Pirates me hearties, pirates!

[kandrathe]

"I hate myself so much because my ancestors were very white. Sure, they may have been farmers and piano makers in Devonshire, but I'm sure in their own way, they contributed to the voracious dragon of empire! Now, in order to assuage my personal white-liberal-rich-male guilt, we all must be kidnapped by Somali pirates, who, by virtue of having been born in a country with a history of not being Britain, are definitionally blameless!"

I suspected as much!

Or, alternately, we could go back to what I've actually said, which is to question whether our being "Western" or having "Western" values mitigates the danger caused by *modern weapons* (not ancient empires, not diseases from five centuries ago) when "Westerners" have killed more people (mostly Westerners as well as Occhi rightly points out) with those weapons than the rest of the world put together. (The increasingly strangely named "East", or "Orient", a category which would surely surprise the average Somali to learn that they are a part of.)

Sort of. The middle east, source of the Jihad has also been on the march in Africa helping to destabilize nations, including Somalia. Not that the century or so of colonialism helped, or the vacuum caused by shattered empires of WWII, and then we had the Cold War with Africa acting as the stage for various proxy wars. I'm not ready to accept your premise that the "The West" has killed any more than "The East", or the "Middle East". In fact, due to the fact that gunpowder, land mines and cannons are Chinese inventions, we might equally say that our modern war killing machines are directly descended from eastern culture. Europeans certainly stole all the blueprints they could, and vastly improved the weapons lethality. I can think of no examples of societies that have not been atrocious from time to time. You can simply look at WWII Japan as an example of a nation that commingled its Bushido code with grenades and machine guns. The Somali's get their Russian made weapons mostly from Yeman, which is middle eastern.

My premise is that the entirety of humanity is a murderous lot, and only redeemed by appealing to our better natures (and that includes the judicious use of "killing" when criminal miscreants violate their societal contract).