I guess with a judge present, I have to be particularly careful in what I say today.
I want to talk about state war and imperialism today and begin by reminding you, of course,
that fighting and war and conquest and plunder and so forth are part of human history.
despite the advantages of division of labor about which I have talked extensively
and if we look for reasons for this deviationist behavior so to speak
we will have to name three, one is a lack of intelligence so to speak
and closely correlated with that a very high time preference. High time preference and low intelligence are closely correlated phenomena, being just concerned about the immediate effects, not being able to grasp the long run advantages that result from division of labor, but being tempted by the immediate advantages that you can gain by raw
Stopping, plundering and engaging in these sorts of activities.
And of course the third factor that contributes to it are violent ideologies.
There exist ideologies like ardent nationalism and things of that nature that have of course
also mightily contributed to the fact of war.
You just have to think of the current war.
The idea that some countries are simply superior over others
due to who knows what obviously contributes
to Adventures, such as the Iraq War, for instance.
Nonetheless, I also want to emphasize,
before I get to the subject of war in history,
I want to mention also that there has, of course, also
been a peaceful spread of civilization.
Just recall what I talked about very early in my lectures,
the slow and gradual outward expansion
of agricultural life from the fertile crescent,
progressing, so to speak, from that area
by about one kilometer per year for several thousand years
and displacing gradually the less civilized societies of hunters and gatherers and herders
and so forth and instituting more peaceful social relations than existed before.
Or think of examples of colonialism, which is something very different from imperialism.
Colonialism also driven by the motive of scarcity of land and also driven by some missionary
Ideologies, Christians wanting to spread the Christian belief to other areas.
Just to give you a few examples of relatively peaceful colonial adventures such as the Greek
colonialism, without which we would not have had cities like Stagira, where Aristotle
was born, or Paestum, or Pergamum, or Ephesus, or Agrigento, or Syracuse, all of which are
of Greek origin and the places to which the Greek culture was exported.
Similarly we can say that, at least partially, the primitive Rome also had a civilizing effect
on the rest of Italy, carrying on its superior culture to less developed places in Italy
and also less developed places in the parts of parts of the later Roman Empire.
Without colonialism by the Bavarians, there would be no such thing as Austria, which was
at that time at the eastern fringes of civilization, and the Bavarians settled these places and
turned them into more or less civilized places.
We should mention the efforts of Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia who also promoted
the settlement of Germans in more eastern regions with the purpose of lifting cultural
Life in those regions, or coming to more modern times, New France of Canada.
There were in 1754 55,000 people from France who settled in Canada and created so to speak
After 1650, some 80,000 people settled in New England, and more than 100,000 settled in Maryland and Virginia.
All in all, some 2 million people left Britain during the 17th and 18th century for colonial purposes, by and large peaceful ventures.
200,000 Germans left for America before 1800 and I give you some numbers of countries where people left and countries to which people went from the mid-19th century to about 1930.
All in all, 52 million Europeans left Europe during that period of time, 5 million Austrians
left their country, 18 million Britons, less than 5 million Germans, 10 million Italians,
About 5 million Spaniards, about 2 million Russians, and slightly less than 2 million Portuguese, and where did they go?
6 million of them went to Argentina, more than 4 million went to Brazil, more than 5 million went to Canada,
34 million went to the United States, slightly less than 3 million went to Australia,
and about half a million went to New Zealand, and slightly less than half a million went to South Africa.
There's also an interesting fact that close to 4 million people went to Siberia during the 19th century.
that is into an area that was basically nothing, nothing before and last but not
least by 1930 or so some eight million Chinese had left their country and went
to various Southeast Asian places and lifted up their cultures.
Again, I'm not saying that all of these colonial movements
were entirely peaceful, but overwhelmingly.
So we can say that those were peaceful expansions of culture
and civilization to places that were less civilized and less
cultured before.
Now to the topic.
And I will return to the West as the ultimately superior
civilization.
And I want to begin first with the pre-state conflicts.
that is, the conflicts as they existed during the feudal age,
that is to say, essentially before 1500.
In order to set the stage, remember that Europe,
and that was one of the reasons for the uniqueness
and of the development of Europe,
Europe was a highly decentralized place at this time with tens of thousands of smaller
or larger lords, princes, and kings.
And this is to say there existed at this time tens of thousands of people who owned some
Castle or Fortresses and could say no to whoever wanted to plunder them or oppress them or
tax them or whatever it was because castles for a long time were indeed a very effective
means of protecting yourself against any kind of enemy.
And this protection that fortresses and castles constituted only gradually disappeared with
the development of artillery, which appears for the very first time in 1325, but does
has not become really a relevant factor of warfare until about 200 years later, that is, in the 1500s.
The fighting forces during this feudal age consisted by and large of mounted knights,
Horses, which were quite expensive at this time. Horses, after all, compete in a way with men for food, and it was an expensive thing to own a horse and armor and all the rest of it to make up a fighting night.
And in addition, there were archers used in warfare.
And from 1300 on until about 1500,
important role was also played by pikers.
That was a strategy developed in particular
by the Swiss, assembling large groups of people.
In German, they were called Spieser Gewalthaufen.
