War on Terror

Home
About
My Bookshop
Main Menu
Previous Posts
Subscribe to RSS feed
Winged with Death Reviews
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War III, 82, trans. Rex Warner, The Penguin Classics, pp. 209-210)

john baker, November 23rd, 2007. No comments. Filed under politics, quotations.

Sam Smith on Undernews has some pertinent observations about the so-called struggle against terrorism:

The journalist Bernard Fall noted that the French, after Dien Bien Phu, had no choice but to leave Southeast Asia. America, with its vast military, financial, and technological resources, was able to stay because it had the capacity to keep making the same mistakes over and over. Our war against “terrorism” has been in many ways a domestic version of our Vietnam strategy. We keep making the same mistakes over and over because, until now, we could afford to. More . . .

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Tweet This: Reading: War on Terror Send Page to Twitter.

Previous post: Poet in New York

Next post: A Writer’s Notebook VIII

John Baker's Blog

War on Terror

Leave a Reply

Recent Comments

Most commented posts