Ah, here’s the comment that I was looking for! Nothing. NOTHING. Will be more violent than WWI. Once I hit my early 30’s, as a white/cishet male I was under contractual obligation to become interested in one of the two WWs. I chose The Great War. What happened in those four years will never be possible again. Going from shoulder to shoulder musket fire to 50+ machine guns firing all at once while you are being shelled at the speed of a drumroll and next second running through minefields that funneled men into what the Generals affectionately called “the meat grinder”. This isn’t an exaggeration. Ernst Junger wrote in ‘The Storm of Steel’ that one time he was happy that after four hours, shelling calmed down to ‘mere drumfire’. Yet, drumfire lasted for WEEKS on end. To be concise: no army in WWI wore helmets at first. Bullets? Yup. Shrapnel? Yup. 20,000 pounds of earth and rock thrown into the air regularly and raining down in a tight column? Yup. No helmets. The Battle of Waterloo (Napoleon, etc. 1812) was the last time multiple nations battled. They expected the same. The French had Calvary with plumes and fancy streamers and bright shiny armor, and thought guns were ungentlemanly. And then they fought mounted against TANKS. Flamethrowers melting entire groups of men... A weapon that fired a shell twice the size of a big Volkswagen 70+ miles... It wasn’t uncommon for the eastern nations to use Napoleonic canon... while having planes drop bombs on them and strafe them with machine gun fire. Mechanized Warfare was unimaginable. No one... NO ONE had any clue what they were getting in to. And they all jumped in head first at lightning speed. The race to the bottom was perfected, industrial warfare was a literal learning experience. Sometimes you accidentally blew up 800 of your own men. And then did it again 15 mins later.
16 year olds went from competitive barbershop competitions to being marched to their deaths. Sometimes they were being forced by their own old schoolmaster, who wouldn’t hesitate to dome you if he even thought you were going to drop rank and run.
Nations encouraged their young men to join up with your town buddies, join with your workmates... sounds good until you learn that there were entire villages left with no male survivors. More than one account of a local generation of 2,000ish men being vaporized with a single shell.
Ok, so... WWI saw the invention and use chemical warfare. A certain Austrian Corporal was gassed very badly and thought it was too inhumane for battlefield. Never again. But that same lil Austrian is known for his non combat use of toxic gas in concrete rooms...
Amount of deaths in the 21st vs 20th? Probably much more in the 21st.
But nothing will ever touch the sheer violence of 1914-1918.
WW2 brought a fat surprise and then a little surprise, but WWI was a torrent of shock. Like. Yeah, war... it’s no good folks. But the world was in collective catatonic horror at the drop of a hat. The “why” was irrelevant so quickly. The honest thought was directed towards “there is no way to stop this” and the world entered the modern age. All at once. Like going to bed a fifth grader and then waking up with a fucking Afro between your legs. It was exactly that. Very unpleasant and very unexpected. 10 days before the outbreak of it, there was no thought war was a possible thing (in the general population). And then Europe exploded all at once.
over 3 times more people died. only one country had the temerity to do a communism over ww1-->some dozen did over ww2. civilians had a much more limited 'role' in ww1, only russian & polish & belgian civilians were getting shot in ww1, vs. literally all of them except americans in ww2.
aerial bombings, firebombings, these must be as traumatising as the fields of flanders. you wanna talk about vast cultural trauma--holocaust, nuclear bombings, japanese atrocity in china, the list goes on and on and on
Agree, 100%. I was using violence and mortality too ambiguously. The deaths are not comparable. But to be very callous, work camps and starvation doesn’t have violence in the same way. I went very very out of my way to drop this, but a veteran who was intimately acquainted with both said “the trenches were just as bad as Treblinka”. I am referring to work/POW camps. I should have been clear. The Holocaust is... just a given in my opinion. Like, nothing can compare. Also the 50,000 German civilians who committed suicide en masse kinda falls off the radar when getting nitty gritty. You hit the nail on the head though concerning clear non-combatants. The Second War was elevated mechanized warfare brought to every street corner. Thanks for helping me hash this out. :sicko-instapot:
Books are for nerds. (Jk) If you want to get a “non-academic”, as in actually interesting and not a chore, view of almost everything pertaining to culture, concurrent events, etc... Get the “Blueprint for Armageddon” series of podcasts by Dan Carlin (Hardcore History). It’s six episodes of around 4.5hrs each. But it’s audio so that sounds daunting, but Mr. Carlin is a journalist and not a historian (he says this at LEAST once a show for ever episode he puts out) so it’s very fact based narrative history. There’s a plot and through lines like any novel. I have every episode he’s put out (lots of single episode topics but also series of episodes dedicated to a single subject) and Blueprint for Armageddon is his magnum opus. No question.
