War is far more likely to make us its servants than we are to make war our instrument. War subjects us to its dynamics, it draws in ever greater resources, and it changes everything, especially but not only for those caught in the direct grip of its violence.
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Violence is not an instrument that can be applied in laboratory conditions, only just so much more bomb tonnage on these particular targets and you get the result forecasted by theorists of coercion. It is rather the most diabolical and active ingredient in war’s cauldron. In a blinding flash that no one escapes, you can become a different person living in a different world. As Mike Tyson once said, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”
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War consumes and reworks that which is taken to be true, in the lives of individuals as in the lives of nations. It does so because it is intimately bound up with politics, in recurring cycles of cause and effect that shift the ground on which we stand. This is what Clausewitz meant when he said that war was a continuation of politics.
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