A little over 20 years ago, when I was finishing my freshman year in college, I was a full-blown
neoconservative.
But I didn't know it.
I just knew I was not a leftist, and I didn't like Hillary Clinton, so I figured by process
of elimination, I must be a Rush Limbaughian.
So like most people, I just assumed there was no alternative.
Either you were for Hillary or you were for George H.W. Bush, and that was your grand
spectrum of political options in America.
And in particular, I embraced that neoconservative foreign policy with gusto.
The way to show that you weren't some kind of a commie, pinko, liberal was by supporting
the U.S. military as it doled out summary justice to bad guys all over the world.
And frankly, I'll be honest with you, I thought it was kind of exciting to watch it all unfold
on TV.
I never gave the human cost of war a second thought and frankly I was impatient with anybody
who did.
War was like a video game that I could enjoy from the comfort of my home.
Devastation and human suffering were quite beside the point.
The righteous U.S. government was dispensing justice to the wicked and that was that.
What are you, a liberal?
The Persian Gulf War of 1991 was the first U.S. conflict of my college career, and during
the months-long U.S. military buildup in the Gulf known as Operation Desert Shield, I eagerly
supported the mission to anyone foolish enough to listen.
When war came, it was swift and decisive. Very few American casualties were suffered.
The Iraqi forces were decimated. Some 100,000 were burned alive by a chemical agent or buried
alive in the desert while making a retreat. Now believe it or not, this actually bothered
me in spite of how voracious a consumer of war propaganda I was. Nobody defended Saddam
Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, which he undertook in response to Kuwait was slant-drilling
The outcome of that war was nevertheless a terrible tragedy for the Iraqi people, virtually
none of whom had a say in Saddam's decision to invade Kuwait.
So the way it seemed to me was, a far poorer country than our own suddenly had a lot more
widows and orphans, not to mention a great many civilian deaths to grieve over and much
destruction to repair.
Mothers and fathers were crying themselves to exhaustion over children they had lost
or who worse still were dying agonizing deaths before their very eyes.
There's no worse anguish for parents than to watch their children suffer and be unable
to do anything about it.
So I asked myself the question, was it really right that we Americans should meanwhile be
will be celebrating with a Bob Hope special and on cue flattered with the ceaseless reminders
that ours was the most awesomest country ever.
It later emerged that the story that we heard the most as Bob mentioned about the, Bob or
Tom, about what happened in Iraq, we heard this story that the Iraqi troops going into
to Kuwait were so gratuitously wicked that they made a side visit to Kuwaiti hospitals
so that they could take babies out of incubators and just throw them on the hospital floors.
Which I mean it just, first of all that should, alarm bells should have been going off with
that story.
I mean presumably if you want to invade and overtake a country you don't really have time
to stop and throw the babies out of the incubators, like it's just not efficient.
But it turns out that the Kuwaiti government had hired the public relations firm Hill and
Knowlton to sell the idea of military invasion to the American people, and they came up with
this fake atrocity story. And it turns out that the emotional young woman who testified
to this effect in Washington turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador
to the United States.
Now although I had strongly favored military action by the US government from the start
in response to Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, in the wake of George H.W. Bush's declaration
of victory, I could not stop thinking about the lopsided casualty counts, the waves of
killing rained down on a ramshackle army facing the greatest military machine in the world.
And these were soldiers, not civilians, so by the logic of war, I'm supposed to hate
them or at the very least not care about them, and greet their deaths as cause for celebration
rather than regret.
But all of a sudden I was having trouble doing that.
So I went to see my European history professor, and I've mentioned his name in the past and
maybe that was indiscreet.
So there probably should be like a seal of the confessional, there should be a seal of
the office hours.
I don't know what a professor tells you in his office hours.
So I'm not going to tell you who he was.
But this is a European history professor at Harvard, has a very famous wife who teaches
history at MIT.
All right, anyway, I can give you a lot of clues later over lunch, but I went to him
to talk about my misgivings about the war.
He was a liberal in the New Republic magazine since.
And it's wonderful that there are a lot of people in this room who will never even have
heard of the New Republic magazine.
It's just, the world is becoming a better place every day, I think.