Joe Stromberg might be the perfect person
to translate this, piker violence clusters,
or something like this would be the translation, I guess.
And these groups of pikers were the first development that
could take care of mounted knights.
Before mounted knights were, so to speak, the none plus ultra
in terms of weaponry until these massive groups of pikers
came into existence.
And they could take care of these mounted knights.
These groups sometimes were 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 people large
and then simply just eliminating the horses.
The fighters themselves were either the vassals
of the lords or the tenants of the lords.
Recall during the feudal time, there
existed some sort of contractual relationship
between those people, the lords who owned the fortresses
and offered protection, and then the various tenants
that they had for mutual assistance in cases of conflict.
And somewhat later, also mercenaries, mercenary groups
appeared, that is, groups that could be hired by whoever
needed them for defensive or aggressive purposes.
Fights were quite frequent at that time,
but they were, of course, as you can imagine,
of comparatively small scale.
And typically, they were some sort of inheritance disputes.
Who owns this place?
who owns this piece of land, and so forth.
No army at that time exceeded 20,000 people,
and most armies were significantly smaller than this.
But what is important, there existed certain rules
about how to fight.
Despite the fact that these fights were bloody,
there existed something like knightly honor.
And the knightly honor prescribed certain ways
of proceeding and outlawed other ways.
And I want to read you a quote to this effect
by Stanislaw Andreski, who I mentioned a few times before.
He writes here that, at the height
of the medieval civilization, the wars
were almost sporting matches, bloody to be sure,
but just as restricted by conventions.
Let us look at one of the many examples of such a spirit.
At the beginning of the 15th century,
Jagiello, the King of Poland and Lithuania, was fighting the order of the Teutonic Knights.
On one occasion he found their army when it was crossing a river and, although many of
his warriors were eager to pounce upon the enemy, he restrained them because he thought
that it was unworthy of a knight to attack the enemy who was not ready.
When both armies finally met upon a fair ground, they first engaged in parlays, during which
the envoys of the Teutonic knights gave Jagiello two swords, thus mocking the inferior armament
of his troops.
Having slept overnight, each side celebrated a mass in its camp, and when both sides were
Already, they signaled to each other by trumpeting and then rushed into battle.
As a rule, the medieval knights considered it unworthy of their honor to attack by surprise
or pursue the defeated enemy.
The knights who fell from their horses were usually spared and released for ransom.
When mercenaries became used as soldiers, wars likewise were mostly bloodless battles.
The mercenaries were a bunch of adventurous international men.
They were not united by any kind of ideology, and their general attitude was that my enemy
today might be my employer tomorrow, so I had better watch out to protect myself from
being killed, wait until those people who are my enemies maybe go bankrupt and have to
give up, but in any case avoid massive amounts of casualties.
And to this effect, a quote from J.F.C. Fuller, a military historian, who writes on mercenary
warfare in 14th century Italy.
He writes, in Florence and in Milan and other ducal principalities, in their fractional
In their contests, their tyrants relied on highly trained professional mercenaries hired out by their condottieri or contractor captains.
These soldiers fought solely for profit. One year they might sell their services to one prince and to his rival the next.
For them, war was a business as well as an art, in which the ransom of prisoners was
more profitable than killing their employers' enemies.
Because war was their trade, to prolong a war rather than end it was clearly to their
advantage.
Hence, the historian Jokardini writes, they would spend the whole summer on the siege
of a Fortified Place, so that wars were interminable,
and campaigns ended with little or no loss of life.
And by the end of the 15th century,
such noted soldiers as the Condottieri Paolo Vitelli
and Prospero Colonna declared that wars are won rather
by industry and cunning than by the actual clash of arms.
And of these soldiers, Sir Charles Oman writes,
The consequences of leaving the conduct of war in the hands of the great mercenary captains
was that it came often to be waged as a mere tactical exercise or a game of chess, the
aim being to maneuver the enemy into an impossible situation and then capture him rather than
to exhaust him by a series of costly battles.
It was even suspected that the condottieri, like dishonest pugilists, sometimes settled
beforehand that they would draw the game.
Battles when they did occur were often bloodless affairs.
Machiavelli cites cases of general actions in which there were only two or three men
at Arms Slain, though the prisoners were to be numbered by hundreds.
From the 16th through the 17th century, essentially until the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648,
We see a change in warfare.
We might call this period the period where not states fight each other but wars are conducted
in order to create states.
When I talked about the origin of the state, I explained how kings frequently try to create
the Hobbesian situation of war of all against all in order then out of this war to come
out as a state rather than as a feudal king who had to rely on voluntary contributions
from his various vessels.
And again, just to document the ceases that these wars, because these wars were quite
brutal from the 16th to the 17th century, to document that these were wars that were
were used as instruments to the formation of states.
A quote from a German historian who writes,
the period from 1500 to 1700 was by far the most war-like
which Europe had seen up to this point.
In 95% of the years, there was some war.
On the average, every three years a new war was started, whereby the duration and the extent increased over time.
In this case, up to the Thirty Years War, these wars were not interstate wars, but they were state formation wars.
And the state formation wars, of course, were fought precisely in the period of the Protestant
Revolution.
