"Oftentimes Mary I have been reminded of the scene in one of the Irish plays at the Abbey theater. You remember it is Easter week and the people of the slums come out with baby carriages and gather up anything they can find. I remember how I laughed at that scene. But I don't laugh any more. I know that that scene meant social disorganization, a rift in the fabric. I have seen and felt in the turmoil of war how quickly people's instincts of self preservation and self aggrandizement come to the fore. One night in a Fr. commune I found myself acting like a regular policeman in my instincts. I felt just like going out on patrol[.] I must say for the French people that they have behaved admirably in the turmoil and stress. They have shown magnificent capacity to come back quickly, organize and administer. Every officer, at least this one, is always happy to see one gendarme in a village, for that man in blue symbolizes the establishment of order and law."
- Arthur Bromage, my great-grandfather, a political science professor at U Michigan
Letter to his Wife, Daughter, and Parents, September 11th, 1944
Written somewhere in France while participating in the reconstruction of municipal governments in the wake of WWII.
"In war reality rends the words and images that dissimulate it, to obtrude in its nudity and in its harshness. Harsh reality (this sounds like a pleonasm!), harsh object-lesson, at the very moment of its fulguration when the drapings of illusion burn war is produced as the pure experience of being. The ontological event that takes form in this black light is a casting into movement of beings hitherto anchored in their identity, a mobilization of absolutes, by an objective order from which there is no escape. The trial by force is the test of the real. But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognizer themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action. Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. War does not manifest exteriority and the other as other; it destroys the identity of the same."
Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, (p. 21)