But he suggested that I read a recent article in that magazine, Making the Case for War
from a liberal point of view.
And I did read that, and believe it or not, that more or less helped to suppress any contrary
thoughts for a while.
Now, by the early 1990s, I was already beginning to read libertarian literature because of
my support for the market economy.
A lot of people wondered, how did I get through Harvard with my sanity?
And the answer was that I came to the conclusion, having observed what goes on on that campus
and in the city of Cambridge at large, that whatever the heck these people are, I think
I want to be the exact opposite.
So I wanted to be...I took my convictions and decided I wanted to take them to their
logical conclusion.
If I favor the free market, then I want to favor it 100%.
So I began reading a lot of libertarian literature and of course I came across the work of Murray
Rothbard, Mr. Libertarian.
Well that led inevitably to reading his more philosophical works.
Rothbard was a guy who...it wasn't enough for him in 1962 to write a thousand page economic
treatise.
He's just getting started.
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.
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.
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.
Well, same thing, anybody who says he's read all of Rothbard.
Well, you don't know, but he has all these papers that are still yet to be published.
Books are still being published from the Rothbard papers.
You know, well over ten years after his death, they were still coming out with new books they discovered in his papers.
So Rothbard wrote an essay called War, Peace and the State.
You read that essay, you're never the same.
You're never the same. You're never the same again. It leaves an impression on your mind that you never can quite shake.
And Rothbard had famously observed that you can figure out, you can uncover the libertarian position on X
by imagining a gang of thugs carrying out X.
If the thugs aren't allowed to do it, neither is the state.
And we would view the state in exactly the same moral light as we would view the thugs.
So if thugs can't just come up to you and grab your money, no matter how much they promise
you it's for a worthy goal and it's just to help the children and buy flowers for people
and whatever, they still aren't allowed to do that. Well, likewise, a well-dressed group
of thugs calling itself the state can't do it either. The same moral law, just moral
consistency across categories of people was Rothbard's message.
Well, war, peace and the state takes this analysis and applies it to war. If you steal
Still my TV, I can take it back from you, but I can't just walk down the street firing
a gun everywhere and hitting third parties in order to make you surrender my TV. Likewise,
even assuming a war-making state to be in the right, it has no greater moral entitlement
to harm third parties in pursuit of its ends than a private individual does.
To be sure, there are moral complications involved here. For example, there's the issue
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.
That they know that the high moral conscience of other countries will prevent them from bombing the civilians,
so therefore they can get away with their dastardly deeds.
Now, it's not my task here to address, much less resolve, every relevant moral problem.
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,
The Justice and Prudence of War Toward a Libertarian Analysis.
And this morning, before I came here, I actually made up, just so that I could cover a lot of stuff,
and it wouldn't seem like a cop-out when I would say, well, I don't have time to get into this.
A lot of times when people say, I don't have time to get into this, what they're really saying is,
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.
but I genuinely don't so what I did was I made a page on my site just for the people in this audience
with links to things that if I did have more time I would talk about so that's at tomwoods.com
slash readings and so if any of this whatever winds up on youtube all you people as long as my
heirs continue to pay the fees to keep my website going that page should be up in perpetuity so if
So if you're viewing this in the year 2407, tomwoods.com slash readings, still up there.
The links may all be dead by that point, but the site, the page will be up there.
So we take it for granted now, we hardly give it a second thought, that simply because some
politician utters the word war, this magic word, that it's good and right, and just,
that the rights of everyone within the confines of an arbitrary border are abruptly cancelled
and what would in any other circumstance be murder and atrocity now becomes an antiseptic
matter of public policy.
Now following that Persian Gulf War that briefly opened my eyes and then they closed firmly
shut again, we had sanctions imposed on those poor people.
And those sanctions made it impossible for certain things to get into the country and
some of these were very important necessities.
Now many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright,
who at that time was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and later would become
the Secretary of State, she declared that the price of half a million dead children
in Iraq had been, quote, worth it.
And notice what she did not say. She didn't say, oh, I dispute that figure. It couldn't
possibly be that many kids who died as a result of complications stemming from the sanctions.
