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pocketvolcano's review
5.0
Interesting book. Goes to show that humanity is constantly coming up with new ways to kill each other.
saintboleyn's review against another edition
3.0
DNF @ 20%
It's not you, it's me - I just for whatever reason could not get into this book at this point in the semester. With any luck, I'll be able to pick it back up over spring break
It's not you, it's me - I just for whatever reason could not get into this book at this point in the semester. With any luck, I'll be able to pick it back up over spring break
oneoflifeslollopers's review against another edition
4.0
I hope you noticed that two of the heroes from earlier chapters are the villains in this chapter. History is complicated.
When I came across Atrocitology at work, I thought it was a really intriguing concept. I was actually quite surprised by the results of this book too – while some of the results were as I expected (WW2 is Number 1) there were plenty of events that I did not expect to have such a high death toll, nor some events to have occurred so long ago.
Matthew White’s compendium spans from nearly 500 BC to the present day, and if that seems like a weighty time period, it’s because it is. This book is not for the faint hearted – it took me nearly five months to digest this 700 page monolith but it is well worth the undertaking. It is clear to see how much research has put into writing Atrocitology and how much work has gone into condensing some very involved historic events to make them easier to follow. While at times I felt completely overwhelmed by the vast amount of information, White does his best to break up the great slabs of information with humour.
Most writers treat the Taipings as poor deluded peasants following a madman’s hallucinations, but when you get right down to it, that’s how most religions begind (not your religion obviously, but all the other ones.) - The Taiping Rebellion.
He also goes to great lengths to justify his choices and total death counts, and I found his justifications as interesting as the main information, as he goes into the details of the decision making process.
As I said before, there were some things I expected to have high death tolls, like the world wars, but there were plenty of events that I had never even heard of, and I found it fascinating – and saddening - to know that an event that I’ve never heard mentioned could have such a high death toll. I also found it quite interesting to know that I’d expected most of these events to be wars and I was surprised by mentions of preventable famines or how much influence political changes can have on a region in non violent ways.
War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war.
With each event, White details the key players, areas affected and goes into the reasons why such events took place, with a quick summary at the beginning of each entry. Interspersed with the count down as it were, are chapters on topics like genocide, world conquerors or the ways of war which explore in further detail the main themes behind certain groups of atrocities.
Often with this book, what becomes more interesting than the events themselves, is White’s theories on history and record keeping. There is the common saying that history is told, and recorded, by the winners and this is definitely true. White shows that, by record keeping standards, more importantly it is when the history is recorded and by whom that matters just as much as what is being recorded. While some things have melted into the background of my memory, the more individual stories have stuck in my head and I’ve listed some below:
About 60 percent of the individual oppressors and warmongers who were most responsible for each of these multicides lived happily ever after. (There is a chart showing that 49% continued ruling until death by natural causes and 11% had a peaceful retirement.)
Tuol Sleng high school in the suburbs of Phnom Penh was adapted as a prsion, S-21. The records show that only 7 of the 14,000 prisoners who entered this building survived the visit. (Democratic Kampuchea [Cambodia])
The largest shark attack in history occurred when the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship went down too quickly for an adequate distress call to go out, delaying rescue for several days. Of the 900 stranded sailors who bobbed in the water in their life vests, only 316 survived the circling sharks.
The only absolutely vital detail you need to know about any of these battles is that 19,240 British were killed on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, most of them in just a few minutes charging across no-man’s-land. (First World War).
Until the Nazis built their death camps, the Colosseum may have been the smallest site of the most killings in history, with more killings per acre than any battlefield or prison…Five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals were killed to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. Trajan killed eleven thousand animals to celebrate his Dacian triumph in 107 CE. (Gladiatorial Games)
In Joan (of Arc)’s entourage rode Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, earning glory as one of his nation’s greatest warriors, but he eventually earned greater fame as one of the deadliest serial killers in human history. After retiring from military service to his estates in 1435, he began kidnapping, sodomizing, and disembowelling young boys. When he was caught in 1440, he confessed in vivid and convincing detail to 150 murders. (Hundred Years War)
What came across as especially horrifying to me was the consistently poor treatment of female civilians through out all these events. In several of these chapters – Chinese Civil War, Second World War, Rwandan Genocide, Second Congo War – there is rape, mutilation and murder on a mass scale:
Women by the tens of thousands were gang-raped, often killed afterward, mutilated, and left on display to terrify the locals. (Chinese Civil War)
…almost every woman in the path of the onslaught was raped, then tossed aside, then raped again whenever a new unit of the Red Army arrived. (Second World War)
Among the first to die was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu woman who was raped with bayonets and killed. The Belgian soldiers of her UN bodyguard were under orders not to provoke the locals by fighting back, so they surrendered without a fight, only to be castrated, gagged with their own genitalia, and killed anyway. (Rwandan Genocide)
The Interahamwe made a special effort to rape and mutilate female victims before cutting them apart. Sometimes the victims were killed immediately after the rape; sometimes they were left to die of grotesque mutilations; sometimes they were caged for another round of rape later. On one occasion, a woman was pinned to the ground with a spear thrust through her foot while her attackers ran a quick errand before returning to rape her again. Witnesses could see the proof of these atrocities months later, ‘even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them…They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with the legs bent and their knees wide apart.” (Rwandan Genocide)
When I came across Atrocitology at work, I thought it was a really intriguing concept. I was actually quite surprised by the results of this book too – while some of the results were as I expected (WW2 is Number 1) there were plenty of events that I did not expect to have such a high death toll, nor some events to have occurred so long ago.
