The moral authority of the state is death.

Theologian William Stringfellow put it this way.

“Every sanction or weapon or policy or procedure – including law where law survives distinct from authority – which the State commands against both human beings and against other principalities carries the connotation of death, implicitly threatens death, derives from and symbolizes death … Enumerate the usual prerogatives of the State and it becomes plain that each and every one of them embodies the meaning of death: exile, imprisonment, slavery, conscription, impeachment, regulation of production or sales or prices or wages or competition or credit; confiscation, surveillance, execution, war. Whenever the authority of the State is exercised as such ways as these, the moral basis of that authority remains the same: death. That is the final sanction of the State and it is the only one.” [Emphasis original]

This isn’t just mere theological speculation. Modern nation-states have left a trail of human carnage in their wake.

Simply put, nothing exists more deadly and destructive than modern states and the governments that run them.

In the 20th century alone, governments killed 262 million people.

And this horrifying number does not even include the millions of combatants killed in wars.

R.J. Rummel Ph.D. has meticulously documented 20th-century democide and compiled the information on his website.

Rummel coined the term democide and defines it as ” the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.”

According to Rummel’s research, the most prolific murdering governments include the People’s Republic of China, the USSR, various colonial governments, Germany and the Chinese Nationalist Party.

To put the 20th-century carnage into perspective “on this incredible murder by government,” Rummel writes:

“If all these bodies were laid head to toe, with the average height being 5′, then they would circle the earth ten times. Also, this democide murdered 6 times more people than died in combat in all the foreign and internal wars of the century. Finally, given popular estimates of the dead in a major nuclear war, this total democide is as though such a war did occur, but with its dead spread over a century.”

Conventional wisdom holds that governments protects minorities. But many of the victims of democide were ethnic and religious minorities targeted by their own governments, including the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ukrainians in the Soviet Union.

Apologists for the state point with pride at things like government roads, schools and police. But 262 million deaths seems like a steep price to pay for a strip of asphalt.

People often accuse anarchists and voluntaryists of living in a utopian dreamland. They say our ideas won’t work in the real world. But as economist Robert Higgs pointed out, given the brutality governments have inflicted on humanity throughout history, the onus should fall on the statist.

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”