Body counts

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/europe/07/14/warcrimes.trial.ap/
A couple months ago I wrote three or four times about the constantly changing counts of victims in the Bosnian "genocide". I related the importance to the alleged honesty or lack thereof in going to war of Clinton and Bush, among other things. I pointed out several widely varying estimates of how many people were killed in the attempt at genocide. Even the highest totals fell far short of the alleged million Armenians from World War I or the current ongoing killings all across Africa.
Well, today we have more numbers, these from the Srebrenica massacre. 8,000. 500. 2000. 2500.1000. All numbers within one article for how many people were killed. The 500, 2000 and 2500 depend on how you read it, they all three refer to the same mass killing. It is unclear where the 8,000 or 1,000 come from, whether the same one, different ones, or just overall totals.
In other words, random numbers thrown about make it seem more horrific. And by constant retelling and reshuffling the events become worse and worse and it seems like there were more of them.
I have said it before, I will say it again...the "genocide" in Bosnia was more media hype and massive government hyperbole than actual fact.
Not that any mass killings are not horrible things. But the reason I keep coming back to this has been something I have had a hard time putting into words. Maybe until now. By over-reporting, artificially inflating numbers, and calling a small number, less than 12,000 is the highest number I recall seeing, of deaths into "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing", the rules have been changed. Crises cannot be taken serious as crises anymore because there is no way of knowing what it really means.
The Iraq death toll for U.S. soldiers is well under 3,000 the last time I saw totals. But to hear the media presentation I would assume it was approaching a million. Again, not that I don't believe 2,000 is a big number (see? I can play the numbers game too!) but...seriously...for a war 2 or 3 years old...that is ridiculously small. Check out casualty totals from a month or even week from Vietnam, Korea...or for a DAY from World War II, World War I, the Civil War...
But we have blown out of all proportion the relevance and meaning of casualties. As an ardent opponent of war, I find one casualty to be too many...in a vacuum. We are not in a vacuum, we are in reality. As wars go, this one has been relatively painless.
And as genocide goes, the Bosnia massacres are nonsensical. The numbers just don't add up. Check out totals of people, say...Hussein murdered, several African nations are racking up, etc. And that is what makes it tragic.
We are talking about a large number of people being killed at one time. And it is sad and tragic. The number is indeterminate do to the timing and nature of the killings. And because of the presentation, the tragedy of it, in an attempt to magnify it, has been minimized and rendered meaningless.
The presentation of events alters the perception and, in the public memory, that alters the reality of the events.
There may or may not be another post on this because again I lost my train of thought and could not put it in writing. There is something about trivializing what it means to have genocide by calling Bosnia by that name.