OK, here goes. My Stiletto One memorial from '06:
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Rohannan: You want dead people? I've got lots of dead people.
Bodies littering a church in Rwanda. Total body count: around 8e5. It stopped when armed Tutsis from neighboring countries managed to invade Rwanda and put a stop to the massacre.
Skulls retrieved from some mass grave, somewhere in Cambodia. Left behind by the Khmer Rouge. Body count: around 2e6. People still disappear all the time in Cambodia, including what few charity workers are brave or stupid (or suicidal) enough to go there.
A corpse haul from the mass graves at Srebrenica. Body count: only 8373. Then again, the 1991 census indicated about 36,700 residents in the municipality. Think about what it means for a community to lose over 20% of itself. Never mind what it would mean to go through that mess with the UN "protecting" force. By the way, look at the Wiki article for Srebrenica itself. It's curious how little up-to-date information there is for a town of historical interest. I like how the present population stat is a question mark.
Oh, the larger war over Bosnia-Herzegovina claimed 2e5, but maybe as much as half of those were actually combat losses (and by combat losses, I mean irregulars fighting off an army using old SKSes, Mausers, and maybe a few scrounged machine guns and assault rifles), so that's OK. Murderous ____s. There's no such thing as a legitimate defensive action, right? Anyway, they really shouldn't have send Milosevic to tribunal, since I doubt he ever actually did any killing on his own. Communicating orders doesn't matter, since the only thing that actually matters is the guns involved. People are irrelevant, it's all about the instruments of death and human suffering.
I didn't bother to list the WWII and pre-WWII massacres, but bear in mind that the Holocaust's count was 6e6, Stalin's pet famines claimed 7e6, 1.5e6 Armenians were slaughtered in Turkey, and the Imperial Japanese murdered around 3e5 (small change, I guess) in Nanking.
Consider, for a moment, that the blood-soaked, bullet-riddled streets of the US, at their current rate of legal "homicide", would take
Common denominators?
>Systemic or systematic disarmament of the victim populaces.
>Cutting off of communications and possibility of outside assistance.
Global apathy.
>Disregard to contempt for any international forces who politely ask the killers to stop.
What then? How would you propose to close Pandora's Box? Guns are already out there. You can't get them away from the bad people, because they already have them and they have no reason to give them up—so are you going to take them away from the victims, because "guns are bad" and any reduction in armament is inherently good and a worthy end in itself, with no social context necessary?
____, machetes were the weapon of choice in Rwanda, and the horror stories out of Cambodia suggest that by the time they finally shoot you in the back of your head, you will be begging for the bullet. Ditto Nanking; it's called the "Rape" of Nanking for a reason. Holocaust, guns accounted for a (lucky) miniscule fraction of the ones who died in concentration camps. Stalin's forced famines literally starved millions to death, they didn't need guns for that (although I suppose the State asserted its power with the threat of using its guns on the populace...), Mao's Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward mostly killed by starvation...I could go on and on.
Dead children indeed. We might have one of the highest murder rates of any first-world nation, but when you can honestly say "I have no use for the police", you have it lucky in the grand scheme of things.
</rant>
(Can you tell this stuff gets me kind of annoyed?)
Last edited by Stiletto One : December 21, 2006 at 11:18 AM.
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Now,
that has impact. And, so far as I know, no numbers were tortured in the process.