As I explained, the Protestant Revolution was precisely the events used by the various
princes in order to combine earthly and religious power and establish themselves as state rulers
rather than feudal kings.
During this period, 1500 to 1648, for the first time,
the wars take on an ideological connotation.
I recall what I mentioned before was
The mercenaries had no ideology to fight.
The various feudal nobles fighting each other typically had also no ideological purposes
in mind behind their fighting.
But their reason for fighting were more or less inheritance disputes, which tend to be
settled once you have occupied a certain territory, then the war is basically over.
But these religious wars were of course ideologically motivated wars and ideologically motivated
wars.
I'll come back to that later on when I talk about democratic wars.
Ideologically motivated wars tend to be far more brutal because they involve, so to speak,
the involvement of the masses than professional wars.
For the first time during this period,
also muskets were used, which had a range of about 200 meters,
slightly more than 200 yards.
But they were only able to shoot once per minute about.
And artillery was used now to a larger extent.
And in addition, from the 17th century
on, a combination of the piking strategy
with the Shooting Musket was introduced to by using bayonets.
The ability to use artillery and muskets
made it possible for the first time
to defeat these clusters of pikers
before it was impossible basically to break them up.
Now through artillery fire and through the use of muskets,
you could break up these clusters of pikers
to spread around and then be able to attack them.
And also the fortifications, which for a long time
had offered, so to speak, solid protection,
became less and less protective because
of the development of artillery.
And in response to the development of artillery,
new types of fortifications were developed,
either in the form of triangles or in the form of stars
and with some sort of water mounts in front of them
in order to force the artillery to be placed at greater
distances and make the artillery less
effective in crushing the walls of the fortifications.
The religious uprisings, which were initially stimulated by people like Luther and the various Protestant reformers and the social chaos that resulted from it,
as I said, was used by the various princes as a springboard for the state formation and forcing the smaller nobility into submission and accepting, so to speak, the ruler, the rule and the taxing power of the larger lords.
In addition, of course, these religious wars were used by the princes to grab, as I also mentioned before, to grab the substantial amounts of property that the Catholic Church owned.
In some countries up to 30% of cultivated land was owned by the churches and kings formed now alliances with some national religions and the old style separation between church and state increasingly broke
at the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, still, however, the German territories, for
for instance, had lost some, which had about 20 million people before, had lost 8 million people as a result of this period of permanent state formation wars.
and the modern state came into existence in Europe at the end of this 30 years war.
Typically now standing armies came into existence.
Standing armies were of course far more expensive than hiring mercenaries here
is here and there and then dismissing them again.
So the formation of standing armies
requires already a certain amount
of centralization of power and requires, of course,
that taxing power exists on the part of the lords or kings.
During the Thirty Years' War, for instance,
There existed still some 1,500 independent condottieri, army leaders.
All of these were now consolidated into standing armies, either they were dissolved or they
were simply taken over as a state army.
and had to be paid, of course, during peacetime and during wartime, which made them quite expensive.
Nonetheless, even at this time, Europe still remained highly decentralized.
To give you an indication of this, even after the Thirty Years' War, Germany consisted still of 234 countries and 51 free cities and about 1,000 independent large manors owned by significant noble families.
and the period, noble people, now then after 1648, the next period of warfare begins, which we might call the period of monarchical warfare and before I come to characterise this period of monarchical warfare,
Warfare, let me present some theoretical arguments that help us understand the development that
results now after the 30 years war.
First we should recognize that institutions such as states show a natural aggressiveness.
The explanation is very simple.
If you have to fund your own aggressive ventures yourself out of your own pocket, that will
sometimes curtail your natural inclination to fight other people, because you have to
pay it yourself.
On the other hand, if you imagine that if I want to fight some of you guys and I can
text him or him or him and ask them to support me in my fighting endeavors, then whatever
my initial aggressive impulses might be are certainly stimulated because I can externalize
the cost of war onto other people.
I don't have to bear the cost myself.
Other people have to bear the cost.
This explains, so to speak, why institutions
that have the power to tax, and also institutions
in particular that have the power to print money
in later ages, have financial abilities, of course,
that make it more likely that they go to war than you would go to war if the power to tax
is lacking or the power to print money is lacking on your part.
We can also see that states, because they compete with each other for population, do
Do not like to see taxing states, do not like to see if people move from one state to another state.
After all, every individual that moves from one place to another means there is one taxpayer less,
and your opponent gets likely one taxpayer more.
The high degree of decentralization that existed in Europe went hand in hand also with a high degree of regional mobility, people moving from territories that were more oppressive to territories that were less oppressive and this of course then causes, so to speak, automatically rivalry
between the different states and leads frequently leads frequently to to war
and we can say that this competition of states in contrast to the competition of
General Motors against Ford or Toyota against Honda or whatever it is that the
The competition of states is an eliminative competition.
It is possible that Ford and Toyota and Honda and GM can live side by side, coexist side
by side until the end of history.
However, there can in any given territory be only one institution that is entitled to tax and pass laws.
There cannot be free competition in a territory in terms of taxing power and legislative power.
If everybody could tax everybody, so to speak, there would be quickly nothing left to be taxed.
And everybody could make laws. Chaos would break out.
