“Rarely in history has a war seemed so just to so many.” ~ Michael Bess

“Participation in the war against Hitler remains almost wholly sacrosanct, nearly in the realm of theology.” ~ Bruce Russett

On September 1, 1939 — 70 years ago — Germany attacked Poland and officially began World War II. Although over 50 million people died in the war — including 405,000 Americans — it is considered to be the Good War. The fact that most of deaths were on the Allied side (the “good” side), the majority of those killed were civilians, hundreds of millions were wounded — including 671,000 Americans — and/or made refugees, homeless, widows, or orphans, hundreds of billions of dollars worth of property was destroyed, hundreds of billions of dollars more were wasted on armaments, and untold millions underwent an incomprehensible amount of suffering, misery, and loss doesn’t seem to matter either. World War II is still universally recognized as the Good War.

How is it possible to make such a description of such carnage on a grand scale?

As John V. Denson explains in his essay “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Shot” in his book A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt:

Part of the mythology that surrounds this war is that it was the “last good war.” It was a “just” war because it was defensive. Despite President Roosevelt’s supreme efforts to keep America neutral regarding controversies in Europe and Asia, the Japanese launched an unprovoked surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, thereby “forcing” America into the fray. It was also a “noble” war because America fought evil tyrannies known as Nazism in Germany and fascism in Italy and Japan.

From the American point of view, World War II is basically considered to be the Good War for two reasons: Pearl Harbor and Hitler.

But setting aside for a moment the facts of Roosevelt’s duplicity and culpability, as well as the U.S. provocation of Japan: Was it necessary for 405,000 American soldiers to die to avenge the 2,400 (1,177 were from one ship, the USS Arizona) who were killed at Pearl Harbor? Was it moral to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians in Japanese cities because Japan bombed the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, a military target? And setting aside for another moment the folly of U.S. intervention in World War I, which prevented a dictated peace settlement and paved the way for the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, thus facilitating the rise of Hitler: Was it necessary that tens of millions were slaughtered to prevent Hitler from slaughtering millions? Was it wise to join forces with a brutal dictator like Stalin, who had already killed millions, with the result that he enslaved half of Europe under communism?

It is time to rethink the Good War.

World War I

“The Second World War,” as explained by the widely-published British military historian John Keegan in his book of that name, “in its origin, nature and course, is inexplicable except by reference to the First; and Germany — which, whether or not it is to be blamed for the outbreak, certainly struck the first blow — undoubtedly went to war in 1939 to recover the place in the world it had lost by its defeat in 1918.” Not only would World War II never have taken place without World War I: “The first war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far as one event causes another,” said British historian A. J. P. Taylor (1906—1990) in his seminal work The Origins of the Second World War. “Germany fought specifically in the second war to reverse the verdict of the first and to destroy the settlement that followed it,” adds Taylor. “This is not peace,” said French Marshal Ferdinand Foch after Versailles, “it is an armistice for twenty years.”

World War II as we know it would never have taken place without U.S. intervention in World War I. Just before the Second Battle of the Marne, only five months before the armistice of November 11, 1918, German armies, as related by John Keegan,

occupied the whole of western Russia . . . enclosed Kiev . . . and cut off from the rest of the country one-third of Russia’s population, one-third of its agricultural land and more than one-half of its industry. . . . German expeditionary forces operated as far east as Georgia in Transcaucasia and as far south as the Bulgarian frontier with Greece and the plain of Po in Italy. Through her Austrian and Bulgarian satellites Germany controlled the whole of the Balkans and, by her alliance with Turkey, extended her power as far away as northern Arabia and northern Persia. In Scandinavia, Sweden remained a friendly neutral, while Germany was helping Finland to gain its independence from the Bolsheviks . . . . In distant south-east Africa a German colonial army kept in play an Allied army ten times its size. And in the west, on the war’s critical front, the German armies stood within fifty miles of Paris. In five great offensives, begun the previous March, the German high command had regained all the territory contested with France since the First Battle of the Marne fought four years earlier. A sixth offensive promised to carry its spearheads to the French capital and win the war.

The United States officially declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. By June of that year, the first U.S. troops landed in France. By March of 1918, 250,000 U.S. doughboys were in France. That number increased to 1 million by the time of the Second Battle of the Marne. But even after this and subsequent victories for the Allies, no battles were ever fought on German soil.

World War I was not our war. In a memo written at the end of World War II, Churchill wrote:

This war should never have come unless, under American and modernizing pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones. No doubt these views are very unfashionable.

The Revolutionary War was our war. The War of 1812 was our war. The Mexican War was our war. The Spanish-American War was our war. The Philippine-American War was our war. But World War I was not our war. Had we stayed out of it, another European war would have come to an end — as they had for centuries. The history of Europe is the history of war.

European Wars

The America Founding Fathers, whatever their faults, realized this. Most educated people are familiar with the “isolationist” sentiments of George Washington in his farewell address:

The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible.

Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.

Why, by interweaving our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice?

It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world.

But it is our third president, Thomas Jefferson, who had spent time in Europe, that over and over and over again warned about getting embroiled in European affairs:

For years we have been looking as spectators on our brethren in Europe, afflicted by all those evils which necessarily follow an abandonment of the moral rules which bind men and nations together. Connected with them in friendship and commerce, we have happily so far kept aloof from their calamitous conflicts, by a steady observance of justice towards all, by much forbearance and multiplied sacrifices.

We have seen with sincere concern the flames of war lighted up again in Europe, and nations with which we have the most friendly and useful relations engaged in mutual destruction. While we regret the miseries in which we see others involved let us bow with gratitude to that kind Providence which, inspiring with wisdom and moderation our late legislative councils while paced under the urgency of the greatest wrongs, guarded us from hastily entering into the sanguinary contest, and left us only to look on and to pity its ravages.

Believing that the happiness of mankind is best promoted by the useful pursuits of peace, that on these alone a stable prosperity can be founded, that the evils of war are great in their endurance, and have a long reckoning for ages to come, I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side.

You will do what is right, leaving the people of Europe to act their follies and crimes among themselves, while we pursue in good faith the paths of peace and prosperity.

Since this happy separation, our nation has wisely avoided entangling itself in the system of European interests, has taken no side between its rival powers, attached itself to none of its ever-changing confederacies. Their peace is desirable; and you do me justice in saying that to preserve and secure this, has been the constant aim of my administration.

Peace and abstinence from European interferences are our objects, and so will continue while the present order of things in America remain uninterrupted.

I have used my best endeavors to keep our country uncommitted in the troubles which afflict Europe, and which assail us on every side.

Nothing is so important as that America shall separate herself from the systems of Europe, and establish one of her own. Our circumstances, our pursuits, our interests, are distinct. The principles of our policy should be so also. All entanglements with that quarter of the globe should be avoided if we mean that peace and justice shall be the polar stars of the American societies.

I am decidedly of opinion we should take no part in European quarrels, but cultivate peace and commerce with all.

I am for free commerce with all nations, political connection with none, and little or no diplomatic establishment. And I am not for linking ourselves by new treaties with the quarrels of Europe, entering that field of slaughter to preserve their balance, or joining in the confederacy of Kings to war against the principles of liberty.

At such a distance from Europe and with such an ocean between us, we hope to meddle little in its quarrels or combinations. Its peace and its commerce are what we shall court.

Determined as we are to avoid, if possible, wasting the energies of our people in war and destruction, we shall avoid implicating ourselves with the powers of Europe, even in support of principles which we mean to pursue. They have so many other interests different from ours, that we must avoid being entangled in them.

In 1941, Representative Frances Bolton (R-OH), in the Congressional Record, and historian Charles A. Beard, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, each presented lists of the various European wars. John Keegan points out that “Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the first successful machine-gun, is alleged to have given up experiments in electrical engineering in 1883 on the advice of a fellow American who said: ‘Hang your electricity! If you want to make your fortune, invent something which will allow those fool Europeans to kill each other more quickly.’”

American Foreign Policy

The United States followed Washington’s “great rule” for most of the nineteenth century. In the midst of enthusiasm for Greece in its nationalist struggle against the Ottoman Turks and Latin America against Spain, Secretary of State (and future president) John Quincy Adams delivered a brief address on American foreign policy on the Fourth of July in 1821 in which he argued for a policy of sympathy and example, but not intervention:

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been unfurled, there will her [America's] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

Likewise, when the Hungarian nationalist Louis Kossuth sought American aid in the struggle for Hungarian independence, Henry Clay remarked that “the cause of liberty” is better served by “avoiding the distant wars of Europe.” We should instead “keep our lamp burning brightly on this Western Shore, as a light to all nations, than to hazard its utter extinction, amid the ruins of fallen or falling republics in Europe,” said Clay.

When President Grover Cleveland delivered his first inaugural address in 1885, he saw no reason to deviate from a century of nonintervention:

The genius of our institutions, the needs of our people in their home life, and the attention which is demanded for the settlement and development of the resources of our vast territory dictate the scrupulous avoidance of any departure from the foreign policy commended by the history, the traditions, and the prosperity of our republic.

This does not mean that U.S. forces never landed in Central and South America or that the U.S. Navy never sailed to the Far East. These things happened every year or so, but always to protect U.S. citizens or promote U.S. interests. The acquisitions, absorptions, imperialism, and military expansionism of the United States in the nineteenth century were primarily continental.

The big shift in American foreign policy began with the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy and the 1898 annexation of Hawaii — a de facto American protectorate since the 1850s. (It should be noted that without the annexation of Hawaii there would have been no Pearl Harbor to be bombed by the Japanese; just like without the purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 there would have been no fighting with Japan in the Aleutian Islands in 1942—1943, which resulted in the deaths of 1,500 American soldiers.) The seizing of Hawaii was followed by the acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam from Spain during the Spanish-American War. The United States was fast becoming a global imperial power — like the Europeans.

But after being reelected on the campaign slogan of “He kept us out of war,” President Wilson, not five months later, asked Congress for a declaration of war against Germany to make the world “safe for Democracy.” The vote was 82—6 in the Senate and 373—50 in the House — in favor of jettisoning the foreign policy of the Founders. The cost in American lives was 117,000.

The Great War — with its death and destruction on a scale never seen before in history, tremendous expansion of government power, unprecedented violations of civil liberties, artificial creation of countries like Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Iraq, Carthaginian peace imposed on Germany, and starvation blockade of Germany that former president Herbert Hoover called “a wicked thrust of Allied militarism and punishment” — was the great mistake, as far as America was concerned.

The Interwar Years

All of this was almost universally recognized in the United States in the interim between the world wars. The spirit of peace and nonintervention prevailed. Disillusionment with war spread throughout society. The horrors of war were graphically depicted in literature and film. In 1921, Eugene Debs, who had been sent to prison in 1918 for urging resistance to conscription, had his sentence commuted and was received by President Harding at the White House.

“Revisionist” books, like The Genesis of the World War (1926) by Harry Elmer Barnes (1889—1968), were published by the major publishing houses. The German antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which appeared in 1928, was translated in English and made into a movie in 1930. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler denounced war after his retirement in his 1935 book War Is a Racket.

New peace and pacifist organizations were formed. After winning the right to vote, women turned more of their attention to the peace effort. Women founded the War Resister League in 1924 as a registry for those who refused to participate in war. The Peace Letter campaign of 1925 sought and received signatures on a pledge to “refuse to support or render war service to any Government which resorts to arms.” Albert Einstein and other intellectuals actively supported campaigns for conscientious objection and against conscription. Hundreds of college students signed a pledge that they would not “support the United States government in any war it may conduct.” There were student strikes in the mid-1930s to protest the growing threat of war. Advocates of strict neutrality called for the embargoing of all belligerents to prevent economic interests from dragging the country into war. As Spain erupted into civil war, the Emergency Peace Campaign sponsored meetings in hundreds of American cities in 1936. The following year the group launched the No-Foreign-War Crusade to bolster the antiwar movement. The Keep America Out of War Congress was formed in 1938. Even many American organizations that supported FDR’s domestic agenda opposed his foreign policy.

The Five-Power Treaty, signed by the United States, Britain, France, Japan, and Italy in 1922, was an agreement to voluntarily scrap warships and limit the construction of new ones. The Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed in 1928 by the United States and the other major powers as they pledged to renounce war as an instrument of national policy. The Nye Committee in the U.S. Senate, which met between 1934 and 1935, investigated the munitions industry and documented not only the large profits made by arms manufacturers during World War I, but price fixing, the bribing of public officials, and collusion between U.S. and British firms. The U.S. Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts beginning in 1935. The proposed amendment to the Constitution by Rep. Louis Ludlow (D-IN), introduced several times in Congress beginning in 1935, called for a national referendum on congressional declarations of war, unless the United States was attacked first. General Smedley Butler recommended a Peace Amendment that would prohibit the removal of the Army from U.S. soil, limit the distance that Navy ships could steam from our coasts, and limit the distance that military aircraft could fly from our borders.

It was the same even after the start of the war in Europe. The America First Committee was formed in 1940 to try to keep the United States out of the war. Membership was over 800,000, with millions of fellow travelers. The AFC regularly published its statement of principles:

Our first duty is to keep America out of foreign wars. Our entry would only destroy democracy, not save it.
We must build a defense, for our own shores, so strong that no foreign power or combination of powers can invade our country by sea, air or land.
Not by acts of war, but by preserving and extending democracy at home can we aid democracy and freedom in other lands.
In 1917 we sent our ships into the war zone; and this led us to war. In 1941 we must keep our naval convoys and merchant vessels on this side of the Atlantic.
Humanitarian aid is the duty of a strong free country at peace. With proper safeguards for the distribution of supplies we should feed and clothe the suffering and needy people of the occupied countries.
We advocate official advisory vote by the people of the United States on the question of war and peace, so that when Congress decides this question, as the Constitution provides, it may know the opinion of the people on this gravest of all issues.
On the American First Committee, see Bill Kauffman’s America First!: Its History, Culture, and Politics (Prometheus Books, 1995). On American anti-interventionist thought during the interwar years, see Eric A. Nordlinger’s Isolationism Reconfigured: American Foreign Policy for a New Century (Princeton University Press, 1995) and David Cortright’s Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Indispensable on this subject is Justus D. Doenecke’s Storm on the Horizon: The Challenge to American Intervention 1939—1941 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000).

Both the Democrats and Republicans had antiwar statements in their 1940 political platforms:

We will not participate in foreign wars and we will not send our army, naval or air forces to fight in foreign lands outside the Americas, except in case of attack.

