Legendary founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Lew Rockwell, delivers a fascinating and very important talk at the 2019 RPI Summer Washington Conference: Murray Rothbard's views on the centrality of the war and peace issue to the libertarian movement.
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Honoring Lou Rockwell
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| The next speaker really needs no introduction. | |
| He's the inspiration to many of us here. | |
| He certainly was my gateway drug into libertarianism, into the anti-war. | |
| In fact, my ticket to go work for my hero Ron Paul came, was punched by my articles that I wrote for Lou Rockwell before I was hired. | |
| That was kind of, okay, this guy's okay. | |
| Little did he know. | |
| But Lou Rockwell is a source of inspiration. | |
| He's done more than anyone really to encourage the development of the Ron Paul Institute, to encourage, to provide the example that the Mises Institute provides for us, the things that they've done, the wonderful Mises University, which in our small way we emulate with our new scholars program, and hopefully we can grow. | |
| But Lou, for me personally, is always a source of optimism. | |
| When I'm feeling down, things aren't going well, we'll talk on the phone, and I'll just feel better. | |
| And that's a pretty great thing. | |
| So I'm very, very honored to introduce Lou Rockwell to speak. | |
| It's an honor to be here, which I would say we all have a moral duty to support. | |
| Sorry for all the... | |
| So I want to talk about Rothbard and War. | |
| Murray Rothbard was the creator of the modern libertarian movement and a close friend of both Ron Paul's and mine's. | |
| His legacy was a great one. | |
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Murray Rothbard and War
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| And at the Mises Institute, I try every day to live up to his hopes for us. | |
| One issue was the most important to him of all the issues he was concerned with, and that 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 had him blacklisted from National Review and tried, fortunately without success, to silence his voice. | |
| During the 1950s, Murray worked for the Volcker Fund, a libertarian foundation that did great work. | |
| And in a letter to Ken Templeton, who was an executive there, in 1959, he complained about the situation, quote, I can think of no other magazine which might publish this, but might fix it up and try for one of the leftist pacifist publications. | |
| The thing is, I'm getting more and more convinced that the war and 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 until we can end this Cold War for which I believe our rough policy, our tough policy, is largely responsible. | |
| Buckley's position was that it would be necessary to erect a, quote, totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores, unquote, in order to battle communism abroad. | |
| The implication was that once the communist menace subsided, this extraordinary effort, domestic and foreign, could likewise diminish. | |
| But 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 welfare of the warfare state and its right-wing apologists hummed right along after the initial rationale, 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. | |
| Now, the wickedness of the Soviet regime was never in doubt. | |
| But its capabilities and intentions were consistently distorted and overblown. | |
| Despite the dubious foundation on which the hysterical claims behind the alleged Soviet threat existed, it was, excuse me, arrested. | |
| Its existence was ossified into one of the unchallengeable orthodoxies of National Review and the broader conservative movement then being born. | |
| When Murray pointed out the silliness of the whole thing, not to mention the counterproductivity of American military intervention abroad, he quickly became an unperson at National Review, which had published him in its early days. | |
| And I can't stress how important National Review was in those days as the one conservative publication and just of tremendous importance. | |
| Well, before there was an official conservative movement with its magazine, its crusty orthodoxies, its ineffectual think tanks complete with sinecures for ex-politicians, and its striving for respectability, there was a loose, less formal association of writers and intellectuals who opposed Franklin Roosevelt in both his domestic and his foreign policies, a group Murray dubbed the old right. | |
| There was no party line among these intrepid thinkers because there was no one to enforce 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 first insisted no conscription, as well as the principle, quote, enter no foreign wars unless the safety of the United States is directly threatened, unquote. | |
| Murray likewise made note of a 1953 article by George Morgenstern, who was an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune, which was the great libertarian newspaper of its era. | |
| Hard as that is to believe today for anybody who's looked at the Chicago Tribune. | |
| He wrote in Human Events, now become a hacked publication for the conservative movement, Murray lamented in 1966. | |
| He deplored the imperialist tradition in American history. | |
| Morgenstern ridiculed those who swoon at the very sight of the phrase world leadership. | |
