I’m currently reading Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, and after reading about the absolute horrors that went on, it made me wonder-what other instances are there in history like this, that we never learn about in school, that even some history professors are surprised to learn about?
We all learn about the Holocaust, about Nagasaki and Hiroshima, about slavery and the Civil War. But how many of us have ever heard of Nanking? Or the Armenian genocide? Or the Ustase in Yugoslavia? King Leopold II of Belgium’s atrocities in the Congo?
How many other historical massacres are there out there perhaps we SHOULD pay more attention to?
Plenty of them. Most of them, probably. In addition to recent ones (Tutsis and Hutus, Cambodia, Bosnia) there are countless ones from the past that people no longer read about or care about – read the campaigns of the ancient Persians, or the Greeks or Romans or the Hebrews i the old Testament. There’s plenty of scary stuff out there. And then there’s the vast number that we don’t know about because no one wrote them down, or the accounts have been lost.
Take tyhis one, for example – Basil the Bulgar-Slayer of the Byzantine Empire. He is supposed to have blinded 14,000 captives (except for 1 in every 100, who got to keep one eye). Exaggerated, maybe, but recorded as soberv fact and believed by many people. There’s something horrible and fascinating that he would not have achieved had he killed them outright.
I’d never had heard of this event, were it not for two comics-for-adults, Larry Gonick’;s Cartoon History of the Universe III and Paradox Press’ the Big Book of Bad.
I can’t imagine anything more depressing than having to study every atrocity one set of humans has ever committed against another set of humans. There’s be no time in school to study anything else.
They shouldn’t be ignored either: a sampling, an overview of the reasons/excuses, a knowledge that it is more than just the Nazis capable of it - that’s all good. But to immerse students in it? No.
Or La Matanza? A while back I mentioned it in a Pit thread and Bricker, whose father was born in El Salvador, had never heard of it, and thought I was bullshitting him.
It happened in 1932, and about 30,000 people were just slaughtered by the Salvadoran military. It was a HUGE event to the people there, yet someone like Bricker has never heard of it? That’s not a fault to Bricker, btw-just an amazement that these kinds of things can be swept under the rug.
And yet we talk of the Holocaust, of slavery in the US, about the atomic bombing in Japan. Why some events and not others?
Definitely, though I don’t think its on the same scale as what happened in Armenia or any of the others mentioned here.
Personally I think one of the greatest atrocities (not sure how forgotten it is…doesn’t seem to be a big thing in the US) is not a single event, but the conquest of the new world by the Spanish. THAT was atrocity on an epic scale IMO. Oh, it wasn’t all the Spanish being the Spanish…a lot of it was the various diseases brought over. But still…it was pretty horrific, and there is still a lot of bad blood towards the Spanish where I come from.
Taiping Rebellion (at least 20 million dead, not more than about 150 years ago) comes to mind as having a pretty high bloodiness to awareness ratio – I was talking to a second-generation Chinese chick last month and she had never heard of it.
The complete catalog of man’s industrial scale inhumanity to man is depressingly mind boggling.
It is natural that events that happened more recently are more quickly recalled. Events perpetrated upon “us” or perpetrated by “us” both tend to linger in consciousness, as well as events perpetrated by our rivals, in the hopes that the evil of others will mitigate our own.
I don’t know. I mean, the man who did the most to get the Jews out of Lithuania during WWII was the Japanese consul. So, I think those examples just show that there are decent people in all governments.
And of course there is the ever present Russians killing Russians during the various era’s the Soviets ruled. Plenty of horrific atrocities there, and I think a lot of them are kind of forgotten. Then there is whats been going on in North Korea for decades…starvation and REAL gulags being just a the tip of the iceberg.
John Rabe. Chang referred to him as “The Oscar Schindler of Nanking.”
It wasn’t just how bad the rape was, he really did peform heroically. He tried to contact Hitler about the atrocities, but old Schickelgruber just ignored him.
RJ Rummel has spent a lifetime researching this stuff. He estimates that the Soviets killed 62 million of their own and China killed 35 million in the 20th century. For more horrendous stats: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM
Look at what the Americans did to the Filipinos after the Spanish-American War. Women and children were routinely hunted like dogs. At least 30,000 were murdered. Largely forgotten today. And probably not in the Top 100 of forgotten atrocities.