• DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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    1 year ago

    Sure, if you don’t count all the mercenaries they hired as coalition troops. Mercenaries you can watch, on YouTube, firing .50 cals into traffic as “warning shots.”

    And you ignore that “military age male” doesn’t mention being visibly armed, particularly suspicious, and is defined as simply being over a male over 16.

    But even if that number was a hundred times higher in reality it would still be about 10% of the total estimated casualties.

    The point, as mentioned, was not to kill people, as the original comment implied.

    It was to conquer and control an oil rich nation.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        1 year ago

        Compared to the atrocities of the fairly recent past? The Rape of Nanking, the Holocaust, the Eastern Front, even Manifest Destiny?

        Absolutely. Even assuming the worst, because unlike then mass extermination wasn’t the point, which is what they claimed it was.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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          1 year ago

          I didn’t realize it was a contest. What is the minimum number of people to not count as “pretty low?”

          • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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            1 year ago

            In case you’ve forgotten the context of this internet argument, the original commenter implied the world was seeing unprecedented wars launched solely to kill as many people as possible.

            So if they could point to a war in the last two decades that killed, idk, five million people solely to kill five million people, like the Second Congo War, that’d be a start, but it still wouldn’t be at all comparable to the ethnic cleansings of the past.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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              1 year ago

              I don’t think there’s ever been a war solely to kill people. There are always other factors even when there’s a genocide going on. So if that is your criterion, the number is zero.

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                  1 year ago

                  Then you run into a definition of genocide. A lot of people would consider what Israel is doing right now to be genocide.