That's an absurd figure. She didn't say that. She didn't say, Saddam, if only he hadn't
built so many palaces, he could have fed all his people. She didn't say that. She looked
the interviewer in the eye and said half a million kids were worth it in pursuit of one
man she and her colleagues did not like.
Now suppose the Soviet Union, during the height of the Cold War, had starved half a million
children in the course of a sanctions policy. We would never have heard the end of it.
Now it appears certain that during the war, the U.S. government destroyed the civilian
infrastructure of that country as a part of a deliberate war strategy. 18 out of 20 plants
As the generated electricity were taken out, as were the water pumping and sanitation systems.
And we have a document dated January 22, 1991, from the U.S. government, called Iraq Water
Treatment Vulnerabilities.
It says that Iraq's rivers, quote, contain biological materials, pollutants, and are laden
with bacteria.
Unless the water is purified with chlorine, epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis and typhoid could occur.
Well, it won't come as a surprise to learn that importation of chlorine was embargoed after the war.
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.
Parts that were needed to repair the electrical and water purification systems were not allowed to enter the country.
Now, one of the great triumphs of the government propaganda machine in self-described democracies
is the We Are the Government line.
Now, that serves two purposes for the government.
On the one hand, it's hard for the Habsburgs to say to the people,
We are the government, because you know you're never going to be a Habsburg. You're always
going to be on the outs. But in this system, technically, strictly speaking, you could
become president someday. So it's really all of us. We are the government. And it makes
people a little more compliant, because, well, you know, okay, it doesn't seem like some
alien family dominates. It's us in some sense. So that makes people fall into a little bit
more slumber than they might otherwise do, but much more importantly, this idea that
we are the government.
The government's foreign policy now becomes our foreign policy.
So that criticism of the government's foreign policy now is viewed as a personal affront.
We are the government, after all, so how dare you criticize our foreign policy?
For that reason, opponents of American foreign policy should, when speaking on this topic,
eliminate the pronoun we from their vocabulary.
We did not starve those Iraqi kids.
In 2002 and 2003, we did not repeat transparent untruths about the alleged threat from a two-bit
Nobody, whom the U.S. government's own officials had said was safely contained.
We did not lay waste to an already suffering country, killing hundreds of thousands and
displacing four million others.
They did this, the American political class.
We did not.
What some Americans did do, though, was to make sorry excuses for their political overlords.
Some Americans defended a series of policies which, if pursued by the Soviet Union thirty
years ago, they themselves would have condemned as grotesque violations of basic standards
of morality.
But with the U.S. government, the perpetrator, everything was different.
These people became as gullible on foreign policy as they accused left liberals of being
on domestic policy.
They dutifully searched for evidence to corroborate their leaders' claims, even claims their
own leaders had long since abandoned.
They accepted the most transparent propaganda without batting an eye.
Andrew Bacevich, a West Point graduate, 23-year U.S. Army veteran, who describes himself correctly
as a conservative, says this,
Americans in our own time have fallen prey to militarism, manifesting itself in a romanticized
view of soldiers, a tendency to see military power as the truest measure of national greatness,
and outsized expectations regarding the efficacy of force.
To a degree without precedent in American history, Americans have come to define the
nation's strength and well-being in terms of military preparedness, military action,
and the fostering of or nostalgia for military ideals.
Felix Morley is an old right journalist back before the days of the neoconservatives when
some people on the right did see these points about military intervention and were concerned
about it and were slow to endorse it.
And Felix Morley, who helped to found Human Events, the long-running weekly conservative
newspaper that's still around, was founded in the 1940s, said this,
The process of empire building, he said, is essentially mystical.
It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation
is great, that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such, an Englishman to an
Irishman, an American to a Mexican, merely because the first-named countries are in each
are in each case more powerful than their comparatives.
And people who have no individual stature whatsoever
are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense
because it gives them a sense of importance
without the trouble of any personal effort.
That's a nice way of saying that this kind of poisonous nonsense
is eaten up by a lot of losers
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.
Some Americans now get the same sort of lift from the fact that the Stars and Stripes now
floats over detachments of our boys in 40 foreign countries. 40 foreign countries. You
can see he's writing in 1959. How old-fashioned? Only 40? Sober and mature self-examination
is precluded by this juvenile way of thinking. Now, I remember 1984, the Republican convention,
Because I was 12 years old and I watched that convention gavel to gavel.
