The Most Horrid Fact I Know
How often do governments kill their own people?
I am not talking about Civil Wars. I am not talking about governments killing other soldiers or even other civilians when they invade another country.
I mean, how often and how much do governments massively kill their own people whom they are sworn to protect? I just concluded the most depressing, dark, and demoralizing research I have ever done. Here are my filters. I looked for historical instances wherein:
Government soldiers, police, or similar directly did the killing. I didn’t count pogroms or riots or clashes between groups, even if I felt the government allowed or even encouraged them.
I only looked at instances of 5,000 murders or more.
I did NOT include deaths or instances of famine, disease, or any other non-direct mass death situation, even when caused by bad governance. I did not generally count them even when the starvations might have been intentional.
I counted it as one incident if it occurred continuously at the same place and same time, even if over years and whole regions.
I looked at the last 150 years only.
I looked only at countries with populations in the top 150, with populations of about 2 million or more at the time of the massacre.
I did not count civil wars, unless one side was extremely outmatched, like peasants rising up with pitchforks and clubs against soldiers with tanks and guns.
If it was perpetrated by a government at the city or district level, I did not count it. This is to reduce the influence of local warlords on the data. I only included these crimes by national and regional level governments, as that is my focus here.
Here is what I found:
About 25 million people have been murdered by their own governments in the last 150 years.
Again, not due to foreign wars or civil wars. Just governments deciding to kill their own people.
The median number killed in each event was 24,000. The average number killed in each event is 296,000.
There were many, many incidents where the number of people killed by their own government was in the hundreds of thousands. Many.
There were 84 different mass murder incidents of 5,000 or more in the last 150 years alone, involving 47 different countries.
These were scattered across almost every inhabited region, in every time period, in war times and in “peace” times. That said, during the two World Wars and during the 1960s and 1980s things were worse.
Here is a graph of the deaths in each year by year.
Which, when combined together, leads me to the most horrid fact I know: For the top 100 governments by size in the world,
The average time between the average government mass murdering their own citizens is 80 years.
There is a half-life of governments turning pure evil and mass murdering their own citizens. It is short. It is widespread.
If you think you live in a region where that cannot happen, you have too short or too narrow view of history.
I don’t have some clever analysis. I think that the more people are aware of this data, this Most Horrid Fact Ever, perhaps the better off we will be.
It does seem as though the vast majority of these mass murder events occurred in societies that are hyper-authoritarian, where the state has unchecked power (no checks and balances). But the vast majority of these offending countries have elections, at least nominally. Checks and balances on power seem to be the number one thing that helps prevent such atrocities. There is some hope, in that as the number of actual, functional democracies have recently grown (with checks and balances), the number of these mass murders by government has gone down. But this data shows they have gone down before. Many times. And come back up again.
Here is the spreadsheet. Look through it and verify it yourself.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jcFfms2k1EqAJev09pueypLfkDEGckX8eGPuPTjBnZ4/edit
I have also pasted screenshots of the spreadsheet at the bottom of this article.
And here are some links of people who also do monitoring and research on this topic.
http://www.genocidewatch.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Genocide-politicide.pdf - An extensively compiled list of government genocides, referenced multiple times as source material in my spreadsheet.
http://hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM - The website of a professor at the University of Hawaii who specializes in studying and analyzing such data.
https://earlywarningproject.ushmm.org/ This project is looking to learn from this sort of data to predict the next (or current) government-led massacre.
Here is their latest report (pdf): https://earlywarningproject.ushmm.org/storage/resources/2177/Early-Warning-Project-Statistical-Risk-Assessment-2021-22.pdf
I think that Society is a Technology. But like any Technology, it can be weaponized. It’s our jobs to stop that from happening in ways like this. But first we have to stare at what has already happened:
With the 80 year timing you have rediscovered the Turchin Secular Cycle aka the Strauss & Howe Saeculum aka the Dalio World Order - a natural century, one long human lifespan. One interesting anomaly in Europe is that the wars at the 80-ish year mark after 1648 remained Cabinet Wars, even if at large scale. So it was almost two cycles 1648-1793 between the REALLY mass slaughters. And then 99 years 1815-1914.