LITMIR.BIZ

INTRODUCTION

      NO 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.

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