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To: Broken_Clock who wrote (384096)	6/23/2009 6:28:08 PM
From: Bilow	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Hi Broken Clock; Re: "Yet it is also evident that no other century on record equals the 20th in uncivilized civil violence, in the number of conflicts waged, the hordes of refugees created, the millions of people killed in wars, and the vast expenditures for "defence."" The century that the human race was most populous in (so far) was the 20th century, so any statistics comparing it with previous centuries should concentrate on per capita statistics. Re: "With four years still to go, this modern century has already been responsible for 250 wars and 109,746,000 war-related deaths, a number somewhat larger than the total current population of France, Belgium, Netherlands, and the four Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Since mid-century, wars have become more frequent and much more deadly. There have been six times as many deaths per war in the 20th century as in the 19th. More lies with statistics. Re: "Increasingly, civilians are the major victims of war. In the first half of this century, they represented about 50 per cent of war-related deaths. In more recent years, however, the proportion of civilians in total deaths has been rising. Wars are now more life-threatening for non-combatants than for those fighting them. In the 1960s civilians accounted for 63 per cent of the recorded war deaths; in the 1980s for 74 per cent; and in the 1990s the rate seems to be going higher still." This is due to better statistics being kept for civilian deaths in modern warfare. The truth is that civilians have always been, and always will be, fair game in war. The concept that civilians should be left alone is a modern affectation. For example, the 30 years war, from 1618 to 1648, killed 30% of the population of Germany. About 2/3 of the population of Paraguay died during The War of the Triple Alliance in 1864-1870. In the ancient world, the tradition was that if a city resisted a siege, the inhabitants would be killed or sold into slavery. Athens did this famously to the island of Melos. This is recorded in great detail in the Melian dialogue, which give a very accurate description of actions against civilians in ancient times: en.wikipedia.org The result of this was that every male in Melos was killed and everyone else was sold into slavery. But that is nowhere near the only city so subjected during the Peloponnesian war. Heck, the ancient Romans had chariot (sports) riots with fatality totals in the tens of thousands. The human race has been steadily becoming milder as the centuries go by. In contrast to ancient man, people are very civilized nowadays. You guys are shocked when someone shows you a video of a man getting his head cut off. Your ancestors considered this entertainment worth paying to watch. (In this appetite we have not changed, see the Iranian woman shot on film a few days ago, what's changed is that one death can be observed by billions instead of hundreds or thousands.) The total number of people killed in the 20th century, according to your figures as of 1996, was 109,746,000. The century ended with 6.1 billion people and began with 1.65 billion. This is an average of something like 3 billion. So the percentage of the population killed in wars is around 3.7%, for the century. Studies of ancient man indicate that human violence, as a cause of death, was around 20%. In the 19th century, something like 80 to 110 million people were killed in just one war, the Taipei rebellion: hawaii.edu 220-280AD was the Third Kingdom era in China. The population dropped by 34 million. The number killed in violence (note that the most common way that civilians are killed in wartime has generally been starvation) must have been something around that number; some say as many as 40+ million. en.wikipedia.org That's just one war, one country. And it's from a time when the population of the planet was far far less than during the 20th century.