 Weil’s development of the concepts of power and prestige continued in her article “Let Us Not Start Another Trojan War” (1936, subtitled, and translated into English as, “The Power of Words” in SWA 238–258). Her thesis is that a war’s destruction is inversely proportional to the official pretexts given for fighting it. Wars are absurd, she argued (against Clausewitz), because “they are conflicts with no definable objective” (SWA 239). Like the phantom of Helen that inspired ten years of fighting, ideologies (e.g., capitalism, socialism, fascism), as well as capitalized words such as “Nation” and “State”, have taken on the role of the phantom in the modern world. Power relies on prestige—itself illusory and without limit because no nation thinks it has enough or is sure of maintaining its imagined glory, and therefore ever increases its means to wage war—so as to appear absolute and invincible. In response to these forces, Weil prescribed distinguishing between the imaginary and the real and, relatedly, defining words properly and precisely. Taken together, these prescriptions amount to a critique of ideology with its bloated political rhetoric.