: Indeed, i have seen Mr. Rummel's site before. Though there is definitely a lot of interesting numerical information, the interpretation of those numbers is necessarily somnewhat ideological, and so I'd have a number of bones to pick with him, nor do I regard him as an "unbiased" source/ however, I recognize taht the points in that site are hsi and not yours, so I won't argue with you about them. Rummels research is pretty good - it wouldnt have mattered if he was in favor of stateless socialism - for which his arguments are equally valid.
: what I think you are saying is that government, per se, is teh problem, and that governments of the left and right are both bloody murderes who should be done away with. the problem with this is a)Rummel's site, being avowedly anti-communist, does not support your general indictment of all government,
It says basically that the more power a government has the more likely it seems to result in mass murder.
: and b) more importantly, private individuals, comnpanies and the capitalist economic system have been significant killers as well, not just governments.
I would need to see research of comparable quality here. Most killer companies do so with the explicit / implicit support of the state (both home state and location state)
: It is the econpomic system that deprives them of the food and medicine they need.
What you must basically say here is that mankind be damned for their uncaring ways - because in capitalism it would be as possibl, more even considering the rapid expansions of wealth, for people to privately hand over 20% of their take home pay to 'good causes' and still have comfortable lives. Blaming a systm for their choices is to refuse facing the reasons people dont help (remember reasons are not causes)
: do not call it capitalist if you don't wish to, but whatever it is, the economic system outside the socialist world is to blame for these deaths.
if I wish not to call it capitalism it is because it isnt about private ownership of property - what we have is so called mixed economies, a little 'mixing' does not mean 'alot' of private ownership - privacy being an either / or proposition not a sliding scale. in this sense, when feeling disgust at the worlds ills you will find surprisign agreement with many libertarians.
: It is PARTICULARLY ironic that you should condemn this, the bloodiest genocide of the century, as an example of "death by govrernment". The problem wasn't too much government, it wa stoo little! The belgian govrenmnet didn't even run teh Congo! Hard as this may be for us to believe, teh Congo was the PRIVATE ESTATE of King leopold,
Monarchies are states when they are present in this form, just as if Britain todays was 'owned' by the queen. the difficulty is with how one mediates the hand down of property accross multiple generations.
The problem wasnt too little government.
: Simnilar examples occur all over the world. The Tasmanian Aborigines were wiped out largely by individual ranchers. ranchers were responsible for killing essentially the whole Ache tribe in Paraguay to get their land. Even your quoted R.J. rummel admits taht p[rivate companies murdered 200,000 Amazonian Indians,
he doesnt admit it he shouts it. he isnt pro company in any particular way. he doesnt excuse it.
: out of a total population of only a few million. Private shopkeepers in Brazil today hire death squads to hiunt down and murer homeless street children. Private businessmen in Colombia have formed militias that terrorize the country and kill suspected "subversives".
And how do they get away with it? They have government in their pockets (esp columbia) and other states close borders, national boundaries being part of the prob.
