The ceremony, pomp and reverence we pay to soldiers and the fallen are all aimed at making sure the young remain willing to do an ugly job at affordable prices. For every poem like this there is a parade, monument, wreath-laying ceremony, or the modern equivalent of young girls handing white feathers to young boys.

It seems ungrateful to view it this way. We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in. It seems like we should owe them respect. However, we need to recognize that this kind of respect, while indeed owed, is also sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.

If, "War is the continuation of politics by other means", then we must demand better policy from our politicians than what we're seeing today.

War is the poor dying for the rich. The only way to pay respect to those who have died at the behest of the rich is to explicitly recognize who sent them, why they were sent, and to do everything we can to prevent it happening again.

I think if you read "On Killing" by Grossman, parades etc are almost like an ancient Greek purification ritual.

Killing is the biggest taboo and people need societal "absolution" afterwards.

The absence of this for Vietnam is what caused issues with veterans.

>sometimes abused by politicians to field armies at affordable prices in the service of their own greed and vanity.

After Khamenei death Russian Foreign Ministry issued a statement that Russia is "against killing of the leaders of sovereign countries". Somehow they didn't mention nor regular citizens nor rank-and-file soldiers of sovereign countries.

In the Spanish series "El Cid" there is a nice depiction of how a battle and the whole war immediately ends once the king of one side is killed in that battle. Everybody just went back to their regular business.

A translation of saying in Russian, not sure whether it exists in English - "One's heroism is always a result of incompetency and idiotism of somebody else."

And with "sometimes" we mean we cant remember the last time it didn't happen.

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> We owe a real debt to the soldiers who died for the world we live in.

Why? It's a job. Chosen voluntarily (usually), with known risks. Never mind the propaganda part that they are dying for a "world we live in". How a soldier dying for some war with dubious morality is owed any "debt" is beyond me.

I submit that we owe others who died doing some kind of public good much more debt than some dude who was duped into sacrificing his life to gun down others for some made-up reason. It's really hard to find any soldier who died for a good cause for most of the past century actually.