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| worst genocides in world history: Stalin's Genocides Norman M. Naimark, 2010-07-19 The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler. |
| worst genocides in world history: Blood and Soil Ben Kiernan, 2008-10-01 A book of surpassing importance that should be required reading for leaders and policymakers throughout the world For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements. Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Great Big Book of Horrible Things Matthew White, 2011-10-25 A compulsively readable and utterly original account of world history—from an atrocitologist’s point of view. Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White's epic examination of history's one hundred most violent events, or, in White's piquant phrasing, the numbers that people want to argue about. Reaching back to 480 BCE's second Persian War, White moves chronologically through history to this century's war in the Congo and devotes chapters to each event, where he surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. With the eye of a seasoned statistician, White assigns each entry a ranking based on body count, and in doing so he gives voice to the suffering of ordinary people that, inexorably, has defined every historical epoch. By turns droll, insightful, matter-of-fact, and ultimately sympathetic to those who died, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things gives readers a chance to reach their own conclusions while offering a stark reminder of the darkness of the human heart. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran Mohammad Gholi Majd, 2013-07-19 At least 8–10 million Iranians out of a population of 18–20 million died of starvation and disease during the famine of 1917–1919. The Iranian holocaust was the biggest calamity of World War I and one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, yet it remained concealed for nearly a century. The 2003 edition of this book relied primarily on US diplomatic records and memoirs of British officers who served in Iran in World War I, but in this edition these documents have been supplemented with US military records, British official sources, memoirs, diaries of notable Iranians, and a wide array of Iranian newspaper reports. In addition, the demographic data has been expanded to include newly discovered US State Department documents on Iran’s pre-1914 population. This book also includes a new chapter with a detailed military and political history of Iran in World War I. A work of enduring value, Majd provides a comprehensive account of Iran’s greatest calamity. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Top 10 Worst Genocides in History Larry Slawson, 2021-11-22 This eBook examines (and ranks) the 10 worst genocides in history. It provides a brief overview of each event, and discusses each genocide's social, economic, and political impact on the world at large. |
| worst genocides in world history: Worse Than War Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, 2009-10-06 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's books are events. They stir passionate public debate among political and civic leaders, scholars, and the general public because they compel people to rethink the most powerful conventional wisdoms and stubborn moral problems of the day. Worse Than War gets to the heart of the phenomenon, genocide, that has caused more deaths in the modern world than military conflict. In doing so, it challenges fundamental things we thought we knew about human beings, society, and politics. Drawing on extensive field work and research from around the world, Goldhagen explores the anatomy of genocide -- explaining why genocides begin, are sustained, and end; why societies support them, why they happen so frequently and how the international community should and can successfully stop them. As a great book should, Worse than War seeks to change the way we think and to offer new possibilities for a better world. It tells us how we might at last begin to eradicate this greatest scourge of humankind. |
| worst genocides in world history: Death by Government R. J. Rummel, 2011-12-31 This is R. J. Rummel's fourth book in a series devoted to genocide and government mass murder, or what he calls democide. He presents the primary results, in tables and figures, as well as a historical sketch of the major cases of democide, those in which one million or more people were killed by a regime. In Death by Government, Rummel does not aim to describe democide itself, but to determine its nature and scope in order to test the theory that democracies are inherently nonviolent. Rummel discusses genocide in China, Nazi Germany, Japan, Cambodia, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Pakistan. He also writes about areas of suspected genocide: North Korea, Mexico, and feudal Russia. His results clearly and decisively show that democracies commit less democide than other regimes. The underlying principle is that the less freedom people have, the greater the violence; the more freedom, the less the violence. Thus, as Rummel says, “The problem is power. The solution is democracy. The course of action is to foster freedom.” Death by Government is a compelling look at the horrors that occur in modern societies. It depicts how democide has been very much a part of human history. Among other examples, the book includes the massacre of Europeans during the Thirty Years' War, the relatively unknown genocide of the French Revolution, and the slaughtering of American Indians by colonists in the New World. This riveting account is an essential tool for historians, political scientists, and scholars interested in the study of genocide. |
