A Rough Estimate of Blood
In the course of casual correspondence I recently found myself locked in a discussion with a man who greatly admires Chairman Mao. He asked me what my thoughts were on the chairman and I made it clear that I’m not fond of the man and the other fellow asked, Why not? I noted that Mao “killed a whole lot of people” trying to sidestep a longer, even more unpleasant conversation about communism and Korea, but it quickly devolved into banter over whether or not America is the “great mass murderer” of our time or all-time (as he charged). This is not a new criticism of American foreign policy or the American government, and it is not necessarily one that “Leftists” are alone in spreading because there are right-wing Americans who will tell you the same sort of things about American foreign policy. I, on the other hand, won’t, because I find the criticism lacking empirically and anecdotally and comparatively, not just with the massacres of ours and others but with the altruisms of ours and others, from the liberation of Europe to the feeding of that continent after the war to our current aid policy in Africa. Even today, we feed millions in the world who might otherwise not be fed, from friends and allies to the North Korean nation, and if you listen to me speak it will become clear, and I will tell you beyond the subtle hints, that I consider America the great preserver of peace in our world and I believe we are currently living in the most peaceful time period of human existence in the last two thousand years, if not ever. Pax Americana is real and, I think, something to be encouraged. So it is an irritation to listen to critiques that are more than critiques — that are adament about charges which I don’t believe hold water historically or politically.
I called a friend to discuss general business but the American Blood conversation came up and I told him, offhand, that I “don’t think we’ve killed, over two hundred years, as many people as Mao or Stalin killed in their lifetimes” (38 million by Mao, 43 million by Stalin, according to The Straight Dope and other sources). It was just a remark I made on a hunch, with little thought, and he challenged it: “Really? You think?” and I thought about it for a moment then stammered out, “I do, I do.” I proceeded to amaze my friend by recounting every War and conflict the United States has been in and giving a rough estimate of those we killed or might’ve off the top of my head. I then said, “I’ll look it up, but I’m sure I’m approximately right,” and so I looked it up to see how approximately right I was.
I have always flatly rejected the criticism of America as the most violent society or nation in history and even in present times. The first time I heard these claims, I was in my High School AP Government course and we were discussing the Weather Underground. Bernadine Dohrn’s infamous declaration of war against American’s republican constitution and state struck me hard: “There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in one of the most violent societies that history has ever created. I’m not committed to non-violence in any way.” I scoffed then and I scoff now (we even had words over whether or not her group accomplished anything, which I charged they hadn’t and she countered with “the War Powers Act” at which point I laughed). I’m just not fond of overheated extremist rhetoric and I become frustrated when I have to listen to holy hyperboly, batman! This is what happened here, with the Soviet Union, Mao and America’s totality.
Oddly enough, I stopped corresponding with the man who had originally prompted this conversation because he told me that he doesn’t believe any of the numbers on Stalin or Mao’s death totals. Thinks they’re fabricated by Western writers and propagandists. I don’t know what to say to that except Goodbye, I will not have a debate over life with a Creationist. I mean, how can you argue with a Creationist? And why would you?
This isn’t an entirely comprehensive undertaking, or a formally academic one — it is just a brief look at what we can reasonably (and unreasonably) claim to have been America’s responsibility in terms of loss on life on Earth to see if my claim that we killed less people in 200 years than Stalin/Mao is accurate. I looked the numbers up in Wikipedia and verified them elsewhere. Let us get to the numbers, and save the rest for conclusion.
REVOLUTIONARY WAR:
We killed 24,000 Brits:
Around 24,000 killed or died of disease, 20,000 wounded.
WAR OF 1812:
Killed or wounded: 4,400
Disease and other: unknown
Civilian: unknown
MEXICAN AMERICAN WAR
25,000 killed or wounded (Mexican government estimate)
CIVIL WAR
500,000
THE PHILLIPPINE INSURRECTION
16,000 soldiers killed
est. 250,000 to 1,000,000 civilians died of war (through combatants of both sides), famine, or disease.
[HERE is a war that is largely forgotten by people but it was considered a Vietnam of sorts in its time and it was, clearly, a brutal conflict for one that raged so short a time on such a small place to have achieved such casualties. Too many people do not know about this War and that is a shame as it was an important, defining and divisive event in its era.]
Spanish American War 5,000
[A number was hard to find but most sources discount the severity of it, although the length of our involvement and victory in “the splendid little war” as well as all the extenuating circumstances make me doubt that it was more than 5,000, significantly or otherwise, but this is unlikely to have any true effect on this compilation. It should still be “noted” and a number included for representation’s sake.]
