Pretty much all there is to say. As others have pointed out, at the current rate, we're going to see mass displacement at an unheard of rate in the second half of this century. This isn't several hundred thousand people - we're talking hundreds of millions, if not billions of people having to relocate.
Look at the interactive map NYT (or was it WaPo?) put out about what climate effects could look like for the US in a few decades time - the lower half of this country will have pretty much large dead zones.
I think you could make a strong argument it already is, depending on how you wanna split hairs over the word "violence."
I had in mind WW1, WW2 and the Great Chinese Famine. Nothing in history compares to those events. Yet.
Well again, this is where the splitting hairs comes in.
You could argue that the inequal distribution of resources by international capital is violence against the domestic workforce/people outside of the imperial core which leads to ~9million (specifically hunger) deaths annually.
A possible counter to this is "hunger existed prior to 2001"
The counter-counter to that is "but productive forces have expanded greatly and increased overall efficiency and productivity in foodstuffs production; it's more possible than ever to reduce or eliminate these deaths and yet here we are."
So if there is greater capacity to resolve this issue, but an equal will to just not do that (if not a greater resolve to not fix the issue due to a further need for economic anxiety as profitability falls), does this make it a MORE violent act?
IDK like I said I think you can try to work this out, but I think it would be an.... unproductive use of time?
The global starvation rate kills people at roughly the same rate as Mao's famine, so I guess you could say the worst crisis in communist history is just business as usual under capitalism. If Mao is to blame for his management of the famine, then the capitalists are definitely to blame for basically refusing to eliminate poverty even as productivity skyrockets.
Ah, here’s the comment that I was looking for! Nothing. NOTHING. Will be more violent than WWI. Once I hit my early 30’s, as a white/cishet male I was under contractual obligation to become interested in one of the two WWs. I chose The Great War. What happened in those four years will never be possible again. Going from shoulder to shoulder musket fire to 50+ machine guns firing all at once while you are being shelled at the speed of a drumroll and next second running through minefields that funneled men into what the Generals affectionately called “the meat grinder”. This isn’t an exaggeration. Ernst Junger wrote in ‘The Storm of Steel’ that one time he was happy that after four hours, shelling calmed down to ‘mere drumfire’. Yet, drumfire lasted for WEEKS on end. To be concise: no army in WWI wore helmets at first. Bullets? Yup. Shrapnel? Yup. 20,000 pounds of earth and rock thrown into the air regularly and raining down in a tight column? Yup. No helmets. The Battle of Waterloo (Napoleon, etc. 1812) was the last time multiple nations battled. They expected the same. The French had Calvary with plumes and fancy streamers and bright shiny armor, and thought guns were ungentlemanly. And then they fought mounted against TANKS. Flamethrowers melting entire groups of men... A weapon that fired a shell twice the size of a big Volkswagen 70+ miles... It wasn’t uncommon for the eastern nations to use Napoleonic canon... while having planes drop bombs on them and strafe them with machine gun fire. Mechanized Warfare was unimaginable. No one... NO ONE had any clue what they were getting in to. And they all jumped in head first at lightning speed. The race to the bottom was perfected, industrial warfare was a literal learning experience. Sometimes you accidentally blew up 800 of your own men. And then did it again 15 mins later.
16 year olds went from competitive barbershop competitions to being marched to their deaths. Sometimes they were being forced by their own old schoolmaster, who wouldn’t hesitate to dome you if he even thought you were going to drop rank and run.
Nations encouraged their young men to join up with your town buddies, join with your workmates... sounds good until you learn that there were entire villages left with no male survivors. More than one account of a local generation of 2,000ish men being vaporized with a single shell.
Ok, so... WWI saw the invention and use chemical warfare. A certain Austrian Corporal was gassed very badly and thought it was too inhumane for battlefield. Never again. But that same lil Austrian is known for his non combat use of toxic gas in concrete rooms...
Amount of deaths in the 21st vs 20th? Probably much more in the 21st.
But nothing will ever touch the sheer violence of 1914-1918.
(thanks for coming to my ted talk)
I appreciate your qualitative, rather than quantitative, answer. In a sense it is the greatest tragedy in history.
WW2 brought a fat surprise and then a little surprise, but WWI was a torrent of shock. Like. Yeah, war... it’s no good folks. But the world was in collective catatonic horror at the drop of a hat. The “why” was irrelevant so quickly. The honest thought was directed towards “there is no way to stop this” and the world entered the modern age. All at once. Like going to bed a fifth grader and then waking up with a fucking Afro between your legs. It was exactly that. Very unpleasant and very unexpected. 10 days before the outbreak of it, there was no thought war was a possible thing (in the general population). And then Europe exploded all at once.
Fight me, bro.
The original is always the best.
over 3 times more people died. only one country had the temerity to do a communism over ww1-->some dozen did over ww2. civilians had a much more limited 'role' in ww1, only russian & polish & belgian civilians were getting shot in ww1, vs. literally all of them except americans in ww2.
aerial bombings, firebombings, these must be as traumatising as the fields of flanders. you wanna talk about vast cultural trauma--holocaust, nuclear bombings, japanese atrocity in china, the list goes on and on and on
Agree, 100%. I was using violence and mortality too ambiguously. The deaths are not comparable. But to be very callous, work camps and starvation doesn’t have violence in the same way. I went very very out of my way to drop this, but a veteran who was intimately acquainted with both said “the trenches were just as bad as Treblinka”. I am referring to work/POW camps. I should have been clear. The Holocaust is... just a given in my opinion. Like, nothing can compare. Also the 50,000 German civilians who committed suicide en masse kinda falls off the radar when getting nitty gritty. You hit the nail on the head though concerning clear non-combatants. The Second War was elevated mechanized warfare brought to every street corner. Thanks for helping me hash this out. :sicko-instapot:
Books are for nerds. (Jk) If you want to get a “non-academic”, as in actually interesting and not a chore, view of almost everything pertaining to culture, concurrent events, etc... Get the “Blueprint for Armageddon” series of podcasts by Dan Carlin (Hardcore History). It’s six episodes of around 4.5hrs each. But it’s audio so that sounds daunting, but Mr. Carlin is a journalist and not a historian (he says this at LEAST once a show for ever episode he puts out) so it’s very fact based narrative history. There’s a plot and through lines like any novel. I have every episode he’s put out (lots of single episode topics but also series of episodes dedicated to a single subject) and Blueprint for Armageddon is his magnum opus. No question.
