R. J. Rummel Talks About the Miracle of Liberty and Peace

Possibly the greatest lost interview in the history of political science.

Be warned this is a serious and heavy read. It will take the constitution of a saint and it may not sit well with you. Disturbing facts can be unsettling.

This Ring of Tears is a photomontage — a megatomb — memorializing the 174,000,000 murdered by governments 1900–1999.

RUDOLPH J. RUMMEL, b, 1932, BA and MA from the University of Hawaii (1959, 1961); Ph.D. in Political Science (Northwestern University, 1963); Phi Beta Kappa, Phi Kappa Phi, Omicron Delta Kappa. Taught at Indiana University (1963), Yale (1964–66), University of Hawaii (1966–1995); then Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Hawaii.

Professor Rummel passed away on March 2, 2014.

The Freeman (1997) Re-published with permission.

Since the late nineteenth century, most intellectuals have embraced the illusion that government could somehow be tamed. They promoted a vast expansion of government power supposedly to do good.

But the twentieth century turned out to be the bloodiest in human history, confirming the worst fears of classical liberals who had always warned about government power. Perhaps nobody has done a better job documenting its horrors than University of Hawaii political science professor emeritus Rudolph J. Rummel.

Little known outside the academic community, he suddenly received much attention when he wrote Death by Government (Transaction, 1994). In the book, Rummel analyzed 8,193 estimates of government killings and reported that throughout history governments have killed more than 300 million people — with more than half, or 170 million, killed during the twentieth century. These numbers don’t include war deaths!

Rummel went on to identify keys for peace, noting which kinds of governments engaged in wars during the past 200 years. In his latest books, Power Kills (Transaction, 1997) and The Miracle That Is Freedom (Martin Institute, University of Idaho, 1997), he reported his finding that liberal democracies are far less warlike than authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. Indeed, he could not find a single case of a war between two liberal democracies. He presented compelling evidence that the most effective way to secure peace is to secure liberty by limiting government power. Last year he was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

To be sure, classical liberals always knew that liberty and peace go together. Classical liberalism blossomed after centuries of brutal war. Mindful of how casually kings had launched so many senseless wars, America’s Founders gave the war-making power to Congress, not to the chief executive. Peace was a primary passion of Richard Cobden and John Bright as they launched the successful movement for free trade. By giving people on both sides of a border easy access to resources, they believed free trade would eliminate major provocations for war and strengthen the self-interest of nations to get along. The international movement for liberty was a peace movement. But during the late nineteenth century, statists relentlessly attacked classical liberalism, promoted a vast expansion of government power and imperialism and blamed escalating conflicts on capitalism. The dynamic link between liberty and peace was forgotten.

Rummel’s personal experience led him to explore these great themes. Born in Cleveland, he endured parents who never seemed to get along. This experience, he says, “made me hate conflict — the bickering, the emotion, the yelling, the irrationality.” He joined the army during the Korean War as a way of escaping the slums. He was stationed in Japan, he saw firsthand the horrifying destruction of war, and he found the Japanese friendly. It led him to ask why we had made war on each other and to study war later when he went to college.

Meanwhile, he recalls, “I became thoroughly captured by science fiction. It occupied my free time, being to me what rock, movies, and television are to contemporary youth. I got my hands on whatever science fiction pulp magazines or books I could find to read; and unbeknownst to me at the time, not only got something of an education in basic science, but also developed scientific norms. I simply fell in love with science and took it as axiomatic that truth came from science, and that to be a scientist one had to learn mathematics.”

After the Korean War, Rummel enrolled at Ohio State University — even though he hadn’t been to high school. A year later he transferred to the University of Hawaii because he had become fascinated with Asian culture. “There I discovered that I could actually, as a student and later as a professor, study war. I was elated. From that time on, I never had any doubt this was what I must do.”

He earned his master’s degree at Hawaii, then went to Northwestern University. After teaching stints at Indiana University and Yale University, he returned to Hawaii, where he has been ever since.

During the 1960s, he wrote articles for Peace Research Society Papers, Journal of Conflict Resolution, American Political Science Review, World Politics, Orbis, and other journals, and he contributed chapters to many edited books. He wrote the five-volume Understanding Conflict and War (1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1981). Then came In the Minds of Men: Principles Toward Understanding and Waging Peace (1984), Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murders 1917–1987 (1990), The Conflict Helix: Principles and Practices of Interpersonal, Social, and International Conflict and Cooperation (1991), China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 (1991), and Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder (1992).

Despite his voluminous writings, Rummel’s findings were ignored because, among other things, they posed an unacceptable challenge to statist dogmas that dominated the intellectual world. But after the collapse of so many communist regimes, he could no longer be denied.

Now retired from teaching, Rummel works mostly at his Kaneohe, Hawaii, home, which is filled with books and Asian art. Recently we talked with him about war, peace, and liberty, issues which thinkers have grappled with for thousands of years.