R.J. Rummel estimates that approximately 262,000,000 people died at the hands of 20th century governments and notes that if the average height of a victim was five feet, the bodies laid end to end would circle the Earth ten times. Here's another calculation to put it in perspective. If the average democide victim was five feet tall and if you laid the bodies end to end, you would create a chain of dead bodies over 248,106 miles long. The average distance from the Earth to the Moon is 238,857 miles, and the circumference of the moon is 6,790 miles. Laid end to end, the chain of dead bodies would stretch from the surface of the Earth to the surface of the moon and around the moon completely with another 2459 miles worth of bodies left over--which is almost the distance between New York and Los Angeles.

Imagine you had a rope that was as long as the line of 20th century democide victims laid end to end. With this rope, you could lasso the moon and cut off enough excess rope to stretch from New York to LA.

Update: Here's Pete Boettke on the Wall coming down. Here's Don Boudreaux's link to Pete's post, which offers the best Beatles-related blog post title ever.

11/9/09 Addendum: I read earlier that the average adult male body contains 6 quarts of blood. Round that down to five quarts to account for women and children and recall that there are four quarts in a gallon, and you've got approximately 327,500,000 gallons of blood spilled by democidal mortacracies in the twentieth century. By comparison, wikipedia reports that the capacity of the Exxon Valdez was roughly 53 million gallons. The Valdez spilled some 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in the one of the biggest environmental disasters on record. Thus, a crude estimate suggests that the blood spilled by democide in the 20th century would fill over six tankers with the capacity of the Exxon Valdez.