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Comment by cgh | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all of humanity. If you think those are "wars", you should get some perspective. The Battle of Passchendaele alone killed roughly 600,000 men. Compare that to the total number of casualties in every one of the conflicts above.

I'm not trying to minimise things, and I understand that those who face state violence have a rough time of it. But taken as a proportion of humanity as a whole, war is at an all-time low. That is something to celebrate.

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Yes we haven't had a "World war" and your intention isn't to minimise things but you've just minimised things - those wars are not simple conflicts. The second Congo war alone took more than 5 million lives. Although officially over, lives are still being lost everyday from its aftermath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War - more recently, not even a month ago, there was another fight that saw a city fall in rebel arms and thousands of people flee from their homes.

This needs to be said a million times.

I do not support wars. That said, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the Iraq war killed less people than the Vietnam War, which in turn killed less people than WW2.

A mere 70 years ago, my country was occupied by some of the most brutal oppressors in the world. Now, our biggest problem is that we eat too much food. Most of my fellow countrymen will never have to know what it's like to be starving, to have our homes destroyed, our family members enslaved or worse.

It truly is something to celebrate.

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