[annowiki]

I can strongly recommend Fussel's (the author of this essay) book "The Boys' Crusade", which provides a very eye opening account to WWII. It is most likely a longer version of this essay (I haven't read this essay).

I can also recommend his book Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, but for different reasons.

Other books in the same vein:

- The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle by J Glenn Gray (Gray was a philosophy PhD and a 2nd Lieutenant in the war)

- War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges (Hedges was a war correspondent during the balkans and numerous other conflicts, this is much more interested in the psychological build up to war in common society, and its effects on society)

These books make me very pessimistic about human nature, but Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors provides a nice antidote: the total number of people killed by warfare in the 20th Century, if we followed similar patterns to our prehistoric ancestors, would have dwarfed what actually happened. We are becoming less warlike, even if its not cured.

[siavosh]

I read the Chris Hedges book when it came out and it's left a lasting impression on me. I think it got rid of any academic notions of war I may have had. One part that I'll always remember was him saying the war criminals were the pundits on TV leading up to and during the Bulkan war, they held much guilt in leading the masses to the terrible outcomes. The other counter intuitive insight it gives is how wars have this strange effect on some people where they can relinquish their day-to-day worries/anxiety/failings and instead can find some kind of strange peace or even thrive in a more black/white just-survive reset of society. I should probably read it again.

[branko_d]

> the war criminals were the pundits on TV

Mila Štula comes to mind.

I still remember watching the hysteria on Radio-Television Belgrade in disbelief that people would actually believe it. But they did. And the rest is history, as they say. Ugly, murderous, and utterly unnecessary history.

I see some signs of this in the contemporary US media landscape, and I worry the consequences might be similar.

[rhn_mk1]

What event are you describing? A quick search doesn't reveal any English sources for Mila Štula.

[hnuser123456]

translated from https://www.espreso.co.rs/vesti/hronika/197603/umrla-mila-st...

Mila Štula is mostly remembered by the public as one of the leading media poets of the Milošević regime on Serbian Radio and Television from the beginning of the 90s of the last century. She became famous for her famous comments in the daily Dnevnik in which she disqualified the opposition and its leaders. Her statement that Vuk Drašković has a villa on Lake Geneva is particularly noteworthy, which has never been proven.

The other side saw her as a victim of Tuđman's regime, who became unwelcome in Zagreb after HDZ came to power, as she provoked, or asked unpleasant questions, to the first president of independent Croatia at media conferences. She was a journalist for "Danas" in Zagreb. The Croats, among other things, accused her of working for the counter-intelligence service of the JNA. This led to her moving to Belgrade in 1991.

[branko_d]

I’m describing the breakup of Yugoslavia. TV pundits had a big role in demonizing everybody who might oppose the regime, be it the other political parties or the other republics/ethnicities. This paved the road to the war.

Imagine Alex Jones-level “journalism” directed by the government, blasting from the official and more-less the only widely available TV station in the country. Štula was one of the most notorious examples, but I’m not surprised she’s a relative unknown to the people who didn’t watch her with their own eyes.

The most disappointing aspect about the whole situation was that it was so transparent. It was obvious what they were doing, and yet the population at large somehow went along with it… the socialist apparatchik Milošević won elections at the time Eastern European countries were getting rid of their old communist/socialist power structures. Not that he was the only problem, far from it, but to this day I believe that reformists like Ante Marković would have had a fighting chance if not for Milošević.

And then, when there were no answers to economic problems, it was easy to put blame on others: your neighbors and far-away foreign powers alike. Do that in a powder keg that is the Balkans, where so much blood was spilled in the past and everybody remembers it, and the consequences are predictable.

I think that people who lived in democracies their whole lives underestimate how dangerous the malicious journalism and misinformation can be when enough people start believing it.

[agumonkey]

I've read an article long ago about war veteran that wanted to go back. They found life in society more dreadful than war. War brought them unrivaled intensity of bonds (life or death is unquestionable) and order. In society everything is muddy and mediocre.

Even without going to the extent of war, I find "primitive life" is probably still healthiest for us existentially. Maybe using proxies like sports as symbolic wars.

[mannykannot]

I'm fairly sure that anthropological evidence shows, pretty conclusively, that early society was a good deal more violent (on account of violence inflicted by people) than what we have today. (I may well be mistaken about this, but I have a recollection of hearing something to the effect that all pre-columbian adult skeletal remains found in the Americas show evidence of violence (not that Columbus improved things, of course.))

[hcrisp]

Sounds like "Why Young Men Go to War" [0] by Sebastian Junger. He also wrote the book called War with similar themes.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9389520

[agumonkey]

Thanks but the webpage i remember was older. Early 2000s style article and more about Vietnam era.

[rospaya]

The Hague is full of poets, playwrites, psychiatrists and lawyers and the media was heavily used to incite hatred. Not in the way that directed violence in Rwanda for example, but it was propaganda.

[yamtaddle]

Not about war, but the same author's Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, published in 1983, is insightful and very entertaining.

Incidentally, if anyone knows of a worthy successor, I'd love to read it. His observations remain remarkably accurate in most cases (his completely-off take on "Class X" notwithstanding) but there must be more to say on the topic since then.

[bwanab]

"Class" seems to have held up very well. I remember back when it was published trying to shoehorn myself into his "Class X". I had to squint really hard.

[yamtaddle]

I think the core problem was his not recognizing Class X as just the usual bohemian avant-garde, and thinking that it represented some shift in the class hierarchy rather than a constant part of it. His hope for some bright future for this "classless" class was simply misplaced, because he didn't see what it actually was. Which makes the end of that otherwise fun book kind of a downer.

[buescher]

Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks is "what happened when the upper middle class became class X". You could argue whether it's worthy or not, but it's what we've got.

[js2]

Let me also recommend an extraordinary book about the Russian women who fought in WWII:

The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/book-review-u...

[agumonkey]

here's fussell through internet archive https://archive.org/details/boyscrusadea00fuss

argh sorry, limited preview only.