When are we going to stop citing RJ Rummel?

Hans Hoppe cites Rummel's figures in the early pages of The God that Failed, Joe Sobran cites him in essay Reluctant Anarchist, today Thomas DiLorenzo cites him in a LRC blog post.

Rummel is a clown who pulls numbers from behind his ears. He is to the study of history as English tabloids are to journalism. Reliance on Rummel's fairy-tales is detrimental and makes it appear as if libertarian arguments were weak and needed the backing of distortion and lies to be effective. Rummel's basic problem is that his stuff is irresponsible guesswork. The type of estimates he makes eg on China, the USSR, Yugoslavia (and that is decades ago, before any acess to archives) would be a very bold thing to do even for a specialist which he is not, and some of the stuff he writes makes it obvious he is talking about things he doesn't have a clue about. That leaves his numbers basicaly a produce of his personal politics and suspicions. And seeing that politically he is a disgusting neocon (in the wider sense of the word) these numbers naturally tend toward the hysterical.

I hope we are able to show the state is bad without Rummel's fairy tales of 40 million dead in the gulag (that is twice the number of people that ever experienced the gulag and twenty times the number of documented gulag deaths) and the like. Signing under stuff like that only makes people who recognise that for the nonsense it is wonder about what else we are wrong about.

I can't speak to every specific instance but I think Rummel's figures disagree with the mainstream numbers primarily because he is counting deaths differently. Whereas mainstream historians count only things like deaths due to a policy of genocide or deaths due to political imprisonment, and so on, Rummel counts all deaths that result from government policy even if not directly executed by government agents. For example, he chalks up millions of deaths in the Ukrainian famine under Stalin's name because Stalin's policies were the direct cause of those millions of deaths.

Mainstream historians might recoil in horror at counting millions of Ukrainian starvation deaths in the same column with people who had a bullet put in the back of their skull by the NKVD but I think Rummel is counting correctly, at least, in this instance and some of the others I've read on his website. I can't speak to whether his deaths stats in the Gulag or China are exaggerated or wrong but my understanding of his methodology was to choose "uncontroversial" death tolls; the difference is that he counts deaths that mainstream historians ignore - including deaths of soldiers in supposedly "justified" wars, such as WWI and WWII.

In any case, anti-statism in no way depends on Rummel's numbers. Rummel has simply done us the favor of tallying the body-count without the usual arbitrary definitions that are used to exclude millions and millions of deaths that did, in fact, occur and ought to be counted as the direct result of government policy.

Clayton -

Even taking that into consideration, his numbers are still widely considered to be wildly inflated.

Why one would feel the need for that, seeing as how ONE unjust death is good enough, I don't know.  Maybe it's because people believe what they believe for social reasons, not really because they know what they are talking about.

widely considered

By whom?

Clayton -

Rummel's numbers are probably inflated, but there is an upside to this: if you're arguing with a communist and you cite Rummel, how can they refute it?

"No, 50 million people didn't die in the Soviet Union. It was only something like 10 or 20 million TOPS!" (I added some special Buck Turgidson emphasis.)

LOL, at this from Rummel:

I have changed my estimate for colonial democide from 870,000 to an additional 50,000,000. Details here.

How the heck do you go from 870,000 to 50,870,000? So the first time he was off by a mere 5800%? Instead of one million he now thinks there was one million... times fifty(!) "democide" deaths.

When you are going to make mistakes of that magnitude on a topic, you probably shouldn't be just casually "reevaluating estimates". You should be reevaluating whether you have any business writing books on the topic.

 

Assigning legal causation to someone's death can be a tricky thing even when it's just one person who died yesterday and you have the most extrensive documentary evidence conceivable to bear testimony to the facts.  There is a strong subjective element to it.

Exact figures for mass homicides are always notoriously controversial.  It's often a question of how remote a factual cause of death has to be before it can be considered a legal cause, e.g. did "the government" commit murder, or at least culpable homicide, by imposing communist agricultural policies in Ukraine leading to famine?  Are you implying that the Holodomer was "as bad" as the Holocaust if you count the deaths in a particular fashion?  Is it "as bad" to starve someone to death as it is to shoot them in the head?  Does intent come into it?  If so, whose intent precisely?  The intellectuals who come up with the schemes, or the grunts who enforce them?  If you apply the principle consistently, and count every death that most likely would have been postponed significantly without the presence of a given government policy, where do you stop counting?

