The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (116 page)
Authors: Matthew White
2.
Berkeley,
Graves Are Not Yet Full, pp. 258–259.
3.
Sperling, "Mother of Atrocities."
4.
Berkeley,
Graves Are Not Yet Full, p. 269.
5.
"Mayor Gets 30 Years for Genocide," BBC, June 17, 2004; Fergal Keane, "Massacre at Nyarubuye Church," BBC, April 4, 2004.
6.
"Rwanda Genocide Priest Given Life," BBC, March 12, 2008.
7.
Sperling, "Mother of Atrocities," p. 656.
8.
Ibid., pp. 644–646, quoting Lt. Gen. Romeo Dallaire.
9.
Arthur Asiimwe, "Rwanda Census Puts Genocide Death Toll at 937,000," Reuters News, April 4, 2004.
10.
Sperling, "Mother of Atrocities,".
11.
Berkeley,
Graves Are Not Yet Full, p. 273.
12.
"Local Rwandan Courts Convict More Than 3,600 over Genocide," Agence France Presse, January 10, 2006.
13.
"Death Penalty Abolition Spurs Quest for Justice," Inter Press Service, August 7, 2007.
Second Congo War
1.
Casteneda, "Revolutionary's View of Kabila."
2.
Mcgreal, "Worrying Past of a Rebel in Crocodile Shoes."
3.
Donald G. McNeil, "In Congo, Forbidding Terrain Hides a Calamity,"
New York Times, June 1, 1997; French, "Kagame's Hidden War in the Congo."
4.
Amnesty International, "Democratic Republic of Congo: War against Unarmed Civilians," AI Index: AFR 62/036/1998, November 23, 1998.
5.
Weiss and Carayannis, "Reconstructing the Congo."
6.
Ibid.
7.
"Radio Expeditions: Coltan Mining."
8.
Braeckman, "Looting of the Congo."
9.
Amnesty International, "Democratic Republic of Congo: From Assassination to State Murder?" AI Index: AFR 62/023/2002, December 12, 2002; "Death Sentences for 'Kabila Killers,' " BBC, January 7, 2003,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2635295.stm
.
10.
"Profile: Joseph Kabila," BBC, last updated Wednesday, December 6, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/6209774.stm
.
11.
International Rescue Committee, "Congo Crisis." There have been four reports by the IRC, each with revised estimates of death tolls: 2000 (1.7 million); 2001 (2.5 million); 2005 (3.8 million); 2008 (5.4 million). The 2008 study found that the mortality rate in Congo still exceeds the African average, causing over a million and a half excess deaths since the formal end of hostilities; however, deaths by violence fell sharply from 11.1 percent at the peak of the fighting, to 1.5 percent after December 2006, and the IRC has moved away from calling it a war to calling it a humanitarian crisis. For the sake of ranking, I'm blaming the war only for the 3.8 excess deaths that actually occurred during it, as determined by the 2005 study.
12.
Nolen, "War on Women."
13.
Ibid.
What I Found: Analysis
1.
See "Homosexuality in Nazi Germany," Conservapedia,
http://www.conservapedia.com/Homosexuality_in_Nazi_Germany
, for an example of this.
2.
David Biello, "Rise and Fall of Chinese Dynasties Tied to Changes in Rainfall,"
Scientific American, November 7, 2008,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monsoon-climate-change-chinese
.
3.
William J. Broad, "In the Mediterranean, Killer Tsunamis from an Ancient Eruption,"
New York Times, November 2, 2009.
4.
Kimberly Johnson, "1600 Eruption Led to Global Cooling, Social Unrest,"
National Geographic News, April 29, 2008,
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080429-peru-volcano.html
.
5.
Based on estimates from Carl Haub, "How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?"
Population Today, November/December 2002,
http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx
, it appears that 5.5 billion people died during the twentieth century. Of these, I've counted some 203 million multicides.
6.
Lawrence Keeley,
War before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), table 6.1.
Appendix 1: Disputing the Top One Hundred
1.
Dares of Phrygia,
History of the Fall of Troy, Theoi Classical E-Texts Library, http://www.theoi.com/Text/DaresPhrygius.html (accessed March 14, 2011).
2.
Putnam's Home Cyclopedia (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), p. 417 (400,000);
A Military Dictionary and Gazetteer: Comprising Ancient and Modern Military Technical Terms . . . (Philadelphia: Thomas Wilhelm, 1882), p. 310 (300,000).
3.
Historia Augusta, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Claudius*.html (accessed March 18, 2011).
