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There is no mention of the genocide in East Timor
The "Significant 20th century democides" paragraph is based on a corruption of Rudolph J. Rummels concept of democide.
The main part of the article on democide is criticism, not a neutral presentation.
Rummel may have coined the term 'democide', but it got the universal value -- what means, that it may be used regardless of the validity of Rummel's numbers. After all, it describes _a type of event_, which may be applied to any such event, whether taken into account by Rummel or not. It's beyond any debate, that there are the governmental and non-govermental crimes against humanity, including the crimes against large groups of people, that are well-documented (eg. by international organisations as Amnesty International). I agree that the crimes should be documented as reliably as possible (don't expect me to discuss this matter, though; Polish penal law has provisions against those who 'publicly and against the facts' deny the crimes committed by the nazi, fascist and commmunist regimes, or other regimes, and it seems to be fiercely enforced, also against some scientists (ever heard of Ratajczak's or Bender's case ? The mere mentioning by the first one of the holucaust revisionists' views, and lacking of comment about them, was a cause for criminal charges, which (as I remember) he was finally cleared of; nevertheless, I don't feel free eg. to discuss the validity of data about Stalin's crimes, Pol Pot's crimes, Ottoman soldiers' crimes against Armenians, etc). Let the discussion about the aforementioned validity not influence the debate about the term as such, which is simply useful to describe the kind of crime that didn't have its name previously (as killing whole groups of people for their political beliefs). [Critto]
As an old fellow and a strong supporter of the Wikipedia project, I would condemn any actions that would harm the project. However, as a responsible wikipedian, I find myself commissioned to discuss this topic. It is very easy to write on disputable facts based on falsified documents, faked pictures and exaggerated figures that would only distort history and the definition of genocide. This kind of authorship can give harm to the essence of Wikipedia project. Wikipedians should be very careful about not including the questionable subjects as sheer and undiscussible facts and should also not forget that this is not an area of discussion and debate. This is the very reason that I do not simply change or delete these statements (about Young Turks) and instead try discussing them.
It should not be forgotten that Armenian genocide is still a historical hypothesis that is dominantly advertised by the Armenian diaspora and is still pending for reliable proofs. There are scholars working on this issue all over the world and some accept the existence of a possible genocide, while some do not. Both sides have reliable and emotional proofs for their own beliefs. The supporters of the Armenian genocide are showing the pictures of the burried remnants of Armenian people killed by Ottoman soldiers, whereas the supporters of the other side is showing the pictures of Turkish people, who were killed by Armenian soldiers. It is not fair to base such a disputable issue by just showing one single reference. I can find lots of debateful articles in Britannica about Turkey or Turkish people and I can also give other references which do not support the existence of a genocide.
http://azerbaycan.hypermart.net/tragedy.htm
http://azerbaycan.hypermart.net/testimony.htm
I will not copy and paste these references because of the copyright restrictions.
What I understand from the discussions about this issue is shortly as follows: The ethnic struggles between Turkish and Armenian communities began about two centuries ago. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, Russia and Great Britain provoked one of the main ethnic groups of the Ottoman State, the Armenians to uprise in the eastern parts of the Empire. First sporadic clashes were seen between the Turkish and Armenian settlements. When the Russian army began to invade Eastern Anatolia in World War I, the Armenian gangs with the helps of Russian army, started systematic attacks against Ottoman troops and their civilian Turkish citizens. The same gangs are also accused of cutting the supply lines of the Ottoman army, which was fighting with the invading Russian forces. Under these circumstances, the Ottoman Government decided to relocate the Armenians to the other provinces in the Empire. The reason for that was to prevent the fights between Turkish and Armenian communities and cut the support extended by the Armenian towns to the Russians. During the period of this enforced delocation, hostilities between two communities and famine heavily affected the Armenian people. The policy of enforced delocation was a routine application for Ottoman Empire and it had been applied to a variety of communities including Turkish people. Young Turks were guilty for not protecting their citizens duely and also by applying this primitive and ancient policy. However, not only Armenians but many other Ottoman citizens suffered from these treatments throughout centuries and Ottoman governments never seem to carry any intention of giving end to an entire ethnicity. By contrast, it is possible to see many Armenian people in the highest ranks of the Ottoman hierarchy (ministers, architects etc). Any researchers working on Young Turks can easily agree that these people never carried ideologies related with the termination of any community. Indeed, the fact that the same events did not affect tens of thousands of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, living in Istanbul (then the capital of Ottoman Empire) is the strongest evidence why this incident can not be labeled as ?genocide?. It is also worth mentioning that in the time frame subject to those claims, an Armenian, Noradounghian Efendi, served as the Ottoman Foreign Minister. Moreover, it has been stated in some official records (see references) that when the British forces (who had complete control over all Ottoman official records) occupied Istanbul after World War I, they admitted that they could not find any evidence of an organized genocide against Armenians.
I do not say that I know what the truth is but I just want to draw attention to the other side of this discussion and to remind that we must be very careful when we are writing such sensitive and debateful articles that could easily be abused for political reasons. I do not find myself authorized to change this article, since I am not an expert of this subject. I believe that we must be very careful about these statements for some mentally sick people could more easily find reasons for their aggressive actions and it should not be forgotten that many innocent people were already killed by such people in this context.
SJK draws attention to the decisions of several parliaments of different countries. I wrote about my concerns in the Talk section why these decisions should not be accepted as real proofs and why we should not base our articles on such decisions. I believe with all my heart that the sinful secrets of history should be uncovered for the welfare and goodness of future generations. But I also believe that this should be done with a sense of equality and justice. This would be much more fair for the souls of Turkish people, who seem to have died or killed in similar conditions as Armenian people. [ErdemTuzun]
Mainstream academia believes that it was a Genocide. Live with it.
(I'm so not even touching the argument above...) I've restored the "democide" link as an article unto itself. A google search turned up over 4000 instances of the word, including its use in the Journal of International Affairs (and not in reference to Rummel). I feel that is enough to warrant the treatment of the term by Wikipedia. Not incidentally, it also provides a place to put certain allegations of democide/mass murder - though as alway, we will have to be careful to phrase some of these as "Group A claims..." -- April
I have no problem with the article being here. One advantage to Wiki is the ability to include even the most obscure and fringe ideas. There are literally 1000s of "Journals of International Affairs". Every major university has one. I doubt many (if any) have included the term in reference to anyone or anything. The hit you likely got was the Australian Journal of International Affairs, but that's another matter. A google search with 4000 instances of the word means nothing. You'll get more today. Rummel's days as a credible political scientist whose work was respectable and meaningful ended long ago. Most of those google hits are meaningless google seeding and google bombing. Surely you've heard of that. It's perfectly fine that his ideas are given exposition here. But to treat them as being peer reviewed or given any credibility or weight outside the fever swamps of his own mind, or those of his equally deluded proponents, is ludicrous. This is fringe nonsense. It's not mainstream or pariculary insightful, useful or important in any way. It's merely propaganda.
Wikkid Won 10:43, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to have to challenge the neutrality and usefulness of this article. The definition of democide given is mass murder of persons by a government or its agents. From the numbers given it is clear that the author considers all casualties in a war to be victims of democide, which makes all war murder. Arguable but not NPOV. It's also not clear when democide is different from genocide, or whether democide includes genocide.
If the definition of democide includes war casualties the opening paragraph should say so, and it might then be better to reref to the relevant war page to get the casualty figures. If not then the figures should be revised, and it should be made clear who the victims are in each example.
Personally I think the word democide is barely differentiated from genocide in common usage. Our definition of genocide includes killings of political groups, so only a few mass killings would be considered democide rather than genocide. The article should concentrate on those rather than try to cover the whole spectrum of death.
