From Randolph Bourne’s famous essay, “War is the Health of the State”:
“The history of America as a country is quite different from that of America as a state. In one case it is the drama of the pioneering conquest of the land, of the growth of wealth and the ways in which it was used, of the enterprise of education, and the carrying out of spiritual ideals, of the struggle of economic classes. But as a state, its history is that of playing a part in the world, making war, obstructing international trade, preventing itself from being split into pieces, punishing those citizens whom society agrees are offensive, and collecting money to pay for it all.”
Some other wise words from Bourne:
“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.”
“Criticism of the state, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity or the beauty of conscription, are made subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding in severity those affixed to actual . . . crimes.”
The state in wartime creates a “regression into infantile attitudes.”
“The state is a jealous god and will brook no rivals. Its sovereignty must pervade every one, and all feeling must be run into the stereotyped forms of romantic patriotic militarism which is the traditional expression of the state herd-feeling.”
“War is a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces . . . this means not only the actual and potential destruction of an enemy, but of the nation at home as well.”
“There is no case known in modern times of the people being consulted in the initiation of a war.”
We’ll be discussing such things in detail in my Mises Academy online course on “The Political Economy of War,” beginning on September 21.
6:08 pm on September 12, 2010
