Reddit Reddit reviews Death by Government

We found 15 Reddit comments about Death by Government. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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15 Reddit comments about Death by Government:

u/mentalhibernation · 18 pointsr/Turkey

Arkadaslar kusura bakmayin ama bu postu upvote biraz ilginc.

OP'nin gosterdigi eser akademik bir calisma ve yazari da siyaset bilimci. Yale'de de calismis, cok unlu bir profesor. Kitapta kullandigi butun bilgiler de yine universitelerde uretilmis veya arsivlerden toplanmis bilgiler. Yani kaynak bilimsel bir kaynak.

Su anda mesela nukleer enerji veya gunes enerjisi kullaniyoruz, atomu parcaliyoruz falan ya, bu noktaya nasil geldik sizce? Universitelerde, akademik olarak ve bilimsel yolla uretilmis calismalarla degil mi? Birisi bir sey yaziyor, baskalari okuyor, bunun dogrulu kanitlaniyor ve bilimsel ilerleme yasaniyor.

Heh, bu adamin yazdigi da boyle bir sey iste. Tarihsel bilimsel surecin bir parcasi. Dalga gecebilecegimiz, ahahah sacmalik diyebilecegimiz bir sey degil. Karsisina kendi bilimsel makalelerimizle, arsivsel kanitlarimizla cikabilecegimiz bir sey.

Edit: /u/bokavitch'in de bahsettigi gibi buradaki bilgiler Death by Government isimli bir kitabin yazari olan profesorun resmi sitesinden alinmis durumda. Ancak bilgiler ilk olarak o kitapta basiliyor.

Kitabin amazon linki: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-R-J-Rummel/dp/1560009276
Ucretsiz indirip incelemek isterseniz de bu link var: https://libgen.pw/item/adv/5a1f054a3a044650f50e8e47

u/bokavitch · 16 pointsr/Turkey

THIS

Source OP is ridiculing is the author’s personal website where just he republished statistics from this book online.

If OP even bothered to scroll to the bottom of the page to read the author’s acknowledgements he’d find “In particular I want to thank [...] Guenter Lewy, Heath Lowry”. The guy did his research and incorporated information from the same scholars that are constantly cited in the Turkish government’s official position.

The numbers could still be off, but that’s always the case, even for the best historians. Unless you have a specific argument about why his numbers are off then don’t criticize the source.

This is one of the dumbest posts I’ve seen on this topic. It boils down to OP saying the web design sucks so it’s not a legitimate source without actually doing the most basic work to investigate what the source actually is.

u/combatmedic82 · 12 pointsr/Conservative

Death By Government, written by R.J. Rummel. An exhaustive study of genocides during the 20th century. Enjoy the grim read.

u/avengingturnip · 3 pointsr/EndlessWar

He studied human history and the only variable he could discern was the rise of the state and warfare. He did not notice any other potentially pacifying influences at all. Not any. Not even the birth of the Prince of Peace. Not the Sermon on the Mount or the wholesale embrace of those teachings by the very societies he studied and their conversion away from a pagan view of violence. He did not notice that at all.

u/Zoomerdog · 2 pointsr/AskReddit

[1 edit to add links]
Why on Earth should the hired help (cops, etc.) be armed but not their employers -- the mass of citizens themselves?

Given the long history of mass-murder and war by governments, it is the height of insanity to let a heavily-armed government disarm the people it supposedly works for.

Refs: Death by Government by R. J. Rummel (or see his website, with updated figures showing 262 million murders by government in 20th century, in ADDITION to war) and The Black Book of Communism (100 million murders by Communist governments in the 20th century; see p. 4) -- by a group of left-wing European scholars, not Rush Limbaugh.

u/uncalin · 2 pointsr/Romania

Mda. Aici gasesti un studiu detaliat:

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-R-J-Rummel/dp/1560009276

Desi Anarchisto il considera "propaganda Americana".

u/sloppyjoes7 · 2 pointsr/forwardsfromhitler

Are you asking what "document" proves these deaths? How about:

Rummel, R. J. Death by government. New Brunswick, N.J: Transactions Publishers, 1994. Print.

u/W_Edwards_Deming · 1 pointr/IAmA

Read a book

...

Or click a link.

