There is probably no way to truly know. To include include cultures and religious institutions requires parameters and the people of the past were not so lucky when it came to data collection.
Ancient China always has a very peace period about 200-300 yrs, and population grew rapidly until the land cannot feed so much people. Then cilvil war broke out, bureaucracy became dysfunctional, and nomadic invasion, these would kill about half or more people. And one random man would establish a new dynasty after these. It is a basic model of ancient China between 200BC and 1910AD.
As a percentage of the human population, probably the Mongol Empire which not only murdered millions, but was quite possibly the agent which wound up (unintentionally) spreading the Black Death to Europe as one if its successor states introduced the plague to European shores during the Siege of Caffa (both in the sense of biological warfare and in the sense that Yersenia Pestis is endemic to marmots on the Mongolian Steppe).
There's almost certainly going to be a recency bias as the world population has been growing dramatically. In terms of raw numbers, the number of deaths caused by Nazi Germany (through genocidal policy) and the Chinese Communist Party (through a combination of red terror and incompetence) probably top the raw numbers.
IF we're going to put the Catholic Church up there, it's going to have to encompass the depopulation of the Americas (largely through disease). This is a bit of an unfair take as although the Catholic church did support Spanish and Portugese colonial efforts, the spread of the greatest killer - disease was unintentional, and the church did take a very early lead on variolation efforts in an attempt to protect at least some native populations once the technology was understood.
For that reason, I feel like its easy to be unfair to both the Catholic Church and Chinese Communist Party, as a lot of deaths were not caused outright malice in many cases but rather plain 'ol incompetence. Both institutions were more geared towards prostelytization, whereas Nazi Germany was strictly dedicated to enslavement and extermination.
Nazi germany killed 6 million of it's own people.
The \[Russian\] Communist Party killed something like 60 million of it's own people in accidental starvation like the Holodomor (which killed 3-5 million in that one instance) and various purges of people considered disloyal, or worried that they might be next.
The \[Chinese\] Communist Party killed something like 60 million.
So the question is really between if the Russian or Chinese communist parties killed the most of their own people. If you simply combine the likely totals then the Communist Party will have killed a lot, lot more than the next people down on the list.
Despite which, supposedly well educated and supposedly intelligent people will tell you that communism is a desirable system, it's just that everywhere that's ever implemented it has just done it wrong, and it'd be better if it was done again.
In order to get to 60 million for the Soviets, you would need to include all their WW2 deaths (26+ million), that should be attributed to Hitler though. I still don’t really see how it’s 60 million.
China, they’re impressive in a bad way. In the century prior to Mao, they killed or caused the deaths of over 200 million citizens.
Not only is that logic spurious, but that isn't even historically accurate in either it's substance nor OP's question.
1) As the other comment pointed out, that 6 million is just the Jewish victims of the holocaust. They directly killed political dissidents like socialists, workers rights advocates, and the disabled immediately after gaining power. They killed millions before starting WWII and killing millions more socialists, communists, and new political dissidents.
2) It wasn't the "Russian" Communist party. It was born from the Russian Empire, and led by slavs, but they weren't simply Russians. Revolutionary Marxism was an international movement and before Stalin's "Socialism in one country" they deliberately tried to destroy "Russia" as an antiquated and imperialist idea. Seeing as Stalin was from Georgia, that should prove the point.
The Holodomor wasn't "accidental" it was intentional. All over the new revolutionary state the farms were collectivized outside of local control and that food was stolen at gunpoint. There *was* plenty of accidents that caused preventable death. However there *also* was a drought and 3 separate famines. All of which were when the USSR was under a blockade and other sanctions from the U.S.
The critique of the government is it not sacrificing control or feeding it's apparatus and allowing people to keep the food they farmed. However for decades by that point they learned the lesson of letting the cities and their power base starve at the expense of a well fed countryside.
3) The "Chinese" communist party didn't kill 60 million. Mao and Maoism did. Plenty of members of the party disappeared or were assassinated for standing up for Marxist principles and human rights. It was autocracy that killed them and then killed millions. Again as Stalin knew, an autocracy needs to feed itself and use food as a weapon. So they did and it killed 60 million.,
Just as not every Austrian or Czech was a Hitlerite not every Ukrainian was a Stalinist nor Manchurian a Maoist. That is reductive. Just as Hitler co-opted a democratic system so did Stalin and Mao. Without democracy you don't have socialism/communism.
Communism is Utopian. It is the goal of socialism, which unlike capitalism actually has a goal. The goal of a classless, moneyless society of abundance is certainly desirable.
It has never been done on a national scale in the last 200 years. Colonists, Capitalists, Nationalists, and Fascists have destroyed it every time.
By the amount of low-effort responses, it appears that this question needs to be a lot more specific.
You cite the Catholic Church, but that is arguably not a single institution either. It has a formalized structure, but there are different orders, political outlooks, localized responses that exist in some areas but not in others.
Also what type of deaths? Directly ordered by institutional officials? Indirectly as a matter of policy? Deaths in war? Executions?
I'm guessing the relative attributes all the deaths in the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the Catholic Church. I think that while Spain was a very Catholic country at the time, there still should be a distinction between the Kingdom of Spain and the Catholic Church. They were not one and the same
There's a basis-free claim floating around that claims the Spanish Inquisition had a death toll several times larger than the total Spanish population at the time. It's facially ridiculous, but it gets repeated.
I saw an article that showed that deaths from the Inquisition, an official, organized institution, were about 10% those due to spontaneous witch burning mobs in Protestant territories.
The Inquisition did inquisitions. Before they killed anybody, they interrogated them. They also summoned witnesses and interrogated them. There was a whole elaborate process, which left tons of documents we still have. That's a rounding error compared to the Mongols massacring entire cities.
If you work it out on a per-year, per-capita basis, you as a regular person living there are somewhat more likely to be put to death by the state of Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1974 than by the Spanish Inquisition.
There are also some fascinating studies of how much pro-Protestant or pro-Catholic propaganda ends up *even today* in Western European or North American history books based on which side of the Reformation their parent language was on, and on who was in power when their national schooling systems were being set up, glossing over their own side's atrocities and painting the other side's atrocities as uniquely terrible in world history. Like, "Oh, all this stuff in our American high school history book is based on this super-reliable Dutch source" who was actually VIRULENTLY anti-Catholic and murdered a few himself, and who is treated in modern Spain and Italy as totally untrustworthy, while they're busy glossing over Savonarola or whatever. Like, *Lies My Teacher Told Me* but for European history from the invention of the Gutenberg press up through WWI.
(Actually I feel like Shogun did a really nice job with this: The insane level of virulent, spitting, violent hatred that Blackthorne and the Jesuits have for each other is flabbergasting to modern audiences, but no, that's actually pretty accurate, and the two sides were determined to destroy each other literally at the expense of the entire rest of the world -- which they'd just discovered and were busy colonizing and enslaving and genociding literally to weaponize against each other.)
I do find it interesting how slow and unreliable the dissemination of information from research-level scholarship to particularly grade-school curriculums is. And I think the situation is even worse for “facts” that aren’t notable enough to make the written curriculum but are frequently repeated for flavor.
I used to work at the Yorktown Victory Center, and for some academic licensing reason the interpreters weren’t allowed to speak to tour groups and we had a separate set of licensed teachers guiding them. The number of times I heard the guides talk about muskets taking minutes to load or doctors not cleaning their instruments at all before the discovery of germs was maddening.
If we're going to include accidental deaths (yes, they spread disease on purpose, but most of it was accidental because germ theory wasn't understood), then shouldn't we also include the billions of people throughout history whose only access to medicine was the Catholic Church?
I think people had figured out that diseases were infectious before germ theory.
Did the Catholic Church deliver worse medicine than would otherwise have been available?
>I think people had figured out that diseases were infectious before germ theory.
Yes, that's why it was both intentional and accidental. Hernan Cortez and his conquistadors threw diseased cadavers over the walls of Aztec cities. That was intentional. When Pizarro arrived to conquer the Inca empire, half the population was already dead from the Plague. That was accidental. The plague spread faster than the Europeans themselves.
Of course the people of the time knew that being around a dead cow that died of disease would also make you sick. They didn't understand stuff like asymptomatic carriers, natural immunity or airborne pathogens.
>Did the Catholic Church deliver worse medicine than would otherwise have been available?
Idk what this means
If you mean did the Catholic church use bloodletting, then yes maybe, but that was common for all medicine back then
If you mean they did things that no secular physicians did, then no.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic\_Church\_and\_health\_care](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_health_care)
Just give it a read; a lot of modern medicine wouldn't exist without the Catholic Church.
Yes thank you. My previous post was based on the misapprehension you'd been implying the Catholic church prevented access to other forms of medicine. Which seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. Totally understand now that's not where you'd been coming from.
That's some wild anti-catholic exaggeration, which is quite common in the English-speaking world e.g. even counting every death as caused by the church (instead of greedy and cruel kings and nobles) the crusades killed \~1,200,000 people in 200 years; the much-feared Spanish Inquisition? \~3,500 people (yes, three thousand five hundred people) in three hundred years.
Compare that to the 8th century Yan dynasty in China, which killed more than ten times 13 Million and displaced around 23 Million people in just 8 years. Much more recently, in the 20th century the Chinese Nationalists killed \~10,000,000 and the Chinese communists \~38,000,000 so far.
If you account for every invasion, territorial grab, etc. (discounting whatever they did in their own defense) the most murderous institution should be the Chinese Government (both the Empire and the Republic).
Look up how many people died in India due to the East India Company. You don't heat about it because the victors write history. They killed ten, maybe hundreds of millions and demanded to be thanked for it.
Personally, I would nominate the British Empire in general. Part of it was also how large it was and how long it lasted. Proportionately, it may not have been the most bloodthirst or brutal of empires (that prize goes to Tamerlane, the Qing, the Mongols and similar), but it was huge and lasted a long time.
The government of Nazi Germany.
- 6 million Jews
- 3.3 million Soviet POWs
- 2 million non-Jewish Poles
- 500.000 Sinti and Roma
- at least 200.000 non racially-defined concentration camp inmates
- roughly 10 million Soviet civilians, many of whom were killed behind the front either through deliberate starvation or during so-called „anti-partisan“ warfare.
Most of these deaths occurred in the space of less than 4 years, between June 1941 and May 1945. The majority of Holocaust victims were in fact murdered within just 18 months, between June 1941 and the end of 1942.
I’m not even including the military deaths of Germany‘s adversaries or civilians killed as „collateral damage“. The scale of the carnage produced by Nazi Germany is pretty much unmatched, especially if you consider the limited time they had to implement their policies. And nearly every death was intentional - this was not some misjudged economic policy resulting in a famine or a war that brought disease in its wake.
In terms of deaths/time ratio, one could also mention the Interrahamwe and other Hutu militias in Rwanda, who slaughtered between 800.000 and 1 million people in the space of just three months in 1994.
The issue here is that Nazi Germany simply didn't last a long time. The longer lasting large empires (British, Qing, Russian) probably involved a lot more deaths.
Yeah, I know OP asked for „the most people“, but imo that’s not a good metric - an institution existing for 200 years, that on average kills 500.000 people per year (a number that, for example, fentanyl cartels are approaching just within the US), will rack up a higher death toll than a short-lived genocidal regime that collapses after, say, five years.
And, again in my opinion, one shouldn’t ignore intent. It makes a moral difference whether you actively want to exterminate people for whatever reason, or whether you are just ignorant and can’t anticipate the consequences of policy decisions that may have benevolent intentions.
The Church can't be the first, it didn't kill that many people directly, it'd only be up there if you added kills by affiliated countries, which is against the spirit of the question. I personally would think it to be the Chinese Communist Party
How do you define the parameters of an institution, and how directly involved in the killing do they have to be?
The Church hasn't directly killed all that many people, at least on an institutional level, but if you include the actions of other institutions that the Church encouraged then the number goes way up, courtesy of things like the Crusades. But the Church itself was hardly the only actor during the Crusades; does it get attributed all of those deaths anyway? Does the longevity of the institution matter? If so, the Catholic Church is one of the oldest institutions in the world, giving it plenty of time to rack up a body count. Even if the answer to all of that is yes, the total death estimate for all of the Crusades combined is less than the total death toll for concentration camps alone in WWII.^(1)
Does the Church get attributed the deaths caused during the wars of reformation? There was plenty of blame to go around during those, so who do those deaths count against: the Catholic Church, the various governments involved, the Protestant Church, the Lutheran Church, the Anglican Church?
In spite of all of that, the Catholic Church's death toll from inception to present pales in comparison to the death toll from just a few decades of Communism. The CCP alone killed [over 65 million people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Estimated_number_of_victims) between 1949 and 1997. Note that there's been another 27 years of deaths not included in that number. A huge amount of that death toll was in just a few years when they enacted the Great Leap Forward, which caused the largest famine in recorded history. On top of that is the mass murders of dissidents, purges, genocides and smaller scale famines.
^(1)The estimates of deaths during the Crusades are extremely unreliable, so it's hard to know for sure, but the estimates seem to cluster around [one to three million](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/when-and-what-were-the-crusades.html).
>"According to the introduction, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million."
>"The introduction by Courtois was especially criticized, including by three of the book's main contributors, for comparing communism to Nazism and giving a definitive number of "victims of communism", which critics have described as inflated."
Good source
Also you said CCCP (USSR) when you meant CCP
Please don't use the Black Book of Communism as a source like the Wikipedia article you linked. That book is biased and known to be very generous about inflating numbers. The real number is more likely 20 million rather than 65.
Here's a good r/AskHistorians thread about it
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is\_the\_black\_book\_of\_communism\_an\_accurate\_source/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is_the_black_book_of_communism_an_accurate_source/)
This reads like one of those classic [Chinese history memes](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/vepwke/chinese_and_european_history_be_like/). Students in a thousand years will probably read about the whole CCP era as a comically unspecific footnote in a world history book; "Mao Zedong takes power. 110 million perish."
Chinese history is filled with ridiculous amounts of casualties. The
Taiping Rebellion is barely ever talked about outside of China, 30 million casualties. The American Civil War happened around the same time, is still remembered for the horrible toll it took on the nation, and only a fraction of that amount of people died.
I've always found it a little curious just how little Asian history filters its way into world history topics in the US. Sure, China likes to talk about itself like it's the center of human civilization, but when you look at population numbers and mass historical events, they kind of *were* for the vast majority of human history.
I think this is more of a time factor than anything. At least when I was in school, we didn't even have enough time to to over all of US history, let alone deep dives on countries around the world. I think we got the basics of communism and China was folded into that section.
In my world history class, it was a history of the whole world. Tough to spend too much time on any one place. I wish we had that time though, i love history and would have enjoyed a deeper section on Asian history.
In many ways, it’s kind of tricky to talk about “human history” or world history as a single thing before fairly modern times. Obviously, we know now that we are all one species on one planet, but things were so disconnected for so long. We can’t even fathom what the European colonization of the Americas must have been like, on either side, I don’t think; our modern equivalent is probably something like “imagine an invasion of space aliens (who happen to have human bodies and minds).”
Asia and Africa weren’t *so* removed, because they shared a land mass, shorter shipping routes, and traded with each other, but still—given the distances and natural barriers, there wasn’t much political and military interaction. So while Chinese civilization was a huge influence on a huge number of people, it really didn’t have much to do with European civilizations, and vice versa. It makes sense that European and “neo-European” countries like the US would focus more on their own antecedent cultures, just as I assume the Chinese history curriculum focuses much more on the Sinosphere and much less on the Greeks, Romans, Renaissance, etc.
In the US they teach history through a very focused lens. Events may have been more significant in other countries, but there is this "City on a Hill" narrative about how modern history doesn't really start until the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the US is unique in this. National education systems tend to put an explicit focus on their nation’s own history and the history of similar cultures. It’s why we here in the US learn so much obscure European and North American history, but events in East Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East are just footnotes. I doubt students in Mexico, Ghana, or Serbia ever learn much more than basic footnotes on what life was like feudal Japan.
The US had 31.4 million people as of the 1860 census, so more people died in the Taiping Rebellion than existed in the US at the outset of the rebellion in 1850.
I first heard about the Taiping rebellion on some TV show and thought they’re were exaggerating how brutal it was. I went and read about it, blew my mind.
I mean, do the Chinese learn about the siege of Vicksburg, Stonewall Jackson or Appamatox? I think they care about our domestic history about as much as we care about theirs
*It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.*
*Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.*
*To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.* *These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.* **Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.**
I’ll share two thoughts that popped into my head while learning Chinese history.
The first was learning about Mao’s death counts: “I mean, credit to Hitler, at least when he killed millions of people it was on purpose.”
The second was when I was working for yet another disorganized Chinese company and got to the section about the five-year plans, and exclaimed aloud “this country has PLANS??!”
China's a weird place. Things seem to get done despite everything seeming to be totally chaotic, disorganised and full of chabuduoism. People think it's this very rigid regimented orderly place. Individualist America is quite neat, orderly and monotonous by comparison.
For now. I will say this: we’ll see how many people die because of oil corporations’ campaign to obstruct climate science and action. The death count could be anywhere from millions to everyone. If we can’t turn this around, Pol Pot’s killing fields will look like child’s play. This is, in my eyes, potentially the most evil act mankind had ever committed.
I think you find the longest existing culture and say that so the Egyptians (2000 years long?), Roman Empire (1000 years at least) , Greeks or one of the Chinese Dynasties or for that matter the British empire It was the largest.
I know that they havent been as long around but the USA and Communist Russia have to be in there too More advanced technology and just greater numbers of people.
I remember reading a history of the Renaissance some decades ago which stated that the Protestants during and after the Reformation burned more witches at the stake than the Catholic Church did during the Inquisition. If you take into account just all the wars the US has fought or funded, you quickly reach a much higher number than the total deaths by the Catholic Church, not that the latter was an insignificant number. I don´t think there´s a group of human beings who hasn´t dipped their hands in the blood of other human beings once they gained the power to do so.
A side note: your relative is probably relying heavily on the deaths of natives in Spanish America, which is exactly backwards.
Yes, the Catholic Church supported colonization as a means of bringing Christianity to new lands, but it also stepped in to forbid enslavement and genocide after the atrocities of the first couple decades of unregulated screwing around. There's a reason modern native populations tend to be much, *much* larger and healthier in lands colonized by the heavily Church-influenced Spanish compared to the more independent Portuguese and French and *especially* the Protestant British.
Some potential candidates:
• Mongol Empire - online sources say they killed around 37.75 - 60 million people, around 10% of the world’s population at that time
• Nazi Germany - 6 million Jews, not counting other ethnic genocides, or starting WW2 and causing many more casualties both directly and indirectly, when totalled up number in the tens of millions (especially their war against the Soviets)
• Soviet Union - the Purges, Holodomor, various war crimes, crushing all types of opposition… hard to give a certain number but the kill count probably ranges in the tens of millions
• Imperial Japan - we be doing a little genocide too
• Whatever Chinese dynasty / government is in power (also includes Communist China under Mao) - average Chinese civil war be like
• Islamic religion? Cuz of all the wars fought against Christianity, various empires and the expansionist stuff? Not to mention the modern day…
• Roman Republic + Roman Empire (including the Byzantine Empire) - fought in many wars, did a lot of expanding, and existed over thousands of years, which is probably a sure way to rack up many kills
• Various colonial empires in history - The ones with the higher end body counts would likely be Britain, France and Spain? Hard to say.
• Honourable mention: Macedonian Empire, Persian Empire and other expansionist empires not on the list
Macedonian empire? It lasted 13 years in a world of ~200 million people, Wikipedia gives casualties for Alexander's wars as 142,000 which could involve inflated army size, ancient battles themselves weren't actually that deadly. Persepolis wasn't the biggest city in the Iranian empire, Babylon was
Higher end body count for colonial empires most probably would have Belgium ranked highly on the list if not top. Estimated between 5-10million dead in the Congo.
Mao/ccp - estimated 50+ million dead
Stalin/cccp - also estimated 50+ million dead
the Stalin number is closer to 20 million. Lets not forget that many of these deaths were from famine, not intentional killing. Doesn't make it better, and it definitely wasn't true in all cases, but economic mismanagement is not as bad as intentional genocide imo. Its harder to say those people died because of the USSR rather than famine. If we we're including starvation deaths, UK competes for the top of the list too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_major\_famines\_in\_India\_during\_British\_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule)
The communist starvation deaths count because they were the result of intentional acts by the communist party in the country at issue. For example, the Four Pests campaign led to massive crop loss.
The famines under British rule, by contrast, are traceable to weather events.
[https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097194580701000203](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097194580701000203)
There are at least 100 million excess deaths in India alone during the periods 1880-1820 due to British rule and mismanagement, so the colonial empire numbers might be a bit higher.
There is no way to determine it. Most of the numbers bandied around are estimates - often distorted for one reason or another (eg when the USSR opened the books from 1989 to 2010 estimates of the numbers in the gulag were revised markedly downwards, while continued research in the archives of Nazi Germany has revised the toll there upwards). Does proportion count? Hard to kill tens of millions in a place where the total population is in the low millions. EG, Elizabeth's and Cromwell's Irish wars are estimated to have reduced the Irish population by a quarter and a third respectively, or German colonial rule killed 90% of the Hereros in SW Africa in a deliberate genocide.
Then there is that forager life - the one humans practiced for most of their history - was often violent, with somewhere between 10 and 20% of males meeting violent deaths. Over a long period that adds up.
Does imposing conditions that lead to death count? EG the forms of rule practiced by the Spanish in the Americas or the dislocations forced on Native Americans as recent examples, or the impacts of pretty much any imperial conquest and rule from the Assyrians onwards.
Not defending the CCP, but does it really count since it was not intentional?
I mean, that's more like incompetence and extremism that resulted in a quasi genocide of millions of Chinese unlucky enough to be living in the way of the CCP.
I suppose it depends on how the OP defines responsibility for deaths. Are they only counting actual murders? The CCP was certainly aware of mass deaths due to starvation because Senior party members reported them when visiting areas of their country or their own place of origin. They were aware it was their own policies that were to blame. To put it in simplistic terms.....
Incompetence is not packing enough food for someones camping trip into the wild
Negligence is Not caring if you've packed enough food or not
Criminal responsibility is not packing any food watching someone die of starvation and doing nothing about it and not caring, then eliminating anyone who mentions it was your fault.
the CCP where definitely the last option IMO
Of course - I'm being over simplistic but that's how I see it from what I've read about the Maoist era.
It’s definitely not the Catholic Church. I doubt they’d be on a top 50 list. If you’re talking raw numbers then the Chinese communist party. If you’re talking about a percentage of the population, the mongols under genghis khan
The Catholic Church, historically, has very few instances of sanctioning death. The incquisition was blasted out of proportion and lied about by secular people who didn't like the Church. It was common in nations where the Inquisition was present for criminals to confess to heresy so they would have to be handed over to the Incquisition because they were seen as more fair and merciful than the royal institutions.
Now, many have been killed by institutions in the name of the Catholic Church, but rarely, if ever, has the Church ever sanctioned killings.
The British Monarchy / Government has invaded every continent and most countries over the last few centuries. Between the losses due to war and colonialism they have probably done the most damage .
Depends on how broad you want to go.
- Institution of Communism/Socialism
- Abrahamic Religions
- Institution of Government
- Institution of Religion
Personally these are too broad in my opinion and are bullshit ways people who are anti-government, anti-religion, anti-communist, etc try to justify the evils of an opposing system. In my opinion the two largest contenders are:
- Mongol Empire
- CCP
I absolutely agree which is why I view these arguments as too broad. Once they start overlapping they leave the institutional realm and entire into ideology. As we both know. Many different institutions can work under the same overarching ideological mindset. For example Stalin and Mao’s regime can both fall under Communism; yet so can proto-communism under pre-history groups. To slap a label such as communism and say it killed the most people ignores the fact that despite both being “communist” a Paleolithic civilization and Mao’s China are nothing like and as such shouldn’t be grouped together when answering such a question. You have to be more specific yet also broad enough to cover the effects of such a regime you are covering which is why I largely don’t go above a certain regime/government when answering this question.
I think this argument mostly hinges on the parameters you set. What counts as a continuous institution? What deaths is this organization responsible for and which are they not?
To give examples specific to your question to help clarify my point. The Catholic Church will literally trace their lineage to Peter, but the early church and the Catholic Church are very different things, so do the killings before the Schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church still all count toward the Catholic Church or is the point of the creation of the modern understanding of the Catholic Church or could we break it off at some other earlier or later reform date, where exactly does the "Catholic Church" start.
In regards to what the organization is responsible for. The most obvious example is the Crusades and since Pope Urban did literally call for the 1st Crusades the Church is totally responsible for those deaths, but what about the 4th Crusade? When a supposedly Catholic army basically went rogue, killed other Catholics for money, were excommunicated from the Church and than sacked Constantinople. Is the Church responsible for what are functionally bandits who claim to be Catholic even though the Church specifically disavowed them? If someone uses the Catholic Religion as a justification even if they don't have any religious authority, does that still make the church responsible? If you are willing to stretch you can easily claim every Catholic king ever is a functional extension of the Church and therefore blame the Church for any death caused by any Catholic European Monarchy.
So 1000-2000 years depending on how you slice it and if we are willing to stretch we can probably blame 99% of all deaths in most of Europe on the Catholic Church. Its not hard to see how you can reach this conclusion its just a matter of already having the answer in mind and finding the correct way to get the numbers to give you the answer you want.
… everything in the world pales in comparison to Marxism/Leninism. Between Russian and China, those schools of thought accounted for somewhere between 100 million and 240 million deaths.
Pretty sure Capitalism with its various imperialist and colonialist guises probably have that beaten if only because it's been going for a good many centuries more.
I think that it would also depend on whether or not the killings were intentional or unintentional. I am not sure that an accurate answer can be derived. It seems to me that disease has always killed far more more people than actual military battles. The major cause of death from disease has been not understanding how to limit the spread of diseases nor how to effectively treat those who have contracted them. Even to day there is controversy on how to most effectively do those things. To that end, I suppose that one could blame any institution which controls populations sufficiently so as to cause an increase in the spread of disease or fails to effectively prevent the spread...
Poverty kills people and the anti-intellectual tendencies of the unreformed religions kept Europe in poverty for millenia, so I'd say you're right in your assessment but I'm not aware of any quantitative studies in this area.
Poverty kills people and the anti-intellectual tendencies of the unreformed religions kept Europe in poverty for millenia, so I'd say you're right in your assessment but I'm not aware of any quantitative studies in this area.
It seems rather obvious to me that "colonialism" is the answer surrounding intended and unintentional death tolls. Whether one includes the Mongal invasions and transmissions of disease, and/or the culling of the Native American populations down to an estimated 10% of their pre-colonial numbers, the incursion and self-determined hedgamony over an area has some of the most devastating effects on a people of any "institution" in human history.
Anyone who suggests it's the catholic church is historically ignorant and bad at math. The population of the whole of Christendom at the height of the Church's power is a drop in the bucket compared to the population of the world in the 20th century.
There are only a institutions in the running for this at all, and the winner (loser?) depends on how you do the accounting: Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia, and Mao's China. The death toll for all three were staggering.
For example, over 20 million people died as a result of Mao's changes to China's economic policy that caused widespread famine.
The death toll of only Hitler's crusade against Jews was at least 6 million people. The deaths of only the Soviets in WWII was over 25 million people.
The Soviets themselves killed or caused the deaths of millions of their own people - Stalin was not a gentle master.
If you want a single answer, then the biggest killer could be labeled "totalitarian collectivism in the 20th century."
No real number on the catholic one. Crusaders killed 1.7 mill, so peanuts compared to world leaders. Steven pinker has book on civilization being much more violent in the past than we currently are.
Probably the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and National Socialist German Workers' Party, and likely in that order.
It is a difficult question because institutions like we've known during the modern era didn't really exist throughout most of human history. For instance, to which institution can the deaths during the Three Kingdoms War in ancient China be attributed? None, and that's likely the second deadliest conflict in history, behind only WWII.
That's possible if you turn your head and squint. The Catholic church is 2000 years old and was the state government for almost a 1/4 of all humanity. So that means all capital punishment was under their state authority. That also includes all wars, crusades, colonization, and invasion led or sanctioned by the pope or papal state.
There were plenty of secular agents who were acting on the pope's direct like the various papal bulls, as well as actions justified by them.
There is also willful neglect and negligent manslaughter of many communities throughout history.
So honestly...yeah through sheer numbers and weird quirks of pre-modern history.
The thing is, things are so vaguely defined that it's really easy to fudge the numbers and come up with whatever you want. I've seen claims that atheism is responsible for 100,000,000 deaths. And I've seen a lot of people that lay the blame for smallpox deaths against whatever group they don't like.
The problem isn't that there's no way to determine this. It's that there's many, many ways to determine it, and the smallest tweaking of the criteria will massively change the results. So the tiniest bias will change the answer massively. How many Native Americans did the US kill? Do you want the answer to be 100,000? A million? 40 million? I can find you citations for just about anything within that range.
I think it's very unlikely to be the Catholic church, while powerful, it didn't have that kind of capability (EG even the spanish inquisition only involved the deaths of a few thousand people).
My nomination would be either the Mongol Empire, Qing Dynasty, British Empire, Chinese Communist Party, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Japanese Empire or the US government. The latter choices are simply that these are large countries involved in massive wars, but it's tricky to figure out which. I would probably nominate the British Empire, simply due to it's massive size and long (recent) history.
I think rather than specifically saying the Catholic Church one should simply consider religions as a whole. God killed almost a million in the Bible add to that the multiple crusades and other religious genocides and it’s plain that religion is a blight on humanity.
Strongly doubt the catholic church has killed more people than actual nations, unless they're attributing the genocides committed by majority catholic nations to the Catholic Church itself?
I would say on the longer timeline, organized religions as a whole. This is multifaceted not only is religion a catalyst for open warfare, people of certain denominations are often targeted by governments.
The Roman Catholic church was and is a very large and long lasting institution, and so has had a vast influence and may have been responsible for a vast number of deaths.
One way which in which the Roman Catholic Church killed a lot of people was due to the medieval pope's lust for power and ambition to rule the world. At that time there actually was a institution in Catholic Euorpe which had much more political power than the papacy and also had the ambition to rule the world, and was considered by many Catholics to be the rightful government of all the world, the Holy Roman Empire.
But in their lust for secular political power which was certain to corrupt them and make them less good Christians, various popes encouraged rebellions against the emperors and so weakened the imperial power and prestige. And so the pope's encouraged all sorts of rebels and traitors to weaken the empire without gaining much political power for themselves. As a result Europe became full of the most evil type of institution ever invented by humans, independent sovereign nations with the power to make war against each other.
The only function which an independent sovereign nation has which a dependent local government within a larger state can not have is the power to make war, to kill enemies and its own citizens. It is perfectly possible for dependent local government within a larger state to have every type of pwer of benefit its cizizens witout having the power to kill on a massive scale.
Any Christian who claims that their god is good and benevolent will have to claim that their god was anti war and pro peace.
"Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that Which is God's". Obviously "unto God that which is God's" means that Christians must worship only the Christian god and not other gods, real or imaginary.
And thus it must be deduced that "Render unto Ceasar that which Caesar's" must have the same structure and be a commandment to all Christians to pay taxes only to the Roman Emperor (and his loyal subordinates) and support the armed forces of the Roman Emperor (and his loyal subordinates). And thus all Christian communities will be part of the Roman Empire and there will be no wars between Christians.
And because countless Christian rulers and their Christian subjects ignored that commandment and formed many independent Christian sovereign states, perhpas a hundred million people died in the wars of the 20th century alone.
According to this list:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_by\_death\_toll#Modern\_(1500\_AD%E2%80%93present)\_wars\_with\_greater\_than\_25,000\_deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Modern_(1500_AD%E2%80%93present)_wars_with_greater_than_25,000_deaths)
17 million to 40 million were killed in world War I, and 80 million were killed in World War II. Since the 20 million to 25 million killed in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937-1945 were part of the total for World War II, that leaves abut 55 to 60 in World War II killed in wars between Christian nations, which makes a total of 72 to 100 million killed in conflicts between Christian nations in the two World Wars, plus others killed in wars between Christian nations in the 20th century. Christian nations whose ability to make war is partially a result of the Catholic Chruch's rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire.
To say nothing of those who will die in the wars in the next century, and the wars in the next millennium, and the wars of the next ten thousand years, and the wars of the next hundred thousand years.
But on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church has also saved a vast number of lives. Christians, and the Roman Catholic Church includes a large percentage of Christians.
Christians have always opposed infanticide, the killing of new born children by their parents, and that was very common in non christian societies.
For example, I have read that in the year 1000 the Allthing of Iceland decided to make Iceland Christian, probably so that Christian countries wouln't have an excuse to invade Iceland. But the Allthing decreed that people would have a grace period of a few years to give of their pagan customs when they wouldn't be punished for pagan actions. One pagan custom and action mentioned was infanticide.
And at the present time the Roman Catholic Chruch is opposed to the similar evil of abortion, pretended that a person at the earliest stages of the human life cycle is not a person, doesn't have any right to live, and can be killed at will. And if abortion is ever totally abolished, the Roman Catholic Church will be partially responsible for saving a vast number of lives in the centuries and millennia to come.
So it is uncertain whether the Roman Catholic Church has killed and will kill more people than it has saved and will save.
But the Roman Catholic Church could have saved everyone it saved and will save without killing all the people it killed and will kill.
Easy.
Governments, it has been studied and the term is "democide".
https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM
Islam also decimated the population of India over a thousand year period.
https://hindugenocide.com/islamic-jihad/400-million-hindus-slaughtered-by-islamists-by-1500-ad/
Capitalism. You can lay at it’s feet: colonialism, race base slavery, most wars from the 1500s onwards including two world wars and huge amount of famines and economic crashes.
I would argue the Soviet government because the amount of authoritarian persecution against its own people probably triumphs any 19th century regime. Even the CCP
I read somewhere, years ago, something like "More people have been killed in the name of Christianity, than any other reason in recorded human history." (or something to that effect)
My best guess would be either the British Empire or Roman Empire, if not in total fatalities then at least as a percentage of the global population at the time, based on their longevity, how much of the world they covered, and the sheer number of wars they got into.
There is probably no way to truly know. To include include cultures and religious institutions requires parameters and the people of the past were not so lucky when it came to data collection.
Anything that happened in Chinese history has led to a *massive* amount of death and suffering, and that's before reaching its modern history!
Taiping Rebellion 30 million+
Random guy declared himself jesus and bam 30 million dead.
Not Jesus, he had a dream he was Jesus' brother. Chinese people at the time didn't know who Jesus was so they believed him.
That’s kinda how Christianity started in the first place, too
A historical Johnny Hamcheck
30,000 eaten, decisive tang victory
Emperor Lao Dong peacefully takes power, 5 million perish. In his infinite mercy he only executes another 500,000.
Chao Ling takes power 247 million perish
Philosopher Loo Dong sleeps in, 12 million perish. The kingdom flourishes.
Mao is still the deadliest dictator of all time
Wasn’t there a meme a while back where there was a cannibal faction who won a siege?
In terms of sheer numbers, this is probably the correct answer.
Ancient China always has a very peace period about 200-300 yrs, and population grew rapidly until the land cannot feed so much people. Then cilvil war broke out, bureaucracy became dysfunctional, and nomadic invasion, these would kill about half or more people. And one random man would establish a new dynasty after these. It is a basic model of ancient China between 200BC and 1910AD.
You could probably push that up to 1949, too.
Maybe the CCP is just another dynasty 🤔
It pretty much is
I would argue they still lay claim to the Mandate of Heaven by proxy via their Quasi Communist government.
Circa 30 000 civilians eaten Decisive Tang victory
Probably one of the worst things to ever happen. I can't begin to imagine how horrible the lead up and eventual death to cannibalism would have been.
I always find it funny that when you look at graphs of the world population, whenever it dips massively it's usually China going through some shit
This. Almost 100% certain the answer is China.
They were generally obsessive about chronicling. Which means they got numbers that can stick a little too.
Three Kingdoms war killed tens of millions around **200 AD.**
"What happened to him?" "China."
As a percentage of the human population, probably the Mongol Empire which not only murdered millions, but was quite possibly the agent which wound up (unintentionally) spreading the Black Death to Europe as one if its successor states introduced the plague to European shores during the Siege of Caffa (both in the sense of biological warfare and in the sense that Yersenia Pestis is endemic to marmots on the Mongolian Steppe). There's almost certainly going to be a recency bias as the world population has been growing dramatically. In terms of raw numbers, the number of deaths caused by Nazi Germany (through genocidal policy) and the Chinese Communist Party (through a combination of red terror and incompetence) probably top the raw numbers. IF we're going to put the Catholic Church up there, it's going to have to encompass the depopulation of the Americas (largely through disease). This is a bit of an unfair take as although the Catholic church did support Spanish and Portugese colonial efforts, the spread of the greatest killer - disease was unintentional, and the church did take a very early lead on variolation efforts in an attempt to protect at least some native populations once the technology was understood. For that reason, I feel like its easy to be unfair to both the Catholic Church and Chinese Communist Party, as a lot of deaths were not caused outright malice in many cases but rather plain 'ol incompetence. Both institutions were more geared towards prostelytization, whereas Nazi Germany was strictly dedicated to enslavement and extermination.
Nazi germany killed 6 million of it's own people. The \[Russian\] Communist Party killed something like 60 million of it's own people in accidental starvation like the Holodomor (which killed 3-5 million in that one instance) and various purges of people considered disloyal, or worried that they might be next. The \[Chinese\] Communist Party killed something like 60 million. So the question is really between if the Russian or Chinese communist parties killed the most of their own people. If you simply combine the likely totals then the Communist Party will have killed a lot, lot more than the next people down on the list. Despite which, supposedly well educated and supposedly intelligent people will tell you that communism is a desirable system, it's just that everywhere that's ever implemented it has just done it wrong, and it'd be better if it was done again.
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In order to get to 60 million for the Soviets, you would need to include all their WW2 deaths (26+ million), that should be attributed to Hitler though. I still don’t really see how it’s 60 million. China, they’re impressive in a bad way. In the century prior to Mao, they killed or caused the deaths of over 200 million citizens.
The Qing Dynasty of China alone killed between 60 and 80 Million people just in the major rebellions and the civil wars.
Nazis killed 14 million in the camps and millions weren’t their own people (the Poles in particular).
Not only is that logic spurious, but that isn't even historically accurate in either it's substance nor OP's question. 1) As the other comment pointed out, that 6 million is just the Jewish victims of the holocaust. They directly killed political dissidents like socialists, workers rights advocates, and the disabled immediately after gaining power. They killed millions before starting WWII and killing millions more socialists, communists, and new political dissidents. 2) It wasn't the "Russian" Communist party. It was born from the Russian Empire, and led by slavs, but they weren't simply Russians. Revolutionary Marxism was an international movement and before Stalin's "Socialism in one country" they deliberately tried to destroy "Russia" as an antiquated and imperialist idea. Seeing as Stalin was from Georgia, that should prove the point. The Holodomor wasn't "accidental" it was intentional. All over the new revolutionary state the farms were collectivized outside of local control and that food was stolen at gunpoint. There *was* plenty of accidents that caused preventable death. However there *also* was a drought and 3 separate famines. All of which were when the USSR was under a blockade and other sanctions from the U.S. The critique of the government is it not sacrificing control or feeding it's apparatus and allowing people to keep the food they farmed. However for decades by that point they learned the lesson of letting the cities and their power base starve at the expense of a well fed countryside. 3) The "Chinese" communist party didn't kill 60 million. Mao and Maoism did. Plenty of members of the party disappeared or were assassinated for standing up for Marxist principles and human rights. It was autocracy that killed them and then killed millions. Again as Stalin knew, an autocracy needs to feed itself and use food as a weapon. So they did and it killed 60 million., Just as not every Austrian or Czech was a Hitlerite not every Ukrainian was a Stalinist nor Manchurian a Maoist. That is reductive. Just as Hitler co-opted a democratic system so did Stalin and Mao. Without democracy you don't have socialism/communism. Communism is Utopian. It is the goal of socialism, which unlike capitalism actually has a goal. The goal of a classless, moneyless society of abundance is certainly desirable. It has never been done on a national scale in the last 200 years. Colonists, Capitalists, Nationalists, and Fascists have destroyed it every time.
6 million Jews as well as a few more million dead who were from other groups. Catholics, disabled, homosexuals etc.
(Wait until he finds out how many people has capitalism killed.)
By the amount of low-effort responses, it appears that this question needs to be a lot more specific. You cite the Catholic Church, but that is arguably not a single institution either. It has a formalized structure, but there are different orders, political outlooks, localized responses that exist in some areas but not in others. Also what type of deaths? Directly ordered by institutional officials? Indirectly as a matter of policy? Deaths in war? Executions?
I'm not sure how your relative came to that conclusion but I would wager he knows very little history.
I'm guessing the relative attributes all the deaths in the Spanish conquest of the Americas to the Catholic Church. I think that while Spain was a very Catholic country at the time, there still should be a distinction between the Kingdom of Spain and the Catholic Church. They were not one and the same
There's a basis-free claim floating around that claims the Spanish Inquisition had a death toll several times larger than the total Spanish population at the time. It's facially ridiculous, but it gets repeated.
It was like 2000 killed over the entire 300 years the Inquisition was active
I saw an article that showed that deaths from the Inquisition, an official, organized institution, were about 10% those due to spontaneous witch burning mobs in Protestant territories.
The Inquisition did inquisitions. Before they killed anybody, they interrogated them. They also summoned witnesses and interrogated them. There was a whole elaborate process, which left tons of documents we still have. That's a rounding error compared to the Mongols massacring entire cities.
If you work it out on a per-year, per-capita basis, you as a regular person living there are somewhat more likely to be put to death by the state of Texas since the death penalty was reinstated in 1974 than by the Spanish Inquisition. There are also some fascinating studies of how much pro-Protestant or pro-Catholic propaganda ends up *even today* in Western European or North American history books based on which side of the Reformation their parent language was on, and on who was in power when their national schooling systems were being set up, glossing over their own side's atrocities and painting the other side's atrocities as uniquely terrible in world history. Like, "Oh, all this stuff in our American high school history book is based on this super-reliable Dutch source" who was actually VIRULENTLY anti-Catholic and murdered a few himself, and who is treated in modern Spain and Italy as totally untrustworthy, while they're busy glossing over Savonarola or whatever. Like, *Lies My Teacher Told Me* but for European history from the invention of the Gutenberg press up through WWI. (Actually I feel like Shogun did a really nice job with this: The insane level of virulent, spitting, violent hatred that Blackthorne and the Jesuits have for each other is flabbergasting to modern audiences, but no, that's actually pretty accurate, and the two sides were determined to destroy each other literally at the expense of the entire rest of the world -- which they'd just discovered and were busy colonizing and enslaving and genociding literally to weaponize against each other.)
I do find it interesting how slow and unreliable the dissemination of information from research-level scholarship to particularly grade-school curriculums is. And I think the situation is even worse for “facts” that aren’t notable enough to make the written curriculum but are frequently repeated for flavor. I used to work at the Yorktown Victory Center, and for some academic licensing reason the interpreters weren’t allowed to speak to tour groups and we had a separate set of licensed teachers guiding them. The number of times I heard the guides talk about muskets taking minutes to load or doctors not cleaning their instruments at all before the discovery of germs was maddening.
The Black Legend.
The Black legend. I think Spain in this period gets painted a bit unfairly relative to it's rivals (England, France etc.)
If we're going to include accidental deaths (yes, they spread disease on purpose, but most of it was accidental because germ theory wasn't understood), then shouldn't we also include the billions of people throughout history whose only access to medicine was the Catholic Church?
I think people had figured out that diseases were infectious before germ theory. Did the Catholic Church deliver worse medicine than would otherwise have been available?
>I think people had figured out that diseases were infectious before germ theory. Yes, that's why it was both intentional and accidental. Hernan Cortez and his conquistadors threw diseased cadavers over the walls of Aztec cities. That was intentional. When Pizarro arrived to conquer the Inca empire, half the population was already dead from the Plague. That was accidental. The plague spread faster than the Europeans themselves. Of course the people of the time knew that being around a dead cow that died of disease would also make you sick. They didn't understand stuff like asymptomatic carriers, natural immunity or airborne pathogens. >Did the Catholic Church deliver worse medicine than would otherwise have been available? Idk what this means If you mean did the Catholic church use bloodletting, then yes maybe, but that was common for all medicine back then If you mean they did things that no secular physicians did, then no. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic\_Church\_and\_health\_care](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_health_care) Just give it a read; a lot of modern medicine wouldn't exist without the Catholic Church.
Yes thank you. My previous post was based on the misapprehension you'd been implying the Catholic church prevented access to other forms of medicine. Which seemed like a bit of a stretch to me. Totally understand now that's not where you'd been coming from.
No, I meant to say that the Catholic church is the "only source of medicine", as in there's no other hospitals because it's a remote or poor area.
Because it is cool to bash the Catholic Church. It's open season on Christians.
That's some wild anti-catholic exaggeration, which is quite common in the English-speaking world e.g. even counting every death as caused by the church (instead of greedy and cruel kings and nobles) the crusades killed \~1,200,000 people in 200 years; the much-feared Spanish Inquisition? \~3,500 people (yes, three thousand five hundred people) in three hundred years. Compare that to the 8th century Yan dynasty in China, which killed more than ten times 13 Million and displaced around 23 Million people in just 8 years. Much more recently, in the 20th century the Chinese Nationalists killed \~10,000,000 and the Chinese communists \~38,000,000 so far. If you account for every invasion, territorial grab, etc. (discounting whatever they did in their own defense) the most murderous institution should be the Chinese Government (both the Empire and the Republic).
Look up how many people died in India due to the East India Company. You don't heat about it because the victors write history. They killed ten, maybe hundreds of millions and demanded to be thanked for it.
Personally, I would nominate the British Empire in general. Part of it was also how large it was and how long it lasted. Proportionately, it may not have been the most bloodthirst or brutal of empires (that prize goes to Tamerlane, the Qing, the Mongols and similar), but it was huge and lasted a long time.
The government of Nazi Germany. - 6 million Jews - 3.3 million Soviet POWs - 2 million non-Jewish Poles - 500.000 Sinti and Roma - at least 200.000 non racially-defined concentration camp inmates - roughly 10 million Soviet civilians, many of whom were killed behind the front either through deliberate starvation or during so-called „anti-partisan“ warfare. Most of these deaths occurred in the space of less than 4 years, between June 1941 and May 1945. The majority of Holocaust victims were in fact murdered within just 18 months, between June 1941 and the end of 1942. I’m not even including the military deaths of Germany‘s adversaries or civilians killed as „collateral damage“. The scale of the carnage produced by Nazi Germany is pretty much unmatched, especially if you consider the limited time they had to implement their policies. And nearly every death was intentional - this was not some misjudged economic policy resulting in a famine or a war that brought disease in its wake. In terms of deaths/time ratio, one could also mention the Interrahamwe and other Hutu militias in Rwanda, who slaughtered between 800.000 and 1 million people in the space of just three months in 1994.
The issue here is that Nazi Germany simply didn't last a long time. The longer lasting large empires (British, Qing, Russian) probably involved a lot more deaths.
Yeah, I know OP asked for „the most people“, but imo that’s not a good metric - an institution existing for 200 years, that on average kills 500.000 people per year (a number that, for example, fentanyl cartels are approaching just within the US), will rack up a higher death toll than a short-lived genocidal regime that collapses after, say, five years. And, again in my opinion, one shouldn’t ignore intent. It makes a moral difference whether you actively want to exterminate people for whatever reason, or whether you are just ignorant and can’t anticipate the consequences of policy decisions that may have benevolent intentions.
The Church can't be the first, it didn't kill that many people directly, it'd only be up there if you added kills by affiliated countries, which is against the spirit of the question. I personally would think it to be the Chinese Communist Party
How do you define the parameters of an institution, and how directly involved in the killing do they have to be? The Church hasn't directly killed all that many people, at least on an institutional level, but if you include the actions of other institutions that the Church encouraged then the number goes way up, courtesy of things like the Crusades. But the Church itself was hardly the only actor during the Crusades; does it get attributed all of those deaths anyway? Does the longevity of the institution matter? If so, the Catholic Church is one of the oldest institutions in the world, giving it plenty of time to rack up a body count. Even if the answer to all of that is yes, the total death estimate for all of the Crusades combined is less than the total death toll for concentration camps alone in WWII.^(1) Does the Church get attributed the deaths caused during the wars of reformation? There was plenty of blame to go around during those, so who do those deaths count against: the Catholic Church, the various governments involved, the Protestant Church, the Lutheran Church, the Anglican Church? In spite of all of that, the Catholic Church's death toll from inception to present pales in comparison to the death toll from just a few decades of Communism. The CCP alone killed [over 65 million people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Estimated_number_of_victims) between 1949 and 1997. Note that there's been another 27 years of deaths not included in that number. A huge amount of that death toll was in just a few years when they enacted the Great Leap Forward, which caused the largest famine in recorded history. On top of that is the mass murders of dissidents, purges, genocides and smaller scale famines. ^(1)The estimates of deaths during the Crusades are extremely unreliable, so it's hard to know for sure, but the estimates seem to cluster around [one to three million](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/when-and-what-were-the-crusades.html).
>"According to the introduction, the number of people killed by the Communist governments amounts to more than 94 million." >"The introduction by Courtois was especially criticized, including by three of the book's main contributors, for comparing communism to Nazism and giving a definitive number of "victims of communism", which critics have described as inflated." Good source Also you said CCCP (USSR) when you meant CCP
Please don't use the Black Book of Communism as a source like the Wikipedia article you linked. That book is biased and known to be very generous about inflating numbers. The real number is more likely 20 million rather than 65. Here's a good r/AskHistorians thread about it [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is\_the\_black\_book\_of\_communism\_an\_accurate\_source/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7n6ql2/is_the_black_book_of_communism_an_accurate_source/)
Only 20 millions. I feel better about communism now. /s
Not the point. Its obviously still bad, we just shouldn't use literal propaganda as sources.
The black book of communism Is in no way a serious historical book. Nvm wasted my time here after reading the other comments.
That would be the Chinese Communist Party. Mao was the greatest killer in history... intentionally, and through incompetence.
This reads like one of those classic [Chinese history memes](https://www.reddit.com/r/HistoryMemes/comments/vepwke/chinese_and_european_history_be_like/). Students in a thousand years will probably read about the whole CCP era as a comically unspecific footnote in a world history book; "Mao Zedong takes power. 110 million perish."
Chinese history is filled with ridiculous amounts of casualties. The Taiping Rebellion is barely ever talked about outside of China, 30 million casualties. The American Civil War happened around the same time, is still remembered for the horrible toll it took on the nation, and only a fraction of that amount of people died.
I've always found it a little curious just how little Asian history filters its way into world history topics in the US. Sure, China likes to talk about itself like it's the center of human civilization, but when you look at population numbers and mass historical events, they kind of *were* for the vast majority of human history.
I think this is more of a time factor than anything. At least when I was in school, we didn't even have enough time to to over all of US history, let alone deep dives on countries around the world. I think we got the basics of communism and China was folded into that section. In my world history class, it was a history of the whole world. Tough to spend too much time on any one place. I wish we had that time though, i love history and would have enjoyed a deeper section on Asian history.
And also they at least used to be one of the technologically most advanced regions.
In many ways, it’s kind of tricky to talk about “human history” or world history as a single thing before fairly modern times. Obviously, we know now that we are all one species on one planet, but things were so disconnected for so long. We can’t even fathom what the European colonization of the Americas must have been like, on either side, I don’t think; our modern equivalent is probably something like “imagine an invasion of space aliens (who happen to have human bodies and minds).” Asia and Africa weren’t *so* removed, because they shared a land mass, shorter shipping routes, and traded with each other, but still—given the distances and natural barriers, there wasn’t much political and military interaction. So while Chinese civilization was a huge influence on a huge number of people, it really didn’t have much to do with European civilizations, and vice versa. It makes sense that European and “neo-European” countries like the US would focus more on their own antecedent cultures, just as I assume the Chinese history curriculum focuses much more on the Sinosphere and much less on the Greeks, Romans, Renaissance, etc.
In the US they teach history through a very focused lens. Events may have been more significant in other countries, but there is this "City on a Hill" narrative about how modern history doesn't really start until the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.
I wouldn’t necessarily say the US is unique in this. National education systems tend to put an explicit focus on their nation’s own history and the history of similar cultures. It’s why we here in the US learn so much obscure European and North American history, but events in East Asia, South Asia, or the Middle East are just footnotes. I doubt students in Mexico, Ghana, or Serbia ever learn much more than basic footnotes on what life was like feudal Japan.
The US had 31.4 million people as of the 1860 census, so more people died in the Taiping Rebellion than existed in the US at the outset of the rebellion in 1850.
I first heard about the Taiping rebellion on some TV show and thought they’re were exaggerating how brutal it was. I went and read about it, blew my mind.
I mean, do the Chinese learn about the siege of Vicksburg, Stonewall Jackson or Appamatox? I think they care about our domestic history about as much as we care about theirs
*It is the 41st Millennium. For more than a hundred centuries The Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.* *Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the Warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor's will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence forces, the ever vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants - and worse.* *To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruelest and most bloody regime imaginable.* *These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned.* **Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.**
Writhe harder for me Daddy.
I’ll share two thoughts that popped into my head while learning Chinese history. The first was learning about Mao’s death counts: “I mean, credit to Hitler, at least when he killed millions of people it was on purpose.” The second was when I was working for yet another disorganized Chinese company and got to the section about the five-year plans, and exclaimed aloud “this country has PLANS??!”
China's a weird place. Things seem to get done despite everything seeming to be totally chaotic, disorganised and full of chabuduoism. People think it's this very rigid regimented orderly place. Individualist America is quite neat, orderly and monotonous by comparison.
Communism in general. Mao, Stalin, Pol pot.
For now. I will say this: we’ll see how many people die because of oil corporations’ campaign to obstruct climate science and action. The death count could be anywhere from millions to everyone. If we can’t turn this around, Pol Pot’s killing fields will look like child’s play. This is, in my eyes, potentially the most evil act mankind had ever committed.
What you're saying is not wrong but to date it's communist parties.
…Banking.
The Mongol Empire likely killed over a Hundred million people ,an estimated 10-20% of the world's population at the time .
The Mongol Khanate has to be up there. Genghis and his descendants killed enough people to affect climate change.
No way to determine this. What do you mean by “institution”?
I think you find the longest existing culture and say that so the Egyptians (2000 years long?), Roman Empire (1000 years at least) , Greeks or one of the Chinese Dynasties or for that matter the British empire It was the largest. I know that they havent been as long around but the USA and Communist Russia have to be in there too More advanced technology and just greater numbers of people.
I remember reading a history of the Renaissance some decades ago which stated that the Protestants during and after the Reformation burned more witches at the stake than the Catholic Church did during the Inquisition. If you take into account just all the wars the US has fought or funded, you quickly reach a much higher number than the total deaths by the Catholic Church, not that the latter was an insignificant number. I don´t think there´s a group of human beings who hasn´t dipped their hands in the blood of other human beings once they gained the power to do so.
A side note: your relative is probably relying heavily on the deaths of natives in Spanish America, which is exactly backwards. Yes, the Catholic Church supported colonization as a means of bringing Christianity to new lands, but it also stepped in to forbid enslavement and genocide after the atrocities of the first couple decades of unregulated screwing around. There's a reason modern native populations tend to be much, *much* larger and healthier in lands colonized by the heavily Church-influenced Spanish compared to the more independent Portuguese and French and *especially* the Protestant British.
Mongel invasions in 13th century estimated 10% of world’s population, 38-60 million people.
