August 18, 2015 by Carl Herman

“Crimes against humanity” include any of the following acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack:

murder;

extermination;

enslavement;…

the crime of apartheid;

other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious bodily or mental injury.

– International Criminal Court (ICC)

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) (1), the hunger-ending organizations RESULTS (2), and Bread for the World (3) estimate that 15 million people die each year from preventable poverty, of whom 11 million are children under the age of five. Jeffrey Sachs says the total deaths are closer to 8 million (4). Either way, poverty causes more human destruction every year than those claimed in the Holocaust.

The total deaths from poverty in the last 15 years is conservatively greater than from all wars, revolutions, murders, accidents, and suicides in the 20th century (5). In the past 20 years, the total deaths from poverty probably eclipse all the above categories of death in all known human history; ~400 million (6).

Make sure you get this: in your lifetime, human beings have allowed other people in poverty, mostly helpless children under the age of five, to die before our eyes in slow, gruesome, painful death in numbers greater than all of the catastrophic events in all recorded human history. To put this number in one perspective that I provide for my students: since I graduated from high school in 1978, preventable poverty has killed ~ 500 million people, one-half a billion; which equals the entire population of the United States plus five additional Californias.

SNIP