Well there was the notorious Katyn massacre. There were the various mass murders and expulsion of people in Soviet occupied areas, including Germans, Poles, Finns, people from the Baltic nations, etc. There were the people inside the Soviet Union who were accused of collaborating with the Nazis and were subsequently persecuted and/or internally exiled, including Volga Germans, Tartars, Greeks, Chechens, etc.
Can’t be bothered to try to calculate a number of casualties. Perhaps five million. But Communist purges is perhaps not the correct word. But Communist violence certainly, which cannot be blamed on the Nazis.
In a cage death match I’m putting my money on Genghis Khan. I think he could easily take Hitler.
Well, it’s certainly an argument (I’d put Stalin up there too, and some of the Roman Emperors were pretty bad as well, if on a more limited scale). I’m guessing your definition of ‘worse’ has to do with body count or intent? I’d say Hitler in that case, since GK was more a killer from necessity. He wiped out whole cities, to be sure, but that was more for the intimidation effect…wipe out a city today and kill all it’s inhabitants and you might not have to even fight in the next few cities. If you gave into the Mongols then things were good. Crime would be almost non-existent, there was a great degree of religious tolerance, etc etc.
Hitler, on the other hand, was all about simply wiping out the Jews in any way he could. There was no reason for it other than just wanting to get rid of them. To me, that’s a much more evil act.
Some cities that capitulated without a fight were also massacred whereas other cities where the soldiers put up a strong fight were spared, or at least the surviving soldiers were, because they had fought bravely. There doesn’t seem to have been some big plan to the killing. If crime was any lower under Mongol rule, it is probably because they had murdered half the population, and later Tamerlane also turned to religious persecution.
If you want to compare the two perhaps comparing them as ideological driven murderers vers. nihilistic murderers. I don’t know what is best.
That would be a reprise of the famous scene from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Genghis Khan would below a war cry, whip his sword around dramatically, and Hitler would shoot him.
And then the referees would shoot Hitler because after all, he’s Hitler. You can’t expect them to resist that kind of temptation.
“To crush your enemies, and see them fall at your feet - to take their horses and belongings, and to hear the lamentation of their women. That is the best life”
Which wasn’t in any way a communist purge, it was the elimination of captured Polish officers. If that’s a communist purge, one may as well call the holocaust a Nazi purge. While horrible, it’s also only 15-20,000 deaths, hardly a blip on the radar of that 72 million.
Which also can hardly be described as purges comparable to the deaths in the Ukraine in the 20s and 30s, for example. And again, while horrible, it’s barely a blip on the radar. I have never heard of the combined total deaths from all of these expulsions reaching anywhere near the vicinity of 1 million, much less the absurd figure you pulled from the ether given below.
It’s very clear you can’t be bothered with actual facts. You have no idea, but what the hell, perhaps five million?
I think you are conflating my namesake and GK here a bit erroneously. I can’t off hand think of major massacres GK ordered committed ( note this excludes forced resettlement, press-gangs, forced labor corvees and the like ) if a town or city offered zero resistance to GK. He even busted one of his own generals down to a common trooper for engaging in such an unauthorized bit of looting. Rather we see episodes like in Samarqand where the city resisted for ten days, launching successful sorties ( and purportedly torturing Mongol prisoners ) until it was betrayed from within by the chief Imam worried about Mongol retaliation after it fell. And retaliate with massacres the Mongols did, but spared a chunk of the populace that was specifically sheltered by agreement with said Imam. GK did seem to renege on his agreement to spare surrendering soldiers, but than they had resisted at first, even if they surrendered later.
If you look at the Khwarezmian campaign it is replete with massacres - but all of those towns resisted assault. When Tolui ( Gk’s youngest ) set about reducing Herat and Nishapur, Nishapur set up a brisk defense, killing Gk’s son-in-law in the process and was obliterated as a result ( with GK’s widowed daughter presiding over the slaughter and egging it on ) . But after only a token resistance Herat surrendered and Tolui killed the small garrison that had offered a fight, but left the city otherwise untouched, sparing all the civilians. Until the city made the colossal error of revolting a few months later and then it too was annihilated.
Tamerlane ( the other one ) on the other hand had considerably less iron control over his troops and was kind of a nastier piece of work generally. More randomly distributed massacres were more his bag than GK’s. But Tamerlane, with his occasional religious bigotry and tendency to building skull mountains, came two hundred years after GK and was operating in a far different cultural milieu. There is no reason to bring him up in the context of the Mongol conquests.
