"List of Dictatorships by Death Toll – The Top..." Topic

… Biggest Mass Killings in History

Trully horror…

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Amicalement
Armand

Interesting that the Japanese word for the reign of Hirohito is Showa, while the Hebrew word for the European holocaust is Shoah. I don't speak either language, so I don't really know how close the words sound.

The meaning of these words is more or less diametric, so its just coincidence.

So the take away is that communists are the best at mass murder. Figures.

When some of those totals are from periods of 4 or 6 years and others are 40, 50, and more years, I wonder how much thought was put into methodology. But whatever, it's a listicle.

What's important to remember is that for scores of generations war was the number two killer of humans after disease. In the twentieth century disease took some serious hits with vaccines and antibiotics and so fort making their appearance, and it was a big century for war dead. Still, somehow, war came in number three and disease at number two, with a new player as the number one cause of premature death in humans: Democide. Governments killing their own people. Not in war or civil war, not after a trial, not suppressing uprisings, but simply killing unarmed, untried civilians in huge, huge numbers. This is a shocking change in the nature of human existence and our relationship to the state, and should be the topic of much more discussion.

Andrew, you need to read more history. This is NOT a recent development.

The fact of governments killing their own people is not a recent development. Emperor Qin killed a million people over 20 years building the Great Wall, Vlad the Impaler sacrificed at least thousands to frighten the Turks, etc.

What is new is that the number of people killed by their own governments exceeded the numbers killed by war or disease.

The last century featured the Turkish genocides, the German genocide, Stalin's mass murders and starvations, Mao's Great Leap Forward (and Cultural Revolution, which actually killed fewer people), and the Khmer Rouge, just for the big numbers off the top of my head. We've never had a century quite like that, but then we didn't really start to harness industrial methods of killing until the Boer War.