DEATH BY GOVERNMENT Chapter 3

Pre-Twentieth Century Democide *

By R.J. Rummel







Agamemnon: "My dear Menelaus, why are you so chary of taking men's lives? Did the Trojans treat you as handsomely as that when they stayed in your house? No; we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mothers' wombs--not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped out of existence, and none be left to think of them and shed a tear."

----Homer, Iliad

The mass murder of their own citizens or those under their protection or control by emperors, kings, sultans, khans, presidents, governors, generals, and other such rulers is very much part of our history. In ancient times captured cities or towns would be pillaged and their inhabitants massacred; whole lands would be turned into regions of ruins and skeletons. Even the Hebrews, according the Bible, put to the sword those they conquered. It was the Assyrians, however, whose reputation for such savagery would be transmitted down the ages. They would reward their soldiers for every severed head they brought in from the field, whether enemy fighters or not. They would decapitate or club to death captured soldiers; they would slice off the ears, noses, hands and feet of nobles, throw them from high towers, flay them and their children to death, or roast them over a slow fire. Consider what one historian writes about the capture of Damascus by King Sargon of Assyria.





Sargon had the defeated king of Damascus burned alive before his eyes. The wives and daughters of the captured king were destined for the Assyrian harems and those who were not of noble blood were condemned to slavery. Meanwhile the soldiery had been massacring the population, and brought the heads of their victims into the king's presence, where they were counted up by the scribes. Not all the male prisoners were put to death, for the boys and craftsmen were led into captivity, where they would be assigned to the hardest tasks on the royal building projects, where the swamps which cover so much of Mesopotamia must have caused an enormously high rate of mortality. The remainder of the population were uprooted and sent to the other end of the Empire. . . . 1

But such barbarity not only happened in classical times. After the capture of Bram in 1210, the Albigensian Crusaders, Christians all, took 100 of the captured soldiers and gouged out their eyes, cut off their noses and upper lips, and had them led by a one-eyed man to Cabaret, yet to be attacked. 2 This to terrorize Cabaret into immediate surrender.

Genocide, massacre, and human slaughter; pillage, rape, and torture have been much more common than war and revolution. But historians do not dwell on such events. And even if they do, they very rarely attach numbers to them. They prefer the glamour of war, of diplomacy, of the clash of nations and personalities. So in revenge for an arrow from Nishapur's walls that killed Jinghiz Khan's son-in-law in 1221, when the city was finally captured the Mongol Tolui massacred its unarmed inhabitants. 3 So this ancient capital of Khorassan in Persia was then a "scene of a carnival of blood scarcely surpassed even in Mongol annals. . . . Separate piles of heads of men, women, and children were built into pyramids; and even cats and dogs were killed in the streets." 4 So an utterly fantastic 1,747,000 human beings reportedly were slaughtered, a number exceeding the contemporary population of Hawaii, Rhode Island, or New Hampshire; a number that is around a third of the total Jews murdered by Hitler. 5 This possible world record massacre is only a fugitive datum, unrecorded in most histories. It is the magnificence of Jinghiz Khan, the court intrigues, the great Mongol conquests and their eventual threat to Europe that is drama. And while some other great massacres, such as those of the Crusaders, do get some attention, it is only as a small part of the larger doings of kings, dukes, and sultans. It is hard for Western historians to ignore, for example, the alleged 40,000 to possibly even over 70,000 men, women, and children that were butchered after the Christian Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099. 6 Yet I know of no study that focuses on this massacre by itself; or even a chapter in a book.

Surely one may point out that such killings were then the stuff of war and thus not of interest apart from war, no more than is a particular bloody battle. But some battles have been the focus of much historical interest. Who has not read in detail about the battle of Thermopylae pass in 480 B.C., where a small Greek force held out to the last man for three days against an invading Persian army. In truth, massacres are simply not of great interest. They are horrible, despicable, loathsome acts of the state or its agents. They are outright mass murder. And, apparently say the historians, it is best not to dwell on them.

Those cases of mass murder for which historians do estimate the toll are only a small number of those mentioned in the literature. Historians will note, for example, that "40 cities and towns were sacked and all inhabitants massacred in the conquest," or "the city was finally taken and all killed;" or being specifically unspecific: "The scene of desolation that must have presented itself in the northern borderland of Persia at this time is terrible. From the banks of the Oxus to Asterabad every town of any importance was reduced to ruins, and its inhabitants slaughtered by the Mongols." 7

There are other cases of mass killing that are beyond belief, but for which specific numbers are unrecorded. For example, it is written that in the 12th and 13th centuries the Sultan of Delhi, Kutb-d Din Aibak, slaughtered his subjects by the hundreds of thousands, 8 which at least gives us an order of magnitude. But one can only guess at the many thousands murdered by Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak, who, according to a Moslem historian, slaughtered Hindus such that "there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were wearied out by their work of dragging" the poor souls "and putting them to death in crowds." 9 Then there was the world-wide, day-by-day, democide. Without any historical notice, people must have been murdered in small groups, put in prisons and dungeons to waste sway, slaughtered by whole families in the countryside. In the full run of written human history, individual farmers or common folk running athwart officials, knights, samurai, nobles, soldiers, and the like, on the roads or in the towns, were simply decapitated, run through, or raped and killed, surely to total millions over the centuries.

In any case, we can make note of the various institutions, revolutions, wars, empires, states, and social patterns through or by which people have been murdered en masse. One such is slavery. Until modern times slavery was almost universal, and in most parts of the world the slave's life was wholly dependent upon the master. But even before being sold, millions of people were killed while being pressed into legal slavery--during slave raids, transportation on slave ships and in overland convoys--or they died from associated deprivation and disease. In the 16th to 19th centuries alone the death toll among African slaves being transported to the New World may have been over 1,500,000, 10 possibly 2,000,000 11 ; millions more died in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East. And just among those kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died. 12 Overall, in five centuries, Europeans, Arabs, Asians, and African slave traders, possibly murdered near 17,000,000 Africans; perhaps even over 65,000,000. 13 I am sure that this total only partly excavates such cold-blooded, government approved or committed, bloodletting known as slavery.

