Politics & Power Quote by Peter Scott

There is a quiet horror in the verb choice: “obliterate.” Peter Scott doesn’t accuse; he observes, and that restraint is the blade. “It seemed to me” sounds modest, even tentative, but it also signals the witness’s posture of disbelief, the feeling of watching a machine at work that doesn’t pause long enough to learn what it’s destroying. As an artist, Scott is keyed to the particular - the texture of a place, the small differences that make one hillside unlike another. “A complete area” reads like the language of maps, planning memos, and after-action reports: clean, rectangular, remote. The line stages a clash between two ways of seeing: the local, intimate gaze that notices what’s there, and an industrial vision that treats terrain as a problem to be solved.

The subtext is not only about violence but about epistemology: power acting without knowledge, and then treating ignorance as irrelevant. “Without really knowing exactly what was there and where they were” turns the sentence from critique into indictment. It’s not collateral damage; it’s a workflow. The “American way” here implies a cultural confidence - speed, scale, decisiveness - that becomes moral carelessness when applied to land and lives. It echoes the logic of modern warfare and modernization alike: bulldoze first, inventory later; shock-and-awe as a planning principle.

Contextually, coming from a 20th-century British artist, it lands as an outsider’s diagnosis of American bigness - not envy, but alarm at how a nation’s talent for grand projects can slide into a talent for erasure. The sentence works because it refuses spectacle and instead indicts the banality of destruction: not hatred, just haste.