WEBVTT NOTE The Humanitarian with the Atom Bomb 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.160 I'm in the typical position of a revisionist historian who has to follow John Denson. That 2 00:00:06.160 --> 00:00:13.320 is to say, I don't have too much more to say, since he tends to cover all the important 3 00:00:13.320 --> 00:00:19.640 points. I will have some remarks, maybe in some instances a glass really, on what Mr. 4 00:00:19.640 --> 00:00:28.580 Mr. Denson presented today, but I offer these for your consideration. 5 00:00:28.580 --> 00:00:34.800 In 1943, way back in 1943, a book was published entitled The God of the Machine, and this 6 00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:38.200 was also alluded to by Mr. Denson. 7 00:00:38.200 --> 00:00:41.240 The author of this book was Isabel Patterson. 8 00:00:41.240 --> 00:00:44.440 She was one of the intellectual leaders of the old right. 9 00:00:44.440 --> 00:00:47.920 Now that's something you have to find out, something about maybe from Justin Raimondo's 10 00:00:47.920 --> 00:00:54.820 Roosevelt's book reclaiming the American right because we are, whether we know it or not, 11 00:00:54.820 --> 00:01:00.860 we are the heirs and heiresses of the old right movement in America. 12 00:01:00.860 --> 00:01:06.680 This was a group of writers and political leaders who had come together to fight against 13 00:01:06.680 --> 00:01:12.920 the New Deal and collectivism in America and against Roosevelt's drive to war. 14 00:01:12.920 --> 00:01:21.920 Now, this book, The God of the Machine, was republished in 1993 by Transaction Books with an introduction by Stephen Cox. 15 00:01:21.920 --> 00:01:26.920 I remember that Murray Rothbard thought that this edition was a fine work of scholarship. 16 00:01:26.920 --> 00:01:33.920 I might mention that Transaction Books itself is an excellent publishing house endowed with brilliant editorial judgment, 17 00:01:33.920 --> 00:01:40.920 illustrated, for instance, by their publication this year of The Costs of War, edited by John Denson. 18 00:01:40.920 --> 00:01:48.420 by John Denson. You have to admire and really stand in awe of the editorial brilliance of 19 00:01:48.420 --> 00:01:53.340 people who will do something like that. Now, probably the best known chapter in The 20 00:01:53.340 --> 00:01:59.720 God of the Machine is the one that John Denson alluded to entitled The Humanitarian with 21 00:01:59.720 --> 00:02:05.320 the Guillotine. Patterson's thesis was that most of the man-made misery in the world is 22 00:02:05.320 --> 00:02:11.160 is brought about not by obviously evil-minded men, but by people who believe they are motivated 23 00:02:11.160 --> 00:02:16.280 by the best of intentions, people who are convinced that they are serving not mere personal 24 00:02:16.280 --> 00:02:25.240 profit, but the highest ideals. These humanitarians feel perfectly justified, therefore, in ruthlessly 25 00:02:25.240 --> 00:02:31.160 applying the force of the state to further their noble ends. For instance, as she points 26 00:02:31.160 --> 00:02:50.160 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. 27 00:02:50.160 --> 00:02:58.160 The men of the Inquisition believed they were acting to further faith, morality, salvation of souls when they killed Jews and heretics. 28 00:02:58.160 --> 00:03:10.160 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. 29 00:03:10.160 --> 00:03:21.160 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. 30 00:03:21.160 --> 00:03:27.160 Their adherents burned with a religious fervor to spread their new political faith by means of the state. 31 00:03:27.160 --> 00:03:31.160 These political zealots, too, believed that they were acting on the highest motives, 32 00:03:31.160 --> 00:03:34.160 that they were furthering the cause of humanity. 33 00:03:34.160 --> 00:03:42.160 No one was ever more selfless, more wholly dedicated to equality, civic virtue, and other good and grand things 34 00:03:42.160 --> 00:03:48.160 than a man named Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Jacobins in the French Revolution 35 00:03:48.160 --> 00:03:51.160 and the impresario of the reign of terror. 