Thursday, January 31, 2013
Sunday, January 27, 2013
The Story of Refusing Gun Control: Lexington and Concord
Refusing to Disarm: Lexington and Concord
An Excerpt of Conceived in Liberty By Murray Rothbard
Despite the mounting tension in the South, the main focus of potential revolutionary conflict was still Massachusetts. The British authorities, ever more attracted to a hard line, were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the timorousness and caution of General Gage, who had actually asked for heavy reinforcements when everyone knew that the scurvy Americans could be routed by a mere show of force from the superb British army. Four hundred Royal Marines and several new regiments were sent to Gage, but the king, one of the leaders of coercion sentiment, seriously considered removing Gage from command.
There were a few voices of reason in the British government, but they were not listened to. The Whiggish secretary of war, Lord Barrington, urged reliance on the cheap and efficient method of naval blockade rather than on a land war in the large expanse and forests of America. And General Edward Harvey warned of any attempt to conquer America by a land army. But the cabinet was convinced that ten thousand British regulars, assisted by American Tories, could crush any conceivable American resistance. Underlying this conviction—and consequent British eagerness to wield armed force—was a chauvinist and quasi-racist contempt for the Americans. Thus, General James Grant sneered at the “skulking peasants” who dared to resist the Crown. Major John Pitcairn, stationed at Boston, was sure that “if he drew his sword but half out of the scabbard, the whole banditti of Massachusetts Bay would flee before him.” Particularly important was the speech in Parliament of the powerful Bedfordite, the Earl of Sandwich, first lord of the Admiralty, who sneeringly asked: “Suppose the colonies do abound in men, what does that signify? They are raw, undisciplined, cowardly men. I wish instead of... fifty thousand of these brave fellows, they would produce in the field at least two hundred thousand; the more the better; the easier would be the conquest... the very sound of a cannon would carry them off... as fast as their feet could carry them.”
There was another reason, it should be noted, for Sandwich’s reluctance to use the fleet rather than the army against the enemy. While the army was to dispatch the Americans, Sandwich wished to use the fleet against France, with which he hoped and expected to be soon at war.
Accordingly, the Crown sent secret orders to Gage, reaching him on April 14. The Earl of Dartmouth rebuked Gage for being too moderate. The decision had been made; since the people of New England were clearly committed to “open rebellion” and independence of Britain, maximum and decisive force must be slammed down hard upon the Americans—immediately. While reinforcements were under way, it was important for the British troops to launch a preventive strike, by moving hard before an American revolution could be organized. Therefore, Gage decided to arrest the leaders of the Massachusetts provincial congress, especially Hancock and Sam Adams. As in so many other “preventive” first strikes in history, Great Britain itself precipitated the one thing it wished most to avoid: a successful revolution. Interestingly enough, the Massachusetts radicals were at the same time rejecting hotheaded plans for a first strike by rebel forces, who would thus be throwing away the hard-forged unity of the American colonists.
Adams and Hancock were out of town and out of reach, near Concord; so Gage decided to kill two birds with one stone by sending a military expedition to Concord to seize the large stores of rebel military supplies and to arrest the radical leaders. Gage determined to send out the force secretly, to catch the Americans by surprise; that way if armed conflict broke out, the onus for initiating the fray could be laid on the Americans. Gage also used a traitor high up in radical ranks. Dr. Benjamin Church, of Boston, whom the British supplied with funds to maintain an expensive mistress, informed on the location of the supplies and the rebel leaders. (Church’s perfidy remained undetected for many more months.) Gage learned from Church, furthermore, that the provincial congress, under the prodding of the frightened Joseph Hawley, had resolved on March 30 not to fight any armed British expedition unless it should also bring artillery. By not sending out artillery, Gage figured that the Americans would not resist the expedition.[1]
Gage, however, immediately encountered what would prove a major difficulty in fighting a counterinsurgency war by a minority ruling army against insurgent forces backed by the vast majority of the people. He found that, surrounded by a sullen and hostile people, he could not keep any of his troop or fleet movements hidden. The rebels would quickly discover these movements and spread the news.
