h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Correct me if I am wrong, but in the 1930's didn't the Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the SSR, a.k.a. Joseph Stalin, manage a pretty good job of keeping a whole accretion of nations in abject terror with wholesale purges, deportations and shootings? Final figures are in dispute, but most reliable authorities have the total deaths well into the millions.

Fascism and Communism are two faces of the same horrible coin (see the Soviet/German Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939, and the subsequent attack, rape and division of Poland..and we won't even THINK about what happened to the innocent, peaceable nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia when the Red Army rolled in!). I trust that NOBODY will even think of bringing up the enforced repatriation, slaughter, and the many cases of suicide caused when the Allies handed over thousands of Cossacks to the welcoming arms of the Soviet machine after the war ended in 1945.

Sorry, the record of the Communist Party of the SSR is write large on the world stage, and with bloody hands.....

I'll probably have to do some research, but at face value, this stat is hard to believe.

"In 1900 the ratio of military to civilian casualties was 1 civilian to 9 soldiers, the average for 1970 - 1990 it was 1 soldier to >500 civilians."

Let's take the US/ARVN/NVA war in Vietnam. According to a website that I can't list here, but which I can email to anyone who is interested, there were about 113,812 soldiers killed in 1970 in Vietnam (counting US, ARVN, NVA and Vietcong soldiers.) In 1971, there were 40,601 soldiers killed in action. In 1972, there were 30,348 killed in action. Total of 1970-1972 = 184,761 soldiers killed in action. If that ratio is accurate, then at least 500 times that number of civilians should have died in military actions between 1970 and 1972, or roughly 92 million civilians. I'm not saying that 92 million civilians died in the fighting in Vietnam, but if this statistic of 500 civilians to every 1 soldier is accurate, then 92 million should be the minimum number of civilians around the world who were killed in combat. This also fails to take into account any other military actions around the world from 1970-1972 in which soldiers were killed, which would increase the number of civilians even more.

Now depending on who you ask [and how much that person wants to emphasize or stifle civilian casualty stats in Nam] there were somewhere between 1 million and 4 million civilians killed in all of Vietnam during the course of that war (covering 10-20 years of war). If 4 million civilians were killed in the course of the entire Vietnam war, then where were the other 88 million civilians around the world who died in military actions between 1970-1972? Wouldn't that have been a pretty catastrophic couple of years?

If that same statistic applied to the heaviest part of the US involvement in Vietnam, (about 1961-1972) the total numbers would be about 1,377,000 soldiers dead (including US, ARVN, NVA, VC, Australians, South Koreans, New Zealanders, Thais).

1,377,000 x 500 = 688,500,000 civilians. Could 688.5 million civilians have died in military actions between 1961 and 1972? About 57 million civilians killed in military action per year during that time?

I tried to search up Melvyn Bragg on BBC.co.uk to find any reference to "civilians" "casualty" "military" "historian", but the search engine on BBCi is totally useless. [Friggin thing doesn't understand phrases in quotes. I don't know why they bother. Much better to search bbc via google.]

Civilian casualties in this period of the Vietnam war was lower because the bombing of North Vietnam was called off in 1969 to increase bombing elsewhere in SE Asia.

Then if you look at the stats for Laos as the same time, the US and the Arme Clandestine lost around 400 men in the whole conflict (64-73), and the Pathet Lao had no troops to speak of, and only a couple of hundred civilian members - most of who survived, while the civilian casualties were over 220,000 - and 10 civilians a month still die, killed by unexpolded ordinance.

I still find the figure a little astounding, even if you think of 'wars' like Nicaragua and Guatamala, in both of which less than 1,000 soldiers died and well over 200,000 civilians.

Rape and division would be a good description of what happened to Germany after the first world war. And so the wheel turns...

Well, the world *did* change on September 11th. I'm interested in history and something you should remember is that when world-altering events happen, it doesn't mean you wake up one day and everything has changed. When Churchill made his "iron curtain" speech that heralded the start of the cold war, I doubt things changed drastically for the average Western or Soviet citizen. When the Berlin Wall fell, symbolically singalling the end of the cold war (which I think was announced by President's Bush and Gorbachev either a couple of months before or after), nothing really altered for the average Westerner. Just as the world has been changed by what happened on Sept 11th. This change *was* however more evident. It came out of nowhere (although I'm sure many doomsayers predicted it) and there was the sense of people being shaken. Effectively, we are now out of the post-cold war period of 1989-2001. A new chapter has opened in the history books. I have no idea how long it will be and no idea how it will end.

