There's a civil military divide that is not just demographic, but it's about different moral worlds. A real contradiction here in the civil military divide discourse is that the purpose of the US military fighting all these forever wars is to protect the American people from violence. Teddy Roosevelt's idea of the strenuous life comes to mind this deep anxiety that that success and dominance makes us soft.
Featuring Nadia Abu El-Haj on Combat Trauma: Imaginaries of War and Citizenship in Post-9/11 America. How the civil-military divide makes troops into super citizens and what it means that agents of state violence are turning to the grammar of identity politics—and more. The second in a two-part interview.
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