![]() ![]() Perhaps the worst, but hardly the only, terrible example of this trend can be seen in the Congo war - flaring up again right now - in which over 90 percent of the several million dead were noncombatants. The number of noncombatant deaths jumped to as much as 50 percent of the 50 million-plus lives lost in World War II, and the sad toll has kept on rising ever since. In World War I, perhaps only 10 percent of the 10 million-plus who died were civilians. The pattern of the past century - one recurring in history - is that the deaths of noncombatants due to war has risen, steadily and very dramatically. The problem with the conclusions reached in these studies is their reliance on "battle death" statistics. In his Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker goes a little further, noting that over the past 70-plus years the number of battle deaths per 100,000 people has fallen dramatically - with no spikes, just a couple of "blips." (In 2012, the total I see is back up to about 10.) In addition to this, the number of battle deaths per year, worldwide, has dropped since the end of World War II - with just a few spikes largely explained by the Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam from the mid-‘60’s to mid-‘70s, and the strife in the Balkans and among former-Soviet republics in the ‘90s. First, the number of ongoing conflicts in a given year in which more than 1,000 people die in battle has declined, if a bit choppily, from 25 in the mid-80s to five in 2006. The Human Security Report bases its conclusion on some key trends. The Human Security Reportarrived at this conclusion, which former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan affirmed in its foreword as offering proof that "he world has become much less insecure over the past 20 years." At Harvard, psychology professor Steven Pinker has taken a very long view, finding that our era is far less brutal than ancient, medieval, or even early modern times. Yet a number of remarkably hopeful studies published recently suggest war is on the wane. Writing their Lessons of History in the tumultuous year 1968, Will and Ariel Durant observed that in "the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war." The 44 years since they made this observation have added not a single year of peace to that meager total.
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