Looking at one of the world’s deadliest conflicts helps us appreciate the current “New Peace.”
Peace is a difficult thing to measure. Yet this is exactly what Neil Halloran attempts to do in his interactive documentary on the casualties of the Second World War.
In just six years, World War II ranked up the highest body count of any conflict in history, with at least 60 million dead. Although it was not the world’s deadliest war by proportion of population, the systematic slaughter of the Holocaust death camps, the devastating air raids and the horror of the atomic bomb have brought the Second World War to a hallmark of human brutality.
Halloran carefully compiles the numbers of civilian and military deaths on all sides of the war. This is not a story of individual tragedy, but that of which engulfed the entire planet.
What this visualization of data achieves is putting modern conflicts in perspective, measuring current “Long/New Peace” in perhaps unusual, yet highly convincing terms of people who have not died.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.
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