Either way, please catch a clue.

u/fieryseraph · 1 pointr/Libertarian

Here is a good book on the subject, if you haven't read it yet.

u/empleadoEstatalBot · 1 pointr/vzla
	


	


	


> # Socialism Worked in Venezuela | AIER
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> Political conservatives often deride socialism because, in their words, “it doesn’t work.” By this, they mean socialism doesn’t deliver liberty, prosperity, or peace but, instead, tyranny, poverty, and war. Although the facts certainly support this critique, the logical premise underlying the critique does not. To declare that something works (or not) implicitly assumes a standard of measurement. Which one do conservatives use?
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> Conservatives seem to blithely presume that socialists intend to deliver liberty, prosperity, and peace. But where’s the evidence for that claim, beyond mere self-serving socialist rhetoric and demagoguery? Why assume that socialists seek progress when their many “experiments” over the past century make clear, to anyone aware of the history, that socialist systems repeatedly, ineluctably, and inherently inflict human harm?
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> Even socialist despots now concur with conservatives that socialism doesn’t work. A recent headline reads “Venezuela's President Admits Economy Has Failed.” The despot is Nicolás Maduro, who last month told the Venezuelan congress that “the production models we’ve tried so far have failed, and the responsibility is ours, mine and yours.” Maduro is an avowed socialist in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela.
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> No mystery there. Since his election in 2013, Maduro has accelerated the socialization of that once-rich nation, causing a severe economic contraction, capital flight, refugees, worsening poverty, hyperinflation, shortages, rising mortality rates, malnutrition, and starvation. For many years prior, Maduro was a minister in the socialist regime of his predecessor and hero, the late Hugo Chávez, who initiated the latest socialization without apology. Venezuelans elected Chávez four times between 1999 and 2012.
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> Neither Chávez nor Maduro presented himself as anything other than socialist. They knew what they were aiming at, and voters knew what they were getting. The ultimate details may have differed, but the basic results were generally expected. Why should they regret the results? Did someone expect instead to get liberty, prosperity, and peace? Did some prefer capitalism but could find no political party to represent their wish? Perhaps the voters were duped because Chávez and Maduro promised public ownership of the means of production and a redistribution of wealth. The first occurred; the second didn’t. But isn’t that always the way with socialism? As Jack Nicholson put it to his evading, lying client in the movie Chinatown (1974), “There’s no time to be shocked by the truth.”
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> “Redistribution” is but a euphemism for legalized grand larceny; you don’t create wealth by stealing it, any more than you multiply it by dividing it. Moreover, don’t the means of production include not only machines but people — that is, laborers? When human capital is publicly owned, it’s akin to slavery. Why today would it remain a mystery, to any people anywhere, that government ownership of people is inhumane?
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> As mentioned, the historical facts support the conservative critique of socialism. That socialist systems have impoverished and killed more than 100 million people over the past 100 years is a matter of established historical record. The gruesome evidence through the end of the 20th century, which is indisputable, is compiled in R.J. Rummel’s Death by Government (1994) and in The Black Book of Communism (1999).
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> Socialists are anxious to insist, of course, that none of the horrors of socialism have been due to socialism, that true socialism has yet to be tried, and that it’s only coincidental that “socialist” appears as part of the names United Socialist Party (PSUV) in Venezuela, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in Russia, National Socialist (Nazi) Workers’ Party in Germany, and Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the latest fad group for some of the young. These were irrelevant cases of mistaken identity, claim socialists, who add that real socialism now exists in the Nordic countries, even though those countries have no significant public ownership of the means of production. Socialists are unashamedly contradictory when claiming that the USSR wasn’t socialist, but Denmark is.
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> In addition to implicitly complimenting socialists by assuming they want liberty, prosperity, and peace, conservatives also try to educate socialists about the principles of sound economics to show how private property, sound money, a free price system, and the profit motive ensure economic success, while communal ownership, fiat money, price controls, and punitive taxation necessarily bring economic ruin. It’s all quite true, of course. But what if socialists already know this stuff and don’t care? What if they recognize sound economics but evade it because they have other priorities? Suppose they agree with their hero Karl Marx, who wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) that capitalism is a vital, energetic, productive engine, yet morally evil because it is so egoistic, individualist, and rights-obsessed? Perhaps demagogues and despots keep promising socialism, and victims keep accepting it, because both consider it to be moral, even though destructive.
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> In their critiques of socialism and interventionism, conservatives also like to cite the law of unintended consequences, which says the well-laid plans and policies of political-economic leaders often yield the precise opposite results of what’s intended. Likewise, the common cliché says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Again, notice the underlying (but unproven) premise: the intentions are good.
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> Is this always true? When Maduro concedes that his models have failed, in the sense that they’ve destroyed Venezuela’s economy, does it make him less socialist? Might his constituents now become pro-capitalist? Does he consider the possibility that capitalism’s underlying ethic is moral after all, while that of socialism is larcenous, unjust, and punitive? Unlikely. Socialists are crazy like a fox. That is, they know their intended prey (capital) and they’ll do whatever it takes to seek it out, take it, kill it, and eat it, with nary a thought about the future.
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> Of course, one should never argue by impugning, without evidence, an opponent’s inner motives or intentions. But sometimes aims and goals are named explicitly. Even when not, it seems perfectly fair to conclude that whenever certain ideologues keep pushing for a social-political-economic system that invariably proves disastrous, they probably prefer disaster. Nihilists exist, after all. Many conservatives simply assume that they know the socialists’ motives, and without much evidence, presume that they’re benevolent.
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> Conservatives seem unaware that socialists don’t expect their system to work in the sense of creating liberty, prosperity, and peace. First and foremost, they expect it to work to seize the means of production, human capital included. Then they expect it to entail, in their own words, a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” They expect it’ll destroy liberty and prosperity. In this sense, history demonstrates unequivocally that socialism works wonderfully.
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> That destruction was Marx’s main aim is clear from his Manifesto of the Communist Party. The hoped-for anti-capitalist revolution, he wrote, would be a “radical rupture of traditional property relations,” for it first would “raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy,” and then, with its “political supremacy,” the rulers would “wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie,” an act that “cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” That was “unavoidable.” The takeover would occur “by means of measures which appear economically insufficient and untenable.”
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> Marx was right to concede that socialism is “economically untenable.” It’s only the flip-side to his equally true concession that capitalism is productive. What he knew, socialists have known for years. In fact, socialism is worse than untenable. It’s destructive and inhumane. Conservatives should know that socialists know of their own destructive intent and should oppose them, instead of implicitly praising them.
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u/assorted_flavors · 1 pointr/ShitLiberalsSay

