Clausewitz

Thanks to ibergus' recommendation, I read Walter Russell Mead's post on Clausewitz: Master of War. I haven't seen the propaganda films some criticize you for doing (except for a piece of one), but how anybody could be criticized for patriotism, I'll never know. Wasn't your country at war? Against the Enemy?



I do know:

ONODERA. It was forced labor during the war that made her ill.

SOMIYA. And spending her rare days off lugging home potatoes.

ONODERA. Terrible times. How she must have suffered.

Isn't this also true?

To the objection that every artist is also a citizen and therefore has a duty to fight fascism or communism (in Russia it would be capitalism) it may be answered that no such duty exits in law or tradition. . . . Of course, an artist who knowingly lives off crime or depravity is bound to be contaminated by it. Art and life mix unevenly, but they do mix. And for that very reason, the public's judgment of artists' moral and political careers should be tempered by the sobering thought, What could I do in such perplexities? — Jacques Barzun, Erich Kleiber, in Critical Questions, 1982, pp. 45–46.

I see at my elbow Charles Downer Hazen's The French Revolution, a two-volume work. What will we talk about then?