Western Europe in and post WWII would seem to apply.

Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.

The problem is that basically wherever you go in the world, you can find lack of peace and prosperity, and you can usually find some reason or another to attribute some blame to one power or another involved in the last major change. Any location you name will welcome a "what about X!?"

The whole world though, the whole of human civilization is now and has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity. If you smooth out the bumps there is a very significant increase in every metric you could think was positive. Consistently. For centuries. Is that a result of world power using force? Probably to a significant extent.

What is called in Israel the War of Independence and outside the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, wasn't a revolution. The Jews in Palestine had their own territory and governance distinct from the Arabs for decades. So I think it was more a case of expanding and consolidating what they already had.

  Israel is pretty prosperous if you're Israeli.

Perhaps it’s because 1) what ideologies are widespread in a society is the key factor in determining that society’s prosperity and 2) historically (and to a large extent now) the only way to change ideologies on a large scale in a relatively short time span is refine change (and the often accompanying death, subjugation, and/or displacement of large populations).

There are, of course, many ideas of ways to organize a society such that new ideologies can be proposed, criticized, and implemented (and old ideologies disposed of) without such regime change. Some have even been implemented and are believed by many to be very promising.

Solidarity in Poland, supported with plausible deniability at arms length by the CIA.

Solidarity was a Polish labour union that grew massively in size from its foundation in 1980 to evolve into a civil resistance social movement using non-violent means to achieve change.

In 9 years Solidarity went from inception to leading Poland’s post-totalitarian communist pivot towards democracy.

In a program called QRHELPFUL, CIA provided cash as well as communicatio/distribution equipment via 3rd party cutouts to prevent the Soviet KGB and Polish UB/SB from portraying Solidarity as a western puppet.

It was incredibly successful, but it would best be described as providing a bit of tailwind to existing organic momentum.

CIA didn’t create Solidarity, they simply backed the right player in a non-kinetic way that has had lasting impact.

Poland’s post-communism pivot initially led by a Solidarity coalition government would be considered a considerable success for the people of Poland in terms of economic value creation and political freedom.

What world powers funded revolutionary forces in Western Europe in and post WWII?

By winning the popular vote in an election. No revolution at all.

> The point applies at least there.

Even leaving aside the above, the point would only apply if you are claiming that Nazi Germany promoted "peace and prosperity" in Western Europe.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hitler-was-not-voted... is a good example of the reasoning.

I did a bit of digging on Wikipedia. And based on the description in https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_1933_German_federal_el... I think the claim that the ‘33 election wasn’t a free election isn’t baseless.

Having your fascist enforcers “monitor” the election, helping elderly people to the voting booths and “helping” them to vote correctly all seem to be indicators that the election is fishy.

And even then, the fascist party didn’t even get a majority…

The problem here is solid data, but I believe we are at an all time high with the need and use of antidepressants and co.

"has been for a long time on a significant upward trend in peace and prosperity"

Prosperity paid for with a coming climate collaps and deforestation and constant fear of nuclear holocaust.

I am really not an back-to-the-trees kind of guy, but knowing rough and wild nature life and knowing and seeing the systematic suffering in our modern meatfactories (whether for humans or pigs) I remain very sceptical that everything is so much better now, than how it used to be.

Yes, unequivocally, and by every real measure life is better now than it has ever been for more people than ever before. You claim to "know rough and wild nature life" but how do you propose forcing it upon 8 billion human beings with your self indulgent logic? Nothing stops you from living this supposed rough life consistently, yet here you are regularly commenting on HN, participating in tech industries and contributing to the use of a wast, worldwide high technology infrastructure that extracts resources from the Earth to sustain itself. It's not just meat farms that contribute to massive natural resource use.

The aside about antidepressant use as an argument against the previous claim about improved living standards is just bizarre, because for one thing it does the opposite of negate a claim of improved conditions for people and secondly, it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century.

No doubt the number of humans is at an all time high, but whether the amount of happiness on this planet is at an all time high, is quite dubious. Or is "happiness" not a real meassure?

"it's such a minor thing relative to billions of people living longer, better, more calorically and medically stable lives than has ever been the case in any previous century"

Modern people might be well fed, but overall they live a stressful, anxious and lonely life. They might still be better off, than a medival starving and exploited peasant, but human history is more diverse than that.

My main point was btw. that we have no real data, of how happy the average human was 10000 years ago, 1000 years ago, .. till now. Since we do not have that data, all the nice self reasuring meassurements are mainly a placebo.

And I am glad people are getting help they need. I wish more were.

The French helped out the American revolution and the two haven’t had a major military conflict. Although it did end up bankrupting the French monarchy and causing the Revolution.

This point requires justification. There’s no evidence that democracy would have arrived in France without revolution.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_of_Notables

While military deaths are invariably put at between 2.5 million and 3.5 million, civilian death tolls vary from 750,000 to 3 million. Thus estimates of total dead, both military and civilian, range from 3,250,000 to 6,500,000.