But slavery was just one of many historical institutions through which people were murdered en mass. Another was the massacre. The most noted of these have been committed by armies during crusades, war, or conquest. It was not rare for armies to butcher tens of thousands of unarmed men, women, and children in captured towns and the neighboring countryside. In this the Mongol armies have had no peers. I mentioned the 1,747,000 people possibly killed in Nishapur. In 1219 Jinghiz Kahn's army captured Bokhara and allegedly murdered 30,000; and another 30,000 people in capturing Samarkand. 14 In 1221 a Mongol army seized Merv and reportedly took 13 days to slaughter 1,300,000 inhabitants 15 Historians also record that in 1220 the Mongols killed 50,000 in Kazvin after it was captured; 16 70,000 in Nessa, and a similar number in Sebzevar. 17

It is written that in 1221, the Mongol Tului slew 700,000 to 1,300,000 people in Meru Chahjan, one of the four main cities of Khorassan in the Northern borderland of Persia. Upon capture the inhabitants were made to evacuate the city, a four-day task. Then they were distributed among the Mongols and massacred. It took 13 days to count corpses. Among those who hid from the massacre, 5,000 were killed by Mongol detachments when they later emerged. 18

Also, the entire population of Rayy, a city with 3,000 mosques, was slaughtered. 19 Herat was later captured, but only some 12,000 soldiers and their dependents were killed. However, after the inhabitants later rebelled Jinghiz Khan angrily sent his general Noyan against them. The city was recaptured and it took a whole week to burn it down and murder its estimated 1,600,000 people. Many thousands escaped, but Noyan later sought and killed over 2,000 of them. 20 Then in 1226-33 there was the nearly total extermination--truly a genocide--of the Tanguts and their kingdom of Hsi-Hsia in China (in the province of Kansu). The Tanguts would not supply horses or auxiliaries for Jinghiz Khan's war against Khwarizmian. This was insolence that could not be tolerated. After winning the war he then turned with vengeance on the Tanguts. But as the campaign began he was thrown from his horse and seriously injured. Even then he would not stop the campaign, pledging that even "If it means my death I will exterminate them!"21 At his command and with sheer slaughter as its ultimate goal, the Tanguts were defeated in one battle after another and pursued. According to a Mongol Bard, "To escape the Mongol sword, the inhabitants in vain hid in the mountains . . . or, if that were not possible, in caves. Scarcely one or two in a hundred succeeded. The Fields were covered with human bones." 22 Upon finally defeating the Tangut chief and driving him into the mountains, the bard continues, Jinghiz Khan





seized from him his tents, his treasure-laden camels, all his people, till all this was scattered as so much ash. Tanguts of an age to bear arms he had slaughtered, the lords being first to die . . . . As to the rest, he left these orders for his soldiers As many Tanguts as you can take are yours to do as you please with. 23

When in 1233 the last Tangut capital, Ning-hsia, fell to the Mongols, as willed by the dying Jinghiz before his death, all defenders were killed to the last generation. "The Conqueror of the world had for his funeral rites the massacre of an entire people." 24

The Mongols subsequently invaded what is Iraq and in 1258 the Mongol Khulagu captured Baghdad, sacked and burned the city, including most mosques, and reportedly annihilated 800,000 of its people. 25 For good reason, as all this horrible killing of helpless people shows, the Mongols have become justly known for their bloody conquests and disregard of life. As the historian of the Mongols, J. J. Saunders, points out, there was





something indescribably revolting in the cold savagery with which the Mongols carried out their massacres. The inhabitants of a doomed town were obliged to assemble in a plain outside the walls, and each Mongol trooper, armed with battle-axe, was told to kill so many people, ten, twenty or fifty. As proof that orders had been properly obeyed, the killers were sometimes required to cut off an ear from each victim, collect the ears in sacks, and bring them to their officers to be counted. A few days after the massacre, troops were sent back into the ruined city to search for any poor wretches who might be hiding in holes or cellars; these were dragged out and slain. 26

Such horrible mass murder was part of their strategy. They wanted to so terrorize those in their path of conquest that cities and nations would immediately surrender when the first armed Mongols were seen in the distance. Better to bow and acknowledge a new lord than chance fighting, losing, and everyone dying.

Even well over a century after Jinghiz Khan's death, the Mongols still were engaged in conquest, spreading destruction and death from one part of Asia to another. Tamerlane (or Timur Lenk), a Turk who proclaimed himself restorer of the Mongol Empire,





razed Isfarã'in to the ground in A.D. 1381; built 2,000 prisoners into a living mound and then bricked them over at Sabsaw‹r in 1383; piled 5,000 human heads into minarets at Zirih in the same year; cast his Luri prisoners alive over precipices in 1386; massacred 70,000 people and piled the heads of the slain into minarets at Isfahan in 1387; . . . buried alive 4,000 Christian soldiers of the garrison of Sivas after their capitulation in 1400; and built twenty towers of skulls in Syria in 1400 and 1401. 27

As best I can figure from such accounts, and recognizing that at best they all are the roughest approximations, the Mongol khans and their successors and pretenders possibly slaughtered around 30,000,000 Persian, Arab, Hindu, Russian, Chinese, European, and other men, women, and children. 28 As incredible as this huge estimate seems, that it gives some indication of the sheer human cost of Mongol conquest can be inferred just from Khubilai Khan's rule over China. According to a Chinese writer, "in gaining and maintaining his throne he slaughtered more than 18,470,000 Chinese. 29 Given the contemporary Mongol census of almost 58,834,711 people, 30 then from 1252 when Khubilai was granted full power over the Eastern Mongol Empire through his conquest of all of China in 1279 and to his death in 1294--for two generations--he killed something like 1 out of every 137 Chinese each year. Even if the figures are highly exaggerated, which is probable, and he annually killed 1 out of 1,000, the inhumane barbarity would be no less.

While the Mongol Khans may have established an historical record for individual massacres, surely various Chinese Emperors were in their league. Observe the bacchanalia of blood by Chang Hsien-chung when, near the end of the Ming Dynasty in 1644, he conquered Szechwan province and in Chengtu declared himself emperor of the Great Western Kingdom. The Chinese chronicles say that when the scholars rejected his imperial claim he immediately had them all massacred. Then he set about destroying all the merchants, then all the women and all the officials. Finally he ordered his own soldiers to kill each other. He ordered the feet of the officers' wives to be cut off and made a mound of-them, and at the top of the mound he placed the feet of his favorite concubines. For some reason he was obsessed with ears and feet, and since it was too much trouble to bring the bodies of the villagers who lived in remote outlying districts to Chengtu, he ordered his private guards to bring him their ears and feet, and he carefully counted them. When the massacre was over, he ordered that there should be placed in a prominent position in Chengtu an inscription carved in stone, reading:





Heaven brings forth innumerable things to help man.

