then, democracies will avoid the
terms murder or genocide.
Even in the American war against the Taliban and then Saddam Hus-
sein, and subsequently the Iraqi and foreign terrorists and insurgents, the
argument for these wars was not that these thugs murdered people
wholesale, but that the wars were justified as part of a war on terror and
in defense of American national security.
Such reluctance to term foreign rulers or nations guilty of genocide is
also illustrated by the many decades-long refusal on the part of the U.S.
State Department to admit, despite the evidence from its own ambassa-
dor and other diplomats at the time, that the Turkish government planned
and launched a genocidal campaign against its Armenian citizens during
World War I, murdering as many as 1.5 million of them. Turkey is a
member of NATO, refuses to admit the genocide, and has taken strong
diplomatic action against those who make this claim. Yet Turkey per-
petuated the first large-scale act of genocide in the twentieth century, not
Russia or Germany.
Although I have mentioned democide in previous chapters, I have
not focused on it to show the nature and extent of this abominable and
utterly inhumane practice. Now I will, beginning with Rwanda’s Great
Genocide of 1994. This involved the plotted murder in four months of
over 600,000, perhaps 800,000, even possibly as many as 1 million Tutsi
and Hutu—at least 14 percent of the population. In the number of people
killed within such a short period of time, it is one of the twentieth cen-
tury’s worst acts of democide.
Second we will look at the largely non-genocidal democide com-
mitted by the Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia, 1975–1979.
This killer regime murdered about 2 million Cambodians in four years,
or a little less than one-third of the population. Many more were killed
than in Rwanda, but over a much longer time. I also will give examples
from Stalin’s democide, unmatched historically in the 42.7 million he
30 31
murdered, and Mao’s vast democide of 37.8 million, second only to
Stalin.
The various totals I will present, such as 100,000 or 200,000 mur-
dered, in terms of human beings killed is hard to grasp. To feel what
100,000 dead means, think of laying 100,000 corpses head to toe, in a
line alongside a straight road. Assume, since many were babies, young
children, and short adults, that each corpse averages a little more than
five feet long. Now, to drive a car down this road along these 100,000
bodies, you would have to drive almost one hundred miles to reach the
last corpse. This provides a simple multiplier—200,000 murdered would
stretch head to toe nearly two hundred miles, and a million murdered
would be almost a thousand miles. Maybe now you can feel how in-
credible, how horrible it is that 100,000 or even 1,000 human beings
(end to end, a little less than a mile), each a separate soul, each with a
unique personality and emotions, each a thinking, feeling human being,
would have their precious lives wiped out. Each death also leaves count-
less heartbroken loved ones, thus multiplying the toll. This human
misery is not in the numbers, but numbers are necessary for recounting
the sad tale of such gargantuan crimes.
30 This figure is based on the estimates, sources, and calculations summarized in Ta-
ble 1.A of my Lethal Politics: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991). The
table is also given on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB1A.GIF
31 Includes the Civil War period. The figure is based on the estimates, sources, and
calculations summarized in Table 1.1 of my China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and
Mass Murder Since 1917 (1990). The table is also given on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TAB1.1.GIF
Chapter 21
The Rwandan Great Genocide
For innocents on both sides this was a historically un-
precedented catastrophe. Over 1 million might have
died, and around 2 million Hutu were forced to flee
their homes, with possibly some 1.2 million ending up
in Zaire alone.
Background
T
he Rwandan Great Genocide of 1994, though by far the largest in
the country’s history, was only one of many acts of genocide car-
ried out by different Rwandan governments in the decades before
1994, and that have continued since.
Located in the south-central region of Africa and bordered by Bu-
rundi, Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania, Rwanda is smaller than the state of
Maryland. In 1999, its population was about 7.2 million, making it one
of the most densely populated countries, and one of the poorest. One
important ethnic group was the small minority of Tutsi, who made up
15 percent of Rwandans, and who tended to be tall and thin. The over-
whelming majority of Rwandans, over 80 percent, were ethnic Hutu,
more likely to be short and stocky.
The Western media have greatly misunderstood the 1994 genocide
as a tribal meltdown, as ethnic hatred and intolerance run amok. The
mental picture is of a Hutu running wildly down a street, swinging a
machete at any Tutsi he can catch. This is largely a myth. Rather, the
genocide was a well-calculated mass murder planned by Hutu govern-
ment leaders. Surely individual Hutu who hated Tutsi, or had
grievances against certain Tutsi, joined in the bloodfest, and undoubt-
edly, sadistic Hutu saw this genocide as an excuse to kill. But we
should not overlook the many Hutu who refused to kill, and protected
Tutsi even at the risk of their lives.
This genocide was, pure and simple, part of a political struggle to
maintain power, as was the “ethnic cleansing” that happened later in
Bosnia and Kosovo. It exemplified the iron law of human behavior:
power kills.
Centuries ago, the Tutsi migrated from the north to Rwanda and
proceeded to dominate the Hutu with a feudal system, but without the
strict tribal or ethnic divisions one sees in Rwanda today. At the time,
“Hutu’ and “Tutsi” distinguished social and political groups, rather
than ethnic. Generally, Tutsi were cattle owners and members of the
court, while Hutu were farmers, but these were not indelible distinc-
tions: Hutu could become Tutsi, and vice versa. Nor was Tutsi political
domination absolute. Hutu chiefs became part of the hierarchy, and
custom required Tutsi governors to recognize certain obligations to the
Hutu. In many ways there was a sharing of power, and eventually, both
Tutsi and Hutu spoke the same language, generally were Catholic in
religion, and shared the same culture.
Then came colonization. Germany first took Rwanda in the nine-
teenth century, and then after the defeat of Germany in World War I,
the victors turned Rwanda over to Belgium as a protectorate. As Ger-
many had, Belgium tried to rule at a distance by indirectly governing
through existing Rwandan political institutions, which largely meant
working through the Tutsi. Certainly colonial authorities thought the
Tutsi to be more intelligent and vigorous, more like Caucasians, and
therefore favored them in government, education, and business. In ef-
fect, Belgium promoted a more rigid and pervasive Tutsi rule over the
Hutu. Since the difference between Tutsi and Hutu was not always
readily evident, the colonial authorities defined a Tutsi as anyone who
owned ten or more cows, and a Hutu as anyone with less. Moreover,
Christian missionaries, particularly of the Roman Catholic Church,
taught that the Tutsi were Hametic rather than Negroid in origin, possi-
bly from Ethiopia, and with Christian roots. Where the difference
between Tutsi and Hutu had been unclear before colonization, hardly
stressed in social affairs and interaction, it now became a precise gov-
ernment and social matter. In 1926, Belgium introduced identity cards
indicating whether the holder was Tutsi or Hutu.
After the end of World War II, there was much talk about equality
and freedom. Western intellectuals began spreading the word about the
benefits and justice of democracy, and Christian missionaries joined in
this new ideological wave, promoting democracy and equality among
the Hutu. Yet for all the teaching about social justice, the Hutu were
still required to carry ethnic identity cards; and behind the scenes, the
colonial authorities continued to support Tutsi control over all govern-
mental functions. All this did much to aggravate Hutu and Tutsi
differences, therefore, while encouraging the wish for self-government
among the great majority of Hutu.
Independence and self-determination were the irresistible cry dur-
ing the 1950s, and Belgians came to see Rwandan independence as
152 R. J. Rummel
inevitable. This raised the question of what kind of government an

independent Rwanda would have. Being members of a democracy
themselves, colonial authorities wanted to give more power to the
Hutu majority and prepare free elections and a democratic govern-
ment. So they changed colonial policy and began to prepare the Hutu
for a large role in government by encouraging their education, and
phasing them into more numerous and more important official posi-
tions. This further encouraged the belief among Hutus that by right,
the government belonged to them.
In 1959 this rising sentiment culminated in a Hutu rebellion against
both Belgium and the Tutsi government and elite. The Hutu massacred
about 10,000 Tutsi, and the next year forced 100,000 to 200,000 to flee
the country with their king. The Hutu then declared a republic, and in
1962 Belgium granted Rwanda full independence.
Over the next decades, Tutsi would continually invade one border
area of Rwanda or another to overthrow the Hutu government. In the
years between 1961 and 1967 alone, they tried this ten times. The re-
sulting fighting and genocide over the years forced Tutsi from their
homes, and increased the number of refugees to about 600,000, among
whom the men became ready fighters in new Tutsi incursions.
In 1963 they launched the most serious of these invasions, this one
from Uganda, and for the first time threatened to bring down the gov-
ernment. But they were soon defeated, and only succeeded in pro-
voking another Hutu massacre of Tutsi who had remained in the coun-
try. Also, during this and other invasions of this period, Tutsi carried
out their own genocide, murdering some 20,000 Hutu.
Despite their unsuccessful attempts to defeat the Hutu government,
the Tutsi refugees would not give up. Under German and then Belgian
colonial rule, they had come to believe that they were superior to Hutu
in all-important ways, and that it was only right that they, and not the
Hutu, rule the country.
Among themselves, the Hutu were split between the north and
south, as shown in 1973, when Defense Minister General Juvenal Ha-
byarimana overthrew the president, accusing him of favoritism for
southern Hutu, and made himself president. His new power was not
secure either, but he did defeat a coup against him in 1980, and re-
mained in power until the beginning of the Great Genocide.
Added to the political difficulties of his rule was the collapse in the
international market for coffee, the principal crop of Rwanda, which
led to famine in some areas. Moreover, President Habyarimana drove
the government deeply into debt, forcing him to turn to the World Bank
for aid. This he got in return for the promise to liberalize the economy
from government controls, but he spent the money on building up the

army, and ignored the World Bank’s stipulations.
President Habyarimana’s government allowed Rwandans virtually no
freedom. He created a strict one-party state with the intention of control-
ling and quickly mobilizing the population. The government divided
people into communes, and any citizen who wanted to move in or out of
an assigned commune had to report to the police. All citizens had to reg-
ister, and, as in Burma, the government forced everyone to do a certain
amount of forced labor: building roads, clearing brush, digging ditches,
and so on. They also had to participate in weekly propaganda meetings
to glorify the party.
Rwandans have been among the least free in civil and political
32
rights. On a scale of 2 (free) to 14 (unfree), Freedom House rated the
Rwandan people as 13 in lack of freedom for 1993, and a bottom 14 for
the following year, when the Great Genocide occurred.
In 1990, in the midst of Rwanda’s economic troubles, Tutsi refu-
gees again invaded the country. With the help of the Ugandans, they
had formed a political and military force they named the Front Patri-
otique Rawndais (FPR, sometimes called the RPF), but were again
defeated, this time with the help of Belgian and French troops. The
FPR tried to hold onto parts of the country and periodically resumed its
offensive until the government launched the Great Genocide in 1994.
While this civil war was devastating part of the country, economic
troubles increased. Inflation, along with personal and government debt,
rose sharply. Coffee prices dropped so low that the government de-
stroyed coffee plants and replaced them with other crops. The World
Bank responded to another request for aid, and provided more funds
toward overcoming Rwanda’s huge national debt.
By this time, Hutu extremists had resurrected the old nonblack,
Ethiopian theory about Tutsi origins that Belgium had once used to jus-
tify Tutsi rule, only now, the Hutu used this myth to their advantage.
Extremists claimed that the Tutsi did not belong in Rwanda, that they
were outsiders who had invaded the country and subjugated the Hutu.
They argued for the total expulsion of all Tutsi. Government anti-Tutsi
propaganda also made much of the genocide of Hutu by the Tutsi in
neighboring Burundi. There, the ethnic division was about the same as in
Rwanda, but the Tutsi were in control. In 1972, the Burundi government
responded to a Hutu uprising by massacring about 150,000 Hutu, and
after another Hutu uprising in 1988, the Tutsi massacred as many as
200,000 of them. The Hutu Rwandan government regularly cited this
32 At: www.freedomhouse.org
154 R. J. Rummel
genocidal slaughter by the Burundi Tutsi as a reason why they could not
allow the Tutsi within their own borders to take or share power.
However, the United Nations, United States, Belgium, and other
African nations were applying considerable pressure to President Ha-
byarimana to come to terms with the FPR and end the civil war. Badly
in need of more foreign aid, in 1992 he agreed to form a coalition
government with all political parties, and to share power with Tutsi
leaders until he could hold an election. This hardly sat well with the
Hutu political and military elite and extremists, but in any case, Presi-
dent Habyarimana found one reason or another to delay fulfilling this
agreement—perhaps in order to prepare for the Great Genocide. Also,
the United Nation’s mandate for overseeing this accord was to expire
in April of 1994; then UN troops would have to withdraw. Mean-
while, Tutsi FPR forces, helped by Ugandan military, continued the
civil war, broken by only occasional cease-fires.
By April of 1994, events had prepared the way for the Great
Genocide. The economy was a mess, and tensions between Hutu and
Tutsi were at a boiling point due to the continuing FPR assaults. The
country was so beleaguered that it began to look as though Habyari-
mana would finally surrender to foreign pressure and allow the Tutsi
to share power. Radical Hutu elite and top governmental leaders,
however, had other plans.
The Great Genocide

In April of 1994, a plane carrying Habyarimana and Burundian
President Ndadaye crashed under mysterious circumstances. The pre-
vailing theory was that Habyarimana’s own Presidential Guard shot it
down. Whether radical Hutu planned this assassination or not, it trig-
gered the Great Genocide.
There was bloodlust in the air, and some Hutu and Tutsi now felt
free to settle scores and kill those they resented. However, the govern-
ment—that is, President Habyarimana’s wife, a few close advisors, and
three brothers-in-law—had prepared for the Great Genocide before Ha-
byarimana’s death.
Their middle-level organizers numbered about three to five hundred
officials and bureaucrats. The police, with a special Hutu militia (inter-
hamwe) of 7,000 to 14,000 Tutsi-haters at their command, did the dirty
work. Officials in on the plan had specifically organized the militia to
murder Tutsi, and they succeeded very well: some may well have killed
as many as two to three hundred people. Militia killers also encour-
aged—and sometimes ordered at gunpoint—Hutu civilians to kill their
Tutsi friends and neighbors. Hutu who refused, or who showed reluc-
tance, were themselves murdered. Insiders had also trained a Palace
Guard of about 6,000 Hutu to help the militia and exterminate Hutu and
Tutsi political opponents and their supporters. Even Hutu moderates
did not escape death. Meanwhile, every day a radio station from the
capital exhorted Hutu, as their patriotic duty, to grab whatever weapon
they had and kill Tutsi without mercy.
Note that this was not an act of massacre by the uneducated, undis-
ciplined masses, ordinary folk easily misled and aroused. As with the
Holocaust, when Nazi killing squads were often led and composed of
Ph.D.s and other professionals, the claims of the powerful and authori-
tative easily swayed the well-educated to murder. In the Great
Genocide, Hutu lawyers, teachers, professors, medical doctors, journal-
ists, and other professionals made their contribution to the methodical
annihilation of the Tutsi or defiant Hutu.
Since most Rwandans were Christians, the country had many
churches in which the Tutsi sought refuge. Not to be deterred, the Hutu
killers simply surrounded the churches and set them on fire, or forced
their way in and systematically butchered all inside. Hospitals were
also a favorite target, since they not only hired many Tutsi, but also
were places where the Hutu killers could easily find and kill wounded
or sick Tutsi. For example, on April 23 militia and soldiers from the
Rwandan army killed 170 patients and medical personnel at the Butare
Hospital. Dr. Claude-Emile Rowagoneza, a Tutsi, gave testimony on
what he saw happen in and outside the hospital:
The massacres were delayed until

April 20th. That day everyone was asked
to stay at home except those working in
the hospital. Medical staff was trans-
ported to the hospital. Nurses had to walk
and many were stopped at the check-
point, asked to show their identity cards,
and killed if they were Tutsi. There were
35 doctors at the hospital of which four
were Tutsi. Because of the danger all four
Tutsi stayed at the hospital, as did some
nurses. Drs. Jean-Bosco Rugira and Jean-
Claude Kanangire are known to have
been killed, and the fate of Dr. Isidore
Kanangare who was hiding in the hospi-
tal and may have been evacuated by the
French, is unknown. In mid-May injured
156 R. J. Rummel
soldiers from the Kanombe barracks

started being brought to Butare Hospital
and no more civilians were being admit-
ted. They also started deciding who were
Tutsi on the basis of their features, look-
ing at the nose, height, and fingers
because the identity cards were no longer
accurate. Some of the doctors at the hos-
pital risked their lives by helping
threatened staff by hiding and feeding
them . . . . When the patients’ wounds
had healed some of the doctors—the
“bad” doctors—expelled the Tutsi al-
though everyone knew they would be
killed outside. At night, the interhamwe
and the soldiers came in but these doctors
were colluding willingly. If people re-
fused to go, they were taken out at night.
They could be seen being killed by the
interhamwe waiting at the gates. Later
the Prime Minister came down to Butare .
. . and while here he had a meeting with
medical staff. They all said peace had re-
turned and told the patients that it was
safe to return home . . . . Those who did
were then killed . . . . My wife was taken
twice by interhamwe but neighbors in-
sisted that she was Hutu . . . . My sister,
mother, and father fled to Burundi but all
my aunts, uncles, and in-laws were killed
except for my mother-in-law. In other
words, more than 40 of my relatives were
killed.
By June 6, eight weeks later, this deliberate Great Genocide had al-
ready taken some 500,000 Rwandan lives, mostly Tutsi. Whole
families were massacred, including babies. As the Great Genocide pro-
gressed, the United Nations, Belgium, and particularly the United
States showed extreme caution in calling this genocide a genocide. Nor
could they decide whether to remain engaged in the country. In the first
few days, Belgium withdrew completely when Hutu killed ten of its
soldiers. Not understanding what was going on, the UN reduced its
peacekeeping soldiers from 4,500 men to 270, and fully restricted the
action of even this small contingent. As UN troops retreated from one

