by Dave Mulcahey

In These Times

08/17/04

Shortly before he died in 1918, the American critic Randolph Bourne penned an incendiary essay laying bare the monstrous duplicity at the heart of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy. We know Wilson from school history as the champion of national self-determination. Bourne regarded such high-minded talk as a hollow ruse. History will record, he wrote, that 'when the American nation had ostensibly a chance to conduct a gallant war, with scrupulous regard to the safety of democratic values at home, it chose rather to adopt all the most obnoxious and coercive techniques of the enemy and of the other countries at war, and to rival in intimidation and ferocity of punishment the worst governmental systems of the age.' The essay, which Bourne never finished, is remembered for a pithy aphorism, 'War is the health of the state.' This slogan has lately taken on a discomfiting resonance...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/912/


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp