WEBVTT NOTE What War Does 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.320 A little over 20 years ago, when I was finishing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown 2 00:00:05.320 --> 00:00:08.400 neoconservative. 3 00:00:08.400 --> 00:00:10.800 But I didn't know it. 4 00:00:10.800 --> 00:00:16.080 I just knew I was not a leftist, and I didn't like Hillary Clinton, so I figured by process 5 00:00:16.080 --> 00:00:21.720 of elimination, I must be a Rush Limbaughian. 6 00:00:21.720 --> 00:00:26.080 So like most people, I just assumed there was no alternative. 7 00:00:26.080 --> 00:00:31.300 Either you were for Hillary or you were for George H.W. Bush, and that was your grand 8 00:00:31.300 --> 00:00:36.880 spectrum of political options in America. 9 00:00:36.880 --> 00:00:43.500 And in particular, I embraced that neoconservative foreign policy with gusto. 10 00:00:43.500 --> 00:00:49.180 The way to show that you weren't some kind of a commie, pinko, liberal was by supporting 11 00:00:49.180 --> 00:00:55.680 the U.S. military as it doled out summary justice to bad guys all over the world. 12 00:00:55.680 --> 00:00:59.680 And frankly, I'll be honest with you, I thought it was kind of exciting to watch it all unfold 13 00:00:59.680 --> 00:01:02.200 on TV. 14 00:01:02.200 --> 00:01:06.920 I never gave the human cost of war a second thought and frankly I was impatient with anybody 15 00:01:06.920 --> 00:01:08.400 who did. 16 00:01:08.400 --> 00:01:13.200 War was like a video game that I could enjoy from the comfort of my home. 17 00:01:13.200 --> 00:01:17.140 Devastation and human suffering were quite beside the point. 18 00:01:17.140 --> 00:01:21.560 The righteous U.S. government was dispensing justice to the wicked and that was that. 19 00:01:21.560 --> 00:01:24.480 What are you, a liberal? 20 00:01:24.480 --> 00:01:31.040 The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first U.S. conflict of my college career, and during 21 00:01:31.040 --> 00:01:38.280 the months-long U.S. military buildup in the Gulf known as Operation Desert Shield, I eagerly 22 00:01:38.280 --> 00:01:43.000 supported the mission to anyone foolish enough to listen. 23 00:01:43.000 --> 00:01:50.000 When war came, it was swift and decisive. Very few American casualties were suffered. 24 00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:56.700 The Iraqi forces were decimated. Some 100,000 were burned alive by a chemical agent or buried 25 00:01:56.700 --> 00:02:02.980 alive in the desert while making a retreat. Now believe it or not, this actually bothered 26 00:02:02.980 --> 00:02:10.940 me in spite of how voracious a consumer of war propaganda I was. Nobody defended Saddam 27 00:02:10.940 --> 00:02:16.840 Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, which he undertook in response to Kuwait was slant-drilling 28 00:02:16.840 --> 00:02:24.880 The outcome of that war was nevertheless a terrible tragedy for the Iraqi people, virtually 29 00:02:24.880 --> 00:02:30.400 none of whom had a say in Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait. 30 00:02:30.400 --> 00:02:35.940 So the way it seemed to me was, a far poorer country than our own suddenly had a lot more 31 00:02:35.940 --> 00:02:42.540 widows and orphans, not to mention a great many civilian deaths to grieve over and much 32 00:02:42.540 --> 00:02:45.440 destruction to repair. 33 00:02:45.440 --> 00:02:50.880 Mothers and fathers were crying themselves to exhaustion over children they had lost 34 00:02:50.880 --> 00:02:57.080 or who worse still were dying agonizing deaths before their very eyes. 35 00:02:57.080 --> 00:03:02.960 There's no worse anguish for parents than to watch their children suffer and be unable 36 00:03:02.960 --> 00:03:06.160 to do anything about it. 37 00:03:06.160 --> 00:03:11.040 So I asked myself the question, was it really right that we Americans should meanwhile be 38 00:03:11.040 --> 00:03:17.540 will be celebrating with a Bob Hope special and on cue flattered with the ceaseless reminders 39 00:03:17.540 --> 00:03:23.540 that ours was the most awesomest country ever. 40 00:03:23.540 --> 00:03:32.540 It later emerged that the story that we heard the most as Bob mentioned about the, Bob or 41 00:03:32.540 --> 00:03:39.780 Tom, about what happened in Iraq, we heard this story that the Iraqi troops going into 42 00:03:39.780 --> 00:03:47.940 to Kuwait were so gratuitously wicked that they made a side visit to Kuwaiti hospitals 43 00:03:47.940 --> 00:03:53.380 so that they could take babies out of incubators and just throw them on the hospital floors. 44 00:03:53.380 --> 00:03:57.060 Which I mean it just, first of all that should, alarm bells should have been going off with 45 00:03:57.060 --> 00:03:58.060 that story. 46 00:03:58.060 --> 00:04:01.900 I mean presumably if you want to invade and overtake a country you don't really have time 47 00:04:01.900 --> 00:04:07.980 to stop and throw the babies out of the incubators, like it's just not efficient. 48 00:04:07.980 --> 00:04:13.900 But it turns out that the Kuwaiti government had hired the public relations firm Hill and 49 00:04:13.900 --> 00:04:18.900 Knowlton to sell the idea of military invasion to the American people, and they came up with 50 00:04:18.900 --> 00:04:24.380 this fake atrocity story. And it turns out that the emotional young woman who testified 51 00:04:24.380 --> 00:04:29.500 to this effect in Washington turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador 52 00:04:29.500 --> 00:04:32.940 to the United States. 53 00:04:32.940 --> 00:04:39.140 Now although I had strongly favored military action by the US government from the start 54 00:04:39.140 --> 00:04:46.380 in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in the wake of George H.W. Bush's declaration 55 00:04:46.380 --> 00:04:53.100 of victory, I could not stop thinking about the lopsided casualty counts, the waves of 56 00:04:53.100 --> 00:05:00.380 killing rained down on a ramshackle army facing the greatest military machine in the world. 57 00:05:00.380 --> 00:05:05.180 And these were soldiers, not civilians, so by the logic of war, I'm supposed to hate 58 00:05:05.180 --> 00:05:11.420 them or at the very least not care about them, and greet their deaths as cause for celebration 59 00:05:11.420 --> 00:05:14.020 rather than regret. 60 00:05:14.020 --> 00:05:17.360 But all of a sudden I was having trouble doing that. 61 00:05:17.360 --> 00:05:21.860 So I went to see my European history professor, and I've mentioned his name in the past and 62 00:05:21.860 --> 00:05:23.260 maybe that was indiscreet. 63 00:05:23.260 --> 00:05:27.340 So there probably should be like a seal of the confessional, there should be a seal of 64 00:05:27.340 --> 00:05:28.340 the office hours. 65 00:05:28.340 --> 00:05:30.940 I don't know what a professor tells you in his office hours. 66 00:05:30.940 --> 00:05:33.300 So I'm not going to tell you who he was. 67 00:05:33.300 --> 00:05:41.180 But this is a European history professor at Harvard, has a very famous wife who teaches 68 00:05:41.180 --> 00:05:42.180 history at MIT. 69 00:05:42.180 --> 00:05:49.660 All right, anyway, I can give you a lot of clues later over lunch, but I went to him 70 00:05:49.660 --> 00:05:52.900 to talk about my misgivings about the war. 71 00:05:52.900 --> 00:05:56.540 He was a liberal in the New Republic magazine since. 72 00:05:56.540 --> 00:05:59.140 And it's wonderful that there are a lot of people in this room who will never even have 73 00:05:59.140 --> 00:06:01.020 heard of the New Republic magazine. 