Probably more fluid details than today where someone can push a button and level a building 1000 miles away without seeing the faces of any of the people torn to shreds. Maybe there would be less appetite for war if people had to still physically hack up their enemies with a sword or axe.

There was an idea that the key to the nuclear launch codes should be surgically implanted adjacent to the heart of the president’s assistant. If the president should desire to launch the nukes, they would have to personally cut down a man and pull the key from the man’s entrails.

It was essentially not done because it would be too effective.

It’s John von Neumann’s idea, at least from the biography I read. Before too much praise is heaped upon him, he also strongly argued for a nuclear first strike on Soviet Union before they got their own nuclear weapons because it was best strategy from game theory POV.

I think there is a general distance to a lot of things in today's society. Very few of us have to farm or hunt for our own food, or clean an animal carcass. I don't have a strong view on the moral aspects of eating animals (I'm not a vegetarian or vegan), but I think it'll probably do some good if anyone that eats meat at some point slaughters, cleans and butchers one of the animals they eat.

I agree, a society shielded from blood either grows callous to it as long as the blood is somebody else's or becomes too traumatised to even defend itself even if the aggressor is perfectly fine killing them

"It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it." - Robert E. Lee

I think it was Call of Duty 2 (when the franchise was still WW2-based) when they would show, in my recollection, an anti-war message including this one every time your character died. I think this was absent from later incarnations of the franchise.

Cod 4, World at War, and MW2(?) also did this to my memory. At least one of them did for sure. Not always necessarily anti-war, but historical quotes related to war.

Thanks, I didn’t recall

And the quotes showed up longer, like 5 seconds, so you could read them in full. Later games would display the quote for 1-2 seconds, which often wouldn’t be enough time to process the full text

I was at Auschwitz in summer. It was beautiful weather, the birds were singing, flowers everywhere. Hard to connect this to the conditions in a concentration camp. It would have been much easier in winter.

Much much smaller scale but we did a 'Salem Witch Trails' tour and it was a grey dreary autumn day and I felt it complimented the story.

I was at Dachau a couple summers ago in similar weather. I actually found it worse and hit harder because it was such a pleasant day as I watched people stroll around the grounds, taking selfies, kids running around playing. It made me feel like I couldn't even breath.

I too was at Dachau on a day like that, over a decade ago. My partner recently asked me about it, and just thinking back to how I felt made my skin crawl. It's terrible to remember, and I hope I never forget.

It is so well preserved, because those who were liberated from it, were so horrified at what they witnesses, that they did not want anyone to forget. It was a herculean effort, many wanted to bury it,because of the pain, and many more wanted to bury it, like it never happened.

A personal salute to all those who fought to preserve it.

There is a great video on the Poles who worked to preserve it. A lot of it is ... Unspeakable.

It might have reflected the experience of the guards. One of the most astonishing facts i heard was that the guards used to get prisoners to play music for them and would even be moved to tears!

It reveals something deep about the human condition. Auchwitz was a perfectly lovely place for many of the employees as long as they disassociated themselves from all the suffering and evil around them.

I visited Dachau years and years ago. It was a nice summer day, but a pallor fell over when we went inside the camp. It felt like the sky darkened and the color drained from the entire environment.

I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in February of 1995. It was well below freezing and there was some type of ice ball precipitation, perhaps because it was too cold to snow. I was the only person there.

I walked all the way back from the famous entrance gate, along the train tracks, to the monument at the back. The place was huge and imagining people suffering there during that type of weather was especially heartbreaking. I was luckily able to convince the taxi driver to wait for me. I have some black and white photos I took of it somewhere on my shelves. That visit sticks with me more powerfully than almost anywhere else I've been.

I was fortunate enough to once have the daughter of a client I took care of in a nursing home ask me if I would escort her dad and her on a day trip as he needed help into the bathroom and such. We ended up going to a Ukrainian hall in Vancouver BC where he was going to meet some old friends.

The older ladies busy making handmade perogies was such a delicious treat.

But I also got to meet Stefan Petelycky. He wrote the book: Into Auschwitz, for Ukraine

He ended up there and was one of the lucky ones who made it out. When he pulled up his sleeve and showed me his tattoo, the number he was given there, a chill crossed my entire body and an overwhelming sense of sadness hit me.

I of course had heard about the concentration camps but seeing a tattoo in person made the event much more real where I could connect to the tragedy in a way I never did.

When history becomes prehistory, we have to go through it again

A lot of war stories get embellished and no one is going to challenge it.

There's the story about the guy who says he was the hardest working man in Vietnam, and then when pressed about what he did, he states he was a trucker to the great surprise of anyone listening.

When asked why he thought that, he says "well I was the only one."

If you're talking about the ones who drove supply trucks during the war years, the hardest working men were women.

https://vietnamnews.vn/sunday/features/947180/female-drivers...

The story wasn't actually about the trucker being hard working (or not), though I'm sure he was. He wasn't actually trying to make people believe he literally was the hardest working.

The joke is that everyone else he went to war with was claiming to be something else, so he must have delivered all the supplies himself.

The response is interesting to me, because having fought in a war, though I am not a US veteran -- I instantly got it. And the place I heard it from was more veteran dominated, and everyone instantly understood/appreciated the joke.

I didn’t get it until you explained it. It makes a lot of sense - people who have actually gone to war know of stolen valor and embellishments - you can sniff them immediately. People who have never been and don’t hang around military types much have much less of this kind of context

I suspect that for every grandpa who likes telling war stories, there are probably a hundred who get quiet and sullen when the war comes up and have to excuse themselves and go be alone for a while.

> Also, if your grandpa likes telling war stories, it's only because he survived.

As someone whose parents, grandparents, and entire family lived in Italy through WWII (and one grandfather who lost an eye in WWI), nobody liked talking about it.

If they did talk about it, it was usually brief and imbued with a feeling of "thank God it's over. what a tragedy that we were all used as pawns by the political class for nothing more than selfish ambitions."

Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

There was a prominent component of political scheming to his rise to power, and it was a totalitarian state that murdered political opponents even before it got to genocide, but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

Same in Sweden, the majority popular opinion started shifting away from supporting Germany late in the war as they were obviously losing.

Citation please.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

And there's no doubt about it - it was a myth. Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944. Ivan and Uncle Sam were kicking down the door, extermination camps were working overtime, yet most people were still fully behind him.

The hardest thing for people to admit is that they've been duped.

> Most of Germany stood behind him, and were outraged by the failed July 20th coup... In 1944.

Most of Germany had seen the defeat of 1918. Once a war is started the only way is forward.

And they liked it so much that 1918 nearly resulted in revolution.

Anyone picking up the paper could tell that the war wasn't going to be won by them in 1944. It was two years after Stalingrad, a year after Kursk and Italy's surrender, France was being liberated, Finland was collapsing, and Germany was fighting a three-front war.

Compared to all that, 1918 at the time of the armistice looked down-right optimistic.

And yet mention any of that to your husband/wife would likely get you and all your relatives killed.

> Isn't that just a comforting fantasy, though? Germans also embraced the myth of Hitler as a guy who just somehow hoodwinked everyone and made good people do terrible things.

Another way this observation is manifested is how out of nowhere you have countries voting in extremist parties and politicians.

"Out of nowhere" just like how the Germans elected Hitler for no reason at all.

As a point of fact, Germans never elected Hitler. The National Socialists never achieved a majority, and their share of the vote had been decreasing over successive elections.

Hitler was appointed to the chancellorship by senior political leaders (the president and the former chancellor) who thought they could control him. Unfortunately Germany at the time embraced the "unitary executive" theory of government.

We all know how that worked out.

The German people certainly elected the coalition government, which the NSDAP was the leader of.

You’re completely correct about the conservatives and others thinking they could control Hitler

No single human is smart enough to manage unitary executive an optimal long term form of government

Fascism was quite fashionable at the time.

> but he was enthusiastically supported by a large portion of the German society.

I can't tell you what my relatives were like leading up to the war (I certainly wasn't born at that point), but they were illiterate peasants from the south, far removed from the cities and politics.

My suspicion is that, if anything, they were like most southern Italians, who seem to have a profound distrust of the government and politicians.

If I'm honest, they didn't have any moral objections to the war--they just felt used.

People forget that the popularity of being anti-war is relatively new, like maybe 100-150 years old. World War 1 popped off so quickly specifically because moral objections to war from the standpoint of "violence is wrong" were just not even part of the discussion. Even during World War 2, most objections within the US to entering the war were based on it just not being our problem.

Up until the last century, violence was seen as just another necessary part of living, and morality only came into play when it involved you're own community.

Up to some point not that long ago, public opinion as we know it didn't exist, and for some time after that it didn't matter much. I'm mentioning this because the poster you are responding to is writing about Italy. Italy's entrance into WW I was deeply unpopular in the south of Italy, and not all that popular elsewhere, I gather.

Just some other fascinating things about WW1 and Italy. Mussolini was heavily was heavily in the Italian socialist party. His family was socialist. World War 1 breaks out, he leaves/get kicked out of the party for his support of WW1. And it wasn't just Mussolini, it caused a huge fracture in the socialist party. The main party line was neutral with a heavy anti-war stance. Which I would suggest leads Mussolini to what would become Mussolini and perhaps with a lot less opposition. I would say there is probably some evidence there giving credit to the claim that today it is probably much more easier to maintain an anti-war stance than in the past.

Some book on WW I, I think by Alistair Horne, claims in passing that the French bought Mussolini.

I was just adding color to the statement that they didn't believe their family's objections were necessarily moral objections.

And it is not the only case. The French people went to war in 1914 "la fleur au fusil"[0]. Jean Jaurès is assassinated for his pacifism and (his assassin would be found not guilty - despite being totally guilty - in 1919).

[0]: a more nuanced take that is illuminating can be read here: https://www.france24.com/fr/20140730-grande-guerre-poilus-vr...

I wouldn't necessarily call it comforting fantasy, people change their minds all the time. I think we're all to some extent able to justify some negative sides of any political movement as tensions rise.

I've felt this myself a few times now. Both when Trump was attempted assasinated and now with Charlie Kirk. I am sad that public discourse and our democracies are kind of unraveling these days and that this is just a sad reality of that fact. As far as Trump or Charlie Kirk go, I have no sympathy what so ever.

I'm not sure I really want to blame anyone for things becoming like this, it all seems like par for the course in the world we've created for ourselves. I just wish we were able to stop before this.

I don't think anyone remembers war fondly, but least of all those who lost.