|
|
Stephen Cox
argues that winners and losers are not so easily determined. America's Wars
America Won, Americans Lost by Robert Higgs War kills the
innocent, strengthens the state, supports dictatorships, and stirs up hatred. How
can anyone be considered a winner?
General Thomas Power, commander in chief
of the Strategic Air Command from 1957 to 1964 and Director of the Joint
Strategic Target Planning Staff from 1960 to 1964, ranked near the top of the
U.S. Armed Forces waging the Cold War. An ardent warrior, he did not subscribe to
the Aristotelian maxim of moderation in all things. In 1960, while being briefed
on counterforce strategy, he reacted petulantly to the idea of exercising
restraint in the conduct of nuclear war: "Restraint!" he retorted. "Why are you
so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the
bastards. . . . Look. At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one
Russian, we win!"1 Everyone who knew
Power seems to have thought that he was crazy.
| | Robert
Higgs is an economist and editor of Independent Review.
|
|
Even the man he replaced as SAC commander, General Curtis LeMay, regarded him
as unstable — and everybody knew that LeMay himself was, as "Dr.
Strangelove's" Group Captain Lionel Mandrake would have put it, "as mad as a
bloody March hare." After LeMay left his command at SAC, he became Vice Chief of
Staff of the Air Force in 1957 and Chief of Staff in 1961. He is most often
remembered as a tireless advocate of an all-out, nuclear first strike on the
Soviet Union and its allies, and as the most likely inspiration for General Buck
Turgidson in "Strangelove." Either Power or LeMay might have served as a model
for the "Strangelove" character General Jack D. Ripper, whose own nuclear first
strike on the Ruskies came straight out of the LeMay-Power playbook. It is
chilling to recall that such men once held — and may still hold — the
fate of the world in their hot hands. In Power's day, heaven be thanked, the
civilian leadership had slightly more sense than the military leadership, but in
more recent times, that relationship seems to have been reversed, and now men
such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and their zealous, bloodthirsty
subordinates vividly attest to F.A. Hayek's observation that "the worst get on
top." Winning Whatever else one might say about
our glorious leaders, it must be admitted that they have had, just as the current
gang claims to have, a dedication to "winning" the wars they set out to fight.
President George W. Bush characteristically declared on January 11 that he wants
to bring the troops home from Iraq, but "I don't want them to come home without
achieving the victory."2 Indeed,
winning a war strikes most people as a splendid idea until they stop to think
about it. Given an option to fight and win a war a la Thomas Power,
however, with just two Americans and one Russian (Iraqi, Iranian, Chinese, or
other foreign devil du jour) left alive at the end, sane people recoil. Such
"winning" seems all too clearly absurd. As we back away from this reductio ad
absurdum to consider less extreme conceptions of "winning the war," a great deal
of the senselessness continues to cling to the notion as long as we insist on an
honest account of what actual war and actual winning involve.
|
| "Restraint!" Power
retorted. "Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to
kill the bastards." |
|
The major reason for people's confusion on this account
probably pertains to their reification or anthropomorphization of the collectives
— whether they be clans, tribes, nation-states, or coalitions of such groups
— whose violent conflict defines the war. Lost in the fog of war-related
thought is the concrete, unique, individual person. Hardly anyone seems capable
of talking about war except by linguistically marshalling such collectivistic
globs as "we," "us," and "our," in opposition to "they," "them," and "their."
These flights of fight-fancy always pit our glob against their glob, with ours
invariably prettied up as the good against the bad, the free men against the
enslavers, the believers against the infidels, and so forth — on one side
God's chosen, on the other side the demons of hell.3 Of course, which is which depends entirely on the side that people
happen to find themselves on, usually as a result of some morally irrelevant
contingency, such as birthplace, family migration, or a line that distant
diplomats once drew on a map.4 More
than 50 years ago, sociologist George A. Lundberg observed that despite "the
cavalier fashion in which 'statesmen' revise boundaries, abolish existing
nations, and establish new ones, . . . the demarcations thus arrived at thereupon
become sacred boundaries, the violation of which constitutes 'aggression,' an
infringement on people's 'freedom.'"5
It's almost as if human beings clamored to slay one another on behalf of little
more than historical accidents and persistent myths. French philosopher Ernest
Renan aptly characterized a nation as "a group of people united by a mistaken
view about the past and a hatred of their neighbors."6 A widespread inclination to think in terms
of the group, rather than the distinct individuals who compose it, plays directly
into the hands of violent, power-hungry leaders. Without that popular
inclination, the leaders' capacity to wreak destruction would be reduced nearly
to the vanishing point, but with it, the sky's the limit — or maybe it's not
the limit, now that space-based weapons are all the rage in the
military-industrial-congressional complex. Nothing promotes the sacrifice of the
individual to the alleged "greater good of the whole" more than war does. On this
ground, government leaders successfully levy confiscatory taxes, impose harsh
regulations, seize private property, and even enslave their own country's
citizens to serve as soldiers, to kill or be killed in hideous ways.