| He wrote, an all-pervasive propaganda has established a myth of inevitability in America and the American action that 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 our prospects of world peace have been improved by American intervention in four wars in half a century. | |
| Intervention, he said, 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 argument in foreign policy. | |
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Wars Deform Views
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| 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, which, by the way, the Mises Institute sells that great book and it's very much worth reading. | |
| Very, very still has a lot to teach us. | |
| And it reached number two on the New York Times bestseller list. | |
| He 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 we are. | |
| Here are a few points basic to his thought. | |
| First and foremost, war deforms us morally. | |
| It does so because the state itself warps our moral sense. | |
| We imbibe the idea that the state may legitimately do things that would be considered unspeakable enormities if carried out by any private individuals. | |
| If I have a grievance, even the legitimate one, against someone else, no one would excuse me if I launched an attack on that person's neighborhood. | |
| And I would be thought deranged if I dismissed the deaths I caused as mere collateral damage. | |
| Or suppose Apple Computer or the Staples office chain or the Elks 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 attacks 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 wars stop short of drawing sweeping conclusions from this about the nature of the state. | |
| They remain enthralled to what they learned in high schools and civics. | |
| When the state is described as a great and progressive institution, not even the horrors of war caused them to revisit this crippling assumption. | |
| 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 attitudes have a 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 launched 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 that one time or another that war can stimulate economies. | |
| It's true that wars can stimulate parts of economies. | |
| As Louis von Mises pointed out, it stimulates, as is a plague, the funeral industry. | |
| But war cannot stimulate the economy in general. | |
| Remember, what the economy is for, after all, meeting the needs of consumers. | |
| During the war, the needs of 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 sources from civilian use to military. | |
| There need not be a war raging for militarism to deform the economy. | |
| When half or more of the research and development talent is diverted to 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, you go from being a cost-minimizing firm to becoming a cost and subsidy maximizing firm. | |
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War Deforms Perspective
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| War and war propaganda deform our views of other peoples. | |
| World War I may have been the classic example of this. | |
| The Germans were the Huns, uniquely prone to carry out the most heinous atrocities. | |
| That portrayal made it all the easier to persuade citizens of the Allied countries to support, or at least acquiesce in, four years of war against them. | |
| And then a long starvation campaign against them, forcing them to, even though they were sick and starving, to get the government to sign an unjust treaty, a terrible unjust treaty leading to the second half of World War I, World War II. | |
| There was a minor backlash after all this 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 dimensions of World War I. | |
| They looked with embarrassment at the chauvinistic fervor that they had bought in right along with their countrymen and hoped that more interaction among peoples might make this kind of demonization less effective in the future. | |
| The various hate campaigns carried out against U.S. 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 camels and plotting massacres. | |
| They instead find modern cities bustling with activity. | |
| Most surprising of all, they encounter people who like Americans, although as even if as including we ourselves, they don't care much for the U.S. 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 yawn. | |
| We certainly pay attention if the federal government blew up a wedding party in, say, Providence, Rhode Island. | |
| We'd be really shocked if in pursuit of an accused terrorist, the U.S. 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 people, civilians. | |
| When citizens of country A wonder aloud years later whether that had been a morally acceptable thing to do, their impatient fellows tell them, that's war, whereby begging every important moral question. | |
| Those who raised the issue in the first place are dismissed as naïve, probably of dubious loyalty. | |
| War corrupts the culture. | |
| As literary critic Paul Fussle pointed out, quote, the culture of war kills something precious and indispensable in a civilized society: freedom of utterance, freedom of curiosity, freedom of knowledge, unquote. | |
| He makes an example of the Pentagon official who, in explaining why the military had censored some TV footage showing Iraqi soldiers actually being cut in half by U.S. fire, he noted casually, if we let people see that sort of thing, There'd never again be another war. | |
