"The Framers of our Constitution had a fear of standing armies, and of governments backed by them, that one legal scholar calls 'almost hysterical.'
A standing army of professionals, they were sure, would eventually do one of two things: agitate for foreign military adventures to keep itself employed, or turn against its civilian masters to create a military dictatorship.
To these two political threats they added a third, moral danger: that citizens used to relying on professionals for the defense of their liberties would come to take their freedom lightly."
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*If I ever found myself in the presence of an animal that could potentially kill me, from serpent to cetacea, I would never turn my back to it.*
--gs, 2005
Such should be the citizenry's mindset regarding standing military's.
"Don" wrote in news:zaTNe.733$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread2.news.atl.earthlink.net:
Is the mysterious Dorothy the suthor? Pardon my ignorance but please enlighten me with the full name/reference...this seemslike something I might like to read.
"Don" wrote in news:eQLOe.794$ snipped-for-privacy@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net:
Oh, OK - I'm not well-educated at all in that area. I ought to invest in a print copy, it sounds interesting even apart from the history.
It makes sense, given that they were also students of European history.
Hey, so would my Grandmother, if she were alive...
It's even a contrast to things I remember - I couldn't imagine what they'd think!, and I don;t mean the typical "how would they think of all our modern marvels like teevee" and that sort of thing. I think they'e be intelligent and curious enough to explore all of that. I mean, the cultural (political, social, etc.) attitudes. A lot fo people say they were hypocrites because they wrote about freedom in a culture that still maintained slavery, but I think they were aware of that. Whereas nowadays, it's uncouth to be aware of hypocrisy and all the fashion to simply turn a blind eye to it.
Well, I wouldn't say it's more communist - the Soyuz wasn't truely "communist", more socialist. (("USSR" meant Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - "Soviet" referring to the Russian brand of representative democracy. There was only one party, but local areas voted for local representatives (and so on up the line). A "Soviet" is basically a "council", i.e. political meeting.)) OTOH, it's also true that, the more functions a gov.t takes on, and esp., the more production it takes over, the more it becomes like the old USSR. Especially in terms of the ever-expanding bureaucracy. In any event, given that various aspects of the Soyuz had, many years back, been my area of expertise, it's been very, very weird to see how much some of the similarities have grown.
OTOH, it currently isn't the gov.t that is collecting unto itself the means of production and distribution - "privitization" also has a darker and more extreme side - I certainly don't claim to be well-versed on German history, but there seem to be more than a few parallels there as well that I find extremely disturbing.
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