[[Image:Violence world map - DALY - WHO2004.svg|thumb|Rates of
violence per 100,000 inhabitants by country in 2004.
]]
Violence is the expression of physical or verbal
force against self or other, compelling action against one's will
on pain of being hurt. Worldwide, violence is used as a tool of
manipulation and also is
an area of concern for law and culture which take attempts to
suppress and stop it. The word
violence covers a broad
spectrum. It can vary from between a physical altercation between
two beings where a slight injury may be the outcome to
war and
genocide where millions
may die as a result.
Psychology and sociology
The causes of violent behavior in humans are often topics of
research in
psychology and
sociology. Neurobiologist Jan Volavka emphasizes
that for those purposes, “violent behavior is defined as overt and
intentional physically aggressive behavior against another
person."
Scientists don't know whether to disagree or agree on whether
violence is inherent in humans. Among prehistoric humans, there is
archaeological evidence for both contentions of violence and
peacefulness as primary characteristics.
Since violence is a matter of perception as well as a measurable
phenomenon, psychologists have found variability in whether people
perceive certain physical acts as 'violent'. For example, in a
state where execution is a legalised punishment we do not typically
perceive the executioner as 'violent', though we may talk, in a
more metaphorical way, of the state acting violently. Likewise
understandings of violence are linked to a perceived
aggressor-victim relationship: hence psychologists have shown that
people may not recognise defensive use of force as aggressive or
violent at all, even in cases where the amount of force used is
significantly greater than in the original aggression.
Riane Eisler, who describes early
cooperative, egalitarian societies (she coins the term "gylanic",
as it is widely agreed that the term matriarchal is inaccurate),
and
Walter Wink, who coined the phrase
“the myth of redemptive violence,” suggest that human violence,
especially as organized in groups, is a phenomenon of the last five
to ten thousand years.
The “violent male ape” image is often brought up in discussions of
human violence. Dale Peterson and
Richard Wrangham in “Demonic Males: Apes
and the Origins of Human Violence” write that violence is inherent
in humans.However, William L. Ury, editor of a book called "Must We
Fight? From the Battlefield to the Schoolyard—A New Perspective on
Violent Conflict and Its Prevention” debunks the "killer ape" myth
in his book which brings together discussions from two Harvard Law
School symposiums. The conclusion is that “we also have lots of
natural mechanisms for cooperation, to keep conflict in check, to
channel aggression, and to overcome conflict. These are just as
natural to us as the aggressive tendencies."
James Gilligan writes violence is often pursued as an antidote to
shame or humiliation. The use of violence often is a source of
pride and a defence of honor, especially among males who often
believe violence defines manhood.
Stephen Pinker in a
New Republic
article “The History of Violence” offers evidence that on the
average the amount and cruelty of violence to humans and animals
has decreased over the last few centuries.
Diagnosis of psychiatric disorder
The
American
Psychiatric Association planning and research committees for
the forthcoming
DSM-V (2012) have canvassed a
series of new
Relational
disorders which include
Marital Conflict Disorder Without
Violence or
Marital Abuse Disorder (Marital Conflict
Disorder With Violence). Couples with marital disorders
sometimes come to clinical attention because the couple recognize
long-standing dissatisfaction with their
marriage and come to the
clinician on their own initiative or are referred
by an astute health care professional. Secondly, there is serious
violence in the marriage which is
-"usually the husband
battering the wife" . In these cases the emergency room or a
legal authority often is the first to notify the
clinician. Most importantly, marital violence "is
a major risk factor for serious injury and even death and women in
violent marriages are at much greater risk of being seriously
injured or killed (
National
Advisory Council on Violence Against Women 2000)." The authors
of this study add that "There is current considerable controversy
over whether male-to-female marital violence is best regarded as a
reflection of male
psychopathology
and control or whether there is an empirical base and clinical
utility for conceptualizing these patterns as relational."
Recommendations for clinicians making a diagnosis of
Marital
Relational Disorder should include the assessment of actual or
"potential" male violence as regularly as they assess the potential
for
suicide in depressed patients. Further,
"clinicians should not relax their vigilance after a battered
wife leaves her
husband,
because some data suggest that the period immediately following a
marital separation is the period of greatest risk for the women.
Many men will
stalk and
batter their wives in an effort to get them to return
or punish them for leaving. Initial assessments of the potential
for violence in a marriage can be supplemented by standardized
interviews and questionnaires, which have been reliable and valid
aids in exploring marital violence more systematically."
The authors can conclude with what they call "very recent
information" on the course of violent marriages which suggests that
"over time a husband's battering may abate somewhat, but perhaps
because he has successfully
intimidated
his wife. The risk of violence remains strong in a marriage in
which it has been a feature in the past. Thus, treatment is
essential here; the clinician cannot just wait and watch." The most
urgent clinical priority is the protection of the wife because she
is the one most frequently at risk, and clinicians must be aware
that supporting assertiveness by a battered wife may lead to more
beatings or even death.
It is also important to this topic to understand the paradoxical
effects of some sedative drugs. Serious complications can occur in
conjunction with the use of sedatives creating the opposite effect
as to that intended.
Malcolm Lader at
the
Institute of
Psychiatry in London estimates the incidence of these adverse
reactions at about 5%, even in short-term use of the drugs. The
paradoxical reactions may consist of
depression, with or without
suicidal tendencies,
phobias,
aggressiveness,
violent behavior and
symptoms sometimes misdiagnosed as
psychosis.
Law
One of the main functions of
law is to regulate
violence.
Sociologist
Max Weber stated that the
state is, for better or worse, a
monopoly on violence practiced within
the confines of a specific territory.
Law
enforcement is the main means of regulating nonmilitary
violence in society. Governments regulate the use of violence
through
legal systems governing
individuals and political authorities, including the
police and
military. Most
societies condone some amount of
police
violence to maintain the status quo and enforce laws.
