This lesson seems especially apt for the good citizens of the West, many of whom tend to mistake their own moments of private repose for the final realization of peace on earth. Against those who assume that the planet has been working its way toward an eventual state of tranquil prosperity—except for some final pieces of humanitarian business to be tidied up, a few cases of unresolved ethnic unrest, some shocking atrocities, and an occasional multinational police action—one should point out that the fault lines of conflict keep spreading all over the place. The front lines of warfare may not be visible all at once, but they cut everywhere, across households and workplaces, down streets and over countrysides, around patches of urban turf and rural tracts, through overlapping jurisdictions and spheres of influence; they weave back and forth through forced migrations and acts of exodus, erased and overwritten by territorial seizures, armed threats, surgical strikes, and grand strategic zones. What was advertised as an era of peace, when war was finally confined to the hinterlands or carefully administered in calibrated doses, should instead be recognized as a generalized system of violence long in the making, a fraught world where peace remains a precarious and elusive exception—and that only by virtue of careful stagecraft . In the name of keeping the global peace, the strongest combatants have claimed permanent emergency powers with monopoly privileges.

Th e second link between war and debt is really just the obverse of the first: alongside debts imposed in order to make war, there are debts imposed in order to keep the peace.

the only arena in which “moral and legal” justifications can be adjudicated is a “public sphere” emptied of all effective mechanisms of answerability

the dimension of spectacle has never before interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one’s satrapies in order

it seemed like a case of old-fashioned brinksmanship, warning “partisans of the deed” that the state itself can match their boldness and ferocity

[...] She tries to outsmart the bombers. But, Kluge notes, it is too late. Her only chance to develop an effective strategy against the bombers did not occur that morning or even the night before, or in 1939, or in 1933 . . . but in 1918, at the end of the previous war, when she would have had to join with thousands of other teachers, to organize and teach “hard,” in order to build lasting social relationships that might have blocked the rise of the Nazis. But Gerda learns the lesson of November 1918 in April 1945: Once upon a time, it would have been possible to turn history around.