[plug] [OT] megadeaths (was: Columbia)

[Leon Brooks]

On Sunday 02 February 2003 06:25 pm, Alex Polglaze wrote:
>> The worst and most horrendous war crimes, in the history of life on this
>> planet, were committed by the USA, in Hirohima and Nagasaki.

> What a load of bulldust! What about all the allied lives that were saved
> by this action.

Japan surrendered, twice (once in code and once in plain), before the USA 
dropped a firework on Nagasaki. As usual for wars, there is no guiltless 
side.

The bomb that levelled Hiroshima was originally intended for a different city 
which at the time had roughly 100,000 Allied POWs quartered in it, but wierd 
weather meant that Enola Gay had to choose a secondary target. As it turned 
out, tens of thousands of Korean POWs were exposed to atomic effects at 
Hiroshima anyway.

On the other hand, Bret, you need to do lots more research before making 
sweeping statements like that. For example:

 * Both the Japanese and Germans did some fairly nasty things to Allied
   POWs; the sum of those would easily eclipse Hiroshima or Nagasaki for
   outrage value;

 * Again, Stalin's or Mao's excesses casually outweigh that brace of nukes;

 * The Beziers massacre saw a Papal army, at the command of a Papal Nuncio,
   murder 30,000 people hand-to-hand (half of them Catholics, that's where
   we got `kill them all, let God sort them out'); the St Bartholomew's Day
   Massacre saw at least 70,000 Protestants turtured and murdered in one
   day (the then Pope had a medal struck celebrating that one); the Goan
   Inquisition killed at least 1 million people, yet hardly anyone knows it
   even happened;

 * Shinto soldiers killed at least 20 million of the 70 million strong
   community which had been built up following the Ti Ping Revolution;

 * The Romans killed at least a million people at the siege of Jerusalem,
   including at least 70,000 by crucifixion, the residents had turned to
   cannibalism and conditions within the walls were so bad that the
   hardened Roman soldiers were sickened to the poit of vomiting after
   they broke in;

 * more soldiers were killed in single battles in WW1 than at Hiroshima;

 * by the year 2020, smoking will kill 30,000 people every day (think
   about that, more than a Hiroshima every week - David Gerlitz, a
   cigarette model, quotes an RJ Reynolds executive as saying "We don't
   smoke this shit, we reserve the right to smoke for the young, the poor,
   the black and the stupid" and I consider that less civilised than
   blatant murder);

...and so on. There's a lot more world out there than you can imagine, and the 
odds of being wrong on any given topic are astronomical.

So... can we finish this thread now?

Cheers; Leon