History has many examples of wars that started with a country’s sick economy. Its politicians and business leaders set about curing it, trumping up the view that another country(s) was an enemy. Then it is only a matter of stirring up patriotism, setting the factories to full work supplying the war machine. Long before Dick Cheney and George W. Bush, Leo Tolstoy confirmed their kind, saying:
Patriotism and its results—wars—give an enormous revenue to the newspaper trade, and profits to many other trades.
(Quoted from page 97 of Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, by Judith Allen. Edinburgh University Press, 2010.)
For a brief biography of Leo Tolstoy, click here. For images of or relating to Leo Tolstoy, click here.
According to her publisher, “Judith Allen leads the Virginia Woolf Discussion Group at Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania. She has written on James Joyce, Michel de Montaigne, and Virginia Woolf, and has done editorial work and book reviews for Journal of Modern Literature, Woolf Studies Annual, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany.”
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