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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

lunarchick - 08:23pm Apr 2, 2001 EST (#1926 of 1927)
lunarchick@www.com

The 'funding' for a war crimes court should and is separate from the process and findings of that court. To provide funds is an enabler of the legal process. Within the process are the 'rules' and checking that determine if a person is a war criminal.

On rape and war. It seems that 4/5ths (80%) of women who seek refuge status from war zones, have been sexually abused and raped. The crime of 'rape' in relation to war .. so important to women .. is only JUST included in war crime terms of reference for the courts.

War is tramatic. Historically wars will have shaped the 'culture' of nations. This can be seen with regards to the GreatWar and Second World War. Former wars over Eurasia would have been spasmodic and brutal attacks on settlements. Take the following as a for example:

""The secret of Genghis Khan's success lay in skilful cavalry tactics, acquired from long practice in the saddle on the wide open Mongolian plains. Frequently his armies would rout forces ten or twenty times their size. Each of his warriors would have three or four horses and nothing more. Food was taken from the surrounding country, the troops slept in the open, meat was cooked by being placed under the saddle; and when the going got tough they would slit a vein in the horse's neck and drink the blood while still on the move. There was no supply problem, no camp followers, no excess baggage."" http://travel.roughguides.com/content/3164/19072.htm

So while Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was a hero in Mongolia, he was a war criminal to Russia and Europe, and China.

The butchery of people by him would have created a 'gene' in their ongoing culture that would make them forever wary of bullying, butchering intruders.

Let's put Genghis Khan before a mock-modern-war-court and determine how he fares.

In historical terms he was a pillager, who did not sustain and culture the zones he 'harvested' .. as such, and as a leader he was a 'failure'.

Mongolia today is itself still in recovery from the antics of the Great Khan - pity they don't hold the franchise ($) to the world wide chains of Genghis Khan eating houses!

rshowalter - 09:24pm Apr 2, 2001 EST (#1927 of 1927)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Beautiful, Dawn.

I believe that, if more Western Europeans (and perhaps more Russians, too) knew the history, and the anguish, and the drama of the history of Russia, under the brutality of the Khans, and how Russia has been resolutely facing implacable enemies, all though her history, -- they would know more about how differently Russians feel about many things -- so that they are sensitive and merciful in ways we are not, hard and tough in ways we are not, and brave in ways different from the ways we are brave. It is a glorious and tragic history. -- And the most recent horde, and perhaps the ugliest, was German.

And perhaps an even uglier threat, yet more recently, has come from, and been led by, Americans. -- And that was a threat consciously honed and coached by defeated Nazi Germans, saving their own skin, and acting on their hate of the Russians.

The 20th century was a nightmare century - and now that we are out of it, we should study hard, to try to get back some of the human virtues that died in the trenches of World War I, values that were erased in World War II, with an ethic of "total destruction" as ugly as any Ghengis Kahn professed taking their place -- and "flowering" in the "anything goes" aesthetic and sense of "morality" one can find in many places in this country, notably Los Alamos.

Is there a figure in history, viewed from a fair distance, uglier and more terrible than America's Curtis LeMay? I'm not sure there is. None scare me more, anyway.

We need to get past this horror -- for the sake of decency, and to keep the world from ending, as it could easiy do now . And we can.

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