Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the
Libertarian Institute. This article from 1995 is titled
On the Importance of Revisionism for Our Time by Doctor Murian
Rothbard, an economics professor from the University of Nevada,
Las Vegas. Revisionism, as applied to World
War 2 and its origins, as also for previous wars, has the
general function of bringing historical truth to an America
and a world that had been drugged by wartime lies and
propaganda. This in itself is a virtue, but
some truths of history, of course, may be largely of
antiquarian interest with little relevance to present day
concerns. This is not true of World War 2
revisionism, which has much critical significance for
today's world. Anytime you watch the Piers
Morgan Show, CNN, Fox News, any enemy of the US regime is
compared to the National Socialist, German Workers Party,
any leader, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, David Koresh,
Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad
is always compared to Hitler. So the reason this is important
is it's the analogy they constantly use to justify crimes
in the present. Well, we're going after Hitler
just like we previously did. What can be wrong with going
after Hitler? The least of the lessons that
revisionism can teach has already been thoroughly learned,
that Japan and Germany are not uniquely aggressor nations
doomed from birth to menace the peace of the world.
The larger lessons have unfortunately, yet to be
learned. the United States is again being subjected to that
complex of fear and vaunting in the brilliant phrase of Garrett
Garrett, which drove us and the Western world into two other
disastrous wars in our century. Once again, the American public
is being subjected to nearly unanimous barrage of war
propaganda and war hysteria so that only the most searching and
rational can keep their heads. Once again we find there has
emerged upon the scene and enemy a bad guy with the same old bad
guy characteristics that we have heard of before.
A diabolic monolithic enemy which generations ago when some
sacred texts decided for some reason that remains obscure,
that it was out to conquer the world.
This was the claim for the Spanish during the Spanish
American War. This was the claim that Kaiser
Wilhelm was going to take over the world, that Adolf Hitler was
going to take over the world. Iran, Brooke just said that the
Iranian mullahs are trying to take over the world.
Now notice that if you watch closely, you can see this scam
play out when it's less convenient to play this card.
Here is President Trump talking just the other day.
Teen missiles, we shot at us the other day and they were very
nice. They gave us warning.
They said we're going to shoot them.
Is 1:00 OK? It is fine.
And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn't get
hurt except for the Gunners. They call them the Gunners.
And out of 14 high end missiles that were shot at the base in
Qatar, all 14, as you know, were shot down by our equipment.
So here we have the evil, diabolical Iranian regime who?
They're Twelvers and that's a reference to Islam.
They just want the world to burn.
They want to rule over the ashes.
These people love death. They just want global
destruction. They want to take us down.
They want to nuke us. They want us all dead and just
enslaved. Also, when they fired 14
missiles at us, they called us beforehand so there wouldn't be
any casualties. The the propaganda is just so
pathetic and it has to explain why the state wants to control
compulsory education. I mean you, you have to get a
population completely stupid before selling him such
nonsense, the article goes on. Since then, the enemy, darkly,
secretly, diabolically, has plotted conspiratorially to
conquer the world, building up a vast and mighty and overwhelming
military machine, and also constructing a mighty,
international and subversive 5th column which functions as an
army of mere puppets, agents of the enemy's central
headquarters, ready to commit espionage, sabotage, or any
other act of undermining other states.
The enemy then is monolithic, ruled solely and strictly from
the top by a few masters, and is dominated always by the single
purpose of world conquest. The model to keep in mind is
Doctor Fu Manchu here trotted forward as an international
bogeyman. It is funny how we are called
conspiracy theorists when the establishment, as you could call
it, is always saying, well, the elites are conspiring against
us, the whites are conspiring against US.
Men have built up a patriarchy just to oppress women.
Islam's going to take over the world.
The Germans tried to take over the world.
The Japanese just wouldn't surrender.
They wanted to take over the world, so we had to nuke them
twice. Basically everyone in Iran wants
everyone in Israel dead. They don't really have lives
where they have jobs and families and worry about other
things. They're just obsessed with
taking over the world. You see this clearly with Andrew
Roberts and Niall Ferguson who keeps saying, well Germany tried
to take over the world twice as the British Empire ruled over
460 million people and controlled 1/4 of the landmass
of planet Earth. Watch out for the Germans.
