Top Ten Outrages of the Past Half Millenium

[JohnT]

But what about the special form of communism practiced by Mao, Pol Pot, etc? Or aren't those communism either?

Talk about revisionism! This "the USSR wasn't real Communism" BS has got to stop, people! American Communists of the 1920's and 1930's didn't have any problem holding the USSR up as the shining Communist light at the end of the Capitalist tunnel, y'all should do the same. Be proud of what you've achieved - millions of dead kulaks, starvation, gulags, oppression and terror, and a truly ****ty standard of living.

[Verto]

Originally posted by JohnT
But what about the special form of communism practiced by Mao, Pol Pot, etc? Or aren't those communism either?

Talk about revisionism! This "the USSR wasn't real Communism" BS has got to stop, people! American Communists of the 1920's and 1930's didn't have any problem holding the USSR up as the shining Communist light at the end of the Capitalist tunnel, y'all should do the same. Be proud of what you've achieved - millions of dead kulaks, starvation, gulags, oppression and terror, and a truly ****ty standard of living.

[JohnT]

I truly consider it to be as monstrous a case of revisionism as holocaust denial.

[DinoDoc]

It's Odin. You might as well expect Sava to have a coherent thought.

[Ancyrean]

1. Holocaust. A concerted and meticulously planned crime, done with such concern with efficiency that it involved train schedules, rate of consumption of human flesh by flames, rate of cleaning chimneys require due to choking by human fat, psychological tricks to keep victims under control with minimum of force, all done in the name of a theory of race, implemented by the full heritage of industrial revolution. A true disgrace for all of us humans, in its scientificity and industrially efficient cold execution.

2. Deaths in the name of/because of whatever form of communism. Go through the hall of fame of communism, and you’ll isolate many outrages in this category. Here Stalin shines as the worst of what is possible. Deaths in this category have many forms. Aside from the usual execution, you had mass starvation in the name of collectivization of agriculture (some figures put the starvation number in the soviet union in the 1920s-30s in TENS of millions. The Gulag archipelago also claimed MILLIONS. Beyond the bad old Soviet Union, communism in its various forms claimed yet more millions (China, Cambodia, etc), if not tens of millions, of lives throughout its unfortunate period of prominence. A disgrace for humanity in that it’s an example of what can be done in the name of FORWARDING the social evolution of human race. Numbers of deaths are many times more than that of Holocaust and it’s a close call between the two, but I guess the scientific and industrial nature of the Holocaust puts it past the outrages of communism, if barely.

3. Slavery in all its forms (inclusive instead of exclusive to the American context). This one is also connected to no. 4 and 6 but I believe it deserves separate mention and in a higher ranking, as I believe it also transcends them, being present as a concept from antiquity to even today. The nature of slavery also has been elaborated by other posters already.

4. Colonialism. This is the larger and related framework with regard to no. 3 and 6 and therefore I believe it deserves separate mention. Still, at least the mentality and the practice of exploitation of the peoples of the world for whatever king or country, utilizing the best means of technology, despising all those subjects as racially inferior in a time of self-declared enlightenment, killing en masse “when necessary”, so on, so forth. The net result, untold millions died under it.

5. 30 years war (1618-1648) and related wars to it. Killing in the name of religion, with religious zeal and mercilessness, not without state blessing. Population of central Europe declined by % 33 percent alone (to how many millions does this correspond in today’s numbers, just figure), let alone other parts of the continent. Feel free to bunch up with this one whatever religious war you want to mention. Speaking of wars of religion, the Crusades are yet another outrage, but alas, it misses our time frame by a few centuries.

6. Extinction of Native Americans. I probably cannot put it in any better way than Dr Strangelove has already done.

7. The Inquisition. The outrageous low point of human reason and of religion as a guide to human spirituality. I could as well have put it in higher rank.

8. WW II. I put it down here despite the numbers of dead, partly because I try to have less bias toward the centuries before the 20th. The high (or low, if you will) point of warfare between industrialized nations and the disregard for civilian life throughout. This one has more memorable individual outrages within it (like fire bombings, atomic weapons, and others recounted so far in this thread) than we care to learn about those of the others above, although I singled out Holocaust as a separate categorical outrage (largely agreeing with Azazel).

