What's the biggest genocide in history?
Asked by
w2pow2 (
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December 9th, 2009
Details as to how many were killed, by whom, and for what reason would be greatly appreciated.
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42 Answers
Pretty sure that would be The Holocaust.
Nazi regime’s extermination of the Jews. Something like 6 million Jews murdered plus a couple million more prisoners such as Soviet POW’s and homosexuals etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
I visited the Sachsenhausen concentration camp while I was living in Berlin. Was one of the most moving and heart wrenching experiences I have ever had. Really difficult to handle the emotions of sadness and horror those human beings were subjected to day in and day out. And for no reason other than a pathetic lunatic’s racist, anti-semitic ideology.
I believe the Holocaust is #1, tallying millions of deaths.
Second that I can think of would be the witch-burning craze, where I have heard it estimated that millions also died (though there aren’t any official tallies).
Mao Zedong beats Hitler- 50 million to 6 million.
And just for clarification- genocide is defined as an extermination of ethnic, political, or religious groups.
So Mao Zedong commit genocide. So did Kim Jong-il or whatever his name is: leader of North Korea.
by w2pow2’s definition, the supposed witches wouldn’t count. literal witch hunts still go on in parts of africa, by the way.
So wait. If you’re going to correct people’s answers.. why did you ask the question in the first place?
What is the point of this “question” (though you seem to have already had an “answer” all along)? When actual genocide is committed, be it in Eastern Europe (Holocaust), Sudan, Turkey (Armenian Holocaust), Cambodia (Khmer Rouge), Croatia, etc. does the precise number of people killed mean anything specific? I don’t get it. Genocide is genocide.
@Qingu You’re right! I have discovered that Mao Zedong killed 36 million due to deliberate famine, but that can be catagorized as mass murderer at most.
There’s still a chance that he beats Hitler if the remaining difference is political genocide.
Such dark talk…
Wow, this question makes me feel good.
@rangerr, zinger there I think.
@shilolo: and I have met people completely willing to commit genocide, though they wouldn’t call it that. and I don’t mean neo-Nazis. that had a profound effect on my political views.
(I had confronted them a bit earlier but not as directly as I should have. though if I had, I’d’ve had gotten stranded somewhere around Washington DC when I lived near Boston.)
Holocaust, the extermination of the Aztecs and the native north americans, the starvation of soviet farmers by taking all produced food, etc.
I think the Aztec Holocaust was the worst because it lead to the extinction of an entire culture and society.
@shilolo and @rangerr Because I don’t know if anyone commit a bigger genocide than Mao. And look where we’ve already gotten with this discussion! I’ve discovered that Mao didn’t technically commit genocide on the scale that I previously thought he did!
Isn’t learning just so freaking fun!
@shilolo sure numbers mean something! I’ll give you an example- If you had to make a choice between 2 million dead or 7 million dead, which would you chose?
With 7 million dead, a lot more mothers will have to attend their children’s funerals. Much more depression than 2 million.
@ragingloli is there an estimate on how many people were killed in the Aztec genocide?
According to this
“Tribute lists indicate the population of the Aztec Empire was 30 million in 1518. By 1568, Spanish officials estimated only 3 million remained. By 1620 the number had shrunk further to 1.6 million.”
the Aztecs themselves must have murdered quite a few people as part of their human sacrifices.
Most of the Aztecs died from infectious diseases, like smallpox, measles, and possible hemorrhagic fevers, rather than directly being murdered (in contrast to say, the gas chambers in Poland and Germany). Whether or not the Conquistadors knowingly infected the Aztecs with the intent of mass murder is unclear. I doubt highly that they knew enough to predict the destructive nature of their presence alone.
So why didn’t you ask if anyone committed a bigger genocide than Mao?
::facepalm::
I don’t think callous-but-unintentional starvation or disease should count as genocide.
KNOWN genocide (IE we have records to prove it, which rules out pre-colonial native americans, and deliberately done to wipe out a people, which means not including famine that was just a side effect of poor leadership)
The Nazi’s are an easy #1 with 7 million.
# 2 if I’m not mistaken would be the Khmer Rouge, I think they did 1 or 2 million. back in the 70’s.
You could argue Mao or Stalin, as both killed a lot of people in their own countries. But the records are sparse (either from poor keeping or purposely covering it up), and it’s also combined with general famine and poor living conditions leading to deaths.