The enemy then says the war propaganda is guided by but one
purpose, conquest of the world. He never suffers from such human
emotions as fear. Fear that we might attack him or
believe that he is acting in self-defense or out of self
respect and the desire to save face before himself as well as
before others. Neither does he possess such
human qualities as reason. This is why whenever the
corporate press shows you images of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin,
Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, they'll show him talking in a
video with no audio and the commentator is speaking over it.
So you watch it and you go, God, he must be saying something
crazy about how he wants to kill us.
Seldom will they say, you know, we really hate Vladimir Putin
and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. So we're going to go through
their speeches together, just as if you had a person who died
under mysterious circumstances and they had a spouse.
You know, the spouse is most likely the one who did it.
So you would want to interview them.
You'd want to get their side of the story.
Even if you think they're an evil murderer who's just totally
greedy, you still want to interview that person to get
their side of the story, to know what incentives they face.
No, there is only one other emotion that can sway him.
Superior force will compel him to back down.
All you have to do is look at who the previous allies of the
US regime have been. They had an open alliance with
the Bolshevik regime, with Joseph Stalin after they
committed many atrocities in many countries far before 1941,
when the alliance was really set in stone. the US government had
no problem inviting Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the
Soviet Union, over to tour America for 10 days under
Republican Dwight D Eisenhower in 1959.
Nikita Khrushchev flew from California to Iowa to New York
and shook hands with President Eisenhower.
Famously, Khrushchev and Kennedy exchange letters.
These people still face incentives and can be negotiated
with. Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger shook hands with Chairman Mao.
They're friends with Mohammed bin Solomon in Saudi Arabia.
Not exactly a Jeffersonian democracy from from what I've
heard. This is because even though Fu
Menchu, he is also like the bad guy in the movie Western, he
will cower before the good guy if the good guy is strong, armed
to the teeth, resolute of purpose, etcetera.
Hence the complex of fear and vaunting, fear of the supposedly
implacable and permanent plotting of the enemy, vaunting
of the enormous military might of America and its meddling
throughout the world to contain, rollback, etcetera, the enemy or
to liberate the oppressed nations.
Yeah, you know, in Kuwait they were fighting to liberate the
population so they could be ruled over.
King Al Jaber again, it There's no consistency about supporting
A democracy, much as Hillary Clinton loves to lie about it.
They don't exactly have democracy in Bahrain or Kuwait
or Saudi Arabia. Any of those inconvenient
allies. Many people in Greater Israel
who don't have the right to vote?
Not exactly a democracy either. Vladimir Solinsky not holding
his March 31st elections of last year?
Not exactly a democracy. Conscripting men to get their
limbs blown off. It's like, well, even if it was,
a democracy in conscripting someone to fight a war against
their will is a far greater violation of human rights and
liberty then denying them the right to vote once every five
years between two lying politicians.
Now, revisionism teaches us that this entire myth, so prevalent
then and even now about Hitler and about the Japanese, is a
tissue of fallacies from beginning to end.
Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely
untrue or not entirely the truth.
If people should learn this intellectual fraud about
Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask questions and
searching questions about the current World War Three version
of the same myth. Nothing would stop the current
headlong flight to war faster or more surely 'cause people to
begin to reason about foreign affairs once again.
After a long orgy of emotion and cliche.
President Harry Truman wrote his memoirs 1946 to 1952.
The book is titled Years of Trial and Hope, Memoirs by Harry
S Truman. This is the second volume.
The first volume only goes over the 1945 year.
Here he is on page 399 explaining a discussion that he
had with Douglas MacArthur. He Douglas MacArthur, describe
the difference between the attitude towards death of
Westerners and Orientals in the issues that were faced between
the Philippines and the Koreans and the Japanese.
Here's what MacArthur was saying about why we had to fight these
people. We hate to die, only face danger
out of a sense of duty and through moral issues.
Whereas with Orientals, life begins with death.
They die quietly, folding their arms as a dove, folding his
wings, relaxing and dying. Same exact nonsense that we hear
about. The Iranians just love death.
Al Qaeda just loves death. North Korea just wants to watch
the world burn. Putin just wants to nuke us all.
It's all completely fake, for the same myth is now based on
the same old fallacies, and this is seen by the increasing use of
the Cold Warriors have been making of the Munich myth.
The continually repeated charge that it was the appeasement of
the aggressor at Munich that fed his aggression.
Again, Fu Manchu or wild beast comparison.
And that caused the aggressor drunk with his conquest to
launch World War 2. Yeah, at the Munich Conference,
the agreement was the National Socialist could take over the
Sudetenland, 1/5 of Czechoslovakia.
