War & Peace Quote by Curt Siodmak

Imperial appetite is framed here with the bluntness of a menu description: conquest “feeds us,” and the promised spoils aren’t abstract glory but a grotesquely domestic comfort - sitting back, fork poised, whip at the ready. Siodmak’s intent is less to argue than to expose. By letting the speaker luxuriate in the fantasy, he strips away the polite euphemisms that usually dress up expansionism: security, destiny, civilization. What remains is the real engine - consumption and control.

The subtext runs on moral inversion. The fork is civilization’s symbol, table manners and refinement; the whip is the tool that makes refinement possible by outsourcing suffering. Putting them in the same tableau collapses the distance between “our way of life” and the violence underwriting it. “Slaves working for us everywhere” isn’t presented as a regrettable byproduct but as the central perk, a revealing confession about how empire thinks when it stops pretending to be noble.

Contextually, Siodmak’s background matters: a Jewish German-born writer who fled Nazism, he had a front-row view of how modern states sell brutality with bureaucratic calm. The line reads like a deliberately unfiltered Nazi dream of the postwar world, the kind of speech that would sound too cartoonish if it weren’t historically accurate in its logic. It works because it weaponizes specificity: not “power,” but knees, a fork, a whip. You can see the posture. You can feel the casualness. That casualness is the horror.