The Republican Party is firmly opposed to involving this nation in foreign wars.

Both candidates — Roosevelt and Willkie — campaigned on the promise to stay out of foreign wars:

While I am talking to you mothers and fathers, I give you one more assurance. I have said this before but I shall say it again and again. Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.

If you elect me President, I will never send an American boy to fight in a European war.

Now, we know that presidential candidates, like all other political candidates, will say whatever they think the public wants to hear in order to get elected. Roosevelt, as will be seen, moved the country toward war even while speaking out against getting involved. And Willkie, who openly espoused interventionism and raised money for interventionist causes before his run for the presidency as a weak peace candidate, showed his true interventionist colors after he lost the election. The point here is that what both candidates said about staying out of foreign wars resonated with the American people.

But instead of Americans learning the lesson they should have from World War I, they succumbed to the war propaganda once more and got involved again — going to war in Europe after being attacked by an Asian country. This time, however, there was no turning back. World War II has been viewed as the “great exception” to the “great rule” of George Washington ever since. And not only that, America’s entry in the war was, as Murray Rothbard wrote in his obituary for Harry Elmer Barnes:

The crucial act in expanding the United States from a republic into an Empire, and in spreading that Empire throughout the world, replacing the sagging British Empire in the process. Our entry into World War II was the crucial act in foisting a permanent militarization upon the economy and society, in bringing to the country a permanent garrison state, an overweening military-industrial complex, a permanent system of conscription. It was the crucial act in creating a Mixed Economy run by Big Government, a system of State-Monopoly-Capitalism run by the central government in collaboration with Big Business and Big Unionism. It was the crucial act in elevating Presidential power, particularly in foreign affairs, to the role of single most despotic person in the history of the world. And, finally, World War II is the last war-myth left, the myth that the Old Left clings to in pure desperation: the myth that here, at least, was a good war, here was a war in which America was in the right. World War II is the war thrown into our faces by the war-making Establishment, as it tries, in each war that we face, to wrap itself in the mantle of good and righteous World War II.

But none of this matters because of Pearl Harbor. In fact, nothing we did to Japan during the war matters — because of Pearl Harbor. And for that matter, nothing we did during the war to Japan, Germany, Italy, or anyone else, including civilians and U.S. citizens, matters — because of Pearl Harbor.

A Date which Will Live in Infamy

The attack on Pearl Harbor was, of course, what actively put the United States into the Second World War. Without war against Japan, the conflict with Germany could conceivably have been limited to naval engagements. But was the “sudden and deliberate attack” on Pearl Harbor a surprise?

There have been a slew of books written over the years on the subject of Roosevelt’s duplicity and culpability regarding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. I believe the most recent one is George Victor’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable (Potomac Books, 2007). This is an exceptional book, not only because it is up-to-date and very well documented, but also because the author is an “admirer of Roosevelt” who maintains that “criticism and justification of Roosevelt’s acts are outside the purpose of this book.”

But before World War II had even ended, Roosevelt’s nemesis John T. Flynn (1882—1964) wrote what is probably the first “revisionist” account of the Pearl Harbor attack: The Truth About Pearl Harbor. This appeared on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune on October 22, 1944, “with only a few deletions,” under the headline of: “Records Bear Truth about Pearl Harbor.” Flynn wrote a sequel in 1945 that was published in the same paper on September 2, 1945, under the three headlines of:

Exposes More Secrets of Pearl Harbor Scandal

Blame for Tragic Delays Fixed; Blunders Bared

John T. Flynn Charges Government Knew Jap Cabinet Intended to Break Relations

The editor’s note preceding the article reads:

John T. Flynn, investigator and publicist, author of “The Truth About Pearl Harbor,” has written a second sensational article on this catastrophe. He discloses new and startling information that was in the possession of the United States high command during the final days and hours before the great Pacific base was attacked by the Japanese on Dec. 7, 1941. In this inclusive treatise, he fixes the blame for the disaster squarely upon Franklin D. Roosevelt, then President of the United States.

This was published in booklet form as The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor. At the end of his essay in this latter work, Flynn summed up what he saw as the “pathetic tragedy of blunders”:

By January l, 1941, Roosevelt had decided to go to war with Japan.
But he had solemnly pledged the people he would not take their sons to foreign wars unless attacked. Hence he dared not attack and so decided to provoke the Japanese to do so.
He kept all this a secret from the Army and Navy.
He felt the moment to provoke the attack had come by November. He ended negotiations abruptly November 26 by handing the Japanese an ultimatum which he knew they dared not comply with.
Immediately he knew his ruse would succeed, that the Japanese looked upon relations as ended and were preparing for the assault. He knew this from the intercepted messages.
He was certain the attack would be against British territory, at Singapore perhaps, and perhaps on the Philippines or Guam. If on the Philippines or Guam he would have his desired attack. But if only British territory were attacked could he safely start shooting? He decided he could and committed himself to the British government. But he never revealed this to his naval chief.
He did not order Short to change his alert and he did not order Kimmel to take his fleet out of Pearl Harbor, out where it could defend itself, because he wanted to create the appearance of being completely at peace and surprised when the Japs started shooting. Hence he ordered Kimmel and Short not to do anything to cause alarm or suspicion. He was completely sure the Japs would not strike at Pearl Harbor.
Thus he completely miscalculated. He disregarded the advice of men who always held that Pearl Harbor would be first attacked. He disregarded the warning implicit in the hour chosen for attack and called to Knox’s attention. He disregarded the advice of his chiefs that we were unprepared.
When the attack came he was appalled and frightened. He dared not give the facts to the country. To save himself he maneuvered to lay the blame upon Kimmel and Short. To prevent them from proving their innocence he refused them a trial. When the case was investigated by two naval and army boards, he suppressed the reports. He threatened prosecution to any man who would tell the truth.
[Kimmel and Short were the Pearl Harbor Navy and Army commanders; Knox was the Secretary of the Navy.]

Flynn’s works on Pearl Harbor were followed by George Morgenstern’s Pearl Harbor: The Story of the Secret War (New York: Devin-Adair, 1947) and Rear Admiral Robert A. Theobald’s The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor: The Washington Contribution to the Japanese Attack (New York: Devin-Adair, 1954). In addition, the following books were also published about the same time that contain valuable chapters relating to Pearl Harbor and/or U.S. foreign policy in relation to Japan in the 1930s: Charles A. Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941: A Study in Appearances and Realities (Yale University Press, 1948), William Henry Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade (Henry Regnery, 1950), Charles Callan Tansill’s Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933—1941 (Henry Regnery, 1952), and the edited work by Harry Elmer Barnes, with contributions by Morgenstern, Chamberlin, Tansill, et al., titled Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath (The Caxton Printers, 1953).

Nevertheless, the myth of Pearl Harbor was soon well established. Barnes lamented in 1966:

Despite this voluminous revisionist literature which has appeared since 1945 and its sensational content, there is still virtually no public knowledge of revisionist facts over twenty years after V-J Day. The “man on the street” is just as prone to accept Roosevelt’s “day of infamy” legend today as he was on December 8, 1941.

He gives several reasons why this is the case: the country never really had time to cool off after the war like it did following World War I, the American public proved more susceptible to simple brainwashing through propaganda than Orwell could imagine, the conformity of intellectuals whereby individuality and independence all but disappeared, the moderation of the liberals and radicals who had been champions of revisionism after the First World War, the intense hatred of Hitler and Mussolini that blinds people to accept any facts that might diminish their guilt, the rise of the idea that the United States must do battle with any foreign country whose political ideology does not accord with ours, the excessive security measures adopted under the Cold War that have increased the public’s fear and timidity, and the lack of major publishers willing to publish revisionist material.

This latter point is especially important because, says Barnes: “No matter how many revisionist books are produced, how high their quality, or how sensational their revelations, they will have no effect on the American public until this public learns of the existence, nature, and importance of revisionist literature.”

The last thing Barnes wrote before he died in 1968 was a careful summary of the whole Pearl Harbor controversy. He reasoned that “only a small fraction of the American people are any better acquainted with the realities of the responsibility for the attack than they were when President Roosevelt delivered his ‘Day of Infamy’ oration on December 8, 1941. The legends and rhetoric of that day still dominate the American mind.” “Pearl Harbor After a Quarter of a Century” was published in Murray Rothbard’s journal Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought (Vol. IV, 1968, 9—132). It would also be this journal’s last article, as it ceased publication with this “special Harry Barnes—Pearl Harbor issue.”

Perhaps the most authoritative book on Pearl Harbor is Robert Stinnett’s Day Of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press, 2000). Stinnett, who served in the Navy during World War II, spent seventeen years of his life researching in archives, conducting interviews, and examining documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. He concludes that not only did FDR know the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, he deliberately provoked it. From the White House perspective, the Pearl Harbor attack “had to be endured in order to stop a greater evil — the Nazi invaders in Europe who had begun the Holocaust and were poised to invade Europe.” Pearl Harbor was Roosevelt’s “back door to war.”

The Peruvian minister to Japan reported to the U.S. embassy there in January of 1941 — almost a year before Pearl Harbor — that “Japanese military forces were planning, in the event of trouble with the United States, to attempt a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor using all their military resources.”

In former CIA director William Casey’s book The Secret War Against Hitler (Regnery, 1988), he claims that “the British had sent word that a Japanese fleet was steaming east toward Hawaii.”

Secretary of War Henry Stimson recorded in his diary on November 25 — less than two weeks before the Pearl Harbor attack:

The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much damage to ourselves.

In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.

On the day the attack took place, he expressed relief: “When the news first came that Japan had attacked us, my first feeling was of relief that indecision was over and that a crisis had come in a way which would unite all our people.” And testifying after Pearl Harbor, Stimson stated: “If there was war, moreover, we wanted the Japanese to commit the first overt act.”

Eleanor Roosevelt didn’t seem too surprised either. In an article in the New York Times Magazine a few years later, she recalled: “December 7 was just like any of the later D-days to us. We clustered at the radio and waited for more details — but it was far from the shock it proved to the country in general. We had expected something of the sort for a long time.”

But even if Pearl Harbor was not in any way a surprise, was it, as Secretary of State Cordell Hull said, “a treacherous and utterly unprovoked attack on the United States”?

Japan had become the dominant power in the Far East after its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904—05. In 1931 Japan began the process of controlling all of Manchuria by seizing Mukden. After a series of skirmishes and “incidents,” full-scale war began in 1937 between China and Japan. The Chinese nationalists and the Chinese communists, who had been fighting a civil war since 1927, temporarily united against Japan.

But instead of remaining neutral, the United States sided with China. As William Henry Chamberlin explains:

There was sentimental sympathy for China as the “underdog” in the struggle against Japan. This was nourished by missionaries and other American residents of China. The “Open Door” policy for China, enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay about the turn of the century, was regarded as a sacrosanct tradition of American diplomacy and was seldom subjected to critical and realistic examination. Considerations of prestige made it difficult to surrender established rights under pressure. The groups which believed in permanent crusade against aggression, in a policy of perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace, were quick to mobilize American opinion against Japan.

China, of course, is now the boogeyman and Japan is one of our allies.

The United States had already pressured Great Britain to scrap its Anglo-Japanese treaty, thus isolating Japan. The United States supplied munitions, arms, and aircraft to British, Chinese, and Dutch forces in the Pacific. China received millions of dollars worth of loans. Twenty-four U.S. submarines were sent to Manila. Roosevelt sent U.S. naval vessels on cruises into Japanese waters. He refused to meet with the Japanese prime minister, Prince Konoye, leading to the rise of Tojo. Secretary of State Hull issued a provocative ultimatum to Japan on November 26, 1941, that he knew the Japanese government would reject: “The government of Japan will withdraw all military, naval, air and police forces from China and Indochina.”

The United States waged economic warfare against Japan. The 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Japan was abrogated on January 26, 1940. Based on the Export Control Act of July 2, 1940, Roosevelt restricted exports of aviation fuels, lubricants, melting iron, and scrap steel beginning on July 31. On October 16, 1940, an embargo took effect on all exports of scrap iron and steel to overseas destinations other than Britain. All Japanese assets in the United States were frozen on July 25, 1941. On August 1, 1941, a final embargo on all oil shipments to Japan was instituted. Japan was allowed to build up its oil reserves just enough to enable it to go to war.

In General Smedley Butler’s aforementioned book War Is a Racket, he mentions U.S. Navy war games in the Pacific that were bound to provoke Japan: “The Japanese, a proud people, of course will be pleased beyond expression to see the United States fleet so close to Nippon’s shores. Even as pleased as would be the residents of California were they to dimly discern through the morning mist, the Japanese fleet playing at war games off Los Angeles.”

Then there is the American Volunteer Group (AVG), known as the Flying Tigers. This was the “efficient guerrilla air corps” mentioned in 1940 by Major Rodney Boone (USMC) of the Office of Naval Intelligence. This group of 100 American pilots, who were allowed to resign from their branch of the military with the assurance that they could be reinstated when their one-year contract with a front company called the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company (CAMCO) was up, were mercenaries who secretly trained in the jungles of Southeast Asia to fly bombing missions for the Chinese Air Force. They sailed from the West Coast as ordinary civilians in order to keep hidden their true mission and mask FDR’s secret attempt to support China against Japan. All of the details, supported by government documents, are in Alan Armstrong’s Preemptive Strike: The Secret Plan that Would Have Prevented the Attack on Pearl Harbor (The Lyons Press, 2006). In 1991, the Flying Tigers were retroactively recognized as members of the U.S. military during their period of mercenary service.

The most damaging piece of evidence that the United States provoked Japan into firing the first shot is the “McCollum memo” of October 7, 1940, written by Lieutenant Commander Arthur McCollum, the head of the Far East desk of the Office of Naval Intelligence. McCollum’s five-page, ten-point memorandum proposed eight actions under point nine to provoke Japan into war:

Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-shek.
Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
Keep the main strength of the U.S. Fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
McCollum concludes that “if by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better.” The Tripartite Pact had just been signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan. Provoking Japan into war was a backdoor way to get the United States involved in the European war. McCollum’s proposals were all implemented by Roosevelt. The attack on Pearl Harbor was but the climax of a long series of events. It was neither a surprise nor unprovoked.

