Rothbard and War

Rothbard and War by Lou Rockwell.

Murray Rothbard was the creator of the modern libertarian movement and a close friend

of both Ron Paul and me. His legacy was a great one, and at the Meez's institute I try every day

to live up to his hopes for us. One issue was the most important to him, of all the many issues

that concerned him. This was the issue of war and peace. Because of his support for a peaceful,

non-interventionist foreign policy for America, the CIA agent William F. Buckley

blacklisted him from national review and tried fortunately without success to silence his voice.

During the 1950s Murray worked for the Folker Fund, and in a letter to Ken Templeton in 1959,

he complained about the situation. I can think of no other magazine which might publish this,

though I might fix it up a bit and try one of the leftist pacifist publications.

The thing is that I am getting more and more convinced that the war peace question

is the key to the whole libertarian business and that we will never get anywhere in this great

intellectual counter revolution or revolution unless we can end this cold war. A war for which I

believe our tough policy is largely responsible. Buckley's position was that it would be necessary

to erect a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores in order to battle communism abroad.

The implication was that once the communist menace subsided, this extraordinary effort,

domestic and foreign, could likewise diminish. Since government programs do not have a habit of

diminishing, but instead seek new justifications when the old ones no longer exist. Few of us

were surprised when the warfare state and its right-wing apologists hummed right along after

its initial rationale vanished from history. As it turns out, by the way, the Soviet threat

was grossly exaggerated, as such threats always are. The wickedness of the Soviet regime was never

endowed, but its capabilities and intentions were consistently distorted and overblown.

Despite the dubious foundations on which the hysterical claims behind the alleged

Soviet threat rested, its existence ossified into one of the unchallengeable orthodoxies

of national review and of the broader conservative movement than being born.

When Murray pointed out the silliness of the whole thing, not to mention the counterproductive

nature of American military intervention abroad, he quickly became an unperson at national review,

which had published him in its early years. Well before there was an official conservative movement

with its magazines, its crusty orthodoxies, its ineffectual think tanks, complete with

sinecures for ex-politicians, and its craving for respectability, there was a loose,

less formal association of writers and intellectuals who opposed Franklin Roosevelt

in both his domestic and foreign policies. A group Murray dubbed the old right.

There was no party line among these intrepid thinkers because there was nobody to impose one.

Even into the 1950s and the advance of the Cold War, voices of restraint amidst the remnants

of the old right could still be found. In a 1966 article, Murray points to the right wing group

for America, a political action group whose foreign policy platform demanded no conscription

as well as the principle. Enter no foreign wars unless the safety of the United States

is directly threatened. Murray likewise pointed to the Jeffersonian novelist Louis Bromfield who

wrote in 1954 that military intervention against the Soviet Union was counterproductive.

One of the great failures of our foreign policy throughout the world arises from the fact

that we have permitted ourselves to be identified everywhere with the old, doomed,

and rotting colonial imperialists small European nations which once imposed upon so much of the

world, the pattern of exploitation and economic and political domination. None of these rebellious

awakening peoples will trust us or cooperate in any way so long as we remain identified

with the economic colonial system of Europe which represents even in its capitalistic pattern

the last remnants of feudalism. We leave these awakening peoples with no choice but to turn to Russian

and communist comfort and promise of utopia. Murray likewise made note of a 1953 article by George

Morgan Stern editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune in human events now become a hack organ

for the conservative movement Murray lamented in 1966 that deplore the imperialist tradition in American

history. Morgan Stern ridiculed those who swoon on very sight of the phrase world leadership

and wrote an all pervasive propaganda established a myth of inevitability in American action.

All wars were necessary all wars were good the burden of proof rests with those who contend

that America is better off. That American security has been enhanced and that prospects of

world peace have been improved by American intervention in four wars in half a century.

Intervention began with deceit by McKinley. It ends with deceit by Roosevelt and Truman.

Perhaps we would have a rational foreign policy if Americans could be brought to realize that the

first necessity is the renunciation of the lie as an instrument of foreign policy.

