Success Quote by Simone Weil

Weil slices through the comforting myth that wars are morally legible because they begin with a “good cause.” The line is a rebuke to the romantic paperwork we file after the bloodshed: manifestos, speeches, sacred grievances. For her, justice is not a prewar credential; it is a postwar architecture. A victory’s ethical weight shows up in the regime it installs, the rights it recognizes, the humiliations it institutionalizes, the everyday lives it permits to resume - or prevents from resuming.

The subtext is sharply anti-heroic. Weil implies that causes are cheap precisely because they are infinite: every side can narrate necessity, defense, destiny. War, once unleashed, has its own gravity, distorting intentions into force, propaganda, and revenge. So the only honest audit happens after the guns go quiet, when power stops pretending to be temporary. If the “victors” build an order of domination, surveillance, and collective punishment, their righteous origins become irrelevant; the moral story has been retroactively falsified.

Context matters: Weil wrote in the shadow of the interwar period and World War II, when lofty language routinely masked mechanized cruelty and when “liberation” could curdle into occupation. Her insistence on the settlement over the slogan also anticipates the modern problem of humanitarian war: the rhetoric sells the intervention, but the aftermath - the institutions, borders, prisons, and debts - is where justice either materializes or evaporates. The quote works because it shifts the moral spotlight from intention to consequence, from drama to administration, from triumph to governance.