Yeah,

Terrorism as a way of life........that's the future you see. The Art of War has changed once again.

I would love to get in the Tardis (*) and go 250 yrs further on, and see what happened/what changed/who was really responsible for Sept 11th/who was determined to be responsible at varying points: 1,10,50,100,200,250 years from now.. if things have changed/do change radically and the Sept llth thing remains of abiding interest, that is. Someone asked on the radio this morning, why there hadn't been any more attacks on America? I read in TIME magazine last week (an old ish from October) that they (Americans) were expecting something new any minute.
The thread on the radio this morning has been: "What shld we do with Osama when we get him?" The consensus is kill him, with or w/out planting evidence that he committed suicide,kill him and pretend you never found him etc., just bleedin' lovely, don't you think?

*=footnote. The Tardis is necessary because reincarnation wldn't be satisfactory,as it is my experience (or my hypothesis) that no one remembers minutiae, or maybe cares - so our future selves 250 yrs on,wld just say "Osama who?' when studying that bit of history in school..

Zagreb: You could say the same thing about the death of Lady Di. It was tangeble that everyone in the UK, and many people around the world were shocked and even those who couldn't care less were affected by it. But it didn't change anything.

The end of the cold war changed nothing on a large scale. America re-focused on the middle east and China, positions changed but the whole situation remained similar.

The Death of Lady Di was politically irrelevant. It had an impact, but not on world politics.

The end of the Cold War had immense repercussions. Russia (which had actually been in decline for decades as the USSR) finally relinquished Superpower status and was gave independence to it's constituent parts. This ended the Superpower deadlock (although, in the 80s, it was basically a case of strong superpower (USA) versus rapidly-weakening superpower (USSR). It's weird to see movies from the 80s where the USSR is depicted as a scary monolith of totalitarian might when, we know now, it was falling apart from within and squandering it's vast wealth on a hopeless arms race) and left the USA with the (demented) idea that it could police the world. This lead to enormous problems (the USA is famously and traditionally isolationist. It's basically not interested in the rest of the world, but it was in a position where it felt it had to police it), especially in the Middle East. Another major difference post cold war is that Western Europe, previously under the US thumb, has begun to shrug free and become independent. Japan looks like going the same way. Ironically, the end of the cold war seems to have ended the US "empire".

> "Another major difference post cold war is that Western Europe, previously under the US thumb, has begun to shrug free and become independent."

Woohoo!
(except for that backwards country they call the UK... )

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The US has always tried to police the world, ever since the end of WWII, it has systematically interviened in dozens of countries, and those since the end of the cold war are largely just replays of the old interventions as the US contiues to make the world safe for its corporations.

A few examples: China, 1945-49, Philippines, 1945-53, South Korea, 1945-53, Italy 1947-1948, Greece, 1947-49, Albania, 1949-53, Vietnam, 1950-73, Iran 1953, British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64, Guatemala 1953-1954, Cambodia 1955-1973, Indonesia 1957-1958, Laos 1957-1973, Ecuador 1960-1963, Congo 1960-1964, Dominican Republic 1960-1966, Cuba 1961, Brazil 1961-1964, Guatemala 1962-1990s, Chile 1964-1973, Uruguay 1964-1970, Greece 1964-1974, Indonesia 1965, Colombia 1965-2001, East Timor 1975, Zaire 1975-1978, Angola 1975-1980s, Nicaragua 1978-1989, Grenada 1979-1984, Afghanistan, 1979-92, El Salvador 1980-1994, Libya, 1981-89, Haiti 1986-1994, Panama, 1989, Bulgaria 1990, Albania 1991. This list is far from complete.

The immaginary Communist threat was a blanket of fear which the US could use to goad its citizens into backing American agression around the world. Now they use the fear of Islamic fundementalism / terrorism.