People tend to hand wave away the massive cost in human lives it's historically taken to replace a regime with a more "enlightened" one.

The decades following the overthrow of Charles I of England, Louis XVI of France, Nicholas II of Russia, or Wilhelm II of Germany were not good ones.

That is of course very selective; I have no read Pinker's book, but I don't think he argues that horrible wars never occurred, just less so.

It's important to keep in mind that the population has also grown in the intervening period. For example, Caesar's conquest of Gaul cost the lives of about a million Celts, with a further million enslaved (estimates). While "1 million" and even "2 million" seems low compared to, say, the second world war, it was a huge percentage of the population, up to as much as ~25%.

There are many such truly staggering figures if you look at history. No one really remembers it in the same way as we do more modern atrocities, which is why we can have fun Asterix & Obelix cartoons about it, but the numbers of historical battles are often truly staggering.

I don't know if Pinker was right or wrong, but I do think you really need to actually look at the numbers to get a good overview throughout the centuries and you can't just rely on "armchair analysis" for this sort of thing, as there will be a strong bias towards more recent events.

I think the genocides of the XX century completely negate Pinker's entire thesis. I am not saying there were no genocide before, but I do not see a downward trend, and some of the largest contributors to these genocides are some ideologues that are the children of the enlightenments.

I think it only stopped because of 1) technological advancements, nukes in particular, that made a war between large powers unthinkable (if you look back at the XIX/XX century, every large war was an order of magnitude more destructive than the previous one because of technology), and 2) capitalism which created a large middle class (the XX century term for what would have been called bourgeoisie in the XIX century) who aspire to live peacefully and have the resources to ensure it happens.

Sure, but I think you need to do a more detailed analysis that goes beyond "look at these horrible things that happened in the last 100 (or 400) years!" On the face of it Pinker's claim indeed seems very counter-intuitive, but sometimes counter-intuitive things are true. Pinker may very well be wrong, but I wouldn't dismiss his argument quite so quickly from my armchair.

Of the internal kind, there's Augusto Pinochet -- Chile is still the 2nd wealthiest country in Latin America in terms of per capita GDP (Uruguay being 1st)

Do what now? From what I have read it seems like Panama, Chile, and several Caribbean island nations all have higher per-capita GDP than Uruguay.

The people are certainly better off financially, thanks largely to the creativity and drive of entrepreneurs and workers. But go down to the public square and challenge the powers that be verbally. See how that ends for you.

Hint: they still send a bill for the bullets to the family.

I also enjoyed My Traitor's Heart"

The simple answer is that the US military industrial complex dominates our foreign policy decisions. "Success" is measured in how much money was given to boeing and how much boeing agrees to give back through political donations and "speaking fees" after the politicians are out of office.

Or even, with American president trying to extort Ukrainian president to persecute familly of his political opponents so that he can cheat elections in USA ...

China.

This is the greatest example of all. Search for "Soviet support for Mao"

Northern Ireland, although the US funding was always indirect/deniable.

Maybe paying more attention to geopolitics would yield this answer to you. The base of most conflicts is usually a resource war or outright coups to enable imperialism.

With your example of Ukraine, the finding of large oil and gas fields under the east, west and Crimean regions in 2012 sealed it's fate. The Maidan revolution 2 years later was nothing more than a coup setup by Jonn McCain and Lindsey Graham. Then Shell moved in to look at how to extract said resources.

Then it would have been likely Ukraine would be used as a base to cut off Russia's access to the middle east through the Volgograd Gap in order to more easily topple Assad, allowing the Qatar-Turkey pipeline to complete it's route through Syria, thus giving Europe an out from the Russian gas monopoly.

Of course the Russians couldn't stand for any of that, so they formed their own opinions about what actions were necessary. The action they chose ended up hurting them with Germany being forced into, (not even forming their own opinions), the necessary actions of dropping the Nord Stream pipelines, adding $100bn to their military budget and signing a deal with Qatari's for access to the yet to be completed Qatar-Turkey pipeline.

Of course all of this benefits the respective populations and corporations allowing them to climb into higher positions of power.

We like to think that politicians don't think further than the next election cycle and it's mostly true. But the deeper structures in the respective state, the states needs, and corporate profit ARE in fact playing the long game, causing the politicians to almost stumble upwards in some twisted version of natural selection.

When you take into account that US war corps get to test new weapons systems against a near peer adversary without having to sacrifice US lives, it's a perfect storm.

Like that old Bill Hicks bit... "Bring up G12 Tommy; says here it destroys everything but the fillings in their teeth!"

Greece? Post-WW2, the US-aligned powers funded a anti-communist drive in Greece, which successfully kept Greece on this side of the Iron Curtain.

It is "revolution" when it ends in positive (for the west) outcomes

It is "terrorism" when it does not