The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (134 page)

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Two possible explanations would be the cynical and the theological. Cynically, we might say that large religions are part of the ruling class, so
of course
they support keeping everyone in their place. Theologically, religions usually emphasize that we are all subservient to God regardless of our rank here on earth—slaves or kings, it doesn't matter. We are all equally humble in God's eyes.

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Worried by the loss at Metema, the Europeans began supplying modern weapons to the Ethiopian army to hold back the Mahdists. The side effect of this is that the Ethiopians were well armed enough to fight off European encroachment, becoming the only native state to survive the Scramble for Africa (ca. 1880-1900).

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"The most important point in this massive body of law is that war is not legally about killing. It is about compelling an enemy to submit. To achieve this it is lawful to incapacitate the enemy's military forces and damage or destroy valid military objectives. But you can never kill or further injure an enemy who offers to surrender or who is already incapacitated by illness, wounds, or previous capture. . . . We could kill or wound them only when they were combatants at large and there was a military necessity to disable them from conducting further military operations against us. As soon as they were incapacitated, they became protected under both longstanding customary principles, enforced through literally thousands of war crimes convictions post-WWII, and the more familiar law of war." (Dave Glazier, professor at Loyola Law School, quoted in Marty Lederman, "John Yoo Appears to Confirm CIA Waterboarding," March 17, 2007, http://balkin.blogspot
.com/2007_03_11_balkin_archive.html)

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Confusingly, when the war arrived, the Triple Alliance didn't become the "Allies." It was the Entente that came to be called the "Allies," while the Alliance came to be called the "Central Powers," after their place on the map.

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Peter Pan was shot through the head in Flanders
. That's the war in a nutshell. Most soldiers killed in wars are either too young to have had much impact other than as someone's son or else they are known to history primarily for their military accomplishments. Civilians killed in war are even more faceless, usually disappearing without a trace, without even a regimental paymaster to take note of their passing. Among the few people known for nonmilitary achievements who died in wars other than the First World War are Archimedes, Lord Byron, and Glenn Miller.

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Rather than sending out human waves under cover of artillery, these new tactics depended on small squads creeping close enough to seize strategic strongpoints behind the front lines without the warning that a lengthy, preparatory bombardment would give.

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Every account of the Russian Revolution is required by law to have a footnote where the author tries to clear up confusing nomenclature. For starters, the February and October Revolutions took place in March and November because the Russians were using the Julian calendar that was ten days out of sync with the Gregorian calendar used by the rest of us. Also, during World War I, the Russians called Saint Petersburg "Petrograd" because "Saint Petersburg" sounded too German. Later they called it "Leningrad" because "Petrograd" sounded too imperialist. Nowadays they call it "St. Petersburg" because "Leningrad" sounded too Communist. "Soviet," by the way, doesn't mean anything special. It's just the Russian word for council.

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The Socialist Revolutionaries tend to get forgotten in the confusion of the revolution, but they were Russia's major radical party until the rise of the Bolsheviks. They were the driving force behind the unsuccessful revolution in 1905. Their main policy called for confiscating and redistributing land to the peasants. Most Socialist Revolutionaries opposed the Bolsheviks, whom they easily beat in the first parliamentary elections following the Bolshevik takeover, which is why the Socialist Revolutionaries were quickly banned and parliament closed.

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It doesn't matter what it was the committee of.

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To be fair, Trotsky went on to say, "And yet armies are not built on fear. The Czar's army fell to pieces not because of any lack of reprisals. . . . Upon the ashes of the great war, the Bolsheviks created a new army. . . . The strongest cement in the new army was the ideas of the October revolution."

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"It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite." (Winston Churchill,
The World Crisis
, vol. 5 [London: Butterworth, 1929], p. 409)

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Sun and Chiang married two sisters of the Soong family, a wealthy and powerful dynasty of American-educated Christian Hakkas.

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For comparison, beef chuck roast sold for $0.43 per pound in Illinois in 1947.

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The exile of Trotsky was the fork in the road of Western Communism. Ever since then, Communists in the West could put a comfortable distance between themselves and the horrible events happening in the Soviet Union by calling themselves Trotskyites. Being a Trotskyite implied an ideological purity that was clearly missing from the Stalinists. Obviously,
anyone
would have been an improvement over Stalin, but it's worth noting that Trotsky's behavior during the Russian Civil War showed that he wasn't exactly Mr. Cuddly either.

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The Soviet Secret Police were constantly being reorganized and renamed. Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, and KGB are the four most notorious manifestations, but you don't have to know what all those letters stand for because it's just bland bureaucratic jargon in Russian. The agents were commonly called Chekists, after the first version.

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The Great Purge followed the assassination of Kirov so closely that some scholars suspect that Stalin planned the shooting as an excuse; however, an official search through newly opened secret Soviet archives in 1989 found no evidence for this. (David Aaronovitch,
Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping History
[New York: Riverhead Books, 2010], p. 84)

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The Red Army was the first modern army to make extensive use of women, mostly (but not entirely) in support units.

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For comparison, the British executed 306 for cowardice in the First World War and none in the Second. (Richard Norton-Taylor, "Executed WW1 soldiers to be given pardons,"
Guardian
, August 16, 2006) The Americans executed only one deserter in the world wars.

