Daily Inspiration Quote by John Keegan

Men killing other men isn’t framed here as tragedy or heroism, but as something stranger: a social behavior so normalized that it takes a deliberate act of defamiliarization to see how bizarre it is. Keegan’s opening move is to pry war loose from its usual rhetorical packaging. No flags, no “sacrifice,” no strategic chessboard. Just the brute fact of human beings organizing themselves to destroy other human beings, and the insistence that this should still shock us.

The intent is diagnostic. Keegan, a military historian who famously pushed back against armchair, commander-centric narratives, is signaling a method: start with the human event, not the official story. His questions aren’t rhetorical flourishes; they’re an agenda. “Why does it happen?” refuses the lazy answer of “because politics” and points toward psychology, culture, training, obedience, fear, and the manufactured intimacy of units. “How long has it gone on?” widens the lens to anthropology and deep history, challenging the comforting idea that modern warfare is an aberration rather than an evolving institution.

The sharpest edge is in “have the motives changed?” That’s a quiet provocation aimed at readers who want moral progress to map neatly onto history. Keegan hints that the rationales mutate - religion, empire, nation, ideology, security - while the underlying mechanisms of coercion and belonging remain stubbornly consistent. It’s a historian’s way of saying: don’t be hypnotized by the stated reasons; watch the recurring human machinery that makes killing possible, and repeatable, across centuries.