04-14-2009, 09:59 AM
Quote: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).
No doubt humanity seems to have a knack for murdering its own. Occhi will no doubt chime in with the idea that this is a perceptive issue, that there is no "its own", only a whole series of "our owns". He might be right.
However, the statistics for "the West" are grim at best. The European-theatre deaths in WWI and WWII, almost all of which are the direct result of the weapons under discussion, counting conservatively, are something like 45 million people dead. Even if we left aside every other conflict the west has been in, either with itself or with non-western peoples, that's a huge lead to overcome.
Where, *counting deaths arising from the use of modern weapons*, does "the East" or "the Orient" or any other grouping, get the sheer volume of deaths to catch up? The worst death counts, such as The Cultural Revolution/Great Leap Forward or the Killing Fields were largely accomplished without guns or bombs, but with much simpler, time honoured ways of killing people: starving them to death, or letting them die of disease. And, even then, they don't add up to the West's figures. By my reckoning, they're not even close, and that's before we even adjust for population size.
-Jester