I read something long ago, and it struck a chord

Grok says it made every reader sit bolt upright the first time they hit it.

Here’s the precise wording from the 1951 Dial Press edition of James Jones' From Here to Eternity, published in 1951(Chapter 23, pages 441–442 in most printings).

One of the characters in the novel, General Slater, is holding court in the Schofield Barracks Officers’ Club, drunk enough to stop pretending:

“You take any man—any damn man in the world—and you can control him two ways: through his belly and through his balls. Give him just enough food to keep him alive and just enough sex to keep him quiet, and you’ve got him. Take either one away and he’ll do any damn thing you tell him to keep from losing the other. That’s the whole secret of command, gentlemen. That’s the whole secret of the Army. That’s the whole secret of the human race. Pleasure and pain. The promise of one and the threat of the other. Nothing else ever worked and nothing else ever will.”

He then lifts his glass and laughs, because he knows every officer in the room is living proof of it.

That paragraph is why the US Army tried to ban the book on military bases when it first came out.

Jones (1921–1977) wrote what is arguably the greatest trilogy in American war literature.
 
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Diogenes said:
Grok says it made every reader sit bolt upright the first time they hit it.

Here’s the precise wording from the 1951 Dial Press edition of James Jones' From Here to Eternity, published in 1951(Chapter 23, pages 441–442 in most printings).

One of the characters in the novel, General Slater, is holding court in the Schofield Barracks Officers’ Club, drunk enough to stop pretending:

“You take any man—any damn man in the world—and you can control him two ways: through his belly and through his balls. Give him just enough food to keep him alive and just enough sex to keep him quiet, and you’ve got him. Take either one away and he’ll do any damn thing you tell him to keep from losing the other. That’s the whole secret of command, gentlemen. That’s the whole secret of the Army. That’s the whole secret of the human race. Pleasure and pain. The promise of one and the threat of the other. Nothing else ever worked and nothing else ever will.”

He then lifts his glass and laughs, because he knows every officer in the room is living proof of it.

That paragraph is why the US Army tried to ban the book on military bases when it first came out.

Jones (1921–1977) wrote what is arguably the greatest trilogy in American war literature.
Click to expand...
yes.

controlling the the carrots is actually a stick.

quite evil.
 
Freddy Figbottom said:
that's what criminals and murderers say too.
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Is it? I understand that criminals and murderers have also professed a belief in Jesus Christ.

Does that mean anyone doing likewise is therefore a criminal and a murderer? (BTW, murderers are perforce criminals, legally. All murderers are criminals, but not all criminals are murderers). :thup:
 
In the novel I mentioned earlier, General Slater lays out his worldview calmly to a subordinate officer, Captain Holmes, growing "calmer and more cold than ever" as his enthusiasm builds:


“In the past,” Sam Slater said carefully, “this fear of authority was only the negative side of a positive moral code of ‘Honor, Patriotism, and Service.’ In the past, men sought to achieve the positives of the code, rather than simply to avoid its negatives.”

He was obviously choosing his words gingerly, as if worried that they would not be understood.

“Obviously, you cannot make a man voluntarily chain himself to a machine because it’s ‘Honorable.’ The man knows better.”

Holmes nodded his agreement. It was an original idea.

“All that is left, then,” Sam Slater went on, “is the standardized negative side of the code as expressed in Law. You have to make him afraid.” “...the quickest, efficient, least expensive way to educate a man is to make it painful for him when he is wrong, the same as with any other animal.” “For every general in this world there have to be 6,000 privates.”

Holmes is mesmerized. As they continue playing golf, he keeps turning the ideas over in his mind:

Holmes could not get over the simplicity of it. It was so marvelously simple. Why had he never thought of it himself? [...]

All these years he had been trying to build a team by appealing to the men’s honor and their loyalty. What a fool he had been. All these years he had been trying to get Prewitt (another character, a private) to fight (for Holmes's company in the regimental boxing matches) by appealing to his sense of duty and his fairness. What a fool. You have to make him afraid. It was so marvelously simple.

This epiphany directly inspires Holmes to intensify "The Treatment" on Private Prewitt—endless punishing details, harassment, and isolation—not to break him into boxing out of pride or camaraderie, but purely out of fear.

Jones (the author) uses the scene to expose the Army's (and society's) shift from idealistic "honor" to raw authoritarian control in the modern era.

Slater's philosophy foreshadows the fascism the U.S. would soon fight in WWII, while Holmes embodies the careerist officer who adopts it without question for personal gain.

In the 1953 film, this entire exchange is omitted (the Army demanded heavy censorship), so General Slater never appears, and Holmes's cruelty feels more petty than ideologically driven. The book is far darker and more insightful on that front.
 