And I remember the speech that Jean Kirkpatrick, who had been U.S. Ambassador to the UN, gave.
And at the time I cheered on that speech like there was no tomorrow.
And now I look back on it and I think it may have been one of the most destructive speeches
ever given by a U.S. official in the 20th century.
And man, there is some heavy competition for that honor.
Her speech was the blame America first speech.
And she went down a laundry list of things that had happened in the world.
And she said, but you know, instead of blaming the terrorists, they blamed America.
But yet they always blame America first, she said of her opponents.
What she meant by that, of course, is that anybody who says, well, look, yeah, I know
that it's terrible savages who are killing Americans, and nobody excuses terrible savagery,
but maybe if the U.S. government wasn't propping up so many dictators in so many parts of the
world, there wouldn't be as much resentment stirred up.
And this might be, this problem might be improved at least 15 to 20 percent.
We need to at least consider that people might resent this, that we need to consider that
some people in the world might hate Hillary Clinton as much as we do.
You know, like, it is understandable, right? I mean, like, why would this not be understood?
But this just becomes, well, you're blaming America. I mean, it's this second-grade level
mantra that makes it impossible to analyze policies sensibly. Of course, nobody blames
America for a terrorist attack on this or that or this particular episode. Obviously,
the moral guilt must be applied to the perpetrators. Nobody's blamed, nobody says, well, Donald
Rumsfeld is responsible for this bombing of that ship. Well, the guy who bombed the ship
is responsible for that. The point is that if you engage in policies like this, there
is going to be a response. Now, that doesn't make the policies necessarily wrong in and
of themselves. They may be. It just means you have to go into this with your eyes open.
You have to be honest with yourself. There will be consequences. There will be consequences
if people did things to the U.S. We would respond. Well, the U.S. government does things
to them, they respond just common sense. Now I understand, Muslims are irrational and they
don't use their brains and they don't use reason, and so they're just going to bomb
and kill and slaughter no matter what happens, so none of this analysis applies. But I don't
think that's safe to say of all billion Muslims, that every single one of them is unmoved when
his kid is killed in a pile of rubble. Well, I am in no way angrier than I was before because
because of this. I mean, really, we've reduced to arguing this way. In fact, to the contrary,
when we look at U.S. history in the Middle East in the 20th century, what we find is
that the United States actually had an excellent reputation in the Middle East early in the
20th century. Nobody mentions this, mostly because none of them know it. I mean, what
do you think Sean Hannity knows about any of this? I was on Sean Hannity's show once
years ago, and he had never heard the argument that the Great Depression might have been
prolonged by the New Deal.
He'd never heard that.
Here he is, one of the great conservative leaders of the country, and he's never heard
this.
So it's not that I just pick on him at random, I mean he deserves to be singled out.
But for example, something called the King-Crane Commission in 1920 did a survey of public
opinion in Syria, interesting that it was Syria, and found out that Syria wanted to
to be governed by the United States as a League of Nations mandate.
You think that would happen today?
What happened?
What happened in the interim?
What happened?
What's the change?
Well, in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, there are warnings coming from the State Department over and
over and over again.
If the U.S. government gets involved in the Middle East, we are going to attract enemies
we did not have before, we're going to make enemies out of friends we need, and a strategic
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.
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,
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.
That's how people want to be talked to. That's how the so-called conservative movement wants people to be talked to.
In mid-2004, a Zogby poll of people in half a dozen Middle Eastern countries asked them
to identify the best thing that comes to mind about America. Virtually everyone polled replied,
nothing at all. So, war dulls our moral compass, drives a wedge between peoples who have no
drives a wedge between peoples who have no honest quarrel with each other
and encourages a juvenile mentality that makes sobriety and even-handedness
into wimpiness and even treason.
But at least it's good for the economy, right?
Yeah, blowing things up is great for the economy.
Here's Ludwig von Mises, after whom our institute is named.
War is harmful not only to the conquered, but to the conqueror.
Society has arisen out of the works of peace.
The essence of society is peacemaking.
Peace and not war is the father of all things.
Only economic action has created the wealth around us.
Labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness.
