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Quote by George C Vaillant

“Soldiers on our own side are brave and attain glory, preserve our social virtues and sacrifice themselves for the public well-being. Those on the other side are aggressors, agents of evil and cowardly knaves.”

Quote by George C Vaillant

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George C Vaillant

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“London. “Look Olivier. Quite a sight isn’t it?” Commandant Auguste Angers stood tall in his stirrups as he pointed out the far distant dome of St. Paul’s. The bronzed roof of the cathedral was glistening in the sun during a brief break in the clouds. The commandant and his colleague and deputy, Captain Olivier Rougemont, had enjoyed a morning’s exhilarating ride in Richmond Park. The commandant was riding his favourite grey, Chloe, and Rougemont was on his boss’s second string, a chestnut Annette.”

“The soldier above all other people," said MacArthur, "prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." There is wisdom in the words of these soldiers. There is wisdom in these tales of a "handful of ashes, a mouthful of mould. / Of the maimed, of the halt and of the blind in the rain and the cold." There is wisdom here, and we would do well to listen”

“Moral distance processes tend to provide a foundation upon which other killing-enabling processes can be built. In general they are less likely to produce atrocities than cultural distance processes, and they are more in keeping with the kind of "rules" (deterring aggression and upholding individual human dignity) that organizations such as the United Nations have attempted to uphold. But as with cultural distance, there is a danger associated with moral distance. That danger is, of course, that every nation seems to think that God is on its side.”

“When I had flown in sixteenth months earlier, the view from above was of a green paradise. The landscape we swept over on the way out had been shelled, bombed, napalmed, and defoliated spreading cancerlike through virtually every village, every rice paddy, every patch of woods. There were craters everywhere, craters of all sizes, craters that overlapped one another, and I was brokenhearted by the extent of the destruction. We had come and laid waste, but we had not conquered. It was difficult to believe we had accomplished anything at all.”