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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   3688 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 7, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Do countries at war experience a suppression of crime rates on the home front as large numbers of disproportionately poorer young men are instead off fighting?

I'd argue that even if such suppression takes place, which I think it usually does (sociologically it makes sense), it's bound to be undone when large numbers of young men return home after the war ends, and some of them, traumatized and disillusioned, invariably become violent criminals. It definitely happened in the Soviet Union after 1945 and also after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, to name just two examples.

Possible counteracting force: well-armed civic nationalism a la Battle of Athens. I’d expect an effective military to bias its veterans towards law and order, if only at a small scale.

I don’t have a source handy, but I recall reading that crime rose considerably in London and other bombed-out English cities during the Blitz. Criminals would dress like air raid wardens and empty shops of their inventory, steal jewelry and wallets off corpses, and dump dead bodies in an area recently hit by bombs. The war effort meant that there were fewer police around, and the criminal element proved surprisingly adept at securing medical exemptions to the draft, either by bribing doctors or paying cripples to impersonate them at medical exams.

The 1946 Battle of Athens is possibly instructive as well. Once all the normal, upstanding, patriotic young men went to war, the only men left were scoundrels.

(Edited to fix link)

This is the correct bare link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

And this seems to be a good summary referenced in Wikipedia:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100624094438/http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1985/2/1985_2_72.shtml

Ah, thanks. I’ve corrected it in my comment.

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