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Comment by bix6 | Hacker News Reader

Combined with the other ongoing conflicts it really feels like we’re in a WW3 era

I don't want to downplay the atrocities going on in the current conflicts, but this sort of comment deserves some perspective.

About 70 million people were killed in WW2, as of the present day about 1 million have died in the war Russia is waging against Ukraine and about 70k people have died in the Israeli/Palestine conflict. The horrors are most certainly real. But WW3 this era is most certainly not, that's thankfully off by an order of magnitude.

The World Wars were called World Wars because of the number conflicts and the powers involved. While the casualties and damage has been lower, it seems like the powers are at least indirectly involved at the moment.

If you look back through history this has been the case since at least the Cold War, though. All the proxy hot wars in the Cold War, for example, back when the world was bi-polar. Now it’s multipolar with similar proxy wars.

Yes, but WWII also had a phase called Phony War, and after that much of the war was in Poland.

We could say that Ukraine is the current Poland.

The Phony War was the phase between the fall of Poland (took ~1 month) and the invasion of France, where the dominant phase of the war was actually taking place in Norway.

The Invasion of Norway was only the final month.

The China-US arena in Taiwan has not begun. What about the Russian “provocations” against NATO? I don’t think that it is necessarily clear that these conflicts are anywhere near WWIII yet but there are clear signs that we could be heading there

Sadly history is a very poorly studied topic.

I look at European leaders and they don't seem to remember it any better.

The best way to teach history would be to make politicians dig slit trenches and then shell them for a few days. Anything less than that people will always end up regurgitating ethno nationalist bullshit or "geopolitics".

> The best way to teach history would be to make politicians dig slit trenches and then shell them for a few days

I don't see why you think that. That didn't work for Hitler, Göring, and the countless numbers of WW1 veterans in the SA and SS hungry for another try.

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