Ok, books are cool too: (caveat: these are informative books, but not my favorites)
-“Guns of August”, B. Tuchman
-“A World Undone”, G.J. Meyer
-(I lied this is my favorite)the best, hands down, in every single way, no caveats WWI book is “Storm of Steel”, Ernst Junger. The prose and writing is GORGEOUS, his ability to relate what being shelled is like so vividly and easily understood by anyone over 10 years old, and most importantly: his actual life story is amazing and at times fucking hilarious to think about. A lil anecdote, paraphrased and modified for the post: he was getting drunk with his homies, went to go back to his own trench, got lost and was so hammered that he ended up a few yards from a heavily garrisoned English trench. Literally walked up to the enemy’s door by accident... his solution? “Fuck it.” Threw a few grenades into the Brit trench and fucking ran away laughing like he ding-dong-ditched someone. Lol, he was also 18. By 19 he was a decorated officer who led a unit. After the war he just... changed...
he decided bugs were fuckin’ rad so he became a respected entomologist.
War was boring to him... but beetles were exhilarating. I could almost write the book verbatim due to repetition of reading. But I have read it so many times because it’s SO readable. Calling it a “page turner” is an insult. You can’t put it down because there’s a cliffhanger, it’s impossible to put down because you are becoming spiritually intimate with what the kids call a “hard motherfucker”. He is a man of contrasts(😏). He liked war. He wrote and liked poetry. But the dude loved bugs...
Deadly* not violent. My main idea was that it was so unexpected, the scale, the timeframe, the fact that 60,000 soldiers died in the first minute of a battle. People had heard of automatic firing weapons. But not fucking Machine Guns. We have a really good idea of how this will progress. And it’ll be gruesome, but nothing new. Ugh. That last sentence was struck with heavy keys. God damn. The Climate will do the “big work”, but we as a generation cannot fathom the horror of what will unfold at our collective doorsteps.
Really the only reason I dare make my contention (because again, aside from my dismal view of the future I think you are correct) is WWI had an end date.
With something like Climate Catastrophe theoretically its death tally will keep rolling until there's noone left to paint the cave walls..
Ah, here’s the comment that I was looking for! Nothing. NOTHING. Will be more violent than WWI. Once I hit my early 30’s, as a white/cishet male I was under contractual obligation to become interested in one of the two WWs. I chose The Great War. What happened in those four years will never be possible again. Going from shoulder to shoulder musket fire to 50+ machine guns firing all at once while you are being shelled at the speed of a drumroll and next second running through minefields that funneled men into what the Generals affectionately called “the meat grinder”. This isn’t an exaggeration. Ernst Junger wrote in ‘The Storm of Steel’ that one time he was happy that after four hours, shelling calmed down to ‘mere drumfire’. Yet, drumfire lasted for WEEKS on end. To be concise: no army in WWI wore helmets at first. Bullets? Yup. Shrapnel? Yup. 20,000 pounds of earth and rock thrown into the air regularly and raining down in a tight column? Yup. No helmets. The Battle of Waterloo (Napoleon, etc. 1812) was the last time multiple nations battled. They expected the same. The French had Calvary with plumes and fancy streamers and bright shiny armor, and thought guns were ungentlemanly. And then they fought mounted against TANKS. Flamethrowers melting entire groups of men... A weapon that fired a shell twice the size of a big Volkswagen 70+ miles... It wasn’t uncommon for the eastern nations to use Napoleonic canon... while having planes drop bombs on them and strafe them with machine gun fire. Mechanized Warfare was unimaginable. No one... NO ONE had any clue what they were getting in to. And they all jumped in head first at lightning speed. The race to the bottom was perfected, industrial warfare was a literal learning experience. Sometimes you accidentally blew up 800 of your own men. And then did it again 15 mins later.
16 year olds went from competitive barbershop competitions to being marched to their deaths. Sometimes they were being forced by their own old schoolmaster, who wouldn’t hesitate to dome you if he even thought you were going to drop rank and run.
Nations encouraged their young men to join up with your town buddies, join with your workmates... sounds good until you learn that there were entire villages left with no male survivors. More than one account of a local generation of 2,000ish men being vaporized with a single shell.
Ok, so... WWI saw the invention and use chemical warfare. A certain Austrian Corporal was gassed very badly and thought it was too inhumane for battlefield. Never again. But that same lil Austrian is known for his non combat use of toxic gas in concrete rooms...
Amount of deaths in the 21st vs 20th? Probably much more in the 21st.
But nothing will ever touch the sheer violence of 1914-1918.