So the competition between states is eliminative in the sense that in any given territory there can only exist one taxing authority
and one monopolist of legislation.
And so we should expect that wars will by and large lead to a tendency of concentration.
That is, more and more of these small states are eliminated and the territories of states become
And we can also quickly address and solve the question, who is about to win and who is about to lose in these types of battles.
If you assume that the states were initially of roughly equal size with roughly equal populations, then we recognize that some sort of paradox that is those states that treat their population nicer,
more liberal states, so to speak, are the states that have a more prosperous civil society
than those states that mistreat their population, because if you are liberal to your population,
less oppressive to your population, they tend to be more productive.
And after all, in a war, in order to conduct a war, especially a war that lasts for a while,
that requires that you have a productive population.
People have to continue working, have to continue making weaponry and so forth and feeding the
soldiers and whatever it is.
And those territories, those state territories that oppress their population tend to be also
the poorer places and have less resources on which to draw in the conduct of war.
So we would expect that as a tendency, so to speak, that more liberal states will tend
to defeat, at least in the long run, less liberal states, wiping them out and enlarging
their territory at the expense of these less liberal states.
You can also see, however, that there is a limitation in this tendency.
That is, the larger the territories become, the more difficult it becomes, of course,
for people to move from one territory to another.
At the conceivable endpoint of the process of concentration that would be, we have a
in a one world state, so to speak, the possibility of people to move with their feet entirely disappears.
Wherever you go, the same tax and regulation structure applies and the implication of that is that of course,
Increasingly then, with larger and larger size of the territories, the initial reason for state rulers to be comparatively moderate in their taxing and regulation policy to their own population in order to be successful in wars,
This initial motive disappears more and more, the larger the territories become and the more difficult voting with feet becomes.
So we can recognize some sort of dialectic process.
Initially you want to be relatively liberal in order to expand your territory.
The more successful you become in expanding your territory,
The less important becomes the motive to be liberal to your own population because voting with your feet becomes ever more difficult.
Jumping ahead for a moment, this sort of paradox that liberal states tend to be more aggressive in their foreign policy is nicely illustrated in a way by comparing the United States and the former Soviet Union.
There's no doubt that the former Soviet Union was, of course, an extremely oppressive state internally,
with the result being that, of course, they had a basket case economy.
And the United States, on the other hand, being a comparatively nice country, at least comparatively speaking,
was a very prosperous economy and if we now look so to speak at the foreign policy of these two countries we find what some people consider to be a curious result but which I think can be easily explained we find that the Soviet Union engaged in comparatively little amounts of imperialist ventures and those imperialist ventures
The countries that they engaged in were usually like second, third, fourth rate places because they knew precisely that their economy was so weak that they could not take on a highly developed country due to a lack of resources needed in the conduct of war.
Keep in mind that the main territorial gains that the Soviet Union achieved were territorial gains that were granted to it by the United States as a result of these various agreements during World War II.
that all of Eastern Europe was given to the Soviet Union
by the Americans.
It would not have been possible for the Soviet Union
to take over all of these places if they would have had to fight,
so to speak, the United States to the hilt.
The United States actually, the leadership of the United States
actually ordered some of the generals, like General Patton, to withdraw and prevent him
from marching further to the east, taking over places like Prague and so forth and preventing
communism from spreading to the west.
So the main territorial gains of the Soviet Union can hardly be described as the result
of Their Internal Imperialist Desires.
But if you compare this with the foreign policy
of the United States, you find that the United States has,
in fact, in every single year been engaged in some sort
of imperialist ventures.
And the explanation for this is precisely the United States
did that because they knew that because
of their Internal Resources, because of their internal wealth,
they would likely become winners, whereas the Soviet Union
full well knew that they would not
be capable of waging a successful war against highly
industrialized countries.
That was not the result, so to speak,
of the goodness of the hearts of Gorbachev and Brezhnev
and all these people.
Quite to the contrary, I admit that these were evil people
and the Soviet Union was, so to speak, the evil empire.
All of this is perfectly correct.
Nonetheless, there is a rational explanation
why they were reluctant in their imperialist desires
and why the United States, precisely because it
is more liberal internally, was more aggressive as far
as its external policy is concerned.
Now, back to the type of monarchical wars
before the backdrop of these theoretical considerations.
Now, recall that kings, princely rulers, regard their country as their own property, and even
in war, which are typically again motivated by inheritance disputes, something of that
Nature, that is, which are non ideologically motivated wars. Even during their war they
have then some sort of incentive to preserve the territories that they try to take over
because after all they regard themselves as the owner of the capital stock represented
ivided by these provinces that they try to take over.
And this then leads to a relatively civilized form of warfare during the monarchical age.
And again some quotes to this effect referring to monarchical state wars and showing the
moderation of these type of non-ideological, territorially motivated wars.
On the continent commerce, travel, cultural and learned intercourse went on in wartime
almost unhindered.
The wars were the king's wars, the role of the good citizen was to pay his taxes and
sound political economy dictated that he should be left alone to make the money out of which
to pay those taxes.
He was required to participate neither in the decision out of which wars arose, nor
to take part in them once they broke out, unless prompted by a spirit of useful adventures.
These matters were purely royal matters and the concern of the sovereign alone.
