available to leaders. The question now is: how has this interaction changed over the course of history?
It’s not an easy question to answer, because historians have never found genocide particularly interesting. Since antiquity the stacks of libraries have been filled with scholarship on war, but scholarship on genocide is nearly nonexistent, though it killed more people. As Chalk and Jonassohn point out of ancient histories, “We know that empires have disappeared and that cities were destroyed, and we suspect that some wars were genocidal in their results; but we do not know what happened to the bulk of the populations involved in these events. Their fate was simply too unimportant. When they were mentioned at all, they were usually lumped together with the herds of oxen, sheep, and other livestock.”130
As soon as one realizes that the sackings, razings, and massacres of past centuries are what we would call genocide today, it becomes utterly clear that genocide is not a phenomenon of the 20th century. Those familiar with classical history know that the Athenians destroyed Melos during the 5th-century-BCE Peloponnesian War; according to Thucydides, “the Athenians thereupon put to death all who were of military age and made slaves of the women and children.” Another familiar example is the Romans’ destruction of Carthage and its population during the Third Punic War in the 3rd century BCE, a war so total that the Romans, it was said, sowed salt into the ground to make it forever unfarmable. Other historical genocides include the real-life bloodbaths that inspired the ones narrated in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Hebrew Bible; the massacres and sackings during the Crusades; the suppression of the Albigensian heresy; the Mongol invasions; the European witch hunts; and the carnage of the European Wars of Religion.
The authors of recent histories of mass killing are adamant that the idea of an unprecedented “century of genocide” (the 20th) is a myth. On their first page Chalk and Jonassohn write, “Genocide has been practiced in all regions of the world and during all periods in history,” and add that their eleven case studies of pre-20th-century genocides “are not intended to be either exhaustive or representative.”131 Kiernan agrees: “A major conclusion of this book is that genocide indeed occurred commonly before the twentieth century.” One can see what he means with a glance at the first page of his table of contents:Part One: Early Imperial Expansion
1. Classical Genocide and Early Modern Memory
2. The Spanish Conquest of the New World 1492–1600
3. Guns and Genocide in East Asia 1400–1600
4. Genocidal Massacres in Early Modern Southeast Asia
Part Two. Settler Colonialism
5. The English Conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603
6. Colonial North America, 1600–1776
7. Genocidal Violence in Nineteenth-Century Australia
8. Genocide in the United States
9. Settler Genocides in Africa, 1830–1910132
Rummel has fitted a number to his own conclusion that “the mass murder by emperors, kings, sultans, khans, presidents, governors, generals, and other rulers of their own citizens or of those under their protection or control is very much part of our history.” He counts 133,147,000 victims of sixteen democides before the 20th century (including ones in India, Iran, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and Russia) and surmises that there may have been 625,716,000 democide victims in all.133
These authors did not compile their lists by indiscriminately piling up every historical episode in which a lot of people died. They are careful to note, for example, that the Native American population was decimated by disease rather than by a program of extermination, while particular incidents were blatantly genocidal. In an early example, Puritans in New England exterminated the Pequot nation in 1638, after which the minister Increase Mather asked his congregation to thank God “that on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to Hell.”134 This celebration of genocide did not hurt his career. He later became president of Harvard University, and the residential house with which I am currently affiliated is named after him (motto: Increase Mather’s Spirit!).
Mather was neither the first nor the last to thank God for genocide. As we saw in chapter 1, Yahweh ordered the Hebrew tribes to carry out dozens of them, and in the 9th century BCE the Moabites returned the favor by massacring the inhabitants of several Hebrew cities in the name of their god, Ashtar-Chemosh.135 In a passage from the Bhagavad-Gita (written around 400 CE), the Hindu god Krishna upbraids the mortal Arjuna for being reluctant to slay an enemy faction that included his grandfather and tutor: “There is no better engagement for you than