74 00:06:01.020 --> 00:06:05.740 It's just, the world is becoming a better place every day, I think. 75 00:06:05.740 --> 00:06:11.340 But he suggested that I read a recent article in that magazine, Making the Case for War 76 00:06:11.340 --> 00:06:14.600 from a liberal point of view. 77 00:06:14.600 --> 00:06:19.180 And I did read that, and believe it or not, that more or less helped to suppress any contrary 78 00:06:19.180 --> 00:06:22.260 thoughts for a while. 79 00:06:22.260 --> 00:06:27.220 Now, by the early 1990s, I was already beginning to read libertarian literature because of 80 00:06:27.220 --> 00:06:30.900 my support for the market economy. 81 00:06:30.900 --> 00:06:35.340 A lot of people wondered, how did I get through Harvard with my sanity? 82 00:06:35.340 --> 00:06:40.580 And the answer was that I came to the conclusion, having observed what goes on on that campus 83 00:06:40.580 --> 00:06:45.860 and in the city of Cambridge at large, that whatever the heck these people are, I think 84 00:06:45.860 --> 00:06:49.060 I want to be the exact opposite. 85 00:06:49.060 --> 00:06:54.200 So I wanted to be...I took my convictions and decided I wanted to take them to their 86 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:55.200 logical conclusion. 87 00:06:55.200 --> 00:06:59.260 If I favor the free market, then I want to favor it 100%. 88 00:06:59.260 --> 00:07:03.620 So I began reading a lot of libertarian literature and of course I came across the work of Murray 89 00:07:03.620 --> 00:07:06.500 Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian. 90 00:07:06.500 --> 00:07:10.180 Well that led inevitably to reading his more philosophical works. 91 00:07:10.180 --> 00:07:15.780 Rothbard was a guy who...it wasn't enough for him in 1962 to write a thousand page economic 92 00:07:15.780 --> 00:07:16.780 treatise. 93 00:07:16.780 --> 00:07:17.780 He's just getting started. 94 00:07:17.780 --> 00:07:30.780 And then he writes a four-volume history of colonial America and a two-volume history of economic thought. It just goes on. If you had done one of these things, it would make your career. 95 00:07:30.780 --> 00:07:42.780 This guy just did them. And then he wrote movie reviews. He was like ten guys. So I read the work of like three of the Murray Rothbards. I'm still trying to get through. 96 00:07:42.780 --> 00:07:49.780 It reminds me of what St. Isidore of Seville once said of anyone who claimed to have read all of St. Augustine must be a liar. 97 00:07:49.780 --> 00:07:51.780 Well, same thing, anybody who says he's read all of Rothbard. 98 00:07:51.780 --> 00:07:54.780 Well, you don't know, but he has all these papers that are still yet to be published. 99 00:07:54.780 --> 00:07:57.780 Books are still being published from the Rothbard papers. 100 00:07:57.780 --> 00:08:03.780 You know, well over ten years after his death, they were still coming out with new books they discovered in his papers. 101 00:08:03.780 --> 00:08:07.780 So Rothbard wrote an essay called War, Peace and the State. 102 00:08:07.780 --> 00:08:10.780 You read that essay, you're never the same. 103 00:08:10.780 --> 00:08:16.780 You're never the same. You're never the same again. It leaves an impression on your mind that you never can quite shake. 104 00:08:16.780 --> 00:08:25.780 And Rothbard had famously observed that you can figure out, you can uncover the libertarian position on X 105 00:08:25.780 --> 00:08:29.780 by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out X. 106 00:08:29.780 --> 00:08:33.780 If the thugs aren't allowed to do it, neither is the state. 107 00:08:33.780 --> 00:08:37.780 And we would view the state in exactly the same moral light as we would view the thugs. 108 00:08:37.780 --> 00:08:42.300 So if thugs can't just come up to you and grab your money, no matter how much they promise 109 00:08:42.300 --> 00:08:47.020 you it's for a worthy goal and it's just to help the children and buy flowers for people 110 00:08:47.020 --> 00:08:51.860 and whatever, they still aren't allowed to do that. Well, likewise, a well-dressed group 111 00:08:51.860 --> 00:08:57.140 of thugs calling itself the state can't do it either. The same moral law, just moral 112 00:08:57.140 --> 00:09:01.300 consistency across categories of people was Rothbard's message. 113 00:09:01.300 --> 00:09:06.540 Well, war, peace and the state takes this analysis and applies it to war. If you steal 114 00:09:06.540 --> 00:09:11.580 Still my TV, I can take it back from you, but I can't just walk down the street firing 115 00:09:11.580 --> 00:09:18.380 a gun everywhere and hitting third parties in order to make you surrender my TV. Likewise, 116 00:09:18.380 --> 00:09:24.100 even assuming a war-making state to be in the right, it has no greater moral entitlement 117 00:09:24.100 --> 00:09:29.540 to harm third parties in pursuit of its ends than a private individual does. 118 00:09:29.540 --> 00:09:34.180 To be sure, there are moral complications involved here. For example, there's the issue 119 00:09:34.180 --> 00:09:42.180 The issue of innocent human shields, and it's argued that a lot of warlike dictators are in effect using their civilian populations in this way. 120 00:09:42.180 --> 00:09:49.180 That they know that the high moral conscience of other countries will prevent them from bombing the civilians, 121 00:09:49.180 --> 00:09:54.180 so therefore they can get away with their dastardly deeds. 122 00:09:54.180 --> 00:10:00.180 Now, it's not my task here to address, much less resolve, every relevant moral problem. 123 00:10:00.180 --> 00:10:08.180 That's a separate issue. And for that, I refer you not simply to the Rothbard essay, but also to Roderick Long's very important piece, 124 00:10:08.180 --> 00:10:12.180 The Justice and Prudence of War Toward a Libertarian Analysis. 125 00:10:12.180 --> 00:10:17.180 And this morning, before I came here, I actually made up, just so that I could cover a lot of stuff, 126 00:10:17.180 --> 00:10:20.180 and it wouldn't seem like a cop-out when I would say, well, I don't have time to get into this. 127 00:10:20.180 --> 00:10:23.180 A lot of times when people say, I don't have time to get into this, what they're really saying is, 128 00:10:23.180 --> 00:10:28.180 I'm really BSing you and I don't know what I'm talking about, so I'll pretend I don't have time to talk about it. 129 00:10:28.180 --> 00:10:33.940 but I genuinely don't so what I did was I made a page on my site just for the people in this audience 130 00:10:34.580 --> 00:10:40.820 with links to things that if I did have more time I would talk about so that's at tomwoods.com 131 00:10:40.820 --> 00:10:47.140 slash readings and so if any of this whatever winds up on youtube all you people as long as my 132 00:10:47.140 --> 00:10:53.380 heirs continue to pay the fees to keep my website going that page should be up in perpetuity so if 133 00:10:53.380 --> 00:10:59.140 So if you're viewing this in the year 2407, tomwoods.com slash readings, still up there. 134 00:10:59.140 --> 00:11:04.840 The links may all be dead by that point, but the site, the page will be up there. 135 00:11:04.840 --> 00:11:10.000 So we take it for granted now, we hardly give it a second thought, that simply because some 136 00:11:10.000 --> 00:11:19.680 politician utters the word war, this magic word, that it's good and right, and just, 137 00:11:19.680 --> 00:11:25.220 that the rights of everyone within the confines of an arbitrary border are abruptly cancelled 138 00:11:25.220 --> 00:11:31.820 and what would in any other circumstance be murder and atrocity now becomes an antiseptic 139 00:11:31.820 --> 00:11:34.760 matter of public policy. 