Responding to my post about the De Maistre Drones, Larry Houghteling, a reader, directs me to this poem of A. E. Housman. Seems appropriate for our “all-volunteer army.”
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth’s foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.
Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth’s foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.
Housman was a Tory.
Hugh MacDiarmid, the great Scottish (and Communist!) poet, wrote a famous rejoinder:
Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
It is a God-damned lie to say that these
Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride.
They were professional murderers and they took
Their blood money and their impious risks and died.
In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.
Corey, no offense, but these posts are really stupid. Comparing Bush quotes to Hitler. Saying enthusiasm for Corey Booker is equivalent to Stalin’s cult of personality. I’ve read your books so know your capable of much better.
I’d like, for example, to hear you talk about gun control and how it does or does not fit into the framework you introduced into reactionary mind.
It might be appropriate if your “all volunteer army” were fighting the modern equivalents of the German Army. And were outnumbered by about twenty divisions to one. And were killed, defending France from invasion, on the Marne.
But it aint. It is eating surf and turf in air conditioned billets in the Hindu Kush or Kuwait or Nevada. And it fights no regular forces.
What about Democracy?
“The flag’s off to that filthy place, and our speech drowns the sound of
The drum.
“In the metropolis we’ll feed the most cynical whoring.
We’ll smash all logical revolts.
“On to the languid, scented lands!-in the service of the most gigantic
industrial or military exploitation.
“Farewell here, anywhere. Conscripts of good intention, we’ll have
savage philosophy; knowing nothing of science,
depraved in our pleasures; to hell with the world around us…
This is the real advance. Forward… march!”
The “logical revolt” the poet is referring to was massacred here and his country’s exploitation of the “languid, scented lands” ended 8 decades later.