The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (109 page)

Congo Free State

1.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, p. 159.

2.
Forbath,
River Congo, p. 370.

3.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, p. 161.

4.
Ibid., pp. 164–166.

5.
Forbath,
River Congo, p. 374.

6.
Ibid., p. 375.

7.
Pakenham,
Scramble for Africa, p. 590.

8.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, pp. 179–180.

9.
Pakenham,
Scramble for Africa, pp. 591–592.

10.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, pp. 195–199.

11.
Pakenham,
Scramble for Africa, p. 597.

12.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, p. 192.

13.
Ibid., p. 199.

14.
Ibid., pp. 245–249; Pakenham,
Scramble for Africa, p. 597.

15.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, p. 202.

16.
E. D. Morel,
The Black Man's Burden (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920), ch. 9 ("When the country had been explored in every direction by travellers of divers nationalities, estimates varied between twenty and thirty millions. No estimate fell below twenty millions. In 1911 an official census was taken. It was not published in Belgium, but was reported in one of the British Consular dispatches. It revealed that only eight and a half million people were left."); this estimate also appears in "Congo Free State," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 3, p. 535; and Bertrand Russell,
Freedom and Organization 1814–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2001; first published by George Allen, 1934), p. 453, citing Sir Harry Hamilton Johnston,
A History of the Colonization of Africa
by Alien Races (Cambridge Historical Series; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1899), p. 352.

17.
Forbath,
River Congo, p. 375.

18.
Hochschild,
Leopold's Ghost, pp. 225–234.

Cuban Revolution

1.
Between 1895 and 1899, Cuba's population declined from about 1.8 million to 1.5 million. Hugh Thomas,
Cuba (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), p. 423; Anderson,
Under Three Flags (New York: Verso, 2005), p. 146. Three hundred thousand Cubans died, 200,000 of them civilians from disease and hunger. Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, p. 364. In addition, 62,853 Spanish soldiers died in Cuba, 85 percent by illness. Sergio Díaz-Briquets,
The Health Revolution in Cuba (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), p. 199.

2.
Rogozinski,
Brief History of the Caribbean, pp. 205–207; Scheina,
Latin America's Wars, pp. 351–364, 415–425.

The Western Way of War

1.
This concept was originated and is described in detail by Victor Davis Hanson in
The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Knopf, 1989), and in
Carnage and Culture.

Mexican Revolution

1.
The median of seventeen published estimates. See
http://www.necrometrics.com/20c1m.htm#Mexican
.

2.
Skidmore and Smith,
Modern Latin America, p. 234.

3.
McLynn,
Villa and Zapata, pp. 151–159.

4.
Ibid., pp. 308–309.

5.
Ibid., pp. 309–310.

6.
Boot,
Savage Wars of Peace, p. 188.

First World War

1.
The canonical military death toll is around 8.5 million. See, for example: "World Wars," in
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 29, p. 987 (8,528,831); Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 529; Overy,
Hammond Atlas of the 20th Century; Rod Paschall,
The Defeat of Imperial Germany 1917–1918 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), citing Arthur Banks (8,513,000); John Ellis and Michael Cox,
The World War I Databook (London: Aurum, 2001)
(8,364,712).

2.
Civilian deaths during World War I were not recorded as carefully as the deaths of soldiers, but the median of the various guesses falls at 6.6 million. From high to low: "World Wars," in
Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 15th ed., vol. 29, p. 987 (13 million); "Twentieth Century," in
Encyclopedia Americana (Danbury, CT: Scholastic Library, 2006) (12.5 million); Overy,
Hammond Atlas of the 20th Century, p. 36 (9 million); Spencer Tucker, et al.,
European Powers in the First World War (New York: Garland Pub., 1996), p. 172 (ca. 6.6 million); "Losses of Life," in
Dictionary of Military History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1994), p. 470 (6.6 million); John Ellis and Michael Cox,
The World War I Databook (London: Aurum, 2001) (ca. 6.5 million); Urlanis,
Wars and Population, p. 268 (6 million plus); Davies,
Europe (5 million).