140 00:11:34.760 --> 00:11:41.200 Now following that Persian Gulf War that briefly opened my eyes and then they closed firmly 141 00:11:41.200 --> 00:11:46.920 shut again, we had sanctions imposed on those poor people. 142 00:11:46.920 --> 00:11:51.160 And those sanctions made it impossible for certain things to get into the country and 143 00:11:51.160 --> 00:11:55.160 some of these were very important necessities. 144 00:11:55.160 --> 00:12:01.180 Now many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, 145 00:12:01.180 --> 00:12:06.060 who at that time was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later would become 146 00:12:06.060 --> 00:12:11.800 the Secretary of State, she declared that the price of half a million dead children 147 00:12:11.800 --> 00:12:15.860 in Iraq had been, quote, worth it. 148 00:12:15.860 --> 00:12:20.860 And notice what she did not say. She didn't say, oh, I dispute that figure. It couldn't 149 00:12:20.860 --> 00:12:25.980 possibly be that many kids who died as a result of complications stemming from the sanctions. 150 00:12:25.980 --> 00:12:30.220 That's an absurd figure. She didn't say that. She didn't say, Saddam, if only he hadn't 151 00:12:30.220 --> 00:12:34.820 built so many palaces, he could have fed all his people. She didn't say that. She looked 152 00:12:34.820 --> 00:12:39.460 the interviewer in the eye and said half a million kids were worth it in pursuit of one 153 00:12:39.460 --> 00:12:43.180 man she and her colleagues did not like. 154 00:12:43.180 --> 00:12:48.020 Now suppose the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War, had starved half a million 155 00:12:48.020 --> 00:12:55.480 children in the course of a sanctions policy. We would never have heard the end of it. 156 00:12:55.480 --> 00:13:00.820 Now it appears certain that during the war, the U.S. government destroyed the civilian 157 00:13:00.820 --> 00:13:08.820 infrastructure of that country as a part of a deliberate war strategy. 18 out of 20 plants 158 00:13:08.820 --> 00:13:15.140 As the generated electricity were taken out, as were the water pumping and sanitation systems. 159 00:13:15.140 --> 00:13:22.100 And we have a document dated January 22, 1991, from the U.S. government, called Iraq Water 160 00:13:22.100 --> 00:13:25.420 Treatment Vulnerabilities. 161 00:13:25.420 --> 00:13:31.460 It says that Iraq's rivers, quote, contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden 162 00:13:31.460 --> 00:13:33.340 with bacteria. 163 00:13:33.340 --> 00:13:43.340 Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis and typhoid could occur. 164 00:13:43.340 --> 00:13:49.340 Well, it won't come as a surprise to learn that importation of chlorine was embargoed after the war. 165 00:13:49.340 --> 00:14:01.340 Even when necessities were not embargoed, Iraqi exports were so restricted by 90%, according to one educated estimate, that there was no money to buy them. 166 00:14:01.340 --> 00:14:09.340 Parts that were needed to repair the electrical and water purification systems were not allowed to enter the country. 167 00:14:09.340 --> 00:14:15.340 Now, one of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies 168 00:14:15.340 --> 00:14:19.340 is the We Are the Government line. 169 00:14:19.340 --> 00:14:23.340 Now, that serves two purposes for the government. 170 00:14:23.340 --> 00:14:27.340 On the one hand, it's hard for the Habsburgs to say to the people, 171 00:14:27.340 --> 00:14:31.380 We are the government, because you know you're never going to be a Habsburg. You're always 172 00:14:31.380 --> 00:14:36.520 going to be on the outs. But in this system, technically, strictly speaking, you could 173 00:14:36.520 --> 00:14:42.700 become president someday. So it's really all of us. We are the government. And it makes 174 00:14:42.700 --> 00:14:47.180 people a little more compliant, because, well, you know, okay, it doesn't seem like some 175 00:14:47.180 --> 00:14:53.980 alien family dominates. It's us in some sense. So that makes people fall into a little bit 176 00:14:53.980 --> 00:14:58.820 more slumber than they might otherwise do, but much more importantly, this idea that 177 00:14:58.820 --> 00:15:01.400 we are the government. 178 00:15:01.400 --> 00:15:07.420 The government's foreign policy now becomes our foreign policy. 179 00:15:07.420 --> 00:15:13.760 So that criticism of the government's foreign policy now is viewed as a personal affront. 180 00:15:13.760 --> 00:15:21.760 We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize our foreign policy? 181 00:15:21.760 --> 00:15:27.040 For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic, 182 00:15:27.040 --> 00:15:32.280 eliminate the pronoun we from their vocabulary. 183 00:15:32.280 --> 00:15:35.360 We did not starve those Iraqi kids. 184 00:15:35.360 --> 00:15:45.880 In 2002 and 2003, we did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat from a two-bit 185 00:15:45.880 --> 00:15:52.480 Nobody, whom the U.S. government's own officials had said was safely contained. 186 00:15:52.480 --> 00:15:57.960 We did not lay waste to an already suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and 187 00:15:57.960 --> 00:16:00.680 displacing four million others. 188 00:16:00.680 --> 00:16:04.640 They did this, the American political class. 189 00:16:04.640 --> 00:16:07.060 We did not. 190 00:16:07.060 --> 00:16:13.900 What some Americans did do, though, was to make sorry excuses for their political overlords. 191 00:16:13.900 --> 00:16:19.580 Some Americans defended a series of policies which, if pursued by the Soviet Union thirty 192 00:16:19.580 --> 00:16:26.060 years ago, they themselves would have condemned as grotesque violations of basic standards 193 00:16:26.060 --> 00:16:27.820 of morality. 194 00:16:27.820 --> 00:16:32.640 But with the U.S. government, the perpetrator, everything was different. 195 00:16:32.640 --> 00:16:38.100 These people became as gullible on foreign policy as they accused left liberals of being 196 00:16:38.100 --> 00:16:40.340 on domestic policy. 197 00:16:40.340 --> 00:16:46.260 They dutifully searched for evidence to corroborate their leaders' claims, even claims their 198 00:16:46.260 --> 00:16:50.020 own leaders had long since abandoned. 199 00:16:50.020 --> 00:16:55.980 They accepted the most transparent propaganda without batting an eye. 200 00:16:55.980 --> 00:17:03.780 Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate, 23-year U.S. Army veteran, who describes himself correctly 201 00:17:03.780 --> 00:17:06.620 as a conservative, says this, 202 00:17:06.620 --> 00:17:13.140 Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized 203 00:17:13.140 --> 00:17:20.280 view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness, 204 00:17:20.280 --> 00:17:25.220 and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force. 205 00:17:25.220 --> 00:17:29.660 To a degree without precedent in American history, Americans have come to define the 206 00:17:29.660 --> 00:17:36.000 nation's strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action, 207 00:17:36.000 --> 00:17:43.040 and the fostering of or nostalgia for military ideals. 