To supplement these provocations against Japan, the U.S. Pacific Fleet was moved from the West Coast to Pearl Harbor beginning in April of 1940. The commander of the fleet at the time, Vice Admiral James Richardson, objected because of the lack of training facilities, large-scale ammunition and fuel supplies, support craft, and overhaul facilities. There was also the morale problem of men kept away from their families. FDR relieved Richardson of his command on February 1, 1941. In January of 1941, the Secretary of the Navy, Frank Knox, warned that Pearl Harbor was vulnerable to bombing, sabotage, and submarine attack. In an interview with FDR in June of 1941, the new commander of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Husband Kimmel, outlined the weaknesses of placing the fleet at Pearl Harbor. In the days before Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet’s two aircraft carriers, the Lexington and Enterprise, and twenty-one modern warships were sent out to sea.

Although the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes were broken, vital information was withheld from the commanders at Pearl Harbor, General Walter Short and Admiral Husband Kimmel. Both men were made scapegoats, relieved of their commands, demoted in rank, and denied an opportunity to defend themselves. Yet, title V, subtitle D, section 546, of the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2001 reversed nine previous Pearl Harbor investigations and found:

Numerous investigations following the attack on Pearl Harbor have documented that Admiral Kimmel and Lieutenant General Short were not provided necessary and critical intelligence that was available, that foretold of war with Japan, that warned of imminent attack, and that would have alerted them to prepare for the attack.

Although Kimmel and Short were never posthumously restored to their former ranks, Congress concluded that “the losses incurred by the United States” in the attacks on Pearl Harbor “were not a result of dereliction in the performance” of their duties.

Admirers of FDR — past and present — admit that he, as Clare Booth Luce remarked, “lied us into war”:

Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period before Pearl Harbor. . . . If he was going to induce the people to move at all, he would have to trick them into acting for their best interests, or what he conceived to be their best interests. He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the patient’s own good. . . . A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it. (Thomas A. Bailey, The Man in the Street, 1948).

As Germany began to prepare for conquest, genocide, and destruction of civilization, the leader of only one major nation saw what was coming and made plans to stop it. As a result of Roosevelt’s leadership, a planned sequence of events carried out in the Atlantic and more decisively in the Pacific brought the United States into one of the world’s greatest cataclysms. The American contribution helped turn the war’s tide and saved the world from a destructive tyranny unparalleled in modern history. (George Victor, The Pearl Harbor Myth, 2007).

For those who refuse to believe that presidents lie, see Eric Alterman’s When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences (Viking, 2004). Truth, it has been said, is always the first casualty of war.

But would Roosevelt really be willing to sacrifice American lives to become a war president? When he sent U.S. naval vessels on “pop-up” cruises into Japanese waters, FDR remarked: “I just want them to keep popping up here and there and keep the Japs guessing. I don’t mind losing one or two cruisers, but do not take a chance on losing five or six.” According to Robert Stinnett, losing two cruisers would be sacrificing 1,800 men. That is almost as many naval personnel as were killed at Pearl Harbor. And of course, Roosevelt knew that American entry into the war would result in thousands of dead U.S. soldiers.

But even with all the Roosevelt lies and provocations, Japan still attacked us, it is argued. None of our pre-war actions directly killed any Japanese, but they killed 2,400 of our men when they bombed Pearl Harbor. But what did we expect Japan to do? We don’t cheer on the bully who taunts another kid for weeks and then beats him up after the kid finally breaks his nose. True, Japan was not just “another kid.” Japan was becoming increasingly militaristic. Japan sought to aggressively expand its empire in the Far East. The Japanese brutally treated the Chinese and the Koreans. But none of this should have been the concern of the United States. In fact, previous to this, the United States became increasingly militaristic, sought to expand its control over the Philippines, and brutally treated the Filipinos. The British and Dutch had been expanding their empires in the Far East for many years. Japan wanted to eject the European empires and replace them with its own.

The Japanese may have been short, bucktoothed, slant-eyed, yellow vermin, subhuman apes in khaki (see U.S. wartime propaganda), but they weren’t stupid. Japan knew it could not win a war against the United States. Japan in 1941 was not the economic powerhouse it became after the war. It was a small island nation of fishermen and farmers. At the time of American entry into World War II, Japan had less than 4 percent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, while America produced more steel, aluminum, oil, and vehicles than all the other major nations combined. Japan had very little of the necessary resources for an industrial war economy. And the United States was the chief supplier to Japan. During the war there were four tons of supplies for each American soldier and two pounds of supplies for each Japanese soldier. Japan did not attack the United States because Japan was “evil” and America was “good.” Japan sought to gain control of Southeast Asian resources. The attack on Pearl Harbor would prevent the U.S. Pacific Fleet from interfering. Secretary of War Stimson acknowledged after the war that “if at any time the United States had been willing to concede to Japan a free hand in China there would have been no war in the Pacific.”

This is all clear now, or at least it should be. The problem is that the average American at the time knew nothing about the lies and provocations of the Roosevelt administration. The only thing the typical American knew on December 7, 1941, was that Japan had attacked the United States. These things are also true of Americans serving in the military at the time. Should we fault the servicemen who valiantly defended Pearl Harbor? No. Should we dishonor those military personnel who were killed by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, many of whom are still entombed in the USS Arizona? Certainly not. But was it necessary for 405,000 American soldiers to die to avenge the 2,400 killed at Pearl Harbor?

But even if Japan had not been provoked, and the Pearl Harbor attack was a complete surprise, was war with Japan the correct response? This is a question that is rarely, if ever, raised. And here is another question that should be considered: Is it still a defensive war if troops have to travel thousands of miles to engage an “enemy” that attacked and then retreated? The war against Japan was certainly more a war of revenge, vengeance, retaliation, retribution, anger, or rage than a war of defense.

Once again, if Japan had not been provoked, and the Pearl Harbor attack was a complete surprise, what should the United States have done? Regardless of what course of action should have been taken, there is one thing that should have been done immediately: determine why it happened. No country, army, navy, air force, terrorist organization, or individual aggresses against the United States for no reason. We may not like or agree with the reason, but there is always a good reason, at least in the minds of the attackers.

Yet again, if Japan had not been provoked, and the Pearl Harbor attack was a complete surprise, does that justify the atrocities committed against the Japanese during the war? I mean things like the harvesting of gold teeth from dead and not-so-dead Japanese soldiers, boiling the flesh off enemy skulls to make ornaments for military vehicles or to send home as souvenirs, urinating in the mouths of dead Japanese soldiers, carving enemy bones into letter openers, mutilating corpses, attacking and sinking hospital ships, shooting sailors who abandoned ship, shooting pilots who bailed out, killing wounded enemy soldiers on the battlefield, torturing and executing enemy prisoners, massacring unarmed Japanese soldiers who just surrendered, kicking in the teeth of prisoners before or after their execution, and the collecting of Japanese ears. See John W. Dower’s War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books, 1986). True, the Japanese committed unspeakable brutalities and atrocities against Allied soldiers and POWs, their own soldiers, and civilians in areas they occupied (see e.g., The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II [Basic Books, 1997]). But it is the Japanese that were considered to be uncivilized, knuckle-dragging brutes, not the Americans.

And finally, if Japan had not been provoked, and the Pearl Harbor attack was a complete surprise, does that justify terrorizing the civilian population of Japan? The Japanese had the decency to attack a genuine military target instead of dropping bombs on downtown San Diego or Honolulu. After months of studies, planning, and several incendiary bombing test runs, the U.S. Army Air Force firebombed densely-populated Tokyo on the night of March 9, 1945. The results were unprecedented: 100,000 dead, 40,000 wounded, 1,000,000 made homeless, 267,000 buildings destroyed. Further incendiary attacks were made against other Japanese cities for the duration of the war. This was climaxed by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then, on August 14, 1945, after the two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan, and after Emperor Hirohito had agreed to surrender because “the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage,” the egotistical General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold got his big finale: a 1,000-plane bombing mission against Tokyo. This was worse than Nagasaki and Hiroshima because it was so unnecessary. Although this was the largest bombing raid in history, many timelines of World War II do not even list this event as having occurred. Why is it that the 9/11 attacks on America are considered acts of terrorism but a 1000-plane bombing raid on Tokyo after the dropping of two atomic bombs isn’t? (On the atomic bombing of Japan, see Gar Alperovitz’s The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth [Knopf, 1995]).

I have seen documentaries on Pearl Harbor where U.S. servicemen who survived the attack still say that they will never forgive the Japanese and refuse to meet with Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor, as other survivors have done. But if any of these servicemen support the war in Iraq then they are hypocrites. Japan made a preemptive strike against the United States just like the United States did in Iraq. It can also be argued that the United States certainly provoked Japan more than Iraq provoked the United States. Why should we fault the Japanese pilots who bombed Pearl Harbor? Weren’t they just following orders like we expect American troops to do? And why should we fault the Japanese civilians who grew food and built weapons for their soldiers just like American civilians? None of this matters, of course, because of Pearl Harbor. Nothing we did to Japan during the war matters — because of Pearl Harbor.

It is time to rethink Pearl Harbor.

There is nothing “conspiratorial” about Pearl Harbor revisionism. In addition to the books mentioned thus far in relation to Pearl Harbor, I recommend chapter 3, “A Hobson’s Choice for Japan,” in Bruce M. Russett’s No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S. Entry into World War II (Harper & Row, 1972); chapter 4, “Myth: The Attack on Pearl Harbor Was a Surprise,” in Michael Zezima’s Saving Private Power: The Hidden History of “The Good War” (Soft Skull Press, 2000), issued in paperback in 2005 as There Is No Good War: The Myths of World War II; part 3, “The U.S. Enters the War,” in Richard J. Maybury’s World War II: The Rest of the Story and How It Affects You Today (Bluestocking Press, 2003); and chapter 4, “Franklin D. Roosevelt and the First Shot,” in John V. Denson’s A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt (Mises Institute, 2006). The Independent Institute also maintains a very informative Pearl Harbor Archive.

Hitler

So, what about Hitler? I have answered that question in the context of just war theory in my review of Robert Brimlow’s What about Hitler? Wrestling with Jesus’s Call to Nonviolence in an Evil World (Brazos Press, 2006). Here, however, we are concerned with the questions of the necessity of the United States to fight against Hitler, the wisdom of allying with Stalin against Hitler, the tactics of the U.S. military, the conduct of U.S. troops during and after the war, and, most importantly, the lies, provocations, and other actions of Roosevelt that resulted in the United States getting involved in the deadliest European war in history.

Like Pearl Harbor, it is time to rethink Hitler.

Now, there are many things about Hitler that don’t need rethinking. The evils of Hitler and Nazism are beyond dispute: fascism, militarism, racism, anti-Semitism, forced labor, death camps, gruesome medical experiments, murder, genocide, theft, book burning, lies, propaganda, brutal suppression of dissent, deliberate targeting of civilians, horrendous destruction of property, tremendous violations of civil rights, the invasion, conquest, and occupation of other countries, etc., etc., etc.

Still, without excusing any of the horrors of Hitler’s regime, the questions remain about the necessity of fighting against Hitler, the wisdom of allying with Stalin, the tactics of the U.S. military, the conduct of U.S. troops, and the activities of Roosevelt that moved the country toward war.

Like Pearl Harbor, nothing we did to Germany during the war matters — because of Hitler. Nothing we did during the war to Germany, Italy, Japan, or anyone else, including civilians and U.S. citizens, matters — because of Hitler. And furthermore, nothing the U.S. military has done since World War II matters — because of the supposed threats of other Hitlers.

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, and the declaration of war against Japan by the United States on December 8, Germany and Italy, signatories of The Tripartite Pact with Japan, declared war on the United States on December 11. This was immediately followed by a declaration of war by the United States against Germany and Italy on the same date (the United States also declared war on the Axis powers of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania on June 5, 1942).

Whether Germany declared war on the United States or not, it was not necessary for the United States to fight against Germany. Hitler was not a threat to the United States. On May 20, 1940, German forces reached the English Channel. Yet, the German Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain to the Royal Air Force; the German Kriegsmarine was no match for Britain’s Royal Navy, and the German Heer could neither invade nor conquer Great Britain. The British Isles were much more secure against a German invasion in 1941 than they were at the beginning of the war. Yet, Roosevelt made a speech on May 27 in which he asserted: “The war is approaching the brink of the western hemisphere itself. It is coming very close to home.” If Hitler couldn’t conquer Great Britain across the English Channel, how could he possibly have been a threat to the United States across the Atlantic Ocean? This was exactly the argument made at the time by several U.S. senators, including the great Old Right stalwart Robert Taft (R-OH).

And looking back from the present time, three other things are clearly evident. If the French in occupied France weren’t forced to speak German, how can American’s keep repeating the lie that we would all be speaking German right now if the U.S. military hadn’t intervened to stop Hitler? If it was unnecessary for Britain and France to fight against Germany, as Patrick J. Buchanan powerfully and compassionately argues in Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World (Crown Publishers, 2008), it was certainly more unnecessary for the United States to do so. And if Switzerland could remain neutral during World War II, then so could the United States.

Hitler never wanted war with Britain. He wanted absolute power in Germany. He wanted to be a great German historical figure like Bismarck. He wanted to overturn the injustices of the Versailles Treaty. He wanted to restore German lands and people. He wanted to enlarge the German empire to the east. He wanted to cleanse Germany of Jews and other inferior races. He wanted to destroy Bolshevism. He wanted Germany to achieve economic self-sufficiency in Europe. Whether these things were right or wrong is immaterial. Hitler never wanted war with Britain, and certainly not with the United States. He never wanted a two-front war, let alone a world war. He wanted Germany to be a world power, not the ruler of the world. He wanted a friendly or neutral Britain, not a hostile or rival Britain.

The greatest blunder in British history was not Munich, where Chamberlain “appeased” Hitler, but the Polish war guarantee that committed Britain to fight for an anti-Semitic Polish dictatorship that had considered making a preemptive strike against Germany, signed, like Stalin, a nonaggression pact with Hitler, and joined in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement.

Germany did not declare war on Great Britain and France on that fateful day in September of 1939; Great Britain and France declared war on Germany after Germany invaded Poland. Yet, when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east just two weeks later, neither Great Britain nor France declared war on the Soviet Union. Why?

On the other hand, just because Germany declared war on the United States doesn’t mean that American troops had to cross the Atlantic Ocean and go to war in Europe. Defensive wars are not fought thousands of miles away. It was Japan, not Germany, that attacked Pearl Harbor. The United States didn’t go to war with Germany over actual attacks on American ships like the Robin Moor, Sessa, Steel Seafarer, Greer, Montana, Pink Star, I. C. White, W. C. Teagle, Bold Venture, Kearny, Lehigh, Salinas, and Reuben James — all bombed or torpedoed and in most cases sunk by Germany during the period from May 21 to October 31, 1941.

