“Saying that a state or regime is a murderer is a convenient personification of an abstraction. Regimes are in realty people with the power to command a whole society. It is these people that have committed the kilo- and megamurders of our century, and we must not hide their identity under the abstraction of the ‘state,’ ‘regime,’ ‘government,’ or ‘communist.’” Rudolph Rummel (1994) “Death by Government” Due to Rummel’s book title, some might take this quote to be contradictory, but it is not. People murder or purposely allow murder; so only identifying the killers by way of identity abstraction is … Continue reading →