208 00:17:43.040 --> 00:17:47.760 Felix Morley is an old right journalist back before the days of the neoconservatives when 209 00:17:47.760 --> 00:17:53.080 some people on the right did see these points about military intervention and were concerned 210 00:17:53.080 --> 00:17:55.720 about it and were slow to endorse it. 211 00:17:55.720 --> 00:18:01.620 And Felix Morley, who helped to found Human Events, the long-running weekly conservative 212 00:18:01.620 --> 00:18:06.200 newspaper that's still around, was founded in the 1940s, said this, 213 00:18:06.200 --> 00:18:11.380 The process of empire building, he said, is essentially mystical. 214 00:18:11.380 --> 00:18:17.180 It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation 215 00:18:17.180 --> 00:18:23.780 is great, that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such, an Englishman to an 216 00:18:23.780 --> 00:18:30.220 Irishman, an American to a Mexican, merely because the first-named countries are in each 217 00:18:30.220 --> 00:18:34.220 are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. 218 00:18:34.220 --> 00:18:38.220 And people who have no individual stature whatsoever 219 00:18:38.220 --> 00:18:42.220 are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense 220 00:18:42.220 --> 00:18:46.220 because it gives them a sense of importance 221 00:18:46.220 --> 00:18:50.220 without the trouble of any personal effort. 222 00:18:50.220 --> 00:18:54.220 That's a nice way of saying that this kind of poisonous nonsense 223 00:18:54.220 --> 00:18:58.220 is eaten up by a lot of losers 224 00:18:58.220 --> 00:19:26.220 Morley added that empire building amounted to an application of mob psychology to the sphere of world politics, and how well it works is seen by considering the emotional satisfaction many English long derived from referring to the empire on which the sun never sets. 225 00:19:26.220 --> 00:19:30.820 Some Americans now get the same sort of lift from the fact that the Stars and Stripes now 226 00:19:30.820 --> 00:19:38.040 floats over detachments of our boys in 40 foreign countries. 40 foreign countries. You 227 00:19:38.040 --> 00:19:46.080 can see he's writing in 1959. How old-fashioned? Only 40? Sober and mature self-examination 228 00:19:46.080 --> 00:19:54.900 is precluded by this juvenile way of thinking. Now, I remember 1984, the Republican convention, 229 00:19:54.900 --> 00:20:03.340 Because I was 12 years old and I watched that convention gavel to gavel. 230 00:20:03.340 --> 00:20:09.860 And I remember the speech that Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been U.S. Ambassador to the UN, gave. 231 00:20:09.860 --> 00:20:15.580 And at the time I cheered on that speech like there was no tomorrow. 232 00:20:15.580 --> 00:20:21.140 And now I look back on it and I think it may have been one of the most destructive speeches 233 00:20:21.140 --> 00:20:25.300 ever given by a U.S. official in the 20th century. 234 00:20:25.300 --> 00:20:29.660 And man, there is some heavy competition for that honor. 235 00:20:29.660 --> 00:20:33.460 Her speech was the blame America first speech. 236 00:20:33.460 --> 00:20:37.820 And she went down a laundry list of things that had happened in the world. 237 00:20:37.820 --> 00:20:44.620 And she said, but you know, instead of blaming the terrorists, they blamed America. 238 00:20:44.620 --> 00:20:49.460 But yet they always blame America first, she said of her opponents. 239 00:20:49.460 --> 00:20:53.000 What she meant by that, of course, is that anybody who says, well, look, yeah, I know 240 00:20:53.000 --> 00:20:58.780 that it's terrible savages who are killing Americans, and nobody excuses terrible savagery, 241 00:20:58.780 --> 00:21:03.620 but maybe if the U.S. government wasn't propping up so many dictators in so many parts of the 242 00:21:03.620 --> 00:21:05.700 world, there wouldn't be as much resentment stirred up. 243 00:21:05.700 --> 00:21:09.780 And this might be, this problem might be improved at least 15 to 20 percent. 244 00:21:09.780 --> 00:21:14.020 We need to at least consider that people might resent this, that we need to consider that 245 00:21:14.020 --> 00:21:17.740 some people in the world might hate Hillary Clinton as much as we do. 246 00:21:17.740 --> 00:21:22.340 You know, like, it is understandable, right? I mean, like, why would this not be understood? 247 00:21:22.340 --> 00:21:27.860 But this just becomes, well, you're blaming America. I mean, it's this second-grade level 248 00:21:27.860 --> 00:21:34.620 mantra that makes it impossible to analyze policies sensibly. Of course, nobody blames 249 00:21:34.620 --> 00:21:40.020 America for a terrorist attack on this or that or this particular episode. Obviously, 250 00:21:40.020 --> 00:21:46.380 the moral guilt must be applied to the perpetrators. Nobody's blamed, nobody says, well, Donald 251 00:21:46.380 --> 00:21:50.780 Rumsfeld is responsible for this bombing of that ship. Well, the guy who bombed the ship 252 00:21:50.780 --> 00:21:55.860 is responsible for that. The point is that if you engage in policies like this, there 253 00:21:55.860 --> 00:22:00.140 is going to be a response. Now, that doesn't make the policies necessarily wrong in and 254 00:22:00.140 --> 00:22:05.540 of themselves. They may be. It just means you have to go into this with your eyes open. 255 00:22:05.540 --> 00:22:09.500 You have to be honest with yourself. There will be consequences. There will be consequences 256 00:22:09.500 --> 00:22:14.600 if people did things to the U.S. We would respond. Well, the U.S. government does things 257 00:22:14.600 --> 00:22:20.080 to them, they respond just common sense. Now I understand, Muslims are irrational and they 258 00:22:20.080 --> 00:22:23.780 don't use their brains and they don't use reason, and so they're just going to bomb 259 00:22:23.780 --> 00:22:28.900 and kill and slaughter no matter what happens, so none of this analysis applies. But I don't 260 00:22:28.900 --> 00:22:36.160 think that's safe to say of all billion Muslims, that every single one of them is unmoved when 261 00:22:36.160 --> 00:22:41.680 his kid is killed in a pile of rubble. Well, I am in no way angrier than I was before because 262 00:22:41.680 --> 00:22:47.980 because of this. I mean, really, we've reduced to arguing this way. In fact, to the contrary, 263 00:22:47.980 --> 00:22:51.440 when we look at U.S. history in the Middle East in the 20th century, what we find is 264 00:22:51.440 --> 00:22:55.720 that the United States actually had an excellent reputation in the Middle East early in the 265 00:22:55.720 --> 00:22:59.840 20th century. Nobody mentions this, mostly because none of them know it. I mean, what 266 00:22:59.840 --> 00:23:04.940 do you think Sean Hannity knows about any of this? I was on Sean Hannity's show once 267 00:23:04.940 --> 00:23:10.160 years ago, and he had never heard the argument that the Great Depression might have been 268 00:23:10.160 --> 00:23:13.160 prolonged by the New Deal. 269 00:23:13.160 --> 00:23:14.160 He'd never heard that. 270 00:23:14.160 --> 00:23:17.520 Here he is, one of the great conservative leaders of the country, and he's never heard 271 00:23:17.520 --> 00:23:18.520 this. 272 00:23:18.520 --> 00:23:24.460 So it's not that I just pick on him at random, I mean he deserves to be singled out. 273 00:23:24.460 --> 00:23:30.960 But for example, something called the King-Crane Commission in 1920 did a survey of public 274 00:23:30.960 --> 00:23:37.600 opinion in Syria, interesting that it was Syria, and found out that Syria wanted to 275 00:23:37.600 --> 00:23:43.100 to be governed by the United States as a League of Nations mandate. 276 00:23:43.100 --> 00:23:45.880 You think that would happen today? 277 00:23:45.880 --> 00:23:46.920 What happened? 278 00:23:46.920 --> 00:23:48.760 What happened in the interim? 