Another recent book besides Buchanan’s that will cause one to question the well-entrenched orthodox view of the beginnings of World War II is Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (Simon & Schuster, 2008). I agree with a sympathetic revisionist critic of the book that “it is not the book that needs to be written,” but for a different reason. That reason is that we don’t have to wait “until that book is published,” for it, or rather they, have already been published.

I previously mentioned some revisionist books published soon after World War II that contained valuable chapters relating to Pearl Harbor and/or U.S. foreign policy in relation to Japan in the 1930s. These works likewise include much valuable information on the events leading up to World War II in Europe: Beard’s President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War 1941, Chamberlin’s America’s Second Crusade, Tansill’s Back Door to War, and the edited work by Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. To this I can now add Beard’s American Foreign Policy in the Making 1932-1940: A Study in Responsibilities (Yale University Press, 1946) and A. J. P. Taylor’s The Origins of the Second World War (Atheneum, 1962).

To cite but one damning passage from these works, William Henry Chamberlin stated that “the eleven principal steps by which Roosevelt took America into undeclared war in the Atlantic may be briefly summarized as follows”:

The repeal of the arms embargo in November 1939.
The trade of destroyers for bases in September 1940.
Enactment of the Lend-Lease Act in March 1941.
The secret American-British staff talks, January—March 1941.
The institution of “patrols” in the North Atlantic on April 24.
The sending of American laborers to build a naval base in Northern Ireland.
The blocking of German credits in the United States and the closing of consulates in the early summer of 1941.
The occupation of Iceland by American troops on July 7.
The Atlantic Conference, August 9—12.
The shoot-at-sight orders given to American warships and announced on September 11.
Authorization for the arming of merchant ships and the sending of merchant ships into war zones in November 1941.
All the details are in the abovementioned books by Beard, Chamberlin, Tansill, Barnes, and Baker, plus the other books I have mentioned by Russett, Zezima, and Maybury.

There are, of course, many additional actions of Roosevelt that could be added to Chamberlin’s list. As Harry Elmer Barnes concluded:

In regard to American entry into the European war, the case against President Roosevelt is far more serious than that against Woodrow Wilson with respect to the First World War. . . . Roosevelt had abandoned all semblance of neutrality, even before war broke out in 1939, and moved as speedily as was safe and feasible in the face of an anti-interventionist American public to involve this country in the European conflict.

Yet, the same conservatives who denounce FDR for his socialism and interventionism often praise him for his warmongering. I cite here just a few more of FDR’s activities that moved the country toward war.

In June of 1940, Roosevelt fired his anti-interventionist secretary of war, Harry Woodring, and appointed a militant interventionist, Republican Henry Stimson, to replace him. Another Republican war hawk, Frank Knox, was named the new Secretary of the Navy. Both supported the massive transfer of munitions and supplies to Great Britain. Stimson endorsed compulsory military training while Knox wanted a million-man army.

The U.S. government began a massive military buildup as a “defensive” measure. Automobile companies were enlisted in the pre-war effort. To take Ford as an example, in early 1941 — long before Pearl Harbor — plans were made by Ford to manufacture the B-24 Liberator bomber for the government at a new plant at Willow Run, west of Detroit. One of the largest manufacturing plants ever constructed, the Willow Run plant was finished in 1942, eventually producing one bomber per hour. Before Pearl Harbor, Ford was already committed to, or had begun the production of, planes, tanks, aircraft engines, jeeps, reconnaissance cars, and anti-aircraft guns (see Ford: Decline and Rebirth: 1933—1962). In the five weeks before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. government contracted for $3.5 billion worth of military supplies from automobile plants alone.

A peacetime conscription bill was introduced in June of 1940. This, of course, was another “defensive” measure. It passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by FDR on September 16. Originally applying to men between 21 and 35, this was expanded after the United States entered the war to all men aged 18 to 65 being required to register. The day had already come in Europe where, as related by John Keegan: “Military service was seen no longer as the token by which the individual validated his citizenship but as the form in which the citizen tendered his duty to the state and took part in its functions.” And as Catherine Fitzgibbon of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom pointed out, it was large conscript armies that allowed Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin to hold power. It is therefore not surprising that conscription had opponents from across the political spectrum. “Military conscription is not freedom but serfdom; its equality is the equality of slaves,” said the socialist Norman Thomas. “Conscription . . . is a road leading straight to militarism, imperialism and ultimately to American fascism and war,” he added. Harry Elmer Barnes called conscription “the first step to American fascism.” According to Senator Taft, the logical conclusion was “the conscription of everything — property, men, industries, and all labor.” Over 16,000 Americans were imprisoned for draft evasion. On November 14, 1940, a group of students stood before a judge and pled guilty to this “crime,” maintaining that “war consists of mass murder, deliberate starvation, vandalism, and similar evils.” They were each sentenced to a year and a day in prison. Around 40,000 soldiers in the European Theater alone decided that they weren’t fighting for our freedoms and deserted.

While all of these things were going on in the United States, and before Hitler broke the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact and invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, Stalin was engaged in carving up Europe just like Hitler. After attacking Poland soon after Germany, Stalin attacked Finland on November 30. Then, on June 17, 1941, the Soviet Union invaded and conquered Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. These Baltic states thus became part of Russia’s pre-war conquests that made up the Soviet Union: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan — all now independent countries since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union’s aggressive territorial expansion was greater than that of Germany. In light this, was it wise to ally with Stalin against Hitler?

And not only did the Soviet Union join Germany in the rape of Poland and execute thousands of Polish army officers and intellectuals in what is known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, the Soviets had their own concentration camps. And as contemporary historian Norman Davies relates: “The liberators of Auschwitz were servants of a regime that ran an even larger network of concentration camps of its own.” In light of this, was it wise to ally with Stalin against Hitler?

Stalin’s body count was also much greater than Hitler’s. Stalin, who had once attended seminary and was exceptionally well read, was also an exceptional liar, forger, robber, sadist, adulterer, terrorist, revolutionary, and murderer. One can read all the gory details in a book like Donald Rayfield’s Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (Random House, 2004). Stalin was a greater threat, and the Soviet Union a greater evil, than Hitler and Germany. After Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Senator Taft remarked that the victory of communism would be far more dangerous to the United States than the victory of fascism. This is because, although each had committed unspeakable horrors, communism had more of a worldwide appeal; fascism of the Nazi variety was racist and nationalistic. Communism, explained Taft, “Is a greater danger to the United States because it is a false philosophy which appeals to many. Fascism is a false philosophy which appeals to very few.” In light of this, was it wise to ally with Stalin against Hitler?

More than anything else, World War II was a war between Nazism and Bolshevism. Three-fourths of all the deaths in the war were on the Eastern Front. Then-senator Harry Truman (D-MO) had the right idea: “If we see Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if we see Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.” When the fascists and the communists turned against each other, Great Britain should have withdrawn from the war and watched from the sidelines with the United States as two of the most tyrannical states in history slaughtered each other. Instead, Great Britain and the United States sided with Stalin.

The tactics of the U.S. military during the war were sometimes despicable. The United States joined with Great Britain in bombing civilians in German cities. And just like the United States did to Japan, American planes firebombed German cities, killing civilians by the thousands. The city of Dresden, which was packed with refugees from other German cities, was hit particularly hard. On Wednesday, February 14, 1945, it was Ash Wednesday in more ways than one as Dresden was firebombed by the U.S. Army Air Force, destroying much of the city and incinerating thousands of civilians. This was not war; this was terrorism and wholesale murder.

Even the hallowed D-Day invasion is not untainted. About 3,000 French civilians died on D-Day — about the same number as American soldiers killed in the invasion. All told, hundreds of tons of Allied bombs were dropped during the “liberation” of Normandy, destroying fields and livestock, obliterating towns and villages, and killing 20,000 civilians. On D-Day from the civilian perspective, see William I. Hitchcock’s The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe (Free Press, 2008). But, it is argued, this was all for the greater good: the liberation of Europe from the Nazis. True, but that is the problem with war: The greater good always results in too much collateral damage, destruction of property, and civilian suffering, and too many deadly mistakes, friendly-fire incidents, and unforeseen consequences.

The conduct of American forces during the war, and in some cases after the war, was sometimes shameful. After the D-Day invasion, some members of the “greatest generation” engaged in drunkenness, carousing, vandalism, petty thefts, looting, seizing property as trophies, robbery, trafficking in stolen military goods, wasting scarce food and drink, billeting themselves in private homes, sexual assault, rape, and gang rape of women of all ages, and mistreating, assaulting, and otherwise abusing their power over those they liberated in France, Belgium, and Germany. Venereal disease and prostitution were rampant, as you can imagine. None of this matters, of course, because we were fighting Hitler.

But after we were done fighting Hitler, American soldiers participated in the forced repatriation of hundreds of thousands of Russian POWs to the Soviet Union, where many were killed or sent to the gulag, and the mistreatment and neglect of German POWs. But none of this matters either because we fought against Hitler.

But Hitler was evil, it is argued, and the United States had a moral duty to stop him regardless of whether he was a direct threat, regardless of Great Britain, regardless of Poland, regardless of Stalin, regardless of the tactics of the U.S. military, regardless of the conduct of U.S. soldiers, and regardless of Roosevelt. I will leave it to the philosophers to debate whether one can truly perform a moral duty while acting immorally. The world is full of evil — it always has been and always will be. Any individual or any group of people anywhere in the world who want to confront evil anywhere else in the world are free to do so. But, it is said, Hitler and Nazism were such a great menace that only the might of the U.S. military could bring about their downfall. Even if this were true (it isn’t — the Red Army was more responsible for the defeat of Germany), it doesn’t mean, in the words of John Quincy Adams, that America should go abroad seeking monsters to destroy. Neither the Bible nor the Constitution appointed the United States to be the world’s policeman. And if Hitler had to be stopped because he was so evil, then why did we wait until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on us? Hitler was just as evil during the first two years of the war as he was after the German declaration of war.

And why does everyone stop with Hitler? The United States did nothing to stop greater and lesser evils like Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Kim Il-sung in North Korea, and Idi Amin in Uganda. Should the United States have gone to war against these evil rulers as well? If not, then what is it about Hitler that justifies the deaths of 405,000 Americans to make Eastern Europe safe for Stalin?

The reason certainly isn’t the Holocaust. Roosevelt was indifferent when asked — just days after Kristallnacht — if he would relax immigration restrictions so Jewish refugees from Germany could settle in the United States. On June 6, 1939, the passengers of the MS St. Louis, a German ship filled with over 900 Jewish refugees, were denied entry to the United States and forced to return to Europe where many of them later died in the Holocaust. On the recent 70th anniversary of this “voyage of the damned,” the U.S. Senate passed a resolution (S. Res. 111) acknowledging the role that the United States played in this tragic event. And how can we forget that the great ally of the United States — the Soviet Union — had a history of Jewish pogroms. And although our other great ally — Great Britain — did not have Jewish blood on its hands, it had the blood of German civilians on its hands thanks to its starvation blockade after World War I. According to Harry Elmer Barnes: “Had Hitler tortured and then killed every one of the half million Jews living in Germany in 1933 such a foul and detestable act would still have left him a piker compared to Britain’s blockade of 1918—1919.” Although Jewish persecution may have continued — as it had throughout history — the Holocaust was not inevitable; it was a consequence of the war.

Conclusion

In addition to World War I being the Great War, it should have also been the Great Example of how utterly and senselessly destructive to life, liberty, and property war on such scale could be. Over 400,000 U.S. soldiers died during World War II because what should have been never was. True, American soldiers fought and bled and died heroically, valiantly, and courageously, but how much greater the “greatest generation” would have been if its members had said “not again” and stayed out of the war altogether.

The legacy of World War II is a gruesome one. The bombing of civilians on a grand scale was adopted as an intentional policy. The killing of innocents at a distance was made part of our national character. The military/industrial warfare state became a permanent fixture in the United States. World War II ushered in the nuclear age of mutually assured destruction. The war also set a precedent for later interventions by the world’s new superpower.

But even if World War II were good, just, and necessary, it still doesn’t justify any American military action since then — not in Korea, not in Vietnam, not in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, and certainly not in Iran.

The governments of the world cannot be trusted when they say that their soldiers must go to war. The U.S. government is no exception. There is always more to it than this country did this so the U.S. military needs to do that. So, no matter what happens, the next time the U.S. government says that some military action overseas is necessary — just say no. Say no to loss of liberties. Say no to senseless destruction of property. Say no to flag-draped coffins. Say no to billions of dollars wasted. Say no to supporting the troops. Say no to the warfare state.

Besides the books relating to World War II I have mentioned thus far, I would also recommend Clive Ponting’s Armageddon: The Reality Behind the Distortions, Myths, Lies, and Illusions of World War II (Random House, 1995), Karl Roebling’s Great Myths of World War II (Paragon Press, 1985), Thomas Fleming’s The New Dealers’ War: FDR and the War Within World War II (HarperCollins, 2001), Norman Davies’ No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe (Viking, 2007), and World War II veteran Edward W. Wood’s Worshipping the Myths of World War II: Reflections on America’s Dedication to War (Potomac Books, 2006). On the British propaganda effort to push America into the war, see Thomas E. Mahl’s Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States, 1939—44 (Brassey’s, 1988) or Nicholas J. Cull’s Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford University Press, 1995). On Churchill as a power-hungry warmonger see Buchanan’s book and Ralph Raico’s “Rethinking Churchill” in John V. Denson, ed., The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, 2nd expanded ed. (Transaction Publishers, 1999). On the absurd idea that World War II is what got American out of The Great Depression, see Robert Higgs’ Depression, War and Cold War: Studies in Political Economy (Oxford University Press, 2006). And on historical revisionism in general see Jeff Riggenbach’s Why American History Is Not What They Say (Mises Institute, 2009). The Independent Institute also maintains a very detailed archive on World War II.

It is time to rethink the Good War. Rather than being good, just, and necessary, it was the most destructive thing to life, liberty, and property that the world has ever seen. As Benjamin Franklin once said: “There never was a good War or a bad Peace.”

This is a guide with about 30 charts and their interpretation that you ought to read before you buy or sell your home this year. The guide is from about a year ago. It gives some compelling information as to why buying a home right now might not be the best time or thing to do.

Do we really want a repeat of 2008? The “best against Obama” mentality does not work. Especially not if that person is a moderate. You have to contrast Obama. Not be the closet to him, but still a conservative.

