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.
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.