    14

    Are There Killer Cultures?

    "Man's greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy,

    seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and

    wailing, ride his gelding (and) use the bodies of his women as a

    nightshirt and support."

        Genghis Khan

    "He butchered three of them with an ax and decapitated them.

    In other words, instead of using a gun to kill them he took a hatchet to

    chop their heads off.  He struggled face to face with one of them, and

    throwing down his ax managed to break his neck and devour his flesh

    in front of his comrades.  ...I ...award him the Medal of the Republic."

    General Mustafa T'las, Syria's Minister of Defense

    praising a hero of the 1973 war with Israel

    before the Syrian National Assembly

    "Appeasing of governments which revel in slaughter is an invitation to

    worldwide catastrophe."

    Fang Lizhi

    Some readers will be outraged by my presumption.  How dare I

    regard any group as barbaric.  What appalling ethnocentrism!  There

    are no barbarians.  There are simply cultures we haven't taken the time

    to understand.  Cultures to whom we haven't given sufficient aid.

    Cultures in need of development.  Beneath the skin, all men and

    women are the same.  They have the same needs, the same emotions,

    and the same ideals.  If you simply took those folks you speak of so

    contemptuously out for a cup of coffee, you would discover that they

    are just like you and me.

    But there are barbarians--people whose cultures glorify the act of

    murder, and elevate violence to a holy deed. These cultures portray the

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