We have become blind to the alternatives to violence. This involves us in a sort of official madness, in which, while following what seems to be a perfect logic of self-defense and deterrence, we commit one absurdity after another: We seek to preserve peace by fighting a war, or to advance freedom by subsidizing dictatorships, or to “win the hearts and minds of the people” by poisoning their crops and burning their villages and confining them in concentration camps; we seek to uphold the “truth” of our cause with lies, or to answer conscientious dissent with threats and slurs and intimidations. […] All this is made frighteningly clear, in Vietnam, in our inability to control the swiftly widening discrepancy between what we are doing and what we say we are doing.

Wendell Berry (b. 1934) American farmer, educator, poet, conservationist

Speech (1968-02-10), “A Statement Against the War in Vietnam,” Kentucky Conference on the War and the Draft, University of Kentucky
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Collected in The Long-Legged House, Part 2 (1971).