I am, as I suppose many of you are too, deeply concerned about what is currently happening in the world. But, to avoid digressing, in this article I will refer only to conflicts of a certain magnitude, although I don't mean to say that the victims of small-scale incidents aren't important—on the contrary. In this matter, everyone is.

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Wars are a disaster at all times and everywhere: a disgrace to society, a kind of stupidity of humanity as a whole, which, it seems, cannot resolve its differences of opinion in a peaceful conversation, while also being unable to elucidate its territorial ambitions or its opposing points of view on such thorny issues as religion or politics, and which, unfortunately for everyone, cannot escape the clutches of the personal ego of the leaders of the world's governments.

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I'll try to take into account the time periods in which the events I'll be referring to took place. For example:

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The First World War between 1914 and 1918, where statistics reflect some 40 million casualties, both military and civilian, with around 23 million soldiers wounded.  

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The Second World War, from 1939 to 1945, resulted in an estimated 70 to 80 million deaths, of which 20 to 25 million were military personnel and 40 to 50 million were civilians. Added to this is the Holocaust, which resulted in the murder of some 6 million Jews.

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The Korean War, which took place from 1950 to 1953, was a devastating conflict. Around 3 million people died or were reported missing, most of them civilians, and it is considered one of the bloodiest wars of the 20th century.

The Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 2 million Vietnamese civilians and approximately 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Viet Cong combatants. In addition, an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 58,300 American soldiers were killed. Other countries in the region also suffered considerable losses.

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The Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 resulted in approximately 4,492 U.S. military personnel killed in combat and more than 32,292 wounded, according to Department of Defense data. Additionally, an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians died as a result of the conflict. The war ultimately resulted in an estimated one million dead and nearly two million wounded.

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The Afghan War from 2001 to 2021 left 2,459 U.S. service members killed in combat and an estimated 20,769 wounded. It was a long and terrible confrontation, with rivers of blood flowing constantly throughout the region.

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The Russia-Ukraine War, motivated by Russia's annexationist invasion on February 24, 2022, as an escalation of the war crisis that began after the Euromaidan events in 2014. According to experts, this conflagration is the largest conventional military conflict in Europe since World War II, with an imprecise death toll, although estimates suggest casualties of more than 250,000 soldiers on the Russian side and around 100,000 on the Ukrainian side. Added to this is the fact that more than 7 million Ukrainians have fled the country and another 7 million have been internally displaced. All this, in addition to the significant environmental damage in the area, which has jeopardized food distribution in the country and surrounding areas, with its consequent disastrous results.

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The Israel-Gaza War is a confrontation sparked by an attack by the Hamas terrorist group against Israeli civilians on October 7. It had a threefold objective: to shatter the myth of Israel's superiority; to put Palestine back on the political agenda; and to produce an exaggerated response that would give the international community cause to criticize the Israelis. It is worth noting that the two countries have been fighting each other since the beginning of the 20th century, precisely since 1917, when the British government, through the Balfour Declaration, supported the establishment of a "home" for the Jewish people in the region of Palestine, which at that time was part of the Ottoman Empire.

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According to official figures, by the end of June 2025, more than 56,077 Palestinians and 1,706 Israelis had died in the war, described as a genocide by various international organizations. Thousands more bodies are believed to lie under the rubble of destroyed buildings, and according to academic studies, 80% of the Palestinian dead are civilians: 70% of those killed in residential buildings were women and children. An extraordinary debacle. A war of extermination that brings the defenseless to the brink of death. Pathetic.

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In total, the loss of human beings due to political, religious, territorial disputes, coups d'état, dictatorships, tyrannies, terrorism, and other causes in the 20th and early 21st centuries amounts to hundreds of millions, not counting other armed conflicts in remote regions of the planet—more than 90 conflicts of varying magnitude and importance—for which it is virtually impossible to obtain reliable statistics on their outcome.

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Nor have I included in this work the deaths inflicted in ancient times between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens, when humanity was in its infancy and the struggle was established with total dedication for the simple hegemony of some over others, without taking into account geographical, historical, ego, political or religious possibilities.

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Thousands of years later, the first clashes arose between Muslims, Christians, and other multiple religions that did not share their views. And to avoid dwelling on ground that has been trampled on time and again, suffice it to say that the famous Jihad, or Islamic War, against all those faiths irreverent to their views, left hundreds of thousands of victims, if not millions.

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However, these cultural clashes were balanced over time, and Christians organized a powerful army of faithful fanatics, giving rise to what is known as the Crusades, a series of religious military campaigns undertaken during the Middle Ages, mainly between the 11th and 13th centuries, with the aim of recovering the Holy Land from Muslim rule. Everyone knows that those campaigns left a staggering number of tens of millions dead in their wake.

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In line with this theme, it is now the turn of the colonialists who ravaged the poorest and most humble areas of the planet: Great Britain, Spain, France and Portugal, among other powers of the time, mercilessly massacred the indigenous people of the lands they devastated in Africa, Asia, Latin America, South America, the Caribbean, and so on, to suit all tastes, with their infinitely superior troops, much better equipped than the local natives, leaving hundreds of millions of fatalities in their wake.

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So, when we take a simple look at history, we realize that the phrase popularized by the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes: “man is wolf to man,” falls short when compared to the harsh reality that a vast population of the globe has had to live with, and which, to our misfortune, has made us witnesses of the massacres to which they have been subjected at different times.

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So, it occurs to me to ask: How long will young soldiers, recruited by their governments, continue to die while the leaders—elderly adults—who provoke the clashes according to their whims remain safe in the rear? How long will innocent people continue to die: women, children, and the elderly, who are not to blame for anything and are cornered by the crises their respective countries are experiencing? How long will the danger of a warlike conflagration on our own territory, engulfing and exterminating us, loom over us all? How long?!