The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (95 page)

SIEGES

Military history usually focuses on battles; it brushes lightly over everything else as second-rate war-making. Sieges are dismissed as wasted time between battles, and no one pays them much attention. They’re boring. It’s easier to find popular histories on Gettysburg than on Petersburg, on Stalingrad rather than Leningrad, on World War II rather than World War I. Sitting around in fortifications waiting for the other side to crack isn’t proper war; however, in writing this book, I found that the most destructive and decisive event of many wars was a siege, not a battle.

MISTAKES

I’m amazed at how often the immediate cause of a conflict is a mistake, unfounded suspicion, or rumor. People seem to just blunder through history. A few wars that started before all of the relevant facts were available would be the First World War, Sino-Japanese War, Spanish-American War, Vietnam War, Seven Years War, Second French War of Religion, An Lushan’s Rebellion, Indonesian Purge, and Time of Troubles. And these don’t even include ordinary ideological and religious wars, which are fought in support of ideas that might be wrong. I’ll grant you that some of these wars were coming anyway and just needed an excuse to get started, but history would be a lot more pleasant if people didn’t rush into things.

WOMEN

Even though I’ve never entirely trusted the old truism that a world run by women would be more peaceful than our male-dominated society, I still expected this book would be mostly male: Hitler, Stalin, Chinggis Khan . . . not just men, but men advised and assisted by other men, opposed by more men, in which women only appeared as victims, trophies, or background.

Surprisingly, I found more women causing atrocities than I had originally expected. As my research progressed, I discovered Catherine de Medici, Honoria, Maria Theresa, Jiang Qing, Marina Mnieszech, and a handful of equally difficult women causing trouble throughout history. They are still a small minority among our perpetrators, but this book has more women than Hindus or homosexuals.

Which brings me to . . .

Maybe

Here are some categories that are far from blameless, but probably not as deadly as some of you might suppose.

INDIA AND HINDUISM

Wars of conquest are rarely launched from India. A naval expedition against Indonesia in the eleventh century and scattered raids into Afghanistan may be history’s only attacks outward across the natural borders of India. Who else can claim to be so harmless? Certainly not the British. Nor the French. Nor the Americans, Turks, Japanese—well, we don’t have enough room to continue listing nations that have been more dangerous than India historically. Even the Mongolians and Portuguese have caused more trouble.

That might be explained by geographic isolation, but there’s also a notable scarcity of massive killings inside India as well. Considering that India has usually contained around one-fifth or one-sixth of the human population—as many people as either China or Europe—why doesn’t India show up on my list as often as China and Europe? Even when India appears on the list, the worst megadeaths were inflicted by non-Hindus—Lytton, Yahya Khan, and Aurangzeb. This seems to make the native culture of India almost eerily nonthreatening.

Or does it mean only that no one wrote it down? Hindu philosophy has never been very interested in the real world around us, which means Hindus don’t put a lot of effort into recording the chain of cause and effect that got us here. Most societies that have produced recorded megadeaths have also produced historians to record it. India, however, has no tradition of history writing. Even if some ninth-century Indian warlord had burned and slaughtered his way across the Gangetic Plain, we probably wouldn’t have any record of it.

Even so, that doesn’t entirely explain why there are so few recorded megadeaths after 1000 CE, when historians arrived alongside the major Muslim conquerors. I should also point out that I managed to find two megadeaths (Mayan and Aztec) in the poorly recorded history of pre-Columbian America, so why not India?

HEREDITARY MONARCHS

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

—Denis Diderot

Considering that hereditary monarchy has such a bad reputation among political theorists, you would expect to see more mad monarchs on my list; however, when we study the careers of the bloodiest individuals in history, we find that most are self-made men. Regardless of what they called themselves at the peak of their powers, Hitler, Napoleon, Timur, Chinggis Khan, Mao, and Stalin all had to claw their way up from the bottom. Catherine de Medici, Boris Godunov, and Wang Mang caused trouble as regents and usurpers who were connected to the royal families by marriage. Even the Crusades were started by an elected leader (Pope Gregory). None of these people inherited their position.

In 1801, almost every monarch in Europe was a gibbering lunatic. Even those who may not have been clinically insane were odd enough that later generations could find plenty of strange stories. You would think that with so many unbalanced individuals at the helm, countries like England (George III), Russia (Paul I), Portugal (Maria I), Sweden (Gustav IV Adolf), and Denmark (Christian VII) would be a menace to society, but no. Lunatics were running every country in Europe—except one. A perfectly sane military dictator, Napoleon Bonaparte, ruled France, and
that
was the country causing all of the trouble.

Among the monarchs on my list, none rise to the same level of personal blame as Hitler and Timur. The deadliest, King Leopold II, brutalized the Congo as CEO of a company he created himself, rather than as inheritor of a sovereign state. The monarchs that blundered into World War I were followers more than leaders. The truly deadly monarchs born and raised as royal heirs don’t appear until the middle levels, down around Peter the Great, Frederick the Great, and Alexander the Great.
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Is there a reason why monarchy is relatively benign? One possibility is the absence of meritocracy. In a system where the rulers inherit their positions, their individual talents are the luck of the draw. Some might be very skilled, while others are hopelessly incompetent, but most will be extremely mediocre. Meanwhile, in a republic or dictatorship, individuals rise and fall based on their strengths and talents, so talented evil can rise as easily as talented virtue.

