from Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (p 291)
'It is, I think, this glamour, this magic, this incomparable keying up of the spirit in a time of mortal conflict, which constitute the pacifist's real problem - a problem still incompletely imagined and still quite unsolved. The causes of war are always falsely represented; its honour dishonest and its glory meretricious, but the challenge to spiritual endurance, the intense sharpening of all the senses, the vitalising consciousness of common peril for a common end, remain to allure those boys and girls who have just reached the age when love and friendship and adventure call more persistently than at any later time. The glamour may be the mere delirium of fever which, as soon as war is over, dies out and shows itself for the will-o' the wisp that it is, but while it lasts no emotion known to man seems as yet to have quite the compelling power of this enlarged vitality.'
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"Good people sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." George Orwell
For good people, one may substitute sniveling hypocrites.
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