Peace builds, war destroys.
and elsewhere. War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings.
The earthquake means good business for construction workers. And cholera improves the business
of physicians, pharmacists, and undertakers. But no one has for that reason yet sought
to celebrate earthquakes and cholera as stimulators of the productive forces in the general interest.
Come on Ludwig, no one, all our journalists celebrate these things.
Oh well, you know, at least this will create jobs.
I know everyone has perished, but the three people left are going to experience a real
boon in employment.
And finally, war can really cause no economic boom, at least not directly, and here's the
central point, since an increase in wealth never does result from destruction of goods.
When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s,
I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime Keynesian miracle could not withstand critical
Social scrutiny, once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary
Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures such as GDP, the Consumer Price
Index and the rate of civilian unemployment, because, of course, we're told that World
War II was a wonderful time economically, it was a great boom in the country.
You hear this from everybody, you probably hear this from professors here.
Again at my little page, tomwoods.com slash readings, I have a video by Professor Higgs
in which he dismantles this so devastatingly, you've got to internalize it so you can show
off to your professors and they'll crawl into a hole and you'll never see them again.
So he goes on to say,
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.
Thus the great wartime boom consisted entirely of
1. some people's mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction
and 2. other people's employment in producing supplies for these warriors
after the government's military labor drain, turning out goods never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions
but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command and control economy.
In no sense was the alleged wartime prosperity comparable to real, normal prosperity.
And Professor Higgs, who recommends his book Crisis and Leviathan, talks there about how
wartime precedents were appealed to in peacetime to justify further expansions of government
power, as he also indicated today.
Leftist intellectuals who favored government planning were practically unanimous in favoring
and U.S. Government Involvement in World War I.
Since they understood the opportunity it presented
for institutional change at home, wartime economic planning they were convinced
would help to erode Americans' conservative beliefs in the limits of government
and the inviolability of private property.
The experience of wartime planning never entirely faded from the national consciousness
and certainly not from that of the left.
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.
The rallying cry was, we planned in war, so let us plan in peace.
War symbolism was ubiquitous in the imagery adopted by Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.
And as Robert Nisbet, the great conservative sociologist
In terms of frequency of use of such symbols by the national government, not even Hitler's
Germany outdid our propagandists.
This was no anomaly.
As Nisbet went on to say, it is in time of war that many of the reforms first advocated
by socialists have been accepted by capitalist governments and made part of the structures
have all been, in one country or another, achieved or advanced under the impress of war."
And then in a recent, I think, blog post, Bob Higgs said this, that it goes beyond even
that.
Even things that don't seem to have direct relationship to war will grow during wartime.
During wartime, many people increase their broad support for the government, and hence
they are less inclined to challenge its actions even when those actions have little or nothing
to do with the war.
Hardly anyone was surprised that real defense spending, as measured in accordance with the
government's own narrow concept, increased by almost 60% between 2000 and 2007, while
real GDP rose by only 18%.
We know, however, that the government's real non-defense outlays increased concurrently
by more than 24%, an increase one-third greater than that of GDP.
When people let down their guard because they, quote, support the troops, they permit the
government to make greater headway in its ceaseless quest to enlarge its spending in
a wide range of areas, many of them strictly civilian in nature.
Well, then we can even look at the planning for war or the equipping the country for war.
When you have a military industrial complex as sophisticated and expansive as that in the United States,
it has consequences for the economy.
The United States government now spends as much on the military as the rest of the world put together.
And I might add, by the way, that 40% of the military budget is now secret,
as is the budget of every intelligence agency.
So there's the prospect of popular oversight under Republican government, up with a small r.
Front loading and political engineering are a couple things I want to tell you about,
about how this actually works.
How do they get all this money for all these weapons systems when some of these weapons systems
are designed for enemies that don't exist anymore, haven't existed for years,
couldn't possibly be relevant to the war on terror, so why do they keep getting funded?
Well, two different things. One is called front-loading. Everybody in military procurement knows what this stuff is.
Front-loading is when you over-promise what a proposed military project can deliver.
Oh, it's going to be unbelievable what this thing can do. It can zap a whole country with the push of a button,
and it can fly, you know, whatever. It can colonize Mars, whatever it is.
