The American government in the past has intentionally killed people different to the system who fought back but were disarmed, will America have a redo of the late 19th century.
Whatever, there is no need to know the actual number that government has killed to see that it has been truly a cold-blooded, mass murderer, a global plague of man's own making. While diseases may have killed more people in a shorter time, perhaps 25,000,000 died from the Black Plague in Europe from 1348 to 1349,134 government committed, encouraged, or permitted murder has been a continuing year-by-year scourge up to and through, as we will see, the twentieth century.
Not even considered here is the human cost of war, another way governments are an agency of death. For the years 1740 to 1897 there were reportedly 230 international and revolutionary wars; and according to one count these killed 20,154,000 people.135 If with more tolerance for gross estimation we accept the calculations of those killed in all international wars since 30 B.C., we get the 40,457,000 dead shown in Table 3.1.136 This is less than a third of the overall democide just that we have been able to estimate. There should be little doubt that while pre-twentieth century war has been of the greatest historical interest and drama, governments have killed many times more people in cold-blood than they have in the heat of battle. As noted in "20th Century Democide", this is even true of our century. In any case, government--particularly nondemocratic governments--clearly should come with a warning label: "this power may be a danger to your life and limb."
The question for my book Death By Government is not whether such killing has continued into the twentieth century, which no informed reader would deny. Rather the question is about the form this killing has taken and its toll. In answering this I want to be as precise as possible about the numbers. And the better data available for our century should help to answer the what and particularly the why of such awful destruction of human life.
PRE-20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER
Whatever, there is no need to know the actual number that government has killed to see that it has been truly a cold-blooded, mass murderer, a global plague of man's own making. While diseases may have killed more people in a shorter time, perhaps 25,000,000 died from the Black Plague in Europe from 1348 to 1349,134 government committed, encouraged, or permitted murder has been a continuing year-by-year scourge up to and through, as we will see, the twentieth century.
Not even considered here is the human cost of war, another way governments are an agency of death. For the years 1740 to 1897 there were reportedly 230 international and revolutionary wars; and according to one count these killed 20,154,000 people.135 If with more tolerance for gross estimation we accept the calculations of those killed in all international wars since 30 B.C., we get the 40,457,000 dead shown in Table 3.1.136 This is less than a third of the overall democide just that we have been able to estimate. There should be little doubt that while pre-twentieth century war has been of the greatest historical interest and drama, governments have killed many times more people in cold-blood than they have in the heat of battle. As noted in "20th Century Democide", this is even true of our century. In any case, government--particularly nondemocratic governments--clearly should come with a warning label: "this power may be a danger to your life and limb."
The question for my book Death By Government is not whether such killing has continued into the twentieth century, which no informed reader would deny. Rather the question is about the form this killing has taken and its toll. In answering this I want to be as precise as possible about the numbers. And the better data available for our century should help to answer the what and particularly the why of such awful destruction of human life.
PRE-20TH CENTURY GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER
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