Have someone read "Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900" by R. Hummel

https://www.amazon.com/Death-Government-Genocide-Murder-Since/dp/1560009276

There's probably a PDF out there somewhere also

u/cassander · 1 pointr/history

For the communist death toll? The generally cited figure of 100 million comes from the Black Book of Communism. Other estimates are even higher. The commonly cited figure for the Holocaust is 12 million.

u/Amsacrine · 1 pointr/AskThe_Donald

>I think the lesson to learned from the Chinese and Soviet famines is less about redistributing wealth and more about how we're all one wave of farm failures away from mass starvation

A great point. But I fundamentally disagree.

We do live in a limited resource world. I would argue that socialized system not only naturally breaks the system of incentives which drive a market (in this case a farming market), but it's also easily weaponized to intentionally do that - and to murder people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

This was intentional. There's no denying at all, with any historical knowledge, that the soviets intended to kill these people, rape, and take all material possessions from them.

Now, I would concede that later on, the soviets made mistakes which exacerbated other situations where people starved, but that has more to do with the way that socialism functions.

This has to do with the bell curve, the normal distribution. In any given system, and this is a rough average, but it holds pretty stable and true, that 10% of the people involved in that system produce about 50% of the goods.

So if you have a 1000 farmers, 100 of them produce 50% of the grain. If you have 100,000 farmers, 1000 of them produce 50% of the grain. This is really easily observable in statistics like these: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/45-of-americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax-2016-02-24

When you introduce forced redistribution into these systems, it significantly reduces the overall production of the system. Well, if you are one of the people doing a lion's share of innovation, or work, labor, or investment into a given system, and you're suddenly told that bob who produces almost nothing compared to you will now be receiving the same pay as you, you will stop being incentivized to maintain that same level of production.

And what that means, is that now the redistributionist policy doesn't work anymore.

Because this whole idea was predicated on the following: Hey, look at this capitalist system. In theory, if we redistribute everything evenly, we will have enough for everyone, and that is fair. We should do that.

Except people aren't always the same. They dont have the same values, they dont work the same, there's variation.

So now, we introduce this redistribution of product. But now, since we're not capitalistic, we're no longer producing enough to go around.

And now, people starve to death.

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To restate this, lets say it takes a minimum of 2lbs of grain per person, per day to survive. We have 100 people. We need 200 lbs of grain a day so that no one starves.

We take a look at our capitalist system, and we produce 300 lbs of grain a day overall. Ok, lets forcefully redistribute it.

Now, after we forcibly take people's personal property away from them, often kill the people who best know how to produce grain, and then pay everyone the same for farming that grain....we end up with 90 people (we killed ten of them and took their wine).

So now we need 180 lbs of grain a day to survive. But now, since we got rid of the 10 people who produced 50% of the grain, we only have a production of 150 lbs of grain a day, overall.