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.
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.
Oh, and don't worry, it's going to cost 15 cents. It's going to be unbelievable.
And then it turns out, number one, the thing can't do half the things that was promised. It was supposed to be stealthy,
But all radar systems can see it, so what was the problem with that? What's going on with that?
The second thing is it winds up costing far, far more than envisioned.
So you would think, okay, well at this point then, the show's over. The plug is going to be pulled.
That's where political engineering comes in. It's a deliberate attempt to spread out all the different parts of this project
across as many congressional districts as you can, particularly the districts that have
and the Chairman of important committees representing them.
So that hundreds of districts now have the jobs and the profits of this mission spread all across them.
So now nobody would dare to try to cancel it.
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.
Once you turn on that taxpayer spigot, it can't be turned off.
They've rigged it this way.
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
The Department of Defense, but you all know the reason I can't tell you about that.
The Department of Defense is exempted from audit.
So it's not that they failed the audit and it's really awful.
My gosh, what a miserable failure of that audit.
There is no audit.
But again, you're a commie.
That's just the way they like it.
Is to exploit people's natural inclination to want to support their country.
and you rote them indirectly into supporting these boondoggles that line the pockets of a lot of people, none of whom are you.
So economic consequences, it has political consequences too.
Dr. Higgs talked about that famous warning by James Madison, the executive power is going to be strengthened.
Centralization is going to take place. All that is true.
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.
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,
Stealth and Cunning by an ever-expanding core of government officials.
As we now know in detail, he goes on, the utilization of the FBI and other paramilitary
agencies by presidents and other high executive department officers for the purposes of eavesdropping,
electronic bugging and similarly intimate penetrations of individual privacy goes straight
back to FDR, and the practice has only intensified and widened ever since.
Naturally, all such royalist invasions have been justified right down to Watergate under
the name of national security.
The record is clear and detailed that national security cover-up has been a practice of each
of the presidents since FDR.
I might add, by the way, what Nisbet had to say about conservatism in this respect.
In the 1980s, he wrote that of all the misapplications of the word conservative, he said, the most
Most amusing, in a historical light, is surely the application of conservative to great increases
in military expenditures.
For in America throughout the 20th century, and including four substantial wars abroad,
conservatives had been steadfastly the voices of non-inflationary military budgets and of
an emphasis on trade in the world instead of American nationalism.
In the two world wars, in Korea and in Vietnam, the leaders of American entry into war were
such renowned liberal progressives as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and
John F. Kennedy.
In all four episodes, conservatives, both in the national government and in the rank
and file, were largely hostile to intervention.
He goes on to say that it would be difficult to imagine a combination more at odds with
both traditional conservatism than military adventurism and ideological crusading.
He further recalled that contrary to public opinion, the political left had not opposed
war per se.
Hard leftists have traditionally found much revolutionary potential in war.
Again, Nisbet, Napoleon was the perfect exemplar of revolution as well as of war, not merely
in France but throughout almost all of Europe and even beyond.
Marx and Engels were both keen students of war, profoundly appreciative of its properties
with respect to large-scale institutional change.
From Trotsky and his Red Army down to Mao and Zhou Enlai in China today, the uniform
of the soldier has been the uniform of the revolutionist.
And finally, he said, war is by nature revolutionary in its impact upon a people.
Its values are antithetical in the extreme to the values of kinship-based society with its consecration of tradition, conventionality and age or seniority.
Finally, what does this do to us as human beings?
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.
This is published by Basic Books, which is a nice little coup for us, and it's a collection
of the best anti-war writings in American history.
And we've got people on all sides of the spectrum.
The restriction was you can't be a fascist or a commie, otherwise you're welcome in
this book.
So we've got, it's a great spectrum, and people were talking about, the other speakers
were talking about Randolph Bourne, he's in there, it's just a one-stop shop.
And I did this as a kind of a, oh I don't know, in a spirit of contrition for my own
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
The news of the death or mutilation of thousands of men equally precious on the field of battle is received.
How different is the valuation, he says. How different in universal sympathy.
War seems to reverse our best and boasted civilization,
to carry back human society to the dark ages of barbarism,
to cheapen the public appreciation of human life almost to the standard of brute beasts.