Sometimes, as in the aftermath of World War I, people have the wit to recognize,
with the benefit of hindsight, that the alleged "greater good" for which so many
individuals' lives have been sacrificed and so many individuals' wealth and
well-being have been squandered actually consists of little more than their
leaders' foolishness and vanity. On other occasions, however, people never come
to that realization, preferring to live with a mythical justification of their
losses. Even now, after 60 years have passed in which people have had ample
opportunity to see through the official lies and cover-ups, the myth of World War
II as "the good war" (in this country) or "the Great Patriotic War" (in Russia)
remains robust. Once memories of the War Between the States had faded, the
mythologization of war came more easily to Americans because all our wars from
the Spanish-American War on down to the current wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have
been fought on other people's soil. No one can recall in sorrow and bitterness
the wartime devastation of Philadelphia or Chicago because it never happened
— devastation is what Americans dispense to Tokyo or Dresden or Fallujah. In
an immensely important sense, our wars have long seemed to be, in their worst
aspect, somebody else's problem, something that happens "over there."
| Winning a war strikes
most people as a splendid idea until they stop to think about it.
|
|
If Ambrose Bierce could observe a century ago that "war is
God's way of teaching Americans geography,"7 one shudders to imagine what he might say today.
Guadalcanal, Tarawa, Saipan, Peleliu, Iwo Jima, Okinawa — in 1940, probably
not one American in a hundred had ever heard of these remote places where tens of
thousands of young American men, and far more Japanese, would soon lose their
lives. Our good fortune in this regard has been real and important, but it ought
not to blind us to the great variety of genuine losses that we have sustained
notwithstanding our capacity to make all our wars since 1865 — apart from
the sporadic clashes between whites and Indians — take the form of "foreign
wars." For one thing, many Americans have gone "over there" and done some
definite dirty work — let's be honest, war is always dirty work, no matter
how hyped up we might get about its seeming necessity. World War II, the
so-called good war, might have been the dirtiest work of all. American forces
abroad slaughtered not only multitudes of enemy soldiers but also hundreds of
thousands (maybe more) of noncombatants — men, women, and children —
most notably in the terror bombing of German and Japanese cities. Curtis LeMay had a hand in this
evil work, as commander of the B-29 forces that laid waste to scores of Japanese
cities. Speaking of his flyers' devastation of Tokyo with incendiary bombs, LeMay
declared: "We knew we were going to kill a lot of women and kids when we burned
that town. Had to be done."8 Oh, did
it really? Brigadier General Bonner Fellers, an aide to General Douglas
MacArthur, called the March 10, 1945, raid on Tokyo "one of the most ruthless and
barbaric killings of noncombatants in all history."9 As a result of the U.S. air attacks on Japanese
cities, by the end of July 1945, "civilian casualties exceeded 800,000, including
300,000 dead," and more than 8 million people had been left
homeless.10 Unsated by this orgy of
savagery, the Americans went on, completely unnecessarily, to annihilate scores
of thousands of the hapless residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaski with atomic
bombs. These events were not just losses for Germans and Japanese. The men
who carried out these barbarous acts also sacrificed their decency and a vital
part of their humanity. War brings many of its participants to that tragic end.