279 00:23:48.760 --> 00:23:49.760 What happened? 280 00:23:49.760 --> 00:23:50.760 What's the change? 281 00:23:50.760 --> 00:23:56.960 Well, in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, there are warnings coming from the State Department over and 282 00:23:56.960 --> 00:23:58.040 over and over again. 283 00:23:58.040 --> 00:24:01.920 If the U.S. government gets involved in the Middle East, we are going to attract enemies 284 00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:07.180 we did not have before, we're going to make enemies out of friends we need, and a strategic 285 00:24:07.180 --> 00:24:26.180 And on my tomwoods.com slash readings I have a link to a book on this, Donald Neff's book, Fallen Pillars, where he gives you all the evidence of this. I'm not making this stuff up. 286 00:24:26.180 --> 00:24:36.180 But this doesn't satisfy what people have come to expect. They, like me, as I used to be, we get used to this diet of war propaganda, 287 00:24:36.180 --> 00:24:51.180 of being talked to like this. You Americans are the awesomest of the awesome, and the only reason any people in the world could be unhappy with your government is because of your sheer awesomeness. 288 00:24:51.180 --> 00:24:59.180 That's how people want to be talked to. That's how the so-called conservative movement wants people to be talked to. 289 00:24:59.180 --> 00:25:06.180 In mid-2004, a Zogby poll of people in half a dozen Middle Eastern countries asked them 290 00:25:06.420 --> 00:25:13.420 to identify the best thing that comes to mind about America. Virtually everyone polled replied, 291 00:25:15.660 --> 00:25:22.660 nothing at all. So, war dulls our moral compass, drives a wedge between peoples who have no 292 00:25:22.660 --> 00:25:27.660 drives a wedge between peoples who have no honest quarrel with each other 293 00:25:27.660 --> 00:25:33.660 and encourages a juvenile mentality that makes sobriety and even-handedness 294 00:25:33.660 --> 00:25:36.660 into wimpiness and even treason. 295 00:25:36.660 --> 00:25:39.660 But at least it's good for the economy, right? 296 00:25:39.660 --> 00:25:43.660 Yeah, blowing things up is great for the economy. 297 00:25:43.660 --> 00:25:48.660 Here's Ludwig von Mises, after whom our institute is named. 298 00:25:48.660 --> 00:25:54.060 War is harmful not only to the conquered, but to the conqueror. 299 00:25:54.060 --> 00:25:56.660 Society has arisen out of the works of peace. 300 00:25:56.660 --> 00:25:59.740 The essence of society is peacemaking. 301 00:25:59.740 --> 00:26:03.340 Peace and not war is the father of all things. 302 00:26:03.340 --> 00:26:06.900 Only economic action has created the wealth around us. 303 00:26:06.900 --> 00:26:11.320 Labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. 304 00:26:11.320 --> 00:26:14.600 Peace builds, war destroys. 305 00:26:14.600 --> 00:26:21.300 and elsewhere. War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings. 306 00:26:21.300 --> 00:26:26.600 The earthquake means good business for construction workers. And cholera improves the business 307 00:26:26.600 --> 00:26:33.420 of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers. But no one has for that reason yet sought 308 00:26:33.420 --> 00:26:41.040 to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest. 309 00:26:41.040 --> 00:26:44.600 Come on Ludwig, no one, all our journalists celebrate these things. 310 00:26:44.600 --> 00:26:46.800 Oh well, you know, at least this will create jobs. 311 00:26:46.800 --> 00:26:50.760 I know everyone has perished, but the three people left are going to experience a real 312 00:26:50.760 --> 00:26:54.160 boon in employment. 313 00:26:54.160 --> 00:26:59.600 And finally, war can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, and here's the 314 00:26:59.600 --> 00:27:10.840 central point, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods. 315 00:27:10.840 --> 00:27:28.120 When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, 316 00:27:28.120 --> 00:27:35.280 I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime Keynesian miracle could not withstand critical 317 00:27:35.280 --> 00:27:40.800 Social scrutiny, once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary 318 00:27:40.800 --> 00:27:45.560 Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures such as GDP, the Consumer Price 319 00:27:45.560 --> 00:27:49.340 Index and the rate of civilian unemployment, because, of course, we're told that World 320 00:27:49.340 --> 00:27:53.480 War II was a wonderful time economically, it was a great boom in the country. 321 00:27:53.480 --> 00:27:57.680 You hear this from everybody, you probably hear this from professors here. 322 00:27:57.680 --> 00:28:02.160 Again at my little page, tomwoods.com slash readings, I have a video by Professor Higgs 323 00:28:02.160 --> 00:28:09.020 in which he dismantles this so devastatingly, you've got to internalize it so you can show 324 00:28:09.020 --> 00:28:14.240 off to your professors and they'll crawl into a hole and you'll never see them again. 325 00:28:14.240 --> 00:28:15.240 So he goes on to say, 326 00:28:32.160 --> 00:28:49.160 Employees set to work in factories, shipyards and other facilities, turning out war-related goods the government purchased only after forcing the public to pay for them sooner, via wartime taxes and inflation, or later, via repayment of wartime borrowing. 327 00:28:49.160 --> 00:28:53.160 Thus the great wartime boom consisted entirely of 328 00:28:53.160 --> 00:28:57.160 1. some people's mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction 329 00:28:57.160 --> 00:29:02.160 and 2. other people's employment in producing supplies for these warriors 330 00:29:02.160 --> 00:29:10.160 after the government's military labor drain, turning out goods never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions 331 00:29:10.160 --> 00:29:17.160 but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command and control economy. 332 00:29:17.160 --> 00:29:25.160 In no sense was the alleged wartime prosperity comparable to real, normal prosperity. 333 00:29:25.160 --> 00:29:29.800 And Professor Higgs, who recommends his book Crisis and Leviathan, talks there about how 334 00:29:29.800 --> 00:29:35.240 wartime precedents were appealed to in peacetime to justify further expansions of government 335 00:29:35.240 --> 00:29:39.000 power, as he also indicated today. 336 00:29:39.000 --> 00:29:45.280 Leftist intellectuals who favored government planning were practically unanimous in favoring 337 00:29:45.280 --> 00:29:48.280 and U.S. Government Involvement in World War I. 338 00:29:48.280 --> 00:29:51.280 Since they understood the opportunity it presented 339 00:29:51.280 --> 00:29:56.280 for institutional change at home, wartime economic planning they were convinced 340 00:29:56.280 --> 00:30:01.280 would help to erode Americans' conservative beliefs in the limits of government 341 00:30:01.280 --> 00:30:04.280 and the inviolability of private property. 342 00:30:04.280 --> 00:30:09.280 The experience of wartime planning never entirely faded from the national consciousness 343 00:30:09.280 --> 00:30:11.280 and certainly not from that of the left. 344 00:30:11.280 --> 00:30:21.280 When the Depression came, the Left jumped at the chance to revive the spirit of government planning it had so assiduously cultivated during the Great War. 345 00:30:21.280 --> 00:30:27.280 The rallying cry was, we planned in war, so let us plan in peace. 