Whether you like or dislike Paul, the fact remains that all other candidates are talking about moderate deficit eduction, which will result in over $20 trillion of debt by the end of their first term.

The biggest issue (which CNN didn’t even bring up in their debate), is the nations debt.

In contrast to everyone else’s deficit reduction, Paul offers serious cuts. $1 Trillion in the first year. And his plan will be creating surpluses to shrink the debt from 16 to a more manageable $10 by the time he’s out of office. In doing so, he’ll prove life will go on with surpluses and smaller government.

There is a lot of misinformation circulating about Ron Paul. Most of which is either a fundamental misunderstanding or an intentional skewing of Ron Paul’s words. The comments are often repeated across the internet and hold little to no weight in truth. The heroin, marriage and abortion issues that are recycled frequently are grossly misconstrued. When you listen to him speak on these issues, he is for the federal government to stay out of them. Does that mean he wants people shooting up heroin, while killing babies at a gay wedding? Of course not. He just wants the individual states to have the right to set their own laws. Any one in SC should appreciate a shift away from a bigger Federal Government and back toward more states rights and individual Liberty.

As for bringing the troops home: Yes. Humanity will always have issues. But did God ordain the USA to be the world’s police? No. And frankly we cannot afford to keep this arrogant savior approach any longer. People in the military favor Paul 2:1 and they know better the pains of war. I find it disrespectful (yet borderline humorous) that the other candidates try to act like they know more about the military than Paul. Newt was a dodger. Obama, Mitt & Santorum did not serve their country in uniform. Only Paul did.

As for bringing home the troops weakening our military: poppycock. we can send a jet from US soil anywhere in the world in a matter of hours. If anything his defense stance is stronger. It’s easier to defend than spread yourself thin and attack. We are spread thin all over the world. Bring it home and keep every troop and cut the billions and billions in needless embassy and base buildings around the world. You’d have the ability to add many more domestic bases and still save billions of dollars a year. He’s all for the military. He’s the only vet among them.

On Israel: he doesn’t want to abandon Israel. He wants free trade with all nations. Israel. And everyone else.

Again. Biggest issue.: All others candidates will create more debt. A deficit reduction is still not a surplus creation and keeps our burden growing. Only Paul offers a real solution to the most important issue facing the future of America.

While it is unfortunate how many lies are spread about him because certain people do not want the status quo challenged. Obviously Washington is sick and needs this doctor.

I remind you of Psalm 22:7: “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” (ESV)

It’s time to once again end slavery in America.

Originally published in Left and Right, Spring 1965, this essay is collected in Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays, 2^nd Edition.

The Conservative has long been marked, whether he knows it or not, by long-run pessimism: by the belief that the long-run trend, and therefore time itself, is against him. Hence, the inevitable trend runs toward left-wing statism at home and communism abroad. It is this long-run despair that accounts for the Conservative’s rather bizarre short-run optimism, for since the long run is given up as hopeless, the Conservative feels that his only hope of success rests in the current moment. In foreign affairs, this point of view leads the Conservative to call for desperate showdowns with communism, for he feels that the longer he waits the worse things will ineluctably become; at home, it leads him to total concentration on the very next election, where he is always hoping for victory and never achieving it. The quintessence of the practical man, and beset by long-run despair, the Conservative refuses to think or plan beyond the election of the day.

Pessimism, however, both short-run and long-run, is precisely what the prognosis of conservatism deserves, for conservatism is a dying remnant of the ancien régime of the preindustrial era, and, as such, it has no future. In its contemporary American form, the recent Conservative revival embodied the death throes of an ineluctably moribund, fundamentalist, rural, small-town, white Anglo-Saxon America. What, however, of the prospects for liberty? For too many libertarians mistakenly link the prognosis for liberty with that of the seemingly stronger and supposedly allied Conservative movement; this linkage makes the characteristic long-run pessimism of the modern Libertarian easy to understand. But this chapter contends that, while the short-run prospects for liberty at home and abroad may seem dim, the proper attitude for the Libertarian to take is that of unquenchable long-run optimism.

The case for this assertion rests on a certain view of history which holds, first, that before the eighteenth century in Western Europe there existed (and still continues to exist outside the West) an identifiable Old Order. Whether the Old Order took the form of feudalism or Oriental despotism, it was marked by tyranny, exploitation, stagnation, fixed caste, and hopelessness and starvation for the bulk of the population. In sum, life was “nasty, brutish, and short”; here was Maine’s “society of status” and Spencer’s “military society.” The ruling classes, or castes, governed by conquest and by getting the masses to believe in the alleged divine imprimatur to their rule.

The Old Order was, and still remains, the great and mighty enemy of liberty; and it was particularly mighty in the past because there was then no inevitability about its overthrow. When we consider that basically the Old Order had existed since the dawn of history, in all civilizations, we can appreciate even more the glory and the magnitude of the triumph of the liberal revolution of and around the eighteenth century.

Part of the dimensions of this struggle has been obscured by a great myth of the history of Western Europe implanted by antiliberal German historians of the late nineteenth century. The myth held that the growth of absolute monarchies and of mercantilism in the early modern era was necessary for the development of capitalism, since these served to liberate the merchants and the people from local feudal restrictions. In actuality, this was not at all the case; the king and his nation-State served rather as a super-feudal overlord reimposing and reinforcing feudalism just as it was being dissolved by the peaceful growth of the market economy. The king superimposed his own restrictions and monopoly privileges onto those of the feudal regime. The absolute monarchs were the Old Order writ large and made even more despotic than before. Capitalism, indeed, flourished earliest and most actively precisely in those areas where the central State was weak or nonexistent: the Italian cities, the Hanseatic League, the confederation of seventeenth-century Holland. Finally, the Old Order was overthrown or severely shaken in its grip in two ways. One was by industry and the market expanding through the interstices of the feudal order (for example, industry in England developing in the countryside beyond the grip of feudal, State and guild restrictions). More important was a series of cataclysmic revolutions that blasted loose the Old Order and the old ruling classes: the English Revolutions of the seventeenth century, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution, all of which were necessary for the ushering in of the Industrial Revolution and of at least partial victories for individual liberty, laissez-faire, separation of church and state, and international peace. The society of status gave way, at least partially, to the “society of contract”; the military society gave way partially to the “industrial society.” The mass of the population now achieved a mobility of labor and place, and accelerating expansion of their living standards, for which they had scarcely dared to hope. Liberalism had indeed brought to the Western world not only liberty, the prospect of peace, and the rising living standards of an industrial society, but above all, perhaps, it brought hope, a hope in ever-greater progress that lifted the mass of mankind out of its age-old sinkhole of stagnation and despair.

Soon there developed in Western Europe two great political ideologies, centered around this new revolutionary phenomenon: one was liberalism, the party of hope, of radicalism, of liberty, of the Industrial Revolution, of progress, of humanity; the other was conservatism, the party of reaction, the party that longed to restore the hierarchy, statism, theocracy, serfdom, and class exploitation of the Old Order. Since liberalism admittedly had reason on its side, the Conservatives darkened the ideological atmosphere with obscurantist calls for romanticism, tradition, theocracy, and irrationalism. Political ideologies were polarized, with liberalism on the extreme “left,” and conservatism on the extreme “right,” of the ideological spectrum. That genuine liberalism was essentially radical and revolutionary was brilliantly perceived, in the twilight of its impact, by the great Lord Acton (one of the few figures in the history of thought who, charmingly, grew more radical as he grew older). Acton wrote that “Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is.” In working out this view, incidentally, it was Acton, not Trotsky, who first arrived at the concept of the “permanent revolution.” As Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote in her excellent study of Acton:

. . . his philosophy develop(ed) to the point where the future was seen as the avowed enemy of the past, and where the past was allowed no authority except as it happened to conform to morality. To take seriously this Liberal theory of history, to give precedence to “what ought to be” over “what is,” was, he admitted, virtually to install a “revolution in permanence.”

The “revolution in permanence,” as Acton hinted in the inaugural lecture and admitted frankly in his notes, was the culmination of his philosophy of history and theory of politics. . . . This idea of conscience, that men carry about with them the knowledge of good and evil, is the very root of revolution, for it destroys the sanctity of the past. . . . “Liberalism is essentially revolutionary,” Acton observed. “Facts must yield to ideas. Peaceably and patiently if possible. Violently if not.” [1]

The Liberal, wrote Acton, far surpassed the Whig:

The Whig governed by compromise. The Liberal begins the reign of ideas. . . . One is practical, gradual, ready for compromise. The other works out a principle philosophically. One is a policy aiming at a philosophy. The other is a philosophy seeking a policy. [2]

What happened to liberalism? Why then did it decline during the nineteenth century? This question has been pondered many times, but perhaps the basic reason was an inner rot within the vitals of liberalism itself. For, with the partial success of the Liberal Revolution in the West, the Liberals increasingly abandoned their radical fervor and, therefore, their liberal goals, to rest content with a mere defense of the uninspiring and defective status quo. Two philosophical roots of this decay may be discerned. First is the abandonment of natural rights and “higher law” theory for utilitarianism, for only forms of natural or higher law theory can provide a radical base outside the existing system from which to challenge the status quo; and only such theory furnishes a sense of necessary immediacy to the libertarian struggle by focusing on the necessity of bringing existing criminal rulers to the bar of justice. Utilitarians, on the other hand, in abandoning justice for expediency, also abandon immediacy for quiet stagnation and inevitably end up as objective apologists for the existing order.

The second great philosophical influence on the decline of liberalism was evolutionism, or Social Darwinism, which put the finishing touches to liberalism as a radical force in society. For the Social Darwinist erroneously saw history and society through the peaceful, rose-colored glasses of infinitely slow, infinitely gradual social evolution. Ignoring the prime fact that no ruling caste in history has ever voluntarily surrendered its power, and that, therefore, liberalism had to break through by means of a series of revolutions, the Social Darwinists looked forward peacefully and cheerfully to thousands of years of infinitely gradual evolution to the next supposedly inevitable stage of individualism.

An interesting illustration of a thinker who embodies within himself the decline of liberalism in the nineteenth century is Herbert Spencer. Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millennia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned liberalism as a fighting, radical creed and confined his liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well, so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory, for example, in repudiating his famous chapter in Social Statics, “The Right to Ignore the State.”

In England, the classical liberals began their shift from radicalism to quasi-conservatism in the early nineteenth century; a touchstone of this shift was the general British liberal attitude toward the national liberation struggle in Ireland. This struggle was twofold: against British political imperialism and against feudal landlordism which had been imposed by that imperialism. By their Tory blindness toward the Irish drive for national independence, and especially for peasant property against feudal oppression, the British Liberals (including Spencer) symbolized their effective abandonment of genuine liberalism, which had been virtually born in a struggle against the feudal land system. Only in the United States, the great home of radical liberalism (where feudalism had never been able to take root outside the South), did natural rights and higher-law theory, and consequent radical liberal movements, continue in prominence until the mid-nineteenth century. In their different ways, the Jacksonian and Abolitionist movements were the last powerful radical libertarian movements in American life. [3]

Thus, with liberalism abandoned from within, there was no longer a party of hope in the Western world, no longer a “Left” movement to lead a struggle against the state and against the unbreached remainder of the Old Order. Into this gap, into this void created by the drying up of radical liberalism, there stepped a new movement: socialism. Libertarians of the present day are accustomed to think of socialism as the polar opposite of the libertarian creed. But this is a grave mistake, responsible for a severe ideological disorientation of libertarians in the present world. As we have seen, conservatism was the polar opposite of liberty; and socialism, while to the “left” of conservatism, was essentially a confused, middle-of-the-road movement. It was, and still is, middle-of-the-road because it tries to achieve liberal ends by the use of conservative means.

In short, Russell Kirk, who claims that socialism was the heir of classical liberalism, and Ronald Hamowy, who sees socialism as the heir of conservatism, are both right; for the question is on what aspect of this confused centrist movement we happen to be focusing. Socialism, like liberalism and against conservatism, accepted the industrial system and the liberal goals of freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war; but it tried to achieve these ends by the use of incompatible, conservative means: statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc. Or rather, to be more precise, there were from the beginning two different strands within socialism: one was the right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism and which was thus a projection of conservatism trying to accept and dominate the new industrial civilization. The other was the left-wing, relatively libertarian strand, exemplified in their different ways by Marx and Bakunin, revolutionary and far more interested in achieving the libertarian goals of liberalism and socialism; but especially the smashing of the state apparatus to achieve the “withering away of the State” and the “end of the exploitation of man by man.” Interestingly enough, the very Marxian phrase, the “replacement of the government by men by the administration of things,” can be traced, by a circuitous route, from the great French radical laissez-faire liberals of the early nineteenth century, Charles Comte (no relation to Auguste Comte) and Charles Dunoyer. And so, too, may the concept of the “class struggle”; except that for Dunoyer and Comte the inherently antithetical classes were not businessmen versus workers, but the producers in society (including free businessmen, workers, peasants, etc.) versus the exploiting classes constituting, and privileged by, the State apparatus. [4] Saint-Simon at one time in his confused and chaotic life was close to Comte and Dunoyer and picked up his class analysis from them, in the process characteristically getting the whole thing balled up and converting businessmen on the market, as well as feudal landlords and others of the State privileged, into “exploiters.” Marx and Bakunin picked this up from the Saint-Simonians, and the result gravely misled the whole left-socialist movement; for, then, in addition to smashing the repressive State, it became supposedly necessary to smash private capitalist ownership of the means of production. Rejecting private property, especially of capital, the left socialists were then trapped in a crucial inner contradiction: if the State is to disappear after the revolution (immediately for Bakunin, gradually “withering” for Marx), then how is the “collective” to run its property without becoming an enormous State itself in fact, even if not in name? This was a contradiction which neither the Marxists nor the Bakuninists were ever able to resolve.

Having replaced radical liberalism as the party of the “left,” socialism, by the turn of the twentieth century, fell prey to this inner contradiction. Most socialists (Fabians, Lassalleans, even Marxists) turned sharply rightward, completely abandoned the old libertarian goals and ideals of revolution and the withering away of the State and became cozy conservatives permanently reconciled to the State, the status quo, and the whole apparatus of neomercantilism, State monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and war that was rapidly being established and riveted on European society at the turn of the twentieth century. For conservatism, too, had re-formed and regrouped to try to cope with a modern industrial system and had become a refurbished mercantilism, a regime of statism, marked by State monopoly privilege, in direct and indirect forms, to favored capitalists and to quasi-feudal landlords. The affinity between right socialism and the new conservatism became very close, the former advocating similar policies but with a demagogic populist veneer. Thus, the other side of the coin of imperialism was “social imperialism,” which Joseph Schumpeter trenchantly defined as “an imperialism in which the entrepreneurs and other elements woo the workers by means of social welfare concessions which appear to depend on the success of export monopolism.” [5]

Historians have long recognized the affinity, and the welding together, of right-wing socialism with conservatism in Italy and Germany, where the fusion was embodied first in Bismarckism and then in fascism and national socialism – the latter fulfilling the Conservative program of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, theocracy, and a right-wing collectivism that retained and even cemented the rule of the old privileged classes. But only recently have historians begun to realize that a similar pattern occurred in England and the United States. Thus, Bernard Semmel, in his brilliant history of the social-imperialist movement in England at the turn of the twentieth century, shows how the Fabian Society welcomed the rise of the imperialists in England. [6]   When, in the mid-1890s, the Liberal Party in England split into the radicals on the left and the liberal-imperialists on the right, Beatrice Webb, co-leader of the Fabians, denounced the radicals as “laissez-faire and anti-imperialists,” while hailing the latter as “collectivists and imperialists.” An official Fabian manifesto, Fabianism and the Empire (1900), drawn up by George Bernard Shaw (who was later, with perfect consistency, to praise the domestic policies of Stalin and Mussolini and Sir Oswald Mosley), lauded imperialism and attacked the radicals, who “still cling to the fixed-frontier ideals of individualist republicanism (and) noninterference.” In contrast, “a Great Power . . . must govern (a world empire) in the interests of civilization as a whole.” After this, the Fabians collaborated closely with Tories and liberal-imperialists. Indeed, in late 1902, Sidney and Beatrice Webb established a small, secret group of brain-trusters, called The Coefficients; as one of the leading members of this club, the Tory imperialist, Leopold S. Amery, revealingly wrote:

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were much more concerned with getting their ideas of the welfare state put into practice by anyone who might be prepared to help, even on the most modest scale, than with the early triumph of an avowedly Socialist Party. . . . There was, after all, nothing so very unnatural, as [Joseph] Chamberlain’s own career had shown, in a combination of Imperialism in external affairs with municipal socialism or semi-socialism at home. [7]

Other members of The Coefficients, who, as Amery wrote, were to function as “Brain Trusts or General Staff” for the movement, were: the liberal-imperialist Richard B. Haldane; the geopolitician Halford J. Mackinder; the Imperialist and Germanophobe Leopold Maxse, publisher of the National Review; the Tory socialist and imperialist Viscount Milner; the naval imperialist Carlyon Bellairs; the famous journalist J. L. Garvin; Bernard Shaw; Sir Clinton Dawkins, partner of the Morgan Bank; and Sir Edward Grey, who, at a meeting of the club first adumbrated the policy of Entente with France and Russia that was to eventuate in World War I. [8]

The famous betrayal during World War I of the old ideals of revolutionary pacifism by the European Socialists, and even by the Marxists, should have come as no surprise; that each Socialist Party supported its “own” national government in the war (with the honorable exception of Eugene Victor Debs’s Socialist Party in the United States) was the final embodiment of the collapse of the classic Socialist Left. From then on, Socialists and quasi-Socialists joined Conservatives in a basic amalgam, accepting the state and the mixed economy (= neo-mercantilism = the welfare state = interventionism = state monopoly capitalism, merely synonyms for the same essential reality). It was in reaction to this collapse that Lenin broke out of the Second International to reestablish classic revolutionary Marxism in a revival of left socialism.

In fact, Lenin, almost without knowing it, accomplished more than this. It is common knowledge that “purifying” movements, eager to return to a classic purity shorn of recent corruptions, generally purify further than what had held true among the original classic sources. There were, indeed, marked “conservative” strains in the writings of Marx and Engels themselves which often justified the State, Western imperialism, and aggressive nationalism, and it was these motifs, in the ambivalent views of the masters on this subject, that provided the fodder for the later shift of the majority Marxists into the “social imperialist” camp. [9] Lenin’s camp turned more “left” than had Marx and Engels themselves. Lenin had a decidedly more revolutionary stance toward the State and consistently defended and supported movements of national liberation against imperialism. The Leninist shift was more “leftist” in other important senses as well. For while Marx had centered his attack on market capitalism per se, the major focus of Lenin’s concerns was on what he conceived to be the highest stages of capitalism: imperialism and monopoly. Hence Lenin’s focus, centering as it did in practice on State monopoly and imperialism rather than on laissez-faire capitalism, was in that way far more congenial to the Libertarian than that of Karl Marx.

Fascism and Nazism were the local culmination in domestic affairs of the modern drift toward right-wing collectivism. It has become customary among libertarians, as indeed among the Establishment of the West, to regard fascism and communism as fundamentally identical. But while both systems were indubitably collectivist, they differed greatly in their socioeconomic content. Communism was a genuine revolutionary movement that ruthlessly displaced and overthrew the old ruling elites, while fascism, on the contrary, cemented into power the old ruling classes. Hence, fascism was a counterrevolutionary movement that froze a set of monopoly privileges upon society; in short, fascism was the apotheosis of modern State monopoly capitalism. [10] Here was the reason that fascism proved so attractive (which communism, of course, never did) to big business interests in the West – openly and unabashedly so in the 1920s and early 1930s. [11]

We are now in a position to apply our analysis to the American scene. Here we encounter a contrasting myth about recent American history which has been propagated by current conservatives and adopted by most American libertarians. The myth goes approximately as follows: America was, more or less, a haven of laissez-faire until the New Deal; then Roosevelt, influenced by Felix Frankfurter, the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and other “Fabian” and communist “conspirators,” engineered a revolution which set America on the path to socialism, and further on beyond the horizon, to communism. The present-day libertarian who adopts this or a similar view of the American experience, tends to think of himself as an “extreme right-winger”; slightly to the left of him, then, stands the conservative, to the left of that the middle-of-the-road, and then leftward to socialism and communism. Hence, the enormous temptation for some libertarians to red-bait; for, since they see America as drifting inexorably leftward to socialism and, therefore, to communism, the great temptation is for them to overlook the intermediary stages and tar all of their opposition with the hated Red brush.

One would think that the “right-wing Libertarian” would quickly be able to see some drastic flaws in this conception. For one thing, the income tax amendment, which he deplores as the beginning of socialism in America, was put through Congress in 1909 by an overwhelming majority of both parties. To look at this event as a sharp leftward move toward socialism would require treating President William Howard Taft, who put through the Sixteenth Amendment, as a Leftist, and surely few would have the temerity to do that. Indeed, the New Deal was not a revolution in any sense; its entire collectivist program was anticipated: proximately by Herbert Hoover during the depression, and, beyond that, by the war-collectivism and central planning that governed America during World War I. Every element in the New Deal program: central planning, creation of a network of compulsory cartels for industry and agriculture, inflation and credit expansion, artificial raising of wage rates and promotion of unions within the overall monopoly structure, government regulation and ownership, all this had been anticipated and adumbrated during the previous two decades. [12] And this program, with its privileging of various big business interests at the top of the collectivist heap, was in no sense reminiscent of socialism or leftism; there was nothing smacking of the egalitarian or the proletarian here. No, the kinship of this burgeoning collectivism was not at all with socialism-communism but with fascism, or socialism-of-the-right, a kinship which many big businessmen of the twenties expressed openly in their yearning for abandonment of a quasi-laissez-faire system for a collectivism which they could control. And, surely, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Clark Hoover make far more recognizable figures as proto-Fascists than they do as crypto-communists.

The essence of the New Deal was seen, far more clearly than in the Conservative mythology, by the Leninist movement in the early 1930s; that is, until the mid-thirties, when the exigencies of Soviet foreign relations caused a sharp shift of the world communist line to “Popular Front” approval of the New Deal. Thus, in 1934, the British Leninist theoretician R. Palme Dutt published a brief but scathing analysis of the New Deal as “social fascism” – as the reality of fascism cloaked with a thin veneer of populist demagogy. No Conservative opponent has ever delivered a more vigorous or trenchant denunciation of the New Deal. The Roosevelt policy, wrote Dutt, was to “move to a form of dictatorship of a war-type”; the essential policies were to impose a State monopoly capitalism through the NRA, to subsidize business, banking, and agriculture through inflation and the partial expropriation of the mass of the people through lower real-wage rates and to the regulation and exploitation of labor by means of government-fixed wages and compulsory arbitration. When the New Deal, wrote Dutt, is stripped of its “social-reformist ‘progressive’ camouflage,” “the reality of the new Fascist type of system of concentrated State capitalism and industrial servitude remains,” including an implicit “advance to war.” Dutt effectively concluded with a quote from an editor of the highly respected Current History Magazine:

The new America [the editor had written in mid-1933] will not be capitalist in the old sense, nor will it be socialist. If at the moment the trend is towards fascism, it will be an American fascism, embodying the experience, the traditions, and the hopes of a great middle-class nation. [13]

Thus, the New Deal was not a qualitative break from the American past; on the contrary, it was merely a quantitative extension of the web of State privilege that had been proposed and acted upon before: in Hoover’s administration, in the war collectivism of World War I, and in the Progressive Era. The most thorough exposition of the origins of State monopoly capitalism, or what he calls “political capitalism,” in the United States is found in the brilliant work of Dr. Gabriel Kolko. In The Triumph of Conservatism, Kolko traces the origins of political capitalism in the “reforms” of the Progressive Era. Orthodox historians have always treated the Progressive period (roughly 1900–1916) as a time when free-market capitalism was becoming increasingly “monopolistic”; in reaction to this reign of monopoly and big business, so the story runs, altruistic intellectuals and far-seeing politicians turned to intervention by the government to reform and to regulate these evils. Kolko’s great work demonstrates that the reality was almost precisely the opposite of this myth. Despite the wave of mergers and trusts formed around the turn of the century, Kolko reveals, the forces of competition on the free market rapidly vitiated and dissolved these attempts at stabilizing and perpetuating the economic power of big business interests. It was precisely in reaction to their impending defeat at the hands of the competitive storms of the market that big business turned, increasingly after the 1900s, to the federal government for aid and protection. In short, the intervention by the federal government was designed, not to curb big business monopoly for the sake of the public weal, but to create monopolies that big business (as well as trade associations of smaller business) had not been able to establish amidst the competitive gales of the free market. Both left and right have been persistently misled by the notion that intervention by the government is ipso facto leftish and antibusiness. Hence the mythology of the New-Fair Deal-as-Red that is endemic on the right. Both the big businessmen, led by the Morgan interests, and Professor Kolko, almost uniquely in the academic world, have realized that monopoly privilege can only be created by the State and not as a result of free-market operations.

Thus, Kolko shows that, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and culminating in Wilson’s New Freedom, in industry after industry, for example, insurance, banking, meat, exports and business generally, regulations that present-day rightists think of as “socialistic” were not only uniformly hailed, but conceived and brought about by big businessmen. This was a conscious effort to fasten upon the economy a cement of subsidy, stabilization, and monopoly privilege. A typical view was that of Andrew Carnegie; deeply concerned about competition in the steel industry, which neither the formation of U.S. Steel nor the famous “Gary Dinners” sponsored by that Morgan company could dampen, Carnegie declared in 1908 that “it always comes back to me that government control, and that alone, will properly solve the problem.” There is nothing alarming about government regulation per se, announced Carnegie, “capital is perfectly safe in the gas company, although it is under court control. So will all capital be, although under government control.” [14]

The Progressive Party, Kolko shows, was basically a Morgan-created party to reelect Roosevelt and punish President Taft, who had been overzealous in prosecuting Morgan enterprises; the leftish social workers often unwittingly provided a demagogic veneer for a conservative-statist movement. Wilson’s New Freedom, culminating in the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, far from being considered dangerously socialistic by big business, was welcomed enthusiastically as putting their long-cherished program of support, privilege, and regulation of competition into effect (and Wilson’s war collectivism was welcomed even more exuberantly). Edward N. Hurley, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission and formerly president of the Illinois Manufacturers Association, happily announced in late 1915, that the Federal Trade Commission was designed “to do for general business” what the ICC had been eagerly doing for the railroads and shippers, what the Federal Reserve was doing for the nation’s bankers, and what the Department of Agriculture was accomplishing for the farmers. [15] As would happen more dramatically in European fascism, each economic interest group was being cartelized and monopolized and fitted into its privileged niche in a hierarchically-ordered socioeconomic structure. Particularly influential were the views of Arthur Jerome Eddy, an eminent corporation lawyer who specialized in forming trade associations and who helped to father the Federal Trade Commission. In his magnum opus fiercely denouncing competition in business and calling for governmentally-controlled and protected industrial “cooperation,” Eddy trumpeted that “Competition is War, and ‘War is Hell’.” [16]

What of the intellectuals of the Progressive period, damned by the present-day Right as “socialistic”? Socialistic in a sense they were, but what kind of “socialism”? The conservative state socialism of Bismarck’s Germany, the prototype for so much of modern European – and American – political forms, and under which the bulk of American intellectuals of the late nineteenth century received their higher education. As Kolko puts it:

The conservatism of the contemporary intellectuals . . . the idealization of the state by Lester Ward, Richard T. Ely, or Simon N. Patten . . . was also the result of the peculiar training of many of the American academics of this period. At the end of the nineteenth century the primary influence in American academic social and economic theory was exerted by the universities. The Bismarckian idealization of the state, with its centralized welfare functions . . . was suitably revised by the thousands of key academics who studied in German universities in the 1880s and 1890s. [17]

The ideal of the leading ultraconservative German professors, moreover, who were also called “socialists of the chair,” was consciously to form themselves into the “intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern” – and that they surely were.

As an exemplar of the Progressive intellectual, Kolko aptly cites Herbert Croly, editor of the Morgan-financed New Republic. Systematizing Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Croly hailed this new Hamiltonianism as a system for collectivist federal control and integration of society into a hierarchical structure. Looking forward from the Progressive Era, Gabriel Kolko concludes that:

a synthesis of business and politics on the federal level was created during the war, in various administrative and emergency agencies, that continued throughout the following decade. Indeed, the war period represents the triumph of business in the most emphatic manner possible . . . big business gained total support from the various regulatory agencies and the Executive. It was during the war that effective, working oligopoly and price and market agreements became operational in the dominant sectors of the American economy. The rapid diffusion of power in the economy and relatively easy entry virtually ceased. Despite the cessation of important new legislative enactments, the unity of business and the federal government continued throughout the 1920s and thereafter, using the foundations laid in the Progressive Era to stabilize and consolidate conditions within various industries. . . . The principle of utilizing the federal government to stabilize the economy, established in the context of modern industrialism during the Progressive Era, became the basis of political capitalism in its many later ramifications.

