So, anonymous, I appreciate your comments and I’ll try not to say things like that again.
It seems the issue of disbanding police maybe is a little to extreme for people to consider at the moment so we’ll just leave that alone for now. We’ll change the focus just a little bit and consider the war in Iraq.
The number of civilian casualties in a war is disturbing to me. I mean back in the day wars were fought with folks lining up in rows in a field and shooting each other or stabing each other, now we bomb villages and cities.
In The Powers that Be, by Walter Wink, (and you should read it if you haven’t), he talks about how from 1700 till recently civilian deaths (meaning we didn’t intentionally kill the person) had been about 50 percent of the deaths in a war. But recently with modern technology it jumped to 74 percent of the deaths in the 1980’s and appears to be close to 90 percent in the 90’s. That’s scary.
If you compare the casualties in Iraq to the soldiers that 90% seems about right.
Does anyone else think we need to sit back and reconsider this war thing a little bit? If you do I’ve got a great place to start: Read The Powers that Be, by Walter Wink (check it out of your local library).
Another place to start would be to check out this link: Addressing the issue of Nuclear weapons (still being built in the USA)
If I said something terribly obvious here I’m sorry.
“Love your enemies.”
hey ariah, this is christy from mosaic. well, i mean, you haven’t met me because i’m in VA for the summer, but i’m on the forum as scribebytrade.
just wanted to say it’s great to see someone who’s interested in social justice issues attending the church now. we were in need of someone to get things rolling on that. there are more than a few people at mosaic who are interested in making things happen on that front. don’t be too discouraged about the reaction about the tenncare stuff. i know that many of us haven’t been in TN for too long and aren’t real familiar with the issue. but the interest is there, so please keep on trucking. i look forward to meeting you and mindy in a couple of weeks, and maybe we can discuss some of these things in person.
have a lovely evening.
OK, let’s take this piece by piece.
First of all, the percentages about proportions of civilian casualties (unintended, non-combatant deaths) are an inadequate part of a larger picture. If you would examine the total number of civilian deaths in war (compare WWI with the Gulf War, for example), I know that you would fine that the ascendancy of modern technology in war has led to a drastic decrease in non-intended deaths.
I’ll state it differently. Instead of lining people up across fields and shooting until one side is gone, planes now make it possible to guide weapons in an extraordinarily precise manner. Do pilots make errors? Of course. However, your statistics about percentages and proportions are tremendously misleading and would suggest that civilian deaths are on the RISE, when any serious-minded study would tell you that we are vastly better off, both attacker and defender, now than in the 1700s.
Now, whether or not war should be “rethought” is an ethical question best left to your own personal conscience. I would recommend though that you make absolutely certain that you know what you are talking about. I would not want to be responsible if I instituted a pacifist foreign policy and incurred all sorts of attacks from foreign aggressors. I would not want to tell Americans that my ethics demanded their death. I would not want to say that, especially if I was wrong about my ethics.
I would also recommend that you drop the link to Iraq Body Count. This website has been discredited tremendously and is not considered credible by those who would bother to look behind that nice running total.
Stephen Spruiell from the National Review Online does a fantastic job of demonstrating the duplicity and errors that are so prevelant in IBC. You can read his review here: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/spruiell200507260924.asp