Reflections from this week's reading

As a kid in Australia in the 60s and early 70s (I don't recall the last two years of the 50s :) ), I grew up with things like reuse of food containers (milk bottles were washed and out out for replacement by the milko * , and clean containers were refilled with butter or it was dished up into paper [my recollection of the latter is hazy, but of the former is clear - especially as my maternal grandfather wouldn't mix the cream into the rest of the pre-homogenised milk, so he got the cream and we got a "lite" milk] etc ** ) and the idea that Britain had "lost the flower of its youth" in World War (part) One. Of course, Australia had also lost a lot of young men, but we seemed to be so fixated (from my perspective) on this as "coming of age" as a nation that the notion of "loss" wasn't too much part of the official narrative other than around ANZAC Day - and survivors would then mostly be forgotten about and ignored for most of the other 364 days of the year . . . and they would be forgotten and ignored for an extra day in a leap year.

In fact, from this page, the UK lost around 1.9 to 2.2% of its population, and Australia lost ~1.2% . . . while the USA lost 0.1%, Russia 1.6 to 1.9% (in ~3 years and had two revolutions and a civil war thereafter, with a further 7 to 12 million casualties), Italy - fighting on the side of the allies - lost 3 to 3.5% of its population [and considered itself so badly done by it eventually developed fascism], Austria-Hungary 3.5 - 4%, France 4.3 - 4.4%, the Ottoman Empire 13 - 15% (including the Armenian genocide), and Serbia lost 17 - 28% of its pre-war population . . . (the fact that there is such a range in the estimates suggests, to me, that many areas didn't have enough survivors to indicate how many people had lived in an area before it was subjected to fighting - which I understand was a problem that also was part of estimating deaths from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in some places.)

I think a fair few other nations have a greater right to narratives around loss - and perhaps many did build some sort of narrative (France seems to have remembered honestly, but Germany eventually - more in the 30s than the 20s, perhaps? - twisted the memory into a mythology of false claims that its army didn't lose in the field, and of being "stabbed in the back').

Nevertheless, there is still the narrative that somehow "the best" of a nation's population had been lost - certainly the physically bravest, and possibly those who were most inclined towards service to the community (this is something that was part of a short story I wrote - see here; better writers than I have written about this - for instance, the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth"). Possibly that is true - certainly the war had scarred the survivors in terrible ways (including what is now termed PTSD) that we, as societies, were only just starting to come to terms with.

Also, as societies, there were massive financial costs - before that war, there were comments (see Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns  of August",  "The Great War" YouTube channel, and the BBC TV miniseries "37 Days") about economies being so interconnected that war - or prolonged war - was impossible, which was clearly, even as it was said, a stupid, naïve and blind comment (and still is, every time some idiot trots it out now); the winners paid massive costs (I recall reading somewhere that the Australian General and later engineer Sir John Monash had calculated the cost of destroying a town by bombardment as being three times the cost of building it), and the losers had reparations - reparations sometimes described as onerous, given that Germany needed to be bailed out, but I suspect that view is a simplification, and that other influences (such as greed and unregulated banking) and consequences of the "war to end all war" contributed to that calamity.

One question that does come to mind is, if many nations indeed lost the best of their (mostly male, in the case of the UK and Australia, and other nations which did not have much or any fighting on their lands) youth, did that contribute - together with the financial costs and the poor regulation of greed and the many other factors - to the Great Depression?

But, moving on, this week I have been doing more reading (on the electronic reader that I finally weakened and bought [my concerns about such devices are part of this article] - and am liking as it makes finding quotes easier, now that I've learned how to use highlights . . . but I still like the physicality of books, especially for fiction) on the Viêt Nàm war - I read Robert McNamara's apologia some time ago, recently read Ted Sorensen's autobiography, and have now - after having re-watched the Spielberg film "The Post" - started reading the Neil Sheehan - Hedrick Smith - E.W. Kenworthy / New York Times  book on the Pentagon Papers (I downloaded the declassified  Pentagon Papers from the US National Archives some time ago, but it is heavy going, and I haven't got far into it as yet - maybe another retirement project . . . ).

And as I have done this reading, another thought has struck me: did the losses and injuries of the USA's participation in the Viêt Nàm war also lead to a similar effect to that which is mourned/glorified from World War (part) One - did a significant part of a generation "get lost" as a result of that war (although I don't consider "the counterculture" of 60s a loss)?

This is not just the casualties (and those who tended the wounded and dying, men AND WOMEN, were also scarred) - horrendous enough though that is (58,000 US and one to two MILLION Vietnamese dead [although that doesn't seem to show in the demography of the USA - it equates to ~0.03% of the total population, and ~0.3% of the age bracket], 300,000 US injured [~1.2% of that age bracket] and how many Vietnamese?), but the hope and trust and faith that might have prevented - or at least mitigated - the so-called Decade of Greed, the 1980s that saw excesses (or perceived  excesses, or greater revelation of existing excesses) and the start or acceleration of neoliberalism? (As I pose that thought, I am aware of the many other losses that had an impact - including the murders of John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, and the great Dr Martin Luther King, Jr., and others - deaths that were the most calamitous for both the USA and the world since the murders of Abraham Lincoln and Archduke Ferdinand.) I know some of what I was living through doesn't show in the official statistics and articles, but, in everyday attitudes and lived experience, the 1980s was a indeed a "Decade of Greed" that undid a lot of the gains of the 60s and 70s - a Decade of Greed made worse by the treacherous participation of so many (not all) former members of the counterculture in it.

Would that have been less of a problem if we didn't lose to death and injury of body and soul so many young people?



 * One of my uncles in my adoptive family was a milko: his horse was trained to walk the route, while he would trot off from side to side, collecting the empty milk bottles and delivering the full, leaping side fences to stay up with the horse - all of which worked well until the time he wound up injuring a leg and had to slow down, but the horse wanted to get back to its nice warm stable :) 

 ** There are obvious environmental benefits with this (no disposable containers), but there were public health risks as well - I saw several containers being brought back for refilling that weren't properly cleaned, and wonder what the illness rate was?