Matthew White’s compendium spans from nearly 500 BC to the present day, and if that seems like a weighty time period, it’s because it is. This book is not for the faint hearted – it took me nearly five months to digest this 700 page monolith but it is well worth the undertaking. It is clear to see how much research has put into writing Atrocitology and how much work has gone into condensing some very involved historic events to make them easier to follow. While at times I felt completely overwhelmed by the vast amount of information, White does his best to break up the great slabs of information with humour.
Most writers treat the Taipings as poor deluded peasants following a madman’s hallucinations, but when you get right down to it, that’s how most religions begind (not your religion obviously, but all the other ones.) - The Taiping Rebellion.
He also goes to great lengths to justify his choices and total death counts, and I found his justifications as interesting as the main information, as he goes into the details of the decision making process.
As I said before, there were some things I expected to have high death tolls, like the world wars, but there were plenty of events that I had never even heard of, and I found it fascinating – and saddening - to know that an event that I’ve never heard mentioned could have such a high death toll. I also found it quite interesting to know that I’d expected most of these events to be wars and I was surprised by mentions of preventable famines or how much influence political changes can have on a region in non violent ways.
War kills more civilians than soldiers. In fact, the army is usually the safest place to be during a war. Soldiers are protected by thousands of armed men, and they get the first choice of food and medical care. Meanwhile, even if civilians are not systematically massacred, they are usually robbed, evicted, or left to starve; however, their stories are usually left untold. Most military histories skim lightly over the massive suffering of the ordinary, unarmed civilians caught in the middle, even though theirs is the most common experience of war.
With each event, White details the key players, areas affected and goes into the reasons why such events took place, with a quick summary at the beginning of each entry. Interspersed with the count down as it were, are chapters on topics like genocide, world conquerors or the ways of war which explore in further detail the main themes behind certain groups of atrocities.
Often with this book, what becomes more interesting than the events themselves, is White’s theories on history and record keeping. There is the common saying that history is told, and recorded, by the winners and this is definitely true. White shows that, by record keeping standards, more importantly it is when the history is recorded and by whom that matters just as much as what is being recorded. While some things have melted into the background of my memory, the more individual stories have stuck in my head and I’ve listed some below:
About 60 percent of the individual oppressors and warmongers who were most responsible for each of these multicides lived happily ever after. (There is a chart showing that 49% continued ruling until death by natural causes and 11% had a peaceful retirement.)
Tuol Sleng high school in the suburbs of Phnom Penh was adapted as a prsion, S-21. The records show that only 7 of the 14,000 prisoners who entered this building survived the visit. (Democratic Kampuchea [Cambodia])
The largest shark attack in history occurred when the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The ship went down too quickly for an adequate distress call to go out, delaying rescue for several days. Of the 900 stranded sailors who bobbed in the water in their life vests, only 316 survived the circling sharks.
The only absolutely vital detail you need to know about any of these battles is that 19,240 British were killed on July 1, 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, most of them in just a few minutes charging across no-man’s-land. (First World War).
Until the Nazis built their death camps, the Colosseum may have been the smallest site of the most killings in history, with more killings per acre than any battlefield or prison…Five thousand wild animals and four thousand domestic animals were killed to celebrate the opening of the Colosseum. Trajan killed eleven thousand animals to celebrate his Dacian triumph in 107 CE. (Gladiatorial Games)
In Joan (of Arc)’s entourage rode Gilles de Rais, marshal of France, earning glory as one of his nation’s greatest warriors, but he eventually earned greater fame as one of the deadliest serial killers in human history. After retiring from military service to his estates in 1435, he began kidnapping, sodomizing, and disembowelling young boys. When he was caught in 1440, he confessed in vivid and convincing detail to 150 murders. (Hundred Years War)
What came across as especially horrifying to me was the consistently poor treatment of female civilians through out all these events. In several of these chapters – Chinese Civil War, Second World War, Rwandan Genocide, Second Congo War – there is rape, mutilation and murder on a mass scale:
Women by the tens of thousands were gang-raped, often killed afterward, mutilated, and left on display to terrify the locals. (Chinese Civil War)
…almost every woman in the path of the onslaught was raped, then tossed aside, then raped again whenever a new unit of the Red Army arrived. (Second World War)
Among the first to die was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu woman who was raped with bayonets and killed. The Belgian soldiers of her UN bodyguard were under orders not to provoke the locals by fighting back, so they surrendered without a fight, only to be castrated, gagged with their own genitalia, and killed anyway. (Rwandan Genocide)
The Interahamwe made a special effort to rape and mutilate female victims before cutting them apart. Sometimes the victims were killed immediately after the rape; sometimes they were left to die of grotesque mutilations; sometimes they were caged for another round of rape later. On one occasion, a woman was pinned to the ground with a spear thrust through her foot while her attackers ran a quick errand before returning to rape her again. Witnesses could see the proof of these atrocities months later, ‘even in the whitened skeletons. The legs bent and apart. A broken bottle, a rough branch, even a knife between them…They died in a position of total vulnerability, flat on their backs, with the legs bent and their knees wide apart.” (Rwandan Genocide)
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