I'm in the typical position of a revisionist historian who has to follow John Denson. That
is to say, I don't have too much more to say, since he tends to cover all the important
points. I will have some remarks, maybe in some instances a glass really, on what Mr.
Mr. Denson presented today, but I offer these for your consideration.
In 1943, way back in 1943, a book was published entitled The God of the Machine, and this
was also alluded to by Mr. Denson.
The author of this book was Isabel Patterson.
She was one of the intellectual leaders of the old right.
Now that's something you have to find out, something about maybe from Justin Raimondo's
Roosevelt's book reclaiming the American right because we are, whether we know it or not,
we are the heirs and heiresses of the old right movement in America.
This was a group of writers and political leaders who had come together to fight against
the New Deal and collectivism in America and against Roosevelt's drive to war.
Now, this book, The God of the Machine, was republished in 1993 by Transaction Books with an introduction by Stephen Cox.
I remember that Murray Rothbard thought that this edition was a fine work of scholarship.
I might mention that Transaction Books itself is an excellent publishing house endowed with brilliant editorial judgment,
illustrated, for instance, by their publication this year of The Costs of War, edited by John Denson.
by John Denson. You have to admire and really stand in awe of the editorial brilliance of
people who will do something like that. Now, probably the best known chapter in The
God of the Machine is the one that John Denson alluded to entitled The Humanitarian with
the Guillotine. Patterson's thesis was that most of the man-made misery in the world is
is brought about not by obviously evil-minded men, but by people who believe they are motivated
by the best of intentions, people who are convinced that they are serving not mere personal
profit, but the highest ideals. These humanitarians feel perfectly justified, therefore, in ruthlessly
applying the force of the state to further their noble ends. For instance, as she points
The Emperor Nero may have persecuted the early Christians in order to satisfy his own vicious desires, but many more Christians were killed by Emperors like Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian, who were considered good Emperors and who felt that they were serving the public good by stamping out Christianity.
The men of the Inquisition believed they were acting to further faith, morality, salvation of souls when they killed Jews and heretics.
and the terrible wars of religion in Europe, each side felt the same way about itself, it was doing God's work, and therefore, they just went ahead, there were no limits, used ruthless force.
Isabel Patterson argued that after a while, political ideologies arose that took the place of religion. They became modern man's substitute for religious faith.
Their adherents burned with a religious fervor to spread their new political faith by means of the state.
These political zealots, too, believed that they were acting on the highest motives,
that they were furthering the cause of humanity.
No one was ever more selfless, more wholly dedicated to equality, civic virtue, and other good and grand things
than a man named Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins in the French Revolution
and the impresario of the reign of terror.
In Russia, Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were inspired by what much of the world still
Israel considers noble ideals, that is a gut hatred of all forms of human inequality and
the profit motive and the passion to abolish all distinctions of class and therefore these
Bolsheviks became the greatest mass killers of the 20th century.
Isabel Patterson's conclusion was the humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action.
My theme this afternoon is the humanitarian with the A-bomb. I will try to show how in
warfare too, the humanitarian in theory is often the terrorist in action. We all know
the famous saying of William Tecumseh Sherman, that war is hell. And I don't need to tell
this audience here how General Sherman did his darndest to make sure that that's exactly
what it was. But when we look over the history of human warfare in Western civilization,
You can see that there are various phases, and that there was, for a while, what appeared
to be a certain evolution towards something a little better, a little better.
In the early modern times, in the 16th and 17th century, wars in Europe were definitely
hellish. It was a period of the great religious wars when Catholics and Protestants tried
to destroy each other in the name of the Prince of Peace. This culminated in the awful Thirty
The Thirty Years' War, which destroyed much of Central Europe and caused millions of deaths
among the civilian population especially. But after the Thirty Years' War reaction
set in, the very horrors of that war led people and governments to consider whether certain
limits couldn't be placed upon the practice of war to the advantage of everyone. The aim
was not to abolish war, that was considered utopian, but to regulate it, to place certain
Actions out of bounds, to civilize war a little bit.
The goal would be no longer to exterminate your enemy, but to wage war skillfully, husbanding
your resources, and once one side saw that it was defeated, to conclude a moderate peace.
