Wednesday, May 2, 2018

All the isms have become wasms

From War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris. Page 25.
Hitler did not need pseudoscientists to convince him to make war on Europe and exterminate what he called Untermenschen (“subhumans”); rather, he decided on war and then looked for pseudoscientists to justify it. Europe’s chattering classes were scandalized when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact proclaiming friendship between fascism and communism in 1939—“All the isms have become wasms,” some wit in the British Foreign Office quipped—but they should not have been. The truth of the matter is that the isms have always been wasms. The hard, paradoxical logic of strategy has always trumped everything else.

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