man, f**k you hurf. WWII is NOT an outlier. It is what modern war actually looks like, and was the last major war. you call it an outlier because it blatantly is laughing in your face when you're trying to pass off your sophistry. We know this because the great war was ALSO horrible and killed millions and it happened right before the second world war (the great war was arguably worse; in the second they didn't throw chemical weapons on the battlefield, for example, and the tank killed the defensive war of attrition. however, more died in the second, and then when you think about the atrocities it gets even worse). The whole f**k point is that the threat of nuclear Armageddon is why the cold war never went hot. This is why Putin argues against missile defense, because it neuters him and allows his enemies to act with impunity.
the first and second were outliers in that they were sharp divergence from the generalized trend of declining violence. is that what you're arguing now?
and i wasn't just talking about that. i was talking about the relative-to-mid-20th-century of over 100 million who died because of a refugee crisis in the 3rd century that precipitated in a thousand years of feudalism