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Niall Ferguson is a well-known historian and and college professor who has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy award for Best Documentary in 2009.
On many occasions I've produced statistics on what happened to men in the First World war.
Click here fpr the complete picture, which may be summarized as follows: 65 million men mobilized; 8.5 million dead; 21 million wounded; 7.7 million prisoners of war/missing in action;37 million total casualties. Casualties were 57% of men mobilized
These figures are astounding. Through LSS Newsletters, I've attempted to account for the persistence of the First World War in the face of this extraordinary rate of casualties.
Yet in his well-reviewed, The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I (2000), Ferguson claims that the war persisted--men fought--because "fighting was fun."
This is a bizarre statement. Still, one might claim that, somehow, getting killed and wounded was a byproduct of the "fun" or enjoyment soldiers experienced participating in battle. I've reproduced to the right descriptions of what happened to men at the Battle of Verdun. If you are squeamish, don't read these passages.
I am not qualified to comment on Ferguson's analysis of the political dimensions of the war. But as a human being, I can state that men did not participate in the war because fighting was "fun."
This claim clearly is part of the denial mechanism that is part-and-parcel of what war is: refusal to look at the slaughter (of mostly young men). The delusion that men are aggressive warriors, heroes, etc. which serves to deny the reality: that men at war are abject, pitiable victims.
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DESCRIPTIONS OF THE
BATTLE OF VERDUN
“Men were squashed. Cut in two or divided from top to bottom. Blown into showers; bellies turned inside out; skulls forced into the chest as if by a blow from a club.”
“You eat beside the dead; you drink beside the dead, you relieve yourself beside the dead and you sleep beside the dead.”
“I saw a man drinking avidly from a green scum-covered marsh, where lay, his black face downward in the water, a dead man lying on his stomach and swollen as if he had not stopped filling himself with water for days.”
“To die from a bullet seems to be nothing; parts of our being remain intact; but to be dismembered, torn to pieces, reduced to pulp, this is the fear that flesh cannot support and which is fundamentally the great suffering of the soldier."
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YOUNG MEN: THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP IN HUMAN HISTORY
I have no desire to participate in "gender wars." But it's clear that young men (between the ages of approximately 18-25) have been the most oppressed group of human beings in human history, certainly in the Twentieth Century.
Yet young men do not acknowledge their own oppression; the abject state of a soldier in war. Soldiers plug into the role that has been assigned to them: honorable, heroic men who are willing to fight for their country to defeat its enemies.
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