A picture of those murdered speaks truth to power better than words. I therefore have constructed a number of rooms to memorialize through photographs the pain and suffering of the millions murdered by governments.

This room concentrates on the individual dead and on their piles of corpses, skeletons, and skulls. Of course, a single murder is awful, and we can imagine that person's death, feel their pain, and empathize with the victim's grieving loved ones. But the millions of deaths which are so much referenced on this site are an indigestible statistic that in its sheer size defeats a feeling of empathy and commiseration. Contact is lost with each of the poor souls making up this number with their individual deaths. Well, I am trying to do something about that. I want to give more feeling to these numbers, more contact with each of the individuals murdered by government, and hope you will be moved to help end this moral monstrosity that inflicts our era.

A second room shows with forms of murder (shooting, burying alive, starvation, and so on); and a third room shows the faces of those about to be murdered, most of whom knew they were to die. Perhaps other rooms will also be constructed, if available photos allow. I invite visitors to alert me to available photos on the internet that I might use in these future rooms. In case the hyperlink e-mail does not work in your browser, my e-mail address is Rummel@hawaii.edu.

Now regarding this room, nearly 174,000,000 people probably have been murdered by governments in the 20th Century, 1900-1999. This absolutely incredible human slaughter is over four-times those killed in combat in all international and domestic wars during the same years. If all these dead were to populate a nation, out of 190 nations in the world it would be the sixth largest. Moreover, if you were to sit in a chair in a room and the spirits of these dead were to walk in one door, float before you and exit through another door, for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take about six years for all to pass.

Rings of Tears 3: Faces of Death

But these attempts to give meaning to the 174,000,000 murdered are conceptual. Something visual is needed, and thus the photomontage-megatomb--thumbnail in the upper left that links to what I call "Rings of Tears." Assuming that the average height of these murdered was little more than 5 feet, their corpses would circle the earth about four times, as shown.

The montage was made of actual photos of these victims. All the photos used, including a few that were not, are linked here to their thumbnails shown below. These photos were taken from the internet, and where possible I have given their source, along with some comments. Some of these photos I had downloaded for my own interest and before realizing I would use them on my site. I had committed the scholar's sin of not keeping a record or journal of my sources for them. I'm sorry about this and especially wish to apologize to anyone from whose site I took the photo and now use it without citation. I did a thorough search of the internet to locate these sources, but could not. In some cases I suspect the site is down or dead, but in any case I will be indebted to anyone who can fill in these unknown sources for me.

Finally, there are only a few photos of the Holocaust murdered here. The simple reason for this is that these photographs are easily available on the net at, for example, the United States Holocaust Museum. Moreover, my aim here is not only to give visual meaning to the millions of dead, but also to display their diversity and that of their murderers in culture, race, and nationality. After all, the only meaningful correlation for all these dead is with the power of their governments.

Murdered By Government

Go to Photographs of Democide: Room 2

Go to Room 3

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