Death by Government: The Missing Chapter by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Death by Government: The Missing Chapter

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

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Over the past decade a number of researchers have attempted to document the extent to which various governments during the twentieth century committed acts of mass murder against their own citizens. The millions of deaths catalogued by such researchers as R.J. Rummel, author of Power Kills and Death by Government, and by the authors of The Black Book of Communism, are not deaths caused by foreign armies, but by all those unfortunate souls' own governments. 

The reason for all the killing, whether it is called genocide or "democide," to use Rummel's term, was to eliminate all opposition to the ruling regime and its ideology. In Russia, the kulaks "who resisted collectivization [of land] were shot, and the others deported," according to The Black Book of Communism (p. 9). When the rural population of the Ukraine resisted, Stalin created a famine that killed 6 million in a few months. "Virtually identical crimes" were committed "by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and Pol Pot," according to The Black Book (p. 10). 

In Power Kills, R. J. Rummel writes that "democidal" regimes tend to become even more vicious toward their own people when their political power "is conjoined with an absolutist ideology" (p. 93). And, "when the rulers of such regimes find for whatever reason that the continued existence of a social group is incompatible with their beliefs or goals, totalitarian power enables them to destroy that group" (p. 93). "War or rebellion" have often provided "an excuse and cover for a regime to eliminate those social groups it finds objectionable."
Armed with this understanding, the authors of The Black Book present the following statistics regarding how various communist governments killed their own citizens by the millions (p. 4):

• U.S.S.R.: 20 million deaths
• China: 65 million deaths
• Vietnam: 1 million deaths
• North Korea: 2 million deaths
• Cambodia: 2 million deaths
• Eastern Europe: 1 million deaths
• Latin America: 150,000 deaths
• Africa: 1.7 million deaths
• Afghanistan: 1.5 million deaths

Rummel has studied more than just the former communist regimes, and includes Nazi Germany's 21 million civilian murders, among others. 

After familiarizing myself with this stomach-turning literature (you cannot really understand the essence of socialism without it), it struck me that there is a glaring omission. According to this scholarship, "democide" occurs because of a desire on the part of a ruling regime to eliminate its opposition; to eliminate all challenges to its "absolutist ideology"; to exterminate a social group whose very existence is incompatible with the regime's goals or ideology; and often occurs disguised by a war or a rebellion that provides a convenient excuse. 

The glaring omission is the 300,000 Americans who were killed by the Lincoln regime from 1861—1865. According to some conservative estimates, some 50,000 Southern civilians were also killed. The southern secessionists certainly were a significant opposition to the ruling regime; they absolutely denied the validity of the regime's absolutist ideology — nationalism and a "mystical" union (as Lincoln called it) that must be held together at all cost; they were certainly dissenting to the Lincoln regime's goals and its nationalistic ideology; and Lincoln did refer to the original, peaceful acts of secession as a "rebellion." Indeed, the "official" U.S. government title for the War to Prevent Southern Independence is "The War of the Rebellion." 

More than half of the 300,000 or so southerners (one out of four adult men) who died, perished from disease. Nevertheless, it was the war, which forced those men to live in conditions where they would be subjected to being exposed to epidemics, that was the root cause of their death.......................

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