How many people died in all the
wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions
of the Twentieth Century? Here are a few atrocitologists who have made
estimates:
M.
Cherif Bassouni, "Searching for
peace and achieving justice: the need for accountability", published on
Law and Contemporary
Problems, vol. 59: no. 4. [http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?59+Law+&+Contemp.+Probs.+9+(Fall+1996)]
(Citing Rummel and SIPRI)
33 million "military
casualties" (That's how the article phrased
it, but I presume that means military deaths.)
170 million killed in
"conflicts of a non-international charater,
internal conflicts and tyrannical regime victimization")
incl. 86M since the
Second World War
[TOTAL: 203,000,000]
Zbigniew
Brzezinski, Out
of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve
of the Twenty-first Century
(1993)
"Lives deliberately
extinguished by politically motivated carnage":
167,000,000 to
175,000,000
Including:
War Dead:
87,500,000
Military war
dead:
33,500,000
Civilian war
dead:
54,000,000
Not-war Dead:
80,000,000
Communist
oppression:
60,000,000
David
Barrett, World
Christian Encyclopedia (2001)
My estimate for the
Communist share of the century's unpleasantness:
Genocide &
Tyranny: 29M
(incl. intentional
famine)
Man-made Famine: 41M
(excl. intentional
famine, but including both wartime and peacetime)
Communist-inspired War
(for example the Russian Civil War, Vietnam, Korea, etc.)
Military: 7m
Civilian
(collateral): 10m
NOTE: With these
numbers, I'm tallying every
combat death and accidental civilian death in the war, without
differentiating who died, who did it or who started it. According to
whichever theory of Just War you are working from, the Communists may
be entirely blameless, or entirely to blame, for these 17M dead.
Carl Haub, "How Many
People Have Ever Lived on Earth?" (Population Today, November/December
2002) [http://www.prb.org/articles/2002/howmanypeoplehaveeverlivedonearth.aspx]
From Haub's chart, it
looks like there were 9,801,490,715 births between 1900 and 2002. Added
to the 1,656,000,000 alive in 1900, it seems that 11,457,490,715 people
lived during the 20th Century. With only ca. 6 billion still alive in
2000, the century probably saw about 5.5 billion deaths.
That means that the 203
million multicides I've counted in the 20th Century would account for
3.7% of all deaths, or 1 out of every 27.
R. Peto, "Mortality from
tobacco in developed countries: indirect
estimation from national vital statistics", Lancet,
23 May 1992:
1930-59: 11,000,000
1960s: 9,000,000
1970s: 13,000,000
1980s: 17,000,000
1990s: 21,000,000
TOTAL (1930-1999):
71,000,000 tobacco-related deaths in developed
countries. (US, Europe, USSR, Canada, Japan, Australia, NZ)
Note: Although the bulk
of humanity lives outside
developed
countries, tobacco-related deaths are not as common there, largely
because the
average Third World life expectancy does not leave enough time to
develop cancer
and heart disease. Ditto for the developed world prior to 1930.
Basically,
smoking is a rich man's way to die.
The World Health
Organization estimates that 3 million people die each year
worldwide from tobacco, which becomes 900,000 3rd-Worlders when we
subtract the
2.1 million 1st- and 2nd-Worlders calculated by Peto (yearly average
for the
1990s, above). This indicates some 9 million tobacco deaths in
non-developed
countries during the 1990s and (using the same ratio) perhaps 5 million
during
the 1980s. If we continue this ratio all the way back, we get an even
hundred
million deaths by tobacco worldwide; however, as Peto puts it, "the
epidemic is generally at an earlier stage," so the tobacco-related
mortality rate in the third world was relatively low before 1980. Let's
add
only another 5 million for the years prior to 1980, bringing the
century total
up to 90,000,000.
AHS: 9.6 million animals
euthanized in the US, 1997 [http://www.americanhumane.org/site/PageServer?pagename=nr_fact_sheets_animal_euthanasia]
HSUS: 3-4 million cats
and dogs euthanized by US shelters each year [http://www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/pet_overpopulation_and_ownership_statistics/hsus_pet_overpopulation_estimates.html]
NOTE: Because the first
outbreaks of the disease were often spread via
troop movements, the temptation is to add all
the world's pandemic
deaths to the death toll of World
War I, thereby
raising it from ca. 15M to more than 35M; however, I have never
seen an
actual, published history of the First World War do this. Yes,
histories of the
war will count the soldiers and refugees that died of the flu in camps,
but
obviously not the millions in, say, China or India, that died far from
any
battlefield, long after the armistice.
11,700,000 deaths
worldwide, 1981-98 (from 23 June 1998 report by the Joint
United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS at http://www.unaids.org/highband/document/epidemio/june98/index.html)
Very, very
rough estimate until I research this more fully: 8.5
million murders worldwide, 1900-1999.
