PEACE...........................Scott
A Century of War
By John V. Denson
Posted on 11/25/2006Subscribe at email services, tell others, or Digg this story.
This article is excerpted from A Century of War.
The most accurate description of the twentieth century is "The War and Welfare Century." This century was the bloodiest in all history. More than 170 million people were killed by governments with ten million being killed in World War I and fifty million killed in World War II. In regard to the fifty million killed in World War II, it is significant that nearly 70 percent were innocent civilians, mainly as a result of the bombing of cities by Great Britain and America.
This number of fifty million deaths does not include the estimated six to twelve million Russians killed by Stalin before World War II, and the several million people he killed after the war ended when Roosevelt delivered to him one-third of Europe as part of the settlement conferences. George Crocker's excellent book Roosevelt's Road to Russia describes the settlement conferences, such as Yalta, and shows how Roosevelt enhanced communism in Russia and China through deliberate concessions that strengthened it drastically, while Nazism was being extinguished in Germany.
It is inconceivable that America could join with Stalin as an ally and promote World War II as "the good war," against tyranny or totalitarianism. The war and American aid made Soviet Russia into a super military power that threatened America and the world for the next forty-five years. It delivered China to the communists and made it a threat during this same period of time.
The horror of the twentieth century could hardly have been predicted in the nineteenth century, which saw the eighteenth century end with the American Revolution bringing about the creation of the first classical liberal government. It was a government founded upon a blueprint in a written constitution, which allowed very few powers in the central government and protected individual liberties even from the vote of the majority. It provided for the ownership and protection of private property, free speech, freedom of religion, and basically a free-market economy with no direct taxes.
Both political factions united behind the first administration of President Washington to proclaim a foreign policy based upon noninterventionism and neutrality in the affairs of other nations, which remained the dominant political idea of America for over a hundred years.
These ideas of classical liberalism quickly spread to the Old World of Europe and at the end of the eighteenth century erupted into a different type of revolution in France, although a revolution in the name of liberty. The new ideal, however, adopted in the French Revolution was "equality" by force and it attempted to abolish all monarchy throughout Europe. The ideas of classical liberalism were twisted and distorted, but nevertheless were spread by force throughout Europe, thereby giving liberalism a bad name, especially in Germany; and this was accomplished by a conscripted French army.
| The 19th century largely remained, in practice, a century of individual freedom, material progress, and relative peace, which allowed great developments in science, technology, and industry. |
The nineteenth century largely remained, in practice, a century of individual freedom, material progress, and relative peace, which allowed great developments in science, technology, and industry. However, the intellectual ferment toward the middle of the nineteenth century and thereafter was decidedly toward collectivism. In about 1850 the great classical liberal John Stuart Mill began to abandon these ideas and adopt socialism, as did most other intellectuals. After the brief Franco–Prussian War of 1870–71, Bismarck established the first welfare state while creating the nation of Germany by converting it from a confederation of states, just as Lincoln did in America. From this point up until World War I most German intellectuals began to glorify the state and collectivist ideas. They ignored one lone voice in Germany, a lyric poet by the name of Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, who died in 1843. He stated, "What has made the State a hell on earth has been that man has tried to make it his heaven."[1] Hegel and Fichte immediately come to mind.
Finally, the greatest tragedy of Western civilization erupted with World War I in 1914. It may be the most senseless, unnecessary and avoidable disaster in human history. Classical liberalism was thereby murdered, and virtually disappeared, and was replaced by collectivism, which reigned both intellectually and in practice throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. The ideas of socialism began to take over the various governments of the world following World War I. Socialism was not initially a mass movement of the people but was a movement created by intellectuals who assumed important roles in the governments ruled by the collectivist politicians.
While I could quote from numerous political and intellectual leaders throughout the war and welfare century, I have chosen one who summed up the dominant political thoughts in the twentieth century. He was the founder of fascism, and he came to power in 1922 in Italy. In 1927, Benito Mussolini stated:
Fascism … believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace…. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it…. It may be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism. For the nineteenth century was a century of individualism…. [Liberalism always signifying individualism], it may be expected that this will be a century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State…. For Fascism, the growth of Empire, that is to say, the expansion of the nation, is the essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite is a sign of decay and death.[2]
Mussolini's statement bears closer study because it dramatically states some of the guiding principles of the twentieth century:
- It states that perpetual peace is neither possible, nor even to be desired.
- Instead of peace, war is to be desired because not only is war a noble activity, but it reveals the true courage of man; it unleashes creative energy and causes progress. Moreover, war is the prime mover to enhance and glorify the state. War is the principal method by which collectivists have achieved their goal of control by the few over the many. They actually seek to create or initiate wars for this purpose.
- Individualism, the philosophy practiced in the nineteenth century, is to be abolished and, specifically, collectivism is to rule the twentieth century.
- Fascism is recognized as a variation of other forms of collectivism, all being part of the Left, as opposed to individualism. It was not until the "Red Decade" of the 30s, and the appearance of Hitler, that leftist intellectuals and the media began to switch Fascism on the political spectrum to the Right so that the "good forms of collectivism," such as socialism, could oppose the "extremism on the Right" that they said was fascism.
The founder of fascism clearly realized that all of these collectivist ideas — i.e., socialism, fascism, and communism — belonged on the Left and were all opposed to individualism. Fascism is not an extreme form of individualism and is a part of the Left, or collectivism.
| World War I may be the most senseless, unnecessary and avoidable disaster in human history. |
The ideals upon which America was founded were the exact opposite of those expressed by Mussolini and other collectivists on the Left. Why then was America, in the twentieth century, not a bulwark for freedom to oppose all of these leftist ideas? Why didn't the ideas of the American Founders dominate the twentieth century and make it the "American Century of Peace and Prosperity" instead of the ideas of the Left dominating and making it the "War and Welfare Century"? The failure of the ideas of the Founders of America to be dominant in the twentieth century was certainly not because America had been conquered by the force of arms of some foreign leftist enemy.
We need to learn the real reasons why America abandoned the principles of its Founding Fathers and allowed this tragedy to occur. We must determine why America became influenced by leftist thoughts, the ideas of empire, and the ideas of glorification of the state. How did America itself become an empire and an interventionist in World Wars I and II and help create the war and welfare century in which we now live?
We can begin by examining a quotation from one of the main leaders of America in the nineteenth century and the answer will become apparent. This statement was made in 1838 by a rather obscure American politician at the time who would become world famous in 1861:
At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth … could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.[3]
Abraham Lincoln is the author of these words and he concluded his statement with the following: If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.[4]
Abraham Lincoln himself became the principal instigator of America's suicide. It was not a foreign foe, but it was a war, even a "victorious" war, that ended the Founders' dreams in America. However, leftist intellectuals have never revealed to the American people the real cause and effect of the American Civil War, and instead have proclaimed it a "noble war" to free the slaves, and therefore, worth all of its costs. In fact, it was a war to repudiate the ideas of a limited central government and it moved America towards a domestic empire, which led inevitably to a foreign empire several decades later.
We can see photographs of Lincoln near the end of the war that show signs of strain. However, I think the strain was due mainly to the fact that at the end of this long and costly war, he understood that it had been unnecessary and that he had acted initially and primarily only to secure the economic and political domination of the North over the South. At the end of the war, President Lincoln finally understood the real costs as revealed by this statement:
As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until wealth is aggregated into the hands of a few and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.[5]
Other key individuals also recognized the real effect of the American Civil War. One of these was the great historian of liberty, Lord Acton, who wrote to a prominent American, Robert E. Lee, immediately after the war and stated:
I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy…. Therefore, I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.[6]
With a careful analysis of the results of the Civil War, General Lee replied to Lord Acton in his letter dated December 15, 1866:
I can only say that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of our peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.[7]
| Lee also saw that the domestic empire would lead to an empire abroad. |
Lee clearly saw the North's victory as the beginning of the growth of empire at home, the loss of freedom to Americans and the destruction of the original ideas of our Founders. He also saw that the domestic empire would lead to an empire abroad. Consolidation of power into the central government is the basic premise of collectivism, and it was the basic idea the Constitution attempted to avoid. After the creation of the domestic American empire as a result of the Civil War, and then after the next three decades, America specifically repudiated its one-hundred-year old foreign policy and initiated the Spanish-American War, allegedly to free Cuba. We now know, however, that the original and ultimate purpose of the war was to take the Philippine Islands away from Spain in order to provide coaling stations for the trade with China that was considered by many American economic interests to be essential to America's expansion.
McKinley ordered the American warships sent to the Philippines at approximately the same time he sent the battleship Maine to Cuba and instructed the American Navy to support the Philippine rebels against their Spanish rulers. McKinley asked Congress to declare war because of the sinking of the battleship Maine, but we know today that the explosion occurred within the ship and, therefore, could not have been done by the Spanish. In the Philippines, the native rebels were successful in throwing off their Spanish rulers and were aided in their effort by the American Navy. Once the rebels had succeeded, McKinley ordered the American guns turned upon the rebels, murdering them in cold blood by the thousands, and snatched their islands away from them. McKinley then ruled as a military dictator without authority from Congress. Next, without any authority from Congress, he sent five thousand marines into China to help put down the Boxer Rebellion, which was an effort by the Chinese to expel foreigners from their own soil. McKinley joined with other European nations in seeking the spoils of China and sacrificed America's integrity and her right to be called a leader for freedom.
Next came the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century that was America's late entry into World War I. America's entry drastically changed the balance of power of the original contenders in the war and resulted in the horrible Treaty of Versailles, which paved the road to World War II.
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John V. Denson, a practicing attorney in Opelika, Alabama, is vice chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He is the editor of two books: The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency. Send him mail. See his archive. Comment the blog.
This article is excerpted from his new book, A Century of War, available in the bookstore.
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