Ann Jones > Quotes

“war is not inevitable. Nor has it always been with us. War is a human invention—an organized, deliberate action of an anti-social kind—and in the long span of human life on Earth, a fairly recent one. For more than 99 percent of the time that humans have lived on this planet, most of them have never made war. Many languages don't even have a word for it. Turn off CNN and read anthropology. You'll see.
What's more, war is obsolete. Most nations don't make war anymore, except when coerced by the United States to join some spurious "coalition." The earth is small, and our time here so short. No other nation on the planet makes war as often, as long, as forcefully, as expensively, as destructively, as wastefully, as senselessly, or as unsuccessfully as the United States. No other nation makes war its business.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story

“In 2011, as American forces left Iraq, Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders made public a Defense Department report prepared at his request: 300 defense contractors in Iraq providing products or services to the Pentagon had been involved in fraud, including Lockheed Martin and Northrup-Grumman, both rewarded with even bigger multibillion dollar contracts after paying small fines. During the decade of war, the Pentagon had forked over to the top 37 fraudulent corporations alone $1.1 trillion.”
― Ann Jones

“Kids . . . were hustled through basic training and speedily deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, only to find another army already there—the shadow army of private for-profit defense contractors. Most of them were contracted to do a long list of chores that uniformed soldiers used to do for themselves when, courtesy of conscription, there were a lot more of them. To maximize their profits and minimize their work, however, the private contractors hired subcontractors who, in turn, hired subcontractors from third world countries to ship in laborers to do on the cheap the actual grunt work of hauling water and food supplies, cleaning latrines, collecting garbage, burning trash, preparing food, washing laundry, fixing electrical grids, doing construction, and staffing the fast food stands and beauty salons that sold tacos and pedicures to the troops.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story

“Temperance workers protested the economic dependence that made married women subject to drunken husbands. Organizations of women workers sought respect and higher wages for women’s labor. Women’s”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“At the same time, popular notions of marriage and the home were challenged on other fronts. Utopian communities experimented with radical new forms of marriage or, as in the Oneida Community, did away with it altogether. The Shakers took up celibacy, the Mormons polygamy; and Charles Knowlton issued an underground best-seller on birth control methods. William Alcott, Catherine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and scores of other experts countered”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“Louisiana was notorious as the last refuge of French whores and scoundrels. By”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“(At the end of the nineteenth century, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman complained that housework was the only job that had not been modernized.)”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“they were all just as ignorant as Blackstone was of the chancery law system that had long tempered the inequities of Blackstone’s beloved Common Law in both England and the American colonies. Under the old doctrine of the femme covert, which Blackstone almost single-handedly revived, married women legally died; they lost their property rights, their rights to contract and sue, and even the right to custody of their own children and possession of their own bodies. At the same time, the states, one by one, acted to correct an “oversight” in their constitutions; in 1798 New York inserted the word male in the section dealing with suffrage.”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“To a large extent, then, the position of women and girls worsened in the early nineteenth century because the work of most of them did not change at a time when everything else was changing very rapidly. Those”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“It's possible that the chief of trauma surgery has things backwards. It's possible, even likely, that for all military medicine contributes to specialized skilks, it actually detracts from civilian medicine be diverting resources, research, and personnel from medical practices more relevant and applicable to the general good.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story

“New Jersey, in 1844, became the last state to add the qualifying male to citizen, and women who had been voting all along could not vote anymore.”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“For all practical purposes, soldiers in the field have the status of slaves, the prisoners of their grand illusions, their training, and their army.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story

“those who married and bore children, and those who worked and consequently were not really women at all. The”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“Pray for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.     —Mother Jones”
― Ann Jones, Women Who Kill

“The mind can be bent without battering the body ... The controlling man knows exactly what he is doing—even when, or especially when, he appears to be out of control or “unpredictable.” ... One moment he’s Mister Nice Guy: generous, charming, ebullient, entertaining. The next, he’s blowing his stack, and then denying what’s just happened, or claiming he’s been “misconstrued" ("I never said that!") and making nice again ... That seemingly unpredictable behavior is toxic because once you’ve felt an incendiary blast of wrath and scorn, you’re likely to do almost anything to avoid “setting him off” again. But it wasn’t you who triggered him. In fact, the controller sets himself off when it serves his purposes, not yours, and he leaves you scrambling to figure out how to deal with him without setting him off again.

... the controller “monopolizes the perception” ... that is, he draws all attention to himself. He strives to eliminate any distractions competing for attention, and he behaves with enough inconsistency to keep his potential victims off-balance, focused on him alone, and—whether they know it or not—seeking to comply.”
― Ann Jones

“Most of them [the soldiers—Warriors in New Pentagon Speak—of the all-volunteer military] come from small towns in the South or the rustbelt of the Midwest or the big city ghettoes. Many are following a family heritage of military service that has made veterans of past wars a relatively privileged class, enjoying special access to higher education, jobs, and a nationwide system of socialized medicine. But so many of them are so very young, enticed or strong-armed by smartly uniformed recruiters who work the corridors and classrooms of America's most impoverished and thoroughly militarized high schools. So many are badly educated, knowing nothing of the world and how it operates. So many are immigrants, risking their lives for a fast track to citizenship. So many are poor and short on promise. So many have such a slim chance of another job, another line of work [like the one who tells the author "where else can I get a job doing the stuff I love? . . . Shootin' people. Blowin' shit up. It's fuckin' fun. I fuckin' love it."], let alone a decent wage or a promotion. And because the Pentagon lowered standards to fill the ranks of the volunteer army, so many are high school dropouts, or gangbangers, or neo-Nazi white supremacists, or drug addicts, or convicted felons with violent crimes on their record. In just three years following the invasion of Iraq, the military issued free passes—so called "moral waivers"—to one of every five recruits, including more than 58,000 convicted drug users and 1,605 with "serious" felony convictions for offenses including rape, kidnapping, and murder. When the number of free passes rose in the fourth year, the Pentagon changed the label to "conduct waiver.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story

“War is not natural. We have to be trained for it, soldiers and citizens alike.”
― Ann Jones, They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America's Wars: The Untold Story