The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (50 page)

In 1838, Henry Francis Fynn, one of Shaka’s white visitors whose diary is a major source for what is written about him, offered the first body count of 1 million dead at Shaka’s hands.
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Within a year of Fynn’s publication, military intelligence from Cape Town passed this number back to London.
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In 1900, historian George McCall Theal bumped the body count up to 2 million, and since then, most modern historians either repeat these numbers without much doubt
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or avoid numbers altogether.

Although there is no compelling evidence for a death toll of a million or more, the fact that so many historians accept it is persuasive in itself. If they were truly dissatisfied with this estimate, they have had two centuries to replace it. They haven’t.

FRENCH CONQUEST OF ALGERIA

Death toll:
775,000
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Rank:
57

Type:
colonial conquest

Broad dividing line:
French vs. natives

Time frame:
1830–47

Location:
Algeria

Who usually gets the most blame:
France

F
RANCE ALREADY HAD A STANDING QUARREL WITH ALGIERS OVER THE BARBARY
pirates (see “Mideast Slave Trade”). Then in 1827, while negotiating payment for a debt the French owed some North African merchants from the Napoleonic Wars, Hussein, the ruler of Algiers, testily whapped the French consul with his fly whisk. Back in Paris, King Charles X of France was widely disliked, but he decided that avenging this insult to French dignity would boost his popularity, so he sent French warships to blockade Algiers. When the Algerians fired on one of the French ships, the French retaliated by occupying all of the cities on the Algerian coast. Critics inside and outside France denounced the conquest as pure aggressive adventurism.

Even conquering Algeria failed to make King Charles popular, and in 1830 the French people threw him out and put a more liberal king on the throne. The new King Louis-Philippe was hoping to get out of North Africa, but his throne was too shaky to risk alienating imperialists in France by abandoning the war, so he reluctantly continued to escalate the fight against the native Arab opposition.

In 1831, faced with a shortage of citizens willing to fight in the war, France created a special army, the French Foreign Legion, to fight the Bedouin in the desert. The legion was stocked with the toughest, meanest cutthroats and scoundrels recruited from all over the world, lured with promises of sanctuary, citizenship, regular pay, and adventure.

For several years, the French couldn’t decide whether they wanted to keep Algeria, so they didn’t spread beyond the few coastal towns they occupied. Finally, in 1834 they officially accepted Algeria as their colony and began to organize an administration for it. By this time, tribal elders had selected Abd el-Kader, the twenty-five-year-old son of a prominent holy man, to rule the unconquered interior region of Algeria from a new capital at Tlemcen. As the resistance solidified, the Algerians harassed the French forces with raids and ambushes. The French, unaccustomed to this kind of war, were easy targets.

The inland city of Constantine withstood several years of French attention. Perched on a rocky plateau, Constantine was difficult to reach, and the first French offensive in 1836 was easily driven off. The Arabs hounded the retreating French with sniper fire and night attacks that whittled them down to a weary, miserable fraction of their original size. In 1837, the French tried again and took Constantine after bombardment, house-to-house street fighting, and angry massacres, all of which left 20,000 Arab civilians dead in the streets.
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By May 1841, the number of French troops deployed in Algeria reached 60,000, but equipment and tactics that had been designed to blow away large armies on the fields of Europe could make no headway against the mobile skirmishing used by the local Arabs and Berbers. Then the new French commander appointed in 1841, Marshal Thomas-Robert Bugeaud, overhauled the entire operation. He lightened the packs carried by the average French soldier and loaded their baggage on mules instead of wagons. Bugeaud left behind the heavy artillery that encumbered his army on the march. He also left behind his irregular native auxiliaries because their presence made it too difficult to tell friend from foe, causing too many French units to not fire on unidentified natives for fear of slaughtering their own troops. Bugeaud redesigned the marching formation, placing combat troops all around the perimeter, ready at a moment’s notice to fend off a native ambush. His flying columns were now able to hunt Abd el-Kader as fast as he could retreat, giving him no rest.
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Bugeaud encouraged his subordinates to deal mercilessly with hostile tribes. In June 1845, a rebel tribe took refuge with their families in a cave at Dahra in the northwest and refused to surrender. French Colonel Aimable Pelissier ordered a bonfire set at the mouth of the cave that consumed all of the oxygen in the cave and replaced it with carbon monoxide. The soldiers that he sent inside afterward to investigate “came back, we are told, pale, trembling, terrified, hardly daring, it seemed, to confront the light of day. . . . They had found all the Arabs dead—men, women, children, all dead!”
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At least 500 people suffocated that day. Pelissier’s official report to Paris proudly and luridly described the incident as a fine example of clever tactics, and he was shocked when French public opinion erupted in protest at his brutality. His career continued to advance anyway.

