-Caveat Lector-
The Roots of War
by Alyssa Rosenbaum
It is said that nuclear weapons have made wars too
horrible to contemplate. Yet every nation on earth
feels, in helpless terror, that such a war might
come.
The overwhelming majority of mankind -- the people
who die on the battlefields or starve and perish
among the ruins -- do not want war. They never wanted
it. Yet wars have kept erupting throughout the
centuries, like a long trail of blood underscoring
mankind's history.
Men are afraid that war might come because they know,
consciously or subconsciously, that they have never
rejected the doctrine which causes wars, which has
caused the wars of the past and can do it again -- the
doctrine that it is right or practical or necessary
for men to achieve their goals by means of physical
force (by initiating the use of force against other
men) and that some sort of "good" can justify it.
It is the doctrine that force is a proper or
unavoidable part of human existence and human
societies.
Observe one of the ugliest characteristics of today's
world: the mixture of frantic war preparations with
hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both
come from the same source -- from the same political
philosophy. The bankrupt, yet still dominant, political
philosophy of our age is statism.
Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements.
Professlng love and concern for the survival of mankind,
they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should
be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as
a means of settling disputes among nations, and that
war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet
these same peace movements do not oppose
dictatorships; the political views of their members
range through all shades of the statist spectrum,
from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to
communism. This means that they are opposed to the
use of coercion by one nation against another, but
not by the government of a nation against its own
citizens; it means that they are opposed to the
use of force against armed adversaries, but not
against the disarmed.
Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation,
the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture
chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by
dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged
peacelovers are willing to advocate or tolerate -- in
the name of love for humanity.
It is obvious that the ideological root of statism
(or collectivism) is the tribal premise of primordial
savages who, unable to conceive of individual rights,
believed that the tribe is a supreme, omnipotent
ruler, that it owns the lives of its members and
may sacrifice them whenever it pleases to whatever
it deems to be its own "good." Unable to conceive
of any social principle, save the rule of brute
force, they believed that the tribe's wishes are
limited only by its physical power and that other
tribes are its natural prey, to be conquered, looted,
enslaved or annihilated. The history of all primitive
peoples is a succession of tribal wars and intertribal
slaughter. That this savage ideology now rules nations
armed with nuclear weapons, should give pause to
anyone concerned with mankind's survival.
Statism is a system of institutionalized violence
and perpetual civil war. It leaves men no choice
but to fight to seize political power -- to rob or
be robbed, to kill or be killed. When brute force
is the only criterion of social conduct, and
unresisting surrender to destruction is the only
alternative, even the lowest of men, even an animal
even a cornered rat--will fight. There can be no
peace within an enslaved nation.
The bloodiest conflicts of history were not wars
between nations, but civil wars between men of the
same nation, who could find no peaceful recourse
to law, principle or justice. Observe that the
history of all absolute states is punctuated by
bloody uprisings -- by violent eruptions of blind
despair, without ideology, program or goals-which
were usually put down by ruthless extermination.
In a full dictatorship, statism's chronic "cold"
civil war takes the form of bloody purges, when
one gang deposes another -- as in Nazi Germany or
Soviet Russia. In a mixed economy, it takes the
form of pressure-group warfare, each group fighting
for legislation to extort its own advantages by
force from all other groups.
The degree of statism in a country's political
system, is the degree to which it breaks up the
country into rival gangs and sets men against
one another. When individual rights are abrogated,
there is no way to determine who is entitled to
what; there is no way to determine the justice of
anyone's claims, desires or interests. The criterion,
therefore, reverts to the tribal concept of: one's
wishes are limited only by the power of one's gang.
In order to survive under such a system, men have
no choice but to fear, hate and destroy one another;
it is a system of underground plotting, of secret
conspiracies, of deals, favors, betrayals and
sudden, bloody coups.
It is not a system conducive to brotherhood, security,
cooperation and peace.
Statism -- in fact and in principle -- is nothing
more than gang rule. A dictatorship is a gang devoted
to looting the effort of the productive citizens of
its own country. When a statist ruler exhausts his
own country's economy, he attacks his neighbors. It
is his only means of postponing internal collapse and
prolonging his rule. A country that violates the rights
of its own citizens will not respect the rights of
its neighbors. Those who do not recognize individual
rights, will not recognize the rights of nations: a
nation is only a number of individuals.
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism
survives by looting; a free country survives by
production.
