The Nature and History of Human War and Violence Throughout Hisotry

Yeah WWII was still easily more brutal then a few cave men braining each other. They did not bomb food stocks and blast women and children, and the old and infirm into meat gibs. Or devastate the wider landscape and their civilization with their war.

For world War I if you removed several generations of a large clan in cave men days they would be lucky to survive.

We nearly depopulated who regions with two separate wars. Hell it kept on going after the fact.

Population size has nothing to do with brutality only how likely we are to survive our own self hating savagery.

Also 73 million total dead from World War II war related deaths alone is no small number. World War I left 21 million from war related deaths. From the start of world war I to the end of WWII we put over 94 million people in the ground.

That is an appreciable dent in the worlds population at the time.

edited 16th May '11 12:50:18 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Population size matter. if you belong to clan with several hundred people, hundred deaths would be disastrous for the clan survival. if you belong to an Empire with hundred million citizen, million deaths is unimportant on the imperial scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties - Deaths as % of 1939 population 3.17 to 4.00

Again population has nothing to do with brutality. Cavemen were very unlikely to have the desire to wage war on the scale and intensity of the two world wars. They didn't sit around developing weapons that could wipe out a platoon of 100 in matter of seconds.

World war i and ii were easily more brutal because we turned our human ingenuity to the task of blasting as many of each to gore as we could manage in a time frame.

edited 16th May '11 2:00:50 AM by TuefelHundenIV

aah, we have different of brutality then.

my view is brutality on WW only consume small amount of groups resources, so they not as brutal. in my view its essentially specialist affair : small amount of group protector (allied soldier) given small amount of resource (tank, nuke) , engage battle with another protector (axis soldier) on limited area ( battlefield ) and limited time (several year).

I'm with Philippe here, you're describing all these things but even if we used our most powerful weapons of today (nuclear weapons) we still wouldn't kill as many people (as a percentage) as tribal societies. A typical raid can kill between 20-30% of the male population in one go. If you think it's sunshine and lollipops because they don't have machineguns, when the Iroquois captured people (they're basically stone age tech compared to Europeans), they tortured them so badly that the British would end up mercy killing the guys to much confusion of the Iroquois.

Brutality is relatively. Certainly we're more efficient per soldier in terms of firepower but they end up killing much fewer people in total. I mean what is brutality? Wiping out whole tribes, or just causing a lot of absolute deaths but barely a few percent of total population?

Vast majority of your time, you sit here, you contemplate with the rest of us. Perhaps you have a job, maybe you go to school, maybe you're a lazy bum but you have peace and you have security. In tribal societies, every day is different. Once a year the raiding begins, especially for nomadic herding societies. People die. It's not some game. But you don't have to suffer that. You can go your entire life, even through world wars and never have to fight.

edited 16th May '11 8:48:54 AM by breadloaf

Uh we if we nuked the world with all of our weapons we would likely doom humanity and turn our planet into a radioactive hell hole. It would be way worse then what cave men could do by comparison. Again your population size has nothing to do with brutality of humanity. I have no idea where you people get this silly idea. If anything it would be more brutal because we just keep shoving people into the grinder because we have more.

Cavemen were unlikely to engage in protracted wars because it was extremely dangerous to their very survival to do just that. Same reason most tribal groups usually had periods of rest between wars and skirmishes. If anything the more populous we get the more brutal we get.

Humans have a We Have Reserves mentality built in then?

I would say our civilizations and societies do where numbers of population are less of a worry.