austin-murphy-the-triumph-of-evil

50 THE TRIUMPH OF EVIL
tral and South America may have been way too high, as explained in
Denevan (1976) and Henige (1998). In addition, ofthe millions oflndi­
ans who did once live in Spanish America, many were killed in battle
and from related causes (such as from starvation and disease on the
front lines of military sieges of fortified cities defended by armed com­
batants), and many more died as a result of the harsh living and working
conditions they had to endure as Spanish slaves (Chalk and Jonassohn,
1990) or as overtaxed serfs (Borah and Cook, 1969).
A large portion of the Indians in Spanish America died of disease,
which spread rapidly in the environment of Spanish conquest (Stannard,
1992), but Spain's official policy was one of forcing the conversion
of the Indians to Christianity and subservience as opposed to outright
genocide (Jaimes, 1992). As a result, except for the deaths resulting
from some of the initial genocidal policies followed by the Spanish
Conquistadors, who may have engaged in willful extermination policies
that contributed to the spreading of disease (Larsen, 1994), most of
the Indian deaths are not counted as deliberate murders. In particular,
the Spanish generally sought via slavery (and extracting raw materials
like gold from their land) to economically exploit the Indians (and not
kill them), and, in contrast to the USA policy of offering rewards for
the killing of natives, Spain even punished "heroes" like Columbus just
for excessively exploiting the Indians (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990). In
addition, a significant portion of the decline in the Indian population of
Central and South America can be attributable to the Spanish policy of
separating the Indian male slaves from the females for substantial periods
of time and by working them so hard even when they were allowed
to meet that they had "little inclination for marital communication; in
this fashion they ceased procreation" (Cook, 1998). Moreover, a large
part of the reduction in the pure Indian population in the Spanish colonies
was due to interracial mating, as many Indians were assimilated
into society via Christian conversions, and most Spanish freely married
with the Indians (Driver, 196 1). Although Spain has also committed
atrocities against non-Indian peoples, such as during the Inquisition
(which mostly involved the Christian murder of non-Christians), it has
not been involved in any material atrocities in the last few decades. An
exact number of noncombatants deliberately killed by the Spanish is
not known, but it may exceed 5 million (Stannard, 1992).
INTRODUCTION
The remaining countries in the top ten killed far less people. For
instance, number 4 Pakistan murdered as many as three million Benga­
lis in 19 71 (Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990), number 5 Japan slaughtered
over a million Chinese civilians in its invasion of China in the 1930s
and 1940s as well as conducted several lesser atrocities (Markusen and
Kopf, 1995), number 6 Turkey exterminated over a million unarmed
Armenian civilians between 1915 and 1922, as well as thousands of
people in the Balkans in prior years (Levene and Roberts, 1999) and
thousands of Kurds in subsequent years (Andreopoulos, 1994), number
7 czarist Russia slaughtered over a million people in a purge ofCircassians
from its Caucasus provinces (Levene and Roberts, 1999), number
8 Nigeria killed over a million of its ethnic Ibo civilians (via flagrant
mass murder, blatant aerial bombings of civilians, and deliberate efforts
to prevent Red Cross and other relief supplies from reaching a starving
civilian population) in a war against its secessionist Biafra province
(Forsyth, 1969), number 9 France massacred over 500,000 in its colonies
(Smith, 2000), and number 10 Britain legalized the killing of hundreds
of thousands of people, including over 200,000 aborigines in
Australia after ruling the country to be ''uninhabited" in 1788 (Reynolds,
1995), and over 300,000 Irish in the seventeenth century (Levene
and Roberts, 1999) in a parliament-approved campaign that "treated
all sections of Irish as if they were, not humans but beasts," and that
imposed the death penalty for Irish found repeatedly communicating
with Catholic priests or failing to leave land seized by British soldiers
(MacManus, 19 73). 1 It is interesting to observe that, with the exception
of Japan, all of the countries in the top ten are religiously Christian or
Moslem.
. In addition, all of the countries in the top ten just happen to be capital­
ISt ones, even though no "credit" is being given here for the millions
who have died of starvation and disease as a result of colonialism and
other methods of capitalist economic exploitation, as those people like
the millions who perished in the slave trade) died as a result of the crue�ty
of the capitalist economic system as opposed to being deliberately
ktlled (Marx and Engels, 1988b ). The criteria used in this study to mea
s� the magnitude of human exterminations ignores all such deaths
which are not clearly deliberate. For instance, the deaths of millions of
slaves who died in transit from Africa were not caused by deliberate
51