Observe that the major wars of history were started
by the more controlled economies of the time against
the freer ones. For instance, World War I was started
by monarchist Germany and Czarist Russia, who dragged
in their freer allies. World War II was started by
the alliance of Nazi Germany with Soviet Russia and
their joint attack on Poland.
Observe that in World War II, both Germany and Russia
seized and dismantled entire factories in conquered
countries, to ship them home--while the freest of the
mixed economies, the semi-capitalistic United States,
sent billions worth of lend-lease equipment, including
entire factories, to its allies. (For a detailed,
documented account of the full extent of Russia's
looting, see East Minus West = Zero by Werner Keller,
New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1962.)
Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did
not and gained nothing. (In fact, the United States
lost, economically, even though it won the war: it
was left with an enormous national debt, augmented
by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former
allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism
that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they
advocate -- in the name of peace.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based
on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore,
the only system that bans force from social relationships.
By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it
is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
Men who are free to produce have no incentive to loot;
they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to
lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights
does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the
point of a gun, inside or outside his country.
Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy
where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war
come out of the income of private citizens there
is no overblown public treasury to hide that
fact -- and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his
own financial losses (such as taxes or business
dislocations or property destruction) by winning
the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the
side of peace.
In a statist economy, where wealth is "publicly owned," a
citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving
peace -- he is only a drop in the common bucket While war
gives him the (fallacious) hope of larger handouts from
his masters. Ideologically, he is trained to regard men
as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no
concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the
same public altar for the benefit of the same state.
The trader and the warrior have been fundamental
antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish
on battlefields, factories do not produce under
bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble.
Capitalism is a society of traders -- for which it
has been denounced by every would-be gunman who
regards trade as "selfish" and conquest as "noble."
Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe
that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace
in history -- a period during which there were no wars
involving the entire civilized world -- from the end of
the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War
I in 1914.
It must be remembered that the political systems of the
nineteenth century were not pure capitalism, but mixed
economies. The element of freedom, however, was dominant;
it was as close to a century of capitalism as mankind has
come. But the element of statism kept growing throughout
the nineteenth century, and by the time it blasted the
world in 1914, the governments involved were dominated
by statist policies.
Just as, in domestic affairs, all the evils caused by
statism and government controls were blamed on capitalism
and the free market-so, in foreign affairs, all the evils
of statist policies were blamed on and ascribed to
capitalism. Such myths as "capitalistic imperialism,"
"war profiteering" or the notion that capitalism has to
win "markets" by military conquest are examples of the
superficiality or the unscrupulousness of statist
commentators and historians.
The essence of capitalism's foreign policy is free
trade -- i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, of
protective tariffs, of special privileges-the opening
of the world's trade routes to free international
exchange and competition among the private citizens
of all countries dealing directly with one another.
During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that
liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the
remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of
absolute monarchies.
"As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire
because it opened world channels of energy for commerce
in general. Though repressive (status) government was
still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with
very bad results, on the whole England's invisible
exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking,
while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could
go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him in
safety." (The God of the Machine, by Isabel Paterson,
Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1964, p. 121. Originally
published by G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1943.)
As in the case of Rome, when the repressive element of
England's mixed economy grew to become her dominant
policy and turned her to statism, her empire fell apart.
It was not military force that had held it together.
Capitalism wins and holds its markets by free competition,
at home and abroad. A market conquered by war can be of
value (temporarily) only to those advocates of a mixed
economy who seek to close it to international competition,
impose restrictive regulations and thus acquire special
privileges by force. The same type of businessmen who
sought special advantages by government action in their
countries, sought special markets by government action
abroad. At whose expense? At the expense of the
overwhelming majority of businessmen who paid the
taxes for such ventures, but gained nothing. Who
justified such policies and sold them to the public?
The statist intellectuals who manufactured such
doctrines as "the public interest" or "national
prestige" or "manifest destiny."
The actual war profiteers of all mixed economies were
and are of that type: men with political pull who
acquire fortunes by government favor, during or
after a war -- fortunes which they could not have
acquired on a free market. Remember that private
citizens -- whether rich or poor, whether businessmen
or workers -- have no power to start a war. That power
is the exclusive prerogative of a government. Which
type of government is more likely to plunge a country
into war: a government of limited powers, bound by
constitutional restriction -- or an unlimited government,
open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests
or ideologies, a government able to command armies to
march at the whim of a single chief executive?
