War & Peace Quote by Gijs de Vries

“Indiscriminate attacks on civilians” is a deliberately juridical phrase with a moral fuse built in. De Vries isn’t describing the fog of war; he’s singling out a category of violence that international law already treats as taboo, then tightening the screw by insisting it should be “illegal in war as in peacetime.” That last clause is the point: war is the usual excuse people reach for when they want to downgrade civilian life into collateral math. De Vries rejects that escape hatch. The line tries to make the norm feel continuous, not situational.

The specific intent is political as much as ethical. As a European politician shaped by postwar institutions and counterterror debates, de Vries is staking out a center of gravity: legitimacy depends on restraint, and “security” does not get to redefine the target. The word “indiscriminate” does heavy lifting, too. It doesn’t ban all force; it bans force that refuses the discipline of discrimination and proportionality. That makes the statement both harder to oppose and easier to deploy against whoever is currently claiming necessity.

The subtext is a warning about rhetorical laundering. States and armed groups alike try to rebrand civilian harm as inevitability, deterrence, or “pressure.” De Vries pushes back with a clean, prosecutorial standard: if you can’t tell combatant from bystander, you don’t get to pull the trigger - and you don’t get to call it war to make it sound less like a crime.