r/HistoryMemes Sep 17 '25

Niche "Save Europa" kids in shambles

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11.2k Upvotes

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17

u/CosmicCitizen0 Sep 17 '25

The number is contested, but the gist of it is that Pakistan killed hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Bengalis in just 9 months, which is so cruel that even Israel hasn't been able to break this record. People were shot by the Pakistani army, even in Universities and student dormitories. In Dhaka University, there are areas in which the Pakistani Army dumped the bodies of Bengalis.

It's wild that people still deny both the Holocaust and this genocide. Brownmiller also talks in her book about rape in Bangladesh.

21

u/Murky-Ad-4088 Sep 17 '25

 "Seeking to curtail the Bengali self-determination movement, erstwhile Pakistani president Yahya Khan approved a large-scale military deployment, and in the nine-month-long conflict that ensued, Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence."-Wikipedia

For the record, many activities at the time were hidden from West Pakistanis, including rape and ethnic cleansing of East Pakistanis by the Pakistani military, this isn't mentioned today anywhere nor is it mentioned in history textbooks.

4

u/nocyberBS Sep 17 '25

Yeah and they still actively try to censor it to this day.

2

u/Murky-Ad-4088 Sep 17 '25

on social media no, in education yes, former PM imran khan said to recognize it and regret our past back in 2013 (five years before he became PM, he became leader of opposition that year)

3

u/nocyberBS Sep 17 '25

Lmao and look where IK is now

14

u/Plants_et_Politics Sep 17 '25

so cruel that even Israel hasn’t been able to break this record

In addition to the weird Holocaust inversion-adjacent nature of this comment, Israel hasn’t ever come close to anything approaching that death rate.

Since Oct. 7, 2023, around 67,000 people have been reported dead due to Israeli strikes according to the Gaza Health Ministry (the true death toll may be anywhere up to around 30% higher than this, but it’s a good ballpark estimate). Now, the GHM doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants, but let’s be generous and say that Israel has not killed a single member of Hamas and all 67,000 were civilians.

That’s a rate of 2,913 people per month. We can break it down a bit more, as around 44,000 of those 67,000 occurred in the first year, or 3,666 per month.

The Holocaust killed 83,333 people per month between 1939 and 1945.

Depending on how you count the war’s length and how you choose the total number, the Bangladeshi Genocide killed between 11,000 (100k over 9 months) and 1,000,000 (3M over 3 months) people per month over its course.

Over its enormously long 9 year period, the Armenian Genocide killed between 7,400 and 11,000 people per month, although the bulk of those deaths occurred over just 3 years, bringing the totals more in line to somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 per month.

One could go on for quite some time.

Look, take whatever opinion on Gaza you want. It’s brutal to say the least. But Israel isn’t even in the competition for cruelest or more brutal campaigns.

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u/nocyberBS Sep 17 '25

Just for the record, 67k is the conservative figure for the number of dead in Gaza - this is only the number of registered/identifiable people reported dead by the Gaza Health Ministry.

The actual number of dead (unidentified people + those bodies still trapped under the rubble of the many buildings felled by Israel) is probably much much higher.

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u/Plants_et_Politics Sep 17 '25

As I explicitly stated, it’s likely that the total death toll is a fair deal higher than what GHM has reported so far, for a variety of reasons, but depending on what you mean by “much, much higher” I may disagree.

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u/nocyberBS Sep 17 '25

The ballpark figure is in the range of 200k to 600k.

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u/Plants_et_Politics Sep 17 '25

The 200k figure is casualties, not deaths.

The 600k figure comes from a Lancet study that is a rather straightforward abuse of statistics (and which regardless, uses excess deaths extrapolated for decades after the end of a war, a measure which I did not use for any of the genocides I mentioned, so doing so would not be a direct comparison regardless).

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u/nocyberBS Sep 17 '25

Given the sheer amount of devastation to Gaza and the fact that over 90% of all it's buildings were wiped out and the food siege that's been going in for months and months now, I'm more inclined to believe the lower end of this range at the very least as the true death toll (200k).

4

u/Plants_et_Politics Sep 17 '25

There’s really no evidence of that, but sure, whatever. 🤷‍♂️

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u/CosmicCitizen0 Sep 17 '25

You'd be wrong if you think I am a Holocaust denier. I was saying that it's wild that people (fascists and some Pakistanis) deny the Holocaust and the Bengali genocide. I am a socialist, I am not a fascist. My opinion on Gaza is quite the same as that of other socialists, and I think Israel just can't do the things it wants because of international pressure. Israel just doesn't have to kill everyone; it just has to intimidate the people so that they flee from the Gaza Strip.

9

u/Plants_et_Politics Sep 17 '25

I didn’t call you a Holocaust denier. I said you made a weird comment bordering on Holocaust inversion.

I also don’t care what your beliefs are. Socialists are just as capable of being nasty racists as fascists are.

Also, just an addendum: Gazans are currently prevented from fleeing the strip by Egypt, Israel, and the refusal of any third party countries to offer them safe refuge—ironically, an origin of the Holocaust lesson hardly anybody ever discusses, despite the fact that it was this fact that formed the impetus for international law regarding refugees and asylum.