On April 15, the day after receiving his orders, Gage relieved his best troops of duty, gathered his boats, and on the night of April 18 shipped 700 under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith to the mainland, from which they began to march northwest to Lexington and Concord. But the Americans quickly discovered what was happening. Someone, perhaps Dr. Joseph Warren, sent Paul Revere to Lexington to warn Adams and Hancock. Hancock, emotional, wanted to join the minutemen, springing to arms; but the sober intelligence of Sam Adams reminded Hancock of his revolutionary duty as a top leader of the American forces, and they both fled to safety. Revere was soon captured, but Dr. Samuel Prescott was able to speed to Concord and bring the news that the British were coming.
As news of the British march reached the Americans, the Lexington minutemen gathered under the command of Captain John Parker. Rather absurdly, Parker drew up his handful of seventy men in open formation across the British path. When Major Pitcairn, in charge of six companies of the British advance guard, came up to confront the militia, Pitcairn brusquely ordered the Americans to lay down their arms and disperse. Parker, seeing his error, was more than willing to disperse but not to disarm. In the midst of this tense confrontation, shots rang out. No one knows who fired first; the important thing is that the British, despite Pitcairn’s orders to stop, fired far longer and more heavily than necessary, mercilessly shooting at the fleeing Americans so long as they remained within range. Eight Americans were killed in the massacre (including the brave but foolish Parker who refused to flee), and eight wounded, whereas only one British soldier was slightly wounded. The exuberant and trigger-happy British troops cheered their victory; but the victory at Lexington would prove Pyrrhic indeed. The blood shed at Lexington made the restraining resolution of Joseph Hawley obsolete. The Revolutionary War had begun! Sam Adams, upon hearing the shooting from some distance away, at once realized that the fact of the open clash was more significant than who would win the skirmish. Aware that the showdown had at last arrived, Adams exclaimed, “Oh! What a glorious morning is this!”
The British troops marched happily on to Concord. This time the Americans did not try any foolhardy open confrontation with the British forces. Instead, an infinitely wiser strategy was employed. In the first place, part of the military stores were carried off by the Americans. Second, no resistance was offered to the British entry into Concord, thus lulling the troops into a further sense of security. While the British were destroying the remaining stores, three to four hundred militiamen gathered at the bridge into Concord and advanced upon the British rear guard. The British shot first, but were forced to retreat across the bridge, having suffered three killed and nine wounded. The despised Americans were beginning to make up for the massacre at Lexington.
Heedless of the ominous signs of the gathering storm, Colonel Smith, commanding the expedition, kept his men around Concord for hours before beginning to march back to Boston. That march was to become one of the most famous in the annals of America. Along the way, beginning a mile out of Concord, at Meriam’s Corner, the embattled and neighboring farmers and militiamen employed the tactics of guerrilla warfare to devastating effect. Knowing their home terrain intimately, these undisciplined and individualistic Americans subjected the proud British troops to a continuous withering and overpowering fire from behind trees, walls, and houses. The march back soon became a nightmare of destruction for the buoyant British; their intended victory march, a headlong flight through a gauntlet. Colonel Smith was wounded and Pitcairn unhorsed. The British were saved from decimation only by a relief brigade of twelve hundred men under Earl Percy that reached them at Lexington. Still, Americans continued to join the fray and fire at the troops, despite heavy losses imposed by British flanking parties.
Despite the British reinforcements, the Americans might have slaughtered and conquered the British force if (a) they had not suffered from shortages of ammunition, (b) the British had not swerved into Charlestown and embarked for Boston under the protecting guns of the British fleet, and (c) excessive caution had not held the Americans back from a final blow at the troops on the road to Charlestown. Even so, the deadly march back to Boston was a glorious victory, physically and psychologically, for the Americans. Of some fifteen to eighteen hundred redcoats, ninety-nine were killed and missing, and 174 wounded. The exultant Americans, who numbered about four thousand irregular individuals that day, suffered ninety-three casualties. Insofar as these individuals were led that day, it was by Dr. Joseph Warren and William Heath, appointed a general by the Massachusetts provincial congress.
Events could not have gone better for the American cause: initial aggression and massacre by the arrogant redcoats, then turned to utter rout by the aroused and angry people of Massachusetts. It was truly a tale for song and story. As Willard Wallace writes, “Even now, the significance of Lexington and Concord awakens a response in Americans that goes far beyond the details of the day or the identity of the foe. An unmilitary people, at first overrun by trained might, had eventually risen in their wrath and won a hard but splendid triumph.”[2]
Above all, as Sam Adams was quick to realize, the stirring events of April 19, 1775, touched off a general armed conflict: the American Revolution. In the immortal lines of Emerson, penned for the fiftieth anniversary of that day:
By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
I do not own this article. This article is owned by the Mises Institute
Saturday, December 29, 2012
British Influence on U.S. Foreign Policy Before and After World War 2
This was a research paper that I wrote for my British history class this past semester. There was much more that could have been written, but I was limited by a page amount of 10-12 pages and time.
