War & Peace Quote by John Le Carre

Le Carre is doing that signature move of his: making conspiracy feel less like a thrilling plot twist and more like an administrative habit. The line splits the world into two parallel narratives, "reality" and "public perception", and the repetition of "in every" lands like a bureaucrat stamping the same form again and again. Not once, not occasionally: always. The intent is not to deliver a single anti-war slogan, but to indict the machinery that sells wars as digestible morality plays.

The subtext is colder than simple cynicism. "Why the war was being fought" isn’t framed as a disagreement among honest parties; it’s framed as a story constructed for consumption. Le Carre implies that the gap isn’t an accident of ignorance but an engineered distance: complexity exists, but the public is "allowed" only a curated portion of it. That verb matters. It suggests gatekeeping, paternalism, and a quiet contempt for democratic oversight.

Context sharpens the edge. Le Carre wasn’t just a novelist with a taste for intrigue; he had lived inside British intelligence and built a career exposing the banal ethics of statecraft, where motives are mixed, alliances are compromised, and truth is a managed resource. Coming from him, "complex" doesn’t mean nuanced in a comforting way. It means morally contaminated, politically inconvenient, and therefore routinely flattened into slogans, flags, and televised certainty.

The rhetorical power is its restraint: no named villains, no specific war, no shouting. Just an observational pattern that dares the reader to stop treating official narratives as explanations and start treating them as tactics.