Re: 'what cypherpunks is about' [RANT]

[Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com>]

At 10:26 PM 11/2/96 -0800, Dale Thorn wrote:
>Following similar logic was Teddy Roosevelt, then the mad fire-bombers of
World War 2,
>capped by the ultimate terrorist fire-bombing of all at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, then
>by immense fire-bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc., followed by
prodigious fire- 
>bombing of Iraq and a deliberate fire-bombing and massacre of retreating
troops at the
>end of the "Gulf War".  Fighting the U.S. can be literal Hell!

Terror bombing of civilians was a European not an American invention, though.

>Quick, how many times have you heard this pro-interference argument?  The
pro- people
>will even show "proof" that the "savages" (it actually says this in the
United States
>Declaration of Independence) were as mean to each other as the invaders
were to them.
>What they fail to say, however, is that the "meanness" in such things as
human sacrifice 
>and so forth were imported to native cultures by "god-like" superiors who
descended on
>the locals to "help" them to the next level of technology and
hero-worship.  Fooey!

The death rate among civilians in many pre civilized wars was as high as
civilian death rates in many of our 20th Century wars.  We have the piles
of bones to prove it.  In addition to peonage, serfdom, chattel slavery and
the treatment of women as chattels, pre civilized people were considerably
more xenophobic than the worst US redneck.  Many had problems accepting the
denizens of the next village a few miles away.  They tended to be racists
as well.  And did I forget to mention infanticide and royalism.

DCF