| worst genocides in world history: Power Kills R. J. Rummel, 2002-11-01 This volume, newly published in paperback, is part of a comprehensive effort by R. J. Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder, or what he calls democide. It is the fifth in a series of volumes in which he offers a detailed analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention. In Power Kills, Rummel offers a realistic and practical solution to war, democide, and other collective violence. As he states it, The solution...is to foster democratic freedom and to democratize coercive power and force. That is, mass killing and mass murder carried out by government is a result of indiscriminate, irresponsible Power at the center. Rummel observes that well-established democracies do not make war on and rarely commit lesser violence against each other. The more democratic two nations are, the less likely is war or smaller-scale violence between them. The more democratic a nation is, the less severe its overall foreign violence, the less likely it will have domestic collective violence, and the less its democide. Rummel argues that the evidence supports overwhelmingly the most important fact of our time: democracy is a method of nonviolence. |
| worst genocides in world history: Forgotten Genocides Rene Lemarchand, René Lemarchand, 2011-06-01 Unlike the Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia, or Armenia, scant attention has been paid to the human tragedies analyzed in this book. From German Southwest Africa (now Namibia), Burundi, and eastern Congo to Tasmania, Tibet, and Kurdistan, from the mass killings of the Roms by the Nazis to the extermination of the Assyrians in Ottoman Turkey, the mind reels when confronted with the inhuman acts that have been consigned to oblivion. Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial, and Memory gathers eight essays about genocidal conflicts that are unremembered and, as a consequence, understudied. The contributors, scholars in political science, anthropology, history, and other fields, seek to restore these mass killings to the place they deserve in the public consciousness. Remembrance of long forgotten crimes is not the volume's only purpose—equally significant are the rich quarry of empirical data offered in each chapter, the theoretical insights provided, and the comparative perspectives suggested for the analysis of genocidal phenomena. While each genocide is unique in its circumstances and motives, the essays in this volume explain that deliberate concealment and manipulation of the facts by the perpetrators are more often the rule than the exception, and that memory often tends to distort the past and blame the victims while exonerating the killers. Although the cases discussed here are but a sample of a litany going back to biblical times, Forgotten Genocides offers an important examination of the diversity of contexts out of which repeatedly emerge the same hideous realities. |
| worst genocides in world history: Democide Rudolph J. Rummel, This volume is part of a comprehensive effort by Professor Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder-what is herein called Democide. It is the third in a series of volumes published by Transaction, in which Rummel offers a comprehensive analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention. Curiously, while we have a considerable body of literature on the Nazi Holocaust, we do not have a total accounting-at least not until now with the issuance of Democide. In addition to the quantitative lacunae, there remains a paucity of theoretical information distinguishing the historical descriptive and the anecdotal accounts. This study of Nazi killings in cold blood is a path-finding effort in political psychology. While Rummel does not claim to give a definitive accounting, his explanation for the numbers reached-and they are high-is compelling. In addition, we now have a correlation of information on the murder of diverse groups: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukranians, and even Germans themselves. It is now possible to fathom the Nazi genocidal poiicies-which were collective and which were selective. Rummel's volume is a clear guide to a murky past. It offers the first systematic effort to ascertain the nature and the extent of the Nazi genocide from the point of view of the perpetrator's aims rather than the victims' consequences. This is not a pretty picture, but it is not a partisan one either. The materials are presented in a clinical as well as a systemic fashion. Rummel has a deep sense of the life-saving instincts of individuals and the life-taking propensities of impersonal state machinery. It is thus, a humanistic effort, one that plumbs the effects of the Nazi war-machine on innocents in order to better understand present conditions. Professionals ranging from social scientists to demographers will find this a quintessential effort at political reconstruction. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Massacre in History Mark Levene, Penny Roberts, 1999 Six papers from a March 1995 conference in Warwick, England, and seven additional commissioned essays span from the 11th century to the early 1990s and from western Europe to China. The historian authors explore such issues as what a massacre is, when and why it happens, cultural and political frameworks, how human societies respond, social and economic repercussions, and whether they are catalysts for change. They suggest that the massacre is often central to the course of human development and societal change. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR |
