Atrocitology - Matthew White

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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.a

      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

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