Убийства, санкционированные государством: Демоцид в XX веке.

Government sanctioned killing

Democide refers to "the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command." The term was first coined by Holocaust historian and statistics expert, R. J. Rummel in his book Death by Government, but has also been described as a better term than genocide to refer to certain types of mass killings, by renowned Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer. According to Rummel, this definition covers a wide range of deaths, including forced labor and concentration camp victims, extrajudicial summary killings, and mass deaths due to governmental acts of criminal omission and neglect, such as in deliberate famines like the Holodomor, as well as killings by de facto governments, for example, killings during a civil war.

In his estimates, Rudolph Rummel relied mostly on historical accounts, an approach that rarely provides accuracy compared with contemporary academic opinion. In the case of Mexican democide, Rummel wrote that while "these figures amount to little more than informed guesses", he thought "there is enough evidence to at least indict these authoritarian regimes for megamurder." According to Rummel, his research showed that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war. After studying over 8,000 reports of government caused deaths, Rummel estimated that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle. One of his main findings was that democracies have much less democide than authoritarian regimes. Rummel argued that "concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth." Rummel's estimates, especially about Communist democide, typically included a wide range and cannot be considered determinative. Rummel responded that the 20 million estimate is based on a figure from Robert Conquest's The Great Terror and that Conquest's qualifier "almost certainly too low" is usually forgotten. For Rummell, Conquest's calculations excluded camp deaths before 1936 and after 1950, executions (1939–1953), the forced population transfer in the Soviet Union (1939–1953), the deportation within the Soviet Union of minorities (1941–1944), and those the Soviet Red Army and Cheka (the secret police) executed throughout Eastern Europe after their conquest during the 1944–1945 period. Moreover, the Holodomor that killed 5 million in 1932–1934 (according to Rummel) is also not included. According to Rummel, forced labor, executions, and concentration camps were responsible for over one million deaths in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from 1948 to 1987. After decades of research in the state archives, most scholars say that Stalin's regime killed between 6 and 9 million, which is considerably less than originally thought, while Nazi Germany killed at least 11 million, which is in line with previous estimates.

In response to David Stannard's figures about what he terms "the American Holocaust", Rummel estimated that over the centuries of European colonization about 2 million to 15 million American indigenous people were victims of democide, excluding military battles and unintentional deaths in Rummel's definition. Rummel wrote that "[e]ven if these figures are remotely true, then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history." Rummel stated that his estimate for those killed by colonialism is 50,000,000 persons in the 20th century; this was revised upwards from his initial estimate of 815,000 dead.