Nadya Williams, discussing Leah Libresco Sargeant’s book The Dignity of Dependence:
To take the principles Sargeant presents and apply them to war means, ultimately, to confront the continued existence of genocide in our seemingly civilized modern world. The problem is that any one of us, if we were to find ourselves in the wrong part of the world at the wrong time, could be the object of a brutal missile attack or a nuclear bomb or a terrorist group invading a peaceful kibbutz on a holiday morning. It is not only that our own society does not recognize the dignity of the weak. It’s that the weak are considered worthless even today in war zones the world over, deemed good for nothing other than violence and outright destruction. The very attacks on the weak that the Geneva Conventions outlaw are repeatedly violated with no visible consequences for those committing these war crimes—just ask Victoria Amelina, the Ukrainian mother and poet, who sent her son away from Ukraine and became a war crimes investigator in 2022, until she was killed during a bombing of a pizzeria in summer 2023. In wartime, such simple acts as meeting friends for dinner can be deadly.
Virginia Woolf, via Mandy Brown:
Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Of what use then is a university education in influencing people to prevent war? […]
It seems as if there were no progress in the human race, but only repetition. We can almost hear them, if we listen, singing the same old song, ‘Here we go round the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree, the mulberry tree’ and if we add, ‘of property, of property, of property,’ we shall fill in the rhyme without doing violence to the facts.
But we are not here to sing old songs or to fill in missing rhymes. We are here to consider facts. And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now?