Hans Hoppe cites Rummel’s figures in the early pages of The God that Failed, Joe Sobran cites him in essay Reluctant Anarchist, today Thomas DiLorenzo cites him in a LRC blog post.
Rummel is a clown who pulls numbers from behind his ears. He is to the study of history as English tabloids are to journalism. Reliance on Rummel’s fairy-tales is detrimental and makes it appear as if libertarian arguments were weak and needed the backing of distortion and lies to be effective. Rummel’s basic problem is that his stuff is irresponsible guesswork. The type of estimates he makes eg on China, the USSR, Yugoslavia (and that is decades ago, before any acess to archives) would be a very bold thing to do even for a specialist which he is not, and some of the stuff he writes makes it obvious he is talking about things he doesn’t have a clue about. That leaves his numbers basicaly a produce of his personal politics and suspicions. And seeing that politically he is a disgusting neocon (in the wider sense of the word) these numbers naturally tend toward the hysterical.
I hope we are able to show the state is bad without Rummel’s fairy tales of 40 million dead in the gulag (that is twice the number of people that ever experienced the gulag and twenty times the number of documented gulag deaths) and the like. Signing under stuff like that only makes people who recognise that for the nonsense it is wonder about what else we are wrong about.
I can’t speak to every specific instance but I think Rummel’s figures disagree with the mainstream numbers primarily because he is counting deaths differently. Whereas mainstream historians count only things like deaths due to a policy of genocide or deaths due to political imprisonment, and so on, Rummel counts all deaths that result from government policy even if not directly executed by government agents. For example, he chalks up millions of deaths in the Ukrainian famine under Stalin’s name because Stalin’s policies were the direct cause of those millions of deaths.
Mainstream historians might recoil in horror at counting millions of Ukrainian starvation deaths in the same column with people who had a bullet put in the back of their skull by the NKVD but I think Rummel is counting correctly, at least, in this instance and some of the others I’ve read on his website. I can’t speak to whether his deaths stats in the Gulag or China are exaggerated or wrong but my understanding of his methodology was to choose “uncontroversial” death tolls; the difference is that he counts deaths that mainstream historians ignore - including deaths of soldiers in supposedly “justified” wars, such as WWI and WWII.
In any case, anti-statism in no way depends on Rummel’s numbers. Rummel has simply done us the favor of tallying the body-count without the usual arbitrary definitions that are used to exclude millions and millions of deaths that did, in fact, occur and ought to be counted as the direct result of government policy.
Even taking that into consideration, his numbers are still widely considered to be wildly inflated.
Why one would feel the need for that, seeing as how ONE unjust death is good enough, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because people believe what they believe for social reasons, not really because they know what they are talking about.
Rummel’s numbers are probably inflated, but there is an upside to this: if you’re arguing with a communist and you cite Rummel, how can they refute it?
“No, 50 million people didn’t die in the Soviet Union. It was only something like 10 or 20 million TOPS!” (I added some special Buck Turgidson emphasis.)
How the heck do you go from 870,000 to 50,870,000? So the first time he was off by a mere 5800%? Instead of one million he now thinks there was one million… times fifty(!) “democide” deaths.
When you are going to make mistakes of that magnitude on a topic, you probably shouldn’t be just casually “reevaluating estimates”. You should be reevaluating whether you have any business writing books on the topic.
Assigning legal causation to someone’s death can be a tricky thing even when it’s just one person who died yesterday and you have the most extrensive documentary evidence conceivable to bear testimony to the facts. There is a strong subjective element to it.
Exact figures for mass homicides are always notoriously controversial. It’s often a question of how remote a factual cause of death has to be before it can be considered a legal cause, e.g. did “the government” commit murder, or at least culpable homicide, by imposing communist agricultural policies in Ukraine leading to famine? Are you implying that the Holodomer was “as bad” as the Holocaust if you count the deaths in a particular fashion? Is it “as bad” to starve someone to death as it is to shoot them in the head? Does intent come into it? If so, whose intent precisely? The intellectuals who come up with the schemes, or the grunts who enforce them? If you apply the principle consistently, and count every death that most likely would have been postponed significantly without the presence of a given government policy, where do you stop counting?
I agree with Laotzu, the figures aren’t really all that important when you’re talking about genocide. If you’re losing count because the pyramid of corpses is too big, don’t worry, it’s enough to prove whatever point you’re trying to make.
For what its worth, my history professor, (here in China) stated that about 90 million were killed (either directly or as a result of failed policy) from 1949 to the early 70s, which is actually 14 million higher than what Rummel has on his site.
My only real issue with Rummel is his cranky “Democratic Peace Theory” nonsense. He comes across as a weird sort of neoconservative with leftist-humanitarian leanings (which makes sense, given neocons are the redheaded stepchildren of Trotskyites and Lovestonites) who I see getting cited as a libertarian writer.
I don’t think Marko needs to supply much in the way of numbers. If a historian is casually changing his numbers by 5000%, then that’s a clear sign of that historian being completely full of it.
Anyway, the same argument could apply to any field outside of history. “Everything that Marko has said raises the question, 'how do you know that the numbers contradicting Time Cube are correct?”