36 00:03:51.160 --> 00:03:56.160 In Russia, Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders were inspired by what much of the world still 37 00:03:56.160 --> 00:04:03.920 Israel considers noble ideals, that is a gut hatred of all forms of human inequality and 38 00:04:03.920 --> 00:04:11.440 the profit motive and the passion to abolish all distinctions of class and therefore these 39 00:04:11.440 --> 00:04:17.000 Bolsheviks became the greatest mass killers of the 20th century. 40 00:04:17.000 --> 00:04:23.900 Isabel Patterson's conclusion was the humanitarian in theory is the terrorist in action. 41 00:04:23.900 --> 00:04:29.540 My theme this afternoon is the humanitarian with the A-bomb. I will try to show how in 42 00:04:29.540 --> 00:04:35.920 warfare too, the humanitarian in theory is often the terrorist in action. We all know 43 00:04:35.920 --> 00:04:42.460 the famous saying of William Tecumseh Sherman, that war is hell. And I don't need to tell 44 00:04:42.460 --> 00:04:47.740 this audience here how General Sherman did his darndest to make sure that that's exactly 45 00:04:47.740 --> 00:04:52.300 what it was. But when we look over the history of human warfare in Western civilization, 46 00:04:52.300 --> 00:04:57.660 You can see that there are various phases, and that there was, for a while, what appeared 47 00:04:57.660 --> 00:05:03.020 to be a certain evolution towards something a little better, a little better. 48 00:05:03.020 --> 00:05:07.220 In the early modern times, in the 16th and 17th century, wars in Europe were definitely 49 00:05:07.220 --> 00:05:12.300 hellish. It was a period of the great religious wars when Catholics and Protestants tried 50 00:05:12.300 --> 00:05:17.180 to destroy each other in the name of the Prince of Peace. This culminated in the awful Thirty 51 00:05:17.180 --> 00:05:22.580 The Thirty Years' War, which destroyed much of Central Europe and caused millions of deaths 52 00:05:22.580 --> 00:05:27.060 among the civilian population especially. But after the Thirty Years' War reaction 53 00:05:27.060 --> 00:05:32.380 set in, the very horrors of that war led people and governments to consider whether certain 54 00:05:32.380 --> 00:05:39.780 limits couldn't be placed upon the practice of war to the advantage of everyone. The aim 55 00:05:39.780 --> 00:05:46.740 was not to abolish war, that was considered utopian, but to regulate it, to place certain 56 00:05:46.740 --> 00:05:51.900 Actions out of bounds, to civilize war a little bit. 57 00:05:51.900 --> 00:05:56.680 The goal would be no longer to exterminate your enemy, but to wage war skillfully, husbanding 58 00:05:56.680 --> 00:06:03.400 your resources, and once one side saw that it was defeated, to conclude a moderate peace. 59 00:06:03.400 --> 00:06:10.540 And jurists and philosophers began to develop a system of rules of warfare, using the concepts 60 00:06:10.540 --> 00:06:16.100 developed by St. Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic philosophers in their theory of 61 00:06:16.100 --> 00:06:21.740 The Just War. This evolution towards a more civilized or at least less savage form of 62 00:06:21.740 --> 00:06:27.740 warfare experienced a grave setback in the French Revolution. The armies that France 63 00:06:27.740 --> 00:06:34.800 launched against Europe were animated by the first great new religious faith that was translated 64 00:06:34.800 --> 00:06:41.860 into political terms, a political movement that was almost like a religion. This was 65 00:06:41.860 --> 00:06:54.860 To the French revolutionaries, their enemies were not simply other soldiers fighting for their country, they were the slaves of tyrants. 66 00:06:54.860 --> 00:07:06.860 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. 67 00:07:06.860 --> 00:07:17.860 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. 68 00:07:17.860 --> 00:07:22.860 And I want to point out what that means, that we haven't heard of it. 69 00:07:22.860 --> 00:07:25.860 The Vendée is a section in Western France. 70 00:07:25.860 --> 00:07:33.860 During the Revolution, the peasants there, oddly enough, refused to accept the blessings bestowed upon them by the Jacobins. 71 00:07:33.860 --> 00:07:40.360 They continued to revere their king and, above all, their church and their traditional faith. 72 00:07:40.360 --> 00:07:45.360 They would not accept the decrees from Paris abolishing both. 73 00:07:45.360 --> 00:07:51.360 Then the Parisian revolutionaries, those great advocates of the rights of man, introduced conscription throughout France. 