“Yes, and another aspect the author of the original post ignores out of convenience, is the advantage of time that the Communists and other modern mass-murderers had- technology.”
“Want to bet on the efficiency of the Inquisition, had the machine gun, electronic telecommunications and nuclear bombs been invented in the Middle Ages?”
You need to read Elliot’s book. “High technology” certainly gives mass-murderers more powerful tools, and they have occasionally been applied (WWI trench warfare, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gas chambers, allied fire-bombing of German and Japanese cities), but in fact most of the mass murder committed so far, even in the 20th century, has been a pretty low-tech affair.
Hutus slaughtered Tutsis in Rwanda-Burundi mostly with machetes and other low-tech means, e.g., herding victims into churches and other public buildings and then setting the buildings on fire. Stalin’s slaughter of the Ukranians was largely accomplished by state expropriation of their food and letting them starve to death (and the government of North Korea is even now doing the same to its own population, reserving the high tech tools for use in extorting wealth from its neighbors, having failed utterly in its economic management at home). Most of the 100 million plus excess (approximately) deaths in 20th century slaughters were of that sort: famine, disease, low-tech mayhem.
As for the Inquisition, you need to do some study.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
It’s death toll has been greatly exaggerated. If the point was extermination of the heretics, it could have killed a lot more than it did.
In earlier centuries, there were many great slaughters, in the hundreds of thousands per episode, but all with ‘low tech’ methods, methodically applied by large numbers of killers. Read the accounts of the Mongols in Asia and the various jihad expeditions running from the 7th century to the 20th (ending with the Ottoman’s dying gasp - the massacres of the Armenians during WWI). A useful account of the latter phenonomen, which is likely to be more relevant in the 21st century, may be found in Fregosi’s and Bostom’s books:
http://www.amazon.com/Jihad-West-Muslim-Conquests-Centuries/dp/1573922471
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Jihad-Islamic-Holy-Non-muslims/dp/1591026024
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad
Without the products of technology such as transport vehicles, railroads and the telephone, Hitler and Stalin wouldn’t be able to gather and exterminate the millions, and do so with barely any opposition, for the fear that the tools imposed on those who even thought of revolting.
It’s one thing when sword/ arrow is used against another weilding the same or similar. It is easier to defend oneself from attacking swordsmen, than it is, from the same bunch with machine guns.
The game changes, and with it, the scale, when modern assault weapons and chemicals are brought into the mix.