Chomsky: Elites Have Forced America into a National Psychosis to Keep Us Embroiled in Imperial Wars | Alternet
"War is the health of the State," wrote social critic Randolph Bourne in a classic essay as America entered World War I:
"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. ... 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."
And at the service of society's "significant classes" were the
intelligentsia, "trained up in the pragmatic dispensation, immensely
ready for the executive ordering of events, pitifully unprepared for the
intellectual interpretation or the idealistic focusing of ends."
