-- "James A. Donald" wrote:
The nearest equivalent in European history to the crimes of the the nazis and commies was the spanish inquisition,and that was a small scale operation: Handcrafted murder rather than mass produced murder. Each victim was individually identified and processed, rather dumped by the truckload. They murdered about 12000, and the world was horrified by their crimes.
At 11:16 AM 12/22/2000 +0000, Ken Brown wrote:
1 out of 10 for knowledge of history.
I promise not to mention the witch hunts, or the French & Italian massacres of Protestants, or the aftermath of the Wars of religion, or the Thirty Year's War or Louis XIVs campaigns in Germany,
War crimes, bad they though are, are not the same as similar crimes committed against an unresisting and disarmed populace. Many governments have committed crimes similar to those committed by the nazis and commies in the course of fighting guerrilla wars, for example the recent war crimes in Guatemala But when the guerrilla war ended, those governments ceased to commit those crimes. With commies and nazis, the end of resistance frequently resulted in an escalation, rather than diminution of those crimes, as for example recently occurred after the communist victories in Cambodia and South Vietnam. During the American war between the states, the feds created artificial famine in much the same way, for much the same reasons, as the Soviet, Cambodian, North Korean, and Ethiopian governments did, deliberately starving non combatants just as communist regimes did. When the war between the American states ended, so did hunger, whereas in communist states, the famine intensified as resistance diminished. The less the resistance, the greater the destruction. The difference between the US regime and the Pol Pot regime was small during war, but obvious after victory. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG jmKGEODS5+FIZeg+Uw98pzyOWCS2+J8lElvJBq8F 4Z7J6on5d8kQYvLw3jCS9FjKu9nBHlNRAj5tpgANr