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"Every up-to-date dictionary should say that 'peace' and 'war' mean the same thing, now *in posse*, now *in actu*.
[...]
Modern war is so expensive that we feel trade to be a better avenue to plunder; but modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect upon him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the *strong* life; it is life *in extremis*; war-taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.
History is a bath of blood. The Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed. No detail of the wounds they made is spared us, and the Greek mind fed upon the story. Greek history is a panorama of jingoism and imperialism....
[...]
General Homer Lea, in his recent book, _The_Valor_of_Ignorance_, plants himself squarely on this ground. Readiness for war is for him the essence of nationality, and ability in it the supreme measure of the health of nations.
Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary -- they must necessarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or their decrepitude."
[From William James's "The Moral Equivalent of War," 1910]
-B.