However, German political theorist
Hannah
Arendt noted: "Violence can be justifiable, but it never will
be legitimate ... Its justification loses in plausibility the
farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions
the use of violence in self-defence, because the danger is not only
clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is
immediate". In the 20th century in acts of
democide governments may have killed more than 260
million of their own people through
police brutality,
execution,
massacre, slave
labor camps, and through sometimes intentional
famine.
Violent acts that are not carried out by the military or police and
that are not in
self-defence are
usually classified as
crimes, although not
all crimes are
violent crimes.
Damage to property is classified as
violent crime in some jurisdictions but not in others. It is
usually considered a less serious offense unless the damage
injures, or potentially could injure, others. Unpremeditated or
small-scale acts of random violence or coordinated violence by
unsanctioned private groups usually are prosecuted. While most
societies condone the killing of animals for
food and
sport, increasingly they
have adopted more laws against
animal
cruelty.
The
Federal
Bureau of Investigation
classifies violence resulting in homicide into criminal
homicide and justifiable
homicide (e.g. self defense).
War
War is a state of prolonged violence,
large-scale conflict involving two or more groups of people,
usually under the auspices of government. War is fought as a means
of resolving territorial and other conflicts, as
war of aggression to conquer territory or
loot resources, in national
self-defense, or to suppress attempts of part
of the nation to
secede from it.
Since the
Industrial
Revolution, the lethality of modern warfare has steadily grown.
World War I casualties were
over 40 million and
World War II
casualties were over 70 million.
Nevertheless, some hold the actual deaths from war have decreased
compared to past centuries. In
War Before Civilization,
Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois,
calculates that 87% of
tribal
societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65% of
them were fighting continuously. The attrition rate of numerous
close-quarter clashes, which characterize
endemic warfare, produces casualty rates of
up to 60%, compared to 1% of the combatants as is typical in modern
warfare. Stephen Pinker agrees, writing that “in tribal violence,
the clashes are more frequent, the percentage of men in the
population who fight is greater, and the rates of death per battle
are higher.”
Jared Diamond in his award-winning
books,
Guns, Germs and Steel
and
The Third Chimpanzee
provides sociological and anthropological evidence for the rise of
large scale warfare as a result of advances in technology and
city-states. The rise of agriculture provided a significant
increase in the number of individuals that a region could sustain
over hunter-gatherer societies, allowing for development of
specialized classes such as soldiers, or weapons manufacturers. On
the other hand, tribal conflicts in hunter-gatherer societies tend
to result in wholesale slaughter of the opposition (other than
perhaps females of child-bearing years) instead of territorial
conquest or slavery, presumably as hunter-gatherer numbers could
not sustain empire-building.
Religious and political ideology
Religious and political ideologies have been the cause of
interpersonal violence throughout history. Ideologues often falsely
accuse others of violence, such as the ancient
blood libel against Jews, the
medieval accusations of casting
witchcraft spells against women, caricatures of
black men as “violent brutes” that helped excuse the late
nineteenth century
Jim Crow laws in
the United States, and modern accusations of
satanic ritual abuse against day care
center owners and others.
Both supporters and opponents of the twenty-first century
War on Terrorism regard it largely as an
ideological and religious war.
Vittorio Bufacchi describes two different modern concepts of
violence, one the “minimalist conception” of violence as an
intentional act of excessive or destructive force, the other the
“comprehensive conception” which includes violations of rights,
including a long list of human needs.
Anti-capitalists assert that
capitalism is violent. They believe
private property,
trade,
interest and
profit survive only because police
violence defends them and that capitalist economies need war to
expand. They may use the term "
structural violence" to describe the
systematic ways in which a given social structure or institution
kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic
needs, for example the deaths caused by diseases because of lack of
medicine.
Free market supporters argue
that it is violently enforced state laws intervening in markets -
state capitalism - which cause many
of the problems anti-capitalists attribute to structural
violence.
Frantz Fanon criticiqued the violence
of
colonialism and wrote about the
counter violence of the "colonized victims."
Throughout history, most religions and individuals like
Mahatma Gandhi have preached that humans are
capable of eliminating individual violence and organizing societies
through purely
nonviolent means. Gandhi
himself once wrote: “A society organized and run on the basis of
complete non-violence would be the purest anarchy.” Modern
political ideologies which espouse similar views include pacifist
varieties of
voluntarism,
mutualism,
anarchism and
libertarianism.
Health and prevention
The
Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines violence as
"Injury inflicted by deliberate means", which includes assault, as
well as "legal intervention, and self-harm". The
World Health Organization (
“WHO”) in its
first
World Report on Violence and Health defined violence
as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or
actual, against oneself, another person or against a group or
community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of
resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment or
deprivation."
WHO estimates that each year around 1.6 million lives are lost
worldwide due to violence. It is among the leading causes of death
for people ages 15–44, especially of males.
Recent
estimates for murders per year in various countries include: 55,000
murders in Brazil
, 25,000
murders in Colombia
, 20,000
murders in South Africa, 15,000 murders
in Mexico
, 14,000
murders in the United
States
, 11,000 murders in Venezuela
, 8,000 murders in Russia
, 6,000
murders in El
Salvador
, 1,600
murders in Jamaica
, 1000
murders in France
, 500 murders
in Canada
, and 200
murders in Chile
.
Sports violence
Both in fabrication and reality, violence is integrated into
sporting events.
This was very prevalent in Greece
during the
Olympic games where Wrestling and Boxing was an entertaining sport, many people would
fight to the death in these spectacles. An even more well
known and notorious example is in Rome
where
Gladiators would fight animals and other
Gladiators until someone was killed in
the process, also in theatre a scene that called for a person to be
killed in a violent manner, they would indeed kill an actor or a
step-in. In
Asia, martial arts became
both a sport and a way of life for followers. Currently,
Boxing,
Professional Wrestling, Various
Martial Arts and
Mixed Martial Arts are a set of violent
sports that have become forms of entertainment worldwide.
