BEYOND BELIEF

After my last entry, I found that I kept coming back to the estimated toll from WWII, almost fifty million. Some scholars raise the estimate to some fifty four million and add in the Chinese civil war that was going on at the same time.

I found myself wondering what a Viet Nam style memorial would look like. How far would it reach, that sort of thing. The fact that we don’t have names for many of the casualties. In my cyber wanderings I came across a site with casualties from all the wars, civil wars, ethnic cleansings, ad nauseum from the American Civil War to what is essentially the Civil War in Iraq. Many of the numbers look fairly accurate. I would imagine that our administration would argue about the figures for the Iraqi Civil War. A few tens of thousands in a possible total of 160,000,000 probably wouldn’t make much of dent. The site does include a small bibliography.

To put things in perspective: If you laid the casualties  end to end and allowed six feet per person you could circle the earth more than seven times. If you recited either names or said something like “known only to the creator” and allowed five seconds per person you’d be going 24/7 for more than nine thousand years. Yes, that’s thousand. I know, it took my breath away too.

What is heartbreakingly appalling is that a big chunk of the total is the result of governmental policies against their own people. The Stalinist purges, China’s Great Leap Forward, Rwanda, you name it. I’m not making this entry make people lose heart but to put what we’re doing to each other into some kind of perspective.

If anyone has suggestions on how we can put some sand in the gears or sugar in the gas tank of the steamrollers that go beyond praying my little heart out and voting very carefully I’m listening.


Wars and Genocides of the 20th Century

by Piero Scaruffi

160 million people died in wars during the 20th century

(See also 1900: A century of genocides)



1860-65: American civil war (360,000)
1886-1908: Belgium-Congo Free State (3 million)
1899-02: British-Boer war (100,000)
1900-01: Boxer rebels against Russia, Britain, France, Japan, USA against rebels (35,000)
1903: Ottomans vs Macedonian rebels (20,000)
1904: Germany vs Namibia (65,000)
1904-05: Japan vs Russia (150,000)
1910-20: Mexican revolution (250,000)
1911: Chinese Revolution (2.4 million)
1911-12: Italian-Ottoman war (20,000)
1912-13: Balkan wars (150,000)
1915: the Ottoman empire slaughters Armenians (1.2 million)
1914-18: World War I (8 million)
1917-21: Soviet revolution (5 million)
1928-37: Chinese civil war (2 million)
1931: Japanese Manchurian War (1.1 million)
1934: Mao's Long March (170,000)
1936: Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (200,000)
1936-37: Stalin's purges (13 million)
1936-39: Spanish civil war (600,000)
1939-45: World War II (55 million) including holocaust and Chinese revolution
1946-49: Chinese civil war (1.2 million)
1946-49: Greek civil war (50,000)
1946-54: France-Vietnam war (600,000)
1947: Partition of India and Pakistan (1 million)
1948-1958: Colombian civil war (200,000)
1948-1973: Arab-Israeli wars (70,000)
1948-: Kashmir's civil war (40,000)
1949-: Indian Muslims vs Hindus (20,000)
1950-53: Korean war (4 million)
1952-59: Kenya's Mau Mau insurrection (20,000)
1954-62: French-Algerian war (1 million)
1958-61: Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (30 million)
1960-90: South Africa vs Africa National Congress (?)
1961-2003: Kurds vs Iraq (180,000)
1962-75: Mozambique Frelimo vs Portugal (?)
1964-73: USA-Vietnam war (3 million)
1965: second India-Pakistan war over Kashmir
1965-66: Indonesian civil war (200,000)
1966-69: Mao's "Cultural Revolution" (11 million)
1966-: Colombia's civil war (31,000)
1967-70: Nigeria-Biafra civil war (800,000)
1968-80: Rhodesia's civil war (?)
1969-79: Idi Amin, Uganda (300,000)
1969-02: IRA - Norther Ireland's civil war (2,000)
1969-79: Francisco Macias Nguema, Equatorial Guinea (50,000)
1971: Pakistan-Bangladesh civil war (500,000)
1972-: Philippines vs Muslim separatists (120,000)
1972: Burundi's civil war (300,000)
1972-79: Rhodesia/Zimbabwe's civil war (30,000)
1974-91: Ethiopian civil war (1,000,000)
1975-78: Menghitsu, Ethiopia (1.5 million)
1975-79: Khmer Rouge, Cambodia (1.7 million)
1975-89: Boat people, Vietnam (250,000)
1975-90: civil war in Lebanon (40,000)
1975-87: Laos' civil war (184,000)
1975-2002: Angolan civil war (500,000)
1976-83: Argentina's military regime (20,000
1976-93: Mozambique's civil war (900,000)
1976-98: Indonesia-East Timor civil war (600,000)
1976-: Indonesia-Aceh (GAM) civil war (12,000)
1979: Vietnam-China war (30,000)
1979-88: the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan (1.3 million)
1980-88: Iraq-Iran war (1 million)
1980-92: Sendero Luminoso - Peru's civil war (69,000)
1980-92: El Salvador's civil war (100,000)
1980-99: Kurds vs Turkey (35,000)
1982-90: Hissene Habre, Chad (40,000)
1983-2002: Sri Lanka's civil war (64,000)
1983-2002: Sudanese civil war (2 million)
1987-: Palestinian Intifada (4,500)
1988-2001: Afghanistan civil war (400,000)
1988-2004: Somalia's civil war (550,000)
1989-: Liberian civil war (220,000)
1989-: Uganda vs Lord's Resistance Army (30,000)
1991: Gulf War - large coalition against Iraq to liberate Kuwait (85,000)
1991-97: Congo's civil war (800,000)
1991-2000: Sierra Leone's civil war (200,000)
1991-: Russia-Chechnya civil war (200,000)
1991-94: Armenia-Azerbaijan war (35,000)
1992-96: Tajikstan's civil war war (50,000)
1992-96: Yugoslavia's civil war (200,000)
1992-99: Algerian civil war (150,000)
1993-97: Congo Brazzaville's civil war (100,000)
1993-: Burundi's civil war (200,000)
1994: Rwanda's civil war (900,000)
1995-: Pakistani Sunnis vs Shiites (1,300)
1995-: Maoist rebellion in Nepal (10,000)
1998-: Congo/Zaire's war - Rwanda and Uganda vs Zimbabwe, Angola and Namibia (3.8 million)
1998-2000: Ethiopia-Eritrea war (75,000)
1999: Kosovo's liberation war - NATO vs Serbia (2,000)
2001: Afghanistan's liberation war - USA & UK vs Taliban (25,000)
2002-: Cote d'Ivoire's civil war (1,000)
2003: Iraq's liberation war - USA, UK and Australia vs Saddam Hussein (14,000)
2003-: Sudan vs Darfur (180,000)
2003-: Iraq's civil war (113,000)


