What was the worst genocide?

[Darwin123]

Actually, I'd say there are NO people who literally worship the Christian Satan.

That is actually what I believe. However, I was afraid of making such an absolute statement. What I actually meant was 'Few or none'.

It is really clear that the vast majority of witches killed in the late medieval times were completely innocent of the crimes they were convicted of. Some religious apologists would say that the witch hysteria was really about crimes that actually occurred. For instance, I actually know people that say most of the witches convicted were drug addicts and drug pushers.

There may have been people convicted as witches who were just using drugs. Maybe it was true early in the middle ages, before the witch hysteria was fully established. However, it becomes clear on looking at the law that this was not the case in later medieval times.

In early medieval times, there was some constraints to witch investigations. One needed solid evidence that some ritual was physically practiced. The criterion for conviction required some competent observer who was awake and clear minded to be a witness.

One could torture accused witches, as one could torture other accused criminals. However, an accused witch could not be accused twice for the same offense. In fact, you couldn't be tortured twice for any crime. Even convictions for heresy required either physical evidence or witnesses who were awake. You couldn't convict someone for changes in weather. If a witness was shown to be lying, a witness could receive the same punishment as the supposed witch received. Furthermore, there were laws against using witnesses who were under extreme duress. A witness had to come forward of their own free will. A conviction could be overturned if witnesses contradicted each other. Deformities on a person could not be used as evidence for conviction.

The law was changed so it was easier to convict a witch. A witness could be asleep at the time of the crime. Many witches were burnt alive who were seen only in a dream by the witness. A person could be tortured again and again, every time a witness came forward. A person could be accused based on a sudden change of weather which profited them. A person who saw the astral image of a witch could be the basis of a conviction, even if no one else saw the astral image.

No authority actually said it was illegal to use psychedelic drugs. This excuse sometimes raised by apologists is not correct. The visions someone had while on drugs could be used as evidence of witchcraft. This sometime meant the person who was tripping got convicted for witchcraft. However, it often turned out that the person tripping accused a perfectly sober person of being a witch. What we would call hallucinations were considered better evidence than wide awake observations.

It is interesting that the witch executions continued even after the death penalty had been removed for heresy. Now, sometimes a heresy trial was turned into a witchcraft trial by the judges. However, the mere worship of Satan is just heresy. The vast majority of people convicted of witchcraft were executed on the basis of magical beliefs.

So in terms of fear, that witch trials created more than the Nazis. Hey, the Nazis even fooled the victims when they could. They did purposely create pain and publicize their murder. They often hid it. They sometimes argued over which was a more merciful method of murder (CO2 or HCN, anyone?). However, people vanished into the night and fog. People got burned in the cremation ovens. However, this was just a little accident. The intention of the crematoria were to eliminate the evidence.

The fear was just a means to achieve racial purity. Gypsies and Jews actually existed. Whether they really were a cancer is just a matter of opinion. There was no explicit magic used in the Nazi holocaust. Nor were there for the Turkish holocaust. There were real Armenians who were eliminated. The Turks didn't kill thousands of people for changing the weather.


Yet, there were localities where the witch hysteria emptied the towns. Mostly it was aimed for women. Sure, these women were part of the community. However, they were eliminated as something foreign. They just were't eliminated. They had to be HURT!

Heretic trials could be almost as bad. Spain and Portugal burned many Jews. However, there were actually people practicing the Jewish religion. The criteria for evidence was much tougher than the criteria for witchcraft. In fact, capital punishment for heresy was banned after a few decades. People could be strangled before they were burned. The Spaniards didn't add embellishments like ripping beats off to heretic executions. You needed testimonies from witnesses WHO WERE AWAKE to burn a heretic !

So I still vote for the European witch trials in categories 2 and 4. I don't think you can make an unambiguous judgement as to how many fast murders are equivalent to a slow drawn out death.

So I don't think we have to know how many witches were burnt per year. One set of numbers that I read about 500 witches per year for 400 years. However, maybe it was less. Maybe it was only 50 witches burned alive per year for 200 years. I think that is a fair estimate for Scotland alone, but never mind. Even a few well documented stories will show most people that the European witch trials were the most sadistic expressions of mass insanity ever known.


