"War is the Health of the State"

[villager]

Always worth reading what Randolph Bourne wrote, on the eve of World War I, at times such as these:

<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://www.bigeye.com/warstate.htm

[Cooley Hurd]

1. More important are the writings of Major General Smedley Butler...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_is_a_Racket

It spells out, exquisitely, the marriage of capitalism and war.

[villager]

2. In both cases, what's sad is they saw exactly what was afoot, what was happening...

...and it's only gotten worse, since then.

[Cooley Hurd]

3. Those who control the press control the message.

General Butler was faced with the same dilemma in 1934.

[villager]

4. And Bourne, some 20 or years earlier, was also hounded and marginalized...

Not unexpectedly...