What was the worst genocide?

Damien Evans said:
50% of Armenians were killed by the Ottoman Empire in the Armenian Genocide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide

Turkey still refuses to admit that there ever was a genocide.
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The Turks don't outright deny that a large number of Armenians died. They say they were casualties in a rebellion. Then they gloss over the way those casualties happened. National vanity is a strange thing.
 
Beothuk Indians, in what is now the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador were eliminated to the last person.

There is of course some discussion about weather it was an organized genocide depending who you ask, it's a tragedy regardless ... and not many people know about it ... not even most Canadians.
 
Spindrift said:
The Turks don't outright deny that a large number of Armenians died. They say they were casualties in a rebellion. Then they gloss over the way those casualties happened. National vanity is a strange thing.
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And when you call it genocide, you risk going to jail.
 
Spindrift said:
Well America the Beautiful didn't manage it all on its own. The Spanish, English, French, and Dutch did most of the work for 300 years. America then just had to finish up the leftovers.
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Irony is the greatest weapon might have been unintenional...disease. The massive drop in populatation in the Native American Population in North America in the 1600's and 1700's was almost certainly due to the spread of diseses accidently introduced for which their bodies had no protection. Tribes who had never really seen a white man were decimated.
And this was before the much exaggerated "SMallpox infected with Blankets" iindicent in the 1760's. In fact, although the idea was suggested by a British official, there is no evidence it was actually put into practice. And it was a very ineffictive way of spreading diseases.

This is not to excuse the way the Europeans treated the Native Americans..it is one of the great crimes of history.
 
Aepervius said:
IIRC My understanding is that it was illness shortly after or before, pest among other , and that is why settlers had an easy go : nobody was bloody there to stop them. Estimate I read was 70 to 100 million people at some point and then massive die off due to an epidemic a hundred or two hundred year before the settling. So by the time settlers came, there was no resistance and not many native left.

Is my memory misleading me ?
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That estimate is for the whole of the Americas? IIRC, the most credible estimates for the USA and Canada are below 10 million indigenous people before the arrival of westerners.

But yes, diseases brought over from the Old World had a heavier toll than swords and muskets.
 
Spindrift said:
Well America the Beautiful didn't manage it all on its own. The Spanish, English, French, and Dutch did most of the work for 300 years. America then just had to finish up the leftovers.
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That's the implication if not direct statement in my post - by including the entire western hemisphere and the years post 1491. Sorry if I wasn't clear on that... the USA has been the USA for less time than it wasn't. ;)
 
Susheel said:
^^ The Winnah.

I used to tell people that in the Bible, God is resposible for all the bloodshed. Satan seems to appear only once, tempting Jesus in the wilderness and if one wishes to stretch the narrative, earlier, when offering Eve a fruit. In the latter case, maybe he felt she seemed undernourished and needed some vitamins.
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Damien Evans said:
You're forgetting the book of Job.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Job
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Um, didn't God specifically give Satan permission to torture Job beforehand? :confused:
 
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applecorped said:
Is this genocide restricted to humans only? Obviously not correct for the definition of genocide, but what the hell. I'm going with the Permian–Triassic extinction event.


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If you want to include genocide of animals by humans then things humans have done for the last 100,000 years has wiped out many species. If all trace of humans are wiped out future people will know about us because so many species disappeared suddenly.
 
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.
 
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Are we forgetting the Mongols? Particularly their invasion of Persia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_under_the_Mongol_Empire
The total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.
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And China:
China reportedly suffered a drastic decline in population during the 13th and 14th centuries. Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million people.
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There is debate about how much of that is directly attributable to the Mongols, how much is simply errors in the census rather than actual population decline, how much is attributable to the black plague, etc.

Speaking of which, the Mongols may be responsible (directly* or indirectly) for the black death in Europe.

There's a valid objection to my post: invasion is different from genocide, particularly in that the invader is better off with more surviving subjects to tax, he's killing people only in order to subdue them, not with the intent to wipe out entire ethnicities. But it's worth pointing out that the Mongols did often intentionally exterminate entire populations (in order to promote an atmosphere of terror that would lead to quick surrender and fewer revolts) after they refused a chance to surrender. As I understand that's pretty much why the conquest of Persia was so bad, but it certainly wasn't limited to there.