I agree with Laotzu, the figures aren't really all that important when you're talking about genocide.  If you're losing count because the pyramid of corpses is too big, don't worry, it's enough to prove whatever point you're trying to make.

For what its worth, my history professor, (here in China) stated that about 90 million were killed (either directly or as a result of failed policy) from 1949 to the early 70s, which is actually 14 million higher than what Rummel has on his site.

Everything that Marko has said raises the question, "how do you know the numbers that you (Marko) have used to contradict Rummel are correct?"

My only real issue with Rummel is his cranky "Democratic Peace Theory" nonsense. He comes across as a weird sort of neoconservative with leftist-humanitarian leanings (which makes sense, given neocons are the redheaded stepchildren of Trotskyites and Lovestonites) who I see getting cited as a libertarian writer.

I don't think Marko needs to supply much in the way of numbers. If a historian is casually changing his numbers by 5000%, then that's a clear sign of that historian being completely full of it.

Anyway, the same argument could apply to any field outside of history. "Everything that Marko has said raises the question, 'how do you know that the numbers contradicting Time Cube are correct?"

Everything that Marko has said raises the question, "how do you know the numbers that you (Marko) have used to contradict Rummel are correct?"

I don't know they are correct. I know a far better case has been made for them than the one Rummel makes for his. In fact I know Rummel can not make any case for a number of his figures. Take a look at this: Democratic Peace Blog. He claims between 1970 and 1982 the Soviet Union murdered 780,000 of its citizens. Just how nuty is this? Do I even have to counter it? Because I doubt any of you buy it. It counters itself. Nobody here has ever heard of it, because nobody has ever claimed this before Rummel. Because it didn't happen.

My only real issue with Rummel is his cranky "Democratic Peace Theory" nonsense. He comes across as a weird sort of neoconservative with leftist-humanitarian leanings (which makes sense, given neocons are the redheaded stepchildren of Trotskyites and Lovestonites) who I see getting cited as a libertarian writer.

He is as despicable an imperialist and warmonger as they get. He is very much cut from the same cloth as the people behind the 'Iraqi troops are throwing babies from incubators' lie and he subscribes to every bit of neocon and liberal interventionist pro-war propaganda of the day, eg on Iran, Iraq, Africa, the Balkans.

This is a pretty big issue when you think about it. Consider this, right now we libertarians are on guard from propaganda coming from the neocons and liberal interventionists and doing a job of uncovering it for what it is. We consult non-libertarian specialists (infinetely better informed on the regions of the world in the sights of the warmongers than the propagandists) or even refute the lies ourselves (eg the crew at antiwar.com). This includes being sceptical of and when necessary refuting commonly wild allegations of number of people killed by this or that chosen villain of the day. (Recall the 250,000 figure for Bosnia and 100,000 for Kosovo, both since debunked.)

Now imagine that 50 or 70 years from now a new RJ Rummel comes around and adds up "the most likely" estimates of victims of all the states, which happen to be precisely all the distorted, pro-war propaganda figures that we fought all this time, but that now we accept, because they make the state look bad. That is what citing RJ Rummel is to me.

Hysterics of warmongers don't cease to be crap after they have aged a few decades and cease to be immediatelly useful for daily politcs. It's still the same old crap you were (or should have been) on guard against, back in the day.

My Buddy:

I don't think Marko needs to supply much in the way of numbers. If a historian is casually changing his numbers by 5000%, then that's a clear sign of that historian being completely full of it.

I don't know why Rummel changed his numbers and I don't recall anyone in this thread saying why he changed them. What if some new evidence was discovered, such as the unearthment of mass graves, and it caused his numbers to change by 5000%; would he still be full of it?

Anyway, the same argument could apply to any field outside of history. "Everything that Marko has said raises the question, 'how do you know that the numbers contradicting Time Cube are correct?"

That's my point.

Marko:

Everything that Marko has said raises the question, "how do you know the numbers that you (Marko) have used to contradict Rummel are correct?"

I don't know they are correct. I know a far better case has been made for them than the one Rummel makes for his. In fact I know Rummel can not make any case for a number of his figures. Take a look at this: Democratic Peace Blog. He claims between 1970 and 1982 the Soviet Union murdered 780,000 of its citizens. Just how nuty is this?

I don't know. I haven't studied how many citizens the Soviet Union murdered between 1970 and 1982.