BOXER REBELLION is here for the record, because it was significant, but it is not clear to me that it should count or what proportion of American responsibility should be attributed as a coalition of nations fought the Chinese and we were one of the lesser ones. However, here were the totals dead there:
18,952+ civilians, 50,000-100,000 Boxers, 70,000 Imperial Troops
[How many of these are America’s responsibility? A small percentage, but let’s count it for the record as 20,000 — essentially all of the civilians and some soldiers, although I doubt that many were our “fault” but let us be “generous” in this assessment.]
BANANA WARS (Latin American conflicts):
I could not quantify it, but let us, for the sheer sake of using a “generous” (to critics) estimate, say we killed 1,000,000 people, even if I am 99% sure that we killed nowhere near that many people in the Banana Wars.
WORLD WAR I:
Military dead:
4,386,000
Military wounded: 8,388,000
Military missing: 3,629,000
[We only entered the War late in the conflict and didn’t actually fight for much of that time. The percentage of those killed by Americans is likely very small, but I am giving America a 1,000,000 responsibility only for the sake of seeing what we wind up with. I deeply doubt we killed that many.]
WORLD WAR II: This conflict and American responsibility for deaths is exceptionally hard to come by but we will make a fighting effort.
Japan lost 2,680,000 people in the war. Let’s assign them all to America for argument’s sake, due to the difficulty we’d find attempting to separate Asian casualties from American causation. (I do know that we killed about 150,000 with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaaki, and about 150,000 with the firebombing of Tokyo. Those we can “credit” America with little concern.) Now let’s add 400,000, which is the Japanese government’s official total for people who have died BECAUSE of the bombings after-the-fact
In the Western and African fronts, I do not know how many Germans and North African Germany invaders were killed and I can not find a way to figure it, but I imagine it to be less than three million although that is hard to quantify because we had English, Canadian and French troops with us (amongst others) and because, to be…patriotic and altruistic we had God and everything right/moral on our side in liberating Western Europe, so these wouldn’t count, to me, as murders in the way Stalin’s or Mao’s did, but let’s count these as three million if only for the sake of representing something resembling Western Europe responsibility on our own behalf.
KOREAN WAR: Here, a caveat applies: we were not the majority military force (SK was) and we did not start the conflict (NK did) and we can not separate people killed by Americans or S Koreans, but the total number is 1,000,000 Chinese and North Koreans. We will attribute them all to the American government.
VIETNAM WAR:
According to the Vietnamese government: 5.1 million died, North and South, during the conflict. 4 million civilians, and 1.1 million soldiers. It is hard to know how many WE killed but it is not a stretch to attribute all to the American government, although I do wonder how many of the 4 million civilians died in the South at the hands of the North. We didn’t kill all of them, but for the sake of this unscientific calculation we will attribute them to the American government.
GULF WAR:
Immediate estimates said up to 100,000 Iraqis were killed. Some now estimate that Iraq sustained between 20,000 and 35,000 fatalities. However other figures still maintain fatalities as high as 200,000.
A report commissioned by the U.S. Air Force, estimated 10,000-12,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the air campaign and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. This analysis is based on Iraqi prisoner of war reports.
The Iraqi government claimed that 2,300 civilians died during the air campaign, most of them during an F-117 Stealth Fighter strike on what was believed to be an Iraqi military communications center in Baghdad but was also serving as an air raid shelter.
According to the Project on Defense Alternatives study, 3,664 Iraqi civilians and between 20,000 and 26,000 military personnel were killed in the conflict.
Let’s be “generous” and attribute 50,000 deaths to the Americans.
IRAQ WAR:
All Iraqi violent deaths, Opinion Research Business. As of August 2007: 1,033,000 (946,000-1,120,000). Causes; gunshots (48%), car bombs (20%), aerial bombing (9%), accidents (6%), another blast/ordnance (6%).
***Total deaths (all excess deaths) Johns Hopkins (Lancet) - As of June 2006: 654,965 (392,979-942,636). 601,027 violent deaths (31% by Coalition, 24% by others, 46% unknown)
All Iraqi violent deaths. Iraqi Health Ministry casualty survey for the World Health Organization. As of June 2006: 151,000 (104,000 to 223,000).
Hard to say how many America is responsible for, but let us say 1,000,000 for the sake of addition.
INDIAN WARS:
There are numbers all over the place. One I found was 100,000, but I do not know what to make of this. I am open to hearing more about the numbers but a search has, so far, led me to nothing, as many historians find it difficult to quantify and then you have to contend with the fact that estimates vary wildly about how many Indians there were on our continent when we began to move west in earnest, not to mention how many we “killed” and how many the Spanish are responsible for and how many natural Western disease is responsible for. I have found estimates as low as 50,000, and I know that the Trail of Tears only had 4,000 deaths, mainly by disease and malnutrition. Not that that makes it acceptable, but it gives an idea of how difficult it is to quantify and how, perhaps, exaggerated it’s become. We will use a 100,000 estimate for the time being, although it is impossible to qualify.