And a Swiss-Italian historian, Ferrero, writes of the wars during the 18th century.
War became limited and circumscribed by a system of precise rules.
It was definitely regarded as a kind of single combat between the two armies, the civil population
being merely spectators.
Pillage, requisitions and acts of violence against the population were forbidden in the home country as well as in the enemy country.
Each army established depots in its rear in carefully chosen towns, shifting them as it moved about.
Conscription existed only in rudimentary and sporadic form.
Soldiers being scarce and hard to find, everything was done to ensure their quality by a long
patient and meticulous training, but as this was costly, it rendered them very valuable
and it was necessary to let as few be killed as possible.
Having to economize their men, generals tried to avoid fighting battles.
The object of warfare was the execution of skillful maneuvers and not the annihilation
of the adversary.
A campaign without battles and without loss of life, a victory obtained by a clever combination
of movements, was considered the crowning achievement of this art, the ideal pattern
of perfection.
It was avarice and calculation that made war more humane.
War became a kind of game between sovereigns.
A war was a game with its rules and its stakes, a territory, an inheritance, a throne, a treaty.
The loser paid, but a just proportion was always kept between the value of the stake
and the risks to be taken, and the parties were always on guard against the kind of obstinacy
which makes a player lose its head.
They tried to keep the game in hand and know when to stop.
So we come back on a slightly larger scale to the form of warfare that existed during
the age of knights, the difference being here essentially that the armies are of course
of far larger size than they were at this earlier age.
And now comes the next transformation in the conduct of war, and that is the transformation
from monarchical wars to democratic wars, to national wars.
I spoke about this transition from monarchy to democracy yesterday.
This transition begins with the French Revolution,
is then interrupted to a certain extent
after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 until 1914,
and the Outbreak of World War I and resumes in World War I and continues then after World War I up to the present.
But the first new experience is indeed the French Revolution.
The French Revolution represents in a way a return to these religious types of wars that I mentioned earlier.
It is an ideologically motivated event.
The king is killed and instead some high-floating ideals become prominent, liberty, fraternity and thinks of this and the glory of the nation and thinks of this nature.
The right to vote is introduced, and as people could not vote before, and always said, if the king goes to war, we have nothing to do with the state, this is the king's state, we also don't get involved in the king's wars.
Of course, now the argument was turned around, saying, now you all of a sudden, we give you a stake in the state, you participate in the state, you elect, you have the right to elect representatives and so forth, and as a consequence, of course, you also have to serve in the state's wars.
So revolutionary France introduces for the first time, that had existed in rudimentary
form sometimes in the past, but in very rudimentary form.
King had tried to introduce a draft sometimes, but typically unsuccessfully.
For the first time, we see now during the French Revolution, and in particular after
and Napoleon Comes to Power, The Draft, Mass Draft, all people of the French population
are somehow made participants in the war, there exists no clear-cut distinction anymore
war between combatants and non-combatants, the resources of the entire nation are put
at the disposal of the warring armies and since it is no longer inheritance disputes
that Motivate Wars, but ideological differences, the hatred against monarchs, the desire to
spread liberty, whatever that means, it becomes extremely difficult to stop wars.
If you have non-ideologically motivated wars with territorial objectives, once you have
Once you have reached your territorial objective, then the reason for the war is over.
Once you have ideological motives, you want to make the world safe for liberty or nowadays for democracy,
you are never quite sure if you actually reached your goal.
Maybe these people just pretend that they have become Democrats or whatever, Catholics or Protestants.
And the only way that you are really sure that you succeeded in your conversion is of course to kill as many as possible.
Then you know for sure that they don't adhere to their old wrong beliefs anymore.
And of course there are no borders to how far should you extend your war.
So if you liberate Germany and turn that to make that a free country, what about Poland?
They have not been freed yet. And if you are in Poland, then what about Russia?
Russia needs to be freed as well. And then you turn to the south. Egypt needs to be freed and Spain needs to be freed.
The world is a wide place, and all of them are yearning for freedom, of course.
So it becomes very impossible to ever end a war.
So war becomes a total war, just also the size of the armies.
The biggest armies before Napoleon were about 400,000 under Louis XIV or something like this, which up at that point was considered a huge army.
The armies under Napoleon are well above a million.
And a quote here from Fuller and from Howard to illustrate this change in warfare that
began with the French Revolution.
First Howard, he says, once the state ceased to be regarded as property of dynastic princes
and became instead the instrument of powerful forces dedicated to such abstract concepts
as liberty or nationality or revolution, which enabled large numbers of the population to
see in that state the embodiment of some absolute good for which no price was too high, no sacrifice
is too great to pay, then the temperate and indecisive contests of the Rococo age appeared
as an absurd anachronism.
And another quote, a new era had begun, the era of national wars, of wars which were to
assume a maddening pace, for those wars were destined to throw into the fight all the resources
of the Nation. They were to set themselves the goal not of a dynastic interest, not the
conquest or possession of a province, but the defense or propagation of a philosophical
idea in the first place, next of principles of independence, of unity, of non-material
advantages of various kinds. Lastly, they staked upon the issue the interests and fortune
of Every Individual Private.
