“The enduring attraction of war is this:
Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us
what we long for in life.
It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”

"There is a part of me -- maybe a part of many of us --
that decided at certain moments that I would rather die like this
than go back to the routine of life (..)

The chance to exist for an intense and overpowering moment,
even if it meant certain oblivion, seemed worth it
in the midst of war -- and very stupid once the war ended."

"..war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent
and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug,
one I ingested for many years.
It is peddled by mythmakers .."

"We demonize the enemy so that our opponent is no longer human.
We view ourselves, our people, as the embodiment of absolute
goodness. Our enemies invert our view of the world to justify
their own cruelty.
In most mythic wars this is the case. Each side reduces the other
to objects -- eventually in the form of corpses."

“Where else, but from the industrialized world, did the suicide
hijackers learn that the huge explosions and death above
a city skyline are a peculiar and effective form of communication?
They have mastered the language.”

“The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of
responsibility.
There are times when we must take this poison -
just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live.
We can not succumb to despair.
Force is, and I suspect always will be, part of the human condition."

/

“The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been
twenty-nine years in all of human history
during which a war was not underway somewhere.”

Innzooming --her-- (Peter Englund)

Omtale-klipp: (-1-) (-2-)