The First World War was sold as a war “to end all
wars” and to “make the world safe for democracy”. President Woodrow Wilson, who
would run a reelection campaign with the slogan “He kept us out of war” would
none the less plunge an unwilling American people into the First World War on
the side of the Allied power of Russia, France, and most importantly Great
Britain. But the aftermath of the war left much to be desired for Americans.
Seeing the failure of Woodrow Wilson to get his idealistic “Fourteen Points” implemented
in a post-war world, a post-war settlement at Versailles that severely punished
Germany while enriching the French and British empires, the British propaganda
used to bring America into the war on their side, and a new international
organization that threatened the sovereignty of the United States, the American
people came to despise the war and the effects it brought upon the world. With
a sense of feeling that they had been duped into the European bloodbath to play
the game of power politics, a majority of Americans wished to see their country
return to a policy of nonintervention.
And
nonintervention is what the American people got. The U.S. Senate refused to
ratify the Treaty of Versailles and thus rejected American membership in the
League of Nations. A Naval Conference was held in the United States with the
purpose of downsizing the naval strength of the great powers. And America
wished to never entangle itself with the power politics of Europe. Fast forward
to the mid-1930s, and this noninterventionist sentiment still permeated the
minds of most Americans. But as the threat of another great war loomed on the
horizon during this time, Great Britain wished to bring the United States into
the emerging conflict on the side of the empire. While this was a difficult
task, the British influence on U.S. foreign policy and their efforts to bring
America into World War Two was implemented in a few ways. The first was a
propaganda effort aimed at influencing American public opinion towards
supporting American intervention on the side of the British. The second was the
official policies of both the United States and British governments such as the
Lend-Lease Act, the Destroyer Deal, and so on. The last way was a covert
campaign within the United States by the British government.
All
of these efforts did eventually help to bring the United States into World War
Two, but only after the attack at Pearl Harbor. But it is important to examine
this topic because of the grave implications it has for American foreign policy
since the end of World War 2. George Washington warned Americans against
allowing foreign influence on government policy, especially foreign policy.
The British Propaganda Campaign
Prior
to Pearl Harbor, public opinion towards what would become World War Two was
unfavorable. With the horrors of World War One still fresh in their minds, many
Americans wished to avoid another European war. The revisionist works of
historians such as Henry Elmer Barnes, Charles A. Beard, and Charles C. Tansil
were in high demand after World War 1 as Americans wished to inform themselves
of how they were misled by the British into war.[1]
Even Roosevelt would at times appease his noninterventionist critics by
appealing to the idea of America remaining aloof of another European war and
passing neutrality legislation such as The Neutrality Act of 1935. While this
position of nonintervention and neutrality seemed to dominate American public
opinion, the British government had plans to undermine this position and to
convince the United States to abandon neutrality.
The
British propaganda effort did not officially start until the mid to late 1930s,
but such a propaganda effort had to overcome some obstacles to their goals.
Americans loved all things British that were related to culture and society.
But what love of England existed was equally if not overmatched by Anglophobia.
[2]
The American struggle to shake off the British rule of redcoats and the king
during the American War for Independence plays a large part in American
Anglophobia at this time. Americans in many cases also abhorred British imperialism
and the rigid class structure of their society. But these feelings of
Anglophila and Anglophobia varied from community to community, with even
Southerners remembering the British honoring their shipbuilding contracts
during the American Civil War.[3]
Most Americans loathed British politicians but loved their actors.