9. WWI. Worthy of mention as the breaking point of an otherwise “civilized” conduct between industrial nations. “Civilised conduct” of course excluded the rest of the world, but I already put colonialism up there in this regard. .WWI was about breakdown of common sense and losing of foresight by “scientific” countries because of unreasonably high self-confidence by the parties that they imagined they could “win” a war quickly, totally disregarding the impact of technology on warfare. Trenches, gas-attacks, frontal assaults against blazing machine guns…Europe lost an entire generation of young men. Also momentous as the forerunner of yet more insanity in WWII.

10. Balkan wars. I include here the Balkan war of 1912 as well of the war of 1990s. Both involved hundreds of thousands of people displaced and killed, lives and livelihoods destroyed. The 1990s war stands out more, as it takes places at a time when it was an article of faith that humanity learned from the outrages of that century, particularly after the Holocaust. But suddenly, it was mass graves, concentration camps, killing in the name of Greater Whatever came back with a vengeance. To add a footnote to this, there’s also the fact that Europe, as the self declared high point of political, economic and social human conduct, watched it with due “grave concern”. Up until that point I had a higher regard of Europe (however you define it).

11. The interethnic strife between the Turks and Armenians. This claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. It was a disgrace, but recounting this only as affecting one side of the suffering (i.e. Armenians) and packaging it in genocidal terminology does disservice to the sufferings of ALL in it. It was a tragic spiral of violence flamed by nationalism: local Armenian bands taking the opportunity of WWI (and diminishing Ottoman authority in the region) to try to ethnically cleanse Turkish villages (in Eastern Turkey, there are many mass graves of the Turks killed), Turkish villagers responding in kind, Russians using the flames of hatred by sending in regular Armenian troops in Russian uniform who added to the carnage, Ottoman government deciding to relocate the Armenian population of Eastern Turkey to Syria, untold thousands dying on the way there. It does not compare with the Holocaust, mainly because there was no intent by the government to “exterminate” Armenians off the face of the earth (the Allies after the War failed to find any documentation outlining such a grand scheme, or describing its specifics; plus Armenians living elsewhere in the empire were not attacked, rounded up, put into camps etc), and the imperial Ottoman governors along the route of relocation were sent strict orders to provide food and security for the relocees. In the end, hundreds of thousands died on BOTH sides during the whole process. Although it was not “genocide” as inadvertently dubbed by some in the thread, I still agree the Turkish-Armenian strife deserves mention here, as it’s a reminder to us that even communities that lived together in perfect harmony and peace for a millennium can succumb to parochial nationalism.

[Ancyrean]

Double post.

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten

Pinochet is responsible for just as many missing/deaths.

I'm gonna have to call shenanigans on this one; break out the links, baby, cause I don't believe this for a second. Hussein probably killed more in a year than Pinochet killed in his whole career.

You are correct sir...

Pinochet gets between 3000 and 4000, which makes him very minor league on comparison to Saddam or Milosevic. The fact that the victims were mostly commies is the reason he is even given more than a cursory glance these days, as the commies have so few baddies that didn't come from their farm system to complain about.

[Wernazuma III]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Some may have been offered the option of being allowed to work to death before expiring, but the results were the same.

Not at all. All of them were offered the option of working to death. Still, most of the deaths occured through disease, of course helped by bad treatment and exhaustion. Spanish had no intentions to wipe out Indians, after all they needed them as slaves or cheap labor force and thus were worried that soon there were none left (not out of philanthropy of course)

In the Andes the Spaniards opened up several mines that became infamous as death camps. Some of these mines were located at altitudes of over 17,000 feet, an altitude beyond the range of human adaptation. The Spaniards brought them up to the mine and chained them in, then retreated down to a more habitable level until the workshift was over. Few workers survived more than a month. In these mines the Spanish chewed up the entire Incan nation. The Indians currently inhabiting Peru are actually not the descendents of the Incas, but instead were brought into the area after the mines were depleted.

