I have a spreadsheet of 100 wars and conflicts from history, stretching from 475 BC to the present. Wars before then tend to have poor data. All major wars are on the spreadsheet, which can be viewed on Google Drive.
A few interesting things about this sheet are how I approach the data. I include the length of the conflict, total casualties, and the world population when the conflict ended. The data is from Wikipedia, from the most recent scholarship for each conflict.
I then calculate a few statistics from this data:
- Casualties per year
- Percent of global population killed
- Annual Casulaties as a percent of the global population
We now can find some interesting insights from this on the five worst conflicts in history by each of these metrics:
Casualties
- World War II (about 73,000,000)
- Great Leap Forward
- An Lushan Rebellion
- Mongol Conquests
- Native American genocide (about 30,o00,000)
Casualties per year
- World War II (about 12,200,0o0)
- Great Leap Forward
- Holodomor
- World War I
- Rwandan Genocide of 1994 (about 4,696,000)
Percent of global population killed
- An Lushan Rebellion (16%)
- Mongol Conquests
- Warring States Era
- Qing Dynasty Conquest of Ming Dynasty
- World War II (3%)
Annual casualties as a percent of the global population
- An Lushan Rebellion (2%)
- World War II
- Great Leap Forward
- World War I
- Holodomor
Even if we go with the lowest acceptable scholarly estimate for Holodomor fatalities, it still makes the top 5 on 2 of these rankings.
An interesting takeaway from this data is that the Holocaust doesn’t make the top 5, 11 million people killed or 900,000 people per year, placing it as the 12th worst calamity in history by total numbers and 17th worst in history by deaths per year. A horrible event without question, there’s no denying that.
World War II appears in all lists by this cut-off. It truly was the worst war in world history. Only the An Lushan Rebellion beats it when controlling for the global population.
If the Holodomor lasted for one more year, its death could have surpassed the Holocaust. Both genocides were horrible and need to be recognized in full to understand their causes and to understand that anyone can be the victim of genocide under certain circumstances. We need to study the political economic and social forces which led to these genocides so future genocides can be prevented. Erasing victims of genocide only increases the probability of genocide in the future by painting it as being across indelible racial lines that cannot be changed, and nothing could possibly be further from the truth. For example, the fact that many slave owners in the Southern US were Irish, does not erase the horrors of the Irish Potato Famine, which I consider a genocide because it was the consequence of deliberate British policy to prevent the import of food until the crisis got so bad that parliament repealed the corn laws.
Genocides do not appear out of thin air.
To understand the nature of genocide and properly bulletproof our institutions and our societies to be immune from this type of madness, it is essential not to underplay or undercount while also recognizing when events are repeating.
Understanding the Holodomor requires you to understand it was deliberate, quick, and effective. From that, you can then study how it progressed and how politics in the Soviet Union led to such a disaster. The basics of it is the Soviet Union used central planning to force people out of their professions and onto the farms while also stealing the food from the people and letting Ukrainians starve. This central planning resulted in one of the two fastest genocides in history, comparable only to the Great Leap Forward based on modern counts of how quickly people died and how pointless it was.
Behind the Holodomor, Holocaust, Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and Great Leap Forward there is not just a simple hatred directed toward a single group of people found from the leaders of such horrible events, but a general antihumanism which more than anything denies the central tenant of humanism of egalitarianism. This is rooted in Kant’s categorical imperative, which is fundamental to all following liberatory philosophy:
Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.
Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.
Thus the third practical principle follows [from the first two] as the ultimate condition of their harmony with practical reason: the idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.
Act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible kingdom of ends.
~ Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant
This forms the basis of liberalism from which the rest of the school of thought is built.
Genocide breaks all four maxims of the Categorical Imperative. It is impossible to advocate for the eradication of innocent people while also arguing for universality. The first step to eradicating the rights of the individual is to group them into groups by either wealth, race, gender, or whatever distinguishing factor. Fascism examines history through the battle of nations and communism through class struggle. In this way, they obscure individual liberty in favor of a larger group based not on equal rights and universality but on conflict theory.
It is rare to find a regime that targets only one demographic.
If history is based solely on conflicts between groups, then increasing the rights of one group to that of the other will intensify the conflict and harm the rights of the opposing party. For this reason, as we observe in philosophy and history, this observation:
Universality cannot coexist with conflict theory.
Human rights abuses generally follow if the base unit of history is not the individual but a category above the individual. It is rare for organizations to be fully based on one philosophy or another because, at the individual level, conflicting interests create tensions in the politics we observe in our law. Using the founding of the United States, you had humanist idealists from New England building a constitution with literal slaveholders in the South. Right here, we have a conflict, but due to outside pressure from the global powers of the day, idealists and slavers worked together, as we read in the Federalist Papers. From this, we observe:
Much of politics is the struggle between humanists and conflict theorists.
As time goes on and we as people debate and fight for beliefs, there are times where old hatreds last for generations.
Slava Ukraine.
Free Palestine.
Free Israel.
Free Russia.