Quotes
Thoughts become weapons. Philosophies are distinct reasons for war. Good intentions are the most destructive arsenal of all.
The army fosters technology, and technology breeds anarchy because it distributes the terrible machines of destruction. Even before this Jihad, one man alone could create and apply enough violence to ravage an entire planet. It happened! Why do you think the computer became anathema?
War: A manufactory that produces desolation, death, and secrets.
Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you'll never be surprised.
Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.
There is a new and highly regarded literary genre inquiring into the cultural defects that keep us from responding properly to the crimes of others. An interesting question no doubt, though by any reasonably standard it ranks well below a different one: Why do we persist in or crimes, either directly or through crucial support for murderous clients? It is constructive to ask how often, or how accurately, one finds reference to Turkey, Colombia, East Timor, and many contemporary literature on the flaws in our character. There is much self-congratulation about the new "ruling ideology" in the moral universe of the enlightened states, grounded in the principal that "all states have a responsibility, to protect their citizens' if their leaders are unable or unwilling to do so, they render their countries liable to military intervention = authorized by the Security Council or, failing that (as in the case of Kosovo), by individual countries in 'conscience-shocking situations'" Atrocities comparable to or much worse than anything charged to Milosevic in Kosovo before the NATO bombing were not "conscience-shocking" when responsibility traced back home, as it often did - and even when the crimes took place within, not just near, the borders of NATO.
Let us turn now to the most elementary principle of just war theory, universality. Those who cannot accept this principle should have the decency to keep silent about matters of right and wrong, or just war. If we can rise to this level, some obvious questions arise: for example, have Cuba and Nicaragua been entitled to set off bombs in Washington, New York, and Miami in self-defense against ongoing terrorist attack? Particularly so when the perpetrators are well known and act with complete impunity, sometimes in brazen defiance of the highest international authorities, so that the cases are far clearer than Afghanistan? If not, why not?
Let's begin with the first modern (U.S.) government propaganda operation. That was under the Woodrow Wilson Administration. Woodrow Wilson was elected President in 1916 on the platform "Peace Without Victory." That was right in the middle of the World War I. The population was extremely pacifistic and saw no reason to become involved in a European war. The Wilson administration was actually committed to war and had to do something about it. They established a government propaganda commission, called the Creel Commission which succeeded, within six months, in turning a pacifist population into a hysterical, warmongering population which wanted to destroy everything German, tear the Germans limb from limb, go to war and save the world.
The progressive intellectuals, people of the John Dewey circle ... took great pride, as you can see from their own writings at the time, in having shown that what they called the "more intelligent members of the community," namely, themselves, were able to drive a reluctant population into a war by terrifying them and eliciting jingoist fanaticism.
The means that were used were extensive. For example, there was a good deal of fabrication of atrocities by the Huns, Belgian babies with their arms torn off, all sorts of awful things that you still read in history books. Much of it was invented by the British propaganda ministry, whose own commitment at the time, as they put it in their secret deliberations, was "to direct the thought of most of the world." But more crucially they wanted to control the thought of the more intelligent members of the community in the United States, who would then disseminate the propaganda that they were concocting and convert the pacifistic country to wartime hysteria. That worked. It worked very well.
All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it.
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult—to begin a war and to end it.
