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Editorial


“That Devil’s Madness”


by Rick Lewis


“The only advice I can offer when someone invites you to go to a war, is to bawl no, and if they’re smaller than you and unlikely to respond in kind, belt them in the mouth so there’s no risk of them asking you again and you changing your mind. If you want to know what it’s like, don’t eat or sleep for three days, jump in some mud, visit a mortuary and then blindfold yourself and walk across a motorway (give yourself a chance: do it at three in the morning); if you survive, it’s cheaper and easier.”


From The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer



I don’t know whether any of the contributors to this issue have ever gone to a war, but some of the great philosophers of the past certainly did. They include Socrates (who not only asked questions about the nature of courage, but was himself decorated for valour), Descartes (who was a mercenary in the armies of Maurice of Nassau and the Duke of Bavaria), David Hume (who as private secretary to an admiral took part in a farcical attempted invasion of the French coast), Nietzsche (a volunteer medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War), Ludwig Wittgenstein (who fought in the trenches in WWI), Jean-Paul Sartre (the French army wisely entrusted him with a weather balloon rather than a gun) and Marcus Aurelius, who spent most of his reign as Roman Emperor unhappily fighting long wars in remote provinces and found consolation writing Stoic philosophy in his diary.


Why a war issue now? At the time of writing India and Pakistan have just recently edged back from the brink of Armageddon and the US Army is studying roadmaps of Baghdad again, so war is topical (it usually is).


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