Politics & Power Quote by Peter Scott

The chill in Peter Scott's line is how casually it treats a logistical fact as a moral turning point. "Certainly" does a lot of work: it acknowledges Korean War deaths as settled, almost administrative history, then pivots to what matters in his memory and politics - the shift from leaving bodies behind to hauling them back into the national living room. From Vietnam on, he implies, war stops being something that happens "over there" once the dead return to the suburbs, to airports, to the kitchen table.

Scott, an artist rather than a general or a polemicist, speaks with the observational plainness of someone noticing how images and rituals change public feeling. Repatriation isn't framed as compassion; it's framed as optics and consequence. Bringing the killed home forces a reckoning that distant burial grounds can buffer against: grief becomes local, visible, hard to mythologize as clean sacrifice. Vietnam, especially, turned the corpse into a political actor. The body bag, the flag-draped coffin, the funeral - these are not just private sorrows but public evidence that can puncture official narratives of progress and purpose.

The phrase "in our case" subtly widens the indictment. He's not only talking about America; he's positioning Australia inside the same Anglosphere machinery of alliance and attention, where the management of death is part of the management of consent. The subtext is stark: modern democracies learned that wars are harder to sell when the dead come back with receipts.