Daily Inspiration Quote by William Kunstler

Kunstler’s line lands like an accusation you can’t politely file away. “Charnel house” isn’t just a grim metaphor; it’s a medieval image of stacked bones, the architecture of mass death. By saying “we have become” one, he turns the indictment inward and collective: not they, not some rogue agency, but us - the nation as a moral system. The phrasing is calibrated to deny escape routes.

As an activist-lawyer who made a career defending the despised and the disposable, Kunstler is speaking from the courtroom outward. The subtext is that American power doesn’t merely commit occasional atrocities; it normalizes them, launders them through procedure, and then calls the residue “order.” “Western World” sharpens the blade. It drags in the self-mythology of liberal democracy and civilized progress, then forces that audience to sit with the body count implied by empire, prisons, policing, foreign interventions, and a domestic politics that can treat suffering as an acceptable cost of doing business.

The intent is shock as moral strategy. “Charnel house” is too extreme to be a casual insult; it’s designed to rupture complacency and make euphemisms (“collateral damage,” “law and order,” “national security”) sound obscene. It also courts backlash. Kunstler knew that to say this is to invite dismissal as hysterical or unpatriotic, which is part of the point: a society that can’t hear such language may already be too invested in its innocence to confront what it’s done.