Arab-Israeli wars

I (1947-49): 6,373 Israeli and 15,000 Arabs die
II (1956): 231 Israeli and 3,000 Egyptians die
III (1967): 776 Israeli and 20,000 Arabs die
IV (1973): 2,688 Israeli and 18,000 Arabs die
Intifada I (1987-92): 170 Israelis and 1,000 Palestinians
Intifada II (2000-03): 700 Israelis and 2,000 Palestinians



Main sources:

Charny: Genocide - A Critical Bibliographic Review (1988)
Stephane Courtois: Black Book on Communism (1995)
Clodfelter: Warfare and Armed Conflicts (1992)
Elliot: Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (1972)
Bouthoul: A List of the 366 Major Armed Conflicts of the period 1740-1974, Peace Research (1978)
R.J. Rummel: Death by Government - Genocide and Mass Murder (1994)

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstats.htm
Matt White's website

Several general textbooks of 20th century history



Back to world news | Back to history

SIXTY YEARS

This month will see the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. There have been the usual columns from both sides. Should we have used the bomb? Should we have not used the bomb? I can’t say what my decision would have been if it had been mine to make based on the information that was available in August of 1945.

I don’t think it’s fair to judge based on what we’ve learned since the end of the war. All we had to go on was the cost in casualties that had occurred already. The Americans had 800,000 casualties and counting. The Japanese, over 1,000,000, My mom lost a classmate at Tarawa. My uncle got blown off one baby aircraft carrier and woke up on another one. There had been approximately eight million civilian casualties in the areas of Asia occupied by Japan alone.

We’d managed to totally devastate German cities like Dresden and Hamburg with conventional weapons and were well on our way to doing the same thing to the Japanese cities. In some ways it was horrifyingly easier to do the job. Most of their cities were built of wood. Nice well-seasoned wood. Aside from their Kamikaze pilots Japan had lost control of the airspace over their country.

