Coincidentally, I’m reading “King Leopold’s Ghost”, by Adam Hochschild, about the Belgian Congo. The author claims ten million deaths there. Granted, the killing started in the late 1800s, but a significant fraction were in the early 1900s. I’m haven’t finished the book yet, so there may be some caveats I’m unaware of. But why doesn’t it rate?
The column which alewbail refers to is Was Andrew Jackson one of the world’s biggest mass murderers?
And King Leopold doesn’t rate because the list of those “leaders” who killed their own people.
Sorry, but it should be areas controlled by the regime. Otherwise, the Nazi number would be much lower, right? If it only included German victims, not Polish Jews, etc., it wouldn’t approach the 21 million figure. Certainly the Congo was as much a “property” of Belgium as Poland was a “property” of Nazi Germany?
And the ethnicity of the ruler vis-a-vis the victims shouldn’t matter, again taking the Nazi example.
So I think my original question’s still valid.
Part of the problem is documentation. Leopold’s people destroyed absolutely everything they could in the way of records when Belgium lost the Congo.
Your question is valid. But the evidence to answer it is largely gone.
Cecil changed the question.
The guy asked “how does Jackson rank among practitioners of genocide”. Cecil ignored that question and answered, “Was Andrew Jackson one of the world’s biggest mass murderers?”, further narrowing it to include only state-sponsored murders.
The question he chose to answer had a simple answer “no, of course not, not even close”.
The original question was more complex, and the answer could be formulated in several ways.
One possibility: excluding combatants in wartime, how many people of a specific race were sent to death by the perpetrator?
Another possibility: how close did the perpetrator come to the extermination of an entire race, tribe, or ethnic group?
By the first formulation, Jackson was still off the leader board. But that interpretation is not a reflection of a man’s success in genocide, but only his ambition. Jackson terrorized a small ethnic group while Stalin went after a massive target. By this definition, Jackson couldn’t even claim the lead among U.S. Presidents. For example, Harry Truman would be higher on the list, having killed far more Japanese non-combatants than Jackson killed Cherokee.
Interpreting the question the second way - the one that essentially measures how close a perpetrator came to successful genocide, Jackson may have a case as the kingpin.
I don’t know
But it would be interesting to see the answer to the original question.
Pol Pot killed x% of the Cambodian population, Hitler y% of European Jewry, Stalin z% of ethnic _____ (whatever group he killed the highest percentage of).
I wonder if Jackson approached or surpassed x, y, and z in terms of the percentage of the Cherokee nation? He may not have been the most ambitious genocidal maniac because he terrorized a small group, but was he the most efficient? Did he, in fact, come closest to successful genocide in the past two centuries?
I can’t believe Jackson was even close to the top, but I doubt there is a good way to answer this question. Should the Cherokee be counted as different ethnic group than related tribes? Even if so, 4000 would not be that big a percentage, relative to the ones who were really good (bad?) at this sort of thing. Hitler certainly wiped out far larger percentages of some of his hated groups. (What percentage of Gypsies survived?) Even in America, Jackson is second rate. It was either the Navajo or the Utes that were forced marched at a much higher death rate in the Southwest - to a camp with conditions that appalled all but the General. On my last trip to the Grand Canyon, I was told that stragglers on that march were shot without delay.
From what I recall, Jackson considered what he was doing a military action. Genocide was not his aim, although I doubt he was greatly troubled. Relocating people after a conquest was hardly a new idea. Let’s see, it happened to the Jews with Assyria, Chaldea, Rome, … To the best of my knowledge, Assyria was the first state, empire, nation, political entity to make forced relocation a policy. Ironically, there are more Americans claiming Cherokee descent than other tribes precisely because of the Trail of Tears. Many who just know they have some “Indian blood”, claim Cherokee.
You mention “only 4000” Native Americans died. Do you have any figures for what percentage this is?
I’d have to hazard the guess that Leo doesn’t rate because Rummel’s statistics are deliberately doctored to make the United States look good. The USA is probably the biggest killer of the 20th century, but it doesn’t tend to kill its own people in large numbers, and most of its murders take place during nominal wartime. You can’t really pin it on a single despot. The blame is well-spread in a democracy.
And what about trade sanctions that result in famines?
I don’t know anything about King Leopold, but his aquittal is probably just a lucky side-effect of Rummel’s shifty definitions.
<< The USA is probably the biggest killer of the 20th century, but it doesn’t tend to kill its own people in large numbers, and most of its murders take place during nominal wartime. >>
Oh, please. This is about the most ludicrous statement I’ve seen here in weeks.
Excluding war deaths, Cecil mentions 62 million killed by the USSR, USSR, 35 million by the People’s Republic of China, 35 million and 21 million by Nazi Germany. There’s no way that the US came anywhere close to these number, even if you include war deaths caused by the US and exclude war deaths caused by other countries.
Oh, wait, I forgot, the US is the Great Satan and is responsible for every death, disease, earthquake, fire, flood, or plague since 1492. Bah.
DonnyOsmond does have a point about how Cecil shifted the answer from being about genocide to being about democide. I think Cecil was responding with a list of mass murderers, as opposed to mass murderers for the intent of ethnic cleansing. I suppose it is subjective as to whether that was an appropriate response.