Now THAT is a piece of crap.
1.) the infamous mines of Potosí were in the first years run exclusively by Indian entrepreneurs. Only ~1560 the Spanish came in. Yes, Potosí was a dirty place with many abuses by Spanish treating their mitayos (temporary forced Indian laborers)extremely badly under inhuman working conditions and the extremely unhealthy mercury-mining and many thousands died in these mines. It is the worst crime of Spanish colonialism that for the sake of the profit, the crown only took quarter-hearted measures to contain the abuse.
However, the motive was greed and the mines were no death camps, most workers did survive much longer and there are records that show that not few mitayos, after having ended their forced mita decided to continue to work in the mines with a contract.
I've read private(!) letters from emigrants to their families in Spain where they tell about "their" Indians with some respect or even affection, lamenting that so many die of diseases and bad treatment (of course by the bad neighbors). In thousands of letters I could find some negative statements about Indians, and traces that show how they were exploited but never anything close to hate.
2.) At first, there never was an "Inca" nation, do some reading. Inca meant the ruler, there was no "Inca" people but rather the Quechua and other related groups who formed the core of the empire. And they were never even closely extinct. I really wonder, where you got the idea of this annihilation and alleged massive resettlement, it's only laughable and complete bull****. I'd suggest to make a trip to Peru and Bolivia. You'll not only see that Incan tradition is very well alive, but also that (beyond Lima), the population is predominantly (pure) Indian, especially in the south-east, where I've been. They'll tell you another story and affirm their tradition in the land (yet surely telling all the atrocities which happened in the mines). Whites have always been the minority there.

Recent genetic studies conducted in Columbia uncovered yet another Spanish atrocity. The mitochondria of virtually all Columbians appears to be Native American, but the somatic chromosomes are aproximately 50% Spanish. This means that at some point in the history of the area ALL of the male natives were eliminated such that the remaining people there today are the descendents of the breeding of the surviving females with the Spanish conquerers. The Spanish would have had to not only murdered the native men, but also the teenaged boys, the preteen boys, the little boys, and even the baby boys in order to have achieved this result.

Judging on the probability and the quality of the above statements this it's utter BS. I don't even start to tell about reasons why such a huge androcide would be better recorded by those clergymen who always opposed and critizized the bad treatment of Indians or telling you about the numerous small (pure) native minorities in Colombia.
The mere notion of killing the whole male population (of such a whole region!) doesn't fit any motive the Spanish had in their relation to the Indians. They needed cheap labor, period. Before the mid-19th century (Araucan Wars of Chile and Argentine), there were no efforts to deplace Indian population in order to free the space for white settlers, the colonization and Spanish immigration followed completely different patterns.

In the American Southwest there are numerous reports of Spanish missionaries using Spanish soldiers to exterminate any natives who refused to submit to living at missions as converts, and of course as obligatory workers (translated as "slaves".)

To exterminate? Hardly, unless there was some other incident (like Indians killing a moron of a missionary who acted stupidly. Conversion zeal was a major source of conflict though and often led to incidents responded by military force, the best known being the Pueblo revolt in mid 17th century. After that, Spanish policy shifted a bit towards a more gentile treatment to avoid larger conflicts. This relation is comparable, however, to the Anglo-Indian relations. Indian Wars follwed similar patterns (inevitable incidents by stupidity of either side, followed by military response), though on a smaller scale and less expansionist.
Use of Indians for forced labor is, as already pointed out, the worst Spanish did to Indians, but they were not slaves and had many rights, although wherever large profits were to be made (mines) or in isolated frontier areas (like New Mexico), those rights were trampled upon.

In British America the bad history between the whites and the natives began at Jamestown, known as the Rebellion of Martin's Hundred, and in the Plymouth colony with King Phillip's War. Both incidents were known to have been incited by natives escaping the Spaniards. These refugees told stories about the atrocities visited upon their peoples by the Spaniards, and the natives of Virginia and Massachusetts becoming fearful that the English would eventually treat them in the same way staged pre-emptive attacks. Thus three centuries of Anglo-American reaction to native Americans was actually triggered by Spanish misbehavior.

I've never heard any of these stories before, but it seems to be very biased again, especially taking into account that the Spanish didn't even closely get so far north as the English colonies and there are records of '"homemade" incidents between English and Indians leading to hostilities way before the Jamestown conflicts, like the story of Roanoke-founder Ralph Lane who in 1585 missed a silver plate, blamed the Indians and burned an Indian village. Such behavior is not uncommon, but rather lamentably the standard in Spanish and English colonialism thelike and Powhatan possibly had also heard stories from the south (Florida)about Spanish atrocities, but blaming the Anglo-Indian conflicts on Spanish misbehavior shows the bias in all your arguments.

