Delhi Massacre of 1857 -- Lessons for Today

I happened to hear -- sleepily -- the WNYC rebroadcast of the interview on Leonard Lopate's program yesterday (4/5/07) of an author who reports on the bloody Delhi massacre of 1857 when the British finally converted India into a colony and began aggressively to superimpose British values upon its diverse cultures:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebeli%25C3%25B3n_de_la_India_de_1857&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3DDelhi%2Bmasacre%2Bof%2B1857%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26channel%3Ds%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DO94%26sa%3DG

According to the author, the inhabitants of Delhi -- about 500,000 at that date -- were largely slaughtered and the city destroyed:

http://www.wnyc.org/books/16548

In his book, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, Niall Ferguson reports on this brutal horror on the basis of newly discovered archives detailing the specifics of that event, often presented as a dual narrative from the perspectives respectively of the British doing the bulk of the killing and those slaughtered.

Ferguson makes the obvious point that mass killing in pursuit of empire dominance is not the newest game in town and notes that we are just beginning to understand Islam, actually a far more benign religion than Christianity down through the ages so far as tolerance of other religions is concerned.
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"A war is just if there is no alternative, and the resort to arms is legitimate if they represent your last hope." (Livy cited by Machiavelli)
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