New York Daily News, NY
Sept 11 2005

Mankind’s deadly toll

One of the many disturbing aspects of the Gulf Coast disaster is the
way everyone has been repeating this one phrase: A devastating
hurricane hit was never a question of “if,” they say, but “when.”
It is the same wording people use when they talk about another
terrorist attack here in New York.

For the last four years, an “if, not when” at the hand of man has
haunted most New Yorkers’ scariest daydreams. The London bombings
turned up the volume. So does an anniversary like today.

But as we see the bodies in New Orleans and feel for the families
there, it’s obvious that Mother Nature harbors a wrath at least as
terrible as Osama Bin Laden’s. And guess what? A ‘cane could drown
N.Y.C., a headline in the Daily News announced Thursday. Said the
story, “New York is a coastal city in a vulnerable spot.”

Vulnerable again? It’s enough to make a mere mortal wonder which to
fear more: man or nature. And it is hardly reassuring to hear the
answer: Humans are gaining the deadly edge.

This is a new distinction for our species. Until the last century,
says Steven Katz, director of the Elie Wiesel Center at Boston
University, nature was probably responsible for more death than
murderous mankind. And if you count disease, nature still is – maybe.
No one is absolutely sure about the math.

But if we are talking about natural disasters like floods and fires
versus man-made evils like war and banishment, humans recently pulled
ahead in the destruction sweepstakes.

“In the 20th century, the estimate is that 100 million people were
killed by government,” says Katz. These include all the soldiers who
died in World Wars I and II – 5 million Russians alone in the first
six months of fighting Hitler – as well as the 6 million Jews
exterminated in the Holocaust, all the Chinese killed in China’s
civil war and later Cultural Revolution, millions more killed in the
India-Pakistan War, millions slain by Stalin, as well as untold
murders in Rwanda, Uganda, Croatia, Cambodia, Armenia, Argentina. …
The list, unfortunately, goes on and on.

What’s worse, we civilians are only becoming more imperiled, says
Stephen Couch, a sociologist at Penn State. “Centuries ago, wars were
by and large limited to professional armies fighting one another,” he
says. “So the majority of casualties were military. Now, the majority
of casualties are civilians.”

This is a byproduct of what we call progress. “New weapons made new
tactics possible, like the deliberate wiping out of civilian
populations,” says Couch, citing Dresden and Hiroshima.

Terrorism is just the latest military technique, and Couch is not
optimistic about how it may evolve. “I think that the destructiveness
of war is likely to remain the same or perhaps get worse, with all
sorts of weapons of mass destruction, atomic proliferation and
biological warfare. The history of weaponry is that if you have a
weapon, it gets used.”

Mother Nature will continue to wreak her tsunamis, floods,
earthquakes and hurricanes, all of them devastating. But she does not
spend her days devising new ways to destroy mankind.

That is what the Bin Ladens of this world do.

In New York, as we pray for all those lost and prepare for all
eventualities, we must vow to work for peace. Because it’s not Mother
Nature that we can change.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress