Pat Oliphant for February 28, 2012
Transcript:
Voices: Shouldn't we do something? Which one of us is 'we'? I think it's you. You want another war to pay for? Most of us are already broke. Well, we should something. Agreed? Yes. Maybe. Or not. And a war with Arabs, no less. Who needs it. Assad: Last one standing wins!
On the other hand, looking at history we see it was the proud privilege of rulers to slaughter as many as needed until a population was manageable, if necessary to extinction. They often did it to clear an area of tens of thousands of tribesmen. If the women and children weren’t killed, they were enslaved. A big bonus to being warriors was to rape and pillage, then to colonize.
For examples, read the great heroic sagas of any nation, read Plutarch’s LIVES, read the Bible. Read modern history, and pick up the current newspapers. The tradition continues.
Scientists think Genghis Khan had a certain identifiable gene that was passed through time to a large part of the population of Asia and the Middle East. How do they think that happened?
One theory is that in his conquests he impregnated large numbers of women to make copies of himself: Pre-scientific cloning. To look at the closely similar facial features among the inhabitants of some countries, it can be imagined that this has happened many times in the past.
What would our population be without these massacres? It’s ironic that when the world population was so small they were accepted; and now that it’s so large they’re not. Since religious disputes often instigated the past slaughters, I guess it was their acceptable alternative to birth control – and probably still is.