This demoralization of sentiment is not confined to the two or three nations engaged in war.
It extends to the most distant and neutral nations, and they read of thousands slain
or mangled in a single battle with but a little more human sensibility than they would read
the loss of so many pawns by a move on a chessboard.
With what deep sympathy the American nation, even to the very slaves, heard of the suffering
in Ireland by the potato famine. What shiploads of corn and provisions they sent over to relieve
that suffering. But how little of that benevolent sympathy and of that generous aid would they
have given to the same amount of suffering inflicted by war upon the people of a foreign country?
This is one of the very worst works of war. It is not only the demoralization, but almost
the transformation of human nature. We can generally ascertain how many lives have been
and Lost in War.
The tax gatherer lets us know how much money it costs.
But no registry kept on earth can tell us how much is lost to the world by this insensibility
to human suffering which a war produces in the whole family circle of nations.
Now even if we were inclined to care, much of this damage is deliberately kept from the
public eye.
A Florida newspaper told its staff in October 2001, and I'm quoting,
Do not use, in all caps, do not use, photos on page 1a showing civilian casualties from the war on Afghanistan.
All caps do not use wire stories that lead with civilian casualties.
They should be mentioned further down in the story.
If the story needs rewriting to play down the civilian casualties, all caps do it.
That's what I mean, and that's what Burritt means, about the demoralization and the transformation
of human nature.
Centuries earlier, Erasmus spoke about war.
He said, Peace is at once the mother and the nurse of all that is good for man.
War, on a sudden and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful,
whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of
mortals.
Peace shines upon human affairs like the vernal sun.
The fields are cultivated, the gardens bloom, the cattle are fed upon a thousand hills,
new buildings arise, riches flow, pleasures smile, humanity and charity increase, arts
Experts and manufacturers feel the genial warmth of encouragement and the gains of the
poor are more plentiful.
But no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower than what a deluge of miseries and
misfortunes seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action.
The flocks are scattered, the harvests trampled, the husband been butchered, villas and villages
burnt, cities and states that have been ages rising to their flourishing state subverted
by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war.
So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good, of destroying than of building
up.
To these considerations add that the advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far
and wide and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage
redounds only to a few and those unworthy of reaping it.
One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another.
One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another.
The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning.
Whatever is unfortunate in war is severely so indeed, and whatever on the contrary is
called good fortune is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving
its existence from another's woe.
I myself was once blind to these effects of war on my own moral compass, and to how callous
and the course I had become toward entire countries and the fellow human beings who inhabited them.
Now Rush Limbaugh would have you believe that being opposed to war makes you some kind of left liberal.
But as I've said, the best, most sober and least juvenile conservatives have been the slowest to support war.
Left liberals haven't been so good on war themselves, as I show in my book 33 Questions about American History.
The current interventionist foreign policy is bipartisan.
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.
And once in a while they get together and they do something that's both stupid and evil.
And this is called bipartisanship. That's the bipartisan foreign policy.
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.
To remember the ideas of the great international law theorists of the 16th and 17th centuries,
The Conservatives who lecture the world about moral relativism are themselves the worst offenders.
They thoughtlessly approve behavior they would condemn in anyone else, and they gullibly
repeat propaganda they'd laugh at if uttered by any other country.
You also need a healthy skepticism about war propaganda, which has been so grotesquely
wrong so often that no excuse remains to fall for it.
And you need a properly formed moral conscience that will not betray you the moment the flags
start waving and the songs are being sung.
And you need to shut off, once and for all, anyone who tells you that the only way to
To oppose the social democrats of the left is by being a pro-war neo-conservative of
the right. And if it makes you feel any better, Hillary Clinton supported the Iraq War so
you can be against her in everything. Leave all that behind, be a libertarian instead
and have a principled reason to oppose the initiation of force. Murray Rothbard, Mr.
Libertarian, said in a private letter in 1956,
I am getting more and more convinced that the war-peace question is the key to the whole libertarian business, and indeed it is.
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?
When the world's population of orphans increases, let us not celebrate but mourn.
Let us stand against the crowd as the Mises Institute has done courageously for the past 30 years.
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.