In the general scheme of manmade disasters, terrorism is trivial. That’s not even debatable, as I’ll itemize below. Westerners who’ve been consuming televised fears for 15 years straight may object, but fear has nothing to do with truth… and very much the opposite.
And I’ll skip through the obvious fact that I’m opposed to people being murdered by maniacs and the equally obvious acknowledgment that terrorism is a very big thing to the people involved.
The Facts
When deciding whether a statement is true or false, facts should decide. If we let ourselves imagine that fear makes something true, we doom ourselves to lives of abuse.
So, let’s take a look at the facts.
To address this question directly, I decided to take facts from just the past hundred years or so and to stick to the large powers. My apologies to those associated with events I left out; I do not mean to minimize them.
This list shows how many deaths are attributable to each. These figures are from Wikipedia, and if there was a range, I took the middle of it.
| World War II: | 75,000,000 |
| Great Leap Forward (China): | 32,000,000 |
| World War I: | 18,000,000 |
| Russian Civil War: | 7,000,000 |
| Ukrainian Genocide (Holodomor): | 5,300,000 |
| Killing Fields (Cambodia): | 2,000,000 |
| Korean War: | 2,500,000 |
| Vietnam War: | 1,900,000 |
| Great Purge (USSR): | 1,000,000 |
| Gulf War II (Iraq): | 700,000 |
| Gulf War I: | 130,000 |
| Mexican Drug War: | 107,000 |
| Afghan War: | 85,000 |
Now, would you like to know how many people have died at the hands of terrorists? Here are the numbers, over more years and a larger area:
| 1900–1929: | 520 |
| 1930–1949: | 1,088 |
| 1950–1969: | 283 |
| 1970–1979: | 1,523 |
| 1980–1989: | 3,401 |
| 1990–1999: | 2,203 |
| 2000–2009: | 6,625 |
| 2010–2015: | 3,470 |
Terrorism numbers are difficult to define post-2000, because every minor skirmish is now called “terrorism.” So, the numbers above exclude many attacks on government facilities and uniformed government employees. Civil wars aren’t terrorism; attacks on churches, buses, and markets are terrorism.
All told, this comes to 19,113 deaths over 116 years. Compared to the almost 146,000,000 deaths listed above, terrorism amounts to one one-hundredth of one percent: 0.013% to be precise.
Compared to Rudolph Rummel’s data showing 262 million “deaths by government” over the 20th century, terrorism stands at a statistically insignificant 0.0073%
A few more comparisons:
- Since 1970, terrorism world-wide has claimed considerably less than 18,000 lives. Over those same years, the War on Drugs has claimed seven times as many in Mexico alone.
- In the worst year of terrorism (2001), less than 4,000 died. In just one battle of World War I (Verdun), more than 300,000 died – 75 times as many.
- On the worst day of terrorism (Sept. 11, 2001), less than 3,000 died. In one day of World War II (June 6, 1944), only in Normandy and only on the winning side, there were 4,413 confirmed dead.
Our Feelings Are Wrong
To most of us, war feels a lot less scary than terrorism. And the reason for that is obvious: the images that are presented to us and the attitudes of the people around us proclaim war to be normal.
War doesn’t surprise us; it doesn’t shock us. We’ve been trained to believe that wars are contained and that it’s mainly people in uniforms that are affected. The truth, however, is otherwise. Civilian deaths in World War II, for example, were double the number of soldier deaths.
Uniforms, authorizations, and official displays turn our eyes away from the massive horror of war. Everything around us supports the old saying that “one man dying is a tragedy; a million men dying is a statistic.” Everything supports fear of terror rather than fear of war.
Reality, however, is unmoved by our fears: War is death, dismemberment, and impoverishment, and it will never be anything else… just like terrorism, but much, much larger.
Our images and norms are at odds with reality. Consider this, please:
Government-waged war is hundreds of times worse than small bands of crazies. To take a ho-hum attitude toward war while remaining panicked over terrorism is wildly irrational.
When our feelings disagree with realty, it’s time to recalibrate them.
Now What?
Now, if we care about reality – if we care about our hearts and minds functioning well – we must stop accepting the massive terror of war as normal. Millions of people being killed in political disputes is beyond barbaric.
If this be normalcy, the systems that produce it must be questioned at the most basic levels and replaced. Promptly.
At the same time, we must stop living in fear. Fear makes us stupid; it makes us manipulable. Fear enslaves us.
Last Words
My point in this article is not that we should ignore the horrors of terrorism. Rather, it’s that we should see the situation as it is. And for those of us in the West, the situation is that terrorism is a political weapon, wielded by politicians in the service of what Dwight Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex.”
We should further understand that eliminating terrorism would deprive these people of their greatest tool. If terrorism stopped, they’d have to replace it. The Western status quo requires a frightened and confused populace.
Terrorism is a deadly reminder of just how deceived humans can become. Eliminating it will be awfully hard if we remain terrified and deceived ourselves.
* * * * *
If you’ve enjoyed Free-Man’s Perspective or A Lodging of Wayfaring Men, you’re going to love Paul Rosenberg’s new novel, The Breaking Dawn.
