Here are a few minor items from the November 2003 issue of the Atlantic:
- a study ranks the U.S. as one of the world’s most likely spots for a large-scale terrorist attack (already report in this Guardian story)
- economic sanctions against governments are increasingly common (50+ incidents in the 1990s versus 15 in the 1950s) but there is no evidence that they are effective
- single scientists, artists, writers, and criminals are vastly more productive into middle age than married men (the journal article is hidden behind a commercial publisher’s veil but this summary on nature.com is available)
- R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) contribute a graph of “Statistics of Democide”, killing of people by their own governments. These deaths dwarf the numbers killed in wars. The largest mass killing since World War II was by Pakistan against its Bengali citizens around 1970 (background). Partly this was an attempt by a Muslim government to kill as many Hindus as possible but it was intensified by the fact that some East Pakistanis were attempting to achieve independence and create an independent state of Bangladesh.
Did it really take “a study” to discover that the U. S. is one of the world’s most likely spots for a large-scale terrorist attack? Wow. Another example of academic bureaucracy?
Not that I have any sympathies for Bolsheviks who ran my country for 70 years, but R.J.Rummel’s statistics for Russia/USSR is bullshit.
He claims upwards of 60,000,000 (yes, sixty million) killed between 1917-1945 in a country with population of barely 90 million in 1917 and 105 million in 1945. This implies a) that 2/3 of population were killed and b) an extraordinary birth rate. Given that USSR lost more than 20,000,000 lives in WWII the place should’ve been absolutely empty in 1945.
Anecdotally his statistics also seems wrong. Of about 200 Russian families I know, every single one lost someone in WWII, and only about 5 lost people in Stalin’s purges. Stalin was definitely a bloody tyrant of the worst Asiatic school, but picking numbers out of one’s nose when dealing with his crimes does history a disservice.
A lot of Stalin’s victims were Tatars, Chechens or Ukranian, so Alexey’s contacts may not be typical. Even so 60 000 000 is a lot. The 1958-61 Chinese famine might be said to have been caused by the government. Pol Pot’s killings or perhaps Rwanda would probably hold the record for percentage of total population killed.
Dave, I was using the term “Russian” collectively to refer to all people living in Russia/USSR at that time, much like anyone coming from the former USSR is considered Russian these days in the US. Many of these families are Belorussian, Ukrainian, Jewish, Tatar etc. One is Chechen, and they’ve also lost their granddad in WWII, although he, like most Chechens and their neighbour tribes, was fighting on the German side.
The wrath of pre-war purges was aimed at ethnic Slavs, mostly at Russians. I’ve seen many cemetries of people who died in labour camps all over Russia, and one is hard-pressed to find a single non-slavic name on tombstones. Anti-semitism and persecution of minorities came after the war.
Let’s see, if there were about 90 million Russians in 1917, and very few of those are still alive today, so that implies that nearly 90 million died at the hands of the Bolsheviks.
>> The largest mass killing since World War II was by Pakistan against its Bengali citizens around 1970 (background). Partly this was an attempt by a Muslim government to kill as many Hindus as possible but it was intensified by the fact that some East Pakistanis were attempting to achieve independence and create an independent state of Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is a Muslim country and it was called East Pakistan when the civil war occured. I am not sure how you can say the Muslim government was trying to kill as many Hindus as possible?
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