Finally, this is a statistic that I'd heard before, but you'll have to take is as somewhat unsourced as I'm not entirely sure on the methods of counting, but it's worth pointing out:
http://www.scifacts.net/745/it_is_e...f_total_world_population_during_his_conquests
Mongol campaigns may have resulted in the deaths of 40 million people which at the time accounted for approximately 11.1% of total world population.
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*Some suggest that it was Mongols catapulting plague victim's bodies over the walls in the Seige of Caffa that allowed the plague to spread to Europe.
 
Lothian said:
Would a nomination for the bestest ever genocide be off topic? I don't want to get into trouble.
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When the Juggalos fought the Bronies in the War of the Clowns and Ponies, it was hard to decide which side to cheer on. The mutual annihilation of both races was perhaps a boon to the rest of the world.
 
MG1962 said:
The genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal is I believe the only such event recorded in history they wiped an entire gene pool and culture from the face of the Earth :(
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Actually that is not true. To the north of Tasmania island proper, on Flindlers and Cape Barron island a small group of people the descendants of Native Tasmanian women and Sealers managed to survive. Mainly because unlike the Natives on the main island they avoided falling into the hands of Missionaries whose ministrations helped seal their destruction. The descendants of these mixed relationships now number in the thousands.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
 
Pacal said:
Actually that is not true. To the north of Tasmania island proper, on Flindlers and Cape Barron island a small group of people the descendants of Native Tasmanian women and Sealers managed to survive. Mainly because unlike the Natives on the main island they avoided falling into the hands of Missionaries whose ministrations helped seal their destruction. The descendants of these mixed relationships now number in the thousands.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
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Yes,its a irony of history that this growing population descended from sealers and kidnapped and abused women has survived. Especially since the unkidnapped population went extinct.
 
Pacal said:
Actually that is not true. To the north of Tasmania island proper, on Flindlers and Cape Barron island a small group of people the descendants of Native Tasmanian women and Sealers managed to survive. Mainly because unlike the Natives on the main island they avoided falling into the hands of Missionaries whose ministrations helped seal their destruction. The descendants of these mixed relationships now number in the thousands.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_Tasmanians
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truganini
 
Travis said:
Obviously we could just count bodies and declare the highest number the worst but I think we should also consider other factors.

Speed and ferocity
Composition of perpetrators
Percentage of population killed
Torture and murder tactics
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I think that you can't really add these quantities. All holocausts have a little of each. However, there is no way to compare them. You can find a worse for each category.

I would say that the burning of European witches in medieval times easily makes the top in categories 2 and 4.

It takes category 2 for three reasons. First, there are no real witches as defined by the perpetrators! The existence of people with magical powers don't exist. There are very few people that literally worship Satan. Most of the burned women were convicted on the basis of forced confession or dreams. There was no 'real' criteria for evidence. Second, most of the people were female in the same nation as the perpetrators. Third, all of the perpetrators were men.

It takes category 4 because the emphasis was on torture. In most holocausts, torture is used as a means to an end. Curiously, the immediate goal of the perpetrators seems to have been the production of pain.


It comes near the bottom in terms of 1 and 3. Maybe two hundred thousand people were killed over a period up to four hundred years.
 
Actually, I'd say there are NO people who literally worship the Christian Satan. There are in modern days atheists who basically troll with that idea, but that's about it. The proposition that some people KNOW that Christianity is true, Satan will just get them burned for eternity, but, meh, just want to spite God and burn for ever, was and is just an intellectual cop-out. It really makes no sense whatsoever.

It's the rationalization the intellectually challenged reach for, when they have no good arguments to convert you to their flavour of fanboyism. Of course they know they're right, so why don't you see things their way? Right, you must be a shill for the other camp. It's really no different from Mac/Linux/Windows fanboys postulating you're some Microsoft/Apple/IBM/whatever shill if you dare as much have an open mind about the opposite camp. They "know" they're right, and if you don't see things the same way, you're just lying for some ulterior motive. Christians did the same.

And we can know they were wrong about other groups, about which the same satan worship or intention to spite god or harm the true faith or whatever, was postulated. E.g., it was popular to say the same "they're just trying to spite God" about Jews. We're pretty sure that those guys didn't. E.g., about pagans. No, they were just worshipping their own gods, for purposes like fertility or protection, not to supposedly spite the one they knew to be the one true god. E.g., about the templars. Yeah, we're pretty sure that not only those guys didn't worship a demon called Baphomet, but nobody had even heard of Baphomet before. Etc.

And that the rituals postulated, again, make no sense for any of those. E.g., pagan cults didn't involve reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards, or anything.

So, you know, even by simple induction, why would I believe that it would be more based on reality for any other group?
 
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