Infamous Massacres in History, Man's cruelty had been manifested many times in history through indiscriminate killings of human beings Options

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http://www.bukisa.com/articles/29176_12-in...cres-in-history



This horrible act of men is called massacre. Here are 12 of the most tragic incidents of slaughter of people in history.

1. The Nanking Massacre


The massacre of Nanking according to reliable sources had estimated 200,000 - 300,000 victims, mostly civilians.

This infamous tragedy is one of the most tragic in Chinese history. This incident is popularly called the Rape of Nanking,

an act of violence committed by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army upon its occupation of China in December, 1937

and lasted until early February 1938. The Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and

the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. Hundreds of women and children were also killed.

2. The Babi Yar Massacre

Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. On September 29 and 30, 1941, a special team of German SS troops

supported by other German units, local collaborators and Ukranian police murdered 33,771 Jewish civilians. The Babi Yar

massacre is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust". In the months that followed,

thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 people,

mostly civilians, of whom a significant number were Jews, were murdered by the Nazis there during World War

3. The Massacre of Prisoners

A tragic massacre committed by the Russians is the Massacre of Prisoners. The overall death toll in the Massacre of

Prisoners is estimated at around 100,000, including more than 10,000 in Western Ukraine. It was a series of mass

executions committed by the Soviet NKVD against prisoners in Poland, the Baltic States, and parts of the Soviet Union

from which the Red Army was withdrawing after the German invasion in 1941.

4. The Katyn Massacre

The Katyn Massacre is an incident that occurred in Russia with a number of victims estimated at about 22,000. The

victims were murdered in the Katyn forest, the Kalinin and Kharkiv prisons and elsewhere. This massacre is also known

as the Katyn Forest massacre. It was a mass execution of Polish military officers, policemen and civilian prisoners of

war ordered by Soviet authorities on March 5, 1940.

5. The Massacre of Elphinstone's Army

The total incompetence of a commanding officer led to the massacre of Elphinstone's Army in January 1842. This

incident was named after Major-General William Elphinstone. It was a victory of Afghan forces, led by Akbar Khan

against a combined British and Indian force led by Ephinstone. After the British and Indian troops captured Kabul in

1839, an Afghan uprising forced the occupying garrison out of the city. The British army, consisting of 4,500 troops

and 12,000 working personnel left Kabul on January 6, 1842. They attempted to reach the British garrison at Jalalabad,

90 miles away, but were immediately harassed by Afghan forces. The remaining forces were killed near Gandamak

on the 13th of January. Only William Brydon, the assistant surgeon, survived and managed to reach Jalalabad.

6. The Batak Massacre


Batak massacre occurred on April 30, 1876. It is referred to the massacre of Bulgarians in Batak by 8,000 Ottoman

troops at the beginning of the April Uprising. There were an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 number of victims according to

different sources. According to other sources, 5,000 people were massacred in Batak alone. The number of victims in

the district of Philippopolis estimated at 15,000. Most of the victims were beheaded.

7. The Massacre of Thessaloniki

One of the earliest recorded incidents of large scale massacre in history is the Massacre of Thessaloniki. It occurred in

390 CE when Gothic troops allegedly massacred 7,000 people. It was a retaliatory action by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I against the people Thessaloniki in Greece who had risen in revolt. The cause of the uprising had been Butherich or Botheric,

a Gothic magister militum in the Emperor's army, ordered to arrest a popular charioteer for trying to seduce and have sex with

a servant of the emperor or even the magister militum himself. The charioteer was locked up in prison, but the citizens of

Thessaloniki demanded his release. Butherich was murdered in the following turmoil, and so the Emperor intervened and

ordered executions.

8. St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre was the worst of the 16th century's religious massacres. It has been estimated

that over 5,000 Huguenots were killed in Paris and in the French provinces. This was a wave of Roman Catholic mob

violence against the Calvinist Protestants popularly knows as Huguenots, during the French Wars of Religion. It had

been traditionally believed to be instigated by Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX. The massacre

happened 6 days after the wedding of the king's sister to the Protestant Henry III of Navarre, who later became Henry IV.