Man has nothing with which to recompense Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. 31

Even the great emperor who unified China and gave it his name, Qin (pronounced Chin) Shihuang, buried alive 346 scholars in order to discourage opposition. 32 Burying people alive seems to have been a favorite murder weapon of Chinese rulers and emperors. For example, when the ruler of the Wei kingdom (Zaozao) conquered Xuzhou, "he buried alive several dozens thousands civilians." 33

As one Chinese dynasty was taken over from another their was a tremendous loss of life from war, mass murder, and associated hardship, famine, and disease. This can be seen from the resulting steep declines in population--really demographic catastrophes, proportionally akin to that which took place in Cambodia in 1975-1979 with the takeover by the bloody Khmer Rouge. Consider that





in the eight years that the Han Dynasty was being replaced by the Qin Dynasty 221-207B.C., the population of China decreased from 20 million to 10 million.

. . . .

In the Dong (Eastern) Han Dynasty 206B.C.-220A.D., the population of China was 50 million. After the transition of power to the Three Kingdom period 222-589, the population decreased to 7 million.

. . . .

In the Sui Dynasty 581-618, the population of China was 50 million. After the transfer of power to the Tang Dynasty 618-907, only one third was left.

. . . .

At the peak of the Song Dynasty 960-1279 the population was about 100 million. But in the beginning of the Qing Dynasty in 1655, the population was 14,033,900. During the 20 year period from 1626 to 1655, the population decreased from 51,655,459 to 14,033,900. 34

Some sense for the pure slaughter underlying these population collapses can be had from more recent massacres. For example, just in the one month of 1681, for just the Triad Rebellion, in merely the one province of Kwangtung, with the rebellions defeat "some 700,000 people were executed." Eventually the province was almost depopulated. 35

The sanctity of life was no greater nearer our time. During the last century in over some fifteen years the Teiping Rebellion possibly cost "tens of millions" of lives, 36 maybe even as many as 40,000,000. 37 Some 600 cities were "ruined." 38 Because the rebellion began in the province of Kwangsi, Imperial forces allowed no rebels speaking its dialect to surrender. All were slaughtered. 39 Indeed, massacre on both sides during this and the almost concurrent Nein Rebellion was general. For one county in the province of Anhwei, for example, local scholars lamented that out of a population of 300,000 Chinese, "By the time the rebels were cleared only a little over 6,000 survived. This is a catastrophe unique for the locality since the beginning of the human race." 40 Overall, 70 percent of the province's population were killed or died. 41

When the Taiping rebels captured Nanking in 1853 they killed all the Tartars garrisoning the city. But this was not enough. They also murdered all their family members. In total about 25,000 people may have been wiped out. 42 When imperial troops recaptured Nanking the following year they in turn allegedly exterminated about 100,000 rebels, and in just three days. 43 They followed the same quick and bloody policy in Canton and along the Pearl River. After they recaptured this area from the rebels they are said to have beheaded 700 to 800 inhabitants a day, whether rebel collaborator or not, ultimately killing another 100,000 people. Just in the province of Kwangtung, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed. 44 In one province, reportedly 1,000,000 were executed! This is more than the total number of Americans killed in all the civil and international wars the United States has fought in its whole history, including the War of Independence.

But there is more. There also was the nearly concurrent Moslem uprisings with their attendant slaughter. For the province of Yunnan 5,000,000 out of 8,000,000 may have died. When the last Muslim stronghold fell to imperial forces, 20,000 men, women, and children were "put to the sword." 45 In Shensi province population fell from 700,000 or 800,000 Moslems to between 20,000 and 30,000 in ten years. Even most of the 50,000 to 60,000 Moslems that fled to Kansu province perished. All told still a much larger number of Chinese were massacred by Moslem rebels or otherwise died. 46

The number of Chinese and their subjects so murdered down through the centuries must be in the tens of millions, even excluding the Mongol carnage. Putting together population crashes and massacre estimates, I guess that roughly around 34,000,000 Chinese and their subjects were killed in cold blood. It is not inconceivable that this historical democide might even exceed 90,000,000 dead. 47

In massacre and generalized killing, other nations made their own very bloody contributions to our history. When the Ottoman Mohammed II sieged and finally took Constantinople in 1452, he massacred thousands. 48 Sixteen Century Sultan Selum (The Grim), father of SŸleyman whose campaign diary was quoted above, killed his father, two brothers, many nephews, sixty-two other relatives, and seven grand viziers during his eight year rule. It is told that he inaugurated this bloody reign by slaughtering 40,000 Turkish Shi'ites. 49

In destroying whole populations and in the pursuit and accomplishment of mass murder, Europeans were no better. In 1527 the army of Tirolese condottiere Frunsberg and Charles, Duke of Bourbin, captured and sacked Rome. Historians record that at a minimum 2,000 corpses were thrown into the Tiber river and 9,800 dead were buried; 50 many more were killed. During the Thirty Years War the Count of Tilly and Count zu Pappenheim may have massacred as many as 30,000 inhabitants of Magdeburg when the city fell to them after a six-month siege. 51 Magdeburg was only one of numerous massacres of this very destructive war. But probably more common folk died when towns and farms in the path of invading or marauding armies were pillaged and families killed. Moreover, many died from famine and disease caused by passing armies. The German Empire alone may have lost more than 7,500,000 people in the war, 52 most doubtless perishing from such causes. The population of Bohemia was been reduced from around 4,000,000 people to possibly no more than 800,000. 53 Putting a number of such figures together I estimate that in this war alone from 2,000,000 to over 11,000,000 people were probably murdered. 54 That aside from combat and nondemocidal famine and disease. 55

