Re: CHAT: Nov 11th

abrigon wrote:

> Yes, Veterans Day/Rememberance Day/Armistice Day, basically the end of
> one of the stupidist and bloodiest war of humanity, and especially the
> 20th Century.
Actually, until WWII, the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) held the
record both for the absolute number of people killed (over 20 million)
and in terms of the percentage killed in a certain country (about 25%)
(although the 20% killed in the Phillipines by the US during an
insurrection after the Spanish American War in 1898 comes pretty
close).

> Maybe a good reason for a common lingo,
> AuxLang is so people can talk to each other and make sure WW1s and like
> never happen again.
This has unforunately rarely, if ever, been the case.  One need
not look far, to the former Yugoslavia or any of the innumerable
civil wars in South America or Germany of the 16th and 17th centuries
to find examples of nations torn apart by fratricidal and genocidal
impulses, even when the language they speak usually differs no more
than a few relatively minor dialectal differences.  No:  war does not
occur simply because people don't understand each other.

War occurs, among the probably innumerable reasons,  for one because
people don't *care* about the rights and affairs of other people;
this becomes transmitted through language, but is not caused by it.

Moreover, that doesn't explain why peoples with mutually unintelligible
and often totally unrelated languages, like the US and Japan or Canada
and France, can remain the best of friends.

======================================
Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
ICQ#: 4315704   AIM: Deuterotom
Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/>
"Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."

Non cuicumque datum est habere nasum.
It is not given to just anyone to have a nose.
        -- Martial
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