The victims of Communism

A superb tribute to the many victims of communism has been posted at David Farrar's blog: A five-minute video commemorating the twenty million* killed by communists in the blackest century in human history: a century in which more people were killed by their own governments than in all the wars in human history. Twenty million killed in order to squeeze living, breathing, thinking human beings into the Procrustean bed of a totalitarian ideology.

Lest we forget.

[One warning: unless you like Donovan, turn the sound down.]

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* Twenty million? The Democide Information Service suggests that figure barely scratches the surface:

In Death by Government R.J. Rummel estimated that more than 169 million people were murdered by governments in the 20th century, over 138 million in totalitarian states, 28 million by authoritarian regimes, and 2 million in democracies (mostly due to the aerial bombing of enemy cities during wartime). He recently increased this figure to 262 million due to further research into deaths in China and Africa. The reason for this century's high death toll is due to the increased population and the industrialization of mass murder, notably by the Chinese and Russian communists and Nazi Germany.

Rummel's research into state violence (Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence, 1997) found that there is a solution to war and democide. It is to foster democratic freedom and democratize coercive power and force. He found that mass killing and mass murder carried out by government is a result of the indiscriminate, irresponsible use of centralized power. The more unaccountable power at the center, the more killing. His research revealed a clear continuum - the less democratic and liberal a nation, the greater the incidence of war and democide.