The World’s Fair links to a great site at Telegraph.co.uk: the Atlas of the Real World. It’s a set of world maps (really cartograms), with the area of countries proportional to something more interesting than the mere land area — number of nuclear weapons, wealth in the year 1, and so on. Here is one to chew over: number of war deaths in the years since WWII.
Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Latin America shows up just a bit. The big orange country in Asia is China, not Russia.
Comments
14 responses to “Where Wars Kill People”
What this does not tell you is that by far the largest numbers of deaths are not actual combat deaths or even civilians killed as so called “collateral damage.” A far number of people die just from the opportunity loss because so much of the world’s resources and capital are devoted to war and preparations for war. The largest number of casualties occur because this activity curtails food production, education, healthcare and productive forms of economic activity.
Lawrence B. Crowell
Look at Africa, how are we supposed to know which color refers to which country?! I dislike this ambiguity!
Was there some massive Antarctic war I don’t know about? I know the projection enhances
things, but still, zero shouldn’t get projected to anything…
This site has many more cartograms:
http://www.worldmapper.org
Zodia,
Go look at the regular map for reference.
Re Antarctica, I like those elliptical projection they use for the CMB.
What Mr Crowell said in #1. I could not agree more.
The true weapons of mass destruction are the huge stockpiles of conventional weapons that are produced and the huge armies maintained. They end up depriving ordinary people — who have do dogs in any battle — of the basics of a human existence. It is heartbreaking to see the poverty in third world countries and realize that if these countries were to divert some of the resources devoted to war for development, the world would not be in such a sorry state.
Here endth my bleeding heart rant.
Mmmm, nice concept, dubious implementation…How come South America with a population in the same order of magnitude than the US still appears in the map in spite of no big significant war ( yes there was the Malvinas/Falklands, and small and extremely short wars between Peru-Ecuador) and US does not appear after Korea, Vietnam!!, Iraq I, Iraq II, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada, Serbia. Maybe they are counting the deaths caused by the several military dictatorships to their own citizens, but no matter how atrocious they were, those were not wars per se. And yes I know US always did most of the killing, but even so, they suffered casualties.
JJ — Latin America has suffered through countless civil wars over the last 60 years; “military dictatorships to their own civilians” sounds like the government just rounding people up and shooting them, and is a vast oversimplification. Deaths from these conflicts are rightly called “war deaths” for the most part; when competing rural militias, or rural militias and government troops, are killing both each other and civilians supposedly sympathetic to the other side, it’s every bit as much a war as the Viet Cong versus the US Army and ARVN. Deaths in Latin America since WWII include something like 200,000 in Guatemala, 200,000 in Colombia, and 100,000 in Peru — and those are just the ones I can think of right off. By comparison the US has lost about a hundred thousand people in all post-WWII conflicts put together.
This ties to something the map is probably trying to get across: for all the talk in the Western world about the cost of war, most of us haven’t really internalized the impacts that these conflicts, especially ones that raged for decades, really had on their respective countries.
One major signature is that some of the bigger nations in this map are those which the US has been in a war with: Korea, Vietnam, and I think Iraq shows up there — though the Iraq-Iran war contributed a lot to that one.
Lawrence B. Crowell
A subtle message in this particular cartogram is found in the questions of JJ and Zodia. If one is aware of African continental history over the last 60 years, one would have some way to identify the major revolutions and independence movements that lead to massive bloodshed of millions. Central and South America have likewise been engaged in long struggles of disappearing relations and outright slaughter of swaths of population in the name of control of resources and cognitive liberty.
The map of world’s influences after the end of the present financial crisis 😉
Is this map supposed to show the location of the deaths, or the dead’s nationalities? If it’s the former, it would explain why the US doesn’t show up at all, despite something like 100,000 US deaths since WW2. Somehow that doesn’t seem like the right way to plot it, though.
I think a key point is that it’s plotting deaths as a percentage of the population. (Explicitly stated if you click on the map)
“The true weapons of mass destruction are the huge stockpiles of conventional weapons that are produced and the huge armies maintained. They end up depriving ordinary people — who have do dogs in any battle — of the basics of a human existence. It is heartbreaking to see the poverty in third world countries and realize that if these countries were to divert some of the resources devoted to war for development, the world would not be in such a sorry state.”
This isn’t fair. Stockpiling weapons and maintaining armies is necessary for maintaining security and for preventing war. Look at Iraq, for example. Disbanding its army led to a complete breakdown in security and tens of thousands of people died. Militias formed to restore security but they fought among themselves. Only as the central government has slowly been able to rebuild its security forces and build alliances among the factions has violence fallen.