September 19, 2001

Murderers Row: Top 4 in history

Through A Glass Darkly, by John Myers, Internet Photojournalist

A week after the terrorist attacks, we're still trying to understand the magnitude of the events. What can we possibly compare them to, when there has been nothing like this in America's history?

I did a little research to compare America's greatest atrocity to history's greatest atrocities, and this is what I found.

Pearl Harbor, our previous yardstick of American atrocity, had a death toll of 2,390 in the Dec. 7, 1941 attack, but it was mostly military personnel, while last Tuesday's victims were mostly civilians. And it occurred in faraway Hawaii, not in the heart of the American mainland.

We avenged Pearl Harbor with nearly four years of war with Japan, ending when atomic bombs are dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945. At least 100,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the first atomic bombings, but somehow last Tuesday's atrocities seem far worse. I guess it's worse when it happens to your people, rather than the other fellows.

Japan brought the first use of nuclear weapons on itself with its grisly defenses of Iwo Jima (6,825 Americans killed, 22,000 Japanese) and Okinawa (12,250 Americans killed; 109,629 Japanese military, 150,000 Japanese civilians), the first two Japanese home islands we attacked. Had we been forced to invade the main island of Japan, millions more would have died, both American and Japanese, which justified the use of A-bombs.

And consider one of history's forgotten atrocities. In 1937, Japan occupied much of China and took Nanking, longtime capital of China, where Japanese troops killed more than 200,000 civilians. The Rape of Nanking, as that event has come to be called, has to be one of the worst campaigns of civilian casualties of any war. Japan never admitted it or apologized.

But when it comes to a list of the most murderous regimes of history, the Japanese of World War II rank only fourth in notoriety. The Japanese miltarist government, from its invasion of China in 1937 until its destruction by the Americans in 1945, murdered an estimated 5.9 million human beings, apart from war deaths.

In researching this topic, I found the writings of Rudolph Rummel, professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career studying wars, conflicts, and governmental mass murder, for which he has coined the term democide, defined as "death by government," which is the title of a book Rummel has written about his murderous research.

Among Rummel's more startling findings is that the death toll from government mass murder is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying some 8,193 reports of government killing, Rummel estimates that there have been 169 million victims of democide in the last century, as against some 38 million killed in war. Four times as many people have been murdered in cold blood by people working for governments than have died in battle.

Rummel's top three for "death by government" are:

1. Soviet Union: 1917-1987, 61.9 million killed.

"The Soviet Union exemplifies the dictum that government is a mechanism by which depraved people legitimize their depravity. As an all-powerful state, the Soviet government attracted the most depraved people who then unleashed the worst depravity. Joseph Stalin is unique only in surpassing all others in this regard.

"The Soviet death toll - those murdered in cold blood by people working for the Soviet government - exceeds, nearly doubles, the combined total of people killed in all of the 20th century's wars," Rummel says.

2. Communist China: 1949-1987, 38 million killed.

"Since 1950, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans have been killed by the Chinese, In Communist China, 38 million people killed, includes 15.7 million killed in Chinese concentration camps. These totals do not include the 27 million people who starved to death due to Mao's mismanagement of Chinese agriculture in the early 1960s. This was the worst famine in human history, and it was caused entirely, though not deliberately, by politicians," Rummel says.

"The number of deaths in China resulting from coerced abortions and infanticide since 1971 is estimated at over 110 million, making this perhaps the greatest crime in all of history," Rummel adds.

3. Nazi Germany, 1933-1945, 20.9 million killed.

"Overall, by genocide, the killing of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, 'euthanasia,' starvation, exposure, medical experiments, terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from about 15 million to over 31.6 million people, most likely closer to 21 million men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Italians, Poles, Frenchmen, Ukrainians, and so on. Among them were 1 million children under 18 years of age," Rummel says.

"Of all the homicidal governments in history, the Nazi death machine is the best known. The estimated total of 21 million people murdered in cold blood places the Nazis in third place as the most democidal government of the century, behind the Soviets and the Chinese communists. But there are reasons to consider Nazi Germany the worst killer of all. For one thing, while the Soviets murdered for 74 years, and the Chinese communists for nearly as long, the Nazis lasted in power for only 12 years, and for only six years in non-German Europe, where they did the bulk of their killing."--R.J. Rummel, "Death by Government."

(See: www.freedomsnest.com/rumrud.html for more information on R.J. Rummel's works.)

Now, if you've waded through all those gory statistics, do you feel any better about our greatest American atrocity? Neither do I.

Osama bin Laden may not rank up there with Hitler and Mao and Stalin, but he's evil enough to last me for the rest of my lifetime. May we hasten his departure to the lower parts to join his peers.