Anyone knows the number of people who drowned in the biblical flood? I have seen a 7 billion estimate on wiki answers.
@ragingloli would that make God the biggest perpetrator of genocide?
@ragingloli – That is highly contestable. First beginning with whether the Bible is an accurate historical record (and for many points, I would argue it isn’t).
No one has mentioned the Native Americans yet?
@colliedog
here
”Holocaust, the extermination of the Aztecs and the native north americans,”
Well, the very fact that there can be a question like this (and various different answers) shows how good we are in this sport as human beings.
The first genocide was probably the Neanderthals by the Cro Magnions, and we never stopped: the Picts were exterminated by the Celts, the Native Americans by European settlers, the Armenians by the Turks, the list goes on…the unsuccessful attempt by Hitler is obviously the “big star” of genocides, but part of its glamour comes from the very fact that there were survivors to tell their story, which by definition disqualifies it as “genocide” (ie the complete anihilation of a nation). It was more the brutality of the Holocaust, rather than the numbers, that intrigued us, as well as the fact that, being fairly recent, it was fairly well documented. But there are no survivors of the conquest of the New World to share their own horror stories.
The various attacks on the Chinese (the most recent by the Japanese) have had far more victims in terms of numbers, but due to the already huge population of China, went largely unnoticed. And let’s face it, even though nobody will ever admit it, there is different value placed on human life, depending on the nationality of the victim. Americans care a lot more about the death of an American soldier than 200 Iraqis, and a lot more about 1m Jews than 10m Chinese (who nobody would even miss). As for Africans, they are valued around 300,000:1 Americans in the “human life value” stockmarket. Nobody even remembers the thousands of slaves that died in the ships before even getting across the Atlantic, or cares about the genocide in Sierra Leone just a few years ago.
Here is an interesting chart I found doing a google search. It is truly a sad, sad state of affairs when a question like this can be debated because man has done such horrible things to man.
@w2pow2 sure numbers mean something! I’ll give you an example- If you had to make a choice between 2 million dead or 7 million dead, which would you chose? With 7 million dead, a lot more mothers will have to attend their children’s funerals. Much more depression than 2 million.
Am I the only person who finds this comment sickening?
This question makes me sorry that I am not really a dog.
@colliedog: the Aztecs lived in what we now call mexico… a part of North America.
@SuperMouse thanks for the link
People, don’t go getting all depressed about mass killings – the number of people saved by people helping each other is far, far higher than anything you see here.
Stalin “purged” a crapload of his own….
@ragingloli Ignoring the religious question that is brought up by your question (IE did the flood even really happen)... The population of humanity didn’t exceed 1 billion even until the last few hundred years. Moreover given ancient agriculture and other food production methods available to mankind around the supposed time of the flood (or anytime prior to the last few hundred years for that matter), the planet could not possibly have supported that many persons at the time.
@Jack79 While China has always had a sizeable population, the times of all but one of Japans incursions/genocides into Chinese territory would not have provided nearly enough population to surpass Hitlers count (or even the Khmer Rouge). In fact you would probably have to combine them all to TIE the Khmer Rouge. And estimates are that during WW2 the Japanese killed as many as a few million Chinese, but that still does not surpass Hitler’s count…. even when combined with all other Japanese genocide in history.
How many did the Khmer Rouge kill?
@YARNLADY Well there’s a new thought! But is there a way to map that out?
I would suppose not, but still an interesting comment.
@w2pow2 Between 1 and 2 million… most reliable estimates put it at 1.5
@w2pow2 I looked all over for a reference to site that showed the number of people helping other people, but I could find nothing all in one place. There are 86,000 charity sites listed on Goodsearch.com and 100 more listed every day, so if we take 1000 people per charity, that would add up to 86 million and that is just one site.
The greatest mass murder ever committed was (supposedly) by Gawd, if you believe the Noah’s Ark legend.
Besides Holocaust by Hitler,the other one that’s worst and took around 2 Million lives is Yale Cambodian Genocide Project under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
An interesting question to add to this would be how many are we killing every day out of negligence? We eat here in America because third world countries use their farmland to grow food for us…we eat, they don’t. We are guilty by association, and by omitting this thought every time we take a bite of food.
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