It begins with an attack that crashes the investment markets, brings down economic systems, and divides the world. One part is dominated by mass surveillance and massive data systems: clean cities and empty minds… where everything is assured and everything is ordered. The other part is abandoned, without services, with limited communications, and shoved 50 years behind the times… but where human minds are left to find their own bearings.
You may never look at life the same way again.
Get it now at Amazon ($18.95) or on Kindle: ($5.99)
* * * * *
Paul Rosenberg
[Editor’s Note: Paul Rosenberg is the outside-the-Matrix author of FreemansPerspective.com, a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence and privacy. He is also the author of The Great Calendar, a report that breaks down our complex world into an easy-to-understand model. Click here to get your free copy.]
Time for a break.
Dave
I think your article should also address the deaths where religions pair off against each other.
I submit the following article.
I hope you were not intending to ignore the millions of deaths in history by Islamic and Christian
warriors, as you encourage readers to believe that today’s terrorism by Muslim’s is minuscule.
In my opinion, their Caliphate, and their coming ‘Mahd’i are still forming up for their next worldwide
assault.
According to prophesy Many places will be destroyed. We know precisely what is to occur,
where it will occur, but are lacking when the events will occur. This info has come from ‘Heaven’
and is unpleasant to contemplate.
The second thing you address is “Our Feelings are Wrong”. I agree. Today’s truths seem to be based more on ’emotional truth’ than ‘actual, factual truth’. People are dumbed down and cannot see the difference. Imagine, most believe the Jewish Holocaust actually occurred the way ‘the Big Lie’ said it did. I submit, that this is a perfect example of ’emotional truth’ continuing to exist
at the expense of actual, factual, truth. As ex- Potus Bill Clinton says: “It depends on what the meaning of “is’ …is’.
https://www.quora.com/Which-religion-is-responsible-for-the-greatest-number-of-deaths-of-infidels-over-its-entire-history
Which religion is responsible for the greatest number of deaths of “infidels” over its entire history?
I’m thinking of the Crusades of course, but also the putting to death of many Central Americans in the name of “civilizing” them by Cortez and his fellow (Christian) travellers.
Today, in the West, we seem to think of Islam as being more prone to violence in the name of the prophet, whilst conveniently forgetting the bloody history of Christianity and all its sectarian divisions.
Is this a real difference now. Has it ever been? Is it in any way related to the age of the religion in question? After establishment, are religions, as a generality, more prone to proselytisation at the tip of a sword, during their adolescence, so to speak, until they reach a staid middle age and roll steadily down hill into senescence and death?
11 Answers
Luke A Bean, AP World/US/European History tutor
This is long, but the answer is going to make your jaw drop, so bear with me.
It’d be tough to track down statistics on every religious war in history, but most religions can be eliminated pretty quickly, either because they don’t have a track record of religious war or because they were never popular enough to rack up much of a body count. I’ll focus on the two you’ve mentioned, Islam and Christianity, since both are extremely popular religions with a strong focus on proselytizing and a tendency to come to blows over theology.
This is going to involve arbitrary judgement calls and back-of-the-envelope estimations, so don’t expect a particularly definitive answer. I’m going to count both martyrs and slain infidels towards each religion’s score, since it’s hard to find detailed statistics on which sides lost how many people for some of these wars. I’m also going to award each war’s death total to whichever side started it, since any country’s going to fight back against an invasion whether or not it’s religiously motivated. I’ll start by ignoring any war with <100,000 deaths, since those aren't likely to tip the scales, as well as civil wars where neither side is secular and there's no clear aggressor.
German Peasants' War -- A series of peasant revolts during the height of the Protestant Reformation, spurred on by a mix of economic and religious causes. 100k deaths for Christianity.
Moro Insurgency -- Islamic rebels in the Philippines have a long, bloody history of resistance against colonial and Philippine governments alike. 120k deaths for Islam.
Northern Crusades -- Crusades to root out the Baltic pagans. Couldn't find any good casualty estimates, but 150k deaths for Christianity seems reasonable.
Algerian Civil War -- More Islamist rebels. 200k deaths for Islam.
Lord's Resistance Army -- Christian militants in Central Africa. Remember Kony 2012? 200k deaths for Christianity.
Albigensian Crusade -- France leads a crusade to root Cathar heretics out of the Languedoc. Estimates vary wildly from 7k to 1mil, but let's just say 200k deaths for Christianity.
Great Turkish War -- A "Holy League" of Christian states rolls back the Ottoman Empire's conquests in Eastern Europe. 300k deaths for Christianity.
Afghan Civil Wars -- A variety of Islamists, including Al Qaeda, vie for control over Afghanistan. 400k deaths for Islam.
Rashidun Conquests -- The Islamic Caliphate conquered its way from being a desert backwater to the world's most powerful state in an incredibly short period of time. I can't find anything resembling an estimate for the casualties involved, so I'm going to completely BS this one: 500k deaths for Islam. Trust me, it won't affect the winner.
Ottoman Conquests -- Mehmed II leads the Ottomans on a merry path of conquest over Eastern Europe. 800k deaths for Islam.
The Crusades -- All of Christendom spends a few
Paul Rosenberg wrote the article.