21 June 2014

Moyers: Andrew Bacevich on the Duplicity of Ideologues and Chaos In Iraq


"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors...

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no 'true patriot' ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours."

George Orwell

I found it interesting that Kagan's piece was published in The New Republic.