Between 2010 and 2021, unilateral sanctions caused ~564,258 deaths each year – more than five times the number of people killed annually in direct armed combat. This warning comes from a new report published in The Lancet, which contextualizes decades of data on how sanctions affect mortality.
“From a rights-based perspective, evidence that sanctions lead to losses in lives should be sufficient reason to advocate for the suspension of their use,” the study’s authors argue. But that is far from reality. Over the same decade, nearly a quarter of all of the world’s countries were affected by sanctions, driven primarily by a sharp increase in unilateral economic measures imposed by the United States and its European allies.
While Western sanctions “have the claimed aim to end wars, protect human rights, or promote democracy,” the report shows they do the very opposite. By restricting a country’s ability to import essential goods like food, medicine, and medical supplies, and by slashing public budgets, sanctions systematically undermine healthcare systems and other vital services.
Pretty glaring omission of the sanctions on Russia in this blog-post universally condemning sanctions.
Looks like the People’s Dispatch is far-left biased, so probably tankies deliberately writing stuff that benefits Russia.
Damn tankies and their checks notes suggestion we not use policy to murder 500k people a year.
First of all, “causing excess death” is not “murder”, no matter how much you want to equate them.
But merely lamenting the consequences of sanctions is like lamenting how lives are ruined by imprisoning criminals with no attention given to what would likely happen if crime just went unpunished.
Sanctions are applied in response to something and have to be viewed through that lens. How many more deaths would result if repressive governments felt they had free rein to commit crimes against their own populations and those of their neighbours if they faced no repercussions for doing so?
This is why the article is written irresponsibly, and probably is a propaganda piece: it does not make any attempt to relate the outcome of sanctions to likely alternative situations in which sanctions were not applied. This way of examining sanctions (or anything) can perfectly well be used to criticise sanctions as causing suffering in excess of what they are supposed to be combating.
There’s a case to be made for sanctions in times of war. The point on the left though is sanctions are an act of war and in the past they’d be enforced through something like a blockade or siege. We’ve white-washed it to make it sound like it’s just simple economic policy though.
The problem with this position is that it doesn’t make sense to say that countries are obliged to trade with one another. If there’s no obligation to trade, then there’s no obligation to avoid sanctions. The difference between sanctions and a blockade is that you’re not forcing other countries not to trade.
The arguments may differ when there are frozen assets but it comes down to the same thing: we categorise actual use of force differently from harmful acts short of force for a reason.
No, mate, the parent commenter asserts that the tankies only claim it murders 500,000 people a year because it also economically hurts Russia.
The left has been harping on this for quite a while.
I am not reading through a fucking 10,000 word podcast transcript to find the relevant two paragraphs. Quote some points if you want.
Edit: I actually underestimated this thing. The transcript is so large that it crashed LibreOffice Writer the first time I tried pasting it in to get the actual word count. The transcript is 16,719 words long.
Exactly man. Stay strong. You’re not here for nuance or context. You’re the kind of guy that likes having little Snippets hand fed to you. Reading is for nerds. If there ain’t a YouTube video saying it while a guy gives shocked reaction faces you don’t need to know it.
I am not opposed to reading. I will happily read a 1,000 or 2,000-word article to hear new ideas. What I will not do is listen to a 90-minute podcast or read its transcript, which is so long it crashed LibreOffice Writer when I tried pasting it to get the word count, just to understand what CabbageRelish@midwest.social is talking about with the comment that took them twenty seconds to write.
It’s not unreasonable for me to say that if you took less than 60 seconds to write your comment, I’m going to spend a maximum of 5-10 minutes thinking about and writing my response.
I am not saying tankies wrote the Lancet article.