THE BIGGEST MASS KILLING IS THE KILLING OF POOR WHITES AND BLACKS AT A RATE FAR ABOVE THE PERCENTAGE OF THEIR ACTUAL NUMBERS IN THE POPULATION.
ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS CONVINCE THEM THAT IT’S WHAT THE RICH DO WHEN THERE IS A PREGNANCY THAT THEY DON’T WANT.
OVER 43,000,000 AND STILL COUNTING.
APPROXIMATELY 40% ARE MINORITY ABORTIONS WHILE THEY ARE ONLY ABOUT 12% OF THE POPULATION.
ADOLF WOULD BE PROUD.
I was about to dismiss the above as a drive-by pro-life troll, but then I noticed that he backed up his argument with the use of all capital letters. I’m convinced.
The U.S. went into Somalia during the last days of the presidency of George H.W. Bush.
ALLIGATOR: Please look on your keyboard, probably on the left edge, between the [Tab] key (above) and the [Shift] key (below). You will find a key labeled [Caps Lock]. Please tap this key once. Thank you.
I admit to being confused by the actions of President Clinton, who pulled US forces out of Somalia while it was still in chaos and yet, in the last months of his administration, toured Africa pledging US forces would protect those living there from genocides such as those that occured in Rwanda. Yet his proposals and those actions planned by his successor in Iraq bring into sharp focus the question of a UN delegate at the time of the (first?) Gulf War: “Is the United States (now) the constable of the world?”
How could we afford such a position? We are now committed to rebuilding Afghanistan, even though we came out of the Cold War with the greatest national debt of any nation in the history of mankind. Yet President Bush speaks confidently of going to war in the Middle East then rebuilding Iraq as well…all without raising taxes. One wonders if our leaders have decided our public debts simply do not matter. Our citzens wallow in private debt as well ($7,000 to $8,000 in high interest credit card debt alone among card holders who carry unpaid balances) and a disconcerting number of families depend on their place at the public trough for their private wealth. Clearly, those well to do who hope to preserve their private assets if our Federal government dissolves in debt will be little better than first class passengers on the Titanic.
We can and should forestall any genocidal movements within our own borders. We have neither the resources or the military might to police the whole world. Morover, any attempt to do so will inevitability put us in morally ambiguous situations such as attended our recent intervention of the genocidal Vietnamese civil war, where in one celebrated incident an officer admitted he had to destroy a town in order to save it.
Hey WWW, you should bone up on the etiquette here. This thread is in the forum called Comments on Cecil’s Columns. That means the topics are supposed to be about what Cecil actually discussed. The thread in question was about genocide and how Andrew Jackson measured up. Political diatribes belong in the forum called Great Debates. Go over there and you will find plenty of people happy (or at least willing) to discuss America’s political endeavors, budget problems, etc. Over here, let’s stay on topic, okay? Or do we need a moderator to come in here and bash some heads?
I’m sure we can all point fingers at several others in this thread. Let’s not and just all stay on topic.
Hear, hear! Here’s a way to get back on thread…
Now that I’ve progressed a ways in “King Leopold’s Ghost”, I can report how Hochschild arrives at the ten million figure for the Belgian Congo.
He cites four main causes for the ten million loss in population from 1880-1920 (apparently in ascending order of influence):
- murder
- starvation/exhaustion/exposure
- disease
- plummeting birth rate
Obviously, murder – which actually accounts for the smallest loss – should be included in any accounting of genocide.
Starvation, etc. are direct effects of the regime, due to burning down villages, stealing foodstuffs, forced labor, etc., and I think clearly should be included.
The third is less clear. In some cases, the introduction of disease is purposeful, such as the infamous story of the small-pox-infected blankets given to American Indians as gifts. But usually disease is a side-effect of other genocidal processes. People are forced together into refugee camps; people are under-nourished; transportation avenues are opened that didn’t exist before.
The last is interesting. These aren’t deaths at all, but rather births that didn’t occur. However, in some cases (like the Congo), this is a very large effect. In the Congo, men were killed at a greater rate than women, so a gender imbalance was created. In addition, women were often taken hostage in order to force the men to work, creating physical separation of the sexes. Shortages and disease meant that pregancies were less viable, and certainly less desirable, since they put a severe strain on the women.
[The birth rate effect isn’t as difficult to calculate as you might think, assuming you can get good population statistics before and after the genocide (a difficult task in itself). Subtract the “after” population from the “before”, and you have the total loss, assuming the population would’ve been stable without the genocide. Then, from the result, subtract the amounts for the other causes (if you know them), and the remainder is the loss due to drop in birth rate.]