Violence in the media
Government
censorship has sometimes
addressed violence in media.
In the United States the FCC regulates television
and radio, as does the CRTC
in Canada.
Media also self-regulate, as through many
movie ratings and the
Entertainment Software
Rating Board for video games.
Violent content has been a central part of
video game controversy. Critics like
Dave Grossman and
Jack Thompson argue that violence
in games hardens children to unethical acts.
Historical examples of violence
Acts of violence are commonly found in historical record. The
following is an incomplete list of some of the more large-scale
examples of violence in history.
-
Caesar's campaigns.
As many as 1 million
people (probably 1 in 4 of the Gauls) died, another million were
enslaved, 300 tribes were
subjugated and 800 cities were destroyed during the Gallic Wars (present-day France). The
entire population of city of
Avaricum
(Bourges) (40,000 in all) was slaughtered.
During Julius Caesar's campaign against the Helvetii (modern-day Switzerland
) approximately 60% of the tribe was destroyed, and
another 20% was taken into slavery.
-
Boudica's uprising.
Boudica (d. 60/61AD) was a
queen of the
Celtic
Iceni people of
Norfolk
in
Roman-occupied Britain who led a
major uprising of the tribes against the occupying forces of the
Roman Empire.
They destroyed
Camulodunum
(Colchester
, a settlement for discharged Roman soldiers),
Londinium
(London
) and
Verulamium
(St
Albans
). In the three cities destroyed, between
70,000 and 80,000 people are said to have been killed.
Tacitus says the Britons had no interest in taking
or selling prisoners, only in slaughter by gibbet, fire or cross.
Cassius Dio's account gives more prurient detail: that the noblest
women were impaled on spikes and had their breasts cut off and sewn
to their mouths, "to the accompaniment of sacrifices, banquets, and
wanton behaviour" in sacred places, particularly the groves of
Andraste.
-
Albigensian Crusade.The
Albigensian Crusade or
Cathar
Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated
by the
Pope Innocent III of the
Roman Catholic Church to eliminate
the
heresy of the
Cathars of
Languedoc.
Béziers
was a Languedoc stronghold of Catharism and the first city to be sacked, on July
22, 1209. In the bloody massacre which followed, no one was
spared, not even those who took refuge in the churches.
The
commander of the Crusade was the Papal Legate Arnaud-Amaury (or Arnald Amalaricus, Abbot of Citeaux
). When asked by a Crusader how to
distinguish between the Catholics and Cathars once they'd taken the
city, the abbot famously replied, "Kill them all, God will know His
own" - "
Neca eos omnes. Deus suos
agnoscet".According to "
Caesarius of Heisterbach: Medieval
Heresies," after the city was taken, at a cost in life of thousands
of defenders, about 450 heretics were "examined" by the inquisitors
and many of them claimed to be good Catholics rather than being
heretics. Fearing the possibility that these were lying, must have
caused the infamous phrase to first be uttered. In the end, the
Albigensian Crusade killed an estimated 1,000,000 people, not only
Cathars but much of the population of southern France.
-
Mongol Empire.Quoting Eric Margolis, Adam Jones
observes, in his book
Genocide: A Comprehensive
Introduction, that in the 13th century the
Mongol horsemen of
Genghis Khan were genocidal killers
(
génocidaires) who were known to kill whole nations
leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones. Many ancient sources
described Genghis Khan's conquests as wholesale destruction on an
unprecedented scale in their certain geographical regions, and
therefore probably causing great changes in the demographics of
Asia. For example, over much of
Central Asia speakers of
Iranian languages were replaced by
speakers of
Turkic languages.
The
eastern part of the Islamic world
experienced the terrifying holocaust of the Mongol invasions, which turned northern and
eastern Iran
into a
desert. Between 1220 and 1260, the total population of
Persia may have had dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result
of mass
extermination and
famine.
Before the Mongol invasion, Chinese dynasties reportedly had
approximately 120 million inhabitants; after the conquest was
completed in 1279, the 1300 census reported roughly 60 million
people. About half of the
Russian
population died during the
Mongol
invasion of Rus.
Historians estimate that up to half of
Hungary
's two million population at that time were victims
of the Mongol invasion of
Europe.
The Pope
Innocent IV’s envoy to the Mongol Khan,
who passed through Kiev
in February
1246, wrote:
"They [the Mongols] attacked Russia, where they
made great havoc, destroying cities and fortresses and slaughtering
men; and they laid siege to Kiev, the capital of Russia; after they
had besieged the city for a long time, they took it and put the
inhabitants to death.
When we were journeying through that land we came
across countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the
ground.
Kiev had been a very large and thickly populated
town, but now it has been reduced almost to nothing, for there are
at the present time scarce two hundred houses there and the
inhabitants are kept in complete slavery."
-
Timur’s conquests.
Timur
Lenk was a 14th century conqueror of much of Middle East and
Central Asia, and founder of the
Timurid
dynasty. He thought of himself as a
ghazi,
but his biggest wars were against
Muslim
states. In 1383, Timur started the military conquest of Persia.
He
captured Herat
, Khorasan
and all eastern Persia to 1385 and massacred almost all inhabitants
of Neishapur
and other Iranian cities. When revolts broke
out in Persia, he ruthlessly suppressed them, massacring the
populations of whole cities.
When Timur entered Delhi
(India), the
city was sacked, destroyed, and left in ruins. When Timur
conquered Persia, Iraq and Syria, the civilian population was
decimated.
In the city of Isfahan
he ordered the building of a pyramid of 70,000
human skulls, from those that his army had beheaded, and a pyramid
of some 20,000 skulls was erected outside the Aleppo
.