(thanks for coming to my ted talk)
I appreciate your qualitative, rather than quantitative, answer. In a sense it is the greatest tragedy in history.
u r my nemesis, WW2 worse than WW1
WW2 brought a fat surprise and then a little surprise, but WWI was a torrent of shock. Like. Yeah, war... it’s no good folks. But the world was in collective catatonic horror at the drop of a hat. The “why” was irrelevant so quickly. The honest thought was directed towards “there is no way to stop this” and the world entered the modern age. All at once. Like going to bed a fifth grader and then waking up with a fucking Afro between your legs. It was exactly that. Very unpleasant and very unexpected. 10 days before the outbreak of it, there was no thought war was a possible thing (in the general population). And then Europe exploded all at once.
Fight me, bro.
The original is always the best.
over 3 times more people died. only one country had the temerity to do a communism over ww1-->some dozen did over ww2. civilians had a much more limited 'role' in ww1, only russian & polish & belgian civilians were getting shot in ww1, vs. literally all of them except americans in ww2.
aerial bombings, firebombings, these must be as traumatising as the fields of flanders. you wanna talk about vast cultural trauma--holocaust, nuclear bombings, japanese atrocity in china, the list goes on and on and on
Agree, 100%. I was using violence and mortality too ambiguously. The deaths are not comparable. But to be very callous, work camps and starvation doesn’t have violence in the same way. I went very very out of my way to drop this, but a veteran who was intimately acquainted with both said “the trenches were just as bad as Treblinka”. I am referring to work/POW camps. I should have been clear. The Holocaust is... just a given in my opinion. Like, nothing can compare. Also the 50,000 German civilians who committed suicide en masse kinda falls off the radar when getting nitty gritty. You hit the nail on the head though concerning clear non-combatants. The Second War was elevated mechanized warfare brought to every street corner. Thanks for helping me hash this out. :sicko-instapot:
:sicko-instapot:
deleted by creator
I'm gonna need your top 3 books on ww1. Thank you
Books are for nerds. (Jk) If you want to get a “non-academic”, as in actually interesting and not a chore, view of almost everything pertaining to culture, concurrent events, etc... Get the “Blueprint for Armageddon” series of podcasts by Dan Carlin (Hardcore History). It’s six episodes of around 4.5hrs each. But it’s audio so that sounds daunting, but Mr. Carlin is a journalist and not a historian (he says this at LEAST once a show for ever episode he puts out) so it’s very fact based narrative history. There’s a plot and through lines like any novel. I have every episode he’s put out (lots of single episode topics but also series of episodes dedicated to a single subject) and Blueprint for Armageddon is his magnum opus. No question.
Ok, books are cool too: (caveat: these are informative books, but not my favorites)
-“Guns of August”, B. Tuchman
-“A World Undone”, G.J. Meyer
-(I lied this is my favorite)the best, hands down, in every single way, no caveats WWI book is “Storm of Steel”, Ernst Junger. The prose and writing is GORGEOUS, his ability to relate what being shelled is like so vividly and easily understood by anyone over 10 years old, and most importantly: his actual life story is amazing and at times fucking hilarious to think about. A lil anecdote, paraphrased and modified for the post: he was getting drunk with his homies, went to go back to his own trench, got lost and was so hammered that he ended up a few yards from a heavily garrisoned English trench. Literally walked up to the enemy’s door by accident... his solution? “Fuck it.” Threw a few grenades into the Brit trench and fucking ran away laughing like he ding-dong-ditched someone. Lol, he was also 18. By 19 he was a decorated officer who led a unit. After the war he just... changed...
he decided bugs were fuckin’ rad so he became a respected entomologist.
War was boring to him... but beetles were exhilarating. I could almost write the book verbatim due to repetition of reading. But I have read it so many times because it’s SO readable. Calling it a “page turner” is an insult. You can’t put it down because there’s a cliffhanger, it’s impossible to put down because you are becoming spiritually intimate with what the kids call a “hard motherfucker”. He is a man of contrasts(😏). He liked war. He wrote and liked poetry. But the dude loved bugs...
I'm like 95% in agreement with you here
But the 5% I do disagree with is I foresee that Climate Catastrophe will be orders of magnitude more violent.
Edit: And obviously the sun going supernova will be infinitely more violent, but I'm making a healthy wager we won't be around to see that.
Deadly* not violent. My main idea was that it was so unexpected, the scale, the timeframe, the fact that 60,000 soldiers died in the first minute of a battle. People had heard of automatic firing weapons. But not fucking Machine Guns. We have a really good idea of how this will progress. And it’ll be gruesome, but nothing new. Ugh. That last sentence was struck with heavy keys. God damn. The Climate will do the “big work”, but we as a generation cannot fathom the horror of what will unfold at our collective doorsteps.
These are excellent points.
Really the only reason I dare make my contention (because again, aside from my dismal view of the future I think you are correct) is WWI had an end date.
With something like Climate Catastrophe theoretically its death tally will keep rolling until there's noone left to paint the cave walls..