4.
Susan P. Mattern,
Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 93.
5.
Historia Augusta, http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Historia_Augusta/Probus*.html (accessed March 18, 2011).
6.
Book of Mormon, Ether 15:2.
7.
Will Durant,
Our Oriental Heritage (New York: MJF, 1971), p. 459.
8.
Rajeev Srinivasan, "The Roots of Hindu Anxiety: An Interview with Controversial Scholar Koenraad Elst,"
India Currents 9, no. 11 (February 28, 1996), p. 21.
9.
Koenraad Elst, "India's Holocaust: Belgium Scholar Analyzes 'The Bloodiest Story in History,' "
Hinduism Today, March 31, 1999.
10.
I found two books from the late nineteenth century (M. D. Aletheia,
The Rationalist's Manual (London: Watts, 1897); William Wright Hardwicke,
The Evolution of Man: His Religious Systems and Social (London: Watts, 1899), p. 275) with identical lists of multicides committed by Christians, which include "7,000,000 during the Saracen slaughters. In Spain 5,000,000 perished during the eight Crusades"; however, I suspect the punctuation is misplaced. As written, we have unidentified Saracen slaughters somewhere, and then we have eight Crusades in Spain, but neither of these fit easily into recorded history. However, if we move the period to after "in Spain," we get Saracen slaughters in Spain, and then 5 million killed in eight Crusades somewhere outside of Spain, which fits the well-known Crusades in Palestine. In any case, this isn't strong evidence for any number, but it
is the most boring footnote in this book, combining obscure questions about both punctuation
and statistics.
11.
Philippe Contamine,
War in the Middle Ages (New York: Blackwell, 1984), p. 257, citing J. N. Hillgarth,
The Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 1 (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 342.
12.
McFarlane,
Savage Wars of Peace, pp. 56–59; Mary Elizabeth Berry,
The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
13.
For example, Henry Hampton Halley,
Halley's Bible Handbook, 24th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1965).
14.
Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton Acton et al.,
The Cambridge Modern History, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1903), p. 290.
15.
See, for example, Gibbons, "Recent Developments in the Study of the Great European Witch Hunt" (favoring estimates of 40,000 to 60,000); Davies,
Europe (50,000); Rudolf Grimm, "Historians Take a Critical Look at Burning of Witches," Deutsche Presse-Agentur, January 5, 1999 (review of Wolfgang Behringer's
Hexen: Glaube—Verfolgung—Vermarktung, which favorably cites estimates of 30,000 to 100,000, and unfavorably cites estimates of 6 million to 13 million).
16.
Levy,
War in the Modern Great Power System, p. 90.
17.
Corvisier and Childs, eds.,
Dictionary of Military History and the Art of War, p. 470.
18.
Levy,
War in the Modern Great Power System, p. 90.
19.
The most authoritative claim for high numbers is by Stephen Shenfield, "The Circassians: A Forgotten Genocide?" in Mark Levene and Penny Roberts,
The Massacre in History (Providence, RI: Berghahn Book, 1999), p. 154 ("The number who died in the Circassian catastrophe of the 1860s could hardly, therefore, have been fewer than one million, and may well have been closer to one-and-a-half million"), but he's all alone. I found no one important who agrees with him.
20.
Joseph Glascott, "600,000 Aborigines Died after 1788, Study Shows,"
Sydney Morning Herald, February 25, 1987.
21.
Mike Dash,
Thug: The True Story of India's Murderous Cult (London: Granta Books, 2005).
22.
Justin McCarthy,
Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821- 1922 (Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1995).
23.
James J. Reid,
Crisis of the Ottoman Empire: Prelude to Collapse (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000), p. 42.
24.
Of the fifteen books I found giving a specific death toll, eight claimed that 200,000 civilians had died.
25.
Denis Mack Smith,
Mussolini's Roman Empire (London: Longman, 1976), pp. 40–41; John Wright,
Libya A Modern History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1982), p. 42.
26.
"Burundi Civil War Claims 260,000 Lives—UNFPA," Panafrican News Agency (PANA) Daily Newswire, April 25, 2004.
27.
"Iraqi Official: War Dead 100,000," BBC, November 10, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6135526.stm; "New Study Says 151,000 Iraqi Dead," BBC, January 10, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7180055.stm; Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg, "What Is the Real Death Toll in Iraq?"
Guardian, March 19, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/19/iraq; Kim Gamel, "Secret Tally Shows 87,215 Iraqis Killed since 2005," Associated Press, April 24, 2009.
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