Timur
herded thousands of citizens of Damascus
into the Cathedral Mosque before setting it aflame,
and had 70,000 people beheaded in Tikrit
, and another
90,000 more in Baghdad
. After the capture of Bagdad, Timur ordered
that every soldier should return with at least two severed human
heads to show him (many
warriors were so
scared they killed prisoners captured earlier in the campaign just
to ensure they had heads to present to Timur).
Nestorian Christians east of
Iraq were almost entirely eliminated by Timur. As many as 17
million people may have died from his conquests.
-
Aztec human sacrifice.The
Aztecs sacrificed thousands of victims (often
slaves or
prisoners of
war) annually to the sun god
Huitzilopochtli; an offering to
Huitzilopochtli would be made to restore the blood he lost, as the
sun was engaged in a daily battle.
Human sacrifices would prevent the end of
the world that could happen on each cycle of 52 years. For the
re-consecration of Great Pyramid of
Tenochtitlan in 1487, the
Aztecs reported that they sacrificed about 80,400
people over the course of four days. According to Ross Hassing,
author of
Aztec Warfare, "between 10,000 and 80,400
persons" were sacrificed in the ceremony.
-
Vlad the Impaler.
Vlad the Impaler, also known as Vlad
Dracula, the 15th century ruler of
Wallachiain present-day Romania
, has been characterized as exceedingly
cruel. Impalement was his
preferred method of
torture and
execution. As expected, death by impalement was
slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days.
Impalement was Vlad's favourite method of torture but was by no
means his only one. The list of tortures he is alleged to have
employed is extensive: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs,
blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears,
mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women),
scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to animals, and
boiling alive. No one was immune to Vlad the Impaler's attentions.
His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords,
ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants.
In 1459, he had
30,000 of the Saxon merchants
and officials of the Transylvanian city
of Kronstadt
who were transgressing his authority
impaled. In 1462 Sultan
Mehmed the Conqueror, during his
campaign against Wallachia, was
“greeted”by the sight of veritable forest of stakes on which Vlad
the Impaler had impaled 20,000 Turkish prisoners. Dracula was
probably killed in battle against the
Ottoman Empire near Bucharest in December of
1476.
-
Thirty Years' War.The
Thirty Years' War was fought between 1618
and 1648, primarily on the territory of
Holy Roman Empire. Virtually all of the
major European powers were involved. The Thirty Years' War was the
most destructive conflict in Europe prior to
World War I. Atrocities and massacres, such as
Sack of Magdeburg, became standard
methods of warfare.
During the war, Germany
's population was reduced by 30% on average; in the
territory of Brandenburg
, the losses had amounted to half, while in some
areas an estimated two thirds of the population died.
Germany’s male population was reduced by almost half. The
population of the
Czech lands declined
by a third. The historian Lange claims
Swedish armies alone destroyed 2,000 castles,
18,000 villages and 1,500 towns in Germany, one-third of all German
towns.
-
Reconquest of Ireland.
It is estimated that
as much as a third of the entire population of Ireland
perished during the civil wars and subsequent
Cromwellian conquest in the mid-17th
century. Since the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Ireland had
been mainly under the control of the Irish Confederate
Catholics
. The
Cromwellian reconquest of
Ireland was extremely brutal, and it has been alleged that many
of the army's actions during the reconquest would
today be
called
war crimes or even genocide.
William Petty who conducted the first
scientific land and
demographic survey
of Ireland in the 1650s (the
Down
Survey), concluded that at least 400,000 people and maybe as
many as 620,000 had died in Ireland between 1641 and 1653, many as
a result of
famine and
plague. At the time, Ireland had around 1.5
million inhabitants.
-
The Deluge.During the 1640s and 1650s the
Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth was devastated by several conflicts, in which the
Commonwealth lost over a third of its populations (over 3 million
people).
First, the Chmielnicki Uprising when Bohdan Khmelnytsky's Cossacks massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles in the eastern and
southern areas he controlled (today's Ukraine
). It is recorded that Khmelnytsky told the
people that the Poles had sold them as
slaves "into the hands of the accursed Jews". It is
estimated that 100,000 Jews were massacred and 300 of their
communities destroyed.
The decrease of the Jewish population during
that period (referred to in Polish
history as
The Deluge) is estimated
at 100,000 to 200,000, which also includes emigration, deaths from
diseases and jasyr (captivity
in the Ottoman Empire).
-
Revolt in the Vendée.
Vendée
is remembered as the place where the peasants
revolted against the French
Revolutionary government in 1793. They resented the
changes imposed on the
Roman
Catholic Church by the
Civil Constitution of the
Clergy (1790) and broke into open revolt in defiance of the
Revolutionary government's military
conscription. This
guerrilla war became known as the
Revolt in the Vendée, led at the
outset by an underground faction called the
Chouans.
Initially the Vendée rebels gained the upper hand, so on August 1,
1793 the
Committee of Public
Safety ordered General
Jean-Baptiste Carrier to carry out a
pacification of the region. The Republican army was reinforced and
the Vendéan army was eventually defeated. The
Reign of Terror, seen elsewhere in France,
was extraordinarily brutal in the Vendée. There was a massacre of
6,000 Vendée prisoners, many of them women, after the battle of
Savenay. Subsequently, there was the drowning of 3,000 Vendée women
at Pont-au-Baux.
This was followed by 5,000 Vendée priests,
old men, women, and children killed by drowning at the Loire River
at Nantes
in what was
called the "national bath" - tied in groups in barges and then sunk
into the Loire. Under orders from Committee of Public Safety
in February 1794 the Republican forces launched their final
"pacification" (the
Vendée-Vengé or "'Vendée Avenged") -
twelve columns, the
colonnes
infernales ("infernal columns") under
Louis-Marie Turreau, were marched
through the Vendée, indiscriminately targeting not only the
remaining rebels and the people who had given them support, but the
innocent as well.
