Jack Kirby On: World War II Influences

[Javaman]

http://twomorrows.com/kirby/articles/27ww2.html

>snip< (from the end of the article)

It was a whole nutty affair. War itself is a nutty affair, but somehow I think it may get worse. Look at Russia and Afghanistan. The Russians are a great big power and she goes down over Afghanistan and kicks the sh*t out of their people, but then she runs like hell. Why? The Afghanis have one thing that the Russians haven't got—they like to die. That is part of their religion and they are very religious. The Russians had never run up against that and I can tell you that the war in Europe would have been very different if the Germans were like that. A guy from another culture wouldn't know what to do. The Russians didn't know what to do. I mean, what do you do when you fight an enemy who has a martyr complex? I myself, as a General, if I came up against a culture that was completely different than my own, I would investigate it thoroughly. I don't believe that the Russians were that thorough with the Afghani and this was their fatal mistake.

They assumed they just were peasant people and they could just mow over them with their high technology. The Afghani had some technology and I imagine that plenty of them got killed by what the Russians threw at them, but they held their line and they held the Russians back. There were plenty of dead soldiers around—thousands—and it was these farmers and peasants who were doing most of the damage.

Soon, even our technology will not protect us. Our opponents will have a different mind and we will find it very difficult to understand them. The Russians are very much like us and our soldiers have a lot in common. Can either army afford the odds of losing thousands and thousands on a war? We will have to find another way to settle our differences. It is in that way that I would say that war is senseless.