This video suffers from the ethnocentric view that only western history matters... and it's boring (imo).

If it were truly what it claims, there would be an orgasm of explosions all throughout.

But this is simply how people are. You're kidding yourself if you believe it's not unending. Our history will be written, from prologue to epilogue, in blood. Perhaps our fighting isn't as gruesome at the moment as WWII, and we may have reached a sort of pinnacle, where most of our basic needs are available in excess of what our ancestors had and we are growing sedentary, but don't be fooled.

There's not been a moment in time where we've had any real sort of peace. Even if we're somehow not involved in a war, we don't even need wars for a majority of people, just right here in our own country, to suffer to the day they die.


...but that's just the world and the endless cycle of humans fighting, eating, fucking, and dying as it has always been and always shall be. Just smile and try to enjoy life. :)

If you think that looks bad, just wait 'til Skynet becomes self-aware.

That is what I was thinking through the video. The whole thing is so Eurocentric. For reasons of where the data came from (wikipedia) and what data historians (/wikipedia historians) have on battles and wars of course, but none the less. It is interesting, but I think could be more effective on a smaller scale. Maybe regionally this could be done, which would allow for more detail on a map while also including more small "conflicts" or battles. This also would present the need for data to be gathered/found on Africa, Asia, North America, and South America.

To think these were all the wars we have records of. Imagine how lively that map would get if we could include those we don't have records of.

I don't think present times are worse than ancient ones, since back then, border wars and land conquests were oh so common. Then again, today we have weapons that can do a thousand times more damage than the swords and pikes of old.

That video is pure bullshit. Here is just one example how stupid this thing is.

The 30 Years war was the most devastating war in Europe’s history. For many countries it was more devastating than WW 2. Germany lost 1/3 (in words: one-third) of its population due to famine and other war related problems. Yet in this video there are just a few blimps...

And Lukasz has mentioned other problems with this video.

If you want to wallow in self pity because the world has become so bad, go cuddle a panda...

All problems of lacking data, unmentioned known conflicts and the limitation to 'battles' aside, one has to consider the actual number of human population when these conflicts happened as well. While the number of casualties happily rose, so did [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_curve.svg]world population[/url]. If you want to scale the battles by 'importance' then you have to consider the impact on the country as well. If ten out of twelve people die compared to when a hundred out of ten thousand die the results for a country seriously differs from the visual representation in that video.

I heard that panda bears are actually quite dangerous.

Well, it only includes the major battles. It doesn't take into account people killed in the aftermath, due to famine or otherwise, but not on the field of battle.

That makes this whole thing even more redundant and pointless.... And this guy obviously took the biggest estimates on casualties, otherwise Yom Kippur War wouldn't have the size of most napoleonic battles ...

Were there any major wars that we know of in NA or SA in the early 1000s? The Maya and Inca weren't really established until centuries later, or perhaps they were but that is lost to history now, with a wee bit of help from the spanish. We know very little about any inter-wars on the american continent due to the lack of records of that era. Some shit probably happened, but ... with no sources, you can't know. Well, of course the data is limited. What else would you expect? Do you have better data than what the video shows? The problem is everybody has a pretty limited scope here; the time they have been alive. Whatever came before it doesn't really count. What the video shows is that there is no significant decline in the number of major conflicts going on in our time vs. several centuries back. There is a decline in total number of people killed of course, and what with international aid and such to conflict zones the civilian populace no longer faces years of famine and constant looming threat after an armed conflict. Well, mostly anyway.
When it comes down to the numbers the main source is this wikipedia article, and it's related content:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles

That, also form a German, or even European point of view, is not true. (Western-)Europe has atm the longest uninterrupted period of peace ever. Same goes for to some degree for China and Japan. We are not fighting more wars, we are just documenting them better.

Yes, and if you have an estimate of 8,000 - 18,500, taking 18,500 flat-out for dramatic effect is just lame.

This whole thing is one emo reach around for all those hippy kids who think it's fashionable to blame modern society for everything.

Edit: Sorry if I sound like a dick, but there is sure as hell enough bad stuff happening at the moment. Stuff, we need to work on, and BS like this simply doesn't help...

This video is absolutely ridiculous.
It grossly ignores or misinterprets historical data as a tool to try and convince us that the world is just as bad now as before.

I mean, no wars anywhere other than Europe and the Middle East for almost the first 500 years?
No scaling of losses according to actual population?
Ignoring everything other than major battles despite the fact that war-related problems like famine and disease used to be a more important source of death than actual fights until the 19th century?

Frankly, I find it pathetic. The fact is that people in our time, with very few exceptions (i.e. some in Africa and Asia) lead much more peaceful, healthier and happier lives than people a few centuries ago.
No amount of pampered Western kids who want to convince themselves otherwise in order to whine about how their lives suck and humanity being so bad will change that.

Yeah, we do, but in terms of the sheer number of wars we start we're basically going at the same rate as always. It's only been 40-odd years since the last major conflict, 4% of the timespan shown in the video, and most of us on here haven't been alive for more than about half that long.

It's all about perspective, and this at least shows that the "peacefulness" of modern society may just be a bias caused by our short horizons and limited lifespans. In truth we are just as warmongering as ever - the scale of the provocation needed to launch another major conflict is much higher than before due to sociopolitical structure, yes - but to those who think that we are past the point where a major world or continental war is likely to ever happen again, well, take your pick from past periods that have exibited the same apparent "peacefulness" as that of today.

In the whole 3-5million years of man's existence on this little pebble of a world, there's been *MAYBE* 2,000 years, total, when there's never been a fight, battle, war.

As much as we say we hate war, we're significantly predisposed to doing it.