War...What is it Tolerated For?

Photographer Unknown

Playwright Eugene O'Neill wrote this to his son six months after Pearl Harbor, when all of America was being prepared for war:

It is like acid always burning in my brain that the stupid butchering of the last war taught men nothing at all, that they sank back listlessly on the warm manure pile of the dead and went to sleep, indifferently besotting custody of their future, their fate, into the hands of State departments, whose members are trained to be conspirators, card sharps, double-crossers and secret patriarchs of their own people, into the hands of greedy capitalist ruling classes so stupid they count not even see when their own greed began devouring itself, into the hands of that most debased type of pimp, the politician, and that most craven of all lice and job-worshippers, the bureaucrats.

From Howard Zinn's amazing book, Artists in Times of War (see below).