4/18: Killing in the 20th Century

[Undertoad]

I came across this graphic recently ("image of the day" doesn't mean I'm restricted to photos) and I found it quite interesting. Roughly speaking, it's a graph of governments killing people - including wars where people are sent to kill other people.

For one thing, it's a nice visual display of quantitative information that would make Edward R. Tufte proud. (Sorry. Only information designers know who Edward R. Tufte is; his books on displaying information graphically are considered the Strunk and White of visual design.)

It shows you this information in a way that helps you understand it. It doesn't show you everything, and it does have problems, but it gives you a fresh sense of what is going on.

For example, there are a few spikes on the graph where there was a big killing all at once. But more often, even in the case where there aren't wars, the killing begins, proceeds at the same pace for 4-5 years, and then finds a new pace.

I had no idea that the "noise level" of people being killed worldwide hasn't been below 500,000 per year since the 20s.

That there never was a peaceful time in Stalin and Mao's regimes. They took over, began killing and didn't stop until they were gone.

Also, apparently in our modern world, one dictator doesn't come in and start massive purges. Instead, they kill under their limit - not enough to get noticed, perhaps? So we have a slow escalation of smaller atrocities adding up to a pretty large number of deaths.

It's hopeful to think that we have entered a new era in the world, where communications technologies allow us to share news of atrocities and somehow cut them off. Hopeful to think that maybe the big spikes of the past are not going to happen again. That maybe history does move forward and is not cyclic. That the 21st century graph is not going to look like this. That modern war is more like desert storm than ww2, that nations won't suffer a loss of a tenth of their male population in them.

And hopeful to say that the western hemisphere seems only marginally related and that it could never happen here. But I know that I could just as easily replace the word "hopeful" with the word "naive".