slaughter in mankind history?

New_Zealand

New_Zealand

Veteran
I'm working on a project and wanted to know what you thought was the worst war or killing/slaughter in mankind history? One of them I would say would be 'Hitler'.
 
For me is the "Triple Alianza" war (1864), between Brasil-Argentina-Uruguay against Paraguay. 90% of the population of the latter country died and they lost a very important part of their territory
 
The biggest slaughters in history are probably hardly known as before mediums for the fast spread of information history was written by the victors who would downplay their role. During history entire populations of people have been wiped out so its hard to get an accurate assessment.

All of the modern dictators like Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin and several rulers in the middle east and Africa are fresh on everyones mind and well documented but I'm sure there was far worse further back in time with less accountability.
 
It also depends on if you are focusing on intentional murdering by violence, or if you are also including actions taken by governments that caused large-scale death. By at least one interpretation (R.J. Rummell), the famine caused by Mao Zedong caused the death of 77 million people. I doubt that's what you're looking for though; I just throw it out there as it's another potential interpretation.
 
If you use your criteria loosely, you might say the Bubonic Plague was the worst slaughter in the history of mankind, killing almost a third of the worlds population by some estimates. It also contributed to the dark ages and created a more violent society.

Spanish Inquisition was bad but yeah, Hitler and the Nazi death machine he created is probably the worst I can think of.
 
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I interviewed the author of this book, an "atrocitologist," some years ago...

http://books.wwnorton.com/books/detail.aspx?ID=22362

Hitler may win if you blame the total deaths of WW2 upon him (~60M), but if you parse it out to member nations instead, Josef Stalin (somewhere between 3-72M - the number varies so widely because the USSR "un-created" people, literally eradicated the memory of them from history, so many records essentially don't exist) and Mao Zedong (a similarly vague 40-80M, depending upon what proportion of the cultural genocide of the Great Leap Forward you ascribe to him) surpass the 6-12M murders of the Holocaust handily... of course that's simply talking raw numbers. Hitler may have even been surpassed by a Belgian... King Leopold II in his tyrannical exploitation of the Congo Free State.

I know it's a "no politics" zone, but this is simple fact: folks will sometimes decry political division, but political unity is unmatched in its efficiency when it comes to murder.
 
It's all a matter of perspective I suppose. You could argue that time is the most lethal as it's 100% fatal, but any untimely death is a tragedy to the victim.
If you want to look at just numbers in the modern era you could look at the genocide of the Native Americans by the European settlers. Imported disease did a lot of the work for them, but if you look at our continent now you can see just how efficient that ethnic cleansing was. An entire inhabited continent changed hands. Hawaii is a good example too, 95% of the native Hawaiians were killed by diseases that the Europeans brought, but if you go way back there is evidence that the native Hawaiians were actually Tahitians who came there in the 14th century and conquered the natives who were there before them.
I guess all of it is relative and it all sucks. Let's be a little nicer to each other, yeah?
 
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