A picture of those being murdered by government, as of their bodies, bones, and skulls in Room 1, speaks truth to power better than words. I am therefore constructing a number of rooms to memorialize through photographs the pain and suffering of the millions murdered by governments. Here are displayed photos of those being murdered.

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. 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, as mentioned in Room 1, and documented on this site, nearly 174,000,000 people probably have been murdered by governments in the 20th Century, 1900-1999. They have been burned alive, buried alive, shot, carved up by machetes, chopped up by axes, stabbed to death by bayonets, decapitated, drowned, starved to death, worked to death, poisoned, murdered by exposure and disease, hanged, tortured to death, beaten to death, torn apart, and murdered in other ways only limited by the imagination of governments.

Rings of Tears 3: Faces of Death

As with the first megatomb, the one introducing this room also shows the rings around the earth comprising all the bodies of the murdered, head to toe. 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.

All the photos used in the megatomb, 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, some may feel that I've overdone the photos of the Japanese military's World War II murders, even though during World War II, which for them began in 1937 with the Second Sino-Japanese War, they murdered more people than did Hitler in the Holocaust. I included them because they are available, and unlike those of the Holocaust, little known. I regret that there are virtually no photos I could find of Mao's and Stalin's mass murders, or of other megamurderers like Pakistan's slaughter of Bengalis; the Chinese Nationalist massacre of communists, political opponents, and others that happened to be in their way; the Cambodian Khmer Rouge's murderous rampage; and above all, the blood orgy of the Rwandan Hutu government. For this reason all the photos here should be treated as symbolic of the victims of government who died unknown, without at least a photograph to serve by their death as a testament to the human costs of power.