[lbo-talk] a new low

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Feb 5 13:06:19 PST 2010


John Thornton wrote:
>
>
> I do however fail to see how military service makes one a better
> citizen
> nor am I one to encourage the idea that the opinions of those who have
> served carry greater weight on matters of armed conflict than those
> who
> have not served.
>

My memory is hazy on this, but if I remember correctly in the ancient City States (from which the concept of _citiznship_ emerged, citizen and military service were simply differnt words for the same person. To be a citizen was to be a soldier; to be a soldier was to be a citizn. And one reason for this would be an obsevation Marx makes in the Grundrisse: land tenure presupposes military occupation of the land and miltary defense of that land. And this is still to some extent thecase. There would be no Vietnam citizens had not the Vietnamese fought for many years against the Japanese, the French, and the Amerians. I haven't read the column itself, it being just too clumsy to read websites with my low vision, but I'm curious what department at Princeton she is in.

Probably she shares this opinion with several billion other humans, so to consider her either unitellignet or evil on the basis of it seems sort of odd.

Carrol



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