Beyond these massacres there were formal orders for forced
evacuation and '
scorched earth' -
farms were destroyed, crops and forests burned, and villages razed.
There were many reported atrocities and a campaign of mass killing
universally targeted at residents of the Vendée regardless of
combatant status, political affiliation, age or gender. Some
consider these acts to be the first modern
genocide. The campaign was ordered as such by the
Comité de Salut public:
"The committee has prepared measures that tend to
exterminate this rebellious race of Vendéeans, to make their abodes
disappear, to torch their forests, to cut their
crops."
The orders to Turreau were:
"Exterminate the brigands to the last man instead
of burning the farms, punish the fleeing ones and the cowards, and
crush that horrible Vendée. Combine the most assured means
to exterminate all of this race of brigands."
When the campaign dragged to an end in March 1796 the estimated
dead numbered between 117,000 and 500,000, of a population of
around 800,000.
-
Wahhabist conquests.
The Saudi
Wahabbist
sheiks were convinced that it was their religious
mission to wage holy war (jihad) against all other forms of
Islam. In 1801 and 1802, the Saudi Wahhabists
under Abdul Aziz ibn
Muhammad ibn Saud attacked and captured the holy Shia cities of Karbala
and Najaf
in Iraq
, massacred
the Shiites anddestroyed the tombs of the Shiite
Imam Husayn and
Ali bin Abu Talib.
In 1802 they occupied
Taif
where they massacred the population.
In 1803
and 1804 the Wahhabis captured Mecca
and Medina
. In
Mecca and Medina they destroyed monuments and various holy Muslim
sites and shrines, such as the shrine built over the tomb of
Fatima Zahra, the daughter of Muhammad,
and even intended to destroy the grave of the
Prophet Muhammad.
-
Taiping Rebellion.
During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) that
followed the secession of the Tàipíng Tiānguó (太平天國, Heavenly
Kingdom of Perfect Peace) from the Qing empire
both sides tried to deprive each other of the
resources to continue the war and it became standard practice to
destroy agricultural areas, butcher the population of cities and in
general exact a brutal price from captured enemy lands in order to
drastically weaken the opposition's war effort. This war
truly was total in that civilians on both sides participated to a
significant extent in the war effort and in that armies on both
sides waged war on the civilian population as well as military
forces. In total between 20 and 30 million died in the conflict
making it bloodier than the
World War I
or
Russian Civil War.
-
American Civil War.The
American Civil War, the deadliest in
American history, caused 620,000 soldier deaths and an undetermined
number of civilian casualties. Based on 1860 census figures, 8% of
all white males aged 13 to 43 died in the war, including 6% in the
North and an extraordinary 18% in the South.
General
Phillip Sheridan's
stripping of the Shenandoah Valley starting from September 21,
1864 and continuing for two weeks was considered "total war" in
that its purpose was to eliminate foodstuffs and supplies vital to
the South's war plans. Sheridan took the opportunity when he
realized opposing forces had become too weak to resist his army. In
another event in that conflict, Union
General Order No. 11 ordered the near-total
evacuation of three and a half counties in Missouri
, which were subsequently looted and burned.
U.S. Army General
William
Tecumseh Sherman's '
March
to the Sea' in November/December 1864 destroyed the resources
required for
the South
to make war. Sherman is considered one of the first military
commanders to deliberately and consciously use total war as a
military strategy. General
Ulysses
S. Grant and President
Abraham Lincoln initially opposed the plan
until Sherman convinced them of its necessity.
-
War of the Triple Alliance.
War of the Triple Alliance
(1864-1870) was the bloodiest conflict in the history of South
America, fought between Paraguay
and the allied countries of Argentina
, Brazil, and
Uruguay
. Paraguay’s prewar population of between one
and one-half million was reduced to about 221,000 in 1871, of which
only about 28,000 were men. Paraguay's dictator,
Francisco Solano López, is
widely regarded as being responsible for the war, which led to his
death. "Conquer or die" became the order of the day. Lopez ordered
thousands of executions in the military. In 1868, when the allies
were pressing him hard, he convinced himself that his Paraguayan
supporters had actually formed a conspiracy against his life.
Thereupon several hundred prominent Paraguayan citizens were seized
and executed by his order, including his brothers and
brothers-in-law, cabinet ministers, judges, prefects, military
officers, bishops and priests, and nine-tenths of the civil
officers, together with 500 foreigners, among them several members
of the diplomatic legations (the San Fernando massacres). The
bodies were dumped into mass graves.
-
Indian Wars.In his book
The Wild Frontier:
Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to
Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M.
Osborn sought to
tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually
become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the
frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from
atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and
7,193 people died from those perpetrated by settlers. Osborn
defines an atrocity as the
murder,
torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded,
and
prisoners.
The most reliable figures are derived from collated records of
strictly military engagements such as by Gregory Michno which
reveal 21,586 dead, wounded, and captured civilians and soldiers
for the period of 1850–90 alone. Other figures are derived from
extrapolations of rather cursory and unrelated government accounts
such as that by Russell Thornton who calculated that some 45,000
Indians and 19,000 whites were killed. This later rough estimate
includes women and children on both sides, since
noncombatants were often killed in frontier
massacres.
-
Second Boer War.
The English term "concentration camp" was first used to
describe camps operated by the British
in South Africa during
the Second Boer War
(1899–1902).
These had originally been set up as "refugee camps" by the Army for
families whose farms had been destroyed by the British under their
"
Scorched Earth" policy (sweeping the
country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the
guerrillas, including women and children,
and including destroying crops, burning down homesteads and farms,
poisoning wells, and salting fields) and thousands of Boers had
already been brought into them.