And the Crusades of the Middle Ages should not be ignored. In the aforementioned 1099 sack of Jerusalem, besides the 40,000 to over 70,000 Moslems that may have been butchered, the Crusaders herded surviving Jews into a synagogue and burned them alive. 56 Interestingly, in light of the Mongol and Chinese hecatombs, this massacre of unarmed Moslems and Jews "has long been reckoned among the greatest crimes of history." 57 In 1209 the Albigensian Crusaders also slaughtered some 15,000 to 60,000 inhabitants of B�ziers, after which the city was plundered and burned. 58 And in 1236 when the Jews of Anjou and Poitou refused to be forcibly baptized, the Crusaders reportedly trampled 3,000 of them to death with their horses. 59

That such killing is done by armies during war, crusades, or conquest should not mitigate the responsibility of governments. Often the heads of governments have led their armies; generals have sometimes been rewarded for their bloody deeds, and in any case, not punished. Governments generally accepted the fruits of their military victories, not excluding the riches of wealthy cities that were sacked, no matter the human cost in innocent lives. That such killing was traditional or customary, or served a military purpose (removing an enemy population from the rear; creating terror and fear among populations in the line of advance), or gave incentive to the troops (rape and booty in the offing), or enriched the state, should not lessen in our eyes the monstrous immorality of this killing.

Besides the siege-take-and-massacre during war or conquest, there is that generalized murder in or after rebellions or revolutions. Here the responsibility of government is more direct. We have already seen much of this in the Teiping and Moslem rebellions in China. History is full of other examples, such as the 1876 Bulgarian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire that was brutally suppressed by the Sultan: about 60 villages were destroyed, and 12,000 to 15,000 massacred. In one reported incident, a church was set ablaze to burn alive the 1,200 people who had gathered inside for protection. 60 From 1567 to 1573, the Duke of Alba (representative to the Low Countries of Philip II, King of Spain) tortured to death and otherwise killed 18,000 Protestants to maintain order, or so it is said. 61

One of the best publicized historical democides is that of the Great Terror of 1793-1794 in revolutionary France. The Revolutionary Tribunal and its equivalent in the provinces may have executed up to 20,000 of the nobility, political opponents, and alleged traitors. 62 And although often reported as a civil war, in fact a full-scale genocide was carried out in the Vend�e in which possibly 117,000 inhabitants were indiscriminately murdered. 63

A particular kind of massacre is that of scapegoats for major human disasters. The presence of Jews in Christian Europe has always provided an easy explanation for catastrophes like the plague. "Why are people getting sick and dying on mass? Because the Jews are poisoning the water." Jews everywhere were thus attacked during the Black Death of 1347-1352 that killed around 25,000,000 Europeans. Jews were massacred wholesale. For example, in Mainz, Germany, 6,000 were recorded killed; in Erfurt 3,000 died. "By the end of the plague, few Jews were left in Germany or the Low Countries." 64

As already shown, mass murder is not confined to legitimate governments and their agents. Rebellious groups or nations sometimes succeed in forming a temporary government and as did the Teiping rebels use their power to slaughter civilians and massacre suspected opponents. Although hardly significant in its scope, to an American one of the more interesting of these is the Mountain Meadows Massacre by the Mormons. To escape persecution by Gentiles, the Mormons had fled west to the Utah Territory and succeeded in turning it into a de facto, independently governed theocracy. Seeking revenge for past wrongs done them by Gentiles and in a declared state of war against the federal government, church leaders assembled Indian "confederates" to set up an ambush at Mountain Meadows of a passing wagon train of twenty to twenty-five prosperous immigrant families. During the resulting battle, Mormon militia appeared, ostensibly to save the train from the Indians, but after disarming the defenders by a ruse they slaughtered 121 men, women, and children (some escaped to tell the tale). 65

Then there are the colonial "peace-keeping" massacres of tribes or primitive groups engaged in raiding or limited tribal warfare. One example is an 1849 expedition sent out against certain native tribes of the coast of Borneo. Under the direction of Sir James Brooke, British Rajah of Sarawak, it annihilated a force of Dyaks then allegedly returning from a piratical excursion against coastal tribes. About 1,500 to 2,000 of them were killed by cannon shot, musket, grapeshot. This was simply a wanton massacre of a native tribe engaged in traditional limited, native warfare. 66

Sometimes natives or offending groups were simply killed. An extraordinary case of this was the Dutch orchestration of the massacre of the Chinese in Jakarta (then Batavia). The Dutch first had the Chinese confined





inside the walls of Batavia, stripping them of the smallest kitchen knife and putting them under a dusk-to-dawn curfew. The Dutch then distributed arms to what they themselves called "the low-class masses" and gave these "mobs" a free hand to massacre the helpless Chinese. The rapine inside Batavia was allowed to go on from the 9th to the 22nd of October, 1740. While the "mobs" were despatching Chinese lives inside Batavia, the Dutch East India Company troops killed those who had fled from the city before the curfew and roamed in Batavia's environs. At the end of the "Grand Guignol" inside Batavia, most sources agree, 10,000 city-Chinese lost their lives, but little is said about the many more who must have perished outside the city's walls. Of the 80,000-odd Chinese in Batavia's environs prior to the extermination only around 3,000 survived. . . . Finally, it is notable that the Dutch declared an open season on the Chinese all over Java. Governor General Valckenier mentioned that in June 1741 the Council of the Indies voted for a "general massacre of the Chinese over the whole of Java." Thus, 6 months after the first slaughter, a rerun took place in Semarang (Central Java). Likewise, "in other parts of Java the violence continued . . . where i.a. the Chinese of Soerabaia and Grisee East Java were also massacred." 67

Not to be overlooked is that democide associated with the clash of civilizations and in particularly the European conquest of the Americas. There is no ambiguity about the outright massacres that occurred, such as the Puritan killing of 500-600 Pequot Indians at Mystic Fort in 1637 68 and the French annihilation of perhaps 1,000 Nanchez Indians in the lower Mississippi after defeating them in 1731. 69 As everyone knows, such also occurred with the post-conquest expansion of national frontiers, as in the United States. Although cowboy and Indian movies leave the impression that Indians were massacred by the tens of thousands, actual body counts show otherwise. To consider one notorious massacre, in 1864 citizen and military troops enlisted from the Colorado territory and led by Colonel John Chivington surrounded and surprised Cheyenne at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory. Two-thirds of them women and children, the Indians tried to surrender and parley, but all were killed without mercy, their bodies being scalped and mutilated. In total from 70 to 600 were massacred, the latter the upper estimate of the Colonel; 130 killed seems closer to the truth. It was argued that this massacre did not reflect government policy, and it was the subject of army and congressional investigations. But other than Chivington resigning his commission, no one was punished. 70 Just to note the other most well-known massacres by Calvary: at Washita 103 Cheyenne were killed in 1868; in 1870 at Piegan Village 173 Indians were killed; and at Wounded Knee in 1890 it was possibly 146 Sioux. 71 Also often cited is the Bear River Massacre of 1863 in which 250 Shoshoni were wiped out. This began as a battle between Indians and soldiers, but degenerated into a slaughter of helpless and wounded Indians. 72

