of the Second Congo War (1998 to 2008).167
Some 1 million were killed by the 2003-begun war on Iraq.168
Some 34,000 to 110,000 people were murdered in the Herero and Namaqua genocide.169
Some 480,000 to 600,000 people were murdered in the Dzungar genocide.170
Some 3.8 million died violent war deaths in the U.S. war on Vietnam, not counting the dead in Laos or Cambodia.171
Some 0.4 to 1.5 million were killed or expelled in the Circassian genocide.172
Some 450,000 to 750,000 died in the Greek genocide.173
Some 1.5 million were killed in the Armenian genocide.174
Some 1.5 to 2 million died in the Cambodian genocide.175
Some 390,000 died, 380,000 of them on the Ethiopian side, when Mussolini’s Italy attacked Ethiopia in 1935, yet not a single person at one of my events has ever asked “But what about Mussolini?”176
This is a small sampling. We could add other types of horrors to it.
As of this writing, some 0.7 million people, and rising fast, have died from coronavirus.
Those who die from poverty on a wealthy planet dwarf all of these numbers. According to UNICEF, 291 million children under age 15 died from preventable causes between 1990 and 2018.177
How do we compare such horrors?
I’m not sure why that has to be a difficult question, why the very question should offend us or threaten our sense of identity. We compare various horrors by looking at all the similarities and differences among them. Ignoring some atrocities does not help us better appreciate others.
While no two horrors are the same, some came before others and set precedents. Hitler believed the world’s failure to seriously protest the Armenian genocide gave him license to commit his own.178
While genocide in Western Europe was unusual, genocide committed by Western Europeans was not. Prior to “settling” the United States, some of the early settlers had previously “settled” Ireland, where the British had paid rewards for Irish heads and body parts, just as they later would for Native American scalps.179
Hitler’s war on the Slavic East was planned to violently kill and starve vast numbers of people. It did kill many more people than were killed in the Holocaust. The war, considering all sides, killed several times what the Holocaust killed, and killed mostly civilians. Most of the members of the militaries killed on all sides were low ranking draftees.
Why in current U.S. culture is the immediate go-to example of evil “Hitler” or “the Holocaust”? I mean, why isn't that one of dozens of possibilities? Why is it almost always the one and only example of ultimate evil? Why, for that matter, is there a U.S. Holocaust Museum featuring a Holocaust in Germany, and the more recently built Washington, D.C., museums of “The American Indian” and “African American History and Culture,” but no museum of U.S. Genocide and Slavery? Is it “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention U.S. slavery in the same sentence with the Holocaust? Why? Isn’t it exactly as nonsensical to claim that it is “relativizing” something sacredly and supremely and separately evil to mention the Holocaust in the same sentence with U.S. slavery? Aren’t both things hideous enough to demand respect for irrational attitudes toward them?
Isn’t the current U.S. practice of separating immigrant families and locking up children in cages, or the sheriff in Texas who recently set up what he called a concentration camp for Latinos and was pardoned for his crimes by President Donald Trump, combined with centuries of similar precedents reason enough to not always -- perhaps just sometimes -- reach over to Germany to find an example of evil public policy?
WWII had long precedents but occurred in just a handful of years. It is, as a chapter yet to come will establish, the worst thing that humanity has done to itself and the earth in any short period of time. Probably just the European or Pacific half of it alone would also meet that threshold. But WWII was committed by numerous nations and was much larger than the Holocaust.
How necessary was the developed Euro-American model of racist extermination to the development of Nazism and to the ability of the Nazis to justify their statements and attract more followers? Well, we can’t run an experiment in which Europeans don’t assault the globe, in order to see whether Germany still invades Poland. But I think the preceding pages have shown the connections between Nazism and what came before it to have been critical to its creation. The next chapter covers some additional things without which WWII could not have happened: raw materials, war supplies, and money.
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