I'll let everyone else decide on categories 1 and 3 ! I know there are a lot of contenders.

 

[Loss Leader]

I hesitate to say the Holocaust because, as a Jew, I may be biased. It's hard to deny Rwanda because the west knew all about it and willingly chose to do nothing.

But I'm going to go with the Neanderthals. We just murdered every last one of them. That takes commitment.

 

[MG1962]

I hesitate to say the Holocaust because, as a Jew, I may be biased..

Well I think the thing that stands out for me is how lucky the Jews where. If the Nazis had been able to get even half way organized, the death toll could easily have doubled.

 

[Loss Leader]

Well I think the thing that stands out for me is how lucky the Jews where. If the Nazis had been able to get even half way organized, the death toll could easily have doubled.

It's too bad they had to fight a two-front war at the time. They just overcommitted and spread themselves too thin. When you do that, you end up getting none of it right.

 

[Venom]

Definitely the Holocaust.

There are some honorable mentions from the Medieval era, such as the Tangut massacre ordered by Genghis Khan in 1227, which completely scattered what remained of an entire culture.

However the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazis is the best kept record of a modern genocide. I say they are rivaled by the Japanese imperialists halfway around the planet as well. The Japanese, like the Nazis, had a general disregard for civilian life, using Chinese, Koreans, and POWs as guinea pigs for medical experimentation or slow, torturous target practice. They're up there too.

 

[Craig B]

Well I think the thing that stands out for me is how lucky the Jews where.

I think that's the first time I have encountered anyone whose main impression of the Holocaust is how lucky the Jews were.

 

[HansMustermann]

@Darwin123
While by and large I agree with you, I'd have some nits to pick, so sto speak.

For starters, the criteria for being convicted as a heretic or whatever, were not quite so lenient as they may seem. Sure, the rules from above did say that someone could only be tortured once into confessing, but there were no rules for how long that could mean, nor exactly what qualified as torture. A torture session could even be interrupted any number of times, and for however long the inquisitor wanted, so basically they could keep at it all week if they wanted to, and still count as only once. Sleep deprivation was also pretty much the norm, and AFAIK not counted as a separate torture session. Etc.

Being let go once also didn't mean automatically the end of it. Far from meaning they can't accuse you again, it meant the next time it counts as a relapse and is an automatic death penalty. The papacy was pretty content to keep sinners alive, as long as such a horrible "we know who you are, and next time you even breathe wrong you burn" warning worked.

Also, even that keeping the sinner alive wasn't always quite being let go. The Papal inquisition handed out life prison like candy.

ETA:

Or it could mean having everything confiscated and being banished, which was a lot worse than it would mean today.

Also the details of the execution varied from time to time and place to place. In England people tended to get strangled first, in France and Germany they got to scream for 1-2 hours on top of a pyre. In various times and places, one could even be roasted more slowly by (A) being tied to a concrete post which heats more slowly, (B) placing the wood at a distance, and/or (C) being doused in water. See the execution of IIRC Baba Novac for the last one in action. In various times and place, including Spain and Germany, they even built special ovens to roast the heretics and/or witches slower. The story of the witch being thrown into the oven in Hansel and Grettel may have been inspired by such executions.

And when people decide that (A) just burning someone for an hour or two isn't inhumane enough, and (B) they plan to keep burning enough for such permanent structures to be worth building... yeah, you know they're not ticking right...