What do people think? DJ Clayworth 16:00, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
No it does not. SS soldiers killed in action by Allied soldiers in World War II, while their associates murdered inmates of concentration camps is not the same thing. If the word is to have any useful meaning it should only include those who are murdered by the state (with possible recless endangerment as a braketed addition) and the figures through out should be adjusted accordingly. If that is not done then the word becomes so defuse as to be usless. Philip Baird Shearer 22:20, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have deleted the paragraph about Chomsky's allegations about Afghanistan and replaced it with something less tendentious. It seems odd to illustrate the meaning of the word democide by picking an "example" which is at best debateable and at worst completely fictitious. If people want to make claims for or against Chomsky's allegations they can do so at the appropriate page. Adam 09:38, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I read again the democide article, and it should be stated, that Germans weren't victims of democide after WW2. There were few massacres committed by Red Army, there were bombing and torpedoing evacuation ships and trains, accidental revange. Probably also hunger deaths. The fantastic number 2 100 000 is out of the question for total number of victims. But democide requires the active government to organise the crime. Seaman 10:15, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Cautious 09:00, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC) Again give me the answer for the questions given by Seamen: when it has occured? what really happenned? Who died? Who was involved? Cautious 09:00, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)
After deletion discussion: OK, stay, on condition that some NPOV comments are included. Somebody can open the article and be terrified by huge number of people allegedly killed, while this is mostly playing with statistical numbers. Cautious 12:58, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
One example from
[1]
Rummel states in row 304 that the pre war population of the former German
provinces was 6500/9000/10000 thousand people low/middle/high
Evacuation row 321 4000//5000 with 618 dead
Remaining population was row 317 100/617/1134
Found in W.Germany row 346 6000/6944/7400
Crude deficit of population he estimated in 319 meaning rows 307-317
6400/8383/8866
How he could calculate that number? My understanding that the proper caluclation is:
pre-war population of 9000 with error margin 2500
remaining 617 with error margin 517
gross deficit is 8383 with error margin 3017
So his number is obviously guesswork.
Another Rummel calculation:
Now he drops his numbers and use another set:
All kinds of migration to Germany row 338 7017/7144/8369
Then he substracts those who reached Germany row 346 again 6000/6944/7400
Deficit according to him is row 349 200/969/1017
I would calculate 7144 with error margin 1225
minus 6944 with error margin 944 and
the result is obviously 200 with error margin 2169!
His number is obviuosly wrong!
In addition it is not clear wether he included the Jews killed during holocaust / I would reserve at least 100 000 killed, Poles and other minorities sent to concentration camps 100 000 is also good estimate /soldiers killed in action at least 500 000 / victims of bombing of the cities I don|t know how many/ his number of victims of evacuation 618 000/ deported to USSR around 200 000 and so on.
By the way, according to Polish sources Polish citizenship was granted to around 1 500 000 former Germans, not 200 000 Rummel claims, and it is obviuosly true, since the emigration of ethnic Germans from Poland continued since 1945. I read recently, that in 1980/ties emigrated 1 000 000 of people on the status of ethnic Germans.
I am going to remove Rummel numbers, since they are obviously not relaible
Cautious 21:07, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I voted to keep this article, but I strongly object to bunching together victims and perpetrators. E.g. the number for WW2 (51 Million) includes the Nazis, the Allies, the victims of the Holocaust... all clumped together. That's immoral. These numbers must be broken, IMHO. -- Humus sapiens 09:28, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The "A victim is a victim" argument is immoral. Just as (I hope) you wouldn't count victims of terror attacks together with deaths from natural causes, those numbers are worse than useless. Let the reader judge who's right or wrong but don't lump them together. I am not against including a URL of that site, but for the WP this list has to either vastly improve or simply go. I propose to reuse/reorganize the list from Genocide to either satisfy both articles (as it already does, kind of) or split between the two. Sorry I don't have time to do this right now. -- Humus sapiens 23:55, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Government induced famine isn't a method of execution? Even when the perpertrators even have been known to comment that this was exactly what they were doing, a purge of the population as a whole?
MSTCrow 23:02, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
__ (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;__
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Besides, Polish penal code includes (c) as means of committing crime against humanity. Art. 118 states it clearly
"118. 1. Who, in order to destroy the specified national, ethnic, racial, political, religious-based or world's outlook-based group, commits killing or causes the serious harm to the health of the person who is a member of such group, is liable to the penalty of deprivation of liberty not shorter than 12 years, the penalty of 25 years deprivation of liberty or the deprivation of liberty for life
2. Who, to achieve the goal (described) in 118.1, brings upon the persons belonging to such group the life conditions which threaten its biological extinction, applies the means to stop births within the group or forcibly takes the children of such group from the persons belonging to it, is liable to the penalty of deprivation of liberty (5-25 years)."
(translation was amateur, and my own)
You may find the code in Polish here: www.kodeks.wirt.pl
Removed from article:
Someone who has read his work can sort this out, but we can't say he did and didn't explicitly exclude war deaths. — Tkinias 07:41, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
From the external references in the article:
I think we can say that he does explicitly exclude war deaths which occure within the laws of war.
He satates above War related killing by military forces that international agreements and treaties directly or by implication prohibit is democide, whether the parties are signatories or not. The directives under which the RAF and the USAAF operated did not target civilians, the specific ones they were operating under in 1945 specifed Oil, direct war industries and comminications. Dreseden was assessed as a priary target under communications, and war industries. Further International Review of the Red Cross no 323, p.347-363 The Law of Air Warfare (1998) states:
There is far more detail on all this in the article Bombing of Dresden in World War II. I am removing the reference to the Bombing of Dresden in the article. Philip Baird Shearer 19:35, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
Where is your evidence for this? The section Reasons for the attack in the Bombing of Dresden article does not list the targeting of the civilian population as a reason for the attack. -- Philip Baird Shearer 09:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Ultramarine 'corrected' Warlord China from 6,800,000 to 800,000. Was this a mistake, or is there some reason for doing so? If Warlord China is to be downgraded to 800,000 then it must be removed from the list altogether, since it is supposed to be of democides of 1 million or greater. Osgoodelawyer 16:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
The total is, I would assume, not going to add up, since it was probably of the original list not the countless edits. Also, the paragraph above about the explulsion of Germans after WWII doesn't seem to be relevant, since the list doesn't, in fact, include such an event. Osgoodelawyer 16:12, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I think that changes that user:Ultramarine has made, particularly to the lists is to be commended. I had downloaded the PDF pages from the web to scan them into ASII intending to replace the previous list but Ultramarine has beaten me too it. But it had been my intention to sort and combing them in a slightly novel way to get around copyright problems For example "20th century democides causing more than one million deaths" could be sorted alphabetically. AFAICT the lists in their current from are a copyright violation. What do others think? -- Philip Baird Shearer 19:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I have sorted them in a "novel" way. The C20th and dictators alphabetically. The other by end of domicide and a secondary sort by start of democide. But to re-inforce this, the tables need to be updated with R.J. Rummel's newer research, like his addition of the Congo to the C20th. This would alter two of the table and reduce the claim that the lists are a copyright violation. -- Philip Baird Shearer 13:28, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
The current article has in the introduction
See the policy WP:V: Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed. If the above can not be sourced then the sentence should be removed. BTW Google searches are of no use in proving or disproving this, as that would be original research, it must be a paper from a source not connected with Rummel -- Philip Baird Shearer 23:23, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
Hello. I'm not a heavy editor, and this is the first time I've come across what I would consider a very questionable entry.
By no means am I an expert in the fields of sociology or mass murder, but stumbling upon this entry vexes me. Here are some of my concerns:
This brings me to
Which leads me to
Again, I think the point is missed. In order to justify the term it cannot be a simple synonym, or else it's really and manifestly absurd. Were I to try to steal credit for Moby-Dick or the toaster I would alter things slightly, then charge hard for credit. In both cases- quoted or not- the case for the term's relevance is extremely weak. And I did, yesterday, read through his site and published papers. Again, this only paints him as a fringe character like a David Irving or Lyndon LaRouche.
