Mass killings and deportations of religious minorities certainly had its roots with earlier manifestations of totalitarian rule. In 1915, leaders of the Turkish government (under Muslim-majority control) set in motion a plan to expel and massacre Armenians, who were Christians living in the Ottoman Empire. Though reports vary, most sources agree that there were about 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the massacre. By the early 1920s, when the massacres and deportations finally ended, some 1.5 million of Turkey’s Armenians were dead, with many more forcibly removed from the country. Today, most historians call this event a genocide–a premeditated and systematic campaign to exterminate an entire people. To this day, Turkish officials refuse to acknowledge that anything ever happened, and in fact, it is illegal to bring up the question in Turkey even now.
Both Stalin and Hitler took these examples to heart, and applied similar measures in their own countries as the opportunity arose. The Nazis, meticulous people that they were, kept very complete and tidy records, so we KNOW their perfidy, but the Soviets, many of whom were near-total illiterates, were much more casual, so the totals in Russia shall never be known.
Naturally, this article omits the greatest mass murder in human history: Mao Tse-Tung, racking up a whopping 76,700,00 odd.
“Peace In Our Time”...Chamberlain redux. Keep re-proving history.