Some regimes, indeed, seem prepared to treat their own people in a very brutal manner if it suits their purposes. In the twentieth century, Stalin's Soviet Union, Mao's China, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, among others, murdered tens of millions of real or imagined enemies among their own citizens, often through policies of deliberate starvation. Chairman Mao was fond of observing that the quality of a revolutionary could be measured by the number of people he had killed.1 The sheer scale of the Soviet, Chinese, and Cambodian governments’ atrocities against their own citizens may have been unprecedented, but many other regimes have made up in simple ferocity what they lacked in reach and ambition. Throughout early modern Europe, for example, some of those who broke the law or otherwise incurred the wrath of the authorities were commonly subjected to whipping, branding, amputation of hands and ears, and blinding. Other offenders were subjected to ever more hideous tortures, drawn and quartered, burned alive, and, of course, hanged at the whim of one or another sadistic ruler.2 Every modern-day government is certainly capable of mistreating its citizens.