[Sir Og]

I am amazed that noone has mentioned yet Berlin congres, Yalta etc. (small nations' fates being decided by the powers of the time. this usually results in major suffering in the long term)

[Az]

Colonialism by itself, wasn't bad, by creating new towns, cities, and developing the lands. It was the other practices that were destructive and awful.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by Wernazuma III


Not at all. All of them were offered the option of working to death. Still, most of the deaths occured through disease, of course helped by bad treatment and exhaustion.

You take someone, put him in a field under the carribean sun and work him day in and day out without water. When he develops terminal heat stroke he feels like he's having a fever, so you call it a disease. Written reports of the death of the Indians in the fields often describe them as developing a fever and dieing within a matter of hours. That is more likely to reflect heat stroke rather than an infectious disease. Of course it's also true that many of them did develop infectious diseases, but were forced to continue working in the sun without water, thus killing many via dehydration who might have survived. But if this doesn't count in your mind, then fine, let it be on your conscience.

Spanish had no intentions to wipe out Indians, after all they needed them as slaves or cheap labor force and thus were worried that soon there were none left (not out of philanthropy of course)

Indeed there soon were none left in the carribean.

Now THAT is a piece of crap.
1.) the infamous mines of Potosí were in the first years run exclusively by Indian entrepreneurs. Only ~1560 the Spanish came in. Yes, Potosí was a dirty place with many abuses by Spanish treating their mitayos (temporary forced Indian laborers)extremely badly under inhuman working conditions and the extremely unhealthy mercury-mining and many thousands died in these mines. It is the worst crime of Spanish colonialism that for the sake of the profit, the crown only took quarter-hearted measures to contain the abuse.
However, the motive was greed and the mines were no death camps, most workers did survive much longer and there are records that show that not few mitayos, after having ended their forced mita decided to continue to work in the mines with a contract.

This flies in the face of the "National Geographic" article I read on the mines. The article was on about a discovery of mass graves in and below the mines. The excavators found that due to the rarified atmosphere they were forced to provide Oxygen not only for themselves, but also their native workers. I doubt the original Indian miners chained themselves into the mine, but the Spanish, who were after all much less well equipped for high altitude life found it necessary to do so since they could not stand to stay in the mines and watch the slaves. Bear in mind that the Potosi area is quite large, that not all of the mines were at the highest altitudes, and that they were in operation for over a century. If the fact that some of the mines might have been less lethal than others is sufficient excuse for sending thousands of slaves to their deaths then fine, that's on your conscience.

I've read private(!) letters from emigrants to their families in Spain where they tell about "their" Indians with some respect or even affection, lamenting that so many die of diseases and bad treatment (of course by the bad neighbors). In thousands of letters I could find some negative statements about Indians, and traces that show how they were exploited but never anything close to hate.

So what, I've read letters from pre-Civil War southern slave owners gushing with affection for their favorite darkies. Heck, when I went to school down here in the 1960s we were still taught that blacks were loved and cared for by their masters and had been better off as slaves than as free men. There are still some people around here who like to repeat that garbage. They have their own organizations. Would you like to join one? Just drive south into the Carolinas on Interstate 95 and look for the 3 big K's. Then again, the survival rate for American slaves was actually much better than that of either Spanish American slaves or natives, so one might even say that American slavery was indeed less onerous than the Spanish treatment of people of color in their colonies. How does that grab you?

2.) At first, there never was an "Inca" nation, do some reading. Inca meant the ruler, there was no "Inca" people but rather the Quechua and other related groups who formed the core of the empire. And they were never even closely extinct. I really wonder, where you got the idea of this annihilation and alleged massive resettlement, it's only laughable and complete bull****. I'd suggest to make a trip to Peru and Bolivia. You'll not only see that Incan tradition is very well alive, but also that (beyond Lima), the population is predominantly (pure) Indian, especially in the south-east, where I've been. They'll tell you another story and affirm their tradition in the land (yet surely telling all the atrocities which happened in the mines). Whites have always been the minority there.