| worst genocides in world history: Revolution and Genocide Robert Melson, 1996-06 In a study that compares the major attempts at genocide in world history, Robert Melson creates a sophisticated framework that links genocide to revolution and war. He focuses on the plights of Jews after the fall of Imperial Germany and of Armenians after the fall of the Ottoman as well as attempted genocides in the Soviet Union and Cambodia. He argues that genocide often is the end result of a complex process that starts when revolutionaries smash an old regime and, in its wake, try to construct a society that is pure according to ideological standards. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Problems of Genocide A. Dirk Moses, 2021-02-04 Historically delineates the problems of genocide as a concept in relation to rival categories of mass violence. |
| worst genocides in world history: Worse than Death Mamtimin Ala, 2021-02-08 Uyghurs are descendants of Turkic peoples, currently facing genocide committed against them in their homeland, East Turkistan. This land has been colonized by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, creating a police state and renamed Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR). In his book, Worse than Death: Reflections on the Uyghur Genocide, Mamtimin Ala explains how Uyghur rights have been diminishing under the authoritarian rule of the CCP, which has recently escalated into the cultural genocide of Uyghurs. Since Xi Jinping became President of the People’s Republic of China in 2013, he has clearly defined his political agenda towards Uyghurs of implementing the Four Breaks intended to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections, and break their origins.” The situation has now rapidly deteriorated at an alarming rate. Millions of Uyghur families have been separated with an estimated more than one million Uyghurs being indiscriminately placed in concentration camps, under the guise of “re-education.” Xi has justified this as a fight against the Three Evils (terrorism, separatism, and religious extremism). Uyghurs are subject to forced thought reform, torture, rape, organ harvesting, slave labor, and ultimately death in the shrouded secrecy of the camps in the very eyes of the world. For Uyghurs in exile, they face an endless uncertainty, cut off from their families back home without knowing whether they are alive or dead, and are harassed by Chinese security agents with threats against their family back home if they speak out against these atrocities. The world has to date largely remained silent over this genocide due to economic ties with China in the era of globalization. In reflecting upon this situation, the question remains: Who has the courage to speak up and act against this totalitarian regime of the Chinese Communist Party which is committing one of the worst genocides of the twenty-first century before it is too late to repeat the chilling warning of “Never Again?” |
| worst genocides in world history: Empire, Colony, Genocide A. Dirk Moses, 2008-06-01 In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.” |
| worst genocides in world history: Survivors Donald E. Miller, Lorna Touryan Miller, 1999-02-02 A superb work of scholarship and a deeply moving human document. . . . A unique work, one that will serve truth, understanding, and decency.—Roger W. Smith, College of William and Mary |
| worst genocides in world history: Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia Ben Kiernan, 2011-12-31 Two modern cases of genocide and extermination began in Southeast Asia in the same year. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and Indonesian forces occupied East Timor from 1975 to 1999. This book examines the horrific consequences of Cambodian communist revolution and Indonesian anti-communist counterinsurgency. It also chronicles the two cases of indigenous resistance to genocide and extermination, the international cover-ups that obstructed documentation of these crimes, and efforts to hold the perpetrators legally accountable. The perpetrator regimes inflicted casualties in similar proportions. Each caused the deaths of about one-fifth of the population of the nation. Cambodia's mortality was approximately 1.7 million, and approximately 170,000 perished in East Timor. In both cases, most of the deaths occurred in the five-year period from 1975 to1980. In addition, Cambodia and East Timor not only shared the experience of genocide but also of civil war, international intervention, and UN conflict resolution. U.S. policymakers supported the invading Indonesians in Timor, as well as the indigenous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Both regimes exterminated ethnic minorities, including local Chinese, as well as political dissidents. Yet the ideological fuel that ignited each conflagration was quite different. Jakarta pursued anti-communism; the Khmer Rouge were communists. In East Timor the major Indonesian goal was conquest. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge's goal was revolution. Maoist ideology influenced Pol Pot's regime, but it also influenced the East Timorese resistance to the Indonesia's occupiers. Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia is significant both for its historical documentation and for its contribution to the study of the politics and mechanisms of genocide. It is a fundamental contribution that will be read by historians, human rights activists, and genocide studies specialists. |