base after another, waiting Hutu militia set upon and massacred the
Tutsi families that had huddled under the UN flag for protection.
It took the Clinton Administration three weeks—by which time
hundreds of thousands had already been massacred—to declare a state
of disaster in Rwanda. Even then, they characterized the situation as
one of tribal killings, with crazed Hutu civilians roaming the streets
with machetes hacking away at any Tutsi within reach. In actuality, this
genocide was no less planned than the Holocaust or Turkey’s World
War I genocidal slaughter of their Armenians.
The American declaration provided unintended cover for the Hutu
government to continue its Great Genocide. Even when the deliberate
nature of the government’s action became too blatant to ignore, the
Clinton Administration refused to call it genocide. To do so would have
required foreign signatories of the Genocide Convention, including the
United States, to immediately get involved. The Clinton Administration
also continued to delay agreeing to the details of a UN dispatch of
troops, and prevented any foreign action until June 8, nearly three
months into the Great Genocide. Then, the Security Council finally re-
ceived U.S. agreement, and authorized troops to enter Rwanda and
prevent further genocide. These troops backed the Tutsi FPR, helped
defeat the Hutu conspirators, and caused their government to collapse.
An FPR-backed government then took power, and installed a dictator-
ship as severe as the one it replaced.
At this point I should stress that the Tutsi were not blameless in the
Great Genocide. In retaliation for the government’s actions against
them, Tutsi civilians and the FPR killed Hutu, sometimes at random.
For innocents on both sides, this was a historically unprecedented ca-
tastrophe. As mentioned, over 1 million might have died, and around 2
million Hutu were forced to flee their homes, with as many as 1.2 mil-
lion ending up in Zaire alone. All would live miserable lives in refugee
camps, suffering from hunger and disease, and often in danger from
attacks by armed gangs of Tutsi. Localized cholera epidemics were fre-
quent; just one of these killed 20,000 refugees. Still, Hutu were
unwilling to leave the camps, fearing Tutsi reprisals—with good rea-
son. When the new Tutsi government tried to close one camp in
southwestern Rwanda, troops opened fire on an unarmed crowd of
Hutu protesters, an act which the United Nations claimed killed 2,000.
Overall, perhaps one-third of a 1993 population around 7.3 million
died or fled the country during the Great Genocide and the subsequent
fighting. Though foreign troops and the FPR had ended the Great
Genocide itself, the killing was not over. Several thousand Hutu re-
belled against the new government, and with the support of the local
158 R. J. Rummel
Hutu population, they continued to attack and murder Tutsi. To deny

these rebels cover, soldiers cleared rebel areas of banana plantations,
particularly in the northwest, all but destroying the local economy.
From May 1997 to March 1998, these hostilities killed about 10,000
Tutsi and Hutu in this region alone.
These are just numbers, of course. At the personal level, we can
more easily feel what these facts mean for one Tutsi small business-
man, Immanuel Sebomana. He was on a bus in northwestern Rwanda
when Hutu rebels stopped it. Sebomana immediately jumped from a
window and ran for his life into the bush. Behind him, the rebels sur-
rounded the bus, set it on fire, and killed any of the remaining
passengers who tried to escape. Meanwhile, Hutu civilians joined the
soldiers gathered around the bus, cheering and singing while thirty-five
passengers died.
Chapter 22
Death by Marxism I:
The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia
In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a
human catastrophe unequaled by any other country in
the twentieth century.It probably lost slightly less than 4
million people to war, rebellion, manufactured famine,
and democide—genocide, nonjudicial executions, and
massacres—or close to 56 percent of its population.
Background
R
wanda represents a clear case of genocide by a government try-
ing to maintain power. The incredible killing that took place in
Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 is different. First, it is an exam-
ple of large-scale, nongenocidal mass murder, and only secondarily one
of genocide. Second, this democide was part of an attempt by commu-
nists to impose a revolution on the country. They tried to abolish its
religion, eradicate its culture, totally remodel its economy, communize
all social interaction, and control all speech, writing, laughing, and lov-
ing. They exterminated anyone with any ties to Western nations, or to
Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, and eliminated everyone who had any
connections to the previous government or military. Because of all this,
it is necessary to focus on the intended revolution itself to explain how
and why this one government, in four years, could and did murder more
than one-quarter of its population.
A little smaller than Oklahoma, Cambodia is located in southeast
Asia, bordered by Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and the Gulf of Thailand.
Cambodia’s population in 1970 was about 7.1million, slightly smaller
than Rwanda’s. It was almost wholly Buddhist.
The devastating history of Cambodia during the 1960s and 1970s is
intimately bound up with the Vietnam War. Communist North Viet-
namese provided military aid and soldiers to Cambodia’s own
communist guerrillas, the Khmer Rouge, or Red Cambodians. Cambo-
dia was an avenue for war supplies from North Vietnam to their army
and Viet Cong guerrillas fighting under their command in South Viet-
nam against South Vietnamese and American troops. As a result, the
160 R. J. Rummel
United States systematically bombed Khmer Rouge guerrillas and Viet

Cong supply routes and, in a final attempt to destroy these routes, in-
vaded Cambodia from South Vietnam. But American congressional
and public opinion hostile to the invasion soon compelled American
forces to retreat back to South Vietnam.
In proportion to its population, Cambodia underwent a human ca-
33
tastrophe unequaled by any other country in the twentieth century. It
probably lost slightly less than 4 million people to war, rebellion,
manufactured famine, and democide—genocide, nonjudicial execu-
tions, and massacres—or close to 56 percent of its 1970 population.
Successive governments and guerrilla groups murdered almost 3.3 mil-
lion men, women, and children, including 35,000 foreigners, between
1970 and 1980. Most of these, probably as many as 2.4 million, were
murdered by the communist Khmer Rouge, both before and (to a much
greater extent) during their takeover of Cambodia after April 1975.
The United States had supported and supplied the Cambodian mili-
tary government of General Lon Nol, but the American Congress ended
all aid to him with the withdrawal of the United States from the Viet-
nam War in 1973. After successive retreats, Lon Nol could no longer
even defend the capital, Phnom Penh, against the Khmer Rouge guerril-
las. The Cambodian army declared a cease-fire and laid down its arms.
On April 17, 1975, a ragtag bunch of solemn teenagers clad in black
pajamas, red scarves, and Mao caps, and carrying arms of all descrip-
tions, walked or were trucked from different directions into Phnom
Penh. They were part of an army of 68,000 Khmer Rouge guerrillas
that had achieved victory for a Communist Party of only 14,000 mem-
bers against an army of about 200,000 men.
Rule by Murder
At first, the people hardly knew what to make of these victorious
guerrillas. After all, the war was over, the killing had stopped, and peo-
ple who had chafed under the Lon Nol government were relieved and
happy. Many intellectuals and middle-class Cambodians, disgusted with
the everyday corruption of the government, were willing to try anything
that brought change, even communism. The Khmer Rouge was cheered,
and there were public and private celebrations.
33 See Figure 1.2 of my Death By Government (1974), which is also available on my

website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.FIG1.2.GIF. I provide estimates, calcu-
lations, and sources of the Khmer Rouge catastrophe at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP4.HTM
But before the people could settle down and enjoy a few days of
peace, the Khmer Rouge did the unimaginable: they turned their weap-
ons on the 2 to 3 million inhabitants of the capital. Shouting threats of
immediate death, waving their arms angrily, and actually shooting in-
habitants, they demanded that everyone leave the city. In Phnom Penh
and all other newly-occupied cities and towns, their order to evacuate
was implacable. The Khmer Rouge kicked nearly 4,240,000 urban
Cambodians and refugees, even the sick, infirm, and aged, out of the
cities and towns into a largely unprepared countryside. Even for those
on the operating table or in labor during childbirth, the order was abso-
lute: “Go! Go! You must leave!”
Families evacuated any way possible, carrying what few posses-
sions they could grab. The wealthy and middle classes rode out in cars
that were soon abandoned or stolen from them by the Khmer Rouge.
Some left on heavily loaded motor scooters or bicycles, which were
also soon confiscated. This vast multitude of urbanites and refugees,
with only their feet to move them, formed barely moving lines that ex-
tended for miles.
Some ill or infirm hobbled along; others, thrown from the hospi-
tals, crawled along on hands and knees. According to a British
journalist who watched the slowly moving mass of evacuees from the
safety of the French embassy, the Khmer Rouge was “tipping out pa-
tients [from the hospitals] like garbage into the streets . . . . Bandaged
men and women hobbled by the embassy. Wives pushed wounded
soldier husbands on hospital beds on wheels, some with serum drips
still attached. In five years of war, this is the greatest caravan of hu-
man misery I have seen.”
Failure to evacuate meant death. Failure to begin evacuation
promptly enough meant death. Failure of anyone to obey Khmer Rouge
orders meant death. Failure to give the Khmer Rouge what they
wanted—whether a car, motor scooter, bicycle, watch, or whatever—
meant death.
The direction from which people exited the city depended on their
location at the time they received the evacuation order. The Khmer
Rouge told refugees to return to their home villages, but particularly for
the urbanites, where they went after evacuation and what village the
Khmer Rouge eventually settled them in depended on the whim of the
soldiers and cadres along the way. People were jumbled together,
trudging along for days or weeks, usually with only the clothes, cover-
ings, and provisions they had snatched at the last moment. Many had
minimal supplies, since they had believed the Khmer Rouge who, to
minimize disorder, had told them that the evacuation would be for only
162 R. J. Rummel
a few days. The very young and the old, and those already sick, injured,
or infirm soon died on the roads or trails. One of these trudging mil-
lions, a medical doctor named Vann Hay, said that every two hundred
meters, he saw a dead child.
And, as the pitiful evacuees reached their homes or assigned vil-
lages, there was usually no relief from the horrors they’d already
suffered. The situation was just different in kind.
The toll from this outrageous and bloody evacuation, including
those killed outright, is in dispute. Whether 40,000 to 80,000 evacuees
were murdered or died, as one scholar sympathetic to the Khmer Rouge
claimed, or 280,000 to 400,000 died, as the CIA estimated, the sheer
horror of this urban expulsion is undeniable.
Primarily, this was done as a matter of ideology. The Khmer Rouge
saw the cities as the home of foreign ideas, capitalists, and their suppor-
tive bourgeoisie intellectuals; they were thoroughly corrupt, and
required a thorough cleansing. And those the Khmer Rouge believed
the city had corrupted—its professionals, businesspeople, public offi-
cials, teachers, writers, and workers—must either be eliminated or
reeducated and purified. To the Khmer Rouge, the best way to remake
those “corrupted minds” that they allowed to survive was to make them
work in the fields alongside pure peasants. Consider the slogans broad-
cast over Radio Phnom Penh and spoken at meetings at the time: “what
is infected must be cut out . . . . What is rotten must be removed . . . .
What is too long must be shortened and made the right length . . . . It
isn’t enough to cut down a bad plant, it must be uprooted.”
This inhuman expulsion was an opening salvo in the Khmer Rouge
campaign to utterly remake Cambodian culture and society, and to con-
struct pure communism forthwith. Pol Pot and a few henchmen, who
organized and loosely commanded the Khmer Rouge, planned all this.
Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who had received
his higher education and radical ideas in France, and helped found the
Khmer Workers party—Khmer Rouge—in 1960, which he then
headed. He subsequently organized and led the guerrilla attacks on
Prince Sihanouk’s Western-oriented government in the 1960s, and
against the American-supported General Lon Nol government that
overthrew it in 1970.
It should be noted that under Khmer Rouge rule, Cambodia was not
one totalitarian society dictated by one set of doctrines or rules, except
at the most abstract and general level. How the Khmer Rouge applied
such abstractions, under what rules, and with what punishment for vio-
lations, varied from one district or region to another. This is why I
write that Pol Pot “loosely” commanded.
TABLE 22.1
Conditions of Life
Under the Khmer Rouge
Civil/Political
no freedom to travel abroad or from village to village
no freedom to choose employment
no freedom of speech
no freedom of organization
no freedom of religion—no religion allowed
no courts, judges, or appeals
no codified law or rules
Social/Cultural
no public or private worker rights
no independent work or living (all in collectives)
no skilled private or public medical care
no foreign medicines
no mail or telegrams
no radio, television, or movies
no international telephones or cables
no newspapers, journals, or magazines
no books or libraries
no general schooling
no holidays or religious festivals
Economic
no money (all money eliminated)
no banks
no wages or salaries
no markets
no businesses
no restaurants or stores
Personal
no independent eating (all cooked and ate collectively)
no personal food
no regional gastronomic specialties (all ate the same)
no private plots to grow food
no personal names (all personal names had to be given up)
no independent family life
no sexual freedom
no music
no freedom from work after the age of five
no personally owned buses, cars, scooters, or bicycles
no personal clothes, pots, pans, watches, or anything
no freedom to cry or laugh
no private conversation
164 R. J. Rummel
Nonetheless, Pol Pot and his henchmen managed to hold the initia-
tive, establish control throughout the country, and create the surprising
uniformity in most regions shown here in Table 22.1.
Take a moment and study the table. It shows that, with the Khmer
Rouge seizure of power over Cambodia, its people were plunged into a
border-to-border prison with rigid rules that made their lives worse,
more controlled, and more dangerous than those of slaves.
The Khmer Rouge collectivized peasants everywhere—95 to 97
percent of the population was eventually forced into collective farms—
and expected evacuees and peasants to work solely for the communist
revolution. They forbade all political, civil, or human rights. They pro-
hibited travel without a pass from village to village. They forced
Cambodians to eat and sleep in communes, and ordered even young
children to work in the fields. In some regions, they made peasants
work from about 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 or 10:00 p.m., with time off only for
“political education.” They closed permanently all primary, secondary,
and technical schools, as well as colleges and universities. They shut
down all hospitals and automatically murdered Western-trained medi-
cal doctors. They prohibited sex between the unmarried and, in some
places, they threatened boys and girls with death for as little as holding
hands. Unauthorized contact was forbidden even between those who
were married, also at risk of death. The Khmer Rouge allowed no ap-
peals, no courts, no judges, no trials, and no law. They eliminated all
money, businesses, books, and newspapers. They banned music. They
eliminated practicing lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists,
and all other professionals, because whatever truths these professions
possessed, “the peasant could pick up through experience.”
This is all incredible; some details may help its digestion. Just con-
sider how the Khmer Rouge controlled personal relations. They made
showing love to relatives or laughing with them dangerous, often per-
ceiving this as showing less dedication to, or poking fun at, the Great
Revolution. It was even dangerous to use some term of endearment, such
as “honey,” “sweetheart,” or “dearest,” for a loved one. When a spy
overheard the doctor Haing Ngor referring to his wife in this manner, the
spy reported him for both this and eating food he picked in the forest,
instead of bringing it into the village for communal eating. The local
cadre interrogated him about these sins, and told him, “The chhlop [in-
formers] say that you call your wife ‘sweet.’ We have no ‘sweethearts’
here. That is forbidden.” Soldiers then took him to a prison where cadre
members severally tortured him, cut off his finger, and sliced his ankle
with a hatchet. He barely survived.
This deadly communist revolution created pitiful human dilemmas.

Think about what this same doctor, Haing Ngor, went through when his
wife suffered life-threatening complications during childbirth. To help
her deliver her baby would mean death, since the Khmer Rouge for-
bade husbands from delivering their wives’ babies. In any case, to use
his medical skills to save her would in effect tell the cadre that he was a
doctor, and would result in not only his death, but possibly that of his
wife and newborn child. To do nothing might mean their death anyway;
still, if he did nothing, the wife might pull through. He chose to do
nothing—perhaps he could do nothing anyway, since he had no proper
medical instruments. Both mother and baby soon died, leaving a gaping
wound in his heart that never healed.
(Haing Ngor subsequently came to the United States after the defeat
of Vietnam, became an actor, and received an Academy Award for his
performance in The Killing Fields, the movie about the murderous
Khmer Rouge regime. In 1996 he was murdered for money as he ar-
rived home in Los Angeles, for which three members of the Oriental
LazyBoyz street gang were subsequently tried and convicted.)
But even if Ngor’s child had been born, he could not have kept it
for long The Khmer Rouge took children away from their parents and
made them live and work in labor brigades. If the children died of fa-
tigue or disease, the cadre was good enough to inform their parents;
then, what emotion the parents showed could mean their life or death.
If they wept or displayed extreme unhappiness, this showed a bour-
geois sentimentality—after all, their children had sacrificed themselves
for the Great Revolution and the parents should be proud, not unhappy.
Similarly, a wife expressing grief over an executed husband—an en-
emy of the Great Revolution—was explicitly criticizing the Khmer
Rouge. This unforgivable act of bourgeois sentimentality could mean
her death.
Throughout Cambodia, fear was a normal condition of life. The
Khmer Rouge systematically massacred people because of past posi-
tions, associations, or relatives. Top military men under a previous
government, former government officials or bureaucrats, business ex-
ecutives or high monks, when discovered by the cadre, were murdered
along with their whole families (including babies), sometimes after ex-
tended torture. This root-and-branch extermination of the tainted even
reached down to cousins of cousins of former soldiers—when Khmer
Rouge cadres came to believe that the villagers of Kauk Lon really
were former Lon Nol officers, customs officials, and police agents,
troops forced every villager (about 360 men, women, and children) to
march into a nearby forest. As they walked among the trees, waiting
soldiers ambushed and machine-gunned them all down.
166 R. J. Rummel
Similar slaughter often awaited those who had had any relations
with the West or Vietnam, even sometimes with the Soviet Union, or
with those who had ever opposed the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge
were even known to execute those found with Western items, such as
books, or those who spoke French or English, or who had been
schooled beyond the seventh grade. In some areas, even wearing
glasses was a capital offense.
Then there was the killing of people for laziness, complaining,
wrong attitudes, or unsatisfactory work. I will give only one example of
this, but for me, as a teacher, it is the most hideous of all the accounts I
read. This is the Buddhist monk Hem Samluat’s description of an exe-
cution he witnessed in the village of Do Nauy:
It was. . . of Tan Samay, a high

schoolteacher from Battambang. The
Khmer Rouge accused him of incompe-
tence. The only thing taught the children
at the village was how to cultivate the
soil. Maybe Tan Samay was trying to
teach them other things, too, and that was
his downfall. His pupils hanged him. A
noose was passed around his neck; then
the rope was passed over the branch of a
tree. Half a dozen children between eight
and ten years old held the loose end of
the rope, pulling it sharply three or four
times, dropping it in between. All the
while they were shouting, “Unfit teacher!
Unfit teacher!” until Tan Samay was
dead. The worst was that the children
34
took obvious pleasure in killing.
The scale of these murders can be gauged from the admission of

Chong Bol, who claimed that, as a political commissar at the end of
1975, he had participated in the killing of 5,000 people. Think about
this for a moment. If this murderer had been a citizen of a democracy
and had admitted killing even one-tenth this many people in cold
blood, historians would record him as history’s most monstrous mur-
34 John Barron and Anthony Paul, Peace with Horror: The Untold Story of Commu-
nist Genocide in Cambodia. London: Hodder and Stoughton, pp. 148–149. American
Edition titled Murder of a Gentle Land. New York: Reader’s Digest Press—Thomas
Y. Crowell.
derer. As an officer of a government, as with the Nazi SS soldiers,

