The Holodomors of History
There is a great 2019 movie that few people saw called Mr. Jones about a Welsh investigative journalist who goes to the Ukraine in the 1930s and uncovers the massive state orchestrated famine occurring in the countryside there.
The Holodomor (which translated from Ukrainian means murder by hunger) killed between 7 to 10 million Ukrainians according to a 2003 UN Commission.
This is an event that occurred within the last hundred years, that almost wiped out an entire people, and yet if you said the word Holodomor, few people would have any idea what you are referring to.
Now the Holocaust, a genocide of a similar scope, would occur a few years later. We remember The Holocaust –there are countless movies and books and works of art dedicated to that remembrance.
But why don’t we remember The Holodomor?
The answer is that history is told by the winners and the Soviet Union won the Second World War and the decades that followed. They wrote their history and that history did not include the tales of the millions of starving Ukrainians.
The foreigners who did try to write that history like Mr. Jones were assassinated (as he was by agents of Stalin a few years later) or they were ignored and discredited. In some cases like that of the American New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, they even turned into cheerleaders of the regime.
Germany on the other hand lost.
The history of their wartime atrocities was written by their conquerors – many of whom had been prior victims. But if Hitler had won the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943 and secured a victory over Russia and a stalemate with the West – the Holocaust would likely have been remembered very differently if at all.
For one, the allied soldiers would have never entered Dachau and the Soviets would have never encountered Auschwitz and so whatever historical records existed there would have been extinguished. (It is important to remember that even after these camps were discovered and reported upon, few in the West really believed that such an atrocity occurred. As it is, it took years of combing through these records for the West to come to terms with what had happened.)
Imagine if they had never been discovered? Imagine a victorious German regime with every incentive to hide or obscure what had happened. Furthermore, imagine if we had an incentive to not know about it – what if our collective security and prosperity demanded that we look the other way and just accept that things happened?
While today, it may seem obvious that such a horrific travesty like the Holocaust would be remembered, it is very easy to construct a scenario with a different set of winners and losers, where the Holocaust is only dimly remembered, as dimly remembered as The Holodomor.
This in fact, is what Hitler was counting on. Hitler saw the way the world quickly forgot the Armenian genocide by the Turks during World War I and felt that as long as he won, the world would never know or would quickly forget his concentration camps.
At least in this respect, Hitler was right. When it comes to history, it is not so much what happens, but who is around to tell it.
So what are the other Holodomors of history?
Here are three that come quickly to mind.
Rome’s Take Down of Carthage (146 BC)
You probably know that Carthage was some sort of thing that existed and then they fought some wars with Rome and then it didn’t exist. You might also recall that some guy named Hannibal took some elephants through the Alps.
But to really know the full story of Carthage is to become haunted. It is perhaps the first example in recorded history of a systematic genocide by one nation state against another.
Carthage was in many ways a clone of Rome, carrying with it a civilization and culture that was every bit as advanced as Rome. But by the time its conflict with Rome ended, it was utterly extinguished – and now only exists as turn of phrase – a Carthaginian solution – which means to totally wipe out your enemy from the face of the earth so they never rise again.
So what happened?
Well, Rome and Carthage fought the First Punic war over Sicily – an island equidistant between them - and while both sides suffered immensely, the Roman side eventually prevailed with a superior ability to raise funds/men. The Second Punic War was even more vicious with Carthage at various points getting close to sacking Rome. Despite huge military defeats on Italian soil, Rome won a second time again through superior ability to raise funds/men even after defeats.
Following this second war, Rome essentially de-militarized Carthage – not too dissimilar to how the US treated Japan and Germany following World War II – and they also demanded a huge indemnity.
Like Japan and Germany, the de-militarized Carthage managed to prosper and become rich again as they were some of the best trades people in the Mediterranean. They paid back their indemnity to Rome much more quickly than anticipated.
With Carthage newly prosperous, certain Roman senators started to look at it with envy. Here was Rome’s enemy growing rich again. Cato the Elder famously gave a speech where he brought out a fig (which he claimed was from Carthage but was actually from his farm) and told the Senate that this fig demonstrated that their enemy was becoming rich and again would soon pose a new threat to Rome (despite having no army or navy to speak of at the time). He began ending all of his speeches regardless of the subject matter with “Delenda est Carthaago” – “Carthage must be destroyed”.
