Igor Chudov @ home wrote:
Dale Thorn wrote:
There are tradeoffs between the old and new - in the old society, say, the USA circa late 1800's to early 1900's, we were much more violent. The big stir about shooting 4 students at Kent State would be severly dwarfed by the mass killing of 1200 in one day in New York city in the anti-draft riots of the mid-1860's,
Could it be due to excess of men? Or lack of education?
Today we have to be much more subtle to drag the kids off to kill and die, hence the Ken Burns-style poster at the U.S. Post Offices which says "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do", i.e., one of the first lessons in logic courses is the unspoken lie in the quote. In the old days, they didn't have to be so subtle - they could call up all manner of demonic images of the enemy, or claim that God had called them to slay the infidels, which was rampant as late as the "Civil" War circa 1865. There's a song "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic", which was crafted to crank up the emotion to kill the Southerners. (It never occurred to king schmucko Ken Burns that slavery wasn't against the law until 1863). It actually surprises me (how naive, you say) that they could get away with the Incubator Baby Scam in Congress circa 1991. Funny thing is, one of my young charges visited the Museum Of Tolerance in Los Angeles recently, and there was an eerily similar account of Hitler's men throwing Jewish babies out of the hospitals....
Personal (non-government) violence was rampant long ago - men and women as parents routinely called up the Bible verse "spare the rod and spoil the child" to beat the living crap out of their kids. Don't even ask about the violence against women.
What did they do with the poor women?
Women would disappear for weeks at a time, from time to time, generally to fix some "female problem" at the hospital (no need for the kids to visit, better to have fun visiting aunts and uncles, or have a nanny over for a couple of weeks) until the "problem" was taken care of. If you could allow me to use the freeways as a model for potential violence, when there is a very stressful situation at hand, and people are allowed to do things that they would never do outside of the confines (and protection) of their cars, it is this: At home in the old days, with a wife and several kids (families were mostly larger then), you often had a boiling bot for stress, and the (effectively) legal act of beating one's wife severely would be covered up by the "family, friends, neighbors, and church". Especially the church, the good old Christian church (my experience) where God is a terrible God and the punishment for even raising an eyebrow to His Agent on Earth (daddy) might be a body damaged for life in some way. The power and the temptations inherent in the sovereignty of a man's home were too much for most people to manage honestly and fairly, hence the heavy reliance on Bible verses to cover up/justify the excesses. This BTW is one of my most important reasons to distrust Libertarians and other Right-Wingers, i.e., the sovereignty of the home principle. It cuts both ways, you see...