Hacker News Reader

Comment by Mikeb85 | Hacker News Reader

Not particularly surprising. In the ancient world, men were often killed in various ways (conflict, hunting accidents) or enslaved so the gender ratio was quite skewed.

I mean, typical ancient warfare meant you attack a town, kill/enslave all the men and boys, rape all the women, and ensure your culture's dominance over them for the next generation or two...

View on HN

I have a hunch that this ancient way of warfare is still the optimal way to destroy a culture and achieve total victory. Not that it's acceptable in any way, but imagine if the US had done this in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is heart-wrenching to think about, but I think it would have worked.

This is pretty much how Isis conducts their warfare.

Only against non-muslims, as far as I've gathered. Most of the muslim world (as far as I've gathered) isn't particularly religious, just very socially conservative. So IS isn't employing this tactic to its full advantage here. Nor is it clear how they could, because as long as you go through all the motions it's hard to check whether you really have all that much religious fervour.

An argument could probably be made that it worked fairly well in subduing East Germany after WWII.

Not sure why you were downvoted, this has been well-documented e.g. by Beevor.

I new that those things happened there but not that this was was so widespread! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_G...

"estimates of the numbers of German women raped by Soviet soldiers have ranged up to 2 million"

I suspect all that depleted uranium the US has been dumping in other countries via bullets is not helping the local DNA at all.

And don't forget the death of women during childbirth. That would leave a father/child pair - I'm sure the fathers in that instance would not be voluntarily celibate afterwards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com