107,594 is the estimated number of Iraqi civilians who died from violence since the US-led invasion, as of October 29th 2010 (Source: Iraq Body Count). To me, the number is so big that can only exist on computers. Using my body, I want to feel the magnitude of this number and the scale of the war destruction by writing the information of the victims on index cards. Since November 19th 2010, I have been writing the cards every day for an hour.
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Countless of Unknowns
They really don't make any sense. I'm saying it with shame, guilt and sadness. So far on Day 8, I have writing around more than 1,700 of unknowns. They are the people who died but yet identified. So, the media did not know thier names, according to Iraq Body Count.
Maybe that's why Tony kept quoting Stalin's quote "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic".
I am reading Michael Otterman's "Erasing Iraq" now. In the forward section, I found the following words by Harold Pinter really powerful when he commented on the War in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
"They are blank. They are not even being recorded as dead."
What Pinter said is haunting. But what even more haunting is that what he said is true.