While these were the largest American massacres, there undoubtedly were numerous small ones. Moreover, many Indians were killed by vigilantes while local government looked the other way, or were murdered individually by settlers. Taking all the army-Indian battles and massacres into account, probably no more than some 3,000 Indians were killed in the years 1789 to 1898. Settlers and vigilantes likely killed a thousand more. Since many of these Indians were killed in pitched battles, it seems very unlikely that the number of Indians massacred outright by Calvary and settlers in the American West could have been more than 4,000, and was probably a good number less. 73 But this is not the whole story. Many Indians also died from barbarous mistreatment or conditions purposely forced upon them.

For example there was the fate of the Californian Yuki Indians. Originally having a population of around 3,500, in a little more than thirty years its numbers fell to about 400 through "kidnapping, epidemics, starvation, vigilante justice, and state sanctioned mass killing." 74 Moreover, there was the so-called Trail of Tears deaths. In the 1835 treaty of New Echota with the U.S. government Cherokee leaders of a minority faction, and without the approval of the majority, agreed to the nation moving out of Georgia to West of the Mississippi River. Although many prominent Americans publicly opposed such a deportation, in 1838 President Van Buren ordered the army to enforce the treaty. At gun point the Cherokees were thus made to trek westward to Oklahoma in the winter of 1838-39. The resulting exposure and disease killed off nearly 25 percent of the tribe, or about 4,000 people. 75 While the Federal Government's responsibility is mitigated by the treaty, the cruelty of the enforcement amounts to indirect massacre. It was democide. Perhaps overall, considering these and other cases and including massacres, by 1900 some 10,000 to 25,000 Indians may have been killed. 76

But these estimates are only a fraction of the overall democide among Indians that inhabited all the Americas. Before the conquest of the New World the Indian population may have numbered from 8,000,000 to 110,000,000; 77 perhaps even 145,000,000. 78 A moderate population estimate consistent with the latest research is of 55,000,000 Indians 79 Almost totally as a result of several waves of disease carried to the Americas by the conquering and colonizing Europeans, the Indian population dropped steeply by tens of millions, even possibly by as much as 95 percent. 80 In Mexico alone the Indian population may have fallen by 23,000,000 to under 2,000,000. 81 Including those Indians who were killed in warfare and democide, perhaps 60,000,000 to 80,000,000 Indians of Central and South American and the Caribbean died as "a result of the European invasion." 82

Judging what proportion of this mammoth toll constituted democide by the invading armies and colonists is hardly better than picking a number out of the air. No doubt there was much indiscriminate and outright murder. No doubt conditions were forcibly imposed on whole tribes that led to their rapid near extinction. No doubt large numbers of Indians died from inhuman treatment, especially under forced labor. And no doubt in some cases disease may have been knowingly spread. 83 But even Professor David Stannard, author of the American Holocaust, 84 who clearly blames Europeans for many of these deaths, is unwilling to give even a rough approximation of the "genocide." 85 I found one overall estimate of 15,000,000 Indians killed in what appears to be democide, but this figure is given without citation or elaboration. 86 In any case, judging by the bloody history of this period of colonization throughout the Americas, a democide of 2,000,000 would seem a rough minimum and 15,000,000 dead a maximum. Even if these figures are remotely true, then this still make this subjugation of the Americas one of the bloodier, centuries long, democides in world history.

Natives elsewhere were similarly mistreated and murdered. The Australian Aborigine, for example, were massacred by soldiers and killed indiscriminately by settlers, often with actual or tacit government approval. In Tasmania alone by 1832 as many as 700 out of an original population of 1,000 may have been killed. 87 In all of Australia the Aborigine population in 1788 was about 300,000, divided into about 500 tribes, each with a distinct dialect and culture. In the resulting frontier conflict with settlers during the 18th and 19th centuries, possible 20,000 or more Aborigines were killed. 88

The manner in which some of this killing was conducted is clear from the Burke Town Correspondent's report in the Port Denison Times of June 4th, 1868:





"I much regret to state that the blacks have become very troublesome about here lately. Within ten miles of this place they speared and cut steaks from the rumps of several horses. As soon as it was known, the Native Police, under Sub-Inspector Uhr, went out, and, I am informed, succeeded in shooting upwards of thirty blacks. No sooner was this done than a report came in that Mr. Cameroon had been murdered at Liddle and Hetzer's station . . . Mr. Uhr went off immediately in that direction, and his success I hear was complete. . . .Everybody in the district is delighted with the wholesale slaughter dealt out by the native police, and thank Mr. Uhr for his energy in ridding the district of fifty-nine (59) myalls" 89

Such killing of natives verges on genocide, and doubtless this was the intention of some settlers. The complicity of the Australian government is an open question, however. But the role of government in some other recorded genocidal massacres is clear. For example, I have already mentioned some acts of genocide, or attempts to liquidate in whole or in part racial, religious, ethnic, or cultural groups, such as Sultan Tughlak's systematic slaughter of Hindus. It is recorded that in the 12th or 13 century Sultan Firoz Shaw invaded Bengal and offered a reward for every Hindu head, subsequently paying for 180,000 of them. Whenever in his territory the number of Hindus killed in one day totaled 20,000, Sultan Ahmad Shah celebrated with a three-day feast. 90

Although not competing in numbers with those massacred in Asia and the Americas, Europeans had their share of such genocidal massacres. An illustrative case is the St. Bartholomew massacre. On August 24th, 1572, King Charles IX or his Court unleashed a slaughter of French Calvinists that spread from Paris to the whole country. In this famous St. Bartholomew day massacre a contemporary Protestant estimated that 300,000 were killed; later estimates reduced this to 100,000, then 36,000. 91