Soviet death camp managers, and Chinese commissars, who also ex-
terminated thousands, his murders will be noted as acts of his regime,
and history will forget the individual murderer. Such heinous crimes
are depersonalized, their horror lost among general abstractions. They
are just statistics.
Not only did the Khmer Rouge run amok massacring their people,
they also tried to destroy the very heart of peasant life everywhere. Hi-
nayana Buddhism had been a state religion, and the priesthood of monks
with their saffron robes was a central part of Cambodian culture. Some
90 percent of Cambodians believed in some form of Buddhism. Many
received a rudimentary schooling from the monks, and many young peo-
ple became monks for part of their lives. The Khmer Rouge could not
allow so powerful an institution to stand and therefore set out to destroy
it. They exterminated all leading monks and either murdered or de-
frocked the lesser ones.
One estimate is that out of 40,000 to 60,000 monks, only 800 to
1,000 survived to carry on their religion. We do know that of 2,680
monks in eight monasteries, only seventy were alive in 1979. As for the
Buddhist temples that peppered the landscape of Cambodia, the Khmer
Rouge destroyed 95 percent of them, and turned the few remaining into
warehouses or allocated them for some other degrading use. Amaz-
ingly, in the very short span of a year or so, the small gang of Khmer
Rouge wiped out the center of Cambodian culture, its spiritual incarna-
tion, its institutions.
This was an act of genocide within the larger Cambodian democide,
and it was not the only one. In most if not all of the country, simply be-
ing of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, or Lao ancestry meant death. As part
of a planned genocide campaign, the Khmer Rouge sought out and killed
other minorities, such as the Moslem Cham. In the district of Kompong
Xiem, for example, they demolished five Cham hamlets and reportedly
massacred 20,000 people living there; in the district of Koong Neas, only
four Cham apparently survived out of some 20,000. The cadre threw the
Cham Grand Mufti, their spiritual leader, into boiling water and then hit
him on the head with an iron bar. They beat another leader, the First
Mufti, to death, tortured and disemboweled the Second Mufti, and im-
prisoned and murdered by starvation the Chairman of the Islamic
Association of Kampuchea (Cambodia). Overall, the Khmer Rouge an-
nihilated nearly half—about 125,000—of all the Cambodian Cham.
The Khmer Rouge also slaughtered about 200,000 ethnic Chinese,
almost half of those in Cambodia—a calamity for ethnic Chinese in this
part of the world unequaled in modern times. They murdered 3,000 Prot-
estants and 5,000 Catholics, around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese (over
168 R. J. Rummel
half), and 12,000 out of 20,000 ethnic Thai. One Cambodian peasant,
Heng Chan, whose wife was of Vietnamese descent, lost not only his
wife but also five sons, three daughters, three grandchildren, and sixteen
of his wife’s relatives. In this genocide, the Khmer Rouge probably mur-
dered 541,000 Chinese, Chams, Vietnamese, and other minorities, or
about 7 percent of the Cambodian population.
As though this was not enough, by threat of death the Khmer Rouge
forced ordinary Cambodians to labor to the point of life-endangering ex-
haustion, and fed them barely enough to keep them alive while further
weakening their bodies through extreme malnutrition. The Khmer Rouge
fed their hard laborers an average of 800 to 1,200 calories per day—for
even light labor, a worker requires an average minimum of 1,800 calo-
ries. Nor did the Khmer Rouge provide them with protection against
exposure and disease. Even Pol Pot admitted in 1976 that 80 percent of
the peasants had malaria. In many places, people died like fish in a heav-
ily polluted stream. People are not fish. They are thinking, feeling, loving
human beings.
As one would expect, in this hell the Khmer Rouge did not spare
each other the fear of death either, but often executed their soldiers and
cadres for infractions of minor rules. More important, as the Pol Pot gang
maneuvered to consolidate its rule over Cambodia, the struggle for
power at the top, and the paranoia of top leaders, increased. Not only was
there the usual despot’s fear of an assassin’s knife in the night, there was
also an intensifying fear that dissident Khmer Rouge might destroy the
communist revolution. Increasingly, the Pol Pot gang saw sabotage, and
CIA, KGB, or Vietnamese operatives behind all production failures and
project delays.
Purge after purge of high and low Khmer Rouge followed. They in-
creasingly filled the cells of Tuol Sleng, the major security facility in
Phnom Penh, with communist officials and cadre members. Pol Pot’s
gang had these people tortured until they fingered collaborators among
higher-ups, who were then executed. Confessions were the aim of most
torture, and the gang would even arrest, with all the lethal consequences,
interrogators who were so crude as to kill their victims before getting a
confession. On the suffering of the tortured, one such interrogator re-
ported, “I questioned this bitch who came back from France; my activity
was that I set fire to her ass until it became a burned-out mess, then beat
her to the point that she was so turned around I couldn’t get any answer
35
out of her; the enemy then croaked, ending her answers . . . .”
35 Arch Puddington, “The Khmer Rouge File,” The American Spectator (July 1987):
pp. 18–20.
The sheer pile of confessions forced from tortured lips must have
further stimulated paranoia at the top. The recorded number of prison-
ers admitted to Tuol Sleng was about 20,000, suggesting how many
were tortured and made such confessions. Only fourteen of them sur-
vived this imprisonment—fourteen. And this was only one such
torture/execution chamber, albeit the main one in the country.
In summary, the Cambodia of the Khmer Rouge was a giant forced
labor and death camp, in which all suffered the torments of hell.
In foreign relations, Pol Pot and his people hated their neighboring
communist Vietnamese and felt no fraternal loyalty to them. They
saw the Vietnamese as racially inferior, and as the foremost danger to
the Khmer Rouge revolution. Even before their victory over Lon Nol,
the Khmer Rouge had tried to purge their ranks of those trained in
Hanoi, and had carried out the pogrom against ethnic Vietnamese de-
scribed above. It was not long after their victory that they began to
attack Vietnamese territory across the border. In many of these incur-
sions they fought pitched battles with Vietnamese units, attacked and
burned Vietnamese villages, and murdered their populations.
These attacks grew in intensity and became, in effect, a war
against Vietnam. The Vietnamese first responded vigorously to these
attacks; then, apparently to buy time for war preparations, they tried
to negotiate Khmer Rouge border complaints, and to find a basis for
cooperative relations. This phase lasted until December of 1979, when
Vietnam launched a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Her heavily
armed troops, backed with gunships and tanks, easily rolled over the
fewer, more lightly armed Khmer Rouge defenders. In the next
month, the invading forces occupied Phnom Phen.
As Vietnamese troops approached one village after another, most
peasants rebelled against the local Khmer Rouge cadre and troops,
killing them with their own weapons, with farm tools, and sometimes
with their own hands. Surviving Khmer Rouge, along with possibly
100,000 people they forced to move with them (vengefully killing
many on the way), retreated to a mountainous region along the Thai
border. From there and from refugee camps they soon controlled in
Thailand, they carried out a guerrilla war against the Vietnamese and
their puppet Samrin regime, and then against the government Vietnam
established when it completely withdrew from the country. Only in
the last decade would they finally be defeated.
The human, social, and cultural cost to Cambodia of the Khmer
Rouge years is incalculable. In democide alone, the Khmer Rouge
probably murdered 600,000 to 3 million Cambodians by execution,
torture or other mistreatment, malnutrition, famine, exposure, and dis-
170 R. J. Rummel
ease. A most prudent estimate is 2 million dead, or about one-third of

the 1975 population. Some 352,000 refugees escaped the country.
As wholesale murderers, the Khmer Rouge are in a class with the
Rwandan Hutu government. For rapidly killing a high proportion of
their population, they have no competitors. Not even Stalin or Mao
could come close. Even Hitler might be shamed by the poor perform-
ance of his killers compared to Pol Pot’s gang or the Hutu
government.
And, yes, the Khmer Rouge were racists—they believed in the ra-
cial superiority of the dark-skinned Khmer over the Vietnamese,
Chinese, Moslem Cham, and others. This racism underlay the genocide
they committed against these minorities, but it also played a role in
their vicious incursions into Vietnam and the massacre of its citizens.
This being noted, the basic motive behind much of their democide
was ideological. The Khmer Rouge were fanatical adherents to a new
variant of communism, one that combined the Maoism of the destruc-
tive Great Leap Forward and communes, the Stalinism of the Soviet
collectivization period in the early 1930s and the later Great Terror
(Chapter 23), and an obsessive and deadly nationalism. To create their
revolution, the Khmer Rouge were willing to kill millions of Cambo-
dians—even, they said, until no more than a million remained—as
long as they were able to do three things in a few short years. One, to
totally reconstruct Cambodia; to fully collectivize it and exterminate
all class enemies, capitalists, monks, former power-holders, and any-
thing foreign. All others would work and eat communally, and the
Khmer Rouge would satisfy their every need. All would be equal; all
would be happy.
Two, the Khmer Rouge wanted to immediately create a thor-
oughly independent and self-sufficient Cambodia. For the Khmer
Rouge, the key idea was “independence-sovereignty.” They wanted to
end any dependence on other nations for anything, whether food or
newsprint or machinery. As crazy as it was—all nations depend on
trade—this was a basic, constantly repeated fixation.
And three, they wanted to recover the ancient glory of the Khmer
Kingdom. Part of this glory, they felt, lay in the pure soul of the
Khmer that existed then, a soul that modern life and Western influ-
ence had corrupted. The Khmer Rouge believed that by emptying the
cities and ordering the millions of urbanites to work like oxen in the
fields to absorb the simple peasant life, they were purifying the people
and the nation. During the evacuation of Phnom Penh, a political offi-
cial explained to the French priest François Ponchaud, “The city is
bad, for there is money in the city. People can be reformed, but not
cities. By sweating to clear the land, sowing and harvesting crops,

men will learn the real value of things. Man has to know that he is
born from a grain of rice!”
Yes, ideas do have consequences, as the Cambodian death toll un-
der these ideologues well attests.
Chapter 23
Death by Marxism II: Stalin’s Great Terror
What is so hard to convey about the feeling of Soviet
citizens through 1936–38 is the similar long-drawn-out
sweat of fear, night after night, that the moment of arrest
might arrive before the next dawn . . . [J]ust as in the
mud-holes of Verdun and Ypres, anyone at all could feel
that he might be the next victim.
– Robert Conquest
Prelude to the Great Terror
O
ther governments have murdered many more of their citizens
than did the Rwandan Hutu government and the Khmer Rouge,
but over a longer period and with a much larger population. The
most murderous of these have also, like the Khmer Rouge, been com-
munist governments, as I’ve already shown in Chapters 13 to 15.
Here I will focus on Stalin’s democide alone, and Mao’s in the next
chapter, in order to further illustrate the shocking consequences of their
absolute power on human life.
During this period, as I described in Chapter 14, Stalin also forced
mass starvation upon Ukrainian peasants as a means to defeat their na-
tionalism and opposition to collectivization, thus murdering around 5
million of them within a couple of years. It is as though the American
Federal Government purposely starved to death or killed by associated
diseases everyone in Maryland, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. Yet Stalin was
not satisfied with this; he also struck at Ukrainian nationalism in other
ways, such as directly murdering those who communicated the Ukrain-
ian culture—he ordered shot Ukrainian writers, historians, composers,
and even itinerant, blind folksingers. The following, from the memoirs of
composer Dmitri Shostakovich, contains its own chilling horror.
Since time immemorial, folk singers

have wandered along the roads of the
Ukraine . . . . they were always blind and
defenseless people, but no one ever
touched or hurt them. Hurting a blind

man—what could be lower?
And then in the mid thirties the First
All-Ukrainian Congress of Lirniki and
Banduristy [folk singers] was announced,
and all the folk singers had to gather and
discuss what to do in the future. “Life is
better, life is merrier,” Stalin had said.
The blind men believed it. They came to
the congress from all over the Ukraine,
from tiny, forgotten villages. There were
several hundred of them at the congress,
they say. It was a living museum, the
country’s living history. All its songs, all
its music and poetry. And they were al-
most all shot, almost all those pathetic
blind men killed.
Why was this done? . . . Here were
these blind men, walking around singing
songs of dubious content. The songs
weren’t passed by the censors. And what
kind of censorship can you have with
blind men? You can’t hand a blind man a
corrected and approved text and you
can’t write him an order either. You have
to tell everything to a blind man. That
takes too long. And you can’t file away a
piece of paper, and there’s no time any-
way.
Collectivization. Mechanization. It
was easier to shoot them. And so they
36
did.
The Great Terror

As bad as this democide was, the worst was yet to come. By 1934
the Peasant War was over. But it left an aftertaste. Some activists and
36 Quoted in Oksana Procyk, Leonid Heretz, and James E. Mace, Famine in the So-
viet Ukraine 1932–1933: A Memorial Exhibition. Widener Library, Harvard
University. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 53–54.
174 R. J. Rummel
party officials in the field could not quite accept the horrors of the pre-
vious years with ideological equanimity. Shooting children as kulaks?
Starving to death helpless old women? Was this what Marxism meant?
Moreover, many old Bolsheviks in the Party who could contrast Bol-
shevik ideals with the present still had the old rebellious spirit. Then
there were the top contenders for Stalin’s power, each with his own fol-
lowers, each willing to criticize Stalin’s policies and argue alternatives.
Stalin ruled, but with an increasingly shaky party beneath him and the
real possibility of a palace coup, he did not rule securely. This was un-
derlined in January 1934 at the Party Congress of the Communist Party
of the Soviet Union. Most delegates had decided to replace Stalin;
some wanted as his replacement Sergei Kirov, a popular member of the
Politburo, head of the Leningrad Party, and a Russian, unlike Stalin.
Obviously a major purge was needed, and Stalin was a man of ac-
tion. He met this early challenge by directly confronting his opponents,
in effect launching a coup d’état against the Communist Party. First he
had Kirov assassinated; then, under the guise of exposing the perpetra-
tors of this abominable deed, he set up special staffs of NKVD in every
district executive committee of Leningrad to uncover all those involved
in the assassination (which turned out to be almost the whole Leningrad
Party, of course). The “conspirators” were shot or sent to labor camps.
None could appeal. A quarter of Leningrad was purged—cleaned out—
in 1934–1935.
This bloody purge was extended to other major cities and eventu-
ally to the whole country. It reached its zenith with Stalin’s
appointment of a supreme headhunter, Nikolai Yezhov, as chief of the
NKVD in 1936. Immediately justifying Stalin’s faith in him, Yezhov
inaugurated his reign by having all the NKVD People’s Commissars in
the Union republics, and usually their deputies as well, shot. And no
NKVD officer who had served under the former head, Yagoda, was
safe either. In 1937 alone, 3,000 were shot.
As the murderous purge embraced one Party bureau and then an-
other, one government agency and then another, and one social
institution and then another, its nature, extent, and scope began to defy
reason and belief. Yet, we can see a rationale in it. Stalin may have
wanted to go beyond simply exterminating the opposition, and create a
new party in abject fear of him, one that would work in lockstep to
achieve his utopia. Now consider these aspects of what came to be
called the Great Terror, and see if this is not the only way in which they
can be understood.
Throughout the vast country, “top and middle echelons of the Party
and government were executed or sent to camps to die. Their replace-
ments, and sometimes even their replacements again, also were subse-
quently murdered or sent to labor camps. In 1938 in Tbilisi: . . . the
Chairman of the City Executive Committee, his first deputy, depart-
ment chiefs, their assistants, all the chief accountants, all the chief
economists were arrested. New ones were appointed in their places.
Two months passed, and the arrests began again: the chairman, the
deputy, all eleven department chiefs, all the chief accountants, all the
chief economists. The only people left at liberty were ordinary account-
37
ants, stenographers, charwomen, and messengers . . . .”
Many old Bolsheviks and other top communists were given show
trials during which they confessed to spying, “counter-revolutionary”
plotting, and other “crimes”; they were sentenced to death. In August
1936, after a dramatic public trial, sixteen top Party leaders, including
Lev Kamemev, Ivan Smirnov, and Grigori Zinoviev, were executed as
Trotskyites. In January 1937, another public trial of seventeen more top
communists, including Karl Radek, was held; all but four were later
executed. In March of 1938, more top Party members, among them Ni-
kolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, and Genrikh Yagoda, were tried and
executed. Many Westerners, including the American ambassador, were
completely duped by these trials. They thought them legitimate, and
these top Party men guilty; they could not believe that all the confes-
sions of these high officials were false. But they were, as the Soviets in
later decades admitted.
The chief of Soviet military intelligence was also shot. Military in-
telligence agents serving abroad were brought home and shot. Major
Soviet officers and diplomats who had played a role in the Spanish
Civil War were shot.
The top military echelons of the Red Army and Navy were shot.
Marshal M. N. Tukhachevsky, the Chief of Staff, was shot along with
seven high-ranking generals for plotting against the country (the mar-
shal was posthumously exonerated in 1956). Overall, about half of
those in the Red Army officer corps were shot or imprisoned—35,000
men. These included three of the five marshals, thirteen out of fifteen
commanders, all eight admirals, 220 out of 406 brigade commanders,
seventy-five out of the eighty sitting on the supreme military council,
all military district commanders, and all eleven vice-commissars of
war. Heroes of the Soviet Union many were, unto their death. There is
no evidence that they plotted against Stalin, Party, or country, or even
tried to use their military forces to save themselves.
37 Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in

Literary Investigation I–II. Translated by Thomas P. Whitney. New York: Harper &
Row, 1973, pp. 68–69.
176 R. J. Rummel
Not only were the officers, officials, and workers in Party or gov-
ernment executed or sent to labor camps, often with an impossible
twenty-five year sentence, but so were their wives, parents, and chil-
dren, and often, associates and friends.
It was assumed that all those arrested and interrogated had to be
part of a plot or conspiracy. NKVD interrogators labored over each
prisoner (interrogators themselves could and were arrested for “wreck-
ing” if they seemed insufficiently dedicated) to uncover names and
dates, often supplied by the interrogators themselves. But this was a
vicious cycle. A prisoner was forced to confess to at least two co-
conspirators; these in turn were arrested and each confessed to at least
two more, and in turn came more new names. It was a mathematical
certainty that the NKVD would eventually interrogate every adult in
the Soviet Union except for themselves and Stalin.
The countrywide scope of these arrests, the sheer mass of those
raked in, is unimaginable. Even race and ethnicity were bases for arrest.
Greeks were arrested throughout the nation in 1937. Chinese were ar-
rested en bloc. National minorities in Russian towns were all but
eliminated. All Koreans from the Far East were arrested; all those in
Leningrad with Estonian family names were arrested; all Latvian Ri-
flemen and Chekists were arrested.
Sometimes, the NKVD would murder people on no pretext at all—
simply to meet a quota. This is so incredible to a person born and raised
in freedom that I will repeat it. This communist government—really the
Communist Party, which was the de facto government— would set up a
quota for the number of people its lower officials had to murder.
How could this be? Top communists believed that a certain per-
centage of the population opposed the Communist Party, and therefore
had to be eliminated. But in typical communist fashion, this was not
something that could be left to the discretion of a low-level cadre. After
all, to ensure that lower level cadres were correctly guided in their
work, the Party had to put a production quota on iron, steel, pigs,
wheat, and virtually everything else of an economic nature. It followed
that officials should also be given quotas of people to murder. Further-
more, it was consistent with the communist idea of central planning and
control. From Moscow NKVD headquarters, the order would go out to
officials or the communist cadre in a village or town to kill so many
“enemies of the people,” and soon enough, the NKVD would receive
word that it had been done.
That such orders would be given is incredible enough, but that the
local official would obey them is also unbelievable. Vladimir and
Evdokia Petrov, in their book appropriately titled Empire of Fear, ques-
tioned why “quite ordinary decent human beings, with a normal hatred
of injustice and cruelty” would carry out these merciless purges and
executions. The answer was simple: sweating, trembling, fear. They
related what a friend they called M— said of his experience as an
NKVD official in a country town in the Novosibirsk region:
The number of victims demanded by