 

[Pacal]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini

Thanks for that. In it I found the following:

Truganini is often considered to be the last full-blood speaker of a Tasmanian language.[14] The Companion to Tasmanian History details three full blood Tasmanian Aboriginal women, Sal, Suke and Betty, who lived on Kangaroo Island in South Australia in the late 1870s and 'all three outlived Truganini.' There were also Tasmanian Aborigines living on Flinders and Lady Barron Islands. Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905), outlived Truganini by 30 years and in 1889 was officially recognised as the last full blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal. Smith recorded songs in her native language, the only audio recordings that exist of an indigenous Tasmanian language.[4][15]

Regarding the Tasmanian "extinction", the following quotes from Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold, by Mark Cocker, Jonathan Cape, London, 1998 might be of interest:

Truganini's death marked the melancholy end of all those Aborigines originally taken into possession by Conciliator Robinson and then incarcerated, firstly at Flinders, then Oyster Cove. Yet there had always been a small community of Tasmanian women living with the sealers out in the islands of the Bass Strait. While captive compatriots learned to exchange the ways of the Neolithic for the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, and to praise their Commandant in the Flinders Island Weekly Chronicle, these female sealers were gradually creating the basis of a new Aboriginal community.

Although European in dress, and increasingly in physical appearance, by the 1850s the group still included at least seven full-blooded Aboriginal women and as a whole the community retained characteristics of its Tasmanian antecedents. (p. 182)

On the one hand to have accepted the Bass Strait group as Aborigines would have made nonsense of the myth of extinction. At the same time, to have recognized them as a racially mixed community, distinct but of equal status to mainstream settlers - as indeed the Bass Strait people wished themselves to be seen - was almost as difficult.(p. 183)

For almost a century the islander community persisted in a legal and administrative no-man's land, as the authorities moved from one set of prescriptive measures to another. Central to these was a desire to bleed out their Tasmanian heritage and to oblige them to adopt European patterns of social and economic behaviour. It is only in the last quarter of the twentieth century that the policies of coercive assimilation were truly abandoned and the islanders allowed to claim in full their Aboriginal identity. In 1976 the number of people openly asserting this status was 2,942, while in the 1990s the figure has risen again to over 8,500. (p. 183)

 

[MG1962]

I think that's the first time I have encountered anyone whose main impression of the Holocaust is how lucky the Jews were.

I did not say it was my biggest impression, I mentioned it terms of comparative discussions of other attempted genocides. The Holocaust is virtually unique in the respect it was undertaken by a highly developed industrial nation.

If we compare the murder rate of the Armenian genocide there would have been close to another 2 million Jews killed in Europe by WW2 and who knows how many more Catholics, Poles, Gypies etc would have also been murdered.

 

[Pacal]

Here is a a Photo of some of the Bass Strait Tasmanians:

 

[Craig B]

I did not say it was my biggest impression

You called it "the thing that stands out for me".

 

[nota]

neanderthals a whole race of humans

neanderthals a whole race of humans were wiped out totally by our ancestors

I think that is the top one

american natives were the biggest resent event
far larger numbers of people mostly by disease
plus war and starvation

 

[Darwin123]

The Palastinians. The slowest genocide evah.

You contradicted yourself. If it is the 'slowest', then it can't be the 'worse'. Let us look again at the criteria listed by the OP.

1) Speed and ferocity

Obviously, not fast.

2) Composition of perpetrators

This criteria wasn't too clear. Maybe it applies, I don't know.

3) Percentage of population killed

What percentage of the Palestinians have been killed?
What percentage have been relocated?



4) Torture and murder tactics

Perhaps. However, you did say this is the slowest genocide ever. So the rate of murder isn't all that impressive.

There has been torture by the Israeli's. They have their excuses. Hell, sadistic lunatics always have their excuses. However, I think the Palestinians and their allies should get an honorable mention. Saddam Hussein was a bit of a classic. The

Interestingly, Saddam doesn't quite make the worse torture class of genocidal maniacs, either.

The European witch trials included torture at least as bad as Hussein's. I count this as a genocide since there was a gene greatly reduced in number. The witch trials focussed on women. Hence, the X-chromosome was basically under attack.

The Moslems have started witch trials recently. However, they don't yet compare to Christians in their medieval prime.

The torture by Vlad Romanov of Transylvania may have been worse than even the European witch trials. All that impaling. He was just copying the Moslems, who were also big on impaling. However, Vlad may have topped them.

I think the Biblical Hebrews probably beat the rest in terms of percentage and ferocity. Their modern descendants, the Jews and the Arabs, are merely pale imitations. How many Canaanites does anyone know?


