Sorry about not citing the stats. It was late last night.
Here's one of the more recent studies published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
The Dresden bombings happened
in 1945 –four years into the US’s
involvement in WWII. They were designed to quicken the Soviet advance into Germany and
subsequently shorten the world war. And it worked. (BTW, I assume you mean 25,000 - 40,000 civilian casualties). But that’s not the point.
The point is that the Dresden
bombings were legitimately an offensive during a war. The 9/11 attacks were not
by any stretch of the imagination a wartime offensive. Does the fact that the Dresden bombings happened
during a war make them ethically better in the long run? Of course not. But for
some reason our society has decided that “all is fair in war.” The rules allow
for mass murders in wartime.
Li Peng (the Chinese Prime Minister during the Tiananmen Square
Massacre) is allegedly insane. He’s never undergone a psychiatric analysis, so
nobody can be absolutely certain, but in much of what I’ve read about him, he’s
simply considered to be mentally unstable. Historically, it’s obvious that he
has no compassion for human life. You don’t get the lovely nickname “the insane
butcher of China”
without being a little messed up. BUT, even if he’s completely sane, the
Tiananmen Square Massacre was provoked by the students. They were getting
violent. Please don’t think that I in any way condone those sick actions in
1989, but the fact is that when the Massacre started, the protests were no
longer peaceful. 9/11 was not provoked at all.
As for the Soviet’s Ukraine mass murders, I’m sure you
know that Khrushchev’s mental health has been debated. Maybe Russia’s long
history of frequent massacres has made their leaders simply accept mass
murdering as a normal and acceptable political action. I don’t know much on the
subject. My apologies.
It's accepted that Jorge Rafael Videla is probably sane, he’s just a sick
power-hungry individual.
Now I don’t agree with many of George Bush’s actions, but he
does not seem like the sort of monster who could allow the unprovoked killing
of 3000 Americans. He’s not mentally ill, he doesn’t support martial law, the
US doesn’t have a history of frequently massacring thousands of Americans, we
weren’t in a war when 9/11 happened, and he’s not trying to become a dictator
(please don’t try that argument). It seems extraordinarily cynical to consider
all these things and believe that W allowed the 9/11 attacks. In terms of sheer
mental healthiness, W and his administration and I are very similar, and I
could not order the murder of 3000 Americans to gain any reward. I hope you
couldn’t either. For that reason (disregarding the rest of the logical
information debunking the 9/11 conspiracy theories), I’m going to give the Bush
Administration the benefit of the doubt.
