Are we living in a “uniquely troubled, blood-soaked phase” of human history? Paul Johnson examines the record for Forbes magazine and concludes the answer is no. For one thing, the “great nations” have engaged in no major wars for 70 years.

The great wars are the spectacular killers. During World War I 8.5 million men were killed in action, not counting those wounded or disabled. Germany lost 1.8 million, Russia 1.7 million, France 1.4 million, the British Empire 908,400 and the U.S. 116,500. Minor participants such as Italy (650,000) and Turkey (325,000) sustained heavy losses. Another big loser was Armenia: About 1.5 million of its people perished in the genocide perpetrated by the Turks under the darkness of war.

Yet it’s a melancholy fact that the influenza pandemic that swept the world in 1918-19 claimed twice as many victims as the First World War. Most of them would have survived had penicillin and similar “miracle” drugs, still a generation away, been available.

The Second World War probably had a bigger death toll than the First, particularly when we count the civilians killed in air raids. Yet the number who died–more than 20 million–was certainly exceeded by the number of those killed in what might be called the apparatus of totalitarianism.

Hitler not only exterminated more than 6 million Jews in his holocaust but also equal or larger numbers of Poles, Slavs and Russians. Stalin–when we total up the lives lost in his artificially induced famine, the transporting of entire populations, the Gulag Archipelago and the mass executions–was responsible for the deaths of more than 20 million people, most of them Russians.

Pol Pot, the Cambodian mass-killer, heads the genocidal list, having murdered about a third of his country’s entire population. But Mao Zedong, during his career as China’s head of state, managed to kill via execution, famine and brutal social engineering more than 70 million of his fellow countrymen. This appalling statistic, certified by the most penetrating of his biographers, Jung Chang, means that Mao was responsible for the deaths of more people than both world wars combined.

Despite these terrifying atrocities, global population totals continue to rise. It would be wrong to use the expression “population explosion.” Rather it is a slow, persistent increase, basically because of medical advances at all levels of society.