With the advent of national review these increasingly isolated voices would be silenced and

marginalized. Even the heroic John T. Flynn whose anti-FDR biography the Roosevelt myth had reached

number two on the New York Times bestseller list was turned away from national review when he

tried to warn of the dangers of a policy of military interventionism. Why did Murray oppose war?

Here are a few points basic to his thought. First and foremost war deforms us morally.

It does so because the state itself first warps our moral sense.

We've imbibed the idea that the state may legitimately do things that would be considered

unspeakable anomalies if carried out by private individuals. If I have a grievance even a legitimate one

against someone else no one would make excuses for me if I launched an attack on that person's

entire neighborhood. And I would be thought deranged if I dismissed any deaths I caused as mere

collateral damage. Or suppose Apple Computer or the Staples Office Supply Chain or the Elk's Club

launched a series of missile attacks that killed a thousand people. The outrage would be ceaseless.

The attacks would be portrayed as evidence of the incorrigible wickedness of the private sector.

But when the United States government launches indefensible wars against Iraq and Afghanistan,

spreading death, destruction, and dislocation to an extraordinary number of people,

there is some anger to be sure among opponents of the policy. Yet even most opponents of the war

stop short of drawing sweeping conclusions from this about the nature of the state.

They remain in thrall to what they learned in high school civics, where the state is described

as a great and progressive institution. Not even the horrors of war cause them to revisit this

crippling assumption. And the next time they're on an airplane, they'll applaud the soldiers who

fought in that very war. Would they, by the way, applaud soldiers who had fought a war launched

by a Walmart? On the other hand, if we think of the state as a parasitic and self-interested

institution that survives by siphoning resources from the productive citizenry,

and which bamboozles the public with a now familiar battery of arguments as to why it is indispensable

to our well-being, we can look at war realistically without all the superstitions and the patriotic

songs. Unfortunately, naive civics class platitudes have greater purchase on the American mind than

does Rothbard's brutally realistic portrayal of the state, its nature, and its motivations.

So the racket continues. The presidents who launch these wars still adorn American classrooms,

thereby conveying the message that whatever their so-called mistakes, these are decent men,

occupying a decent institution whom the kids have a duty to respect.

War and the preparation for war deform the economy. Now this one will come as a surprise to some

people since virtually everyone has heard at one time or another that war can stimulate economies.

It's true that war can stimulate parts of economies. As Ludwig von Mase's pointed out,

it stimulates as does a plague the funeral industry, but war cannot stimulate the economy in general.

Remember what the economies for after all, meeting the needs of consumers. During the war,

the needs of the people take a back seat to the demands of the military.

National income statistics may give the false impression of prosperity,

but any fool understands that seizing money and spending it on, say, cruise missiles,

can't make the public wealthy. It merely diverts resources away from civilian use.

There need not be a hot war raging for militarism to deform an economy. When half or more of your

research and development talent is diverted into military purposes, that means so much less devoted

to civilian needs. When the Pentagon becomes your major customer, you lose the competitive edge to

which market discipline gives rise. Since cost is not the Pentagon's major concern,

the cost minimizing firm tends to become the cost and subsidy maximizing firm.

War and war propaganda deform our views of other peoples.

World War I may have been the classic example of this. The Germans with a hunts uniquely prone to

carry out the most heinous atrocities. That portrayal made it all easier to persuade citizens of

the Allied countries to support, or at least acquiescent, four years of war against them.

And then a long starvation campaign against already impoverished and sick civilians

to force the government to sign an unjust treaty. After the war, there was a minor backlash

against the lies and insults that had rendered international understanding all but impossible.

In fact, our modern exchange student program arose out of intellectuals' unhappiness

with the propaganda dimension of World War I. They looked with embarrassment at the showvenistic

fervor they had been caught up in right alongside their countrymen and hoped that more interaction

among peoples might make that kind of demonization less effective in the future.

The various hate campaigns carried out against US enemies is why it's so shocking for most

Americans to watch videos made by Western travelers and filmmakers about ordinary life in Iran.

