Modern war appears as a struggle led by all the State apparatuses and their general staffs against all men old enough to bear arms.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the nature of modern warfare as a collective effort involving state institutions against able-bodied individuals.
Simone Weil articulates the essence of modern warfare as a collective struggle where all of a nation's resources and institutions unite to combat every citizen capable of fighting. This perspective emphasizes the pervasive impact of war on society, suggesting that the state mobilizes not just military might but also utilizes the full weight of its bureaucratic apparatus against a significant portion of its population.
In practice
During a discussion on the effects of government during wartime.
The afflicted are not listened to. They are like someone whose tongue has been cut out and who occasionally forgets the fact. When they move their lips no ear perceives any sound. And they themselves soon sink into impotence in the use of language, because of the certainty of not being heard.
The appetite for power, even for universal power, is only insane when there is no possibility of indulging it; a man who sees the possibility opening before him and does not try to grasp it, even at the risk of destroying himself and his country, is either
As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.
Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.
I am not a Catholic; but I consider the Christian idea, which has its roots in Greek thought and in the course of the centuries has nourished all of our European civilization, as something that one cannot renounce without becoming degraded.
How many people have been thus led, through lack of self-confidence, to stifle their most justified doubts?
Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.
So the city became the material expression of a particular loss of innocence β not sexual or political innocence but somehow a shared dream of what a city might at its best prove to be β its inhabitants became, and have remained, an embittered and amnesiac race, wounded but unable to connect through memory to the moment of injury, unable to summon the face of their violator.
Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.
Woes and wonders of power, that tonic hell, synthesis of poison and panacea.
Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.
The crowd, still shouting, gives way before us. We plough our way through. Women hold their aprons over their faces and go stumbling away. A roar of fury goes up. A wounded man is being carried off.
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