Ooooh! I technically got the name of the dominant tribe in the "Incan Empire" wrong. Golly, and to think that millions of textbooks around the world also label it as "The Incan Empire". Well, it's easy to see that the name of the tribe was infact the main point. Gosh, I'm sorry. Read my previous post carefully and you'll sees that nowhre did I say that the decimated tribes were replaced by Europeans.

Judging on the probability and the quality of the above statements this it's utter BS. I don't even start to tell about reasons why such a huge androcide would be better recorded by those clergymen who always opposed and critizized the bad treatment of Indians or telling you about the numerous small (pure) native minorities in Colombia.
The mere notion of killing the whole male population (of such a whole region!) doesn't fit any motive the Spanish had in their relation to the Indians. They needed cheap labor, period. Before the mid-19th century (Araucan Wars of Chile and Argentine), there were no efforts to deplace Indian population in order to free the space for white settlers, the colonization and Spanish immigration followed completely different patterns.

Well, you know the scientific magazine "Nature", where I read this is known for fabricating data, isn't it? The first Spanish expeditions to the northern coasts of South American focused on finding gold. The natives had an inexplicable lack of ardor for the Spanish cause and often became hostile for no apparent reason. I mean why would anyone get so upset over beating up and holding hostage some old chieftan? Sometimes military commanders were forced to invent innovative ways of persuading the naives to co-operate. Killing off the men was one way of definitely racheting down the hostility level of the natives, since women tend to be less aggressive, especially after the boys have given them a good example of Spanish manhood.

To exterminate? Hardly, unless there was some other incident (like Indians killing a moron of a missionary who acted stupidly.

You'd be surprised how many Native Americans failed to recognise the inherent superiority of Spanish culture and resisted to their best ability. I guess that the stories of the Conquistador atrocities of Columbus, Cortez, Coronado, Balboa, and Pizzaro are a bunch of fables too. Do you think you will ever be able to set the record straght?

Conversion zeal was a major source of conflict though and often led to incidents responded by military force, the best known being the Pueblo revolt in mid 17th century. After that, Spanish policy shifted a bit towards a more gentile treatment to avoid larger conflicts.

How many years was it from 1498 to the mid 17th century? Golly, such a short period of time, hardly worth fretting about.

This relation is comparable, however, to the Anglo-Indian relations. Indian Wars follwed similar patterns (inevitable incidents by stupidity of either side, followed by military response), though on a smaller scale and less expansionist.

Less expansionist? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Spanish carved out an empire that spanned from Tierra del Fuego to Oregon. What do you think the total square mileage of that chunk of Earth would be compared to the US west ot the Mississippi?

Use of Indians for forced labor is, as already pointed out, the worst Spanish did to Indians, but they were not slaves and had many rights, although wherever large profits were to be made (mines) or in isolated frontier areas (like New Mexico), those rights were trampled upon.

Hmmmm....Let me see here, you take a man and his family by force, you bring him to your farm, you make him family work for you giving back only food and lodging, and you force his children and their children and their children to do the same, but that's not slavery? OK, let me guess. It's only called slavery if English speaking people do it, right?
Have you ever heard of a man called Santa Anna, the Mexican revolutionary? He claimed to have been a slave. On seizing the Presidency of Mexico he sent out armies to force the slave owners of Mexico to release their slaves. Now you would have us believe that this was some monstrous lie. OK, I'll anticipate you. Are you going to claim that the Mexicans instituted slavery after seperating from Spain? Sorry, but you're wrong. Slavery was widespread throughoput the Spanish Americas. In the carribean, where the native population had "accidently" disappeared they imported blacks, but in Mexico and the western provinces of South America they used the natives. If you knew your history well, you'd know that Simon Bolivar, after liberating the South American colonies from Spanish rule tried to convince them to free the slaves as well. He failed, and went home thinking himself a failure. Spanish slavery in the Americas finally ended in the 1880s, with the liberation of the slaves in Cuba.

