Absolute Friends

There will be no war, but in the pursuit of principle no stone will be left standing.

With people you see in them what you already know.

He has his chin on his chest and his eyes down. He is thinking of his new baby, his new novel, tomorrow's dance contest. He is thinking of everything except what he is thinking about.

Outside the school's walls the Swinging Sixties are in full cry, but inside them the band of Empire plays on. Twice-daily chapel services praise the school's war dead to the detriment of its living, value the white man above lesser breeds, and preach chastity to boys who can find sexual stimulation in a Times editorial.

With a child’s wonder, he examines the eternal spire of the Church of the Holy Ghost carved against the evening sky. What would it be like really and absolutely to believe? Like Zara. Like Mustafa. Like Jay Rourke’s chums. To know, really and absolutely know, that there’s a Divine Being not set in time or space who reads your thoughts better than you ever did, and probably before you even have them? To believe that God sends you to war, God bends the path of bullets, decides which of his children will die, or have their legs blown off, or make a few hundred million on Wall Street, depending on today’s Grand Design?

In this respect he embodies what Mundy considers the least attractive characteristic of both our Western leaders and their spokesmen: a levitational self-belief that nimbly transcends the realities of human suffering.

It’s called preemptive naïveté, and it rests on the assumption that everyone in the world would like to live in Dayton, Ohio, under one god, no prizes for guessing whose god that is.

When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.

I’m not paid to have a conscience, I’m paid to find new ways to fuck up the planet.

Their one aim is to perpetuate the insane concept of limitless expansion on a limited planet, with permanent conflict as its desired outcome. And their product is the zero-educated robot known otherwise as the corporate executive.

By repetition, each lie becomes an irreversible fact upon which other lies are constructed. Then we have a war. This war.

The easiest and cheapest trick for any leader is to take his country to war on false pretenses.

According to our anarchist writers, world conflict should lead to creative chaos. If such chaos is intelligently exploited, a free society will emerge. But when I looked about me, I was forced to accept that the preconditions of creative chaos did not exist, neither did the intelligent exploiters. Chaos presupposes a vacuum of power, yet bourgeois power was gaining everywhere, and so was the military might of America, for whom West Germany was by now the arsenal and craven ally in the world war that appeared inevitable. As to the intelligent exploiters, they were too busy making profits and driving Mercedes cars to avail themselves of the opportunities we had created for them.

To possess another language, Charlemagne tells us, is to possess another soul.

There comes a moment for all of us when our childhood ceases to be an excuse. In your case, I would say that, as with many English, the moment is somewhat delayed.

Any acts of protest currently performed by the Left only legitimize the rightist conspiracy that we are forced to call democracy. Our very existence as radicals underpins the authority of our enemies. Bonn’s military-industrial junta has strapped West Germany so tight to the American war wagon that we shall never be able to raise a finger against its atrocities.

Our movement was inspired not by the will of the oppressed classes but by the liberal guilt of the affluent.

And let us both blindly serve our Queen and country, notwithstanding the fact that both are wholly owned subsidiaries of the one great Hyperpower in the Sky. Agreed?

I am an artist of the unobserved life.

he will expect nothing of life but life itself.

marks of dignity and erudition.

It was an old colonial oil war dressed up as a crusade for Western life and liberty, and it was launched by a clique of war-hungry Judeo-Christian geopolitical fantasists who hijacked the media and exploited America’s post-9/11 psychopathy.

what is conviction? How do we identify it? How can we know that we should be guided by it? Is it to be found in the heart, or in the intellect? And what if it is only to be found in the one and not the other?

We cannot live in a bubble, Mr. Mundy. Comfortable ignorance is not a solution. In German student societies that I was not permitted to join, they made a toast: ‘Better to be a salamander, and live in the fire.’” After