“Power kills, absolute Power kills absolutely. This new Power Principle is the message emerging from my previous work on the causes of war and this book on genocide and government mass murder—what I call democide—in this century. The more power a government has, the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects.”

Source: Death by Government (1994), pp. 1-2

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Rudolph Rummel57

American academic 1932–2014

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“The less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. xvi

“The more constrained the power of governments, the more it is diffused, checked and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide. At the extremes of Power, totalitarian communist governments slaughter their people by the tens of millions, while many democracies can barely bring themselves to execute even serial murderers.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. 2

“The evidence on this question is persuasive: the best way of eliminating war between nations, of minimizing domestic political violence, and of virtually making genocide and mass murder a horror of the past, is by fostering political freedom. Politically free nations do not make war on each other, have minimum domestic political violence, and virtually no genocide and mass murder. I call this the miracle that is freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Democide: Rudy Rummel Interviewed” by Alberto Mingardi, The Laissez Faire City Times, August-September 1998 https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/INTERVIEW.ITALY.HTM

“I conclude that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“There are those in America today who have come to depend absolutely on government for their security. And when government fails they seek to rectify that failure in the form of granting government more power. So, as government has failed to control crime and violence with the means given it by the Constitution, they seek to give it more power at the expense of the Constitution. But in doing so, in their willingness to give up their arms in the name of safety, they are really giving up their protection from what has always been the chief source of despotism — government. Lord Acton said power corrupts. Surely then, if this is true, the more power we give the government the more corrupt it will become. And if we give it the power to confiscate our arms we also give up the ultimate means to combat that corrupt power. In doing so we can only assure that we will eventually be totally subject to it. When dictators come to power, the first thing they do is take away the people's weapons. It makes it so much easier for the secret police to operate, it makes it so much easier to force the will of the ruler upon the ruled.”

Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) American politician, 40th president of the United States (in office from 1981 to 1989)

Column published in Guns and Ammo (1 September 1975)
1970s

“Democide is a government’s murder of people for any reason or no reason at all. Genocide is the murder of people because of their race, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or language.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 76

“Governments can be democratic or not, more or less corrupt, but they will still pursue the same basic goals, and they will still be controlled by an elite. Government by its very nature concentrates power and excludes people from making decisions over their own lives.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Source: "The Failure of Nonviolence" (2013) https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-the-failure-of-nonviolence, Chapter 4. The Color Revolutions

“It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking Power, i. e., through fostering democratic freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: Death by Government (1994), p. 27

“People say that knowledge is power. The more knowledge, the more power. Which makes you just about the most powerful person on earth. When it comes to killing people. And then getting away with it.”

Lee Child book Running Blind

Source: Running Blind (2000), Ch. 1.

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