Greatest Man-made Tragedy in History -- Nominations

[??????????]

Ah, the old fiction about the "terra nullus". Didn't know there were people nowadays who believed it.
And as for "peaceably living with the white man", it's failure was certainly not all, or even mainly their fault. You might have forgotten what happened in your beloved South in the 1830s. Or what's happening now in some Latin American countries.
Atrocities happened, but the European settlers weren't that civilised, in the modern sense, themselves.

The Indians themselves say they never owned the land. That is FACT and one which even modern day Natives espouse. What happened in the south? You mean the Fort Mims massacre? or how about the Scott Massacre? Do you need a more complete list? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre#From_1500_up_to_1830. A lot of tit for tat, pretty much defending the Native Americans is equivalent to defending the Israelis. A lot of blood on both parties hands.

[Eraserhead]

-The Holocaust
-The Trail of Tears
-The Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
- World War I (in general)
- The American War on Vietnam

No order to that or anything.

[Хahar 🤔]

World War I. Without World War I (15 million), no World War II (55 million). And no communism & the related civil wars (70+ million total in Russia & China alone). So you are talking 140 million without even including things like Korea, the Khmer Rouge, and all the side-effects of World Wars I & II. The European nations would have gradually transferred peacefully over to constitutional democracy, with the exception of Russia. But even Russia would have been much better off.

Why couldn't Russia transfer to Constitutional democracy?

The Bolsheviks only took power because the Provisional Government and Soviets adopted Revolutionary Defensism rather than pacifism.

[GMantis]

World War I. Without World War I (15 million), no World War II (55 million). And no communism & the related civil wars (70+ million total in Russia & China alone). So you are talking 140 million without even including things like Korea, the Khmer Rouge, and all the side-effects of World Wars I & II. The European nations would have gradually transferred peacefully over to constitutional democracy, with the exception of Russia. But even Russia would have been much better off.

Why couldn't Russia transfer to Constitutional democracy?

The Bolsheviks only took power because the Provisional Government and Soviets adopted Revolutionary Defensism rather than pacifism.

He stated that Russia coudn't transfer to Constitutional Democracy even without WWI.

[Хahar 🤔]

World War I. Without World War I (15 million), no World War II (55 million). And no communism & the related civil wars (70+ million total in Russia & China alone). So you are talking 140 million without even including things like Korea, the Khmer Rouge, and all the side-effects of World Wars I & II. The European nations would have gradually transferred peacefully over to constitutional democracy, with the exception of Russia. But even Russia would have been much better off.

Why couldn't Russia transfer to Constitutional democracy?

The Bolsheviks only took power because the Provisional Government and Soviets adopted Revolutionary Defensism rather than pacifism.

He stated that Russia coudn't transfer to Constitutional Democracy even without WWI.

The regime could have handled only a certain number of 1905s before falling.

[GMantis]

Ah, the old fiction about the "terra nullus". Didn't know there were people nowadays who believed it.
And as for "peaceably living with the white man", it's failure was certainly not all, or even mainly their fault. You might have forgotten what happened in your beloved South in the 1830s. Or what's happening now in some Latin American countries.
Atrocities happened, but the European settlers weren't that civilised, in the modern sense, themselves.

The Indians themselves say they never owned the land. That is FACT and one which even modern day Natives espouse. What happened in the south? You mean the Fort Mims massacre? or how about the Scott Massacre? Do you need a more complete list? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacre#From_1500_up_to_1830. A lot of tit for tat, pretty much defending the Native Americans is equivalent to defending the Israelis. A lot of blood on both parties hands.

I was referring more to the Trail of Tears, where most of the deported were peaceful and integrated Indians.
What was the point of all those treaties, if the Indians didn't consider the land theirs?

[Fmr President & Senator Polnut]

- Slavery (I mean ALL of it)
- The Holocaust
- WWI (all SO SO SO SO stupid)
- The Cultural Revolution
- The Conquest of Central/South America
- The Rwandan genocides

Some, which could be defined as natural problems vastly exacerbated by human involvement.
- The Black Death (thank you Mongols)
- The AIDS pandemic (thank you ignorance and dogma)

[jokerman]

Thinking about this further, an obvious answer (that fits in well with the idea of a Tragedy) would be Marxism. Thinking on from there, perhaps the entire idea, ideology really, of Progress.

Oh, in that sense of the word "tragedy" (which was defined differently in the original post) I completely agree with marxism, and the Soviet Union in particular, being perhaps the great peak of modernism.  Very depressing.

