William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecrafts husband, on the French Revolution, as written by Lyndall Gordon:
"War was justifiable only to repel invasion, not to prevent it, and he believed there would be less talk about a 'justifiable' cause for war if we trained our imaginations to call up the unfeeling carnage which 'justifiable' intended. It's a fallacy, he warned, that our war may be ended by making it more and more terrible: 'a most mistaken way of teaching men to feel that they are brothers by imbuing their minds with perpetual hatred.'"
This written in the late 1700's. You would think by the 21st century we would have changed our feelings at least slightly about war given the results of such wars as the French Revolution and those that followed.
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Gordon, Lyndall. Vindication A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft 2005, page 298.
Brussels Bronté Group April Weekend 2024
5 hours ago
3 comments:
Human nature never changes, and the veterans of those wars are all long dead now. There is nothing new under the sun.
Yep. Consider Hawthorne's important, important, important "Earth's Holocaust": the masses zealously threw offensive and corrupting things into a bonfire to cleanse society - but they didn't burn the jagged, tricky thing that's the nucleus of all things glorious and horrible, of dangerous freedom.
The human heart.
Speaking of the weirdness and folly of war, Montesquieu said that "a rational army would run away." ;)
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