This was an occasion for which many of the most wealthy and prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic

Paris. Events began two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, a Huguenot military

leader. Starting on 24 August 1572 (the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle) with the murder of Coligny, the massacres

spread throughout Paris, and later to other cities and the countryside, lasting for several months.

9. The Granada Massacre

On this tragic incident, about 4,000 persons died in one day of the more than 1,500 Jewish families. This incident

occurred on December 30, 1066 when a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada in Spain, assassinated

Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela and massacred most of the Jewish population of the city.

10. The Sabra and Shatila Massacre

One of the more recent incidents of massacre that gained worldwide attention took place on September 15 and 16, 1982,

the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. The number of victims of the massacre varies according to source: the lowest estimate is

328; the highest is placed at 3,500. It was a massacre carried out by the Lebanese Forces militia group. It is alleged that

Israeli Defense Forces allowed Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen to enter two Palestinian refugee camps, and

that the militia massacred civilians inside. It was argued that the Israelis should have known that a massacre could occur,

considering the assassination of Phalangist leader and prospective president Bachir Gemayel the day before, and given

the long history of bad blood between the Palestinians and the Phalangists.

11. The Bolton Massacre

The Bolton Massacre happened on May 28, 1644 when 1,600 of Bolton's defenders and citizens were slaughtered during

and after its storm and capture by Royalist forces. This incident is sometimes recorded as the Storming of Bolton, an

episode in the English Civil War.

12. September Massacres

Another infamous massacre that occurred in France specifically in the city of Paris is the September Massacres. The

incidents took place in late summer of 1792 during the French Revolution. By the time it had subsided, half the prison

population of Paris had been executed: some 1,200 trapped prisoners, including many women and young boys. There

were almost 1.400 prisoners who were condemned and executed; more than 200 of them were priests. Sporadic violence

against the Roman Catholic Church continued throughout France for nearly a decade to come.

[orangesand]

What about the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi, Stalin(killing 10 million peasants, in own country), the 30 years war,
the Japanese Medical Experiments on the Chinese in 1930s, 33 million people killed to study bio-chemical delivery methods. The Spanish genocide of the New World? Old World Wars, where they killed everyone, Viking raids...

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What about the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi, Stalin(killing 10 million peasants, in own country), the 30 years war,
the Japanese Medical Experiments on the Chinese in 1930s, 33 million people killed to study bio-chemical delivery methods. The Spanish genocide of the New World? Old World Wars, where they killed everyone, Viking raids...

Can you cite a few online articles for our reading? I'm trying to address the statistical part of these events in this thread.

[orangesand]

Crimes

The Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933–45 because of the sheer scale of suffering. 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] prostitutes 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%.[30]

According to the findings of the Tokyo Tribunal, the death rate among POWs from Asian countries, held by Japan was 27.1%.[31] The death rate of Chinese POWs was much higher because—under a directive ratified on August 5, 1937 by Emperor Hirohito—the constraints of international law on treatment of those prisoners was removed.[32] Only 56 Chinese POWs were released after the surrender of Japan.[33] After March 20, 1943, the Japanese Navy was under orders to execute all prisoners taken at sea.[34]
Mass killings

R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military murdered from nearly 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most likely 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. "This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture."[35] According to Rummel, in China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians, as a direct result of the Japanese operations and 10.2 millions in the course of the war.[36] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 300,000 civilians and prisoners of war, although the accepted figure[by whom?] is somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.[37] In Southeast Asia, the Manila massacre, resulted in the death of 100,000 civilians in the Philippines. It is estimated that at least one out of every 20 Filipinos died at the hand of the Japanese during the occupation.[38][39] In the Sook Ching massacre, Lee Kuan Yew, the ex-Prime Minister of Singapore, said during an interview on with National Geographic that there were between 50,000 and 90,000 casualties[40] while according to Major General Kawamura Saburo, there were 5000 casualties in total.[41] There were other massacres of civilians e.g. the Kalagong massacre.

Historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta reports that a "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) was implemented in China from 1942 to 1945 and was in itself responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians. This scorched earth strategy, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, directed Japanese forces to "Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All."