It doesn't matter how evenly we redistribute this now, we're screwed.

And in addition, in most of these socialist cases, the lions share was also sent to party members, making the problem even worse.

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>he common denominator between these and the Soviet/Chinese isn't socialist ideology(hardly), it's a heavy handed elite trying to squeeze the peasantry dry even while they were starving.

A communist perspective, through and through. It's the oppressor, vs the oppressed. Not all starvation was caused by communism, that would be absurd. And i'm not even saying that capitalist systems DONT do what you are saying they do, where an elite act in a manner where it's an elite trying to squeeze the peasantry , maybe even kill them too:

For instance, here's a writeup I just happened to do on the causes of the Irish potato famine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskThe_Donald/comments/7wle75/why_is_the_term_politically_incorrect_only_ever/du1w3x4/


What I am absolutely willing to claim is that whenever you have a socialist or communist system, death follows inevitably. It has happened, or is happening, in every single instance in which the communist system has been tried. And often, it's much more than just lowering production and causing starvation, but the totalitarianism which always occurs leads to purges and genocides in nearly every observable case.

It's not just the soviets, or the chinese. Here, since it's handy:

Here you go, citations, in low end to high end death estimates!

Communists/Socialists in the USSR Killed between 3.5 million to 60 million people

Communists/Socialists in China killed between 18 to 40 million people

Communists/Socialists in Cambodia killed between 1.1 million to 3.8 million people

Communists/Socialists in Bulgaria killed at least 31,000 people

Communists/Socialists in North Korea killed between 500,000 to 3.5 million people

Communists/Socialists in East Germany killed between 80,000 to 100,000 people

Communists/Socialists in Romania killed between 30,000 and 450,000 people

Communists/Socialists in Cuba killed between 17,000 and 65,000 people

Communists/Socialists in various African countries killed between 120,000 and 1.7 million people

Communists/Socialists in Yugoslavia killed between 150,000 to 1 million people

Communists/Socialists in Afganistan killed between 750,000 to 1.5 million people

And we're seeing the cycle repeat in real time now, as political dissidents against socialism (among other prisoners) are being left to stave to death in Venezuelan prisons.

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Edit: TLDR: Non redistributionist capitalism is by no means perfect, but it's the best system we have at the moment, and whenever we try socialism or communism, tens of millions of people die, and that's immoral, so please stop advocating for it.

u/SnowflakeMod · 0 pointsr/worldnews

>My God, your only proving my point even further.

Lol, are you really bad at math? 10,000<10,000,000. I can see that you are not going to be honest.

>My fucking God damn your old. Do you still think we're in the Cold War or something?

I am old. I am actually a retiree but, most importantly, I am not stupid. This thread has been about US actions from 1941 to 1991, which essentially corresponds to the Cold War. Are you incapable of reading the thread, or are you just here to pump out anti-American bullshit?

>Where the fuck did you hear that Russia has helped subvert China.

It's called history. Do they not teach it in your country? Bolshevik-modeled and supported subversion of China, culminating in Mao's murderous reign, with tens of millions starved, tortured and murdered, just as they had been in previous decades in Russia. Russian training, Russian support, Russian recognition of Chinese territorial claims, same result: millions of innocent people dead.

>The only reason Russia has the the illusion of power on the world stage is Putin...

You misspelled nuclear weapons.

>he is a expert chess player and is phenomenal at statecraft.

Is he better at chess than running a country? I would not call blowing up an apartment building, killing 293 innocent Russians to accelerate his consolidation of power phenomenal, just typical of Russian autocrats.

>Now on to the "torturing and murdering of tens of millions of people" Russia may or may not have done this (and I would be surprised if they did) but considering how you talk about geopolitics, I doubt you have any evidence for this (but please do share it with us).

You should be so ashamed for lying so much. I know that your parents would be. Gulag has come to mean the Russian repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat-grinder": the arrests, the interrogations, the transport in unheated cattle cars, the forced labor, the destruction of families, the years spent in exile, the early and unnecessary deaths. 7 to 10 million Ukrainians starved and murdered. This is why Ukraine is currently trying to fight off a Russian invasion. You are so profoundly ignorant of the world that I no longer know what to say. You need to do a lot of reading about the world. There are plenty of thorough books that describe the horrific torture, murder and starvation of about 60 million innocent Russians throughout the 20th century. It's not like Russia ever stops torturing and murdering innocent people. You need decades of catching up to understand the world today. As it is, you are not even paying attention to what I've written.

Edit: spel badd