Only a deranged man can live complacently with the knowledge that he has
committed such heinous acts. In greater or lesser degree, however, every war
encompasses an enormous mass of such indecencies. Soldiers may excuse themselves
on the ground that they are "just following orders" or, if they are especially
naive, that they are acting heroically in defense of all that is good and great
about their own country. Kept in combat long enough, however, nearly everyone who
is not a natural-born killer becomes either psychologically disabled or
absolutely cynical in his single-minded quest to survive. Government leaders and their blindly nationalistic followers
invariably tolerate and even glorify many of the bestialities perpetrated during
warfare and elevate the perpetrators to the status of heroes, but these ignoble
rituals of apotheosis ring hollow when placed alongside the raw realities, not
only of the conduct of warfare but of its typical outcome. A half century ago,
looking back on 15 years of warfare and its aftermath, William Henry Chamberlin
wrote, "It was absurd to believe that barbarous means would lead to civilized
ends."11 It is no less absurd
today.
| WWI's consequences in
fostering freedom-quashing, prosperity-destroying federal interventions in the
economy have no equal in U.S. history. |
|
In the past century, in the United States, the two world wars required the
greatest degree of mobilization, and therefore they entailed the heaviest losses
for individuals both on the battlefield and on the home front, notwithstanding
that this country is said to have "won" both wars. World War I Although American casualties in the Great War were very few in
comparison with those of the major belligerents, their seriousness must have
loomed a great deal larger to each of the 116,516 men who died as a result of
their service, and to their wives and sweethearts, mothers and fathers, sisters
and brothers, among others. In addition, 204,002 men sustained nonmortal wounds,
and an undetermined number had their minds rearranged for the worse — "shell
shock" was the common name for battle-induced psychic derangements in that
war.12 All these individuals, vaguely
denominated "casualties" in military parlance, paid the heaviest price, but many
other Americans — in some respects, all others — also bore substantial
costs. World War I changed the character of the American
political economy for the worse in ways too numerous to list completely here.
Before the war, federal revenues had never exceeded $762 million in a fiscal
year; during the 1920s they were never less than $3,640 million. Before the war,
federal expenditures had exceeded $747 million in a fiscal year only twice, in
1864 and 1865; during the 1920s they were never less than $2,857 million.
Although part of the increase in the level of fiscal activities reflected price
inflation, itself the product of the government's war finance, the bulk of it was
real. The public debt ballooned from slightly more than $1 billion before the war
to more than $25 billion at its end. Income-tax rates were pushed up enormously
during the war, and although they were reduced somewhat in the 1920s, they never
again returned to the prewar level or even close to it.13 Many aspects of the "wartime socialism"
left enduring legacies. The War Food Administration became the model for the New
Deal's agriculture program, which, despite countless changes to and fro over the
subsequent decades, continues to plague consumers and taxpayers today. The
Railway Administration gave way to a near-nationalization of the railroad
industry in 1920. The Shipping Board inaugurated the government's regulation of
shipping rates and routes and its direct participation in the ocean shipping
industry, which have continued ever since 1916. After the war, the War Finance
Corporation continued to operate until 1925, came back to life as the
Reconstruction Finance Corporation in 1932, and transmogrified into the Small
Business Administration in 1953, misallocating resources by means of its
extensions of subsidized credit and other interventions at every step of the
way. The War Industries Board roared back to life in 1933 as the
disastrous National Recovery Administration, which unsettled the entire economy
at the depths of the Great Depression with a muddleheaded program to cartelize
every industry in the country, thereby making a mighty contribution to prolonging
the depression. Although the Supreme Court struck down this loony experiment in
1935, the NRA in effect then fragmented into a variety of interventionist
components, such as the National Labor Relations Board, that persisted for
decades, some of them permanently.
| Worse than any economic
control was the forced relocation of more than 110,000 persons of Japanese
ancestry, who were herded at gunpoint into camps surrounded by barbed wire and
guarded by armed troops. |
|
Space does not permit me to continue this doleful recitation. Suffice it to
say that the war's consequences in fostering freedom-quashing,
prosperity-destroying federal interventions in the economy have no equal in U.S.
