Hey Tom,

For my two cents, I might make brief note of the Nat Turner rebellion and the backlash against the rebellion during the antebellum period. Also, I would note the description that Primo Levi gives in, I believe, The Drowned and the Saved (or perhaps If This is a Man) of groups of Jews from the concentration camps stealing vehicles and weapons to go hunt down Germans in nearby towns. One could also perhaps include the Kamikaze bombers, or perhaps Jack the Ripper as well, among others. We could also go through the long history of warfare on this planet (the Assyrians in particular come to mind) to find acts, sometimes by lone individuals, sometimes by small groups, sometimes systematized by entire nations, that are filled with atrocities of, at least in my mind, an equally horrible nature. What of the Spartan procedure of exposure? I think if anything could qualify as being destructive towards the "natural affection for humankind," it would be that, yet it was more than 2,000 years ago.

I think overall I simply disagree with the premise that things, in this way at least, are worse today. If nothing else, I think we have a clear continuation of humanity's ability to be very affectionate and close with those that they consider within their own group, and very hostile and brutal to those who are seen as outsiders. As brutal and horrific and suicide bombers are, they too often have families and friends. I would say that, excepting certain sociopaths, they do not lose affection for all of humanity, but rather come to hate a specific group.

Anyway, that's my two cents, good to hear from you again.

-Ragoth

Might all this hatred be an offshoot of Satan's "great anger, knowing that he has a short time left," (Rev 12:12)? If he has a strong influence over the entire inhabited earth (Rev 12:12, 1 John 5:19) then it stands to reason that the more intense his emotions, the more intense his actions would be upon mankind.

Aren't all wars premised on the idea of playing the odds that "we'll kill more of their people than ours?". I suppose recently at least you can ratchet up the idea to "We'll kill more of their people than ours before our people get tired of sending people to die," but from a historical perspective at least, you're always playing the odds and trying to stack the deck in your favor.

As far as particular incidents, let's run briefly over the past 200 years.

If we start at the American Revolution, indeed things do seem a bit more civilized. You have large standing armies engaging each other mostly in the field. There is some spill-over into the general population, which I'm sure affected both sides (Tories were likely harmed intentionally or unintentionally by Brits, and Whigs were likely harmed intentionally or unintentionally by the Continental Armies). But, yes, indeed, it was much more civilized.

The French Revolution eventually took a much darker turn, however, and you begin to have a lot of executions of people who don't share your views "enough." The likely response of a radical Muslim who wants to blow up Time Square when informed that he may harm other Muslims would be "Yes, but if they are truly Muslim they will be glad to die for it." If they would not be glad to die in such an explosion, likely they would not be viewed as radical enough.

I would say we could also take the World Wars for a few potential examples - carpet bombing by the Brits across Germany, and "close air support", which has always been a risky maneuver. Even though these actions could kill allies or innocents, they were undertaken to end the war. The Kamikaze pilots flew their planes into ships, where Japanese prisoners could well have been held. Gas attacks and artillery shellings always come with the potential for "friendly fire".

Now, you might say, World Wars I and II were large-scale wars that were targeted against enemy combatants, and some violence spilled over into the civilian or allied population. Fair enough.

With the rise of Stalin you of course also get his purges. Now, the State would say, and indeed everyone eventually confessed, that those who were purged were actually traitors and didn't share the Party's idea...but we know for the vast majority that simply wasn't true. Here you have a state whose dogmatically held ideology leads them to create another "them" group from among their own populace. Just as today, many radical Muslims (and radical Christians) see their less radical brethren as "other," or falling short. I would also guarantee you that many of these radicals would view it as an honor for their brethren if they happened to die in a terror attack - they will become part of something bigger.

In Vietnam, you had isolated guerrillas, sometimes women and children, who would wire themselves with explosives and detonate anywhere where there were soldiers - if they took out some of their own population, no matter, getting rid of the enemy was more important.

You also have the Khmer Rouge, with wide-spread genocide against their own people, and, as happened also in China and Russia (in Russia due to Lysenko's insistence on Lamarckian genetics), widespread famines that killed millions of people who supported the government.

Even more recently (and I'm sorry to begin stepping into your 20 years frame), you have bishops in Africa who renounce the use of contraceptives, or the Pope who claims that condom use increases the transmission of HIV, likely condemning millions more who whole-heartedly believe, love, and follow these people to their deaths.

The idea of a "suicide mission" has been around forever, and in these kinds of situations, collateral damage is always acceptable, so long as the mission itself is accomplished - that's the entire point. With the invention of high explosives, such suicide missions have taken a much more gruesome and potentially harmful turn. Nowadays, even the most unfinanced of guerrilla groups can buy a few sticks of dynamite and get someone to blow up a town square and kill indiscriminately. I would say that recently, the technology with which these people carry out their attacks has changed more than the ideas behind them. Their tactics have adapted to the availability of more deadly weaponry, but I don't think that the base ideas have changed, and indeed, I think that throughout all of warfare, there has been the over-arching, though likely mostly unconscious idea of, "Well, we can kill more of their guys than they can kill of ours."

Now, I'm going to call a bit of a foul on the 200 year limit that you imposed in your contest. It's a touch unfair. In those 20 years you get most of the really interesting stuff - the fracturing of large states, the rise of fundamentalist and radical religious groups, massive development of new technology that can be disseminated cheaply, etc. Going back 200 years, what do I have? The Enlightenment? The foundation of the Age of Reason? It's a bit unfair. There is indeed a long lull in this kind of violence starting about 200-300 years ago, with the formation of the first modern states, conventions for warfare, the creation of true standing armies, etc. But if we go back much before that, we see that the same sort of things going on now have been happening for a long, long time, with vastly different technologies. Protestants and Catholics have murdered one another, terrorized one another, tortured one another, and killed their own members for not being fervent enough in their faith. The Inquisition tortured those who were even suspected of bad thoughts or bad behavior. The Sunnis have always killed the Shiites, and vice versa, and both have always killed the Sufis. Civilians and innocents were often caught up in the wars of the princes, kings, or states, and suffered horribly for it, regardless of if the army was technically allied to them or not, especially when kings began hiring out mercenary troops.

My argument would be that people have always had a propensity for justifying and accepting collateral damage if they see the gains as large enough. As Arnaud Amalric advised a Crusader soldier trying to distinguish Catholic allies from the Cathars, "Kill them all. For the Lord knows them that are His."

What I'm not going to argue with at all is that it seems that we have been sliding more and more into factions, tyranny, and brutality recently. What I do argue against is that this is anything truly new. We had a brief run of a slightly more progressive and civilized era, and now it seems that it is slipping away and we're going back to an Iron Age mentality. It's that issue that I find more depressing than anything else.