12-11-2020, 02:58 PM
(12-11-2020, 01:57 PM)David Horn Wrote:(12-11-2020, 07:54 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: While Pbrower has been comparing the cumulative casualties of COVID to the population of increasingly big cities, the coastal media is comparing the day’s death rates to important events such as Pearl Harbor, D Day or September 11th. Yes, the daily deaths have matched those events.
The total death toll now exceeds the war casualties of every war we've fought -- even WW-II and the ACW.
One of the most disgusting citations that I have heard or seen by someone not Adolf Hitler is one of Josef Stalin:
"One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".
The most obvious divide between Good and Evil is respect for life. By comparing a death toll to a the population city I attempt to make the deaths related to COVID-19 a tragedy instead of a statistic. I have mentioned places for being cities with distinguished colleges (Tuscaloosa, College Station, South Bend, Boulder, Berkeley, Ann Arbor), for having major-league sports franchises situated in them (starting with Green Bay and now approaching Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and St. Louis), state capitals, largest cities in states... and of course, death tolls from America's wars. Maybe I could have counted numbers of deaths related to the Holocaust, except that national totals are not so discrete as the result of the positions of borders during the war. I have compared the number of deaths due to vehicle collisions, and noted that deaths from this cause have been in decline. Vehicle-related deaths have fallen due to
(1) better training of young drivers
(2) more rigid enforcement of traffic laws
(3) the improvement of existing roads to remove death traps or the replacement of Blood Alleys with freeways
(4) more safety features built into motor vehicles
America still remembers Pearl Harbor even if the people remembering it were largely not born at the time. Consciousness of the Holocaust is seared into the minds of people who weren't around at the time, who are not Jewish, and have never been in Europe. Newsreels of dead bodies stacked like cordwood and photos of emaciated people who barely survived sear a conscience -- if one has one. Maybe it need not be so recent, and dehumanization of people for profit is disgusting, too. The Atlantic Slave Trade killed at least as many people as did the Holocaust, and somehow I can compare a death train to Auschwitz with a ship laden with slaves to the New World. Diagrams of such ships elicit their own disgust in me. No, I am not Jewish, and I am not black.
...Even Stalin refuted his quip trivializing mass death when it was time to take revenge on Holocaust perpetrators, and the Soviet Union lost more people to the Holocaust than any other political entity of the time. The Nazis committed massacres of Jews as far from Germany as one of their easternmost advances in Krasnodar, and that is one of the first cities the Nazis fled. As early as 1943 the Soviet Union held a trial for Nazis and local collaborators who participated in massacres of the local Jews and performed eight executions of offenders who didn't escape with the Wehrmacht.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.