Democide

by Jason Stotts

There is nothing more dangerous to a citizenry than its government.  Whether with “good intentions” or simply a lust for power, governments, particularly communist and socialist governments, kill their own citizens at an astounding rate. R. J. Rummel, Professor Emeritus at the Univerisity of Hawaii, says that:

The bubonic plague that in 1347-1353 depopulated Europe has horrified historians and surely all those who have read about it. Death. Death everywhere. Cities and towns devastated. Whole families of several generations gone. About 25,000,000 people perished.

Yet, we have had a different kind of plague in the last century, one over four times more deadly, and historians shy away from writing about it. Indeed, most contemporaries did not even know it was occurring, for the media and politicians that were not affected by it, tended to ignore it. It was a Red Plague [socialism]. A plague of democide. [Link]

As one example of this, Rummel points to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and notes that:

The Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all time, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these (I know you’ve read the toll as 20,000,000, but it was only for the 1930s and has been mistaken applied to Stalin’s full and bloody reign 1928-1953). Most of the Soviet deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto.

Compare the moderate estimate of 61,000,000 deaths in the USSR (there is evidence it may be as high as 126,891,000) to the “Black Death” that wiped out Europe, at only 25,000,000 deaths.  Really, the “Red Death,” and here I mean socialism and not tuberculosis, is much more deadly than the black one.

As we usher in socialism in the United States, I think we should consider what happens when the government has unlimited control over our lives and becomes, not our servant, but our master.