One raid on Tokyo in the spring of 1945 destroyed sixteen square miles of the city and killed nearly 80,000 people. And that was one raid. The general commanding the Army Air Force estimated that the bombers would run out of useful targets by September of 1945. The low, that’s the low estimate of Allied casualties in an invasion of the Japanese home islands, was 30 to 35 percent.

The worst-case scenario we beloved we were facing was that the Japanese army was planning to mobilize the entire surviving population to resist the invasion planned for the spring of 1946.

The last major battle before the invasion of Japan was the battle of Okinawa ending in July of 1945. Approximate casualties-72.000 American, 130.000 Japanese, and 150.000 civilians.

There were no indications that invading Japan was going to be any easier. And there had never been a successful invasion of the Japanese home islands.

We know now that the civilian members of the Japanese government were trying to open negotiations through the Soviets. Unfortunately they didn’t know that the Soviets had promised to enter the Pacific War within three months after the end of the war in Europe and had no intention of negotiating on their behalf or acting as an intermediary.

In some ways I’m afraid the Japanese were stuck in God’s little acre. West of the American rock and East of the Soviet hard place as both sides maneuvered for post war positions of power. The Americans were hoping to end the Pacific War before the Soviet’s entered the war and had the chance to carve up parts of east Asia they way they were carving up eastern Europe.

I can understand the decision to use the bombs in 1945. What I have never been able to understand are the decisions to not only keep building atomic bombs but to upgrade to hydrogen bombs. To build so many of those demons' spawn that we could not only destroy ourselves but every other living thing on the planet.

I’ve seen some statistics that place the total casualties from WWII at close to fifty million. The Viet Nam War memorial has fifty thousand names on it. I wonder how far a similar memorial would reach with fifty million names on it.

I think that at this point everyone was so exhausted by the war that it was easier to make the decision to use the bombs than it should have been.

This entry has been hard. It refuses to come easily but it's the best I can do. Sixty years, who can believe it.

MIDSUMMER MEMORIES

It’s midsummer alright. There are certain sounds and smells that have always said “midsummer” to me. Something beyond the roses, sweet williams and dry grass. There used to be the click thunk of the knife cutting corn off the cob. The hiss from the pressure cooker as the water heated and air in the cooker exhausted. The odd steamy smell of the steam from the processing. Corn in the canner doesn’t smell anything like corn. The faint pop of the lids as they sealed. We used to find dried corn kernels in the oddest places for the next week or so. We finally wised up and just set up the workstation in the driveway. The kernels could go wherever they wanted and all it took was a hose to clean it up.

There’s the snippy sound as you stem green beans and break them into smaller pieces. Mom said the heck with it this year and we skipped the blanching step. So what if we don’t get quite so many beans in each jar. The blanching semi par boils the beans and makes for a tighter pack. It’s also steamy work and it was going to be hot enough in the kitchen already. Same little pop pop as the lids sealed, Too bad there was a big loud pop as one of the Mason jars decided it was time to head for a better incarnation and broke in the canner. Nice clean break at the bottom. Since most of the beans just floated it was easy enough to salvage them. I think that jar may have been older than I am. I know the pressure cooker is. My folks bought two things right after they were married. Mom doesn’t remember if it was the sewing machine or the pressure cooker. It still has the original wooden handles.

We’re lucky. In about twenty-five minutes we can be buying produce from the folks who grew it. Peaches are just coming on and the summer apples. I swear the zucchini plants in the front yard have grown a foot in the last week. Some things adore hot weather. I hope we don’t find the squash that tried to eat Springfield out there later in the month. There’s always at least on that manages to hide until it’s big enough for a cat to hide behind.

The blackberries by the bike path are beginning to change color. I know some of them are ripe because the car next to me at work had really pretty purple splotches on it. Obviously a bird or two had found some early ripe ones.

I don’t think we save much money by doing it ourselves but they taste too much different from what you can get in the can. I know we don’t do anything resembling the five hundred jars a year we used to do when I was in my teens. Hard work? Yeah. But, you got a little scent of midsummer in January. And that was hard to beat.

TRUTH or truth?

I ran across this recently but I’ve been dipping in and out of several books and I’m not sure who wrote it. There’s a good chance it was either Kathleen Norris or Malcolm Boyd. The gist of the passage was that when we try tie truth with a capital T to provable fact we end up distorting both.

