Yes, Patriarchy Is Dead; the Feminists Prove It

[thucythucy]

28. Agreed. The patriarchy, however defined, should be consigned

to the scrap heap of history.

As for its disproportionate impact on men, I notice you tease out US military deaths in these conflicts, which tends I think to distort the whole picture. In WWII, for instance, the US, of all the major biligerants, was essentially untouched by invasion or bombardment of its homeland. If you include civilian casualties as well as military, and include the other major actors in that sordid drama: Germany, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, China, Japan, as well as nations that were occupied or fought over--most especially Poland, Korea, Indochina, Mayalsia, Burma, I think you'll find the gender disparity among casualties overall is smaller, in some instances much smaller. And of course, of the twelve million or so victims of the various Nazi extermination campaigns, I would say the disparity probably is reduced to zero or close to zero.

And if you include colonialism as a subset of militarism, well, casualties there are pretty much impossible to calculate, so in terms of gender it becomes much more difficult to discuss. For instance, roughly two million Vietnamese peasants starved to death due to the famine inflicted on that country by the French in the early to mid 1950s. I would imagine many if not most of those deaths were of women and children (and elderly). The mass exterminations of people in the "Belgian Congo" at the turn of the 20th century, the famines inflicted upon India (which at the time included Pakistan and Bengladesh) by British colonialists expropriating the land from peasant farmers for use to grow cotton, indigo and tea for the British market, all of these had mortality rates that probably exceeded most of the wars we regard as "history," and all of them I would bet inflicted disportionate mortality on children, women, elderly people, people with disabilities. Even in the US, the "counter insurgency" campaigns against Native Americans usually didn't distinguish very much between men, women, or children. Smallpox infected blankets target everyone.

Speaking of which, military conflict often brings in its wake epidemics such as plague, emphysema, cholera. During the Thirty Years War the military casualities were actually quite small compared to the mortality caused by disease brought on by famine and the march of the armies hither and yon through central Europe. The emphysema epidemic after WWI--a direct result I would argue of that conflict--hit children and the elderly paticularly hard. Old men, old women, women in general, boys and girls. Then too, the "starvation blockade" of Germany of 1914-19 hit the home front much worse than the soldiers. Indeed, people at home were urged to tighten their belts so the fighting men could be fed. I even have a vague memory of reading how the plague took out more people during the Peloponnesian War than the actual fighting between Athens and Sparta. So that's a whole other cost of militarism that must be examined, if we're to talk about who suffers.

But whatever our differences, I think we agree on the fundamentals.

Best wishes.

PS: please pardon any spelling mistakes. Couldn't get the damn spell check to work, and I'm too lazy to use a dictionary.