In the real-world cartoon we inhabit, much of what is now happening will mean war. It always has in the past, and there is no reason to believe it won't in the future - the fairly near future, in fact.
Pat Buchanan included this quotation from Ernest Hemingway in a recent column:
"The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists."
“War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne, the prophetic American thinker who died of war-borne "Spanish flu" just after the Armistice. Time and again the behavior of the political class sickens society to the point where peoples are driven to war as a purgative. Lives are destroyed - fewer mouths are left to feed. Credit is destroyed - crushing debt can be written off. Cities and factories and farms are destroyed - wildly profitable investments can again be made, particularly by the victors. What remains of life arises from the ashes, less free, less fine, less human.
Countless voices like Bourne's have warned against wars to come. Many a war has been finally fought to a standstill and many a nation has sworn "Never again." Just as we are doing now, people have ever walked with eyes open toward destruction.
What's up, Doctor Strangelove?