Thanks to years of systematic demonization of Iran and Iranians, they expect to find bloodthirsty

savages riding on camels and plotting massacres. They instead find modern cities bustling with

activity. Most surprising of all, they encounter people who, like Americans, even if, like us ourselves,

they don't much care for the US government. Along these lines, war encourages us to think of other

peoples as dispensable or simply beneath us. A wedding party is blown to smithereens in Afghanistan

and Americans Yon. But we certainly pay attention if the federal government blew away a wedding

party in Providence, Rhode Island. We'd be nearly as shocked if in pursuit of an accused

terrorist, the US government bombed an apartment building in London, or the ruling class of country B

attacks a military installation of country A, country A, then bombs country B,

eventually killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. When citizens of country A wonder

allowed years later, whether that had been a morally acceptable thing to do, their impatient fellows

tell them that's war, thereby begging every important moral question. Those who raised the issue in

the first place are dismissed as naïve and probably of dubious loyalty. War corrupts the culture.

As literary critic Paul Fussell has pointed out, the culture of war kills something precious and

indispensable in a civilized society. Freedom of utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of

knowledge. He makes an example of a Pentagon official who, in explaining why the military had

censored some TV footage showing Iraqi soldiers actually cut in half by US fire,

noted casually that if we let people see that kind of thing, there would never again be any

war. War distorts our sense of what service to others truly means. Only the members of the military

are we urge to say thank you for your service. Toward the great entrepreneurs who extend our lives

and make them more fulfilling, we are taught to be envious and resentful. They are most certainly

not thanked for their service. The state is able to get away with its aggression, thanks in part to

its manipulation of language. A soldier who perished in the Iraq war was said to have been serving his

country. What could that mean? The war was launched on preposterous pretext against a leader who

had not harmed Americans and was incapable of doing so. If the war was in the service of anything,

it was the imperial ambitions of a small ruling group. By no means did such a mission,

which diverted vast resources away from civilian use serve the country. War distorts reality itself.

Schoolchildren are taught to believe that the American soldier purchased their freedom by his

sacrifices. Blasphemous bumper stickers compare the American soldier to Jesus Christ.

But in what way was American freedom threatened by Iraq, or Panama, or Somalia? For that matter,

how could any 20th century adversary have managed an invasion of North America, given that even the

Germans couldn't cross the English Channel? But this carefully cultivated mythology helps keep

the racket going. It increases the superstitious reverence people have for a past and present

members of the military. It puts critics of war on the defensive, indeed. How can we criticize war

and intervention when these things have kept us free? In short, war is inseparable from propaganda,

lies, hatred, impoverishment, cultural degradation, and moral corruption. It is the most horrific

outcome of the moral and political legitimacy people are taught to grant the state.

Wrapped in the trappings of patriotism, home, songs, and flags, the state deludes people into

despising a leader and a country that until that point they had barely even heard of.

Much less had an informed opinion about, and it teaches its subjects to cheer the

maming and death of fellow human beings who have never done them any harm. Given how bad war is,

what can we do to stop it? Part of the answer lies in how we think about war. And here are a few vital

points we need to bear in mind. One, our rulers are not a law unto themselves. Let us pursue the

subversive mission of applying the same moral rules against theft, kidnapping, and murder to our

rulers that we apply to everyone else. Our war makers believe they are exempt from normal moral

rules. Because they are at war, they get to suspend all decency, all the norms that govern the

conduct and interaction of human beings in all other circumstances. The anodine term

collateral damage, along with perfunctory and meaningless words of regret, are employed when

innocent civilians, including children, are maimed and butchered. A private individual behaving

this way would be called a sociopath. Give him a fancy title and a nice suit, and he becomes a

statesman too. Humanize the demonized. We must encourage all efforts to humanize the populations of

countries in the crosshairs of the war makers. The general public is whipped into a war frenzy without

knowing the first thing or hearing only propaganda about the people who will die in that war.

The establishment's media won't tell their stories, so it is up to us to use all the resources

we as individuals have, especially online, to communicate the most subversive truth of all

that the people on the other side are human beings too. This will make it marginally more difficult

for the warm makers to carry out their two minutes hate and can have the effect of persuading

Americans with normal human sympathies to distrust the propaganda that surrounds them.