346 00:30:27.280 --> 00:30:33.280 War symbolism was ubiquitous in the imagery adopted by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. 347 00:30:33.280 --> 00:30:37.280 And as Robert Nisbet, the great conservative sociologist 348 00:30:37.280 --> 00:30:46.800 In terms of frequency of use of such symbols by the national government, not even Hitler's 349 00:30:46.800 --> 00:30:50.300 Germany outdid our propagandists. 350 00:30:50.300 --> 00:30:51.940 This was no anomaly. 351 00:30:51.940 --> 00:30:57.140 As Nisbet went on to say, it is in time of war that many of the reforms first advocated 352 00:30:57.140 --> 00:31:02.700 by socialists have been accepted by capitalist governments and made part of the structures 353 00:31:02.700 --> 00:31:16.620 have all been, in one country or another, achieved or advanced under the impress of war." 354 00:31:16.620 --> 00:31:21.660 And then in a recent, I think, blog post, Bob Higgs said this, that it goes beyond even 355 00:31:21.660 --> 00:31:22.660 that. 356 00:31:22.660 --> 00:31:28.680 Even things that don't seem to have direct relationship to war will grow during wartime. 357 00:31:28.680 --> 00:31:32.880 During wartime, many people increase their broad support for the government, and hence 358 00:31:32.880 --> 00:31:37.420 they are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing 359 00:31:37.420 --> 00:31:39.240 to do with the war. 360 00:31:39.240 --> 00:31:43.880 Hardly anyone was surprised that real defense spending, as measured in accordance with the 361 00:31:43.880 --> 00:31:50.680 government's own narrow concept, increased by almost 60% between 2000 and 2007, while 362 00:31:50.680 --> 00:31:54.120 real GDP rose by only 18%. 363 00:31:54.120 --> 00:31:59.500 We know, however, that the government's real non-defense outlays increased concurrently 364 00:31:59.500 --> 00:32:05.840 by more than 24%, an increase one-third greater than that of GDP. 365 00:32:05.840 --> 00:32:10.940 When people let down their guard because they, quote, support the troops, they permit the 366 00:32:10.940 --> 00:32:16.200 government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge its spending in 367 00:32:16.200 --> 00:32:21.320 a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature. 368 00:32:21.320 --> 00:32:29.320 Well, then we can even look at the planning for war or the equipping the country for war. 369 00:32:29.320 --> 00:32:37.320 When you have a military industrial complex as sophisticated and expansive as that in the United States, 370 00:32:37.320 --> 00:32:40.320 it has consequences for the economy. 371 00:32:40.320 --> 00:32:47.320 The United States government now spends as much on the military as the rest of the world put together. 372 00:32:47.320 --> 00:32:52.320 And I might add, by the way, that 40% of the military budget is now secret, 373 00:32:52.320 --> 00:32:56.120 as is the budget of every intelligence agency. 374 00:32:56.120 --> 00:33:02.320 So there's the prospect of popular oversight under Republican government, up with a small r. 375 00:33:02.320 --> 00:33:05.320 Front loading and political engineering are a couple things I want to tell you about, 376 00:33:05.320 --> 00:33:07.320 about how this actually works. 377 00:33:07.320 --> 00:33:11.320 How do they get all this money for all these weapons systems when some of these weapons systems 378 00:33:11.320 --> 00:33:16.120 are designed for enemies that don't exist anymore, haven't existed for years, 379 00:33:16.120 --> 00:33:22.120 couldn't possibly be relevant to the war on terror, so why do they keep getting funded? 380 00:33:22.120 --> 00:33:27.120 Well, two different things. One is called front-loading. Everybody in military procurement knows what this stuff is. 381 00:33:27.120 --> 00:33:34.120 Front-loading is when you over-promise what a proposed military project can deliver. 382 00:33:34.120 --> 00:33:39.120 Oh, it's going to be unbelievable what this thing can do. It can zap a whole country with the push of a button, 383 00:33:39.120 --> 00:33:43.120 and it can fly, you know, whatever. It can colonize Mars, whatever it is. 384 00:33:43.120 --> 00:33:52.120 And then, because that way we can, you know, extradite people or whatever, and then we can rendition them and whatever, so that no one will be able to have any oversight there. 385 00:33:52.120 --> 00:34:01.120 And then it turns out that as time goes on, we realize that this has been totally over-promised, and also front-loading understates the estimated costs. 386 00:34:01.120 --> 00:34:05.120 Oh, and don't worry, it's going to cost 15 cents. It's going to be unbelievable. 387 00:34:05.120 --> 00:34:10.120 And then it turns out, number one, the thing can't do half the things that was promised. It was supposed to be stealthy, 388 00:34:10.120 --> 00:34:15.120 But all radar systems can see it, so what was the problem with that? What's going on with that? 389 00:34:15.120 --> 00:34:19.120 The second thing is it winds up costing far, far more than envisioned. 390 00:34:19.120 --> 00:34:23.120 So you would think, okay, well at this point then, the show's over. The plug is going to be pulled. 391 00:34:23.120 --> 00:34:30.120 That's where political engineering comes in. It's a deliberate attempt to spread out all the different parts of this project 392 00:34:30.120 --> 00:34:35.120 across as many congressional districts as you can, particularly the districts that have 393 00:34:35.120 --> 00:34:38.120 and the Chairman of important committees representing them. 394 00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:44.120 So that hundreds of districts now have the jobs and the profits of this mission spread all across them. 395 00:34:44.120 --> 00:34:47.120 So now nobody would dare to try to cancel it. 396 00:34:47.120 --> 00:34:55.120 No matter how absurd it is, no matter what an obvious waste it is, how hopeless the project is, it becomes impossible to stop it. 397 00:34:55.120 --> 00:34:59.120 Once you turn on that taxpayer spigot, it can't be turned off. 398 00:34:59.120 --> 00:35:01.120 They've rigged it this way. 399 00:35:01.120 --> 00:35:31.120 And meanwhile, again, I say this as somebody I was, you know, I'm not a left-winger or anything like that, I just can't get over the conservatives who haven't bothered to educate themselves about this, who just, without a thought, without a thought, just give a blanket endorsement to the Pentagon. Blanket endorsement. Because if you don't support them, you must be some kind of commie. No, it just means you don't like being scammed constantly and being taken advantage of. And that's what's happening all the time. Now, I would tell you about the most recent audit of the Department 400 00:35:31.120 --> 00:35:35.120 The Department of Defense, but you all know the reason I can't tell you about that. 401 00:35:35.120 --> 00:35:38.120 The Department of Defense is exempted from audit. 402 00:35:38.120 --> 00:35:42.120 So it's not that they failed the audit and it's really awful. 403 00:35:42.120 --> 00:35:44.120 My gosh, what a miserable failure of that audit. 404 00:35:44.120 --> 00:35:46.120 There is no audit. 405 00:35:46.120 --> 00:35:48.120 But again, you're a commie. 406 00:35:48.120 --> 00:35:50.120 That's just the way they like it. 407 00:35:50.120 --> 00:35:56.120 Is to exploit people's natural inclination to want to support their country. 408 00:35:56.120 --> 00:36:05.620 and you rote them indirectly into supporting these boondoggles that line the pockets of a lot of people, none of whom are you. 409 00:36:05.620 --> 00:36:09.120 So economic consequences, it has political consequences too. 410 00:36:09.120 --> 00:36:15.120 Dr. Higgs talked about that famous warning by James Madison, the executive power is going to be strengthened. 