The Costs of War

I rarely bother reading nonfiction anymore (thank you book on the Detroit housing industry), but for some reason I found myself thinking about getting Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory based on its review in the New York Times - or as I call it, "The Times" - which ended with:

Eight million dead. Another sublime horsefly of a writer, the art critic Robert Hughes, described some of the war’s almost limitless damage this way: “If you ask where is the Picasso of England or the Ezra Pound of France, there is only one probable answer: still in the trenches.”

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you talk about this about a year & a half ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

We love to look back and partly justify warfare by bragging about scientific innovation brought on by necessary victory in battle, or that war is good for an economy as it was after World War II, but we never seem to wonder about all the intellectual possibilities we sent out to get sprayed around battlefields in pink mists instead of nurtured & implemented into human life. I know the thinking generally is "they're all just 18 year-old kids who cares", but out of the millions of them purposefully sent off to fight wars and killed, who knows what possibilities really lived in each of them? How many cancer cures did we lose? Could we be living on the Moon by now, with pills that let us live to 200 years old? Who know? 🤷‍♂️ We bungled one chance back in the 50s vis-a-vis women and technology, and we seem intent on repeating such a thing with our endless thirst for war over peace. It's just weird I never seem to hear anything like this mentioned when it comes to the costs of war.