What would you say is worst atrocity that mankind has ever committed?

The Holocaust.

Rape of children as a weapon of war.

I’d have to say the Holocaust even outweighs Stalin’s slaughter of 61 million, because of the Nazi’s deliberate decision to carry it out.

@zenvelo I was about to add that Stalin’s reign of terror would be one of them too.

Also, The Jonestown Massacre. I’m watching a documentary on it right now, and it’s absolutely horrible.

There isn’t one. ‘Mankind’ doesn’t commit atrocities, groups of individuals do.

@KatetheGreat You’ll have to forgive me, what exactly is the Jonestown Massacre? I feel like I’ve heard the phrase before

Hate spawned by religion
Hate spawned by racism
Hate spawned by politics
Hate spawned by ignorance
Rape of Mother Nature!

Medieval inquisitions, the Holocaust… Those come to mind, but really, seems to me that man’s history is built on a pillar of bones that stands proud over a river of blood.
Take your pick, man. :(

@Symbeline I’d have to agree about Medieval inquisitions. There were a lot of horrific things that happened around that time, based on what I know.

Mao Zedong’s regime of killings was greater than Hilter or Stalin.
How does one argue what is worse of any of them?

@Joker94 A man by the name of Jim Jones created a cult and he moved all of his followers down to Guyana. After a congressman came to explore the real situations down in Guyana, Jim Jones forced all of his followers to “drink the Kool-Aid”. The Kool-Aid was laced with cyanide and over 900 people were killed that day.

Here’s a great documentary on it.

@joker94, @katethegreat also here is the recording of the mass suicide he convinced them all to perform, complete with a big speech of his, crying children, fading background noise. It’s pretty grizzly stuff but very real and reminds you what the human race can do at its worst!

http://listverse.com/2007/07/15/top-10-incredible-recordings/

Number 9 is the Jonestown Massacre

SLAVERY!

Don’t forget the Japanese atrocities against China during WW2.

The Rape of Nanking sparked the US embargo on scrap metal and oil sales to Japan, which lead to Pearl Harbor.

The Rape of Nanking, where members of the barbaric Japanese Imperial Army decapitated innocent civilians for sport, buried many people alive, bayoneted babies by the hundreds, raped thousands of women and killed them (as well as keeping many women as sex slaves, especially in Korea), and subjected people to cruel, torturous experiments. They were so inhuman and evil that even Nazi German officials were shocked and horrified by what was happening in Nanking at the time.

The Japanese Imperial Army not only subjected hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians to horrendous treatment, but they were also unusually cruel to captured American and British POWs, resorting to countless beheadings, tortures, and live experimentations.

@Joker94 The inquisitions were indeed disgusting. I read a lot about that stuff, and I can’t believe how much work went into devising ways to torture and kill a fellow human. The Romans were quite good at this too, if not better.

EDIT
@MRSHINYSHOES has yet another excellent example. Been reading about that lately, too, along with the Holocaust.

@blueiiznh I learned a bit about that in my World History course. Horrifying stuff.
@KatetheGreat & @trickface I knew it sounded kinda familiar! I’m gonna look into this a little more, I’m really intrigued.
@WestRiverrat & @MRSHINYSHOES I just learned about some of the Japanese atrocities, and I am genuinely surprised that no class had taught me about it before. It was equally as cruel as the Holocaust in my mind.
@Symbeline Ughh, the Romans freaked me out to no end. Crucifixion was bad enough, but when I heard about the Iron Chair method I was cringing.

@Joker94 It’s really worth it to watch the documentaries, read the books, and hear the tapes. It’s appalling.

If you guys are interested in getting disturbed, see if you can check out a four part documentary called Machines of Malice. Gah. (Inquisition and the Roman era)

@Joker94 What bothers me is that in modern day Japan, the Rape of Nanking is rarely mentioned (if at all ) in history books, and if it is, it is very much downplayed. All the atrocities that the Imperial Army committed are ignored——one of the recent Japanese Prime Ministers even visited a grave and shrine dedicated to Japanese war criminals. When you ask an ordinary person on the street in Japan about Japanese Imperialism during WW2, he/she would most likely tell you that the Japanese were “actually” helping to defend Asia from the evil Western powers, trying to “rationalize” their involvement in the Pacific war as “heroes”, when in fact it was the Americans who were the real heroes——if it were not for them, my paternal grandparents would have succumbed to the invading Japanese. The American involvement in the Pacific war stopped the spread of Japanese Imperialism, and helped saved thousands of innocent Chinese people who otherwise would have starved to death or been subjected to further human degradation and torture.

@MRSHINYSHOES I think it’s rarely mentioned at all period. I don’t want to downplay the Holocaust at all, but I think some of the atrocities committed by Japan were overlooked in it’s wake.

@Joker94 Absolutely. I don’t want to downplay the Holocaust either, but I think sometimes the Rape of Nanking is overlooked in school history texts in comparison.

The Inquisition wasn’t in Medieval times!!!

The Crusades.

@MRSHINYSHOES I agree completely. Even though it was a horrible event, I think I benefited from learning about it this year.

Though the Holocaust and Stalin’s slaughter killed far more people, I would say the Rape of the New World from the Indians.
This was, essentially, a successful genocide. We completely destroyed the lifestyles of the indian tribes, took their land, killed most of them off, and herded the rest into small reservations.
Well, they did get casinos…

@filmfann That too was a rather terrible period in history that a lot of my classes glazed over…

@MyNewtBoobs Sorry, Dark Ages.

And yeah, we didn’t learn about Nanking or the Romani in school, either. :/

@Symbeline Lol, no – it happened after the Middle Ages/Dark Ages/Medieval time.

