One of the most popular human activities is killing each other – and last century was the pinnacle (so far, at least). The total death toll from war, tyranny and slaughter from 1900-1999 was around 180 million people, equivalent to everyone in Germany, Italy and France [*].

So why was the 20th century so bad? Was it because of the godless communists? The fascists? The evil colonialists? The crazy tribalists? The theocrats?

No. It was just We The People. Once you correct for population size (which is fair enough: as evil ruler of China you have the opportunity to kill a lot more people than the equally evil ruler of Luxembourg), there is absolutely no pattern to the distribution of massacres by ethnic group, religion or political affiliation.

This has positive and negative implications. The positive is that none of the current set of crazy ideologies seem likely to have a substantially worse impact than the wars of the 20th century – and right now, the human race is still flourishing, as are many of the countries that were worst impacted by slaughtering. The negative, obviously, is that there’s a strong chance that tens if not hundreds of millions of people will be arbitrarily slaughtered by their neighbours over the next 100 years.

It’s probably worth noting as a final point that Saddam Hussein’s domestic evils don’t even make the top 30, in proportionate or absolute terms. This doesn’t make him a good man, but it’s yet more evidence that his evil has been played up to con humanitarians into supporting the invasion (I’m as guilty as anyone of falling for this one).

(from Matthew White, via Tomodachi)

[*} Anyone suggesting that the above distribution would have been a better use of scarce killing resources is not taking the topic seriously enough.