Some Positive Stastistics

Humanity's efforts to promote peace and human rights is working!

"The Human Security Report Project which, to the surprise of many, revealed that there had been a dramatic decline in political violence around the world in the wake of the Cold War.

After nearly five decades of inexorable increase, the number of violent conflicts dropped by 40 percent. The deadliest conflicts, and genocides, dropped even more dramatically––by more than 70 percent.

Wars are not only far less frequent; they are also much less deadly. In 1950, the average armed conflict killed 38,000 people; by 2005, the figure was just 700."

Save Darfur!

Today we heard about one of the largest ongoing human rights tragedies of our time, the Darfur Genocide. We heard from two awesome representatives from the BYU/UVU Darfur Action Committee (Facebook group) about the history of the conflict there and also what we can do to help stop it. We talked about the awesome Save Darfur website, and specifically the things you can do to help listed in the Current Initiatives section.

As pointed out at the meeting today, the situation there is unique in that it is the first genocide ever to be recognized as such while it is going on, rather than looking back afterwards and going "Whoops, that was genocide, huh?" as happened with Nazi Germany, Rwanda, and basically every other genocide in history. So now that we're not in the denial stage, we can do something about it!

Next week, we'll be talking about the situation in Burma, which is also an ongoing nightmare. Same time and place: Wednesday, 6 pm, 117 HRCB. See ya there!