19 Nov 2010

Genocide and mass murder in the twentieth century

Genocides of the twentieth century as recorded by Peace Pledge Union, the oldest secular pacifist organisation in Britain:
o       1904 Namibia
o       1915 Armenia
o       1932 Ukraine
o       1939-1945 Nazi Holocaust 
o       1975 Cambodia
o       1982 Guatemala
o       1994 Rwanda
o       1995 Bosnia
Genocide is 'the deliberate extermination of a racial, religious or ethnic group' (Chambers Dictionary) or acts intended 'to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group' (Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide of December 1948).

Armenian genocide
The BBC reports that there is general agreement that hundreds of thousands of Armenians died when the Ottoman Turks deported them en masse from eastern Anatolia to the Syrian desert and elsewhere in 1915-16. They were killed or died from starvation or disease. The total number of Armenian dead is disputed. Armenians say 1.5 million died. The Republic of Turkey says 300,000. Significance today? It is hardly remembered in history lessons in the UK, which focus instead on the horrors of Flanders, the Somme, Verdun and Ypres. “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Adolf Hitler asked his generals in August 1939 in preparation for his invasion of Poland


Stalin’s gulag, purges and terror
Eric Hobsbawm writes that ‘it will probably never be possible to calculate the human cost’ of Stalin’s gulag, purges and terror from the 1930s to the early 1950s because of the lack of adequate records. ‘In the circumstances it does not much matter whether we opt for a ‘conservative’ estimate nearer to ten than to twenty millions or a larger figure: none can be anything but shameful and beyond palliation, let alone justification.’ (Age of Extremes, p393) On the purges of the 1930s, he writes that ‘The seventeenth Congress of the CPSU revealed a substantial opposition to [Stalin]. Whether it actually constituted a threat to his power we shall never know, for between 1934 and 1939 four or five million party members and officials were arrested on political grounds, four or five hundred thousand of them were executed without trial and the next (eighteenth) Party Congress, which met in the spring of 1939, contained a bare thirty-seven survivors of the 1827 delegates who had been present at the seventeenth in 1934 (Kerblay, 1983, p245).’ (Age of Extremes, p391)

The Nazi Holocaust 
Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis caused the deaths of more than one third of the total Jewish population in the world: over five million Jews perished in the concentration camps. (Alan Palmer, Penguin Dictionary of Twentieth-Century History, 1983)

How many millions killed in Mao's China?
Jung Chang, author of ‘Wild Swans’, describes Chairman Mao’s 27-year rule as one of the most merciless in a cruel century: ‘seventy million killed at the absolute minimum’ (The Guardian, Thursday 26 May 2005).  On the other hand, J M Roberts, dealing with the Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, and the cultural revolution of 1966-9, does not seem able to quantify the death toll of the period against the background of China’s massive population growth:  “Though more slowly than in the early nineteenth century, the Chinese population has continued to rise, and to rise to colossal totals. 545 million has been thought a reasonable estimate for 1950, 685 million ten years later, and 750 million in the middle of the 1960s.” (Pelican History of the World, 1980, p959)
Hobsbawm notes that: “According to official Chinese statistics, the country’s population in 1959 was 673 millions. At the natural growth rate of the preceding seven years, which was at least 20 per thousand per year, one would have expected the Chinese population in 1961 to have been 699 millions. In fact, it was 658 millions or forty million less than might have been expected.” (Age of Extremes, p466)

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