So Rome sent a delegation to Carthage and that delegation began making a series of outlandish demands on Carthage.
In one of the most amazing displays of supplication, Carthage acquiesced to all of Rome’s initial demands.
The Roman’s first demanded that Carthage hand over all their weapons. Carthage basically promptly did that – giving Rome their remaining warships and catapults and armor.
Then Rome asked for the children of the aristocrats, to be held as hostages and raised in Rome. Despite the howls of many mothers, Carthaginians acquiesced even to that.
Then, the Romans came up with the most absurd ask they could think of - they demanded that Carthage remove their entire city and rebuild it in the desert.
At this point, the Carthaginians balked and that was all Rome needed to declare total annihilation war and begin sieging the 150,000 inhabitants of Carthage.
Despite no preparation or military, Carthage put up a valiant defense and the siege lasted three years. The Romans did eventually pierce through the walls and when they did over 50,000 male citizens were ritualistically butchered in the streets. They took every women and child – another 100,000 citizens and enslaved them. They then burned the entire city for 17 days and put salt over the earth so that nothing could grow there.
Carthage would become a Roman province and Roman architecture would be built over the ruins with the history and culture of a civilization that was every bit the rival of Rome, utterly lost forever.
The Mongol Takedown of Baghdad (1258)
Take a map of EuroAsia and look at all the modern day countries that were partially or fully conquered by the Mongol empire. Then compare that map to the richest and most developed countries in the world– members of the OECD (organization of economic co-operation and development) – and you will notice something.
Countries that were partially or fully conquered by the Mongols.
Countries that are members of the OECD
The rich, developed countries of the world today (Western Europe, Japan) are essentially those places that weren’t touched by Genghis Kahn’s armies of serial killer rapists.
Genghis Kahn’s reign of terror on the Eurasian continent goes down as the biggest destroyer of human life ever. Wars he helped lead killed 40 million people or roughly 10% of the human population (for comparison’s sake, World War II killed less than 3% of the world wide population).
It was such a destruction of life that it was “good for the environment” removing 700 million tons of Carbon and leading to a global cooling epoch period according to a recent research report. (Important to note that despite this horrific track record, Kahn is a hero in his homeland with airports named after him and gigantic statues erected in his honor.)
While it is hard to highlight just one atrocity, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad stands out in particular.
It took the Mongols less than 2 weeks to destroy this city in its entirety and in doing so they ended the Islamic Golden Age – a period in which those countries of the Middle East led the world in learning and economic prosperity. In many ways, the Muslim world is still recovering from these eleven days.
To imagine Baghdad in the 13th century is to picture London at the late 19th century or New York City of the late 20th century. It was the center of the world, the world’s most populous and learned city for hundreds of years up until the Mongols came.
Baghdad was an architectural marvel – constructed from scratch by the Abbasid caliph starting in the 8th century to be circular in shape (14 centuries later Apple’s spaceship campus would derive inspiration from it).
At the center of the city was the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom. It contained essentially all the books ever written and all the most learned scholars at the time. This is where much of Plato and Aristotle was transcribed and preserved. Imagine taking Oxford/Cambridge and combining it with Harvard/Yale/Princeton and then making that the focal point of a city.
Then imagine taking all of this – the most modern and beautiful city in the world at the time - and seeing it literally destroyed to nothing over the course of 11 days with very little forewarning. What the Mongols did to Baghdad is the equivalent of someone nuking New York City/London/Paris/Los Angeles all on the same day.
The war with the Mongols started because the Caliph (head of the Abbasid state) didn’t bother to go bend the knee to Hulagu Khan, the grandson of Genghis. Hulagu got pissed and came with his army to demand supplication. Rather than organize a resistance or kneel before Hulagu, the Caliph basically got drunk and did nothing as the Mongols approached (just picture a 13th century version of Mayor De Blasio). So the Mongols began a seige.
The siege didn’t last long before the Mongols broke through. What happened next blew everyone’s mind. They proceeded to butcher every man, women and child and anyone who did survive was sold off into slavery. Basically, one day you’re a dude in the coolest city on the planet and then two weeks later, you’re either dead or a slave as is everyone you know.
But Hulagu didn’t stop there. He torched every building including the greatest center of learning that the world had seen up until that point and destroyed all the canals that irrigated the farm land – which destroyed crops for several generations. His army also brought with them various diseases like the bubonic plague so the remaining slave population was further decimated.
This didn’t just kill a city, it killed a whole civilization – the Islamic world would never again regain its lead in science and math and would over time see itself dominated by Western Europe – the one area that the Mongol hordes did not touch.
The Bantu Takedown of the Khosian (500 AD – to the present)
If you have ever seen the movie The God’s Must be Crazy – you will remember this guy. He uses a bizarre clicking language to speak. He is a bushman of South Africa, and he is a Khoisan.
The Khosian are the direct descendants of one of the earliest human groups. If you were to go back 200,000 years ago, and you were to look at the ethnicities that existed then, you would find the vast majority of humans at that time appeared to be Khosian.
However, today, there are only 100,000 left – they represent less than .001% of the global population.
What has happened to them is one of the most under recognized genocides in human history – not too dissimilar to what occurred with Native Americans during the arrival of European colonialists.
Playing the role of Europeans here, was another African group – which has become the dominant ethnic group of western and southern Africa today – the Bantu.
The Bantu originated from what is now Cameroon and began an expansion south 1,500 years ago into Khosian territory. The Bantu had developed superior agricultural and pastoral techniques while the Khosian remained Stone Age hunter gathers. With better diets, the Bantu were able to overwhelm the Khosian and starve them of arable land. When the Dutch arrived in South Africa in the 1600s, the annihilation was almost complete. From a small corner of the Gulf of Guinea, the Bantu had taken over the entirety of the ancestral Khosian territory and reduced the Khosian to a small population of hunter gatherers in the Kalahari desert.
With the population devasted, the Khoisan were not even really regarded as people by either the encroaching Bantu tribes that came to dominate the population of South Africa or the Europeans who were taking control of the territory and did to them what the Bantu had done previously – denying them land and pushing them to the periphery.
Up until 1936, it was in fact possible to get a license to hunt them.
To this day, the Khoisan have trouble getting people to acknowledge that they even exist. They went from being the most dominant ethnic group on the planet for most of human history, to considered a non-entity within their native country of South Africa – which acknowledges 12 different native languages – none of which are Khoisian.
It is conceivable that within another hundred years, one of humanities oldest and most distinct ethnic groups and cultures will no longer exist.
What about Today?
Are their groups that are being systematically extinguished suddenly or slowly and no one is memorializing it.
The answer is, of course, yes.
One blatantly obvious example are the Uighurs in China.
There are 12 million Uighurs living in Xinjiang, which is in Northwestern China. They have lived there for thousands of years and speak a Turkish language.
The Han Chinese have been migrating there en mass and the Chinese Communist Party has moved in to assert greater control over the native Uighurs. They have begun to among other things sterilize Uighur women and have interned over a million Uighur men in “counter-extremism centers.” These aren’t just rumors. We have satellite imagery of these new concentration camps being built.
The problem, however, is that that the Chinese Communist Party – carries a ton of power. And no one from Lebron James to Disney wants to risk offending it. Speaking out against police brutality in the US – carries with it no negative costs and instead garners positive media attention. Speaking out against the Chinese committing genocide – carries actual negative costs. So corporations and celebrities do the former but do not do the latter.
As these examples demonstrate, history is written by the winners and right now the Chinese Communist Party is winning. What is occurring with Uighurs like what occurred against the Carthaginians and the Baghdadis and the Khoisan will invariably be forgotten – unless of course the CCP gets overthrown in which case we will hear all about the historic bravery of these victims. But for now, they will die as these other poor souls did - extinguished from all human memory.
Although we are living in a cultural moment where victimhood is celebrated and held as the supreme good, remember that you don’t hear from real victims as they for the most part leave the world powerless and forgotten.