The Wonder of the Human Person - A Book to Ponder VIII
War and its Consequences The twentieth century was arguably the most violent century in human history, certainly in terms of the number of people killed. Those numbers vary, of course, according to the source cited. A cursory search on Google yields the following figures: 203 million ( M. Cherif Bassouni), 167 - 175 million ( Zbigniew Brzezinski), and 203 million (Matthew White: Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century , 2010) ). See Necrometrics for further estimates. One way or another, the numbers are in the hundreds of millions. An interesting question to ask ourselves here is the age-old one: What have we learned from our mutual destruction? The purpose of historical inquiry, according to most historians, is not simply to present facts but to search for an interpretation of the past. They are attempting to find patterns and establish meaning through the rigorous study of documents and artifacts left by people of other ti...