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Is War Necessary to Human Nature?
Forty thousand armed men forced their way in to the city... Neither rank nor years saved the victims from an indiscriminate orgy in which rape alternated with murder and murder with rape. Greybeards and frail old women, who had no value as loot, were dragged off to raise a laugh, but any full-grown girl or good-looking lad who crossed their path was pulled this way and that in a violent tug-of-war between would-be captors... A single looter trailing a hoard of money or temple-offerings of massive gold was often cut to pieces by others who were stronger... In their hands they held firebrands, which, once they had got their spoil away, they wantonly flung into empty houses and rifled temples... There was a diversity of wild desires, differing conception of what was lawful, and nothing barred. Cremona lasted them four days.
Tacitus
The destruction of Cremona in A.D. 69 caused a scandal throughout Italy—an undefended Roman city sacked by Roman legions—and the soldiers who had done it found their captives valueless because of a concerted refusal to buy them as slaves...other Italian cities contributed to the rebuilding of Cremona. In the vast majority of cases, there was no such outside help for a slaughtered city or a devastated province. Yet, provided there was a generation or two of relative peace, the city would usually be restored, the fields repopulated—in time for the same thing to happen again... The problem with history is that there is too much of it, and this is nowhere truer than in military history. Almost fifteen hundred years after Cremona fell, practically the identical scene was being reenacted a few hundred miles to the south, in Rome. Sebastian Schertlin, commander of the Spanish Imperial troops, recalled: “In the year 1527, on 6 May, we took Rome by storm, put over 6,000 men to the sword, seized all that we could find in the churches and elsewhere, burned down a great part of the city, tearing and destroying all copyists’ work, all registers, letters and documents.”
Gwynne Dyer
Restricted warfare was one of the loftiest achievements of the eighteenth century. It belongs to a class of hot-house plants which can only thrive in an aristocratic and qualitative civilisation. We are no longer capable of it. It is one of the fine things we have lost as a result of the French Revolution.
Guglielmo Ferrero
At the height of the Seven Years’ War, Laurence Sterne left London for Paris without getting the necessary passport to travel in an enemy country (“it never entered my mind that we were at war with France”), but nobody stopped him at the French coast, and the French foreign minister courteously sent him one after he had arrived at Versailles.
War is the province of uncertainty; three-fourths of the things on which action in war is based lie hidden in the fog of greater or less uncertainty.
Karl von Clausewitz
You can say more truly of the First World War than of the Second or of the Third that if the people had known what was going to happen, they wouldn’t have done it. The Second World War—they knew more, and they accepted it. And the Third World War—alas, in a sense they know everything about it, they know what will happen, and they do nothing. I don’t know the answer.
A. J. P. Taylor
There is a terrifying automatism in the way we have marched straight toward scientific total war over the past few centuries, undeterred by the mounting cost and the dictates of reason and self-interest. We do know what is going to happen, and we are frightened, but we do none of the seemingly obvious things that might let us alter our course away from oblivion. We resemble a column of intelligent lemmings, holding earnest meetings to denounce the iniquity of cliffs during halts in the march. Everybody agrees that falling off cliffs is a bad idea, many have noticed that the cliff edge is getting steadily closer, and some have come to the heretical conclusion that the column’s own line of march is causing this to happen. But nobody can leave the column, and at the end of each halt it sets off again in the same direction.
Gwynne Dyer
The United States and the Soviet Union have no common border, no claims on each other’s territory, no history of national animosity—they are not even serious rivals for trade or resources—but their postwar confrontation was perfectly predictable (and widely predicted) as soon as the probable outcome of World War II became clear around 1943.
Gwynne Dyer
It is always stubbornly and stupidly repeating that men fight for material ends, without reflecting for a moment that the material ends are hardly ever material to the men who fight... Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, ‘My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, ‘If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen!’ Materialist history is the most madly incredible of all histories, or even of all romances. Whatever starts wars, the thing that sustains wars is something in the soul; that is something akin to religion... There is a religious war when two worlds meet; that is, when two visions of the world meet; or in more modern language when two moral atmospheres meet. What is the one man’s breath is the other man’s poison.
G. K. Chesterton
A great war is not a matter of human choice. On the contrary, it marks the point at which events pass out of human control. It is a kind of social convulsion—an eruption of the forces which lie dormant like the subterranean fires of a volcano on the slopes of which man builds his cities and cultivates his fields.
Christopher Dawson
Thoughts about War
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As soon as by one’s own propaganda even a glimpse of right on the other side is admitted, the cause for doubting one’s own right is laid.
Adolf Hitler
The first casualty when war comes is truth.
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Contrary to what pacifists and other humane person would like to believe, wars, when they break out, tend to be popular. They offer the illusion of an escape from the boredom which is the lot of, particularly, technological man.
Malcolm Muggeridge
How could the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a peaceful world with which he was fed up, so exceedingly fed up!
Thomas Mann
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Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been at sea.
Samuel Johnson
We admire the soldier, not so much because he kills the enemy as because he exposes himself to being killed by them.
*
For a war to be just three things are necessary—public authority, just cause, right motive.
St. Thomas Aquinas
He who does not wish to fight in this world where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.
Adolf Hitler
War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with . . . The struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. ‘To supplant or to be supplanted is the essence of life,’ says Goethe, and the strong life gains the upper hand . . . The weaker succumb.
General Friedrich von Bernhardi
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It is well that war is so terrible—lest we should grow too fond of it.
Robert E. Lee
War is indeed a mighty creator. It is an intellectual awakener and a moral tonic . . . It purges away old strifes and sectional aims, and raises us for a while into higher and purer air . . . It reveals to us what constitutes a modern nation, the partnership between the living, the dead and the yet unborn.
A. L. Smith (master of Oxford’s Balliol College)
It simply is not true that war never settles anything.
Felix Frankfurter
William Blake
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Men must have a fairly elevated motive for getting themselves killed. To die to protect or enhance the wealth, power or privilege of someone else, the most common reason for conflict over the centuries, lacks beauty. Conscience is better served by myth.
John Kenneth Galbraith
We must suffer much, but we shall suffer for the great name of England and for all her high ideals, as our fathers did before us.
The Times (August 5, 1914)
The first modern army that could not have been defeated by the army of Alexander the Great [330 B.C.] was probably the army of Gustavus Adolphus [A.D. 1620].
Col. T. N. Dupuy, U.S. Army
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To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace.
George Washington
At bottom, every state regards another as a gang of robbers who will fall upon it as soon as there is an opportunity.
Schopenhauer
War does not determine who is right—only who is left.
Patriotism is the willingness to be killed for trivial reasons.
Bertrand Russell
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War is like love. It always finds a way.
Bertholt Brecht
On an intellectual and emotional level war is easier than peace. In waging war we will physically often work around the clock in preference to doing the intellectual work of peace, and will gladly risk our physical lives rather than risk ourselves emotionally. In other words, war comes quite naturally to human beings while peace does not.
M. Scott Peck
War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.
G. K. Chesterton
Pale Ebeneezer thought it wrong to fight, but Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
Hilaire Belloc
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War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.
Karl von Clausewitz
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We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies.
William Tecumseh Sherman
He who uses force unsparingly, without reference against the bloodshed involved, must obtain a superiority if his adversary uses less vigour in its application... To introduce into a philosophy of war a principle of moderation would be an absurdity. War is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds.
Karl von Clausewitz
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