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Comment by throw310822 | Hacker News Reader

> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda

Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.

Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.

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The millions of deaths are still happening, they just aren't our boys so we were all cool with it.

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.

https://ourworldindata.org/conflict-deaths-breakdown - certainly has been in the millions - maybe lower in the 'Western world' but countless of the dead in wars across the world in ww2, have been civilians.

For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

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.

They are. They just are killed in utero instead of on the front lines.

I for one am happy the US is not being as hypocritical as to call its military department the Department of Defense anymore. The US has initiated or participated directly in many, many wars since the UN was founded, and none of them were in self defense - no country on Earth would be foolish enough to attack the US (arguably, Al-Kaeda did it, but they're not a country and Afghanistan was essentially scapegoated). Yet, we have a long list of conflicts the US either started outright, or entered on its own volition for reasons that just can't be called self-defense by any sane person: Korea (1950), Vietnam (1960s and 1970s), Libya (1980s), Iraq and Balkans (1990s), Afghanistan (2000s), Syria + Iraq + Libya (2010s) and now Iran. Not to mention the many CIA-led regime changes it instigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Surely Iraq was the main scapegoat? I've never quite understood how a Saudi national (who hated the secular Saddam Hussein) hiding in Afghanistan caused Iraq to be attacked.

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