# Quote — Margaret MacMillan, War: How Conflict Shaped Us

> Blinded by their own racial theories and driven by the increasing demands of the war to extract whatever they could from occupied territories, the Axis powers in both Europe and Asia drove civilians into active opposition. Forced labour, punitive taxes, indiscriminate killing and deliberate genocide gave people a stark choice of resisting or probably dying in any case. As armed resistance grew across Asia, from the Philippines to China, and throughout Europe, the Axis powers cracked down ever more severely, the Japanese with such policies as the Three Alls in China and the Nazis with collective punishment for any locality where there were resistance activities. As one German diplomat in occupied Greece said after German forces massacred Greek villagers, ‘The wonderful result of this heroic deed is that babies are dead; but the partisans continue to live.’ Ukrainians who had welcomed Nazi troops with the traditional gifts of salt and bread as their deliverers from Soviet rule formed partisan groups as the Nazis started their killings and mass deportations of slave labour to the West.

- Author: [Margaret MacMillan](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan.md)
- Book: [War: How Conflict Shaped Us](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan/war-how-conflict-shaped-us.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Margaret_MacMillan#War:_How_Conflict_Shaped_Us_(2020)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan/war-how-conflict-shaped-us/blinded-by-their

## More from this book

> The Persians were to learn in the most costly manner just what that Greek way of war could do to an enemy. ... Centuries later knights on horseback were to learn a similar lesson in fighting from the massed infantry of Swiss soldiers who, like the Greek hoplites before them, fought with and for each other as equals. We now think of the Swiss Guards who stand on duty at the Vatican in their multicoloured Renaissance uniforms as a charming detail and Switzerland as peaceful and bucolic, home to good chocolate, discreet banks and, as the character Harry Lime in The Third Man unkindly says, the cuckoo clock. For 200 years, until a square was finally broken in 1515, the Swiss formations, bristling with pikes and sheltering archers with their deadly crossbows, were the terror of Europe and the key to victory, at least for anyone who could afford to hire them. ‘Pas d’argent, pas de Suisse,’ as the saying went.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan/war-how-conflict-shaped-us/the-persians-were.md)

> Religion, and it can merge into nationalism as orthodoxy does with the Serbs and the Russians, offers both a cause worth dying for and the promise of eternal life. The crusaders did not leave their homes all over Europe and make the long and dangerous journey to the Holy Land just to acquire loot and land. There was more and better to be had much closer to home. They were driven by what they thought was a divine mission, to retrieve the land where Christ had once lived for Christendom. Many crusaders – kings such as Richard I of England, the Lionheart, and Philip II of France and great landed magnates – left behind properties, position and families and many never returned. Egged on by religious leaders such as Pope Gregory VII, who reminded the faithful of the passage from the Book of Jeremiah ‘Cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood’, they killed indiscriminately those they thought of as infidels. In the massacres in Jerusalem in 1099 the streets were said to have run with blood, in some places up to the knees of the crusaders’ horses. ‘None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared,’ said a contemporary account.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan/war-how-conflict-shaped-us/religion-and-it-can.md)

> How groups of humans contemplate and plan for wars is also affected by their culture, including geography. Island nations or those with long coasts have understood and invested heavily in sea power. In the case of Britain, its navy – tellingly called the Senior Service – has absorbed more resources and had much greater prestige over the centuries than its army. While paintings, poems, films and histories memorialise the great naval battles – Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway – when one navy destroyed another, the main strategic purpose of navies is to control the seas, and the highways that criss-cross them, and prevent their enemies from doing so. Even today land communications are vulnerable to disruption, either man-made or natural; how much more so in the past before surfaced roads and railways?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/margaret-macmillan/war-how-conflict-shaped-us/how-groups-of-humans.md)