We have yet to see another Stalin with all this new tech. Something I hope we never see. I wish Gulag Archipelago was history 101 at university.
If you include economic causes, you might need to include the excess mortality of systematically impoverished communities in western nations — and I don’t just mean “PoC in the USA”, as I can point to a UK study claiming the government’s austerity policies since 2010 have caused 120,000 excess deaths: https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/health-and-social-care-...
Also, if those deaths were related to economic policies, you probably have to weigh them by population size.
Obviously that’s still a million executions more than most; I am not defending him, this is just about making it an apples-to-apples comparison.
Numbers from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...
I'd say if famines are the cheapest way, many dictators with a genocide mind set would do that if possible.
We criticize them just a little, by principle, but as soon as the tech proves effective at controlling population, we adopt the tech "because it works".
"But at what?", one may ask...
We have learned a lot about building stable power structures in the last 50 years. You don't need to have a death grip on everything in the country. A much softer touch is the technique of choice of modern oppressive regimes.
Why disallow other parties when you can just make sure the right party always wins?
Why get rid of capitalism if you can just pick the winners?
Why censor information when you can drown the airwaves in fake news?
Why purge dissidents if they have no power to change things?
Why control what people do when you can control what people want to do?