The Spanish Inquisition officially started in 1483 and the Office of Inquisition was not closed by the Vatican until 1968, altho it was ended in all but name by the mid 1800s. The last official Crusade ended in 1291.

@MyNewtBoobs Didn’t people torture others in the name of God as far back as the ninth century though? Some dude back then wrote a book that was years older than that Hammer of Witches thing, but was more or less the same thing. (learning to spot heathens and witches and stuff)

I can’t pick just one. There are so many, too many to count. Although, pretty much the same crap just keeps repeating throughout history. Raping, killing, enslaving, torturing, it all just happens over and over again.

@Symbeline There was always some bloodshed over the issue, but it didn’t really get going until after after the Middle Ages. Most of the Middle Ages was spent with people just trying to meet their most basic needs – food, water, shelter, protection, living long enough to have children, etc – and the structure of government was so disorganized (well, ish – that’s a vast oversimplification, but it works for now) that they didn’t really have time to spare in which to commit religious massacres (save for the Crusades, in which they had opportunities to get lots and lots of money). They were concerned with heretics, but they didn’t hunt them out the same way, and they had a lot of “warnings” before actually killing someone. Witchcraft wasn’t really an issue until later, and in fact there was “cunning folk” who were good witches – people who could use magic to heal, to help you find things, etc. It wasn’t seen so much as making a pact with the devil as it was using saintly intercession.

I would definitely need more info to identify that book.

@WestRiverrat During the Spanish Inquisition didn’t they allow people to convert or leave? Or, I guess they were forced out, but were they murdering people like some of these other horrible examples listed?

@JLeslie Jein. At first, it was all “convert or leave” but then later on it was all “Hey, new converts, we think you’re lying about the reality of your conversion”.

During the Spanish Inquisition, it was common for people to turn in their rivals as possible heretics or jews. The Inquisition would then systematically torture them, often to death, to get confessions and more names.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

I see.

‘Friday’ by Rebecca Black.

I think in the long run, it’s going to be the worldwide destruction of forests. It’s going to change the balance of nature and destroy us all eventually. People destroying people is unthinkable and horrible, but we have plenty of human beings. We have a limited number of trees.

@sunny, forests have been destroyed and recovered foe eons. The balance of nature has been changed several times. Think ice ages scraping everything in their path off the earth and the extinction of the dinosaurs and the fern forests in the distant past.

We may destroy humankind and everything on the planet but earth will survive, it has taken worse hits than anything that mankind can do to it.

@WestRiverrat I hope so. I won’t be around to see it.

The Rwandan Genocide must rank pretty high on the list. Whilst not so great in sheer numbers, the organised nature, the speed (800,000 killed in 100 days) and the connivance of large sections of the population make it truly horrifying.

The worst atrocities that mankind has ever committed have been done by unrestrained government power in many shapes and sizes and all variations of communism.

@atomicmonkey Bwahhhaha, love it.

@MyNewtBoobs Wait, that was the dark ages? I thought those were the middle ages…damn, going around my whole life thinking one was the other. ’‘facepalm’’

@filmfann Wasn’t there pillow torture in that? :D

@Symbeline Middle ages and Dark ages overlap. One is a subset of the other, but I can’t remember which is which off the top of my head.

I think the Dark Ages are included in the middle ages.

Erm…so then, the dark ages started first? And what differentiates the two?

@WestRiverrat @Symbeline Dark Ages is a pejorative term for the Middle Ages that pretty much all reputable medievalists (Middle Ages historians) don’t use anymore, because it’s not really accurate. The only time we still use the term “Dark Ages” is to refer to a period that is dark to us because of a lack of sources – meaning there wasn’t much writing going on, and little of it survived (and even then, we try to avoid it). 400s-500s AD in Britain is considered fairly Dark, and in general the Early Middle Ages (c. 400s-800s AD) are darker on the continent than the High or Late Middle Ages, except for the Carolingian Renaissance, which is an incredibly “Light” period which focused on increasing literacy, so we have lots of sources.

So if I’m getting this right, dark ages is used to describe some periods of the middle ages where people didn’t socially evolve much?

@Symbeline Socially evolve much like….? Laypeople use Dark Ages all the time to describe the entire Middle Ages, but every time they do, a medievalist looses her wings (seriously, it’s like calling black people “ne*ro”). Occasionally, historians will refer to a period where we don’t have many sources anymore as “dark” – maybe they didn’t write on substances that last (like paper…), maybe there wasn’t much literacy to begin with, maybe they all got destroyed later on in a mass purge, the buildings they created didn’t last very long so we can’t do archaeological digs on them, etc.

Well like you said, people just fending to live, not much literacy going down and all. But nah now I get what you mean. It’s like a slang basically, that WE use, for periods we don’t know much about, as opposed to it being an actual period, like I thought. I think…
I once heard that in Britain, for a number of years somewhere in the early medieval ages, a type of freak wolf existed…like big ass wolves. But nobody can prove that, since no skeletons or any kind of traces of said wolves were found. So that would be a ’‘dark age’’ to someone studying this?
(lame example yeah, but I always thought that whole direwolf thing was awesome, if it was real)

@Symbeline mmm… I don’t know. Because it sounds a bit more conspiracy theory than, like… trying to find out how gender relations changed in Cornwall between 500 and 850.

Right…and if these wolves are said to have existed, then something, some writing, scripture or whatever about them would have been found from that period, so it’s not entirely ’‘dark age.’’
Anyways, thanks for clearing some of this up. :)
When I was on AB I answered a lot of stuff in their ’‘dark ages’’ section and kept talking about the inquisition, and not a single person ever corrected me. I musta looked like an ass to anyone who actually knows about it. XD