How England Sees Itself

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droid

Guest
What the fuck?? Are you going on about this again? I let you off last time, this time I won't -- post the figures, matey.

lol. You really think Im going to go up to the attic and actually transcribe pages from a book for you? Do your own research. I thought you knew all this anyway, having had an empire bashing historical education.

Generally, ignoring scores of minor conflicts, and are straight death tolls and not a calculation of surplus deaths:

Zulu wars - 30,000+
Boer war - 75,000
Burma - 10,000
Australia - 240,000 - 600,000
Indian famines between 1876 and 1901 - as high as 29 million (Davis)
Bengal famine of 1943 - 2 to 4 million
Irish famine - at least 1.5 million + 500,000 deaths during emigration (Mokyr)
Post war period - 10 million direct and indirect (Curtis)
 
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droid

Guest
Huh? You've quoted 50 million over the course of 250 years. I've heard figures in excess of that, approaching 100 million even, for both Stalin and Mao, over the course of a few decades.

No you havent. You may have heard the combined figure of 100 million for Stalin and Mao. That comes from the discredited 'black book of communism'. Even 2 of its authors dispute that figure and put it at about 60-70 million. Stalin's death toll is generally estimated to be around 20 million these days. Mao's is about 30-40 million, both sets of figures ( the majority in Mao's case) include famines.

The standard figure quoted for WWII is 60 million, over the course of six years.

60 million killed in the course of warfare. Im specifically talking about genocide and colonialism. The widely accepted figure for the Nazis is 9 million. Unless you count German, Italians and Japanese killed by the allies as 'victims of the nazis'?

And we're back to the genocide pissing contest...

All of these figures are incomprehensibly high and rank amongst the worst crimes in history, but only one set are being disputed here, only one set is 'unexceptional'.

Why is that?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
A great many authors other than the guys who wrote that book have produced estimates far in excess of the figures you've just given: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm.

As far as the Holocaust goes, most sources I've seen state 11 million. That's just deaths in the camps and doesn't take into account the many millions of Soviet civilians and POWs (not active servicemen) killed.

And if we're talking about combat deaths, I think it's fair to lay most of the blame for horrendously destructive wars at the door of the regimes that started those wars, don't you?

From that website:

HITLER TOTAL:

Courtois: 25,000,000
Rummel: 20,946,000 democides
Heidenrich, How to Prevent Genocide: 17,000,000
Brzezinski: 17,000,000
Urlanis: 15-16,000,000 (11-12M civilians + 3.9M POWs)
MEDIAN: ca. 15.5M
Our Times: 13,000,000 (6M Jews + 7M others)
Compton's: 12,000,000
Grenville: 10,000,000, including 2M children.

NOTE: These numbers only include outright murders, but keep in mind that some 28M civilians and 14M soldiers died in the European War. That's 42,000,000 deaths which can probably be blamed on Hitler to one extent or another.

most of which happened over the course of less than five years.

All of these figures are incomprehensibly high and rank amongst the worst crimes in history, but only one set are being disputed here

Whut? I just quoted some figures and you're disputing them too!
 
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droid

Guest
A great many authors other than the guys who wrote that book have produced estimates far in excess of the figures you've just given: http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm.

Uh huh. Show me where it says 200million for Stalin and Mao combined.

Stalin's death toll has been estimated as anywhere between 9 million & 72 million. A rough consensus based on recent research is about 20 million.

Its less clear in the case of China. I've seen estimates from 12 million to 60 million. Credible estimates seem to be between 30-40 million.

As far as Holocaust goes, most sources I've seen state 11 million. That's just deaths in the camps and doesn't take into account the many millions of Soviet civilians and POWs (not active servicemen) killed.

Where did you get these figures? Total estimates including Russian and eastern european civilian deaths (4 million), Russian POWs (2 million) and the Holocaust are about 14 million afaik.

And if we're talking about combat deaths, I think it's fair to lay most of the blame for horrendously destructive wars at the door of the regimes that started those wars, don't you?