His colleague, Colonel Armand-Jacques Saint-Arnaud, learned the lesson, so when he sealed up another 500 natives who took refuge in another cave in August, he kept it secret. He lied to his men and his superiors, telling them that these caves were empty and were being blown up only as a precaution. Saint-Arnaud’s career also continued to rise, eventually to war minister and commander of the French army in the Crimean War.
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It took several tries before the fighting in Algeria ended. In 1836, Abd el-Kader looked beaten, so he agreed to a peace treaty splitting Algeria between direct and indirect French rule, but in 1839, the French encroached on the region of indirect rule and the war started up again. The French chased Abd el-Kader into Morocco in 1843. Although Abd el-Kader kept up border raids from his base in Morocco, he finally surrendered in December 1847. The French allowed him to peacefully retire to Lebanon.

TAIPING REBELLION

Death toll:
20 million
¹

Rank:
6

Type:
messianic uprising

Broad dividing line:
Taiping rebels vs. Manchu dynasty of China

Time frame:
1850–64

Location and major state participant:
China

Major non-state participants:
God Worshippers, Taiping Tianguo, the Ever-Victorious Army

Who usually gets the most blame:
Hong Xiuquan, the decadent Manchu dynasty

Another damn:
Chinese peasant revolt

The important question no one ever asks:
What if Hong Xiuquan really
was
the son of God?

T
HE STANDARD SHORT VERSION OF THE TAIPING REBELLION SOUNDS LIKE
science fiction: Space-faring humans land on a primitive world, disturbing the peaceful society with their advanced weaponry, odd scientific notions, and magical technologies. The humans violate the Prime Directive by speaking indiscreetly of many strange things, including their all-powerful God who sent his son to save mankind, and who will one day come again. Amid these confusing rumors, a native falls into a fever and has delirious visions that he himself is this new Son of God whom everyone has been expecting. He confides this to his friends. He rallies followers and launches a crusade that convulses the planet in the most destructive frenzy in its long history. In order to set things right again, the humans must now use their superior technology to crush this uprising and return the world to its previous status quo.

Prelude: The Opium War

For much of recorded history an impartial observer would have considered China to be the most technologically advanced civilization on earth. The Chinese were self-sufficient, self-contained, and self-satisfied. To keep alien contamination to a minimum, the ruling Manchus of the Qing dynasty confined Westerners to a few ports. European merchants had to pay cash on the barrelhead in the form of silver if they wanted any Chinese goods—mostly tea, silk, and porcelain. The Chinese certainly didn’t want any shoddy Western goods from the seafaring barbarians of Portugal, Holland, or England. In the long run, China was draining too much hard currency out of Europe, so the West had to find something to sell the Chinese to get their money back.

Opium was the perfect solution. The British had a steady supply of it coming out of India, and Chinese demand for narcotics was growing as the onslaught of alien ideas and technologies battered their social structure. Unfortunately for the West, the Chinese government completely and utterly banned opium—unless there was a suitable bribe attached. This wasn’t a big problem at first. The bribes were usually less than the import duties the Europeans would have to pay on legal trade, but then, almost by accident, the Chinese court appointed an honest commissioner to stamp out opium addiction. Unlike his predecessors, Lin Zexu actually used his authority to fight opium instead of to shake down merchants. Lin locked down the foreign community and destroyed ten thousand chests of opium, so the British and French declared war.

Although China had spent much of history as the most advanced civilization on earth, the Europeans had long ago passed the Chinese where it counted—military technology. In the First Opium War, the Anglo-French forces shattered the Chinese fleet and destroyed their army with hardly a scratch to themselves. Under the peace treaty of 1842, the Chinese legalized the opium trade and established diplomatic relations with the Europeans on a level of equality; they promised to stop calling the Europeans barbarians, and they allowed them trading posts (“factories”) in treaty ports up and down the coasts and navigable rivers. Along with the merchants came Christian missionaries, who fanned out over the countryside.

The Opiate of the Masses

The battering of their society was driving many Chinese to reconsider ancient spiritual certainties, and Christianity was making substantial gains. This was not entirely new. Christians had been poking around China for centuries. The Nestorian variety of the religion had arrived in caravans from Persia long, long ago. Jesuit missionaries came with the Portuguese navigators in the 1500s. Both types had limited success, but until the Opium War, Christianity never progressed beyond the level of an interesting alien cult that eccentrics sometimes converted to.

Hong Xiuquan would come to be one of those eccentrics. He lived in the far south, deep in the hinterland of Hong Kong and Canton (Guangzhou), where he scraped along as a school teacher. One night in 1837, while Hong recovered from a serious illness, a golden-haired man in a black robe appeared to him in a vision telling him to purify the land. Because the vision made no sense, Hong tucked it away in the back of his mind for a few years and got on with his life. Then, his career stalled after he repeatedly failed the civil service exam that was required to move ahead in Chinese society.