history. People typically think that this sort of government policy began for the
most part in the 1930s, but almost everything the New Dealers did along these
lines amounted to a revival of some wartime precedent. The war's constitutional legacies also took big bites out of
American liberties. In virtually every case, the Court upheld the extraordinary
powers that the government had exercised during the war. Highly significant was
the blessing the Court gave to military conscription. Chief Justice Edward White
could not take seriously the idea that the draft constituted involuntary
servitude and was therefore proscribed by the 13th Amendment. He declared that
the Court was "unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government
from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing
to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation as the result of a war
declared by the great representative body of the people can be said to be the
imposition of involuntary servitude."14 While the Court was
smashing individual liberty under the iron heel of "the great representative body
of the people" — the same gang that Mark Twain had described more accurately
as "America's only native criminal class" — the justices did not hesitate to
give their approval to the government's rampant wartime assaults on the freedoms
of speech, press, and assembly, many of these outrages being the products of the
Espionage Act (1917) and its notorious amendment, the Sedition Act (1918). The
justices also validated the government's wartime takeovers of the railroads,
telephone and telegraph lines, and oceanic cables. They sustained wartime rent
controls. Everything, so far as the Court was concerned, was fair game. Said the
chief justice, "[T]he complete and undivided character of the war power of the
United States is not disputable."15 In later times, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
other presidents would boldly seek, gain, and exercise quasi-wartime powers
triggered solely by their declaration of a national emergency, even when the
country was not at war, thereby cloaking their crimes in a mantle of pseudo-legal
legitimacy. Owing to the consolidation of the various war-spawned assaults on
liberty, now codified in the National Emergencies Act (1976) and the
International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977), nearly all economic liberties
in this country exist at the sufferance of the president. If he decides to take
over the economy, he possesses ample statutory power to do so. Perhaps
equally disastrous in their implications for the future were the Great War's
ideological legacies. Because the wartime economic management schemes did not
have much time to operate during the short U.S. engagement as an active
belligerent, they did not have time to reveal how badly they were working. When
the war ended, their managers, not surprisingly, announced that the programs had
been splendid successes, critically important in equipping the Allies to defeat
the Hun. Bernard M. Baruch, the chairman of the War Industries Board and a
wealthy gray eminence for many Democratic politicians, did much to promote this
myth and incorporate it into received wisdom. Hordes of
businessmen who had played roles in the government's wartime economic planning
emerged from the experience with, as a contemporary writer described it, "a sort
of intellectual contempt [for] the huge hit-and-miss confusion of peace-time
industry. . . . [and with] dreams of an ordered economic world."16 In other words, they came away from the war with
a bad case of what Hayek famously called "the fatal conceit," the fallacious idea
that central planners can produce a better social outcome than the free market.
These same misguided men would reappear in later crises to preside over
additional assaults on liberty. World War II The Big One took a far greater human toll on Americans than had
the previous world war. The 405,399 deaths loomed largest, for the deceased and
for all those who cared about them as individuals. The seriously wounded amounted
to 670,846, many of them suffering total disability for life.17
| Thanks to the various
war-spawned assaults on liberty, if the president decides to take over the
economy, he possesses ample statutory power to do so.
|
|
Approximately
25–30% of the casualties were psychological cases — victims of "combat
fatigue," as it was dubbed this time around. In the fighting on Okinawa, for
example, American mental casualties accumulated to 26,221 out of the total
(65,641) dead and wounded.18 In the
entire war, more than a million men "suffered psychiatric symptoms serious enough
to debilitate them for some period,"19 and "by V-J Day, 504,000 Americans soldiers,
enough for 50 divisions, had been lost to emotional collapse."20 Some went raving mad for life. Others, seemingly
having gone back to normal, endured mental tics and phobias for the rest of their
lives, often treating their conditions with copious doses of alcohol or
narcotics. Some 75,000 men were listed as missing in
action. Most of them, says historian Michael Adams, "had been blown into
vapor."21 So repulsive were
the sights, sounds, and smells of actual combat that the government heavily
censored what the folks at home were permitted to see or hear. If many of the
soldiers, sailors, and airmen ultimately came home seeming fairly normal, chances
are that they were among the great majority who, though serving in the armed
forces, never got very close to harm's way or stayed there for long —
laborers, clerks, technicians, mechanics, trainers, supply troops, and millions
of others who constituted the big "tail" behind the relatively small fighting
"tooth." A minority of the men, most prominently the infantrymen and in a
different way the bomber crews over Europe, bore the brunt of the sustained
horror and paid the most awful price. Recognizing their position as sacrificial
lambs, condemned to remain at terrible risk until they were killed or seriously
wounded, or the war ended, the infantrymen came to despise their numerous
comrades who stayed safely behind the lines as well as the people who remained
back home in a regular job. On the home front, with