| worst genocides in world history: Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention , 2016 |
| worst genocides in world history: Genocide Norman M. Naimark, 2017 Genocide occurs in every time period and on every continent. Using the 1948 U.N. definition of genocide as its departure point, this book examines the main episodes in the history of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present. Norman M. Naimark lucidly shows that genocide both changes over time, depending on the character of major historical periods, and remains the same in many of its murderous dynamics. He examines cases of genocide as distinct episodes of mass violence, but also in historical connection with earlier episodes. Unlike much of the literature in genocide studies, Naimark argues that genocide can also involve the elimination of targeted social and political groups, providing an insightful analysis of communist and anti-communist genocide. He pays special attention to settler (sometimes colonial) genocide as a subject of major concern, illuminating how deeply the elimination of indigenous peoples, especially in Africa, South America, and North America, influenced recent historical developments. At the same time, the classic cases of genocide in the twentieth Century - the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Bosnia -- are discussed, together with recent episodes in Darfur and Congo. |
| worst genocides in world history: "They Can Live in the Desert but Nowhere Else" Ronald Grigor Suny, 2017-05-09 A definitive history of the 20th century's first major genocide on its 100th anniversary Starting in early 1915, the Ottoman Turks began deporting and killing hundreds of thousands of Armenians in the first major genocide of the twentieth century. By the end of the First World War, the number of Armenians in what would become Turkey had been reduced by 90 percent—more than a million people. A century later, the Armenian Genocide remains controversial but relatively unknown, overshadowed by later slaughters and the chasm separating Turkish and Armenian interpretations of events. In this definitive narrative history, Ronald Suny cuts through nationalist myths, propaganda, and denial to provide an unmatched account of when, how, and why the atrocities of 1915–16 were committed. Drawing on archival documents and eyewitness accounts, this is an unforgettable chronicle of a cataclysm that set a tragic pattern for a century of genocide and crimes against humanity. |
| worst genocides in world history: Belonging and Genocide Thomas Kühne, 2010-10-26 No one has ever posed a satisfactory explanation for the extreme inhumanity of the Holocaust. What was going on in the heads and hearts of the millions of Germans who either participated in or condoned the murder of the Jews? In this provocative book, Thomas Kuhne offers a new answer. A genocidal society was created not only by the hatred of Jews or by coercion, Kuhne contends, but also by the love of Germans for one another, their desire for a united people's community, the Volksgemeinschaft. During the Third Reich, Germans learned to connect with one another by becoming brother and sisters in mass crime. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Dark Side of Democracy Michael Mann, 2005 Publisher Description |
| worst genocides in world history: Atrocities: The 100 Deadliest Episodes in Human History Matthew White, 2011-11-07 “An amusing (really) account of the murderous ways of despots, slave traders, blundering royals, gladiators and assorted hordes.”—New York Times Evangelists of human progress meet their opposite in Matthew White’s epic examination of history’s one hundred most violent events, or, in White’s piquant phrasing, “the numbers that people want to argue about.” Reaching back to the Second Persian War in 480 BCE and moving chronologically through history, White surrounds hard facts (time and place) and succinct takeaways (who usually gets the blame?) with lively military, social, and political histories. |
| worst genocides in world history: Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution Ian Kershaw, 2008-05-28 This volume presents a comprehensive, multifaceted picture both of the destructive dynamic of the Nazi leadership and of the attitudes and behavior of ordinary Germans as the persecution of the Jews spiraled into total genocide. |
| worst genocides in world history: America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 Jay Winter, 2004-01-08 Before Rwanda and Bosnia, and before the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century happened in Turkish Armenia in 1915, when approximately one million people were killed. This volume is an account of the American response to this atrocity. The first part sets up the framework for understanding the genocide: Sir Martin Gilbert, Vahakn Dadrian and Jay Winter provide an analytical setting for nine scholarly essays examining how Americans learned of this catastrophe and how they tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, though, were not enough to stop the killings. A terrible precedent was born in 1915, one which has come to haunt the United States and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century and beyond. To read the essays in this volume is chastening: the dilemmas Americans faced when confronting evil on an unprecedented scale are not very different from the dilemmas we face today. |
| worst genocides in world history: Guinness World Records 2022 , 2022 |
