R. J. Rummel (1932–2014)

Sometimes it takes the insight of others to help me make better sense of what I already knew. I used to think war was the greatest cause of death and tragedy, but after reading R.J. Rummel's "Death by Government" I came to the recognition that governments killing their own citizens (what Rummel terms "democide") accounts for far more death than war in the 20th century (by a factor of about four to one). War's visibility distorts perception. For example, I have long been aware of the six show more million Jews executed in the Holocaust because this was part of World War II. Yet even while I also knew the former Soviet Union had annihilated some fifty to sixty million of its own people, until I read Rummel I had not given the Soviet slaughter nearly the same significance as the Holocaust (though the number of Soviet citizens slaughtered was literally ten times the number of Jews murdered by the Nazis!). Rummel has been called the foremost "atrocitologist" of our time and "Death by Government" has been thoroughly researched with expertise. To complete the book this former Yale professor and Nobel Peace Prize nominee recorded over 8,000 estimates of genocide and mass murder from over a thousand sources. As a political science doctoral student, I have reviewed many books on the subject, and, for anyone interested in understanding genocide and government mass murder, "Death by Government" is the most comprehensive compilation of government atrocities I have ever encountered. It contains the pertinent numbers as well as the sad and grisly tales of unimaginable carnage. "Death by Government" is an illuminating book on some of the darkest elements of this century. Any course on these issues will be seriously enhanced by Rummel's very readable accounting of state sponsored murder. show less

Covers state-sponsored genocides, but starts off saying that a democracy can't do that. It doesn't take into account the harm that a democracy can do in the third-world.

This book haunted me for days

Department of History, University of Hong Kong