36 Facts About Rudolph Rummel

Rudolph Rummel spent his career studying data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination.

Rudolph Rummel estimated that a total of 212 million people were killed by all governments during the 20th century, of which 148 million were killed by Communist governments from 1917 to 1987.

Rudolph Rummel was the author of twenty-four scholarly books, and he published his major results between 1975 and 1981 in Understanding Conflict and War.

Rudolph Rummel spent the next fifteen years refining the underlying theory and testing it empirically on new data, against the empirical results of others, and on case studies.

Rudolph Rummel summed up his research in Power Kills.

Rudolph Rummel authored Applied Factor Analysis and Understanding Correlation.

Rudolph Rummel was born in 1932 in Cleveland, Ohio, to a family of German descent.

Rudolph Rummel is survived by two daughters and one sister.

In 1995, Rudolph Rummel retired and became professor emeritus of political science.

Rudolph Rummel's research was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and the United States Peace Research Institute.

Rudolph Rummel was a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.

Rudolph Rummel posited that there is a relation between political power and democide.

Rudolph Rummel found that there were 205 wars between non-democracies, 166 wars between non-democracies and democracies, and no wars between democracies during the period between 1816 and 2005.

Rudolph Rummel termed deaths of citizens under such regimes as mortacide, and posited that democracies have the fewest of such deaths.

Rudolph Rummel included famine in democide, if he deemed it the result of a deliberate policy, as he did for the Holodomor.

Rudolph Rummel stated that there have been no famines in democracies, deliberate or not, an argument first advanced by Amartya Sen, and he posited that democracy is an important factor for economic growth and for raising living standards.

Rudolph Rummel stated that research shows average happiness in a nation increases with more democracy.

Rudolph Rummel believed that goal might be achieved by the mid-21st century.

Rudolph Rummel started out as a democratic socialist but later became an anti-communist, a libertarian, and an advocate of economic liberalism.

Apart from being an outspoken critic of communism and Communist states, Rudolph Rummel criticized right-wing dictatorships and the democides that occurred under colonialism, which resulted in the hundreds of million deaths.

Rudolph Rummel was a strong supporter of spreading liberal democracy, although he did not support invading another country solely to replace a dictatorship.

Rudolph Rummel posited that there is less foreign violence when states are more libertarian.

Rudolph Rummel was critical of past American foreign policy such as the Philippine War, involvement in the 1900 Battle of Peking, and the strategic bombing of civilians during World War II, and he believed that the United States under the Democratic Party United States president Woodrow Wilson was a domestic tyranny.

Rudolph Rummel was critical of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, alleging that they were seeking to establish an authoritarian, one-party state.

Rudolph Rummel believed that global warming was "a scam for power" and opposed Obama's carbon-trading scheme.

Rudolph Rummel posited that there was a leftist bias in some parts of the academic world that selectively focused on problems in nations with high political and economic freedom and ignored much worse problems in other nations.

Rudolph Rummel discussed some of these exceptions in his FAQ, and he has referred to books by other scholars such as Never at War.

Rudolph Rummel's results were incorporated in a "gigantic philosophical scheme" of 33 propositions in a five-volume work.

Rudolph Rummel did not always apply his definition of democracy to governments under discussion, and he did not always clarify when he did not apply it.

Critical reviews of Rudolph Rummel's estimates have focused on two aspects, namely his choice of data sources and his statistical approach.

Historical sources Rudolph Rummel based his estimates upon can rarely serve as sources of reliable figures.

Rudolph Rummel's works have been criticized for establishing estimates on hearsay and unverifiable overtly high death estimates from highly biased authors.

An example of this is in the Tito's Slaughterhouse chapter of Statistics of Democide, where Rudolph Rummel quotes estimates for the democide record of Tito's Yugoslavia from authors who were sympathetic towards the Independent State of Croatia and who attempted to downplay or deny the crimes of Ustase in the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia, an example of those authors being Ivo Omrcanin, a former NDH official in foreign ministry and an espouser of fascist ideals.

In 1999, Rudolph Rummel was awarded the Susan Strange Award of the International Studies Association.

Rudolph Rummel used to publicly claim that he was a finalist for the Nobel Prize for Peace, based on an Associated Press report reprinted in his local paper about an alleged Nobel short list of 117 names.

Rudolph Rummel was nominated multiple times for the Peace Prize by Per Ahlmark but no shortlist has been made public.