Raymond
2012-05-29 07:59:16 UTC
Americans should no longer believe that our young are dying on foreign
soils because our government is a world peacemaker just trying to save
the citizens of these nations from corrupt despotic leaders ( most, in
power because our government selected them to LEAD their people )
Let's be honest and not deceive ourselves about why we have military
bases and American troops stationed around the planet. It's all about
oil and has been, especially, since the end of World War II.
Today, on Memorial Day, it was nice for our present leaders and our
families to pay their respects to those who lost their lives believing
they were defending us, here at home, from terrorists planning to
destroy our great country and its fine people. However, someone from
the American oil companies should have appeared, along with our
president, at the long black wall, to thank him and the many families
for offering up their young to obtain the oil that is the cause for
the wall.
So, from now on, when our president appears on television to inform us
that we have again landed in some remote place in Africa, or in Asia,
or again in the Middle East, send him an email and tell him, " Yes, we
understand. It's about more oil again, isn't it?" And then, return to
the TV station, to whatever it was you were watching before he
interrupted you.
Onward Christian Soldiers. War is the Health of the State.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican 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 such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
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. 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.
The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
--- Randolph Bourne
War is the Health of the State
soils because our government is a world peacemaker just trying to save
the citizens of these nations from corrupt despotic leaders ( most, in
power because our government selected them to LEAD their people )
Let's be honest and not deceive ourselves about why we have military
bases and American troops stationed around the planet. It's all about
oil and has been, especially, since the end of World War II.
Today, on Memorial Day, it was nice for our present leaders and our
families to pay their respects to those who lost their lives believing
they were defending us, here at home, from terrorists planning to
destroy our great country and its fine people. However, someone from
the American oil companies should have appeared, along with our
president, at the long black wall, to thank him and the many families
for offering up their young to obtain the oil that is the cause for
the wall.
So, from now on, when our president appears on television to inform us
that we have again landed in some remote place in Africa, or in Asia,
or again in the Middle East, send him an email and tell him, " Yes, we
understand. It's about more oil again, isn't it?" And then, return to
the TV station, to whatever it was you were watching before he
interrupted you.
Onward Christian Soldiers. War is the Health of the State.
Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican 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 such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
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. 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.
The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
--- Randolph Bourne
War is the Health of the State