I've never heard any of these stories before, but it seems to be very biased again, especially taking into account that the Spanish didn't even closely get so far north as the English colonies

So you've never heard of the Spaniard who explored the Americna South, traveling as far north as North Carolina and as far west as the Mississippi. Just for fun I'll let you look up his name.[/QUOTE] and there are records of '"homemade" incidents between English and Indians leading to hostilities way before the Jamestown conflicts, like the story of Roanoke-founder Ralph Lane who in 1585 missed a silver plate, blamed the Indians and burned an Indian village. Such behavior is not uncommon, but rather lamentably the standard in Spanish and English colonialism thelike and Powhatan possibly had also heard stories from the south (Florida)about Spanish atrocities, but blaming the Anglo-Indian conflicts on Spanish misbehavior shows the bias in all your arguments. [/QUOTE]
Powhatan was dead by the time of The Revolt of Martin's Hundred.
I'm biased? That's a strange statement coming from a man who denies the historical existence of slavery in the Spanish colonies, the brutality of Spanish Conquistadors, and the snuffing out of some 60 million native americans at the hands of their Spanish tormentors. You sir are in denial.

[Wernazuma III]

OK, let me set straight a few things:
1. Your argumentation is rather foul and personally offending. You lay way too many words in my mouth, like assuming I support a concept like an "inherently superior Spanish culture". You're "anticipating" a bit too much for a reasonable debate, don't you think?
2. I never denied the atrocities of the Spanish conquistadors, I just defended the fact that Spanish colonial rule was not as cruel towards Indians as it is often painted. Pizarro was the greatest and most primitive ******* in the history of all American colonization, Cortes had no consciousness and we could extend the list. They had mainly two things in their mind: Gold and honor/titles. But they are not representative for the Spanish colonial rule which is supposed to have been so much more atrocious than English colonial history. The Conquistadors existed in a limited period and particular campaigns.
3. I never said there was no maltreatment in Spanish America or few deaths due to it. Wherever authority failed (and it often failed for different reasons), Indian rights were, as I pointed out, trampled upon and in the first time the conquista was a very anarchistic enterprise. The main point of going into this arguments are those biased interpretations, where completely exaggerated numbers are presented and said to be true for Spanish colonial history generally. Like your "60 million Indians dying at the hands of Spanish tormentors" is completely out of range and a fantasy number. That's the famous black legend. 60 million is probably the overall number of Indians who lived and died (by forced or natural death thelike) in Spanish America between 1550 and 1650 (OK, that's also a fantasy number, but you get the point).
Indian population declined ~80% (in the Caribbean 99%) until around 1600, then it recovered. Most of the deaths were from diseases. The first smallpox waves, often spreading much faster than the Spanish themselves, killed half of the population. Then came flu and others. In the densly populated areas of Mexico and Peru, those illnesses struck much harder than in the plains or tropical forrest. You simply can't attribute that to Spanish maltreatment. If "only" 5% actually died of maltreatment, it still leaves a huge number of Indians put to death, but you can't make Spanish responsible for the whole massive deaths. Potosi and Huancavelica etc. definitely were the worst atrocities in Spanish America. If you read my above post closely I speak about tens of thousands deaths, possibly even hundreds of thousands.
Your idea that the Spanish deliberately had Indians dehydrate when working is crap though (view cynically at it: Spanish knew that their Indian slaves were "non-renewable" resources and thus tried to keep them) and stems directly from Las Casas, about as reliable a source as his rival Sepulveda. Such an occurance might have happened once and then, at some point, but Las Casas painted it as the rule. He had good reasons to do so, because he was the advocate of the Indians and had to argue like this to enforce their protection by law, but it's exaggerating of course and propaganda publishers in Holland, England and France were delighted that they had material to denounce the brutal Spanyards.
5. Your whole phrasing like "showing their Spanish manhood" reveals your bias towards Spanish. I guess, British or American soldiers never "showed their manhood"? Soldier attitude? Colonial atrocities? Definitely, but neither exclusively Spanish nor of that time. I don't know the magazine "Nature", but if there's the claim that this study counts for the whole nation of Colombia, it's simple crap. Take a look at the history of the conquest of Colombian territory and you'll find that it extended over a long time, so this alleged killing of all men and boys happened all the time from 1500 to 1650, right? The "mestizaje" or mixture between whites and Indians was generally a "one-way-road" with Spanish males and Indian women, mostly from non-marital relations (wives back in Spain), but hardly a large-scale rape as you suggest.
6. About slavery. I did in no occasion deny the existance of slavery in Spanish America. Look at my first paragraph of the last post and you'll find that I said that Spanish needed Indians as slaves or cheap labor. Most former Spanish colonies abolished slavery at the point of independance (contrary to the US). Spanish slavery in the colonies was black slavery, like in the US. At least, in Spanish society the degree of manumitted slaves was quite high and they were rarely used on large plantations (exception in the Caribbean, but even there not really) but rather as artisans and craftmen, other than in the US. You say that in Mexico mainly Indian slaves were used. How then, that Mexico had the highest import of black slaves in all Spanish America? Enslavement of Indians was - de iure - strictly forbidden since 1542, yet inefficient government, corruption and isolation led to -de facto- slavery situations. That changes nothing about the legal status and the legal idea of almost complete autonomy for Indian communities.
7. With "Expansionist" I meant "in the frontier regions", where the Spanish didn't like to go, and when they did, only to counter French and English advances.
8. About Narvaez/Powhatan/Martin's Hundred etc.: Sorry, I didn't know about Martin's Hundred, but as it was later than the early days of Jamestown, it's even more ridiculous to blame native response to rumors that should date back so much time ago (more than 100 years!), when so much had happened in the English colonies shortly before and at much shorter distance.
9. The name "Inca" was not the very point of my critics and you carefully avoided to take on the real point of critique (the lack of evidence for "Incan" extinction and an Indian resettlement), for good reason I'd think.
10. Your comparison of Spanish attitude (or mine) towards the Indians to that of US-Americans to slaves or even the ideology of the KKK is illegitimate. I was not talking about letters that say "I like Indian XYZ", but overall statements. The lack of hate towards Indians generally in private (and in official) documents does have a weight. Except for isolated examples you'll hardly find a Spanyard who killed or enslaved Indians because of hating them, but rather out of not caring at all and greed. This is even true for the Pizarro-expedition.