And jurists and philosophers began to develop a system of rules of warfare, using the concepts
developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers in their theory of
The Just War. This evolution towards a more civilized or at least less savage form of
warfare experienced a grave setback in the French Revolution. The armies that France
launched against Europe were animated by the first great new religious faith that was translated
into political terms, a political movement that was almost like a religion. This was
To the French revolutionaries, their enemies were not simply other soldiers fighting for their country, they were the slaves of tyrants.
What the new creed could produce was shown in the Vendée. That's V-E-N-D accent, cute accent, E and a final E.
And I spell that for you because it would be hard for me to imagine that there are many people here, except maybe trained in history, who have ever heard of this.
And I want to point out what that means, that we haven't heard of it.
The Vendée is a section in Western France.
During the Revolution, the peasants there, oddly enough, refused to accept the blessings bestowed upon them by the Jacobins.
They continued to revere their king and, above all, their church and their traditional faith.
They would not accept the decrees from Paris abolishing both.
Then the Parisian revolutionaries, those great advocates of the rights of man, introduced conscription throughout France.
As Mr. Denson pointed out, something no king would ever have dared to do.
And conscription was to be the means to create those mass armies that would march to liberate Europe from the monarchical tyrants.
The blood tax is what the peasants called it. And it was too much for the people of the Vendée.
They rose up in rebellion against the French Revolution.
Counter-revolutionaries, peasants, reactionaries, people fighting for their traditional ways and their traditional liberties.
and the revolution wreaked a terrible vengeance.
An army was sent out to the Vendée.
General Westermann proudly reported back to Paris
how his troops were killing everything in their path.
Men, women, children, cattle, dogs.
Everything was being put to fire and stored.
This, he told his superiors, is how liberty deals with her enemies.
Hundreds of thousands were killed.
So, already in the Vendée, we have the prototype of the humanitarian with the A-bomb, the fighter for all good things who is using the power of the state ruthlessly to crush the enemies of goodness.
Incidentally, if you've never heard of the butchery of the Vendée, don't be surprised.
As we'll see, somehow the mass murders committed by the humanitarians tend to get a bit neglected.
But the terrorism of the French Revolution seemed to be a temporary throwback to barbarism and the evolution towards a system of rules of warfare continued through the 19th century, into the 20th century, the Hague Conventions and so on.
However, in the middle of the 19th century there was an ominous precursor of things to come, and that was the American Civil War.
I have to admit that I understand that the civil war is a misnomer,
and not because southerners have some eccentric idea that it should be called a war between the states and that's it,
because a civil war is a fight between two sides to gain control of the central power.
In what we call the civil war, the South was not fighting for that, they were fighting simply for their own independence.
So it was really simply a war between the states.
But on the other hand, I'm so used to civil war, I hope you'll forgive my using the term,
and I assure you, I am a sympathizer with the Southern cause, as Professor Thomas de Lorenzo
expressed his sympathy yesterday, and I know my friend Joseph Salerno is also a great Southern
partisan. You might say we formed some kind of mafia of Southern partisans.
so to speak. Now, in the civil war on the northern side, we see the humanitarian at work again.
The North saw its assault on the South as a great crusade, a combat between the noble forces of freedom and equality
and the hideous forces of the slavercratic tyrants. The North was doing, in its eyes, the North was doing nothing less
Then enacting on the secular plane the redemption offered up by Christ on the cross, as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.
Well, so fighting as they were for everything good, the northerners let loose a campaign of ruthless devastation, which Professor Lorenzo has sketched to an extent.
As he began, as General Sherman began his march through Georgia, he candidly stated that his aim was to be
quote, the utter destruction of the roads, houses, and people.
We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people and must make the old and young, rich and poor
feel the hard hand of war. I will make the march and I will make Georgia howl.
Well, that he did as the Union Army waged war on the civilian population through plunder, arson, and murder.
But in the eyes of the humanitarian, all this was perfectly justified, and 620,000 dead on both sides. That was also justified.
You know, sometimes I talk about this at the meetings of, let's say, free market people and mention that there were 620,000 combat deaths in the Civil War, and 5 million slaves were ultimately freed.
You can see the Chicago types trying to do cost-benefit analysis.
You know, quickly, I mean, you know, 500,000 freed, but 620, well...
This was very justified in the eyes of the humanitarians.
For instance, when Lincoln was assassinated and the alleged conspirators were put on trial,
the prosecutors, the northern prosecutors said,
the rebellion and aid of which this conspiracy was formed and this great public crime committed
was itself a criminal conspiracy and gigantic assassination.