Kitchener
succeeded
Roberts as
commander-in-chief in South Africa in November 29, 1900 and in an
attempt to break the guerrilla campaign, initiated plans to "flush
out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a
sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly 'bag' of killed,
captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything
that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and
children... It was the clearance of civilians – uprooting a
whole nation – that would come to dominate the last phase of
the war." Following Kitchener's new policy, more camps were built
and converted to prisons and many tens of thousands more women and
children were forcibly moved to prevent the Boers from resupplying
at their homes.
By August 1901, 93,940
Boers were reported
to be in "camps of refuge". A report after the war concluded that
27,927 Boers (of whom 24,074 [50% of the Boer child population]
were children under 16) had died of
starvation,
disease and exposure in the concentration
camps. In all, about one in four (25%) of the Boer inmates, mostly
children, died.
-
Don Cossacks.
Following
the defeat of the White Army in Russian Civil War, a policy of decossackization
(Raskazachivaniye) took place on the surviving Cossacks and their homelands since they were viewed
as potential threat to the new Soviet
regime. That was the first example when Soviet leaders
decided to "eliminate, exterminate, and deport the population of a
whole territory". The Cossack homelands were often very fertile,
and during the
collectivisation
campaign many Cossacks shared the fate of
kulaks. The man-made
Holodomor famine of 1932-1933 hit the
Don and
Kuban
territory the hardest. According to historian Michael Kort, "During
1919 and 1920, out of a population of approximately 1.5 million
Don Cossacks, the
Bolshevik regime killed or
deported an
estimated 300,000 to 500,000".
-
Spanish Civil War.The number of casualties is
disputed; estimates generally suggest that between 500,000 and 1
million people were killed in the
Spanish Civil War. Over the years,
historians kept lowering the death figures and modern research
concludes that 500,000 deaths is the correct figure.
Atrocities during
the war were committed on both sides. At least 50,000 were
executed during the civil war.
Franco's victory was followed by tens of
thousands of
summary
executions.
In his recent, updated history of the Spanish Civil War,
Antony Beevor "reckons Franco's ensuing 'white
terror' claimed 200,000 lives. The '
red terror' had already killed 38,000."
Julius
Ruiz concludes that "although the figures remain disputed, a
minimum of 37,843 executions were carried out in the Republican
zone with a maximum of 150,000 executions (including 50,000 after
the war) in Nationalist Spain
."In
Checas de Madrid, César Vidal
comes to a nationwide total of 110,965 victims of Republican
repression; 11,705 people being killed in Madrid alone.
-
During World War II.–
Germany.
During
World War II, the holocaust
initiated by the German National Socialist party killed millions of
people:
Slavs,
Russians,
Ukrainians,
Belarusians,
Serbs,
and especially
Jews. After the end of
World War II, this genocide came to be known as
the
Holocaust.
Poles,
Jehovah's Witnesses,
Roma and
homosexuals
and anybody considered a threat to the
Nazi
party were rounded up and sent to
labour
camps,
death camps, or just killed
in their homes.
The Nazi
occupation of Poland resulted in
the death of one-fifth of the population, some 6 million people,
half of them Jewish. The Soviet Union
lost an estimated 27 million people during the war,
about half of all World War II
casualties. Of the 5.7 million Soviet
POWs captured by the Germans, 3.5 million had died while
in German captivity by the end of the war.
–
Japan.
Japanese
soldiers rounded up and killed millions of
civilians and prisoners of wars from surrounding nations,
especially from Korea
, China
, Philippines
and United
States during World War
II. At least 20 million Chinese died during the
Sino-Japanese War
(1937-1945).
Unit 731 was one example of wartime
atrocities committed on a civilian population during
World War II, where experiments were performed
on thousands of
Chinese civilians and
Allied prisoners of war.
The Rape of Nanking is another example
of atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers on a civilian
population. Many men were killed, while women of were raped and/or
killed.
The
Three Alls Policy (
Sankō
Sakusen) was a Japanese
scorched
earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three
alls being:
"Kill All, Burn All and Loot All". Initiated
in 1940 by
Ryūkichi Tanaka, the
Sankō Sakusen was implemented in full scale in 1942 in
north China by
Yasuji Okamura who divided the territory into
pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified areas. The approval of the
policy was given by Imperial Headquarters Army Order Number 575 on
3 December 1941.
Much of the controversy regarding Japan's role in World War II
revolves around the death rates of prisoners of war and civilians
under Japanese occupation. The historian
Chalmers Johnson has written that:
- It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two
Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was
the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans
killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians
[i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million
Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese
, Cambodians
, Indonesians
and Burmese
, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations
looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though
Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis.
Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as
forced labourers — and, in the
case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitute for front-line troops.
If
you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand
or Canada (but not
Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by
comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was
nearly 30%.
–
Soviet Union.
According to the historian
Norman
Naimark, the propaganda of Soviet troop newspapers and the
orders of Soviet high command were jointly responsible for excesses
by members of the Red Army. The general tenor in the writings was
that the
Red Army had come to Germany as an
avenger and judge to punish the Germans. On January 12, 1945 army
General
Cherniakhovsky turned to
his troops with the words:
There shall be no mercy — for
nobody, as there had also been no mercy for us... The land
of the fascists must become a desert ...
On the German side, any organized evacuation of civilians was
forbidden by the Nazi government to boost morale of the troops, now
for the first time defending the "Fatherland", even when the Red
Army entered German territory in the last months of 1944. It is
estimated that Soviet soldiers raped at least 2,000,000 German
women and girls, an estimated 200,000 of whom later died from
injuries sustained, committed suicide, or were murdered
outright.
-
Mao Zedong.
Mao’s first political
campaigns after founding the People’s Republic
were land reform and
the suppression of counter-revolutionaries, which centered on mass
executions, often before organized crowds. These campaigns
of mass repression targeted former
KMT
officials, businessmen, former employees of Western companies,
intellectuals whose loyalty was suspect, and significant numbers of
rural gentry. The U.S. State department in 1976 estimated that
there may have been a million killed in the land reform, 800,000
killed in the counterrevolutionary campaign. Mao himself claimed a
total of 700,000 killed during these early years (1949–53).