Three, if we oppose aggression, let us oppose all aggression. If we believe in the cause of peace,

putting a halt to aggressive violence between nations is not enough. We should not want to bring

about peace overseas in order that our rulers may turn their guns on peaceful individuals at home,

away with all forms of aggression against peaceful people. The people and the warm makers are

two distinct groups. We must never say we when discussing the U.S. government's foreign policy.

For one thing, the warm makers do not care about the opinions of the majority of Americans.

It is silly and embarrassing for Americans to speak of we when discussing their government's foreign

policy as if their input were necessary to or desired by those who make war.

Four, never use we when speaking of the government, but it is also wrong. Not to mention

mischievous when people identify themselves so closely with their government, they perceive

attacks on their government's foreign policy as attacks on themselves. It then becomes all

the more difficult to reason with them. Why? You're insulting my foreign policy. Likewise,

the use of we feeds into war fever. We have to get them. People root for their

governments as they would for a football team. And since we know ourselves to be decent and good,

they can only be monstrous and evil and deserving of whatever righteous justice we dispense to them.

The anti-war left falls into this error just as often. They appeal to Americans with a catalogue

of horrific crimes we have committed. But we haven't committed those crimes. The same sociopaths

who victimize Americans themselves every day and over whom we have no real control committed those

crimes. Ron Paul has restored the proper association of capitalism with peace and non-intervention.

Leninists and other leftists burdened by a false understanding of economics and the market system

used to claim that capitalism needed war, that alleged overproduction of goods forced market

societies to go abroad and often to war in search for external markets for their excess goods.

This was always economic nonsense. It was political nonsense too. The free market needs no

parasitical institution to grease the skids for international commerce and the same philosophy

that urges non-aggression among individual human beings compels non-aggression between geographical

areas. Mises always insisted, contra the Leninists, that war and capitalism could not long coexist.

Of course, in the long run war and the preservation of the market economy are incompatible.

Capitalism is essentially a scheme for peaceful nations. The emergence of the international

division of labor requires the total abolition of war. The market economy involves peaceful

cooperation. It bursts a sunder when the citizens turn into warriors and instead of exchanging

commodities and services, fight one another. The market economy, Mises said simply, means peaceful

cooperation and peaceful exchange of goods and services. It cannot persist when wholesale killing

is the order of the day. Those who believe in the free and unhappard market economy should be

especially skeptical of war and military action. War, after all, is the ultimate government program.

War has it all, propaganda, censorship, spying, crony contracts, money printing, skyrocketing

spending, debt creation, central planning, hubris, everything we associate with the worst

interventions into the economy. War, Mises observed, is harmful, not only to the conquered but to

the conqueror. Society has arisen out of the works of peace. The essence of society is peacemaking.

Peace and not war is the father of all things. Only economic action has created the wealth around us.

Labor, not the profession of arms, brings happiness. Peace builds, war destroys.

See through the propaganda, stop empowering and enriching the state by cheering its wars,

set aside the television talking points, look at the world and new, without the prejudices of

the past and without favoring your own government's version of things. Be decent, be human,

do not be deceived by the Joe Biden's, the John McCain's, the John Bolton's, Hillary Clinton's

and the whole gang of Nikons reject the biggest government program of them all. Peace builds,

war destroys. Let's return for a moment to Murray. When he opposed the Vietnam war,

he alienated not only national review, the major right wing magazine, and the most important

conservative voice in the country, as well as virtually everyone on the right. He had to write

for a small number of newsletters subscribers. By the late 1960s, he told Walter Block,

there were probably only 25 libertarians in the entire world. Things are much easier for us today,

thanks in large part to Murray's commitment and Ron Paul's extraordinary example.

There are now millions of people who are resolutely anti-war and who don't care which political

party the president launching any particular war happens to belong to. On top of that, it's

encouraging to know that younger people are much less convinced of the need for an interventionist

foreign policy. The younger the audience, the less the warmongers fact-free exhortations fall

on receptive ears. This, in my view, is Murray Rothbard's greatest legacy. It's up to all of us

to help carry it forward. For more content like this, visit mesas.org.