Mass Atrocities 1900-Present [AP World History] Unit 7 Topic 8 (7.8)

Mass Atrocities 1900-Present [AP World History] Unit 7 Topic 8 (7.8)

Mass Atrocities 1900-Present [AP World History] Unit 7 Topic 8 (7.8)

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In this video Heimler takes you through the mass atrocities in the twentieth century which aligns with Unit 7 Topic 8 (7.8) of the AP World History curriculum.

In this video we cover the Ukranian Famine, the Influenza Pandemic of 1919, the firebombing of Tokyo, and the genocides in Serbia and Rwanda.

If you have any questions, leave them below and Heimler will answer.


Content

0.07 -> Hey and welcome back to Heimler’s History.
1.28 -> So we’ve been going through Unit 7 of the AP World History and we’re going to bring
3.84 -> the unit to a close here in this video by talking about mass atrocities in the 20th
8.28 -> century.
9.28 -> Now in the last video I mentioned the staggering death toll that came as a result of fighting
12.329 -> World War II.
13.329 -> But in this video we need to talk about, among other things, all the new ways that people
17 -> found to kill each other in the 20th century.
19.09 -> So, let’s get to it.
20.1 -> Now, I should say up front that if you’ve been watching my videos for any amount of
22.571 -> time at all, you’re used to me cracking jokes and inducing all sorts of buffoonery
26.57 -> in my telling of the past.
27.9 -> But this video deals with events that simply cannot be laughed at, and so there’s not
31.42 -> going to be any of that here.
32.559 -> So let’s look at mass atrocities brought to bear on humanity in the twentieth century.
35.899 -> And we’re going to do that by looking at it under four categories: there’s famine,
39.88 -> disease, firebombing, and genocide.
41.699 -> With respect to famine, let’s go to the Soviet Union, and especially the Ukraine.
45.359 -> If you’ll recall, farmers in the Soviet Union deeply resented Stalin’s collectivization
49.44 -> of agriculture.
50.44 -> And the reason why is because much of the food they grew was confiscated, and then sent
53.35 -> to the urban centers to feed people there.
55.1 -> And in protest to such policies peasants began burning their crops and killing their livestock.
59.079 -> And this had the exact effect that you’d think it would: it created the occasion for
62.269 -> a massive famine, in all of the Soviet Union but especially in the Ukraine.
66.22 -> As a result of this famine, in 1932 and in 1933, something like 7-10 million peasants
71.31 -> died.
72.31 -> Alright, now let’s turn to disease, and for this we’re going to look at the influenza
74.94 -> pandemic of 1918-1919.
76.61 -> So after World War I ended in 1918, soldiers from all over the world began to return home
81.78 -> to their families.
82.78 -> And a lot of them carried a particularly deadly strain of the influenza virus with them.
86.33 -> And as they interacted at home with their loved ones and the wider society, that influenza
89.979 -> virus began to spread.
91.13 -> And by 1919, that worldwide pandemic had killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-50 million
97.31 -> people.
98.31 -> Alright, that’s disease.
99.31 -> Now let’s talk about firebombing.
100.31 -> Now a conventional bomb dropped on it’s target is meant to destroy something with
103.219 -> a blast.
104.219 -> But a new method of bombing called firebombing was introduced during World War II.
107.63 -> These were bombs, that were largely cased in wood, that were meant to blast apart and
110.77 -> then start fires, and in that way they caused far more destruction than the conventional
114.61 -> bomb.
115.61 -> The Allies firebombed the German cities of Hamburg and Dresden, which resulted in the
118.45 -> near complete destruction of those cities.
120.71 -> The result was a combined 75,000 deaths.
122.61 -> The United States firebombed Tokyo as well.
125.799 -> And their campaign was staggering in scale.
128.49 -> Three hundred and thirty four B-29 bombers dropped 2000 tons of firebombs on Tokyo.
134.05 -> And once the fires started, they began to feed each other, and the result was the destruction
137.99 -> of the city and 90-100,000 people dead.
140.93 -> And now let’s turn our attention to what is arguably the bleakest of the atrocities
144.04 -> committed in the twentieth century namley: genocide.
146.48 -> By definition, genocide is the intentional slaughter of a large group of people that
150.27 -> belongs to a particular ethnicity or nationality.
152.7 -> And we’ll begin our consideration of this with the Armenian Genocide.
155.77 -> In Turkey between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenian Christians were killed in a systematic
161.37 -> ethnic cleansing.
