By special request: Walter Benjamin Saturday!

“Militarism is the compulsory, universal use of violence as a means to the ends of the state. … In it violence shows itself in a function quite different from its simple application for natural ends. It consists of the use of violence as a means of legal ends. For the subordination of citizens to laws … is a legal end. If that first function of violence is called the lawmaking function, this second will be called the law-preserving function. … a really effective critique of it is far less easy than the declamations of pacifists and activists suggest. Rather, such a critique coincides with the critique of all legal violence—that is, with the critique of legal or executive force—and cannot be performed by any lesser program.”

—Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”