These people take refuge in the pat and chauvinistic slogans because they are incapable of understanding any others, because these slogans are safer from the standpoint of short-term gain, because the truth is sometimes a poor competitor in the market place of ideas - complicated, unsatisfying, full of dilemma, always vulnerable to misinterpretation and abuse. But I also suspect that what purports to be public opinion in most countries that consider themselves to have popular government is often not really the consensus of the feelings of the mass of the people at all, but rather the expression of the interests of special highly vocal minorities - politicians, commentators, and publicity-seekers of all sorts: people who live by their ability to draw attention to themselves and die, like fish out of water, if they are compelled to remain silent.
It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war. Another is that people are not always more reasonable than governments that public opinion, or what passes for public opinion, is not invariably a moderating force in the jungle of politics. One of them is that suffering does not always make men better.
Context: There are certain sad appreciations we have to come to about human nature on the basis of these recent wars.
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