War & Peace Quote by Sophie Kerr

War sells itself as theater: drums, uniforms, medals, parades, the clean geometry of flags. Kerr’s line punctures that spectacle with a columnist’s needle, arguing that conflict isn’t sustained purely by necessity or ideology but by aesthetics - the seductive packaging that turns destruction into a story people want to watch themselves inside. The jab is that peace, by comparison, is narratively underproduced. It doesn’t arrive with a marching band. It looks like meetings, compromises, paperwork, restraint. Harder to romanticize, harder to recruit for.

The intent is less utopian than diagnostic. Kerr isn’t naively claiming wars happen because humans are bored; she’s pointing to how pageantry launders moral discomfort. When violence is wrapped in ritual, it feels purposeful and communal rather than chaotic and cruel. The music gives you permission to feel pride instead of fear. The costume gives you identity. Pageantry turns death into “service,” grief into “honor,” and political choices into fate.

Contextually, Kerr was writing in a culture where mass media, patriotic ceremony, and modern advertising were tightening their grip on public emotion. In that environment, war becomes not only policy but performance - a brand with better marketing than diplomacy. The line still lands because the imbalance persists: we stage flyovers and halftime tributes for conflict, while peace gets, at best, a press conference and a modest treaty signing. Kerr’s cynicism is strategic. Strip away the soundtrack, and the appetite for war starts to look less inevitable.