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Søren Roest Korsgaard
This is an except from another book I have written that I may publish in late 2026. Subscribe to stay updated.
Wherever you are in the world, chances are that the territory you inhabit falls under the jurisdiction of a government. This raises an important question: What is the purpose of government? According to standard, mainstream sociology textbooks, its primary functions are to maintain order, provide security, and promote welfare. So, if it really does serve the public, let’s examine its track record of compassion, peace, and benevolence, beginning with the work of Dr. Rudolph Rummel (1932-2014), a political scientist who specialized in the concept of democide, or murder by government.
Rummel defined democide as the intentional killing of unarmed or disarmed individuals by state agents acting in their official capacity and pursuant to government policy or directives from high command. Acts that meet this definition range from direct killings, such as shootings and indiscriminate bombings of urban areas, to deaths resulting from knowingly reckless actions or depraved disregard for life.
As documents were unsealed and evidence came to light, Rummel continually updated his statistics on the human cost of government [1]. In his 2007 book, The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War, he presented his final calculation: governments murdered 272 million people in the 20th century. He cautioned, however, that this was his low-end estimate and that the actual number could be significantly higher, possibly reaching “over 400,000,000” [2]. Extensive analysis led Rummel to conclude that the cause was unbridled government power, which he famously summarized as “Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely” [3].
To grasp the scale of democide in the 20th century, if the 272 million corpses, each measuring 170 cm, were lined up from head to toe, they would circle the Earth 11.6 times. If they stood on top of each other, they would reach the Moon and then circle it 7.1 times! Assuming an average of 5 liters of blood per person, all of their blood would be enough to fill 540 Olympic swimming pools.
In many publications, Rummel argued that democracy paved the way for peace and respect for human rights, and he insisted that democracy was a “method of nonviolence” [4]. Yet, he also advocated destabilizing the North Korean government through assassination and military force—even if it would kill a million people—in order to democratize the country [5]. He also vehemently supported the foreign policy of President George W. Bush, arguing that he was committed to promoting freedom and ending democide and war. But trusting politicians is never a good idea, as investigative journalist Charles Lewis revealed in his 2014 book: 935 Lies: The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity, which documented that the Bush administration told 935 lies and falsehoods about Iraq between September 11, 2001, and March 2003 [6].
In November 2004, Rummel’s support for Bush’s so-called “democratic peace foreign policy” ran into a major problem when a peer-reviewed study in theLancet estimated that the US-led invasion of Iraq had caused 100,000 deaths and that women and children were disproportionately represented among those killed by the invading forces [7-10]. The study, led by Dr. Les Roberts, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, compared mortality in the 14.6 months before the war began with the first 17.8 months of the war. Although a shocking estimate, Roberts et al. actually underestimated the number of deaths by excluding data from the city of Fallujah—a statistical outlier showing an exceptionally high number of violent deaths as a result of the Americans leveling the city.
Two years later, a follow-up study by Dr. Gilbert Burnham and coworkers was published in the Lancet. Based on data from nearly 2,000 households, they estimated that the war-related atrocities had “continued to escalate” to a total of 654,965 deaths by July 2006 [11]. This was equivalent to 2.5% of the Iraqi population. Since then, other epidemiological studies have followed, and while their findings have varied, the inescapable conclusion is that the invasion caused an enormous number of deaths [12-13].
Fearing that the two Lancet studies would impede public support for further military aggression, the war criminals and their supporters—even Rummel—launched fraudulent efforts to undermine them. The Burnham study in particular infuriated them. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” Bush grunted on October 11, 2006 [14]. Five days later, Christopher Hitchens, a “distinguished” British and American author and journalist, published a smear piece accusing the Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Richard Horton, of being a “full-throated speaker at rallies of the Islamist-Leftist alliance that makes up the British Stop the War Coalition” [15]. In an obscene attempt to redefine morality and justify mass murder, he postulated that the war machine had actually saved a lot of people from being murdered because the “murderers were killed first” [15]. When conclusive evidence later emerged that the official story was built on lies and falsehoods, he did not lose a wink of sleep or retract a word, and he continued to defend the invasion until his death in 2011.
Hitchens’ support for the Iraq War and the democide that ensued stands in contrast to his fierce criticism of all religious beliefs. Pointing to an assortment of horrors committed in the name of religion, he placed himself on a moral pedestal and proclaimed that his belief system, atheism, was superior to all others and would put an end to much suffering. But while Hitchens dismissed all deities on the one hand, he bowed down to the most savage of all gods on the other: government, which he worshiped with all his heart, all his mind, and all his soul.
In response to the demonization, a group of epidemiologists and medical professionals issued an unequivocal statement affirming that the Burnham study was “sound and its conclusions should be taken seriously” [16]. The methodology was robust, well-established, and the standard for determining mortality in conflict. Curiously, they pointed out, similar studies from different conflicts had faced no criticism.
While the governments complicit in the Iraq War cranked up their PR machines when the Lancet studies were published, they funded and promoted the Iraq Body Count (IBC) project, which relied on a flawed methodology that primarily recorded casualties mentioned in the mainstream media, such as ABC News and the New York Times [17-21]. Thereby, the IBC project understated the number of deaths and softened the public’s perception of the war.
Although Rudolph Rummel was a leading authority on democide, he failed to recognize that major military aggressions are preceded by a barrage of propaganda designed to frame murder as liberation and plunder as economic development. Hence, to disguise its neo-colonial aims, the Bush administration christened the invasion “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The truth, however, has a way of getting out. Four years into the war, Federal Reserve Chairman Dr. Alan Greenspan spilled the beans in his memoir, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: The Iraq War is largely about oil” [22].
While democide is one measure of government failure, another is avoidable mortality—a concept extensively studied by Dr. Gideon Polya, an Australian scientist. Avoidable mortality is defined as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the expected deaths. Simply put, it refers to preventable deaths. This metric can be seen as an approximate measure of how well governments have fulfilled their duties and stated objectives.
In his magnum opus, Body Count: Global Avoidable Mortality Since 1950, Dr. Polya derived the total number of avoidable deaths across all countries from 1950 to 2005 [23]. The final tally: 1.3 billion deaths, of which 1.2 billion occurred in the non-European world. Contrary to Rummel’s claims about democracy, he found that the US, UK, France, and Portugal, among other First World countries, were largely responsible for this loss of life due to colonial occupation, neo-colonial control, militarization, economic exclusion, economic constraint, international war, and others.
Our brief excursion into the bloody history of government shows that it has a very bad humanitarian track record, especially in the context of mediating conflicts and upholding the most basic right: the inalienable right to life. With good reason, we should be skeptical of government.
References
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[2]. Rudolph Rummel. The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (Cumberland House Publishing 2007).
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