 

When extremely conservative religious scholars-unfortunately they’re usually Christian-insist that certain stories in the Bible are fact they end up distorting their science beyond all recognition.

 

The earth is about 25,500 miles around. Even if it’s an unmoving ball at the center of the universe you can’t make the sun stand still without destroying the star closest to us. Once you put the earth in its orbit around the sun and set it spinning at the more than one thousand miles an hour you need for a twenty four hour day-well let’s just say that more that the walls of Jericho would have fallen down. The walls, both armies, the trumpets, the Jordan River, and the Mediterranean would have ended up somewhere on the other side of Persia. Along with everything else that was and wasn’t nailed down. The truth of the story? God may have promised the Hebrews a land of their own but they couldn’t win it without His help. And by the way it’s purely a tribal story. I can’t read about the body count of the conquest without cringing. The idea of collateral damage isn’t anything new. As long as they aren't "us" who's counting?

 

The story of Noah has at least two versions/authors and both were apparently drawing on an earlier Babylonian myth. One problem is that the Babylonian mythology puts the flood at about 430,000 years ago, the Biblical version at about 4,300 years ago. Somebody misplaced a couple of zeros somewhere along the line.

 

If you Google the term “The Black Sea Flood” you get links to a fascinating story. The short version is this. Approximately 7,500 years ago there was a fresh water lake in the area where the Black Sea is now. Recent archeological finds show the shores were heavily populated with farmers who were ancestors of the early Semites (Hebrews, Babylonians etc.) and Indo Europeans. The Mediterranean and Sea of Marmara were over 400 feet higher than the lake. The higher waters were held back by land on the banks of the Bosporus River. The seas rose as the last of the great glaciers melted and the seawater broke through. What started as a trickle became a flood. The final flow is estimated at the volume of 200 Niagara Falls. Every day for at least 300 days. The lake level would have risen six inches a day and spread a mile a day in some places. It’s estimated that the roar of the falls would have been heard over one hundred miles away. The effect on the people living next to the lake, especially the ones closest to the original break through would have been devastating. Imagine trying to keep ahead of the rising water. Salt water now, not fresh. Moving every day, day after day for nearly a year. Trying to keep family, flocks and what you could carry on your backs together. Talk about a wallop to the tribal psyche.

 

It doesn’t matter whether somebody named Noah built an ark. The truth is that the rift between Creator and Creation had become so wide that the Creator considered wiping the slate clean and starting over. But there is hope even in destruction and the whole of creation wasn’t destroyed. But, trying to make physical truth conform to spiritual truth leads to truth with a small t and distortions of science that would send a double jointed contortionist screaming for the Advil. And more liberal theologians get caught in the same trap. Only on the other side. By concentrating on picking out everything that couldn’t possibly happen and focusing on what can be proven both sides get caught in the fact trap and lose sight of the Truth. Oh, and while God basically promises not to wipe us out Himself, there’s nothing said about stopping us from doing it to ourselves if we really put our minds to it in a fit of collective insanity.

 

I’m going to go out on a limb here. I don’t think it matters whether a teacher named Jesus really existed. I’d like to believe that He did. It doesn’t matter whether miracles were performed. I’d like to think they were. Sitting people around a table usually implies family or those very close to you. The Truth is that there is room for everything and everyone at the Creator’s table and the distinctions disappear. It doesn’t matter if you’re male, female, gay, straight, fat, thin, black, white, pink, purple, Hebrews, Canaanites, humans or the rest of Creation. Of course, the theory is great, we’re having big problems carrying it out (imagine Atlas with the world on his shoulders), and nobody can hurt you like family.

 

Now that I think about it (insert tired sigh and a slump here) a lot of the back and forth shouting begins to sound a lot like “mom and dad love ME best.” (the sound effects here are optional and only limited by your imagination)

HOW SCIENCE IS USUALLY DONE

I see the prez has given his opinion on Intelligent Design. I have no problem with teaching this in a philosophy, history, or history of science class. I do have big problems with teaching it in any kind of experimental science class.

In an ideal world there is a way that science is done. I know that this is far from an ideal world but be patient with me. Calling something a theory doesn.t mean it hasn’t been proven. In a way it’s a carry over from the times that modern science was getting started.

