blessed britons

When the East India Company was first established on new year’s eve 1600, Mughal India commanded 22 per cent of global GDP, with Britain producing less than a tenth as much. By the time Britain finally departed India’s shores three and a half centuries later, its national income was more than 50 per cent greater than its former colony.

— Nick Robins

mad world

[At Nuremberg] the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on—those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defence a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved.

— Noam Chomsky

On Responsibility, War Guilt and Intellectuals

duty

becalmed

Submitted by antarchi on February 11, 2008 - 03:12.

Absence of information is important if you want to keep the outside world out, but the distractions of nature also help. You need to have to tear yourself away from what is refreshing, comforting, invigorating, calming, and you need not to want to do so. You need to feel that the minute idyll you inhabit is all that matters, all the world you need to see...

doing their duty

Submitted by antarchi on June 16, 2007 - 00:57.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.