re: #281 Gus 802

OK then. Here are the non-war casualties for Iraq.

Roughly 1 million Iraqis died “by peaceful means”.

The whole “non-war” casualties thing bothers me. I’d need to spend more time thinking about exactly why this is, but I am uncomfortable about who calculates it and how and why.

I recently read Christa Wolf’s masterful autobiographical novel “Patterns of Childhood.” The last part of the book details her family’s flight from Poland into Germany at the end of world war II. In the course of the journey, all the old people die. They just do. That’s how it is. The same is true in the amazing Rossellini film, Germany Year Zero, from 1948. I mean, in the past these things have just been absorbed into the disruption of culture and life. If you’re going to count them as part of war casualties (as apart from direct civilian casualties), where does it end? What other forms of intervention into a society will count as “war” because they cause more deaths than in a “normal” year?

Don’t get me wrong. I’d be one of the ones who’d die along the road as a refugee, just from being weak and unfit. But beyond the individual story, is this a valid way to keep statistics? When and why did it begin, and what purpose does it serve? I think I’m uncomfortable with it because to me it suddenly emerged on The Guardian chat rooms as a way of bashing America. Who started it?