After the war, after 20 million deaths in Europe, the Bolsheviks
occupied all of Czechoslovakia, not just the Sudetenland.
So you have to look at the costs as well as the benefits.
This Munich myth has been used as one of the leading arguments
against any sort of rational negotiations with the communist
nations and the stigmatizing of even the most harmless search
for agreement as appeasement, such as the JCPOA, the Iranian
nuclear deal. One good thing Barack Obama ever
did. It is for this reason that a JP
Taylors magnificent origins of the Second World War received
probably its most distorted and frenetic review in the pages of
National Review. Yeah, there's something about
war that has revolutionary capabilities to really mobilize
the masses, get them all on the same page, drastically grow the
power of the state that allows the state to get away with
things when the population feels threatened that the state
otherwise would not be able to get away with.
And basically all the wars are based on lies in order to get
someone to risk getting their head blown off, to risk sending
their children to die. You can't tell them a rational
cost benefit analysis of what we think your child's life is worth
this much. And if they die, we could have
this person ruling over this geographical area.
We could have Zelinsky ruling over the Don Bass instead of
Yanukovych or or Putin would rule over instead.
So that that's what we're really dealing with the if your son
dies, we might have a chance for Zelensky to rule over Donetsk
and Luhansk instead of Vladimir Putin.
It's like, well, doesn't seem like such a great trade, come to
think of it. So they can never engage in an
honest cost benefit analysis. They just have to scare the hell
out of you. It is about time that Americans
learn that bad guys, Nazis or communist National Socialists or
Communists, may not necessarily want or desire war or to be out
to conquer the world. Their hope for conquest may be
strictly ideological and not military at all.
That bad guys may also fear the possibility of our use of our
enormous military might and aggressive posture to attack
them. That both the bad guys and the
good guys may have common interests which make negotiation
possible, EG that neither wants to be annihilated by nuclear
weapons. That no organization is a
monolith, and that agents, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis
are often simply ideological allies who can and do split with
their supposed masters. And that finally, we may learn
the most profound lesson of all, that the domestic policy of a
government is often no index whatever of its foreign policy.
We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the
delusion of Woodrow Wilson that democracies, if so facto, will
never embark on war, and that dictatorships are always prone
to engage in war, much as we may and do aboard the domestic
programs of most dictators and certainly of the National
Socialists and Communists. This has no necessary relation
to their foreign policies. Indeed, many dictatorships have
been passive and static in history, and Contra wise, many
democracies have led in promoting and waging war.
Revisionism may once and for all be able to destroy this
Wilsonian myth. There is only one real
difference between the capacity of a democracy and a
dictatorship to wage war. Democracies invariably engage
much more widely in deceptive war propaganda to whip up and
persuade the public, whereas monarchs don't necessarily have
this. It's also worth mentioning that
when the state has the right to collect money coercively, when
they have the right to print money at will with a central
bank, when they have the right to conscript, when they have a
legal double standard that allows them to murder people and
get away with it, you know, they're not being held as on
trial as any domestic citizen would if they did the same exact
thing. And they also control compulsive
education, compulsory education ages 5 through 18 in a lot of
democracies. So all of those things make wars
far more likely than they otherwise would be.
Just imagine if Barack Obama had to fund his Libyan operation
through voluntary exchanges and we first had to make a product,
sell it, use the proceeds to fund his operation in Libya.
I think he might come up with some reasons why Gaddafi is the
least evil of all possibilities if he had to fund it himself or
put really any effort. Democracies that wage war need
to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens and at
the same time to camouflage their policies much more
intensely in hypocritical morale.
Can't to fool for the voters. Let me re read that.
Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda
to whip up their citizens and at the same time to camouflage
their policies much more intensely in hypocritical
morale. Can't to fool the voters.
The lack of need for this on the part of dictatorships often
makes their policies seem superficially to be more
warlike, and this is one of the reasons why they have had a bad
press in this century. The task of revisionism has been
to penetrate beneath these superficialities and appearances
to the stark realities underneath.
Realities would show certainly in this century for the US,
Great Britain, France, the three great democracies, to be worse
than any other three countries in fomenting and waging
aggressive war. Realization of this truth would
be of incalculable importance in the currency.
Conservatives should not need to be reminded of the flimsiness of
the democratic myth. We are now familiar with the
concept of totalitarian democracy, of the frequent
propensity of the masses to tyrannize over minorities.
