The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (135 page)

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Not exactly, but that's the gist.

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Actually, much of this bill was paid by the oil-rich Arab countries that the United States was defending, but that only highlights the point that the West had a
lot
more money than the East and could spend a lot more on its war machine.

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Really. Popular accounts of the Rwandan genocide are more likely to blame the West for not stopping it rather than the Hutu for actually doing it. For example, in the (excellent) film
Hotel Rwanda
, two of the major characters were foreign observers complaining about international indifference, and they got more screentime than most of the native characters. At its most ambitious, White Guilt even reaches back and accuses the Belgians of dividing a single harmonious people into manufactured categories of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" when they issued those colonial ID cards.

Why does so much of the blame attach to people and institutions that weren't even involved in the killing? Mostly this is just how some people view foreign affairs: "Yes, it's sad, but how is this
my
problem?" However, other people just want to blame the UN, the West, or Bill Clinton for everything.

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In Burundi, the death of its president rekindled the country's fading civil war, but the subsequent death toll (260,000) didn't reach the threshold for being on my top one hundred list.

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I hope you noticed that two of the heroes from earlier chapters are the villains in this chapter. History is complicated.

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The argument that oppressive governments kill more people than wars is popular among extreme libertarians and supported by including the internal killing by tyrants in peacetime (such as the Cultural Revolution) with the mass murder of noncombatants during war (such as the Holocaust) and then pointing out that this total is higher than the socially approved killing of soldiers during war. (see, for example, Rummel,
Death by Government
) I hold the opposite view:
All
killing during a war should be counted as war dead. After all, the Americans would not have bombed Hiroshima in peacetime, nor would the Nazis have had access to Poland's 3 million Jews without conquering them.

Tweaking definitions to support a viewpoint occurs on the other side of the scale as well. Pacifists trying to show how deadly war is will often label institutional oppression (the Cultural Revolution, Stalin's purges, and so on) as "conflict" and include those with the more obvious war dead—even though they lack the indiscriminate reciprocal killing that characterizes real war. In these cases, I would differentiate between war and oppression by noting what it would take to end the killing. If both sides need to lay down their arms, it's a war; if one side can simply and unilaterally stop killing (without surrendering), it is oppression.

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Not an excessive number. Just in rough proportion to their presence in any collection of important people.

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Do you detect a pattern in what it takes to be considered great?

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I calculated the total number of deaths only for the larger categories. The margin of error is too large with too many variables to make anything but the broadest comparisons. To go much deeper, I would have to start splitting death tolls and deciding, for example, how much of World War II was genocide or combat, or how much of the slave trade was the fault of native kings or the Europeans.

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A friend once wondered aloud how much suffering in history has been caused by religious fanaticism, and I was able to confidentally tell her 10 percent, based on this number. She probably didn't mean the question literally.