Matus1976 - Politics
from - www.freedomhouse.org
Reflections on the Iraq War
As three years and a few months have passed since the start of the Iraq war, I want to take a moment to reflect on it. The Iraq war has seen about 2,500 combat deaths of American Soldiers, and probably some 40,000 deaths of Iraqi Civilians, foreigners and combatants. The number of US Soldiers killed per year averages at around 780, and the number of Iraqi citizens and foreigners is around 12,000 / year. Compare these numbers to World War II, where around 100,000 America soldiers were killed per year, or Korea where 20,000 were killed per year, or Vietnam, where 5,000 were killed per year. Additionally, during his reign, Saddam Hussein is estimated to have killed 2 million people over the course of 30 years, which is an astonishing 67,000 people per year, or 3,000 per month. Two million is 1/3rd the number of Jews killed in the holocaust. Saddam Hussein was perpetuating his own patient holocaust, and indeed his Anfal Campaign was a blatant systemic effort to kill all Kurds. Compared with the 10,000 people per year killed by the violence from the war, and the violence from insurgents and local terrorists, the US led Iraq war could be considered to be saving 50,000 lives per year (read more)
Communism and Moral Ambiguity
Most people react with vile disdain when they see a Nazi flag, and rightly so. Nazism has killed 20 million people, an estimated 6 million Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and physically deformed people intentionally in prison camps. However, how many people share the same disdain for Communism? Even though it has killed almost ten times as many people as Nazism did, it still it is looked on by most people in a favorable light, taught by history professors with an unbiased account, considered good in theory (is Nazism good in theory?) and as of yet just incorrectly implemented. Communism has killed 170 million people this century, according to Political Scientist, Nobel Peace Prize runner up and author of the most cited historical book, R.J Rummel. By 1950 alone that number was in the dozens of millions, many millions in China and may millions in the Soviet Union; so it was right to be very weary of it and any communist political officer of influence. (read more)
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"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements. An artists recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature". - Ayn Rand
"Art represents man and nature as it ought to be, not as it is" - Aristotle
"All art says something, it's up to the artist to choose the language its spoken in" - Robert Heinlein from "Stranger in a Strange Land"
