For people who insist on being brainwashed by the dream of free market democratic democracy this is what he wrote below the graphs.

That's why I was so startled to discover that there is absolutely no pattern to the chart. If I had simply picked 25 countries out of a hat, I could not have gotten a more diverse spread than we've got here. We've got rich countries and poor countries; industrial and agrarian; big and small. We've got people of all colors -- white, black, yellow and brown -- widely represented among both the slaughterers and the slaughterees. We've got Christians, Moslems, Buddhists and Atheists all butchering one another in the name of their various gods or lack thereof. Among the perpetrators, we've got political leanings of the left, right and middle; some are monarchies; some are dictatorships and some are even democracies. We've got innocent victims invaded by big, bad neighbors, and we've got plenty of countries who brought it on themselves, sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind. Go on -- take a third look. Find any type of country that is not represented among the agents of a major blooding, and probably the only reason for that is that there aren't that many countries in that category to begin with (There are no Hindu or Jewish countries on the chart, but then, there's only one of each on the whole planet, and they're both waiting in the wings among the next 25.).

In a way, it's rather disheartening to realize that we can't smugly blame the brutality of the century on the Communists, or the imperialists, or the Moslem fundamentalists, or the godless. Every major category of human has done it's share to boost the body count, so replacing, say, Moslem rulers with Christian rulers, or white rulers with black rulers, is not going to change it at all.

Thats a good paragraph.

wow this is morbid

Ooh, great read megaman79.

But does anybody know who's been slaughtering the masses "in the name of atheism?" I can only think of one kingdom in the 20th century, but I forget its name. I think it was some communist dude in eastern Europe, but I could be wrong.

And the wonderful democratic free country of Great Britain starved at least 2 million Bengalis to death in the artificial famine of 1943, and wonderful free democratic America killed 3 million people in Indochina for... what, I'm not sure, exactly.

Every single great power which ever existed has awful amounts of blood on its hands. That's the sad truth, and the sooner human beings everywhere realize that we are our own worst enemies, the sooner we get to a world where war is obsolete.

Agreed.

Also, stalins numbers are a little deflated from what they likely were.

Keep in mind... for communism to work you need a brutal dictator to come in and force everyone to believe everyone shoudl be treated equally and brainwash people from birth to give up the idea that people should be paid based on merit and that instead all should be treated equally so long as they are the least bit productive. 

It's in the communist manifesto.

I agree with everything you just said, but don't see how it relates to what I said.  I know free democracies murder by the millions.  But free democracies have freedom of religion so they're not slaughtering in the name of atheism.  They're usually slaughtering "in the name of democracy" or something else stupid, like "in the name of freedom," or just for land or oil or revenge, or showing off weapons in theater wars.

That's like asking who's killing in the name of gayness.

Athesim is too small a minority to gain any useful majority to kill over.

If some Atheist countries existed.... i'd imagine you'd see some slaughtering in the name of atheism.

I've seen some REALLY extreme atheists in my time.  People who think religion should be outlawed and the like.

Amusingly they've all been ex catholics.

Last I checked, major communist movements - such as Stalin's USSR, and Mao's China were both pro-atheist. I know in Stalin's writings (such as Dialectical and Historical Materialism) would be a good start to understand Stalin's humanist viewpoint.

Feel free to check religion under communist nations - although it wasn't fully repressed, the fact was/is that major communist nations held to atheistic/humanistic philosophies. Although they didn't 'kill in the name of atheism', it's still a point that China and the USSR were 'officially' atheist during their most brutal periods.