![]() ![]() ![]() While war’s toll-of soldier killing soldier-is horrific, war only accounted for about twenty percent of the unnatural deaths of the previous century. Indeed, the bloody statistics of the twentieth century clearly bear this out. ![]() Further, it gave truth to the proposition that no matter how bad war is, it’s not the greatest killer. Not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples as I was taught in high school, college, and graduate school, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. Through this book, I came to what I regard as an inescapable but not well-accepted idea: state-sponsored murder is and was the primary fact of the twentieth century. Every anti-Communist thought my mother had so rightly drilled into me as a child, every viewing of The Killing Fields (the work of art that inspired my entrance essay for and into the University of Notre Dame), and every Goldwater-esque aspect of my very soul seemed justified by the very existence of Death by Government. ![]() Rummel’s Death by Government (Transaction, 1994). After purchasing the book, I devoured it on a flight from Houston to Indianapolis. It was in June 1996 that I picked up a book that, for all intents and purposes, changed my life: R.J. ![]()
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