The siege of Aleppo is being compared to Stalingrad. It has been called a catastrophe of historical proportion, an epic catastrophe, the mother of battles (again). Being familiar with WW2, I wanted to see if these are reasonable comparisons.
Aleppo is the biggest city in Syria, with a population reported between 1 and 2.5 million, depending on the source, and I suspect, on the definition of city or metropolitan area. The siege of Aleppo lasted 4 years, with about 31,000 dead, 76% or 23,600 being civilians. Based on a map from October, 2016, about 40-50% of the city has been damaged or destroyed. Approximately 18 battalions of rebel forces were present, totaling roughly 6,000 men through most of the 4 years, rising on occasion to 15,000 men. The Syrian army deployed 20,000 men. How does this compare with Stalingrad?
Stalingrad was attacked during the German 1942 summer offensive in Russia. At the time, the city stretched 30 miles along the banks of the Volga River, and had a population of 445,000 in 1941, that had swelled with refugees to 710,000 at the time of the German attack. Definitive forces and casualties are hard to come by, as the Battle of Stalingrad itself became a part of the larger Operation Uranus. Initially there were 270,000 German and allied forces involved, and about 180,000 Russian soldiers. These are the forces directly involved in the city fighting. Virtually the entire city was destroyed in a siege lasting 5 months. 40,000 civilians were killed. The Germans suffered 400,000 dead in the entire operation between November 1942 and mid-January 1943, with about 250,000 of these directly attributable to fighting in Stalingrad, including the loss of the entire 6th Army. The Russians had just over 1,000,000 casualties, with the total in the city unknown.
It is glaringly obvious that Aleppo has nothing in common with Stalingrad except the approximate number of civilian deaths. Aleppo lost 23,000 civilians....in 4 years, or about 480 per month. Stalingrad lost 40,000 in 5 months, or 8,000 per month, a death rate nearly 17 times greater. The military forces engaged in the city totaled 450,000, not 35,000. Stalingrad was completely destroyed. Aleppo has far less damage.
The Siege of Leningrad lasted closer to that of Aleppo, approximately 870 days, or 3.3 years. Aleppo had 23,600 civilian deaths. Leningrad had....642,000 civilian dead during the siege, and another 400,000 dead during the evacuations. Once again, there is no comparison.
In historical terms, the Siege of Aleppo is modest even compared to the worst events in Middle Eastern history, let alone a siege of 'epic' and 'historic' proportion. The Siege of Jerusalem by Titus produced over 100,000 dead, of Acre by Alexander 8,000 dead out of 40,000, with the rest enslaved.
Aleppo does not even register compared to the greatest civilian casualties in even modern times, and I am not counting the Holocaust. 2 million Ukranians starved to death in 1933-34, resorting to cannibalism. 50,000 people died in Dresden in one night, and we, the purported good and moral team, did that. 50,000 more died in Hamburg. 100,000 in firebombings in Tokyo and Osaka, each one of these in a single night.
In historical terms, Aleppo is a blip. It isn't even our business, being part of a civil war in which we have no stake. Indeed, the 'bad guys' as labeled by our government and the press want what we want- to get ISIS out of Syria. In modern times, however, our media portray every event as a calamity, a tragedy, epic, huge, overwhelming. One report wails that Aleppo has 'not one pane of glass intact'. Wow- there's a measure of the intensity of war. What next- a headline telling us Syrians are suffering from a shortage of decaf skinny lattes?
Aleppo is sad, as is all war, suffering and death. It is not epic. It is not historical in proportion. It's a long, stupid siege that could have been settled in a week if anyone had had the force of character to attack properly. As is too often the case with modern sensibilities, attempts to be gentle have led only to greater suffering, but not an epic or cataclysmic tragedy. Those hyperboles are an all-too-common aspect of modern sensibilities as well.
Ted
I suspect that a good part of the reason for why news sources exaggerate their stories about the war in Syria is because hyperbole sells, whereas an academic professorial statistical analysis with careful historical controls for comparison does not. For profit organizations cover the news, so while this doesn't excuse exaggeration, it does explain part of why they do so: a story has to be sold. How do you sell a story to most Americans - ensconced in the safety of a country not at war, absorbed in their social medias, television shows, and unlikely to do more than skim news headlines with what passes for reading skills these days? Such a target audience is unlikely to know where in the world Syria is located or why anyone should be paying much attention to it.
ReplyDeleteBesides the business aspect of news and the intellectual lethargy of many Americans, another factor is emotional, and for those close to the action, statistics mean little. The stories they hear, the explosions they feel, the attacks they see, the suffering they witness: INDIVIDUALS experience them, hence statistics that compare them to other conflicts, bigger or smaller, aren't that helpful in conveying a tragedy.
And Syria is indeed a tragedy. Epic or not, it is a tragedy.
The truth is, even newspaper stories covering the flow of the events in Syria cannot really give readers a feel for what it is like for those affected. That can only be done via individual stories.
It was exactly a century ago, in 1916, that a California-based publication called “The Blast” observed, “There is double the pathos for us in the death of one little New York waif from hunger than there is in a million deaths from famine in China. It is not that distance glosses over the terrible picture of the Chinese horror, or that a feeling of national kinship with the waif impresses us the more sincerely with his plight. It is merely that the mind is unable to grasp a suffering in the gross. Suffering is so intimately personal a thing that it must be explained through the personal equation, if at all.”
I agree that Aleppo is sad, as is all war, suffering and death. I also agree that it isn't the business of the U.S. to get involved in fighting a Civil War. Yet I applaud those Americans (individuals, organizations, or the government) who try to help the victims or who lobby to bring the killing to an end. In the modern world, connected as we are by the Internet, we would do well to remember the parable of the Good Samaritan, for it was told in response to the question, "Who is my neighbor?"
-D-
The current tendency to portray absolutely everything in hyperbolic, apocalyptic terms is just one more example of what I call ‘dumbing and numbing’. We dumb everything down, catering to the lowest common denominator of perceived understanding, serving to feed an increasingly poorly informed public a constant menu of simplistic and often severely slanted news. Political / social issues are broadcast in the harshest shades of black-and-white, allowing no quality of understanding. This is evident in the coverage of the Syrian Civil War, the Russia – Ukraine issues (which you have discussed heretofore), China, Immigration, and (most importantly in my mind) AGW-Climate Change. This all results in numbing; people tire quickly of most issues; the 24-hour news cycle moves on to scream and yell about the next end-of-the-world subject, and no one pauses to think much about the previous end-of-the-world subject. And in the US at least, one effectively never hears about anything outside North America and Northwest Europe. Personally, I read the British and German press just to hear something (despite their respective obvious slants) about the rest of the world.
ReplyDeleteOf course Aleppo bears no comparison with Stalingrad / Leningrad; any such equivalence is laughable. As you quite rightly observe, the “Siege of Aleppo” would have been over in an afternoon had there been the will and the force to do so. It is being wrapped up only now because the Russians are committing some serious forces and the lovely and talented Bashir al-Assad has a green light knowing that the US will do absolutely nothing during the lame-duck Congress and Presidency (although the Presidency has been a byword for erectile dysfunction I must say). The Alawites and their leaders the Assad family have never had any compunctions about slaughtering their subjects whenever a few of them got uppity. When the finish off THIS civil war, it will be a very long time before any Syrian even thinks about rebellion. Oderint dum metuant. It has been ever thus.