Joy Divison wrote...
You aren't giving enough credit to pre-modern mass murderers that was organized by the ruling polity.
The Mongols are the most obvious example. They actually have unfairly been branded as barbarous savages because their habit of wiping cities which resisted off a map was something of a deliberate policy, Baghdad 1258 probably the most (in)famous example, but it was a practice that was tried and true and they were hardly the only pre-modern pracitioners of deliberate mass-murder.
Before the Mongols took the title of history's most notorious barbarians, the Assyrians held that title for nearly 2,000 years with deliberate mass butchery of opponents who resisted their (well organized) armies.
The early Turkish Sultans of Dehli like Qutb-ud din Aibak are genrally described as refined and scholarly men who brought effective government to Northern India by Wikipedia. What is not mentioned is that they "pacified" their intransigent Hindu subjects by constructing piles of skulls.
Chinese census records aren't exactly the most reliable, but what Zhang Xianzhong did in Sichaun would make Pol Pot blush with envy during his two year reign from 1644-46.
It is true the deaths regarding deaths from actual military campaigns, it as not until the First World War that more soliders died from enemy action than "attrition." But military campaigns were a very small part of the exterminationist policies practiced by the pre-modern mass murderers. These were political acts carried out after the soldiers had eliminated effective military resistance.
As a side note, you aren't going to find a totalitarian city-state in Antiquity for much the same reason you won't find a totalitarian state in modern history. I know Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, and the hellhole in North Korea are called totalitarian regimes, but none of them were. They ASPIRED to be totalitarian, claimed to be totalitarian, and legitimized their authority via totalitarianism (no matter how much the champions of democracies call it bad, it does not mean everyone thinks it is bad), but none of these regimes came anywhere close to achieving this goal because it is not possible to run a functioning regime without effective institutions, a literate and loyal bureaucracy, and the consent of the masses. Hitler relied so much on his followers to run **** Germany that one of Germany's most distinguished historians labeled him a "weak dictator."
I also would not call the government of Wilhelm's Germany bad. I've read enough crap from triumphalist American and British histories of the First World War which claim the "good" guys won. The *policy makers* of Kaiser Wilhelm's government were incredibly inept, myopic, and incompetant, something quite different that implying the the government structure was bad. A complicated mess ripe with contradictions, perhaps. But if I have to read one more American author praising the wonders of American democracy circa late 19th and early 20th century by comparing it to the bad authoritarian and militaristic Germans, I'll hit them over the head with their nonsensical book 
You seem to have gotten the wrong impression from what I was saying. I do not think that atrocities in premodern societies did not happen - that would be ridiculous. I simply do not consider them to be of the same scale as later events, something that should be trivially true. This is made more concrete by a properly critical reading of sources that claim atrocities on a grand scale in the premodern era. No one would disagree that the Chinggisids carved a bloody path through Xvarazm, Iran, and Mesopotamia, periodically massacring large portions of the population of resisting urban centers; I daresay the figure of a million dead at Bukhara, a number yielded by an uncritical source-reading, would meet with a similar lack of support. And so on, and so forth. Rulers of premodern states and their adherents could certainly quite vicious and systematic in their application of violence; they could not, however, match the SS or the
Inmin Gun for scale - you know, the defining characteristic of
mass murder.
The claim that certain modern states' governments were not totalitarian seems to be taking the definition of the term to a place it was not originally intended to go. "Totalitarianism" was a term invented specifically to define an idealized potential evolution of Italian Fascism, a place where, it was claimed, the Hitlerites and Stalinists had already gone. Zeroing in on specific elements of that original description and noting that, for instance, the Hitlerite regime did not qualify is missing the point. I
am familiar with the "weak dictatorship" thesis, "working toward the
Führer", and all that. But regardless of your decision to play word games with definitions, surely it is uncontroversial that these states had totalitarian
ideologies and that the
concept of totalitarianism does not date before the modern era. That's all I said in my original post.
As for my opinions about the
Kaiserreich, I assure you that I'm not getting them from some sort of idealized Whiggish deification of American government. And I certainly don't think that Imperial Germany was the "bad guys" of the First World War. I am, after all, a native German. I do not have much truck with Martin Kitchen's thesis of the silent dictatorship - a thesis that has been considerably revised in recent years - much less with the rantings of a Fritz Fischer. But the difficulties that the
Kaiserreich's government encountered in adapting to new conditions and especially to the shock of global war are well known. It was a system that, as you seem to agree, was extremely broken; it could be made to work by some personalities (e.g. Bismarck, in his earlier years, or Bülow, before
Sammlungspolitik fell apart), but that is true of almost any system. When the system was run by unremarkable men, it rapidly began to collapse, as can be seen from the desperate measures taken in the immediate pre-war years (and later, the war years themselves) to establish some sort, any sort, of direct taxation framework, or a way to coherently develop internal state policy while taking the
Kleinstaaterei into account. Unsurprisingly, these all failed.
Does that mean that the
Kaiserreich was doomed? No. Could the
Kaiserreich have won the First World War? Of course; it almost did in 1917 before shooting itself in the foot, and still came reasonably close in 1918. Was the
Kaiserreich unnecessarily hampered, vis-a-vis its neighbors and war opponents, in its policymaking by its political system? Unquestionably so. Was it impossible to overwrite the system and develop something better to replace it, thereby 'saving' the
Kaiserreich? Not until the summer of 1918.
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Thank you for your recs, though.