This is no contest really. Genghis Khan wasn’t much of a bigot. He was just an utterly driven warlord doing what warlords always do.That he did it on a grander scale was mostly down to a little luck and his enormous personal ability. But he propagated a system of laws, brought a universal peace at the pointy end of an arrow that spawned a world trade boom, established an orderly succession ( quite rare for steppe warlords ) and generally governed in a sane, if culturally to be expected bloodthirsty and highly extractive way. His rule can’t really be called a positive, but I give him more credit than any other “barbarian chieftain” I can think of.
Hitler was just crazy. A balls to the wall nutcase driven by a twisted racial ideology that at the time was possibly novel in its extent - modern nationalism taken to its farthest extreme. He is the grandmaster of evil, challenged by only a handful of fellow nutjobs like Pol Pot. Tamerlane ( the other one ) easily out-evils GK in every way but sheer geographical scale ( not for want of trying ) and I don’t think he is much competition for Hitler either.
I have to say claiming that Hitler killed “a couple of million Jews” is a really odd phrase since I’ve never heard the word “couple” to describe “six”.
What was the reason you chose the phrase “a couple of million Jews” rather than “six million Jews”?
doh. Are you actually discussing terminology? You can call it what you want, the only relevant thing is that you couldn’t attribute the deaths to the Nazis.
Double plus doh.
Wikipedia to the rescue. Shortly before to immediately after WW-II approx. 3.3 million people were deported to Siberia, of which 43% died of starvation, disease, etc. To this around 3 million Germans from East Prussian were expelled – you guess the percentage that died, as I recall you think it was trifling affair. Another 200,000 ethnic Germans of East Europe were deported to Siberia, most of which died. Millions of ex-Soviet people were deported back to the USSR, who knows how many died in the process. There are many more incidents. Feel free to dig up your own favorites. Wiki 1 Wiki 2
The 30-70 range is repeated here Wiki. Compared to the estimated world population it (the 30 million I suppose) corresponds to 17.1%. Without comparison the worst disaster by percentage to have befallen the human race in historic time.
Yes. The cite was for the 30 million number which you find preposterous. It comes from: The Cambridge History of China: Alien regimes and border states, 907–1368, 1994, p.622.
I am almost certain that said number is for the period down to the 1290’s ( i.e. to the end of Qubilai Khan’s reign ) and represents total losses over at least three generations to all facets of decades of warfare, including economic devastation, disease, etc., rather than straight-up slaughter. It is also a very rough number, because population estimates are a bit speculative for the pre-Mongol Jin and Sung and aren’t much more reliable for the Ming ( Ming censuses suggest steadily dropping rolls, but most estimates based in part on increased economic production assume the population rebounded considerably in their period ). It seems the northern Chinese population began to drop with the Jurchen eruption and kept right on dropping when the Mongols displaced them right on up to the Ming, with southern China suffering far less.
Note that the above numbers excludes the death tolls in Central Asia et al, where accounts ( almost certainly wildly exaggerated ) indicates multiple million+ slaughters in cities like Nishapur.
I think the general takeaway is GK is responsible for directly killing a lot of people and indirectly setting up the death of many more ( certainly in the millions ) via the warlike and unwise economic policies of several generations of successors. How many that amounts to is going to be a pretty crude estimate compared to much better twentieth estimates. Whether GK brought about the death of 1 million, 5 million, 10 million or 50 million, it fair to say it was a lot. But I don’t think a direct comparison to Hitler’s death toll is really all that possible.
GK is best described by National Geographic: a man of his time, only more so. That means at that time he was the stuff yuppies would talk about and dream of emulating over their capuccinos. The Guinness says he exterminated around 35 million Chinese in northern China.
Hitler is harder to describe. Like Churchill, he was backward thinking; still harking of the days of empire. If you want your country to become an empire, you’re bound to kill a lot of young men militarily, and men, women and children through outright murder.
Uh-huh. Funny, didn’t you yourself just say something about calling them purges not being the correct terminology? Oh, yeah, you did:
I think the only relevant thing here is the imaginary number of 5 million killed by communist purges that you think are included in WW2 casualty figures.
You should try actually reading things you link, especially before you use them to try to bolster a figure that you admit you flatly made up since you can’t be bothered to calculate it. This part seems quite relevant:
Rather hard to miss, it’s the second paragraph in your first link. You’ll notice the bolded “in their entirety” bit, most of it occurred in the 1930s. How are these deaths included in WW2 casualty figures again?
Your ability to recall is on par with your skill at inventing figures and declaring them to be true – which makes your 1984 references ironic in a manner you hadn’t intended.
