Recognizing that all people have the capacity for hostility and hatred does not mean that it is easy to come up with a way of measuring how prominent that is within any given culture or country, but violence and murder often leave a factual record which can be examined. It is difficult to ignore a dead body. The British came to India and found a variety of practices that were quite different from their own. One of the traditions they found was known as sati. It was the Hindu practice of burning alive the widow alongside her husband’s corpse. In a 12-year period (1813 to 1825), it was noted that almost 8000 women died by the custom in Bengal. Witnesses of one incident told the story of a widow named Radhabyee who tried to escape being burned alive. The first time she was put on the fire she was able to escape with only burns on her legs. She might have survived this. But then three men put her back in the fire, and then threw logs on top of her to keep her in the flames. Yet, she was able to escape again and she rushed into a river with her entire body burned. The men followed her and held her under to drown her. While this tradition was not uniformly practiced by all Indians, the numbers of women who suffered this fate were not small.
Compare sati to what is one of the most heinous American crimes, the hanging of American Blacks. The worst year for violence against Black Americans in terms of lynching was 161 in 1892. Just as a ballpark number, the deaths related to sati in Bengal worked out to nearly 600 per year, and that was just in one part of India. As another comparison, the Chinese that lived outside of China faced significant hostility and hatred in the countries in which they lived. Hatred would flair to such a degree that mass murder would ensue. The number of Chinese massacred in only a few days exceeded all of the African Americans ever lynched in the history of the United States. The Spanish Inquisition, often treated as the epitome of large-scale violence and murder, led to approximately 10 deaths per year from 1480 to 1700.
For more information, please see the following:
Empire by Niall Ferguson
Conquests and Cultures by Thomas Sowell
Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality by Thomas Sowell
Bearing False Witness by Rodney stark
The Tyranny of Clichés by Jonah Goldberg
Dominion by Tom Holland
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