Moscow from this town was five hun-
dred. M— went through all the local
dossiers, and found nothing but trivial of-
fenses recorded. But Moscow’s
requirements were implacable; he was
driven to desperate measures. He listed
priests and their relatives; he put down
anyone who was reported to have spoken
critically about conditions in the Soviet
Union; he included all former members
of Admiral Kolchak’s White Army [an
anti-Communist force in the Civil War of
1918 to 1922]. Even though the Soviet
Government had decreed that it was not
an offense to have served in Kolchak’s
Army, since its personnel had been forci-
bly conscripted, it was more than M—’s
life was worth not to fulfill his quota. He
made up his list of five hundred enemies
of the people, had them quickly charged
and executed and reported to Moscow:
“Task accomplished in accordance with
your instructions.”
M— . . . detested what he had to do.
He was by nature a decent, honest, kindly
man. He told me the story with savage
resentment. Years afterwards its horror
and injustice lay heavy on his conscience.
But M— did what he was ordered.
Apart from a man’s ordinary desire to
remain alive, M— had a mother, a father,
38
a wife, and two children.
38 Vladimir and Evodkia Petrov, Empire of Fear. New York: Praeger, 1956, pp. 75–
76.
178 R. J. Rummel
Indeed, the whole country also came under an arrest quota: “Orders
were . . . issued to arrest a certain percentage of the entire popula-
39
tion.” How many were arrested? About 8 million people just between
the middle of 1936 and the end of 1938. Possibly as many as 14 million
people were under NKVD detention, or about 9 percent of the popula-
tion. These were not all Party members or officials; most were simple
peasants and workers. They had nothing to do with the Party, or with
Stalin’s power over the Party and thus the country. They had done
nothing wrong. Yet they were arrested by the millions. Why?
Only one answer is plausible. There was a growing labor shortage,
and needing more forced laborers for its enterprises, the NKVD had
developed a quota system to arrest and collect its slaves. This becomes
even more plausible when those whose camp terms were expiring—
those who, against the odds, had managed to survive the deadly camp
conditions—were given another ten, fifteen, or twenty-five year sen-
tence. This, without interrogation or hearing, for nothing the prisoner
had done, was disclosed to the prisoners as they stood in brigades
called up to the administration building for the purpose, and for which
they were even made to sign their names.
The millions and millions of arrests during 1937 and 1938 got out
of hand. Interrogators were swamped, prison cells were stuffed with
new arrivals, and the system was breaking down by the end of 1938. In
some places, faced with finding space for the daily crowd of newly ar-
rested, officials had holes dug in the ground, a roof put over the top,
and prisoners herded in. Small prisons teemed with thousands—a
prison in Kharkov built for around 800 held about 12,000 prisoners.
Not at all unusual, Butyrka Prison in Moscow had 140 men squeezed
into a cell for twenty-four.
The Great Terror had to end. His purpose accomplished, Stalin
purged Yezhov, the top purger himself, and replaced him with Lavrenti
Beria. Yezhov was given a token position and soon disappeared.
Then, arguing that NKVD fascists had been responsible for the ter-
ror, and like Yezhov before him, Beria had nearly all senior officers of
the NKVD executed, and sent most of the others to the camps (many
camp inmates briefly enjoyed seeing their former interrogators and tor-
turers joining them). As told by a former official in the Secretariat of
the Politburo, Beria had his own methods:
He invited the Ministers of the Inte-

rior of all the republics and all the higher
39 Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, History of Russia. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977, p. 559.
Cheka officials who had especially dis-

tinguished themselves during the purges
to a conference in Moscow. Having been
asked to leave their weapons in the cloak-
room, they were received in the
banqueting hall with lavish hospitality.
Everybody was in excellent spirits when
Beria appeared. Instead of the expected
address he uttered just one sentence:
“You are under arrest.” They were led
from the hall and shot in the cellar the
40
same night.
Executions during the Great Terror were not limited to those

purged; there still was an absolute requirement to liquidate “enemies of
the people,” party members with insufficient revolutionary conscious-
ness, independent thinkers, and the like. Of those arrested, the number
executed cannot be known confidently.
While the Great Terror focused on the Party, it still fell hardest on
peasants, workers, intellectuals, and the religious. Evidence of this ter-
ror was uncovered during the 1943 Nazi occupation of the Ukraine. In
Vinnitsa, a mass grave was discovered that contained over 9,000 bod-
ies, more than 13 percent of Vinnitsa’s prewar population. The Nazis
invited an international commission of medical experts to examine the
bodies. Almost all were found to have been shot in the back of the
neck, all apparently in 1938. A number of those murdered had been
sentenced to forced labor “without the right of correspondence,” an ap-
parently normal deception.
The result of the Great Terror was a whole new Communist Party. Of
139 candidates and members of the Party’s central committee, 98 were
shot. Only 59 of 1,966 delegates to the Party Congress in 1934 were
alive to attend the Congress in 1939. In total, the purge eliminated
850,000 members from the Party, or 36 percent. Throughout the country,
extravagant adulation of Stalin became common, while the population
learned silence and obedience, fear and submission. It was a revolution
not in structure, but in personnel. Virtually all the old guard and Party
faithful who lived through the Bolshevik Revolution were murdered.
Stalin had liquidated the old Party; the new Party was totally terror-
ized into obeying his slightest whim or command. Stalin’s power was
40 Bernard Roeder, Katorga: An Aspect of Modern Slavery. Translated by Lionel

Kochan. London: Heinemann, 1958, pp. 205–6.
180 R. J. Rummel
absolute. He needed to obey no laws, no customs, no tradition. He

feared no man under him. With no competing vision, he was free to
achieve his own version of utopia, unhindered by any norms, traditions,
or ethics.
How many were killed overall during this terror? The probable 1
million people executed does not cover camp and transit deaths. In
1936, the camp population was largely generated by the collectivization
campaign. When these camp deaths are included, along with an esti-
mated 65,000 dying from deportation, and with the number shot, the
total murdered in the Great Terror years is probably 4,345,000. This is
a prudent estimate. The democide could be as high as 10,821,000 or as
41
low as 2,044,000.
Even this very conservative, absolute low is not to be taken lightly.
If it alone were the only estimate for democide in the Soviet Union in
this century, it would still be terribly significant. It is over twice the
number of Armenians the Turks probably murdered during World War
I; it likely exceeds the number of Cambodians killed by the Khmer
Rouge during their brief reign; it is over twice Japan’s battle dead in all
of World War II, almost twice the overall battle dead in the Vietnam
War, and much greater than the total battle dead in the Korean War.
Yet, this low is probably too low by over 2 million lives. And even the
more likely figure of 4,345,000 is less than one-third the probable de-
mocide of the previous collectivization period!
41 For my estimates, calculations, and sources on this toll, see Table 5.A in my Lethal
Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. The table is also available on
my website at www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB5A.GIF
Chapter 24
Death by Marxism III: Mao’s Cultural Revolution
There is no construction without destruction.
– Mao Tse-tung
I think this is a civil war!

– Mao Tse-tung
T
he Great Famine that the Chinese Communist Party caused from
the late 1950s to the early 1960s that I described in Chapter 15
helped split the Party. Many communists militantly and fer-
vently supported Chairman Mao’s desire to continue his Glorious
Revolution. Opposed to him were powerful pragmatists, the “capitalist
roaders,” who wished to liberalize the economy. Mao now wanted to
purge his Communist Party as Stalin had in his Great Terror. But when
he began the purge, he created one of the most violent civil wars of the
last century instead.
Mao’s purge began in May 1966, when he launched a written pub-
lic attack on P’en Chen, mayor of Beijing and member of the Politburo.
He put it in the form of a circular of the Central Committee and dis-
seminated it throughout the Party and the army. It concluded that:
The whole Party must follow Com-

rade Mao Tse-tung’s instructions; hold
high the great banner of the Proletarian
Cultural Revolution; thoroughly expose
the reactionary bourgeois stand of those
so-called ‘academic authorities’ who op-
pose the Party and socialism; thoroughly
criticize and repudiate the reactionary
bourgeois ideas in the sphere of academic
work, education, journalism, literature
and art, and publishing; and seize the
leadership in these cultural spheres. With
this end in view, it is at the same time
necessary to criticize and repudiate those
182 R. J. Rummel
representatives of the bourgeoisie who

have sneaked into the Party, the govern-
ment, the army, and all spheres of
culture, to clear them out or transfer some
of them to other positions. Above all, we
must not entrust these people with the
work of leading the Cultural Revolution.
In fact many of them have done and are
still doing such work, and this is ex-
tremely dangerous.
Those representatives of the bour-
geoisie who have sneaked into the Party,
the government, the army, and the vari-
ous spheres of culture are a bunch of
counterrevolutionary revisionists. When
conditions are ripe, they would seize
power and turn the dictatorship of the
proletariat into a dictatorship of the bour-
geoisie. Some of them we have already
seen through, others we have not. Some
we still trust and are training as our suc-
cessors. There are, for example, people of
the Krushchev [sic] brand still nestling in
our midst. Party committees at all levels
42
must pay full attention to this matter.
Many reasons have been offered for Mao’s mobilization and

unleashing of forces that probably consumed millions of lives in coun-
trywide terror, mass murder, and battles, and almost destroyed the
Party. What stands out, however, is that Mao was losing power over the
Party and that basic policies he favored were being ignored or overrid-
den. He wanted the commune, forced industrialization, tighter
economic controls, more mass movements. The central Party, however,
under Liu Shao-ch’i (vice chairman of the Party and since 1956, appar-
ent successor to Mao) was for further dismantling the commune, more
decentralization, and some liberalization. An obvious “capitalist
roader,” as Mao called such pragmatists in comparison to those in favor
of his strict communist policies.
42 Circular of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 16 May

1966, Chung Fa no. 267 (66), translated in American Consulate General, Hong Kong.
Current Background, no. 852.
Mao’s purpose in organizing and exciting the Cultural Revolution,

therefore, was to discredit and overthrow his party opponents (the
“capitalist roaders”), train through struggle a whole new generation of
proletarian revolutionaries, and to create an ideological revolution
among the masses—to replace old ideas with Mao’s thought. It was to
be the communist revolution all over again.
Thus aiming to regain supreme power and to put China back on
track toward true communism—to again reinforce the Party with the
“spirit of the masses”—Mao used the army to promote, direct, and sup-
port the idealism and energy of millions of high school and college
students in a student rebellion against those who were now treated as
Mao’s enemies. Massive meetings were held involving millions of
“Red Guards,” as these students soon became known. They were en-
couraged to uncover “capitalist roaders” or “counterrevolutionaries,” in
every organization, to attack and even torture and murder such suspects
in and out of the Party.
Throughout August and September of 1966, Red Guards conducted
a reign of terror. People thought to be bourgeois or counterrevolu-
tionaries were beaten, in homes and on the street; houses were invaded
at will and ransacked; belongings that Red Guards thought unnecessary
for a proletarian family were destroyed or confiscated. Having Western
books, records, or goods was sufficient to be accused of spying. And as
Chou En-lai later admitted, “the police and soldiers were under orders
43
not to interfere.”
Even Central Committee members, mayors, and other prestigious
officials were not exempt. The China News Agency admitted that there
“was a special prison [apparently Qin Ching] outside of Peking where
thirty-four senior leaders were tortured to death, twenty maimed, and
44
sixty went insane during the Cultural Revolution.” It secretly held at
one time about five hundred of China’s leaders, each isolated in a small
cell, forbidden to talk to anyone, and known to guards only by a num-
ber. No word was allowed out about their imprisonment, even to
families.
Soon this revolution deteriorated into the murder of anyone who
disagreed with how one faction or another defined Mao’s thought or
policies. Red Guard fought Red Guard, “leftist” military units fought
“leftist” military units, and “conservative” workers and peasants fought
both. According to a report by Minister of Security Hsieh Fu-chih, dur-
43 Edward E. Rice, Mao’s Way. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, p.

257.
44 Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982, p.
354.
184 R. J. Rummel
ing the first ten days of May 1967, Beijing saw 130 “bloody incidents”
45
involving 63,000 people.
Throughout China many such “incidents” went well beyond fists
and knives. There were savage pitched battles with machine guns, gre-
nades, and mortars. In fact:
Serious clashes, and in some places

heavy fighting, reportedly broke out, dur-
ing July and August [1967], in every one
of China’s twenty-six provinces and
autonomous regions . . . .
In Szechwan, possibly in conse-
quence of a split within the armed forces
stationed in the province, heavy fighting
broke out in which even gunboats, tanks
46
and artillery were involved.
Parts of cities and even whole towns and villages were destroyed.
In Wuhan in July 1967, a unit of the army mutinied, occupied key
points, and led an “anti-left” uprising. In the wake of this, struggles
broke out in Canton and spread to other parts of the military region and
were fought with great violence. One large wall poster put up in Canton
in 1974 claimed that in “Guangdong Province alone nearly 40,000
revolutionary masses and cadres were massacred and more than a mil-
47
lion were imprisoned, put under ‘control’ and struggled against.”
Fighting continued intermittently throughout the year and into the
next, and then broke out with renewed ferocity in the spring of 1968.
There were “very serious” engagements, with army units involved on
both sides of the battling factions. The deputy commander of the Wu-
han Military Region declared “that the ammunition they had fired
within the preceding several days would have sufficed ‘to fight several
48
battles in the war against Japan.’” From the first comprehensive ac-
count of this period published in China, we learn that elsewhere
45 Jÿrgen Domes, The Internal Politics of China 1949–1972. Translated by Rÿdiger

Machetzki. New York: Praeger, 1973, p. 183.
408.
47 Quoted in Roger Garside, Coming Alive: China After Mao. New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1981 p. 104.
450.
several tens of thousands of militia troops

surrounded Wuzhou and took the city af-
ter three weeks. Both sides suffered
untold casualties; some areas were razed
to the ground. The “Allied Command”
took up to a thousand prisoners among
the “April 22” faction, whom they treated
with inhuman cruelty. For instance, they
would randomly pick out prisoners on
forced marches to shoot on the spot.
Family members, including children of
prisoners, were mercilessly slaughtered.
The brutality matched the Japanese mas-
sacre in Nanjing. Liuzhou and Guilin
were subject to similar holocausts, except
that the latter, being the stronghold of
“April 22” power, never fell to the “Al-
lied Command.”
In some localities on the island of
Hainan, whole villages had joined the
“Banner” faction. These localities were
designated as “bandit areas” where mili-
tary troops were sent to reduce them to a
shambles. Survivors described massacres
as “worse than the time of the Japanese
49
invasion.”
In the countryside and the major cities of Kwangsi Province, violent

battles went on for weeks, and even involved tanks, artillery, and
anti-aircraft guns. Large urban areas were destroyed, and “gas shells or
explosives were used to flush out those who were fighting from sewer
50
ducts.” This also happened in other provinces. In the cities of Suchou
and Liuchou there were over 50,000 battle dead from military-like
clashes between Red Guards and the army.
Such revolutionary engagements went on for a third year. In the
spring of 1969 there was a resurgence of violence in Szechwan,
Kweichow, Shansi, Sinkiang, Tibet, and elsewhere. A July Central
49 Liu Guokai. A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution. New York: M. E.

Sharpe, 1987, pp. 121, 123. This analysis of the Cultural Revolution was originally
published in China.
451.
186 R. J. Rummel
Committee directive claimed that in Shansi “‘a small handful of class

enemies and evil people,’ . . . had ‘infiltrated’ mass organizations,
staged armed attacks on units of the [army] and seized their arms; de-
stroyed railways, roads, and bridges and carried out armed seizures of
trains; forcefully occupied state banks and warehouses; and used armed
force to occupy territory and set up bases for counterrevolutionary pur-
51
poses.”
All these battles, clashes, and military-like operations notwith-
standing, it would be a misunderstanding of the Cultural Revolution to
conceive of its violence only or mainly in terms of violent engage-
ments. The violence against the individual by one fanatical faction or
another continued everywhere. Incarceration, torture, and death were
readily meted out to supposedly rich peasants, landlords, counterrevo-
lutionaries, rightists, leftists, spies, or alleged sympathizers of opposing
factions. For example, the minister of Public Security in 1968 cited
what the leaders of production brigades in one rural county alone had
done about people with “bad” personal or family backgrounds—in ten
brigades, he said, all “the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionar-
ies, bad elements, and rightists and their children, including babies,
52
were killed in one day.”
According to an authorized book on the Cultural Revolution, the so-
called “East-Hebei Wrong Case” in Tangshan accounted for 84,000 peo-
ple purged, 2,955 of them to death; in Yunan Province during the 1968
53
“Zhao Jianmin Wrong Case,” 14,000 people were purged and killed.
In this regard, the official, post-Cultural Revolution indictment of the
“Gang of Four” (Mao’s wife and three other top leaders during this pe-
riod) is revealing. They were accused of being personally responsible for
wrongfully persecuting 750,000 people, of whom 34,380 died or were
killed, including six mayors or deputy mayors of Beijing and Shanghai.
In one case, over 346,000 cadres and others had been wrongfully ac-
cused of membership in a secret party—16,222 of them were then killed.
The “Gang of Four” were also accused of persecuting 142,000 cadres
and teachers of the Ministry of Education, 53,000 scientists and techni-
cians of the Academy of Sciences, and over 500 of 674 professors in
China’s medical schools, some of whom subsequently died. During the
trial of the “Gang of Four” it came out that in a forty-day wave of terror
51 Ibid., p. 473.
52 Ibid., p. 460.
53 Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, The Ten Year History of the Cultural Revolution. [in Chi-
nese] Tianjin: People’s Republic of China, 1986, p. 287. Translated for the author by
Hua Shiping
in Beijing in 1966 started by the minister of Public Security, “1,700 peo-

ple were beaten to death, 33,600 households were searched and
54
ransacked, and 85,000 people were driven out of the capital.”
Just two personal examples of the fate suffered by millions should
suffice.
Three reporters of the New China News Agency related that “a con-
tingent of government officials went to the Shanghai home of the
mother of a young woman named Lin Zhao, who had been jailed for
keeping a diary critical of the Party. The officials told Lin’s mother that
her daughter had been executed three days earlier as a counterrevolu-
tionary. But the money spent on the execution had been a waste, the
officials added sardonically, and they demanded that the mother pay
five fen—a little more than three cents—to cover the cost of the bullet
55
they had put through the back of her daughter’s head.”
Then there is the story of Yu Luoke, whose parents were called
rightists. He
tried to offer a reasoned refutation of the