I’d argue that all four causes should be included, since it’s a simple measure of what the population would’ve/could’ve/should’ve been, had they just been left alone.
[A side-effect of this scheme is that a regime could get an “anti-genocide credit” in some cases, if population increased due to food/medical/diplomatic aid provided. OK, that’s taking the quantification a bit far, and it would reward overpopulation. But as it is, the equation is pretty one-sided. It’s difficult to quantify your good deeds (“Look at all the people who didn’t die today! We did that!”). It’s much easier to quantify your bad deeds, as long as you keep good records.]
Taken Biblical events into account, where on this list would God fall?
Let me slip in an apology for going off topic earlier. I clearly drifted.
Back to King Leopold. I don’t see how you use missing people due to a drop in birth rate as a genocide statistic. In this case, it is indicative of the general suffering, but counting unborn and unconceived people as genocide victims is ill founded. That kind of logic would imply that birth control and industialization are forms of genocide. Of course, one could eliminate an ethnic group by permanently separating the boys and the girls, but I don’t know that anyone has done that.
There is another genocide that isn’t in that list. The aboriginal Tasmanians were completely wiped out. Even though the numbers are small, that has to list as one of the all time atrocities. As in the Americas, I believe this was mostly done by a independent acts of hatred, and not as a deliberate policy by a government or other group…
Back onto the hijack:
I think it’s wrongheaded to call Andrew Jackson’s (or Martin Van Buren’s) actions with respect to the Cherokee “genocide.” There was never any intent to wipe them out. (If there had been, it would have been an easy task to accomplish.)
The Trail of Tears owes its death count to bureaucratic bungling rather than to intentional killing.
Was the fate of the Cherokee the result of an unconscionable land grab? Yes. Was the removal carried out in an incompetent, even criminally negligent manner? Yes, clearly. Was it a “genocide?” No. The object was to relocate the Cherokee, not to destroy them.
In fact, Jackson would have been perfectly happy if the Cherokee had remained in the East and become US citizens. The treaty ceding Cherokee lands gave Cherokee families the option of remaining in the East, becoming citizens, and receiving 160 acres per household. (Most did not pursue this option, of course.)
Just to be clear – I am in no way excusing the US for its wrong-doings. But there’s a question of proportion. Not every murderer is immediately in the same league as Hitler and the Nazis. Calling the US the “biggest killer of the 20th Century” is clearly nonsense.
The original column clearly took this issue beyond the Cherokee to a governments’ attempts to exterminate large numbers of people. The Unites States government should clearly be held to that same standard.
The Native American population in what is now the United States is considered by historians and anthropoligists to have been between 60 and 70 million prior to the arrival of Columbus in the 1600’s. The following link to the U.S. Census shows that in 1900, there were 237,000 remaining
http://www.census.gov/population/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls
C K Dexter is correct, in that the United States is not the biggest killer in the 20th century, but certainly ranks close to the all time leader. The American policy of extermination of Indians was in effect from the 1700’s through the late 1800’s and was remarkably effective. Somewhere near 60 million natives were slaughtered, infected with disease (Capt. Ecuyer gave smallpox infected blankets to tribes hoping to kill them without risking his men) and hunted like animals (the Governor of New England offered a bounty for the scalps of Indian men, women and children (search for Spencer Phips to see the documents)).
There is much to be learned by those willing to seek out new information about understanding what happened in your own yard.
Actually the Amerindian population figures for pre-colonial North America remain in dispute. AFAIK 60-70 million is not the accepted number by a consensus of workers in the field, but rather the high estimate in a wide range of proposed figures. Regardless, the demographic collapse was enormous. However the vast majority of it, if we take those higher figures in particular, occurred long before the United States was in existence.
Further, though the European conduct was frequently atrocious and at times even locally genocidal, the bulk of those deaths ( again particularly if accepting that very high estimate ) came through imported disease, that, a few incidents aside, were not deliberately introduced with the goal of decimating native populations. Rather it was a unexpectedly devastating lethal byproduct of “cultural exchange”. Indeed in some areas like early colonial Mesoamerica, this demographic collapse was much lamented by priests ( who despaired at the unconverted souls lost ) and local magnates and governors ( who lost the enormous labor pool on which they were parasitic ).
An overstatement, though containing some real elements of truth. Again, while American behavior was hardly exemplary overall ( the British and French were actually rather better for a variety of reasons, lack of bigotry not being one of them ), genocial policies went hand in hand with local alliances ( like the Covenant Chain linking New England colonies with the Iroquois ) and the general pattern was nothing if not schizophrenic - i.e. there was no consistent pattern of extermination. Still, some settlements and whole colonies really did seek peaceful acccomodations from time to time for altruistic reasons as well as strategic ones ( i.e. Quaker Pennsylvania ). Not nearly often enough, obviously.
Again only the tail end of that occurred under the United States’ watch, though that was more than bad enough to feel a real sense of shame.
I say all the above not to exculpate the U.S. from all blame, but just to point out that if we are being bean counters here, it shouldn’t take the undiluted rap for 60 million Amerindians. Morally, however, I agree the U.S. does indeed have dirty hands, both in terms of native populations and as has been mentioned elsewhere, such ugly incidents like the Phillipines campaign and the tacit support of the non-native coup in Hawaii. Sadly that is something that can be said, to one degree or another, for most modern states.
- Tamerlane
spoke-, there have been recent threads in GD and the Pit about Jackson and the Cherokee that go deeper into this, but one problem with the Government’s “alternative” was that it would have anyway involved having them surrender the landholdings they already owned fair and square – large tracts of prime, developed, agricultural land – and having the established communities displaced and fragmented, in order to let whites have at those lands and resources.
neil and bob write:
This is nonsense. I have the Nov. 29, 2001 New York Review of Books in front of me; in it Christopher Jencks reviews, among other books, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History by Shepard Krech III. Jencks writes, “In 1492 the Indian population of today’s United States numbered at least two million. Krech guesses that the number was probably more like six million, and some writers propose even higher figures.” One of the higher figures is the one I cited in my column, 15 million. In fairly extensive reading on this subject I have never seen anyone, including complete lunatics, estimate the pre-Columbian population of what is now the U.S. at “between 60 and 70 million.”
One may ask why I cited 15 million rather than a more conservative figure. The answer has to do with the slippery nature of the numbers tossed around in discussions of mass murder. Readers will appreciate that, given the scale of the killings, the wide geographical range, the totalitarian nature of many of the regimes involved, the lack or destruction of records, the lapse of time, and the sheer number of incidents, any estimate of state-sponsored killing is an educated guess at best. It’s difficult even to find a comprehensive list of massacres, never mind the number of deaths. In that respect the Encyclopedia of Genocide (EG) is invaluable - whatever its shortcomings, it provides the only synoptic account of worldwide mass murder that I have seen. When I wrote the column I resolved to take all my statistics from the EG in order to assure rough comparability of numbers. Granted, EG articles were contributed by a variety of authors, some more reliable than others; still, all the work had passed through the same set of editorial hands, and I could only hope that some effort had been made to iron out the more blatant contradictions and implausibilities. In short, I gave the pre-Columbian population of the (now) U.S. as 15 million because that was the number in the EG. One exception to this policy was the number of deaths during the American occupation of the Philippines - I did not see a mention of this in the EG. There is reliable authority for 300,000, but the conservative (and more commonly cited) figure is 200,000.
The perceptive reader can now guess why I interpreted “genocide” to mean “state-sponsored mass murder.” Answer: because R.J. Rummel interpreted it that way. A towering figure in “genocide studies,” he is the only one to have attempted a comprehensive statistical account of state-sponsored murder during the 20th century. His argument, which I found entirely persuasive, is that it is foolish to quibble over whether a given massacre does or does not qualify as genocide strictly construed. We live in a time when individual rulers or regimes have been responsible for the slaughter of millions, but we are only vaguely aware of who those rulers and regimes are. Everyone knows about the murderous policies of Hitler; many know about Stalin’s; some know about Mao’s. But who would have added Lenin or Chiang Kai-shek to the list? Or Tito or Yahya Khan? Who but a handful now remembers the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks or the Serbians by the Ustasha regime in Croatia? Future scholars will refine Rummel’s work, and individuals or regimes may be added to or removed from his lists. But his research is an important step in giving us a fuller sense of the horror of the era through which we have just passed. Or are still passing.
Forgive my having gone off like this. but you can see why somebody might get worked up.
I assume you’re referring to the option given to the Cherokee to remain in the East, accept US citizenship, and receive 160 acres of land per household.
I am not saying that this offer represented a fair exchange for the land being surrendered. Obviously, it did not. What I am saying is that it proves the government did not have a genocidal intent. It’s hard to argue that Uncle Sam was trying to eradicate the Cherokee when they were being offered the alternative of becoming full citizens.
