A murder rate of 1 per 1000 per day isn’t inherently implausible. Even strictly on mechanical grounds. What, a thousand people can not kill one person? All it really takes is one.

Murder of 800,000 people over 100 days comes down to 8,000 people per day. Not all that implausible. A kill ratio of 1-to-1 requires only 8,000 murderers, or 0.1% (1 per 1000) of the 8 million population to go on a daily murder spree. Don’t forget, murder unchecked is infinitely repeatable. If they took weekends off, they’d need to increase their membership by 3,111 additional murderers. Killing semi-daily requires only 16,000 total murderers. If the murderers held day jobs, working on murder only on weekends, there would have to be a mere 26,666 of them to pull this kind of genocide off.

But it gets worse. The murderous capacities of those who wish to indulge that lust isn’t limited by medieval technological constraints any more, when a sword could only every kill one person at a time. Today a commonly available pistol can kill 6 within a very short window of time. An Uzi can kill 50. A bomb can kill thousands. A nuke can kill millions. All can be wielded by a small number of individuals. So a very conservative kill ratio of 1-to-5 requires anywhere between 1,600 and 5,000 appropriately armed murderers to very practically wipe out 800,000 unarmed civilians within a few weeks (BTW, Rwanda is a very small country, less than 150 miles at its widest, so spacial constraints are also very minimal there). While abhorrent, these are not implausible numbers. And, even more disturbingly, the numbers can get even worse.

I don’t think the lower murder rates Mr. Mahmoud speaks of have much to do with the Nazi regime’s capacity for genocide. If they didn’t murder people faster doesn’t mean the couldn’t have. Nor does it mean that they held their hand (if indeed they did that) out of the goodness of their hearts. They were using their victims as slave labor.

I read in a book once that the murder of one is as awful as the murder of all. So maybe numbers aren’t even worth dawdling over in such matters. Saving lives is what should take priority. Unless politicizing is all we are after.

“In the social equation, the value of a single life is nil; in the cosmic equation, it is infinite … any political movement which implicitly relies on purely utilitarian ethics, must become a victim to the same fatal error. It is a fallacy as naïve as a mathematical teaser, and yet its consequences lead straight to Goya’s Disasters, to the reign of the guillotine, the torture chambers of the Inquisition, or the cellars of the Lubianka.” (Arthur Koestler from The Invisible Writing)”

One Genocide I do believe in is the Nazi Slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and others before, during, and after (Nazi affiliated, and even Nazi resisters slaughtered the Jews for months after the Nazi’s surrendered, particularly Polish freedom fighters and former Nazi Collaborators.)

Now when we look at the Holocaust and Nazi slaughter of the Slavs we see the improbability of the figures presented in the media for Rwanda, Darfur, and just about every other would be Genocide being accurate portrayals of the violence.

Throughout the whole Second World War 72 million people died of which 52 million where through violence and of which half were military losses. The war lasted over 1900 days and involved 15 million German military personnel, 34 million Russian military personnel, 15 Million American and 11 million British Personnel.

The war also involved millions of other military personnel from Japan, Italy, France, Hungary, Poland, and other nations. The war was clearly a huge undertakening, involving TRILLIONS upon TRILLIONS of Man hours of effort from HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of people who served as soldiers, who built the ammunitions used in the war, who built the lines of communications and infrastructure to run the war, grew the food to feed the workers and soldiers to carry on the efforts to engage in the war.

A HUGE UNDERTAKING.

Now look at Rwanada, a nation of 8 million people (or so we are told, no one really knows how many people live in these third world countries, we in the U.S. don’t even know how many illegal citizens live in this country), yet we are to believe that over 100 days (the second world war lasted over 1800 days), 800,000 people were slaughted (A DEATH RATE of 1 PER 1,000 PER DAY versus A DEATH RATE of 0.0185 PER 1,000 PER DAY for all nations involved in World War II. )

The most heavily affected nations Russia, Germany, and Poland experienced losses of 36 million people over 1900 days and had a combined population in excess of 272 million. This comes out a DEATH RATE of roughly 0.0695 PER THOUSAND PER DAY.

Given all of the above how is is possible that even Rwanda could have a death rate per thousand per day over 50 times the World War 2 average and 15 times the most heavily affected nations?

Rwanada and Darfur can’t even compared to pre industrial Europe, these death tolls are inflated. The regime in Khartoum can’t even maintain more then 80,000 soldiers, how can they engineer a Genocide against 5 million people?