In this sense progressivism did not die in the 1920s, but became a part of the basic fabric of American society. [18]

Thus the New Deal. After a bit of leftish wavering in the middle of the late thirties, the Roosevelt administration recemented its alliance with big business in the national defense and war contract economy that began in 1940. This is an economy and a polity that has been ruling America ever since, embodied in the permanent war economy, the full-fledged State monopoly capitalism and neomercantilism, the military-industrial complex of the present era. The essential features of American society have not changed since it was thoroughly militarized and politicized in World War II – except that the trends intensify, and even in everyday life men have been increasingly molded into conforming organization men serving the State and its military–industrial complex. William H. Whyte, Jr., in his justly famous book, The Organization Man, made clear that this molding took place amidst the adoption by business of the collectivist views of “enlightened” sociologists and other social engineers. It is also clear that this harmony of views is not simply the result of naïveté by big businessmen – not when such “naïveté” coincides with the requirements of compressing the worker and manager into the mold of willing servitor in the great bureaucracy of the military-industrial machine. And, under the guise of “democracy,” education has become mere mass drilling in the techniques of adjustment to the task of becoming a cog in the vast bureaucratic machine.

Meanwhile, the Republicans and Democrats remain as bipartisan in forming and supporting this establishment as they were in the first two decades of the twentieth century. “Me-tooism” – bipartisan support of the status quo that underlies the superficial differences between the parties – did not begin in 1940.

How did the corporal’s guard of remaining libertarians react to these shifts of the ideological spectrum in America? An instructive answer may be found by looking at the career of one of the great libertarians of twentieth-century America – Albert Jay Nock. In the 1920s, when Nock had formulated his radical libertarian philosophy, he was universally regarded as a member of the extreme Left, and he so regarded himself as well. It is always the tendency, in ideological and political life, to center one’s attention on the main enemy of the day, and the main enemy of that day was the conservative statism of the Coolidge-Hoover administration; it was natural, therefore, for Nock, his friend and fellow-libertarian H. L. Mencken and other radicals to join quasi-Socialists in battle against the common foe. When the New Deal succeeded Hoover, on the other hand, the milk-and-water socialists and vaguely leftish Interventionists hopped on the New Deal bandwagon; on the Left only the Libertarians such as Nock and Mencken and the Leninists (before the Popular Front period) realized that Roosevelt was only a continuation of Hoover in other rhetoric. It was perfectly natural for the radicals to form a united front against Roosevelt with the older Hoover and Al Smith conservatives who either believed Roosevelt had gone too far or disliked his flamboyant populistic rhetoric. But the problem was that Nock and his fellow radicals, at first properly scornful of their newfound allies, soon began to accept them and even don cheerfully the formerly despised label of “Conservative.” With the rank-and-file radicals, this shift took place, as have so many transformations of ideology in history, unwittingly and in default of proper ideological leadership; for Nock, and to some extent for Mencken, on the other hand, the problem cut far deeper.

For there had always been one grave flaw in the brilliant and finely-honed libertarian doctrine hammered out in their very different ways by Nock and Mencken; both had long adopted the great error of pessimism. Both saw no hope for the human race ever adopting the system of liberty; despairing of the radical doctrine of liberty ever being applied in practice, each in his own personal way retreated from the responsibility of ideological leadership, Mencken joyously and hedonically, Nock haughtily and secretively. Despite the massive contribution of both men to the cause of liberty, therefore, neither could ever become the conscious leader of a libertarian movement, for neither could ever envision the party of liberty as the party of hope, the party of revolution, or a fortiori, the party of secular messianism. The error of pessimism is the first step down the slippery slope that leads to conservatism; and hence it was all too easy for the pessimistic radical Nock, even though still basically a Libertarian, to accept the conservative label and even come to croak the old platitude that there is an a priori presumption against any social change.

It is fascinating that Albert Jay Nock thus followed the ideological path of his beloved spiritual ancestor Herbert Spencer; both began as pure radical Libertarians, both quickly abandoned radical or revolutionary tactics as embodied in the will to put their theories into practice through mass action, and both eventually glided from Tory tactics to at least a partial toryism of content.

And so the Libertarians, especially in their sense of where they stood in the ideological spectrum, fused with the older Conservatives who were forced to adopt libertarian phraseology (but with no real libertarian content) in opposing a Roosevelt administration that had become too collectivistic for them, either in content or in rhetoric. World War II reinforced and cemented this alliance; for, in contrast to all the previous American wars of the century, the pro-peace and “isolationist” forces were all identified, by their enemies and subsequently by themselves, as men of the “Right.” By the end of World War II, it was second nature for libertarians to consider themselves at an “extreme right-wing” pole with the Conservatives immediately to the left of them; and hence the great error of the spectrum that persists to this day. In particular, the modern libertarians forgot or never realized that opposition to war and militarism had always been a “left-wing” tradition which had included Libertarians; and hence when the historical aberration of the New Deal period corrected itself and the “right-wing” was once again the great partisan of total war, the Libertarians were unprepared to understand what was happening and tailed along in the wake of their supposed conservative “allies.” The liberals had completely lost their old ideological markings and guidelines.

Given a proper reorientation of the ideological spectrum, what then would be the prospects for liberty? It is no wonder that the contemporary Libertarian, seeing the world going socialistic and communistic, and believing himself virtually isolated and cut off from any prospect of united mass action, tends to be steeped in long-run pessimism. But the scene immediately brightens when we realize that that indispensable requisite of modern civilization – the overthrow of the Old Order – was accomplished by mass libertarian action erupting in such great revolutions of the West as the French and American Revolutions, and bringing about the glories of the Industrial Revolution and the advances of liberty, mobility, and rising living standards that we still retain today. Despite the reactionary swings backward to statism, the modern world stands towering above the world of the past. When we consider also that, in one form or another, the Old Order of despotism, feudalism, theocracy, and militarism dominated every human civilization until the West of the eighteenth century, optimism over what man has and can achieve must mount still higher.

It might be retorted, however, that this bleak historical record of despotism and stagnation only reinforces pessimism, for it shows the persistence and durability of the Old Order and the seeming frailty and evanescence of the New – especially in view of the retrogression of the past century. But such superficial analysis neglects the great change that occurred with the revolution of the New Order, a change that is clearly irreversible. For the Old Order was able to persist in its slave system for centuries precisely because it awoke no expectations and no hopes in the minds of the submerged masses; their lot was to live and eke out their brutish subsistence in slavery while obeying unquestioningly the commands of their divinely appointed rulers. But the liberal revolution implanted indelibly in the minds of the masses – not only in the West but in the still feudally-dominated undeveloped world – the burning desire for liberty, for land to the peasantry, for peace between the nations, and, perhaps above all, for the mobility and rising standards of living that can only be brought to them by an industrial civilization. The masses will never again accept the mindless serfdom of the Old Order; and given these demands that have been awakened by liberalism and the Industrial Revolution, long-run victory for liberty is inevitable.

For only liberty, only a free market, can organize and maintain an industrial system, and the more that population expands and explodes, the more necessary is the unfettered working of such an industrial economy. Laissez-faire and the free market become more and more evidently necessary as an industrial system develops; radical deviations cause breakdowns and economic crises. This crisis of statism becomes particularly dramatic and acute in a fully socialist society; and hence the inevitable breakdown of statism has first become strikingly apparent in the countries of the socialist (that is, communist) camp. For socialism confronts its inner contradiction most starkly. Desperately, it tries to fulfill its proclaimed goals of industrial growth, higher standards of living for the masses, and eventual withering away of the State and is increasingly unable to do so with its collectivist means. Hence the inevitable breakdown of socialism. This progressive breakdown of socialist planning was at first partially obscured. For, in every instance, the Leninists took power not in a developed capitalist country as Marx had wrongly predicted, but in a country suffering from the oppression of feudalism. Second, the Communists did not attempt to impose socialism upon the economy for many years after taking power; in Soviet Russia until Stalin’s forced collectivization of the early 1930s reversed the wisdom of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which Lenin’s favorite theoretician, Bukharin, would have extended onward towards a free market. Even the supposedly rabid Communist leaders of China did not impose a socialist economy on that country until the late 1950s. In every case, growing industrialization has imposed a series of economic breakdowns so severe that the communist countries, against their ideological principles, have had to retreat step by step from central planning and return to various degrees and forms of a free market. The Liberman Plan for the Soviet Union has gained a great deal of publicity; but the inevitable process of desocialization has proceeded much further in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. Most advanced of all is Yugoslavia, which, freed from Stalinist rigidity earlier than its fellows, in only a dozen years has de-socialized so fast and so far that its economy is now hardly more socialistic than that of France. The fact that people calling themselves “communists” are still governing the country is irrelevant to the basic social and economic facts. Central planning in Yugoslavia has virtually disappeared. The private sector not only predominates in agriculture but is even strong in industry, and the public sector itself has been so radically decentralized and placed under free pricing, profit-and-loss tests and a cooperative worker-ownership of each plant that true socialism hardly exists any longer. Only the final step of converting workers’ syndical control to individual shares of ownership remains on the path toward outright capitalism. Communist China and the able Marxist theoreticians of Monthly Review have clearly discerned the situation and have raised the alarm that Yugoslavia is no longer a socialist country.

One would think that free-market economists would hail the confirmation and increasing relevance of the notable insight of Professor Ludwig von Mises a half-century ago: that socialist states, being necessarily devoid of a genuine price system, could not calculate economically and, therefore, could not plan their economies with any success. Indeed, one follower of Mises, in effect, predicted this process of desocialization in a novel some years ago. Yet neither this author nor other free-market economists have given the slightest indication of even recognizing, let alone saluting, this process in the communist countries – perhaps because their almost hysterical view of the alleged threat of communism prevents them from acknowledging any dissolution in the supposed monolith of menace. [19]

Communist countries, therefore, are increasingly and ineradicably forced to desocialize and will, therefore, eventually reach the free market. The state of the undeveloped countries is also cause for sustained libertarian optimism. For all over the world, the peoples of the undeveloped nations are engaged in revolution to throw off their feudal Old Order. It is true that the United States is doing its mightiest to suppress the very revolutionary process that once brought it and Western Europe out of the shackles of the Old Order; but it is increasingly clear that even overwhelming armed might cannot suppress the desire of the masses to break through into the modern world.

We are left with the United States and the countries of Western Europe. Here, the case for optimism is less clear, for the quasi-collectivist system does not present as stark a crisis of self-contradiction as does socialism. And yet, here, too, economic crisis looms in the future and gnaws away at the complacency of the Keynesian economic managers: creeping inflation, reflected in the aggravating balance-of-payments breakdown of the once almighty dollar; creeping secular unemployment brought about by minimum wage scales; and the deeper and long-run accumulation of the uneconomic distortions of the permanent war economy. Moreover, potential crises in the United States are not merely economic; there is a burgeoning and inspiring moral ferment among the youth of America against the fetters of centralized bureaucracy, of mass education in uniformity, and of brutality and oppression exercised by the minions of the State.

Furthermore, the maintenance of a substantial degree of free speech and democratic forms facilitates, at least in the short run, the possible growth of a libertarian movement. The United States is also fortunate in possessing, even if half-forgotten beneath the statist and tyrannical overlay of the last half-century, a great tradition of libertarian thought and action. The very fact that much of this heritage is still reflected in popular rhetoric, even though stripped of its significance in practice, provides a substantial ideological groundwork for a future party of liberty.

What the Marxists would call the “objective conditions” for the triumph of liberty exist, then, everywhere in the world and more so than in any past age; for everywhere the masses have opted for higher living standards and the promise of freedom and everywhere the various regimes of statism and collectivism cannot fulfill these goals. What is needed, then, is simply the “subjective conditions” for victory; that is, a growing body of informed libertarians who will spread the message to the peoples of the world that liberty and the purely free market provide the way out of their problems and crises. Liberty cannot be fully achieved unless libertarians exist in number to guide the peoples to the proper path. But perhaps the greatest stumbling block to the creation of such a movement is the despair and pessimism typical of the Libertarian in today’s world. Much of that pessimism is due to his misreading of history and his thinking of himself and his handful of confreres as irredeemably isolated from the masses and, therefore, from the winds of history. Hence he becomes a lone critic of historical events rather than a person who considers himself as part of a potential movement which can and will make history. The modern Libertarian has forgotten that the Liberal of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries faced odds much more overwhelming than those which face the Liberal of today; for in that era before the Industrial Revolution, the victory of liberalism was far from inevitable. And yet the liberalism of that day was not content to remain a gloomy little sect; instead, it unified theory and action. Liberalism grew and developed as an ideology and, leading and guiding the masses, made the revolution which changed the fate of the world. By its monumental breakthrough, this revolution of the eighteenth century transformed history from a chronicle of stagnation and despotism to an ongoing movement advancing toward a veritable secular utopia of liberty and rationality and abundance. The Old Order is dead or moribund; and the reactionary attempts to run a modern society and economy by various throwbacks to the Old Order are doomed to total failure. The Liberals of the past have left to modern Libertarians a glorious heritage, not only of ideology but of victories against far more devastating odds. The Liberals of the past have also left a heritage of the proper strategy and tactics for libertarians to follow, not only by leading rather than remaining aloof from the masses, but also by not falling prey to short-run optimism. For short-run optimism, being unrealistic, leads straightway to disillusion and then to long-run pessimism; just as, on the other side of the coin, long-run pessimism leads to exclusive and self-defeating concentration on immediate and short-run issues. Short-run optimism stems, for one thing, from a naïve and simplistic view of strategy: that liberty will win merely by educating more intellectuals, who in turn will educate opinion-molders, who in turn will convince the masses, after which the State will somehow fold its tent and silently steal away. Matters are not that easy. For libertarians face not only a problem of education but also a problem of power, and it is a law of history that a ruling caste has never voluntarily given up its power.

