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syncro
Registered: 01/14/15
Posts: 3,071
Last seen: 1 minute, 15 seconds
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War is the health of the State 3
#27802454 - 06/02/22 09:08 AM (1 year, 11 months ago) |
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This week was the birth anniversary of Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). He died at 32, deformed by botched birth procedure, rejected by society and family for his position against entering WWI. He left the unfinished essay, The State, in the trash next to his desk.
He did not see a separate functional possibility of the state, and war.
'“War is the health of the State,” Randolph Bourne wrote in that discarded essay, which he probably died believing would never see print, “and it is during war that one best understands the nature of that institution.” For
it cannot be too firmly realized that war is … the chief function of States. … War cannot exist without a military establishment, and a military establishment cannot exist without a State organization. War has an immemorial tradition and heredity only because the State has a long tradition and heredity. But they are inseparably and functionally joined."'
"Bourne had reason to be wary when writing sentences like those in 1918. People were being imprisoned and, in some cases, deported for writing things like that. There was a particular prejudice against anarchists and against people who sounded as though they might be anarchists. Perhaps this is why Bourne added the following caveat to his call for ending the State: “The State is not the nation, and the State can be modified and even abolished in its present form, without harming the nation. On the contrary, with the passing of the dominance of the State, the genuine life-enhancing forces of the nation will be liberated.”
Celebrate Our Namesake’s Birthday: The Brilliance of Randolph Bourne https://original.antiwar.com/riggenbach/2022/05/29/celebrate-our-namesakes-birthday-the-brilliance-of-randolph-bourne-2/
The State by Randolph Bourne (1918) https://www.antiwar.com/bourne.php
Edited by syncro (06/02/22 09:10 AM)
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syncro
Registered: 01/14/15
Posts: 3,071
Last seen: 1 minute, 15 seconds
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Re: War is the health of the State [Re: syncro]
#27802467 - 06/02/22 09:19 AM (1 year, 11 months ago) |
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"Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt." 
I actually don't think that of all them, in any party, locally anyway.
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syncro
Registered: 01/14/15
Posts: 3,071
Last seen: 1 minute, 15 seconds
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Re: War is the health of the State [Re: syncro]
#27802507 - 06/02/22 10:12 AM (1 year, 11 months ago) |
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"Country is a concept of peace, of tolerance, of living and letting live. But State is essentially a concept of power, of competition: it signifies a group in its aggressive aspects. And we have the misfortune of being born not only into a country but into a State, and as we grow up we learn to mingle the two feelings into a hopeless confusion."
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syncro
Registered: 01/14/15
Posts: 3,071
Last seen: 1 minute, 15 seconds
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Re: War is the health of the State [Re: syncro]
#27947672 - 09/13/22 01:03 AM (1 year, 8 months ago) |
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I was going to ask if anything sounded familiar.
Quote:
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.
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