From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 03:15:10 MDT
In a message dated 4/6/02 11:58:04 PM Pacific Standard Time, dwayne@pobox.com
writes:
>I'll state it again for the peanut parade: police actions, civil wars,
>counter-insurgency operations etc. pale into insignificance when you are
>talking about the sudden and armed conquest of entire continents,
By that definition we never had a world war. WWI Germany might
have conquered 1/4 of Europe, if that (not counting what they started with)
WWII Germany conquered a lot, but not England, Spain, and most relevantly,
much of Russia. Is China, Indochina, Korea, Eastern Europe and significant
if unrealized possibilities in most nations of the Asian continent too small
to be
relevant to you?
>mobilisation of significant proportions of the population of the planet,
The Cold War certainly did that; almost all the developed nation maintained
huge armies throughout.
>death tolls in the millions,
2 million NVA. 2 million Cambodians. Tens of millions of Chinese. Over
a million in Korea IIRC. Considerably more than WWI. Do they not count
because they're not European?
>destruction of entire cities and regions,
Indochina, Korea, considerable destruction in China and Eastern Europe
during rebellion. I'll bet the square mileage of destruction considerably
exceeded WWI, where wholesale destruction was pretty much confined
to a few dozens of miles deep on the Western Front. In WWI obliterating
cities was still considered uncivilized.
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