Today in my perusing the Drudge Report www.drudgereport.com I stumbled on a story about The First Global Peace Index. The index ranks 121 countries from first being the best and 121 being the worst.
No surprise but a Scandinavian country came in first, Norway. Take a guess at what was 121? Why, Iraq of course. Ready for a laugh? The United States came in 96th. Ninety-sixth?! I mean, we should be thankful that we are ahead of Zimbabwe, 106th on the list even though many of its people are fleeing to anywhere thanks to the dictator Robert Mugabe. And good ol' Venezuela, with that paragon of virtue and socialism, Hugo Chavez came in at 102. Israel, which has never sought war with its neighbors is third from the bottom at 119. Only Sudan and as noted Iraq are worse.
The study was made a group called the Economist Intelligence Unit and here is some of the criteria they used to come to the conclusions.
Peace is correlated to indicators such as income, schooling and the level of regional integration.
Peaceful countries of shared high levels of transparency of government and low corruption.
Small stable countries which are part of regional blocs are most likely to get a higher ranking.
Now, using that criteria, it should not come as a surprise that four of the top ten countries in the "peace index" are in Scandinavia. They are Norway, as noted number one, Denmark, number three, Finland, number six and Sweden number seven. They are also some of the most homogeneous countries on earth. In fact, all of the top ten nations in the top ten are very highly homogeneous. Therefore, they will obviously have a more peaceful and willing group than nations that are not homogeneous. Only number eight, Canada, does not have a strong overwhelmingly homogeneous, dominant group.
So, what does that mean? More racially pure nations are more likely to be peaceful? I do not know. The bottom ten are all nations with strong religious or ethnic tensions.
I think this whole "peace index" is a joke. The criteria makes the outcome predetermined and allows for those that would like to make Scandinavian socialism the world model, well it just backs up their already preconceived notions.
The fact that the United States is ranked 96 is a joke. We do, most of the time, have a transparent government. Is there corruption? Of course but what other nation would put those who are corrupt and caught on trial of a jury of their peers? For corruption alone, Mexico, which ranks 79 should be behind the United States. Is there income disparity? Yes, but this is the one nation where anyone can start at the bottom and become middle class and maybe even rich. Can't say that about Peru, yet it is ranked 70. Schooling? Now there is where we should get low marks. Only in the United States will a student spend more time in a classroom learning about sex than civics. Political correctness over a classical education that has been proven to work in the past. The fact that the United States is the sole superpower means that we have more responsibility. Sometimes, like it or not, we are the policeman of the world. Can't say that about Norway.
This "peace index" is really nothing more than propaganda and really not a true indicator of what constitutes real peace. The index rankings can be found here: http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-30-2
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