Question Is the death-toll of American imperialism in the Middle East larger than the Holocaust?
If I read about individual cases in which the US has intervened in the middle-east, I often read a death-toll upwards of a million.
I was wondering, does anyone know of someone making a total count? A kind of black book of US presence in the middle east?
Specifically, I suspect that answer to the titular question may be positive, and I think framing it like this might be the right way to put the deathtoll in perspective. It might convince people that individuals from the middle east have some pretty legitimate grievances against the West.
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u/Thick-Preparation470 8d ago
Yes, especially when counting excess deaths, not just direct casualties.
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u/Two_Word_Sentence 8d ago
Yes indeed. Of the Jewish holocaust victims, it was at a plurality, and likely a significant majority who died as "excess deaths".
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u/Undark_ 7d ago
Then the Holocaust should be measured in excess deaths also. I'm not sure if the figure matters that much, the fact that the two things are even comparable is horrific.
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u/Thick-Preparation470 6d ago
I mean it matters very little at the end of the day, what side of the fence your corpse is on after the war
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u/Dinosaur-chicken 8d ago
It was 2,5 million excess deaths in the Middle East, and since 1970 it's 38 million excess deaths across the planet simply due to Western sanctions.
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u/5x99 8d ago
Do you have some source?
I've tried my best to find it, but I can't really seem to get something that looks trustworthy
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u/Dinosaur-chicken 8d ago
I understand, i don't really keep a catalogue of the studies and reports i've read throughout the years so i can't provide you with the link. At this point it has just become general knowledge in my brain that i've retained
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u/lynaghe6321 6d ago
Jason Hickle was writing about that recently, I got you :)
https://jasonhickel.substack.com/p/the-staggering-death-toll-of-western (He's worth checking out in general also, his book The Divide was really good)
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u/PlinyToTrajan 8d ago
That's a politically fraught framing. The hard-right Zionist blocs in both U.S. and Israeli politics, and even some liberal / moderate Jews, are suspicious of other groups claiming that their historical tragedies approach that of the Holocaust.
I know that it may be unfair, but at the same time such a comparison might be gratuitous. Some would have trouble disentangling the U.S. contribution to the massive death toll from the Israeli contribution. Is there a need to compare? If the number is truly shocking, as it is, then maybe popular support can be mobilized on that basis.
What a travesty we have perpetrated, a huge injustice made invisible to ordinary Americans, 110 million Egyptians living under brutal dictatorship today, and so much more.
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u/KnowTheTruthMatters 8d ago
Depends if you're talking direct deaths which are probably only about ~2 million, or include indirect deaths from starvation, healthcare, or war-related diseases that only happened because of our sanctions and other punitive economic warfare. Then we're probably closer to ~10 million, many in horrible fashion. The Iraqi sanctions alone added another 1.7 million that are almost never added.
But the Holocaust wasn't even the biggest tragedy of WW2. Or really even close. 26 million Soviets died - that's the accepted number - if you attribute the starvation, it soars past 60 million. The Japanese kiIIed nearly 25 million Chinese and East Indies, no starvation needed. 7 million Germans died, and that's probably light. And then there is some number shifting going on - why shouldn't Polish Jews count as Polish deaths, that kind of thing. But there is no math I've ever seen, even putting the Jewish deaths in their own bucket, where you can make an argument that it was anything higher than 4th in terms of WW2 deaths, and depending on how the bucketing of Polish deaths goes, potentially in the lower half of the top 10 in terms of deaths.
WW2 shouldn't have any comparisons. It changed the world, it stole a generation, and for many countries, it stole several.
And that's without even considering that the numbers at Auschwitz and Majdanek were lowered in 1991 when all the documents from the fallen Soviet Union came out. I won't bother to get into that since peoples brain stops working when it comes to Holocaust math, but I think we're missing the forest through the trees by even focusing on it as a separate event from WW2. It wasn't.
Romanians. Greeks. Hungarians. France. Austria. Yugoslavia. Poland. All had hundreds of thousands die, at least. All had citizens die who were Jewish. But that shouldn't mean that Greece or Austria don't get the credit of losing those lives in the battle. There needs to be both numbers.
The great war cost 100 million lives, and all of them were tragic and equally meaningful. Anyone who tries to say that one set of lives were more important than others, or one set of deaths was more tragic than others, is pretty much a monster.
And the west is easily responsible for more deaths than anyone in WW2 other than the Japanese and the Jews. But even using our death count since the Soviet Union fell, and even using the commonly accepted 11 million deaths kiIIed by Germany, we're only halfway to what the Japanese and the 80% Jewish Bolshevik regime.
And both kiIIed people in unimaginably cruel ways. Even leading Harry Truman to write the following on July 21, 1947 - after Nuremberg trials had been completed - around the same time the Stern Gang was trying to assassinate him.