Hence, the rise of passions, that is, the elements of force,
hitherto in the main unused.
And another quote very revealing from GFC Fuller,
the influence of the spirit of nationality
that is of democracy on war was profound.
It emotionalized war and consequently brutalized it.
In the 18th century, wars were largely the occupation of kings, courtiers and gentlemen.
Armies lived in their depots, they interfered as little as possible with the people, and
as soldiers were paid out of the king's privy purse, they were too costly to be thrown
away lightly on massed attacks.
The change came with the French Revolution.
Since Culeotosum replaced courtiership, and as armies became more and more the instruments
of the people, not only did they grow in size, but in ferocity.
National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like.
The first obey a mob, always demented, the second a king, generally sane.
All this developed out of the French Revolution, which also gave to the world conscription,
herd warfare, and the herd coupling with finance and commerce has begotten new realms of war.
For once the whole nation fights, then is the whole national credit available for the
purposes of war.
Conscription changed the basis of warfare.
These are two soldiers had been costly, now they were cheap.
Battles had been avoided, now they were sought.
And however heavy were the losses, they could rapidly be made good by the muster roll.
From August of 1793, when the Parliament of the French Republic decreed universal compulsory
military service, not only was war to become more and more unlimited, but finally total.
In the fourth decade of the twentieth century, life was held so cheaply that the massacre
of civilian populations on wholesale lines became as accepted as strategic aim as battles
were in previous wars.
In 150 years, conscription had led the world back to tribal barbarism.
Now, there was, as I said, a small pause then after the defeat of Napoleon.
The next, the wars that were fought in Europe during the 19th century after Napoleon's defeat,
such as the war, for instance, Germany against France in 1870-71, was again a traditional
Monarchical War, almost harmless, the German officers resided in hotels and paid their
bills in French hotels, whereas the French military asked the hoteliers to wait for payment
until later dates, practically no involvement of the civilian population whatsoever.
The only exception in the 19th century, the only major exception in the 19th century from
this return to civilized warfare, if we can call warfare civilized at all, the only exception
was the American War of Sassan independence.
And this, again, was a typical democratic war, so much about the Caesars that democracies
do not fight each other and democracies are somehow suitable to create peace.
The only democratic war, so to speak, in the 19th century was, again, the only ideologically
and the American Civil War was, up until this point, unsurpassed in terms of brutality.
It was at least as brutal as the religious wars had been many centuries before.
And as you all know, more Americans were killed in that war than Americans died in World War I.
War I and in World War II as well.
This war also brings for the first time to bear all modern weaponry, machine guns and
telegraphs and railroads and steam ships and rifles of great accuracy over some thousand meters and so forth.
And then this type of warfare, of which the American War was a typical example and the French one, the Napoleonic Wars before,
This type of warfare then continues with World War I, in particular, after the entry of the United States, which was much earlier than the official entry.
The United States, of course, was from the very beginning due to British propaganda on the side of the Western forces.
And incidentally, the entry of the United States into the war was much facilitated by two of our most beloved institutions,
one of which is the introduction of the income tax in 1913,
and the other one is the founding of the Federal Reserve System in the same year, both of which of course facilitated greatly the possibility of a country like the United States carrying on a war far away from its own shores.
Just to give you some ballpark idea, for instance, the reserve requirements for the central bank during the war were lowered from 20% before the war to 10% in the war, which basically implies a doubling of the money supply,
which of course enables greatly the financing of adventures such as this.
And again, with the entry of the United States early on, what began as some sort of traditional
and the European monarchical war and could have ended easily by 1916.
There were various peace initiatives underway, some by the Pope, some by the Austrian Emperor Karl.
This war then became an ideological war, as you know, the war to make the world safe for democracy.
As my old friend Kühnert Ledin said, more appropriate would it be to say we should not make the world safe for democracy,
we should make the world safe from democracy.
And as a result of this ideologically motivated war, the war ended, of course, not with a
mutually face-saving compromise piece, but ended with a completely ridiculous demand for
total and complete and unconditional surrender, enforcing the Germans and the Austrians to
accept sole and exclusive guilt for the war, despite the fact that even nowadays there
are very few historians who would maintain that this was exclusively caused by Austria
or Germany, if anything, the most guilty parties in my judgment were the Russians by encouraging
the Serbs not to give in to the relatively moderate demands of the Austrians, and the
Russians would not have done that if they would not have had some sort of alliance with
the British, encouraging the Russians, so to speak, to behave the way they did.
So I would, in my judgment, not being an historian, just being amateur historian, so to speak,
I would blame Russia and England more so than Austria and Germany for the war.
But in any case, this war ending was a disastrous peace treaty, which then implied already the
seeds for the Second World War.
In many ways, the Second World War can be just considered to be the continuation of
This is the first one with a brief interlude.
As a matter of fact, one of the better-known German historians, Ernst Nolte, has written a book with the title that this was, whatever, a 30 years war,
that is describing history in a way as World War I almost automatically led up to World War II.
And of World War II, we know exactly the same thing happened there, an ideologically motivated war,
or America siding with Stalin, who was a bigger killer than Hitler by far, and not only no
longer respecting in any way the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, wiping
handing out huge masses of the civilian population at points when the outcome of the war was
long decided just for the mere purpose of instilling terror in the population and then
handing over all of Middle and Eastern Europe to communist rule.