So even if the Israeli attacks are a genocide, they are a slow genocide. You called them the 'slowest' genocide ever. A 'worse' genocide has to be fast. The slow means they aren't the worse.

 

[dudalb]

Then you have intent. Genocide, in the official defination, is an deliberate attempt to exterminate a ethnic group. THus you have some kinds of mass murder that might not techiically be Genocide,although invovlve the death of Hundred of Thousands of people. I give you Stalin's Russia as an example.

 

[Craig B]

Then you have intent. Genocide, in the official defination, is an deliberate attempt to exterminate a ethnic group. THus you have some kinds of mass murder that might not techiically be Genocide,although invovlve the death of Hundred of Thousands of people. I give you Stalin's Russia as an example.

Millions of people, but still probably not genocide, because his targets were a social class - the independent peasantry - and wide categories of real or imagined political opponents.

 

[dudalb]

Millions of people, but still probably not genocide, because his targets were a social class - the independent peasantry - and wide categories of real or imagined political opponents.

You are correct about the millions. There is a gray area with the Ukraine since he might have delibertly targeted the Ukraine with famine to destroy what he thought was a threaening Ukaranian Nationalism.

 

[Damien Evans]

Um, didn't God specifically give Satan permission to torture Job beforehand?

What's that go to do with my post?

 

[Damien Evans]

I think Damien meant that there is one more appearance of Satan apart from those listed.

And if I am not mistaken, all of Job's torments are authored by God.

Correct on both counts.

 

[skeptichaggis]

Darwin 123 above mentions Vlad the impaler. We can scratch him from the list. The economic record from that part of the world in the 15th century is fairly good. The two most attacked groups within transalvania were the boyar class and German immigrants.
Most of the nasty stuff we have comes from Saxony and the Hanseatic league,people who benefitted from the blackening of Vlad. The fact that the economic record shows no great decline in this era tells us that whatever the German merchants and settlers went through they were still open for buisness.
We know for sure that Vlad treated many boyars brutally,but tellingly the size of boyar military contingents in this era did not decline vastly and remained a potent military force. This suggests that the numbers of killed are vastly inflated.
As for the anti-ottoman stuff,horrific actions were common along the whole ottoman imperial border. All involved acted with great cruelty-you cannot single Vlad out,or seperate the Transylvanian situation from wider eastern European politics and warfare of 'the time.
We must be carful not to be a Vlad apologist,he was a brutal and cruel man,with the blood of many innocent victims on his door but it was a brutal time-thats just reality. Vlad had four groups blackening his name,the ottomans,the boyars,the Germans and even other eastern European rulers its no wonder that this combined with Victorian fiction has him up beside Stalin and Hitler.
As I said we must not see Vlad as just-he was not. He was a rough medieval warlord in a rough medieval world,but he should be held to historical account based on what he did do-not what his enemies claimed he did. The numbers Vlad did to death,both directly and inderectly did not destroy the fabric of 15th century Transylvanian society. All the social groups in Transylvania survived his rule. The actual numbers are probably less than 40,000 for his two reigns,probably a lot less in fact. And a good portion of them died in warfare not massacres. Remember pretty much all medieval death numbers can be taken with a pinch of salt. A claim is made Vlad impaled 5,000 people is almost certainly a gross exaggeration. Same with battle casualties, these are often vastly inflated.

 

[Craig B]

You are correct about the millions. There is a gray area with the Ukraine since he might have delibertly targeted the Ukraine with famine to destroy what he thought was a threaening Ukaranian Nationalism.

Destroying nationalists is not genocide. Was he seeking out and killing children of Ukrainian ethnic origin in Moscow and Leningrad, which would have been comparable with what Hitler did to the Jews?

The famine was worse in Ukraine to some degree because Stalin's target, the peasants, were more important there than in Russia proper; and indeed he did want to terrorise the Ukrainian SSR to ensure its future submissiveness. That done, he reduced the level of repression.

Kazakhstan suffered even worse than Ukraine during the famine, because collectivisation devastated the pastoral economy in that area.