74 00:07:51.360 --> 00:07:55.860 As Mr. Denson pointed out, something no king would ever have dared to do. 75 00:07:55.860 --> 00:08:03.860 And conscription was to be the means to create those mass armies that would march to liberate Europe from the monarchical tyrants. 76 00:08:03.860 --> 00:08:08.860 The blood tax is what the peasants called it. And it was too much for the people of the Vendée. 77 00:08:08.860 --> 00:08:11.860 They rose up in rebellion against the French Revolution. 78 00:08:11.860 --> 00:08:19.860 Counter-revolutionaries, peasants, reactionaries, people fighting for their traditional ways and their traditional liberties. 79 00:08:19.860 --> 00:08:25.860 and the revolution wreaked a terrible vengeance. 80 00:08:25.860 --> 00:08:28.860 An army was sent out to the Vendée. 81 00:08:28.860 --> 00:08:31.860 General Westermann proudly reported back to Paris 82 00:08:31.860 --> 00:08:35.860 how his troops were killing everything in their path. 83 00:08:35.860 --> 00:08:38.860 Men, women, children, cattle, dogs. 84 00:08:38.860 --> 00:08:40.860 Everything was being put to fire and stored. 85 00:08:40.860 --> 00:08:45.860 This, he told his superiors, is how liberty deals with her enemies. 86 00:08:45.860 --> 00:08:47.860 Hundreds of thousands were killed. 87 00:08:47.860 --> 00:09:03.860 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. 88 00:09:03.860 --> 00:09:08.860 Incidentally, if you've never heard of the butchery of the Vendée, don't be surprised. 89 00:09:08.860 --> 00:09:15.860 As we'll see, somehow the mass murders committed by the humanitarians tend to get a bit neglected. 90 00:09:15.860 --> 00:09:31.860 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. 91 00:09:31.860 --> 00:09:43.860 However, in the middle of the 19th century there was an ominous precursor of things to come, and that was the American Civil War. 92 00:09:43.860 --> 00:09:48.940 I have to admit that I understand that the civil war is a misnomer, 93 00:09:48.940 --> 00:09:55.300 and not because southerners have some eccentric idea that it should be called a war between the states and that's it, 94 00:09:55.300 --> 00:10:00.740 because a civil war is a fight between two sides to gain control of the central power. 95 00:10:00.740 --> 00:10:06.860 In what we call the civil war, the South was not fighting for that, they were fighting simply for their own independence. 96 00:10:06.860 --> 00:10:12.380 So it was really simply a war between the states. 97 00:10:12.380 --> 00:10:18.300 But on the other hand, I'm so used to civil war, I hope you'll forgive my using the term, 98 00:10:18.300 --> 00:10:27.820 and I assure you, I am a sympathizer with the Southern cause, as Professor Thomas de Lorenzo 99 00:10:27.820 --> 00:10:33.980 expressed his sympathy yesterday, and I know my friend Joseph Salerno is also a great Southern 100 00:10:33.980 --> 00:10:40.540 partisan. You might say we formed some kind of mafia of Southern partisans. 101 00:10:42.380 --> 00:10:49.880 so to speak. Now, in the civil war on the northern side, we see the humanitarian at work again. 102 00:10:49.880 --> 00:10:56.380 The North saw its assault on the South as a great crusade, a combat between the noble forces of freedom and equality 103 00:10:56.380 --> 00:11:05.380 and the hideous forces of the slavercratic tyrants. The North was doing, in its eyes, the North was doing nothing less 104 00:11:05.380 --> 00:11:17.880 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. 105 00:11:17.880 --> 00:11:31.880 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. 106 00:11:31.880 --> 00:11:38.680 As he began, as General Sherman began his march through Georgia, he candidly stated that his aim was to be 107 00:11:39.080 --> 00:11:42.520 quote, the utter destruction of the roads, houses, and people. 108 00:11:43.040 --> 00:11:48.500 We are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people and must make the old and young, rich and poor 109 00:11:48.840 --> 00:11:53.800 feel the hard hand of war. I will make the march and I will make Georgia howl. 110 00:11:54.520 --> 00:12:01.440 Well, that he did as the Union Army waged war on the civilian population through plunder, arson, and murder. 