<snip>
The tremendous irony is that in the last 60 years of unprecedented genocide, more people have been killed by humble means than by sophisticated new WMD. The most recent horrible genocide of our time, in Rwanda in 1994, was carried out using the humble machete.
The unique horror of the European Holocaust is often attributed to the fiendish invention of gas ovens by German Nazis. Yet many millions more were shot, or died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. It was exhaustion, starvation and disease that killed most in the Soviet Gulag, and in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. These were techniques that required moral depravity by the commanders, not expensive technology.
More people were killed by the British firebombing of Dresden and Cologne, in Germany, than by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And the weapons that killed 3,000 people so quickly in New York's twin towers on 9/11 were small commercial airplanes, seized by men armed with small commercial box-cutters.
Even the Holocaust could not have been carried out had it not been for the humble and ubiquitous railway train; as Primo Levi, the greatest witness to the Holocaust, has written in "The Drowned and the Saved": "There is not a diary or story (of the camp) in which the train does not appear, the sealed boxcar changed from a commercial vehicle into an ambulatory prison."
<snip>
More:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20040101sb.htm