Chapter Eleven - The Body Count

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Body Count

IT’S EASY TO talk about power when it’s abstract.
When it’s speeches and parades and propaganda posters.
But what about when it’s bullets?
When it’s bones?
When it’s names you’ll never know
and faces no one will ever see again?

Let’s stop pretending.

This isn’t some political science case study.

This is mass murder.

Hitler’s name is stamped on the Holocaust —
but his tally runs even higher.

• 6 million Jews.
• Millions more: Roma, disabled, Slavs, LGBTQ individuals, political dissidents.
• War deaths across Europe — tens of millions.

All because of one man’s delusion of superiority
and a country that played along.

Then there’s Stalin.
The numbers are slippery — buried, altered, denied —
but the scale is unavoidable.

• The Great Purge — 700,000 executions in two years.
• Famine in Ukraine — millions dead.
• Gulags — labor camps with survival rates as low as 10%.

His tally might even be higher.
Not because he hated one group —
but because he trusted no one.

They weren’t monsters in the mythic sense.
They didn’t breathe fire.
They just used trains. And lists. And silence.

They didn’t need to lift a weapon.
They turned systems into weapons.

That’s how modern mass murder works.

There’s no way to count it all.
Not just the dead, but the shattered.
The orphaned.
The displaced.
The broken lineage.
The burnt diaries.
The languages forgotten.
The prayers interrupted.

Empires fall.
But grief compounds.