04 July 2015

Clausewitz Does a Headstand

I had forgotten about Clausewitz when I asserted: "The purpose of war, of course, is to force out governance of a people and replace it with the victor's" in a recent essay. For reasons anon, I visited Wiki to find the source of a quote living in the bottom of my brainstem: "War is politics by other means." Turns out, that's a paraphrase.

It was Clausewitz who said, "War is merely the continuation of policy by other means." Pretty close, huh? Of equal interest:
"War is thus an act of force to compel our enemy to do our will."

Which brings us to a Greek who says, today:
Our country is at peace, but the stakes are as high as if we were at war -- a war waged not with battleships, guns and planes but with words and money.

What we have in the Greek (and, in due time, Portugal, Spain, and Italy) situation is: politics is merely the continuation of war by other means.

Clausewitz was Prussian, which is to say, German.

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