One could beg the question 'what was the worst atrocity in world history?' I really don't know... The Roman Empire? I mean, what did the Romans ever do for us? apart from the aqueducts...
How would you even go about answering that question? I mean, I really don't know how you could possibly figure it out. How do you rank something like that? And furthermore, why would you want to?
That's why I dislike this approach to history... It's absolutely not a competition in nastiness. That diminishes everything the study of history is about. 'Worst atrocity in human history' is something I expect to see in a newspaper, not in srs discussion. :S
There wasn't much else in his poem that had much poetic ring to it anyway. ;P
One of the points I made was that if it was the worst thing ever then you wouldn't need to say that. As a poet, especially, one should seek to show what made it so. *shrug* that's what I thought anyway...
My friend's uncle (who lives at Much Hoole, very near you!) was working in Africa on a contract and they were by Lake Victoria one day and noticed the water was turning red. This was because of bodies thrown into the river upstream during the Rwandan massacres. That image always sticks in my mind as pretty horrible :(
You could make long lists of atrocities and they're all pretty much as bad as each other, it doesn't have to have a high 'body count' for it to be 'the worst'. You could even count all those killed in the Northern Ireland conflicts as one group of people and it would be 'wrose' in terms of numbers affected, probably, than 9/11. Just picking out two incidents, the Omagh and Warrington bombings were horrific. People soon forget we had home grown terrorists for many years scaring the crap out of us in the UK....Our office still has the bomb film on the windows.....If pushed I might say that the terrorist attack on that school in Beslan in Russia was the vilest thing to have happened in recent times....
The point I wanted the guy to realise is that it's dangerous to call something the 'worst atrocity' or whatever because there is so much going on in the world that is probably worse. As was said above by a wise and probably wizard-hat-wearing person, 'it's absolutely not a competition in nastiness. That diminishes everything the study of history is about'. Anyway, the icing on the cake was that the guy followed it with a poem about the Columbine massacre. Happy times. -_-
When the whole Sept. 11 thing was on the news back when I was like six years old, I didn't know what the hullabuloo was all about, yeah people died, but lots of people die every day. I thought it was stupid that it had so much media coverage.
But the most horibble nasty event in recent history is probably not something that happened in the U.S.
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The Roman Empire? I mean, what did the Romans ever do for us? apart from the aqueducts...
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How would you even go about answering that question? I mean, I really don't know how you could possibly figure it out. How do you rank something like that? And furthermore, why would you want to?
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The weird thing is, after seeing him in The Sarah Jane Adventures, the Brig doesn't look so fat anymore... XD
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One of the points I made was that if it was the worst thing ever then you wouldn't need to say that. As a poet, especially, one should seek to show what made it so. *shrug* that's what I thought anyway...
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You could make long lists of atrocities and they're all pretty much as bad as each other, it doesn't have to have a high 'body count' for it to be 'the worst'. You could even count all those killed in the Northern Ireland conflicts as one group of people and it would be 'wrose' in terms of numbers affected, probably, than 9/11. Just picking out two incidents, the Omagh and Warrington bombings were horrific. People soon forget we had home grown terrorists for many years scaring the crap out of us in the UK....Our office still has the bomb film on the windows.....If pushed I might say that the terrorist attack on that school in Beslan in Russia was the vilest thing to have happened in recent times....
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The point I wanted the guy to realise is that it's dangerous to call something the 'worst atrocity' or whatever because there is so much going on in the world that is probably worse. As was said above by a wise and probably wizard-hat-wearing person, 'it's absolutely not a competition in nastiness. That diminishes everything the study of history is about'.
Anyway, the icing on the cake was that the guy followed it with a poem about the Columbine massacre. Happy times. -_-
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But the most horibble nasty event in recent history is probably not something that happened in the U.S.
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