(June 22, 2015 at 8:07 pm)Metis Wrote:(June 22, 2015 at 8:02 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: Simple. Not every group in every age has struggled with the same issues.
However, one cannot help but wonder at the barbaric Japanese treatment of the Chinese and the Allied prisoners of war during WWII.
Any worse than Charlemagne publicly torturing to death all of his subjects who refused to convert to Catholicism in 782 during the Massacre of Verden?
Sure the Japanese got to do it to more people, but I'm sure Charlemagne would have had a go if he'd had the same technology the Japanese had more than a thousand years later.
This is but another whack-a-mole moment, but here is what Wikipedia says:
Quote:An entry for the year 782 in the Royal Frankish Annals records that, after Charlemagne lost two envoys, four counts, and around 20 nobles in battle with the Saxons, Charlemagne responded by massacring 4,500 rebelling Saxons near what is now Verden. Regarding this massacre, the entry reads:
When he heard this, the Lord King Charles rushed to the place with all the Franks that he could gather on short notice and advanced to where the Aller flows into the Weser. Then all the Saxons came together again, submitted to the authority of the Lord King, and surrendered the evildoers who were chiefly responsible for this revolt to be put to death—four thousand and five hundred of them. This sentence was carried out. Widukind was not among them since he had fled to Nordmannia. When he had finished this business, the Lord King returned to Francia.[1]
There was a rebellion.
Some of Charlemagne's homies were killed in the uprising.
Charlemagne exacted revenge.
I'm not convinced the comparison to the Japanese army is justified, but if you say so...
