The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (94 page)

WHAT I FOUND: ANALYSIS

W
HAT CAN WE CONCLUDE FROM MY LIST OF MASS KILLINGS? IS THERE
any single quality that all one hundred of them share? Aside from the horrific everyday details like torture, cannibalism, assassination, rape, castration, betrayal, and severed heads, are there any larger characteristics that all of these multicides have in common?

I don’t see any. In fact, the only major characteristic that applies to most of these mass killings without applying to all of them is that four-fifths are wars. You may not consider it a startling revelation that wars kill more people than dictators—after all, the average war mobilizes more active participants and allows more indiscriminate destruction than the average police state—but there’s a widespread school of thought in atrocitology that wars are
not
the leading cause of violent death. Some atrocitologists claim that oppressive government is worse. This appears to be wrong.
*

A few of the one hundred incidents have some unusually specific similarities. I’ll leave it up to you as to whether these are significant or mere coincidence:

Defenestrations of Prague: Twice in this book, someone was thrown out of a window in Prague. (Thirty Years War and Joseph Stalin)

Many of the dictators came from communities slightly beyond the margin of the nations they would come to lead. Napoleon was Corsican, not French. Stalin was Georgian, not Russian. Hitler was Austrian, not German. Alexander was Macedonian, not Greek.

The United States was sucked into three European wars when the belligerents imposed blockades against their enemies. (Napoleonic Wars, World War I, World War II)

Twice the conquest of China followed the same geographic pattern: During a civil war, an army out of Manchuria took Beijing. The defending Chinese tried to regroup at Nanjing, but were beaten, and a remnant retreated to Taiwan, which they seized from foreigners. (Fall of the Ming Dynasty, Chinese Civil War [second phase])

Thuggish warlords like to be named after iron and steel.
Stalin
comes from the Russian word for steel.
Timur
and
Temujin
probably come from
temur
, the Mongolian word for iron. In alchemy/astrology the same symbol (
) is used for Mars, war, iron, and male, and these gentlemen would probably appreciate the equivalence.

Three times the West tried to put native Christian strongmen in charge of recently created non-Christian East Asian countries. (Chiang Kai-shek in China, Syngman Rhee in Korea, Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam) The religious difference may be one reason why the majority of natives never rallied to their support in the subsequent civil war. (Chinese Civil War, Korean War, Vietnam War)

Saxony can never decide which side it wants to be on. (Thirty Years War, Seven Years War, Napoleonic Wars)

Even though Russia gets all of the credit for being unconquerable, armies invading Egypt get chewed up and spit out too. (Fifth Crusade, Hulagu’s Invasion, Napoleonic Wars, World War II)

While we’re on the subject, it
is
sometimes possible to beat the Russians on their home turf. (Mongols, World War I)

Has anybody actually
won
a war using elephants? (Timur, Second Punic War, Alexander the Great)

Vacationing in France is a bad career move for monarchs. (Cambodia, see “Vietnam War”; Afghanistan, see “Soviet-Afghan War”)

Twice, backstabbing palace intrigues wiped out a ruling family, leaving the throne in the hands of a usurper. Natural disasters showed God’s disapproval of the usurper, so the peasants rose against him. (Xin Dynasty, The Time of Troubles)

The taboo against cannibalism isn’t quite as strong as they say it is. (Too many examples to name)

About 60 percent of the individual oppressors and warmongers who were most responsible for each of these multicides lived happily ever after (see above chart).

Off the Hook

I’m sure that some readers (but certainly not you) will look at this list and smugly declare, “Aha! [Somebody we hate] produced six megadeaths, while [somebody we like] produced only two, which proves that [somebody we hate] is far worse than [somebody we like], so there!” Fill in the blanks however you want—Africans, Belgians, Christians, Communists, French, the godless, left-handers, Muslims, multinational corporations, racists, Russians, or white people.

Unfortunately, that line of reasoning falls apart on one very important issue. “Only” two megadeaths is nothing to be proud of. Causing
any
megadeath is bad, especially since there are a few human types and activities that don’t stand out as the direct cause of my one hundred mass killings.