We don't know why Rummel changed his figure because his link explaining it doesn't work. My guess would be it wasn't about finding new deaths, but about him now blaming certain deaths on the colonial powers that he did not previously blame them for. My guess would also be that he is full of sh** and that he isn't "estimating", instead he is guessing (50 million, come on, that's just about the most round number in the universe) and that isn't the least bit scientific.

Anyhow even if he is now 100% correct it still shows he is enough of a dilettante he had written on a subject he knew nothing about (seeing that he was off by x58).

 

 

I can't speak to every specific instance but I think Rummel's figures disagree with the mainstream numbers primarily because he is counting deaths differently. Whereas mainstream historians count only things like deaths due to a policy of genocide or deaths due to political imprisonment, and so on, Rummel counts all deaths that result from government policy even if not directly executed by government agents. For example, he chalks up millions of deaths in the Ukrainian famine under Stalin's name because Stalin's policies were the direct cause of those millions of deaths.

Mainstream historians might recoil in horror at counting millions of Ukrainian starvation deaths in the same column with people who had a bullet put in the back of their skull by the NKVD but I think Rummel is counting correctly, at least, in this instance and some of the others I've read on his website. I can't speak to whether his deaths stats in the Gulag or China are exaggerated or wrong but my understanding of his methodology was to choose "uncontroversial" death tolls; the difference is that he counts deaths that mainstream historians ignore - including deaths of soldiers in supposedly "justified" wars, such as WWI and WWII.

No, not really. Rummel's Soviet famines figure are fine. His Soviet problem is that instead of these famine deaths accounting for the majority of victims of the Soviet regime, in his "estimates" they represent only a small minority.

I'd say where he differs from mainstream historians is his feeling qualified to speak on any slaughter in any part of the world. Where actual historians have an area of expertise and devote countless effort to just that one part of the world to finally feel confident enough to make a bold pronouncement on it he jumps around spewing out spectacular stuff on all of them.

I know of only one comparable work to Rummel's Death by Government, that being the Black Book of Communism, and that one is a team effort, not a one man show, and it is actually narrower in scope covering only the victims of Communist regimes.

Marko:

[...]

Anyhow even if he is now 100% correct it still shows he is enough of a dilettante he had written on a subject he knew nothing about (seeing that he was off by x58).

Okay. But does the reason for him changing his numbers matter? If not, then I ask again: What if some new evidence was discovered, such as the unearthment of mass graves, and it caused his numbers to change by 5000%; would he still be full of it?

If Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, then would the astronomers be full of it?

 

Exact figures for mass homicides are always notoriously controversial. It's often a question of how remote a factual cause of death has to be before it can be considered a legal cause, e.g. did "the government" commit murder, or at least culpable homicide, by imposing communist agricultural policies in Ukraine leading to famine? Are you implying that the Holodomer was "as bad" as the Holocaust if you count the deaths in a particular fashion? Is it "as bad" to starve someone to death as it is to shoot them in the head? Does intent come into it? If so, whose intent precisely? The intellectuals who come up with the schemes, or the grunts who enforce them? If you apply the principle consistently, and count every death that most likely would have been postponed significantly without the presence of a given government policy, where do you stop counting?

That is true as far as that goes, but Holodomor is a bad example. The fiery debate about the Requisition Famine of 1932/33 is not philosophical, it is historical. It deals with more tangible matters like did the Soviet regime set out consciously to create conditions of famine from the start, once there arose resistance to requisition, or not at all. Was the excessive requisition a consequence of miscalculation, of callousness, or intentional and concieved as an instrument of repression. Was the Soviet regime cracking down on peasants or on Ukrainians. However you answer these questions the people who perished count as victims of Stalin's USSR.

I agree with Laotzu, the figures aren't really all that important when you're talking about genocide. If you're losing count because the pyramid of corpses is too big, don't worry, it's enough to prove whatever point you're trying to make.

That is a very strange statement to make. I would say figures are very important when you are talking about genocide. In fact when you are talking about genocide everything is extremely important, as genocide is a very serious allegation that should never be made lightly. As per the principle that the more serious the allegation the more evidence required, it shouldn't be brought forward except by people with some meticilous research behind them for whom it can be established they know what they are talking about.

How many genocides have there been, ever? You're talking as if they're common. At present I'm certain about one, I wouldn't dare speak of more until I've read more. And no, a pile of corpses doesn't make a genocide. The concept of genocide has its definition and it doesn't inclde a pile of corpses.

