War & Peace Quote by Robert M. La Follette

La Follette’s line is less a lament about war than an accusation about how power behaves when it wants war. The key move is procedural: he doesn’t argue first about battlefield heroics or national destiny; he argues about narrative management. “No sufficient reason” sets a moral and evidentiary bar, then immediately concedes that the bar won’t matter. If the appetite exists, justification becomes a flexible commodity.

The syntax stages the scam in real time: “make war on one pretext, then invent another... after the war is on.” That ellipsis is doing political work. It signals the moment when scrutiny collapses, when the irreversible fact of war becomes its own argument. Once troops are deployed and blood has been spent, leaders can shift rationales without paying the full price of accountability. The subtext is brutally modern: war manufactures consent retroactively. The public isn’t persuaded to start the fire; it’s told, once the house is burning, that the blaze proves there must have been a good reason.

Context sharpens the edge. La Follette was a Progressive-era insurgent and one of the Senate’s fiercest antiwar voices during World War I, willing to absorb charges of disloyalty for opposing intervention. His target isn’t only foreign policy hawks; it’s the domestic machinery that turns dissent into treason and replaces deliberation with momentum. He’s warning that “the war party” isn’t a set of arguments but a habit of governance: act first, launder motives later. The line endures because it treats war as a rhetorical escalation strategy, not just a military one.