"All of us have heard this term 'preventive war' since the earliest
days of Hitler. I don't believe there is such a thing; and, frankly, I
wouldn't even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked about
such a thing: Dwight Eisenhower - Source: Bob Fitrakis and Harvey
Wasserman, Bush and America's Willing Executioners would be Guilty at
Nuremberg, The Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), 3/2/03
=
A people living under the perpetual menace of war and invasion is very
easy to govern. It demands no social reforms. It does not haggle over
expenditures for armaments and military equipment. It pays without
discussion, it ruins itself, and that is an excellent thing for the
syndicates of financiers and manufacturers for whom patriotic terrors are an
abundant source of gain: Anatole France, pseudonym for Jacques Anatole
Thibault (1844-1924)
=
"The misapprehension springs from the fact that the learned jurists,
deceiving themselves as well as others, depict in their books an ideal of
government -- not as it really is, an assembly of men who oppress their
fellow-citizens, but in accordance with the scientific postulate, as a
body of men who act as the representatives of the rest of the nation.
They have gone on repeating this to others so long that they have ended
by believing it themselves, and they really seem to think that justice
is one of the duties of governments.
History, however, shows us that governments, as seen from the reign of
Caesar to those of the two Napoleons and Prince Bismarck, are in their
very essence a violation of justice; a man or a body of men having at
command an army of trained soldiers, deluded creatures who are ready for
any violence, and through whose agency they govern the State, will have
no keen sense of the obligation of justice. Therefore governments will
never consent to diminish the number of those well-trained and
submissive servants, who constitute their power and influence."
Leo Tolstoy -- Source: Writings on Civil Disobedience and Non-Violence
(Signet Books, 1968), pp. 238-239.