That is exactly the problem, the way to have influence isn't by being responsible and having integrity but by being as bombastic as possible. The higher your numbers and the graver the accusation the higher the emotional impact, the greater the pressure on people to proclaim their shock and horror lest they be seen as horrible people, and the greater the chance even the sceptics will conclude that where is smoke there is fire and internalize your acussations albeit at lets say half your figure.

Okay. But does the reason for him changing his numbers matter? If not, then I ask again: What if some new evidence was discovered, such as the unearthment of mass graves, and it caused his numbers to change by 5000%; would he still be full of it?

I don't really know what you want from me.

Yes if new evidence was discovered he needs to change the figure by whatever makes the most sense in the light of current evidence.

And yes he would still be full of it, and it wouldn't be his place to write such a book, even if both his old colonial estimate and his new colonial estimate could be reasonably supported in light of evidence avaliable at that time. (Which we both know isn't the case, at least one of them has to be completely off.) That is because he is a dilettante on more than Africa. I know just enough about the Soviet Union and Communist Yugoslavia to be able to see that Rummel is cluless on them.

I don't know. I haven't studied how many citizens the Soviet Union murdered between 1970 and 1982.

I haven't studied how many citizens the Soviet Union murdered between 1970 and 1982, either. I did study the Soviet Union just enough to be able to say with confidence that if Russia specialists actually wrote about the Soviet Union engaging in mass murder of its citizens through the 1970s I would have run into some of that writing by now. I haven't.

"We don't know why Rummel changed his figure because his link explaining it doesn't work."

How about googling?

In this, Rummel explains that he changed the number so drastically due to the massive number of deaths in colonial Congo (10 millions or more?! ), which were not included in other sources and numbers. He changed his approach and the 50 million number is a guesstimate based on this.

I can't judge his sources or capacity to estimate, but there is the explanation you have been looking for.

(FYI: Apparently he lost access to his old blog and didn't update all his links.)

Yeah, just like the housing bubble would NEVER burst. How do you neocons manage to be wrong 100% of the time??? Shouldn't you get it right by accident sometimes?

Clayton -

The chief thing I see in these countries isn't that they are "democratic" (many of them have political systems that barely resemble each other. Constitutional monarchy versus weak executive versus strong executive, the electoral college versus first past the post versus mixed member proportional representation, federal systems versus centralized systems...), but that they are wealthy. You also omitted the biggest democracy in the world from your list: India. It doesn't look like it's conflict with Pakistan has changed even under the democratic periods of that country. Furthermore, I can name plenty of nondemocratic countries I can scarcely see going to war with each other either (Kazakhstan and Mongolia, China and Thailand, Venezuela and Cuba, Angola and Zimbabwe, Egypt and the Central African Republic).

Also, why is Greece, the cradle of democracy, omitted? Could it be because Germany, which would have been right next to it, might be leading military intervention into Greece in response to the democratic referendum on whether the Greek people wanted to accept European bailout money?

In this, Rummel explains that he changed the number so drastically due to the massive number of deaths in colonial Congo (10 millions or more?! ), which were not included in other sources and numbers. He changed his approach and the 50 million number is a guesstimate based on this.

Thank you for providing the link. It is priceless for my argument.

He read one book. On Congo. And it was enough to force an enormously radical revision for the whole of colonized world. It is not that he found 50 million deaths in Congo. Instead, because he had since read a book on Congo, he now also thinks differently about Mozambique, Chad, Laos... and feels more people must had been killed there than he had figured earlier.

So he could have equally picked up a book on Zambia, Cambodia or Djibouti and learned something about the nature of colonial regimes in that way and it would have made him think differently about Congo and all the rest.

His problem is clearly that he had been unread. When he finally did a thing as radical as to pick up a book and educate himself a little on the stuff he had already writen about himself it was enough to totally destroy his previously given estimate.



The specific book he read was published after he wrote Death by Government, however the death estimate given was not new information. As he makes it clear this information had always been avaliable, only he had been ignorant of it. He provides a list of texts he could have learned of this before writing a book on it:

Now, we have these estimates:

• Britannica, “Congo Free State” claims that the population declined from 20 or 30 million to 8 million.
• A 1904 report by Roger Casement’s estimated that as many as 3 million Congolese died since 1888 (cited in Gilbert’s History of the Twentieth Century; also in Colin Legum, Congo Disaster (1972).
• Peter Forbath (The River Congo (1977) claims that at least 5 million killed.
• John Gunther (Inside Africa (1953) estimates 5-8 million deaths.
• Adam Hochschild (Leopold’s Ghost mentioned above) estimates 10 million, or half the original population from 1885 to 1920.
• Fredric Wertham, A Sign For Cain: A Exploration of Human Violence (1966) estimates that the population of the Congo dropped from 30M to 8.5M, a loss of 21.5 million.