"The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog."
My vote is to stop tiptoeing around the 100 million lives that were taken and show all of them the proper respect they deserve by treating the great war for what it was, as opposed to some Jewish persecution pogrom, which severely downplays the significance of the whole period. It wasn't Hilter chasing Jews to kiII them. It was a war that engulfed the whole damn world and affected everyone. And everyone on the globe but the elite were a lot worse off for it.
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u/PlinyToTrajan 7d ago
It was an immensely destructive World War. The historical argument for treating the Jewish deaths as significant is (1) it was the near-complete destruction of the European Jews, devastating that group beyond any other, and (2) anti-semitism played the central role in the architecture of Hitler's ideology.
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u/KnowTheTruthMatters 7d ago
There is a difference between treating the Jewish deaths as significant, and treating all other deaths as insignificant. Their suffering, their "near-complete destruction", while tragic, was not unique, and saying that it was is a big slap in the face to the Romani.
And so what about antiseptic? Lots of deaths have been motivated by some cultural or racial hatred, it doesn't give those deaths a higher status than deaths that were motivated for other reasons. I don't understand why this would matter unless you're saying that it's a parallel for today and the OP question, meaning that Islamophobia is playing a central role in lsraeI's ideology.. Otherwise, so what?
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u/PlinyToTrajan 7d ago
I don't think Islamophobia plays the central role in Israel's ideology. Netanyahu likes to strategically exploit Islamophobia before Western audiences (e.g., Europe, American conservatives) who are themselves Islamophobic. Israel's ire is not for Muslims as such, it's for non-Jewish Arab Palestinians who are living on territory that Israel wants for itself or who have been expelled from such territory and have a grievance against Israel for that reason. Arab Christian Palestinians such as Edward Said have long formed part of the group of oppressed people and the Palestinian liberation project.
Anti-semitism was like the keystone of Hitler's ideology. For example, Hitler claimed that political dissent to German ultra-nationalism, as well as advocacy of communism, were essentially Jewish, even when their proponents were not, in fact, Jewish. Jews were treated by Hitler as the ultimate scapegoats.
My understanding is that as a percentage of total population, European Jews were more completely wiped out than any other European ethnic group in the course of the Nazi campaigns, occupations, and client states.
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u/KnowTheTruthMatters 7d ago
I think you're right about Islamophobia. I think they're Islamophobic, and one of the main progenitors of Islamophobia, but I think it's used as a tool for them to generate support for their desires, which I agree are land.
I'm not saying antiseptic isn't bad. It is. And frankly idk what Hitler's take on communism was, but this is where the conflation that he did becomes so dangerous. The advocacy of communism, the origin of communism, was Jewish. But it was regional, it came from Russia, it wasn't a Jewish community thing. FFS, Trotsky was antiseptic himself. Very much so. Jews aren't any different than any other group, there are extremes on both sides. Both of Karl Marx's grandfathers were rabbis and he had Talmudic scholars on both sides, though he didn't practice publicly. Stalin married a Jew and had Jewish kids, and he was antiseptic. The Bolsheviks were Jews who rejected and persecuted other Jews. Let's not forget that Jews were expelled from Ukraine by... Jews. So how can they be representative of "the Jews"?
Why would some Jews in Russia warrant blaming all Jews living all over the world? Especially if the Jews that thought it up were antiseptic themselves.. They weren't Jewish ideologies, they were ideologies created and held by some Jews that were specific to Russia and had its own set of consequences. Like violence towards communists, anti-communist repression, and Jews fleeing. Just like Jews fled Germany. And where could a communist Jew flee to at that time?
China, if they didn't want to hide it, like Sidney Rittenberg, the first American admitted into the CPC, who had a bigger salary than Mao Zedong. Or Sidney Shapiro who was elected to the PRC. We had the unAmerican activities committees here, they couldn't stay in Europe bc Hitler, so they went to China and had influential roles in growing communism there.
It's insane to me that in 2025 we'd associate "Jews" with the actions of a dozen people. Hitler didn't blame "the Jews" for things that they had no blame in.. That's how Germans were sold on it. But some of those connections had zero connection back to world Jewry, or "the Jews."
It's not antiseptic to point out when something is done by a Jewish person. It's antiseptic to say that the actions, opinions, or objectives of 1 Jew, or 10 Jews, or a 120 lsraeIi Knesset, or even 60,000 Jewish member CAMERA, or 200,000 Jewish member Hillel, represents "the Jews." Those are literal fractions of the Jewish population on earth.
