Stalin By A Nose
Dean
I have said many times that I believe Mao was the greatest mass-murderer of all time. However, professor Rummell, who has made the study of mass murder a major part of his academic career, indicates that I am mistaken, and that it's Stalin who deserves this particular honor, with a body cont of 42.7 million. Mao is a very close second at "only" 37.8 million, with Hitler coming in third at 21 million. Then comes Chiang Kai-shek (10.2 million), Lenin (4 million), and Tojo (4 million).
Poor old Pol Pot doesn't even get a mention. (/sarcasm)
I did find his breakdown of Hitler's body count rather interesting:
He's got references and credentials. I'll take his word for it. The rest of his article is good too. Especially the stuff from Yehuda Bauer.
* Update * It suddenly occurs to me that long-time readers know this about me, but others don't: the study of genocide (or what Rummel probably more accurately calls democide) is a hobby of mine--not because I love it, but because I consider it something people need to know more about. At times when I write about it I suppose I must sound terribly clinical or casual. Just for the record, it's from long exposure to reams of study of it. There are books that have caused me to break down reading them, but you do reach a point where caustic, hollow laughter seems like the only sane response.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Stalin By A Nose
- Remembering Evil
I think this is the only site I've seen the word "democide" used, although the Prof's listing shows it's very much in use in academia; point being that it seems to be relatively new, and hasn't entered general use yet.
So, Mr. Definition Man {g}, what's the difference between genocide, and democide? Now that I'm thinking about it, would genocide (from the root word genos "race/kind") more properly denote extermination of an entire species, as opposed to the extermination of a people?
(Although you could, y'know, ask him, since he does read and respond on his blog. ;-)
"Genocide" does seem tinged with the notion of race. I'd also note that "genocide" has been badly corrupted in recent decades by people who use it to describe cultural domination and other things that have little to do with mass starvation, death camps, and actually, y'know, murdering people.
Have you seen the insipid ad campaign by the Minneapolis Public Library? James Lileks has it here. More here, and a picture of the ad here.
I think Lileks puts it at his cynical best when he says:
Indeed. Sad, really, that most people don't think or realize what monsters these communist dictators were. *sigh*
But really, the question of "worst" is at best academic and at worst pointless. Choosing between the three is like choosing between cancer, AIDS, and Ebola.
Noel
Hitler was by far the greater menace, because his word -- the fiat of an ignorant and willful madman, had been established as absolute law over the entirety of the strongest and most industrialized nation in central Europe.
When this hate-filled madman mobilized the armies of that nation, along with gangs of some of the most murderous thugs in human history, and when he set out to successfully conquer all the independent states of Europe that refused to become his lackeys, and when he turned his thugs loose on what almost became the attempted outright murder of one entire people and the attempted permanent enslavement of other entire peoples, he had to be put down like a dangerous animal that had been infected with rabies.
Had Hitler gotten control of nuclear weapons, they surely would have been used to destroy -- out of spite rather than from military necessity -- great and ancient cities, such as Paris, that he hated out of envy.
Without the vast and rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union -- and especially, the development of that country's military-industrial complex beginning in about 1927, and without the all but unimaginable sacrifices of the great Russian people to defend their own homeland -- their rodina -- regardless of the murderous stupidities of communism, their country would surely have fallen to Hitler's blitzkrieg in 1941 or 1942.
Had Russia fallen, there would have been no grand alliance against the Hitler gang. Because Hitler would have controlled all Eurasia and much of Africa, from the Atlantic coast to the depths of Siberia, and from the North Cape of Norway to central Africa. And in company with imperialist Japan, fascist Italy and a host of satellite states eager to emulate Hitler's 'fuehrerprinzip' in their own societies, the Axis powers would have captured and dominated more all less all resources other than those of the western hemisphere.
Under these circumstances, it is highly doubtful that the United States and whatever would have remained of British power could have negotiated any alliance capable of stopping Hitler, either in the short or long term.
True, with an effort such as the Manhattan project, the United States would inevitably had been able to construct weaponry capable of destroying an entire city with a single bomb. But so too would the Nazi's. No military secrets are long kept sacrosanct.
In any case the armies of the Russian nation, mobilized and hardened by Stalin's leadership, and mostly armed with superior weapons of Russian manufacture, stopped all the German armies; first at the gates of Leningrad in September 1941, then in the forestlands of central Russia around Moscow in October-November 1941, followed up by a massive and successful counterattack against the then-freezing and depopulated German armies around Moscow in December 1941.
In the following year, the now fully-mobilized and well-armed forces of Russia lured the German armies into Stalingrad and the Caucasus. There, they destroyed some 18 large panzer, motorized and infantry divisions of the German Sixth army and a host of Axis satellite divisions. This great victory of epic proportions, in the greatest battle in world history, the Russian armies set in place the coming doom of Hitler and his gang.
The Soviet victory over nazi Germany was further assured by the great tank battle at Kursk in July 1943, and the remainder of the Nazi military power on the eastern front collapsed one year later, with the destruction of the German central army group in eastern Poland and Belarus in the summer of 1944. But there was Berlin still to take, and the Russians paid dearly for that victory, in that they suffered more casualties smashing across eastern Germany in 1945 than the United States suffered in all of World War II.
The allied expeditionary force preparing for war in Great Britain in 1944 could never have gotten ashore in Normandy had the Russian armed forces collapsed under Hitler's invasion of the east.
Nor can I imagine such an attempt would even have been made. For much the same reason that we have entertained no thought whatsoever of invading China since Mao Zedong consolidated power in that country in 1949. Moreover, I think what would have remained of the power of independent western civilization would have made peace with Hitler, and largely under his terms.
So when the Russians for the past 60 years have claimed that the Soviet armies of Josef Stalin saved the world, and irrespective of his vast crimes and those of other great and minor communist leaders, there is great and factual truth in what they have said.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI