How to End a Mass Killing

The Spanish destroyed the native civilizations and enslaved the populace for extractive wealth, killing entire peoples. They suffered no consequence.

The Qing massacred half a million Buddhist Dzungar and repopulated the area with other Central Asian peoples, an example of successful Imperial policy.

The British and the Americans gradually exterminated the North American peoples and reaped immense benefit.

The British knowingly starved the colony of Ireland, killing about a million. Those who survived either moved away or stayed and fought for new land rights which prevented the next Potato Blight from resulting in the same scale of mass death.

The United States held millions in perpetual and brutal slavery, until a faction in the North commenced the Civil War leading to abolition.

The British applied their colonial food policies to India, killing millions. Eventually the Indians were able to seize power.

The Germans murdered 100,000 in Namibia to control the rebellious population.

The King of Belgium turned the Congo into a slave state for rubber production, killing millions in the process. International outcry among Europeans, all of whom had colonies of their own, caused the King to surrender the territory and end the worst of the atrocities.

The Ottomans and their Turkish successors exterminated the Armenians within their borders, killing about a million. No one stopped them.

The Soviets forcibly starved the Ukrainians during the famine of the early 1930s, killing millions. There were few consequences other than bitter memories.

The Japanese ravaged Asia during the Pacific War, killing millions of civilians. They were stopped by the United States and a resurgent China.

The Nazis rounded up all the ethnic groups which attracted their hate and shipped them to death camps, killing many millions. The United States and the Soviet Union realized they could defeat the Nazis, but also had to race each other for influence in the post-war world. During their advances towards Berlin, freed those in the concentration camps.

During the march on the Eastern Front, the Soviets massacred and raped millions of civilians. They also liberated those under Nazi rule.

The Chinese government murdered millions of citizens during the transition to Communism. Internal politics stopped the starvation and killing, not in the name of justice but of power and efficiency.

The Khmer Rogue killed millions, a third of their people, and were stopped by the Soviet backed Viet-Kong, who imposed a brutal Communist government. Cambodia suffered from subsequent decades of civil war between factions supported by different Cold War powers.

Hutu extremists in Rwanda, backed by Zaire and somewhat by the French, massacred hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, and were stopped by a Tutsi extremist military force who conquered the country.

The Tutsis invading Zaire murdered hundreds of thousands of Hutus, but less than the earlier genocide, in retaliation. They were not stopped. Rwanda has become more prosperous, though it is still repressive.

Saddam Hussein murdered much of the Iraqi Kurdish population, killing near one hundred thousand. He was eventually deposed by the United States a decade later, who invaded for unrelated reasons and caused hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths.

ISIS murdered thousands of Christians and Yazidis and other religious minorities, killing tens of thousands. They were stopped by the United States and the Syrian government of Assad.

Assad murdered hundreds of thousands of Syrians in his campaign to maintain power in Syria. He is now comfortably in power.

Ethnic African rebels in the Darfur region of Sudan provoked a brutal response from the Arab central government of Omar al-Bashir, leading to the massacre of hundreds of thousands. The Western world responded with condemnation and sanctions. The conflict has changed many times over decades, rebel gains sometimes leading to peace talks, sometimes triggering more killing. After a few years of only low-level violence, in 2019 Omar al-Bashir was forced out of power due to his mismanagement of the economy and authoritarian policies. A peace deal with the rebel groups of Darfur was signed with the transitional Sudanese government and violence has gotten worse since.

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Mass killings usually are not stopped. Most often if they are stopped, it is because the perpetrators goal is no longer served by killing - the people could be put to better use. Sometimes they are stopped by a foreign power invading, but the foreign power is rarely invading on humanitarian grounds, and likely has committed similar atrocities, and sometimes commits yet worse atrocities.

Killing should always be opposed. While genocidal states rarely suffer consequences proportionate with the value of human, they do suffer consequences. Assad is free and in command, but much of the world is now closed to him; boring liberal opposition to King Leopold’s policies likely resulted in at least a little improvement in the lives of the people of the Congo. Invasion is the most uneven: far more wars are justified as humanitarian than are the ones that end killings and the desire for righteous punishment for killers is often prioritized over the lives of their victims.

If a state ends its genocidal policy because its oligarchs fear for their international bank accounts, that is good. If a state stops its controlled starvation out of a shrewd adjustment of policy and then preaches to the rest of the world about its moral sophistication, that is good. If a politician imposes well-calibrated sanctions on a brutal regime while repressing their own population, that is good. The self-serving lies of one generation can become an earnest moral belief in the next, killers’ claims to moral goodness inspire their children to take moral goodness more seriously.

Killings do not end through justice, truth, or proper atonement. But they do end, and history gives hope of little more.