Comments on: Les Roberts Weighs in on Lancet Controversy

By: herbert browne

herbert browne — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 07:16:16 +0000

There are certainly excellent reasons- political reasons- to deny Roberts’ body count. How does one create frothing at the mouth over the carnage of Saddam Hussein, if the “relief’ to his vicious oppression results in ANOTHER enormous pile of corpses? ^..^

By: Jon Garfunkel

Jon Garfunkel — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 02:40:05 +0000

Thanks Tom B. I disagree with Chelsea’s comment above and Greta’s repeating of it. I don’t know what home it hits. It signifies indifference. Consider some of the counts of sacred American deaths– three thousand on 9/11; six hundred thousand deaths during the civil war. Now imagine some foreigner saying, what does it matter whether the number is that, or off by a factor of ten. Similarly, imagine being indifferent as to whether the Holocaust killed 6 million or 600,000.

As Roberts puts it: “How can the US and Britain pretend they understand the level of resentment in Iraq if they are not sure if, on average, one in 80 families have lost a household member, or one in seven, as our study suggests?”

I had respected the Iraq Body Count, though I detest the fact that they continue, after all this time, to feature a B-2 bomber on the front page, rather than some other image of humanity (have they not visited a single victims’ memorial in the free world?). Recognizing each victim, in some fashion, by recognizing that they are part of the count.

But reading the column from Roberts in the Independent has changed my mind. It is certainly likely that the Iraqi government has been downplaying the statistics– more likely than there be less of a violent death rate than in former Soviet states Columbia ro South Africa.

By: Tom B

Tom B — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 17:35:23 +0000

Hmmm…. ‘Once you get into the thousands and tens of thousands does it really matter?’ — I’d respond that it matters (to you) if your mom, or dad, or brother or sister is one of the dead. One of the reasons The Holocaust still resonates is because so many family members survived and moved to the United States, media hub of the world, and spoke out — loudly. And one of the most obvious reasons Leopold’s crimes are forgotten is because the relatives of the victims never got hold of a megaphone. It’s absolutely important to realize that PREMATURE death at the hands of another has significance — but it is only the living that can give that significance to the life and death of the deceased. Those who kill (usually) treat those they kill as a pile of dead meat, like road kill on a freeway. The role of the surviving family is really important! Stalin understood this too well, so he simply made entire families disappear so no one was left who could remember them… Some might say that the failure of the American military is that it allows family members to survive and mourn their dead — and to get angry!

By: LumiÃ¨re

LumiÃ¨re — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 21:09:28 +0000

Did Leopold II of Belgium kill 15 million or 20 million in the Congo?

Why does it matter?

People are being killed nowâ€¦.make it stop.

By: Andrew Kinney

Andrew Kinney — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:52:52 +0000

A similar concern with counting the dead is found in Mahmood Mamdani’s recent article that appears in the London Review of Books (“The Politics of Naming”), which is in regards to Darfur. Mamdani (currently at Columbia, I believe) argues that Western intervention (both military and humanitarian) is both a form of colonialism and threatens to send Sudan into a large-scale civil war. He also argues against categorizing Darfur as genocide. His piece is intriguing and potentially controversial–have a read.