1)
This is a passage in which I am highlighting the cyclical nature of war, previously using George Orwell’s fictious “1984” and balancing that out with this passage:
However, actors anchored more to reality such as American diplomat George Kennan agrees with this concept, noting in his book American Diplomacy that;
“some Americans are already reverting, merely in contemplation of a possible war, to the American bad habit of assuming that there is something final and positive about a military decision – that it is the ending of something, and the happy ending, rather than a beginning”( ).
While most of my sources are primary in nature, I do here use Kennan who is commenting on the American people’s aggregate observable feelings and tendencies, of which in this exercise I would follow this quote up with the following;
As a diplomat and otherwise political commentator, Kennan possesses the credibility to study a populace, especially that of his own country, to determine the general mind-set. He shares this ability by explaining how the people hold a collective belief that wars and other military decisions act to ending problems in a finite manner, coupling this observation with his own expert insight of how foolish and unwise this belief is to have. Kennan therefore identifies the feelings of a source – the American people – and utilizes his own knowledge to commentate on how effective or truth-based said feelings are.
2)
Here is a portion of my argument in which I use a second source to uncover the limits of a primary source:
The German philosopher Karl Marx lays out how his desired revolution can take place in the Communist Manifesto;
“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat”( ).
Marx realizes that violent conflict is the only manner in which this change can occur, leading to a more equal socialist society, and that the gains outweigh the losses. While this measurement is a subjective one, I offer a look into those aforementioned losses. Depicting the French Revolution, an example of Marx’s overthrow, Charles Dickens illuminates how the ordeal really unfolds in A Tale of Two Cities;
“So much more wicked and distracted had the Revolution grown in that December month, that the rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and squares under the southern wintry sun.”
While this form of violent conflict may be undertaken with good intentions, it is nonetheless still war, and the three consequences of war previously laid out apply, tipping the balance towards a negative overall result.