SlowMindThinking said:
Do you have some justification for that remark?
The Encyclopedia Britannica estimates the total Cherokee population at about 22,500 in 1650. About 15,000 people were forcibly relocated in the Trail of Tears, and about 4,000 died. That works out to just under 18% of the total Cherokee population, and around 27% of those who marched died.
World Jewish Population in 1939 was under 17 million. Estimates of Jews killed in the Holocaust range from 5 to 6 million, or 30 to 35% of all the Jews in the world. (The population figures on that page–16,728,000 in 1939 and 11,500,000 in 1948–add up to 5,228,000 murdered, or 31% of all Jews worldwide.) This page indicates there were something over 9 million Jews remaining in Europe when the worst phase of the Holocaust, the establishment of the extermination camps, began. Well over half of the Jews of Europe were murdered. This page, with somewhat different numbers, indicates about two-thirds of the Jewish population of the areas occupied or controlled by the Nazis were killed; 90% of the Jewish population in Poland–the largest single community of Jews in the world–were murdered.
So, without in any way excusing the actions of Andrew Jackson or the United States government with respect to the Cherokee, I don’t think they are anywhere near being in the same league as Hitler.
Hm. Tap the knees and it kicks. The above poster may have overstated things when he said that the U.S. is “the biggest killer
of the 20th century” but his basic idea–that the U.S.,mainly through the use of proxy armies, was often a perpetrator of genocide–is by now generally accepted, not only in the leftist circles that CKDH derides, but in mainstream academia. The Bush administration has implicitly acknowledged this fact by its refusal to endorse the World Court because of the very real possibility, if the American sponsored wars of the last 50 years are any indication, that Americans might be tried for genocide at some point in the future.
I wasn’t going to go all the way back to 1492. But, since you mentioned it in a rather snippy, dsmissive way I’ll comment on it. By any definition, Columbus was a perpetrator of genocide. This charge is not the product of some new leftist historical revisionism, as many conservatives seem to think, but was first proposed nearly 500 years ago by Bartolome de la Casas, whose father sailed with Columbus. Commenting on Columbus’ bloody slaughter and enslavement of the the natives of Hispaniola (now The Dominican Republic and Haiti) he said that “it marked the beginning of the spilling of blood, later to become a river of blood, first on this island and then in every corner of the Indies.” By 1496 it is esimated that a third of the people of Hispaniola had been killed–causes ranging from imported diseases, mistreatment, and, in many instances, outright slaughter. Just short of two generations later, the entire population had been wiped out. Columbus’ administration was widely recogized as a disaster. He was later jailed and his patrons generally believed that he was slowly going insane, as his bizarre journals form this period seem to confirm. So, I wouldn’t be so flippant when dismissing Columbus-related perpetrations of genocide.
On recent examples of American genocide I would refer you to Christopher Hitchens’ book “The Trials of Henry Kissinger” which, in a reasoned, well documented way, lays out the case for a a charge of genocide against Kissinger, specifically for the illegal invasion of Cambodia in which civilians were targerted with mass carpet bombings. K’s approval of the invasion of East Timor, in which ten of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, is also cited, though I don’t think that comes under the definiton of genocide unless you were to use the term in a vague rhetorical sense. Certainly I don’t think that K is in the same league as Hitler or Mao. His utilitarian doctrine of “realpolitik” actually constituted a refusal of any governmental racial, ethnic, or utopian ideology. He was interested in the pragmatic needs of nation-states, not in recreating the world as Hitler or Mao tried to do. But his crimes were crimes against humanity nonetheless and are probably best compared, not with Auschwitz or the Gulag, but with the British bombing of Dresden in WWII in which civilians were targeted and killed in the hundreds of thousands.
Cecil seemed fixated on numbers in his column, as though you could somehow quantify human suffering. His basic point is that Jackson wasn’t guily of genocide in the sense that Hitler was, not because of any difference in ideology (similar, actually) but because he didn’t achieve the gargantuan numbers Hitler did. I would point out that the under the laws of the modern War Crimes Tribunal, a modern-day Jackson could be tried for genocide. Milosevic, for example, is charged with being directly complicitous with the execution of perhaps 5,000 people. His influence and ideology certainly created the condiitons for the ethnic cleansing we saw throughout the 90s, but there is no direct evidence linking him with it–a smoking gun–as may be the case here. So numbers are by no means the only criteria for a charge of genocide or “democide”, an ungainly term that I doubt is going to catch on.
It’s the sort of “overstatement” which immediately shuts down all hope of reasonable discussion by virtue of its breathtaking inaccuracy. It’s like the teenager who complains that the new school policy banning all backpacks is “the worst injustice in the history of humanity”. It’s such an obviously stupid thing to say that no one takes the complaint seriously, when a simple protest that the new policy is unfair or counterproductive might actually be heard.
