You want civilians to die for world politics

You say this like “politics” is some nebulous, worthless thing. People typically want wars that are disruptive of the status quo because they view it as the only way to change systems in which, e.g., a much greater number of civilians live under brutal oppression, as their grandparents did and their grandchildren will if the state machinery is not smashed. You’re like the people who bemoan the Haitian Revolution because some white families died with no concern for the fact that it was a slave state and the revolution stopped, it cannot be stressed enough, the continuous, literal chattel enslavement of an entire country’s worth of people.

THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

– Mark Twain on France’s “Reign of Terror”