Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command… - Rudolph Rummel

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Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo- and megamurders of our century, and we must not hide their identity under the abstraction of the ‘state,’ ‘regime,’ ‘government,’ or ‘communist.’

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About Rudolph Rummel

Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014) was professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination. Rummel coined the term “democide” for murder by government (compare genocide), such as the Stalinist purges and Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

Also Known As

Alternative Names: Rudolph Joseph Rummel R. J. Rummel Rummel's law

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Additional quotes by Rudolph Rummel

Most of the world's people have been robbed of their freedom by tyrants… In the last century alone, 272,000,000 were shot, burned, stabbed, tortured, beaten, starved to death, blasted to death, buried alive, or whatever other ways of murdering their slaves these thugs could imagine. This horrific and evil toll of bodies could head-to-toe circle the earth more than ten times. It is as though a catastrophic nuclear war had happened, but its mountain of deaths spread over each day of the last century

Libertarian states are by theory not only less violence prone, but when foreign relations includes the perception of other libertarian states, this inhibition becomes a mutual barrier to violence. Their mutual domestic diversity and pluralism, their free and competitive press, their people-to-people and elite-to-elite bonds and relationships, and their mutual identification and sympathy will foreclose on any expectation or occurrence of war between them; violence may occur only in the most extraordinary and unusual circumstances, or at the margins of what it means to be libertarian.

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