so-called “theory of the blood line” that
decreed him, because his parents were
counterrevolutionaries, a rotten egg . . . .
Yu Luoke argued that the connection be-
tween the class from which an individual
was descended and an individual’s politi-
cal behavior was minimal, that the
influence exerted on young people by the
social environment far outweighed the in-
fluence of the family. Yu Luoke thought
the children of rightists should be treated
the same as children of parents from
“good” class backgrounds.
In the summer of 1967, Yu Luoke was
arrested for those views. During the nearly
three years he spent in prison, Yu Luoke
was given the opportunity to repudiate the
opinions he had earlier expressed, offered
a chance to confess that the argument he
had made was a crime. Yu Luoke refused.
54 Quoted in Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times
Books, 1982, p. 349.
55 Ibid., pp. 17–18.
188 R. J. Rummel
On March 5, 1970, at the age of

twenty-eight, because he continued to re-
fuse to recant . . . . [i]n Peking’s Workers’
Stadium, before a crowd of tens of thou-
sands, little red books waving, revo-
lutionary slogans filling the air, Yu Luoke
56
was shot.
As indicated in the above indictment of the “Gang of Four,” intel-

lectuals and scientists, the educated and talented were also victims. At
least in the Soviet Union under Stalin’s bloody fist, science, learning,
and expertise were not attacked per se. But, as in Cambodia under the
murderous Khmer Rouge, those Chinese intellectuals “who survived or
escaped physical torment, were, at best, forced into a state of intellec-
tual suspension or paralysis.”
No intellectual or scientist of any sort was to be trusted, especially
in governing any organization. Instead, it was customary in these years
to put fanatical radicals, regardless of their lack of experience or poor
knowledge of their job, in charge of universities, schools, scientific in-
stitutes, hospitals, and intellectual associations. Consider the following
experience related by a Chinese scientist when Shan Guizhang, a fa-
natic and ignorant radical, was appointed to head one of most
prestigious of China’s institutes, the Institute of Optics and Precision
Instruments in Changchun.
Shan had read Tales of the Plum Flower Society, a spy thriller about
an entirely fictional effort to break a Kuomintang espionage network in
the Academy of Sciences. The chief Kuomintang agent was named
Peng Jiamu, a name, unfortunately, that also belonged to a real scientist
working at the institute. Incredibly, Shan believed that scientist Peng
was, in fact, the real-life version of the spy in the book. So, it being
fully understandable in the context of the Cultural Revolution, Shan
had 166 scientists at the Institute arrested as spies, along with local ac-
countants, policemen, workers, and even nursery attendants. Some
were beaten to death; others committed suicide. The existence of a ra-
dio or camera at home or the ability of a person to speak a foreign
language was considered sufficient proof of spying. Shan was eventu-
ally promoted to a provincial Party committee.
And then there were the peasants. They had survived the Great Fam-
ine and were now confronted with civil anarchy and bloodshed. They
56 Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987, p.
111.
were harangued by different factions, often caught in the factional cross

fire, and watched their sons and daughters marching to one drummer or
another, sometimes to battle and death. And they rebelled. During 1967
alone, there were peasant uprisings in twenty-one provinces.
Tibet as well saw several revolts. Tibet had suffered severely from
the Great Famine, and now the Cultural Revolution had also been ex-
ported to the colony. Fighting between Red Guard factions disrupted
“Tibet’s delicate system of food distribution [that] abruptly fell apart.
By the end of January [1968], subsistence conditions—which had pre-
vailed since the easing of the famine in 1963—gave way; once more,
starvation reappeared. This time, it was not to depart for a full five
years—until 1973—with isolated regions thereafter continuing to expe-
57
rience famine until l980.”
Caught in the Cultural Revolution, Tibetans were subject to a ruth-
less terror. One report claimed that over seventeen days in 1966, in and
58
around Lhasa, 69,000 people were executed. This seems much too
high an estimate, but there are other reports of “tens of thousands”
killed and imprisoned in 1966. By the end of 1968, a number of revolts
forced Chinese troops to concentrate their forces in the capital, leaving
isolated garrisons in the countryside with their communications cut. In
1970, rebels in southwestern Tibet killed over 1,000 Chinese soldiers
and continued fighting into 1972. The largest revolt during these years
covered sixty of seventy-one districts, and cost 12,000 Tibetan lives.
During the Cultural Revolution in China itself, the Party was being
destroyed at the center and the very authority and power of communist
rule was endangered. By 1969, seven out of seventeen members of the
Politburo were kicked out and declared enemies of the Party; also
purged were fifty-three of ninety-seven members of the Communist
Party’s Central Committee, four out of six regional first party secretar-
ies, and twenty-three out of twenty-nine provincial first party
secretaries. In the country as a whole, claimed Party General Secretary
Hu Yaobang, from 1957 to the end of the Cultural Revolution, 100 mil-
lion people were persecuted, politically harassed, or ended up
59
victims. (By 1980, 2.9 million of them had been officially rehabili-
57 John F. Avedon, In Exile from the Land of Snows, New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1984, p. 299.
58 Phuntsog Wangyal, “Tibet: A Case of Eradication of Religion Leading to Geno-
cide” in Israel W. Charny (Ed.). Toward the Understanding and Prevention of
Genocide: Proceedings of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Geno-
cide. Boulder: Westview Press, 1984, pp. 119–126 p. 123.
59 Fox Butterfield, China: Alive in the Bitter Sea. New York: Times Books, 1982, p.
349.
190 R. J. Rummel
tated; by 1981, over 300,000 of the 1.2 million cases formally tried and
through which people had been sentenced were officially declared “un-
60
just,” “frame-ups,” or “wrong.” )
But Mao had won the battle; opposing party leaders had been de-
stroyed or shaken out of power. Having destroyed the “right,” he could
now move on the “left” that was out of control in many areas. He called
upon loyal army units to restore order. The country was gradually
brought under control, at the cost of much greater military involvement
and dictation in Party affairs and decisions.
Scholars agree that the revolution ended in April of 1969, with the
Ninth Party Congress. While scattered bloody clashes and local anar-
chy were soon eliminated, reconstruction of the Party, cleansing of
residual Party “rightists” and “leftists,” and dampening the violent,
chanting enthusiasm of Red Guard factions preoccupied Mao until his
death in 1976. About 17 million youths were sent to the countryside
after 1967 to be disciplined, and by about 1975, it was conservatively
estimated that a total of 70 million educated youth were deported to
labor in the countryside and border regions. Moreover, executions con-
tinued apace. For example, those assigned to work in the countryside
who returned to the city without permission were executed; so were
those helping refugees to escape the country.
But ultimately, Mao failed. For after his death, in a “right-wing”
coup, the “Gang of Four” were arrested and imprisoned. Deng Xiaop-
ing, the “capitalist roader” who had been maltreated and dragged from
power by the Red Guards, eventually took over the Party and country.
During the following years, economic and social pragmatism and liber-
alization—the line that Mao fought against so bloodily—was pursued
and institutionalized. And Mao’s “revolutionary masses” hardly re-
mained so after his death, if they existed at all. Indeed, judging from
the massive Beijing Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1976 and es-
pecially in 1989, rather than becoming infused with communist
revolutionary spirit, the masses increasingly demanded bourgeois de-
mocracy, Mao’s bête noire. Mao won the revolution, all right, and lost
the hearts and minds of China.
At what human cost? As mentioned, the Party itself admits that some
100 million human beings—one out of every eight Chinese!—suffered
some kind of harassment or persecution during the revolution. This does
not even count their loved ones, relatives, and friends who shared their
pain and suffering, and grieved over their death or imprisonment.
60 China: Violations of Human Rights: Prisoners of Conscience and the Death Pen-
alty in the People’s Republic of China. London: Amnesty International Publications,
1984, p. 6.
But leaving this inestimable misery aside, what was the revolution’s
death toll? Estimates vary widely, and there can be no sure accounting
after such a chaotic revolution. On the high side, estimates exceed 10
million killed. One estimate of 18.1 million dead (which includes those
killed in the so-called “Four Cleanup” Movement) is based on sources
collected by the Republic of China. A communist “restricted internal
61
publication.” reported an estimate of 20 million unnatural deaths dur-
62
ing those years. Still another estimate claims 15 million were killed.
In evaluating these and many other estimates in China’s Bloody
Century,63 I calculated it most likely that both sides in the revolution
murdered about 7,731,000, including those who died from mistreatment
and malnutrition in prisons and concentration camps, “leftists” and
“rightists,” “counterrevolutionaries,” the “bourgeoisie,” “spies,” Party
officials and cadres, government officials and workers, and the more
successful peasants, scientists, writers, teachers, students, and those
unlucky enough to be around—and, of course, sometimes their hus-
bands and wives, and even children. In addition, nearly 563,000 army
troops, members of Red Guard factions, and rebelling peasants may
have died in battle. Then there also was a famine aggravated by the
revolution that killed around 1 million people.
Adding it all together, this revolution cost about 9,292,000 million
lives, more than the cost in lives of World War I. All in one nation.
And all to determine one thing: which dictators would rule.
61 Richard L. Walker, The Human Cost Of Communism In China. A study of the

Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate, Washington, D.C., Government
Printing Office, 1971, p. 16.
62 Maria Hsia Chang [Professor of Political Science, University of Nevada-Reno],
Speech to the Ethics and Public Policy Panel on "China in Transition." Washington,
D.C., May 22, 1989.
63 See Appendix II in the book. Appendix II is also available in two parts on my
website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.1.GIF; and
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/CHINA.TABIIA.2.GIF
Chapter 25
Power Kills
Power gradually extirpates for the mind every humane
and gentle virtue.
– Edmund Burke
Deadly Communism
F ew would deny any longer what the previous bloody examples

attest: communism—Marxism-Leninism and its variants—
meant in practice bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal prison
camps and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extraju-
dicial executions and show trials, outright mass murder, and genocide.
62
In total, as Table 25.1 shows, communist (Marxist-Leninist) regimes
murdered nearly 110 million people from 1917 to 1987. For perspec-
tive on this incredible toll, note that all domestic and foreign wars
during the twentieth century killed in combat around 35 million.
Communists, when in control of a nation,

have murdered over three times the number that
have been killed in combat in all wars, including
the world wars.
And what did this greatest of human social experiments, commu-

nism, achieve for its poor citizens at this most bloody cost in lives?
Nothing. It left in its wake an economic, environmental, social, and cul-
tural disaster.
The Khmer Rouge example provides insight into why communists
believed it necessary and moral to massacre so many of their fellow
humans. Their absolutist ideology was married to absolute power. They
believed without a shred of doubt that they knew the truth, that they
would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness, and that
to realize this utopia, they had to mercilessly tear down the old feudal
62 See my “How Many Did Communist Regimes Murder?” on my website at:

www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
or capitalist order and culture and then totally rebuild a communist so-
ciety. Nothing could be allowed to stand in the way of this
achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was above any
law. All other institutions, religions, cultural norms, traditions, and sen-
timents were expendable.
The communists saw the construction of this utopia as a war on
poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality—and as in a real
war, noncombatants would unfortunately get caught in the battle, and
there were necessary enemy casualties: the clergy, bourgeoisie, capital-
194 R. J. Rummel
ists, “wreckers,” intellectuals, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants,

the rich, and landlords. In a war millions may die, but these deaths may
well be justified by the end, as in the defeat of Hitler in World War II.
To many communists, the goal of a communist utopia was enough to
justify all the deaths.
The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades
of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usu-
ally made living conditions worse than before the revolution. As we’ve
seen, it is not by chance that the greatest famines have happened within
the Soviet Union (about 5 million dead from 1921–23 and 7 million
from 1932–3, including 2 million outside Ukraine) and communist
China (about 30 million dead from 1959–61). Overall, in the last cen-
tury almost 55 million people died in various communist famines and
associated epidemics—a little over 10 million of them were intention-
ally starved to death, and the rest died as an unintended result of
communist collectivization and agricultural policies. This is as though
the whole population of the American New England and middle Atlan-
tic states, or California and Texas, had been wiped out. And that around
35 million people escaped communist countries as refugees was an un-
equaled vote against communist utopian pretensions. Its equivalent
would be everyone fleeing California, emptying it of all human beings.
There is a supremely important lesson for human life and welfare to
be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology:
No one can be trusted with unlimited power.

The more power a government has to impose the
beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or de-
cree the whims of a dictator, the more likely
human lives and welfare will be sacrificed.
Other Mega- and Kilo- Mass Murderers

Certainly, communism does not stand alone in such megamurders
(see the list in Table 20.1 of Chapter 20). We have the example of totali-
tarian-socialist Nazi Germany, which exterminated some 21 million
Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and
64
other nationalities. Then there is the fascist Nationalist government of
64 See my Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1993). A summary chapter
and most of the statistics are on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE3.HTM
China under Chiang Kai-sheik, which murdered nearly 10 million Chi-

65
nese from 1928 to 1949, and the fascist Japanese militarists who
murdered almost 6 million Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans,
66
Filipinos, and others during World War II. There also are the 1 million
or more Bengalis and Hindus murdered in East Pakistan (now Bangla-
67
desh) in 1971 by the fascist Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the
mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from eastern
Europe at or after the end of World War II, particularly by the authoritar-
ian, pre-communist Polish government, which murdered perhaps over a
million of them as it seized the German Eastern Territories.69
68
In Chapter 17, I outlined the democide before and during the Mexi-
can Revolution, and I mentioned the democide by the governments of
Burma and Sudan in Chapter 1. I could go on to detail various kinds of
noncommunist democide, as I did in Death By Government, and more
comprehensively in Statistics of Democide.
The Unifying Cause of Democide: Power

What connects all these cases of democide is this: as a government’s
power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all corners of cul-
ture and society, the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. As a
governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy
its most personal wishes, or to pursue what it believes is right and true, it
may do so whatever the cost in lives. Here, power is the necessary condi-
tion for mass murder. Once an elite has full authority, other causes and
conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism,
massacres, or whatever killing the members of an elite feel is warranted.
65 See my China’s Bloody Century: China’s Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900
(1991). A summary chapter and most of the statistics are on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE2.HTM
66 See my chapter on Japanese democide in my Statistics of Democide (1994) on my
website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
67 See my chapter on Pakistan’s democide in my Statistics of Democide (1994) on
my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP8.HTM
68 See my chapter on Poland’s ethnic cleansing in my Statistics of Democide (1994)
and on my website at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.HTM. Some Poles
have written me irate emails about this chapter. My response is at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP7.ADDENDA.HTM
69 The total number of Reichdeutsch and Ethnic Germans murdered in these expul-
sions from Eastern Europe at or after the end of the war is about 1,863,000 out of
about 15 million expelled.
196 R. J. Rummel
All this provides a solid, life oriented argument for freedom:
Freedom preserves and secures life.
That which preserves and protects human life is a moral good. And,
as I have shown, freedom is already a moral good for promoting human
welfare and minimizing internal political violence. I now will add to
this list the moral good of saving human lives.
I have saved a discussion of another moral good until the next chap-
ter. It may be even more surprising than the life-preserving aspect I
have described here.
PART 6
On Freedom’s Moral Goods: Eliminating War
A
lthough it is sometimes the lesser evil, as in the war against Hit-
ler, war is always a horror. It consumes human lives and
property with the most savage appetite. Humanists, idealists, and
pacifists have focused on it as the supreme human problem that man-
kind must solve. Stacks of library books provide histories of war,
analyses of its causes and conditions, and solutions. Now, finally, a
well researched, well studied solution is at hand. It is practical. It is
much desired for itself. It is consistent with human rights. It is sup-
ported by clear theory. It is based on two facts: democracies throughout
history have never, or virtually never, made war on each other. And the
odds of this fact being a matter of chance are millions to one. The solu-
tion, therefore, is to spread democracy throughout the world.
Histories, and often analyses of war, are dry discussions or descrip-
tions of what generals, commanders, and national leaders or rulers did,
the mechanics, strategies, and tactics of battles, and the consequences
of lost lives, territory, and equipment. They are too often removed from
the human side of it—from the slogging misery, pain, and death in
combat for the soldier. In Chapter 26, I try to provide some understand-
ing of what war can be like for the soldier in just one battle, for just one
side, in just one war.
With that understanding, we’ll move on to discuss the nature of the
democratic peace, the idea that democracy is a solution to war and vio-
lence, and its sources. This is not an either-or solution, but the degree to
which nations are democratic also makes a difference in the severity of
their wars.
Why is democracy so potent in preventing war? Democracies share
their institutions and culture, and are bonded by the governmental, so-
cietal, and economic threads that sew them together.
Chapter 26
Battle of the Somme
From its beginning in 1914 to its end in 1918, World War I
combat ate up about 5,500 lives per day, to total by its end
at least 9 million combat dead—both men and women.
J uly 1 had finally come. Now, at 7:25 a.m., an incredible, all-out

