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The
Massacre Page
"I
have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances
to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of
enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee."
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
The mission
of this page is to list, summarize, and link accounts of major
massacres around
the world since the year One A.D. I begin in the Christian Era
(or Common
Era if you prefer) because events prior to that time are often poorly
documented, obscured in legend, and subject to vastly different
standards of
morality from those we profess today. As the once widely-read
historian
Will Durant has observed, "It was a great moral improvement when men
ceased to kill or eat their fellow men, and merely made them slaves."
Atrocities that occurred when men scarcely knew any better have little
to say
to us.
My own
idiosyncratic definition of a massacre is this: A single occasion
of deliberate
slaughter of a
large number of unarmed persons. Excluded are genocides by
nation-states (e.g.
of Jews, Armenians, American Indians) and battleground annihilations of
armed
foes (e.g. The
This page is
not original research. All the sources I cite are secondary, with their
own
points of view, to which some readers may object. In many cases,
the title of the massacre is linked to other descriptions on the
Web. My goal is to suggest
that, despite the pretensions of many religions and optimistic
philosophies,
homo sapiens is often just another species
of animals,
brutes, and savages. Civilization and liberal education may be
necessary
antidotes, but they are not sufficient. Virtually no race or
religion is
absent from this list, either as victim or perpetrator. And my
list is by
no means complete. Massacres listed are merely those that seem to
be the
most notorious and best documented. Suggestions or comments are
welcome at billmccarter@earthlink.net
.
1
A.D. The
Massacre of the Innocents
According
to the Gospel of Matthew,
“Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was
exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in
Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under,
according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise
men.” This almost certainly never happened (it is mentioned
in no other source), but generations of Christians have believed that
it did.
For that reason alone, it is a worthy introduction to our list.
629
Mohammed
Massacres the Qurayza
Jews
Of
Mohammed,
historian Robert Payne has written “No other religious leader of
comparable stature has ever urged such unpitying wars against his
enemies.” Here is an account by his more sympathetic 1961
biographer, Maxime Robinson, of the fate
of a sect of
Jews who surrendered to Mohammed at
1099 The
Crusaders’ Massacre at
The
Christian Crusaders were far more bloodthirsty than Mohammed. The
goal of
the First Crusade was to retrieve the holy land from the rule of the
infidel
Moslems (now Muslims), and it was temporarily accomplished. But in
conquering
1204 The
Crusaders’ Massacre at Christian Constantinople
The
diversion of the Fourth Crusade from its goal of rescuing the holy land
to
plundering the richest city in Christendom is one of the great
scandals of
western history. This account is from Ernle
Bradford’s The Great Betrayal (1967): “It was the beginning
of a shameful episode, a day that should be deep-edged in black in the
church
calendars of the western world. It was one of the greatest
betrayals in
history – a betrayal of their crusading oaths, of the Christian faith
and
of the Byzantines who had laid down their arms and peacefully submitted
the
city… Imbued with a hatred of the Byzantines who had driven them from
their shops and houses, and confident that they had the protection of
their
fellow countrymen and co-religionists, these Pisans
and Genoese now took an ample revenge. As the monk Gunther
tells us, they were the first to take arms against the Byzantines and
they
alone were responsible for killing nearly 2,000 Greeks.”
1258 Mongol
Massacre at
Mongol
prince Hulegu led the horde’s assault,
aided by
the local Christians. This account is from The Devil’s
Horsemen
by James Chambers (1979): “First Hulegu
sent a
messenger calling on the soldiers in the garrison to lay down their
arms
… and, believing they would be allowed to retire into Syria, they
marched
out unarmed, only to be divided into companies and slaughtered …
The Christians who assembled in the Nestorian church and some of the
foreign
visitors were spared, but the Moslem population was subjected to a
hideous
massacre, in which the Christian soldiers of Georgia took part with
particular
relish, and when all were dead and the plunder had been removed, the
mosques
and palaces were set on fire… [N]ot for the
first time, the Mongol armies were forced
to abandon
their camps by the stench of the corpses.” Although Chambers
thinks
such numbers are exaggerated, Anthony Nutting
asserts
in The Arabs: “Over a million people, including women,
children,
and babies in arms - three quarters of the population - were massacred
by the
blood-crazed Mongols.”
1282 The
Sicilian Vespers Massacre
This account
is from the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Its name derives from a
riot
that took place in a church outside
1415 Henry
V
Massacres his Prisoners at
Mortal
statistics are provided by Christopher Hibbert
in
<>
1453 The
Turkish
Massacre at
Turkish
sultan Mahomet II finally took this great city for Islam on October 29,
1453. In Jihad in the West (1998), Paul Fregosi
gives this account: “Several thousand of the survivors had taken
refuge in the cathedral: nobles, servants, ordinary citizens, their
wives and
children, priests and nuns. They locked the huge doors, prayed,
and
waited. Mahomet had given the troops free quarter. They
raped, of
course, the nuns being the first victims, and slaughtered. At
least four thousand
were killed before Mahomet stopped the massacre at noon… Mahomet
ordered
the Grand Duke Notaras, who had survived,
to be
brought before him, asked him for the names and addresses of all the
leading
nobles, officials, and citizens, which Notaras
gave
him. He had them all arrested and decapitated. He
sadistically
bought from their owners high ranking
prisoners who
had been enslaved, for the pleasure of having them beheaded in front of
him. He then lined up their heads, counted them, meditated, and
at one
moment recited a verse by the Persian poet Firdusi.”
