Chapter 7C
What are two ways to assess a disaster?
(1) Life cycle: What are the birth, life, and death of a disaster? (2) Paradigm shift: Does a Disaster Change How People Think and Feel?
What is genocide?
Genocide is a type of long, drawn-out war waged against a particular population, race, or unique culture. It has existed from long before historical records, as we have stories that describe ancient genocides. However, only since the mid-1900s has the world given such acts their official name, "genocide." The word "genocide" means, specifically, the act of attempting to destroy an entire racial or cultural group of people by killing them physically, stealing or destroying their powers and knowledge, by denying them their cultural and historical identity, or by absorbing them by force into the dominant culture and its ways. And it hurts not only those against whom it is committed but also the society, or members within that society, who commit it.
How many casualties were there from wars from 1 AD to 1900 AD?
.Altogether throughout the world, from the time of Julius Caesar to about 1900 CE (AD), a total of about 150 to 300 million people were killed by war. These figures don't even count most of the additional tens or hundreds of millions killed from war's ravaging results: starvations, plagues, and additional genocides.
What was the "No Sun Disaster?"
A disaster ikely caused by an unusually large volcanic eruption in Iceland. The eruption darkened the sun throughout the world for one to two years, and contributing to or even causing other disasters--major migrations, wars, and plagues--that led to the Middle Ages or Medieval Period. The birth of this climate change was relatively sudden, happening at first over a few days' or weeks' time, in 535 to 536 CE. One theory is that it was caused by a supervolcano or a group of volcanoes near each other in Indonesia. A more recent theory is that the change was caused by a supervolcano in Iceland. This "No-Sun Disaster" caused such a large amount of debris--many cubic tons--to fly into the air and hang in fine-particle suspension that, for about eighteen months throughout much of the world, the sun grew very dim. Roman historian Procopius, in a 536 CE (AD) report, said that "during this year a most dread portent took place. For the sun gave forth its light without brightness...like the sun in eclipse."
What is a disaster's birth?
A disaster's birth often is sudden and surprising, at least to those experiencing it. For example, one of the very biggest prehistoric climate-change disasters occurred about 66 million BCE (BC). In one great, crashing minute in time, a large asteroid hit the earth. The result was the extinction of about 80% of all animal species on earth. A disaster also can start more slowly but still seem sudden to those who experience it. For example, the COVID-19 virus quietly infected a small handful of people in Wuhan, China, then spread to a few hundred, then a few thousand. This took weeks, but most people did not know they were sick at first, and then most thought they had the flu. Only after several weeks did Chinese medical and political authorities realize that COVID-19 was killing and hospitalizing more than a normal flu would. After several more weeks and rigorous social controls and closings of businesses, they thought they had controlled it. However, because of the long period of time in each infected individual for the flu to show symptoms--and because of the ease with which the virus passed from person to person in groups--they were wrong. By then the virus had secretly spread to the whole world through travel by air and ship.
What is an example of climate change from volcanoes?
A rare supervolcano (a volcano so powerful its eruption affects world climate)--the Toba supervolcano--erupted about 70,000 to 75,000 BCE (BC), throwing so much debris into the air that a worldwide temperature drop of about 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius) probably occurred for up to ten years, leading, most likely, to an ice age on earth that lasted up to 1000 years. This event also may have reduced the total population of humans to under 10,000 worldwide. Recently Joseph McConnell of the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nevada and other collaborators may have discovered a connection between the assassination of Julius Caesar in 42 BCE (BC) and the explosion of the Okmok Volcano 6000 miles away in Alaska's Aleutian Islands in 43 BCE. Debris thrown out by Okmok may have lowered temperatures for a brief time by as much as 13.3 degrees F. (7.3 C.) in parts of the Mediterranean Sea area in which Rome and Italy lie. Records at the time indicate major crop failures, food shortages, and famines around that time. Some areas may also have experienced flooding from up to four times more rain, according to the research team. After Julius Caesar's assassination, the Roman Republic soon became the royally-ruled Roman Empire. Though social unrest certainly helped cause this major change, famine in parts of the country and the other countries it controlled may have contributed to the political change, as well.
What was the Black Death?
Also known as the Pestilence or Great Plague, it killed 30-50% of Europe's population in waves of infection and re-infection for over three hundred years. It, too, was bubonic--named from the "bubols" or painful swellings of infected lymph nodes in several parts of the body that caused those who were infected to die often torturous deaths. The Black Death may have spread initially from China to fleas on Central Asian rodents along merchants' travel routes--from fleas moving back and forth between humans and rodents. The types of rodents carrying bubonic-plague fleas vary according to geographic areas, but in Europe's plagues the rodent carriers usually were common rats. The rats moved throughout the continent carrying their infected fleas, which jumped to human hosts. All three infected groups--rats, fleas, and human hosts--usually died, but not before infecting others through more fleas or, on occasion, through breath in close contact.
