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Comment by mrcheesebreeze | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if we can call them the most evil. There are plenty of contenders, even if the death rates don't match up.

If we go purely by deathrates then we should pick communist china or the soviet union.

If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.

Imperial japan was so bad that the nazi ambassador to china in nanking did his best to save as many civilians as he could out of sheer disgust for their behavior.

imperial japanese soldiers used to bayonet babies and do beheading contests for fun.

literally, their newspapers had them even keeping score over who could do more beheadings.

they melted people, literally ate people on one occupied island, they did multiple genocides, they tested gasses.

Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.

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I mean Mongols depopulated entire large cities. E.g. the entire population of Merv, which was one of the world's largest cities at the time, was killed.

Or Baghdad which maybe was the largest city in the world at the time it was sacked.

yeah but I was talking about brutality vs numbers.

the commies killed far more than anyone by numbers and in barbaric ways, but their brutality was beaten by those who killed less in more gruesome ways.

the mongols excelled at both but I argued by brutality imperial japan was a bit worse.

Raw death toll and percentage of total world population slaughtered seem like the two most objective measures. The Horde win the dubious blue ribbon for the latter.

Mongol conquests were roughly comparable to the European conquest of the Americas. Both toppled great empires and may have killed ~10% of world population in a few generations. And both were more noteworthy due to their large-scale success than their brutality. While both waves of conquest were brutal even by contemporary standards, they were not extraordinary brutal. Being an absolute monster is a part of the job description of a conqueror.

I think the comparison works in terms of percentages, but falls apart because the Europeans were not unified. Something like 3 or four great powers colonized America vs a single ethnic group for the Mongols (even if they did fight with each other)

The Mongol Empire was not a single ethnic group. The top leaders were ethnic Mongols (much in the same way as Europe used to be a family business), but the troops were mostly from conquered peoples. I would assume that the field army was mostly Turkic, as Turkic peoples were more numerous than Mongolic peoples and their societies and styles of warfare were similar.

also they splintered into multiple khanates early on with the great khans only having some respect rather than the ability to stop the infighting.

The Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas. They collapsed by themselves due to the sickness brought over by the Europeans before they made contact. It would have been logistically impossible to topple an empire overseas.

This sounds the same to me as saying: "The gunshot didn't kill him. The infection did."

I think it's either an intent thing or a causality thing.

Imagine a hit man showing up to work one day, only to find his targets already dead along with their entire town... and only much later finds out that it's because he'd been an asymptomatic carrier for weird space germs when he was casing the joint the previous month.

Except in reality his targets weren't entirely dead, there were still millions left so he still went about killing the rest[0..2].

The intent in this case existed alongside unintended causes, but it was still there.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Aztec_...

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_conquest_of_the_Inca_E...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars

"Invaders led by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire by force and captured Tenochtitlan in 1521, bringing an end to Mesoamerica's last great native civilization ... The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody... European diseases like smallpox, mumps and measles were also powerful weapons against the local population, who lacked immunity to them...By 1520, smallpox had reduced the population of Tenochtitlan by 40% in just one year." [1]

Maybe an oversimplification to assert "the Europeans didn't topple any empire in the Americas"?

[1] https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-americas/aztecs

Right. Europeans in the Americas and Mongols in Eurasia did what was rational: both had significant, incomparable advantage in military technology and both used it for their advantage according to the standards of their time.

I believe the accepted narrative insofar as the New World is concerned is that it was largely disease that eliminated the population. There's a theory that is posited in Charles Mann's book 1492 which indicates a probable explanation for extremely high mortality rates due to susceptibility to the pathogens the Europeans introduced. The gist: natives of the New World had immune systems conditioned and selected for parasites, which appears to be an either/or proposition, which may explain, in part, the relatively disproportionate fatality rates among the native populations. Relative to that I think the warfare conducted by Europeans pales in comparison.

The best explanation I’m aware of for the disproportionate death rates by Europeans vs Native Americans by disease is mainly population density of European cities was dramatically higher, leading to a lot of diseases that would permanently spread throughout the population until the combination of evolution and immune systems brought it to a symbiotic, fairly neutral relationship.

Which didn’t remain so neutral when applied to fresh populations.

Native Americans simply weren’t playing host to as many diseases, and persisting virulent ones

In 21st century, is it the US on the lead?

You've got to be kidding

We did kill a million in Iraq and we must have done something similar in Afghanistan. Iraq was of course started based on lies.

no but you don't understand "muh freedomz" erases the destabalization of the middle east and large swaths of africa despite us doing it for zero reason.

it also erases our allies killing and starving the yemenis and the starvation in afghanistan post-war we caused by freezing all their funds.

clearly loosely defined ideals erase human suffering.

> If we go by barbarity the mongol empire, the timurids, and the japanese empire (talking the one from ww2) are all good contenders.

It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations. What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.

Adding to the list of steppe empires, not an Asian one though, the Commanche Indians are way up there in terms of barbarism as well. Not just against the encroaching westerners, but other tribes as well. They really did not mess around with the sadistic torture of their war prisoners. Proper nightmare fuel.

>It's interesting that 2/3 are central asian steppe empires/civilizations.

Google tells me the Timurids were Mongol descendents of Genghis Khan, so not really. 100% of that relevant data set is one extended family.

>What is it with that area and producing psychopathic tribes, not to mention being the origin point of several plagues.

The Mongols were little more "psychopathic" than many societies at the time, only distinctive in terms of their relative success, not their cruelty. Alexander the Great tortured and slaughtered people by the thousands, and Westerners don't consider him a barbarian or psychopath so much as a tactical genius and founder of the civilized world.

There might be some form of selection bias by the OP? Neither the colonization of the Americas by various European "tribes", nor the brutal colonial empires in Africa in the 19th century seem to make the cut, and for some reason not even Nazi Germany is listed.

When it comes to the number of genocides, it is probably difficult to beat out the British, but they were always quite jolly about it, so I guess it wasn't that bad.

>Imperial japan is what I consider the worst by barbarity.

On the other hand, the United States committed genocide against an entire continent, was the only nation to drop atomic bombs in warfare (and did so against civilians) continued Nazi and Japanese human experimentation and bioweapons research going under MKULTRA and other secret programs (as well as recruited Nazi scientists for their space program,) raped, tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Vietnam and Korea (and used Agent Orange), and went on a 20 year temper tantrum of violence and war crimes across Iraq for no discernable reason other than Afghanistan not being enough to satisfy their post 9/11 bloodlust.

Not to excuse Imperial Japan or the Nazis or anyone else but ranking evil against evil is always a matter of perspective, and it's often less about which evil is greater than which evils you're willing to excuse and which not. A similar list of sins could be made about the Soviet Union, China, Britain, or just about any nation or empire in history. Humans are bastards everywhere.

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