However, because there was a policy to select "at least one
landlord, and usually several, in virtually every village for
public execution", 1 million deaths seems to be an absolute
minimum, and many authors agree on a figure of between 2 million
and 5 million dead. In addition, at least 1.5 million people were
sent to "reform through labour" camps (
laogai). Mao’s personal role in ordering mass
executions is undeniable. He defended these killings as necessary
for the securing of power.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions,
perished in the violence of the
Cultural Revolution. When Mao was
informed of such losses, particularly that people had been driven
to suicide, he responded: "People who try to commit suicide —
don't attempt to save them! ... China is such a populous nation, it
is not as if we cannot do without a few people."
-
Vietnam War.
According to the Vietnamese government, 1,100,000 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong military personnel and 2,000,000
Vietnamese civilians on both sides died in the conflict.
Estimates of civilian deaths caused by American bombing in
Operation Rolling Thunder range
from 52,000 to 182,000.
347 to
504 Vietnam civilians were killed by US soldiers on 16 March, 1968,
in the My
Lai
area of South Vietnam. See My Lai
Massacre
.
2,800 to 6,000 civilians were executed by the Viet Cong in the city
of
Hue during the
Tet
Offensive. See
Hue Massacre.
-
Equatorial Guinea.
In September 1968,
Francisco Macías Nguema
was elected first president of Equatorial Guinea
, and independence was granted in October. In
July 1970, Nguema created a single-party state. In 1972 Nguema took
complete control of the government and assumed the title of
President for Life. Nguema’s
regime was characterized by abandonment of all government functions
except internal security, which was accomplished by terror; he
acted as chief judge who sentenced thousands to death. This led to
the death or exile of up to 1/3 of the country's population. Out of
a population of 300,000, an estimated 80,000 had been killed.
Uneasy around educated people, he had killed everyone who wore
spectacles. All schools were ordered closed in 1975. The economy
collapsed, and skilled citizens and foreigners left.
-
Idi Amin Dada.
Idi Amin,
dictator of
Uganda from 1971 to 1979, is
notorious for being one ofthe bloodiest dictators of the 20th
century. The exact number of people killed is unknown. The
International Commission of
Jurists estimated the death toll at no fewer than 80,000 and
more likely around 300,000. An estimate compiled by exile
organizations with the help of
Amnesty International puts the number
killed at 500,000. The victims soon came to include members of
other
ethnic groups, religious
leaders, journalists, senior bureaucrats, judges, lawyers, students
and intellectuals, criminal suspects, and foreign nationals. In
some cases entire villages were wiped out.
Bodies were dumped
into the River Nile, on at least one occasion
in quantities sufficient to clog the Owen Falls
Hydro-Electric Dam
in Jinja.
-
Ethiopia.During
Mengistu’s 17-year reign it was not
uncommon to see students, suspected government critics or rebel
sympathisers hanging from lampposts each morning. Mengistu himself
is alleged to have murdered opponents by garroting or shooting
them, saying that he was leading by example. Some experts have
estimated that 150,000 university students, intellectuals and
politicians were killed during Mengistu's rule.
Amnesty International estimates that
up to 500,000 people were killed during the
Red Terror of 1977 and 1978. On 12
December 2006
Mengistu Haile
Mariam was found guilty of genocide and other offences. He was
sentenced to life in prison in January 2007.
-
Western New Guinea.
Amnesty International has estimated
that more than 100,000 Papuans,
one-sixth of the population, have died as a result of
government-sponsored violence against West Papuans
, while others had previously specified much higher
death tolls. In 2004 the Yale University Law School
published "
Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua:
Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian
Control", a 75 page report detailing the applicability of
Indonesian control to each of the genocide conventions.
-
Algerian Civil War.During the
Algerian Civil War of the 1990s, a
variety of
massacres occurred.
The
massacres peaked in 1997 (with a smaller peak in 1994), and were
particularly concentrated in the areas between Algiers
and Oran
, with very
few occurring in the east or in the Sahara. An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people
lost their lives during the conflict.
Starting around April 1997 (the
Thalit
massacre), Algeria was wracked by massacres of intense
brutality and unprecedented size; previous massacres had occurred
in the conflict, but always on a substantially smaller scale.
Typically targeting entire villages or neighborhoods and
disregarding the age and sex of victims, the
Armed Islamic Group guerrillas killed
tens, and sometimes hundreds, of civilians at a time. These
massacres continued through the end of 1998, changing the nature of
the political situation considerably. The areas south and east of
Algiers were hit particularly hard; the
Rais and
Bentalha
massacres in particular shocked worldwide observers. Pregnant
women were sliced open, children were hacked to pieces or dashed
against walls, men's limbs were hacked off one by one, and, as the
attackers retreated, they would kidnap young women to keep as sex
slaves. This quotation by Nesroullah Yous, a survivor of Bentalha,
expresses the apparent mood of the attackers:
- "We have the whole night to rape your women and children, drink
your blood. Even if you escape today, we'll come back tomorrow to
finish you off! We're here to send you to your God!"
The
GIA's responsibility for
these massacres is undisputed; it claimed credit for both Rais and
Bentalha (calling the killings an "offering to God" and the victims
"impious" supporters of tyrants in a press release), and its policy
of massacring civilians was cited by the
Salafist Group for
Preaching and Combat as one of the main reasons it split off
from the GIA. At this stage, it had apparently adopted a
takfirist ideology, believing that
practically all Algerians not actively fighting the government were
corrupt to the point of being
kafirs,
and could be killed righteously with impunity; an unconfirmed
communiqué by Zouabri had stated that "except for those who are
with us, all others are apostates and deserving of death."
