Rudolph Rummel Quotes

The more libertarian a state, the significantly less internal violence it has, and the significantly and predictably (in variance terms) lower its possible peak violence.

The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the war between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars occur. Free people do not make war on each other.

What is the democratic peace? In the literature on or referring to the democratic peace, this means the idea or fact that democracies do not (or virtually never) make war on each other.

Libertarian states have no violence between themselves. The more libertarian two states, the less their mutual violence. The more libertarian a state, the less its foreign violence.

There is a good reason that all of this killing is unknown. The authoritarian and totalitarian thug regimes that do most of the killing usually control who writes their histories and what appears in them.

The less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.

Then there is the common and fundamental justification of government that it exists to protect citizens against the anarchic jungle that would otherwise threaten their lives and property. Such archaic or sterile views show no appreciation of democide’s existence and all its related horrors and suffering. They are inconsistent with a regime that stands astride society like a gang of thugs over hikers they have captured in the woods, robbing all, raping some, torturing others for fun, murdering those they don’t like, and terrorizing the rest into servile obedience. This exact characterization of many past and present governments, such as Idi Amin’s Uganda, hardly squares with conventional political science.

Recall that democratic regimes in an exchange society are at one corner of the political triangle while totalitarian regimes with the coercive society they have constructed are at another. They therefore are at opposing ends of one side of the triangle, which is a continuum ranging from Freedom to Power.

Free people never have famine.

Our century is noted for its bloody wars. WW1 saw 9 million people killed in battle, an incredible record that was surpassed within a few decades by the 15 million battle deaths of WW2. Even the numbers killed in 20th century revolutions and civil wars have set historical records. In total, about 35,654,000 people have died in this century’s international and domestic wars, revolutions, and violent conflicts. Yet, even more unbelievable than these vast numbers killed in war is a shocking fact. The number of people killed by totalitarian or extreme authoritarian governments already exceeds that for all wars, civil and international. Indeed, this number already approximates the number that might be killed in a nuclear war.

Democracy is a metasolution to the problem of diversity.

I conclude that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.

Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war.

Freedom produces wealth and prosperity.

Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and this book on genocide and government mass murder—what I call democide—in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.