Rainier Moreno-Lacalle’s Reviews > The Divided West > Status Update

A "state" is a complex of hierarchically organized capacities available for the exercise of political power or the implementation of political programs; a "constitution," by contrast, defines the horizontal association of citizens by laying down the fundamental rights that free and equal founders mutually grant each other.

... s state that hires its citizens "to kill or be killed" degrades them into "mere machines."

From Bush's perspective, "our" values are universally valid values that all other nations should accept in their own best interests. This pseudouniversalism is a kind of universalized ethnocentrism.

At that time, the German population was suffused with self-pity for its own suffering. People saw themselves in the role of victims and for a long time forgot who the true victims were.

A state that reduces all of its options to the inane alternative between war and peace quickly runs up against the limits of its own organizational capacities and resources. It also diverts the process of political and cultural communication with competing powers and foreign cultures into false channels and drives the costs of coordination to dizzying heights.

Pity the land that needs heroes.
-Bertolt Brecht