Not necessarily. I dont think the Japanese are necessarily to blame for the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example, or the Germans are responsible for Dresden. Culpable perhaps.

Regardless, the vast majority of the figures Ive quoted did not take place in conflict situations, or in the case of the Boer war, they include large amounts of concentration camp victims.

Whut? I just some figures and you're disputing them too!

lol. Ok. Good point. Well lets just say that the exceptional 'evil' of these regimes is not widely disputed.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Blame, culpability...not to defend those events per se, but nontheless they wouldn't have happened without those respective countries having been aggressors in the first place.

Dunno where you got the idea I'd said 200 million for the USSR and China, I said some estimates put each state at over 50 million.
 
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droid

Guest
Blame, culpability...not to defend those events per se, but nontheless they wouldn't have happened without those respective countries having been aggressors in the first place.

Dunno where you got the idea I'd said 200 million for the USSR and China, I said some estimates put each state at over 50 million.

Because, prior to your edit you said 100 million each. Maybe it was a typo?

But yes, I am making an argument for British exceptionalism. The British were the best colonialists. They subjugated the most people, made the most profit from slavery, had the largest and longest lasting empire in centuries, had the most devious policies of coercion and control... you guys were the best! ;)

Edit: no, I don't think you're anti-British, otherwise you wouldn't post on a forum used mainly by Brits. We met once, remember? I have a distinct memory of you not personally accusing me of war crimes.

I may not have said those things to your face, but I was thinking them! No, seriously. Some of my best friends are British.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
People get blacked up for the annual Lewes bonfire night celebrations iirc. There's an effigy of the pope burned, too.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I said I'd heard figures that "approach 100m" for China - I think some estimates on that website say something like 75m. Has to be an overestimate but the very fact that estimates disagree by tens of millions gives some idea of the sheer scale, whatever it was.

But your hilarious joke about Britain being the "best" at imperialism is kind of what I was getting at earlier - it was global in extent and lasted for centuries - compare that to the carnage some regimes wreaked in a much shorter time and, in a couple of cases, in a single (though admittedly huge) country.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
People get blacked up for the annual Lewes bonfire night celebrations iirc. There's an effigy of the pope burned, too.

I was brought up there and don't remember seeing that ever. Haven't been since early 90s but doubt it's changed for the worst. Obviously the pope still gets a blasting though.
 

luka

Well-known member
when i did history a-level i was the only white boy in the class. the teacher was white too, a young blonde girl. most othr students were bengali and one of thm was a famous nutcase with a lot of legnds attached to his name, mostly acts of extreme violence. he got into a debate with th teacher about hitler. he claimed hitler had done a deal with the arabs, some kind of treaty betwen jew haters and he respected the muslim world and had no wish to attack it. he was a great man he said. i think he even stood up during his oration, to add weight to his words. she was a bit dumbfounded.
 

slowtrain

Well-known member
when i did history a-level i was the only white boy in the class. the teacher was white too, a young blonde girl. most othr students were bengali and one of thm was a famous nutcase with a lot of legnds attached to his name, mostly acts of extreme violence. he got into a debate with th teacher about hitler. he claimed hitler had done a deal with the arabs, some kind of treaty betwen jew haters and he respected the muslim world and had no wish to attack it. he was a great man he said. i think he even stood up during his oration, to add weight to his words. she was a bit dumbfounded.

i had a vague of sense of deja vu reading that.

weird.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
yes the exceptionalism wrt britain is what i was getting at.

This isn't debate at all, it's just an endless round of "What about...?".

What about the gold statue of King Leopold clutching african children to his bosom up in that museum in Belgium?