A more recent example of genocidal massacres is given by the Ottoman Empire. It was composed of diverse nations, which were often treated with great cruelty by the ruling Turks. Their massacre of Bulgarians in 1876 has already been mentioned. This was but one of many massacres of national groups. In 1822 they allegedly killed 50,000 Greeks, largely in Scio (Chios); 10,000 Nestorians and Armenians in Kurdistan in 1850; and 11,000 Maronites and Syrians in Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. 92 In 1894 Sultan Abdul Hamid, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, treated a refusal of Armenian mountaineers in the Sossoun district to pay a protection tribute to Kurdish chiefs as a rebellion and launched a nation-wide campaign of terror against all Armenians. The Sultan is reported to have said that "The way to get rid of the Armenian question is to get rid of the Armenians." 93 This solution to the "Armenian Question" amounted to a partial genocide, and a warm up for the near total genocide of the Armenians during World War I described in chapter 10 of Death By Government. From 1894 to 1896 the Sultan carried out a systematic campaign of murder. Armenians would be burned alive in their own churches, shot or cut down in the streets as they fled Turkish mobs or troops, or dumped into harbors to drown. These were the lucky ones. Many were tortured, raped, or otherwise brutalized before being killed. Probably between 100,000 to over 300,000 Armenians were massacred. 94 When these killings are added to those by various Ottoman Sultans through the centuries, at the very least they must have exterminated some 2,000,000 Armenians, Bulgars, Serbs, Greeks, Turks, and other subjects.

Such Massacres and genocides as those of the Mongols and Ottomans are episodic, usually discrete in time or place. But there are other types of government killing that are routine or ritualistic and except for the more dramatic events may simply involve a few people killed in cold blood here, a few there, but across the land and years these numbers accumulate to a colossal slaughter. Such was the Catholic Church's treatment of heretics, who were hunted and when allegedly found tortured, burned at the stake, or left to die of privation and disease in dungeons. During the Thirteenth Century Albigensian Crusade in France, for example, historians count 140 heretics burned to death at Minerva, 400 in Lavaur, 60 in Cass�, 183 in Montwimer, 210-215 at Monts�gur, and 80 in Barleiges.; 95 in the Roman arena at Verona, Italy, 200 heretics were burned at the stake. 96

The Spanish Inquisition established in 1480 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella and that was led from 1483 to 1498 by the Dominican monk de Torquemada may have burned to death as many as 10,220 heretics in total; 125,000 possibly died from torture and privation in prison. 97 A secretary of the inquisition says that no more than 4,000 were burned to death altogether. But in Seville alone this number of heretics may have been so killed. 98 Perhaps a more realistic figure is that of the General Secretary of the Inquisition, who estimated that from 1480 to 1488, 8,800 people were killed by fire, and from 1480 to 1808 the victims may have totaled 31,912. 99 During the most intensive years of the Inquisition about 500 people per year also may have been burned to death in the New World. 100 Note that many of these poor people were not simply killed. They died by a means





which was carefully selected as among the most poignant that man can suffer. They were usua11y burnt alive. They were burnt alive not infrequently by a slow fire. They were burnt alive after their constancy had been tried by the most excruciating agonies that minds fertile in torture could devise. 101

The Catholic Church's attempt to so purge heretics had its counterpart in the Reformation Protestant's campaign against witches. Witches were believed to have sold their soul to the Devil for magical powers. While the Salem witch trials of Massachusetts in 1692 give the impression that early Americans were particularly prone to this superstition, it was really in Europe, particularly in Germany and France, that the torture and killing of alleged witches was most prevalent. Under Calvin's government of Geneva in 1545, for example, thirty-four women were recorded burned or quartered for witchcraft. In the late years of the 16th Century, witch hunts reached their peak. In some German cities historians estimate that as many as 900 "witches" in a year were killed, often after agonizing torture to force out confessions; in some villages hardly a women was left alive. In total, throughout Christendom more than 30,000 "witches" may have killed; 102 Taking into account the routine nature of these killings, the final figure may be around 100,000; 103 it might even reach 500,000. 104

Whether of heretics or witches, this was a religiously induced and ritualistic form of government killing. Witches were presumably allied with Satan; heretics presumably had defied or defiled God. Sacrifice is another religion-based form of killing that is government practiced or approved. As an appeasement of or offering to a deity, sacrifice has often been extravagant in lives. Just consider the Grand Custom in Dahomey. When a ruler died hundreds, sometimes even thousands, of prisoners would be slain. In one of these ceremonies in 1727, as many as 4,000 were reported killed. 105 In addition Dahomey had an Annual Custom during which 500 prisoners were sacrificed. 106 But these sacrifices were small stuff compared to those of the Aztecs in 1487. To inaugurate a new temple prisoners were murdered by the thousands. The victims formed long lines along the main roads into the city while waiting to mount the central temples steps and forcibly laid on an alter. Then their breasts were cut open and their heart torn out by one of the four sacrificers at work. A figure of 80,400 thus sacrificed in four days has been handed down, but Nigel Davies, the author of a foremost work on Human Sacrifice, rightly questions this (by my calculations if each sacrificer took just one minute to complete his bloody task, it would then take near 14 days working 24 hours a day to kill this number), and even believes that 20,000 seems high. 107 The Aztecs conducted sacrifices as a matter of course and often accumulated the skulls of their victims on racks outside their cities. One Conquistador wrote of a rack outside of Tenochtitlan with about 136,000 skulls. If the collection of skulls started in 1428, this was an average addition of 1500 skulls per year. 108

The Inca of Peru also made human sacrifices, but on a much smaller scale. These were usually associated with the accession of a king or his death, or that of some other high personage. Sacrifice might be made if such a person was severely ill. In the case of a ruler dying, his servants, court officials, favorites, and concubines would be killed. As many as 4,000 paid this price upon the death of the Inca Huayna Capac, for example. 109