For example, colonialism's horrors- save for the Congo- are almost entirely absent. Where are the millions killed under British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and German rule outside the Americas? Again, like the lowballing of Native and African Americans, this smacks of an agenda, and apologism for America is rife on his site, as are his dubious theories on democracy and war. And it's generally accepted that Genghis Khan alone, in the less than two decades of his conquests, amassed a minimum of 20m dead. the largest pre-20th C. killer. In the four centuries afterward (only 2 of which are mentioned) his progeny were no less bloodthirsty, so the overall Mongol figure is likely lowballed. His figurs for Native American dead also seem predicated on pre-1980 estimates of pre-Columbian population. It was thought then not even a million people were in the New World, where we now know several million lived in modern Mexico alone, and that the Mississipian cultures accounted for at least a million souls. Estimates range from 15-20m minimum to three-four times that.
That all said, it just seems like he's trying to ride others' coattails, and claim credit for a term that is superfluous, for genocide does, indeed, include, in common usage, political opponents, elsewise Mao and Stalin would not be listed in all genocide totals. It seems that you are merely offering apologiae, not a logical defense of the term, much less the political implications of the philosophies behind them, which, again, border on LaRouchian territory.
But, my gripe is not with his theories, but with the sort of blatantly asterisky way a fringe figure is seeking legitimacy for others' work- which preceded it, and seems much stronger. That, and the fact that all this information is available on his entry and the genocide one. NormalGoddess 22:16, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
I am going to put a disputed notice on this article. This article relies very heavily on RJ Rummel's figures and I don't believe he is a reliable source. Rummel is a hard rightwinger whose figures for communist democide are far higher than those commonly accepted by other sources, while his figures for Western democide are ridiculously low.
For example, he claims that US democide in Vietnam amounts to just 6,000 civilians! That's right, the US "murdered" only 6,000 civilians in Vietnam, in spite of dropping more ordnance on the country than was dropped in the whole of World War II combined.
By contrast, the NV government itself estimates that more than 2 million Vietnamese civilians died in the war, together with 1.1 million VC/NVA soldiers. Other sources put the civilian death toll even higher. And these figures of course, do not include Laos and Cambodia in which it is commonly estimated that US bombing killed 600,000 respectively. Rummel's figures by contrast are 60,000 for Cambodia (ten times less than the commonly quoted figure) and 0 for Laos! That's right, apparently US bombing killed nobody in Laos in spite of entire cities being obliterated by US bombing and the survivors forced to live in caves.
I must say I'm suprised there isn't more criticism of Rummel's work on the net. However I did find the following:
Rummel's conclusions have been criticized the lack of definite correlation. He neglects current conflicts between Israel and Palestine as well as India and Pakistan, all of which are democratic nations--although Rummel's defenders would retort that Palestine was never a real democracy until 2005, and that Pakistan is ruled by a strongman who wields a great deal of undemocratic power. Moreover, were Israel truly at war with Palestine, Palestine would be destroyed due to the enormous disparity of power, and if Pakistan and India were truly at war with each other then tens of millions would die. Rummel's real point is that democracies rarely go to war with each other, and liberal democracies (defined by free speech, free press, and universal franchise) never do. Neither Pakistan nor Palestine, at this time, qualifies as a liberal democracy.
Rummel's conclusions have also been criticized for not considering the number of deaths due to anarchy and the lack of government, through mechanisms such as civil conflict, the breakdown of society, and foreign invasion. Some have found the data that he uses to be questionable.
Other people point out that his methods of calculation of the death toll are highly controversial. He compares the statistical data before and after a certain date and derives an estimate about the number of killings that occurred between. However, he fails to establish evidence of actual killing. Moreover, his results are based on an absolute trust in statistical data and statistics are prone to errors.
However, he himself uses the wider sense of "killed by", including all kinds of "reason-result" relationships between acts of government and actual deaths. Moreover, in calculating the number of victims, he doesn't feel he needs evidence of a death; the result of statistical calculation is, for Rummel, effective proof that death occurred.
For an example of alleged manipulation: Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager as between 4,500 and 56,000. Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The high figure of 56,000 also merited the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts.
Another flaw in Rummel's statistical calculations is that he doesn't use error margins.
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/R._J._Rummel
Do I need a "reliable source"? This guy claims that no civilians were killed by American bombs in Laos! In spite of the fact that Laos had the most intensive aerial bombardment of any country since WWII (or was it, most intensive, period?) It's his claims that are not credible in my view. Gatoclass 11:49, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Oh, my mistake. According to lines 242-243 of his chart (at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB13.1.GIF ) he appears to concede that 3,000 Laotians died from bombing. Laos was the most heavily bombed place on earth, with more than a million tons of bombs dropped - a bombing sortie every nine minutes for the entire duration of the war - and Rummel says it resulted in 3000 dead. And yet it's been widely reported that 5,700 Laotian civilians have been killed by unexploded ordnance since the end of the war alone.
Rummel also makes the astonishing claim that a paltry 6,000 Vietnamese civilians died from US democide during the war (see chart). This in spite of the fact that the total number of civilians killed was probably in excess of 2 million. This simply defies credulity.
Some of Rummel's other figures are also extremely dubious. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that 50,000 boat people drowned trying to escape Vietnam after the war. A couple of other sources put the figure as high as 200,000. But Rummel gives a figure of half a million. Why is his figure so much larger than everyone else's, and how could he (or anyone) possibly know what the true figure was? Gatoclass 13:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Uppsala University debunks Rummel's methodology. I quote: ...The first part shows that the estimates used by Rummel for Tito’s Yugoslavia cannot be relied upon, since they are largely based on hearsay and unscholarly claims frequently made by highly biased authors. http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/1/85
Historian Edwin Moise has the following short review of one of Rummel's books:
Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. 510 pp. From what I have seen of it, the section dealing with Vietnam is dreadfully inaccurate. Examples:
p. 246, bottom, says that in the Red River Delta "98 percent of the peasants owned the land they worked." This is incorrect; Rummel has relied on careless authors who misunderstood statistics that actually (if you trace this figure back to its original source, Yves Henry, Economie agricole de l'Indochine, p. 108) said that 98% of the people who owned land worked part or all of the land that they owned.
p. 250: "The party's Politburo believed that 95 percent of the land was owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of the people." This is baloney; the Politburo neither believed nor suggested it believed in any figure even close to this.
p. 250, just below the middle of the page, does a computation starting from a quota of five landlords to be executed per village in 15,000 villages. Leave aside the question of whether there was such a quota (the source is grossly unreliable). The source that claimed there was a quota of five executions per village used the word "village" to mean the administrative village, xa in Vietnamese, of which there were less than 4,000 in the area covered by the campaign. The book from which Rummel got the figure of 15,000 villages was talking about a subdivision of the xa, the natural village or hamlet.
p. 252: Rummel says that there was a rebellion in the province of Nghe An in November 1956, bloodily suppressed by the Communists. "Rebellions also broke out elsewhere. The worst of these, near Vinh, involved protests . . ." The problem with this is that Vinh is the capital of Nghe An province. An author (Douglas Pike) who didn't know where Vinh was, looked at some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion in Nghe An, and some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion near Vinh, and didn't realize that both sets of accounts referred to the same incident. He wrote it up as two different rebellions, one in Nghe An and the other in some unnamed province that contained the city of Vinh. Rummel borrowed his error. This is about average for the level of knowledge of the people from whom Rummel gets his information.
Another example of Rummel's habit of counting the same thing twice: His figure (p. 253) of 360,000 for the total number of people the Communists killed in the period 1953-56 was achieved partly by counting the people killed in the land reform twice. He took Gerard Tongas' estimate of 100,000 for the people killed in the land reform, and decided it was actually a figure for the number of people killed in the rent reduction campaign, so he could add it to the estimates by other authors for the number of people killed in the land reform campaign.
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/atroc.html
Gatoclass 14:26, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Nevertheless, I think I've compiled enough evidence here regarding Rummel's reliability to justify the retention of the dispute notice. Gatoclass 14:50, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
It's not simply a matter of disagreeing on the figures - these authors are clearly implying that Rummel's research is substandard. But even if they weren't doing so, the fact that his figures are disputed by others knowledgeable in the field is by itself enough, I believe, to justify the dispute notice. His numbers are being disputed, and by reputable scholars. Gatoclass
Okay. I'm content to let your compromise edit stand for the time being. However, the more I look at Rummel's figures and his methodology, the more I'm persuaded that the guy is a shonk. I'm going to continue to look into this issue as and when I can find the time, with a view to adding some balance to the Rummel pages. Regards, Gatoclass 04:49, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I've been meaning to come up with an edit that would reconcile me to the removal of the POV notice on this page for some time, and I finally got around to it today. I've altered the caveat on a couple of Rummel's tables from "Note that most figures for mass murder are more or less disputed" to "Note that Rummel's figures for mass murder are not necessarily accepted by other academics", and removed the POV notice accordingly.
