Salon.com recently published an
interview with Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian woman, lawyer, and human rights activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The title of the article was a quote from Ebadi: "Any attack on Iran will be good for the government".
While this interview is well worth reading, it also brought to mind the phrase "war is the health of the state." I didn't know where this phrase originated, so I did a web-search and discovered the unfinished essay by Randolph Bourne, entitled War Is the Health of the State.
Not only does the essay have a catchy title, but it is very well written (if a bit long) and address major, recurring issues in how humans relate to their states, governments, and nations (each of which is clearly defined as a separate concept).
Bourne describes how different classes of society are motivated to support the war-- the emotional, ideological, and practical benefits that they gain. There are a number of parallels between Bourne's description of American society during WWI and my observations of American society during the Iraq invasion.
The following paragraph is the heart of the essay:
"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 a 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. Loyalty - or mystic devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. 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."
Despite the parallels between America's reaction to WWI and the Iraq invasion, one thing has always struck me as odd: Bush and Co. never tried to get Americans to put their hearts into the war. Maybe they just didn't think it was necessary, or maybe they figured that they could only get support for the war by pretending that it would be easy. Or perhaps, Iraq isn't the real war--it was just a set-up for the eventual invasion of Iran, which seems to be inevitable, and will require the full mobilization of American society, and produce the intended resurgence of the state.
My closing thought is expressed by a song by Chumbawamba: What are we fighting for?