Funmurphys: the Blog

Global Moral Renaissance

(This is a blog. I'm supposed to be provocative, right?) Humanity's march toward righteousness continues. From CNN.com:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/africa/08/30/war.peace.ap/index.html

Despite headlines, global war casualties decline

Monday, August 30, 2004 Posted: 12:13 PM EDT (1613 GMT)
(AP) -- The chilling sights and sounds of war fill newspapers and television screens worldwide, but war itself is in decline, peace researchers report.

In fact, the number killed in battle has fallen to its lowest point in the post-World War II period, dipping below 20,000 a year by one measure. Peacemaking missions, meantime, are growing in number.

"International engagement is blossoming," said American scholar Monty G. Marshall. "There's been an enormous amount of activity to try to end these conflicts.

. . .

A collaboration with Sweden's Uppsala University, that report will conservatively estimate battle-related deaths worldwide at 15,000 in 2002 and, because of the Iraq war, rising to 20,000 in 2003. Those estimates are sharply down from annual tolls ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 in the 1990's, a time of major costly conflicts in such places as the former Zaire and southern Sudan, and from a post-World War II peak of 700,000 in 1951.

The article cites studies by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the Canadian organization Project Ploughshare, and the Human Security Report from the University of British Columbia. Okay, I'm kidding about the "march toward righteousness", but I thought that story ought to be received as good news.

Monty Marshall and others attribute the cause of the decline to the end of the Cold War's aftermath, and to peacemaking and peacekeeping missions, often under U.N. auspices. And you thought Kofi Annan was just some annoying guy who runs onto the battlefield just as American armies are lined up ready to give the bad guy what he deserves! You may still be correct about that, but these researchers think that some good is being accomplished by peace missions that embody what the U.N. is supposed to be.

The fly in the ointment here is that humans have thought up other ways to be nasty to each other that do not involve armed conflict. "The Canadian center's director, Andrew Mack, said the figures don't include deaths from war-induced starvation and disease, deaths from ethnic conflicts not involving states, or unopposed massacres, such as in Rwanda in 1994." So North Korean leader Kim Jong Il can still allow 2-3 million people to starve to death during 1994-1998, and it won't get added to the number of combat deaths.

Probably the encouraging statistics from 2003 will not comfort any parents who lost a child in the Beslan terrorist attack on a school this past week. Still, the statistics suggest that for every Beslan school there are two or more schools where children coming running out to their waiting parents, hug them, and travel happily homeward with nary a terrorist in sight. Is Vladimir Putin our friend? I suppose not. However, Christian theology includes the idea of treating your adversary kindly in his hour of need, and possibly making him your friend. See the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37 for details. God can make good come out of evil (Genesis 50:20).

As George Bush said shortly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: "Hug your children!" Take them on whitewater rafting trips. And love their mother with all your heart.

Posted by Carl Drews at September 8, 2004 10:42 AM | International Politics