20th Century … The Century of …

The 20th century was the century of many greats. The largest population, the largest economic growth, greatest wealth, greatest advances in the sciences and in technology, the development of real medicine, the largest population, the largest number of wars with the greatest losses of life. But in the midst of these firsts and greatests is one that is so overpoweringly depressing and represents such a immensity of unjustified suffering. The 20th century was the century of genocide, mass civilian murder and racial, cultural, national and tribal purgings. The attached list shows just the largest of these events. It is also far from complete.

Starting with what is called the most forgotten mass extinction event of the 20th century – the systematic officially sanctioned casual murder of millions of citizens of the Congo Free State, an event that we should all remember given that it was exposed by our own Roger Casement – the number of mass murder events and the numbers killed increased unremittingly throughout the century.

This lists excludes deaths from events such as famines that were not explicitly man made - so the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s is not listed here – and events such as pandemics and combatants in wars. This list represents the larger events of the murder of civilians purely for their own sake, where even the feeble context of external justification has been removed.

The Turks feature three times: once for the well-known and now much denied Armenian genocide, recalled only because of the probably apocryphal statement by Hitler questioning who remembers the Armenians, to the less known and now long-forgotten Assyrian and Pontic Greek massacres.

Stalin ordered millions to their deaths just to fill quotas with the reasoning that because there must be a certain number of traitors in a given area, that number must be found and killed.

You’d think it would be hard to kill hundreds of thousands of people in circumstances where you are not using military and mechanistic tools and insulated by distance but evidently it is far from difficult. Statements such as “it is inconceivable that …” fall away to irrelevance in the face of the unstoppable sequence of mass slaughter events. The Croatians brutally and physically murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs from 1941 to 1944. The Serbs then revisited this brutality on the Bosnians 50 years later.

It is so hard to tolerate the thought of the accumulated personal pain that these deaths represent.

Critics may decry the world standing idly by as the Rwandan and Bosnian massacres took place. But the world has stood idly by and continues to remain disinterested and uninvolved as these events continue.

The ease with which a society turns from apparent civilisation to gorging on mass murder may seem extraordinary but the reality demonstrates it is so ordinary and routine. The frail restraints of civilisation are so simply snapped and what is then unleashed is appalling. I was going to write unimaginable but again history demonstrates that it can be both imagined and then effected so very easily.