"US worse than the USSR"? American Amnesia of the worst sort

[HiPointDem]

84. well, he's no leftist. his orientation was religious & nationalist. but let's stick with the topic

of rummel's scholarship, since he is the most-quoted 'authority' on such matters:

We can ignore the fact his "most probable estimate" of deaths the responsibility of the Soviet Union presupposes 40 million deaths in the gulag, which happens to be twice the number of people who passed through the camps.

http://books.google.si/books?id=kewLQwngUSkC&q=passed+through&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=%22some%2018%20million%20people%20passed%20through%20the%20prisons%20and%20camps%22&f=false

We can also ignore his "high estimate" of the number of people killed by the USSR presupposes the murder of a fantastic 115 million Soviet citizens — a number of deaths sufficient to demographically break a far more populous nation than the Soviet Union (148 million people in 1926). Ignore also his having "calculated" that Soviet Union extinguished 2.38 million lives in the gulag between 1961 and 1982, and an additional 200,000 lives between 1983 and 1987. Ignore, because there is an even better way to showcase the level of his scholarship than debunking any of these. Better because it is made by Rummel himself.

In Death by Government Rummel claimed 174 million killed by government, but has since revised the figure to 262 million. This is partly the outcome of his changing his estimate of the number of people killed by colonial regimes from 870,000 to 50,870,000! Rummel explains this revision became necessary when, having read a book on Belgian colonialism in Congo, he realized he had been ignorant of a huge state-caused loss of life in that African territory. That seems like an honest explanation, but should he really be left of the hook this easily?

To begin with, the enormous loss of life in colonial Congo is hardly new (or obscure) information that was not available before. Rummel himself gives examples of sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica) that speak about it and were published well before Death by Government...

Also, it is not the case Rummel found 50 million victims he was not previously aware of in Congo. No, it is the case that having read a book on one specific colonial experience he became aware of the level of atrocity colonialism rested on and so he now figures the number of victims in Congo and elsewhere could add up to something like 50,870,000. This means he could have easily picked up a study on any number of brutal colonial regimes besides the one in Belgian Congo and it could have had the same effect of convincing him his figure of deaths caused by Western colonialism was off.

In other words, Rummel admits that at the time of writing Death by Government he was ignorant of the true nature of colonialism, but in a manner of a dilettante gave the 870,000 figure anyway.... However, if an author is going to make errors of this magnitude he probably should not be merely "reevaluating" estimates, he should be reevaluating whether he has any business writing books on the topic.

http://www.crappytown.com/2011/12/why-rj-rummel-shouldnt-be-taken.html


Here's rummel arguing against a study of the number of iraq war dead. as always, his role is to slap down anything that reflects badly on the us government (or 'democratic' govt generally).

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2005/02/25/lancet21/

he's a right-wing (libertarian) apologist, that's always been his role. not a scholar, a cherry-picker.