The Forever Wars and "All Quiet on the Western Front"
Lessons from the greatest anti-war novel ever written.
I read All Quiet on the Western Front for the first time when I was fourteen.
I had studied the First World War, as everyone did, in history class. I knew about the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the rise of nationalism, territorial conflicts in the Balkans, and the complex web of alliances that would drag each nation, one by one, into the ugliest war the world had ever seen. My own country has been at war in some fashion for most of my life, with such ruthless persistence that Americans have a phrase for this state of being. We call them the Forever Wars. The Devil works hard, but the military-industrial complex works harder.
Still, our geographical distance from conflict zones means that most of us live far from the hideous realities of war, whether the unhinged decimation of Gaza or the ceaseless fighting in Ukraine. Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is a window into a world I have never exper…