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38 MILLION LIVES  
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August 2, 2025
Progressive International
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_ A study by the Center of Economic and Policy Research has revealed
that, between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed 38 million
people around the world. _

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The people of Gaza are being starved. The scale of this man-made
catastrophe — a cruel, seemingly terminal phase in Israel’s
genocide — is impossible to overstate. “The level of urban
starvation in Gaza has not been seen since the Dutch Hunger Winter and
the siege of Leningrad during the Second World War,” Alex de Waal,
an expert on famine, wrote
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in the London Review of Books.

Those words were written in February. Today, at least one in three
people in Gaza goes days on end without eating anything at all. At the
same time, thousands of humanitarian aid trucks sit idle at the
border, blocked by Israeli occupation forces. On its own, the United
Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) has 6,000 trucks on
standby, waiting to be allowed entry. "This is unlike anything we have
seen in this century," the United Nation World Food Program’s
Director of Emergencies Ross Smith said. Everyone in Gaza is now at
risk of slow and painful death by hunger.

But Gaza is just a microcosm, a radical condensation of a much broader
crisis of structural violence that imperialism inflicts daily on the
world’s working and oppressed people. Most victims do not die
because of bombs, bullets, or artillery shells. They die from the
thousands of deprivations that are threaded — actively or passively,
with intent or as a byproduct of systems of accumulation — through
the global economy.

Sanctions are one of the main tools in this arsenal of ruin, and their
effect is lethal. According to a landmark new study of mortality rates
and sanctions in 152 countries conducted by the Center for Economic
and Policy Research and published
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in _The Lancet Global Health_, United States and European Union
sanctions have contributed to 38 million deaths between 1971 and 2021.
In the past decade alone, these sanctions have killed approximately
560,000 people every year. That amounts to roughly 1,500 people per
day, a death toll comparable to that imposed by Nazi Germany on
Leningrad during its 872-day siege.

Economic sanctions are often framed as a humanitarian alternative to
war — a way to pressure "rogue states" or "terrorist regimes" to
change their behavior without resorting to armed conflict. But the
latest research confirms what the victims of sanctions regimes have
long known: sanctions are more lethal than any bomb. By some
estimates, over the period subject to the CEPR study, US and EU
sanctions have claimed at least as many lives as all the armed
conflicts and genocides that swept the planet combined — forms of
violence that were often also imposed by the very same sanctioners.

Today, roughly 25% of the world’s countries are under US, EU, or UN
sanctions, with a large part of these imposed unilaterally by the US
without the approval of the UN Security Council.

This is no accident. Sanctions form just one part of a broader
imperial arsenal, one that includes clandestine operations, aerial
bombings, propaganda campaigns, political isolation, diplomatic
pressure, wars of aggression, and economic strangulation. Together,
these tools seek to force states to submit to an international
economic order dominated by Western powers. Like a medieval siege,
which denies food and supplies to a territory, sanctions gradually
erode states’ capacities to develop, while weakening the resolve of
their people to defend their sovereignty.

In this way, sanctions function as collective punishment, violating
fundamental principles of international humanitarian law while
remaining cloaked in the language of diplomacy and security.

But in the corridors of the State Department, the aims of sanctions
are explicit. In the case of Cuba, for example, a memo issued in April
1960 called for the US to take all actions to deny “money and
supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about
hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Their effects are
acknowledged, too. In the 1990s, the UN reported that US sanctions
against Iraq killed half a million children. When former US Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright was asked about the deaths, she said that
“the price, we think, is worth it.”

In aggregate, the scale of the violence imposed by imperialism on
humanity is so great that it amounts to a “structural genocide”
— a continuous wasting of human lives and nature. This was the
subject of last week’s lecture of _The People’s Academy,_ in which
Professor Ali Kadri taught a class on his landmark book, _The
Accumulation of Waste_. Capitalism, Kadri argues, has reached a point
where it has become an instrument of death, which devalues people and
nature to the point of their systematic destruction in order to
guarantee continued profits. (You can watch the lecture here
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classes of _The People’s Academy_ here
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Through strategies of permanent and deepening deprivation, imperialism
deforms and truncates human lives, beating people into submission and
exhausting their very belief in resistance. This is what sanctions do
globally, and what hunger and attacks intended not to kill, but to
maim, do to the Palestinian people. A body depleted by hunger can't
raise its fist, and a limbless child will never pick up a gun. But it
might find itself surrendering its land to destruction or working for
a pittance before collapsing, unceremoniously, from exhaustion —
this is imperialism’s agenda for all the world’s working people.

Juxtaposed with the abundance just beyond its walls, the forced
starvation of Gaza offers us a mirror image of the wider world under
imperialism — one where great misery exists among obscene abundance,
quarantined behind fences, across seas, and beneath turrets prepared
to mow down those seeking sanctuary from deprivation. This profound
contradiction was captured by a young Palestinian poet named Taqwa Al
Wawi, writing from Gaza amid its growing and all-consuming hunger:

_In a world of full plates And overflowing shelves, A crumb of bread
is rare._

_What will we eat When there is no food?_

_The Progressive International launched in May 2020 with a mission to
unite, organize and mobilize the world’s progressive
forces.  Since then, it has grown to include over a hundred
organizations representing millions of people on all inhabited
continents._

* Gaza
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* famine
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* hunger
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* Sanctions
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