we are the dead, short days ago we lived

StategyPage has an essay that is mainly about the problem of Islamic terror, which has had numerous outbreaks in history.

It is all about a religion that has, for over a thousand years, urged its followers to make war on people who not accept (“submit”, which is what “Islam” literally means) Islam. Actually it is worse than that because even within Islam millions have died because of disputes about which form (there are dozens of them) of Islam is the one correct approach.

but they point out that the main source of civilian murder in the 20th century actually was communism:

The major offenders have been; USSR (61 million killed), Communist Chinese (38 million), Nazi Germany (20 million), Nationalist Chinese (10 million), Imperial Japan (six million), Cambodian communists (two million), Ottoman Turks (1.8 million), Vietnam (1.6), Polish communists (1.5 million), Pakistan (1.5 million), Yugoslav communists (one million.)

There are a number of surprises on this list. For one thing, Islamic terrorism doesn’t show up, even though it there as a major component of the deaths attributed to Pakistan and the Ottoman Turks.

and here is the big story rarely discussed in the MSM: The bias didn't start with "fake news" or with the MSM's bubble.

one reason that the press, who is getting a lot of chaff from Trumpettes, is not always believed is because they didn't report these stories of communist atrocities. These stories were well known among the Catholic communities, who often had survivors of various communist regimes in their midst, including Eastern Europeans, Vietnamese, and Cubans....

Overall most people think the Nazis were the worst offenders when it came to democide but they are really only number three. That's because the communists managed to hide their mass murders for most of the century, aided by the tendency of the free world media to believe a lot of the propaganda regarding the "Worker's Paradise". (italics mine).

I'll give a more modern example.

I just peeked at a bad cam copy of Hacksaw Ridge, (to see if I would spend money to see it. The answer: No... too violent). One scene shows Japanese surrendering and then killing the off guard American soldiers. Similar stories were told by acquaintances who fought in Vietnam. So SP goes on to note how the US press seems to inflate "civilian deaths" that make the west look bad in war:

A good example was the news stories in the late 1990s about the killing of South Korean civilians by U.S. soldiers in 1950 near No Gun Ri. This incident, and many similar ones, have long been common knowledge to U.S. soldiers who served during the Korean War or later.

they then explain why:

It was a not uncommon practice for North Korean troops to wear civilian clothes and mix in with fleeing South Korean refugees in order to get behind US troops...
 As a result, civilians were often fired on if they approached troops who feared (often from past experience) that there were armed enemy soldiers mixed in with the civilians.

Right now, the press is lamenting Assad's seige of Aleppo, and the bombing of "civilians" in Yemen. Previous atrocities and ethnic cleansing of Christians? Not so much.

And the rebels in Yemen make the Mullahs of Iran look like pom pom girls, so maybe they need to be wiped out?

so who do we believe? NGO's who mainly work in "safe" areas and will see only the problematic stuff done by the "good guys" (and maybe even believing the tall tales told by the other side pretending to be "innocent civilians" as happened in the Iraq war Lancet civilian casualty study?)

And who is worrying about the civilians caught in central Africa's wars?

sigh:

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie in Flander's field...
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related item: getReligion blog recommended this NYTimes article on the Sunni Shia problem. more at NPR.