Wit & Attitude Quote by Alexander Berkman

Berkman doesn’t describe war; he indicts it, stacking ugly nouns like evidence bags on a courtroom table. The phrasing is designed to deny war its favorite disguises: honor, sacrifice, necessity. Instead, he turns it into a systems-level moral failure - not a series of tragic exceptions, but a machine that reliably produces “blind obedience” and “irresponsible murder.” That last pairing is the razor: murder is usually framed as intensely personal guilt, yet Berkman argues war is precisely how societies outsource that guilt, laundering it through uniforms, chains of command, and patriotic language.

The subtext is anarchist and surgical. Berkman isn’t mainly accusing individual soldiers of being stupid or callous; he’s accusing the institution of manufacturing those traits as requirements. “Unthinking” and “obedience” are not insults so much as job descriptions in a militarized order. The list form matters: it’s rhythmic, relentless, and deliberately redundant, mirroring the way wartime logic collapses nuance into slogans and targets.

Context sharpens the polemic. Berkman lived through the high age of industrialized slaughter and state propaganda - from the era’s labor crackdowns and political violence to the First World War’s assembly-line carnage. For a radical who saw the state as coercion with better branding, war becomes the state’s purest expression: concentrated authority, suspended ethics, mass death rendered bureaucratically “responsible” to no one. The quote works because it refuses consolation. It leaves readers with a choice: accept war’s euphemisms, or admit the moral cost is the point, not a side effect.