Quote:
"We have taken a ball of quicksilver," says the counterinsurgency specialist John Arquilla, "and hit it with a hammer."And it's a good opportunity to point to the almost creepily apposite Auden poem that everybody knows by now. As they say, read the whole thing, but these lines resonate to the point of shaking the building apart.
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief :
We must suffer them all again.
...
All I have is a voice
To undo the unfolded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky :
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone ;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police ;
We must love one another or die.
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