caketastydelish
Deity
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2008
- Messages
- 9,571
Name the demographics and support your argument with reasons.
The people who get killed?
Reason - cuz they dead? Cant get much more "affected" than that
Thinking about it, getting shot and bleeding out over a couple minutes in shock is preferable to being raped and tortured by an advancing army.
Perhaps but:
the soldiers, more than likely, had no choice to begin with. You can't say the people who had no choice in the first place were "the lucky ones" when the others can always voluntarily put themselves out of their misery if they want to.
I feel weird about ranking trauma.
Yeah I think about that when musing on post-apocalyptic situations. Wouldn't it be better to just die right away than scrabble for survival when you're likely to live a horrible life and be dead within 6 months anyway. But most people just don't want to die.Thinking about it, getting shot and bleeding out over a couple minutes in shock is preferable to being raped and tortured by an advancing army.
Not lucky, no. Just that I think there are worse things than death, so using death as the ultimate standard of affect doesn't sit right with me.
As a specific example, I'd rather have been a German infantryman on the eastern front at any point of the war (excluding Stalingrad anyway) than a German woman in East Prussia in 1945
But you never know what's going to happen tomorrow....hope and survival are likely strong evolutionary traitsI already stated that I think soldiers are most affected for precisely those reasons. My point was merely that deaths are not my only criteria. Instead of the hypothetical East Prussian frau, I'm also thinking of a childhood friend who served in Iraq. I would rather be dead than go through what he did. And in a way, his burden did kill him, at least who he was. The person I knew just doesn't exist anymore, not even an echo.
The German woman in East Prussia would be brutalized, but probably not killed. Meaning she had a choice to begin with. She could end it herself to guarantee she doesn't have to suffer, or she she can tough it out because she wants to live and can only hope things will eventually get better.
It's worth noting that for the purpose of "people affected by war"
1) In wars, even the winning/offensive side is going to have causilities too, while the women/children stay home (going off of ww2, American and British women compared to their male counterparts). Yeah some women were nurses and such but didn't see live combat.
2) not every attempt to take a city or village be successful.
So there are plenty of wars/battles that will be in an open battlefield somewhere, not even necessarily involving women and children at all. And then there are times where attempts will made to capture the city/town/village/castle but will fail, because soldiers died to defend it (successfully). So overall, I would say the soldiers are affected the most.