-
Second Congo War.The
Second Congo War, also known as
Africa's World War, began in 1998. The largest war in
modern
African history, one of the
deadliest conflicts since
World War II,
it directly involved eight
African nations,
as well as about 25 armed groups. Nearly 5 million people have
died. A
U.N. human rights expert reported in
July 2007 that sexual atrocities against Congolese women go 'far
beyond rape' and include
sexual
slavery, forced
incest, and
cannibalism.
In 2003, Sinafasi Makelo, a representative of
Mbuti Pygmies, told the UN's
Indigenous People's Forum that during the
Congo Civil War, his people were hunted
down and eaten as though they were game animals. Both sides of the
war regarded them as "subhuman." Makelo asked the
UN Security Council to recognise
cannibalism as a crime against humanity
and an act of
genocide.
See also
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- Cossacks history
- Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartošek, Jean-Louis Panné, Jean-Louis
Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stéphane Courtois,
The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard
University Press, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN
0-674-07608-7
- Soviet order to exterminate Cossacks is
unearthed
- Kort, Michael (2001). The Soviet Colosus: History and
Aftermath, p. 133. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. ISBN
0-7656-0396-9.
- Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (2001), pp. xviii
& 899–901, inclusive.
- Spain: Repression under Franco after the Civil
War
- Spain poised to seek the graves of Franco's
disappeared
- Spain torn on tribute to victims of Franco
- A revelatory account of the Spanish civil
war
- Spanish Civil War: Casualties
- "Men of La Mancha". Rev. of Antony Beevor,
The Battle for Spain. The Economist (June 22,
2006).
- A Week in Books
- Julius Ruiz, "Defending the Republic: The García Atadell Brigade in
Madrid, 1936". Journal of Contemporary History 42.1
(2007):97.
- International justice begins at home by Carlos Alberto
Montaner, Miami
Herald, August 4, 2003
- Leaders mourn Soviet wartime dead
- Massacres and Atrocities of WWII in Eastern
Europe
- Soviet Prisoners of War: Forgotten Nazi Victims of
World War II
- Rummel, R.J. Statistics of Democide:
Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900 Chapter 3. LIT Verlag
Münster-Hamburg-Berlin-Wien-London-Zürich (1999)
- Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against
Japan
- Remember role in ending fascist war
- Chinese city remembers Japanese 'Rape of
Nanjing'
- Johnson, Looting of Asia, [6]
- Norman M.
Naimark Cambridge: Belknap, 1995 ISBN 0-674-78405-7
- Antony
Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books,
2002, ISBN 0-670-88695-5
- Richard Overy, Russia's War: Blood upon the Snow (1997), ISBN
1-57500-051-2
- 'They raped every German female from eight to 80'
- Red Army troops raped even Russian women as they
freed them from camps
- China Misperceived: American Illusions and Chinese
Reality by Steven W. Mosher, pp 72, 73
- Deaths in China Due to Communism by Stephen Rosskamm
Shalom, pg 24
- Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday,
pg 337: "Mao claimed that the total number executed was
700,000, but this did not include those beaten or tortured to death
in the post-1949 land reform, which would at the very least be as
many again. Then there were suicides, which, based on several local
inquiries, were very probably about equal to the number of those
killed." Also cited in Mao Zedong, by Jonathan Spence, as
cited here.
- The Black Book of Communism:
Crimes, Terror, Repression by Stephane Courtois, et al;
China: A Long March into Night by Jean-Louis Margolin, pg
479
- Estimates, sources and calculations from
R.J. Rummel’s
China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since
1900 (See lines 1 through 90)
- Commentary transferred to Huang Jing regarding the
supplementary plan to suppress counterrevolutionaries in
Tianjin
- Mao's "Killing Quotas" by Li Changyu. Human
Rights in China (HRIC). September 26, 2005, at Shandong
University
- Terrible Honeymoon: Struggling with the Problem
of Terror in Early 1950s China by Jeremy Brown
- MacFarquhar, Roderick and Schoenhals,
Michael. Mao's Last Revolution. Harvard
University Press, 2006. p. 110 ISBN 0674023323
- 20 Years After Victory, April 1995, Folder 14, Box 24, Douglas
Pike Collection: Unit 06 - Democratic Republic of Vietnam, The
Vietnam Archive, Texas Tech University.[7]
- http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB6.1A.GIF
- Battlefield:Vietnam | Timeline
- Francisco Macias Nguema
- Coup plotter faces life in Africa's most notorious
jail
- True hell on earth: Simon Mann faces imprisonment
in the cruellest jail on the planet
- If you think this one's bad you should have seen
his uncle
- 2003: 'War criminal' Idi Amin dies
- Idi Amin
- Idi Amin killer file
- Idi Amin: 'Butcher of Uganda', CNN,
August 16, 2003
- Guilty of genocide: the leader who unleashed a 'Red
Terror' on Africa by Jonathan Clayton, The Times Online, December 13, 2006
- 'Butcher of Addis Ababa' is guilty of genocide with
torture regime
- Zimbabwe won't extradite former Ethiopian
dictator
- Ethiopian Dictator Sentenced to Prison by Les
Neuhaus, The Associated Press, January 11,
2007
- Report claims secret genocide in Indonesia -
University of Sydney
- West Papua Support
- Indonesian Human Rights Abuses in West Papua:
Application of the Law of Genocide to the History of Indonesian
Control (PDF)
- Attacks raise spectre of civil war
- Journalists in Algeria are caught in middle
- El Watan,
21 January (quoted in Willis 1996)
- Inside Congo, An Unspeakable Toll
- Conflict in Congo has killed 4.7m, charity
says
- Congo crisis is deadliest since Second World
War
- Congo's Sexual Violence Goes 'Far Beyond Rape',
July 31, 2007. The Washington Post.
- DR Congo pygmies 'exterminated'
- DR Congo Pygmies appeal to UN
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