bombardment was ending the weeklong shelling of German
trenches. The roar of continuous explosions sent fountains of
rock and soil, and sometimes whole tree trunks, into the air. What few
trees remained were little more than shredded trunks.
Some 50,000 British and French artillery gunners had shot 1.5 mil-
lion shells—21,000 tons of explosive material of all descriptions—onto
the Germans. They even fired some gas shells at them, sending a cloud
of gas seeping downward into the German trenches, all the way to the
lowest bunkers. The British and French commanding generals were
confident that this shelling would leave few of the enemy capable of
fighting in their front trenches, and would destroy much of the barrier
of barbed wire protecting them.
The noise had been deafening but reassuring to the young British
volunteers waiting in their trenches to attack the Germans. Fresh from
home and hardly trained, they were apprehensive, nervous, feeling the
suspense after waiting over a week for the battle. They had prayed,
made out their wills, written home, and shaken hands with their friends.
Some were sweating; some were slightly intoxicated, or drunk outright
on army-issue rum.
Above all, they were optimistic. They knew they were going to win
a great victory. After all, they were the volunteer regiments—the Brit-
ish “Pals” who had enthusiastically enlisted with their friends,
coworkers, and neighbors to be formed with those same fellows into
regiments. Clerks and workers from a single commercial company
composed whole platoons. And their officers had told them how easy it
would be. In any case, they had been hearing the thunderous shelling
from their own artillery for seven days, and watching the stupendous
explosions just a thousand or more yards in front of them.
Finally, it was 7:30 a.m. The shelling stopped. Utter silence en-
gulfed the front. Suddenly the British officers blew their whistles,
waved their polished sticks—many thought it beneath them to carry
guns or to personally kill—and yelled for their troops to follow them.
Along a front twenty miles long, nearly 100,000 young men crowded
up the trench ladders and across the parapet in the first wave of this
mighty offensive. Shoulder to shoulder, they walked in the morning
light toward what remained of the German trenches, redoubts, and for-
tified villages. They could not run if they wanted to, since each carried
sixty-six to ninety pounds of ammunition and equipment. Besides, sev-
eral days of heavy rain had turned the clay soil into deep and slippery
mud; in some areas, it was marshland.
In many places along the line, the advancing soldiers were preceded
by a walking barrage of friendly shells timed to keep German troops
hunkered down in their trenches. Since the gunners had a strict rate of
advance for their shells, however, the barrages were often too far ahead
of the men.
These soldiers did not know they were marching 1,000 to 2,000
yards toward their death; most would not reach the parapet of the Ger-
man trenches. The Germans had survived the barrage deep within their
trenches, sometimes thirty or forty feet down, within well-fortified
dugouts; some were actually concrete bunkers. Few of the shells that
exploded above or around them had been the type of heavy artillery
that could reach or bury their fortifications.
Once the shelling stopped and the Germans heard the British whis-
tles, they scrambled for what remained of the parapet of their trenches.
Physically, the Germans were in sad shape. They had been under a con-
tinuous rain of shells. Day after day, they’d faced the prospect of being
blown up or entombed in their trenches. They’d had little sleep; they
were mentally exhausted by the bombardment and a week’s wait; they
were scared. They knew they were going to be attacked and possibly
shot or bayoneted. Still, many were first to the top, with time to set up
their machine guns and arrange themselves along the parapet. They
couldn’t believe what they saw. Walking toward them shoulder to
shoulder were thousands of British men, often with their unarmed offi-
cers in front.
German soldiers opened fire with their rifles. Machine gunners trig-
gered the lethal chatter of their guns, not aiming but simply moving their
barrels left to right, right to left, spraying bullets back and forth into the
line of oncoming men. Then the German artillery opened up. They’d
known weeks before that an attack was coming, though they had
thought, because the preparations were so clearly visible from the high
200 R. J. Rummel
ground they held, it could only be a diversion, and not a full-scale attack.
So German headquarters had not reinforced them. Nonetheless, they had
sighted their artillery beforehand, and now their shells fell among the
advancing British soldiers. The explosions flattened whole sections of
the oncoming wall, throwing men violently aside or heaving them up in
the air in a fountain of mud—full bodies here, parts of bodies there.
The air was a maelstrom of whizzing bullets, buzzing shrapnel, ex-
ploding shells. British officers could not make their commands heard
above the noise, nor could their men hear the yells or cries of pain from
a friend only three feet away. Miraculously, some reached the wire in
front of the German trenches, but shelling had done little to destroy it.
Those who tried to go over it were caught in the barbs, becoming easy
targets for the Germans only feet away. Soon the bodies of British sol-
diers hanging at all angles along miles of wire formed a grotesque line.
Other British soldiers found the few openings the shelling had cut
in the wire, but as they funneled through, the Germans found a concen-
trated target, and slaughtered them. Some of the attackers who did
reach the German trenches were burned to death with flamethrowers
Within minutes, no-man’s land was a dead man’s land of human
bodies, body parts, scraps of uniform, helmets, destroyed equipment,
metal fragments, shrapnel, shredded wood, and shell holes. Before the
morning was over, the body count of British soldiers had mounted to
nearly 20,000 dead and 38,000 wounded or missing.
Nor was this the end of it for the wounded. Since the German sol-
diers could not risk someone crawling up to throw a grenade into their
trench, they shot any wounded that moved. Enemy shelling had partly
buried some British wounded in the mud, and some had fallen or been
blown into slippery-sided shell holes, soon to die of their wounds or
drown in the sludge at the bottom. Many bodies were so deeply buried
in the mud, or so badly disintegrated, they were never found.
At 10:00 a.m., despite the carnage, the general order came down
from British Army Headquarters to continue the attack. This only threw
many more lives away. By noon, the trenches from which the British
soldiers had launched the offensive were in chaos. They were full of
dead, wounded, and the terrified and exhausted men of the first waves
who had managed to make it back to the trenches. Mingling with them
were horror-stricken soldiers fresh from the rear, ordered forward by
their officers. But there was a blessing to this confusion: further efforts
to breach the German trenches died away as local officers became in-
creasingly reluctant to send more men to their deaths.
Meanwhile, the British soldiers’ initial exuberance and confidence
had sunk to a dull expectation of death. At best, they hoped for a wound
that would take them to the rear—a shot through the hand, a shredded
leg, even a lost arm would do, if they could then escape the almost cer-
tain death of no man’s land. Some even wounded themselves to avoid
battle. Some—but not as many as one would think—tried to run away.
The British army had positioned soldiers behind front trenches for just
this possibility, and these “battle police” either turned these men around
to return to battle and probable death, or shot them then and there.
Reported British Lieutenant Alfred Bundy on his part in leading
this first day’s attack:
Went over top at 7.30 a.m. after what

seemed an interminable period of terrible
apprehension. Our artillery seemed to in-
crease in intensity and the German guns
opened up on No Man’s Land. The din
was deafening, the fumes choking and
visibility limited owing to the dust and
clouds caused by exploding shells. It was
a veritable inferno. I was momentarily ex-
pecting to be blown to pieces. My platoon
continued to advance in good order with-
out many casualties and until we had
reached nearly half way to the [German]
front line. I saw no sign of life there. Sud-
denly however an appalling rifle and
machine-gun fire opened against us and
my men commenced to fall. I shouted
“down” but most of those that were still
not hit had already taken what cover they
could find. I dropped in a shell hole and
occasionally attempted to move to my
right and left but bullets were forming an
impenetrable barrier and exposure of the
head meant certain death. None of our
men was visible but in all directions came
pitiful groans and cries of pain . . . . I fi-
nally decided to wait till dusk and about
9.30 I started to crawl flat on my stomach.
At times I made short wild dashes and fi-
nally came to our wire. The [Germans]
were still traversing our front line trenches
and as I lay waiting for strength to rush
202 R. J. Rummel
the final few yards sparks flew from the

wire continuously as it was struck by bul-
lets. At last the firing ceased and after
tearing my clothes and flesh on the wire I
reached the parapet and fell over in our
trench now full of dead and wounded. I
found a few of my men but the majority
were still out and most were dead. Came
across my Company Commander Hunt
who was almost insane. Took charge of
69
‘C’ company of about 30 men. a
Throughout the night, the cries and groans of the British wounded
never stopped. Sometimes someone would cry for his mother.
Wounded and unwounded managed to walk or crawl back to their
trenches, and stretcher-bearers brought in what casualties they could
find. In the rear medical stations, nurses made those wounded sure to
die as comfortable as possible, while those standing a chance of sur-
vival were rushed to hospitals in the rear for immediate treatment.
Clare Tisdall, who worked as a British nurse at a Casualty Clearing
Station during the battle, described her experience.
[W]e practically never stopped. I was

up for seventeen nights before I had a
night in bed. A lot of the boys had legs
blown off, or hastily amputated at the
front-line. These boys were the ones who
were in the greatest pain, and I very often
used to have to hold the stump up in the
ambulance for the whole journey, so that
it wouldn’t bump on the stretcher.
The worst case I saw—and it still
haunts me—was of a man being carried
past us. It was at night, and in the dim
light I thought that his face was covered
with a black cloth. But as he came nearer,
I was horrified to realize that the whole
lower half of his face had been com-
pletely blown off and what had appeared
69a Malcolm Brown, The Imperial War Museum Book of the Somme. Trans-Atlantic
Publications, 1997.
to be a black cloth was a huge gaping

hole. It was the only time I nearly
fainted.70
This was war, and luck and the natural variations in geography,
leadership, weapons, and experience assured different outcomes from
one section of the front to another. In a few places, German trenches
were overrun; in other places, the British bombardment destroyed
German trenches—yet attacking the second line of trenches was often
no less deadly than attacking the first line had been in other places.
Why did the British commanding generals order these men to walk
across no man’s land toward the higher German trenches, in full day-
light, putting them for five to six minutes in easy range of machine
gunners, snipers and riflemen, and artillery? Simple—since British Pal
battalions of “citizen soldiers” were poorly trained and lacked combat
experience, the battle plan gave them the easiest and strictest of com-
mands: “Go up the ladder, stand up, hold your rifle across your breast
pointed at the sky (so that no one would be accidentally shot), walk in a
line abreast to the Germans’ trenches, shoot or bayonet any Germans in
the trench, and occupy it.” They gave no room for initiative; the battle
plan was rigid and finely detailed in pages of orders given to the front
line officers.
Above all, the British commanding generals believed in the ability
of massed artillery to conquer infantry. They thought the artillery
would more than compensate for the lack of surprise and the vulner-
ability of their men. They had planned on a massive six-day
bombardment (extended to seven days because of rain) that would be
so devastating it would destroy the German trenches and fortifications
and cut the frontal barbed wire. Then the British soldiers need only
stroll to the Germans’ wrecked trenches and occupy them. In other
words, these generals did not understand the limits of their artillery and
the resources of the Germans to strengthen their trenches against the
rain of shells. Not only did they spread the shelling evenly across the
whole front, despite the variations in fortifications their soldiers faced,
they did not understand the killing power of the machine gun. And they
did not have any contingency plans for failure.
Nor did the first day’s military catastrophe deter the British gener-
als. They saw it as only a setback, not a defeat. After all, their reason-
ing went, the offensive had weakened the Germans. So they turned
the battle into one of attrition, intending to make the Germans lose so
70 From www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWcasualties.htm
204 R. J. Rummel
many lives and so much material, they must finally retreat. No matter
the dead, the British launched offensive after offensive and chewed up
more human lives.
Four months later, the British finally ended the battle after an unbe-
lievable 1,120,000 casualties: 620,000 on their side, and 500,000
Germans. And the winnings? The offensives had gained at most sixteen
miles of moonscape littered with the debris of battle, all of which the
Germans soon recovered in later battles anyway.
As for those British soldiers who day after day climbed the trench
ladder and, as though moving against a stiff wind or rain, walked to-
ward the Germans through a hail of bullets and shells, one might
wonder how they could do this. The usual characterizations come to
mind. Patriotism, duty, hatred of the enemy—all surely played a role.
Mostly, however, it was loyalty to fellow soldiers, friendship, the desire
not to let anyone down—even the inspiring heroism of their officers.
The latter were often the first up and over the parapet, unarmed yet
standing up fearlessly, knowing they would likely die, and still leading
their men onward.
Then why did the British officers do what they did? Unlike their
men, who had just joined the service and were from the working
classes, the officers had attended the finest schools, and had usually
been acculturated into a military role that they accepted without ques-
tion. They were “gentlemen.” They looked after their men, helped them
with their problems, and showed them compassion—but also tough
discipline. Their job was to lead men into battle and to win the objec-
tive, and to do so calmly and fearlessly. As a result, their life
expectancy was no more than a few weeks, compared to a few months
for their men.
This battle was the Battle of the Somme in World War I, an engage-
ment named after a French river that flowed to the south. The British
Expeditionary Force in France launched this battle in 1916 against the
German front lines. The French, far more experienced and much better
trained for this type of warfare, manned the southern part of the front. By
making better use of their artillery, the French largely achieved their first
day’s objectives against weaker German fortifications.
The French commander-in-chief, Joseph Jacques Cèsaire Joffre,
conceived the offensive, which Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig,
newly appointed commander of the British Expeditionary Force, then
put into action. Joffre hoped the offensive would break through Ger-
man defenses, create chaos in the rear, and enable the encircling of
the Germans in northern France. At the very least, Joffre wanted to
take German pressure off French troops holding fast against the Ger-
man offensive at Verdun 150 miles away, but by the time the Battle of
the Somme was launched, the Germans had already been defeated at
Verdun—another bloody meat grinder that created some 1.2 million
casualties for the two sides before it ended.
Not only was the Battle of the Somme a military failure and a hu-
man disaster, but also, not launching it could have saved Russia from
defeat. Had the British and French transferred the guns and ammunition
used in the Somme to help the Russians, they might have defeated the
Germans and thereby forestalled or prevented the Russian Revolution
that turned Russia into a communist state in 1917, which then withdrew
from the war.
British support for war has not been as robust and enthusiastic as
before the toll and nature of the Battle of the Somme became public.
Those killed in just the first day of this battle exceeded that of any other
day of war in British history, before or since. Even during the first day
of the D-Day invasion of Normandy twenty-eight years later, the Eng-
lish and Canadians suffered only 4,000 casualties, compared to the
58,000 for the first day of the Somme offensive. Since the British army
kept those enlisting from a neighborhood or town together, whole
communities were devastated by the death of most of their young men.
In the first hours of the offensive, for example, the Ulster division from
Northern Ireland lost 5,600 men, all from a relatively small community.
For the British, this battle became symbolic of the horrors and use-
lessness of war, and decades later, when the threat of Hitler was clear,
the British people and especially British intellectuals recoiled from the
thought of rearmament and another war. No one could forget the use-
less death of Britain’s best and brightest in the Battle of the Somme.
Yet, as bloody and stupid as this battle was, it was only one in the
war. From its beginning in 1914 to its end in 1918, World War I com-
bat ate up about 5,500 lives per day, to total by its end at least 9 million
combat dead—both men and women.
Of all the soldiers’ correspondence I have read, one exchange
touched me most deeply, and shows the misery and horror of war not
only for the soldiers in combat, but for their loved ones as well. This
letter is from Private William Martin to his fiancée Emily Chitticks,
written while he was fighting in France with the Devonshire Regiment.
It is dated March 24, 1917.
My dearest Emily
Just a few lines dear to tell you I am
still in the land of the living and keeping
well, trusting you are the same dear. I
206 R. J. Rummel
have just received your letter dear and

was very pleased to get it. It came rather
more punctual this time for it only took
five days. We are not in the same place
dear, in fact we don’t stay in the same
place very long . . . . we are having very
nice weather at present dear and I hope it
continues . . . . Fondest love and kisses
from your loving Sweetheart
Will
Martin was killed in action three days after writing it. Unaware of
this, Emily continued to write, even when receiving no reply. Finally,
the army returned five of her letters with “killed in action” marked on
them. This March 29, 1917 letter was one of those returned.
My Dearest Will
I was so delighted to get your letter
this morning and know you are quite al-
right. I am pleased to say I am alright
myself and hope dear this will find you
the same. I was so pleased to hear dar-
ling that you had such a nice enjoyable
evening, It was quite a treat I am sure. I
don’t suppose you do get much amuse-
ment.
I am glad you are getting my letters
dear, I am not waiting until I get your
letters dear now before I write because it
would make it so long for you to wait
for a letter, and I guess you are pleased
to get as many as possible.
I can understand darling your not be-
ing able to write as frequently. I shall get
used to waiting for your letters soon I
guess, but at first it seems so strange af-
ter being used to having them so
regularly.
Well darling I don’t know any more
to say now and I am feeling sleepy. Oh I
wish you were here darling, but its no
good wishing.
Fondest love and lots of kisses from

your ever-loving little girl
71
Emily.
William Martin’s grave was never found. Emily was so heartbro-

ken by his death that she never married. When she died in 1974,
Martin’s letters were buried with her, as she requested.
71 From an October 1998 British Broadcasting Corporation Special Report on World

War I.
Chapter 27
The Democratic Peace
The absence of war between democracies comes as close
as anything we have to an empirical law in international
relations.
– Jack Levy
W
hat can we do about war? Most wars, like World War I,
should never have been fought. It was the result of flagrant
political and diplomatic errors. The lesson so many learned
from this war, however, was not that avoiding such errors would pre-
vent future conflicts, but that we must never fight another war, and that
armaments and arms races cause wars. This was the wrong lesson, and
it led to World War II. When Great Britain and France could have
stopped Hitler cheaply—when a strong military showing by them
would have avoided World War II—the awful memory of the bloody
cost of the battles of the Somme and Verdun proved too strong. Finally,
Great Britain and France drew the line against Hitler in Poland in 1939,
but it was too late to avoid a war. And with the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor in 1941 and Hitler’s declaration of war against the formerly
neutral United States, it more truly became a world war.
As hellish and bloody as war is, I believe that we had to fight this
war. Just think of what it would mean in lives and misery if the Nazis
had controlled all of Europe, including Great Britain and Russia. Add
to this the control of all of Asia and the western Pacific by the Japanese
military. The butchery that these murderers would have unleashed on
both sides of the world would undoubtedly far exceed the human cost
of World War II. Even before their defeat in 1945, remember, the Nazis
already had murdered about 21 million people—many more than the 15
million killed in battle in all of World War II for all countries involved.
The Japanese militarists murdered an additional 6 million people. Dic-
tators of all kinds have killed several times more people than has
combat in all the wars, foreign and domestic. As horrible as it was, the
Hutu rulers of Rwanda killed more people in four months than did the
Battle of the Somme during the same length of time. And this was only
one murderous government in a fairly small country.
Virtually all proposals to prevent war have suffered from this de-
fect: they ignore how dictators and dictatorships differ from
democratic leaders and democracies. There have always been those
who, when they inherit or seize power, forcefully fill their army with
unwilling soldiers, and then grind them to death in a war to grab more
power and control over others. The rogues’ gallery of these murderers
and aggressors is long, and surely at the top would be, for the twentieth
century alone, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Mao
Tse-tung, Chiang Kai-shek, Tojo Hideki, and Pol Pot. When there are
such people controlling large armies, the solutions to war, such as paci-
fism, unilateral disarmament, or disarmament treaties, do not work.
Worse, these solutions weaken or disarm democracies and make the
world safe only for such tyrants.
Now, finally, we have the proven knowledge to avoid both wars
and the aggression of dictators. This solution was proposed in the latter
part of the eighteenth century and recent social science research has
shown its veracity. In his Perpetual Peace, written in 1795, the great
German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that the way to universal
peace lay in creating republics, or what today we would call representa-
tive democracies. Kant wrote, “The republican constitution, besides the
purity of its origin (having sprung from the pure source of the concept
of law), also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence,
i.e., perpetual peace. The reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is
required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this con-
stitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that
they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decree-
72
ing for themselves all the calamities of war.”
Note two things about this solution. First is that, where people have
equal rights and freely participate in their governance, they will be
unlikely to promote a war in which they or their loved ones might die
and their property be destroyed. And second, where leaders are respon-
sible to their people as voters, they will be unwilling to fight. Then
when both leaders of two nations are so restrained, war between them
should not occur.
The idea that democracies are therefore inherently peaceful was not
lost to others. It became part of a more general philosophy of govern-
ance that Kant shared with liberals of the time, a system of belief we
now call classical liberalism, which I dealt with in Chapter 6 with re-
gard to democracy and in Chapter 11 on the free market. Adam Smith,
72 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace.Translated by Lewis White Beck. New York:

The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1957, pp. 12–13. It is online at
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm
210 R. J. Rummel
John Stewart Mill, and John Locke, among other influential thinkers of
the time, argued for the maximum freedom of the individual. They be-
lieved in minimal government. They also supported free trade between
nations and a free market within. Such freedom, they argued, would
create a harmony among nations, and promote peace. As Thomas
Paine—who like most of America’s founding fathers was a classical
liberal—wrote in his influential Rights of Man in 1791–1792, “Gov-
ernment on the old system is an assumption of power, for the
aggrandizement of itself; on the new [republican form of government
as just established in the United States], a delegation of power for the
common benefit of society. The former supports itself by keeping up a
system of war; the latter promises a system of peace, as the true means
73
of enriching a nation.”
Full proof of this point had to wait, however, until scientists such as
Bruce Russett, Zeev Maoz, James Lee Ray, and I could develop research
74
methods to document it. We did related research throughout the 1970s,
thanks in part to the growth of new statistical models made possible by
the advent of the computer, and in the 1980s we, and scholars who fol-
lowed our lead, proved Kant correct. By then we had collected data on
all wars that had occurred over the last several centuries, and by applying
various statistical analyses to these data, we established that there never
(or virtually never) has been a war between well-established democra-
cies. Moreover, through these techniques, we also proved that there was
not a hidden factor accounting for this, such as a lack of common bor-
ders, or geographic distance between democracies. Nor was this
democratic peace attributable to the wealth of democracies, or their in-
ternational power, education levels, technology, resources, religion, or
population density. Our findings are straightforward:
Well-established democracies do not make war on each other.

