> Why is everything a war. We have wars on poverty, cancer ...., perhaps
> suggesting that the framers of our rhetoric associate anything important
> with a war.
Wyndham Lewis, though politically obnoxious, has this great passage in "Apes of God" on the glories of Western civilization:
[Horace Zagreus says:] 'Thanks to Western training-for-war, the anglo-saxon infant-mind has always resembled the inside of a criminal madhouse. It has been full of drugged potions, sawed-off shot-guns, arsenic, hairbreadth escapes, blackmail, armed warders, King's Messengers, pirates and crooks. What was the schoolboy mind has now become that of the anglo-saxon adult. The post-war anglo-saxon adult has become a boy with a tin pistol. To that the Great War -- the "Great Adventure" -- has brought him.' [Ratner replies] 'He always was. You said so yourself.' [Zagreus continues] 'No, he tried to grow-up out of the criminal reformatory -- he called it "outgrowing". He had aspirations away from murder, arson, public massacre, theft and blackmail. As a boy his elders fed him upon them: as a man he did attempt to escape. But the War wasevery anglo-saxon schoolboy's dream-come-true.' [Ratner] 'But the cabinet-ministers, the generals -' [Zagreus] 'Those preeminent in the profession of Arms, of Politics, of Finance, are of course committed to murder, robbery, blackmail, physical and non-physical lawlessness.'
(pg 420, "The Apes of God", Wyndham Lewis, Penguin Books (c) 1965, written all the way back in 1930)
-- Dennis