War & Peace Quote by John Burns

Spit-polished patriotism gets skewered here with a street-fighter’s contempt. Burns aims straight at the men who cheerlead war from safe distances, then scramble to canonize the brute force that serves their interests. His phrasing is a deliberate moral inversion: the “praises” are “profuse,” excessive, almost greasy, while the supposedly “greatest office in the State” is reduced to something physically contaminated by “presence.” The insult isn’t ornamental; it’s strategic. Burns wants readers to feel that political legitimacy is not abstract law but a public space that can be violated, occupied, dirtied.

The line “the men who made the war” is doing heavy work. It’s not “the nation,” not “the people,” but a culpable class of decision-makers and their enablers. Burns frames war as manufactured policy, not unavoidable fate, and he links it to a broader culture of impunity: the same elite that authorizes mass violence also rewards the domestic strongman who can “kick the P.M. out” when constitutional process becomes inconvenient.

Subtextually, Burns is warning that wartime rhetoric is a solvent. Once violence is normalized abroad, the taste for it returns home, repackaged as “decisive leadership.” His cluster of accusations - “disloyal, dishonest and lying” - reads less like a legal brief than a populist indictment: this is treason against democratic norms, committed in broad daylight and applauded by those who profit from chaos. Burns, an activist rooted in labor politics, is staking out a hard line: you don’t defend the state by seizing it; you degrade it by doing so.