111 00:12:01.880 --> 00:12:11.880 But in the eyes of the humanitarian, all this was perfectly justified, and 620,000 dead on both sides. That was also justified. 112 00:12:11.880 --> 00:12:23.880 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. 113 00:12:23.880 --> 00:12:27.880 You can see the Chicago types trying to do cost-benefit analysis. 114 00:12:27.880 --> 00:12:33.880 You know, quickly, I mean, you know, 500,000 freed, but 620, well... 115 00:12:33.880 --> 00:12:38.880 This was very justified in the eyes of the humanitarians. 116 00:12:38.880 --> 00:12:42.880 For instance, when Lincoln was assassinated and the alleged conspirators were put on trial, 117 00:12:42.880 --> 00:12:45.880 the prosecutors, the northern prosecutors said, 118 00:12:45.880 --> 00:12:50.880 the rebellion and aid of which this conspiracy was formed and this great public crime committed 119 00:12:50.880 --> 00:12:55.600 was itself a criminal conspiracy and gigantic assassination. 120 00:12:55.600 --> 00:12:58.840 So merely by defying the will of the northern politicians, 121 00:12:58.840 --> 00:13:02.320 the whole population of the South was guilty of capital crimes 122 00:13:02.320 --> 00:13:04.560 and deserved everything it got. 123 00:13:04.560 --> 00:13:08.160 Well, the South was devastated for generations, 124 00:13:08.160 --> 00:13:09.920 but the West was open. 125 00:13:09.920 --> 00:13:12.080 We had basically a free enterprise system, 126 00:13:12.080 --> 00:13:15.920 and America grew immensely rich, 127 00:13:15.920 --> 00:13:19.760 rich beyond all imagining, as Garrett Garrett 128 00:13:19.760 --> 00:13:34.460 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. 129 00:13:34.460 --> 00:13:40.260 And here we have an indispensable condition of the American Empire. 130 00:13:40.260 --> 00:13:45.960 We have what we could call the fundamental logistics of our wars in the 20th century. 131 00:13:45.960 --> 00:13:52.680 The great American wealth machine is harnessed by the dominant political class to further 132 00:13:52.680 --> 00:13:57.600 its own goals around the world. At the end of the 19th century, the political class got 133 00:13:57.600 --> 00:14:01.920 interested in imperialism, we had to have colonies, we had to have wars. An occasion 134 00:14:01.920 --> 00:14:08.160 was presented, again as Mr. Benson mentioned, when humanitarians discovered that the Spaniards 135 00:14:08.160 --> 00:14:15.160 in Cuba were behaving abominably. What had happened, these things are always distorted, 136 00:14:15.160 --> 00:14:23.040 Distorted. What happened was there were Cuban revolutionaries, guerrilla fighters. They operated the way guerrilla fighters do. They're blowing up trains, 137 00:14:23.440 --> 00:14:27.760 burning down plantations, killing people and so on. And the Spaniards 138 00:14:29.480 --> 00:14:38.220 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, 139 00:14:39.080 --> 00:14:42.040 naturally barbaric people, you know about those bullfights and all. 140 00:14:42.040 --> 00:14:49.640 So, we went to war and of course we easily won, but now we were stuck with Puerto Rico, 141 00:14:49.640 --> 00:14:56.400 worst of all in far distant Asia, the Philippines, and this professor, I say professor because 142 00:14:56.400 --> 00:15:04.400 believe me, with his reading and his knowledge and the logical character of his mind, Mr. 143 00:15:04.400 --> 00:15:09.120 Denson would easily rank as a professor. 144 00:15:09.120 --> 00:15:18.800 And as Mr. Denson pointed out, now we went to war with the Filipino guerrillas, and we 145 00:15:18.800 --> 00:15:22.700 behaved much more brutally than the Spaniards ever did against the Cubans. 146 00:15:22.700 --> 00:15:28.240 The Filipino villages set on fire by American troops were an eerie prefiguring of the villages 147 00:15:28.240 --> 00:15:32.920 of Vietnam six decades later. 148 00:15:32.920 --> 00:15:37.720 And then came the First World War, and in America the stage was set for the greatest 149 00:15:37.720 --> 00:15:44.680 Humanitarian of them all, Woodrow Wilson. Now, I see that there are people here who 150 00:15:44.680 --> 00:15:52.080 probably remember the old Johnny Carson routine. He was my second favorite statesman. He used 151 00:15:52.080 --> 00:15:55.880 to say this, this is my second favorite thing and then what's your first favorite thing 152 00:15:55.880 --> 00:16:01.960 and that's the punch line. Well, Woodrow Wilson is my second favorite statesman of the 20th 153 00:16:01.960 --> 00:16:04.960 My first favorite is Paul Pot. 154 00:16:04.960 --> 00:16:11.960 So I might not be as fair as some others to President Wilson. 