World War I already in the books, the men who ran the political economy during
World War II could not do much that was genuinely original, but they did almost
everything on a vastly greater scale. The Wilson administration had built up
military and naval forces of some 4 million men, including 2.7 million draftees,
by the end of 1918. Roosevelt and his lieutenants commanded more than 12 million
in 1945, and during the course of the war they drafted some 10 million of the 16
million who served at some time. In prosecuting the war, the government spent
approximately ten times more (in dollars of roughly equivalent purchasing power)
than it had spent on World War I, and it imposed much more comprehensive and
longer-lasting economic controls.22
Federal outlays increased from $9.5 billion in fiscal year 1940 to $92.7 billion
in fiscal year 1945, at which time those outlays amounted to almost 44% of
officially measured GNP. To get the wherewithal for this huge gush of spending,
the government proceeded, as it had during 1917 and 1918, to impose new taxes, to
increase the rates of existing taxes, and to lower the income thresholds above
which people were required to pay income taxes. Annual excise-tax revenue more
than trebled between 1940 and 1945. Employment-tax revenue more than doubled. The
major sources of increased revenue, however, were individual and corporate income
taxes. The latter zoomed from $1 billion in 1940 to $16.4 billion in 1945 (the
greater part of that sum representing an "excess-profits" tax), while individual
income taxes jumped from $1.1 billion to more than $18.4 billion. Before
the war, fewer than 15 million individuals had to file an income-tax return; in
1945, approximately 50 million had to do so. And not only did most income earners
have to pay; they also had to pay at much higher rates: the bottom bracket rose
from 4.4% on income in excess of $4,000 in 1940 to 23% on income in excess of
$2,000 in 1945. The top rate became virtually confiscatory: 94% on income in
excess of $200,000. In one mighty wartime push, the government had completed the
transformation of the income tax from a "class tax" to a "mass tax," which it
would remain ever afterward. Moreover, payroll withholding of income taxes, which
the government imposed midway through the war, also remained an essential
component of the great federal revenue-reaping machine. Notwithstanding the
stupendous increase in taxation, the government's revenues amounted to less than
half its outlays, and it had to borrow the rest. As a result, the national debt
swelled from $54 billion in 1940 to $260 billion in 1945.
| Business leaders took
from World War II an appreciation that government could provide a bottomless
reservoir of subsidies, cozy deals, and other benefits.
|
|
Entire volumes would be required just to summarize all the economic controls
the government imposed: price, wage, and rent controls; materials allocations;
shutdown orders, some of which applied to entire industries (e.g., civilian
automobile production, gold mining); employment controls; allocations of
transportation services; rationing of many consumer goods (e.g., shoes, clothing,
meats, fats, canned goods, gasoline, tires); consumer credit controls; and
countless others. Vastly more outrageous than any economic control was the
forced relocation of more than 110,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds
of them U.S. citizens, who were herded at gunpoint from their homes in the
coastal regions of California, Oregon, and Washington into camps in desolate
areas of the West, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed troops.
Although not one of these people received due process of law, the Supreme Court,
dominated at that time by justices who saw no limits to FDR's war powers, could
find nothing unconstitutional in the government's actions. Nor could they bring themselves to strike down any of the
government's arbitrary and capricious economic regulations. Of course, with the
precedent of World War I decisions in their back pockets, the justices had no
interest in hearing constitutional challenges to military conscription. This
judicial stance was more than convenient for the government, because, as Justice
Hugo Black wrote in a 1942 decision, employing the logic that would guide the
Court throughout the war, "Congress can draft men for battle service. Its power
to draft business organization to support the fighting men who risk their lives
can be no less."23 As presidential
powers rose to unprecedented heights, Roosevelt's appointees on the Court only
smiled approvingly. Perhaps even more consequential than the war's
constitutional legacies were its effects on the country's dominant ideology. The
Big One produced a prominent move toward acquiescence in, and often demand for,
collectivism, as World War I had done, only more so. Not only did the masses now
look more expectantly to the federal government for salvation from life's
troubles large and small, but the leadership of the business class also came
finally to make a complete peace with the government it had long seen as a
nuisance and a menace. Although the war had brought
countless regulations and demands for reports in octuplicate to the government's
control agencies, it had also brought a deluge of government contracts, from
whose fulfillment the typical contractor had earned extraordinary profits with
little or no risk. Thousands of leading businessmen had served in the government
as dollar-a-year men. From this experience they took away not so much an
appreciation of the ponderous irrationalities of government bureaucratic action
as an appreciation that government could provide a bottomless reservoir of
subsidies, cozy deals, and other benefits. The experience, wrote Calvin Hoover,
"conditioned them to accept a degree of governmental intervention and control
after the war which they had deeply resented prior to it."24 In short, the war had broken them to the yoke,
either coercing them or co-opting them to comply with the government's schemes
— indeed, holding out the prospect that they might have a hand in guiding
those schemes, if they behaved themselves.
