(Tho I don't assume anyone ever woulda noticed, I'd still feel guilty if I didn't admit that this image is the backside of the Xmas card that I shared with my "Cloaks of gold" entry.)
Dear diary,
Everything is right with the world. We’ve achieved total harmony. We humans are even at peace with all other animals. Cows like us. Pigs like us. Even educated fleas like us. We made America great again. Also Germany. How’d we do it? It was easy: we just stopped performing evil deeds, took a breather, and set about doing good deeds. The Lord Jesus hasn’t returned yet; but he’s coming soon, I can feel it.
Today I found, stuck to the side of my computer’s screen, two post-it notes that I wrote to remind myself of topics to cover in a future entry. Well the future is NOW, so I will cover them here below. The 1st note says “Add Shoah murders + Stalin’s atrocities and compare with total deaths from U.S. foreign wars (post-WWII).” The other note says “Neighbor with political signs and Christmas lights.”
Here I’ll start with the first note-to-self. I remember writing it, so I can reveal the author’s intentions and thus the true meaning of its text. What I was thinking was this: “How do you know when your country has gone bad?” And the thot that followed that thot was “Take an example of a bad country, and compare your country to that: if they match, or if your country looks worse in comparison, you probably live in a bad country.” So then I had to consider what exactly constitutes badness in a country. This took me back to my school days:
I remember when I was forced to attend public school; but I can’t recall when it was that I first heard about Adolf Hitler. Nonetheless his story really stuck with me. We were taught vaguely in school that Hitler was the leader of Germany; and, under his rule, Germany killed a large number of civilians. Now when I hear “a large number of people died”, I immediately want to know a more specific figure; for the word “large” could mean anything from four to forty people. If you murder one person, or even two or three, your biographer will never refer to you as “a mass murderer on the level of Adolf Hitler.” Because Hitler presumably killed at least forty-two people.
Thus, if I want to know whether or not my own country has become bad, it might help to quantify the number of civilian deaths that we would consider it unacceptable for a good country to have stumbled into committing.
I don’t want to say “a good country can commit up to forty-one civilian deaths without entering the realm of evil; but after the forty-second civilian death, it advances to the next bracket on the chart of immorality.” I’d rather say “for a country to be good, it cannot even murder one civilian.”
But then wouldn’t this definition render ALL countries bad? Or am I wrong about this? Are there countries in existence that’ve managed to exist for more than fifteen minutes without slaying at least a couple civilians somewhere?
I don’t know; I should travel the earth and find out.
But right now, for the sake of argument, let’s use the absurdly arbitrary cutoff of forty-two civilian deaths as our no-good limit.
Now, in our career as a professional researcher, we encounter the following dilemma: How on earth do we find out the death tally of Hitler’s atrocity (the Shoah, also known as the Holocaust)?
All I know how to do is use the Google Search Engine. So if Google wants to manipulate the numbers or rewrite history, I’ll be entirely at their mercy. So I type into the search bar “total number of deaths from Nazi Holocaust”. Now I’ll tell you what I see (I’m performing this research in real-time, during my own present moment, while composing this entry, so as to preserve for futurity these ancient blogging methods):
The first few results that appear on the screen don’t show any numbers in their blurbs; but one entry from a news magazine about halfway down the list says, in its auto-generated summary, “Six million Jewish people were murdered during the genocide in” and then there’s a dot-dot-dot ellipsis. Now I could click thru and read this article, to see if it’s trustworthy or not, but I’m already way in over my head — I don’t even want to be writing about this; I’m already trying to come up with a passable way to end this post — so I’ll accept the figure as accurate, and move on to Stalin.
But before I research Stalin’s murder tally, let us note for the record that Germany under Hitler definitely and officially qualifies as being a “bad” country, because six million murders is more than the requisite forty-two, which we established above as the number of murders that a country must commit to be considered evil.
