POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S DAVID BLAIR
Thanks, David Blair, but a sense of proportion is essential in human affairs.
We have War on Terror drummed into our heads 24 hours a day, but what are the facts that give us a proper sense of proportion?
9/11, the event starting matters, killed about 8% of the number of Americans killed on America's highways every year. About 15% of the number of Americans murdered by other Americans every year. Less than 1% of the number of Americans who die of cancer every year.
The average American's chance of being killed by terror is lower than being struck by lightning. The same for Britains.
Yet a paranoid America has blindly lashed out, killing thousand of innocents in Afghanistan, killing over half a million in Iraq, passing dark laws against its own citizens' rights, creating an international torture gulag, and many other absurdly extreme measures.
The fact is that even the ugly, pointless war in Iraq is small by 20th century standards. America killed about 3 million, mostly civilians, in Vietnam. 55 million died in World War II, including millions of incinerated civilians. About 20 million in the Great War. About another 20 million died worldwide in the flu epidemic which followed. And there was much more during that leader-packed century.
This is, relatively speaking, a time of peace. It's about as good as it gets in human affairs.
There is no genuine crisis that would challenge potential great leaders to rise. The ineffectual, annoying Tony Blair and George Bush is what you get. My problem with those gentlemen is they have been so willing to raise a panic and kill others to further their own careers. This becomes an ethical issue, and one can argue they are among the more evil leaders on earth, remembering that evil is so often bland-looking and seemingly pedestrian.
We all now live with a somewhat fantasy, suggestion-induced sense of reality. This is the result of television pumping advertising, both commercial and political, into our homes 24 hours a day. You need facts and a sense of history to avoid being swept away.
