The Maelstrom of Violence

[Warren Dew]

(08-31-2017, 09:55 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:

(08-31-2017, 09:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I see the identity of the ruling elites evolving.  The agricultural age had a nobility that attempted to monopolize weapon and thus political power.  As first the longbow and then muskets become dominant, we had citizen armies and the old nobility became land owning aristocrats.  The land owning aristocrats eventually contested with the robber barons as the means of gathering wealth changed.

I’m not thrilled by any group of elites being in control, and would emphasize feedback mechanism that allowed the People as a whole to keep the elites in check.  This has tended not to happen with representative democracy, in great part as the representatives tend to become corrupt.  Thus, I’d like to see direct vote networked democracy tried.

Yes, the current military has its virtues, but power corrupts.  The key is allowing a clear enough vision to spot the corruption, and a clear enough tool to pull the corrupt.

In Starship Troopers there is such a system though it isn't gone into much detail in the novel.  I've seen the movie (it is one of my favorite movies actually but I understand that movie was basically written by a cheese eating surrender monkey so his tinkering with the plot makes it suspect) but do not consider it canon. 

Heinlien said that veterans had the right to vote, though it is considered to be a lesser right.  As such this means that there is a lesser democracy.  Rather, the video clip I posted was far more relevant.  Exercising political power is exercising force.  As such it seems prudent to leave the exercising of that force to those who have demonstrated through military service that they are willing to make the safety and security of the body politic their personal responsibility.

This of course necessitates that any such state has an all volunteer military.  Fortunately the US already has such a military and instituting a draft would be an anathema except under the most dire of circumstances, if then.

I think the era of the draft is over.  With nuclear weapons and modern military technology, wars are no longer just a matter of how many warm bodies you can put in the field with rifles.  You don't lose a war because one disgruntled draftee frags his sergeant, but when you're regularly using nuclear weapons, that picture changes.

The other thing mentioned in Heinlein's Starship Troopers is that the system is stable, because in the event of insurrection, the veterans are the ones that determine whether it succeeds.  I wonder how accurate that would be.  I don't think it would have been true in the warm bodies with rifles era, but again, we're due for a change with nuclear weapons.