| worst genocides in world history: The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey Guenter Lewy, 2005-11-30 Avoiding the sterile was-it-genocide-or-not debate, this book will open a new chapter in this contentious controversy and may help achieve a long-overdue reconciliation of Armenians and Turks. |
| worst genocides in world history: In the Midst of Civilized Europe Jeffrey Veidlinger, 2021-10-26 FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD * SHORTLISTED FOR THE LIONEL GELBER PRIZE “The mass killings of Jews from 1918 to 1921 are a bridge between local pogroms and the extermination of the Holocaust. No history of that Jewish catastrophe comes close to the virtuosity of research, clarity of prose, and power of analysis of this extraordinary book. As the horror of events yields to empathetic understanding, the reader is grateful to Veidlinger for reminding us what history can do.” —Timothy Snyder, author of Bloodlands Between 1918 and 1921, over a hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Ukraine by peasants, townsmen, and soldiers who blamed the Jews for the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. In hundreds of separate incidents, ordinary people robbed their Jewish neighbors with impunity, burned down their houses, ripped apart their Torah scrolls, sexually assaulted them, and killed them. Largely forgotten today, these pogroms—ethnic riots—dominated headlines and international affairs in their time. Aid workers warned that six million Jews were in danger of complete extermination. Twenty years later, these dire predictions would come true. Drawing upon long-neglected archival materials, including thousands of newly discovered witness testimonies, trial records, and official orders, acclaimed historian Jeffrey Veidlinger shows for the first time how this wave of genocidal violence created the conditions for the Holocaust. Through stories of survivors, perpetrators, aid workers, and governmental officials, he explains how so many different groups of people came to the same conclusion: that killing Jews was an acceptable response to their various problems. In riveting prose, In the Midst of Civilized Europe repositions the pogroms as a defining moment of the twentieth century. |
| worst genocides in world history: Ambassador Morgenthau's Story Henry Morgenthau, 1919 |
| worst genocides in world history: The Killing Season Geoffrey B. Robinson, 2019-10 The definitive account of one of the twentieth century’s most brutal, yet least examined, episodes of genocide and detention The Killing Season explores one of the largest and swiftest, yet least examined, instances of mass killing and incarceration in the twentieth century—the shocking antileftist purge that gripped Indonesia in 1965–66, leaving some five hundred thousand people dead and more than a million others in detention. An expert in modern Indonesian history, genocide, and human rights, Geoffrey Robinson sets out to account for this violence and to end the troubling silence surrounding it. In doing so, he sheds new light on broad, enduring historical questions. How do we account for instances of systematic mass killing and detention? Why are some of these crimes remembered and punished, while others are forgotten? Based on a rich body of primary and secondary sources, The Killing Season is the definitive account of a pivotal period in Indonesian history. |
| worst genocides in world history: Tested to the Limit Consolee Nishimwe, 2012-06-27 “If there is one book you should read on the Rwandan Genocide, this is it. Tested to the Limit—A Genocide Survivor’s Story of Pain, Resilience, and Hope is a riveting and courageous account from the perspective of a fourteen year- old girl. It’s a powerful story you will never forget.” —Francine LeFrak, founder of Same Sky and award-winning producer “That someone who survived such a horrific, life-altering experience as the Rwandan genocide could find the courage to share her story truly amazes me. But even more incredible is that Consolee Nishimwe refused to let the inhumane acts she suffered strip away her humanity, zest for life and positive outlook for a better future. After reading Tested to the Limit, I am in awe of the unyielding strength and resilience of the human spirit to overcome against all odds.” —Kate Ferguson, senior editor, POZ magazine “Consolee Nishimwe’s story of resilience, perseverance, and grace after surviving genocide, rape, and torture is a testament to the transformative power of unyielding faith and a commitment to love. Her inspiring narrative about compassionate courage and honest revelations about her spiritual path in the face of unthinkable adversity remind us that hope is eternal, and miracles happen every day.” —Jamia Wilson, vice president of programs, Women’s Media Center, New York |
| worst genocides in world history: An American Genocide Benjamin Madley, 2016-05-24 Between 1846 and 1873, California’s Indian population plunged from perhaps 150,000 to 30,000. Benjamin Madley is the first historian to uncover the full extent of the slaughter, the involvement of state and federal officials, the taxpayer dollars that supported the violence, indigenous resistance, who did the killing, and why the killings ended. This deeply researched book is a comprehensive and chilling history of an American genocide. Madley describes pre-contact California and precursors to the genocide before explaining how the Gold Rush stirred vigilante violence against California Indians. He narrates the rise of a state-sanctioned killing machine and the broad societal, judicial, and political support for genocide. Many participated: vigilantes, volunteer state militiamen, U.S. Army soldiers, U.S. congressmen, California governors, and others. The state and federal governments spent at least $1,700,000 on campaigns against California Indians. Besides evaluating government officials’ culpability, Madley considers why the slaughter constituted genocide and how other possible genocides within and beyond the Americas might be investigated using the methods presented in this groundbreaking book. |
