"War Is the Health of the State"

[villager]

Every once in awhile, you have to re-post some Randolph Bourne, too little known today, who was writing this stuff around World War I:

<snip>


With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle.

Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

<snip>


http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/hist_texts/warhealthstate1918.html

[msongs]

1. then the USA must be the healthiest state in the history of the entire universe cuz we are the

most war loving country on the planet.

Msongs

[villager]

2. Bourne was always careful to separate the state -- the machinery of power -- from the "country"

... which is to say, the people, or the culture...

But yeah, that's one goddamn healthy state we have there...

[villager]

3. mid-day kick for Bourne!

n/t