History buff33
Warlord
- Joined
- Aug 6, 2009
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- 287
I would have the US, Canada,and Mexico form a huge American country, I would make the Ottoman Empire still exist, and would have Japan be smart and not join Hitler in WW2.
How would you change history?
- Thread starter Sharwood
- Start date
Huayna Capac357
Deity
I would have allowed Africa to be as advanced as Europe. Maybe we'd still have Mali and Songhai!
The Africans tended to be a lot more barbaric than the Europeans; I like tea and cricket more than the Zulu equivalent
Wasn't that Charlemagne's sword?
If you look at recent history, what happens there a lot is worse than in Europe - Rwanda, Darfur nd the like spring to mind. What's the Joyeuse connection?
Flying Pig said:
I look at Europe's recent history and all I see for the last hundred years is corpses. But lets look at some numbers:
Rwanda ~ 800,000 to 1,000,000 casualties
Darfur ~ 400,000 casualties
Democratic Republic of the Congo ~ 5,000,000 spread over the two Civil Wars and twenty years
Sum of the three most deadly conflicts = ~ 7,400,000
Second World War ~ 73,000,000 casualties with ~ 49,000,000 civilian dead and ~ 5,000,000 exterminated as part of the Final Solution
First World War ~ 41,000,000 causalities
Sum of the two most deadly conflicts = ~ 114,000,000
If civilization is measured in the body count of innocents you win ten times over!
Flying Pig said:
That's for you to find out!
Notice we're measuring twenty years against 100 years. Also, there are more conflicts in Africa, and they tend to be a lot more brutal
Serutan
Eatibus Anythingibus
I think it's safe to say that you can find a good deal of ugly behavior in the history of any culture - the major difference being that thanks to the Industrial Revolution Europe was able to
do the same things everyone else did on an, um, industrial scale. That is, the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
do the same things everyone else did on an, um, industrial scale. That is, the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.
Flying Pig said:
Also, there are more conflicts in Europe like this one and this one, both of which were brutal in the extreme -- mass executions and torture of prisoners were the norm in those two. If you read what I said directly under the calculations you'll note that I put 'deadliest conflicts' under it, not a 100 years of wars, because the Russian Revolution alone killed ~ 13 million civilians far in excess of the Congo, Rwanda and Darfur combined! But as a show of European brutality I tender a nifty example that Dachs put me onto and well this lot and this lot and this lot. I've provided my examples your yet to do the same for me.
Serutan said:
The casualties that the Einsatzgruppen and Schutzstaffel alone managed to kill ~ 1.3 - 1.5 million Jews in open air shootings. They even made them dig their own graves. That they used firearms only makes sense, if they hadn't had them they would have beaten them to death with stones, that the way they killed them was brutal and that the intent was brutal are undeniable. It's also important to note that the casualties from direct fighting i.e being shot or bludgeoned to death for the largest conflicts that African has to offer have trouble coming to close to those figures alone and brutality wise not even considering them human makes for a nasty way to die.
Nerowannabe
Warlord
I'd breed a gorila and a shark...nuff said.
There's only actually been one example in at least100 years of a really brutal european state - statistical anomaly, anyone?
Er, wow. Which one of the several obvious candidates are you thinking of?
Nazis - if we say Russia isn't in Europe (since so much of it is in Asia)
LightSpectra
me autem minui
Assuming that we're ignoring colonial atrocities, is there any reason why post-Tito Yugoslavia doesn't count, among others?
tzarist Russia was brutal
soviet Russia was brutal
most soviet satellites were brutal, at least during stalinism
nazi Germany was brutal
ottoman empire was brutal (vide 1915)
etc
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