3.
Keegan,
History of Warfare, pp. 357–358.

4.
Keegan,
First World War, pp. 18–23.

5.
Barbara Tuchman,
The Guns of August (New York: Dell, 1963), p. 76.

6.
James L. Stokesbury,
A Short History of World War I (New York: Morrow, 1981), p. 61.

7.
Keegan,
First World War, pp. 82–83; McDougall, "Dirty Hands."

8.
Keegan,
Face of Battle, p. 230.

9.
Miller,
Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights, ch. 10.

10.
Ibid.

11.
Attributed to French Marshall Henri-Philippe Petain.

12.
Keegan,
Face of Battle, pp. 213–215, 248.

13.
Edward J. Erickson,
Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), p. 94.

14.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 421.

15.
Strachan,
First World War, p. 188.

16.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 473.

17.
Keegan,
Face of Battle, p. 255.

18.
John M. Barry,
The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004), p. 103.

19.
Adolf Hitler, "Letter from the Western Front," February 1915, at
The Holocaust Project, Humanitas International,
http://www.humanitas-international.org/holocaust/hepplett.htm
.

20.
James L. Stokesbury,
A Short History of World War I (New York: Morrow, 1981), p. 61.

21.
Gilbert,
History of the Twentieth Century, vol. 1, p. 357.

22.
Melson, "Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide," in Rosenbaum, ed.,
Is the Holocaust Unique?; Rouben Paul Adalian, "The Armenian Genocide," in Samuel Totten et al., eds.,
Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004); Chalk and Jonassohn,
History and Sociology of Genocide, pp. 249–289.

23.
Sabrina Tavernise, "Nearly a Million Genocide Victims, Covered in a Cloak of Amnesia,"
New York Times, March 8, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09turkey.html
. "According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916."

24.
Forbath,
River Congo, p. 377.

25.
Strachan,
First World War, pp. 256–257.

26.
McLynn,
Villa and Zapata, p. 333.

27.
Lincoln,
Red Victory, p. 397.

28.
Chris Suellentrop, "What's Osama Talking About?"
Slate, October 8, 2001,
http://www.slate.com/id/1008411
.

Russian Civil War

1.
The median of eleven published estimates. See
http://www.necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm#RCW
.

2.
Kinder and Hilgemann,
Anchor Atlas of World History, vol. 2, p. 142.

3.
Figes,
People's Tragedy, p. 660.

4.
Boot,
Savage Wars of Peace, pp. 207–230.

5.
Figes,
People's Tragedy, p. 576.

6.
Ibid., p. 577.

7.
Ibid., pp. 586–587.

8.
Ibid., pp. 658–659.

9.
Ibid., pp. 578–584.

10.
Mayer,
Furies, pp. 380–389; Figes,
People's Tragedy, p. 662.

11.
Mayer,
Furies, pp. 523–525.

12.
Lincoln,
Red Victory, pp. 392–421.

13.
Johnson,
Modern Times, p. 69.

14.
Service,
History of Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 108.

15.
Ibid., p. 103. He makes the interesting observation that Russia "was clearly not yet a properly functioning police state if this could happen to the Cheka's chairman."

16.
Figes,
People's Tragedy, pp. 635–640; Mayer,
Furies, pp. 275–276.

17.
Johnson,
Modern Times, pp. 69–70.

18.
Leon Trostsky,
My Life (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1930), p. 323. Available at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/1930-lif.pdf
.

Greco-Turkish War

1.
The only well-documented number is that the Greek army lost some 42,000, killed and missing. Urlanis,
Wars and Population, p. 95. Assuming that the Turks lost about the same number brings the total number of military dead for both sides to some 85,000 soldiers. R. J. Rummel, in
Death by Government, pp. 233–234, estimates that the Greeks killed 15,000 civilian Turks, and the Turks killed 264,000 civilian Greeks, including some 100,000 in Smyrna. Based on the number of refugees who disappeared between head counts, the Greeks claim that 353,000 Pontic Greeks were killed in communities along the Black Sea. Totten,
Dictionary of Genocide: A-L, p. 337. All of these fragments point to a total death toll in the neighborhood of 364,000 to 453,000; however, I won't pretend that this is anything but a guess, so I'm just grabbing the nearest round number.