ePub Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans; Moral Sentiment; and Political Culture in the Early Republic by John Resch in History

Description

This is R. J. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder; or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results; in tables and figures; as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide; those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government; Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself; but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent.Rummel discusses genocide in China; Nazi Germany; Japan; Cambodia; Turkey; Yugoslavia; Poland; the Soviet Union; and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea; Mexico; and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have; the greater the violence; the more freedom; the less the violence. Thus; as Rummel says; "The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom."Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples; the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War; the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution; and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians; political scientists; and scholars interested in the study of genocide.