I don’t know they are correct. I know a far better case has been made for them than the one Rummel makes for his. In fact I know Rummel can not make any case for a number of his figures. Take a look at this: Democratic Peace Blog. He claims between 1970 and 1982 the Soviet Union murdered 780,000 of its citizens. Just how nuty is this? Do I even have to counter it? Because I doubt any of you buy it. It counters itself. Nobody here has ever heard of it, because nobody has ever claimed this before Rummel. Because it didn’t happen.
He is as despicable an imperialist and warmonger as they get. He is very much cut from the same cloth as the people behind the ‘Iraqi troops are throwing babies from incubators’ lie and he subscribes to every bit of neocon and liberal interventionist pro-war propaganda of the day, eg on Iran, Iraq, Africa, the Balkans.
This is a pretty big issue when you think about it. Consider this, right now we libertarians are on guard from propaganda coming from the neocons and liberal interventionists and doing a job of uncovering it for what it is. We consult non-libertarian specialists (infinetely better informed on the regions of the world in the sights of the warmongers than the propagandists) or even refute the lies ourselves (eg the crew at antiwar.com). This includes being sceptical of and when necessary refuting commonly wild allegations of number of people killed by this or that chosen villain of the day. (Recall the 250,000 figure for Bosnia and 100,000 for Kosovo, both since debunked.)
Now imagine that 50 or 70 years from now a new RJ Rummel comes around and adds up “the most likely” estimates of victims of all the states, which happen to be precisely all the distorted, pro-war propaganda figures that we fought all this time, but that now we accept, because they make the state look bad. That is what citing RJ Rummel is to me.
Hysterics of warmongers don’t cease to be crap after they have aged a few decades and cease to be immediatelly useful for daily politcs. It’s still the same old crap you were (or should have been) on guard against, back in the day.
I don’t know why Rummel changed his numbers and I don’t recall anyone in this thread saying why he changed them. What if some new evidence was discovered, such as the unearthment of mass graves, and it caused his numbers to change by 5000%; would he still be full of it?
We don’t know why Rummel changed his figure because his link explaining it doesn’t work. My guess would be it wasn’t about finding new deaths, but about him now blaming certain deaths on the colonial powers that he did not previously blame them for. My guess would also be that he is full of sh** and that he isn’t “estimating”, instead he is guessing (50 million, come on, that’s just about the most round number in the universe) and that isn’t the least bit scientific.
Anyhow even if he is now 100% correct it still shows he is enough of a dilettante he had written on a subject he knew nothing about (seeing that he was off by x58).
No, not really. Rummel’s Soviet famines figure are fine. His Soviet problem is that instead of these famine deaths accounting for the majority of victims of the Soviet regime, in his “estimates” they represent only a small minority.
I’d say where he differs from mainstream historians is his feeling qualified to speak on any slaughter in any part of the world. Where actual historians have an area of expertise and devote countless effort to just that one part of the world to finally feel confident enough to make a bold pronouncement on it he jumps around spewing out spectacular stuff on all of them.
I know of only one comparable work to Rummel’s Death by Government, that being the Black Book of Communism, and that one is a team effort, not a one man show, and it is actually narrower in scope covering only the victims of Communist regimes.
Okay. But does the reason for him changing his numbers matter? If not, then I ask again: What if some new evidence was discovered, such as the unearthment of mass graves, and it caused his numbers to change by 5000%; would he still be full of it?
If Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, then would the astronomers be full of it?
That is true as far as that goes, but Holodomor is a bad example. The fiery debate about the Requisition Famine of 1932/33 is not philosophical, it is historical. It deals with more tangible matters like did the Soviet regime set out consciously to create conditions of famine from the start, once there arose resistance to requisition, or not at all. Was the excessive requisition a consequence of miscalculation, of callousness, or intentional and concieved as an instrument of repression. Was the Soviet regime cracking down on peasants or on Ukrainians. However you answer these questions the people who perished count as victims of Stalin’s USSR.
That is a very strange statement to make. I would say figures are very important when you are talking about genocide. In fact when you are talking about genocide everything is extremely important, as genocide is a very serious allegation that should never be made lightly. As per the principle that the more serious the allegation the more evidence required, it shouldn’t be brought forward except by people with some meticilous research behind them for whom it can be established they know what they are talking about.
How many genocides have there been, ever? You’re talking as if they’re common. At present I’m certain about one, I wouldn’t dare speak of more until I’ve read more. And no, a pile of corpses doesn’t make a genocide. The concept of genocide has its definition and it doesn’t inclde a pile of corpses.
That is exactly the problem, the way to have influence isn’t by being responsible and having integrity but by being as bombastic as possible. The higher your numbers and the graver the accusation the higher the emotional impact, the greater the pressure on people to proclaim their shock and horror lest they be seen as horrible people, and the greater the chance even the sceptics will conclude that where is smoke there is fire and internalize your acussations albeit at lets say half your figure.
Yes if new evidence was discovered he needs to change the figure by whatever makes the most sense in the light of current evidence.
And yes he would still be full of it, and it wouldn’t be his place to write such a book, even if both his old colonial estimate and his new colonial estimate could be reasonably supported in light of evidence avaliable at that time. (Which we both know isn’t the case, at least one of them has to be completely off.) That is because he is a dilettante on more than Africa. I know just enough about the Soviet Union and Communist Yugoslavia to be able to see that Rummel is cluless on them.
