State terrorism and its death toll
Stéphane Courtois' The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression notes that communism killed between 85 million and 100 million people in the last century. Communism, as Courtois and his fellow historians establish, killed with brutal efficiency: approximately 65 million in China under Mao Zedong, 25 million in Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia, 2 million in Cambodia, and millions of others in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America. Courtouis notes that this shockingly soaring count of the dead was accomplished by mass murders, town burnings, planned famines and other ruthlessly conceived methods. [39]
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor [2], Dinesh D'Souza maintained that violence perpetrated in the name of God pales by comparison with the violence committed by those who reject religion:
It is strange to witness the passion with which some secular figures rail against the misdeeds of the Crusaders and Inquisitors more than 500 years ago. The number sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition appears to be about 10,000. Some historians contend that an additional 100,000 died in jail due to malnutrition or illness. These figures are tragic, and of course population levels were much lower at the time. But even so, they are minuscule compared with the death tolls produced by the atheist despotisms of the 20th century. In the name of creating their version of a religion-free utopia, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong produced the kind of mass slaughter that no Inquisitor could possibly match. Collectively these atheist tyrants murdered more than 100 million people.