This is, I'm more or less done, I want to just read only one long quote from Mises that
does not deal directly with the questions, can societies natural orders so to speak defend
themselves against enemy states, but it can be read as an indirect statement on this question.
Can free societies defend themselves against hordes of barbarians trying to occupy them?
And the upshot of this longer quotation is, yes, it is precisely the internal coherence,
the integration economically and monetarily of highly civilized societies that can withstand
the onslaught of even the most barbarian invasions.
Mises says here this.
We must reject a priori any assumption
that historical evolution is provided
with a goal by any intention or hidden plan of nature,
such as Kant imagined and Hegel had in mind.
But we cannot avoid the inquiry whether a principle might not
cannot be found to demonstrate that continuous social growth is inevitable.
The first principle this offers itself to our attention is the principle of natural
selection. More highly developed societies attain greater material wealth than the less
highly developed. Therefore, they have more prospect of preserving their members from
misery and poverty. They are also better equipped to defend themselves from the enemy. One must
must not be misled by the observation that richer and more civilized nations were often
crushed in war by nations less wealthy and civilized.
Nations in an advanced stage of social evolution have always been able at least to resist a
superior force of less developed nations.
It is only decaying nations, civilizations inwardly disintegrated, which have fallen
a prey to nations on the upgrade.
Where a more highly organized society has succumbed to the attack of a less developed people, the victors have in the end been culturally submerged, accepting the economic and social order and even the language and faith of the conquered race.
The superiority of the more highly developed societies lies not only in their material welfare, but also quantitatively in the number of their members and qualitatively in the greater solidity of their internal structure.
For this precisely is the key to higher social development, the widening of the social range, the inclusion in the division of labor of more human beings and its stronger grip on each individual.
The more highly developed society differs from the less developed in the closer union of its members.
This precludes the violent solution of internal conflict and forms externally a closed defensive front against any enemy.
In less developed societies where the social bond is still weak and between the separate parts of which there exists a confederation for the purposes of war alone,
Rather than true solidarity based on joint work and economic cooperation, this agreement
breaks out more easily and more quickly than in highly developed societies.
For the military confederation has no firm and lasting hold upon its members.
By its very nature, it is merely a temporary bond which is upheld by the prospect of momentary
advantage, but dissolves as soon as the enemy has been defeated and the scramble for booty
sets in.
In fighting against the less developed societies, the more developed ones have always found
that their greatest advantage lay in the lack of unity in the enemy's ranks.
Only temporarily do the nations in a lower state of organization manage to cooperate
for greater military enterprises.
Traditional disunity has always dispersed their armies quickly.
Take for example the Mongol raids on the Central European civilization of the 13th century
or the efforts of the Turks to penetrate into the West.
The superiority of the industrial over the military type of society, to use Herbert Spencer's
expression, consists largely in the fact that associations which are merely military always
fall to pieces through internal disunity.
With this I'll conclude this lecture.
Thank you very much.
Can you give the reference?
How would you answer or respond to the state of the Soviet Union, one, World War II?
The Soviet Union would not have won a war without the assistance of the Western Allies.
Germany itself was a relatively socialist economy, less so than the Soviet Union, but
But I think if it would have been a war, just Germany against the Soviet Union, there's
no doubt in my mind that that would have ended with a decisive German victory.
And then I'm not sure what people say, but then Hitler would have taken over the world.
First of all we had Stalin taken over the world for a while, of that we are pretty sure.
And there existed a substantial amount of opposition against Hitler in Germany.
The western allies refused out of hand to ever cooperate with the German resistance
resistance movement that existed and tried to play it down as irrelevant and unimportant,
especially because the German resistance movement consisted of course of the aristocracy.
And after all, America was there to spread democracy and they hated in particular those
Those types which still played a great role in the German army.
Hitler at one point had said that the thing that he had regretted the most was that he
had not done what Stalin had done with the Russian army.
That is to eliminate all the czarist officers that he had inherited so to speak, killing
Hitler realized that he had very limited support in the German Wehrmacht, and because of that built a second tier, the SS organizations were the same sort of structuring as the army,
and the Army precisely because he knew that the Wehrmacht was not a trustworthy institution because it was filled with old aristocrats who had nothing but contempt for Hitler.
So again, these sorts of things are very difficult to predict what would have happened.
I have my doubts that things would have turned out significantly worse if Hitler had won the war than what happened as a result of Stalin winning the war.
Let's put it this way. I don't want to go too deep into these sorts of tricky, tricky questions.
Any other questions?
Cecil Rhodes documented an agreement out of the hierarchy, royalty, and the Prime Ministers of England
He had a two-fold purpose, and that was that English-speaking people would rule the world.
His money, diamonds and gold, went into Oxford. Oxford has migrated to Yale and Princeton, at least to my knowledge.
And I'm wondering, go back ahead, and we now have a documentary of the conversation between Woodrow Wilson and the Jewish leaders that the Jews all over the world would support him at home when and if he got into World War I.
To what extent do you think Britain is the commencement of our principal wars of the last century?
and the English-speaking World One, there's no question about it.