Let me use the boiling temperature of water as an example. It.s something that can be tested using a thermometer and a barometer. Incidentally, this experiment probably was never done or at least published in Italy until after the influence of the Roman Church had begun to decline. You see both use something that the church said couldn’t exist-a vacuum. But, that’s a story for another day.

Say a curious scientist notices that when water is heated vapor comes off of it and if you heat it long enough it boils. He does this under controlled conditions, takes its temperature and gets a consistent result of 212 degrees. For the sake of argument, the scientist is English and lives in London. London is as close to see level as you can get.

Say our Englishman writes regularly to a colleague in the Scottish Highlands and he spends his time perched a thousand feet or so higher. He tries the same experiment but doesn’t get quite the same results. They scratch their heads and both write to a mutual friend perched on the top of a Swiss Alp. He tries the experiment and gets a different and lower temperature. Finally, one of them has a glowing light bulb moment and realizes that the decreased temperature is tied to the decrease in air pressure as elevation increases.

That’s how science is supposed to work. Someone gets an idea and designs an experiment to test it. The results are shared. Somebody else follows the same steps and either gets the same results or they don’t. At that point they hash it out, start over and work on it until the original results are either verified or they aren’t. Trying to force science to conform to a particular dogma only results in bad science. It doesn’t help faith either.

Claiming that there is more than one side to an argument and it's only fair to present all of them works in a philosophy class. It doesn't belong in science class.

ANNIVERSARY

Sometime this year there is a fifty-year anniversary. If I wanted to dig through the stored National Geographics I could find the exact month we started taking them. I think it was July actually. There were two constants when I was growing up. No matter how tight things were the subscriptions to the Geographic and Reader’s digest were renewed. We still take the Geographic; we’ve always taken at least two newspapers. I can’t remember when I was introduced to the local library. It wasn’t half bad for a logging town of about 3500 people.

I used to joke that I was born with a book in my hands and I’d read darn near anything. Books about rivers, mountains, submarines, other countries, dog stories, cat stories, historical novels, science fiction, fantasy, encyclopedias, aspirin labels, the first aid book. If it was that black on that white I answered the siren call. I’m not sure that my folks always knew what to make of me. I went to Ben Hur in the fifth grade and promptly went to the library and checked out the book-the unabridged version. I never much cared for romances though.

You may ask what brought on this little meditation. I’ve got five nephews and I don’t think any of them read just for the fun of it. They all get excellent grades; they pass their tests with flying colors. They play sports: the whole modern child hood bit. Video games all that great expensive stuff but the magic isn’t there. Henry VIII is as real to me as Bill Clinton. Paul Revere’s Boston as familiar as down town Eugene, Anne McCaffrey’s Pern is as real as my back yard. (I’ve always had a thing for dragons.)

Oh, well I keep hoping lightning will strike.

I WONDER WHY

There's something that puzzles me. I guess I notice this because I'm kind of in the same fix.

I see a lot of folks that obviously have trouble getting around but don't use anything to help. I.E. a cane. Lord knows they aren't expensive. In my case, I sort of inherited it. Of all the things that dad left behind I don't think it crossed his mind I'd end uup toting his "third leg" around.

Are those folks shuffling down the sidewalk afaid using a cane will make them look old or something. Are they afraid they'll look silly? Believe me, I'll take silly.

I've had some problems for years. I didn't get mom's bust line, I got dad's knees. It didn't help when I was bringing in a load of laundry from the drier, dropped a hanger, stepped on the hanger and went down like a ton of bricks. I'm about a hundred pounds lighter than I was then (this was about three years ago) and getting around better. But, that cane goes to work with me every day. I don't need it 98 percent of the time, but oh that 2 percent. Parking is at a premium at the dealership and when you come right down to it the employee lot is about three blocks from my desk.

I've taken to parking on the farside of the lot and taking the long way into the building in the mornings. I can get in about a quarter of a mile that way. I've been trying to total at least a mile during the day. More if I can, I tend to seize up by the end of the week but it's getting better.

We have a great set of bike paths in this area and there's a stretch near where I live that I can get a mile circuit in. It's paved and I'm thankful for that. That's for weekends. Actually it's next to the river, so it's shady, there's birds and lots of other critters-two legged and four legged.

If using that cane means I can get my mile or so in on the weekends I'll swing it along with the best of them and thank dad for his great investment anyday.