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War is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties. The minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by subtle process of persuasion which may seem to them really to be converting them. Of course, the ideal of perfect loyalty, perfect uniformity is never really attained. The classes upon whom the amateur work of coercion falls are unwearied in their zeal, but often their agitation, instead of converting merely serves to stiffen their resistance. Minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical. But in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Other values such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed, and the significant classes who have constituted themselves the amateur agents of the State, are engaged not only in sacrificing these values for themselves but in coercing all other persons into sacrificing them. --Randolph Bourne, The State, 1918 (http://fair-use.org/randolph-bourne/the-state/) Bourne was a Progressive, but was a critic of WWI, a minority position among his peers. This led him to significant ostracism before his death from Spanish Flu. I find it almost undeniable that Bourne was correct, especially in the contemporary political situation. Progressive president Woodrow Wilson was jailing socialists for sedition, and his administration was thoroughly in love with its own power.[1] It stands to reason given what we've seen since that groups in the media, the academe and the state itself have explicitly adopted the warlike posture Bourne criticizes. So I think you're right, but it's a phenomenon from the last century or so that had originated sporadically in the decades after the Civil War. The reductionist debasement of all problems into enemies vanquished by a conquering army is mostly an artifact of the constitutional structure we've had since then, and the institutional founts of power that sustain it. [1] See e.g. Philip Dru: Administrator (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Dru:_Administrator) |