The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (35 page)

Consider the Powhatans of Virginia. In the book
American Holocaust
, David Stannard claims that their population was 100,000 before contact, but European “depredations and disease” reduced this population to a mere 14,000 by the time the English settled Jamestown in 1607.
³⁵
Now, let’s be fair. Should we blame the English for 86,000 deaths that occurred before they even arrived? Stannard mentions pre-Jamestown depredations, but as far as I can tell, the handful of European ventures into the Virginia region before 1607 were too small to do much depredating. Until Jamestown, the Europeans usually got the worst of it. For, example, a small Spanish mission was wiped out by natives in 1571, and England’s Roanoke Colony mysteriously disappeared around 1589.

If the Europeans had arrived with the most benign intentions and behaved like perfect guests, or if Carib mariners had be
en the ones to discover Europe instead of the opposite, then the Indians would still have been exposed to unfamiliar diseases and the population would still have been scythed by massive epidemics. In that case, society would regard it in the same category as the Black Death: bad luck.
*

That said, the mere fact that disease was the primary agent of death doesn’t absolve the Europeans. Whatever reduced the residual 14,000 Powhatans of 1607 to just about zero definitely counts because by that time, English hostility and land grabs were taking their toll. In most of the atrocities listed in this book, starvation and disease did most of the dirty work but I still count them as atrocities. If I were to limit the tally to the number of deaths by direct violence, the Holocaust killed fewer than 3 million Jews, and the toll from the American Civil War wouldn’t be high enough to make the list.
³⁶

How Many Died?

In 1542, las Casas estimated that the Spaniards had killed more than 12 million Native Americans and probably as many as 15 million in the first fifty years of contact. Despite five hundred years of additional research, that’s still as good as any estimate that has followed.

A few o
ther researchers have attempted to supply better numbers. In
American Holocaust
, Stannard estimates the total cost of the near extermination of the American Indians as 100 million dead. In
Statistics of Democide
, Rudolph J. Rummel suggests a range of 9,723,000 to 24,838,000 democides inflicted on the Native Americans before 1900, including 2 to 15 million during the Colonial Era.
³⁷

Usually, I prefer the median of all available estimates as my death toll. I figure that if I lined up all of our experts, and then started marking out the extremes—using the highest to cancel out the lowest, the second highest against the second lowest, eventually closing in on the center—I would have a number that is more defensible than one that stands alone at the upper or lower edge. The problem here is that there are only three reasonably authoritative estimates, all wildly different. Using the same trick I sometimes used for medieval Chinese estimates, I could decide to go with the geometric mean (14 million) of Rummel’s absolute minimum (2 million) and Stannard’s absolute maximum (100 million).

Can’t we do any better?

The crux of the problem is that no one has the foggiest notion of how many Native Americans were around before the Europeans came along and began to both count them and kill them. As
The New York Public Library American History Desk Reference
puts it, “Estimates of the Native American population of the Americas, all completely unscientific, range from 15 to 60 million.”
³⁸
And even this cynical assessment is wrong. The estimates range from 8 to 145 million.
³⁹
Most writers pick the estimate that best supports whatever thesis they’re pushing. The number of Indians is directly proportional to how destructive they want the Europeans to be.

For what it’s worth, an estimate of around 40 million original inhabitants seems to be a popular choice among the authorities who aren’t screaming from a soapbox.
⁴⁰

So how did I arrive at the 15 million in the heading of this chapter? I’ve assumed that the New World began with 40 million people, but after the Europeans arrived, the Amerindian population crashed and bottomed out at around 5 million.

The next step is to determine how many of these 35 million deaths should count as indictable killings resulting from violence and oppression, both direct (war, murder, execution) and indirect (famine, aggravated disease). Obviously, some were and some weren’t. We can’t apportion the death toll with any kind of certainty, but no matter how much I fiddle with t
he numbers, I can’t get the indictable genocides much lower than 10 million or much higher than 20 million. I split the difference.
⁴¹

GENOCIDE

W
AS THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS GENOCIDE? WELL,
the Indians were in the way, and the Europeans got rid of them. It became genocide in effect if not intent.