155 00:16:11.960 --> 00:16:16.960 He was a great believer in morality, idealism, the strictest obedience to duty. 156 00:16:16.960 --> 00:16:21.960 He was filled to the brim with the sense that he possessed all of these virtues. 157 00:16:21.960 --> 00:16:23.960 He had a very high opinion of himself. 158 00:16:23.960 --> 00:16:28.960 H.L. Mencken famously said of President Wilson that his personal opinion, 159 00:16:28.960 --> 00:16:34.960 Wilson's personal opinion was that he was the natural candidate for the first vacancy in the Trinity. 160 00:16:34.960 --> 00:16:49.960 Now a traditional foreign policy from the founding fathers and nothing could be clearer than their statements one after the other, 161 00:16:49.960 --> 00:16:55.960 not just Washington's farewell address and Jefferson's second inaugural address but Madison's statements 162 00:16:55.960 --> 00:17:16.960 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. 163 00:17:16.960 --> 00:17:23.960 That was our foreign policy. As John Quincy Adams had put it, America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. 164 00:17:23.960 --> 00:17:38.960 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. 165 00:17:38.960 --> 00:17:46.960 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? 166 00:17:46.960 --> 00:17:58.960 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. 167 00:17:58.960 --> 00:18:04.960 Well, the First World War broke out and Wilson had his perfect opportunity. 168 00:18:04.960 --> 00:18:12.960 There was a British hunger blockade, the open aim of which was to starve the civilian population of Germany into submission. 169 00:18:12.960 --> 00:18:18.000 Germany responded with submarine warfare and there were complications in the 170 00:18:18.000 --> 00:18:21.440 elections of 19 which are very interesting and you can follow in a book 171 00:18:21.440 --> 00:18:26.080 which I strongly recommend to you by Walter Karp called the politics of war 172 00:18:26.080 --> 00:18:30.120 it's a brilliantly written he was a journalist a talented journalist rather 173 00:18:30.120 --> 00:18:37.200 than a historian but the history is is immaculate impeccable and that that'll 174 00:18:37.200 --> 00:18:41.360 tell you these details of what actually was going on well in the election of 175 00:18:41.360 --> 00:18:47.080 In 1916, Wilson won barely on the slogan, he kept us out of war. 176 00:18:47.080 --> 00:18:51.920 He was sworn in again as president for his second term on March 4th. 177 00:18:51.920 --> 00:18:56.980 On March 2nd, he appeared before Congress to ask for a declaration of war. 178 00:18:56.980 --> 00:19:00.840 Now keep in mind, by the way, that Wilson bothered to go to Congress for a declaration 179 00:19:00.840 --> 00:19:02.000 of war. 180 00:19:02.000 --> 00:19:05.760 Even Roosevelt bothered to go to Congress for a declaration of war. 181 00:19:05.760 --> 00:19:12.240 Nowadays everybody assumes that the president can get us into any war anywhere in the world 182 00:19:12.240 --> 00:19:19.720 without any declaration of war by Congress. There's a senator named John McCain from Arizona 183 00:19:19.720 --> 00:19:25.320 who's supposed to be another one of these great conservatives like Dick Army and Newt 184 00:19:25.320 --> 00:19:30.040 Gingrich and so on. And I remember he was on the Brinkley show and he said the president 185 00:19:30.040 --> 00:19:35.000 has the right to send American troops into combat anywhere in the world. And George Will 186 00:19:35.000 --> 00:19:41.000 Will said to him, do you mean to say that Wilson simply on his own could have sent the American Expeditionary Force to France? 187 00:19:41.000 --> 00:19:54.000 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. 188 00:19:54.000 --> 00:20:04.000 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. 189 00:20:04.000 --> 00:20:10.840 Because that is not, in the least, a conceivably constitutional government. 