Paul Rosenberg – In the general scheme of manmade disasters, terrorism is trivial. That’s not even debatable, as I’ll itemize below. Westerners who’ve been consuming televised fears for 15 years straight may object, but fear has nothing to do with truth… and very much the opposite.

And I’ll skip through the obvious fact that I’m opposed to people being murdered by maniacs and the equally obvious acknowledgment that terrorism is a very big thing to the people involved.

The Facts

When deciding whether a statement is true or false, facts should decide. If we let ourselves imagine that fear makes something true, we doom ourselves to lives of abuse.

So, let’s take a look at the facts.

To address this question directly, I decided to take facts from just the past hundred years or so and to stick to the large powers. My apologies to those associated with events I left out; I do not mean to minimize them.

This list shows how many deaths are attributable to each. These figures are from Wikipedia, and if there was a range, I took the middle of it. Continue reading →