OK so I return to my Google Search Engine and type the phrase “Joseph Stalin allegations of genocide”. Now, among the results that appear on the first page (one should never scroll past the first page of search results), I don’t see any actual figures—that is, no numbers—; so, in this instance, I’ll click on the Wikipedia entry at the top of the list. Now I’m looking at the Joseph Stalin page on Wikipedia. I scroll down to the subsection labeled “Death toll” and encounter this passage:
The American historian Timothy D. Snyder summarizes modern data, made after the opening of the Soviet archives in the 1990s, and concludes that Stalin was directly responsible for six million deaths along with three million indirect deaths. He notes that the estimate is far lower than the estimates of twenty million which were suggested before access to the archives. He also compares this number to the estimate of twelve million non-combatants killed by the Nazi regime, thereby negating claims that Stalin killed more than Hitler.
Let’s take the low number, just to err on the side of underestimation: six million “direct” and three million “indirect” deaths. Let’s even forget the latter indirect figure and just go with the even six mill.
So we got Hitler and Stalin tied neck-and-neck with six million deaths apiece, and we can say that, according to our threshold of forty-one murders to maintain your label of good, Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were both bad countries.
Now I know that I didn’t include Mussolini in my note, but since nowadays everyone at my bus stop always talks about fascism, I feel that I’d be remiss if I overlooked whatever murders Mussolini committed, since Mussolini is considered the Father of Fascism. Or at least the founder of Italian Fascism. So I type into the search bar…
No, I don’t proceed with a further search. I change my mind: I’ll stop at Hitler and Stalin. I fulfilled my duty to my own note-to-self; that’s more than most people do in a lifetime. If I add Mussolini to this study, then I’ll have to add Mao; and once I add Mao, I’ll have to add Caesar, and ultimately God. I can’t do that; I still believe in God! Plus a total of twelve million murders is more than enough.
Now the second demand of my first note was to tally up the civilian deaths from all U.S. foreign wars, post WWII. The reason I use the Second World War as a starting point is that I’m trying to focus on the span of history that I myself actually experienced in the flesh. All the stuff that happened prior to July 21, 1944 is alien to me; for I was born the moment that Harry Truman was nominated to be President Roosevelt’s running-mate. That was the beginning of the end. Or if you think the word “end” is too histrionic, just substitute the phrase “modern era, which continues to this moment”; for all events before that point in spacetime were mostly bad in ways that are different from the ways that events are mostly bad now.
So first we have Korea. Dear Google, “korean war civilian casualties”. OK, Google says (who cares what the link is: believe me, I’m cherry-picking trustworthy info) “The median total estimated Korean civilian deaths in the Korean War is 2,730,000.” Also Wikipedia gives me this sentence: “20% of the total population of North Korea perished in the war.” So let’s round that total down to an even two million. Or make it one point five million, just to be fair to the U.S.A. (Cuz I was born here: my incubator was positioned right next to the Truman-for-V.P. incubator.)
Next up, Vietnam. “The Vietnamese government has estimated the number of Vietnamese civilians killed in the Vietnam War at two million.” And note that “This figure does not include civilians killed in Cambodia and Laos.” So let’s let that extra two million murders stand unreduced.
Now what’s our running total? Korea, one point five million (rounded down, to serve on the side of the most honest liars); and Vietnam, two million — the total is currently three point five million. Not enough to break our 42-murders rule. Thus, the U.S. is still a good country. Now let’s continue our web search:
Afghanistan: “total civilian casualties” is… I can’t say. The number’s apparently unknown. It’s too complicated. Let’s leave Afghanistan out. Zero civilians dead, no murders to speak of. “The United States invasion of Afghanistan occurred after the September 11 attacks in late 2001”, and it is now 2018 (Christmastime is here again, as I write this): thus the war has lasted more than fifteen minutes. No civilians murdered — that’s quite an accomplishment.
So our total remains three point five million murders: that’s the U.S.A.’s score; Stalin and Hitler are still winning, with a solid twelve million.
OK, Iraq. Here’s some info that’s already eight years old:
According to a 2010 assessment by John Sloboda of ‘Iraq Body Count’ organization, overall, figures from 20 March 2003 to 14 March 2013 indicate that, out of 174,000 casualties, 39,900 were combatants, resulting in a civilian casualty rate of 77%.