190 00:20:10.840 --> 00:20:14.240 Well, Wilson's speech went on. 191 00:20:14.240 --> 00:20:15.240 What are we fighting for? 192 00:20:15.240 --> 00:20:19.360 We are fighting, he said, for democracy, for the rights and liberties of small nations. 193 00:20:19.360 --> 00:20:25.320 For a universal, this is the humanitarian inaction, this is the utopian dreamer inaction. 194 00:20:25.320 --> 00:20:29.760 For a universal dominion of right, I shall bring peace and safety to all nations and 195 00:20:29.760 --> 00:20:32.560 make the world itself at last free. 196 00:20:32.560 --> 00:20:39.560 To such a task, we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything we are, everything we have, easy for him to say, 197 00:20:39.560 --> 00:20:49.560 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. 198 00:20:49.560 --> 00:20:55.560 God helping her, she can do no other. That's an echo of Martin Luther at the Council of Worms. 199 00:20:55.560 --> 00:21:19.560 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. 200 00:21:19.560 --> 00:21:33.560 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. 201 00:21:33.560 --> 00:21:48.560 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, 202 00:21:48.560 --> 00:21:53.640 with their families, in their communities, in their churches, in their voluntary associations. 203 00:21:53.640 --> 00:21:56.800 That's not the reason Americans are born into the world, 204 00:21:56.800 --> 00:22:02.560 but to take up and forever carry the cross of global responsibility. 205 00:22:02.560 --> 00:22:09.840 Except for the decade of the 1920s, that has been the credo of every American president since. 206 00:22:09.840 --> 00:22:17.360 Well, we know the results of Mr. Wilson's war were set forth very well by Mr. Denson. 207 00:22:17.360 --> 00:22:24.080 And now we come to the Second World War, the last good war. 208 00:22:24.080 --> 00:22:30.960 The globalists, by the way, I should mention, they love to talk about the Second World War. 209 00:22:30.960 --> 00:22:34.840 That's sort of their best case, in their eyes anyway. 210 00:22:34.840 --> 00:22:37.600 They never, why don't they talk about the First World War? 211 00:22:37.600 --> 00:22:46.800 Why don't they talk about our initial involvement in global politics and in global military adventures? 212 00:22:46.800 --> 00:22:52.080 And what came of that? Was that so successful? Was that so brilliant? 213 00:22:52.080 --> 00:22:57.520 Oh, by the way, in the First World War, we have another one of those invisible massacres 214 00:22:57.520 --> 00:23:00.640 that the humanitarians perpetrate that we never hear about. 215 00:23:00.640 --> 00:23:07.280 The British hunger blockade led to the deaths through starvation or diseases of malnutrition 216 00:23:07.280 --> 00:23:10.640 of 750,000 German civilians. 217 00:23:10.640 --> 00:23:17.480 The children, the boys who survived the deaths of their grandparents and their siblings, 218 00:23:17.480 --> 00:23:23.320 around 1929, 1930, 1931, they would have been around 18, 20 years old. 219 00:23:23.320 --> 00:23:30.720 They were the eager recruits, the ferocious recruits of Hitler's stormtroopers. 220 00:23:30.720 --> 00:23:37.320 And as, again, Mr. Denson said, World War I was the watershed. 221 00:23:37.320 --> 00:23:44.280 I mentioned this book by Walter Karp to you, and here's a quotation. 222 00:23:44.280 --> 00:23:49.120 Karp says, the fact that today American school children are taught that Woodrow Wilson was 223 00:23:49.120 --> 00:23:56.080 a great president is itself an indication of the damage that that man inflicted on the 224 00:23:56.080 --> 00:23:58.000 American Republic. 225 00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:03.720 Now, as I say, we can talk about the Second World War, and then there's very much to 226 00:24:03.720 --> 00:24:04.720 be said. 227 00:24:04.720 --> 00:24:13.720 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. 228 00:24:13.720 --> 00:24:26.720 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. 229 00:24:26.720 --> 00:24:33.720 A lot of what I might say here is included in some of the essays in that book. 230 00:24:33.720 --> 00:24:43.160 Now, whenever anybody talks about allied, especially American, atrocities in war, especially the Second World War, 231 00:24:43.160 --> 00:24:47.600 somebody will always say, but Hitler and the Nazis did worse. 