See also
The AtlanticNumbers can go a long way toward filling that gap. For example: According to annual figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, released on Thursday, in 2014 there were almost 60 million refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) around the globe right now. Put another way, that’s one in every 122 people worldwide. Put yet another way, that’s roughly the equivalent of the entire population of Italy being pushed out of their homes.
Not since World War II have there been so many refugees or IDPs. (Finding definitive numbers is tough, but the UN reports that the number of refugees and IDPs last exceeded 50 million during the Second World War, an astonishing figure given that the global population was significantly smaller then.) The annual Global Peace Index, released on Wednesday and based on the number of refugees and IDPs recorded through the end of 2013, offers some more detail about how the number got so high. Most of the growth in that period was actually not from refugees—that number had grown a comparatively scant 23 percent between 2004 and 2013—but among IDPs, or those uprooted within their home country, whose ranks had swelled by more than 300 percent since in that time.
Unsurprisingly, many of these people are concentrated in the Middle East and in particular in Iraq and Syria, where ISIS’s advance and the Syrian civil war have driven many people from their homes. A third of the world’s refugees come from those two nations alone. The Global Peace Index reported that more than 9.5 million Syrians, or 43 percent of the Syrian population, had been displaced. Last year, Uri Friedman dug deeper into displacement in Syria; Alan Taylor this week compiled a powerful gallery of Syrians attempting to get over the Turkish border and escape ISIS fighters.
Violence Has Forced 60 Million People From Their Homes
David A. Graham
Maybe we could cast a spell on the economy to generate full employment and lower inequality?
ReplyDeleteMaybe the good Dr. could cast a spell to stop these psychopathic human beings who would displace 60 million of their own species, laying waste to everything, whose answer to everything is war, to turn them from demons into humans again. Didn't they ever see monkey magic? But somehow, I think it is going to be up to people to say No. And the only way to say No to something is to say Yes to something else that leads, evolves, in the right direction.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I think humanity needs Peace; and to embrace peace you have to understand the value of peace, and how peace is necessary for human dignity and prosperity. The most powerful weapon on the face of this earth, is the human heart. Mind has lead us to chaos.
Mind has come up with its solutions and none of them have worked or are lasting. There is more chaos on the face of this earth than ever before.
Einstein had something very simple and direct to say about that.