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This list isn't declaring these to be the seventeen worst tyrants in history. These are merely seventeen that we have some numbers for.

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This saying is commonly attributed to Stalin, but (a) no one can point to a time and place, (b) the quote wasn't attached to Stalin until he was long gone, and (c) Erich Maria Remarque said it earlier.

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You probably think I'm kidding when I say that the main reason for World War II was "because they could," but John Keegan comes pretty close to suggesting the because-they-could explanation in
The Second World War
(pp. 10–11).

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And that's probably all we need to say about China for now. It's not easy to fit the Sino-Japanese War neatly into my top one hundred multicides. The killing of some 10 million Chinese clearly earns it a place on my list, but where? Alone as Number 14? Included as part of World War II? As part of the Chinese Civil War? I consider it best to count all of the dead in China between the Japanese invasion in 1937 and their surrender in 1945 as part of the worldwide conflict; however, the flow of events is easier to explain as an episode of the Chinese interregnum, as I did in the chapter on the Chinese Civil War.

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The Soviet Union encompassed some 8,400,000 square miles, roughly one-sixth of the habitable land surface of the earth, and it contained 164 million people in 1937. Germany on the eve of war covered some 226,000 square miles with a population about half of Russia's: 80 million. The population of France was only half of
that
: 42 million. (Edgar M. Howell,
The Soviet Partisan Movement
[Bennington, VT: Merriam Press, 1997], p. 13; Nick Smart,
British Strategy and Politics during the Phony War
[Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003], p. 43)

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For perspective, notice that this is two-thirds the number of African slaves shipped across the Atlantic and over twice the number held in the Gulag under Stalin.

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This Warsaw uprising (August 1944) is not the same as the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (April 1943), in which the Jews of the ghetto made a last-ditch effort to resist being hauled off to the death camps.

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The Soviets found Hitler's corpse pretty quickly, but they kept the discovery a secret to worry the West. They hoped that the mystery of his disappearance and the nightmare of a resurgent Hitler could be used to bluff more concessions out of Western leaders. Hitler was buried in an unmarked grave at a Soviet base in East Germany until 1970, when the base was transferred to East German control. Hitler was then exhumed, cremated, and flushed into the neighboring river to prevent him from ever becoming the focus of a pilgrimage site.

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The bombing of Dresden has become a metaphor for senseless slaughter, largely as a result of two books published in the 1960s. Kurt Vonnegut's
Slaughterhouse-Five
(1969) is one of the great novels of the twentieth century and a vivid eyewitness description of World War II, so it will shape our perceptions of the event for a long time to come. The other book, David Irving's
The Destruction of Dresden
(1963) was the definitive nonfiction description of the firebombing for a generation. Unfortunately, Irving has turned into the world's foremost defender of Hitler's reputation, and it's now known that he repeated a lot of false Nazi propaganda uncritically in
The Destruction of Dresden
, such as a death toll of 135,000 and a total lack of military targets in the city. The newer book by Frederick Taylor,
Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945
(2004), clears up a lot of Irving's most outrageous mistakes.

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"by human agency": A few sharp, sudden natural disasters, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, killed more people just as quickly.

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For the record: The proof begins with thousands of eyewitness accounts detailing all parts of the process. Then we can illustrate these accounts with photographs taken of the events as they happened. We can dig through census and tax records to show that millions of Jews who existed in the 1930s had disappeared under German occupation. And finally, we have boxes of official documents produced by the perpetrators, including orders, memos, reports, schedules, and invoices. The entire history of the ancient world is based on far less evidence than that. (For more, see chapters 12–14 of Michael Shermer's
Why People Believe Weird Things
[New York: W. H. Freeman, 1997]. For even more, see, Richard Evans's
Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial
[New York: Basic Books, 2001].)

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Although most people didn't know it at the time, Americans were already fighting the Soviets in the air. Russian pilots were getting combat experience and testing new equipment over North Korea in jets with Chinese markings, but they had strict orders not to get shot down over UN territory. Stalin did not want anyone to find proof of Soviet involvement in the wreckage of a downed aircraft. For that matter, neither did the Americans, who had their suspicions. If it became widely known that the two superpowers were already fighting in the air, the Korean conflict could quickly escalate to World War III. (Stanley Sandler,
Korean War: No Victors, No Vanquished
[Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999], p. 185; Carter Malkasian,
The Korean War, 1950–1953
[New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 2009], p. 54)

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The most benign Communist regime seems to have been Nicaragua. The worst accusations I could find directed against the Sandinista government was that dozens, possibly hundreds, of noncombatant Miskito Indians were killed in a couple of disputed incidents (massacres? battles? deliberate? unauthorized?) in 1981. This is closer to the average for a Latin American country than to the average for a Communist country.

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Answers: No. No.

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White-run Rhodesia had already become black-run Zimbabwe in 1979.

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Except for Botswana, which has been a democracy since it started in 1966. This is so unusual it deserves a mention.

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It didn't help Amin's reputation in Moscow that he had had fourteen suspicious meetings with Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador. In February 1979, Dubs was kidnapped by mysterious assailants and killed during the rescue attempt. Most investigators suspect Taraki of planning a hit. (Harrison, "End of the Road")