Edit: I've altered the caveat slightly to "Note that Rummel's figures for mass murder do not necessarily have broad acceptance in the academic community" which I think is more NPOV because it doesn't imply as the previous caveat did that no other academic agrees with him. Gatoclass 05:12, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
This article seems too one-sided. Rummel this... Rummel that...
Mr. Rummel should be aware that the term "democide" was not in fact created by him. The term was used in the 1951 article by Theodore Abel, yet Abel is not cited as a source...interesting use of plagiarism Mr. Rummel.
Why is Israel not on his list? if it wasnt state terror they have done, if it isnt genocide on islam and arabs, then it must be democide, especially if you look at Rummels list and fabricated numbers. He has clearly dubbelstandards of Israels killings and removal of arabs is not in the list, how can he try and put Turkey on the list? they did less than Israel, and he doesnt have sources and scientific explanations for the numbers. This is so strange, so can I also say, Israel 1948 tilll present, democide: 20.000.000 ? come on ````
According to Webster's dictionary [10], the American Heritage dictionary [11], and dictionary.com [12] , democide is not an established word in the english language. Using Neologisms certainly violates Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms guideline. This article should be a candidate for speedy deletion. I have included the relevant sections of the guideline:
Neologism as defined from Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms
Neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities.
Why Wikipedia prohibits using neologisms
Generally speaking, neologisms should be avoided in articles because they may not be well understood, may not be clearly definable, and may even have different meanings to different people. Determining which meaning is the true meaning is original research—we don't do that here at Wikipedia. [13]
Why this article qualifies
Some neologisms and protologisms can be in frequent use and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or even in larger society. It may be natural, then, to feel that Wikipedia should have a page devoted to this new term, but this is not always the case. There are several reasons why articles on (or titled with) neologisms may not be appropriate:
- The first is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and so articles simply attempting to define a neologism are inappropriate.
- The second reason is that articles on neologisms frequently attempt to track the emergence and use of the term as observed in communities of interest or on the internet—without attributing these claims to reliable secondary sources. If the article is not verifiable (see Reliable sources for neologisms, below) then it constitutes analysis, synthesis and original research and consequently cannot be accepted by Wikipedia. This is true even though there may be many examples of the term in use.
In many cases, articles on neologisms get deleted (either via proposed deletion or articles for deletion). Articles on protologisms are almost always deleted as these articles are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term.
As Wiktionary's inclusion criteria differ from Wikipedia's, that project may cover neologisms that Wikipedia cannot accept. If you are interested in writing an article on a neologism, you may wish to contribute it to that project instead.
Abe Froman 16:19, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Say where you got it
It is improper to copy a citation from an intermediate source without making clear that you saw only that intermediate source. For example, you might find some information on a web page which says it comes from a certain book. Unless you look at the book yourself to check that the information is there, your reference is really the web page, which is what you must cite. The credibility of your article rests on the credibility of the web page, as well as the book, and your article must make that clear.
Google scholar is not the same as ordinary Google. Scholarly sources are the most reliable sources available. Ultramarine 22:20, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Google Scholar searches scholarly sources which are the most reliable sources available, ordinary Google do not. Ultramarine 22:30, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
A search enginge for scholarly sources, the most reliable available, is different from one going through all the web. The only caution against Google Scholar is that "Google Scholar should rarely be used as proof of non-notability" since it may miss material not available in online journals. That is not the issue here, Google Scholar has found many 400 academic works, so if it have missed some academic works that are not available online, these would only makes the notability stronger. Ultramarine 22:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Above, Ultramarine has stated that there are over 100,000 google hits. A cursory check of google has shown that there are approximately 33,400 currently. The majority of them, if they aren't written by Rummel himself, certainly reference him. Therefore, I propose that this article be merged into [Genocide] and Rummel's own articles. Wikipedia is not a place where neologisms should be thrown about willy-nilly. I had no idea this word existed a week ago until I saw it here on Wikipedia in a list of genocides. Research since then has shown that it is a convenient blanket for a number of extant terms, under Rummel's POV! Since the term is not being widely used, there are no sources for democides other than the ones Rummel is listing; therefore, the term is loaded in his favour.
Further, I propose that if the article cannot be merged, it should be put up for deletion again. Unless somebody can turn up some articles that aren't by or about Rummel? Perhaps ones that also give equal weight to the term democide alongside terms such as genocide, so it doesn't seem like merely an adverisement for the term? Brady Clarke 04:37, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I first read this and didn't really understand the significance.
"Rummel's counts 43 million deaths due to democide during Stalin's regime inside and outside the Soviet Union. This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million."
So what?
"One of his main findings is that liberal democracies have much less democide than authoritarian regimes."
Well... yeah. Most people would consider this self-evident.
"His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war."
Ok. And?
Now, after reading through his site, I see the point he's making. The essence is that he's encouraging war as the lesser evil; specifically, wars that "spread freedom", or "liberal democracies", which would then prevent future democides. So he strongly supports Bush and his wars because, even though they're destabilizing and killing lots of innocent people, they will ultimately result in democracies and prevent some future horror that would have killed even more.
I didn't get this at all out of this article and it should be made clear, especially in the introduction, the context of why he came up with this term and what he believes the implications are. If others have used the term before he did, of course, their context should be explained, too. — Omegatron 02:43, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
This article seems to be way more about this guy rummel than about democide. The "research" section talks about no one's research but Rummel's, and the definition section is full of "rummel defines" "rummel says" language. If those qualifiers are necessary then the article is POV, if those definitions truly define the widespread usage of the word then all the "rummel" qualifiers are not needed and should be taken out. Right now this article looks like a soapbox for this one guys views and needs serious work including especially usage by other people (preferably not referencing Rummel) in order to be useful. Right now, a stub consisting of just the lead paragraphs would be better than the article as a whole Jieagles ( talk) 16:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Should not the USA's (or at the very least the early colonists) succesfull efforts to get rid of native americans by dehumanizing them, and by coming up with excuses for them to be removed even though it was their land, (including when indians were forced to move from their land even after the United States Supreme Court be counted as genocide? If not, what category does this action fall under? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.96.39.250 ( talk) 01:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC) Native american democide in mentioned in the before 1900 table. Little democide in the US after 1900. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ultramarine ( talk • contribs) 15:02, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Should this not at best be "Democide (term)"? The word is not in the dictionary, so by putting facts and figures next to it are we not forking all the various discussions (like the above) which all have better homes? And the spattering of democide throughout various Wikipedia articles seems to me a bit of "undue weight." As it stands, the article elevates "democide" to common usage. It's not there. — PētersV ( talk) 02:17, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
The Wikipage of the Spanish Inquisition places the number of TRIALS FOR HERESY at well under the number of deaths listed on this page, around 35,000 trials for roughly the same period mentioned here, with 3,000 to 5,000 ending in executions. The Inquisition numbers therefore seem grossly exaggerated —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.151.105.170 ( talk) 01:00, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
There is no mention of the genocide in East Timor
The "Significant 20th century democides" paragraph is based on a corruption of Rudolph J. Rummels concept of democide.
The main part of the article on democide is criticism, not a neutral presentation.
