war

H.G. Wells, one of the most prolific and prominent novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, consistently warned his contemporaries that social institutions were not evolving fast enough to cope with rapid changes in science and technology.

If asked to identify the world’s superpowers today, most people would name the United States, Russia, and China.  Although many citizens of these countries maintain that this status is based on the superiority of their national way of life, the reality is that it rests upon their nations’ enormous capacity for violence.

Certainly none has a peaceful past.  The United States, Russia, and China have a long history of expansion at the expense of neighboring countries and territories, often through military conquest.  Those nations on their borders today, including some that have wrenched themselves free from their imperial control, continue to fear and distrust them.  Just ask Latin Americans, East Europeans, or Asians what they think of their powerful neighbors.

In the early twentieth century, roughly a century before Bernie Sanders’s long-shot run for the White House, another prominent democratic socialist, Eugene V. Debs, waged his own campaigns for the presidency.

In 1915, a mother’s protest against funneling children into war became the theme of a new American song, “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier.”  Although the ballad attained great popularity, not everyone liked it.  Theodore Roosevelt, a leading militarist of the era, retorted that the proper place for such women was “in a harem―and not in the United States.”

Roosevelt would be happy to learn that, a century later, preparing children for war continues unabated.