"We all want peace. Unfortunately, there are times when peace must be defended by fighting terror and tyranny"
About this Quote
Peace gets cast here as both the destination and the alibi. Douglas opens with a consensus line - "We all want peace" - that preempts dissent by framing disagreement as abnormal or naive. It is political jujitsu: once peace is declared the shared goal, the argument shifts from whether to use force to whether you are willing to "defend" the very thing everyone supposedly values.
The hinge is "Unfortunately", a small word doing heavy work. It implies reluctant necessity, the posture leaders adopt when selling escalation: no appetite for violence, just responsibility. Then come the loaded nouns: "terror" and "tyranny". They function less as precise diagnoses than as moral categories. In American political language, those terms are almost definitionally outside negotiation; they collapse complexity into a binary where fighting becomes the only serious option. That rhetorical move also widens the mandate. If the enemy is "terror", the battlefield is potentially anywhere; if the enemy is "tyranny", the mission can drift from self-defense into regime-change ideals.
The subtext is reassurance paired with permission. Reassurance to the public that their desire for stability is respected; permission for extraordinary measures because the threat is framed as existential. It is a line built for the post-9/11 era of permanent emergency, when "peace" became less a condition achieved through diplomacy than a security product maintained through vigilance, surveillance, and occasional war.
Its intent, then, is to moralize hard power: to make coercion sound like caretaking, and to make skepticism sound like complicity.
The hinge is "Unfortunately", a small word doing heavy work. It implies reluctant necessity, the posture leaders adopt when selling escalation: no appetite for violence, just responsibility. Then come the loaded nouns: "terror" and "tyranny". They function less as precise diagnoses than as moral categories. In American political language, those terms are almost definitionally outside negotiation; they collapse complexity into a binary where fighting becomes the only serious option. That rhetorical move also widens the mandate. If the enemy is "terror", the battlefield is potentially anywhere; if the enemy is "tyranny", the mission can drift from self-defense into regime-change ideals.
The subtext is reassurance paired with permission. Reassurance to the public that their desire for stability is respected; permission for extraordinary measures because the threat is framed as existential. It is a line built for the post-9/11 era of permanent emergency, when "peace" became less a condition achieved through diplomacy than a security product maintained through vigilance, surveillance, and occasional war.
Its intent, then, is to moralize hard power: to make coercion sound like caretaking, and to make skepticism sound like complicity.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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