One day in 1843, while moping around the big city after failing the civil service exam yet again, Hong was given Protestant pamphlets. He converted to Christianity and began to study under American Baptist missionaries. Soon he recognized the Christian elements of his half-forgotten vision. He realized that God himself was the man in his vision, and remembered now that God had declared Hong to be his second son, the younger brother of Jesus.
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Some time later, he set up the God Worshippers' Society. At first, Hong kept his kinship to the Messiah secret and simply preached a safe fusion of Confucian and Christian principles with a heavy emphasis on the Ten Commandments. As his following grew, he struck out against the worship of idols, destroying Confucian and ancestral shines. Hong set up communities in the local countryside, baptizing more and more converts until the God Worshippers numbered 20,000 followers in 1850.
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The God Worshippers gained their strongest foothold among Hong's specific ethnic group, the Hakka. Who were the Hakka? Let me oversimplify a complex matter. The people whom most outsiders call "Chinese" are not really an ethnic group; they are more a cultural grouping of peoples who share a common heritage and written language, but not a common spoken language. They call themselves the Han. Because Chinese writing is not phonetic, it exists independently and is used for several diverse tongues that are similar but largely unintelligible to one another when spoken. The most widely spoken and prestigious of the Han languages is Mandarin. It is rooted in the north and is the official tongue of China. South China has several large Han languages such as Cantonese, which is common among Chinese immigrant communities worldwide.

The Hakka people are Han Chinese who fled from north to south in the 1200s during the Mongol conquest, becoming a northern enclave in the southern cultural region. They kept a lot of old traditions and avoided newer customs, such as foot-binding. Their name means "guest people."

If it helps, think of the Hakka like the Amish or Cajuns—alien to the surrounding area, old-fashioned, but not aboriginal. The main difference from the peoples in those examples is that there are many millions of Hakka. Although Hong's God Worshippers gained followers among Chinese of all kinds, the core leadership was Hakka, which made them seem slightly foreign to most southerners.
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Kingdom of Heaven

Can the Chinese still consider themselves men? Ever since the Manchus poisoned China, the flame of oppression has risen up to heaven, the poison of corruption has defiled the emperor's throne, the offensive odor has spread over the four seas, and the influence of demons has distressed the empire while the Chinese with bowed heads and dejected spirits willingly became subjects and servants.

—Taiping pamphlet
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The God Worshippers drifted so far from traditional Chinese behavior that friction was inevitable. They organized into paramilitaries and first clashed with the Qing authorities in December 1850. In January 1851, a God Worshipper army, 10,000 strong, beat the Qing at the battle of Jintian. With victory at his back, Hong declared himself messiah of the Taiping Tianguo or "Great-Peace Heavenly-Kingdom." He elevated five of his closest followers to kings of the East, West, South, North, and (after running out of directions) Wing. Hong took the title of Heavenly King and granted messiahood to his baby son as well.

In the face of imperial assault, the Taipings abandoned their base and went mobile, eventually marching fifteen hundred miles northward across hostile territory. By the time they seized Yongan, their numbers had swollen to 60,000. The movement continued to snowball. Converts among miners brought skills at tunneling and setting explosives, which helped in assaulting walled cities. A force of 120,000 Taipings attacked Changsha in September 1852. There were a half-million Taipings when they seized Wuchang in January 1853. They broke through encircling lines of the Qing armies in April 1853, and when they took Nanjing in September 1853, the Taipings had 2 million followers scattered throughout their territory.

At the fall of Nanjing, the Taipings hunted down and massacred the 40,000 Manchu residents of the city, only 5,000 of whom were troops. Manchu men, women, and children were speared, hacked apart, tied up and thrown into the river, or set on fire.
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Soon after, the Taiping momentum stalled. A column of 70,000 that was sent to take Beijing was repulsed and chased south over the course of several months in 1853–54—harassed, eroded, and eventually wiped out by the Qing. After this setback, Hong abandoned the offensive in order to consolidate control of the Yangtze River and establish a proper court in Nanjing.

The Taipings were not the only group in opposition to the Manchus, but they failed to coordinate with two neighboring uprisings—the Nian in the north and the Red Turbans in the south. At times, the Taipings tried to partner with bandits and river pirates who hated the authorities and were adept at fighting, but the Taipings tended toward puritanical asceticism, so the criminal classes inevitably lost interest.

The Taipings outlawed opium, prostitution, homosexuality, and alcohol. Men and women were kept entirely apart, although both genders were recruited into the armies. The new society was structured along military lines into a kind of holy army.

All land was shared in common. A surplus in the harvest of one village would be used to alleviate the deficiency in another village; "thus, all the people in the empire may together enjoy the abundant happiness of the Heavenly Father, Supreme Lord and Great God. There being fields, let all cultivate them; there being food, let all eat; there being clothes, let all be dressed; there being money, let all use it, so that nowhere does inequality exist, and no man is not well fed and clothed." And that went for "wheat, pulse, hemp; flax, cloth, silk, fowls, dogs, etc., and money, the same is true; for the whole empire is the universal family of our Heavenly Father, the Supreme Lord and Great God."
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