One Geek

What is so important that requires the deaths of people in conflict zones. Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, India, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Dafur in Sudan, the list goes on..

There are so many places currently in conflict which I guess makes sense giving that the world spends 1 trillion dollars and guess who spends 47% of this amount?
The good old US of A of course.

How effectively is this money being spent?
In 2003 100,000 people died as a direct result of conflict according to this report. That’s 10 million dollars per a death, pretty expensive. There must be a cheaper way. And you know there is.. We could just starve countries to death instead of spending money on arms, that worked well with Iraq, until the US decided to break that plan and invade them.

Every year 6 million children under the age of 5 die from completely preventable causes. Apathy seems to be a much more efficient and effective merchant of death then armed conflict. Although World War II was a bit more effective causing about 63 million deaths according to this page. Though if you spread it over the duration of the war it’s only about 9 million a year. Add in other deaths due to poverty and I think you’ll see it’s more effective.

So if anyone really wants to effectively kill people just cut overseas development aid and wait for the people to die from things like hunger, malaria and HIV/AIDS. You see we just can’t kill people as cheaply and efficiently as poverty can. If you really want the land and resources of people in these countries just wait until most of them are dead, and either invade them cheaply or buy them out.

If you want to stop people dying needlessly there is a pretty simple method. Give the poor you voice, your time and some of your hard earned cash. Get behind the efforts already being made.

Did you know that if we took just 20% off the amount that the world spends on arm and put it into the Millennium Development Goals we could End Poverty in the next ten years.

Maybe that would also help solve the problems creating conflicts throughout the world.
My Other ideas for conflict zones:
all forces in disputed zones should withdraw, and all these zones should become neutral zones.
The world should have week where they don’t make or sell any weapons at all.
There should be a global ceasefire day.
We could abolish the concept of nations.

Does anyone else have any ideas? No idea is too crazy.
We could make people use homous loaded guns when they attack of each other.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 12:04 am and is filed under Social Justice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.