BIRDS AND/OR BEES

Considering that sex drives everything that people do, and drives them all crazy in the process, you might think there would be at least one real war fought over it. According to legend, the Greeks destroyed Troy in order to reclaim the fair Helen, and the bachelors of early Rome kidnapped the Sabine women as breeding stock, but I can find no large, documented war by a state-level society that was fought over sex. The closest I can find is an occasional conflict where the winner gets a useful political marriage with a huge dowry.

But that’s not really sexual, is it?

This doesn’t mean that sex is absent from wars. Rape is as much a part of war as killing, looting, and enslavement. Military recruiters have always lured farmboys into the ranks with the promise of adventure, and women traditionally swoon over a man in uniform, but wars don’t start over sex. The fighting is always about something else. After all, you can rally mass armies with appeals to patriotism, God, revenge, glory, and greed, but citizens won’t flock to the colors to help the president get laid.

Some commentators would blame sex anyway. They will talk of hidden motivations, stressed libidos, raging testosterone, macho posturing, and hormone-flooded teenagers, but this becomes the flip side of the problem we faced when discussing holy wars. To what extent do we take declared motivations at face value? Across history, people have always been willing to fight wars in the name of religion, but not in the name of sex. Some scholars ignore those declarations, and instead claim that, deep down, all wars are about sex and none are about religion. Who are we to believe?

TERRORISTS

A terrorist act sparked the First World War, but terrorism itself is small potatoes. Except for a few especially destructive operations, terrorism rarely kills more than a few dozen people per incident. Even an entire campaign of terrorism won’t kill enough to get on my list. If your choice is between tolerating a few car bombings now and then, and starting a war over terrorists, probably fewer lives will be lost with the first choice.

JEWS

Throughout my studies of atrocities, I’ve always found a dark undercurrent of opinion that wants to blame all of the evil in the world on certain sinister minorities. One homosexual Nazi who was purged early in Hitler’s regime (Ernst Roehm) is enough for some people to blame the entire Nazi movement on a supposed cabal of sexual deviants.
¹
One prominent Jew among the Bolsheviks (Leon Trotsky) was enough to provoke massive pogroms during the Russian Civil War.

As tempting as it is to simply ignore people who spout these opinions, we probably should keep in the habit of refuting them whenever we find them. When you let crazy opinions pass without debate, outside observers might think that those opinions are commonly accepted.

So let’s look at the statistics. Only one of these hundred multicides—the Roman-Jewish Wars—can be blamed even partially on the Jews. Go back and count. You’d be hard-pressed to find more than a couple of stray Jews who appear as minor perpetrators in any other chapter. Mostly this is because there have never been enough Jews to cause as much trouble as they get blamed for, but even so—someone’s got to say it. The Jews are
not
behind everything bad that happens in the world.

GAYS

Here’s another much-maligned minority that doesn’t stand out among the prime movers of the multicides. When you start listing the people who have inflicted massive death and destruction on humanity, you don’t find as many gays as when you list, for example, writers, artists, actors, or kings. You’ve got Alexander the Great from a bisexual culture. Julius Caesar, Vespasian, and Titus apparently would jump on anything. Frederick the Great and Shaka were enigmatic and childless. But none of the major perpetrators on my list have been proved to be gay—even when homosexuality is well documented among some of their contemporaries. You might think this is merely a function of the relatively small number of gays throughout history, but alcoholics, painters, giants, and cat-haters (for example) are also minorities, and several perpetrators in this book easily fit those descriptions.
*
The worst thing that gays have done in this book was fail, as monarchs, to ensure a smooth succession by producing sons.

Well, that and stuffing an archbishop into a roaring fire.

VIKINGS, SAMURAI, SPARTANS, SIKHS, AND OTHERS

A lot of people who have reputations as total badasses have not killed very many people, while other nations that are widely ridiculed as losers, cowards, and sissies did.

On the Hook

Some aspects of human destruction surprised me by being more common than I had originally suspected.