Rummel may have coined the term 'democide', but it got the universal value -- what means, that it may be used regardless of the validity of Rummel's numbers. After all, it describes _a type of event_, which may be applied to any such event, whether taken into account by Rummel or not. It's beyond any debate, that there are the governmental and non-govermental crimes against humanity, including the crimes against large groups of people, that are well-documented (eg. by international organisations as Amnesty International). I agree that the crimes should be documented as reliably as possible (don't expect me to discuss this matter, though; Polish penal law has provisions against those who 'publicly and against the facts' deny the crimes committed by the nazi, fascist and commmunist regimes, or other regimes, and it seems to be fiercely enforced, also against some scientists (ever heard of Ratajczak's or Bender's case ? The mere mentioning by the first one of the holucaust revisionists' views, and lacking of comment about them, was a cause for criminal charges, which (as I remember) he was finally cleared of; nevertheless, I don't feel free eg. to discuss the validity of data about Stalin's crimes, Pol Pot's crimes, Ottoman soldiers' crimes against Armenians, etc). Let the discussion about the aforementioned validity not influence the debate about the term as such, which is simply useful to describe the kind of crime that didn't have its name previously (as killing whole groups of people for their political beliefs). [Critto]
As an old fellow and a strong supporter of the Wikipedia project, I would condemn any actions that would harm the project. However, as a responsible wikipedian, I find myself commissioned to discuss this topic. It is very easy to write on disputable facts based on falsified documents, faked pictures and exaggerated figures that would only distort history and the definition of genocide. This kind of authorship can give harm to the essence of Wikipedia project. Wikipedians should be very careful about not including the questionable subjects as sheer and undiscussible facts and should also not forget that this is not an area of discussion and debate. This is the very reason that I do not simply change or delete these statements (about Young Turks) and instead try discussing them.
It should not be forgotten that Armenian genocide is still a historical hypothesis that is dominantly advertised by the Armenian diaspora and is still pending for reliable proofs. There are scholars working on this issue all over the world and some accept the existence of a possible genocide, while some do not. Both sides have reliable and emotional proofs for their own beliefs. The supporters of the Armenian genocide are showing the pictures of the burried remnants of Armenian people killed by Ottoman soldiers, whereas the supporters of the other side is showing the pictures of Turkish people, who were killed by Armenian soldiers. It is not fair to base such a disputable issue by just showing one single reference. I can find lots of debateful articles in Britannica about Turkey or Turkish people and I can also give other references which do not support the existence of a genocide.
http://azerbaycan.hypermart.net/tragedy.htm
http://azerbaycan.hypermart.net/testimony.htm
I will not copy and paste these references because of the copyright restrictions.
What I understand from the discussions about this issue is shortly as follows: The ethnic struggles between Turkish and Armenian communities began about two centuries ago. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, Russia and Great Britain provoked one of the main ethnic groups of the Ottoman State, the Armenians to uprise in the eastern parts of the Empire. First sporadic clashes were seen between the Turkish and Armenian settlements. When the Russian army began to invade Eastern Anatolia in World War I, the Armenian gangs with the helps of Russian army, started systematic attacks against Ottoman troops and their civilian Turkish citizens. The same gangs are also accused of cutting the supply lines of the Ottoman army, which was fighting with the invading Russian forces. Under these circumstances, the Ottoman Government decided to relocate the Armenians to the other provinces in the Empire. The reason for that was to prevent the fights between Turkish and Armenian communities and cut the support extended by the Armenian towns to the Russians. During the period of this enforced delocation, hostilities between two communities and famine heavily affected the Armenian people. The policy of enforced delocation was a routine application for Ottoman Empire and it had been applied to a variety of communities including Turkish people. Young Turks were guilty for not protecting their citizens duely and also by applying this primitive and ancient policy. However, not only Armenians but many other Ottoman citizens suffered from these treatments throughout centuries and Ottoman governments never seem to carry any intention of giving end to an entire ethnicity. By contrast, it is possible to see many Armenian people in the highest ranks of the Ottoman hierarchy (ministers, architects etc). Any researchers working on Young Turks can easily agree that these people never carried ideologies related with the termination of any community. Indeed, the fact that the same events did not affect tens of thousands of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire, living in Istanbul (then the capital of Ottoman Empire) is the strongest evidence why this incident can not be labeled as ?genocide?. It is also worth mentioning that in the time frame subject to those claims, an Armenian, Noradounghian Efendi, served as the Ottoman Foreign Minister. Moreover, it has been stated in some official records (see references) that when the British forces (who had complete control over all Ottoman official records) occupied Istanbul after World War I, they admitted that they could not find any evidence of an organized genocide against Armenians.
I do not say that I know what the truth is but I just want to draw attention to the other side of this discussion and to remind that we must be very careful when we are writing such sensitive and debateful articles that could easily be abused for political reasons. I do not find myself authorized to change this article, since I am not an expert of this subject. I believe that we must be very careful about these statements for some mentally sick people could more easily find reasons for their aggressive actions and it should not be forgotten that many innocent people were already killed by such people in this context.
SJK draws attention to the decisions of several parliaments of different countries. I wrote about my concerns in the Talk section why these decisions should not be accepted as real proofs and why we should not base our articles on such decisions. I believe with all my heart that the sinful secrets of history should be uncovered for the welfare and goodness of future generations. But I also believe that this should be done with a sense of equality and justice. This would be much more fair for the souls of Turkish people, who seem to have died or killed in similar conditions as Armenian people. [ErdemTuzun]
Mainstream academia believes that it was a Genocide. Live with it.
(I'm so not even touching the argument above...) I've restored the "democide" link as an article unto itself. A google search turned up over 4000 instances of the word, including its use in the Journal of International Affairs (and not in reference to Rummel). I feel that is enough to warrant the treatment of the term by Wikipedia. Not incidentally, it also provides a place to put certain allegations of democide/mass murder - though as alway, we will have to be careful to phrase some of these as "Group A claims..." -- April
I have no problem with the article being here. One advantage to Wiki is the ability to include even the most obscure and fringe ideas. There are literally 1000s of "Journals of International Affairs". Every major university has one. I doubt many (if any) have included the term in reference to anyone or anything. The hit you likely got was the Australian Journal of International Affairs, but that's another matter. A google search with 4000 instances of the word means nothing. You'll get more today. Rummel's days as a credible political scientist whose work was respectable and meaningful ended long ago. Most of those google hits are meaningless google seeding and google bombing. Surely you've heard of that. It's perfectly fine that his ideas are given exposition here. But to treat them as being peer reviewed or given any credibility or weight outside the fever swamps of his own mind, or those of his equally deluded proponents, is ludicrous. This is fringe nonsense. It's not mainstream or pariculary insightful, useful or important in any way. It's merely propaganda.
Wikkid Won 10:43, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
I'm going to have to challenge the neutrality and usefulness of this article. The definition of democide given is mass murder of persons by a government or its agents. From the numbers given it is clear that the author considers all casualties in a war to be victims of democide, which makes all war murder. Arguable but not NPOV. It's also not clear when democide is different from genocide, or whether democide includes genocide.
If the definition of democide includes war casualties the opening paragraph should say so, and it might then be better to reref to the relevant war page to get the casualty figures. If not then the figures should be revised, and it should be made clear who the victims are in each example.
Personally I think the word democide is barely differentiated from genocide in common usage. Our definition of genocide includes killings of political groups, so only a few mass killings would be considered democide rather than genocide. The article should concentrate on those rather than try to cover the whole spectrum of death.
