All Quiet on the Western Front

I hope people find some of these reviews interesting.  I do them solely to give people ideas about people or things to learn about.  This book, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque, was written by a German following the first world war.  It is short and very readable, a first person account by a German soldier of his experience of intense trench warfare.  It was a forerunner of the now-common war novel giving a realistic depiction of the horrors, which become commonplace for the soldiers, and destruction of war; and of the mental processes and reactions of these soldiers to being placed in this situation.  And for the truth that the young people who make all the sacrifices are just pawns for old men to use in pursuit of vanity.  Talking about you here Vladimir Putin, the barbarian par excellence.  And it was actually the Ukraine war that sparked me to re-read this book, which I last read in college.  We see in Ukraine exactly what happened in WWI.   I strongly, strongly encourage all of you to pick up this book and be reminded how wasteful and traumatic war is.

We here in the US have repeatedly seen the impact in recent decades of what happens to the men, and now women, that we send into these conflicts–Vietnam, Iraq, etc.  All Quiet shows that nothing has changed for over 100 years–participation in actual sustained combat fundamentally changes and damages people.  And despite the immense damage to people and to economies as well, we see no change in the willingness of some leaders, none of whom you will find on the battlefield, to send hundred, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of soldiers to be killed or maimed.  We see no real commitment by these delusional thugs to peaceful solution of disputes; although it is by now clear that it isn’t really disputes, but vanity that drives these violent conflicts–Putin, Xi, the Ayotallah, the nutbag in North Korea, just take a look at what they are.

So we can write all the books, sing all the songs, film all the movies with the same message–Masters of War, The Thin Red Line, Apocalypse Now, Fortunate Sun, and on and on, but that message isn’t being heard by those vain leaders.  So the destruction of lives and waste of money and physical assets will continue, to humanity’s great detriment.