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Quote by Christopher de Bellaigue

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The Lion House

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Christopher de Bellaigue

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“Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realization that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street towards the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.”

WarResponsibilityJobNurseActionsInjectionTolstoyGeneralsChemical Castration
Book:Murmur
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“What the hell do you know about what we lost?! You think we had it easy? That we had it better than you? That our war was somehow easier? War is hell! You think you're honoring your troops by reopening these wounds?! By murdering these people?! All you've done is perpetuate the cycle! Leaving a new generation of broken families! You came here, where you didn't belong-- You bomb their homes-- You murder their children-- And you wonder why they hate us?!”

WarXenophobiaWar CrimesCaptain AmericaRick RemenderLoose Nuke
Book:Captain America, Vol. 3: Loose Nuke
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