Known For All The Wrong Reasons

One of 500 Dafur refugee children's drawings
from the Waging Peace collection

Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Idi Amin, Franco, Kai-Shek, Mao, Hussein – all well-known names. Most likely though, they are known for the wrong reasons. Asked to associate single words with any of these names and many people would come up with a list looking something like this: dictator, despot, genocide, holocaust, brutal etc.

We know their names because of the atrocities committed under their rule.

Stalin is estimated to have had 40-60 million killed during his regime.

Mao Tse Tung had somewhere between 45 million and 75 million killed whilst in power.

During Hitler’s Reich the number of deaths is estimated at 17-20 million.

Chiang Kai-Shek murdered about 10 million.

Approximately 2 million were killed during Hussein’s rule. Pol Pot’s Cambodian rule killed a similar number.

The number killed during Idi Amin’s reign is indeterminate but estimated at between 100,000 to 500,000. Franco, in Spain, is responsible for about 400,000 deaths.

Those eight names, all from the 20^th century, were responsible for at least a conservative estimate of 116 million deaths. The death toll could have been as high as 170 million. And that number is only by those eight. Others that could be mentioned are: the dictator Milosevic, and the genocides of Rwanda, Dafur, Armenia, and the Rape of Nanking.

More than 116 – 170 million wrong reasons for knowing their names.

In 1948 the Genocide Convention was drafted and gained 153 state parties to it (as of February 2025.) The Convention defines genocide as the ‘… intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group…’  The Convention includes in the rubric of genocide not simply outright killing, but also the causing of bodily or mental harm, deliberately imposing conditions of life that will bring about destruction, preventing births within the group, and forcibly transferring children from the group to another group.

When genocide is considered in the light of this Convention, then the total numbers given above are likely to rise by a considerable number of orders of magnitude.

This definition also enables us to recognise a number of other historical events as genocide. The colonisation (including slaughter) of native Americans by European invaders from the 16^th century onwards, the Atlantic slave trade, the stolen generation in Australia.

Genocide did not end with the signing of the Genocide Convention, and genocide did not end with the shift from the 20^th to the 21^st century. Genocide is continuing.

We can name the names of those contributing to genocide today.

They also will be known for all the wrong reasons when the history of the 21^st century is written.