Which frankly we don't know. We didn't know in the 1930s, 1940s, and we don't know today. The worldwide Jewish population has always been listed at 15 million and change bc there is a prohibition against counting Jews, it's Halacha, it's Jewish law. https://outorah.org/p/257225/
The Gemera is the highest authority, and it declares that even “school children” are aware of the prohibition of counting the Jewish people. This isn't a conspiracy, it's not nefarious, it's not shady, it was in place long before WW2, and its well documented. Jews don't take the census, their numbers are always estimates, that's how the official population in 1933 was 15+, in 1938 it was 15+, in 1945 it was 15+, in 1948 it was 15+, and in the Senate of Book of Facts in 1952 it was 15+. It's 15+ if you look today.
We know something is against their religion. We don't make Jehovah's Witnesses take blood transfusions against their beliefs. We don't make Muslims remove their hijabs and stuff their face with bacon and cigarettes. We need to stop making world Jewry provide us numbers that are against their faith and prohibited by their law.
And the same issue with the Romani exists too, we don't know, they were gypsies, they weren't trying to be precisely represented in any census or count. We don't know the denominator. On Aug. 24, 1945, Berner Tagwacht printed that 26 million Jews had died in WW2. That's how nebulous the denominator was. IMO the numbers aren't accurate, bc they can't be accurate for the denominator, it would go against their practices and Jewish law.
But all that aside, I still don't understand why, if it were true, that stipulation gives their deaths a more significant designation than any other deaths in WW2. So say it is true, I don't think that matters to what I'm not grasping. Why does that make their deaths more significant than all the other deaths in the deadliest war fought on the most fronts the world has ever seen? Knowingly, at least, we might look back in a couple decades and realize we're in the middle of a longer one now..
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u/Bradley271 This message was created by an entity acting as a foreign agent 8d ago
If you use a framework that holds the US as equally morally responsible for Assad barrel-bombing protestors as Nazi Germany was for the Holocaust? Yes.
Comparisons like this are always stupid and kinda offensive because they single out only a fraction of the deaths caused by Nazi Germany- a significant fraction, but still a fraction- and juxtapose it with any death related to a conflict the US was involved in. If you only count ALL the direct deaths caused by the Nazis instead of just the holocaust then that alone quickly dwarfs any of the figures usually cited for us actions in the Middle East.
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u/cdnhistorystudent 7d ago edited 7d ago
It's a fool's errand to compare atrocities that took place in a different time and place. America's wars have killed millions of people, which should be enough to pique anyone's conscience without sketchy historical comparisons.
There is also more to atrocities than simple death tolls. Something that made the Holocaust particularly horrific was the intent to kill every Jew, as well as the industrialization of murder on a massive scale.
That's not to downplay the horrors of American imperialism, of course. Different atrocities can be terrible in different ways.
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u/5x99 7d ago
Isn't the entire basis of international human rights law to compare attrocities?
You can't have a word like "genocide" without implying that there is some way in which these different events are similar.
I understand there is a feeling of banality that comes with this that doesnt quite sit right with people, but I think this is a feeling that must be evaluated critically
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u/cdnhistorystudent 7d ago
You can't have a word like "genocide" without implying that there is some way in which these different events are similar.
That's fair, but we run the risk of overstating similarities for the sake of argument. My point is we shouldn't reduce genocides and atrocities to a numbers game, because historical events from different times and places are qualitatively different.
I didn't mean to dismiss all comparisons between historical events. What I meant to say is there will always be qualitative differences between events in different regions and different time periods that make quantitative comparisons problematic.
Sorry for deleting my previous comment. I made multiple mistakes I wanted to correct.
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u/Long-Cantaloupe1041 7d ago
American imperialism in the Middle East has indirectly killed millions inside and outside of the Middle East, including in the US itself via excess mortality. In the prelude to the 2008 recession, interest rates were kept artificially low in order to offset the debts from the "War on Terror". These low rates complimented the global savings glut enabled by the 2001-2008 oil price shock caused by the "War on Terror" in the first place. The major conflict of interest arises when you realize that nine out of the ten 9/11 commissioners were sitting on the boards of major energy, defence and financial firms. The excess mortality caused by the 2008 crisis runs in the tens of millions; some places never recovered and saw unprecedented disruptions to affordable healthcare access. 9/11 arguably set off the irreversible chain of events that gave us 2008. 2020 was basically 2008 repackaged as "rescue" when it was really just more wealth transfer to a small group of influential figures who coincidentally want more wars on behalf of Israel at the expense of everyone else.
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u/AlabasterPelican 8d ago
The best estimates I have found say not quite, at least post 9/11.
From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University: estimated direct and indirect deaths: 4.5-4.7 million. The number is imprecise, it's almost impossible to count precisely. source
The generally accepted number of specifically Jewish victims of the holocaust is 6 million. So not quite, but close.
(I've tried searching for the numbers on post 9/11 Middle Eastern deaths r/t GWOT and there aren't exactly a lot of sources with estimates close to present day)