So merely by defying the will of the northern politicians,
the whole population of the South was guilty of capital crimes
and deserved everything it got.
Well, the South was devastated for generations,
but the West was open.
We had basically a free enterprise system,
and America grew immensely rich,
rich beyond all imagining, as Garrett Garrett
and his great book, The Wild Wheel, ends it by saying greater riches than had ever existed before, even in the wildest dreams of avarice, were created by this system.
And here we have an indispensable condition of the American Empire.
We have what we could call the fundamental logistics of our wars in the 20th century.
The great American wealth machine is harnessed by the dominant political class to further
its own goals around the world. At the end of the 19th century, the political class got
interested in imperialism, we had to have colonies, we had to have wars. An occasion
was presented, again as Mr. Benson mentioned, when humanitarians discovered that the Spaniards
in Cuba were behaving abominably. What had happened, these things are always distorted,
Distorted. What happened was there were Cuban revolutionaries, guerrilla fighters. They operated the way guerrilla fighters do. They're blowing up trains,
burning down plantations, killing people and so on. And the Spaniards
reacted in a very harsh kind of way. That's what imperial powers do. But we had to go to war against the Spanish tyrants, the Spanish nation itself,
naturally barbaric people, you know about those bullfights and all.
So, we went to war and of course we easily won, but now we were stuck with Puerto Rico,
worst of all in far distant Asia, the Philippines, and this professor, I say professor because
believe me, with his reading and his knowledge and the logical character of his mind, Mr.
Denson would easily rank as a professor.
And as Mr. Denson pointed out, now we went to war with the Filipino guerrillas, and we
behaved much more brutally than the Spaniards ever did against the Cubans.
The Filipino villages set on fire by American troops were an eerie prefiguring of the villages
of Vietnam six decades later.
And then came the First World War, and in America the stage was set for the greatest
Humanitarian of them all, Woodrow Wilson. Now, I see that there are people here who
probably remember the old Johnny Carson routine. He was my second favorite statesman. He used
to say this, this is my second favorite thing and then what's your first favorite thing
and that's the punch line. Well, Woodrow Wilson is my second favorite statesman of the 20th
My first favorite is Paul Pot.
So I might not be as fair as some others to President Wilson.
He was a great believer in morality, idealism, the strictest obedience to duty.
He was filled to the brim with the sense that he possessed all of these virtues.
He had a very high opinion of himself.
H.L. Mencken famously said of President Wilson that his personal opinion,
Wilson's personal opinion was that he was the natural candidate for the first vacancy in the Trinity.
Now a traditional foreign policy from the founding fathers and nothing could be clearer than their statements one after the other,
not just Washington's farewell address and Jefferson's second inaugural address but Madison's statements
and throughout into the 19th century, Webster and Clay and even Seward, our traditional policy was what you could call arm neutrality or nowadays it's called isolationism and that is defense of the United States against any potential or actual attack.
That was our foreign policy. As John Quincy Adams had put it, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.
Well, Wilson had exactly the opposite point of view, even before the war broke out in Europe, Wilson said the idea of America, the idea of America is to serve humanity, he told this at Annapolis.
Is that not something to be proud of, that you know how to use force, like men of conscience and gentlemen, serving your fellow men and not trying to overcome them?
The American flag, he said, is henceforth to stand for dignity, for the assertion of the right of one nation to serve the other nations of the world.
Well, the First World War broke out and Wilson had his perfect opportunity.
There was a British hunger blockade, the open aim of which was to starve the civilian population of Germany into submission.
Germany responded with submarine warfare and there were complications in the
elections of 19 which are very interesting and you can follow in a book
which I strongly recommend to you by Walter Karp called the politics of war
it's a brilliantly written he was a journalist a talented journalist rather
than a historian but the history is is immaculate impeccable and that that'll
tell you these details of what actually was going on well in the election of
In 1916, Wilson won barely on the slogan, he kept us out of war.
He was sworn in again as president for his second term on March 4th.
On March 2nd, he appeared before Congress to ask for a declaration of war.
Now keep in mind, by the way, that Wilson bothered to go to Congress for a declaration
of war.
Even Roosevelt bothered to go to Congress for a declaration of war.
Nowadays everybody assumes that the president can get us into any war anywhere in the world
without any declaration of war by Congress. There's a senator named John McCain from Arizona
who's supposed to be another one of these great conservatives like Dick Army and Newt
Gingrich and so on. And I remember he was on the Brinkley show and he said the president
has the right to send American troops into combat anywhere in the world. And George Will
Will said to him, do you mean to say that Wilson simply on his own could have sent the American Expeditionary Force to France?
And McCain said yes. And now, John McCain, you know, was a war hero who had been captured by the North Vietnamese and imprisoned for quite a while.
And what I think must have happened is in those months of imprisonment, the ideas of government of his North Vietnamese captors sort of penetrated into his brain.
Because that is not, in the least, a conceivably constitutional government.
Well, Wilson's speech went on.
What are we fighting for?
We are fighting, he said, for democracy, for the rights and liberties of small nations.
For a universal, this is the humanitarian inaction, this is the utopian dreamer inaction.
For a universal dominion of right, I shall bring peace and safety to all nations and
make the world itself at last free.
To such a task, we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything we are, everything we have, easy for him to say,
with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness.
God helping her, she can do no other. That's an echo of Martin Luther at the Council of Worms.
So that Oliver Cromwell, I say, himself never set out to exterminate the Irish with more gusto and greater faith and fervor than Woodrow Wilson set out to annihilate the Germanic and monarchical demons of Europe.
This son of a Presbyterian minister was perfectly sure of his cause. God had ordained that America was to spend her blood and might until the whole world was at last forever free.
Let's be clear about this. Wilson's credo was this. The reason that Americans are born into this world is not to live out their lives enjoying their God-given rights in happiness, in peace,
with their families, in their communities, in their churches, in their voluntary associations.
That's not the reason Americans are born into the world,
but to take up and forever carry the cross of global responsibility.
Except for the decade of the 1920s, that has been the credo of every American president since.
Well, we know the results of Mr. Wilson's war were set forth very well by Mr. Denson.
And now we come to the Second World War, the last good war.
The globalists, by the way, I should mention, they love to talk about the Second World War.
That's sort of their best case, in their eyes anyway.
They never, why don't they talk about the First World War?
Why don't they talk about our initial involvement in global politics and in global military adventures?
And what came of that? Was that so successful? Was that so brilliant?
Oh, by the way, in the First World War, we have another one of those invisible massacres
that the humanitarians perpetrate that we never hear about.
The British hunger blockade led to the deaths through starvation or diseases of malnutrition
of 750,000 German civilians.
The children, the boys who survived the deaths of their grandparents and their siblings,
around 1929, 1930, 1931, they would have been around 18, 20 years old.
They were the eager recruits, the ferocious recruits of Hitler's stormtroopers.
And as, again, Mr. Denson said, World War I was the watershed.
I mentioned this book by Walter Karp to you, and here's a quotation.
Karp says, the fact that today American school children are taught that Woodrow Wilson was
a great president is itself an indication of the damage that that man inflicted on the
American Republic.
Now, as I say, we can talk about the Second World War, and then there's very much to
be said.
I want to tell you is that you have to start buying your second, maybe at this point, third or fourth copies of The Cost of War.
By the way, you know, I'm not saying that the next printing is going to last forever, and you know, Christmas is coming, and you should plan ahead.
A lot of what I might say here is included in some of the essays in that book.
Now, whenever anybody talks about allied, especially American, atrocities in war, especially the Second World War,
somebody will always say, but Hitler and the Nazis did worse.
I'm willing to accept that, but is that the standard we want to use for our leaders, that Hitler did worse than our government did?
When, evidently, it was Timothy McVeigh did that awful thing in Oklahoma City, which I still don't
understand. It was so counterproductive to what he said was his own ideals. I don't know if the whole
story will ever come out, but when that happened, people wrote, who kills children? What kind of
person is it that kills children? Well, I can tell you the answer. Powerful states kill children.
I don't know who you think or who one might think was under those bombs in Berlin and Dresden,
Nagasaki, Hiroshima, throughout the length and breadth of Vietnam, in Baghdad, and who was under
the bombardment in those Druze villages above Beirut. And all the time when American power is
is used to subdue some imagined enemy. Children are involved, and others as well.
Well, now the real humanitarian with the A-bomb, the one who used the A-bomb, Harry Truman,
you know, if I'm lucky, I'm not going to live long enough to see a Truman Memorial
in Washington. You know, this was bad enough, this last one, but a Truman Memorial. Because
I remember Harry Truman. I remember what everyone thought about him, the little louse.
And now suddenly he's become the great statesman that everybody loves. It's just, are we to
be spared nothing, really? How long, oh Lord, how long? Right. You know, a lot could be
He said, drop the bomb.
To talk about school children, Hiroshima had 32 schoolhouses filled with little kids.
I mean, what do you expect is in a city?
What do you expect if you're killing civilians?
Were there alternatives? Of course there were alternatives.
First of all, there was no need for him to bring up the talk about unconditional surrender,
which Roosevelt, by the way, had gotten from Ulysses Grant.
Roosevelt said, as Grant said, unconditional surrender.
So we're going to force them to surrender unconditionally.
How else could the war have ended?
How do wars end? Through negotiation.
Well, then if you're going to negotiate it, the Japanese would have insisted on keeping part of their empire and so on.
Well, look, if they like to engage in counterfactual history,
that is, if Hitler had won the war, he would have conquered,
If we hadn't gotten into the war, Hitler would have conquered the world and killed everybody.
That's their counterfactual history.
If they want to engage in counterfactual history, then how about this?
If Japan had retained an empire, a moderate empire, chastened by what had happened in the war,
it's very unlikely the Chinese communists could have come to power.
And if the Chinese communists had not come to power, then there would not have been the 30 million
and more deaths that we now know were caused by Maoist policies in China.
Now how about that for counterfactual?
Maybe that's something to be said for the maintenance of some sort of Japanese power in the Far East.
But in any case, as G.M. Anscombe, the great Catholic philosopher argued
when Oxford was going to give Truman an honorary degree, she opposed it,
and she said, look, simply there are rules or there are no rules.
If there are no rules, then anything goes.
You can massacre people in batches. You can set up death camps.
If there are rules, then you don't deliberately
target civilians. Now,
what I want to just say is, I just want to finish up with a few remarks.
What is the alternative to the humanitarian within
A-bomb? Isabel Patterson wrote that the alternative to the humanitarian with the
guillotine
was, first of all, our free enterprise system.
and then, if not that, to help people in need, voluntary charity.
Just so, in foreign policy, we have two basic alternatives.
We have the humanitarian with an A-bomb.
It will sown in America that goes to the world, setting right every wrong and wiping away every tear.
Or in America that is strong, well-defended against any possible enemy,
but that leaves other people to settle their own problems.
An America that realizes we have enough problems at home without trying to right all the wrongs of the world.
And you know, there's an interesting correlation.
People who are in favor of this crusade to democratize the world are people who tend to think,
yeah, things are pretty good at home, you know, and therefore, why not go around the world replicating American welfare democracy everywhere?
People who are a little suspicious of that, people who are in favor of a more traditional,
Non-interventionist foreign policy think we have plenty of problems at home.
And if you don't think that we do, why don't you just read Lost Liberties by Jim Boehm-Bawerk
and find out what's going on in America and if we have problems.
And I think that if a person doesn't think that we have problems in America,
then maybe that person should find out what really happened at Ruby Ridge and at Waco.
and in light of that, we are going to go around the world and there's, well let me, let me, let me mention one last thing, which is truly Alice in Wonderland, the welfare warfare state creates these really priceless, if you're a connoisseur of human inaneity our government goes all around the world meddling as we know that
The most recent example is a law passed in Russia that unfortunately discriminates, this is what they want to do, against Protestants and Catholics in favor of the traditional Russian Orthodox Church.
The United States government has now launched a campaign to force the Russians to repeal that law because it violates religious freedom.
And Al Gore himself has entered the campaign. It's funny, I thought Al Gore was interested mainly in Eastern religions.
But now we're going to put pressure, military, not military, economic, diplomatic pressure on the Russians.
And I say, Alice in Wonderland, this sudden love of religious freedom comes from the Federal
Government in Washington that for decades has waged war in every locality in America
on the traditional religious freedoms and practices of the American people.
And I frankly suggest that before we worry about religious freedom in Moscow and Irkutsk,
We should worry about religious freedom in Alabama courthouses.
So instead of becoming the world's policeman or sheriff spreading freedom and civilization
everywhere, what I think we should do is to restore the freedoms we have lost in America
and concern ourselves with a civilization that's crumbling all around us.