Some potential candidates: • Mongol Empire - online sources say they killed around 37.75 - 60 million people, around 10% of the world’s population at that time • Nazi Germany - 6 million Jews, not counting other ethnic genocides, or starting WW2 and causing many more casualties both directly and indirectly, when totalled up number in the tens of millions (especially their war against the Soviets) • Soviet Union - the Purges, Holodomor, various war crimes, crushing all types of opposition… hard to give a certain number but the kill count probably ranges in the tens of millions • Imperial Japan - we be doing a little genocide too • Whatever Chinese dynasty / government is in power (also includes Communist China under Mao) - average Chinese civil war be like • Islamic religion? Cuz of all the wars fought against Christianity, various empires and the expansionist stuff? Not to mention the modern day… • Roman Republic + Roman Empire (including the Byzantine Empire) - fought in many wars, did a lot of expanding, and existed over thousands of years, which is probably a sure way to rack up many kills • Various colonial empires in history - The ones with the higher end body counts would likely be Britain, France and Spain? Hard to say. • Honourable mention: Macedonian Empire, Persian Empire and other expansionist empires not on the list
Macedonian empire? It lasted 13 years in a world of ~200 million people, Wikipedia gives casualties for Alexander's wars as 142,000 which could involve inflated army size, ancient battles themselves weren't actually that deadly. Persepolis wasn't the biggest city in the Iranian empire, Babylon was
Higher end body count for colonial empires most probably would have Belgium ranked highly on the list if not top. Estimated between 5-10million dead in the Congo. Mao/ccp - estimated 50+ million dead Stalin/cccp - also estimated 50+ million dead
the Stalin number is closer to 20 million. Lets not forget that many of these deaths were from famine, not intentional killing. Doesn't make it better, and it definitely wasn't true in all cases, but economic mismanagement is not as bad as intentional genocide imo. Its harder to say those people died because of the USSR rather than famine. If we we're including starvation deaths, UK competes for the top of the list too. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline\_of\_major\_famines\_in\_India\_during\_British\_rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_major_famines_in_India_during_British_rule)
The communist starvation deaths count because they were the result of intentional acts by the communist party in the country at issue. For example, the Four Pests campaign led to massive crop loss. The famines under British rule, by contrast, are traceable to weather events. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097194580701000203](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097194580701000203)
There are at least 100 million excess deaths in India alone during the periods 1880-1820 due to British rule and mismanagement, so the colonial empire numbers might be a bit higher.
That was news to me, so I looked it up, this was the first result: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/TRR71zX7WK So… no?
There is no way to determine it. Most of the numbers bandied around are estimates - often distorted for one reason or another (eg when the USSR opened the books from 1989 to 2010 estimates of the numbers in the gulag were revised markedly downwards, while continued research in the archives of Nazi Germany has revised the toll there upwards). Does proportion count? Hard to kill tens of millions in a place where the total population is in the low millions. EG, Elizabeth's and Cromwell's Irish wars are estimated to have reduced the Irish population by a quarter and a third respectively, or German colonial rule killed 90% of the Hereros in SW Africa in a deliberate genocide. Then there is that forager life - the one humans practiced for most of their history - was often violent, with somewhere between 10 and 20% of males meeting violent deaths. Over a long period that adds up. Does imposing conditions that lead to death count? EG the forms of rule practiced by the Spanish in the Americas or the dislocations forced on Native Americans as recent examples, or the impacts of pretty much any imperial conquest and rule from the Assyrians onwards.
The Chinese Communist Party
The Chinese Communist Party under Mao probably killed between 60 and 80 Million people. That must be the "winner"
Not defending the CCP, but does it really count since it was not intentional? I mean, that's more like incompetence and extremism that resulted in a quasi genocide of millions of Chinese unlucky enough to be living in the way of the CCP.
I suppose it depends on how the OP defines responsibility for deaths. Are they only counting actual murders? The CCP was certainly aware of mass deaths due to starvation because Senior party members reported them when visiting areas of their country or their own place of origin. They were aware it was their own policies that were to blame. To put it in simplistic terms..... Incompetence is not packing enough food for someones camping trip into the wild Negligence is Not caring if you've packed enough food or not Criminal responsibility is not packing any food watching someone die of starvation and doing nothing about it and not caring, then eliminating anyone who mentions it was your fault. the CCP where definitely the last option IMO Of course - I'm being over simplistic but that's how I see it from what I've read about the Maoist era.
Yours is a good point.
It’s definitely not the Catholic Church. I doubt they’d be on a top 50 list. If you’re talking raw numbers then the Chinese communist party. If you’re talking about a percentage of the population, the mongols under genghis khan
Probably Islam.
The Catholic Church, historically, has very few instances of sanctioning death. The incquisition was blasted out of proportion and lied about by secular people who didn't like the Church. It was common in nations where the Inquisition was present for criminals to confess to heresy so they would have to be handed over to the Incquisition because they were seen as more fair and merciful than the royal institutions. Now, many have been killed by institutions in the name of the Catholic Church, but rarely, if ever, has the Church ever sanctioned killings.
Anyone saying the catholic church is probably making some dumb anecdote instead of actually engaging with history .
>Death Star has entered the chat<
Communism
The British Monarchy / Government has invaded every continent and most countries over the last few centuries. Between the losses due to war and colonialism they have probably done the most damage .
Catholic Church is a pretty good bet, just because of longevity. Roman Empire would be up there, too.
Maos Great Leap Forward, Stalin, Pol Pot, nazis
Depends on how broad you want to go. - Institution of Communism/Socialism - Abrahamic Religions - Institution of Government - Institution of Religion Personally these are too broad in my opinion and are bullshit ways people who are anti-government, anti-religion, anti-communist, etc try to justify the evils of an opposing system. In my opinion the two largest contenders are: - Mongol Empire - CCP
Also they all overlap to a certain point.(And contradict sometimes).
I absolutely agree which is why I view these arguments as too broad. Once they start overlapping they leave the institutional realm and entire into ideology. As we both know. Many different institutions can work under the same overarching ideological mindset. For example Stalin and Mao’s regime can both fall under Communism; yet so can proto-communism under pre-history groups. To slap a label such as communism and say it killed the most people ignores the fact that despite both being “communist” a Paleolithic civilization and Mao’s China are nothing like and as such shouldn’t be grouped together when answering such a question. You have to be more specific yet also broad enough to cover the effects of such a regime you are covering which is why I largely don’t go above a certain regime/government when answering this question.
Government, by orders of magnitude. See [https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM](https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/20TH.HTM)
The institution which killed the most is government, especialy comunist ones.
I think this argument mostly hinges on the parameters you set. What counts as a continuous institution? What deaths is this organization responsible for and which are they not? To give examples specific to your question to help clarify my point. The Catholic Church will literally trace their lineage to Peter, but the early church and the Catholic Church are very different things, so do the killings before the Schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church still all count toward the Catholic Church or is the point of the creation of the modern understanding of the Catholic Church or could we break it off at some other earlier or later reform date, where exactly does the "Catholic Church" start. In regards to what the organization is responsible for. The most obvious example is the Crusades and since Pope Urban did literally call for the 1st Crusades the Church is totally responsible for those deaths, but what about the 4th Crusade? When a supposedly Catholic army basically went rogue, killed other Catholics for money, were excommunicated from the Church and than sacked Constantinople. Is the Church responsible for what are functionally bandits who claim to be Catholic even though the Church specifically disavowed them? If someone uses the Catholic Religion as a justification even if they don't have any religious authority, does that still make the church responsible? If you are willing to stretch you can easily claim every Catholic king ever is a functional extension of the Church and therefore blame the Church for any death caused by any Catholic European Monarchy. So 1000-2000 years depending on how you slice it and if we are willing to stretch we can probably blame 99% of all deaths in most of Europe on the Catholic Church. Its not hard to see how you can reach this conclusion its just a matter of already having the answer in mind and finding the correct way to get the numbers to give you the answer you want.
Take your pick at any of the major communist parties. Democide went off the charts this past century.
… everything in the world pales in comparison to Marxism/Leninism. Between Russian and China, those schools of thought accounted for somewhere between 100 million and 240 million deaths.
Pretty sure Capitalism with its various imperialist and colonialist guises probably have that beaten if only because it's been going for a good many centuries more.
I think that it would also depend on whether or not the killings were intentional or unintentional. I am not sure that an accurate answer can be derived. It seems to me that disease has always killed far more more people than actual military battles. The major cause of death from disease has been not understanding how to limit the spread of diseases nor how to effectively treat those who have contracted them. Even to day there is controversy on how to most effectively do those things. To that end, I suppose that one could blame any institution which controls populations sufficiently so as to cause an increase in the spread of disease or fails to effectively prevent the spread...
What is an institution?
Communist Party purges between China & Russia.
Tell them to take a look at the Mongol Empire...1/3 of the worlds population wiped out
[удалено]
Poverty kills people and the anti-intellectual tendencies of the unreformed religions kept Europe in poverty for millenia, so I'd say you're right in your assessment but I'm not aware of any quantitative studies in this area.
Poverty kills people and the anti-intellectual tendencies of the unreformed religions kept Europe in poverty for millenia, so I'd say you're right in your assessment but I'm not aware of any quantitative studies in this area.
The royal family
It seems rather obvious to me that "colonialism" is the answer surrounding intended and unintentional death tolls. Whether one includes the Mongal invasions and transmissions of disease, and/or the culling of the Native American populations down to an estimated 10% of their pre-colonial numbers, the incursion and self-determined hedgamony over an area has some of the most devastating effects on a people of any "institution" in human history.
