O caso conservador contra o militarismo

John Zmirack "* War is a revolutionary force, frequently destroying the very institutions it was meant to save. This is obviously true in the losing countries. Which fire-eating Confederate in 1865 would not have wished that he could go back and accept the compromises offered by President Lincoln in 1860? (Of course, not every institution is worth saving--but that’s beside the point here.) Ditto the French right-wingers who supported the war with Prussia in 1870--which led directly to the Commune and the loathsome Third Republic--and the conservatives who goaded the German and Austrian kaisers and the Russian Tsar into a war which destroyed all three monarchies. But the experience of war can also undermine key institutions among the victors. As Allan Carlson and Bill Kauffman document, the effort of waging World War II helped massively and permanently increase the power of the U.S. federal government, drive women into the workplace, encourage Americans to move off farms and into the cities, and in dozens of different ways to break up the old America which the soldiers had fought to defend.

* Not every army is conservative. Think East Germany, Cuba, Venezuela. Go back further, and remember the fanatically nationalistic, anti-Christian armies of the French Revolution and of Napoleon. Indeed, there is no social force which can so quickly smash the arrangements for living which have prevailed for centuries than an army in the hands of radicals. It was not for nothing that “progressives” in America in the early 20th century favored the militarization of large parts of American life."