Last year 61 million people died worldwide but 134 million babies were born so the population of the earth increased by 73 million people. Although every life is precious, if one person you love dies, it will weigh much heavier on your heart than the 61 million others who have died.
Natural disasters claim many lives every year but there is very little that we can do to prevent them. Famine is also a big killer. Climate change is often blamed for these types of disasters. Pandemics are also responsible for huge loss of life but less-so now than in times past. So war, which is responsible for millions of deaths annually, is usually seen as the most avoidable cause of mass deaths.
The war that took most lives ever was World War II. This was clearly the deadliest conflict in the history of the world claiming 70 to 85 million military and civilian deaths including wounded and missing in action. WWII lasted less than six years but claimed over 12 million lives per year on average, or one million military and civilians each month. Some events during World War II like the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a huge death toll.
War is horrible, cruel, unfair, devastating, and avoidable. The motives for war include some unacceptable motives like greed, pride, envy, retribution, and anger. Acceptable motives include self-defence, protecting the innocent, defending our right to freedom, defending family, friends, freedom, and way of life or correcting a grievous wrong. Countries and their leaders must endeavour to avoid starting wars because the blood of thousands, maybe millions could be on their hands.
It is interesting to compare numbers of dead in various conflicts around the world in the last few decades. The number of dead in Afghanistan in the last conflict was estimated at 176,000, unfortunately, that conflict didn’t come to a successful conclusion and now basic human rights are denied to over half of the Afghan population. Sometimes withdrawing from a conflict creates more problems than it solves.
The war in Ukraine between February 2022 and December 2023 has claimed 383,000 killed and wounded on the Ukrainian side and 315,000 on the Russian side a total of over 700,000 or 35,000 per month of this conflict, much lower than in WWII but in a more contained area.
In Syria and Yemen one million people, mainly civilians have died in war and famine. 377,000 in Yemen up to June 2022 and 615,000 in Syria up to March 2023. In Gaza, Hamas claims that 27,000 people have died, Israel believes that this unverified number includes 12,000 Hamas terrorists that they have killed. If the Hamas figures are accurate, and all indications are that they are greatly inflated, the conflict in Gaza, started by Hamas atrocities in October, pales in significance to the one million dead in nearby Syria and Yemen.
One must wonder why the smaller Gaza war gets so much more media attention than the unbelievable situation in neighbouring Syria and Yemen. Likewise, there have been massive violent pro-Palestinian protests in cities around the world, with similar characteristics to the BLM protests that began in 2020. There appears to be a serious lack of balance in the media and in the minds of the public who take to the streets.
The conclusion drawn could be that it is ok for Arabs to kill one million other Arabs or indeed for Arabs to kill Jews and Christians year after year, but it is not ok for Jews to kill 27,000 Arabs to protect themselves from sworn promised genocide against them. Of all the wars in recent decades the Hamas-Israel war has far fewer civilian deaths than any other war but far greater criticism and negative media coverage of the original victim.
