War & Peace Quote by Peter Scott

A shrug disguised as testimony, Peter Scott's line lands with the quiet sting of an insider refusing to flatter his audience. "I don't think" softens the charge, but only barely; it's the verbal equivalent of a polite smile while sliding a damning report across the table. The target is left deliberately vague - "they" could be officials, commentators, patrons, or the broader public - and that ambiguity is the point. Scott isn't litigating facts about Korea so much as indicting the Western habit of forming confident opinions on distant violence with secondhand information and first-rate certainty.

As an artist, Scott would have been steeped in how narratives get framed: what is shown, what is cropped, what becomes background texture. The Korean War is often called "the forgotten war", but the quote suggests something sharper than forgetfulness: willful thinness. People didn't merely lose interest; they never bothered to acquire knowledge in the first place. "At all" turns the screw, implying not a gap in expertise but an absence of serious engagement - a war consumed as rumor, headline, and geopolitical shorthand.

The line also carries a moral subtext about responsibility. If "they" didn't understand Korea, then the opinions, policies, and cultural depictions built on that ignorance are compromised from the start. Scott's restraint makes it work: no grand condemnation, just a modest sentence that exposes how easily public confidence outruns public comprehension, especially when the suffering happens far away and the story arrives prepackaged.