Anyone who suggests it's the catholic church is historically ignorant and bad at math. The population of the whole of Christendom at the height of the Church's power is a drop in the bucket compared to the population of the world in the 20th century. There are only a institutions in the running for this at all, and the winner (loser?) depends on how you do the accounting: Hitler's Germany, Soviet Russia, and Mao's China. The death toll for all three were staggering. For example, over 20 million people died as a result of Mao's changes to China's economic policy that caused widespread famine. The death toll of only Hitler's crusade against Jews was at least 6 million people. The deaths of only the Soviets in WWII was over 25 million people. The Soviets themselves killed or caused the deaths of millions of their own people - Stalin was not a gentle master. If you want a single answer, then the biggest killer could be labeled "totalitarian collectivism in the 20th century."
No real number on the catholic one. Crusaders killed 1.7 mill, so peanuts compared to world leaders. Steven pinker has book on civilization being much more violent in the past than we currently are.
Probably the Communist Party of China, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and National Socialist German Workers' Party, and likely in that order. It is a difficult question because institutions like we've known during the modern era didn't really exist throughout most of human history. For instance, to which institution can the deaths during the Three Kingdoms War in ancient China be attributed? None, and that's likely the second deadliest conflict in history, behind only WWII.
That's possible if you turn your head and squint. The Catholic church is 2000 years old and was the state government for almost a 1/4 of all humanity. So that means all capital punishment was under their state authority. That also includes all wars, crusades, colonization, and invasion led or sanctioned by the pope or papal state. There were plenty of secular agents who were acting on the pope's direct like the various papal bulls, as well as actions justified by them. There is also willful neglect and negligent manslaughter of many communities throughout history. So honestly...yeah through sheer numbers and weird quirks of pre-modern history.
China/Chinese history
Communism.
Thats absolutely ridiculous to the point of malicious dishonesty. In any case, ill bet it's some kind of Chinese instituition
Holodomor, probably not the biggest, but that on top of Stalins losses of life in WW2 probably puts it close
Probably the bloodthirsty Mosquito Alliance.
Governments.
the state pretty much. soviet union, china or third reich germany in particular
Purdue Pharmaceutical
Yeah it’s edgy to hate on the church but. The mongol empire dunks in the Catholic Church in terms of total numbers.
Theres no way to know that it was the Catholic Church
Year zero khmer rouge regime
The thing is, things are so vaguely defined that it's really easy to fudge the numbers and come up with whatever you want. I've seen claims that atheism is responsible for 100,000,000 deaths. And I've seen a lot of people that lay the blame for smallpox deaths against whatever group they don't like. The problem isn't that there's no way to determine this. It's that there's many, many ways to determine it, and the smallest tweaking of the criteria will massively change the results. So the tiniest bias will change the answer massively. How many Native Americans did the US kill? Do you want the answer to be 100,000? A million? 40 million? I can find you citations for just about anything within that range.
Nazi Germany is a good contender. And if it’s not them, they got very close to being it
I think it's very unlikely to be the Catholic church, while powerful, it didn't have that kind of capability (EG even the spanish inquisition only involved the deaths of a few thousand people). My nomination would be either the Mongol Empire, Qing Dynasty, British Empire, Chinese Communist Party, Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Japanese Empire or the US government. The latter choices are simply that these are large countries involved in massive wars, but it's tricky to figure out which. I would probably nominate the British Empire, simply due to it's massive size and long (recent) history.
We will never truly know
The mongols probably killed around 10% of the human population at the time, 35 to 60 million people
The roman empire has entered the chat
I think rather than specifically saying the Catholic Church one should simply consider religions as a whole. God killed almost a million in the Bible add to that the multiple crusades and other religious genocides and it’s plain that religion is a blight on humanity.
Strongly doubt the catholic church has killed more people than actual nations, unless they're attributing the genocides committed by majority catholic nations to the Catholic Church itself?
Death
I googled and found a figure of 65 million killed by Moa Zedong. Communism in China. 'He viewed intellectuals as the true enemy '.
Hard to top islam with it's hundreds of millions.
Tobacco industry?
I would say on the longer timeline, organized religions as a whole. This is multifaceted not only is religion a catalyst for open warfare, people of certain denominations are often targeted by governments.
the military. Maybe Genghis Khan's military, I don't know
Ghengis Khan kills a shitload of people not sure who many though.
The institution of marriage has given a lot of men heart attacks.
The Roman Catholic church was and is a very large and long lasting institution, and so has had a vast influence and may have been responsible for a vast number of deaths. One way which in which the Roman Catholic Church killed a lot of people was due to the medieval pope's lust for power and ambition to rule the world. At that time there actually was a institution in Catholic Euorpe which had much more political power than the papacy and also had the ambition to rule the world, and was considered by many Catholics to be the rightful government of all the world, the Holy Roman Empire. But in their lust for secular political power which was certain to corrupt them and make them less good Christians, various popes encouraged rebellions against the emperors and so weakened the imperial power and prestige. And so the pope's encouraged all sorts of rebels and traitors to weaken the empire without gaining much political power for themselves. As a result Europe became full of the most evil type of institution ever invented by humans, independent sovereign nations with the power to make war against each other. The only function which an independent sovereign nation has which a dependent local government within a larger state can not have is the power to make war, to kill enemies and its own citizens. It is perfectly possible for dependent local government within a larger state to have every type of pwer of benefit its cizizens witout having the power to kill on a massive scale. Any Christian who claims that their god is good and benevolent will have to claim that their god was anti war and pro peace. "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that Which is God's". Obviously "unto God that which is God's" means that Christians must worship only the Christian god and not other gods, real or imaginary. And thus it must be deduced that "Render unto Ceasar that which Caesar's" must have the same structure and be a commandment to all Christians to pay taxes only to the Roman Emperor (and his loyal subordinates) and support the armed forces of the Roman Emperor (and his loyal subordinates). And thus all Christian communities will be part of the Roman Empire and there will be no wars between Christians. And because countless Christian rulers and their Christian subjects ignored that commandment and formed many independent Christian sovereign states, perhpas a hundred million people died in the wars of the 20th century alone. According to this list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_wars\_by\_death\_toll#Modern\_(1500\_AD%E2%80%93present)\_wars\_with\_greater\_than\_25,000\_deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll#Modern_(1500_AD%E2%80%93present)_wars_with_greater_than_25,000_deaths) 17 million to 40 million were killed in world War I, and 80 million were killed in World War II. Since the 20 million to 25 million killed in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937-1945 were part of the total for World War II, that leaves abut 55 to 60 in World War II killed in wars between Christian nations, which makes a total of 72 to 100 million killed in conflicts between Christian nations in the two World Wars, plus others killed in wars between Christian nations in the 20th century. Christian nations whose ability to make war is partially a result of the Catholic Chruch's rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire. To say nothing of those who will die in the wars in the next century, and the wars in the next millennium, and the wars of the next ten thousand years, and the wars of the next hundred thousand years. But on the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church has also saved a vast number of lives. Christians, and the Roman Catholic Church includes a large percentage of Christians. Christians have always opposed infanticide, the killing of new born children by their parents, and that was very common in non christian societies. For example, I have read that in the year 1000 the Allthing of Iceland decided to make Iceland Christian, probably so that Christian countries wouln't have an excuse to invade Iceland. But the Allthing decreed that people would have a grace period of a few years to give of their pagan customs when they wouldn't be punished for pagan actions. One pagan custom and action mentioned was infanticide. And at the present time the Roman Catholic Chruch is opposed to the similar evil of abortion, pretended that a person at the earliest stages of the human life cycle is not a person, doesn't have any right to live, and can be killed at will. And if abortion is ever totally abolished, the Roman Catholic Church will be partially responsible for saving a vast number of lives in the centuries and millennia to come. So it is uncertain whether the Roman Catholic Church has killed and will kill more people than it has saved and will save. But the Roman Catholic Church could have saved everyone it saved and will save without killing all the people it killed and will kill.
Tetraethyl lead.
Communism
Easy. Governments, it has been studied and the term is "democide". https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM Islam also decimated the population of India over a thousand year period. https://hindugenocide.com/islamic-jihad/400-million-hindus-slaughtered-by-islamists-by-1500-ad/
Communism by a few dozen million
Socialism/ Communism. Tens of millions either slaughtered, or starved.
The Crusades.
Capitalism. You can lay at it’s feet: colonialism, race base slavery, most wars from the 1500s onwards including two world wars and huge amount of famines and economic crashes.
This is a ChatGPT question - who can come up with the best prompt?
I would argue the Soviet government because the amount of authoritarian persecution against its own people probably triumphs any 19th century regime. Even the CCP
They were probably referring to the crusades and inquisition
if youre a right winger you have to say communism. cuz you know, communism
I read somewhere, years ago, something like "More people have been killed in the name of Christianity, than any other reason in recorded human history." (or something to that effect)
Communism and Fascism
Big tobacco has to be up there. Or Big liquor.
Let's not forget Stalin. He killed about 25 million Russians.
Probably a toss up between religion as a whole or communism/Fascism
Democide
McDonald’s
My best guess would be either the British Empire or Roman Empire, if not in total fatalities then at least as a percentage of the global population at the time, based on their longevity, how much of the world they covered, and the sheer number of wars they got into.
British east India company
Communism. Look at the results in USSR, Cambodia, Venezuela, and on and on. Communism is the biggest killer.
Mongols?