What do people think? DJ Clayworth 16:00, 11 Sep 2003 (UTC)
No it does not. SS soldiers killed in action by Allied soldiers in World War II, while their associates murdered inmates of concentration camps is not the same thing. If the word is to have any useful meaning it should only include those who are murdered by the state (with possible recless endangerment as a braketed addition) and the figures through out should be adjusted accordingly. If that is not done then the word becomes so defuse as to be usless. Philip Baird Shearer 22:20, 12 Dec 2004 (UTC)
I have deleted the paragraph about Chomsky's allegations about Afghanistan and replaced it with something less tendentious. It seems odd to illustrate the meaning of the word democide by picking an "example" which is at best debateable and at worst completely fictitious. If people want to make claims for or against Chomsky's allegations they can do so at the appropriate page. Adam 09:38, 11 Oct 2003 (UTC)
I read again the democide article, and it should be stated, that Germans weren't victims of democide after WW2. There were few massacres committed by Red Army, there were bombing and torpedoing evacuation ships and trains, accidental revange. Probably also hunger deaths. The fantastic number 2 100 000 is out of the question for total number of victims. But democide requires the active government to organise the crime. Seaman 10:15, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Cautious 09:00, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC) Again give me the answer for the questions given by Seamen: when it has occured? what really happenned? Who died? Who was involved? Cautious 09:00, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)
After deletion discussion: OK, stay, on condition that some NPOV comments are included. Somebody can open the article and be terrified by huge number of people allegedly killed, while this is mostly playing with statistical numbers. Cautious 12:58, 3 Mar 2004 (UTC)
One example from
[1]
Rummel states in row 304 that the pre war population of the former German
provinces was 6500/9000/10000 thousand people low/middle/high
Evacuation row 321 4000//5000 with 618 dead
Remaining population was row 317 100/617/1134
Found in W.Germany row 346 6000/6944/7400
Crude deficit of population he estimated in 319 meaning rows 307-317
6400/8383/8866
How he could calculate that number? My understanding that the proper caluclation is:
pre-war population of 9000 with error margin 2500
remaining 617 with error margin 517
gross deficit is 8383 with error margin 3017
So his number is obviously guesswork.
Another Rummel calculation:
Now he drops his numbers and use another set:
All kinds of migration to Germany row 338 7017/7144/8369
Then he substracts those who reached Germany row 346 again 6000/6944/7400
Deficit according to him is row 349 200/969/1017
I would calculate 7144 with error margin 1225
minus 6944 with error margin 944 and
the result is obviously 200 with error margin 2169!
His number is obviuosly wrong!
In addition it is not clear wether he included the Jews killed during holocaust / I would reserve at least 100 000 killed, Poles and other minorities sent to concentration camps 100 000 is also good estimate /soldiers killed in action at least 500 000 / victims of bombing of the cities I don|t know how many/ his number of victims of evacuation 618 000/ deported to USSR around 200 000 and so on.
By the way, according to Polish sources Polish citizenship was granted to around 1 500 000 former Germans, not 200 000 Rummel claims, and it is obviuosly true, since the emigration of ethnic Germans from Poland continued since 1945. I read recently, that in 1980/ties emigrated 1 000 000 of people on the status of ethnic Germans.
I am going to remove Rummel numbers, since they are obviously not relaible
Cautious 21:07, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I voted to keep this article, but I strongly object to bunching together victims and perpetrators. E.g. the number for WW2 (51 Million) includes the Nazis, the Allies, the victims of the Holocaust... all clumped together. That's immoral. These numbers must be broken, IMHO. -- Humus sapiens 09:28, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
The "A victim is a victim" argument is immoral. Just as (I hope) you wouldn't count victims of terror attacks together with deaths from natural causes, those numbers are worse than useless. Let the reader judge who's right or wrong but don't lump them together. I am not against including a URL of that site, but for the WP this list has to either vastly improve or simply go. I propose to reuse/reorganize the list from Genocide to either satisfy both articles (as it already does, kind of) or split between the two. Sorry I don't have time to do this right now. -- Humus sapiens 23:55, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Government induced famine isn't a method of execution? Even when the perpertrators even have been known to comment that this was exactly what they were doing, a purge of the population as a whole?
MSTCrow 23:02, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
__ (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;__
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Besides, Polish penal code includes (c) as means of committing crime against humanity. Art. 118 states it clearly
"118. 1. Who, in order to destroy the specified national, ethnic, racial, political, religious-based or world's outlook-based group, commits killing or causes the serious harm to the health of the person who is a member of such group, is liable to the penalty of deprivation of liberty not shorter than 12 years, the penalty of 25 years deprivation of liberty or the deprivation of liberty for life
2. Who, to achieve the goal (described) in 118.1, brings upon the persons belonging to such group the life conditions which threaten its biological extinction, applies the means to stop births within the group or forcibly takes the children of such group from the persons belonging to it, is liable to the penalty of deprivation of liberty (5-25 years)."
(translation was amateur, and my own)
You may find the code in Polish here: www.kodeks.wirt.pl
Removed from article:
Someone who has read his work can sort this out, but we can't say he did and didn't explicitly exclude war deaths. — Tkinias 07:41, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)
From the external references in the article:
I think we can say that he does explicitly exclude war deaths which occure within the laws of war.
He satates above War related killing by military forces that international agreements and treaties directly or by implication prohibit is democide, whether the parties are signatories or not. The directives under which the RAF and the USAAF operated did not target civilians, the specific ones they were operating under in 1945 specifed Oil, direct war industries and comminications. Dreseden was assessed as a priary target under communications, and war industries. Further International Review of the Red Cross no 323, p.347-363 The Law of Air Warfare (1998) states:
There is far more detail on all this in the article Bombing of Dresden in World War II. I am removing the reference to the Bombing of Dresden in the article. Philip Baird Shearer 19:35, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
Where is your evidence for this? The section Reasons for the attack in the Bombing of Dresden article does not list the targeting of the civilian population as a reason for the attack. -- Philip Baird Shearer 09:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Ultramarine 'corrected' Warlord China from 6,800,000 to 800,000. Was this a mistake, or is there some reason for doing so? If Warlord China is to be downgraded to 800,000 then it must be removed from the list altogether, since it is supposed to be of democides of 1 million or greater. Osgoodelawyer 16:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
The total is, I would assume, not going to add up, since it was probably of the original list not the countless edits. Also, the paragraph above about the explulsion of Germans after WWII doesn't seem to be relevant, since the list doesn't, in fact, include such an event. Osgoodelawyer 16:12, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
I think that changes that user:Ultramarine has made, particularly to the lists is to be commended. I had downloaded the PDF pages from the web to scan them into ASII intending to replace the previous list but Ultramarine has beaten me too it. But it had been my intention to sort and combing them in a slightly novel way to get around copyright problems For example "20th century democides causing more than one million deaths" could be sorted alphabetically. AFAICT the lists in their current from are a copyright violation. What do others think? -- Philip Baird Shearer 19:19, 5 March 2006 (UTC)
I have sorted them in a "novel" way. The C20th and dictators alphabetically. The other by end of domicide and a secondary sort by start of democide. But to re-inforce this, the tables need to be updated with R.J. Rummel's newer research, like his addition of the Congo to the C20th. This would alter two of the table and reduce the claim that the lists are a copyright violation. -- Philip Baird Shearer 13:28, 6 March 2006 (UTC)
The current article has in the introduction
See the policy WP:V: Facts, viewpoints, theories, and arguments may only be included in articles if they have already been published by reliable and reputable sources. Articles should cite these sources whenever possible. Any unsourced material may be challenged and removed. If the above can not be sourced then the sentence should be removed. BTW Google searches are of no use in proving or disproving this, as that would be original research, it must be a paper from a source not connected with Rummel -- Philip Baird Shearer 23:23, 11 March 2006 (UTC)
Hello. I'm not a heavy editor, and this is the first time I've come across what I would consider a very questionable entry.
By no means am I an expert in the fields of sociology or mass murder, but stumbling upon this entry vexes me. Here are some of my concerns:
This brings me to
Which leads me to
Again, I think the point is missed. In order to justify the term it cannot be a simple synonym, or else it's really and manifestly absurd. Were I to try to steal credit for Moby-Dick or the toaster I would alter things slightly, then charge hard for credit. In both cases- quoted or not- the case for the term's relevance is extremely weak. And I did, yesterday, read through his site and published papers. Again, this only paints him as a fringe character like a David Irving or Lyndon LaRouche.
For example, colonialism's horrors- save for the Congo- are almost entirely absent. Where are the millions killed under British, French, Dutch, Spanish, and German rule outside the Americas? Again, like the lowballing of Native and African Americans, this smacks of an agenda, and apologism for America is rife on his site, as are his dubious theories on democracy and war. And it's generally accepted that Genghis Khan alone, in the less than two decades of his conquests, amassed a minimum of 20m dead. the largest pre-20th C. killer. In the four centuries afterward (only 2 of which are mentioned) his progeny were no less bloodthirsty, so the overall Mongol figure is likely lowballed. His figurs for Native American dead also seem predicated on pre-1980 estimates of pre-Columbian population. It was thought then not even a million people were in the New World, where we now know several million lived in modern Mexico alone, and that the Mississipian cultures accounted for at least a million souls. Estimates range from 15-20m minimum to three-four times that.