Later, there's passage where Milt Warden—top sergeant, the real backbone of G Company—delivers his counter-manifesto against the officer class and the entire property-based civilization they serve.

This comes in Chapter 28, after Warden has just watched Captain Holmes strut away from another petty humiliation of the enlisted men.

He’s talking to himself, half-drunk on primitivo (wine) in the barracks latrine, staring into the cracked mirror:

“Property,” Warden said. “Property. All for property. That’s what it is, all of it. That’s what makes it run. That’s what everything runs on. Property and the protection of property.

That’s the whole works, right there in two words. They got the guys like Holmes and them other sons of bitches up there protectin' their property, and they got us guys down here protectin' it for them, and we’re the ones that get the shaft.

Property. That’s the whole secret of the world. That’s the only lesson there is to learn.

Everything else is romance.

The guys that own the property write the rules, and the guys that enforce the rules get just enough of it to keep them loyal, and the guys that fight the wars to protect it get a medal and a kick in the ass. And the guys that refuse to play the game get The Treatment.

Well, I played the game, and I got my three stripes and my little bit of property—my rating and my hashmarks and my right to be a big wheel among the other slaves. But I still ain’t got no property that’s worth a damn. I still ain’t got nothing that anybody couldn’t take away from me tomorrow with one little piece of paper. Property. All for property. That’s the whole answer, right there.”

Then he spits into the sink, wipes his mouth, and adds the line that has been quoted by every rebellious GI who ever read the book:

“And the hell of it is, there ain’t one damned thing you can do about it except enlist for another hitch and keep on protectin' it.”

Jones gives Warden this speech because he is the only man in the entire novel who sees the machine clearly—neither seduced by Slater’s fascist efficiency nor by the old romantic myths of honor and glory.

He knows the Army is just the armed guard of the owning class, and that every stripe, every promotion, every “career” is just a bigger set of handcuffs made of gold instead of iron.Prewitt rebels by refusing to box (individual defiance).

Warden rebels by understanding the game perfectly and still playing it—because he knows there’s no outside to escape to.

Together, their two philosophies—Prewitt’s “a man’s got to be himself” and Warden’s “property is the whole secret”—formed the novel’s devastating critique of 20th-century America on the eve of its imperial ascent.
 
Here it is: the moment the entire 900-page novel has been building toward:

December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor is burning.

The Japanese attack has shattered the sleepy peacetime Army forever.

Martial law descends on Hawaii like a guillotine.

Private Robert E. Lee Prewitt (AWOL since stabbing Fatso Judson, the sadistic stockade Sergeant in self-defense, hiding in the hills with his prostitute girlfriend, Alma) decides he must go back to Schofield Barracks.

Not to surrender, not to beg forgiveness, but to die as a soldier, on his own terms.

He slips past the roadblocks, carrying only his bugle (the one thing the Army never managed to take from him).

At 2:00 a.m., on the empty parade ground of the blackened post, Prewitt climbs the water tower that looms over G Company’s barracks.

Every enlisted man still awake hears the first notes drift down through the tropical night.

He doesn’t play “Taps.”
He doesn’t play “Reveille.”

He plays them both at once.

Author Jones describes it in a single, unbroken paragraph:

He put the bugle to his lips and blew both calls together, the low mournful notes of Taps weaving through the bright brassy call of Reveille, the two melodies fighting each other, canceling each other, merging into one terrible sound that was neither sleep nor waking, neither death nor life, neither defeat nor victory (just the whole damned impossible thing at once). Every man in the barracks hears it differently. To the new recruits hiding under their blankets: it sounds like the end of the world. To the old regulars who once watched Prewitt refuse The Treatment: it sounds like the voice of every soldier who ever said “no” and paid for it. To Warden, standing barefoot on the porch in his skivvies, it is the purest middle finger ever raised against every general, every captain, every regulation, every stripe, every dollar of property that ever bought a human soul. It was the sound of a man who had nothing left to lose and therefore owned the night. Then the MPs spot him. Searchlights stab upward. Machine guns open up. Prewitt keeps blowing (one last perfect, impossible chord) until the bullets cut him down. He falls spread-eagled from the tower, bugle still clenched in his dead hand, landing exactly on the same spot where he once stood at attention while Captain Holmes tried to break him.

Jones ends the scene with a line that has haunted three generations of readers: "And in the sudden silence after the body hit, every man in G Company knew (without having to be told) that the peacetime Army was dead, and that something new and infinitely worse had just been born in its place".

That bugle solo is Prewitt’s entire rebellion distilled into thirty seconds of molten brass.

He never saluted the system.

He never sold his talent for a promotion.

He never bowed to property or fear.

In the end he gave the Army the one thing it could never take from him: a song that said, louder than any court-martial or firing squad ever could, “I was here. I was a man. And you never owned me.”
 
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