Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how the commercial influences have altered the moral responsibilities of citizenship and military service.
Michael Ignatieff's quote critiques the shift in American ideals from civic duty to commercial interests, highlighting how the nation now relies on private contractors for military actions, a change from previous notions of collective national service. This shift raises ethical questions about the motivations behind military engagement and the responsibilities of citizenship in a society increasingly driven by market forces.
In practice
In a speech about the changing nature of war, one might use this quote to illustrate the implications of privatized military forces.
Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.
Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.
Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.
Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.
Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, 'Those who can, do, those who can't, teach,' forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.
How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
A political problem thought of in military terms eventually becomes a military problem.
The socialism of centralised state control of industry and production, is dead. It misunderstood the nature and development of a modern market economy. It failed to recognise that the state and public sector can become a vested interest capable of oppression as much as the vested interests of wealth and capital. it was based on a false view of class that became too rigid to explain or illuminate the nature of class division today.
Big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.
Those against politics are in favor of the politics inflicted upon them.
Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.
Democracy is the most demanding of all forms of government in terms of the energy, imagination, and public spirit required of the individual.
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