Dead bodies do not lie but they also , sometimes, have nothing to say. I don’t know how reliable the methodology of extrapolation is but it is used when people comment that upto 30 million people died in the Great Leap Forward. At the end of the day it makes little difference -politically speaking-whether it is 40,000, 60,000 or 100,000. The death of other people’s children is unimaginable. This is , perhaps, not just a matter of tribal instincts-and therefore partly understandable- but something that is prefigured in our very language: ‘collateral damage’, ‘human capital’, ‘mass death’. To kill someone from a distance is already to see them as a “dot or dream”, a mere statistic.

I cannot recall making much of the Lancet Report other than I had some ponderings about the method used. I like reading statistics gained through surveys and polls but I often wonder about the accuracy of these surveys. The Lancet Report, as I remember, was based on a survey of people living in Iraq in hopes of getting a number of deaths in Iraq. This does not mean that it is inaccurate, but it is not exactly a reliable methodology. Dead bodies, on the other hand, do not lie.

What did you make of the Lancet report a few years back?