| Distorts reality itself. | |
| School children, school children, excuse me. | |
| Schoolchildren are taught to believe that American soldiers purchased our freedoms by their sacrifices. | |
| Blasphemous bumper stickers compare American soldiers to Jesus Christ. | |
| But in what way has American freedoms threatened by Iraq or Panama or Somalia? | |
| For that matter, how can 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 superstitions, superstitious reverence of people in past and present, past and present members of the military. | |
| It puts critics of war on the defensive. | |
| Indeed, how can you possibly criticize war and interventionism when these things have kept us free? | |
| In short, war is inseparable from the 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 give the state. | |
| Wrapped in the trappings of patriotism, home, songs, and flags, the state deludes people into despising a leader in a country that until that point they'd barely even heard of, much less had an informed opinion about, and it teaches its subjects to cheer the maiming and the death of fellow human beings who've done them no harm whatsoever. | |
| Given how bad war is, what can we do to stop it? | |
| Part of the answer lies in how we think about war, and there are a few vital points we need to bear in mind. | |
| One, our rulers are not a law unto themselves. | |
| Our warmakers 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 other circumstances. | |
| The anodyne 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 in this way would be called a sociopath. | |
| Give him a fancy title and a nice suit, and he's called a statesman. | |
| 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. | |
| Two, we should humanize the demonized. | |
| We must encourage all efforts to humanize the populations of countries and the crosshairs of the warmakers. | |
| 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 the war. | |
| The establishments, media won't tell you the story, so it is up to us to use all our resources that we have as individuals, 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 warmakers to carry out their two-minute hates and can have the effect of persuading Americans with normal moral 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, as important as it is. | |
| We should not want to bring about peace overseas in order that our rulers may turn the guns on peaceful individuals at home. | |
| Away with all forms of aggression against peaceful people. | |
| Four, never use we when speaking of the government. | |
| The people and the warmakers are two distinct groups. | |
| We must never say we when discussing the U.S. government's foreign policy. | |
| For one thing, the warmakers 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 they were necessary or desired by those who make the wars. | |
| 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 becomes all the more difficult to reason with them. | |
| Why, you're insulting my foreign policy. | |
| Likewise, the use of we feeds into the war fever. | |
| We have got to get them. | |
| They root for their governments the way they root for football teams. | |
| And since they know that we ourselves are all decent and good, they can only be monstrous and evil and deserving of whatever justice we dispense upon them. | |
| The anti-war left falls into this error just as often. | |
| They appeal to Americans with a catalog of horrific crimes we have committed, but we haven't committed these 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 because of alleged overproduction of goods that forced market societies to go abroad off into war in search of external markets for their goods. | |
| This was always economic nonsense. | |
| It was political nonsense, too. | |
| The market needs no parasitical institution to grease the skids for international commerce. | |
| And the same philosophy that urges aggression among individual human beings compels non-aggression between 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, he said. | |
| 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 populations. | |
| It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors, and instead of engaging in exchanging commodities and services, they fight one another, unquote. | |
| The market economy, Mises said, simply means peaceful cooperation and peaceful exchange of goods and services. | |
| It cannot exist when wholesale killing is the order of the day. | |
| Those who believe in the free and unhampered market economy should especially be skeptical of war and military action. | |
| After all, war 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 anew 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 Bidens, the John McCain's, the John Boltons, the Harold Clintons, and the whole gang of neocons. | |
| Respect. | |
| 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 newsletter subscribers. | |
| By the late 1960s, he told Walter Bloch there might only be 25 libertarians in the whole world. | |
| Things are much easier for us today, in large part thanks to Murray's commitment and Ron Paul's extraordinary example. | |
| There are now millions of people who are resolutely anti-war and 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' factory exhortations fall on receptive ears. | |
| This, in my view, is Murray Rothbard's greatest legacy. | |
| It's also Ron Paul's greatest legacy, and it's up to all of us to help carry it forward. | |