Power, Genocide and Mass Murder

Abstract

1. Keeping Books on Barbarism Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely. This is the conclusion of the research to be reported here. First, however, some preliminary comments are necessary. Democide that is, genocide and mass murder is the most serious threat to humankind in our century. This is a report of research that began in 1986. All cases were covered, whether by state regimes, quasi states (such as the White army controlled territories during the Russian civil war), or groups. The statistics involved such obvious cases as the Jewish Holocaust and the Armenian genocide by the Young Turk regime of Turkey, the Soviet gulag, and Iraq's gassing of their Kurds, to less known cases, such as forced labor deaths in European colonies or the working to death of indebted labor on Mexican haciendas in the early part of this century. Indeed, I attempted to document and estimate any cases in which a regime or self-governing group intentionally killed an unarmed person or was responsible for their death in a way that would normally be categorized as murder, such as machinegunning of prisoners of war or the deaths of inmates from deprivation and hard labor in gulag. Some preliminary comments on the statistics to be presented may help to evaluate them and avoid misunderstanding. First, they are based on almost 8200 estimates of war, domestic violence, genocide, mass murder, and other relevant data, recorded from over a thousand sources. Over 4200 consolidations and calculations were then done on these estimates and all were organized into appendix tables totaling more than 18,100 rows. These give the subject of an estimate (such as of the number of communists and sympathizers killed by the Indonesian Army and affiliates), the estimate (450,000-500,000 killed), the period covered (October 1965 to 1966?), the source (Crouch, 1978, p. 155, n. 52), and notes on the estimate (from Admiral Sudoma, head of Kopkamtib). All this together comprised one estimate and one row in a published or forthcoming table of estimates (Rummel, 1995). The consolidations of estimates for a particular case, subject, or period also were given, as well as were the calculations on the estimates. The intent was to be as explicit and public as possible so that others can evaluate, correct, and build on this work. Here, I am simply summarizing the more important results of these calculations. Second, since estimates of democide are very uncertain1 and often propagandistic, I generally calculated a low to high range of probable democide, the low being the sum of lowest estimates across events for a regime and the high being a similar sum.2 In this way I tried to bracket the most probable figure, which I then judged or calculated based on the central thrust, objectivity, and quality of the estimates. However, many of the following figures will seem so precise as to belie this cautious approach. The reason for this apparent precision lies in the method by which they were determined, which often involved calculations on dozens and sometimes hundreds of estimates. The democide I give here for, say, Cambodia, was then the outcome of all these calculations, including polynomial regressions

Keywords

Affiliated Institutions

• University of Hawaii System US

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