1572 St.
Bartholomew’s Day Massacre
Personal
responsibility for this, the most notorious event in the sixteenth
century Wars
of Religion, is unclear. According to Alistair Horne in La
Belle
France (2005): “The view long held was that Charles IX, acting on
the
advice of his mother, Catherine, to resolve France’s dilemma by a mass
purge of Protestants, gave the terrible order: ‘Kill them all, so that
not one will be left to reproach me for it.’ … Some 15,000 were
slaughtered that night, most of them in
1692 The
Massacre of Glencoe
The
numbers in this massacre were not great; thirty-eight MacDonalds were
slaughtered by their Campbell hosts.
"There had been more terrible slaughters in the Highlands, clan upon
clan. Even the bitter grievance it left - betrayal of
hospitality, murder
under trust - was not unknown, brother killed brother and cousin
struck
down cousin. The Massacre of Glencoe, however, was a political
act,
planned by a King's Minister. A King's officer carried it out and
the
King himself signed and countersigned the final order." John
Prebble, Glencoe (1966).
1770 The
This petty
killing of five civilians by panicked British regulars scarcely
deserves
mention
here. But everyone, or at least every American, knows the
name.
That it was no real massacre, but is nonetheless far better known than
most of
the events on this page that were, is a testament to the propaganda
value of
elementary school text books.
1792 The
September Massacres
1793 The
Massacre of Prisoners at the Vendee
1805 Dessalines Massacres the Haitian
Whites
Ex-slave Dessalines was crowned
Emperor of Haiti in October of 1804. He feared a counter-revolution by
the white landowners, and by March of 1805 rumors were rife that the
French were about to attack on their behalf. Marxist
historian C.L.R. James gives this account in his classic The Black Jacobins
(1938): "It was then that the complete massacre took place.
The population, stirred to fear with the nearness of the
counter-revolution, killed all with every possible brutality. After the
first slaughter Dessalines issued a proclamation promising pardon
for all who were in hiding. They came out, and were immediately
killed." But James has no sympathy for the whites.
"For these old slave-owners, who burnt a little powder in the arse of a
Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated
by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old
cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one
drop of ink."
1816 The
Massacre at the Negro Fort
One of
several stains on the escutcheon of the president who graces our twenty
dollar
bill, this quasi-military encounter relating to territorial disputes
with
Florida Indians may not strictly qualify for inclusion here.
Readers may
judge, first from this account by Marquis James in his biography Andrew
Jackson: The Border Captain.
“With
three thousand small arms and a thousand barrels of powder, [the fort]
was now
in the hands of fugitive slaves under the determined leadership of one
of their
number named Garcon…
1857 The
Mountain Meadows Massacre
Again from
the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Angered by the U.S. government's
decision to send troops into the Utah territory, Mormons there were
further
incensed in 1857 when a band of emigrants set up camp 40 miles (64 km)
from
Cedar City. On September 7 or 8, the travelers were attacked by a
party
of Paiute Indians and some Mormon settlers led by John Doyle Lee. The
attackers, promising safe conduct, persuaded the emigrants to lay down
their
arms. Then, as the band of 137 proceeded southward toward
1860 Massacre
of
Christians at
Details of
this atrocity are hard to come by. Accounts I have found eschew
statistics in preference for tributes to the chivalrous conduct of
former
anti-French rebel Abd al-Qadir. Here
is Anthony
Nutting’s account, from The Arabs
(using
an older spelling of the hero’s name). “In 1860, four years
after Abd el-Kader settled in
1864 The
Saltville Massacre
What follows
is the Introduction to The Saltville Massacre by Thomas D. Mays
(1998). “On October 2, 1864, near the southwest
1885 The Mahdi's
Massacre
at Khartoum
In The Scramble for Africa
(1991),
Thomas Pakenham gives this account of what the Mahdi found after his
forces had
overrun the city and its heroic Victorian defender, General George
Gordon: "At least 4,000 people out of the 30,000 civilians and
6,000
soldiers of the doomed garrison had been massacred the previous
morning.
The bodies of men hacked to death and then ritually decapitated lay in
every
part of the city. Efforts continued, by dint of the courbash (the
buffalo-hie whip), and still more drastic methods, to persuade the
survivors to
point out where they had hidden their gold and silver. The Mahdi
ordered
his men to stop further killing and not to damage the buildings, which
would be
needed for God's work."
1919 The
"As the sun started to set on
Amritsar's Jallianwala Bagh, British Brigadier Reginald Dyer ordered
fifty of
his toughest Gurkha and Baluchi troops to opoen fire without warning on
an
unarmed gathering of Punjabi peasants celebraing their spring
harvest.
Four hundred were murdered, another 1,200 wounded. As their
ammunition
ran low, the troops withdrew without caring for any of the wounded or
calling
for any medical assistance." Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi's Passion
(2001).
1941 The Katyn
Massacre
1945
1946 The
Bombing of the King David Hotel
1968 The
1988 Pan Am
Flight 103
1989 The
Massacre at Tienanmin Square
1993
Massacre of Branch Davidians
at
1995 The
1995 The Srebernica Massacre
2001 The
September 11 Massacre