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'celebrating' the Belgian 'achievment' against the African 'savages'. Pride of place went to the statues in the front hall, large gilded personifications of kindly Belgium bringing peace, IMG_2832 prosperity and civilisation to the grateful Congolese (as you see at the top of this post, in the statue of the look-alike Leopold clutching the African kids to his breast, and on the right with Mother Belgium doing much the same) -- but the early nineteenth century display of colonial memorabilia told a similar story.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I've had weird experiences with that sort of stuff in Malta - beautiful baroque church interiors with amazing renaissance art treasures and every now and then you find a statue including some classical goddess with her foot on the head of a chained Moor... although in that case it's quite a lot older, so it's easier to skip over it as being just a historical thing. Also the Mediterranean in the middle ages had a rather different power dynamic from colonial Africa in the late 19th century...

Malta is kind of weird generally, though - it's still a very Catholic country, and despite the fact that there's (presumably) some very interesting medieval islamic history and archaeology there, you'd think from looking at the museums that the whole place was created from nothing five minutes before the Knights of St John took over...

Sorry, massive digression.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Let me come clean,’ he wrote in the New York Times Magazine in April 2003, a few weeks after the shock-and-awe campaign began in Iraq, ‘I am a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang.’

Yeah, well he took to slagging off the Iraq war pretty quickly, if he was ever fully for it; he probably was slightly for it, like Kissinger was slightly for it; that is, in a weasly, opportunistic way, when it was going well, when it was profitable. He is an opportunist and a Kissinger fan -- I get the sense that a large part of the neoimperialist schtick, which is much more prevalent and vulgar in Colossus (a shit book) than in Empire (a very good book, and I feel like the only person here who's actually bothered to read it fully), is to do with marketing, distilling a saleable angle. He's a showbiz academic, like Kissinger was a showbiz wonk. When he's being a sensible historian he's as good as anyone, but when he's being a TV celeb, he is glib and reprehensible, if not quite as actively evil as his mate Henry.
 
D

droid

Guest
Blame, culpability...not to defend those events per se, but nontheless they wouldn't have happened without those respective countries having been aggressors in the first place.

This is an interesting road to go down. It would place responsibility for Palestinian suicide bombs, and Hamas and Hezbollah rockets at the feet of Israel for instance.

I prefer to assume that states are responsible for their own actions. The US knew exactly what it was doing when it firebombed Tokyo, the British made precise calculations with regard to the consequences of their bombing campaigns.

You then also have to consider debates regarding the causes of wars... defenders of Japan who say that the American war embargo was an effective declaration of war on Japan. The treaty of Versailles...

And as a general moral principle. If you punch me in the face I am not then absolved of responsibility when I stab you 30 times and burn down your house just because you were the agressor.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
"although in that case it's quite a lot older, so it's easier to skip over it as being just a historical thing."
Isn't this an important point that hasn't really been mentioned? People feel equally separated from an atrocity if it's far distant in time as they do if its perpetrators are far distant in space.
 
D

droid

Guest
I said I'd heard figures that "approach 100m" for China - I think some estimates on that website say something like 75m. Has to be an overestimate but the very fact that estimates disagree by tens of millions gives some idea of the sheer scale, whatever it was.

But your hilarious joke about Britain being the "best" at imperialism is kind of what I was getting at earlier - it was global in extent and lasted for centuries - compare that to the carnage some regimes wreaked in a much shorter time and, in a couple of cases, in a single (though admittedly huge) country.

So 200,000 a year for 250 years is better than a million a year in 20 years? Stalin would have killed everybody in Russia had he lived for another 30 years? The Chinese would have continued to kill millions through forced collectivsiation even after all agriculture in China had been collectivised?

Yes. I was being deliberately inflammatory, and the point is a bit OT but related.

Certain regimes, states and political systems have been demonised in our history, not necessarily because they were objectively 'worst' or because they killed more people, but because they have been subject to sustained propaganda campaigns. 'Our' crimes are minimised and justified, and explained away as being 'too complex' to come to such a basic moral conclusion regarding their nature.
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
Post war period - 10 million direct and indirect (Curtis)
I'd be interested to see a breakdown of this and know what it means by "direct and indirect". As far as I'm concerned this is by far the most troubling figure, since it's most likely to be a feature of ongoing policy...
 
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