232 00:24:47.600 --> 00:24:58.240 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? 233 00:24:58.240 --> 00:25:05.440 When, evidently, it was Timothy McVeigh did that awful thing in Oklahoma City, which I still don't 234 00:25:05.440 --> 00:25:11.600 understand. It was so counterproductive to what he said was his own ideals. I don't know if the whole 235 00:25:11.600 --> 00:25:18.960 story will ever come out, but when that happened, people wrote, who kills children? What kind of 236 00:25:18.960 --> 00:25:25.280 person is it that kills children? Well, I can tell you the answer. Powerful states kill children. 237 00:25:25.280 --> 00:25:35.440 I don't know who you think or who one might think was under those bombs in Berlin and Dresden, 238 00:25:35.440 --> 00:25:44.960 Nagasaki, Hiroshima, throughout the length and breadth of Vietnam, in Baghdad, and who was under 239 00:25:44.960 --> 00:25:53.600 the bombardment in those Druze villages above Beirut. And all the time when American power is 240 00:25:53.600 --> 00:26:04.600 is used to subdue some imagined enemy. Children are involved, and others as well. 241 00:26:04.600 --> 00:26:13.000 Well, now the real humanitarian with the A-bomb, the one who used the A-bomb, Harry Truman, 242 00:26:13.000 --> 00:26:17.660 you know, if I'm lucky, I'm not going to live long enough to see a Truman Memorial 243 00:26:17.660 --> 00:26:23.940 in Washington. You know, this was bad enough, this last one, but a Truman Memorial. Because 244 00:26:23.940 --> 00:26:30.560 I remember Harry Truman. I remember what everyone thought about him, the little louse. 245 00:26:30.560 --> 00:26:35.760 And now suddenly he's become the great statesman that everybody loves. It's just, are we to 246 00:26:35.760 --> 00:26:43.760 be spared nothing, really? How long, oh Lord, how long? Right. You know, a lot could be 247 00:26:43.760 --> 00:26:45.760 He said, drop the bomb. 248 00:26:45.760 --> 00:26:51.760 To talk about school children, Hiroshima had 32 schoolhouses filled with little kids. 249 00:26:51.760 --> 00:26:53.760 I mean, what do you expect is in a city? 250 00:26:53.760 --> 00:26:57.760 What do you expect if you're killing civilians? 251 00:26:57.760 --> 00:27:00.760 Were there alternatives? Of course there were alternatives. 252 00:27:00.760 --> 00:27:04.760 First of all, there was no need for him to bring up the talk about unconditional surrender, 253 00:27:04.760 --> 00:27:07.760 which Roosevelt, by the way, had gotten from Ulysses Grant. 254 00:27:07.760 --> 00:27:10.760 Roosevelt said, as Grant said, unconditional surrender. 255 00:27:10.760 --> 00:27:13.760 So we're going to force them to surrender unconditionally. 256 00:27:13.760 --> 00:27:18.760 How else could the war have ended? 257 00:27:18.760 --> 00:27:21.760 How do wars end? Through negotiation. 258 00:27:21.760 --> 00:27:28.760 Well, then if you're going to negotiate it, the Japanese would have insisted on keeping part of their empire and so on. 259 00:27:28.760 --> 00:27:33.760 Well, look, if they like to engage in counterfactual history, 260 00:27:33.760 --> 00:27:36.760 that is, if Hitler had won the war, he would have conquered, 261 00:27:36.760 --> 00:27:40.760 If we hadn't gotten into the war, Hitler would have conquered the world and killed everybody. 262 00:27:40.760 --> 00:27:42.760 That's their counterfactual history. 263 00:27:42.760 --> 00:27:46.760 If they want to engage in counterfactual history, then how about this? 264 00:27:46.760 --> 00:27:54.760 If Japan had retained an empire, a moderate empire, chastened by what had happened in the war, 265 00:27:54.760 --> 00:27:58.760 it's very unlikely the Chinese communists could have come to power. 266 00:27:58.760 --> 00:28:03.760 And if the Chinese communists had not come to power, then there would not have been the 30 million 267 00:28:03.760 --> 00:28:09.200 and more deaths that we now know were caused by Maoist policies in China. 268 00:28:09.200 --> 00:28:11.560 Now how about that for counterfactual? 269 00:28:11.560 --> 00:28:16.720 Maybe that's something to be said for the maintenance of some sort of Japanese power in the Far East. 270 00:28:16.720 --> 00:28:22.640 But in any case, as G.M. Anscombe, the great Catholic philosopher argued 271 00:28:22.640 --> 00:28:26.720 when Oxford was going to give Truman an honorary degree, she opposed it, 272 00:28:26.720 --> 00:28:30.680 and she said, look, simply there are rules or there are no rules. 