WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- The 60th anniversary commemorations of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp this week prompt many sobering reflections. Coming only a month after the tsunami disaster in South Asia, they remind us that in modern times the cruelty of man has usually far exceeded that of Nature.
Possibly as many as 200,000 people were drowned by the tsunami that swept the Indian Ocean on Dec. 26 following a huge earthquake of 9.0 magnitude on the Richter Scale deep beneath the ocean floor. And that tragedy was far from the worst natural disaster in recent history. Probably twice as many, maybe even more, were drowned when a colossal tidal surge caused by an unprecedented cyclone swept East Pakistan, today the nation of Bangladesh, in November 1971.
The worst natural disaster of the 20th century is virtually unknown and un-remarked in the West: 3.7 million people drowned, or died of starvation in central China following a huge series of floods along the Yangtze River in 1931.
But compared with the death tolls inflicted by world wars, civil wars and exterminations within nations, Nature's tolls appear modest indeed. The human toll of World War I was at least 10 million dead. That of World War II is commonly put at more than 50 million. The Soviet Union alone lost 27 million dead during the conflict. Recent research has indicated that in addition to the 7 million Germans who died during Hitler's war to conquer Europe, exterminate the Jewish people and enslave the entire Slavic race, another 3 million died during the intense hardship of the 1945-48 period after it.
And then there was Auschwitz.
Added to the uniquely awful evil of genocide -- the deliberate attempt to totally exterminate an entire race, including women and at least 1.5 million children -- is the way it was done. The evil could not have been more planned or premeditated. Complex industrial processes were utilized to develop the Zyklon B gas used in the death chambers. Armies of bureaucrats slaved to make sure the trains carrying the endless boxcars of victims got to the extermination centers on time.
The discovery of the horrors of Auschwitz and all the other Nazi extermination and concentration camps dimmed the joy of victory in Europe in 1945 -- to put it mildly. After all the horrors of World War I, World War II had already seen even worse practices by both sides. The Nazis launched the excesses of unrestricted submarine warfare to starve entire nations, and the bombing of entire cities. But by the time the war was over, the Allies had paid Germany and Japan back hundreds of times over the same way.
Yet even after all that, the discovery of the evils and horrors that Nazi racism had unleashed was a stunning revelation of the depths of depravity to which supposedly ordinary human beings could sink.
Now, 60 years on, the collective experience of the human race is forcing it to confront another discovery even more shocking: The crimes of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime were not unprecedented or unique at all. In fact it is astonishing how often similar ones have happened since.
It is tempting and easy to see Hitler, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and China's Mao Zedong as figures of unprecedented, apocalyptic scale horror and evil the likes of whom appear only once or twice every millennium. But the 20th century has been replete with far lesser figures who inflicted comparable carnage on entire races, classes, religions or their own people.
Cambodia's Pol Pot wrote a pedestrian sociological thesis on the evils of urban life in the Sorbonne in the 1950s. Some 20 years later, he exterminated up to 3 million of the 7 million population of his own little nation, Cambodia, in a benighted effort to prove the validity of his argument.
No charismatic, all-powerful figure comparable to a Hitler, a Stalin or a Pol Pot emerged among the majority Hutus of Rwanda in 1994, when militant groups among them pulled off the most shocking mass murder of the past quarter-century. They organized it without benefit of any of the complex bureaucracies or advanced technologies of enslavement and destruction that Hitler and Stalin relied upon. Yet they managed to murder 800,000 innocent Tutsis and moderate members of their own tribe in only three months.
Almost no-one outside Indonesia now remembers the wild slaughter of between 300,000 to as many as a million Chinese and native Javanese who suffered the slightest suspicion of being reformist let alone communist in the dark massacres of 1965-66.
Almost a decade before the Wannsee conference of Jan. 20, 1942 cold-bloodedly coordinated and approved plans for the annihilation of the Jewish people in Europe, even more Ukrainians -- 7 million at a minimum, probably nearer 10 million -- were quite deliberately starved to death by Stalin and his communists as part of their collectivization program in what is now remembered as the Holodomor, the famine-genocide.
This dark record gives stark warning to the bright-eyed optimists who believe that the triumph of peaceful, democratic ideals is now finally imminent across the globe and that such awful crimes can only belong to the dark communist -- or Nazi -- past. Even now, there are those who, in an ironic form of reverse racism, try to maintain that the German people and culture were uniquely evil.
The true lessons of Auschwitz and the Holocaust teach far otherwise. They bear testament to the despairing cry of Immanuel Kant that out of the crooked timber of humanity nothing straight can be made, and to the grim, implacable teaching of the Hebrew Bible in Genesis 8:21 that the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth. In the decades since Auschwitz ended its hellish mission, Russians and Ukrainians, Orthodox Christians and Sunni Muslims, Tibetans and Chinese, Cambodians and Rwandans have all died in their hundreds of thousands, and millions as proof of that lamentable fact.
