The great big book of horrible things

To my mother, who gave me my sense of humor, and my father, who gave me my sense of justice CONTENTS List of Maps Foreword by Steven Pinker Introduction Second Persian War Alexander the Great Age of Warring States First Punic War Qin Shi Huang Di Second Punic War Gladiatorial Games Roman Slave Wars War of the Allies Third Mithridatic War Gallic War Ancient Innumeracy Xin Dynasty Roman-Jewish Wars The Three Kingdoms of China Fall of the Western Roman Empire Justinian Goguryeo-Sui Wars Mideast Slave Trade An Lushan Rebellion Mayan Collapse The Crusades Religious Killing Fang La Rebellion Genghis Khan Albigensian Crusade Hulagu’s Invasion Hundred Years War Fall of the Yuan Dynasty Bahmani-Vijayanagara War Timur Chinese Conquest of Vietnam Aztec Human Sacrifice Atlantic Slave Trade Conquest of the Americas Genocide Burma-Siam Wars French Wars of Religion Russo-Tatar War The Time of Troubles Thirty Years War Collapse of the Ming Dynasty Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland Aurangzeb Great Turkish War Peter the Great Great Northern War War of the Spanish Succession War of the Austrian Succession Sino-Dzungar War Seven Years War Napoleonic Wars World Conquerors Haitian Slave Revolt Mexican War of Independence Shaka French Conquest of Algeria Taiping Rebellion Crimean War Panthay Rebellion American Civil War Hui Rebellion War of the Triple Alliance Franco-Prussian War Famines in British India Russo-Turkish War Mahdi Revolt Congo Free State Cuban Revolution The Western Way of War Mexican Revolution First World War Russian Civil War Greco-Turkish War Chinese Civil War Joseph Stalin Crazed Tyrants Italo-Ethiopian War Spanish Civil War Second World War Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe French Indochina War Partition of India Mao Zedong Korean War North Korea The Black Chapter of Communism Algerian War of Independence War in the Sudan Vietnam War The Cold War Indonesian Purge Biafran War Bengali Genocide Idi Amin Mengistu Haile Postwar Vietnam Democratic Kampuchea Mozambican Civil War Angolan Civil War Ugandan Bush War Post-Colonial Africa Soviet-Afghan War Saddam Hussein Iran-Iraq War Sanctions against Iraq Somalian Chaos Rwandan Genocide Second Congo War Ranking: The One Hundred Deadliest Multicides What I Found: Analysis What I Found: Raw Numbers Appendix Disputing the Top One Hundred Appendix The Hemoclysm Acknowledgments Notes Selected Bibliography Index * 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 * Answers: No No * White-run Rhodesia had already become black-run Zimbabwe in 1979 * Except for Botswana, which has been a democracy since it started in 1966 This is so unusual it deserves a mention * 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") * Not exactly, but that's the gist * Actually, much of this bill was paid by the oil-rich Arab countries that the United States was defending, but that only highlights the point that the West had a lot more money than the East and could spend a lot more on its war machine * Really Popular accounts of the Rwandan genocide are more likely to blame the West for not stopping it rather than the Hutu for actually doing it For example, in the (excellent) film Hotel Rwanda, two of the major characters were foreign observers complaining about international indifference, and they got more screentime than most of the native characters At its most ambitious, White Guilt even reaches back and accuses the Belgians of dividing a single harmonious people into manufactured categories of "Hutu" and "Tutsi" when they issued those colonial ID cards Why does so much of the blame attach to people and institutions that weren't even involved in the killing? Mostly this is just how some people view foreign affairs: "Yes, it's sad, but how is this my problem?" However, other people just want to blame the UN, the West, or Bill Clinton for everything * In Burundi, the death of its president rekindled the country's fading civil war, but the subsequent death toll (260,000) didn't reach the threshold for being on my top one hundred list * I hope you noticed that two of the heroes from earlier chapters are the villains in this chapter History is complicated * The argument that oppressive governments kill more people than wars is popular among extreme libertarians and supported by including the internal killing by tyrants in peacetime (such as the Cultural Revolution) with the mass murder of noncombatants during war (such as the Holocaust) and then pointing out that this total is higher than the socially approved killing of soldiers during war (see, for example, Rummel, Death by Government) I hold the opposite view: All killing during a war should be counted as war dead After all, the Americans would not have bombed Hiroshima in peacetime, nor would the Nazis have had access to Poland's million Jews without conquering them Tweaking definitions to support a viewpoint occurs on the other side of the scale as well Pacifists trying to show how deadly war is will often label institutional oppression (the Cultural Revolution, Stalin's purges, and so on) as "conflict" and include those with the more obvious war dead—even though they lack the indiscriminate reciprocal killing that characterizes real war In these cases, I would differentiate between war and oppression by noting what it would take to end the killing If both sides need to lay down their arms, it's a war; if one side can simply and unilaterally stop killing (without surrendering), it is oppression * Not an excessive number Just in rough proportion to their presence in any collection of important people * Do you detect a pattern in what it takes to be considered great? * I calculated the total number of deaths only for the larger categories The margin of error is too large with too many variables to make anything but the broadest comparisons To go much deeper, I would have to start splitting death tolls and deciding, for example, how much of World War II was genocide or combat, or how much of the slave trade was the fault of native kings or the Europeans * A friend once wondered aloud how much suffering in history has been caused by religious fanaticism, and I was able to confidentally tell her 10 percent, based on this number She probably didn't mean the question literally ... Thirty Years War Collapse of the Ming Dynasty Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland Aurangzeb Great Turkish War Peter the Great Great Northern War War of the Spanish Succession War of the Austrian Succession... 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... Being conquered by the Persians would not have been the end of the world By the standards of the day, the Persians were rather benign conquerors For example, they were one of the only people in