411 00:36:15.120 --> 00:36:19.120 Centralization is going to take place. All that is true. 412 00:36:19.120 --> 00:36:30.120 Robert Nisbet, let me quote, he says the day is long past when this phrase, he means national security, was restricted to what is required in actual war. 413 00:36:30.120 --> 00:36:40.120 As everyone knows, it has been since World War II under FDR, a constantly widening cloak or umbrella for governmental actions of every conceivable degree of power, 414 00:36:40.120 --> 00:36:45.120 Stealth and Cunning by an ever-expanding core of government officials. 415 00:36:45.120 --> 00:36:50.120 As we now know in detail, he goes on, the utilization of the FBI and other paramilitary 416 00:36:50.120 --> 00:36:55.620 agencies by presidents and other high executive department officers for the purposes of eavesdropping, 417 00:36:55.620 --> 00:37:00.760 electronic bugging and similarly intimate penetrations of individual privacy goes straight 418 00:37:00.760 --> 00:37:06.120 back to FDR, and the practice has only intensified and widened ever since. 419 00:37:06.120 --> 00:37:11.360 Naturally, all such royalist invasions have been justified right down to Watergate under 420 00:37:11.360 --> 00:37:13.640 the name of national security. 421 00:37:13.640 --> 00:37:18.280 The record is clear and detailed that national security cover-up has been a practice of each 422 00:37:18.280 --> 00:37:21.600 of the presidents since FDR. 423 00:37:21.600 --> 00:37:28.460 I might add, by the way, what Nisbet had to say about conservatism in this respect. 424 00:37:28.460 --> 00:37:35.620 In the 1980s, he wrote that of all the misapplications of the word conservative, he said, the most 425 00:37:35.620 --> 00:37:42.360 Most amusing, in a historical light, is surely the application of conservative to great increases 426 00:37:42.360 --> 00:37:44.500 in military expenditures. 427 00:37:44.500 --> 00:37:51.020 For in America throughout the 20th century, and including four substantial wars abroad, 428 00:37:51.020 --> 00:37:55.820 conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets and of 429 00:37:55.820 --> 00:38:00.420 an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism. 430 00:38:00.420 --> 00:38:05.900 In the two world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam, the leaders of American entry into war were 431 00:38:05.900 --> 00:38:11.720 such renowned liberal progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and 432 00:38:11.720 --> 00:38:13.420 John F. Kennedy. 433 00:38:13.420 --> 00:38:17.780 In all four episodes, conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank 434 00:38:17.780 --> 00:38:22.300 and file, were largely hostile to intervention. 435 00:38:22.300 --> 00:38:26.300 He goes on to say that it would be difficult to imagine a combination more at odds with 436 00:38:26.300 --> 00:38:32.540 both traditional conservatism than military adventurism and ideological crusading. 437 00:38:32.540 --> 00:38:37.180 He further recalled that contrary to public opinion, the political left had not opposed 438 00:38:37.180 --> 00:38:39.380 war per se. 439 00:38:39.380 --> 00:38:44.420 Hard leftists have traditionally found much revolutionary potential in war. 440 00:38:44.420 --> 00:38:50.900 Again, Nisbet, Napoleon was the perfect exemplar of revolution as well as of war, not merely 441 00:38:50.900 --> 00:38:55.540 in France but throughout almost all of Europe and even beyond. 442 00:38:55.540 --> 00:39:00.140 Marx and Engels were both keen students of war, profoundly appreciative of its properties 443 00:39:00.140 --> 00:39:04.140 with respect to large-scale institutional change. 444 00:39:04.140 --> 00:39:09.540 From Trotsky and his Red Army down to Mao and Zhou Enlai in China today, the uniform 445 00:39:09.540 --> 00:39:13.660 of the soldier has been the uniform of the revolutionist. 446 00:39:13.660 --> 00:39:19.520 And finally, he said, war is by nature revolutionary in its impact upon a people. 447 00:39:19.520 --> 00:39:32.520 Its values are antithetical in the extreme to the values of kinship-based society with its consecration of tradition, conventionality and age or seniority. 448 00:39:32.520 --> 00:39:36.520 Finally, what does this do to us as human beings? 449 00:39:36.520 --> 00:39:48.520 Well, I'm happy to say that several years ago I had an opportunity to write a little book called We Who Dared to Say No to War, which I did as an anthology with a friend, Murray Polner. 450 00:39:48.520 --> 00:39:52.420 This is published by Basic Books, which is a nice little coup for us, and it's a collection 451 00:39:52.420 --> 00:39:56.020 of the best anti-war writings in American history. 452 00:39:56.020 --> 00:39:58.680 And we've got people on all sides of the spectrum. 453 00:39:58.680 --> 00:40:02.840 The restriction was you can't be a fascist or a commie, otherwise you're welcome in 454 00:40:02.840 --> 00:40:03.840 this book. 455 00:40:03.840 --> 00:40:07.100 So we've got, it's a great spectrum, and people were talking about, the other speakers 456 00:40:07.100 --> 00:40:11.560 were talking about Randolph Bourne, he's in there, it's just a one-stop shop. 457 00:40:11.560 --> 00:40:17.680 And I did this as a kind of a, oh I don't know, in a spirit of contrition for my own 458 00:40:17.680 --> 00:40:47.680 and in this book we have a selection from a 19th century figure you've never heard of named Elhue Burritt and Burritt noted the great sympathy that the human race extended to those who have been the victims of misfortunes, famine, shipwreck, railway accidents, whatever, but he then invites his readers, and I'm quoting, to compare the feeling with which the community hears of the loss or peril of a few human lives by these accidents with which the 459 00:40:47.680 --> 00:40:55.680 The news of the death or mutilation of thousands of men equally precious on the field of battle is received. 460 00:40:55.680 --> 00:41:00.680 How different is the valuation, he says. How different in universal sympathy. 461 00:41:00.680 --> 00:41:04.680 War seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization, 462 00:41:04.680 --> 00:41:08.680 to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism, 463 00:41:08.680 --> 00:41:14.680 to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts. 464 00:41:14.680 --> 00:41:19.960 This demoralization of sentiment is not confined to the two or three nations engaged in war. 465 00:41:19.960 --> 00:41:25.240 It extends to the most distant and neutral nations, and they read of thousands slain 466 00:41:25.240 --> 00:41:30.400 or mangled in a single battle with but a little more human sensibility than they would read 467 00:41:30.400 --> 00:41:34.800 the loss of so many pawns by a move on a chessboard. 468 00:41:34.800 --> 00:41:39.520 With what deep sympathy the American nation, even to the very slaves, heard of the suffering 469 00:41:39.520 --> 00:41:45.540 in Ireland by the potato famine. What shiploads of corn and provisions they sent over to relieve 470 00:41:45.540 --> 00:41:51.760 that suffering. But how little of that benevolent sympathy and of that generous aid would they 471 00:41:51.760 --> 00:41:58.000 have given to the same amount of suffering inflicted by war upon the people of a foreign country? 