| Since 1789, the only
government on earth that has had the power to crush the American people's
liberties across the board has been the government of the United States.
|
|
Eventually, the old business-class hostility toward
government faded into a pale semblance of its former self. As Herbert Stein
observed in the 1980s, after having observed the process at close quarters for
nearly half a century, businessmen "had learned to live with and accept most of
the regulations [they] had strenuously opposed in the New Deal." Disturbed only
by new and unfamiliar regulations, "they regard the regulations they are used to
as being freedom."25 War Is
the Mother of Tyranny Stein's comment, which might aptly be applied far
more generally, captures the essence of how the American people transformed their
society from one in which, circa 1910, people enjoyed a great many freedoms to
one in which, circa 1950, they had lost many of their former freedoms, perhaps
irretrievably. Nothing propelled that process more powerfully than the two world
wars — along with the New Deal, of course, but that crisis response itself
involved little more than the revitalization, expansion, and elaboration of
measures first taken during World War I, and therefore it must be understood as
causally linked to the nation's participation in that war. Whenever the
government went to war, whether the war was real or metaphorical, it necessarily
went to war against the liberties of its own citizens. Of course, it invariably justified these assaults on liberty by
characterizing them as necessary, merely temporary means of preserving the
people's liberties in the longer run — in General George C. Marshall's
words, "sacrifices today in order that we may enjoy security and peace
tomorrow."26That claim was either a
mistake or a lie, because the U.S. government did not need to go to war, not even
in the world wars, in order to preserve its people's essential liberties and way
of life: neither Kaiser Wilhelm's forces nor Hitler's — and certainly not
Japan's — had the capacity to deprive Americans of their liberties, "take
over the country," "destroy our way of life," or do anything of the sort. This
country has always contained persecuted minorities, and it still does; but since
1789, the only government on earth that has had the power to crush the American
people's liberties across the board has been the government of the United
States. U.S. participation in World War I was the
classic instance of a war whipped up by self-interested elites and carried into
effect by a megalomaniacal president. As Walter Karp and other historians have
shown, the upper-crust, Anglophile, northeastern movers and shakers —
leading figures in what Murray Rothbard dubbed the Morgan ambit — maneuvered
the psychically twisted, wannabe world saver Woodrow Wilson into seeking U.S.
entry into the war.27 Wilson, in
turn, on completely spurious grounds, stampeded the overwhelmingly opposed
populace into the war against its better judgment. Once war had been declared,
the government used a combination of relentless propaganda and Draconian coercive
measures to beat down active opponents and to stir up a generalized frenzy of
chauvinism — One Hundred Percent Americanism, as its devotees called
it. Within a few years, most people came back to their
senses, but by then the harm had been done. U.S. participation in the war had
brought about many inauspicious, irreversible, politico-economic developments
within the United States, as I've already indicated. More important, it had
contributed decisively to the creation of a worldwide complex of interrelated
ethnic, political, and economic disequilibria whose resolution would entail many
of the great horrors of the following century, including World War II,
communism's geopolitical triumphs, the Cold War, and endless troubles in the
Middle East.28 So obvious and
poisonous were the war's fruits that soon after it ended, most Americans vowed
never to take part in such an idiotic and destructive orgy again. Unfortunately,
within a generation, they permitted themselves to be lured into an even more
horrific charnel house. Roosevelt idolaters and the jingoes of all parties
have long maintained, of course, that the United States went to war
altruistically to save the Jews of Europe from the monster Hitler and to stop
Japan's horrible aggression in east Asia, especially in China. A fair reading of
the evidence will not support either claim. As for the
European Jews, the U.S. government did not go to war to save them; once in the
war, it did not conduct its military operations in a manner designed to save
them; and, most importantly, it did not save them. Ultimately, some 80% of them
were killed.29
| No one can recall in
sorrow and bitterness the wartime devastation of Philadelphia or Chicago because
it never happened — devastation is what Americans dispense to Tokyo or