In fact, such sweeping overstatements have the paradoxical effect of letting their targets off the hook completely. “The U.S. has committed a lot of injustices you know, and not just back during the Indian Wars…Cambodia…Mossadegh…Allende…etc.” might actually elicit some genuine embarassment and/or discussion from defenders of U.S. foreign policy. “The U.S. during the 20th Century was worse than Stalin and Hitler!” is so obviously stupid that it immediately gets a well-deserved reaction of contemptuous dismissal.
And if you pull in America’s wars as examples of mass killings, then to be fair, you must also hold other countries accountable for their wars. All countries fight wars, you know, and if the wars the US has fought have been bigger than most, that’s to be expected, the US being a bigger country than most.
As far as Jackson and the Trail of Tears: While I think that we can all agree that what he did was wrong, his intent wasn’t to kill the Cherokee. His intent was to relocate them. Yes, it’s still reprensible, but it’s not premeditated murder.
Indeed. For example, Rummel excludes deaths due to war, which if included would surely add many millions to Hitler’s total. All the major powers fought World War II, but Hitler started it (at least in Europe), so (excluding casualties in the Pacific War), I think we would have to say Hitler was morally responsible for all those deaths, soldiers and civilians, of the Western Allies, of the Soviet Union, of the Axis-occupied and allied territories, and of his own people, which were caused by his own twisted ambition.
Cecil notes the forced Cherokee relocation known as “The trail of tears” occurred in 1838-1839. I am new to this board but I have yet to discover any reference to the fact that Martin Van Buren was President of the United States of America from 1836-1840. It is difficult to minimize Andrew Jackson’s culpabilily for the relocation policy, but it is perhaps a backhanded tribute to the force of his personality that he so overshadows the individual who carried it out…and who must, therefore, bear the blame for casulties of neglect and incompetence. Granted, the mind boggles at any effort to equate Van Buren with Stalin, but the Cherokees did not forgive him, or those of their own corrupt Cheifs who signed the treaties that provided the legal “fig leaf” for the relocation.
Sorry, C K Dexter Haven; my comment seems inflammatory a day later. However, at the time I thought I was wording it as an opinion. :o I wish I could back it up with numbers, but numbers are hard to find exactly because any research in this area is suspect. I’m not a holocaust-denier, but I don’t believe everything I read about “history’s most evil men,” even when it comes from Cecil.
By the way, in order to debunk my statement you used the very research I was attacking. This seems circular. Here’s a list of more figures for people to throw around if they wish: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm
(Here are some more moral judgements.) The United States should be held responsible for many deaths merely because it is the most powerful country in the world, and it could prevent many tragedies if it so desired. American foreign policy is callous and often hypocritical, and its attitude towards world democracy is one of contempt. A more human-oriented use of power would have brought the century’s death total down considerably.
On the other hand, I recognize that no other country would do as good a job of managing the world. Britain and Rome were awful in their respective days. As a superpower, the USA has shown the planet to a fruitful golden age that will collapse soon enough, leaving us all begging for the return of the so-called Great Satan.
It pretty clear from the question that the intended interpretation was the former:
Granted, due to historical/technological/etc. differences, you can’t always compare numbers as apples-vs-apples.
However, I think we should be more “fixated” on numbers; we often don’t pay any attention to numbers. It’s about time we did try to quantify human suffering, and I’m not talking about how much to pay the WTC families.
What would recent history have looked like if the response were proportional to the numbers? Take Yugoslavia and Rwanda as examples. The Rwandan genocide was an order of magnitude larger than all the strife in Yugoslavia put together (correct me if I’m wrong). If the response had been proportional, maybe a few hudred thousand lives could’ve been saved in Rwanda. I’m not saying the response to Yugoslavia was too great (far from it), but that the response to Rwanda fell incredibly short.
And I found Cecil’s numbers enlightening. I’m a left-leaner, and my basic idea was, “Well, yeah, Stalin and Mao really sucked, but they were no Hitlers.” Well, clearly they were in the same league, regardless of how you run the numbers.
You have to explain this one to me. What exactly are we supposed to do? It is folly to suppose we could have done much in Rwanda. We have no military presence anywhere near there. Preventing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people (in a very short period of time) requires tens of thousands of men, plus we would have to kill at least thousands. Surely we are not blameless. (Why exactly did we bomb that pharmeceutical plant in North Africa? Oh yea, Clinton was having political troubles. Why did we go into Somalia, oh yea, Clinton was having political troubles…) But, the worst you would find would be the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden. Certainly, one can argue that those actions saved more lives than they cost.
Or, perhaps you are referring to attempting to feed everyone in the world? We can try, but it is much harder than you think. One of the reasons Somalia was such a mess was that food could not reach the population most in need. Those with power used food as a weapon. But even in places without corruption, blanketing poor areas with food is often considered as undermining the local population’s ability to feed itself. E.g, what stops the rich landowner from converting all of his land to a cash crop for export? Why should the poor farmer grow food and not a cash crop? It goes on.
As far as,
is concerned, I was a member of mainstream academia. It was leftist when I left in the 80’s, and probably still is. Has the US killed innocent civilians? Without question. Has the US does so as a matter of policy? Perhaps in a few locations such as Cambodia. Have we committed genocide since we stopped trying to wipe out Indian tribes? I don’t think so.