[Letum]

I don't usually like doing this because it ends up in messy posts, but allow me to
address you one quote at a time.

Originally Posted by Wave Skipper

No Letum, Ghengis Khan was not under riot or duress.

See "edit2" in the post before my previous one. Sorry about all the edits, mind at work between posts.

As for the men in the B29s fire bombing Japanese cities they were low enough to the ground to smell the burning flesh and hair to the point that they sickened. But what differnece is that?

A big difference!
To quote my self from a earlier topic:

Try to sneak up behind them and aim for the top of the head.

However unflinching you think you are you will suffer trauma to some extent if the
young man is facing you and it takes several messy blows to finish the job with a
less than surgical hand-to-hand weapon.

He may be the enemy, but you don't want the kind of dreams that the money from
veterans day trys to help people with when you go to sleep the next night.

If you really want to kill someone [...] then go with a gun.
It's all about the distance, speed, visible damage and blame.

It is far less traumatic to kill with more speed, distance, less visible damage and to
put some blame on to an inanimate object or someone else. Guns do all 3 fairly well,
better than a claw hammer anyway.

Of course guns have limitations, the Nazis found this out when trying to kill Jews.
After shooting several hundred the people doing the shooting started to suffer from
trauma.
The gas chambers and ovens fixed this by increasing the distance, decreasing
visible damage and transferring more of the blame away from the killer and onto the gas.

If you want to push it all the way then the A-bomb is a great way to kill people trauma free.
the distances are massive, there is no visible damage to people, speed isn't a issue
and you can blame it all on the bomb, even if you don't then you can always blame it
on someone else responsible for the drop.

If those who dropped the bomb had to kill all those people with a claw hammer then
they wouldn't have got past the first hundred thousand with out breaking into a
gibbering wreck.

Here in Colorado the Cheyeanes would once a year ride through Denver as they headed into the mountains. Once there they'ed wipe out a Ute village and then ride back through Denver with their horses covered with human scalps and leading captured Ute Sqaws - not old women of course - just the yonng ones - the old ones were slaughtered. There was not riot or duress in what they did - it was a yearly tribal CUSTOM and they thought it great fun.

No riot?
Sound pretty much like a riot to me!

*edit* Perhaps I am useing a definition of "riot" that is a little too broad, but I can
think of no better word at the moment.

you believe the killing of the Jews was fake? Just riot or duress?

Certainly not riot, it was as cold blooded as you get, but certainly duress and the
convenience of distance and transference of blame.
See the Milgram Experiment for a nice example of the subtle ways authority makes
normal people act in immoral ways they would not normal consider.
I am certainly not saying that the perpetrators of such acts where in any way
forced to do what they did, or that they did not want to do what they did. Just that
they would have not have killed people like that if it was not for the convenience of
distance, transference of blame and the duress of authority.

That is why the allied forces did not continue the killing when they found the camps.
Not because they where fundamentally any different to the young German men who
signed up as camp guards.

Speaking to you further is pointless.

For me the point of talking in debate is to find what the ideas of others are, construct
my own ideas from them and to have my ideas challenged, tested and occasionally even
changed. That means there is almost always a point for me.

What is the point for you, and why isn't it there?