Authors: Matthew White
The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (2 page)
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 White—self-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 history’s 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 victims—millions 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 history’s 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, I’ve maintained the Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century, a history website on which, among other things, I’ve 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 isn’t 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. Let’s 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 Herod’s 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 don’t 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 can’t 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 history’s 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, Pickett’s Charge, and so on. Unfortunately, just brainstorming a list like that will usually reflect an author’s 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 haphazardly—a TV documentary, a few movies, a political website, a tourist brochure, and that angry man at the end of the bar—and then proceed to make judgments about the world based on those few examples. I’m 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 it’s the other way around. In any case, my philosophy is that I wouldn’t 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.
The best answer would vary on a case-by-case basis, but the short answer is money. Even if a general is reluctant to tell the newspapers how many men he lost in a bungled offensive, he still has to tell the accountants to drop 4,000 men from the payroll. Even if a dictator tries to hide how many civilians died in a massive resettlement, his finance minister will still note the disappearance of 100,000 taxpayers. A customs official at the harbor will be collecting duties on each cargo of new slaves, and someone has to pay to have the bodies carted away after every massacre. Head counts (and by extension, body counts) are not just an academic exercise; they have been an important part of government financing for centuries.
Obviously these death tolls have a significant margin of error, but a list of history’s one hundred biggest body counts is not entirely guesswork. For one thing, big events leave big footprints. Even though no one will ever know exactly how many Inca or Romans died in the fall of their civilizations, histories describe big battles and massacres, and archaeological excavations suggest a massive decline of the population. These events killed a lot of people even if “a lot” can’t be defined precisely.
At the top of the scale, a million here and a million there barely moves an event’s rank a couple of notches along the list. Some people would disagree with my estimate that Stalin killed 20 million people, but even if you claim (as some do) that he killed 50 million, that would move him from Number 6 to Number 2. On the other hand, defending Stalin by claiming (as others do) that he killed a mere 3 million will drop him down to only Number 29, so for my purposes, there’s not much point in arguing about the exact number. Stalin will be on my list, regardless.
At the same time, some events won’t reach the lower threshold no matter how much we dispute the precise numbers. An exact body count is hard to come by for Castro’s regime in Cuba, but no one has ever suggested that he killed the hundreds of thousands necessary to be considered for a slot on my list. Many infamous brutes such as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Vlad the Impaler, Caligula, and Augusto Pinochet easily fall short, as do many well-known conflicts, such as the Arab-Israeli wars and the Anglo-Boer War.
Some people would bring more cleverness to this task than I do. They might track the world’s worst multicide back to some distant root cause and declare
that
to be the most horrible thing people ever did. They might blame influential people for all of the evil done by those who followed them. They would blame Jesus for the Crusades, Darwin for the Holocaust, Marx for the Gulag, and Marco Polo for the destruction of the Aztecs.
Unfortunately this approach ignores the nature of historical causality. Yes, you can take an event (let’s say, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks) and track back through the chain of cause and effect to show how this is the natural result of, say, the 1953 coup against the prime minister of Iran, but you can just as easily track that same event back to the First World War, the Wright brothers, D. B. Cooper, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Henry Ford, the Russian conquest of Turkistan, Levittown, the founding of Yale University, Elisha Otis, the Holocaust, and the opening of the Erie Canal. So many threads of causality feed into any individual event that you can usually find a way to connect any two things you want.
Aside from morbid fascination, is there any reason to know the one hundred highest body counts of history? Four reasons come to mind:
First, things that happen to a lot of people are usually more important than things that happen to only a few people. If I’m in bed with the flu, no one cares, but if half of the city is stricken with the flu, it’s a medical emergency. If I lose my job, that’s my bad luck; if thousands of people lose their jobs, the economy crashes. A few murders a week is business as usual in a big city police department; twenty murders a day is a civil war.
Second, killing a person is the most you can do to him. It affects him more than teaching him, robbing him, healing him, hiring him, marrying him, or imprisoning him—for the simple reason that death is the most complete and permanent change you can inflict. A killer can easily undo the work of a teacher or a doctor, but neither a doctor nor a teacher can undo the work of a killer.
*
Therefore, just by default, my one hundred multicides had a maximum impact on an enormous number of people. Without too much debate, I can easily label these to be among history’s most significant events.
You may be tempted to dismiss the impact of these events as solely negative, but that’s an artificial distinction. Destruction and creation are intimately intertwined. The fall of the Roman Empire cleared the way for medieval Europe. The Second World War created the Cold War and democratic regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan. The Napoleonic Wars inspired works by Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, and Goya. I’m not saying that the
1812 Overture
was worth the half-million lives lost in the Russian Campaign, morally speaking. I’m just saying that as a plain historical fact, there would be no jazz, gospel, or rock and roll without slavery, and everyone born in the postwar Baby Boom of 1946–64 owes their existence to World War II.
A third reason to consider is that we sometimes forget the human impact of historic events. Yes, these things happened a long time ago, and all of those people would be dead now anyway, but there comes a point where we have to realize that a clash of cultures did more than blend cuisines, vocabularies, and architectural styles. It also caused a lot of very personal suffering.
The fourth and certainly most practical reason to gather body counts is for risk assessment and problem solving. If we study history to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it helps to know what those mistakes were, and that includes
all
of the mistakes, not just the ones that support certain pet ideas. It’s easy to solve the problem of human violence if we focus only on the seven atrocities that prove our point, but a list of the hundred worst presents more of a challenge. A person’s grand unified theory of human violence should explain most of the multicides on this list or else he might need to reconsider. In fact, the next time somebody declares that he knows the cause of or solution to human violence, you can probably open this book at random and immediately find an event that is not explained by his theory.
Despite my skepticism about any common thread running through all one hundred atrocities, I still found some interesting tendencies. Let me share with you the three biggest lessons I learned while working on this list:
1.
Chaos is deadlier than tyranny. More of these multicides result from the breakdown of authority rather than the exercise of authority. In comparison to a handful of dictators such as Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein who exercised their absolute power to kill hundreds of thousands, I found more and deadlier upheavals like the Time of Troubles, the Chinese Civil War, and the Mexican Revolution where no one exercised enough control to stop the death of millions.
2.
The world is very disorganized. Power structures tend to be informal and temporary, and many of the big names in this book (for example, Stalin, Cromwell, Tamerlane, Caesar) exercised supreme authority without holding a regular job in the government. Most wars don’t start neatly with declarations and mobilizations and end with surrenders and treaties. They tend to build up from escalating incidents of violence, fizzle out when everyone is too exhausted to continue, and are followed by unpredictable aftershocks. Soldiers and nations happily change sides in the middle of wars, sometimes in the middle of battles. Most nations are not as neatly delineated as you might expect. In fact, some nations at war (I call them
quantum states
) don’t quite exist and don’t quite not exist; instead they hover in limbo until somebody wins the war and decides their fate, which is then retroactively applied to earlier versions of the nation.
