Rudolph Rummel, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Rudolph Rummel

American academic

Date of Birth: 21-Oct-1932

Place of Birth: Cleveland, Ohio, United States

Date of Death: 02-Mar-2014

Profession: historian, political scientist, university teacher

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Libra


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About Rudolph Rummel

  • Rudolph Joseph Rummel (October 21, 1932 – March 2, 2014) was professor of political science who taught at the Indiana University, Yale University, and University of Hawaii.
  • He spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination.
  • Rummel coined the term democide for murder by government (compare genocide), such as the Stalinist purges and Mao's Cultural Revolution. Rummel estimated the total number of people killed by all governments during the twentieth century at 212 million, and he estimated that 148 million were killed by communist regimes from 1917 to 1987.
  • To give some perspective on these numbers, Rummel pointed out that all domestic and foreign wars during the twentieth century killed in combat around 41 million.
  • His figures for Communist regimes are higher than those given by most other scholars, which range from 60 to 100 million.
  • In his last book, Rummel increased his estimate to over 272 million innocent, non-combatant civilians who were murdered by their own governments during the twentieth century.
  • However, Rummel confessed that his 272 million death estimate was his lower, more prudent figure, stating that it “could be over 400,000,000.” He concluded that democracy is the form of government least likely to kill its citizens and that democracies do not wage war against each other.
  • This is known as the democratic peace theory. Rummel was the author of twenty-four scholarly books, and published his major results in Understanding Conflict and War (1975–81).
  • He spent the next fifteen years refining the underlying theory and testing it empirically on new data, against the empirical results of others, and on case studies.
  • He summed up his research in Power Kills (1997).
  • Other works include Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders 1917–1987 (1990); China's Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1991); Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1992); Death by Government (1994); and Statistics of Democide (1997).
  • Extracts, figures, and tables from the books, including his sources and details regarding the calculations, are available online on his website.
  • Rummel also authored Factor Analysis Understanding (1970) and Understanding Correlation (1976). In addition to his extensive research and data analysis, Rummel wrote the Never Again series of alternative-history novels, in which a secret society sends two lovers armed with fabulous wealth and modern weapons back to 1906 with orders to create a peaceful century.

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