The more militaristic a society gets, the more cowardly. From Bionic Mosquito at lewrockwell.com:
The evil of militarism is that it shows most men to be tame and timid and excessively peaceable.
Heretics, Gilbert K. Chesterton (eBook)
I think we see this at the sporting events and parades, when the crowd roars its approval for the military fly-by, the color guard, the hero who just returned from combat. The crowd roars because they are happy that they didn’t have to go. “Let’s you and him have a fight.”
The professional soldier grows evermore courageous as the crowd grows timid – well, evermore courageous in the eyes of the crowd. Maybe it is better said that as the crowd grows more timid, the professional soldier appears to be more courageous – it is all relative, not absolute.
his the Pretorian guard became more and more important in Rome as Rome became more and more luxurious and feeble.
Vietnam helped bring on the tremendous malaise of the 1970s, with high unemployment and high price inflation. And the four years of Jimmy Carter, who – to my recollection – might have been the only president since Herbert Hoover to avoid initiating or extending any major military conflict.
Reblogged this on uwerolandgross.