What was the worst genocide?

[Strawberry]

The Great Famine in Ireland deserves a mention too. I wouldn't say its the worst, (that would be the Holocaust), but after Charles Trevelyan took over in 1847 the intent necessary to class it as genocide was present, so it belongs somewhere on the list.

 

[HansMustermann]

@skeptichaggis
Ugh... no offense, but please excuse me if I'm not impressed by a historical analysis that gets wrong even where he ruled.

So, sure, you don't see much effect in Transylvania, BECAUSE HE NEVER RULED THERE. He was a prisoner of Matthias Corvinus for a while there, but that was about it.

 

[Cainkane1]

I think the worst deliberate genocide was against the Jews in WW@. The worst inadvertant genocide was against the native americans. Most of them died of european diseases.

 

[Craig B]

I think the worst deliberate genocide was against the Jews in WW@. The worst inadvertant genocide was against the native americans. Most of them died of european diseases.

Despite that circumstance much of the killing was intentional genocide.

@Strawberry, I don't agree that the Irish Famine was genocide. It's a bit like the Ukrainian example, which I don't think was genocide either. I stress that these were crimes and horrors. But not genocide as such.

 

[Strawberry]

Despite that circumstance much of the killing was intentional genocide.

@Strawberry, I don't agree that the Irish Famine was genocide. It's a bit like the Ukrainian example, which I don't think was genocide either. I stress that these were crimes and horrors. But not genocide as such.

The Irish Famine was genocide after Trevelyan took over in 1847 because the intent to kill and displace as many Irish Catholics as possible was definitely present and at times openly declared. Up until that point it was merely a badly managed natural disaster, but Charles Trevelyan was guilty of genocide in Ireland.

 

[dudalb]

@skeptichaggis
Ugh... no offense, but please excuse me if I'm not impressed by a historical analysis that gets wrong even where he ruled.

So, sure, you don't see much effect in Transylvania, BECAUSE HE NEVER RULED THERE. He was a prisoner of Matthias Corvinus for a while there, but that was about it.

Amusing that Vlad is identified so strongly with Translyvania, when his involvment there was never very great. Wallachia was his stomping ground.

And there is no evidence Vlad was indulging in Genocide. Cruel though he was, Vlad was just following S.O.P in Medieval Europe for dealing with a revolt. Only diffrence between him and How Kings in the Western Europe treated a revolt was his methods of Execution were more gruesome.

 

[dudalb]

The Irish Famine was genocide after Trevelyan took over in 1847 because the intent to kill and displace as many Irish Catholics as possible was definitely present and at times openly declared. Up until that point it was merely a badly managed natural disaster, but Charles Trevelyan was guilty of genocide in Ireland.

I am no fan of England's record in Ireland but I find the accusations of deliberate Genocide to be unproven.
There is enough to hang England on when it comes to Ireland without exaggration or questionable accusation of deliberate Genocide.
The problem is that the term Genocide is hurled around today pretty loosely.

 

[Strawberry]

I am no fan of England's record in Ireland but I find the accusations of deliberate Genocide to be unproven.
There is enough to hang England on when it comes to Ireland without exaggration or questionable accusation of deliberate Genocide.
The problem is that the term Genocide is hurled around today pretty loosely.

I'm not talking about England's record in Ireland, I'm specifically talking about the policies pursued by Charles Trevelyan and the government who appointed him. Nor do I accuse them loosely or lightly, I know full well that genocide has a very specific definition which includes deliberate intent to kill or displace a certain group.

The policies pursued in Ireland in 1847 fit into that definition.

 

[Craig B]

I'm not talking about England's record in Ireland, I'm specifically talking about the policies pursued by Charles Trevelyan and the government who appointed him. Nor do I accuse them loosely or lightly, I know full well that genocide has a very specific definition which includes deliberate intent to kill or displace a certain group.

The policies pursued in Ireland in 1847 fit into that definition.

Can you be specific?

 

[mikado]

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.

in the last few days I've been in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. I have found it a very difficult thing to deal with, knowing that I would have been killed there seventy years or so ago. very confronting.....

 

[Kochanski]

I don't know if I would class it the worst massacre but it is probably the least known, the Katyn Forest Massacre. For years Poles could not even speak about it and it wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union that the truth about it began to come out.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...ons/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html

http://katyncrime.pl/The,Katyn,Massacre,517.html

 

[Dcdrac]

every single one

 

[Dcdrac]

I am no fan of England's record in Ireland but I find the accusations of deliberate Genocide to be unproven.
There is enough to hang England on when it comes to Ireland without exaggration or questionable accusation of deliberate Genocide.
The problem is that the term Genocide is hurled around today pretty loosely.

I agree with you on this one, at the same time in Northern England people were starving to death as well, due to the potatoe blight that hit then.

It was more a callous adherence to lazziez policies than any deliberate attempt to eradicate a whole people.

 

[Galaxie]

What's that go to do with my post?

Nevermind, Susheel clarified it. I thought you were trying to use the story of Job as a counter to the examples given.

 

[theprestige]

every single one

Hi there.

 

[HansMustermann]

Amusing that Vlad is identified so strongly with Translyvania, when his involvment there was never very great. Wallachia was his stomping ground.

And there is no evidence Vlad was indulging in Genocide. Cruel though he was, Vlad was just following S.O.P in Medieval Europe for dealing with a revolt. Only diffrence between him and How Kings in the Western Europe treated a revolt was his methods of Execution were more gruesome.

Err, no. He wasn't just dealing with revolts, and the tales of his atrocities aren't only perpetrated by his enemies. Here's what he wrote himself to Matthias Corvinus about his surprise attack on Bulgaria:

"I have killed peasants men and women, old and young, who lived at Oblucitza and Novoselo, where the Danube flows into the sea, up to Rahova, which is located near Chilia, from the lower Danube up to such places as Samovit and Ghighen. We killed 23,884 Turks without counting those whom we burned in homes or the Turks whose heads were cut by our soldiers...Thus, your highness, you must know that I have broken the peace with him."​

Him being the Sultan Mehmet II.

He brags himself about killing nearly 24,000 peasants, including women, children and elderly. That is, explicitly not including those burned in their homes or killed on the spot by his soldiers, so that would be nearly 24,000 he ordered impaled, for being Turkish.

If that's not a genocide attempt, I don't know what is.

Mind you, not a very effective one, nor the biggest genocide. But he was doing what he could in a hurry, before the Turks could react and send their bigger army to stop him.

 

[Craig B]

I don't know if I would class it the worst massacre but it is probably the least known, the Katyn Forest Massacre. For years Poles could not even speak about it and it wasn't until the fall of the Soviet Union that the truth about it began to come out.

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-...ons/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art6.html

http://katyncrime.pl/The,Katyn,Massacre,517.html

it was a hideous crime and massacre, but again it was directed at potential political opponents and members of the elite social class of a hostile country. In subsequent years the USSR dominated Poland, and was guilty of many crimes there, but made no consistent attempt to eliminate the Polish nationality as such.

 

[skeptichaggis]

@skeptichaggis
Ugh... no offense, but please excuse me if I'm not impressed by a historical analysis that gets wrong even where he ruled.

So, sure, you don't see much effect in Transylvania, BECAUSE HE NEVER RULED THERE. He was a prisoner of Matthias Corvinus for a while there, but that was about it.

I meant to write Wallachia, EVERYTHING else I wrote still stands. If you would like to refute anything else I wrote please do. Vlad was born in Transylvania and commanded Transylvanian armies,its a easy mistake to make when your tired and about to go to bed.

If you have any reputable research refuting anything else I wrote about vlads reigns I would like to hear them.

I already pointed out you have to take medieval death claims with a pinch of salt. Often the real numbers are less than 10% of the claim made. As I said economic records from the Hanseatic leuge don't show a large drop in the profits of there merchants based under Vlad. Most(not all)German settler communities also survived. You cannot call Vlad genocidal. The folk that suffered worse proportionally were the boyar class yet they could still perform military service when demanded.
We know Vlad personally claimed one army of around 8,000 was twenty plus thousand strong. All late medieval rulers inflated-often vastly-army,death numbers etc. The famous woodcut of Vlad dining among impaled body parts is from Germany. The turk army that "fled"at the sight of thousands of impaled peasants actually retreated for tactical and logistic reasons.
Vlads army grew larger,relied less on mercenaries and got more effective and professional during vlads first rulership. Vlad definitely did persecute the germans and others. He did carry out massacres but not on the scale many imagine. It was not a "worst"genocide-no where near in fact.

 

[HansMustermann]

Skipping over the rest, the problem with assuming all these to be distortions by his enemies is that most of those folks were actually not his enemies. The Slavic chronicle for example is very much in his favour, and pretty much sees him like you: a great warlord, and justified in his cruelty. Yet about half the stories about him in that source corroborate the tales of cruelty in the German sources.

And even to the Saxons (and most of the rest of Christian Europe, the Pope included) his homicidal raiding the Turks actually made him HUGELY popular. He was pretty much a hero of Christianity at the time, which might also be one reason why Matthias Corvinus actually treated him very well after he supposedly threw him in jail (it was actually more like a house arrest in the Corvinus Castle), but then again treating captured kings well was standard in the middle ages. At any rate, pretty much nobody wanted to believe the evidence that Matthias presented against Vlad, because Vlad was such a hero of Christianity, slayer of many Muslims, and all that.

Since you say you knew all along that he ruled in Wallachia, you probably also know that the Saxons were in Transylvania, where they had been colonized by the King Of Hungary, not in Wallachia, which was outside that jurisdiction. They didn't move outside much. In the 17'th century, for example, long after Dracula's time, their distribution looked like this: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Saxons_Transylvania.svg

Notice how it stops at the Carpathians.

Although there was some conflict between Vlad and the merchants of Transylvania, some of which may have been Saxons (especially around Sibiu), and a couple of raids of his against them (oddly enough, despite being allied to Matthias, their liege), mostly they had no problem with each other and they had finally signed a peace with each other in 1460.

Not saying there weren't people there who hated him, but it's hard to see more of a reason to defame him than for any other ruler in Europe.

 

[Craig B]

The Irish Famine was genocide after Trevelyan took over in 1847 because the intent to kill and displace as many Irish Catholics as possible was definitely present and at times openly declared. Up until that point it was merely a badly managed natural disaster, but Charles Trevelyan was guilty of genocide in Ireland.

It was an effect of the outrageous land tenure system. Irish smallholders has no security of tenure, and to pay rent they had to grow the strain of potato with the highest yield. Otherwise they would be replaced with another tenant willing to do so, and who would therefore be able to pay higher rent.

The effect was, that they were all growing the same potato. It was a genetic clone, right across the country. As soon as a disease capable of attacking it appeared, every potato in Ireland was blighted.