Dresden or Fallujah. |
|
The U.S. government can claim some credit for stopping
Japan's aggression against the Chinese, of course, owing to its defeat and
occupation of Japan, even though the same result might well have been achieved by
peaceful means — "in the year before Pearl Harbor the Japanese were willing
to abandon their expansionist program if they could be provided some face-saving
formula, but this the United States persistently refused to grant."30 In any event, however, one must bear in mind what
came next. With Japan no longer acting as a powerful counterforce to the Chinese
and Russian communists in east Asia, the North Koreans and the Chinese soon fell
victim to communist totalitarianism — a far worse fate than integration into
Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere would have been. With
regard to the idea that Japan launched an unprovoked "sneak attack" on the United
States and thereby "started the war," I can only say that anyone who believes
this simplistic contention needs to learn more about the Roosevelt
administration's actions in the years leading up to the Japanese attack. Long
before the bombs and torpedoes rained down on the Pacific fleet conveniently
concentrated at Pearl Harbor, the United States had become an active, if
undeclared, belligerent against Germany, cooperating closely with and providing
enormous quantities of vital supplies to the British, the French (until late June
1940), and the Soviets (after late June 1941). Moreover,
the Roosevelt administration had imposed a series of increasingly stringent
sanctions on Japan, culminating in joint American-British-Dutch economic
embargoes that placed a stranglehold on the Japanese economy. Finally, the U.S.
government presented an unnecessary and completely unacceptable ultimatum that
"called for complete Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina, for Japan to
support only the Nationalist government of China, with which it had been in
conflict for four years, and to interpret its pledges under the Tripartite
[Germany, Italy, and Japan] Pact and the [Cordell] Hull program so that Japan
would be bound to peace in the Pacific and to noninterference in Europe, while
the United States should be free to intervene in Europe."31 By these measures, among
many others, the U.S. government provoked (and, having broken the Japanese
diplomatic and naval codes, knew full well that it was provoking) the desperate
Japanese to attack U.S.-controlled islands in the Pacific as well as the Asian
colonies of Roosevelt's European co-conspirators in these hostile
actions.32 Whether the U.S. government's publicly pronounced rationales for
entering the wars be viewed as self-serving falsehoods or as mere mistakes,
however, the ultimate outcome of waging the wars was the same. As William Graham
Sumner wisely wrote, "It is not possible to experiment with a society and just
drop the experiment whenever we choose. The experiment enters into the life of
the society and never can be got out again."33 Thus, although the wars eventually ended, society
never reverted fully to the relatively freer status quo antebellum. Every
year, on Veterans Day, orators declare that our leaders have gone to war to
preserve our freedoms and that they have done so with glorious success, but the
truth is just the opposite. In ways big and small, crude and subtle, direct and
indirect, war — the quintessential government activity — has been the
mother's milk for the nourishment of a growing tyranny in this country. It
remains so today.
|
| 1 | Power as quoted in Fred Kaplan, "The Wizards of Armageddon"
(Stanford University Press, [1983] 1991), p. 246. |
BACK
| 2 | Deb Reichmann, "Bush Open to Hearings on Domestic Spying,"
Associated Press, Jan. 11, 2006, at Yahoo
News. |
BACK
| 3 | Vice President Henry A. Wallace, characterizing World War II as
"a fight between a free world and a slave world," declared: "We shall cleanse the
plague spot of Europe, which is Hitler's Germany, and with it the hellhole of
Asia — Japan. No compromise with Satan is possible." One ought to bear in
mind, however, that Wallace also said, "The object of this war is to make sure
that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day."
Wallace as quoted in William Henry Chamberlin, "The Bankruptcy of a Policy," in
"Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: A Critical Examination of the Foreign Policy
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Its Aftermath," ed. Harry Elmer Barnes
(Caldwell, Id.: Caxton Printers, 1953), pp.
498–99. |
BACK
| 4 | Anthony de Jasay, "Is National Rational?," The Independent
Review 3 (Summer 1998): 77–89; and Laurie Calhoun, "Just War? Moral
Soldiers?," The Independent Review 4 (Winter 2000):
325–45. |
BACK
| 5 | "American Foreign Policy in the Light of National Interest at
the Mid-Century," in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," p.
