War & Peace Quote by Elias Canetti

War doesn’t begin with tanks; it begins with a story. Canetti’s line is a cold little manual for power: if you want permission to kill at scale, you first need a body that can be framed as proof. The “first victim” isn’t only a casualty. It’s a narrative device, a sacrificial figure whose suffering can be circulated until it hardens into consensus. Leaders don’t merely respond to violence; they curate it, or manufacture its appearance, to convert aggression into “defense.”

The verb pairing “procure or invent” is where Canetti’s cynicism bites. Procuring suggests there may be genuine harm to point to; inventing admits the whole enterprise can run on fabrication, exaggeration, or strategic ambiguity. Either way, the ruler’s priority isn’t truth but emotional leverage: fear, outrage, humiliation. A public that might resist war can be made to crave it if it believes it has been struck first. The “must” is key, too. Canetti isn’t describing a moral failure so much as an operational requirement: mass violence needs a legitimizing spark because modern populations, even when propagandized, don’t like to think of themselves as initiators.

Canetti, a Jewish writer formed by the convulsions of European nationalism and the propaganda machines surrounding the World Wars, is obsessed with crowds and the psychology of collective motion. The “first victim” is how rulers synchronize millions of private anxieties into one marching rhythm. It’s also a warning about the public’s role: when we accept the first victim uncritically, we become the second instrument. The line reads like a diagnosis of how atrocities get their alibis.