Thinking again about the thirty year-old pastime of boomer-bashing (see Thomas Friedman; my response here), it seems to me that underlying that impulse is a repressed sympathy for the kind of openly avowed militarism that no one would subscribe to today. Here is James' distillation of one such thinker's doctrine:
Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their considerations. The Philosophie des Krieges, by S. R. Steinmetz is good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form of the State, and the only function in which peoples can employ all their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health and vigor — there isn't a moral or intellectual point of superiority that doesn't tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one another.Excoriating the postwar generation constitutes a back-door endorsement of the notion that peace and prosperity corrupt and that war cleanses.
Few today would greet the onset of a cataclysmic new war with the enthusiasm of the English poet Rupert Brooke, marching off in 1914:
