Tea at Trianon: Calculating Death Tolls in War

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, April 18, 2025

Calculating Death Tolls in War

From Kyle Orton at It Can Always Get Worse:

Over the last century, the nefarious geopolitical actor that most effectively exploited human psychology to further its cause was the Soviet Union and the current Russian government that is its successor. HAMAS benefits directly from this inheritance: it is a component of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution that seized Iran in 1979, which had assistance from the KGB in constructing the security and intelligence services that keep it in power, and draws on the Soviet model of worldwide Revolution.
In this context, it is less surprising that the information operation HAMAS has run with the Gaza casualty figures resembles a classic of Moscow’s anchoring propaganda: the claim twenty-million Soviet citizens were killed fighting the Nazis.
A caveat to be added here is that while the Soviets/Russia have been particularly successful in sacralising the figure of twenty-seven million Soviet martyrs in the Anti-Nazi War, the success is a matter of degree not kind. For the reasons mentioned above, interested parties developing false casualty figures that persist is not in itself unusual.
The open secret is that war death tolls generally originate from one of the combatants and their supporters, either to try to sway the course of the war and/or to serve a political purpose in the aftermath, and these numbers are frequently invented wholesale.3 Human psychology being what it is, and the widespread equation of numbers with Science, propagandists can short-circuit policy debates by presenting the right number in the right way.4 More importantly, whether the tactic works or not for its narrow purposes, such propaganda-generated numbers “tend to be sticky and to take on lives of their own”.5
A major reason for the endurance of politically-derived casualty numbers is that they, and the emotive narratives they undergird, become important, materially and ideologically, to various constituencies,6 in the war-torn countries and abroad, from activists, academics, and journalists—fluid categories where a single individual often plays multiple roles—all the way up to governments, and repetition of the numbers by these opinion-forming authorities embeds them as conventional wisdom.7 Challengers to the numbers are fiercely resisted, often with vicious reputational attacks, which deter other doubters from going public, explaining the otherwise-baffling paucity of efforts to investigate the origins and veracity of totemic body counts.8 Even were there is a public effort at refutation, it often unintentionally reinforces the number by focusing on it.
The overall result is that casualty counts “everyone knows”, even for wars that have been studied for decades, are often mythical.9
An obvious corollary is that, when it comes to ongoing wars, honest people should be operating on the assumption that death tolls cannot be known, and that anybody making a claim to the contrary is at best lying to themselves and probably consciously trying to advance an untruth. A moment’s thought about the practicalities of carrying out a body count in a warzone is enough to realise that such a thing cannot be done in any meaningful sense, thus when a number is proffered—whether in Syria, Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Yemen—scepticism is in order about exactly where it has come from. The answer in most cases is an extrapolations that is indistinguishable from guesswork given the small sample size it is based on, or it is just outright made up.10 The strangely precise fatality figures proffered with even stranger levels of confidence for these conflicts should be a red flag, not a guide for policy, let alone people’s moral judgments. Gaza is special in this matrix only because we actually do know where the fatality count comes from.11 (Read more.)