As I mentioned before, if the US had wanted to exterminate the Cherokee, it could easily have done so. The government wanted their land, not their lives.
(Sorry for the hijack.)
Forgive it? I welcome it. There have been a lot of ridiculous – and some not-so-ridiculous – claims made in this thread and a lot of numbers thrown around, with frightfully few cites. Vague appeals to unnamed “historians and anthropologists” or “mainstream academia” don’t cut it. It’s a relief to have some rationale explained for some of the figures, even if they can’t be taken as gospel.
Which, of course, they couldn’t be anyway, since “gospel” means “good news,” and none of this is good news. But you get the point.
Thanks, too, to substatique, for his link to the “Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century.” It’s a fascinating site.
RR
Oy yes, and neil and bob, it may interest you to learn that the first record we have of an attempted genocide in North America is from 1622, when the Powhatan Indians sought to exterminate the Jameston settlers. Cite.
Of course, one atrocity does not excuse another (and the Powhatan surely had legitimate grievances), but the fact is that massacres were committed both by Indians against European/American settlers and by settlers against Indians from 1622 right on through the 19th century.
neal and bob: Perhaps you were thinking of the total native population in all of the Americas? That number has been cited in the 60 million range ( and higher ), with Mesoamerica having by far the densest population.
I did a little digging and Cecil seems to be absolutely correct ( what a suprise 
). The highest number I can find anywhere is ~14.5 million estimated by Dobyns. The citation for that is:
Dobyns, H.F., Their number become thinned:* Native American population dynamics in eastern North America.* ( 1983, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. )
However even that number remains in dispute. See for example this brief essay: - Graduate Program in History
- Tamerlane
I assume the “mainstream academia” remark was directed at me. I actually cited two reputable sources for every claim I made in that post so I wouldn’t consider anything I wrote “vague” or unsupported by facts.
The first source is Bartolome de las Casas’ “History of The Indies”.
I was first turned onto this book by an article I read in last month’s New Yorker. If you don’t have time for the book, at least check out the article. It’s fascinating. It reads like a 15th century version of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” with Columbus as a Kurtz-like figure, slowly going insane and imagining himself in his bizarre journals as the herald of the coming of the Anti-Christ. His behavior is almost explainable in light of his possible psychosis. How else to account for his actions in the fall of 1494 when he marched his personal army through Hispaniola butchering villagers with guns, swords and dogs? As I wrote above, it’s important to note that this book wasn’t written by some Yale “New Historicist”, but by the son of one of Columbus’ shipmates.
Information on Kissinger’s career in the late 60s and early 70s can be found in the Hitchens book. Lest you assume that this book is some kind of leftist rant, the recent declassification of documents pertaining to that period has revealed that every one of its assertions is fact-based, not circumstantial. It was the opening of this archive and its confirmation of what many historians have been saying for years that convinced the French to bar Kissinger form its borders on penalty of arrest for war crimes. Again, if you don’t have time for the book, maybe you could check out the recently released documentary of the same name.
True, my citations are books, not web-sites. Research-wise, the main advantage of a book over a web-site is the assurance that what you are reading has legitimacy as a piece of scholarship. It’s also easier on the eyes. I recently googled some Holocaust-related topics and was treated to a list of Holocaust Museum sites right alongside neo-Nazi Holocaust-denial sites as though the two were somehow equally legitimate as sources of information. Say I was uninformed about the topic–how would I judge between the two? I guess this is what Jurgen Habermas would call a “legitimation crisis”.
But I agree with you that some of the massacres being cited around here–colonial America’s policy toward Native Americans, for example–don’t qualify as genocide. This is actually the main sticking point of the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. Its main reason for existing is to prosecute acts of genocide, but true acts of genocide, a governmental policy designed to destroy a racial, ethnic, or culturally aligned group, actually rarely occur.
Undoubtedly it did in the former Yogoslavia and in Rwanda. But the following have also been irresponsibly associated with the G-word: Britain (policy in Ireland), Israel (policy in Palestine), America (policy throughout S.E. Asia in the 60s and 70s; South America in the 80s) and Russia (policy toward Chechnya). The word is simply thrown around with impunity. These countries are guilty of heinous war-crimes, but their policy has never, either overtly or covertly, been to wipe out a group of people in its entirety (Stalin persecuted the Chechnyans mercilessly. As the brutal war there and this current hostage crisis shows, post-Soviet Russia is now reaping what he sowed).
New Yorker article I mentioned: Oct 14 & 21 '02 double issue.
“The Journeys and Crimes of Columbus” by Elizabeth Kolbert.