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" "This little sparrowlike man,
tiny twisted bit of flesh in black cape,
always in pain and ailing,
put a pebble in his sling
and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it. War, he wrote, is the health of the state.
Randolph Silliman Bourne (30 May 1886–22 December 1918) was a progressive writer and leftist intellectual born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work The State, discovered after his death.
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The members of the working-classes... live habitually in an industrial serfdom, by which though nominally free, they are in practice as a class bound to a system of a machine-production, the implements of which they do not own, and in the distribution of whose product they have not the slightest voice... From such serfdom, military conscription is not so great a change. But into the military enterprise they go...with the same apathy with which they enter and continue in the industrial enterprise.
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And among all the Western Empires, the British and the American have always been the most adept at the use of phony moralizing to spin a web of excuses for their acts of conquest and to sucker the American and British publics into enthusiastic support of "their" Empires. It is the old trick of inducing the citizen to identify with "his" State; but the trick has always been most effective in time of war, real or imagined. That is just one of the reasons that the libertarian Randolph Bourne, during World War I, called war "the health of the State."