What was the COVID-19 pandemic?
COVID-19, like the great majority of pandemics, was born--according to most researchers--in a transfer of the illness from animal to human. In this case it occurred in or near the Chinese city of Wuhan, possibly in a marketplace. Similar coronaviruses exist in Kunming, China in bats, so a bat possibly transferred the COVID-19 virus to another animal that then was sold in the marketplace as a pet or for food. Quite possibly humans contracted it in November 2019 or even earlier, but it was not identified in humans until December. This pandemic was called, at first, a "rich man's disease" because it first spread primarily from people on jet airlines, private jets, and cruise ships, perhaps the first pandemic in history to start with the wealthy and spread to everyone. Throughout history, usually pandemics started among the poor, merchant ships, or soldiers. Alternate theories of how it started, such as "pandemic as biological warfare," have been suggested. Biological weapons that can cause pandemics do exist: there are some major nations that keep infectious biological agents in live storage for such use. However, biological weapons, like nuclear bombs, usually are released only in the most extreme situations. Primarily, their existence--like that of nuclear bombs--is considered a defensive threat to keep other nations from using their own similar weapons. In addition, "pandemic as biological warfare" is unlikely in the current pandemic because the genetic material of COVID-19, say the great majority of world scientists, is highly likely to have come from an animal in China, first, and not from a biological-weapon storage facility.
What are some examples of genocide against African Americans?
For example, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a thriving community of Black Americans called Greenwood had grown to become perhaps the richest such neighborhood in the country. In honor of this, it sometimes was nicknamed "The Black Wall Street." However, on May 31, 1921, two misunderstandings started a riot. A white mob invaded Greenwood. In two days, these whites killed, burned, and looted until the Oklahoma National Guard stopped them. The result was that an estimated 150 to 300 Black citizens of Tulsa lay dead, 800 or more were injured, and 10,000 Blacks were left homeless. There also was over $32 million in property damage (in today's dollars). The event was named the Tulsa Race Riot. Greenwood never recovered.
What was the Spanish flu?
It may have been the second biggest pandemic killer in earth's recorded history, in part because earth's population had grown so much compared to earlier historical periods. The Spanish Flu infected up to 500 million people in the world during a three-year period, with the first year being the worst. At the time, this was about one-third to one-fourth of the world's population. Record keeping was poor; however, researchers estimate the 1918 Spanish Flu killed between 15 and 100 million people throughout the world, or from 1.5% and 5% of those who caught it. In contemporary terms, this Spanish Flu death rate is somwhat similar to (or higher than) the current world- and U.S.-science organizations' projections for a COVID-19 death rate of 0.5% to 4%, depending on whether a country is wealthy with excellent health care or poor with very little health care.
How do wars start?
Most wars start with what may seem to most of those living through them as a sudden birth. This is because few countries choose to go to war, and when they do, even those who knew a war probably was coming will tell you that knowing about it and actually experiencing it are quite different. War kills people, even if the war theater is in a different land. That threat of death alone--along with all of the economic and labor-intensive resources required to wage a war--create important physical, emotional, and psychological changes for participating societies, especially for those who are attacked. Likewise, many wars are relatively brief by the standards of history's slow movements--often just a few years. And their ending often may seem to a society to happen somewhat abruptly, coming finally when one of the combatant sides decides it can take no more punishment, or it is overwhelmingly invaded. However, historically, some major wars have lasted for decades or even a century, with quick births but very long lives that grind down both opponents.
What are some other types of disasters?
One of these is locusts, flies, lice, and frogs. They are among the plagues with which Moses threatened the Pharaoh of Egypt. A current example is how desert locusts are plaguing parts of Africa since 2019 and are moving eastward into Pakistan and India. They look like finger-length grasshoppers, and they settle by the millions on farming communities, eating everything on the ground. An average swarm can eat, in just one day, as much food as would thirty to forty thousand people. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, in these parts of the world are facing starvation. Industrial accidents happen, too, such as the local disaster in 1984 in Bhopal, India. A toxic gas spill from a pesticide plant killed an estimated 15,000-20,000 people immediately and over the next several years, and injured perhaps a half million more. Another accident was the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster that likely killed 15,000 to 60,000 people over a period of years and contaminated 1000 square miles of farmland and villages with dangerous levels of radioactivity. Economic disasters also are common. The Great Depression of 1929 to 1939 was perhaps the worst financial disaster since the beginning of industrialization. In the United States alone, half of all banks had to close, unable to return depositors' money, and the unemployment rate ran above 14% for years, peaking at about 25% in 1933.
