Organized Crime

In recent years scholars have attempted to document the extent to which various governments during the twentieth century committed acts of mass murder against their own citizens. These are not estimates of war-related deaths, but of the murder of dissenters to the regime. The most prominent works are those by sociologist R.J. Rummel (Power Kills and Death by Government) and The Black Book of Communism by a collection of French authors.

The main reason for such “democide,” as Professor Rummel calls it, was to eliminate all opposition to the ruling regime and its ideology. In Russia, the Kulaks “who resisted collectivization [of their property] were shot, and the others deported,” according to The Black Book of Communism. When the rural population of the Ukraine resisted, Stalin created a famine that killed some six million in a few months. Virtually identical crimes were committed by the regimes of Mao Zedong, Kim Il sung, and Pol Pot, among others. In every instance, the reason for all the mass murder was the elimination of resisters to centralized political power and centralized planning of entire societies.

The Black Book of Communism estimated that the Soviets murdered at least 20 million of their own citizens; the Chinese socialists killed 65 million; Vietnamese socialists murdered 1 million; the North Koreans killed 2 million; 1 million perished in Eastern Europe; 150,000 in Latin America; 1.7 million in Africa; and 1.5 million in Afghanistan. In addition to this, Professor Rummel included in his estimate 21 million civilians murdered by the Nazi government.

In Power Kills, Professor Rummel writes that “democidal” regimes tend to become even more vicious toward their own people when their political power is “conjoined with an absolutist ideology” such as socialism. And, when the rulers of such regimes find that the continued existence of a social group is incompatible with their beliefs and goals, their totalitarian power enables them to destroy that group, he writes. War or rebellion have often provided a convenient excuse and cover for such “democide” according to Professor Rummel.

In light of this reasoning, there appears to be a glaring omission in the literature on “democide,” namely, the 350,000 or more residents of the Southern states who perished as a result of the Lincoln regime’s invasion and waging of total war on them from 1861–1865. Historians have long pegged the number of Southern war deaths at around 300,000, while historian James McPherson estimated that in addition to these war-related deaths, some 50,000 Southern civilians, mostly women and children, were also killed. There are new estimates in the historical literature that claim that the real number may be closer to 450,000.

Lincoln never admitted that the Southern states were out of the union and that secession was legitimate. He argued that the secession of the Southern states was merely a “rebellion” by a minority of fire eaters and was therefore illegitimate. He always considered every Southerner, from Robert E. Lee to the lowliest yeoman farmer, to be a U.S. citizen. His waging of total war on his own citizens, therefore, qualifies as an act of democide as defined by Professor Rummel.

The ideology that Southerners rejected was the “mystical” and perpetual union, as Lincoln called it, from which there could never be any escape. They believed that the union was voluntary, that the free and independent states were sovereign, and that they had a right to join or not join the union. Lincoln was an Uber-nationalist and disagreed, and was willing to use the powers of the state to murder his own citizens by the hundreds of thousands to “prove” himself right.

The population of the United States in 1861 was about one-tenth of what it was in the early twenty-first century. Standardizing for today’s population, the number of Southerners who perished as a result of the total war that was waged on them would be the equivalent of 3.5 million deaths. That would make the Lincoln regime significantly worse than the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. If the new estimates of some 450,000 Southern deaths comes to be accepted, then the Lincoln regime would be more than twice as bad as the Pol Pot and North Korean communists and four times worse than the Vietnamese communists in terms of democide.