472 00:41:58.000 --> 00:42:03.200 This is one of the very worst works of war. It is not only the demoralization, but almost 473 00:42:03.200 --> 00:42:09.020 the transformation of human nature. We can generally ascertain how many lives have been 474 00:42:09.020 --> 00:42:10.460 and Lost in War. 475 00:42:10.460 --> 00:42:14.100 The tax gatherer lets us know how much money it costs. 476 00:42:14.100 --> 00:42:20.340 But no registry kept on earth can tell us how much is lost to the world by this insensibility 477 00:42:20.340 --> 00:42:27.620 to human suffering which a war produces in the whole family circle of nations. 478 00:42:27.620 --> 00:42:33.940 Now even if we were inclined to care, much of this damage is deliberately kept from the 479 00:42:33.940 --> 00:42:35.540 public eye. 480 00:42:35.540 --> 00:42:41.340 A Florida newspaper told its staff in October 2001, and I'm quoting, 481 00:42:41.340 --> 00:42:49.740 Do not use, in all caps, do not use, photos on page 1a showing civilian casualties from the war on Afghanistan. 482 00:42:49.740 --> 00:42:54.740 All caps do not use wire stories that lead with civilian casualties. 483 00:42:54.740 --> 00:42:58.240 They should be mentioned further down in the story. 484 00:42:58.240 --> 00:43:05.800 If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, all caps do it. 485 00:43:05.800 --> 00:43:11.600 That's what I mean, and that's what Burritt means, about the demoralization and the transformation 486 00:43:11.600 --> 00:43:14.120 of human nature. 487 00:43:14.120 --> 00:43:18.000 Centuries earlier, Erasmus spoke about war. 488 00:43:18.000 --> 00:43:23.240 He said, Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man. 489 00:43:23.240 --> 00:43:29.400 War, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, 490 00:43:29.400 --> 00:43:34.440 whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of 491 00:43:34.440 --> 00:43:36.160 mortals. 492 00:43:36.160 --> 00:43:39.240 Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun. 493 00:43:39.240 --> 00:43:44.120 The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills, 494 00:43:44.120 --> 00:43:50.040 new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts 495 00:43:50.040 --> 00:43:54.320 Experts and manufacturers feel the genial warmth of encouragement and the gains of the 496 00:43:54.320 --> 00:43:56.420 poor are more plentiful. 497 00:43:56.420 --> 00:44:01.200 But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower than what a deluge of miseries and 498 00:44:01.200 --> 00:44:07.240 misfortunes seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action. 499 00:44:07.240 --> 00:44:12.440 The flocks are scattered, the harvests trampled, the husband been butchered, villas and villages 500 00:44:12.440 --> 00:44:17.100 burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted 501 00:44:17.100 --> 00:44:20.940 by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. 502 00:44:20.940 --> 00:44:25.760 So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good, of destroying than of building 503 00:44:25.760 --> 00:44:26.760 up. 504 00:44:26.760 --> 00:44:31.780 To these considerations add that the advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far 505 00:44:31.780 --> 00:44:36.940 and wide and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage 506 00:44:36.940 --> 00:44:41.740 redounds only to a few and those unworthy of reaping it. 507 00:44:41.740 --> 00:44:44.860 One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another. 508 00:44:44.860 --> 00:44:48.220 One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. 509 00:44:48.220 --> 00:44:53.120 The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. 510 00:44:53.120 --> 00:44:57.520 Whatever is unfortunate in war is severely so indeed, and whatever on the contrary is 511 00:44:57.520 --> 00:45:03.360 called good fortune is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving 512 00:45:03.360 --> 00:45:07.060 its existence from another's woe. 513 00:45:07.060 --> 00:45:12.400 I myself was once blind to these effects of war on my own moral compass, and to how callous 514 00:45:12.400 --> 00:45:18.400 and the course I had become toward entire countries and the fellow human beings who inhabited them. 515 00:45:18.400 --> 00:45:23.400 Now Rush Limbaugh would have you believe that being opposed to war makes you some kind of left liberal. 516 00:45:23.400 --> 00:45:30.400 But as I've said, the best, most sober and least juvenile conservatives have been the slowest to support war. 517 00:45:30.400 --> 00:45:36.400 Left liberals haven't been so good on war themselves, as I show in my book 33 Questions about American History. 518 00:45:36.400 --> 00:45:40.400 The current interventionist foreign policy is bipartisan. 519 00:45:40.400 --> 00:45:47.400 And you'll recall what one of my friends said about bipartisanship. We have two parties in this country, the stupid party and the evil party. 520 00:45:47.400 --> 00:45:51.400 And once in a while they get together and they do something that's both stupid and evil. 521 00:45:51.400 --> 00:45:56.400 And this is called bipartisanship. That's the bipartisan foreign policy. 522 00:45:56.400 --> 00:46:03.400 No, you don't need to be a left liberal to refuse to be swept away by war propaganda. All you need is to be humane. 523 00:46:03.400 --> 00:46:08.400 To remember the ideas of the great international law theorists of the 16th and 17th centuries, 524 00:46:08.400 --> 00:46:26.000 The Conservatives who lecture the world about moral relativism are themselves the worst offenders. 525 00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:30.800 They thoughtlessly approve behavior they would condemn in anyone else, and they gullibly 526 00:46:30.800 --> 00:46:36.240 repeat propaganda they'd laugh at if uttered by any other country. 527 00:46:36.240 --> 00:46:40.980 You also need a healthy skepticism about war propaganda, which has been so grotesquely 528 00:46:40.980 --> 00:46:45.840 wrong so often that no excuse remains to fall for it. 529 00:46:45.840 --> 00:46:53.200 And you need a properly formed moral conscience that will not betray you the moment the flags 530 00:46:53.200 --> 00:46:57.040 start waving and the songs are being sung. 531 00:46:57.040 --> 00:47:01.400 And you need to shut off, once and for all, anyone who tells you that the only way to 532 00:47:01.400 --> 00:47:06.540 To oppose the social democrats of the left is by being a pro-war neo-conservative of 533 00:47:06.540 --> 00:47:11.200 the right. And if it makes you feel any better, Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq War so 534 00:47:11.200 --> 00:47:18.000 you can be against her in everything. Leave all that behind, be a libertarian instead 535 00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:23.560 and have a principled reason to oppose the initiation of force. Murray Rothbard, Mr. 536 00:47:23.560 --> 00:47:26.680 Libertarian, said in a private letter in 1956, 537 00:47:26.680 --> 00:47:34.680 I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, and indeed it is. 538 00:47:34.680 --> 00:47:41.680 If we don't get this right, who cares about the minimum wage or the Department of Education or any of these other pet issues? 539 00:47:41.680 --> 00:47:47.680 When the world's population of orphans increases, let us not celebrate but mourn. 540 00:47:47.680 --> 00:47:54.680 Let us stand against the crowd as the Mises Institute has done courageously for the past 30 years. 541 00:47:56.680 --> 00:48:11.680 And even if our numbers are few, our resistance serves as a reminder to anyone who cares that the best instincts of humanity have not perished and that the flame of justice still burns in the human heart.