The peaceful world

IMAGINE for a moment that all the wars of the world have come to a peaceful conclusion. Most violent crime against people and property has also been eradicated. The worst outbreak of violence in the world in the past 24 hours has been a fight in a bar in Irkutsk, Russia.

What item do you think will lead the international news for the next 12 hours, or however long it takes until something fresher come along? The fight in Irkutsk, of course. “If it bleeds, it leads,” says the axiom, and the world’s media follow it slavishly, so they will always give you the impression that the world is drowning in violence. It is not — but people think it is.

Stop people at random and ask them how many wars they think are going on in the world right now. Most people would guess around a dozen, although they wouldn’t be able to name them. The right answer is two, and one of them, Afghanistan, is probably approaching its end.

There are close to 200 independent countries in the world, and only one in a hundred is currently at war. They are both primarily civil wars, although there is some foreign involve- lorn struggle to make a Communist revolution in India. All nasty, but none of them real wars.

And there is, finally, the famous “war” on terror, which these days amounts to little more than over-zealous law enforcement at home and selective assassination by drones abroad. Like the “war” on drugs in Mexico, it is only a metaphor for an activity that is not really a war at all.

So that’s it: Two real wars, and a clutter of lesser conflicts that really do not merit the term. In a world of seven billion people, only a few hundred million have even the slightest experience of organized violence for political ends. Why, then, do so many people think that the world is still overrun by war?

The media are partly to blame, but they are also manipulated by various governments that raise the specter of war for their own ends. Wars that have not happened and are never likely to fill the imaginations of the public: A war in Korea, a US and/or Israeli attack on Iran, Western or Israeli intervention in Syria, a war between China and Southeast Asian countries over islands in the South China Sea, a US-Chinese conflict in the Pacific, and on and on.