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Wendell Berry — whom Steph for years has proclaimed a “master poet” — provides A Citizen’s Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (aka The Bush Doctrine that was published by the U.S. Administration in September 2002):

This [NSS] document affirms peace; it also affirms peace as the justification of war and war as the means of peace and thus perpetuates a hallowed absurdity. But implicit in its assertion of this (and, by implication, any other) nation’s right to act alone in its own interest is an acceptance of war as a permanent condition. Either way, it is cynical to invoke the ideas of cooperation, community, peace, freedom, justice, dignity, and the rule of law (as this document repeatedly does), and then proceed to assert one’s intention to act alone in making war. One cannot reduce terror by holding over the world the threat of what it most fears.

This is a contradiction not reconcilable except by a self righteousness almost inconceivably naive.

Wendell Berry is a man after my own heart. Or is that vice versa? :-)  He writes well what I fumble in trying to articulate at all. Dear God, how exhilarating to read such a writer!

This is essential reading for every U.S. citizen.

[via Doc]