War & Peace Quote by Alexander Cockburn

Cockburn takes a tired wartime aphorism and flips it like a courtroom objection: sustained, but against the premise. “Truth is the first casualty” flatters peacetime society by implying that honesty is our default setting until bombs start falling. His “which is nonsense” is doing more than correcting a cliché; it’s accusing the audience of wanting a comforting timeline where moral compromise begins only at the outbreak of war.

The line works because it drags “truth” out of the heroic register and into the hospital ward. “Sick bay” and “graveyard” are blunt, physical places; truth isn’t an abstract ideal, it’s a body that can be bruised, sedated, or buried long before the first shot. The imagery also mocks the selective solemnity of wartime rhetoric: we pretend propaganda is an emergency measure, when in fact everyday politics, advertising, institutional self-protection, and media routines already run on managed narratives.

Cockburn’s intent is prosecutorial. He’s not just saying that governments lie; he’s saying the public participates in the fiction that peace equals transparency. That’s the subtext: the lie we tell ourselves about lies, the cultural need to quarantine deception as a wartime infection so we don’t have to interrogate the peacetime systems that normalize it.

Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century media environment where “truth” becomes a brand and “objectivity” can be a shield. Cockburn’s cynicism isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand to stop treating honesty as a wartime luxury item and start seeing it as a peacetime responsibility routinely abandoned.