Government administered or permitted sacrifice is a vast historical dimension of the slaughtered innocents. Unlike the few recorded cases, as for the Aztecs and Dahomey, the number of unknown people decapitated, punctured, burned, sliced, stoned, beaten, or suffocated to death against their will to appease or glorify some deity, or celebrate or inaugurate some occasion or building, is uncounted, but must add up over the world and centuries to millions, if not tens of millions of dead. Even when cities or nations were faced with defeat in war, human sacrifices were made to appease the gods. Thus Carthage, besieged by the Roman army in 146 B.C., killed 200 sons of noble families as an offering to Baal. 110 The Scandinavians would try to stop a plague by burying children alive; the Incas would kill children four to six years old to prevent the Emperor from getting sick, or to make him well were he to get sick. Across many cultures, adults or children would be interred under new buildings, city gates, or bridges. 111 In 1565 Rajah Narayana of Assam, India, celebrated a new temple by sacrificing 140 men, whose heads he offered on copper plates to Kali. 112 Hindu rites often involved sacrifice. For instance, a male child would be killed every Friday evening in the temple of Shiva at Tanjor. 113

It is hard to find a tribe, kingdom, or ancient civilization that did not practice sacrifice of some sort. In my home state of Hawaii, well before colonization by the United States, people would be killed if the Hawaiian king got sick and more would continue to be slain, sometimes twenty at a time, until he got well. If he died, then his household would be killed too keep him company in the next world. In building a royal canoe, a man would be killed at the base of the tree from which the wood was cut; another when it was finished; others at the launching ceremony. 114

One kind of sacrifice must not go unmentioned, although virtually ignored in the literature. This is the sacrifice of colonial subjects through forced labor to satisfy private greed or state power. The work gangs of the 20th century gulags in the Soviet Union and Communist China are not an invention of our era. In some form or another they have always existed, as has forced labor to discharge fraudulent debts or contracts; or by contract with the head of a tribe. All the European colonial powers seemed to have extorted labor from their subjects in Africa, Asia, and the New World through such devices. For the Spanish, German, and Portuguese subjects, this was particularly deadly. In some cases the average colonial plantation or estate laborer may not have survived for more than a couple of years. It was sometimes easier or cheaper to "replenish the stock" than provide health maintaining food, clothing, medical care, and living quarters. I suspect that at a rock bottom minimum 10,000,000 colonial forced laborers must have died thusly. 115 The true toll may have been several times this number.

This does not even weigh the human cost of the state's conventional forced labor--that of subjects compelled to man galleys, sail ships (as by the operation of press gangs in British ports), carry supplies and weapons in time of war or rebellion, build pyramids, construct fortifications, or build roads, bridges, dams, canals, and the like. Indeed, the use of such forced labor or corv�e has been traditional in Asia, even up to recent decades. Sometimes this labor served in lieu of taxes, where the subject was decreed to owe to the king or emperor or state a month or more of labor per year. While perhaps justifiable in theory, the practice often meant that overseers would execute the laborer that was too often late for work, slow on the job, sickly, or critical of the work. This treatment of their forced laborers--the whole Cambodian population--by the Khmer Rouge of our time, as described in chapter 9 of Death By Government, mirrors that of many if not most regimes throughout history.

Yet another type of government killing whose victims may total millions is infanticide. In many cultures government permitted, if not encouraged, the killing of handicapped or female infants, or otherwise unwanted children. In the Greece of 200 B.C., for example, the murder of female infants was so common that among 6,000 families living in Delphi no more than 1 percent had two daughters. 116 Among 79 families near as many had one child as two. Among all there were only 28 daughters to 118 sons. 117 Unwanted children





were thrown into rivers, dung heaps, and cesspools. Wild animals were everywhere. Feeding upon children was part of their sustenance, as Euripides noted in his play Ion, "A prey for birds, food for wild beasts, too. . ." . . . .

Cities became deserted and the land became barren. Family life was disappearing. 118

Indeed, the law demanded that imperfect children must be killed; and someone thus even wrote a text on How to Recognize a Newborn That Is Worth Rearing. 119

But classical Greece was not unusual. In eighty-four societies spanning the Renaissance to our time, "defective" children have been killed in one-third of them. 120 And in India, because of Hindu beliefs and the rigid caste system, young girls would be murdered as a matter of course. With the collection of demographic statistics in the 19th century, it was discovered that in "some villages, no girl babies were found at all; in a total of thirty others, there were 343 boys to 54 girls. . . in Bombay, the number of girls alive in 1834 was 603. . . ." 121 Such infanticide is usually a singular event. It does not happen en masse. But the accumulation of such officially sanctioned or demanded murders comprise, in effect, serial massacre. Since such practices were so pervasive in some cultures, I suspect that the death toll must exceed that from mass sacrifice and perhaps even outright mass murder. 122

Perhaps so would also that for official state executions for social or political reasons or for, in our contemporary perspective, trivial infractions, such as stealing bread or criticizing the royal garden. Consider that just in London in the last eleven years of Henry the VIII's reign, there were some 560 executions per year--over one a day. 123 This was terribly excessive, even for the age. Note that the number executed by the Paris central criminal court from 1389 to 1392 was 25 per year; in Brussels over the near two century span between 1404 and 1600 only slightly more than 5 per. 124 On the other hand, King Henry VIII probably was done better by many kings, emperors, or rulers throughout the centuries. Historical statistics do not allow even a wild guess at an overall minimum number executed across the world for trivial or political offenses or as part of government terror, but note that a very low estimate of 1,000 so executed per year would add up to 5,000,000 killed in fifty centuries. Make this a possibly more realistic 10,000 such executions around the world per year for what would appear to us as trivial offenses, then just since Christ the pre-20th century toll would be 19,000,000 people thus killed by the state.