What I do know so far:
Brazil: 350,000
murders in 1990s (24 Oct. 1999 Guardian)
USA 1960-96: 666,160
murders and (non-negligent) manslaughters (Statistical
Abstract of the United States, http://www.census.gov/statab/freq/98s0335.txt)
USA 1900-59: 390,136
murders (Watenburg, The
Statistical History of
the United States, 1976)
USA TOTAL: 1,056,296
(more or less -- depending on how you want to count
manslaughters)
739,938 murders
worldwide, 1986-90, excluding the USA (http://www.ifs.univie.ac.at/uncjin/mosaic/ccrimes/tothom.txt).
The USA produced 12.5% of the world's murders during the years 1986-90,
so if
we apply that ratio to the entire century, then it would indicate that
7.35M
murders were committed worldwide (but outside the US), 1900-96. It
looks like
the century total is somewhere near 1.05M in US + 7.35M elsewhere.
Maybe this 8.5?M should
be added to the wars and oppressions under the
category of deaths "caused by fellow humans", above. If you want to
do this, go ahead.
According to a 20
December 1999 press release from the reinsurance company
Munich Re, a total of 3.5 million people were killed in 20th Century
disasters
such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanos, but not drought or famine.
(A total
of 15M were killed by disasters during the entire Second Millennium.) [http://www.munichre.com]
Just out of curiosity, I
decided to calculate the death toll of racism in
the United States, and it certainly looks like non-whites suffered
3,300,000
excess deaths from 1900 to 1970.
Sources: Throughout most
of American history, non-whites have had a
significantly higher death rate than whites. As there's no natural
reason for
whites to live longer than non-whites, the cause for this difference
must be
social -- rooted in poverty and manifesting itself in malnutrition,
inadequate
public health, substandard medical care, homicide, alcoholism, suicide
and drug
addiction.
If we subtract the
number of non-whites who would have died anyway (even at
a white death rate) from the number who did
die -- year-by-year -- and
then add it all up, we get our total number of excess deaths.
Because this is just my
calculations -- not peer-reviewed or gathered from
a reputable source -- I'll give you a lot of detail. My source for the
raw
numbers is Watenburg, The
Statistical History of the United States
(1976). As an example of my methods, consider this: in 1920, the death
rate for
whites was 12.6/1000, while for non-whites it was 17.7/1000. Now, if we
multiply the non-white death rate by the estimated non-white population
of
10,951,000, we find that there were approximately 193,833 deaths among
non-whites in 1920. If they had died at the white death rate, however,
there
would only have been 137,983 deaths. Therefore, we've got 55,850 excess
deaths
caused by the socioeconomic handicap of not being white.
Decade by decade, here
are the totals:
Decade
Excess
Deaths
1960s
65,000
1950s
200,000
1940s
300,000
1930s
535,000
1920s
630,000
1910s
735,000
1900s
835,000
TOTAL
3,300,000
Escape Hatch: Since no
one's paying me to be mired in controversy, I'll
give a short list of why this calculation might not mean what it seems
to mean. I'll leave it to philosophers and statisticians to iron out
these problems:
I haven't adjusted
for age differences.
I haven't adjusted
for geographic differences -- specifically, I haven't
taken into account that the South has traditionally been unhealthier
than the
North for both blacks and whites. Since the black population has been
disproportionately Southern, then this has boosted their death rates.
Suicide, drug
addiction, alcoholism, etc. are often considered to be
matters of free will.
Homicides are
customarily blamed on the individual murderers rather than
society as a whole.
To give you a chance to
check behind me, here
are
all the calculations in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, compressed with
PKZip.
Jerry Hough, LA
Times 18 August 1998 Op-Ed: With
the collapse of
communism in Russia, poverty and death rates soared, and some 3 million
people
in Russia died who would have been alive if the old life expectancy
rates had
been maintained. [http://www.brook.edu/views/op-ed/hough/19980818.htm]
The
Times (London) 27 Jan. 2000: The
Russian population is roughly
six million lower than if birth and death rates had stayed constant
since the
fall of communism.
28 Dec. 1994 Plain
Dealer: 360,000 more Russians
died in 1993 than
in 1992.
According to a 1999
report from the Institute of Medicine, 44,000 to 98,000
Americans die unnecessarily every year from medical mistakes made by
health care
professionals. (30 Nov. 1999 Washington
Post, 30 Nov. 1999 AP,
or pretty much any news source that day.)
According to official
statistics [http://dsal.uchicago.edu/statistics/],
34,075 people were killed by tigers in British-administered India,
1875-1912. That includes 11,423 k. 1900-1912.
Simple -- I added everything
up. If you sum the first five of the century's
top
30 atrocities, you get a bit
over 142M. Summing
the first 10 brings the total to 157M, while the sum of the first 20 is
171.7M. It may look like, at this rate, we'll shoot past 188M in no
time at all, but
notice how the body counts get smaller at each level -- from 142M for
the 1st 5
to 15M for the next 5 to a mere 14M or so for the next 10. Pretty soon,
we get
to the point where a single atrocity doesn't noticably shift the total
at all.
