The events that are the least emphasized are those that were carried out by dominant powers, particularly when they are still around today writing the history and propaganda books. The way events are handled is seemingly subtle, and the most powerful way they avoid emphasis is to simply never frame the violence they did in terms of its most wide impacts.

For example, you mentioned that you are from India. The greatest violences done to India in the last few hundred years were from the Raj, so the British. And those greatest violences were not the actual acts of ships and soldiers, but in things like this:

• Dismantling of industry and craftmanship in the subcontinent, converting production to the schemes of empire. Namely, producing crops like cotton to supply a British industrialized textile monopoly. This directly created poverty where before there was immense high-value production.

• Famines caused by extreme poverty and the imposition of imbalanced production where farmers had to farm export crops and even export food crops when there were famine risks. The British also did this to Ireland and other colonies.

• The less-talked-about but still incredible violence of poverty in general. Placing a hold on industrialization also meant no balanced infrastructure for the greater public (only what served export and British control), limited hospitals, poor education, more frequent death of one’s children, and so on.

• The tweaking of caste to be more racist and classist (per English tastes), creating internal strife and misery.

• Emphasizing other ethnic divides to use marginalization as a scapegoat for suffering and exploitation. The British created or escalated many of the ethnic rifts in the subcontinent, making issues like exodis from and neocolonialism in Kashmir or the partition more likely and more dramatic.

People that attempt to tally these things lay hundreds of millions of deaths at the feet of the British Raj. Yet such numbers are not well-known!

In fact, the liberal economist Amartya Sen even applied this kind of logic to modern India and suggested that capitalism in India killed around 100 million people from 1947 to 1979. But how often do you hear Westerners talk about the mass death campaign of ongoing capitalism, citing millions every decade? Very few, because this is treated as “normal” and “natural” and not something imposed by the dominant system all around us.

A similar example is looking at the published numbers about deaths in Gaza. What we hear is an outdated number of people confirmed dead. It has almost halted for months. Is this because Israel stopped bombing children, hospitals, schools, refugee camps? No, it is because they explicitly targeted and disruoted the entire system responsible for doing these counts, the healthcare system. But even then, let us say the counts continued. Is this everyone killed by Israel’s genocide there? No! These numbers do not include the people dying from poor sanitation (Israel cut off water and electricity), of diseases, of malnutrition, of any kind of malady that could have been treated by the medical system the Israelis destroyed. The numbers of civilians killed by deprivation is usually larger than those directly killed in war. It is rarely reported as the death count of a given war, or in this case genocidal occupation.

So, the greatest missed events are those hidden from us without our knowledge. By controlling the definitions of terms like “killed in war” or “died under colonialism” or “excess deaths”. The events hidden by our thought patterns ingrained into us since we were young, taught to us by teachers and books and journalists and entertainment media. They weren’t all in on some grand conspiracy, either. At least, not most of them. They were also miseducated in the same way. It is a reflection of the ruling class, filtering down in myriad ways until it dictates our very thoughts.