So the conclusion of your post:

that's a strange statement coming from a man who denies the historical existence of slavery in the Spanish colonies, the brutality of Spanish Conquistadors, and the snuffing out of some 60 million native americans at the hands of their Spanish tormentors. You sir are in denial.

can be countered by
a)I did neither deny the existance of slavery nor the brutality of Conquistadors
b)there simply were no 60 millions dying at the hands of Spanish tormentors, not even closely.

Something to think about (for me too): It's funny that I'm always finding myself defending the Spanish when someone draws out the Black legend while defending the Indian struggle for justice when talking to someone who still thinks that the colonization and acculturation of the Indians was a civilizatory achievement.

[mrmitchell]

I notice a few people tried to list plenty of pre-1900 outrages...I think the ones of the 20th century stand out more (and partially deserve to) for a few reasons.
(1) With the exception of a few things like slavery, the average citizen doesn't learn much about other pre-1900 outrages.
(2) The 19xxs were a civilised century. Killing 500 peasants in 1501 is much less out-of-the-ordinary than killing 500 workers in 1901. (It's not any less of a crime, but compared to the other incidences of the period, it's not as well-stood-out. You could say "Humanity didn't recognise crimes as quickly as it should've" )
(3) The 19xxs have living remnants of them, or are still ongoing. They naturally draw more attention.
(4) The 19xxs were better documented than any other time in history. It is often possible to put an almost-exact mark on a figure...now, tell me the exact number of people who died in the 30 Years' War, or the Crusades.
(5) 19xxs outrages were all huge atrocities compared to their relatively minor predecessors. In fact, looking upon the last 100 years, it's ****ing difficult to believe we didn't turn the planet into a smoking crater.

The Holocaust successfully fills all of these factors. Average citizens know a lot about it, it was done by fairly civilised people (Germans), it has living remnants and things like museums, it was documented, and, unfortunately, it was huge. Killing that many people should put an event at the top of the list anyway, but meeting every criteria is, well, shocking.