At almost every step of the way, powerful factions deliberately killed unassimilated Indians, and this troubled their consciences no more than clearing the forests or hunting down dangerous predators. Across most of the hemisphere, Europeans and Africans completely replaced the Amerindians, and even where the native gene stock has survived, their descendants adopted Western languages and religions.

The G Word

Since genocide is the worst accusation you can throw at a nation, every oppression gets called genocide at some point or another. Merely calling it a purge or massacre doesn’t seem to be enough. Then, because genocide is such an insult, every accusation is vigorously denied, usually by insisting that the killing was a legitimate act of war, the death toll was lower, the enemy deserved it, or the deaths weren’t deliberate. A long history of international law prohibiting the murder of civilians hasn’t actually prevented the murder of civilians, but it has made us quite good at coming up with excuses.

After a half century of arguing about the meaning of
genocide
, the word has lost its sharp edges, but let’s define it narrowly here to mean the attempted eradication of an ethnic group by violence. Let’s further define ethnicity as a group identity you have no control over. You are born into it; you share it with your family, and it does not change no matter what may happen later in your life. Because
genocide
comes from the same root as
genetics
, common sense would indicate that genocide is the killing of a people based on their ancestry, not their religion, wealth, education, or political beliefs.

By this definition, the Nagasaki bombing, killings by the Khmer Rouge regime, and the Katyn massacre were
not
genocides—the Nagasaki bombing because surrender was an option, the Cambodia killings because they were political and within a single ethnicity, and the Katyn massacre (see “Joseph Stalin”) because the scale was not large enough to count as “attempted eradication.”

One defining characteristic of genocide is the single-minded devotion with which the oppressors eradicate the target group. The oppressors are not satisfied with killing just anyone who rises up and resists—they make it a point to hunt down and wipe out every man, woman, child, baby, and dog. If you belong to the target demographic, you will be killed no matter how much you beg for mercy; girls, however, are often spared, raped, and enslaved because they aren’t important enough to be killed.

Taking revenge against an entire family for the crimes of one member doesn’t count as genocide either, even though it often looks like it.

Notice that about half of the genocides listed below were successful. The target group was thoroughly eliminated and replaced by
the perpetrators, at least in the regions under attack. Most of today’s largest ethnicities have gotten where they are by wiping out their rivals. Other genocides were unsuccessful. The victims bounced back, and the only lasting result was the bitter memory of tens of thousands of senseless deaths.

Thirty-One Notable Genocides:

Native American Indians:
15,000,000 may have died at the hands of European conquerors.

Along with the collapse of the native population up and down the Western Hemisphere, hundreds of individual tribes simply disappeared:

The Arrohattoc of Virginia were gone by 1669.

The Apalachee of Florida died out in the 1700s.

The Yazoo of Mississippi died out after 1729.

The Powhatan language of Virginia went extinct in the 1790s.

The Timucua of Florida disappeared shortly after 1821.

Shanawdithit, the last known Beothuk of Newfoundland, died in 1829.

During the 1870s, the Argentines wiped out the Araucanian Indians to open the Pampas to white settlement.
¹

Ishi, the last Yahi of California, died in 1916.
²

The Clackamas of Oregon were gone by the 1920s.

The Natchez language of Louisiana died out in the 1930s.

The Catawban language family of the Carolinas went extinct in the 1960s.

The pattern of destruction for each tribe was much the same. The first white visitors were welcomed with cautious hospitality. Soon, contact with the Europeans infected the natives with catastrophic illnesses. Then whalers, soldiers, settlers, or miners raided the tribe for slave labor or supplies. The Indians stole horses, cattle, or tools. Thieves and trespassers were killed. The other side retaliated. Peace returned for a while. War followed that. Eventually, the local whites decided that the only solution was to remove the natives completely. Cooperative Indians were rounded up and sent away, while uncooperative ones were hunted down and killed. The few pitiful survivors were taken under the protection of a charity, where they were housed in a shed out back and taught to sing hymns. The last members of the tribe were considered a sad, drunken curiosity and were allowed to die without perpetuating their culture or bloodline.

Holocaust:
5,500,000 Jews were killed
³
(see “Second World War” for details).

