The broken machine

      In "Civil Disobedience" the phrase that stood out to me most was when Henry Thoreau "Now what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines at the service of the men in power." Throughout this piece about government inefficiency, Thoreau touches on the governments treatment of the military. specifically the troops themselves. I went back and reread the passage and had a few thoughts from this passage.
For starters, this giant, ineffective government does not view its soldiers as people. Although it may try to preserve its troops, they achieve their goal by any means possible. Thoreau is right when he says "What are they, men at all? Or moveable forts and magazines? In my opinion this phrase although it applies to soldiers can apply to all people in general. Are we independent people or are we subject to the whim of the government.
At another point Thoreau says “Witness the present Mexican American war, the work of a few individuals using the government as a tool.” One connection that I drew was between this and the war in Afganistán. This article describes how although the Afganistán war is drawn out, it still makes people money, such as the executives for Oil Company’s. In this way, you can see the parallels between the two wars.
Although there may have been parts of Civil Disobedience which I didn’t agree with I Thoreau was correct in saying the government is a machine that doesn’t work.

Comments

  1. Sai RavulaSeptember 22, 2019 at 5:04 PM

    While there are many changes in the United States, the role of the military as a arm of fulfill the government's wants is indeed something that is timeless in almost every government in the world. Many American wars were started in order to benefit instead of the people, such as the Spanish-American war, in which one of the claims of the US was to liberate the Philippines, but the US enforced control in a bloody war against the Filipinos after the Spanish-American War.

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