Aside from state executions there are the untold millions that have died in prison or other forms of detention from simple mistreatment, neglect, malnutrition, exposure, and preventable disease, as in the Soviet gulag. The inhumanity of France's penal colony called Devils Island (in French Guiana) is well known. Less well known was the sometimes barbarous nature of the transportation of convicts to Australia by Britain, sometimes a horrible voyage of as much as eight months. For one such fleet of convicts





267 died aboard and three vessels alone landed sick convicts of whom 124 died almost immediately. The dead were thrown naked into Sydney harbor. An army officer aboard, Cap Hill, pointed out that the masters of the transport ships, unlike slave captains, had no financial interest in landing their human cargo in healthy condition: "The slave traffic is merciful compared to what I have seen in this fleet." Evidence given to Parliament in 1812 showed that those transported included boys and girls of 12 and men and women over 80. 125

Then throughout history there has been the particularly lethal treatment of prisoners of war. If their lives were spared they were often sent to slave in mines, on galley ships, in swamps, or at other labor that killed them off rapidly. The Mongols used their prisoners in the front ranks when attacking fortified cities and towns, and forced them to fill in moats or prepare catapults close to the dangerous walls. If not turned into slaves, prisoners of war were often simply killed, captured garrisons massacred. Thus the Crusaders killed 2,500 Moslem prisoners before Acra. 126 And the Turkic conqueror Tamerlane, who we already met for his massacres of civilians and pyramids of severed heads, slaughtered 100,000 prisoners outside of Delhi. When Tamerlane





advanced on Delhi after winning many victories and capturing a hundred thousand prisoners, it occurred to him that he had only to threaten to kill all his prisoners and the rulers of the city would capitulate. Unfortunately the ruse failed, and Tamerlane found himself in a position which he found distasteful, especially since most of the prisoners had already been given as slaves to his amirs, his officers, and the scholars who were in his retinue. He issued orders that all the prisoners 100,000 of them! were to be strangled within an hour. A contemporary chronicler speaks of the repugnance felt by a scholar, who would not have voluntarily slain even a sheep, when he saw his fifteen slaves being strangled. 127

And Sixteenth Century Sultan Sûleyman (The Magnificent), who extended the Ottoman Empire to its maximum power, left proof that his murder of thousands of prisoners was no more significant than the weather. Consider just one day in his words from his campaign diary: "The emperor, seated on a golden throne, receives the homage of the viziers and the beys; massacre of 2,000 prisoners; the rain falls in torrents." 128

Even in Europe up to modern times the slaughtering of captured garrisons was not unusual. During the Thirty Years War, for example, Count of Tilly captured Neubrandenburg in 1631 and allegedly killed the garrison of 3,000; and the same year Gustavus, King of Sweden, captured the garrison of 2,000 at Frankfurt an der Oder and killed them all. 129 Death might come slowly, as prisoners were tortured and mutilated for amusement or to terrorize opposing armies and nations. Even among those Christian states that prided themselves on their humanity, prisoners of war were treated with less than humanity. During the American Civil War, for example, Northern soldiers held in the Southern prison of Andersonville over a six-month period in 1864 died at an annual rate of 79 percent. In total 10,000 perished. Northern prisons were only a little better. For the whole war their death rate for southern prisoners of war was about 23 percent, about the same death rate as the Soviet gulag. 130 Overall, 19,060 Southerners died. For both North and South, many of these deaths of prisoners were avoidable had proper food, clothing, and medical care been provided.

Finally, there is the killing that takes place on a ruler's whim. A pointed finger, a slight nod, and some noble, attendant, concubine, or commoner is immediately grabbed and done away with. Two examples should suffice to clarify this type of government murder. During the British colonization of India, a "party given by the Mogul governor of Surat, the very first British settlement, was rudely interrupted when the host fell into a sudden rage and ordered all the dancing girls to be decapitated on the spot, to the stupefaction of his English guests." 131

Shaka, the King of the African Zulus, was a similarly impulsive murderer. Those in attendance to him or in conference with him never knew when he might point them out for immediate death. No reason was ever given. One of the first white man to visit Shaka observed that





on the first day of our visit we had seen no less than ten men carried off to death. On a mere sign from Shaka, viz: the pointing of his finger, the victim would be seized by his nearest neighbors; his neck would be twisted, and his head and body beaten with sticks, the nobs of some of these being as large as a man's fist. On each succeeding day, too, numbers of others were killed; their bodies would then be carried to an adjoining hill and there impaled. We visited this spot on the fourth day. It was truly a Golgotha, swarming with hundreds of vultures. 132

Of all this pre-twentieth century, killing--massacres, infanticide, executions, genocides, sacrifices, burnings, deaths by mistreatment, and the like--that to which we can put numbers add up to a grand total of from near 89,000,000 to slightly over 260,000,000 million men, women, and children dead. An appropriate mid-democide estimate might be around 133,000,000 killed. The more exact total given by a variety of calculations is shown in table 3.1 along with the more extraordinarily bloody or interesting cases I have sketched above. To get some idea as to how far this total may be off, observe that if government massacred people in previous centuries in the same proportion to world population as in our century, then as shown in the table's hypothetical total (calculated from the 20th century democide rate derived in Death By Government and the world's population for each century since 30 B.C. 133 ) almost a fantastic 626,000,000 people would have been killed; even possibly over 1,138,000,000--over a billion people. As should be clear, an estimated pre-20th century democide of near 133,000,000 cannot even approximate the actual number murdered by governments or their surrogates, and probably reflects only a small fraction of those so wiped out during the thousands of years of written history.

Whatever, there is no need to know the actual number that government has killed to see that it has been truly a cold-blooded, mass murderer, a global plague of man's own making. While diseases may have killed more people in a shorter time, perhaps 25,000,000 died from the Black Plague in Europe from 1348 to 1349, 134 government committed, encouraged, or permitted murder has been a continuing year-by-year scourge up to and through, as we will see, the twentieth century.

Not even considered here is the human cost of war, another way governments are an agency of death. For the years 1740 to 1897 there were reportedly 230 international and revolutionary wars; and according to one count these killed 20,154,000 people. 135 If with more tolerance for gross estimation we accept the calculations of those killed in all international wars since 30 B.C., we get the 40,457,000 dead shown in Table 3.1. 136 This is less than a third of the overall democide just that we have been able to estimate. There should be little doubt that while pre-twentieth century war has been of the greatest historical interest and drama, governments have killed many times more people in cold-blood than they have in the heat of battle. As noted in "20th Century Democide", this is even true of our century. In any case, government--particularly nondemocratic governments--clearly should come with a warning label: "this power may be a danger to your life and limb."

The question for my book Death By Government is not whether such killing has continued into the twentieth century, which no informed reader would deny. Rather the question is about the form this killing has taken and its toll. In answering this I want to be as precise as possible about the numbers. And the better data available for our century should help to answer the what and particularly the why of such awful destruction of human life.

NOTES