“The . . . State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man’s emotions.  What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era . . . even military trappings [are] scarcely seen.  In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.”

“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 . . . [E]ven 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 . . . 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”  (emphasis added).

—Randolph Bourne, “War Is the Health of the State,” 1918

The Best of Thomas DiLorenzo