From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 10:32:40 MDT
On Tue, Aug 13, 2002 at 12:10:02PM -0400, Dickey, Michael F wrote:
>
> "Every civilization has its share of massacre, but nothing tops Western
> civilization's penchant for institutionalized mass killing."
>
> I would have to respectfully disagree, communism has been much more
> effecient at mass killing. Mao 30 million, Stalin 10 - 15 million, Pol Pot
> 3 - 4million. etc. I would not consider communism to be 'western' (despite
> the western liberal elites who still promote it)
But communism is very much based on a Western tradition of thinking.
It all started with Plato's ideas of the perfect society run by the
enlightened elite, was channeled through social justice movements
heavily influenced by Christian virtues of compassion, combined with
Hegelian ideas of history as having a certain direction and meaning
(also based on judeo-christian ideas of time), and then combined with
western economic ideas by Marx. I can't see any point in it which
isn't very western.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:16:03 MST