That all said, it just seems like he's trying to ride others' coattails, and claim credit for a term that is superfluous, for genocide does, indeed, include, in common usage, political opponents, elsewise Mao and Stalin would not be listed in all genocide totals. It seems that you are merely offering apologiae, not a logical defense of the term, much less the political implications of the philosophies behind them, which, again, border on LaRouchian territory.
But, my gripe is not with his theories, but with the sort of blatantly asterisky way a fringe figure is seeking legitimacy for others' work- which preceded it, and seems much stronger. That, and the fact that all this information is available on his entry and the genocide one. NormalGoddess 22:16, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
I am going to put a disputed notice on this article. This article relies very heavily on RJ Rummel's figures and I don't believe he is a reliable source. Rummel is a hard rightwinger whose figures for communist democide are far higher than those commonly accepted by other sources, while his figures for Western democide are ridiculously low.
For example, he claims that US democide in Vietnam amounts to just 6,000 civilians! That's right, the US "murdered" only 6,000 civilians in Vietnam, in spite of dropping more ordnance on the country than was dropped in the whole of World War II combined.
By contrast, the NV government itself estimates that more than 2 million Vietnamese civilians died in the war, together with 1.1 million VC/NVA soldiers. Other sources put the civilian death toll even higher. And these figures of course, do not include Laos and Cambodia in which it is commonly estimated that US bombing killed 600,000 respectively. Rummel's figures by contrast are 60,000 for Cambodia (ten times less than the commonly quoted figure) and 0 for Laos! That's right, apparently US bombing killed nobody in Laos in spite of entire cities being obliterated by US bombing and the survivors forced to live in caves.
I must say I'm suprised there isn't more criticism of Rummel's work on the net. However I did find the following:
Rummel's conclusions have been criticized the lack of definite correlation. He neglects current conflicts between Israel and Palestine as well as India and Pakistan, all of which are democratic nations--although Rummel's defenders would retort that Palestine was never a real democracy until 2005, and that Pakistan is ruled by a strongman who wields a great deal of undemocratic power. Moreover, were Israel truly at war with Palestine, Palestine would be destroyed due to the enormous disparity of power, and if Pakistan and India were truly at war with each other then tens of millions would die. Rummel's real point is that democracies rarely go to war with each other, and liberal democracies (defined by free speech, free press, and universal franchise) never do. Neither Pakistan nor Palestine, at this time, qualifies as a liberal democracy.
Rummel's conclusions have also been criticized for not considering the number of deaths due to anarchy and the lack of government, through mechanisms such as civil conflict, the breakdown of society, and foreign invasion. Some have found the data that he uses to be questionable.
Other people point out that his methods of calculation of the death toll are highly controversial. He compares the statistical data before and after a certain date and derives an estimate about the number of killings that occurred between. However, he fails to establish evidence of actual killing. Moreover, his results are based on an absolute trust in statistical data and statistics are prone to errors.
However, he himself uses the wider sense of "killed by", including all kinds of "reason-result" relationships between acts of government and actual deaths. Moreover, in calculating the number of victims, he doesn't feel he needs evidence of a death; the result of statistical calculation is, for Rummel, effective proof that death occurred.
For an example of alleged manipulation: Rummel estimates the death toll in the Rheinwiesenlager as between 4,500 and 56,000. Official US figures were just over 3,000 and a German commission found 4,532. The high figure of 56,000 also merited the notation "probably much lower" in Rummel's extracts.
Another flaw in Rummel's statistical calculations is that he doesn't use error margins.
http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/R._J._Rummel
Do I need a "reliable source"? This guy claims that no civilians were killed by American bombs in Laos! In spite of the fact that Laos had the most intensive aerial bombardment of any country since WWII (or was it, most intensive, period?) It's his claims that are not credible in my view. Gatoclass 11:49, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Oh, my mistake. According to lines 242-243 of his chart (at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB13.1.GIF ) he appears to concede that 3,000 Laotians died from bombing. Laos was the most heavily bombed place on earth, with more than a million tons of bombs dropped - a bombing sortie every nine minutes for the entire duration of the war - and Rummel says it resulted in 3000 dead. And yet it's been widely reported that 5,700 Laotian civilians have been killed by unexploded ordnance since the end of the war alone.
Rummel also makes the astonishing claim that a paltry 6,000 Vietnamese civilians died from US democide during the war (see chart). This in spite of the fact that the total number of civilians killed was probably in excess of 2 million. This simply defies credulity.
Some of Rummel's other figures are also extremely dubious. For example, Encyclopedia Britannica estimates that 50,000 boat people drowned trying to escape Vietnam after the war. A couple of other sources put the figure as high as 200,000. But Rummel gives a figure of half a million. Why is his figure so much larger than everyone else's, and how could he (or anyone) possibly know what the true figure was? Gatoclass 13:53, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Uppsala University debunks Rummel's methodology. I quote: ...The first part shows that the estimates used by Rummel for Tito’s Yugoslavia cannot be relied upon, since they are largely based on hearsay and unscholarly claims frequently made by highly biased authors. http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/41/1/85
Historian Edwin Moise has the following short review of one of Rummel's books:
Rudolph J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994. 510 pp. From what I have seen of it, the section dealing with Vietnam is dreadfully inaccurate. Examples:
p. 246, bottom, says that in the Red River Delta "98 percent of the peasants owned the land they worked." This is incorrect; Rummel has relied on careless authors who misunderstood statistics that actually (if you trace this figure back to its original source, Yves Henry, Economie agricole de l'Indochine, p. 108) said that 98% of the people who owned land worked part or all of the land that they owned.
p. 250: "The party's Politburo believed that 95 percent of the land was owned by the wealthiest 5 percent of the people." This is baloney; the Politburo neither believed nor suggested it believed in any figure even close to this.
p. 250, just below the middle of the page, does a computation starting from a quota of five landlords to be executed per village in 15,000 villages. Leave aside the question of whether there was such a quota (the source is grossly unreliable). The source that claimed there was a quota of five executions per village used the word "village" to mean the administrative village, xa in Vietnamese, of which there were less than 4,000 in the area covered by the campaign. The book from which Rummel got the figure of 15,000 villages was talking about a subdivision of the xa, the natural village or hamlet.
p. 252: Rummel says that there was a rebellion in the province of Nghe An in November 1956, bloodily suppressed by the Communists. "Rebellions also broke out elsewhere. The worst of these, near Vinh, involved protests . . ." The problem with this is that Vinh is the capital of Nghe An province. An author (Douglas Pike) who didn't know where Vinh was, looked at some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion in Nghe An, and some accounts of the Communists suppressing a rebellion near Vinh, and didn't realize that both sets of accounts referred to the same incident. He wrote it up as two different rebellions, one in Nghe An and the other in some unnamed province that contained the city of Vinh. Rummel borrowed his error. This is about average for the level of knowledge of the people from whom Rummel gets his information.
Another example of Rummel's habit of counting the same thing twice: His figure (p. 253) of 360,000 for the total number of people the Communists killed in the period 1953-56 was achieved partly by counting the people killed in the land reform twice. He took Gerard Tongas' estimate of 100,000 for the people killed in the land reform, and decided it was actually a figure for the number of people killed in the rent reduction campaign, so he could add it to the estimates by other authors for the number of people killed in the land reform campaign.
http://www.clemson.edu/caah/history/facultypages/EdMoise/atroc.html
Gatoclass 14:26, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Nevertheless, I think I've compiled enough evidence here regarding Rummel's reliability to justify the retention of the dispute notice. Gatoclass 14:50, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
It's not simply a matter of disagreeing on the figures - these authors are clearly implying that Rummel's research is substandard. But even if they weren't doing so, the fact that his figures are disputed by others knowledgeable in the field is by itself enough, I believe, to justify the dispute notice. His numbers are being disputed, and by reputable scholars. Gatoclass
Okay. I'm content to let your compromise edit stand for the time being. However, the more I look at Rummel's figures and his methodology, the more I'm persuaded that the guy is a shonk. I'm going to continue to look into this issue as and when I can find the time, with a view to adding some balance to the Rummel pages. Regards, Gatoclass 04:49, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
I've been meaning to come up with an edit that would reconcile me to the removal of the POV notice on this page for some time, and I finally got around to it today. I've altered the caveat on a couple of Rummel's tables from "Note that most figures for mass murder are more or less disputed" to "Note that Rummel's figures for mass murder are not necessarily accepted by other academics", and removed the POV notice accordingly.
