Who Is Deadlier: Man Or Mother Nature?
Janadas Devan, The Straits Times (Singapore), 1/15/05
Many articles have appeared, both in these pages and elsewhere, suggesting that the Indian Ocean tsunamis show that terrorism, compared to the devastation nature can inflict, is an exaggerated threat.
The suggestion is misleading.
Natural disasters can indeed be horrendous, but most of them are one-off events and their effects can be contained, although with considerable difficulty.
Social, economic and political upheavals, on the other hand, are often impossible to contain, and their ramifications can last decades, if not centuries. Thus the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai's famous reply when he was asked about the effects of the 1789 French Revolution. 'Too early to tell,' he said.
Also, it is nonsensical to compare the number of people who have died at the hands of terrorists in recent years to the number who died in the Indian Ocean tsunamis. September 11 took the lives of far fewer people than the tsunamis, certainly, but that is no reason why one should take the threat posed by terrorists less seriously.
If terrorist organisations get hold of a nuclear bomb or some other weapon of mass destruction, they can kill millions. It is not only the harm that we know organisations like Al-Qaeda are capable of inflicting, and have, that should concern us, but the far greater harm that they can potentially inflict.
Finally, the suggestion that non-security-related or natural disasters are more destructive than security-related or man-made disasters is not borne out by the numbers.
The religious wars in 17th century Europe were extraordinarily savage. In 1618, for instance, at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, Germans numbered about 22 million. Thirty years later, they numbered only 12 million.
The Taiping Rebellion in mid-19th century China was similarly bloody. Led by one Hung Xiu-quan, a variety of Christian with startling notions of establishing a kingdom of God on earth, the rebellion caused the deaths of about 20 million people.
The political wars of the 20th century were as savage as the religious wars of the previous centuries. The civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917 killed about 15 million. Josef Stalin's purges, labour concentration camps and forced farm collectivisations added another 20 to 40 million to Russia's killing fields.
World War II resulted in 55 million military and civilian casualties, almost half of them in the former Soviet Union, which lost 27 million. These figures do not include the 15 to 21 million who expired in Adolf Hitler's genocidal schemes, including the six million Jews he exterminated.
Mao Zedong snuffed out the lives of between 20 and 60 million people in the course of his many grandiose campaigns to remake China - from the Hundred Flowers' Bloom and the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Western experts tend to cite the higher figure, while Chinese authorities cite the lower. But even the lower figure is nothing to sneeze at. It is five times Singapore's current population.
Barring a meteorite smashing into Earth, Man's capacity for destruction certainly seems greater than almost anything nature can inflict. The 1876-79 famines in Asia and South America, resulting from droughts caused by El Nino, are about the only natural disasters in recent history that came close to inflicting as many deaths as man did in the 20th century. Those famines killed an estimated 50 million.
We would have to go back further in history, to the 'Black Death' plagues of the 14th century in Europe and China, to glimpse more horrifying 'natural' possibilities. The plague eliminated a third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351, and between half and two-thirds of China's in 1353. Some scholars trace China's decline as a great power from this point.
Even today, diseases of all kinds - from the preventable and curable, like malaria, to the preventable but incurable, like HIV/Aids - kill many more people than do either wars or earthquakes. Insofar as bugs and viruses are 'natural', pandemics may be considered 'natural disasters', but humanity is no longer as helpless before them as it was in the 14th century. The vast majority of the deaths from infectious diseases in the developing world today are wholly preventable.
The same, of course, cannot be said of the deaths due to calamities like the Indian Ocean tsunamis. Still, within a year from now, life would probably have acquired some semblance of near-normalcy in Aceh and Sri Lanka; and within five years, reconstruction would be more or less complete in the devastated areas. And if it isn't, it would not be because of nature, but because of long-standing man-made conflicts in these areas interfering with the reconstruction.
Is it possible to predict a similar end to the threat posed by terrorism in the foreseeable future? In all likelihood, the world will continue to wrestle with Islamic extremism for another generation at least, perhaps longer. It is a phenomenon which has its roots, according to some historians, in the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918, four generations ago, and in the view of others, perhaps earlier still, in Western expansionism going back all the way to the Crusades, 700 to 1,000 years ago. That's how long the rippling effects of human upheavals can last.
The suddenness of the tsunamis, the devastation they caused, reminded humanity of its helplessness before nature. In the wake of that reminder, it was possible to feel man-made disasters paled by comparison with natural ones. Theoretically at least, they can be averted, so why should one think of them as overwhelming?
But that is a deceptive sense born of a sudden shock. Nature, despite the harm it can cause, is capable of a blessed amnesia. Earthquakes and tsunamis are not daily occurrences. History, on the other hand, never sleeps. Its waking nightmares, consequently, can lay waste to life for far longer periods.
Many articles have appeared, both in these pages and elsewhere, suggesting that the Indian Ocean tsunamis show that terrorism, compared to the devastation nature can inflict, is an exaggerated threat.
The suggestion is misleading.
Natural disasters can indeed be horrendous, but most of them are one-off events and their effects can be contained, although with considerable difficulty.
Social, economic and political upheavals, on the other hand, are often impossible to contain, and their ramifications can last decades, if not centuries. Thus the former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai's famous reply when he was asked about the effects of the 1789 French Revolution. 'Too early to tell,' he said.
Also, it is nonsensical to compare the number of people who have died at the hands of terrorists in recent years to the number who died in the Indian Ocean tsunamis. September 11 took the lives of far fewer people than the tsunamis, certainly, but that is no reason why one should take the threat posed by terrorists less seriously.
If terrorist organisations get hold of a nuclear bomb or some other weapon of mass destruction, they can kill millions. It is not only the harm that we know organisations like Al-Qaeda are capable of inflicting, and have, that should concern us, but the far greater harm that they can potentially inflict.
Finally, the suggestion that non-security-related or natural disasters are more destructive than security-related or man-made disasters is not borne out by the numbers.
The religious wars in 17th century Europe were extraordinarily savage. In 1618, for instance, at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War, Germans numbered about 22 million. Thirty years later, they numbered only 12 million.
The Taiping Rebellion in mid-19th century China was similarly bloody. Led by one Hung Xiu-quan, a variety of Christian with startling notions of establishing a kingdom of God on earth, the rebellion caused the deaths of about 20 million people.
The political wars of the 20th century were as savage as the religious wars of the previous centuries. The civil war following the Russian Revolution of 1917 killed about 15 million. Josef Stalin's purges, labour concentration camps and forced farm collectivisations added another 20 to 40 million to Russia's killing fields.
World War II resulted in 55 million military and civilian casualties, almost half of them in the former Soviet Union, which lost 27 million. These figures do not include the 15 to 21 million who expired in Adolf Hitler's genocidal schemes, including the six million Jews he exterminated.
Mao Zedong snuffed out the lives of between 20 and 60 million people in the course of his many grandiose campaigns to remake China - from the Hundred Flowers' Bloom and the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s, to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Western experts tend to cite the higher figure, while Chinese authorities cite the lower. But even the lower figure is nothing to sneeze at. It is five times Singapore's current population.
Barring a meteorite smashing into Earth, Man's capacity for destruction certainly seems greater than almost anything nature can inflict. The 1876-79 famines in Asia and South America, resulting from droughts caused by El Nino, are about the only natural disasters in recent history that came close to inflicting as many deaths as man did in the 20th century. Those famines killed an estimated 50 million.
We would have to go back further in history, to the 'Black Death' plagues of the 14th century in Europe and China, to glimpse more horrifying 'natural' possibilities. The plague eliminated a third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351, and between half and two-thirds of China's in 1353. Some scholars trace China's decline as a great power from this point.
Even today, diseases of all kinds - from the preventable and curable, like malaria, to the preventable but incurable, like HIV/Aids - kill many more people than do either wars or earthquakes. Insofar as bugs and viruses are 'natural', pandemics may be considered 'natural disasters', but humanity is no longer as helpless before them as it was in the 14th century. The vast majority of the deaths from infectious diseases in the developing world today are wholly preventable.
The same, of course, cannot be said of the deaths due to calamities like the Indian Ocean tsunamis. Still, within a year from now, life would probably have acquired some semblance of near-normalcy in Aceh and Sri Lanka; and within five years, reconstruction would be more or less complete in the devastated areas. And if it isn't, it would not be because of nature, but because of long-standing man-made conflicts in these areas interfering with the reconstruction.
Is it possible to predict a similar end to the threat posed by terrorism in the foreseeable future? In all likelihood, the world will continue to wrestle with Islamic extremism for another generation at least, perhaps longer. It is a phenomenon which has its roots, according to some historians, in the collapse of the Ottoman empire in 1918, four generations ago, and in the view of others, perhaps earlier still, in Western expansionism going back all the way to the Crusades, 700 to 1,000 years ago. That's how long the rippling effects of human upheavals can last.
The suddenness of the tsunamis, the devastation they caused, reminded humanity of its helplessness before nature. In the wake of that reminder, it was possible to feel man-made disasters paled by comparison with natural ones. Theoretically at least, they can be averted, so why should one think of them as overwhelming?
But that is a deceptive sense born of a sudden shock. Nature, despite the harm it can cause, is capable of a blessed amnesia. Earthquakes and tsunamis are not daily occurrences. History, on the other hand, never sleeps. Its waking nightmares, consequently, can lay waste to life for far longer periods.