EXCLUSIONS
I did not count casualty numbers from slaves simply because much of it happened during the British, colonial period and it is hard to guess or find how many people we enslaved, died as a result, etc. etc. And it would be difficult to include it as imperialism or mass murder in the sense of Mao and Stalin because many were here at the beginning and remained, through generations, especially after we banned the Slave Trade early on in the nation’s history. A further discomfort: people didn’t literally murder their slaves all that often because slaves were money. That isn’t to discount the impact of slavery or racism by any means, but merely to state that it is almost impossible to quantify and unlikely to have been similar, in exactitude, to the Great Purges or any of Mao’s experiments.
All sorts of small, internal conflicts — like Shay’s Rebellion — are not counted in this study because the casualty totals there were mostly internal and unlikely to sway this rough “count”. Other conflicts, like Grenada, are similarly excluded like this one because of the lack of effect they would have on this very rough estimate. I would note that Mao’s casualties came internally during peacetime but we simply do not have such skeletons in our closet; Shay’s Rebellion is not on that level.
CONCLUSION
TOTAL: 17,444,400
The American Revolution should almost certainly be excluded from this discussion as should the War of 1812, the Civil War, the grossly inflated numbers from the Banana Wars, the wholly-attributed Vietnam casualty total (we didn’t kill all of them by any stretch), the Iraq numbers are likely loaded and none of this takes into consideration American efforts for the good of the world that have saved millions of lives, most notably, I think, the Marshall Plan. Of course, some will criticize my handling of Indian casualties and argue that slaves should be included, but I consider these fair though impossible criticisms to make.
What can we conclude from this brief analysis? Over two hundred years, America killed fewer than Hitler, Stalin or Mao, and with the last two it isn’t even close. Further, some of these wars were quite righteous, and greatly defensible in ways that I don’t believe Stalin or Mao are (although whether or not their actions are defensible is not the broad subject of this quick entry). Comparatively, the American government has been benevolent using only sheer death totals between our nation’s and three of the great dictators of all-time, and I suspect that it becomes even greater if we take into consideration the number of dead in those nations at other times. If we counted 200 years of Russian or Chinese history, they’d be through the roof with far less to point to on the humanitarian front than the United States does.
Is the United States a great mass murderer? I don’t think so, never have and likely never will. That isn’t to say that I endorse our treatment of the Indians; I don’t, although the Indians weren’t entirely noble much like we aren’t (I still cringe when I think of what’s happened to them, however). Slavery, while not confined to America by any stretch, is something that I am sad to say is on our national resume. And no, I don’t believe everything we’ve ever done is beautiful, but I do believe that we are a large, stabilizing and wonderful presence in the world, historically and today, comparatively and on our own merits. I believe in democratic exceptionalism, the democratic peace theory and Pax Americana, and it does sadden me when I hear people criticize the American government as evil, or guilty of mass murder, or a perpetrator of great evils — as an empire to be spat upon, as a country for whom benevolence is non-existent. I just don’t think that’s true, and I was happy to see the results of this addition. If you know me, you’ll know that I believe War immoral in theory but, occasionally, necessary in reality. I take no great pleasure in War or atrocity, and each War is an atrocity, but to pretend that the United States is on scale with the great murders of all-time is unfair and meritless. I think any comparison between any American President and the great mass murderers of all-time misses the boat.
I think our casualty total is nearer to ten million than twenty million, but that’s over the course of two hundred years. That’s something, to be sure, but it isn’t what so many people would make America out to be. People are entitled to call the United States whatever they want, to criticize our policies as they will, but I look at our nation and see a pattern of benevolance and exceptionalism with occasional dark spots that are by far outweighed by the good in this country’s history. I think it’s supported by the history books more than it’s chipped at, and I rest easy, overall, thinking of my country and where it is, where it’s going. I know the chic thing for people to do, especially at my age, is disavow the nation and its foreign policy but I just never became interested in such. Whether it’s because I’m different from most of my peers or because I’m a fool or because I’ve read so much of American history and leadership is something I’ll never know, but I’ve always loved the American republic and admired it, even with its flaws and dark days.
I don’t want you to consider me, sarcastically, a “freedom fighter” or anything of the sort, but I never know just how patriotic I am until someone calls the American republic “the great mass murderer” of all-time or any other such nonsense. Not that I’m accusing others of lacking patriotism or hating America; not at all, although I do believe those who hold such harsh views toward the United States to have a very different opinion than mine, which is fine (some do hate the United States in principle and practice, but we won’t blanket the rest with them).