Ok, books are cool too: (caveat: these are informative books, but not my favorites)
-“Guns of August”, B. Tuchman
-“A World Undone”, G.J. Meyer
-(I lied this is my favorite)the best, hands down, in every single way, no caveats WWI book is “Storm of Steel”, Ernst Junger. The prose and writing is GORGEOUS, his ability to relate what being shelled is like so vividly and easily understood by anyone over 10 years old, and most importantly: his actual life story is amazing and at times fucking hilarious to think about. A lil anecdote, paraphrased and modified for the post: he was getting drunk with his homies, went to go back to his own trench, got lost and was so hammered that he ended up a few yards from a heavily garrisoned English trench. Literally walked up to the enemy’s door by accident... his solution? “Fuck it.” Threw a few grenades into the Brit trench and fucking ran away laughing like he ding-dong-ditched someone. Lol, he was also 18. By 19 he was a decorated officer who led a unit. After the war he just... changed...
he decided bugs were fuckin’ rad so he became a respected entomologist.
War was boring to him... but beetles were exhilarating. I could almost write the book verbatim due to repetition of reading. But I have read it so many times because it’s SO readable. Calling it a “page turner” is an insult. You can’t put it down because there’s a cliffhanger, it’s impossible to put down because you are becoming spiritually intimate with what the kids call a “hard motherfucker”. He is a man of contrasts(😏). He liked war. He wrote and liked poetry. But the dude loved bugs...
I'm like 95% in agreement with you here
Nothing. NOTHING. Will be more violent than WWI.
But the 5% I do disagree with is I foresee that Climate Catastrophe will be orders of magnitude more violent.
Edit: And obviously the sun going supernova will be infinitely more violent, but I'm making a healthy wager we won't be around to see that.
Deadly* not violent. My main idea was that it was so unexpected, the scale, the timeframe, the fact that 60,000 soldiers died in the first minute of a battle. People had heard of automatic firing weapons. But not fucking Machine Guns. We have a really good idea of how this will progress. And it’ll be gruesome, but nothing new. Ugh. That last sentence was struck with heavy keys. God damn. The Climate will do the “big work”, but we as a generation cannot fathom the horror of what will unfold at our collective doorsteps.
These are excellent points.
Really the only reason I dare make my contention (because again, aside from my dismal view of the future I think you are correct) is WWI had an end date.
With something like Climate Catastrophe theoretically its death tally will keep rolling until there's noone left to paint the cave walls..
Once climate catastrophe hits full swing, we're going to see violence on a scale unprecedented in human history.
Mass climate migration totaling in the tens of millions will trigger western nukes and more than one Rwanda-level genocide, I fully expect the majority of third world states to resemble Yemen, Syria and Libya by mid-century
Like Matt Christman said, it's redistribution of the ill-gotten gains of the first world or genocide.
If its any comfort I refer to this time as "concertina time" - it expands and contracts, seemingly at random.
20th century: impossible, we are the most violent century. 21st century: challenge accepted, hold my beer.
Probably not in terms of direct physical violence between people in close physical proximity. For example, use of nuclear, biological weapons, asymmetric warfare, psychological operations are "violence" but not necessarily interpersonal violence.
No sir, Biden is president. All is well. Thank you. Back to brunch now.
It’s popular to imagine that “the apocalypse” is a few large events with meaningful casualties - no - the apocalypse is a perpetually hostile climate that endures the rest of the century and beyond.
I honestly don't think that kind of thing can be accurately or reasonably measured.
Second cold war will see sporadic Climate/Resource conflict (like Syria). Eventually less stable states will collapse. Honestly I would predict more civil wars/ refugees (again like Syria) than actual nation vs. nation wars (haven't had a large one since Iran-Iraq, which is interesting to research if you have time).
Honestly I would predict more civil wars/ refugees (again like Syria) than actual nation vs. nation wars
I think this is correct, but I think it would be a mistake to undersell (what I perceive to be) some inevitable major regional conflicts.
I'm thinking like Scramble for Africa 2.0 between "Eastern" and Western spheres of influence for Africa (which we're seeing the beginnings of already) LATAM and the smaller Asiatic states currently caught between the two powers like Pakistan and Vietnam.
The darkness of Nazi fascism and industrial genocide, plus the rest of WW2 in Europe and Asia is a level of violence I don't think we will see again (unless shit goes full hellworld)
I'd actually say no, in basic terms. QoL has been steadily improving at different rates for most of the world, with hunger and disease still being issues but much less so in 2000 than in 1900. The nature of modern war means we will probably never see another WWII scale conflict that doesn't end in everyone getting nuked.
What does happen will be a lot more apparent, with our unheard-of access to information, and I think it feels a lot more constant because of that, but in overall terms we're getting incrementally better.I sure hope that nuclear weapons mean that nothing like WW2 will ever happen again