But I agree, England was a decisive factor in bringing about World War One, so to speak,
in cooperation with Russia, which had some slightly different motives just to crush the
the Austrian Empire and gain access to the Mediterranean and so forth.
Europe was, so to speak, the dominating world region and it was in Europe.
It was a question, would Europe be dominated by Germany or would Europe be dominated by
by extension, so to speak, the rest of the world be dominated by Britain.
And Germany had been united relatively late in the 1870s and had made great economic progress
because for quite some time they pursued quite consistent liberal free market policies.
And this progress that Germany made increased the worries of the Brits day by day, so to
speak, that they should not wait for too long because the strengths of Germany might become
such that they might become the dominant country in Europe and not Great Britain.
When was this development?
Jill?
I just want to add in relation to Yale,
some of these things,
there were a number of works by Winks and Epstein
that show in massive detail
that the predecessor to the CIA, the OSS,
was basically an extension initially of the Yale English Department.
And of course we know where our recent presidents came from, right? Our Bushmen and then our Clinton men, they went to Yale, and before they went,
Clinton went to Georgetown. One of his teachers was Mr. Quigley. And Mr. Quigley, of course, advocated this type of British dominance openly.
and many of his admirers somehow were a little bit shocked or miffed about the fact that he declared this so openly, this intention of Anglo-Saxon world domination,
because their policy had been, this whole thing has to be hushed up a little bit
and we should not speak openly about that, that is our goal
but Quigley thought that it should be admitted, what's wrong with it
And I think Clinton has repeatedly declared that Quigley was one of his admired, especially admired teachers.
And of course he went then to Yale Law School and Bush is supposed to also have been at Yale at some time.
Well, in that sense, Russian momentarily, or the digression, and we're going back to where Rhodes was talking. The dichotomy between English and Germany, Russian momentarily intruded, upset the timetable.
over for the time being, I think.
The Germans are such a depressed country,
they will never rise to any great things again.
They hate themselves to such an extent
that it is difficult to imagine that they will ever
become a country that might represent
Well, Russia, that may be true as we come back to where we were before Russia got into the picture.
Russia came in and changed the picture momentarily and now has left the pictures in one sense.
And we're back to where they were talking about English and German.
The unification, the economic development, was that because of or in spite of the unification of Germany, the economic development in Germany in that period of time?
You had made a statement earlier that the unification of Germany came back in the 1870s
and that a good bit of economic development had taken place
and that they were growing and that England or Britain considered this sort of a threat to the dominance in Europe.
And my question goes back to the development, economic growth in Germany.
No, I don't think that was a result of the German unification.
I think, as a matter of fact, that good arguments can be made that economic prosperity might
have developed even more so if there would have been no German unification.
Because there existed a free trade zone in Germany before, no, what did take place and
what nerfed the British was, of course, the fact that while Germany before consisted whatever
of 5039 Independent Territories, which of course would not pose any type of threat.
All of a sudden it had, through war effort, I mean Bismarck united Germany by war.
All of a sudden it had become a mighty power and Bismarck had, at least for a while, continued
in relatively free market policies and at the same time of course because of the unification
also had engaged in armaments programs as the Germans considered themselves to be left
out somehow of world history having no colonies, no nothing and the Brits have colonies all
all over the place, so they wanted to play a role in this too, and especially the build-up
of the German Navy was of concern to the Brits, even though the German Navy was no match whatsoever
for the British Navy at the time of the outbreak of the war.
I guess it would be interesting if Germany had not unified and continued to be a tremendous economic power, would the British have considered them a threat?
Germany was, until the 1920s or so, considered to be the most advanced country in terms of universities, scholarships, science and so forth was largely due to the fact that Germany had not been a united country.
Theory, that you had various small princelings all competing against each other trying to
have the best university, made Germany in contrast for instance to a country like France
which had been highly centralized, far superior as far as scientific and scholarly achievements
In France it was just Paris, that was it. In Germany you had 30, 40 quite excellent universities and people from all over the world came to Germany and even after the German unification, this of course remained for a while still effective.
Even though immediately centralization processes took place there too, now the University of Berlin became more famous than all others because more resources were poured into that place.
But still, that did not eliminate places like Heidelberg and Braunschweig and Tübing and Munich and all these other places that also had universities who remained quite substantial intellectual forces, even through the 1920s until then, with the rise of Hitler.
Hitler came to a halt and many people left Germany in a way that the United States became
then after World War II the dominant center of scholarship and learning is explainable
by the inherited, so to speak, the German talents.
But again, Germany could have played a very important role in a different way, not as
a military power, but as some place with unique cultural achievements, I think.
The longer we allow the federal government, state government, local government to diminish
our resources and to tighten their clamp on all of our lives, they are making sensible
people more heightened, more incensed at what is happening.
And I would propose the possibility that enough incense people will have educated themselves
to the point that in some small communities and probably statistically I think it would
happen simultaneously in several small communities to say enough is enough and who knows the
pattern it will take.
You must have read the last chapter in my book.
You must have read the last chapter in my democracy book, because that's what I pretty much say.
Did you? I bought it, but it's in the car.
Oh, you see?
Okay, thank you.