Vote for the most shameful atrocity!

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This is your chance to choose your fave.

Vote on any basis - enormity, cruelness, religious beliefs, politics, your ancestors were victims.

Disclaimer: some folks may consider at least one of these a legitimate act of war but many others will consider it an atrocity. Please feel free to object.

I have defined atrocity as a unilateral act by a government or equivalent. Many wars including some being fought at present are replete with atrocities however I am not including "legitimate" wars except where a single act may have transcended what one expects even from warfare.

These are presented in alphabetical order. The last one is awkwardly identified as I don't know of a single word or phrase to identify it (e.g. Trail of Tears) although it most certainly happened.

Please feel free to add anything I've omitted or take issue with any of my choices.

You forgot to add the atrocities under Mao as an option.

i think this is in poor taste.

I'm going with the Nazis because I think their atrocity has had the most influence on modern times... although, the Trail of Tears has probably had the most influence on the world over all. If not for the Trail of Tears (and a generally ruthless Indian policy on the whole) the US does not become the superpower that it is today.

/\ This.

Here is a comparison of the death tolls in the poll options from what I could find based on Internet sources (I've reported the higher estimates in general):

Apartheid: 30,000
Armenian Genocide, 1,000,000
Cambodian Genocide: 2,000,000
Great Purge: 1,200,000
Nakba (1948 Arab-Israeli War): 30,000
The Holocaust: 12,000,000
Hiroshima/Nagasaki: 250,000
Rape of Nanking: 300,000
Halabja Chemical Attack: 5,000
Trail of Tears: 6,000
Australian Aboriginal Genocide: 20,000 (700,000 in total, if deaths due to diseases are included)

Total from all the incidents in the poll: 17,7521,000

The total death toll from famine alone due to Mao's Great Leap Forward is estimated between 23 and 46 million:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap ... ine_deaths

... thus exceeding the death toll of all the options in the poll... combined...

schools I went to have always taught that the estimate of how many Stalin killed was 20 million.

No African slave trade?? 12 million blacks were crammed into cargo ships in appalling conditions, chained from head to toe, forced in perpetual putrid smell in suffocating conditions for months during the middle passage. this is only making it to the americas. 1/10 died along the way, some being devoured by sharks as they were thrown out into the ocean. when they got to the Americas the slaves were tortured until their will to resist was shattered and crushed. then for 4 hundred years them and their progeny were reduced to abject slaves ignorant of their origins and brainwashed and indoctrinated to accept their plight.

Death toll is just one metric.

When I posted this, I was thinking more like "how angry does X make you feel when you think about it?". Some such events have "relatively" low death tolls but there are people who get very angry thinking about them.

It just occurred to me that I totally forgot the Rwandan Holocaust.

Perhaps this demonstrates my thesis that what matters most is anger. Despite the huge body count, I don't seem to encounter many people today who are angry about the Rwandan Holocaust.

They are all bad,can't choose.
Whatever one a person had the unfortunate luck to be in was the worst to them.

Last edited by Misslizard on 21 Jul 2014, 8:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Of all the ones on the list: The nazi holocaust. With that being said, both Mao and Stalin were far worse than Hitler.

For me, it's a toss up between Hitler and Stalin, but only went in the end with the "Man of Steel" because he got a higher body count.

Great Purge under Stalin

I don't think arguments about what atrocity was worse are helpful. With the possible exception of the atomic bombs, I think we can all agree these were all terrible.

I find it fascinating that people think the Nazis are stereotypically referred to as the worst.