Thanks, Starchild, for the list of wars and deaths. I think it's also important to bear in mind, though, that oppression isn't measured just by number of deaths. If one government is sufficiently more powerful than others, it doesn't need to do a lot of actual killing, except as a last resort (which may be a sign that it's power is breaking down). You recall Al Capone's saying, "You can get a lot farther with a kind word and gun than with the kind word alone." John Perkins makes this point in _Confessions of an Economic Hit Man_, that the U.S. has a graduated series of devices for getting what it wants from other countries; and invasion, as in Iraq, happens only in exceptional cases, when everything else fails. The questions you raise about Africa, in particular, are interesting and important; but it is my impression that a lot of what is happening there, as well as in the rest of the world, is long-run consequences of earlier interventions by the U.S. and other colonial powers. We defined national borders in ways that suited our interests, and often installed minorities in leadership, to guarantee conflicts which might take decades to come to open war; then we blame them. Africans, like Europeans and Asians, have always slaughtered one another, but maybe not in the ghastly numbers that they have in recent decades.