Matthew White - The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of Historys 100 Worst Atrocities

To my mother, who gave me my sense of humor,

and my father, who gave me my sense of justice

CONTENTS

Ranking: The One Hundred
Deadliest Multicides

Appendix 1
Disputing the Top One Hundred

Appendix 2
The Hemoclysm

LIST OF MAPS

FOREWORD

T RADITIONAL HISTORY IS ABOUT KINGS AND ARMIES RATHER THAN PEOPLE. Empires rose, empires fell, entire populations were enslaved or annihilated, and no one seemed to think there was anything wrong with it. Because of this lack of curiosity among traditional scholars about the human cost of historical extravaganzas, a curious person had nowhere to go to answer such basic questions as whether the twentieth century was really the most violent in history or whether religion, nationalism, anarchy, Communism, or monarchy killed the most people.

During the past decade, though, historians and laypeople alike have gone to the sprawli ng website of a guy on the Internet, Matthew Whiteself-described atrocitologist, necrometrician, and quantifier of hemoclysms. White is a representative of that noble and underappreciated profession, the librarian, and he has compiled the most comprehensive, disinterested, and statistically nuanced estimates available of the death tolls of historys major catastrophes. In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things , White now combines his numerical savvy with the skills of a good storyteller to present a new history of civilization, a history whose protagonists are not great emperors but their unsung victimsmillions and millions and millions of them.

White writes with a light touch and a dark wit that belies a serious moral purpose. His scorn is directed at the stupidity and callousness of historys great leaders, at the statistical innumeracy and historical ignorance of various ideologues and propagandists, and at the indif ference of traditional history to the magnitude of human suffering behind momentous events.

Steven Pinker

INTRODUCTION

N O ONE LIKES STATISTICS AS MUCH AS I DO. I MEAN THAT LITERALLY. I CAN never find anyone who wants to listen to me recite statistics.

Well, there is one exception. For several years, Ive maintained the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, a history website on which, among other things, Ive analyzed statistics of changing literacy, urban populations, casualties of war, industrial workforce, population density, and infant mortality. Of those, the numbers that people want to argue about are casualties.

Boy do they want to argue.

From the moment I first posted a tentative list of the twenty-five largest cities in 1900, the twenty bloodiest wars, and the one hundred most important artworks of the twentieth century, I was swamped by e-mails wondering how, why, and where I got my casualty statistics. And why isnt this other atrocity listed? And which country killed the most? Which ideology? And just who the hell do I think I am, accusing the Turks of doing such things?

After many years of this, my website has become a major clearinghouse for body counts, so believe me when I say that I have heard every debate on the subject. Lets get something out of the way right now. Everything you are about to read is disputed. There is no point in loading the narrative with every supposedly or allegedly or according to some sources that it deserves. Nor will I make you slog through every alternative version of events that has ever been suggested.

There is no atrocity in history that every person in the world agrees on. Someone somewhere will deny it ever happened, and someone somewhere will insist it did. For example, I am convinced that the Holocaust happened, but that Herods Massacre of the Innocents did not. It would be easy to find people who disagree with me on both.

Atrocitology is at the center of most major historical disputes. People dont argue about nice history. They argue about who killed whose grandfather. They try to draw lessons from the past and speculate about who is the most Hitleresque politician coming over the horizon. On a particularly contentious topic, two historians from the opposite poles of politics can cover the same ground yet appear to be discussing two entirely different planets. Sometimes you cant find any overlap in the narratives, and it becomes nearly impossible to fuse them into a seamless middle ground. All I can say is that I have tried to follow the consensus of scholars, but when I support a minority view, I will tell you so.

Most people writing a book about historys worst atrocities would describe the One Hundred Worst Things I Can Recall at the Moment. They would include the Holocaust, slavery, 9/11, Wounded Knee, Jeffrey Dahmer, Hiroshima, Jack the Ripper, the Iraq War, the Kennedy assassination, Picketts Charge, and so on. Unfortunately, just brainstorming a list like that will usually reflect an authors biases rather than a proper historical balance. That particular list makes it look like almost everything bad in history was done either to or by Americans rather recently, which implies that Americans are intrinsically, cosmically more important than anyone else.

Other lists might make it seem like everything bad can be associated with one root cause (resources, racism, religion, for example), one culture (Communists, the West, Muslims), or one method (war, exploitation, taxation). Most people acquire their knowledge of atrocities haphazardlya TV documentary, a few movies, a political website, a tourist brochure, and that angry man at the end of the barand then proceed to make judgments about the world based on those few examples. Im hoping to offer a broader and more balanced range of examples to use when arguing about history.

To be fair to all sides, I have carefully selected one hundred events with the largest man-made death tolls, regardless of who was involved or why they did it. To emphasize the statistical basis of this list, I devote more space to describing the deadliest events, while quickly summarizing the lesser events. A death toll of several million gets several pages, while a death toll of a few hundred thousand gets a few paragraphs. The deadliest event gets the longest chapter.

One of the standard ways to skew the data is to decide up front that certain kinds of killing are worse than others, so only those are counted. Gassing ethnic minorities is worse than bombing cities, which is just as bad as shooting prisoners of war, which is worse than machine-gunning enemy troops, which is better than plundering colonial natives, so massacres and famines are counted but not air raids and battles. Or maybe its the other way around. In any case, my philosophy is that I wouldnt want to die in any of these ways, so I count all killings, regardless of how they happened or to whom.

You might wonder how I can possibly know the number who died in an atrocity. After all, wars are messy and confusing, and people can easily disappear without a trace. The participants happily lie about numbers in order to look brave, noble, or tragic. Reporters and historians can be biased or gullible.