What paradigm changes do pandemics create?
Socially, pandemics create paradigm changes similar to those in most disasters. At first, inevitably, a society will have less trust in the normality and safety of life. Fatalism--the belief that you cannot avoid the suffering that life brings to you--becomes pronounced. However, unlike climate disasters in which everyone suffers from the same climate conditions, in pandemics there are winners and losers, those who die and those who survive. This difference creates a paradigm shift in how people perceive others--whether to trust or not trust them--and also in how people may decide to fight the disease, either by copying what survivors do or by isolating themselves from others. Such changes also create deep divisions in a society as people develop emotionally stronger reasons-rational and irrational-for why some survive and some don't. One especially noticeable paradigm change in pandemics is the quality of human closeness. Most societies consider human companionship and physical touching necessary and, often, important.
How are pandemics born?
The birth of pandemics often seems sudden, though scientists in the modern world could have predicted them, and often have done so, months or even decades in advance as a possibility, even if these same scientists could not predict the exact type of sickness that would develop. The lifetime of pandemics in past centuries has been, sometimes, hundreds of years, though in more recent times scientists more quickly have learned how to limit most pandemics to a few years, sometimes less. The methods involve a mix of inventing new vaccines and other health preventatives and cures, and placing social limits on how, when, and where people may possibly expose themselves or others. The final death of a pandemic also can be sudden, especially if it is stopped by a vaccine, or it can be a long and drawn-out affair of many years, infecting and re-infecting populations in cycles.
What is the death or end of a disaster?
The death, or end, of a major disaster also can be sudden or long. The two biggest war disasters the world has experienced, World War I and II, each ended fairly quickly with the final official surrenders in 1918 and 1945 by those who lost. Even when the death of a disaster may take months or sometimes years, for humanity, the psychological end of the disaster is important: the moment in time when the public at large knows the disaster has ended, and it will have only the remaining effects of the changes to handle. The No-Sun Disaster arguably didn't end until the Medieval Period in Europe was over and the Renaissance began: the start of the Renaissance in the 1300s and 1400s was itself a long turning point in European history, as the Medieval Period clung to many less wealthy parts of Europe. As a result, most people were not even aware that the Medieval Period was over until well into the Renaissance. For this reason it is difficult to give a precise date for the death of the No-Sun Disaster.
What is the lifetime of a disaster?
The lifetime of a disaster is the period of time when it is wreaking havoc on a society or civilization. This can be just a few weeks, but more often it is months, years, or occasionally centuries. The Hutu massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda, for example, lasted only three months. However, it was a huge disaster for the Tutsi tribal people, killing 75% of them, perhaps half a million people in all, with half that many more raped before war stopped it. Another disaster, relatively short for a crisis that shook the entire world, was the 1918 to 1920 Spanish Flu pandemic, ending with about 50 to 100 million dead worldwide, most of them young adults, as the pandemic wore on. Some strains of that flu changed genetically to less virulent forms, and a large number of people acquired immunity to it. However, some disasters can continue for centuries. The No-Sun Disaster of 536 CE (AD), in which a volcano eruption in Iceland caused the sun to nearly disappear in a haze for almost two years in much of the world, led to widespread starvation. And this, in turn, caused invasions and pandemic bubonic plagues to sweep the world, slowing its cultural and scientific development for as much as a thousand years. Likewise, five or more major extinction events (one of which is mentioned above) have swept the earth over the hundreds of millions of years of life on this planet, altering the course of evolution each time for tens of thousands of years or more.
What are recent examples of genocide?
The most obvious example known to most people in the West is the Holocaust during the World War II. In this Holocaust, Nazis took over Germany and began invading countries around them. The Nazis killed--or ordered the extermination of--6 to 12 million people in concentration camps, by firing squads, and sometimes by starvation and other means. The single largest group killed in such camps included Jews. Others groups included communists, artists, the disabled, and political dissidents. They were "exterminated" because, in Nazi theory, they were inferior specimens who were contaminating the master race of humans. If the Nazis had succeeded, we would have almost no Jews nor Jewish culture in the lands they would have conquered or controlled.
What was the most recent major climate change?