[Heresson]

11. The interethnic strife between the Turks and Armenians. This claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocents. It was a disgrace, but recounting this only as affecting one side of the suffering (i.e. Armenians) and packaging it in genocidal terminology does disservice to the sufferings of ALL in it. It was a tragic spiral of violence flamed by nationalism: local Armenian bands taking the opportunity of WWI (and diminishing Ottoman authority in the region) to try to ethnically cleanse Turkish villages (in Eastern Turkey, there are many mass graves of the Turks killed), Turkish villagers responding in kind, Russians using the flames of hatred by sending in regular Armenian troops in Russian uniform who added to the carnage, Ottoman government deciding to relocate the Armenian population of Eastern Turkey to Syria, untold thousands dying on the way there. It does not compare with the Holocaust, mainly because there was no intent by the government to “exterminate” Armenians off the face of the earth (the Allies after the War failed to find any documentation outlining such a grand scheme, or describing its specifics; plus Armenians living elsewhere in the empire were not attacked, rounded up, put into camps etc), and the imperial Ottoman governors along the route of relocation were sent strict orders to provide food and security for the relocees. In the end, hundreds of thousands died on BOTH sides during the whole process. Although it was not “genocide” as inadvertently dubbed by some in the thread, I still agree the Turkish-Armenian strife deserves mention here, as it’s a reminder to us that even communities that lived together in perfect harmony and peace for a millennium can succumb to parochial nationalism.

You made an effort of balancing the picture, which is right, but You overdone it, puting the responsibility and cost on both sides equally.
Lets start by saying that what happened to Armenians in 1915 wasn't the first massacre of them; there were several earlier, on big, yet not that big scale, since 1870's I think. Russians didn't come to bring Armenia freedom, they were persecuting Armenian church. But if Armenians preferred their rule over Turkish, that's not anyuthing You can blame on Armenians. Surely some pro-Turkish actions by some part of Armenian population might have been taken. But claiming they intended ethnical clearings on these grounds, is silly.
How would have they done that, as a whole? You need a cooperation, a coordination, some administration in order to do that. I don't claim that any actions directed against Turkish co-habitants of these grounds weren't taken. But they weren't organised action, and the scale could not ge great. The graves? First of all, they might be Armenian graves. Secondly, they may be graves of Turks who died while trying to exterminate Armenians. And perhaps the most probable - Turks died fighting against Russian army. I've read a passage of Turkish book, which was pretty interesting. It accused Armenians, (claiming they were a 1mln minority) of killing over 1mln Turks during the war. That'd mean that every Armenian child or women, and man of course, would have to kill a Turk. Additionally, the book couldn't admit that Armenians were a majority in the region, because it would lead to admitting Armenian claim, and yet could not deny minimal number of them. that's why the book wrote they were "5%minority in the eastern vilayets". They were, but not there, but in entire sultanate, in borders before ww1. Nevermind. the point is that Turks can not write objectively about it, somehow, without misleading informations or simple lies. If they were innocent, they wouldn't.
Unlike what You wrote, Armenians elsewhere, except for Cople, which was hm a too visible place, were massacred as well. All eastern Anatolia, historical Armenia, parts of Syria belonging to Turkey today, Cilicia-
everything is clearily Turkish now, and nothing's left after
Armenians there. The only place Armenians still live are parts of it that weren't captured by Turks.
Look at the result; we may argue on the number of killed Armenians and Turks, but somehow these are Turks and Kurds that got all the lands they wanted, and these are Armenians that were banned. It was not a fightbetween two equal sides, as it may seem from your post. It was a fight of Turkish state and part of its citizens against other part of its citizens.

I don't think Turkish gouverment's goal at the time was destroying Armenians as a whole. They just wanted to keep what they owned, and Armenians were a threat to it. That's why relocation of them was done. But Turks had no interest in keeping them alive. And the way it was done shows that. Nope, security and food/water provision was not good. I doubt Turkey was able to do it good even if it wanted, but that's her fault.

Mind adding that other Christian ethnic groups were not treated better. "By the way" of dealing with Armenians,
at least 0,2mln Christian Syrians were killed. And them, as well as Cilician Armenians, You can't accuse of ethnical clearings.

When it comes to the name of the entire thing, it is just one of the greatest ethnical clearings, a religious pagrom, and precoursor of holocaust. It's no matter how do we call it, the important thing is to know what was it.

[Heresson]

Originally posted by mrmitchell
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/021018.html

Poland, 1.6 million 1945-48

ekhem, this site is somewhat nuts

I do know what this site is talking about, namely I think it is, aside from normal Stalinistic terror, the repatriation of German probably. But this number would be almost as high as the realistic number of all Germans repatriated, and anyway, it was, unlike in Czech case, Allied operation, not Polish.