Genocides: By the Numbers

Anyone who has read into American history, or any history for that matter, knows that we humans have a bloody past. We teach our youngsters that Columbus was a great explorer and not a gold hungry genocidal maniac. We teach them this light-form of history until they graduate, almost to say, "hey, we did some bad stuff in the past but we are getting better, we promise!" The reason for this blog post is to give you the sheer numbers of the genocides during the World War II era. Genocides? You say? More than one? Yes...believe it or not there were many mass killings of people between 1932 and 1950.

I am focusing on world genocides during World War II, however, I do not want to forget the blood that was spilled to provide you and I with the living conditions we have today. By this I am referring to the European Colonization of the Americas and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Both of these major events were both heavily influenced by Columbus, but I will get to him in another post. Between 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and 1900, as high as 100,000,000 Natives had been killed in North and South America. Still to this day they are suspect to prejudice. Many have been forced to live in reservations, live in poverty, and forced to live an American life that they never had a chance to opt out of. Many teens join gangs because they have nothing else to turn to. They are in far worse shape than any other race in America. To prove my point, how many famous Natives do you know from the last 100 years?

Of course, the greedy Europeans that many of us descended from needed free labor to work their stolen land that they now "owned." When most of the natives died off they turned to Africa. The rest is history that I am sure your Social Studies teachers DID go over. When it was all said and done about 10 million Africans had been killed in the Transatlantic slave trade. You may make the same correlation of blacks in poverty that you would with the natives. You would be correct, because it is very difficult to get anywhere in this world if you are placed on the bottom rung. If you add the deaths of the Transatlantic Slave Trade with those of the European Colonization, you would get a number that is 35% of the current US Population.

But of course I am writing to tell you about the WWII era. The genocide that all of you should know about is the Holocaust in middle Europe. Many of us have seen the gruesome pictures and learned the history and some of us may even know that 6 million Jews were put to death. Actually, it was a total of 17 million people that were killed in the Holocaust. To put that to scale, imagine taking everyone who lives in the 4 most populated US cities, New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, and having them put to death in horrific ways. Yes, a number that is 18% of the current US Population was put to death in a matter of 4 years or so years.

But the Germans were not the first to commit genocide in the World War II era, in 1932-1933 (A couple years before World War II started), the Soviets committed genocide on Ukrainians. Holodomor was a man-made famine made by the Soviet government that killed as many as 8 million Ukrainians.

Just because the war ended in 1945 does not mean that the genocides stopped. Because new national lines had to be drawn, Germans were displaced and ethnically cleansed. In the next five years, twelve million Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia and sent back to Germany and Austria. Three million of those Germans were killed in an effort of ethnic cleansing.

Do not get me wrong, mass killings were not just centered in Europe during World War II. The United States is not completely innocent in this war and that is shown by the war in the Pacific. The decision made by Truman to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a very questionable one. He chose not to risk the lives of many US (& Japanese) soldiers and instead wound up killing up to 200,000 people in a matter of 3 days.

However, the Japanese were not innocent either! During the Second Sino-Japanese War (part of WWII) in 1937, the Japanese slaughtered up to 300,000 Chinese in the city of Nanking, China in a matter of three months. This was known as the Rape of Nanking. Though the numbers do not compare to the Holocaust, keep in mind that this was a shorter time frame and just as horrific. Many Chinese were put into sexual slavery and others were decapitated.

A couple of questions arise when discussing this topic. Question one: "How does a nation of only 69 million complete a mass murder on a nation of 504 million?" Well, China was always a country that kept to themselves. They felt like they had everything they needed, until the British got them hooked on Opium in the late 1800's. So they really did not have an idea of size differences between countries. Question two: "How could this kind of thing happen?" Well the Japanese taught children how to hate the Chinese in school. They preached racism at an early age. This way it was easy to produce soldiers without morals to provide as killing machines.

Out of 35 people over the age of 18 surveyed, only 4 had learned about this horrific event in high school. So why did 88.5% of these people not learn about it? Well first I will ask you what type of government was popular in China at the end of the Second World War...Give up? It was Communism. In the other corner, we have a newly depleted Japan that the US could help govern. So it is a no-brainer to act like nothing happened so that we could focus on how much we hated Commies in this newly founded McCarthy era.

So to recap, the Nazis killed the Jews and many others, the US killed the Japanese, the Japanese killed the Chinese, and the Soviets killed everyone. Add all of this to up to 30 million soldiers killed during World War II, you get about 60 million people, 2.5% of the worlds population at the time, about 18% of the current US Population.

The point I am trying to make, besides showing the astronomical amount of people killed, is that we need to realize that each one of these 60 million people is a person with a story. Imagine a family member dying and then realize how hard it hit you. Recognize that, even though you are in a safe environment, does not mean that everyone else in the world is as well. Many Nazi soldiers were against killing innocent people, but after seeing others do it they became accustomed to it. Just like how the Japanese were taught. Racism is taught, just as killing is taught. So teach love.