History pulls the wool over our eyes

Rutgers University professor Deepa Kumar has set off a blaze after she tweeted that the United States is more brutal than the Islamic State. The rationale for her contention is that the US has killed 1.3 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. And, exactly how many people IS may have killed so far? She didn't mention it, although a UN report suggests 24,000 Iraqi civilians were killed by IS in the first eight months of 2014. Extrapolation at this rate gives ballpark indication that IS couldn't have crossed the US figure in roughly three years of its existence.  

James Lucas of Countercurrents.org estimated that covert and overt US criminal wars of aggression caused 20-30 million deaths of human beings since World War II. Why these people were killed obviously have two contrary versions. The American side and its allies argue with immense passion that these people were the necessary cost of honest efforts to save the world. The victims and their sympathisers contend that the USA killed because it poked its nose where it didn't belong.

The Lucas estimate also determined that a total of 37 nations in the world suffered US cruelty during roughly 70 years. It said that US forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths in Korea and Vietnam. The US hands were also involved in the deaths of 9 to 14 million people in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan. Since the counting was done in 2007, the number of deaths that have occurred in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan since then weren't included. 

Conquests have always come to the vanquisher at the expense of the vanquished. And, communism is one example in the 20th century when people died for an ideological cause instead of territorial or other ambitions. A conservative calculation states that between 1900 and 2000, 94 million people perished in China, the Soviet Union, North Korea, Afghanistan, and Eastern Europe. During the same period, 28 million had died under the fascist regimes.

More people died in the last century as a result of communism than from homicide (58 million) and genocide (30 million) combined. The combined death tolls of WWI (37 million) and WWII (66 million) exceed communism's total by only 9 million. If we look at the natural causes, animals killed 7 million, natural disasters 24 million and famine 101 million. Religion killed much less in the 20th century, as Juan Cole claims that out of 120 million killed in various wars only a small fraction, roughly 2 million, of that was the result of Muslim killings on account of political violence, fundamentalism and terrorism. 

Even though 7.1 billion people inhabit the Earth, the total accumulation of people, living and dead, has reached 108 billion. Recorded history shows that out of them roughly 800 million people died in wars, famines, prisons and death camps, floods and landslides and other deadly events. Besides these wholesale deaths, an unknown number must have died retail deaths due to snakebites, attacks by hungry animals, family violence, robbery, car accidents, boat capsizes, natural disasters and other accidents. Rest of the human beings died in their beds suffering from the normal wears and tears of life such as old age and illness.

The question whether IS has been more brutal than the US is ever more relevant now than before. If the beheading part is excluded and killing is viewed as a contest, the US would far exceed its adversary by sheer number and ruthlessness. The drone attacks are probably the most cold-blooded and calculated act of murder in human history. Unmanned aircrafts carry out precision strikes piloted by trained crews sitting at a base.

Throughout history, subjugators have given different names to their targets: idolaters, infidels, rivals, rebels, revolutionaries, communists, fundamentalists, militants and terrorists. And they have killed indiscriminately in the name of kingdoms, religion, and ideology. What IS has been doing to its hostages and captives are atrocious and repulsive. What the US did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, Mai Lai in Vietnam and Baghdad in Iraq was no less perverse and even worse. Many more people died as a result of these actions.

It boils down to a pathetic presumption of human condition. Since the dawn of mankind, death has been bringing out the flavour of life. Trickling down war, destruction, vengeance, misfortune and mishap, the human destiny evolved through countless trials and tribulations. 

But who gets more blame is a matter of perception. Mao Zedong's communist regime is responsible for the deaths of 60 million people, Joseph Stalin 40 million and Adolf Hitler 30 million. Yet, Hitler is hated more than others, because history is a cooked book. Debits and credits are misplaced in it to pull the wool over our eyes. 

The writer is the Editor of weekly First News and an opinion writer for The Daily Star. Email: badrul151@yahoo.com