Indeed, Dean, Dr. Rummel's website is fascinating. I first came across his book "Death by Government" years ago. He's done some fascinating work that is remarkably low on ideology and high on mind-numbing fact. His contribution to the vocabulary, with "Democide" is useful as well.

My personal favorite site on such things is Matthew White's, as I've probably said before.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm

He has some interesting comments on Rummel. He thinks Rummel is basically a good, thorough researcher, but he also thinks Rummel has a slight tendency toward cherry-picking numbers and redefining terms to fit his theories:

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm#n.4

White's own perspective seems to be more or less Democratic Party centrist-liberal, but he's fair to generally sane perspectives across the board, and unstintingly anti-tyrant as well. His page on the sad question of whether Hitler, Mao or Stalin killed more people is priceless.

And what would the link to that page be, Matt?

Uh... let's see...

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/tyrants.htm

(His answer: It depends on how you count, and it's appalling that there are three such splendid candidates for greatest monster of the century.)

Dr. Rummel's website is indeed full of lots well attributed information, I will be churning through some of it for a while.

I'll have to check out the Matthew White urls provided too.

Interestingly, I recently exchanged some email with Rudolph Rummel, and he says of Matthew White that "he makes some errors/mistakes in referring to my statistics. I tried several ways to contact him, but, as you may know, he has removed all contact information (apparently the email questions he received were too much). Nonetheless, I have often made use of his stats that don't conflict with my own."

I'm going to try to get more info on this.