The most recent major climate change was about 66 million years ago. It is called the Cretaceous-Paleocene extinction event, as mentioned above, because it led to the extinction of about 80% of all animal species on earth. This event was caused by an asteroid or comet five to ten miles wide or larger hitting the earth. The explosion was the equivalent of millions of nuclear bombs. It created a crater over 90 miles (145 kilometers) wide near modern-day Chicxulub, Mexico, gale- or hurricane-force winds that flattened forests for up to 600 to 1200 miles (960 to 1920 kilometers), and tsunamis 150 to 1000 feet (50 to 300 meters) in height along southern and central North American coasts. Almost 50,000 cubic miles of sediment--equivalent to 83 million square miles of sediment that was, on average, one yard deep--from the asteroid or comet and from the impacted earth--were distributed especially in the area of the impact, and also throughout the world as a detectable layer of soil. This Chicxulub Asteroid, as it is called, threw into the air billions of pounds of fine dust particles that, in a few weeks, hovered in the air throughout the world, darkening the sun for decades, creating a worldwide, decades-long winter that killed plants and starved animals. Almost all dinosaurs and all other animals weighing more than about 50 to 60 pounds died. Oceans and lakes also were terminally damaged, poisoned by the high acidity of the dust falling into them for years, which killed the majority of marine life. This sudden climate change set the earth back literally millions of years, and required a recovery of millions of years more.
What was the polio epidemic?
The polio epidemic started with lower numbers in 1950. But it became more widespread in 1952 and began to cause significant social changes when it infected about 60,000 people, permanently paralyzing about 20,000 and killing 3000. In 1953 and 1954, another 73,000 were infected. It struck children especially viciously, leaving many of them paralyzed for life. Parents kept their children home during the summers. In 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk tried a vaccine he had invented for himself and his family to prove it was safe. It worked. In 1954, the Salk Vaccine was mass-produced, saving lives throughout the world. Now polio is almost entirely eradicated from the world.
How many people have died in war in the past 2000 years?
The total deaths from war over 2000 years of history total an estimated 250 to 400 million people. That is the same as if, every year for 2000 years, a small city the size of 125,000 to 200,000 people were completely obliterated from the map of the earth. In your own lifetime, assuming you live the average 80 years, that is the equivalent of 80 such cities being destroyed, or about 10 to 16 million people killed from war in your lifetime. War has not been the exception--the unusual event--throughout history, but rather the norm for human civilizations.
What are some examples of genocide towards native and latino populations?
When Europeans arrived in the Americas, for example, they killed so many Native Americans that some historians estimate 90% of all Native Americans were killed. Sometimes Europeans fought Native Americans in wars, but often they simply invaded villages and slaughtered everyone. Other deaths came from the spread of such diseases as smallpox and measles, which were new and deadly to Indians. Often such deaths were accidental, but sometimes such diseases were purposely spread. For example, Spanish leader Hernando Cortez managed, with only 500 men with guns, cannons, and smallpox, to kill half or more people in the Incan, Aztec, and Mayan Empires. Much the same happened as Europeans came to the U.S. eastern coast and then expanded west. In the U.S. West in the 1800s, some people even kept Native American slaves. Gradually, Native Americans were killed less by direct means and instead forced into "reservations" on land so poor that many of them starved and large numbers experienced serious illness. Much of there cultures were endangered and lost, as well. A heritage of this genocidal behavior continues for Native Americans as it does for American Blacks: distrust, racism, poorer economic opportunities, and significantly poorer health and shorter lives. Yet another example in the U.S. of long-term genocide is how Mexicans were treated when the U.S. took over one-third of Mexico and made it into what is now the southwest part of the U.S. During and after the conquest, Mexicans of all types and economic brackets were thrown off their land, penniless; lynched and otherwise killed if they resisted, Mexican women raped, and children slain. Even today, Latinos/Latinas (Mexicans and others from south of the U.S. border) feel the continuing heritage of these genocidal heritages in racism poorer economic opportunities, and poorer communities.
Do climate changes cause paradigm shifts?
You could argue that the 66 million BCE extinction event caused a paradigm shift for evolution on earth: dinosaurs might have developed into the most intelligent species on earth, especially as scientists have discovered that the infamous Tyrannosaurus Rex may have been as smart as a chimpanzee. Smaller climate changes from nearby volcanoes or increases in glaciers cause people to have to rethink how they will farm, where they will live, and what fate and hope mean to them. Bigger climate changes--like the No-Sun Disaster that helped start or expand the Middle Ages for up to a thousand years--caused almost all of the earth's civilizations living in the 500s to 600s CE to change their thinking about life: that life was much less full of possibilities, hopes, and dreams, and more an arena of the hard fate of extended suffering or sudden death. This reshaping of thinking caused similar changes in thought among the religions of the world, a greater distrust of science and other intellectual and artistic endeavors, and, perhaps, the more rapid or thorough spread of the slave to like political system of world feudalism.
