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Is there a moral hypocrisy when it comes to violence?

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Comments

  • #32
    darkpagandeath
    Closed Accounts Posts: 24,461 ✭✭✭✭darkpagandeath


    Samaris wrote: »
    Oh, biological weaponry have been used. Just they have tended to be imprecise. It goes all the way to medieval times, and probably earlier. There was a charming practice of catapulting corpses over walls to spread disease in besieged cities. There is also the old mistranslation of "thou shalt not suffer a well-poisoner to live" as well. The most common method of poisoning a well was to toss a corpse (animal or otherwise) down it.

    Humans have always been rather inventive when it came to being dicks.

    I'm talking in this era not poisoning a well or chucking dead animals over castle walls. You know like weaponized versions of anthrax or smallpox.


  • #33
    Samaris
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 6,544 ✭✭✭Samaris


    darkpagandeath wrote: »
    I'm talking in this era not poisoning a well or chucking dead animals over castle walls. You know like weaponized versions of anthrax or smallpox.

    Fortunately, no-one's -yet- weaponised smallpox. But anthrax has been used. Aum Shinrikyo used sarin nerve gas in a Tokyo underground station in 1995 They were also cultivating anthrax and released it in 1993, pumping it into the air over Tokyo. Fortunately, the strain they had carefully cultivated was non-lethal, despite their best efforts. They were lunatics, but they tried it.

    WWI - the Germans attempted it on the Russians, but failed. They also attempted it against America, to try destroy crops. Fortunately, biological weapons have ever proved a bit unreliable.

    In WWII, the UK weaponised anthrax and botulism, but never deployed them. The Allies did the same thing when the US entered the war, but again, didn't use them. The Japanese weaponised typhoid, infecting a major Chinese river to try decimate the population, along with dropping, of all things, bombs filled with fleas infected with bubonic plague on Chinese cities. Estimates go up to 400,000 Chinese deaths from Japanese testing of these biological weapons. There were apparently plans to try the same on the US, but the Japanese surrender ended that.

    Various counties, including the US and the UK continued to develop biological weapons during the post war and Cold War period, but it would seem that none of them were ever deployed in war. The UK renounced Chemical and Biological weapon use in 1956 and ceased study into it.

    In 2001, various members of the US Congress were sent viable anthrax in letter bombs. Five died.

    I'm not a madman that keeps all this in her head, mind! This is a very short version of the Wiki page on biological warfare. Fortunately, most peoples seem to agree that this sort of thing is just plain evil. There are always those that will take any methods though. And someday, smallpox or something like it will be weaponised and used.


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