‘One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’
It’s a line typically attributed to Josef Stalin, an accomplished veteran of mass homicide, though it probably predates him by decades. The words are nonetheless true. The mind can only grasp so much suffering. The bigger the crime against humanity, the quicker it becomes a mere number – and the more unreal the personal savagery behind it seems.
Ninety years after Stalin’s murderous Holodomor famine in Ukraine, eighty years after Auschwitz, and with dozens of “little” genocides and ethnic and religious wars since, we’ve just about lost our ability to be outraged at anything. We’re accustomed to inhumanity on a grand scale. But it wasn’t always so. The modern taste for mass murder had a beginning. It began in Turkey just over a century ago. To this day, it remains one of the great, unrepented crimes of history.
By the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire had reached a state of advanced decay. Politically, it was a junior player in the struggle for regional dominance among the French, British, Germans, and Russians. A corrupt sultanate stymied reform and ruined imperial finances. In the Balkans, once-conquered Christian peoples were winning
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