So let’s throw out these figures, too, because “Estimates of the total number of Iraqi war-related deaths are highly disputed.” ...But note, regarding the Iraqi refugee crisis, that “roughly 40 percent of Iraq’s middle class is believed to have fled the country.”
And I also found these sentences interesting: “the type of attack that resulted in the most civilian deaths was execution after abduction or capture.” And “an estimated 331 school teachers were slain in the first four months of 2006, according to Human Rights Watch, and at least 2,000 Iraqi doctors have been killed and 250 kidnapped since the 2003 U.S. invasion.”
So zero Iraqi murders for the U.S. We’re holding at three point five million total murders. I think that leaves eight point five million more murders that we can commit before we beat Hitler and Stalin’s combined achievement. So we’re still good.
US drone strikes in Pakistan: “The civilian casualty ratio for U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan is notoriously difficult to quantify.” But “Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution suggests that drone strikes may kill ‘10 or so civilians’ for every militant killed, which would represent a civilian to combatant casualty ratio of 10:1.” So let’s also round this figure down to zero.
Conclusion of Note #1
Hey, good news: the U.S. is not a bad country, as of yet. Hitler and Stalin are winning the game of mass murder, with a score of twelve million slain (conservatively estimated); while the U.S. has racked up a piddling 3.5 mill. If only time would refrain from coming to a halt; if only time would continue past the year 2018, and Jesus would return; then we might beat their record. But, for the moment, the only thing we United Statesians are beating is our own swords back into plowshares to feed our sheep. Still, I have hope that we’ll pull ahead ultimately. How could we not? We’re NUMBER ONE in everything: toy recalls, factory closings, real estate debacles, Star Wars franchises, sitcom wholesomeness, faux court intrigue, and almost politically astute celebrities. Plus we’re the only country that’s doing Christianity right, at present.
Note #2
Alright so you will no doubt recall verbatim the text of my second note-to-self: “Neighbor with political signs and Christmas lights.” This is because I have a neighbor whose house has political signs in its yard and Christmas lights everywhere. The lights are pretty, and the signs are informative. If you’re wondering who to vote for, just look at this guy’s yard: it tells you large-font names of candidates from the Red Dog side of the aisle. As I explained earlier, here in the U.S. we have just two political parties: Corporate Red Dogs and Corporate Blue Dogs. These beasts fight fiercely against each other, sitting in their office chairs at the White House.
Yeah so I wanted to welcome this neighbor of mine to the neighborhood. Cuz that’s what you do when you move into a strange house in a foreign suburb. My sweetheart and I recently bought this old house in the Dimension of Sigismund, on a street where the sun don’t shine, thus it follows that our topmost priority is to greet the new neighbors. So we went to this guy’s house, which is seven houses down from ours, and I knocked on his door, and he answered and said “Yes?” and I said, “I can’t help but notice that you apparently believe in Christmas, because of your Christmas lights, which are extremely beautiful — I myself recently strung Christmas lights around our own house’s fascia, by the way, therefore you and I have a lot in common — and, additionally, I deduced, by the names on all your lawn signs, that you listen to the same talk shows that my dad used to listen to: that is, the shows that pump the truth into America’s bloodstream: the ones that are RIGHT. (My dad’s dead and buried now.)” And the man said, “What are you getting at?” And I said, “Look, sorry, I was going to try to fight with you, like people do when their honor is challenged by some fellow drunkard at the pub; cuz I’m a left-leaning soft-hearted anti-war pinko, and you’re obviously an Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Out-of-Closet Mussolini; but now that I’m face-to-face with you, like Yahweh and Moses on top of Old Smokey, I realize that you’re simply a respectable bear: a bear whose fur is rough and bristly and thick. And I’m afraid you’ll bat me with your leathery paw, and bite my face off with your sharp teeth, and then swallow me whole, so I’ll be found in your stomach when the…”
I’m gonna stop writing this entry now, I hope you don’t mind.
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