| worst genocides in world history: Before the Silence Sofia Kontogeorge Kostos, 2010 Transcribed newspaper accounts of the treatment of Christians in Asia Minor (today's Turkey) primarily from 1914 to 1923. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Circassian Genocide Walter Richmond, 2013-04-09 Circassia was a small independent nation on the northeastern shore of the Black Sea. For no reason other than ethnic hatred, over the course of hundreds of raids the Russians drove the Circassians from their homeland and deported them to the Ottoman Empire. At least 600,000 people lost their lives to massacre, starvation, and the elements while hundreds of thousands more were forced to leave their homeland. By 1864, three-fourths of the population was annihilated, and the Circassians had become one of the first stateless peoples in modern history. Using rare archival materials, Walter Richmond chronicles the history of the war, describes in detail the final genocidal campaign, and follows the Circassians in diaspora through five generations as they struggle to survive and return home. He places the periods of acute genocide, 1821–1822 and 1863–1864, in the larger context of centuries of tension between the two nations and updates the story to the present day as the Circassian community works to gain international recognition of the genocide as the region prepares for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the site of the Russians’ final victory. |
| worst genocides in world history: The destruction of the Indians of the Americas Bartolomé de Las Casas, 2017-07-12 Definitely, this is a disturbing book. Told from the account of a Spanish colonizer who went to Hispaniola to make his fortune, Bartolomé de las Casas soon took up the cause (even petitioning the King of Spain at the time) of not only of the Native peoples on the island of Hispaniola, but of all of the Native peoples and their lands who were conquered and ruled by the Spanish crown. The use of human abattoirs, mastiffs, killing for the sake of killing, all are listed in this book and was used as plea to the Spanish royal court to at least send out a decree to convert the native peoples to christianity (much to no avail). In hindsight, a sad and disturbing account of man's inhumanity to man fueled by his lust for riches. This ebook teach us a great lesson about human being behavior in a no rules environment and should be read by everyone. |
| worst genocides in world history: Atrocitology Matthew White, 2011-10-31 Which wars killed the most people? Was the twentieth century the most violent in history? Are religions, tyrants or ideologies responsible for the greatest bloodshed? In this remarkable and original book, 'atrocitologist' Matthew White assesses man's inhumanity to man over several thousand years. From the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage to the cataclysmic events of World War II, Atrocitology spans centuries and civilisations as it measures the hundred most violent episodes in history. Relying on statistical analysis rather than grand theories, White offers three big lessons: chaos is more deadly than tyranny, the world is much more disorganised than we realise, and more civilians than soldiers are killed in wars—in fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during wartime. Our understanding of history's worst atrocities is patchy and skewed. This book sets the record straight, charting those events with the largest man-made death tolls without fear or favour. |
| worst genocides in world history: "Leave None to Tell the Story" Alison Liebhafsky Des Forges, Human Rights Watch (Organization), 1999 *** Law and Order |
| worst genocides in world history: Humanity at Its Worst Mario Silva, 2020-02-21 Humanity at its Worst is not a handbook for prevention but rather a research driven summary of one of the most disturbing features of the 20th and 21st centuries. Its intent is to provide a basis for understanding of these incomprehensible crimes against humanity. The catalogue is large, disturbing, and troublesome. It is dedicated entirely to assisting readers understand the circumstances of people across the world who must contend with these extreme inhuman actions. Each chapter examines numerous factors including the conditions of the victims, the number of such incidents, the loss of lives, the conditions of women, and children past records of major incidents of this kind. The accounts of genocides examine the differing interpretations of genocide from legal viewpoints, as well as analyzing the influence of race, ethnicity, nationalism, and gender. |
