Rudolph Rummel on Freedom

"The more freedom a people have, the more unlikely the government will murder them. Democratically free governments do not murder their own people."

"The more democratic freedom a people have, the less severe their internal political violence."

"Quite simply, a free press promotes peace; creating a universally free press would promote universal peace. The bridge between the two is democracy."

"The more people are free, the greater their human development and national wealth. In short, freedom is the way to economic and social human security."

"The way to virtually eliminate genocide and mass murder appears to be through restricting and checking Power, i.e., through fostering democratic freedom."

"The less freedom people have the more violence, the more freedom the less violence. I put this here as the Power Principle: power kills, absolute power kills absolutely."

"Democratic freedom is a method of nonviolence and an antidote to war."

"I conclude that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a regime has, the more likely people will be killed. This is a major reason for promoting freedom."

"We have a solution for war. It is to expand the sphere of liberty."

"Free people never have famine."

"Where people are free, political violence is minimal."

"Freedom produces wealth and prosperity."

"The less free the people within any two nations are, the bloodier and more destructive the war between them; the greater their freedom, the less likely such wars occur. Free people do not make war on each other."

"Increasing freedom in the world decreases the death toll of its wars. Surely, whatever reduces and then finally ends the scourge of war in our history, without causing a greater evil, must be the greatest moral good. And this is freedom."

"Recall that democratic regimes in an exchange society are at one corner of the political triangle while totalitarian regimes with the coercive society they have constructed are at another. They therefore are at opposing ends of one side of the triangle, which is a continuum ranging from Freedom to Power."

"unbridgeable chasm in the world. On one side are such criminal gangs, sanctified by the term government, and the United Nations they dominate, enforcing by their guns mass slavery, mass death, mass violence, mass impoverishment, and mass famine. On the other side are democratic countries where people are free, secure, and need not fear mass impoverishment, murder at the hands of government agents, and killing famines."

"The evidence on this question is persuasive: the best way of eliminating war between nations, of minimizing domestic political violence, and of virtually making genocide and mass murder a horror of the past, is by fostering political freedom. Politically free nations do not make war on each other, have minimum domestic political violence, and virtually no genocide and mass murder. I call this the miracle that is freedom."

"Socialism aside, there also has been a rejection of Western values, of which individual freedom is prominent, and acceptance of some form of value-relativism . In some cases this rejection has turned to outright hostility and particularly anti-Americanism, and thus opposition to American values, such as freedom. To accept, therefore, that democratic freedom is inherently most peaceful, is to the value-relativist, to say the unacceptable—that it is better."

"In my ‘Understanding Conflict and War’ I concluded that the more freedom a state accords its citizens, the less likely it is to be involved in foreign violence; and the more freedom within two states, the less likely there will be violence between them. Moreover, war between free-libertarian-states will not occur, and other violence between them is very improbable… This conclusion about the violence-reducing effect of freedom also extends to conflict within states: ‘the more libertarian a state, the less intense its violence can and tends to become.’"

"It should be underlined that while the democratic or state socialist believes that socialist governments will be peaceloving and nonviolent, the Marxist-Leninist believes this true of only the final, communist stage of stateless anarchy. The socialist transition period may well involve war with capitalist states, but while this inter-state war is to be avoided if at all possible in this age of nuclear weapons, the world-wide struggle against capitalism must be pursued by all means short of inter-state war. This would involve not only the arts of deception, disinformation, subversion, and demoralization, against capitalist states, but also terrorism and domestic wars through ‘national liberation fronts’. For the Marxist-Leninist, then, it is the communist system that is inherently peaceful, not the socialist intermediary state. This socialist stage means the purposeful, aggressive use of force and violence to pursue the final, global stage of communist peace and freedom."