Suchergebnisse

chapter 1 Introduction -- part Part I: The Most Important Fact of Our Time -- chapter Introduction to Part I -- chapter 2 No War between Democracies -- chapter 3 Democracy Limits Bilateral Violence -- chapter 4 Democracies are Least Warlike -- chapter 5 Democracies are Most Internally Peaceful -- chapter 6 Democracies Don't Murder Their Citizens -- part Part II: Why are Democracies Nonviolent? -- chapter Introduction to Part II -- chapter 7 A New Fact? -- chapter 8 What is to be Explained? -- chapter 9 First-Level Explanation: The People's Will -- chapter 10 Second-Level Explanation: Cross-Pressures, Exchange Culture, and In-Group Perception -- chapter 11 Third-Level Explanation I: Social Field and Freedom -- chapter 12 Third-Level Explanation II: Antifield and Power -- chapter 13 Power Kills.

"Except for Soviet citizens, no people in this century have endured so much mass killing as have the Chinese. They have been murdered by rebels conniving with their own rulers, and then, after the defeat in war of the imperial dynasty, by soldiers of other lands. They have been killed by warlords who ruled one part of China or another. They have been executed by Nationalists or Communists because they had the wrong beliefs or attitudes or were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In China's Bloody Century, R.J. Rummel's careful estimate of the total number of killings exceeds 5 million. How do we explain such killings, crossing ideological bounds and political conditions? According to Rummel, the one constant factor in all the Chinese mass murder, as it was in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, is arbitrary power. It was the factor that united warlords, Nationalists, Communists, and foreign armies. The author argues that whenever such undisciplined power is centralized and unchecked, the possibility exists that it will be used at the whim of dictators to kill for their own ends, whether the aim is ethnic-racial purity, national unity, development, or utopia. The book presents successive periods in modern Chinese history, with each chapter divided into three parts. Rummel first relates the history of the period within which the nature and the amount of killings are presented. He then provides a detailed statistical table giving the basic estimates with their sources and qualifications. The final part offers an appendix that explains and elaborates the statistical computations and estimates. While estimates are available in the literature on the number of Chinese killed in Communist land reform, or in Tibet, or by the Nationalists in one military campaign or another, until this book no one has tried to systematically accumulate, organize, add up, and analyze these diverse killings for all of China's governments in this century. For"--Provided by publisher.

"While there are estimates of the number of people killed by Soviet authorities during particular episodes or campaigns, until now, no one has tried to calculate the complete human toll of Soviet genocides and mass murders since the revolution of 1917. Here, R. J. Rummel lists and analyzes hundreds of published estimates, presenting them in the historical context in which they occurred. His shocking conclusion is that, conservatively calculated, 61,911,000 people were systematically killed by the Communist regime from 1917 to 1987.Rummel divides the published estimates on which he bases his conclusions into eight historical periods, such as the Civil War, collectivization, and World War II. The estimates are further divided into agents of death, such as terrorism, deportations, and famine. Using statistical principles developed from more than 25 years of Quantitative research on nations, he analyzes the estimates. In the collectivization period, for example, about 11,440,000 people were murdered. During World War II, while the Soviet Union had lost almost 20,000,000 in the war, the Party was killing even more of its citizens and foreigners-probably an additional 13,053,000. For each period, he defines, counts, and totals the sources of death. He shows that Soviet forced labor camps were the major engine of death, probably killing 39,464,000 prisoners overall.To give meaning and depth to these figures, Rummel compares them to the death toll from'major wars, world disasters, global genocide, deaths from cancer and other diseases, and the like. In these and other ways, Rummel goes well beyond the bare bones of statistical analysis and tries to provide understanding of this incredible toll of human lives. Why were these people killed' What was the political and social context' How can we understand it' These and other questions are addressed in a compelling historical narrative.This definitive book will be of interest to Soviet experts, those inte"--Provided by publisher.

The clear consensus in the literature is that democracies are no less or more warlike than other types of regimes. But when the core studies upon which this consensus is based are looked at closely, they imply in fact that democracies are less warlike. Regardless of this, these studies, as well as most others on this question, are based on a frequency count of wars, which gives the same count of one for a nation that lost a few dozen killed and for another that lost several million. It is argued that a better theoretical interpretation of a regime's warlikeness is in terms of the severity of war, and that in these terms the degree to which a regime is democratic is inversely correlated with the severity of its wars, 1900-87. A survey of the published research further substantiates that democracies tend to fight less severe wars than other regimes.

From 1900 to 1987, state, quasi-state, and stateless groups have killed in democide (genocide, massacres, extrajudicial executions, and the like) nearly 170,000,000 people. Case studies and quantitative analysis show that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity, economic development, levels of education, and cultural differences do not account for this killing. Rather, democide is best explained by the degree to which a regime is empowered along a democratic to totalitarian dimension and, second, the extent to which it is characteristically involved in war or rebellion. Combining these results with those that show that democracies do not make war on each other, the more democratic two nations are the less foreign violence between them, and that the more democratic a regime the less internal violence, strongly suggests that democracy is a general method of nonviolence.