ABSTRACT
The mass murder by emperors, kings, sultans, khans, presidents, governors, generals, and other such rulers of their own citizens or of those under their protection or control is very much part of our history. Of all the pre-twentieth-century killing – massacres, infanticide, executions, genocides, sacrifices, burnings, deaths by mistreatment, and the like – that to which the authors can put numbers adds up to a grand total of from nearly 89 million to slightly over 260 million men, women, and children. An estimated pre-twentieth-century democide of nearly 133 million cannot even approximate the actual number murdered by governments or their surrogates, and probably reflects only a small fraction of those so wiped out during the thousands of years of written history. Whatever the true statistics, there is no need to know the actual number killed to see that government has been truly a cold-blooded mass murderer, a global plague of man's own making.