Because the word
genocide
was coined in 1944 specifically to describe what Hitler was doing inside conquered Europe, this is the one event that counts as genocide no matter how you define it. In fact, most people use the word to mean any activity that reminds them of the Holocaust, regardless of whether the UN decides that activity fits its strict legal definition of genocide.
*

Ukrainians:
Around 4,200,000 were starved in 1932–33
⁴
(see “Joseph Stalin” for details).

The “terror famine” that Stalin created while restructuring Soviet agriculture fell most heavily on the Ukrainians, who insist that the Holodomor was an outright genocide directed specifically at them; however, this might be a good example of a brutal atrocity that was as bad as a genocide without actually being one.

Bengalis:
1,500,000 were killed by the Pakistanis in 1971.

Although everyone outside Bangladesh forgets about it, this is probably the deadliest genocide since the Holocaust.

Armenians:
972,000 were killed in 1915 (see “First World War” for details).

The Turks won’t admit that they did this, and no one pressures them on it because Turkey is too important as a strategic and cultural crossroads between East and West. The Turkish version of events is that the Armenians revolted, got into ethnic fights with local Kurds, and slaughtered tens of thousands of Muslims before their rebellion was put down. The Turks explain away the million missing Armenians by claiming that they fled overseas after their defeat.

Tutsi:
937,000 were killed by Hutu in Rwanda in 1994 (see “Rwandan Genocide” for details).

Gypsies:
500,000 were killed from 1940 to 1945 (see “Second World War” for context).

Because the Gypsies had a reputation as congenital criminals, the Nazis classed them as subhuman and systematically exterminated them.
⁵

Tibetans:
perhaps 350,000 have been killed.
⁶

Since the Chinese reconquest of Tibet in 1950, the People’s Republic has systematically tried to eradicate the Tibetan people, to demolish their landmarks, and to erase their culture. Chinese immigrants have replaced the native Tibetans as the majority in most of Tibet’s cities.

Serbs:
300,000 were killed
⁷
from 1940 to 1945 (see “Second World War” for context).

After conquering Yugoslavia in World War II, the Germans set up a puppet Croatian state under the native fascist organization, the Ustase. Not only did this puppet government happily cooperate with Nazi extermination programs directed at Jews and Gypsies, but they made a special effort to eradicate Serbs as well.
⁸

Assyrians:
maybe 275,000 were killed by the Turks,
⁹
starting in 1915 (see “First World War” for details).

Australian Aborigines:
240,000 vanished between 1788 and 1920.

In a phase of history that parallels the conquest of the Americas, the Aborigines (original population: probably 300,000,
¹⁰
possibly 750,000
¹¹
) were caught in the teeth of white colonization and destroyed by violence, disease, and hunger. Only 60,000 were left by 1920. Maybe 20,000 Aborigines and 2,500 whites were killed directly by fighting.
¹²

Chechens, Ingush, Karachai, Balkars, Kalmyks:
230,000 died in exile between 1943 and 1957 (see “Joseph Stalin” for context).

During World War II, Stalin uprooted entire nationalities that had been overtaken by the German advance because he didn’t trust their loyalty. They were shipped off to the east, where hundreds of thousands died.

Asiatic Greeks:
anywhere from 100,000 to 350,000 died at Turkish hands between 1919 and 1923 (see “Greco-Turkish War” for details).

Kurds:
over 200,000 were killed during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s in several countries.

The Kurds spent most of the twentieth century as oppressed minorities in three nations—Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The worst single period of genocide inflicted on them was in 1987–88, when Saddam Hussein had some 180,000 slaughtered in Iraq.

Darfur:
200,000 have died since 2003 (see “War in the Sudan” for details).

Carthaginians:
150,000 died in the fall of Carthage in 146 BCE.
¹³

During the third and final war between Rome and Carthage, the Romans captured the mother city and burned it to the ground. They massacred the men and sold the women into slavery. Because merely killing and enslaving the entire population is just too ordinary, later legend added that the Romans plowed the land with salt so that nothing would ever grow there again.

Hutu:
125,000 were killed in Burundi in 1972–73
¹⁴
(see “Rwandan Genocide” for context).

East Timor:
102,800 died
¹⁵
between 1975 and 1999.

Indonesia invaded and conquered this former colony of Portugal, killing up to a third of the population.