You may not be interested in war... (how, different, ally)
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I'm obsessed with pithy quotes, so naturally I must research this one.
Per an article on Wikiquotes, the phrase was attributed to Trotsky by Alan Furst in his 1988 novel Night Soldiers, a Novel and may be a revision from an earlier quote attributed to Trotsky - "You may not be interested in the dialectic, but the dialectic is interested in you".
That earlier quote seems to be a paraphrase of a statement Trotsky made in a June 5, 1940 letter to Albert Goldman, which has been translated as - "Burnham doesn't recognize dialectics, but dialectics does not permit him to escape from its net".
Your level of enthusiasm for war is mostly based on how far away, or how close you are, from the conflict.
Case in point, in 2019 we nearly hit Iran as retaliation for them downing one of our drones. Thankfully, Trump called it off right before it happened. Since I was at a base very close to Iran, I was very happy that we decided not to do it.
I have to admit that if I would’ve been back in CONUS, far away from any repercussions, I probably would’ve been ok with them going ahead with it.
But that one event somehow changed my thinking, even though I had spent decades in war zones up to that point.
We probably shouldn’t be going to war at all. Or if we do, it’s going to have to be something a helluva lot more important than a drone.
I thought is was the dialectic. Even if you weren't interested in it, it was interested in you. Before they learned to hold their tongues the early communists let slip many telling quotes.
Or a variation by Plato “ only the dead have seen the end of war “.
I dunno. Those seem like two very different ideas to me.
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