Although admittedly challenging once pawns have been pitted against one another on the literal battlefield, sidestepping the false dichotomy of us vs. them through creativity, humor, and propaganda-exposing truths is the most effective way to avoid falling into the monsterdom trap.

Few essays uncloak the artificiality of the linguistic and psychological techniques used to dupe the populace into sacrificing themselves for their rulers more effectively than Aldous Huxley’s essay “Words and Behavior.” Below are a few choice excerpts (I published the original essay and more select quotes here: margaretannaalice.subst…):

“The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual human beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own, to inflict upon the innocent and, innocent themselves of any crime against their enemies, to suffer cruelties of every kind.”

“The implication in both cases is that war is indistinguishable from a bout of fisticuffs in a bar room. Whereas in reality it is profoundly different. A scrap between two individuals is forgivable; mass murder, deliberately organized, is a monstrous iniquity. We still choose to use war as an instrument of policy; and to comprehend the full wickedness and absurdity of war would therefore be inconvenient. For, once we understood, we should have to make some effort to get rid of the abominable thing.”

“The attempt to secure justice, peace and democracy by means of a ‘force,’ which means, at this particular moment of history, thermite, high explosives and vesicants, is about as reasonable as the attempt to put out a fire with a colorless liquid that happens to be, not water, but petrol.”

“We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.”