In spite of all these sources, he had of the 870,000 total deaths attributed to colonialism only a tiny fraction — 25,000 — attributed to colonialism in Congo. Despite the fact that Belgian misrule in Congo is common knowledge to have been particularly attrocious (I have heard of this on more than one ocassion though I know virtually nothing about Africa) Rummel had not known about it because it has been "virtually ignored in books on genocide" (apparently he only reads those).

The notion that he inflates some figures does nothing to discount the fact that it is a virtual impossibilty that any of the following higher order democracies will ever engage in conflict:

That is funny seeing that one half of them are engaging in conflict in Afghanistan.

Democratic peace theory is that democracies don't go to wear with each other. Of course, when you point out historical examples of such (Athens, India, the UK, France), they shift the goalposts and No True Scotsman you until all they're left with is "modern Western multiculturalist democracies have not engaged in major conflict with each other since the end of World War II and the development of globalization and nuclear weapons when they were under the hegemony of the US and the USSR who had a policy of mutually assured destruction towards each other".

+1 Praetyre!

Democratic peace theory is based on the fact that higher order liberal democracies do not wage war AGAINST EACH OTHER.

Read what you wrote. You made an incorrect statement, own up to it. If you meant to say something other than what you wrote that is your problem.

Centinel:

What you fail to see is that wealth (and peace) is dependent on freedom guaranteed by liberal democracy.  You can't have sustainable and substantive wealth in the absence of freedom.

I think we are pretty much in agreement on that.

You have not even begun to elucidate exactly how "liberal democracy" guarantees freedom. Apparently all you can do is simply repeat this bare assertion. But you backpedaled from that very bare assertion in the "Negative Rights Restrict Liberty" thread, now didn't you? So tell me, what does "liberal democracy" actually do in your opinion, and how does it do it?

Centinel:

Nobody in the Democratic Peace camp cites India as a higher order liberal democracy.  Again please allow me to determine what constitutes a higher order democracy and I will continue to allow you the perogative of what constitutes a private-property society.

How about you be so kind as to share with the rest of us your determination of what constitutes a "higher-order democracy"? That way we can determine whether it actually makes any sense at all.

Centinel:

Ridiculous strawman.

Yes, but in every single nation-state conflict -- autocracy in no small measure had a large stake in the fighting ! 

The American Civil War involved the chattel slave holding oligarchic South.    Athens and Sparta involved the slave holding Athens that denied women even the most basic rights.

Every single nation-state conflict in human history has involved an autocratic element in one or more of the combatants, bar none.

Your statements leave me with next to no idea of what you mean by "democracy" - "higher-order" or otherwise. What do you see as the necessary connection between voting for rulers (which is typically what's meant by "democracy" these days) and greater freedom/rights?

Centinel:

Of course, within anarchic society there is also conflict, on a smaller scale because anarchic society is fragile and short-lived, but pervasive nonetheless.

There is conflict within anarchic society? Necessarily? I'm still waiting for your proof of this.

Centinel:

Because they  practiced chattel slavery and denied women even the most basic of individual rights.  Again, please allow me to determine what constitutes a higher order democracy and I will continue to allow you the perogative of what constitutes a private-property society.

I see no reason to do that. It's not like you won't make your determination regardless. How about you explain to me what voting has to do with "individual rights". Obviously there have existed governments which allowed "their" citizens to vote and yet practiced chattel slavery and denial of citizenship to women and/or other groups.

Once you actually provide your definition of "(higher-order) democracy", I think your position will be a lot clearer to the rest of us. But I won't hold my breath for that.

Centinel:

Greece is not a higher order democracy (see Freedom House).  However, it is ludicrious  to suggest  that the possibility of war exists between Germany and Greece.

See above.

Centinel:

It is disturbing that ideological blindness [sic] and hatred [sic] prevent virtually all anarcho-capitalists from recognizing and appreciating the efficacy of democratic peace theory.

The only ideological blindness and hatred that I see in this thread is coming from you, buddy.

Again, regarding our recognition and appreciation of "democratic peace theory" - funny that here you call it a "theory" when you've clearly been presenting it as fact - maybe it'll be easier for us to recognize (if not also appreciate) its efficacy when we actually understand what it is.