Politics & Power Quote by Herbert V. Prochnow

A Martian’s-eye view is a neat little scalpel: it strips away our self-flattering labels and judges us by what we actually build. Prochnow’s line turns “civilized” into a cruel punchline. If an outsider were scanning Earth for evidence of maturity, he suggests, they wouldn’t find it in libraries, public health, or art. They’d find it in procurement budgets, weapons labs, and the polished efficiency of killing at scale.

Coming from a businessman, the barb lands differently than it would from a novelist or pacifist. Prochnow isn’t writing from the margins; he’s talking from inside the managerial class that helped make the 20th century run on systems: production, logistics, accounting. The subtext is that modern “civilization” isn’t simply a set of ideals, it’s an organizational achievement. War is where organization becomes most legible, measurable, and rewarded. The “best implements” aren’t just bombs; they’re supply chains, research institutions, bureaucracies, and the cold competence to convert knowledge into dominance.

The context is a century that treated conflict as a proving ground for modernity: two world wars, the rise of the military-industrial complex, then the Cold War’s technological arms race. Prochnow’s irony is that progress and atrocity share an infrastructure. The line doesn’t just accuse nations of hypocrisy; it indicts a definition of “advanced” that’s been quietly updated to mean “most capable of coercion.” A Martian would recognize us not by our values, but by our engineering priorities.