07-12-2018, 12:51 AM
(07-11-2018, 01:46 PM)Hintergrund Wrote: "repressive, hierarchical, and inequitable social order"? Where people from the wrong side of the tracks can make a career only in the military?
...and it is still a raw deal, as the pathologies of repression, hierarchy, and inequity in a society receive accentuation in its armies and navies. There could be plenty of opportunity to be the 21st-century equivalent of a galley slave.
Bad social orders such as Iran under the corrupt mullahs and Iraq under serial mass-murderer Satan Hussein are prone to treating soldiers as cannon fodder, even resorting to human wave attacks. Good social orders dislike war and use their soldiers more economically, preferring that soldiers survive to fight another day -- and to not need replenishment by green troops and rapidly-advancing junior officers who get fed into the meat-grinder.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.