Yet it is not a limited government that today's peace-lovers
are advocating.
(Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an
invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has
the right of self-defense, so has a free country if
attacked. But this does, not give its government the
right to draft men into miliary service -- which is the
most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his
own life. There is no contradiction between the moral
and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient
army, as many military authorities have testified. A free
country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a
foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for
such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies,
the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would
not be possible.)
So long as a country is even semi-free, its mixed-economy
profiteers are not the source of its warlike influences or
policies, and are not the primary cause of its involvement
in war. They are merely political scavengers cashing-in on
a public trend. The primary cause of that trend is the
mixed-economy intellectuals.
Observe the link between statism and militarism in the
intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. Just as the destruction of capitalism and the
rise of the totalitarian state were not caused by business
or labor or any economic interests, but by the dominant
statist ideology of the intellectuals -- so the resurgence
of the doctrine of military conquest and armed crusades for
political "ideals" were the product of the same intellectuals'
belief that "the good" is to be achieved by force.
The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the
United States did not come from the right, but from the
left, not from big-business interests, but from the
collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For a history of
these influences, see The Decline of American Liberalism
by Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr. (New York: Longmans, Green, 1955).
"In such instances," writes Professor Ekirch, "as the
progressives' increasing acceptance of compulsory military
training and of the white man's burden, there were obvious
reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic
reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent
study of American foreign policy, was a revolt against
many of the values of traditional liberalism. 'The spirit
of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of
collective welfare above individual self-interest, the
heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead
of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid
intellect.'" (p. 189. Quoted from R. E. Osgood, Ideals
and Self-Interest in America's Foreign Relations, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 47.)
In regard to Woodrow Wilson, Professor Ekirch writes:
"Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of
United States foreign trade to come about as a result
of free international competition, but he found it
easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize'
direct American intervention as a means of safe-guarding
the national interest." (p. 199.) And: "He seemed to feel
that the United States had a mission to spread its
institutions -- which he conceived as liberal and
democratic -- to the more benighted areas of the world."
(p. 199.) It was not the advocates of capitalism who
helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving
nation into the hysteria of a military crusade-it was
the "liberal" magazine The New Republic. Its editor,
Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: "The American
nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."
Just as Wilson, a "liberal" reformer, led the United
States into World War I, "to make the world safe for
democracy" -- so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another "liberal"
reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the
"Four Freedoms." In both cases, the "conservatives" -- and
the big-business interests -- were overwhelmingly opposed
to war, but were silenced. In the case of World War II,
they were smeared as "isolationists," "reactionaries"
and "America-First'ers."
World War I led, not to "democracy," but to the creation
of three dictatorships: Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy,
Nazi Germany. World War II led, not to "Four Freedoms,"
but to the surrender of one-third of the world's
population into communist slavery.
If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a
failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable
suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and
check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything
but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting
that "poverty breeds wars" (and justifying war by
sympathizing with a "material greed" of that kind).
But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look
at the world of today and if you look back at history,
you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom
is the degree of its prosperity.
Another current catch phrase is the complaint that the
nations of the world are divided into the "haves" and the
"have-nots." Observe the "haves" are those who have freedom,
and that it is freedom that the "have-nots" have not.
If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must
oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the
individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective,
that some men have the right to rule others by force,
and that some (any) alleged "good" can justify
it -- there can be no peace within a nation and no
people among nations.
It is true that nuclear weapons have made wars too
horrible to contemplate. But it makes no difference
to a man whether he is killed by a nuclear bomb or a
dynamite bomb or an old-fashioned club. Nor does the
number of other victims or the scale of the destruction
make any difference to him. And there is something
obscene in the attitude of those who regard horror as
a matter of numbers, who are willing to send a small
group of youths to die for the tribe, but scream
against the danger to the tribe itself -- and more: who
are willing to condone the slaughter of defenseless
victims, but march in protest against wars between
the well-armed.
So long as men are subjugated by force, they will fight
back and use any weapons available. If a man is led to
a Nazi gas chamber or a Soviet firing squad, with no
voices raised to defend him, would he feel any love or
concern for the survival of mankind? Or would he be
more justified in feeling that a cannibalistic mankind,
which tolerates dictatorships, does not deserve to
survive?
If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind
cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot
afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will
take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of
force--outside or inside his own country. Let all
those who are actually concerned with people -- those
who do love man and do care about his survival -- realize
that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of
force that has to be outlawed.
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