The Communist threat wasn't "imaginary", it was very real in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Soviet Union was technologically on-par with the West. By the 70s and 80s, however, the idea that the USSR could conquer the world was laughable. It was kept alive both by the dying USSR, determined to stop it's own collapse, and the Conservative Right in the USA and Europe to excuse intervening in South America to kill peasants trying to form trade unions and other dangerous Marxist dictators.

As far as I'm concerned, there were no good guys in the cold war, except the little guys who took on one of the two superpowers and got shot in the back of the head in some miserable field. The USA had the moral advantage in that it allowed dissent on it's home ground, but I think that the people who ran it were as cold-hearted and indifferent to human life as the Soviet Politbureau.

The International Communist Conspiricy was invented by the OSS / CIA so they could build a power base for themselves outside the government.

The cold war was a joke. The communist conspiracy was a joke.
The idea of the US as an international policeman was a joke.
The intelligence community in the US are a joke. The notion of the US as an empire is a joke. Go read something about the Spanish, The French, and the British imperial fumblings in North America. Those activities are probably not part of world perception, but they are widely known in the US. We were intervened with by any nation that had a ship or a trading company. At one point before a really bad winter in the early 1880s an enormous amount of land and cattle in the western US was owned by German and English landlords, many of whom never visited. One half of the rolling stock on US railroads was once owned by a Chinese triad.

Nothing has changed. Any disaster is an excuse for immediate and temporary action.
The biggest joke is history. It is not a fact. It is a wish.
The truth is that the world is a squirming ball of worms. They intertwine.
The only truly dangerous ideology is stupidity.
I can think of many things that the US could do that would make the world sit up and truly take notice.
I can think of many things the US has done that receive little notice.
You get bitten by an insect, you slap it. You don't stop to think about what kind of insect it is. Bin Laden is an insect.

Hmmm.

The fact that the cold war was a joke is not because there was no real threat. Quite the contrary; the threat was very real! It was a joke was because it was just a threat.

Either side had absolutely nothing to gain by following through with the threat. They each used the threat to hold onto power; enact laws that limited social liberties and control resources. In fact you could argue that without an idea of imminent danger, neither side could have justified the way and means used to do what they did! (Orwell's 1984 anyone??????????????)

Following the decimation of the USSR, the US needed a new enemy to keep things going. Lybia, Iran and the drug cartels have all attempted to fill the gap. The terrorist threat is doing the job now. Not suprisingly, Bush's popularity is at an all time high (90% approval!). That's the real joke!

Don't forget the Spanish-American War, in which the US acted as hemisphere-police to drive out the oppressive Spanish colonial rulers from Cuba and Philippines, to replace them with oppressive US colonial rulers! Not sure when the US made a transition from police of their hemisphere to full-fledged global police. 100 years ago? Longer?

Sorry. I tried to post three times. Kept getting a lost server screen.
Finally had to close and got over to Radio Kent's site and come in that way. I think New York is having problems again.

Yes, and do try to remember Admiral Perry trying to do to Japan what the British did to China? Only being monkey see, monkey do.

Like I said the only truly frightening ideology is STUPIDITY.
Did it ever occur to you, Flinch, that just as the Clinton stupidities shielded the American eyes from something they should have seen, that all this blather about the manufactured Communist Conspiracy and the US Military/Industrial complex might be just what you're supposed to be thinking about instead of looking at something else?

Remember, the secret of putting on a magic show is not that the 'hand is quicker than the eye', but that misdirection through distracting motion can allow you to lead the audience to believe one thing while you are doing the other.

I believe what any soldier who's ever walked twenty miles to sit on their a**e and do nothing believes: If we're going to go to war, let's put the generals and diplomats in the front lines. Maybe we'll finish one that way.

The longest running conspiracy in the world is the conspiracy of the ignorant against their own selves. Mental self-manipulation is apparently very satisfying.

To recycle second-rate hippy cant at this late date is to show a singular lack of imagination.
On the other hand, it is fun to do while listening to Country Joe and the Fish or Jimi Hendrix (who, by the way, had survived the 82nd airborne, I believe. ((I can't imagine him being a 'leg' with the 101st!)))

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Have you ever heard of the HUAC? Far more repressive and wide ranging than anything in the Soviet Union after '53.

I don't really have a problem with Clinton, he did at least set up the Intelligence Oversight Board etc. Just a shame well never see it acted upon now.