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Quote by K.J. Charles

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Subtle Blood

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K.J. Charles

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“Lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us, the kind that war alone is able to deliver. It reduces and at times erases the anxiety of individual consciousness. We abandon individual responsibility for a shared, unquestioned communal enterprise, however morally dubious.”

WarPurposeMeaningNationalism
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
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“War is necrophilia. And this necrophilia is central to soldiering, just as it is central to the makeup of suicide bombers and terrorists. The necrophilia is hidden under platitudes about duty or comradeship. It awaits, especially in moments when we seem to have little to live for and no hope, or in moments when the intoxication of war is at its pitch, to be unleashed. When we spend long enough in war it comes to us as a kind of release, a fatal and seductive embrace that can consummate the long flirtation in war with our own destruction. The ancient Greeks had a word for such a drive. They called it ekpyrosis - to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes.”

WarSelf DestructionEkpyrosis
Book:War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning
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“І раптом мені стукнула в голову егоїстична, по-романтичному зухвала думка — про своєрідне відшкодування. Його ж таки треба вділяти соратникам, які жертвують своє найсокровенніше задля Держави. Відплачувати їм треба найвищим і найціннішим із усього, чого тільки можна запрагнути, — славою й почестями. Якщо слава й почесті служать достатньою втіхою покаліченому на війні солдатові, то чом би їм не послужити в такий самий спосіб людині, покаліченій внутрішньо?”

WarTotalitarianismDystopiaState
Book:Kallocain
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“You turn the blind eye – you, and all your timid minions in the House, all those who would try and talk their way out of the labyrinth. Every creature out there who would sell their birthrights for a quiet life – the pacifist intellectuals, the wishful thinkers, the dull masses who wait for leadership and who will perish for want of it – you all resolutely refuse to open your eyes and recognise the terrible truth that stares you in the face. Because you do not want to believe it. Which is that the head of a great nation – like so many who have usurped such positions in the past – is nothing but a criminal, a tyrant, a psychopath. For whatever fathomless reasons the psychoanalysts might find. And as such he has no scruples, and only one ambition. To go on conquering, and murdering, and coercing until he is master of all within his vision. Which means first his own people. Then his neighbours. Then the world.”

WarRomanceHistorical
Book:Dinner with Churchill
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