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Blue Vir's avatar

This was so good, all of your articles are so good. Hate to be a sycophant, but it is true.

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TamerOfHorses's avatar

"one likely cause is the greater ability of modern states to recruit a larger share of their population into warfare"

This seems to be a myth. See: War Before Civilisation by Lawrence H. Keeley.

"This does not mean that all types of violence have been reduced, in terms of war deaths the 20th century was quite possibly more deadly than previous ones"

Arguably not true going by the rate of homicide or battlefield massacres. Estimations of modern vs ancient battle casualties usually include deaths from secondary causes (such as disease, accients etc.) in the modern casualty rates but don't do so for estimations of ancient ones, skewing the data (see the book I cited above).

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