Anatomy of a Massacre
And why we need to study massacres, today more than ever
If there’s anything that bridges recorded and pre-recorded history, it’s massacres.
The Talheim massacre in Germany took place seven thousand years ago. Thirty-four people were killed, and their bodies thrown into a pit. Thirty Aboriginal people lost their lives in 1847 at Kangaroo Creek, in New South Wales, when Thomas Coutts gave them a 10-pound bag of flour laced with arsenic after inviting them to his homestead with the promise of work.
On March 16, 1968, American soldiers tortured, mutilated, and eventually killed between 347 and 504 men, women, and children in the Sơn Tịnh district in South Vietnam in what is now known as the My Lai massacre. The dead were all civilians. More than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were butchered in July 1995 under the leadership of Ratko Mladić in Srebrenica. In December 1989, 14 women were killed by Marc Lépine. They were all students at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Canada.
A variety of massacres
Massacre is an umbrella term. Massacres are as varied as humankind — unsurprisingly…
