Just for the record,

[fpb]

- I loved all the seven Harry Potter books, with one exception: I thoroughly hated the epilogue. I regard it not only as bad, but as unredeemable. Its message (destroy the bad guy equals live in peace afterwards) is both dangerously escapistic (was the world any safer after 1945? And what about the widespread hope of a "peace dividend" after 1989?) and plain incredible. What, nineteen years of unbroken peace? On what planet? If that is the chapter that JKR kept in her safe all those years, it should have stayed there.

Comments

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

Did the epidemic of 1918 have anything to do with it? I'd like to think the loss of 40 million made people cherish life a little more. But I have been wrong before

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. You have to remember that it was a very bloody age. World War One was followed by the Russian civil war, which was possibly even bloodier (records are uncertain) and by a considerable amounts of violence in Turkey, where the ancient Greek communities were annihilated, the Balkans, Kurdistan, Arabia (the rise of the house of Saud) and Somalia. It may be that the general instability and decline in living standards caused by the war[s] may itself have encouraged the disease. However, this Spanish flu has some miraculous properties: the first mention I came across of it spoke of ten million dead, then a couple of years ago it was twenty, and now you mention forty! How can a disease be so retroactively deadly?

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

The book I read said 40, so that's my "first and best" truth. All others require "unlearning" and are therefore suspicious.

Revising statistics is pretty common - it's one of those cases of the observer influencing the observation. Like happily ever after endings, unbiased data colletion is a myth we hold too dear. We make our data dance to the tune we choose. Very arbitrary.

The other number I heard was "half a billion people infected." - so some recovered and some never appeared sick.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I am pretty well read about the Great War and its consequences, but I have not actually made any serious study of the Spanish Flu epidemic, so I cannot have an opinion either way.