If conservatives can see this truth in domestic affairs, why
not in foreign? There are many other more
specific but also important lessons that revisionism can
teach us. The Cold War as well as World
Wars 1 and 2 has been launched by the Western democracies so as
to meddle in the affairs of Eastern Europe.
The great power fact about Eastern Europe is that the
smaller nations there are fated to be under the dominance,
friendlier or otherwise, of Germany and or Russia.
In World War One, the US and Britain went to war partly to
help Russia expand into that part of Eastern Europe then
dominated by Austro, Hungary and Germany.
This act of meddling on our part, and the cost of untold
lives both West and East, and of enormous increase in militarism,
statism and socialism at home. Led to a situation in which
Eastern Europe which brought the US and Britain into World War 2
to keep Germany from dominating Eastern Europe.
As soon as World War 2 was over, with its enormous consequent
increase in statism, militarism and socialism in the US, the US
and Britain felt they had to launch a Cold War to oust Russia
from dominance over Eastern Europe, which it had obtained as
a natural consequence of the joint defeat of Germany.
How much longer is the United States to play with the fate of
the American people, or even the human race itself, for the sake
of imposing a solution of our liking on Eastern Europe?
And if we should wage a Holocaust to destroy communism,
and there should doubtfully be any Americans remaining, how
distinguishable from communism will the American system in
reality be? There have been two major facets
to the Cold War trying to establish US and British
hegemony over Eastern Europe and attempting to suppress
nationalist revolutions that would take under undeveloped
countries outside of the Western imperialist orbit.
Here again, visionism of World War 2 has important lesson to
teach us today. For in World War One, England,
backed by the United States, went to war against Germany to
try to hobble an important commercial competitor which had
started late in the imperialist game.
This is very true. A conversation between Lord
Londonderry and Winston Churchill took place and I want
to say May of 1935. This is in a book by Martin
Gilbert titled Churchill a Life where Londonderry says to
Churchill I should like to get out of your mind this terrible
obsession, this anti German obsession to its Churchill
response. You're wrong to think that I
have an anti German obsession. British policy for 400 years
which has allowed us to keep our liberties and have our empire
meant that we go to war with the strongest competitor in Europe.
We find the biggest bully, whether it's the Spanish,
whether it's the French Empire, whether it's the French
monarchy, we gather a number of countries big enough to face the
bully. So, yeah, this has much more to
do about competition. In the case of the US
government, people like Robert O'Brien in the national Security
advisor role, explicitly saying that.
Look, even John J Mearsheimer, one of my reluctant heroes, is
saying that while China's becoming a big competitor, they
never attacked us. In fact, the US actually
attacked China in 1999 by blowing up its embassy.
But yeah, anytime there's a competitor, the psychopaths will
try to use violence as opposed to improving themselves.
Much like a boyfriend who gets extremely jealous that his woman
left him, or it's just insecure that she might leave, He will
get extremely violent and would rather see her dead than with
another man. They would rather the elites
would rather exchange nuclear weapons and get millions of
people dead before they had someone else even be close to
competing with their high social status.
Before World Wars one and Two, Britain and France tried to
preserve their imperialist domination as against the have
not nations Germany and Japan. That came in late to the
imperialist race. And now after World War 2, the
United States has assumed the imperialist skeptor from the
weakened hands of Britain and France.
Revisionism thus provides us with the insight that America
has now become the world colossal of imperialism,
propping up puppet and client states all over the undeveloped
areas of the world and fiercely attempting to suppress
nationalist revolutions that would take these countries out
of the American imperial orbit. As Garrett Garrett also said, we
have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and
empire. Communism.
Having allied itself with the immensely popular movements of
National Liberation against imperialism, the United States,
in the hypocritical name of freedom, is now engaged in the
logical conclusions of its Cold War policy, attempting to
exterminate a whole nation in Vietnam to make very sure that
they are rather dead than red, and to preserve American
imperial rule. I misspoke earlier.
I believe this item first appeared in the Journal of
Individualist Thought in 1966. I said 1995.
I stand corrected. I apologize.
All these lessons revisionism has to teach us.
For revisionism, and the final analysis is based on truth and
rationality. Truth and rationality are always
the first victims in any war frenzy and they are therefore
once again an extremely rare commodity on today's market.
Revisionism brings to the artificial frenzy of daily
events and day-to-day propaganda the cool but the last analysis,
glorious light of historical truth.
Such truth is almost desperately needed in today's world.
Thank you for watching Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone,
and the Libertarian Institute.