273 00:28:30.680 --> 00:28:32.880 If there are no rules, then anything goes. 274 00:28:32.880 --> 00:28:36.360 You can massacre people in batches. You can set up death camps. 275 00:28:36.360 --> 00:28:39.920 If there are rules, then you don't deliberately 276 00:28:39.920 --> 00:28:43.480 target civilians. Now, 277 00:28:43.480 --> 00:28:48.000 what I want to just say is, I just want to finish up with a few remarks. 278 00:28:48.000 --> 00:28:51.800 What is the alternative to the humanitarian within 279 00:28:51.800 --> 00:28:55.800 A-bomb? Isabel Patterson wrote that the alternative to the humanitarian with the 280 00:28:55.800 --> 00:28:56.840 guillotine 281 00:28:56.840 --> 00:29:00.120 was, first of all, our free enterprise system. 282 00:29:00.120 --> 00:29:06.880 and then, if not that, to help people in need, voluntary charity. 283 00:29:06.880 --> 00:29:10.760 Just so, in foreign policy, we have two basic alternatives. 284 00:29:10.760 --> 00:29:13.200 We have the humanitarian with an A-bomb. 285 00:29:13.200 --> 00:29:19.040 It will sown in America that goes to the world, setting right every wrong and wiping away every tear. 286 00:29:19.040 --> 00:29:25.080 Or in America that is strong, well-defended against any possible enemy, 287 00:29:25.080 --> 00:29:28.480 but that leaves other people to settle their own problems. 288 00:29:28.480 --> 00:29:34.480 An America that realizes we have enough problems at home without trying to right all the wrongs of the world. 289 00:29:34.480 --> 00:29:36.780 And you know, there's an interesting correlation. 290 00:29:36.780 --> 00:29:43.080 People who are in favor of this crusade to democratize the world are people who tend to think, 291 00:29:43.080 --> 00:29:51.880 yeah, things are pretty good at home, you know, and therefore, why not go around the world replicating American welfare democracy everywhere? 292 00:29:51.880 --> 00:29:56.380 People who are a little suspicious of that, people who are in favor of a more traditional, 293 00:29:56.380 --> 00:30:01.580 Non-interventionist foreign policy think we have plenty of problems at home. 294 00:30:01.580 --> 00:30:07.020 And if you don't think that we do, why don't you just read Lost Liberties by Jim Boehm-Bawerk 295 00:30:07.020 --> 00:30:11.700 and find out what's going on in America and if we have problems. 296 00:30:11.700 --> 00:30:16.220 And I think that if a person doesn't think that we have problems in America, 297 00:30:16.220 --> 00:30:21.660 then maybe that person should find out what really happened at Ruby Ridge and at Waco. 298 00:30:21.660 --> 00:30:51.660 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 299 00:30:51.660 --> 00:31:08.660 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. 300 00:31:08.660 --> 00:31:17.660 The United States government has now launched a campaign to force the Russians to repeal that law because it violates religious freedom. 301 00:31:17.660 --> 00:31:26.660 And Al Gore himself has entered the campaign. It's funny, I thought Al Gore was interested mainly in Eastern religions. 302 00:31:26.660 --> 00:31:41.660 But now we're going to put pressure, military, not military, economic, diplomatic pressure on the Russians. 303 00:31:41.660 --> 00:31:49.500 And I say, Alice in Wonderland, this sudden love of religious freedom comes from the Federal 304 00:31:49.500 --> 00:31:56.660 Government in Washington that for decades has waged war in every locality in America 305 00:31:56.660 --> 00:32:05.460 on the traditional religious freedoms and practices of the American people. 306 00:32:05.460 --> 00:32:11.520 And I frankly suggest that before we worry about religious freedom in Moscow and Irkutsk, 307 00:32:11.520 --> 00:32:20.480 We should worry about religious freedom in Alabama courthouses. 308 00:32:20.480 --> 00:32:25.080 So instead of becoming the world's policeman or sheriff spreading freedom and civilization 309 00:32:25.080 --> 00:32:31.000 everywhere, what I think we should do is to restore the freedoms we have lost in America 310 00:32:31.000 --> 00:32:35.920 and concern ourselves with a civilization that's crumbling all around us.