Lyle Jeremy Rubin > Quotes

“In the military one is conditioned to slowly indulge in (rather than restrain or check) wanton passions or acts of violence. This is the big secret of modern imperialist warfare and the training that goes into it.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“It's impossible to know what affections existed between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but sexual relations between an owner and his property cannot reasonably be conceived as anything other than rape.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“To be a man in the Marines was to be like my father or Adam's brother. It was to channel life's difficulties into rage, store one’s rage like a battery stores energy, and then apply such rage to whatever battle must be won. It was also to fail to contain that rage, like a corroded battery leaks acid.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“The history of humanity is, to a paralyzing extent, a history of conquest. But it is the oppressive systems of self-anointed white men that have taken over the world in which we now live.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“There was something in the Republican mindset of merciless hierarchy that made posing as a guardian of Western civilization and capitalist competition, in particular, seem serious and unsentimental. And I came to understand this hard-boiled posture toward the world as superior to the feminine self-indulgence of acting.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“All around me men, and aspiring men, were speaking a browbeating language and participating in a pervasive game of force: my father's wrath and the actions of putative friends, influenced by fathers like mine. The bullying I put up with as a boy wasn't at all uncommon. But even unremarkable doses of excess were brutal enough to convince me at such a crossroads that I needed an upgrade, and ultimately a ticket to war.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“Tens of thousands, overwhelmingly aspiring men, are then sent off to wars that are almost never discussed or debated among the public. This despite mounting and searing evidence, inside and outside the United States government, that such wars have culminated and continue to culminate in destructions that have claimed the lives of millions, displaced and marred the lives of tens of millions more, and exacerbated the very violence they were supposed to contain.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“To dehumanize anyone is to dehumanize everyone.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“Research has shown that those who exhibit the personality trait of ‘fearless dominance’ gravitate more toward professions of domination, whether in the armed services, the policing panopticon, the carceral archipelago, or perhaps the upper reaches of corresponding domains of finance, real estate, fossil fuels, corporate law and politics, media, or lobbying.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“But to be a man in the Marines was also more than that. There was a naturalization of the boyish violence I got to know as a child, a violence that conditioned everyone involved, from the perpetrator to the victim to the witness, to become not only accustomed to its blunt impact but also maybe even welcoming of it. And it was a special kind of violence that doubled as something sexual.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming

“If the United States has become more militarized the past twenty years—and by any sensible metric it has—it stands to reason that it would become more suicidal. Women (never mind queer and trans people) bear a special burden in militarized societies. They are the ones most susceptible to rape, abuse, and exploitation. Given their lower propensity to commit violence, they commit fewer suicides. But, again, it makes sense such a propensity would increase at a faster rate when militarization and militarism returned with a vengeance.”
― Lyle Jeremy Rubin, Pain Is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine's Unbecoming