Old men cry war, young men die

When Eric Johnston, who befriended Stalin at the Kremlin in 1944, was asked if he thought ‘Uncle Joe’ — short for Joseph Stalin — would start WW-3, he replied, “He is an old man, and old men do not start wars.” How wrong he was. Hitler was 50 when he started WW-2 in 1939 – a ripe old age when Germany’s average life expectancy was 61. Mussolini was 56, Stalin 60, and Roosevelt too was nudging 60 when the US entered the war in December 1941.

Life expectancy has increased everywhere since then, and so have the ages of the lead figures in today’s wars. Ismail Haniyeh was 61 when he ordered the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel from the safety of Qatar. Putin is 72, Netanyahu 75, Trump 79, and Khamenei 86. Alexander of Macedon was indeed young, just 22, when he set out to conquer the world, but he was an exception.

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Young men die
If starting wars is the prerogative of old men, the young go into battle to die. Soldiers aged 21-24 were WW-1’s biggest cohort. In WW-2, 42% of soldiers were aged less than 20. The tragedy of war is, first of all, the tragedy of young men. They are led to the slaughter in the name of glory and duty. Nobody returns unscathed. Those who escape death or physical mutilation bear psychological scars for life. In the US, 30,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have died by suicide — as against 7,057 killed in action.

Drug addiction is rampant among combat veterans now as it was during the Vietnam war. When Nixon was asked in ’71 about US troops’ heroin addiction — 10-15% incidence — he dismissed the report. But he was 58, while 61% of the soldiers who died fighting were younger than 21. NYT’s Anthony Lewis summed up the problem thus: “They are fighting for a cause they do not understandand do not believe in, by methods that are cruel and in some cases criminal.”

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A growing disconnect
In War and Peace , Tolstoy says: “If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.” But young men have to fight for the convictions — cynicism, rather — of men too old to fight themselves. So, when New York University professor Scott Galloway points out that 51% of Americans aged 18-24 “believe the Hamas attacks of Oct 7 can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians”, the establishment should wake up and listen.

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Do the obvious
After Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961 — which almost triggered nuclear war — writer Walter Lippmann famously said, “I don’t think old men ought to promote wars for young men to fight.” His prescription for them was “to try as best as they can… to avert what would be an absolutely irreparable calamity for the world”. And the biggest calamity today is lack of opportunity for youth. What Galloway calls the broken social contract: “Today’s 25-year-olds make less than their parents and grandparents did at the same age… the statistics on children’s and young adults’ well-being are staggering.” Dropping GBU-57s won’t blow them away.

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