War & Peace Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Ellsberg isn’t predicting a single event so much as naming an American reflex: crisis as permission slip. The line is built like a tripwire. “If there’s another 9/11” invokes the one trauma modern U.S. politics still treats as a moral solvent, capable of dissolving procedural scruples on contact. Pairing it with “a U.S. attack on Iran” widens the trigger from surprise attack to chosen war, suggesting the machinery of emergency powers doesn’t care whether fear is inflicted or manufactured.

The most loaded move is the Reichstag comparison. It’s deliberately radioactive: not a casual “history repeats” nod, but an accusation about how democratic systems can be reconfigured legally, overnight. The Reichstag Fire Decree didn’t require tanks in the streets; it required paperwork, pretext, and a public primed to trade rights for a story of safety. Ellsberg’s subtext is that America has already rehearsed this. The Patriot Act, the dragnet logic of surveillance, the normalization of watchlists and “material support” prosecutions: these are the warm-ups that make “massive detentions” sound less like dystopian fiction and more like policy drift.

His phrasing is prosecutorial: “I have no doubt” dismisses the comfort of uncertainty. “The day after or within days” attacks the liberal fantasy that institutions “slow things down.” He’s warning that the real vulnerability isn’t authoritarian intent; it’s bureaucratic readiness, plus a frightened public eager for choreography. Coming from the Pentagon Papers whistleblower, it reads less like paranoia than like institutional memory speaking out loud.