George Orwell did not write that “people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” That was a summing up of Orwell’s view by Richard Grenier, a journalist and critic. The phrase that Orwell in fact used in a commentary on a poem by Rudyard Kipling was that “men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.”
I think it was in Shirer's "Rise and Fall" that I read the Wehrmacht's contingency plan had the French responded in force to the occupation of the Rhineland was to turn and run like hell. Would have been preferable to what actually happened.
In Homage, the other thing I came away with was that the Republicans spent as much time, or more, fighting each other than they did the Nationalists. Kinda like that Monty Python "People's Front of Judea" skit.
But yeah. The veneer of civilization is lightly draped over our baser instincts.
I think it was in Shirer's "Rise and Fall" that I read the Wehrmacht's contingency plan had the French responded in force to the occupation of the Rhineland was to turn and run like hell. Would have been preferable to what actually happened.
In Homage, the other thing I came away with was that the Republicans spent as much time, or more, fighting each other than they did the Nationalists. Kinda like that Monty Python "People's Front of Judea" skit.
But yeah. The veneer of civilization is lightly draped over our baser instincts.