[Hash]

Add Nicolae Ceauşescu to the above lists.

[DownWithTheLeft]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

[Lunar]

That's not an event sillybear

[SPC]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

As horrific as that is for a pro-lifer, wouldn't events that involved more brutality and greater deaths be better contenders?

EDIT: For the record, I'm not saying this is a bad nominee, I'm just objecting to the "not even close" part.

[Associate Justice PiT]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

As horrific as that is for a pro-lifer, wouldn't events that involved more brutality and greater deaths be better contenders?

     WWII, for instance.

[PBrunsel]

My answer is one that is quite close to my own heart: Indian Reservations. I performed a teaching practicum with a teahcer who grew up on a reservation in Arizona. She showed pcitures to me of drunken Indians, their impoversihed and filthy children and the poverty ridden reservation she was forced to call home. I was overwhelmed that such a place could exist in the wealthiest nation in the world.

[dead0man]

My answer is one that is quite close to my own heart: Indian Reservations. I performed a teaching practicum with a teahcer who grew up on a reservation in Arizona. She showed pcitures to me of drunken Indians, their impoversihed and filthy children and the poverty ridden reservation she was forced to call home. I was overwhelmed that such a place could exist in the wealthiest nation in the world.

I'm pretty sure they aren't "forced" to live on the reservation nor are they required to drink and not wash their kids.  If she was "forced" to live there as a child, blame her parents.  Reservations suck and nobody should be forced to live on one, thankfully, nobody is.


(and I'm not racist against natives, I'm raising two of them...far far away from the tragic reservation.  Oh noes! They'll lose their native culture!  Thank god they've got all those dream catchers and ceramic dolls.  But where is my lederhosen?  Oh noes!  I've lost my culture!)

[dead0man]

WWII wasn't a tragedy, although some parts of it certainly qualify.  WWII was a trial and the good guys won (and one of the bad guys won too).  The Holocaust clearly was.  The Rape of Nanking clearly was (and part of a much larger tragedy of Japanese occupation of the mainland).  The famine in Bengal during the war was pretty tragic.

I don't think the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was any more tragic than any other bombing in the history of war.  In fact, they probably went a long way towards keeping others from using them (nukes) in the mean time.

Outside of WWII-
the Union Carbide disastor was tragic
Holodomor
Armenian Genocide
Stalin's Purges
Pol Pot's Party
the various methods employed by the Chinese socialists to keep their population in check (great leap forward, cultural revolution)
the War on Drugs

[Lief 🗽]

Capitalism.
Communism.
American Slavery.

The rest have been said probably.

[Хahar 🤔]

The famine in Bengal during the war was pretty tragic.

I actually don't remember such a famine. Bengal's suffered worse.

[Platypus]

The extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines is pretty high on the list.

Extermination, as in, total genocide.

Thai-Burma Railway, Sandakan, Changi...Japanese POW camps etc were truly horrific, most of the other atrocities by the Japs have been mentioned.

Zaire/Congolese Civil War.

Bhopal.

Independence of the United States of America.

The Crusades.

Fundamentalist Islamic terrorism.

[Stranger in a strange land]

The Great Leap Forward is definitely up there.

[Earth]

The development of Gunpowder.

[Eraserhead]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

lol down

[JohnFKennedy]

The famine in Bengal during the war was pretty tragic.

I actually don't remember such a famine. Bengal's suffered worse.

1943 - c. 4 million deaths. It is one of the famines that Amartya Sen used as an example of famine being caused by entitlement problems rather than absolute food shortages.

[DownWithTheLeft]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

As horrific as that is for a pro-lifer, wouldn't events that involved more brutality and greater deaths be better contenders?

     WWII, for instance.

No, I strongly disagree with this statement.  While I disagree with America involving itself in the war, the war was aimed to stop a brutual tyrant.  Abortion is the greatest tragedy because 100% of those deaths are preventable and senseless

[Lunar]

This isn't even close, its the one that's claimed 40+ million lives

Abortion

As horrific as that is for a pro-lifer, wouldn't events that involved more brutality and greater deaths be better contenders?

     WWII, for instance.

No, I strongly disagree with this statement.  While I disagree with America involving itself in the war, the war was aimed to stop a brutual tyrant.  Abortion is the greatest tragedy because 100% of those deaths are preventable and senseless

"Give 1-5 nominations for what should be considered the worst event in human history."