Not having fought in a war (yet?) I won't dare to speak about the core message here (it's well worth reading), but I sometimes wonder about dissemination of this knowledge. The fragments about Hitler and Goebbels shielding themselves from gory reality on the ground are interesting in this context. This shows well how the leadership operates on the level of its own fantasies, and moves the "chess pieces" while clueless about what they're really doing.

The current difficulty in Russia with actually mobilizing many parts of society gives one a glimmer of hope: they have a handle mainly on marginalized and poor village dwellers. Maybe the modern living standards and communications landscape does ultimately make people more resistant to being mobilized for dumb wars, even if for 100% selfish reasons and (sadly) without necessarily getting rid of imperialistic nationalism. This one of the crucial reasons defending untampered speech is important, and why communist China has the information policies it has. (To be sure, draft evasion was very much a widespread thing even in republican Rome.)

I sometimes think that middle 20th century was such a horrible time in many respects (not to deny earlier and later brutality) because they did have many technological means of communication, coordination and mass broadcast already--but to the degree it was usable only by the central elite. Thus they could enforce social conformity and mass projects, often wars, with relatively little difficulty. Compare how war journalist work is described in the article.