Root of all Evil
Out of context: Reply #71
- Started
- Last post
- 260 Responses
- flagellum0
Kuzz, please learn:
"Brzezinski estimated that approximately 87 million people had perished in wars during the 20th century. An almost equal number, more than 80 million, had been murdered in cold blood as a result of ideologically motivated terror and totalitarian genocide. Thus upwards of 167 million, or almost 170 million people, represent the lower limit on this century’s dreadful ledger. "This," concludes Brzezinski, "is more than the total killed in all previous wars, civil conflicts, and religious persecutions throughout human history." The mind cannot deal adequately with carnage of such monstrous proportions, and is numbed into incomprehension by the very magnitudes involved. This incomprehension serves as a refuge for the human mind, which instinctively recoils from coming to terms with evil of such dimensions.
The 70 million dead in two world wars; the 50 million dead or missing in combat during the so-called "peace" period since the last world war; the 6 million Jews butchered in extermination camps; the untold millions handed over to famine; the tens of millions that perished in the Soviet Gulag (the devastation is of such magnitude that accurate figures cannot be cited, estimates ranging between 15 and 66 million); the comparable number that went to their deaths in China; the progressive institutionalization of torture by almost all the nations of the world; the ever-increasing degree of violence in the methods of torture; the lack of compassion for women, children and the aged—quite to the contrary, the compulsion to inflict even more merciless torture on precisely those who are most at our mercy—the terrors of the 20th century are far beyond the comprehension of any horror movie. What has happened in fact leaves fiction speechless, no matter how depraved or imaginative. George Steiner hit the nail on the head:
The concentration and death camps of the twentieth century, wherever they exist, under whatever régime, are Hell made immanent. They are the transference of Hell from below the earth to its surface... The absence of the familiar damned opened a vortex which the modern totalitarian state has filled."
http://stjohns-chs.org/english/g…
Again, under the banner of a totalitarianism rooted in Humanist philosophy.