162.54 -> Starting in 1915, the Ottoman government accused the Armenians, who were an ethnic minority
166.27 -> in the empire, of colluding with the enemy Russians.
169.29 -> The result of these trumped up charges is that Ottoman officials gathered Armenians
173 -> into concentration camps where many died of starvation and disease.
177.29 -> And those who didn’t die of those causes, they were flat out executed and buried in
180.83 -> mass graves.
181.83 -> And another genocide we need to consider is the German Holocaust.
184.58 -> Now recall that one of Hitler’s main goals was to acquire lebensraum for the German people
188.63 -> or living space.
189.63 -> And so as he began to claim his living space, he began the systematic removal first of Slavic
193.93 -> peoples into concentration camps where they labored for the war effort.
197.38 -> And he also sent into the camps political opponents, disabled people, and homosexuals
201.35 -> among others.
202.35 -> But by far, the single biggest group that he sent to the camps were Jews.
205.37 -> It began with the institution of the Nuremberg Laws instituted by the Nazi controlled Parliament.
210.02 -> And essentially these discriminatory laws banned Jews from certain professions and pushed
214.49 -> them to the margins of society, consigning them to live in ghettos with the rest of their
218.35 -> people.
219.35 -> And by 1942 Hitler began in earnest the implementation of what he called the Final Solution.
223.64 -> And it’s goal was the complete extinguishing of the Jews from European continent.
227.83 -> This policy of extreme anti-Semitism eventually drove the Nazis to round up Jews and send
232.18 -> them not to labor camps but to death camps, the most notorious of which were Auchwitz
236.59 -> and Dachau.
237.73 -> In a devastating use of technology, the Nazis perfected mass slaughter by means of gas chambers
242.51 -> and crematoria.
243.85 -> By the end of the war, what became known as the Holocaust killed six million Jews in addition
248.81 -> to the five million others that were killed.
250.82 -> Now when news of these camps finally came to the worldwide public, they were, understandably,
255.09 -> horrified.
256.09 -> And the shared sentiment across the world was: never again.
259.09 -> And apparently that sentiment was not enough because there were more genocides later in
262.81 -> the twentieth century, only two of which I’ll mention here.
265.01 -> First, let’s talk about the genocide in Bosnia.
267.22 -> At the end of World War II, many new states were formed, among them, Yugoslavia.
271.12 -> And this state was home to a diverse set of folks including Serbians, Croats, Slovenes,
275.06 -> and Muslims.
276.06 -> This last group of people, the Muslims, lived in the Bosnian region of the state.
280.09 -> Now, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did Yugoslavia.
284.19 -> And that led to lots of conflict as the disparate peoples sought to carve out their own states
288.77 -> according to their ethnic boundaries.
290.15 -> In this effort, a Serbian nationalist by the name of Slobodan Milosevicc led a campaign
294.99 -> of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia to rid his state of Muslims.
298.39 -> And after it was all said and done, 300,000 were dead in the effort.
302.59 -> Second, there was the genocide in Rwanda.
304.78 -> Now Rwanda was a colony of Belgium and it was made up of two ethnic groups: there was
308.26 -> Tutsis (who were the minority) and the Hutus (who were the majority).
311.4 -> Now as it turned out, the Belgians favored the minority Tutsis and gave them power to
315.42 -> rule the colony, and this led to a deep and abiding resentment from the majority Hutus.
319.97 -> And in 1962 Rwanda became an independent nation, and the Hutus, because they were the majority,
325.03 -> had an easy time winning control of the government.
327.3 -> And with this power, they manifested that long simmering resentment by enacting policies
331.53 -> of discrimination against the Tutsis.
333.44 -> All of this kept the population in tension, and in 1994 that tension exploded.
337.92 -> The president of Rwanda, who was a Hutu, was killed in a plane crash, supposedly shot down
342.7 -> by the Tutsis.
343.7 -> And the result of this was devastating.
345.06 -> Over the next three months the Hutus engaged in the systematic slaughter of the Tutsis.
349.67 -> In that short span of time somewhere between 500,000 to a million Rwandans were dead, most
355.87 -> of them killed by the hacking of machetes.
357.79 -> Okay, that was a video with lots of difficult realities to contend with, but now we are
362.36 -> done.
363.36 -> I’ll see you in Unit 8.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRyuspTSDOc