THE HARMS WROUGHT BY NATIONAL CONFLICTS AND WARFARE

The Second World War was responsible for another fifty to sixty million deaths.  Fifteen to twenty million of these were military personnel; the rest were civilian men, women, and children.  The largest number of losses, both military and civilian, were suffered by the Russians.  Seven and a half to ten million troops never came home; and at least ten to fourteen million civilians died.  Approximately five and a half million Germans lost their lives, including at least three and a half million military.  In addition, the Nazis were responsible at the same time for the deaths of five to six million Jews.

The aforesaid grand total includes over two million Chinese who met their death; as well as approximately two million Japanese.  In addition, almost six million Poles, and a million and a half Yugoslavs were killed.  The British, French, and Italians suffered approximately a half million deaths apiece.  Moreover, the United States military suffered a death toll of close to three hundred thousand. 

As in World War I, the scale of the fighting was incredibly gigantic.  For example, during a single episode south of Moscow in 1943, a thousand Russian tanks were engaged in battle with approximately the same number of German tanks. 

 World War II also stands out as a new kind of warfare, wherein the deliberate killing of massive numbers of civilian non-combatants regularly took place.  London was described as an ocean of flames, as tons of German bombs fell upon it day after day in 1940, killing many thousands of civilians.  And when the German army's seige of Leningrad, Russia, was finally terminated in January of 1943, it was determined that half of the city's residents had not survived the winter.

Similar to the accounts of World War I, some of the more focused particulars concerning this vast reckoning of deaths express the most harrowing details.  For example, more than three million of Russia's losses consisted of Russian prisoners of war who died from exposure and famine in German lands.  The German siege of the Russian fortress at Sevastopol, in July, 1942, consisted of twenty five days of ferocious battle, which claimed over three hundred thousand casualties.  During early 1943, when the German occupation of Stalingrad ended, ninety thousand German troops had perished from starvation and the cold, in addition to the one hundred thousand who were killed during the last three weeks of fighting prior to their surrender.  In July, 1943, American bombers destroyed seven square miles within the city of Hamburg, killing thirty thousand people.  In 1944, two hundred thousand Poles died in Warsaw, after nine weeks of fighting with the Germans.  And in February, 1945, the Russian army conquered Budapest, after fifty days of battle, and the death of 159,000 persons.  During the same month, Allied bombers dropoped death and destruction upon the city of Dresden for two days, leaving that beautiful landmark destroyed, and 130,000--mostly civilians--dead.

Britain's battles with the Japanese during 1942 qand 1943 prompted a directed "scorched earth" policy in the Bengal region of India, as well as a stockpiling or hoarding of the rice produced there for the feeding of British and Indian troops.  This resulteed in a famine om the region during 1943 and 1944, in which close to four million human beings perished.

In March of 1945, American bombers pummeled Tokyo, killing at least a hundred thousand.  In desperation, Japan resorted to drastic, though ineffective, measures, including closing its schools, and ordering all chhildren over six years of age into war service.  In June, United States forces killed over a hundred thousand Japanese on Okinowa.  And a few months later, in August, 1945, the U.S. dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima totally destroyed over four square miles of that city, and brought eventual death to over two hundred thousand thousand Japanese.

Winston Churchill described postwar Europe as a "rubble heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate."  One dramatic expression of such hatred was the postwar expulsion of Germans from the nations of Eastern Europe.  This exodus numbered about fifteen million people, of whom two to three million died as a result of lack of food, shelter, and medical care during their travels.

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The greatest man-made threat to humanity--indeed, to our very survival on earth--was unveiled on August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.  The "more fortunate" of those to lose their lives were the many who perished immediately.  A longer, more miserable fate awaited the many others who succumbed to "radiation sickness" by the end of that year.  And, of course, there were the numerous additional poor souls who died of cancer during succeeding months and years.

Shortly after the end of World War II, which termination was attributed to the nuclear attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, differences between the United States and Russia prompted a nuclear arms buildup on the part of both countries.  Thus commenced an arms race that resulteed in each side possessing a cache having the potential to destroy the world.  Like children collecting more and bigger rocks to throw at each other, both nations built, tested, and stockpiled bigger and better bombs.  Subsequently, other countries eventually achieved the dubious distinction of likewise becoming "nuclear powers."

New phrases. like "civil defense," "fall-out shelters," "megadeaths," and "overkill" entered our vocabularies, as the "Cold War" proceeded apace during the sixties and seventies.  The United States and Russia each possessed sufficient "firepower" to destroy each other many times over.  One study estimated that the totality comprised the equivalent of ten tons (i.e., 20,000 pounds) of TNT for each person in Europe (including all of Russia) and America.  A highlight of this dangerous season was the Cuban missile crisis" of 1962, which brought the world closer to the brink of nuclear devastation than it has ever been.  Today, the U.S. and Russia are basically friends; but there have arisen many new enemies in many countries, who constitute threats to world peace.

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Bearing sorry similarity to the Russian Revolution following World War I, a civil war took place in China between 1945 and 1949, which resulted in several million deaths.  Like Russia in 1917, the Chinese upheaval basically resulted from the misery and consequent vulnerability within the country following World War II.  As with Russia of several decades earlier, it likewise represented an attempt by desperate leaders of a miserable mass of citizens to improve the status of a distressed and impoverished giant among the bevy of nations, following a massive destructive war.  Distressed people are ripe for change.  As in genetics, where unfavorable conditions can trigger mutations, distress among people often fosters revolution.  Unfortunately some of these changes can produce more harm than benefit.

A sad result of the changes in China were the excesses and brutalities of  Mao Zedong's regime, which lasted from 1949 to 1975, and cost perhaps some forty million lives.  Responsibility can be assigned to the purges, the labor camps, the famines, and particularly to the casualties of the unrealistic ambitions implicit in a program that bore resemblances to ancient Egypt, called the "Great Leap Forward."

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Another unfortunate event that flared up a short time after the end of the Second World War was the "Korean conflict."  It represented an effort by the communist-led forces of the North, instigated and supported by Communist China, to invade and conquer the non-communist South.  In sum, it could be described as half of a country attacking its other half, with the backing of several larger countries (China and Russia) motivated by their kinship with the North's economic orientation.  Through the mechanism of the United Nations, attempts were made by a group of non-communist countries, consisting mainly of the United States, to stem the tide and repel the invading forces.  As might occur in a schoolyard fight, the North's big brother China eventually became involved.  Two hundred thousand Chinese troops faced a U.N. force of 160,000 (the majority of the latter being American).  What could have become the Third World War was fortunately averted, when President Truman, contrary to the urgings of General MacArthur, his commander of operations in that theater, limited the United States' role in this conflict taking place halfway across the world.

The Korean conflict seems to have been the first of several subsequent examples of two groups of nation-states, on opposite sides of an economic or poolitical ideal, joining an altercation involving two respective younger brothers.   Millions of Koreans and several thousand Americans lost their lives; and the result accomplished was more or less insignificant in terms of thwarting communist expansion.

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 The Vietnamese conflict of 1964 to 1975 represents another instance of half a country attacking its other half.  The North received limited assistance from its "big brother" Russia; and the South was the recipient of massive aid in the form of as many as a half million troops from the United States.  In the end, a million and a quarter Vietnamese were dead; and so were over fifty eight thousand American servicemen.  The final cost to the United States was over $140 Billion Dollars. 

Once more, the less grandiose details serve to better illustrate the wrongness and futility if virtually all warfare.  In September of 1966, American planes accidentally bombed a friendly village in South Vietnam, killing a number of innocent people.  In November of 1969, American soldiers put almost six hundred innocent villagers to death at Mylai.  And in August, 1973, a U.S. aircraft accidentally bombed a village in Cambodia, killing four hundred hapless civilians.

In sum, American efforts in Vietnam produced less benefit than had been hoped for.  At the same time, these efforts occasionally descended to the level of war crimes and atrocities upon the wretched civilians caught in the middle of the violence.  Many American troops sought refuge in drug addiction while there; and returned home with a feeling that their sacrifices were unproductive and unappreciated.

Vietnam comprised yet another illustration of nations assisting opposite halves of a subordinate nation, in its personal civil war.  In a borderless world, such a conflagration could not have occurred--for there would have been no half-country for the other half-country to have aspired to conquer.  Mankind's economic system would be a worldwide system; and, hence, any such similar attempts to disrupt it, other than according to existing precepts of law, would be viewed, and dealt with, as insurrection.  Suggestions of, and petitions for, modification would be permissible; but only via statutorily ordained methods and procedures--for such changes, if any, would affect the entire world.

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During the years following 1945, peace generally prevailed in Europe.  But in much of the remainder of the world, death and destruction continued on a regular basis.  More than a million Cambodians were executed by the Khmer Rouge in its efforts to establish a national socialist system during the 1970s.  Israeli planes dropped bombs on West Beruit, Lebanon, in August, 1982; bringing the two month death toll in this conflict to twenty thousand.  A war between Iran and Iraq went on for eight years, between 1990 and 1998, with a death toll of over a million.  Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 precipitated the Persian Gulf War, which left approximately thirty thousand Iraqi soldiers, plus countless thousands of civilians dead.

Millions of Ethiopians met their demise between 1962 and 1991, as a result of civil war, drought, and famine; the last of which being augmented by its president Mengistu's blockade of donated relief supplies in an effort to "starve out" the rebels.  Civil war in Sudan, which begsan in 1983, caused death to a million refugees who were uprooted by the fighting and subsequently died from hunger.  And in Mozambique, a civil war that commenced in 1976 claimed a great many lives--including a hundred thousand slain by right-wing guerillas between 1987 and 1989.

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