581. |
BACK
BACK
BACK
| 8 | LeMay as quoted in Sven Lindqvist, "A History of Bombing," (New
Press, 2000), p. 109. |
BACK
| 9 | Fellers as quoted in Hiroaki Sato, "Great Tokyo Air Raid Was a
War Crime," Japan Times, Sept. 30, 2002. |
BACK
| 10 | Stanley L. Falk, "Strategic Air Offensives," in "The Oxford
Companion to World War II," ed. I.C.B. Dear and M.R.D. Foot (Oxford University
Press, 1995), p. 1078. |
BACK
| 11 | Chamberlin, "Bankruptcy of a Policy," p. 519. Strange to say,
Chamberlin later became a fanatical Cold Warrior. See Justin Raimondo, "An Enemy
of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard" (Prometheus Books, 2000), pp.
75–76. |
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| 12 | Casualty data from U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Historical
Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970" (U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1975), p. 1140. |
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| 13 | Unless otherwise noted, the factual information about World War
I given in this paragraph and the remainder of the section is drawn from Robert
Higgs, "Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American
Government" (Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 123–58, and the sources
given there; and from Robert Higgs, "Government and the Economy: The World Wars,"
Independent Institute Working Paper Number 59, April 20, 2005, and the sources
given there (available in
PDF). |
BACK
| 14 | Joseph F. Arver v. United States of America, 245 U.S.
366 (1918), at 390. |
BACK
| 15 | Northern Pacific Railway Company et al. v. State of North
Dakota on the Relation of Langer, Attorney General, 250 U.S. 135 (1919), at
149. |
BACK
| 16 | Grosvenor B. Clarkson, "Industrial America in the World War:
The Strategy Behind the Line, 1917–1918" (Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p.
312. |
BACK
| 17 | Casualty data from U.S. Bureau of the Census, "Historical
Statistics," p. 1140. |
BACK
| 18 | Michael C.C. Adams, "The Best War Ever: America and World War
II" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 95. |
BACK
| 19 | George H. Roeder, Jr., "The Censored War: American Visual
Experience During World War Two" (Yale University Press, 1993), p.
16. |
BACK
| 20 | Bruce Shapiro, "Lugging the Guts into the Next Room," Salon, July 30,
1998.T |
BACK
| 21 | Adams, "The Best War Ever," p.
105. |
BACK
| 22 | Unless otherwise noted, the factual information about World War
II given in this paragraph and the remainder of the section is drawn from Higgs,
"Crisis and Leviathan," pp. 196–236, and the sources given there; and from
Higgs, "Government and the Economy: The World Wars," and the sources given
there. |
BACK
| 23 | United States of America v. Bethlehem Steel Corporation,
315 U.S. 289 (1942), at 305. |
BACK
| 24 | Calvin B. Hoover, "The Economy, Liberty, and the State"
(Twentieth Century Fund, 1959), p. 212. |
BACK
| 25 | Herbert Stein, "Presidential Economics: The Making of Economic
Policy from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond" (Simon and Schuster, 1984), p.
84. |
BACK
| 26 | Marshall as quoted in William L. Neumann, "Postscript: Some
Notes for Future Historians on the Truman Foreign Policies," in "Perpetual War
for Perpetual Peace," ed. Barnes, p. 549. (Marshall was speaking specifically in
support of the European Recovery Program, which became known as the Marshall
Plan.) |
BACK
| 27 | Walter Karp, "The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which
Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic (1890–1920)"
(Harper & Row, 1979). |
BACK
| 28 | Jim Powell, "Wilson's War: How Woodrow Wilson's Great Blunder
Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II" (Crown Forum, 2005); Thomas
Fleming, "The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I" (Basic Books,
2003). |
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| 29 | Raul Hilberg, "The Destruction of the European Jews," as cited
in Bruce M. Russett, "No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the U.S.
Entry into World War II" (Harper Torchbooks, 1972), p.
42. |
BACK
| 30 | Chamberlin, "Bankruptcy of a Policy," p.
516. |
BACK
| 31 | George Morgenstern, "The Actual Road to Pearl Harbor," in
"Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," ed. Barnes, p.
346. |
BACK
| 32 | Robert B. Stinnett, "Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and
Pearl Harbor" (Free Press, 2000). |
BACK
| 33 | William Graham Sumner, "Essays of William Graham Sumner," ed.
Albert G. Keller and Maurice R. Davie (Yale University Press, 1934), II, p.
473. |
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