But the problem of power is, certainly in the United States, far in the future. For the Libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to cast off his needless and debilitating pessimism, to set his sights on long-run victory and to set out on the road to its attainment. To do this, he must, perhaps first of all, drastically realign his mistaken view of the ideological spectrum; he must discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all perhaps, who his enemies are. Armed with this knowledge, let him proceed in the spirit of radical long-run optimism that one of the great figures in the history of libertarian thought, Randolph Bourne, correctly identified as the spirit of youth. Let Bourne’s stirring words serve also as the guidepost for the spirit of liberty:

[Y]outh is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition; youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established – Why? What is this thing good for? And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the defenders it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to institutions, customs and ideas and finding them stupid, inane or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem. . . . 

Youth is the leaven that keeps all these questioning, testing attitudes fermenting in the world. If it were not for this troublesome activity of youth, with its hatred of sophisms and glosses, its insistence on things as they are, society would die from sheer decay. It is the policy of the older generation as it gets adjusted to the world to hide away the unpleasant things where it can, or preserve a conspiracy of silence and an elaborate pretense that they do not exist. But meanwhile the sores go on festering just the same. Youth is the drastic antiseptic. . . . It drags skeletons from closets and insists that they be explained. No wonder the older generation fears and distrusts the younger. Youth is the avenging Nemesis on its trail. . . .

Our elders are always optimistic in their views of the present, pessimistic in their views of the future; youth is pessimistic toward the present and gloriously hopeful for the future. And it is this hope which is the lever of progress – one might say, the only lever of progress. . . .

The secret of life is then that this fine youthful spirit shall never be lost. Out of the turbulence of youth should come this fine precipitate – a sane, strong, aggressive spirit of daring and doing. It must be a flexible, growing spirit, with a hospitality to new ideas and a keen insight into experience. To keep one’s reactions warm and true is to have found the secret of perpetual youth, and perpetual youth is salvation. [20]

References:

[1] Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 204–05.

[2] Ibid., p. 209.

[3] Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), chap. 6.

[4] The information about Comte and Dunoyer, as well, indeed, as the entire analysis of the ideological spectrum, I owe to Mr. Leonard P. Liggio. For an emphasis on the positive and dynamic aspect of the Utopian drive, much traduced in our time, see Alan Milchman, “The Social and Political Philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Utopia and Ideology,” The November Review (November, 1964): 3–10. Also cf. Jurgen Ruhle, “The Philosopher of Hope: Ernst Bloch,” in Leopold Labedz, ed., Revisionism (New York: Praeger, 1962), pp. 166–78.

[5] Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 175. Schumpeter, incidentally, realized that, far from being an inherent stage of capitalism, modern imperialism was a throwback to the precapitalist imperialism of earlier ages, but with a minority of privileged capitalists now joined to the feudal and military castes in promoting imperialist aggression.

[6] Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform: English Social-Imperial Thought, 1895–1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960).

[7] Leopold S. Amery, My Political Life (1953). Quoted in Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform, pp. 74–75.

[8] The point, of course, is not that these men were products of some “Fabian conspiracy,” but, on the contrary, that Fabianism, by the turn of the century, was socialism so conservatized as to be closely aligned with the other dominant neo-Conservative trends in British political life.

[9] Thus, see Horace O. Davis, “Nations, Colonies, and Social Classes: The Position of Marx and Engels,” Science and Society (Winter, 1965): 26–43.

[10] See the penetrating article by Alexander J. Groth, “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” American Political Science Review (December, 1964): 888–901. Groth writes:

The Communists . . . have generally undertaken measures directly and indirectly uprooting existing socioeconomic elites: the landed nobility, business, large sections of the middle class and the peasantry, as well as the bureaucratic elites, the military, the civil service, the judiciary, and the diplomatic corps. . . . Second, in every instance of Communist seizure of power there has been a significant ideological–propagandistic commitment toward a proletarian or workers’ state . . . [which] has been accompanied by opportunities for upward social mobility for the economically lowest classes, in terms of education and employment, which invariably have considerably exceeded the opportunities available under previous regimes. Finally, in every case, the Communists have attempted to change basically the character of the economic systems which fell under their say, typically from an agrarian to an industrial economy. . . .

Fascism (both in the German and Italian versions) . . . was socioeconomically a counter-revolutionary movement. . . . It certainly did not dispossess or annihilate existent socioeconomic elites. . . . Quite the contrary, Fascism did not arrest the trend toward monopolistic private concentrations in business but instead augmented this tendency. . . .

Undoubtedly, the Fascist economic system was not a free-market economy, and hence not “capitalist” if one wishes to restrict the use of this term to a laissez-faire system. But did it not operate . . . to preserve in being and maintain the material rewards of, the existing socioeconomic elites?

[11] For examples of the attractions of fascist and right-wing collectivist ideas and plans for American big businessmen in this era, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2000). Also cf. Gaetano Salvemini and George LaPiana, What to Do With Italy (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943), pp. 65ff.

Of the fascist economy, Salvemini perceptively wrote: "In actual fact, it is the State, that is, the taxpayer who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise. . . . Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social." Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936), p. 416.

[12] Thus, see Rothbard, passim.

[13] R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 247–51.

[14] See Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservativm: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 173 and passim. For an example of the way in which Kolko has already begun to influence American historiography, see David T. Gilchrist and W. David Lewis, eds., Economic Change in the Civil War Era (Greenville, Del.: Eleutherian Mills–Hagley Foundation, 1965), p. 115. Kolko’s complementary and confirmatory work on railroads, Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965) comes too late to be considered here. A brief treatment of the monopolizing role of the ICC for the railroad industry may be found in Christopher D. Stone, “ICC: Some Reminiscences on the Future of American Transportation,” New Individualist Review (Spring, 1963): pp. 3–15.

[15] Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, p. 274.

[16] Arthur Jerome Eddy, The New Competition: An Examination of the Conditions Underlying the Radical Change that is Taking Place in the Commercial and Industrial World – The Change from a Competitive to a Cooperative Basis (7th ed., Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1920).

[17] Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism, p. 214.

[18] Ibid., pp. 286–87.

[19] One happy exception is William D. Grampp, “New Directions in the Communist Economics,” Business Horizons (Fall, 1963): pp. 29–36. Grampp writes:

Hayek said that centralized planning will lead to serfdom. It follows that a decrease in the economic authority of the State should lead away from serfdom. The Communist countries may show that to be true. It would be a withering away of the state the Marxists have not counted on nor has it been anticipated by those who agree with Hayek. (p. 35)

The novel in question is Henry Hazlitt, The Great Idea (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951).

[20] Randolph Bourne, “Youth,” The Atlantic Monthly (April, 1912); reprinted in Lillian Schlissel, ed., The World of Randolph Bourne (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), pp. 9–11, 15.

Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and chief academic officer of the Mises Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed Lew as his literary executor. See his books.

Copyright © 1994 Washington Post

Before this day I only thought that I liked Libertarianism. Now I know that I am ideologically, philosophically, most certainly a Libertarian. I have always been such. I just did not know it.

All those little things that most young people (I am now 30… still young) go through are Libertarian yearnings. The recoil against heavy-handed authority. The brashness in addressing “the Man”. All yearnings to be free. To make one’s own decisions and not be told what to do. I am open to guidance, upon asking for it. I wish to improve myself and society. I want help. But on my terms.

I cannot stand injustice. That is Libertarianish. One of its most basic tenets. Justice. For those who do wrong to be held accountable for their actions. Ultimately, all will be held to account for their deeds. But upon this earth, to establish Justice in the land is a most worthy goal. And it is this goal to which Libertarians, and, it seems these days, only Libertarians, strive.

America is rife with injustice. Students graduating with $200,000 in debt and no prospects for employment in a horrible job market. Interminable war and rumors of war with people who have, for the most part, done absolutely nothing to us. Families losing their homes due to fraudulent and predatory loans foisted by parasitical mega-banks. Indefinite detention of  US citizens by the US military for only “perceived” threats and unfounded accusations of “terrorism”. An idiotic Congress of pseudo-Representatives :“Hi, I’m John Corzine. I’m a former VP of Goldman Sachs. I just stole $1 billion. I hate puppies and rainbows and everything about America.”

Libertarianism is about the inevitable victory of Justice and Liberty. Nothing can stop it. The Old Order cannot stop it. The American Fascists cannot stop it. Dead conservatism cannot stop it. This is the true Revolution of our era. Optimism that tomorrow will find us freer than today.

I am an optimist now. I wasn’t always one. Its hard to stay optimistic when so much evil is holding so much power in the world. But the yearning to be free that is in every man’s chest bursts forth in time to drive away the rank pessimism. The prospects for Liberty are strong. Libertarianism is the answer.

NEW YORK (StreetAuthority) – Demand is soaring nearly out of control. Investors can’t get enough silver bullion.

The most popular form of silver bullion is the American Silver Eagle. The coin contains one ounce of pure (99.9%) silver. It has a face value of $1, but right now that single troy ounce of silver is worth $32.

For years now, the United States Mint has been striking these coins as fast as they can. The U.S. Mint facility in West Point, New York, has been solely responsible for minting these coins since 2001. But even the mint facility known as the "Fort Knox of Silver" can’t handle the soaring demand.

In fact, multiple times in 2008 and 2009 the U.S. Mint had to suspend sales. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal on May 23, 2008, "The government rationed food during World War II and gasoline in the 1970s. Now, it’s imposing quotas on another precious commodity: 2008 dollar coins known as silver eagles.

"The coins, each containing about an ounce of silver, have become so popular among investors seeking alternatives to stocks and real estate that the U.S. Mint can’t make them fast enough. In March, the mint stopped taking orders for the bullion coins. Late last month, it began limiting how many coins its 13 authorized buyers world-wide are allowed to purchase."

But the interesting thing is that sales in 2008 were only about half what they are today. You can see the annual sales of American Silver Eagles in the past 10 years in the table below.

In the past five years, demand has grown at a 31% annual pace. The government has even authorized the San Francisco Mint to start producing the Silver Eagle coins for the first time in more than a decade to catch up.

So what’s driving this mountainous demand, and should you be buying silver yourself at these prices?

To be sure, the rise in silver has plenty to do with the increasing uncertainty we see around the world. In fact, I think the soaring debt, inflation worries, mass currency printing, and the falling dollar are so well-known that I won’t go into them here. Instead, there’s another bullish catalyst for silver I want to tell you about that I don’t think most people realize.

Silver is about 17 times more common in the earth’s crust than gold; yet gold is nearly 55 times more expensive than silver.

Something doesn’t add up here. We consume the overwhelming majority of the silver that we take out of the ground each year, while we pile up gold reserves that just sit in vaults. And yet gold is still selling for about 55 times the price of silver — $1,725 an ounce for gold vs. just $32 for silver.

There are two ways this will resolve itself. Gold can fall or silver can rise. My money is on silver going up. Way up.

After all, silver fills every economic function gold does, plus a whole lot more.

Gold is a hedge against economic uncertainty. So is silver. Gold shields investors from inflation, so does silver. Silver offers "safe haven" status, just like gold.

But there’s one big difference: If gold disappeared from the face of the earth tomorrow, then most people would barely notice. But if silver vanished, then our lives would be severely disrupted.

That’s because silver is needed in just about every electronic device modern society runs on — from cell phones to TVs to computers to cameras to MP3 players to iPads.

We use silver in more of mankind’s most useful devices than any other commodity besides petroleum. So when it comes to how valuable these two metals are to our society, silver beats gold hands down.

Action to Take. How high will silver go? I’ll give you my forecast in a coming essay. Just keep in mind that 31 years ago silver spiked to about $143 per ounce in today’s dollars: 347% higher than today’s price. And every supply/demand factor I can find is more bullish now than it was back then.

It’s little surprise investors are scrambling to buy every American Silver Eagle that Uncle Sam can mint.

A man on a Facebook group I belong to posted this link:

Google Trends: Ron Paul, Newt Gingrich

And commented thus: “This is Google’s tracking device for interest in a name or phrase..and though Fox News and others are desperately telling you that Newt Gingrinch is the leader, it is very CLEAR that Ron Paul is kicking his ass…badly ! Enter the candidate you support on the link.. Paul beats them All !”

I agree with his synopsis wholeheartedly. This is what I draw from it. BTW, I live in South Carolina and am somewhat active with the Ron Paul 2012 campaign in SC.

If you change the timeline from past 30 days to past 12 months you will see an even bigger discrepancy between Newt and Ron. RP=1; NG=0.3

Also, if you change it to just SC for past 12 months (30 days doesn’t have enough search volume) you will see that Myrtle Beach is killing it as to RP supporters/volunteers getting on it. Newt is barely getting a hit in that region. What is Myrtle Beach up to?? I’ll probably repost this in their group to see their ideas and tactics. and again, its only been since late October that Newt has even registered in SC. Once the other flavors of the month have faded, Newt has his chance in the sun for a month or so. Come January, Newt’s campaign or Newt himself will implode and I think many of the Cain supporters will coalesce into Ron Paul support; if not overtly, most likely as silent supporters. I think the GOP meeting here in Greenville County proved that point. People are looking for electability. And when they see a bunch of excited, yet courteous and engaging, people supporting Ron Paul they will jump on the bandwagon.

Next if you add the other meaningful candidates (Cain, Perry, Romney, Newt) you will see another picture.

(I had added Bachmann, but she didn’t even register: a big 0.05 for the past 12 months when compared to Paul. When all others are compared to her you see how much of an impact she’s having (at least as far as Search trends go). MB=1; NG=4; Rick Perry=19; Cain=30; and Paul=21. So, as far as this goes: SC, I wouldn’t worry too much about Bachmann. She’ll probably be the next to drop out. If its not Santorum or Huntsman first.)

Back to the others. Compared to Paul, only Cain has drawn more searches (45% more). Perry is closest to Paul with 0.9. And Newt and Romney make up the bottom of the barrel, at 0.2 and 0.15 respectively. What this tells me is that Cain was the “front-runner” candidate to the people of SC. If not by news volume, definitely by search volume. People were interested in Cain’s message and they wanted to get more info about it. That, or they were interested in his sexual scandals and were looking for celebrity gossip. Cain has since dropped out of the race. In either way, this presents a perfect opportunity to capture former Cain supporters to the Ron Paul camp.

Perry has already imploded with his famous “Oops” moment. So he’s a non-contender. Wish he’d just save face and drop out. But he’s got a lot of money and he’ll stay in there no matter how far his poll numbers drop.

Romney is greatly disliked in SC. Period. ‘Nuff said.

So, Paul has a very real shot in SC. Keep it up folks! Ron Paul 2012!

UPDATE: crap, now i have to log in and set the featured image every time. I’ll search Google to see if i can do this from Writer. Crap!