Another reason might be that because the ruling class of monarchies is narrower, rival power structures can be destroyed with smaller massacres. Richard III of England could eliminate his rivals with a few precise murders, but when the Communists set out to destroy the capitalists, they had to kill millions.

NATURE

Well, actually Nature has killed quite a lot of people—most of them in fact. More than 95 percent of all deaths in the twentieth century were by natural causes. That said, there’s a tendency in popular science writing to overemphasize the role that Nature plays in shaping history. To hear some scientists talk, mankind is constantly being knocked around helplessly by every high-pressure system over the Pacific Ocean, or cut down by every bug that lurks in the jungle. Empires rise or fall according to wavering sunshine or annual rainfall.
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Civilizations are immortal without tsunamis to take them down.
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It sometimes sounds like societies don’t budge unless weather or disease forces them to.

Recently I read an article that blamed the Time of Troubles in Russia on a volcanic eruption in Peru.
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The gist was that the dust cloud from the volcano changed the weather, which caused the famine that provoked the peasant revolt. This chain of events is probably more or less true, but I still doubt the overview. Weather fluctuations are quite common; more important is how people react to them.

A few years ago my state had a summer drought that ruined the local crops, but somehow that didn’t provoke a farmer revolt. In fact, I’m pretty sure that every year, the weather does something destructive somewhere in the world, but most of the time people just muddle through. Just about every decade in recorded history has seen a major epidemic somewhere, and most haven’t launched turning points in history. Only when society is ripe for an uprising will bad weather produce an uprising. Social events have social causes. Nature merely provides the setting.

Obviously, a lot depends on your philosophy of causation. If an epidemic cuts through a population that’s been uprooted and battered by a war, are those deaths caused by the war or the disease? If a drought proves to be the tipping point for a system of agriculture straining under mismanagement, which is to blame, farm policies or the weather?

Take, for example, one classic story of the weather’s impact on history: the failure of the Germans to capture Moscow in 1941. If winter hadn’t arrived in the nick of time, the Nazis might have taken the capital in December. But let’s be realistic: if the Red Army hadn’t been in the way, then the Germans would have taken Moscow a whole lot earlier, in June, after a leisurely drive from the border. We really should give more credit to the Russian army for slowing them down long enough for winter to arrive.

PROGRESS

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.

—Gustave Flaubert

Half of the multicides on my list occurred in the past two hundred years. One-third of them occurred in the last one hundred years. I probably don’t need to belabor the point that the twentieth century saw unparalleled horror.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the world is getting more dangerous. Yes, weapons have been getting deadlier, and brutal ideologies have risen and fallen in recent generations. On the other hand, it’s possible that more people were killed in the twentieth century simply because there were more people around to kill. It’s easier to kill a half-million people when nations are fielding armies of millions rather than armies of tens of thousands.

Even that might overstate the increase in killing. Maybe the only reason why it appears that so many were killed in the past two hundred years is that we have more records from that period. I’ve been researching this for years, and it’s been a long time since I found a new, previously unpublicized mass killing from the twentieth century; however, it seems like every time I open an old book, I find another hundred thousand forgotten people killed somewhere in the distant past. Perhaps one chronicler made a note long ago of the number killed, but now that event has faded into the past. Maybe a few modern historians have revisited the event, but they ignore the body count because it doesn’t fit into their perception of the past. They don’t believe it was possible to kill that many people without gas chambers and machine guns so they dismiss contrary evidence as unreliable.

A related misconception is that the killing of civilians is getting more common. This is usually demonstrated by comparing the Second World War to the First World War, or some recent Third World bloodbath to some chivalric war between gentlemen in the era before machine guns. Aside from cherry-picking the examples, this attitude is also based on simply forgetting the past. History books rarely point out that World War I, the Franco-Prussian War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Seven Years War killed plenty of civilians even without air raids and concentration camps.

By my calculation, around 3.5 percent of all deaths in the twentieth century were caused by war, genocide, or tyranny.
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This is certainly higher than the 2 percent who died of those causes in the nineteenth century, but less than the 15 percent that anthropologists and archaeologists have found to be the average for tribal, pre-state societies.
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RESOURCES . . .

It is not easy to find a solid economic cause for many of these conflicts. Yes, plenty of wars have been fought over oil, gold, loot, slaves, and trade routes, but you have to scrounge widely and pass over a lot of counterexamples to build up a list of them. Among my one hundred, I only found eighteen that are easily explained as a fight to control exploitable resources. The rest are better explained as power struggles, holy wars, ethnic squabbles, vendettas, and mistakes (to name just a few alternative reasons).

. . . ESPECIALLY LAND

Since humans are visual creatures, we focus on results that can be illustrated. A territorial change on a map is easier to portray than a change of regime, a debt, a trade agreement, or a realignment of factions. Unfortunately, when we illustrate only wars that resulted in territorial change, it looks like all wars have been about territory.

Notice, however, that the twelve most recent of my one hundred multicides involved no territorial adjustments at all. Even before that, territory didn’t always change hands.