twin58:
Sheesh, grandpa, that was only 1938. Meanwhile:

Bush stricken by blindness, loses all sense of style. Film at eleven.

MIB:
Freedom of Speech, like censorship, applies to the government and not some forum where one makes vile comparisons between a U.S. president and an evil murderer.

MarcusF:
In this case, they're one and the same. Both are war criminals, but one hasn't been brought to justice yet.

MIB:
That's disgusting. Bush and Hitler cannot even honestly be put into the same sentence. I don't think Bush has singled out 6 million + people for systematic elimination, either.

Pathetic.

So isn't it taking things just a little bit out of context to keep harping on the fact Hitler was once Time's person of the year, and asserting the honour has no value?

kick:
You forget that Time's Man of the Year isn't an award for the most incredible gift to mankind...It is usually given to the person that has had the strongest impact on the world from a historical perspective. Also tends to go to those who become infamous.

dfwAggie99:
Do you think W will give me adequate time to sew those pink triangles into my shirts?

puckman1:
Or a noose, unless thats the same thing as a Columbian necktie. wink

puckman1
Only about 56% of the people polled now say the war was worth it,...

WASHINGTON, December 21 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) –

... George W. Bush and his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld continue to lose the support of a majority of Americans over the invasion-turned-occupation of Iraq, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll.

A majority of the 1,004 adults, polled over the phone, believed the war in Iraq was not worth fighting, driving down the ratings of Bush and Rumsfeld, according to poll results released Monday, December 20, Reuters said.

Fifty-six percent of those questioned, a new high, said that the cost of the war outweighs the benefits and is not worth it. It marked a gain of seven percentage points from a poll conducted in July.

Fifty-seven percent said they disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq, and 53 percent disapprove of the way Rumsfeld is handling his job, according to the survey.

The poll was conducted on December 16-19 and has a three-point margin of error.
....

NathanJones
Wow, he's in the same league as Adolph Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini and Joseph Stalin (twice!)!

Public-health experts from the USA and Iraq estimate that around 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the March 2003 invasion-the majority being violent deaths among women and children relating to military activity. Results of the research, done among clusters of Iraqi households last month, is published online by The Lancet.

Les Roberts (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Baltimore, USA) and colleagues did a survey to investigate the effect of the Iraq war on civilian deaths by comparing mortality during the 14.6 months before the March 2003 invasion with the 17.8 months after it. The investigators interviewed a total of 988 households from 33 randomly selected neighbourhoods of Iraq; in those households reporting deaths since January 2002, the date, cause, and circumstances of violent deaths were recorded.

Overall, the risk of death was 2.5 times greater after the invasion, although the risk was 1.5 times higher if mortality around Falluja (where two-thirds of violent deaths were reported) is excluded. The investigators estimate that a 1.5 times increase in deaths equates to an excess of 98,000 deaths relating to the Iraq conflict, although this estimate would be much greater if Falluja data is included.
....

... in the 20th century, far and away the bloodiest period in history, state-sponsored slaughter of innocents averaged 5,300 victims worldwide per day--170 million in all. (That's a conservative total, too, compiled in 1987.)

These numbers come from R.J. Rummel, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii who studies mass killing. Rummel's genocide figures are more inclusive than some--in fact, he prefers the term \"democide,\" which he defines as \"the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.\" Genocide is killing due to ethnicity, religion, or other \"indelible group membership,\" whereas politicide is murder for political reasons. Democide excludes deaths due to war (36.5 million between 1900 and 1987) and reckless but not purposely murderous government policies--for example, the loss of over 20 million Chinese during the famine of 1959-'62, which was caused by the failure of the Great Leap Forward.

Defining terms this way puts the Nazi slaughter in perspective. The following are Rummel's 12 most murderous regimes (from his article in the Encyclopedia of Genocide, 1999): (1) USSR, 62 million deaths, 1917-'87; (2) People's Republic of China, 35 million, 1949-'87; (3) Germany, 21 million, 1933-'45; (4) nationalist China, 10 million, 1928-'49; (5) Japan, 6 million, 1936-'45; (6) prerevolutionary Chinese communists (\"Mao Soviets\"), 3.5 million, 1923-'49; (7) Cambodia, 2 million, 1975-'79; (8) Turkey (Armenian genocide), 1.9 million, 1909-'18; (9) Vietnam, 1.7 million, 1945-'87; (10) Poland, 1.6 million, 1945-'48; (11) Pakistan, 1.5 million, 1958-'87; (12) Yugoslavia, 1.1 million, 1944-'87. Three additional \"suspected megamurderers,\" as Rummel puts it, are North Korea, 1.7 million deaths, 1948-'87; Mexico, 1.4 million, 1900-'20; and czarist Russia, 1.1 million, 1900-'17.

Rummel goes on to identify the top nine killers: (1) Joseph Stalin, 43 million dead, 1929-'53; (2) Mao Tse-tung, 38 million, 1923-'76; (3) Adolf Hitler, 21 million, 1933-'45; (4) Chiang Kai-shek, 10 million, 1921-'48; (5) Vladimir Lenin, 4 million, 1917-'24; (6) Tojo Hideki (Japan), 4 million, 1941-'45; (7) Pol Pot, 2.4 million, 1968-'87; (8) Yahya Khan (Pakistan), 1.5 million, 1971; (9) Josip Broz, better known as Marshal Tito (Yugoslavia), 1.2 million, 1941-'80.

What states murdered the most as a percentage of population? The undisputed leader is Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which killed more than 8 percent of its people per year between 1975 and 1979, and 31 percent of its men overall. Runners-up: the Ataturk regime in Turkey (which continued to murder Armenians), 2.6 percent annually, 1919-'23 (703,000); Yugoslavia (Ustasha regime in Croatia), 2.5 percent, 1941-'45 (655,000); Poland, 2 percent, 1945-'48 (1.6 million); the Young Turk regime in Turkey (the triumvirate you mention), 1 percent, 1909-'18 (1.8 million--domestic killings only). The Soviet Union, just to give you a benchmark, killed 0.4 percent of its population annually between 1917 and 1987--if America did the same, at current population levels that'd be over a million dead each year. Because Rummel's compilation ends in 1987, it doesn't include ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo (probably around 10,000, 1999) and the massacres in Rwanda (800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, 1994).

Rummel observes that communist and fascist regimes accounted for 84 percent of democidal deaths during the period studied, leading him to comment, \"Power kills, and absolute Power kills absolutely.\" But democracies aren't innocent. For example, the United States military killed an estimated 300,000 during the subjugation of the Philippines, 1898-1902. Millions of Africans died during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade. The native population of North America, as large as 15 million in 1500, had been reduced to less than 250,000 by 1890. Granted, native mortality was due primarily to the inadvertent spread of European diseases, and didn't all happen on America's watch. Still, democracies kill fewer, not none.

--CECIL ADAMS

NathanJones
Oh, just 100,000!?!

puckman1:
Thanks for correcting me re the poll results I posted Twin.