| worst genocides in world history: The Tamil Genocide by Sri Lanka Francis Boyle, 2010-04-20 Sri Lanka’s government declared victory in May, 2009, in one of the world’s most intractable wars after a series of battles in which it killed the leader of the Tamil Tigers, who had been fighting to create a separate homeland for the country’s ethnic Tamil minority. The United Nations said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people in Sri Lanka since full-scale civil war broke out in 1983. A US State Department report offered a grisly catalogue of alleged abuses, including the killing of captives or combatants seeking surrender, the abduction and in some cases murder of Tamil civilians, and dismal humanitarian conditions in camps for displaced persons. Human Rights Watch said the U.S. report should dispel any doubts that serious abuses were committed during the final months of the 26-year civil war. The report gains added significance since, during these five months, the Sri Lankan Government denied independent observers, including the media and human rights organizations, access to the war zone, and conducted a “war without witnesses.” This book traces the ongoing engagement of international lawyer Francis A. Boyle during the last years of the conflict. Boyle was among the very few addressing the international legal implications of the Sri Lankan Government’s grave and systematic violations of Tamil human rights while the conflict was taking place. This is the first book to develop an authoritative case for genocide against the Government of Sri Lanka under international law. |
| worst genocides in world history: Denying the Holocaust Deborah E. Lipstadt, 2012-12-18 The denial of the Holocaust has no more credibility than the assertion that the earth is flat. Yet there are those who insist that the death of six million Jews in Nazi concentration camps is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by a powerful Zionist conspiracy. Sixty years ago, such notions were the province of pseudohistorians who argued that Hitler never meant to kill the Jews, and that only a few hundred thousand died in the camps from disease; they also argued that the Allied bombings of Dresden and other cities were worse than any Nazi offense, and that the Germans were the “true victims” of World War II. For years, those who made such claims were dismissed as harmless cranks operating on the lunatic fringe. But as time goes on, they have begun to gain a hearing in respectable arenas, and now, in the first full-scale history of Holocaust denial, Deborah Lipstadt shows how—despite tens of thousands of living witnesses and vast amounts of documentary evidence—this irrational idea not only has continued to gain adherents but has become an international movement, with organized chapters, “independent” research centers, and official publications that promote a “revisionist” view of recent history. Lipstadt shows how Holocaust denial thrives in the current atmosphere of value-relativism, and argues that this chilling attack on the factual record not only threatens Jews but undermines the very tenets of objective scholarship that support our faith in historical knowledge. Thus the movement has an unsuspected power to dramatically alter the way that truth and meaning are transmitted from one generation to another. |
WORST Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of WORST is most corrupt, bad, evil, or ill. How to use worst in a sentence.
"Worse" vs. "Worst" – What's The Difference? | Thesaurus.c…
Jun 9, 2022 · Worse is what’s called the comparative form, basically meaning “more bad.” Worst is the superlative …
WORST | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
WORST definition: 1. superlative of bad: of the lowest quality, or the most unpleasant, difficult, or severe: 2. …
“Worse” vs. “Worst”: What’s the Difference? | Grammarly
Aug 22, 2023 · Worst is used to compare a group of things (three or more) and translates to the lowest quality, the …
WORST definition in American English - Collins Online Dictio…
The worst is the most unpleasant or unfavourable thing that could happen or does happen.
WORST Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
The meaning of WORST is most corrupt, bad, evil, or ill. How to use worst in a sentence.
"Worse" vs. "Worst" – What's The Difference? | Thesaurus.com
Jun 9, 2022 · Worse is what’s called the comparative form, basically meaning “more bad.” Worst is the superlative form, basically meaning “most bad.” Worse is used when making a …
WORST | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
WORST definition: 1. superlative of bad: of the lowest quality, or the most unpleasant, difficult, or severe: 2. the…. Learn more.
“Worse” vs. “Worst”: What’s the Difference? | Grammarly
Aug 22, 2023 · Worst is used to compare a group of things (three or more) and translates to the lowest quality, the least desirable condition, or the most negative among them. As a …
WORST definition in American English - Collins Online Dictionary
The worst is the most unpleasant or unfavourable thing that could happen or does happen.
worst - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Feb 15, 2025 · Something or someone that is the worst. worst (third-person singular simple present worsts, present participle worsting, simple past and past participle worsted) (archaic, …
What does Worst mean? - Definitions.net
What does Worst mean? This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word Worst. To make worse. To grow worse; to …
worst adjective - Definition, pictures, pronunciation and usage …
Definition of worst adjective in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. Meaning, pronunciation, picture, example sentences, grammar, usage notes, synonyms and more.
Worst - definition of worst by The Free Dictionary
1. bad or ill in the highest, greatest, or most extreme degree: the worst person. 2. most faulty or unsatisfactory: the worst paper submitted. 3. most unfavorable or injurious: the worst rating. 4. …
WORST Definition & Meaning | Dictionary.com
Worst describes something as being bad in the highest degree possible. Worst is also used to mean a thing that is the baddest possible and to mean something done in the baddest manner …
