"The army is under orders to defend every place"
About this Quote
A line like "The army is under orders to defend every place" sounds like resolve until you notice the trapdoor: every place is a rhetorical impossibility. Kohl, a practical conservative with an instinct for stability, is deploying the language of total commitment precisely because the real context of modern defense is partial, contingent, and political. The sentence performs certainty at the moment certainty is hardest to guarantee.
The specific intent is deterrence-by-declaration. You tell adversaries there are no soft targets, no negotiable gaps, no inviting ambiguity. You also tell citizens that the state has a plan, that sovereignty is intact, that no town will be quietly written off. In Cold War-era Europe especially, where borders were both heavily militarized and psychologically fragile, this kind of blanket assurance functioned like a civic sedative.
The subtext is more complicated: to say "under orders" shifts agency from leaders to institution, as if policy were simply being executed rather than debated. It launders politics into procedure. And "defend" is a word that flatters itself; it implies necessity and virtue, not escalation. If the army is everywhere, then the government can claim it is merely protecting, even as it expands readiness, budgets, or exceptional powers.
Kohl's genius here is the compression. He doesn't argue strategy; he declares a moral geography. The nation becomes a single, indivisible space that must be treated as equally valuable. It's a promise meant to be believed, even if everyone in the room understands it can't literally be kept.
The specific intent is deterrence-by-declaration. You tell adversaries there are no soft targets, no negotiable gaps, no inviting ambiguity. You also tell citizens that the state has a plan, that sovereignty is intact, that no town will be quietly written off. In Cold War-era Europe especially, where borders were both heavily militarized and psychologically fragile, this kind of blanket assurance functioned like a civic sedative.
The subtext is more complicated: to say "under orders" shifts agency from leaders to institution, as if policy were simply being executed rather than debated. It launders politics into procedure. And "defend" is a word that flatters itself; it implies necessity and virtue, not escalation. If the army is everywhere, then the government can claim it is merely protecting, even as it expands readiness, budgets, or exceptional powers.
Kohl's genius here is the compression. He doesn't argue strategy; he declares a moral geography. The nation becomes a single, indivisible space that must be treated as equally valuable. It's a promise meant to be believed, even if everyone in the room understands it can't literally be kept.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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