Edit: I've altered the caveat slightly to "Note that Rummel's figures for mass murder do not necessarily have broad acceptance in the academic community" which I think is more NPOV because it doesn't imply as the previous caveat did that no other academic agrees with him. Gatoclass 05:12, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
This article seems too one-sided. Rummel this... Rummel that...
Mr. Rummel should be aware that the term "democide" was not in fact created by him. The term was used in the 1951 article by Theodore Abel, yet Abel is not cited as a source...interesting use of plagiarism Mr. Rummel.
Why is Israel not on his list? if it wasnt state terror they have done, if it isnt genocide on islam and arabs, then it must be democide, especially if you look at Rummels list and fabricated numbers. He has clearly dubbelstandards of Israels killings and removal of arabs is not in the list, how can he try and put Turkey on the list? they did less than Israel, and he doesnt have sources and scientific explanations for the numbers. This is so strange, so can I also say, Israel 1948 tilll present, democide: 20.000.000 ? come on ````
According to Webster's dictionary [10], the American Heritage dictionary [11], and dictionary.com [12] , democide is not an established word in the english language. Using Neologisms certainly violates Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms guideline. This article should be a candidate for speedy deletion. I have included the relevant sections of the guideline:
Neologism as defined from Wikipedia's Avoid Neologisms
Neologisms are words and terms that have recently been coined, generally do not appear in any dictionary, but may be used widely or within certain communities.
Why Wikipedia prohibits using neologisms
Generally speaking, neologisms should be avoided in articles because they may not be well understood, may not be clearly definable, and may even have different meanings to different people. Determining which meaning is the true meaning is original research—we don't do that here at Wikipedia. [13]
Why this article qualifies
Some neologisms and protologisms can be in frequent use and it may be possible to pull together many facts about a particular term and show evidence of its usage on the Internet or even in larger society. It may be natural, then, to feel that Wikipedia should have a page devoted to this new term, but this is not always the case. There are several reasons why articles on (or titled with) neologisms may not be appropriate:
- The first is that Wikipedia is not a dictionary, and so articles simply attempting to define a neologism are inappropriate.
- The second reason is that articles on neologisms frequently attempt to track the emergence and use of the term as observed in communities of interest or on the internet—without attributing these claims to reliable secondary sources. If the article is not verifiable (see Reliable sources for neologisms, below) then it constitutes analysis, synthesis and original research and consequently cannot be accepted by Wikipedia. This is true even though there may be many examples of the term in use.
In many cases, articles on neologisms get deleted (either via proposed deletion or articles for deletion). Articles on protologisms are almost always deleted as these articles are often created in an attempt to use Wikipedia to increase usage of the term.
As Wiktionary's inclusion criteria differ from Wikipedia's, that project may cover neologisms that Wikipedia cannot accept. If you are interested in writing an article on a neologism, you may wish to contribute it to that project instead.
Abe Froman 16:19, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Say where you got it
It is improper to copy a citation from an intermediate source without making clear that you saw only that intermediate source. For example, you might find some information on a web page which says it comes from a certain book. Unless you look at the book yourself to check that the information is there, your reference is really the web page, which is what you must cite. The credibility of your article rests on the credibility of the web page, as well as the book, and your article must make that clear.
Google scholar is not the same as ordinary Google. Scholarly sources are the most reliable sources available. Ultramarine 22:20, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Google Scholar searches scholarly sources which are the most reliable sources available, ordinary Google do not. Ultramarine 22:30, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
A search enginge for scholarly sources, the most reliable available, is different from one going through all the web. The only caution against Google Scholar is that "Google Scholar should rarely be used as proof of non-notability" since it may miss material not available in online journals. That is not the issue here, Google Scholar has found many 400 academic works, so if it have missed some academic works that are not available online, these would only makes the notability stronger. Ultramarine 22:52, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
Above, Ultramarine has stated that there are over 100,000 google hits. A cursory check of google has shown that there are approximately 33,400 currently. The majority of them, if they aren't written by Rummel himself, certainly reference him. Therefore, I propose that this article be merged into [Genocide] and Rummel's own articles. Wikipedia is not a place where neologisms should be thrown about willy-nilly. I had no idea this word existed a week ago until I saw it here on Wikipedia in a list of genocides. Research since then has shown that it is a convenient blanket for a number of extant terms, under Rummel's POV! Since the term is not being widely used, there are no sources for democides other than the ones Rummel is listing; therefore, the term is loaded in his favour.
Further, I propose that if the article cannot be merged, it should be put up for deletion again. Unless somebody can turn up some articles that aren't by or about Rummel? Perhaps ones that also give equal weight to the term democide alongside terms such as genocide, so it doesn't seem like merely an adverisement for the term? Brady Clarke 04:37, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I first read this and didn't really understand the significance.
"Rummel's counts 43 million deaths due to democide during Stalin's regime inside and outside the Soviet Union. This is much higher than an often quoted figure of 20 million."
So what?
"One of his main findings is that liberal democracies have much less democide than authoritarian regimes."
Well... yeah. Most people would consider this self-evident.
"His research shows that the death toll from democide is far greater than the death toll from war."
Ok. And?
Now, after reading through his site, I see the point he's making. The essence is that he's encouraging war as the lesser evil; specifically, wars that "spread freedom", or "liberal democracies", which would then prevent future democides. So he strongly supports Bush and his wars because, even though they're destabilizing and killing lots of innocent people, they will ultimately result in democracies and prevent some future horror that would have killed even more.
I didn't get this at all out of this article and it should be made clear, especially in the introduction, the context of why he came up with this term and what he believes the implications are. If others have used the term before he did, of course, their context should be explained, too. — Omegatron 02:43, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
This article seems to be way more about this guy rummel than about democide. The "research" section talks about no one's research but Rummel's, and the definition section is full of "rummel defines" "rummel says" language. If those qualifiers are necessary then the article is POV, if those definitions truly define the widespread usage of the word then all the "rummel" qualifiers are not needed and should be taken out. Right now this article looks like a soapbox for this one guys views and needs serious work including especially usage by other people (preferably not referencing Rummel) in order to be useful. Right now, a stub consisting of just the lead paragraphs would be better than the article as a whole Jieagles ( talk) 16:17, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Should not the USA's (or at the very least the early colonists) succesfull efforts to get rid of native americans by dehumanizing them, and by coming up with excuses for them to be removed even though it was their land, (including when indians were forced to move from their land even after the United States Supreme Court be counted as genocide? If not, what category does this action fall under? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.96.39.250 ( talk) 01:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC) Native american democide in mentioned in the before 1900 table. Little democide in the US after 1900. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ultramarine ( talk • contribs) 15:02, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Should this not at best be "Democide (term)"? The word is not in the dictionary, so by putting facts and figures next to it are we not forking all the various discussions (like the above) which all have better homes? And the spattering of democide throughout various Wikipedia articles seems to me a bit of "undue weight." As it stands, the article elevates "democide" to common usage. It's not there. — PētersV ( talk) 02:17, 6 April 2008 (UTC)
The Wikipage of the Spanish Inquisition places the number of TRIALS FOR HERESY at well under the number of deaths listed on this page, around 35,000 trials for roughly the same period mentioned here, with 3,000 to 5,000 ending in executions. The Inquisition numbers therefore seem grossly exaggerated —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.151.105.170 ( talk) 01:00, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
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