Additionally, captured allied service personnel were massacred in various incidents, including:

* Laha massacre
* Banka Island massacre
* Parit Sulong
* Palawan massacre
* SS Tjisalak massacre perpetrated by Japanese submarine I-8
* Wake Island massacre - See Battle of Wake Island
* Bataan Death March

Human experimentation and biological warfare
Shiro Ishii, commander of Unit 731.

Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731 under Shirō Ishii. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia, amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments. Anesthesia was not used because it was believed to affect results.[42]

To determine the treatment of frostbite, prisoners were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water until frozen solid. The arm was later amputated; the doctor would repeat the process on the victim's upper arm to the shoulder. After both arms were gone, the doctors moved on to the legs until only a head and torso remained. The victim was then used for plague and pathogens experiments.[43]

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths.[44] Furthermore, according to the 2002 International Symposium on the Crimes of Bacteriological Warfare, the number of people killed by the Imperial Japanese Army germ warfare and human experiments is around 580,000.[45] According to other sources, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as 400,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases...", resulting from the use of biological warfare.[46] Top officers of Unit 731 were not prosecuted for war crimes after the war, in exchange for turning over the results of their research to the United States. They were also reportedly given responsible positions in Japan's pharmaceutical industry, medical schools and health ministry.[47][48]

One case of human experimentation occurred in Japan itself. At least nine out of 12 crew members survived the crash of a U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 bomber on Kyūshū, on May 5, 1945. (This plane was Lt. Marvin Watkins' crew of the 29th Bomb Group of the 6th Bomb Squadron.[49]) The bomber's commander was sent to Tokyo for interrogation, while the other survivors were taken to the anatomy department of Kyushu University, at Fukuoka, where they were subjected to vivisection or killed.[50][51]On March 11, 1948, 30 people, including several doctors and one female nurse, were brought to trial by the Allied war crimes tribunal. Charges of cannibalism were dropped, but 23 people were found guilty of vivisection or wrongful removal of body parts. Five were sentenced to death, four to life imprisonment, and the rest to shorter terms. In 1950, the military governor of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, commuted all of the death sentences and significantly reduced most of the prison terms. All of those convicted in relation to the university vivisection were free after 1958.[52] In addition, many participants who were responsible for these vivisections were never charged by the Americans or their allies in exchange for the information on the experiments.[53]

In 2006, former IJN medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered—as part of his training—to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in the Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945.[54] The surgery included amputations.[55] Ken Yuasa, a former military doctor in China, has also admitted to similar incidents in which he was compelled to participate.[56

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/chalmers-john...looting-of-asia
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
click on democide, other killing mentioned
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM
lists Soviet, Chinese, Nazi, Chinese Republic
http://www.necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm
there is a list on this site from 1 to 20 which the author believes
the most people were killed in, it lists 63million for WW2
I have heard 80million, depending if Russia added(internal killing)
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Li...s_by_death_toll
lowest to highest are listed war, genocide, famine

[orangesand]

What about the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi, Stalin(killing 10 million peasants, in own country), the 30 years war,
the Japanese Medical Experiments on the Chinese in 1930s, 33 million people killed to study bio-chemical delivery methods. The Spanish genocide of the New World? Old World Wars, where they killed everyone, Viking raids...

Can you cite a few online articles for our reading? I'm trying to address the statistical part of these events in this thread.

Listed at bottom of my message

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n22/chalmers-john...looting-of-asia
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/welcome.html
click on democide, other killing mentioned
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MEGA.HTM
lists Soviet, Chinese, Nazi, Chinese Republic
http://www.necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm
there is a list on this site from 1 to 20 which the author believes
the most people were killed in, it lists 63million for WW2
I have heard 80million, depending if Russia added(internal killing)
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Li...s_by_death_toll
lowest to highest are listed war, genocide, famine
this site mentions throughout history

[orangesand]

http://www.moreorless.au.com/killers/

tells about horrible killers in 20 century

http://www.arthurhu.com/INDEX/genocide.htm

site with a lot of info, lard to navigate

says 258 million people were killed in 20th century