War & Peace Quote by Ezra Pound

Pound’s line lands like a moral booby trap: it sounds, at first blush, like a bloodthirsty complaint about war’s inefficiency. That’s the bait. The switch is that he’s really indicting modern war as an industrial system that smears responsibility until no one can even pretend they’re exercising justice. “The right people” is deliberately corrosive phrasing - a fantasy of clean violence, of a world where guilt is legible and punishment is targeted. Modern war, Pound suggests, destroys even that illusion. It kills by category and geography, not by culpability.

The parenthetical “(modern war)” does a lot of work. Pound isn’t talking about Homeric combat or duels with names and faces; he’s talking about bureaucratized slaughter: artillery, bombing, distance, paperwork. When killing becomes technological and remote, it becomes morally indiscriminate, and the people most responsible - planners, profiteers, ideologues - are structurally insulated. The sentence is a sneer at that insulation.

Context sharpens the discomfort. Pound was a brilliant modernist poet and also a political crank who flirted disastrously with fascism; he broadcast propaganda during WWII and paid for it. That biography turns “right people” into a charged ambiguity: is he criticizing mass violence, or romanticizing purges? The quote works because it doesn’t let you settle. It forces the reader to confront a grim truth about modern conflict: the machinery is designed to hit the many, while the “right” few often slip the net.