They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically.
No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.
They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.
I asked ChatGPT to compute the rate of total deaths (civilians + military) since the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
Here's what it came up with:
Period. Approx average deaths from war
1815–1913 ~5–15 per 100k per year
1914–1945 ~100–200 per 100k per year
1946–1989 ~5–10 per 100k per year
1990–today ~1–3 per 100k per year
I know AI is not 100% reliable but it searched on many sources to compute that.
I checked some of them and the conclusion is in line with them.
Here's the "bottomline":
> Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the per-capita death rate from war has fallen substantially, with the huge exception of the 1914–1945 world-war era, which produced the highest war mortality rates in modern history.
TBH this surprised me. I thought that with much better killing machines in the 20th century, we'd be more efficient at killing, and as we're still having wars as usual that would mean death rates would increase... but it seems I was quite wrong.
Alas we're seeing a reversion to historical norms. The "civilized" world was a temporary and localized phenomenon. The usual pattern in conflicts between societies was always genocide: kill all the men, take the women and children as slaves, smash the cultural artifacts, and steal anything of value. Probably thousands of societies have been utterly erased that way. Hopefully we can arrest the gradual worldwide regression to barbarism but I'm not optimistic.
People love repeating this stuff, a form of navel-gazing: 'Norms' is used by bad people to support their obviously bad ideas - 'I know this sucks, but it's inevitable!'.
Instead of complaining, do what prior generations did and stand up and build something.
No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.