75
Table 27.1 provides some evidence on this. It gives a simple count
of wars between democracies, wars between democracies and non-
democracies, and those between nondemocracies from 1816 to 1991. As
the table shows, in all the wars during this period, 353 nations fought
73 Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience. New Brunswick: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1978, p. 29.
74 For links to such work on the Internet, see the link page on my website at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM. For much of my research results on this,
see my theme page at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MIRACLE.HTM
75 This is Table 1.1 in my Death By Government at
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.TAB1.1.GIF
each other. The numbers refer to pairs of nations (dyads) violently en-
gaged in war against each other. For example, in the brief 1979 war
between Cambodia and Vietnam, there was only one pair of nations at
war. In the Six Day War of 1967, Israel fought Egypt, Jordan, and Syria,
thus making it three pairs at war (Israel vs. Egypt, Israel vs. Jordan, and
Israel vs. Syria). The table presents the result of adding all pairs at war
for all wars from 1816 to 1991. In no case did a democracy clearly fight
another democracy, which is also true since 1991. There never has been
a Battle of the Somme between free people. No battle has come even
close. In fact, there has been no lethal military action between liberal
democracies, as they are defined in Chapter 6, ever.
But one might still ask whether this is owed to chance. Since in the
twentieth century democracies were a minority among nations, and in
previous centuries there were only a handful of democracies at any
given time, is not it likely that this lack of war is by chance—luck? Sta-
tistical analysis enables us to calculate the probability of such events
taking place. True, statistics can be misused and have been, but this is
true of any scientific method. Virtually all the medical drugs deemed
safe for us to take today are based on statistical tests, not unlike those
used to test whether democracies not making war on each other is a
chance occurrence. If we are going to be cynical about statistics, then
we should also be very wary of taking any modern drugs for an illness
or disease. This issue is really not about statistics but how well they
have been applied, and whether the data meet the assumptions of the
statistical model used.
212 R. J. Rummel
Different researchers have tested the lack of war between democra-

cies in different ways for different years, the definitions of democracy,
and the ways of defining war, and in those studies using tests of signifi-
cance, the positive result has been statistically significant in each
76
case. Thus, the overall significance of this absence of war is really a
multiple (or function, if some of these studies are not independent) of
these different significant probabilities, which would make the overall
probability (subjectively estimated) of the results occurring by chance
77
alone surely at least a million to one.
76 An annotated bibliography on the earlier work on the democratic peace is at:

www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MTF.ANNOTBIBLIO.HTM. See also the “Democracy
and War” links at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/LINKS.HTM
77 Readers may have many other questions about this lack of relationship between
democracy and war, often called the democratic peace. I have tried to answer a num-
ber of them in an Appendix Q&A to my Power Kills. The appendix is on my website
at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PK.APPEN1.1.HTM. See also my article on “What is
the Democratic Peace?” at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DP.IS_WHAT.HTM
Chapter 28
The Freer The People, the Greater the Peace
There is a near perfect correlation between the lack of
freedom in two nations and the number killed in wars
between them.
I t is not just a free, democratic populace that inhibits war, but also
the degree to which people are free. To understand this, we must
stop thinking about war as a single event that happens or does not
happen. Rather, we should think of war as embodying different amounts
of killing, just as a yardstick embodies different degrees of length. A war
may be as vast in scope as World War I or World War II, in which the
fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union alone took more than
7.5 million lives. But the severity of a war may only be in hundreds
killed, not millions—as was the war between India and China in 1962, at
a cost to each of around 500 dead, or the Gulf War, when the United
States lost 148 people from battle and 35 from friendly fire. All are wars,
but the relevant distinction among them here is one of magnitude.
Imagine a yardstick of freedom, with at one end democracies like
Canada, New Zealand, and Sweden, and at the other end the least free
countries like North Korea, Sudan, Burma, Cuba, and Laos. Toward the
middle would be such authoritarian countries as Egypt, Bangladesh,
and Malaysia. Then, for any two countries, the closer the government
of each is to the democratic end of the yardstick, the more likely it is
that there will be fewer killed in any war between them. Thus we can
establish a correlation between the degree of freedom and the degree of
intensity in war.
Figure 28.1 graphs this correlation for governments divided into de-
mocratic, authoritarian (people are partly free), and totalitarian (people
77
have no freedom) subgroups. This shows a near-perfect correlation be-
tween nonfreedom and war dead over the years 1900–1980. At one end
of this correlation we have two nations that are both democratically free
77 This is from Figure 3.1 in my Power Kills (1997) at

www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/PK.FIG3.1.GIF
214 R. J. Rummel
(labeled “demo” in the figure) that have fought no wars and have experi-
enced, if any at all, very minor violence between the most marginal
(electoral) of the democracies. At the other end, we have nations in
which there are no civil rights and political liberties, and a dictator com-
mands all politically relevant activity and groups. Such totalitarian
governments (labeled “tot” or “total”), as the figure illustrates, are most
likely to have the bloodiest wars.
The part of World War II involving totalitarian Germany and the
Soviet Union is a case in point. In fighting against each other, the So-
viet Union lost 7.5 million in battle, and Nazi Germany lost most of its
3.5 million battle dead. No two nations have ever, before or since, in-
flicted such massive bloodshed on each other.
Authoritarian nations (labeled “aut” or “author”) are between de-

mocratic and totalitarian ones in their degree of freedom and, as should
be true empirically, their violence is more or less, depending on
whether they fight against democracies or totalitarian nations.
To the iron law that democracies do not make war on each other,
we can now add:
The less democratically free any two nations

are, the more likely is severe violence between
them.
There are many other kinds of international violence besides war.

There is violence short of war, such as American jets shooting down
Iraqi fighter planes that violated the United Nations-defined no-fly
zone over southern Iraq in the late 1990s; the blowing up of a South
Korean passenger jet by North Korean agents; or military action by
Cuban forces against Somalia during the Ethiopia-Somalia War over
the Ogaden (1976–1983). And despite this absence of violence be-
tween democracies, democracies overall can be violent and
aggressive.
Democracies direct violence only at non-

democracies.
However, when one considers the explanation for why democra-

cies are peaceful—that democratic peoples are acculturated into
negotiation and compromise over violence—one should expect that
democracies overall would have the least severe foreign violence and
war, the least dead in all their violence fighting other countries. An-
other way of putting this is that, the more freedom a nation has, the
less its leaders squander the lives of their people in foreign violence
79
and war. And this is true, as I show in Figure 28.2.
The less democratic a country is, the more intense its foreign vio-
lence.
This is not to say that democracies are generally pacifist. They have
engaged in bloody wars, usually to fight aggression and defend them-
selves and other democracies. And certainly democracies have also
been the aggressors, as was the United States in the Spanish-American
79 This is from Figure 4.2 in Power Kills (1997).

216 R. J. Rummel
War, the Philippine-American War of 1899–1902, the Grenada and Pa-

nama interventions, and the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions. On the
average, however, democratic leaders are more careful about the lives
of their citizens and, therefore, they fight less severe wars. There also
are exceptions to this, as in the Battle of the Somme during which the
British commanding generals continued to throw troops into battle even
after its bloody losses and lack of success. However, it should be
pointed out again that the repercussions of this on British public opin-
ion were so great as to make British foreign policy naively pacifist for a
full generation. Totalitarian regimes have no such negative feedback.
Their dictators can, time after time, in war after war, use their people as
mass instruments of war, like bullets and shells, throwing them at the
enemy in human waves, for whatever purpose.
As a species, we have been killing ourselves by the millions in
war after war throughout history. Now, finally, we have the power of
knowledge to end forever—or at the very least drastically reduce—all
this human slaughter. Freedom gives us the answer.
We must foster democratic freedom for all

humanity to end this bloody scourge.
Until all people everywhere enjoy this freedom, we must foster at

least some freedom where none exists to lessen the mass killing by
war. War is an evil, and the fact that it has necessarily been fought by
free people to preserve their freedom makes it no less so. What would
eliminate this evil must be a moral good. Therefore, lessening and
potentially ending war is another moral good of freedom.
Chapter 29
Why the Democratic Peace?
[Democracies] have other means of resolving conflicts
between them and therefore do not need to fight each
other . . . and . . . they perceive that democracies should
not fight each other . . . By this reasoning, the more de-
mocracies there are in the world, the fewer potential
adversaries we and other democracies will have and the
wider the zone of peace.
– Bruce Russett
W
hy is it that free and democratic peoples do not make war on
each other? Remember Immanuel Kant’s hypothesis that,
since people generally do not want to bear the cost of war,
they would, if they could, restrain their leaders. On the surface, this
seems a good explanation, and it does help to explain why democracies
do not make war on each other. Yet democratic people have also been
jingoistic. They have favored war and encouraged their leaders to fight.
For instance, the public outcry in 1898 over the explosion aboard the
American battleship Maine in a Cuban harbor and its sinking with a
loss of 260 men pressured Congress and President McKinley into inter-
vening militarily in Cuba. Spain then reluctantly declared war on the
United States. American public opinion also strongly favored President
Truman’s commitment of American troops to the defense of South Ko-
rea against the North Korean invasion in 1950, and similarly favored
President Johnson’s request to Congress for a blank check—the Tonkin
Gulf resolution of 1964—to come to the defense of South Vietnam,
then near collapse under the weight of North Vietnam’s aggression.
Clearly, then, there is something much deeper than simply a democ-
ratic people’s fear of death and destruction at work in preventing wars
among democracies. This peacekeeping factor is analogous to what in-
hibits democratic nations from internal political violence, as I described
it in Chapter 19. Where democratic freedom flourishes in two coun-
tries, where there are free markets and freedom of religion, association,
ideas, and speech, then societies of mutual interest such as corpora-
tions, partnerships, associations, societies, churches, schools, and clubs
proliferate in and between the countries. Examples of these are the
the Boy Scouts, and the Association of Tennis Professionals. These

cross-national groups become separate pyramids of power, competing
with each other and with governments. As a result, both democratic
nations then are sewn together into one society, one crosscut by these
multifold groups, with multiple bonds between them.
Moreover, between democratic governments there are many official
and unofficial connections and linkages made to achieve similar func-
tions and satisfy mutual interests. Their militaries freely coordinate
strategies, and may even share equipment in line with their mutual de-
fense arrangements and perceived common dangers. An example is
nuclear weapons and military equipment shared by Great Britain and
the United States. Intelligence services will share some secrets and
even sometimes agents. Health services will coordinate their studies,
undertake common projects, and provide health supplies when needed.
Such multiple shared interests bond these societies together.
Politicians, leaders, and groups, therefore, have a common interest in
keeping the peace. And where conflict might escalate into violence, such
as over some trade issue or fishing rights, interests are so cross-pressured
by different groups and ties that the depth of feeling and single-minded
devotion to the interest at stake is simply not there. Keep in mind that for
democratic leaders to choose to make the huge jump to war against an-
other country, there must be almost fanatical dedication to the interests—
the stakes—involved, almost to the exclusion of all else.
There is also something about democracies that is even more
important than these links, bonds, and cross-pressures. This is their
democratic culture. Democratic peoples see one another as willing to
compromise and negotiate issues rather than fighting violently over
them. More important, they see one another as the same kind—part of
one’s in-group, one’s moral universe. They each share not only so-
cially, in overlapping groups, functions, and linkages, but also in
political culture. Americans and Canadians, for example, have no ex-
pectation of fighting each other over trade restrictions and disputes.
Both see each other as similarly free, democratic, and willing to bar-
gain. And therefore, they have a totally unarmed 5,525-mile border
between them. Similarly, with the development of a solid liberal de-
mocracy in Japan since the end of World War II, there is now no
expectation of war between Japan and any other democracy, including
the United States and democratic South Korea.
Finally, credit should be given to the ideology of democratic liber-
alism itself. Democratic liberals believe in the right of people to make
their voices heard, to have a role in government, and to be free. Such
liberals, who in domestic policy may be conservative, progressive, so-
220 R. J. Rummel
cial democrat, Democrat, or Republican, greatly oppose any violence

against other democracies. Even if those in power would consider such
actions, democratic liberals—who compose the vast majority of intel-
lectuals, journalists, and politicians—would arouse a storm of protest
against them.
To summarize, there is no war between democracies because their
people are free. This freedom creates a multitude of groups that produce
diverse linkages across borders and cross-pressured interests, and make
for an exchange culture of negotiation and compromise. Free people see
each other as being of the same kind, as morally similar, as negotiators
instead of aggressors, and therefore have no expectation of war; and
there is a prevalent ideology of democratic liberalism that believes in
democratic freedom and opposes violence between democracies.
Then why do nondemocracies—or rather, the dictators who control
them, since by definition the people have little say—make war on each
other? Do the dictators not see each other as being of the same kind,
sharing the same coercive culture? Yes, and that is exactly the problem
for them. They live by coercion and force. Their guns keep them in
power. They depend on a controlled populace manipulated through
propaganda, deceit, and fear. Commands and decrees are the working
routine of dictators; negotiations are a battleground in which one wins
through lies, subterfuge, misinformation, stalling, and manipulation. A
dictator’s international relations are no different. They see them as war
fought by other means. They will only truly negotiate in the face of
bigger and better guns, and they will only keep their promises as long
as those guns remain pointed at them. This is also how one dictator sees
another—and, incidentally, how they see democracies.
This is not to say that war necessarily will happen between two
countries if one or both is not democratic. They may be too far away
from each other, too weak, or too inhibited by the greater power of a
third country. It is only to say that the governments of such countries
lack the social and cultural inhibitions that would prevent armed con-
flict between them, and that their dictatorial governments inherently
encourage war. War may not happen, but it can, and the more undemo-
cratic the governments, the more likely it will.
There are two beliefs about democracy as a possible solution to war
that I should address. One is the belief that what we have always done
throughout our history is an inevitable force of our nature. Since we al-
ways have had war, we always will. Note, however, that down through
the ages, almost all the world lived under absolute monarchs, be they
kings, queens, emperors, czars, or whatever. Monarchs inherited their
rule and commanded without question. There were exceptions for his-
torically brief periods, such as in the classical Greek city-states, ancient

Rome, and Switzerland during the Middle Ages. But so dominant was
monarchism that just three centuries ago, in most of the world, it would
have seemed natural to our species, unchangeable. Now, absolute heredi-
tary rule only exists in a few small countries such as Saudi Arabia, and
should be gone entirely within a generation or so.
Another example of an institution that once seemed inevitable was
the ownership of slaves. Slavery was even more universally accepted
and practiced than absolute monarchies. Yet now it is virtually ended
except in some small backwater countries like Sudan, and there only as
an adjunct to its civil war. As a species we may kill and murder each
other, but also as a species we have the mental freedom, will, and crea-
tivity to eliminate that which we collectively despise or which
endangers us. We need only the knowledge to do so, and we now have
this knowledge about war.
The second belief that inhibits accepting freedom as a solution to
war is its simplicity. My social science colleagues often rave about this.
“The social world is too complex,” they say, unaware that this state-
ment itself is not a proven truth, but only a hypothesis. “You can’t
reduce human behavior to one variable like this,” they say. “War must
be the result of many factors interacting in complex ways—diplomatic,
political, military, social, cultural, and so on. I cannot believe you
would simply reduce all this to freedom. How can you ignore the bal-
ance of power, historical grievances, religious conflict, territorial
conflicts, and the like?”
I do not. In relations between democratic and nondemocratic na-
tions, or among nondemocratic nations themselves, all these complex
factors beloved of the historian and political scientist may indeed cause
war. It is just that the less freedom the people of these countries have,
the more likely it is that war will result. Only between democracies
does freedom create the conditions to override these factors.
PART 7
Conclusion
I n the last sentence in the final Volume 5 of my Understanding

