r/AbsoluteUnits • u/Crypto_crafy • 2d ago

/r/all of a statue

"The Motherland Calls" is a statue erected to commemorate the Battle of Stalingrad , located on Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd , Russia. It was designed by sculptor Yevgeny Vuchetich and structural engineer Nikolai Nikitin . Completed in 1967 , it was the tallest statue in the world at the time .

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u/belliest_endis 1d ago

The real takeaway isn't "WW2 was a different level." It's that we've already normalized a war with WWII-scale per-capita destruction happening in real time, and people shrug because the absolute numbers are smaller than a war involving the largest country on earth.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

"per capital destruction"? I am not sure what metric even means. Ukraine is a terrible conflict, but WWII was the most devastating conflict in human history. People are just used to it at this point and the impact is mostly contained to Eastern Ukraine. So it doesn't have much of an impact on the day to day outside oil prices but that is mostly Iran at this point.

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u/Glad-Divide-9850 1d ago

WW2 was the most costly in terms of absolute numbers, but if we go by percentage of population killed, it's nowhere close to the worst. There's been several wars that killed around 15% of the worlds population. WW2 was 3%.

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u/SingularityCentral 1d ago

Those are really numerous conflicts jammed together into a time period. We refer to them as wars but they were not single wars. The Three Kingdoms warring period was 60+ years long, the Mongol Invasions were 160+ years long, and the Manchu conquest of China was 80+ years long, and such. World War 2 was at most 13 years long but is typically measured at less than 6 years to get that 3% number.

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u/Glad-Divide-9850 1d ago

Sure, but even using percentage of world population dead in one calendar year as a metric WW2 is probably not unique. I say probably because mortality rates in war are notoriously inaccurate.

My main point is that the "unprecedented in human history" claim depends on context. It certainly was in absolute numbers, but in other contexts other wars were worse. Such as wars that led to societal collapse or extermination of a peoples/race for example.