War & Peace Quote by George Wald

Renaming the War Department to the Defense Department is the kind of linguistic wardrobe change that lets a nation keep doing the same thing while feeling better about it. George Wald, a scientist with a moralist’s impatience for euphemism, is zeroing in on how modern power sanitizes itself: war becomes “defense,” invasion becomes “security,” escalation becomes “stability.” The policy doesn’t have to improve; the story does.

“Doubletalk” is the key accusation, and it lands because it’s not abstract. Wald is describing a bureaucratic reflex that turns moral responsibility into a branding problem. If you can define your violence as reactive by default, you never have to argue the hard case. You just have to point. The subtext is that language isn’t merely reflecting reality; it’s manufacturing consent by pre-loading the conclusion: we are defending, therefore we are justified.

“The aggressor is always on the other side” is both cynical and diagnostic. It’s a snapshot of Cold War psychology, when each superpower’s self-image depended on being the reluctant actor, forced into action by the other’s provocation. Wald’s line works because it exposes the symmetry: both sides claim innocence, both sides claim necessity, and the label “aggressor” becomes not a finding but a function of allegiance.

Coming from a scientist, the critique sharpens. Wald is implicitly applying an empirical standard to political language: if the terms are designed to prevent falsification, they’re not descriptions; they’re instruments. The warning is cultural as much as governmental: when a society adopts the euphemism, it also adopts the amnesia that comes with it.