Is Terrorism, Russia or any other nation really the greatest threat we face?

Is Terrorism, Russia or any other nation really the greatest threat we face?

There has been a tremendous amount of changes since the events that took place on 9/11- evident both through individuals and society overall. An event that took place nearly 16 years ago. Since then, most governments introduced an array of intrusive methods by which they can detain individuals, monitor innocent citizens and destroy the many liberties which existed prior to the event. Of course, that is not to say the threat does not exist, though it does not take much time to see that such a mere threat is hardly a good reason to invade personal privacy and individual freedoms of millions who have done nothing to be treated in such a way. Some people argue that they are happy to sacrifice such liberties in order to remain protected and safe. Other typical arguments include phrases such as: “if you have nothing to hide, then why does it matter”.

Well, one thing that history has taught us is that it may not matter, until it does. WWII is a pinnacle example of this, though sadly, we seem to have forgotten what can happen when you collect information of citizens on a mass scale. One of the reasons the Nazis were able to track most people of Jewish background was due to the fact that the countries they invaded and their own kept records of their citizens’ religious background. This easily allowed them to identify the people they wanted to target. That was in the early 20th century, now imagine what people can do with the mass amount of information that can be and has been collected in today’s age. Another important factor we must keep in mind is that back then they did not possess the biometric information that is forcedly extracted from innocent people nowadays. If you were of Jewish descent, you could (and many did) change your identity and surname which made it almost impossible to be targeted. Unfortunately - unless you can grow new fingerprints or a new pair of eyes - such a thing has become impossible in today's approach to “safety through breaking liberties”.

"We have to put our money where our mouths are. And we can only realise the promise of this institution’s founding to replace the ravages of war with cooperation if powerful nations like my own accept constraints. Sometimes I’m criticized in my own country for professing a belief in international norms and multilateral institutions, but I am convinced that in the long run giving up some freedom of action, not giving up our ability to protect ourselves or pursue our core interests but binding ourselves to international rules, over the long-term, enhances our security."

- Barrack Obama

A very different mentality to what the founding fathers of USA had in mind:

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

- Benjamin Franklin

You can see signs of this in every bus, taxi, train stations, airports etc. who seem to have no issues installing cameras on every corner possible on top of the highly intrusive questions asked when entering countries such as the USA, Australia, England, Israel and more.

So I started to really think about this concept and whether I was being foolish or ignorant to think of this level of security as a natural thing. I wanted to know whether terrorism really does deserve the attention it is getting along with the fear that has been planted, encouraged through media, news, movies, advertisements etc. It is no surprise to me that we did not learn anything from our past. We live in a highly extrinsic society/world - especially in the Western world - where we never hesitate to point fingers at another group or race of people to avoid ever looking at our own faults and wrongdoings. It is always easier to claim that the world is worse because of others. This is basic psychology and I am sure many are aware of this behaviour. It requires little to no responsibility and is a great way to vent personal frustrations derived from our own lives onto others who are not similar to us.

This has become increasingly true for those of Islamic background or appearance. You can see it in the comments people make, in their thoughts and responses all over social media platforms. I too have been a victim of such discrimination in a country such as the Netherlands which proclaims personal liberty and has one of the most academically educated people on the planet - though these issues are hardly a regional issue and are an issue in all corners of the today's world.

I have had a girl turn around and scream in plain daylight as I was walking behind her to the bus stop. I have had people clench their handbags in fear as I walk behind them, continuously checking if I am still walking behind them. I have had a lady literally turn around, see me and start running to her door. In most cases, I usually cross the road to give them space or just stop for a few seconds to give them some distance so that they can relax. I mean, look at that, I am being treated as a threat due to their ignorance and here I am worried about their feelings. I do not believe that the average local person can understand how it feels to be treated in such a way and I do not believe they ever will. As I said, people rarely learn from their historical mistakes and I believe we will look back at such times with great shame one day, wondering how it happened, blaming it on one or two leaders perhaps, never at our own lack of empathy or understanding.

Smoking Tobacco

Moving forward, I wanted to compare such threats with other catastrophic events that continue to take place in our modern so called “advanced” societies. I wanted to compare how many people are affected by tobacco companies as well the people affected by our modern diets and fast food chains and take away shops that dominate the advertising/media space. A quick search led me to the World Health Organisation that blew me away. NOTE: Do not continue to read if you want to keep living in a bubble as these facts may change your worldly views.

So it turns out that the tobacco industry - and no I do not mean tobacco itself, I rather mean tobacco plus all the chemicals that they put into it that can be as high as 7,000 different chemicals served as a cocktail in today's cigarettes - have a huge death toll attached to them. The facts are as followed:

Global

• Tobacco kills up to half of its users. That's right, up to 50%!
• Tobacco kills more than 7 million people each year - that's one person every 5 seconds. More than 6 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 890 000 are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
• Nearly 80% of the world's more than 1 billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.
• In 2004, children accounted for 28% of the deaths attributable to second-hand smoke.

Europe and EU

• 16% of all deaths in adults over 30 is smoking related, “with many of these deaths occurring prematurely”. Furthermore, “This is in contrast to the African or the Eastern Mediterranean Regions, with 3% and 7% proportion of tobacco-attributable deaths, respectively, and with the global average of 12%.”
• Tobacco consumption is responsible for nearly 700,000 deaths in the EU every year. Smokers suffer more from poor health (as they are more at risk of cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases) and half of them die prematurely (on average, 14 years earlier ).

USA

• 480,000 yearly deaths. You would think the "war on drugs" would be a bit more concerned about tobacco.
• 41,000 as a result of second-hand smoke. People who do not smoke yet have passed away due to other peoples decision to smoke around them.

Australia

• Around 15,000 deaths caused by smoking. $670 million in hospital costs in the financial year 2004–05. According to QuitNow - an Australian government initiative: "There is a tobacco-related death about every 28 minutes in Australia, adding up to more than 50 deaths each day.

Now let us put all these numbers into perspective. If you take a look at the global perspective, that is more than the original figures given by the widely shared views on the Holocaust tragedy brought upon by WWII. You can also compare such figures to the entire population of Bulgaria, Hong Kong or Paraguay being wiped out every year. Imagine that! The entire population of either of those countries being wipe out every bloody year! Now many may argue the point that “it is their right to smoke, and they are doing it out of choice, unlike the terrorist attacks that harm innocent people unknowingly”. Well, firstly if you are addicted to something and never knew when you decided to be a smoker, then it's hardly a choice. Secondly, out of those 7 million people, close to a million, or more precisely, 890,000 of them - close to half of the population of Slovenia - are innocent individuals who have been harmed due to others ignorance and addictive behaviours. Furthermore, as stated by the WHO “In 2004, children accounted for 28% of the deaths attributable to second-hand smoke.” - I am not sure how anyone could justify that part.

In Australia, smoking indoors has been banned for nearly a decade. Since 2012, this has extended to most public areas where it can affect others. Despite such alarming statistics, in Europe - it has been my experience that - people are totally oblivious to it and even find it strange if you tell them to not smoke indoors or around you as if you were intruding on their personal liberty. At times arguing that asking to leave the doors or windows open for fresh air whilst they are smoking is making them cold, yet not understanding that they are literally causing harm to everyone in that room with their selfish addiction/choice. I mean, here they are literally causing harm to themselves and those around them and you are the bad guy for wanting fresh air and letting the room get cold, which you would not even want to do if they just went outside to smoke. It is strange indeed, as one of the greatest unwritten rules of Liberty is to not cause harm to others. Now imagine my surprise when I even saw billboards in Germany - a country praised for research and advancements in scientific fields - advertising cigarette brands like Camel, something that I thought was banned since early 2000. I literally thought I had gone back in time to some weird Cowboy Marlboro era.

Now the tobacco related harms aside, we must take note of even a greater threat. One that you rarely hear about. One that does not require a warning sticker, a photo of a person in poor health or anything in relation to the dangers which it involved.

Cardiovascular Diseases (CVD) Worldwide and in Europe

This section is mostly concerned with personal diet and availability of food across the modern and so called “civilised” parts of the globe. Just keep in mind that most of such issues can easily be avoided with a healthy lifestyle and diet. Moreover, smoking is a strong contributor to CVD. As mentioned by European Heart Network and the World Health Organisation:

Global

• CVDs are the number 1 cause of death globally: more people die annually from CVDs than from any other cause. Can you imagine if smokers or people working for global companies such as British Tobacco, McDonalds, Dominos and the many other take-away stores were treated the same negative way refugees or people of Islamic look/background were. Have a think about that.
• An estimated 17.7 million people died - nearly one person every 2 seconds - from CVDs in 2015, representing 31% of all global deaths. Of these deaths, an estimated 7.4 million were due to coronary heart disease and 6.7 million were due to stroke.

Europe & EU

• Each year cardiovascular disease (CVD) causes 3.9 million deaths in Europe and over 1.8 million deaths in the European Union (EU).
• CVD accounts for 45% of all deaths in Europe and 37% of all deaths in the EU.
• CVD is the main cause of death in men in all but 12 countries of Europe and is the main cause of death in women in all but two countries.
• Overall CVD is estimated to cost the EU economy €210 billion a year. Money that could be going into free education, healthcare or other useful things to improve our society rather than destroy it.
• Dietary factors make the largest contribution to the risk of CVD mortality at the population level across Europe of all behavioural risk factors. High systolic blood pressure makes the largest contribution of all the medical risk factors.

USA

• 610,000 deaths every year.

Australia

• 19,777 deaths every year and according to the nation heart foundation of Australia:
• Kills one Australian every 12 minutes
• Affects one in six Australians or 4.2 million
• CVD was the main cause for 480,548 hospitalisations in 2013/14 and played an additional role in another 680,000 hospitalisations
• claimed the lives of 45,392 Australians (nearly 30% of all deaths) in 2015 - deaths that are largely preventable.

So let us once again put these numbers into perspective. Globally, the numbers represent the entire nation of the Netherlands and nearly half of that of either Canada, Morocco or Poland - every year! In Europe alone, these numbers represent more than half of the population of Bulgaria, again every year.

Alcohol Consumption

So what about alcohol. Oh no! Not my precious beers! Do not tell me that too has negative effects! I will not get into this part too much, but you know for yourself the negative effects. That it breaks away families, friends, relationships, jobs and even lives. So I will just leave you with some details from the WHO report:

• In 2012, about 3.3 million deaths, or 5.9% of all global deaths, were attributable to alcohol consumption.
• In 2012 139 million DALYs (disability-adjusted life years), or 5.1% of the global burden of disease and injury, were attributable to alcohol consumption.
• The harmful use of alcohol is a component cause of more than 200 disease and injury conditions in individuals, most notably alcohol dependence, liver cirrhosis, cancers and injuries.

I will not use the previously references country’s populations to depict the numbers here as I am sure you have gotten the point. Though I will mention that mushrooms were made illegal in the Netherlands after leading to the death of one or two the victims who lost control over themselves and did something they were not aware of. That drugs such as LSD, marijuana and many other drugs are strictly forbidden in most parts of the world and parents usually are deeply troubled if they find out their kids have consumed them. Yet it is perfectly fine to have a couple of beers with the parents to celebrate. You even get a discount and are encouraged to buy it at the airport duty-free shops. Movies and television shows celebrate it, holidays demand a drinking day and nowadays it is very rare to go out and not meet for a beer or two - in most cases one or two is rarely the true number.

Terrorism

Just to give you a point of reference to compare such numbers to that of Terrorism:

Global

A total number of deaths caused by Terrorism between 1970 to 2017: estimated to be around 393,722 People.

Western Europe

A total number of deaths caused by Terrorism between 1970 to 2017: close to 10,000.

USA

An interesting graph depicted this on datagraver.com and the author was kind enough to update the map for me. The total number is estimated to be around 3,658. Just 9/11 alone, took 2,996 innocent lives from this earth. This justified an entire nation along with its allies to go to war. A war that has lasted more than any other war in U.S history, and what a war it has been:

The Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS) released a landmark study concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the “War on Terror” since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.

Australia 1915-2017

Between those dates, there have been around 24 deaths as a result of terrorism within Australian borders.

We can do better

If you made it through this article, you deserve a sticker - if I had one to give you - as I am sure it was not an easy task. You should gracefully accept the hypocrisy present in the very fabric of our society. I am sure most people stopped after it threatened their way of thinking or existing behaviours. If you did make it through though, I congratulate you, for you are now aware of some revealing facts. Do you still believe terrorism, Islam or any religion for that matter is the greatest cause of threat to our existence? It is not religion that made smoking or drinking readily available, in fact, they mostly oppose addictions and impure substances. I am not saying that we should not worry about terrorism, though it would be nice if people were checked for cigarettes, alcohol and foods with saturated fats, sugar and salts at the borders on top of the weapons which they normally seek.

Think about these things next time you want to make a racist comment, support soldiers who are ignorantly believing they are protecting their countries by participating in wars that in most cases have nothing to do with their countries; believing they are somehow “heroes”, meanwhile corporations are killing their people within their borders and beyond by the millions for nothing more than a profit. We praise such CEO’s and think of them as high members of society while we lose our liberties more and more by the day. Meanwhile coming home to have a cigarette with a beer while eating some chicken wings in front of the TV and getting angry that more refugees are coming into our countries due to nothing more than the wars that our tax money has paid to wage on their nations dressed as a fight for "freedom". In the process forgetting that our own choices have the greatest impact - considering costs and harm to others. A far greater threat than any outside forces in human history.

It is never too late to change our view of the world or our personal lifestyle.

References:
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/
http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/disease-prevention/tobacco/data-and-statistics
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20160518STO27901/700-000-deaths-a-year-tackling-smoking-in-the-eu
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/population-by-country/
http://www.ehnheart.org/cvd-statistics.html
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/112736/1/9789240692763_eng.pdf
http://www.datagraver.com/case/people-killed-by-terrorism-per-year-in-western-europe-1970-2015
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/statistics-on-incidents-of-terrorism-worldwide
https://www.heartfoundation.org.au/about-us/what-we-do/heart-disease-in-australia
https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/smoking-statistics
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/Lookup/by%20Subject/4364.0.55.001~2014-15~Main%20Features~Smoking~24
https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/alcohol-health/overview-alcohol-consumption/alcohol-facts-and-statistics
http://theconversation.com/australias-daily-alcohol-toll-15-deaths-and-430-hospitalisations-29906
http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/190430/Status-Report-on-Alcohol-and-Health-in-35-European-Countries.pdf
http://www.tobaccoatlas.org/topic/smokings-death-toll/
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/20th-century-death/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vHTUaPWwlCPCg4O5YvDFRuDOCA8xX2ERnJQImnps6sk/edit#gid=8
https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/general_facts/index.htm