Breach of Trust
Posted on October 26, 2013 by debmeier
Dear readers,
There’s always at least one superbly interesting article in Commonwealth magazine. This week it’s a book review written by David Kennedy of Stanford University. The book, Breach of Trust, is by David Bacevich, The book’s subtitle: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country, is accurate but also misleading..
“Beneath its surface,” Kennedy says of the book, “smolders a scalding indictment of the entirety of contemporary American culture.” I found that sentence chilling. “In its entirety?” He goes on to conclude that “we citizens….have most conspicuously failed our soldiers and our country, We have destroyed not only the tradition of the citizen-soldier, but perhaps the whole delicate fabric of civic membership, community responsibility, and social engagement.”
It’s intriguing to think that the end of the “citizen solider” concept should coincide with the NRA’s defense of the 2nd amendment with its focus on citizen-militias. The unprecedented popularity of our voluntary army, Kennedy suggests, may be thought o