Conflict and War (1981), I wrote what could as well sum up this
book:
To eliminate war, to restrain violence, to

nurture universal peace and justice, is to foster
freedom.80
80 These books are also on my website. The page with the quote is at:
www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/TJP.CHAP13.HTM
223
Chapter 30
Freedom is a Right and Creates Human Security
We have identified power with greatness, thugs with
statesmen, and propaganda with results; we have let
moral and cultural relativism silence our outrage, while
conceding the moral high ground to the utopian dream-
ers; we have refused to recognize evil as evil; and we
have ignored the catastrophic human cost of such confu-
sions, and the natural and moral right to freedom.
T
he best way to sum up this book is by reference to Table 30.1.
In Table 30.1a at the top, we can clearly see the difference that
freedom makes in the wealth and prosperity of a people. The
greater their freedom, the more their purchasing power compared to
other nations, the less their poverty, and the greater their human de-
velopment. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social
human security.
There is more to human security than wealth and prosperity. There
is also the security of knowing that one’s life and the lives of loved
ones are safe from lethal repression, genocide and mass murder, and
deadly famines. Here Table 30.1b could not be more consistent—the
more freedom people have, the fewer their deaths due to famine, geno-
cide and mass murder, and international and civil war.
From this table and the analyses and statistical tests done else-
80
where, I can assert with considerable confidence that freedom is in
fact what it appears to be in Table 30.1, and what I have claimed for it
in the previous chapters, which is that:
80 Because of the technical nature of the appendix to my online Saving Lives, I have
omitted it from this revision. It tests the relationship of freedom to human security (a
people’s wealth, prosperity, health and the absence of a threat to their lives by geno-
cide and mass murder, war, and political turmoil and instability) for 190 nations over
70 variables through the use of factor analysis, analysis of variance, and multiple and
curvilinear regression. The results further confirm the conclusions of this book. The
appendix is at: www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.APPENDIX.HTM
224 R. J. Rummel
The freedom of a people is the cause of their

greater wealth and prosperity, of human devel-
opment, and of security from violence.
But as important as such statistics are, they are still only statistics;
they miss the sheer misery, pain, and horror of the unfree. They can
only imperfectly reflect what is a wretched and bloody hell: in the
world today, billions of human beings are still subject to absolute pri-
vation, exposure, starvation, disease, torture, rape, beatings, forced
labor, genocide, mass murder, executions, deportations, political vio-
lence, and war. These billions live in fear for their lives, and for those
of their loved ones. They have no human rights, no liberties. These
people are only pieces on a playing board for the armed thugs and
gangs that oppress their nations, raping them, looting them, exploiting
them, and murdering them. We hide the identity of the gangs—we
sanctify them—with the benign concept of “government,” as in the
“government” of Khmer Rouge Cambodia, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or
Hitler’s Germany.
The gangs that control these so-called governments oppress whole
nations under cover of international law. They are like a gang that
captures a group of hikers and then does with them what it wills, rob-
bing all, torturing and murdering some because gang members don’t
like them or they are “disobedient,” and raping others. Nonetheless,
the thugs that rule nations “govern” by the right of sovereignty: the
community of nations explicitly grants them the right by international
law to govern a nation when they show that they effectively control
the national government, and this right carries with it the promise that
other nations will not intervene in their internal affairs.
International law now recognizes that if these gangs go to ex-
tremes, such as massive ethnic cleansing or genocide, then the
international community has a countervailing right to stop them.
However, this area of international law is still developing, and as we
saw in the current examples of Sudan, Burma, North Korea, Rwanda,
Saudi Arabia, and China (and one could include Cuba, Pakistan, Iran,
and Syria, among others), the thugs still largely have their way with
their victims.
This is unconscionable. As I showed in Chapter 2, citizens of all
countries—a Chinese peasant, a Sudanese black, a Saudi Arabian
woman, a Burmese Karen, and all of the 6 billion other people—have
the right to freedom of speech, religion, organization, and a fair trial,
among other rights, and all these civil and political rights are sub-
226 R. J. Rummel
sumed by one overarching right to be free. This right overrules sover-

eignty, which is granted according to tradition based on a system of
international treaties, not natural law. Freedom, by contrast, is not
something others grant. It is a right due every human being. It can
only be taken from a people and denied them by force of arms, by
power.
For too many intellectuals, however, it is not enough to point out
that a people have a right to be free. They will counter by arguing that
freedom is desirable, but first people must be made equal, given food to
eat, work, and health care. Freedom must be limited as a means to good
ends, such as the public welfare, prosperity, peace, ethnic unity, or na-
tional honor. Sometimes the intellectuals who go about creating such
justifications for denying people their freedom are so persuasive that
even reasonable people will accept their convoluted arguments. Need I
mention the works of Marx and Lenin, for example, who provided “sci-
entific” excuses for the tyranny of such thugs as Stalin, Mao, and Pol
Pot? There even were many now-forgotten, or now-excused, intellectu-
als and other influential figures who praised the economic efficiency
and progressiveness of Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. And
one should not ignore the large number of Western intellectuals, aca-
demics, and students who fell in love with Mao Tse-tung, some even
carrying around his Red Book of Mao quotations, while this absolute,
tyrannical dictator murdered millions of people, created the world’s
greatest famine through his policies, and caused a civil war—the Cul-
tural Revolution, among the bloodiest in history.
To many compassionate people, such intellectuals, arguing that
freedom must be sacrificed for a better life, have had the best of the
argument and the moral high ground. These intellectuals have tried to
show that freedom empowers greed, barbaric competition, ineffi-
ciency, inequality, the debasement of morals, the weakening of ethnic
or racial identity, and so on. In spite of the international certification
of freedom as a human right by the United Nations, and treaties and
agreements among nations, those defending freedom often feel guilty,
as though they somehow lack sympathy for the poor and oppressed.
For example, some say of communist Castro’s barbaric rule over the
Cuban people, “After all, the Cubans have free medical care, a good
educational system, and a right to work.” Never mind that Castro is
responsible for the murder of tens of thousands of Cubans, the torture
and beating of many more, and the imprisonment of vast numbers of
those who have only protested their lack of rights.
To be defensive about freedom in the face of such justifications is
morally wrong-headed. No moral code or civil law allows that a gang
leader and his followers can murder, torture, and repress some at will
as long as the thugs provide others with a good life. But even were it
accepted that under the cover of government authority, a ruler can
murder and repress his people so long as it promotes human better-
ment, the burden of proof is on those who argue that therefore those
people will be better off.
There is no such proof. Quite the opposite: in the twentieth cen-
tury, we have had the most costly and extensive tests of such
arguments, involving billions of people. The Nazis, Italian fascists
under Mussolini, Japanese militarists, and Chinese Nationalists under
Chiang Kai-shek have tested fascist promises of a better life. Like-
wise, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot have tested the utopian
promises of communism, to mention the most prominent communist
experiments; and Burma, Iraq, and Syria, among others, have also
tested state socialism. All these vast social experiments have failed,
utterly and miserably, and they have done so at the vast human cost
that has included global social upheaval, the displacement of millions,
the impoverishment of billions, and the death of tens of millions from
famine, extreme internal violence, and the most destructive wars—not
to mention the many tens of millions more murdered outright.
These social experiments carried out by

force against billions of people have produced a
vast nation of the dead which, if it were a sov-
ereign country, would be among the world’s top
ten in population.
In sharp contrast, there are the arguments for freedom, which is, as
I have shown in previous chapters, not only a right, but a supreme
moral good in itself. The very fact of a people’s freedom creates a
better life for all, as shown in Table 30.1.
Free people create a wealthy and prosper-

ous society.
When people are free to go about their own business, they put
their ingenuity and creativity in the service of all. They search for
ways to satisfy the needs, desires, and wants of others. The true utopia
lies not in some state-sponsored tyranny, but the free market in goods,
ideas, and services, whose operating principle is that success depends
on satisfying others. As described in Chapter 10, Bill Gates of Micro-
soft did not become a billionaire by stealing people’s money, looting
228 R. J. Rummel
their possessions, taxing them and secreting money away in Switzer-

land, or by using public funds to build himself mansions. No one had
to buy Gates’ products or invest in his company. He became the
world’s richest man by providing people with computer software that
they wanted, that made their life or work easier.
People rarely do things for others because they are completely self-
less—we set apart and admire those rare Mother Theresas who are.
Rather, almost all act out of self-interest, and it is therefore better to
create a society in which self-interest leads to mutual betterment, rather
than one in which a small coterie of fanatics exert their own self-
interest at the expense of the lives and welfare of others.
What underlines this moral good of freedom even more is the inde-
pendence and incentives farmers have to best use their land to produce
crops and food that people need to live. The result is that, in a democ-
ratically free country like the United States, farmers produce a surplus
of food that the government then buys, stores, and grants in aid to poor
countries. At the same time, in many of those countries where the rulers
have denied their farmers any freedom in order to achieve some utopian
future, where they order farmers what to grow, where, and how, and at
what prices to sell the resulting crops, famines have killed tens of mil-
lions of people. The roll call of these famines is long, but must include
the Soviet Union, China, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, Cambodia, and
North Korea. It is not by chance, as shown in Table 30.1, that:
No democratically free people have suffered from mass famine.
It is extraordinary, how little known this is. There are plenty of

hunger projects and plans to increase food aid for the starving millions,
all of which is good enough in the short run. A starving person will die
before the people can kick out their rulers or make them reform their
policies. Yet simply feeding the starving today is not enough. They also
have to be fed tomorrow and every day thereafter. However, free these
people from their rulers’ commands over their farming, and soon they
will be able to feed themselves and others as well. There is an adage
that applies to this: “Give a starving person a fish to eat and you feed
him only for one day; teach him how to fish, and he feeds himself for-
ever.” Yet teaching is no good alone, if people are not free to apply
their new knowledge—yes, teach them how to fish, but also promote
the freedom they need to do so.
Surprisingly, the incredible economic productivity and wealth pro-
duced by a free people and their freedom from famines are not the only
moral goods of freedom, nor, perhaps, even the most important moral
goods. When people are free, they comprise a spontaneous society the
characteristics of which strongly inhibit society-wide political violence,
as shown in Table 30.1. Freedom greatly reduces the possibility of
revolutions, civil war, rebellions, guerrilla warfare, coups, violent riots,
and the like. Most of the violence within nations occurs where thugs
rule with absolute power. There is a continuum here:
The more power the rulers have, and the

less free their people, the more internal vio-
lence these people will suffer.
Keep in mind that throughout the world, people are essentially the
same. It is not that the people of any culture, civilization, or nation are
by nature any more bloodthirsty, barbaric, power-hungry, or violent
than those of another. What makes for peace within a nation is not
national character, but social conditions that reduce tension and hos-
tility between people, lessen the stakes of conflict, cross-pressure
interests, and promote negotiation, tolerance, and compromise. Such
are the conditions created by democratic freedom. The more a people
are free, the greater such conditions inhibit internal violence.
Surely that which protects people against

internal violence, that which so saves human
lives, is a moral good. And this is freedom.
Then there is mass democide, the most destructive means of end-

ing human lives of any form of violence. Except in the case of the
Nazi Holocaust of European Jews, few people know how murderous
the dictators of this world have been, and could be. Virtually un-
known is the fact that the number of non-Jewish Poles, Russians,
Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Germans, and others murdered by
Hitler surpasses by two or three times the Jews he killed.
Then there are the shocking tens of millions murdered by Stalin and
Mao, and the other millions wiped out by Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Kim
Il-sung, and their kind. Just omitting foreigners, who are most often
murdered during a war, such thugs murdered about 123 million of their
own people from 1900 to 1987. Adding foreigners and including the
whole twentieth century raises the toll they have killed to an incredible
nearly 174 million.
Even now, in the twenty-first century, these mass murders still go on
in Burma, Sudan, North Korea, Rwanda, Burundi, Zaire, Sierra Leone,
Liberia, and the Congo, just to mention the most glaring examples.
230 R. J. Rummel
It should be clear, then, why I refer to the rulers of these murder-

ous regimes as thugs. I am not a diplomat or a government official
and do not have to worry about the delicate sensitivities of these rul-
ers. I can call these thugs the thugs they are. As should be clear from
this book, they often murder people by carefully thought-out plans,
they set up a bureaucracy to do so, they train people for this purpose,
and then they order the killing. Sometimes they murder people be-
cause of their race, ethnicity, or religion; sometimes for their parents’
or other relative’s political activities or beliefs or speech; sometimes
for their lack of proper enthusiasm for their glorious rulers. Some-
times they establish a murder quota to fill, or kill people randomly to
set an example. While we can approximate how many these thugs
have killed, we cannot even guess at the heartbreak and misery these
deaths have caused their surviving loved ones, and how many of these
poor people have died of a broken heart or committed suicide.
Moreover, the term murder hardly carries the full weight of the pain
and misery of the victims. Some lucky ones died quickly with a shot to
the back of the head, or by decapitation. Most died quite wretchedly, in
pain from torture or beatings, by drowning or being buried or burned
alive, or in agony from wounds. Many died from intentionally adminis-
tered starvation, thirst, exposure, or disease. Some died horribly as the
result of repeated human medical experiments. We have no pain/misery
index to measure all this except for the incredible pile of corpses these
thugs have created in one century. We must assume that a penumbra of
pain and misery, of love and hope squashed, of a future stolen sur-
rounds each of these millions of corpses.
What is true about freedom and internal violence is also so for this
mass democide:
The more freedom a people have, the less

likely their rulers are to murder them. The more
power the thugs have, the more likely they are
to murder their people.
Could there be a greater moral good than to end or minimize such

mass murder? This is what freedom does and for this it is, emphati-
cally, a moral good.
There is still more to say about freedom’s value. While we now
know that the world’s ruling thugs generally kill several times more of
their subjects than do wars, it is war on which moralists and pacifists
generally focus their hatred, and devote their resources to ending or
moderating. This singular concentration is understandable, given the hor-
ror and human costs, and the vital political significance of war. Yet it
should be clear by now that war is a symptom of freedom’s denial, and
that freedom is the cure. Three points bear repeating from Chapter 27.
First:
Democratically free people do not make war

on each other.
This is so important that some scientists have made this historical

fact the subject of whole books, such as Bruce Russett’s Grasping the
Democratic Peace, James Lee Ray’s Democracy and International
Conflict, and Spencer R. Weart’s Never At War.
Chapter 29 gives a very good explanation for why democracies do
not make war on each other, and it is the same as that for why there is
by far the least internal violence and democide within democracies. The
diverse groups, cross-national bonds, social links, and shared values of
democratic peoples sew them together; and shared liberal values dis-
pose them toward peaceful negotiation and compromise with each
other. It is as though the people of democratic nations were one society.
This truth that democracies do not make

war on each other provides a solution for elimi-
nating war from the world: globalize
democratic freedom.
This solution is far in the future, however. It may only kick in

when most nations are democratized. Therefore the second point:
The less free the people within any two na-

tions are, the bloodier and more destructive the
wars between them; the greater their freedom,
the less likely such wars become.
And third, as seen in Table 30.1:
The more freedom the people of a nation

have, the less bloody and destructive their wars.
What this means is that we do not have to wait for all, or almost
all nations to become liberal democracies to reduce the severity of
war. As we promote freedom, as the people of more and more nations
gain greater human rights and political liberties, as those people with-
232 R. J. Rummel
out any freedom become partly free, we will decrease the bloodiness
of the world’s wars. In short:
Increasing freedom in the world decreases

the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever re-
duces and then finally ends the scourge of war
in our history, without causing a greater evil,
must be a moral good. And this is freedom.
The implications of this for foreign policy and international activ-

ism are profound. Since peace, national security, and national welfare
are the paramount concerns of a democratic nation’s foreign policy,
clearly the overriding goal should be to peacefully promote human
rights and democratic freedom. This should be the bottom line of in-
ternational negotiations, treaties, foreign aid, and military action (if
necessary for defense or humanitarian reasons, as in Kosovo or Bos-
nia). As to defense policy, military planning is based on assessments
of intentions and capability. What is clear is that the less free the peo-
ple of a nation are, the more we should beware of the intentions of
their rulers. In other words, it is not the democracies of the world that
we need to defend against.
Moreover, think about what the peace-creating power of freedom
means for nuclear weapons. Many people are justly worried about the
ultimate danger to humanity—nuclear war. They protest and demon-
strate against nuclear weapons. Some cross the line into illegal
activities, such as destroying military property, and risk prison to
draw public attention to the danger of such weapons. Were these
dedicated people to spend even half this effort on promoting freedom
and human rights for the people of the most powerful dictatorships
that have or may soon have such weapons—for instance, China, North
Korea, and Iran—they would be striking at the root cause for the risk
of nuclear attack.
The power of freedom to end war, minimize violence within na-
tions, and eradicate genocide and mass murder almost seems magical.
It is as though we have a single-drug cure for cancer. Had I not actu-
ally done much of the research myself over more than forty years, I
would have doubted all this. Yet, my work and that of other social
scientists and scholars have proven it true.
Our knowledge of the peace-creating and peacemaking effects of
freedom now gives us a nonviolent way to promote a nonviolent world.
As should now be clear:
Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence.
Enhancing, spreading, and promoting human rights and democracy

are the way to enhance, spread, and promote nonviolence. Proponents
of nonviolence have worked out many peaceful tactics for opposing
dictators, such as sit-down strikes, general strikes, mass demonstra-
tions, refusal to pay taxes, underground newspapers, sabotage by
excessive obedience to the rules, and the like. Much thought has gone
into how a people can nonviolently promote human rights. Overall,
however, nonviolence works best among a free people. And:
Freedom itself promotes a nonviolent solu-

tion to social problems and conflicts.
In conclusion, then, we have wondrous human freedom as a moral

force for the good. Freedom produces social justice, creates wealth
and prosperity, minimizes violence, saves human lives, and is a solu-
tion to war. In two words, it creates human security. Moreover, and
most important:
People should not be free only because it is

good for them. They should be free because it is
their right as human beings.
In opposition to freedom is power, its antagonist. While freedom is

a right, the power to govern is a privilege granted by a people to those
they elect and hold responsible for its use. Too often, however, thugs
seize control of a people with their guns and use them to make their
power total and absolute. Where freedom produces wealth and prosper-
ity, such absolute power causes impoverishment and famine. Where
freedom minimizes internal violence, eliminates genocide and mass
murder, and solves the problem of war, such absolute power unleashes
internal violence, murders millions, and produces the bloodiest wars. In
short, power kills; absolute power kills absolutely.
Now, to summarize this whole book, why freedom?
Because it is every person’s right. And it is a

moral good—it promotes wealth and prosperity,
social justice, and nonviolence, and preserves
human life.

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Praise for books by Nobel Peace Prize finalist

“. . . the most important . . . in the history of international relations.”

“. . . among the most exciting . . . in years.”

“. . . most comprehensive . . . I have ever encountered . . . illuminating . . . .”

“One more home run . . . .”

“. . . has profoundly affected my political and social views.”

“. . . truly brilliant . . . ought to be mandatory reading.”

". . . highly recommend . . . ."

". . . everyone in leadership should read and understand . . . ."

“. . . world's foremost authority on the phenomenon of ‘democide.’”

“. . . bound to be become a standard work . . . .”

“ . . . offers a desperately needed perspective . . . .”

“. . . eloquent . . . very important . . . .”

“. . . should be required reading . . .shocking and sobering . . . .”

Ending War, Democide,

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

Printed in the United States of America by Llumina Press

violence, democide, and famine.

The more constrained the power of governments, the less

its foreign violence, democide, and famine.

At the extremes of power, despotisms kill, murder, and

starve people by the millions, while many democracies grow

surplus food, and refuse to execute even serial murderers.

CHAPTER 27. The Democratic Peace 208

So, for the readers of my novels, here is a factual supplement that

• economic and gender inequality,

• poor health and disease,

Freedom is a solution to all these threats—democratic freedom

What Themes Run Through This Book?

• Freedom is a basic human right recognized by the United

evolution have produced similar rights among nations, specifically the

B illions of people live without freedom, as shown in Table 1.1,

* From Freedom House (www.freedomhouse.org)

2 Linda Slobodian, The Slave Trail, 1997. See:

Even trying to be honest can be dangerous. One poor fellow, Ab-

Women are locked in and kept out, exiled

5 Amnesty International at: www.amnesty.org/ailib/intcam/saudi/briefing/3.html

are not intact on the wedding night; kept

Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women and non-Muslims, as well as

6 Andrea Dworkin, “Take Back The Day,” 1978. At:

have commanded to live in inhospitable forced location zones. Others

butt. They kicked her hard in the stomach,

8 “A Comprehensive Response To Burmese Refugee and Displaced People Problem,”

contributions for the church’s annual Christmas celebration. Even if

9 The Laogai Research Foundation at: www.laogai.org/reports/profit.htm

x Urumqi (in northwestern China) for fruit, mainly hamigua

This while most of Kim’s people were starving, many to death.

wide-scale dwarfishness and, most important from any humanitarian

Some Other Antifreedom Thugdoms

I f a people want to be free, should they be? Should those living in

still claim that believing they should be free is intolerant of different

are part of an International Bill of Rights. The latter comprises Articles

x life, liberty, and personal security;

In effect, these human rights define what I mean by democratic

people without risking mandated sanctions by the United Nations Secu-

children, the horrified American public demanded action, and finally

A people’s freedom—their human rights—is justi-

D oes agreement on human rights, even the international consensus

One favored solution among thinkers, such as the eighteenth cen-