Death by Government
by R. J. Rummel

Our Price: $202.72
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $34.99 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Death by Government

Book Review: If war is hell ... then what is Big Government?
Summary: 5 Stars

I was never taught that in school. I was taught that wars kill people and that governments protect people. The present multi-cultural teaching in this country tells us that all governmental systems and cultures are equally valid and that none of us has a right to condemn any system other than our own, no matter how evil that other system might appear from the outside. R. J. Rummel teaches us lessons about Government murder that give us a reference point from which we can judge all governments and cultures... if you kill innocent people then your system is bad. For example: Communism is bad because the policy requires killing anyone who disagrees with the state, and relies on terror to control its citizens. I wonder if any high school student would give those reasons to choose capitalism over communism?

He offers many other insights into how killing and terror become everyday tools for governing in some countries, and how a peaceful country can end up committing genocide against its own people.

This book provides a perspective that can not be found anywhere else!

My only complaint about this book is that he never seems to find a word strong enough to describe the horror created when a government kills large numbers of its own people. He immediately throws out "Genocide" in favor of "Democide", but that just doesn't seem harsh enough. My first thought was that if war is hell, then Big Government is death. So I guess "Death by Government" is as close as our language can get.

Summary of Death by Government

This is R. J. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.

Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, ?The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.?

Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples, the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide.

True Crime Books

• Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > True Accounts > True Crime
• History > World
• Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Comparative Religion
• Crime & Criminals  > Criminology
• Politics