Nonetheless,
Great Britain still had admirers in America. A Gallup Poll found that 55
percent of American voters considered Britain to be the European country that
they “liked best” in April of 1937.[4]
And even after World War 1, many Atlanticist organizations worked with the
elites in both Britain and the United States to strengthen business and
cultural links. Some examples include Pilgrims Trust and the English Speaking
Union, both of which sought to spread Anglo-Americanism. [5]
The American Council of Foreign Relations also sought such an Anglo-American
Alliance.[6]
But
the British still had to confront the American fear of propaganda that came as
a result of World War One. Prior to the 1930s, the British government’s press
bureau in New York pursued a policy of no propaganda. [7]
As the years passed by into the 1930s, the Foreign Office News Department in
London had increasingly emphasized that propaganda was an appropriate tool of
foreign policy. In 1932, the British Broadcasting Corporation began
broadcasting its “Empire Services”, which sought to portray Great Britain and
life in the British Empire in a positive light.[8]
The British began a process of re-armament in 1935, which included plans for
propaganda, but internal conflict arose in the British Ministry of Information
over the usage of domestic propaganda, which prevented any overseas propaganda
efforts until 1938, when the Foreign Office established a committee to
investigate overseas publicity. [9]
There was some hope for the British, found in American arousal due to Japanese
aggression in China and a growing anti-Nazi sentiment.
When
President Roosevelt proclaimed the New York World’s Fair open in 1939, the
British set up the British Pavilion in the World’s Fair.[10]
It attracted as many as 14 million visitors. The most important piece of the
British Pavilion was the “Hall of Democracy”, which showcased the Magna Carta,
the much celebrated document of Anglo-American liberty along with the pedigree
of George Washington, which showed his direct decent from King John and some of
the barons who signed the Magna Carta.[11]
The potential for propagating the “democratic” ideal through the Magna Carta
(and I used “democratic” in the loosest sense) was so great that the British
mailed a translation and history of the document to every school in America.
Even the New York Times was persuaded to write a cover story on the Magna Carta
by British Library of Information. The Magna Carta was successful indeed.[12]
Sir
William McLean went on a propaganda campaign throughout the United States with
the objective of painting the British Empire in a positive light to Americans
with speeches and lectures. [13]
On the eve of war in 1939, King George VI and the Queen made a visit to America
in June. This visit helped swell pro-British sentiments to new heights and
helped to secure American sympathy before the outbreak of war.[14]
The
British were in many cases clear about the objectives of the propaganda
campaign, which was to win American sympathy and cause the United States to
abandon neutrality in the event of war in Europe. A British officer, Captain
Sidney Rogerson, believed that if the United States was to be brought into a
European war on the side of the British, the Americans would
need
a definite threat to America, a threat, moreover, which will have to be brought
home by propaganda to every citizen, before the republic will again take arms
in an external quarrel. The position will naturally be considerably eased if
Japan were involved and this might and probably would bring America in without
further ado. At any rate, it would be a natural and obvious object of our
propagandists to achieve this, just as during the Great War they succeeded in
embroiling the United States with Germany. [15]
Though
even by 1938, American fear of propaganda was still extremely high. Soon, under
the direction of Congressman Martin Dies of Texas, the House Committee for the
Investigation of UnAmerican Activities convened and began a war against
foreign propaganda.[16]
This was not the first time such a committee had been formed, but Dies did
include the British in his investigation. But due to the fact that London still
“officially” operated on a “no propaganda” policy, Dies found no evidence of
any foul play by the British. Senator Gerald Nye would attempt to expose the
efforts of the British by inserting a chapter of Sidney Rogerson’s book Propaganda in the Next War into the Congressional Record. This insertion
received publicity, but it did little to stop the British in their efforts. [17]
On
September 1, 1939, Germany invades Poland. Shortly thereafter, Britain and
France declared war on Germany. It was during this time that the British used a
propaganda tactic that they used in World War 1: the report of atrocities
committed by the enemy. But unlike World War 1, in which the atrocity stories
were exaggerated or fabricated, such atrocity stories were real.[18]
Such atrocity stories were met with skepticism by most Americans who might
object to the idea of intervention. The British responded to this objection by
claiming that the United States should enter the war because Germany and its
Axis allies posed a grave and direct threat to vital American interests. [19]
The
sympathy of American intellectuals for the British cause may have been a reason
why British propaganda succeeded. The political commentator Walter Lippmann is
one such intellectual. Walter Lippmann advocated strongly for intervention
against Germany, saying that German expansionism constituted a direct threat to
American security.[20]
Lippmann also had contact with British propaganda agencies, more specifically,
the British Press Service, whose works were often seen in Lippmann’s column.[21]
But Lippmann’s work with the British Press Service was more subtle. Lippmann often
equated the interests of the United States with Britain, seeing both countries
as part of an “Atlantic Community”.[22]
But American intellectuals were not the only ones to aid the British in their
efforts to bring the United States to war on the side of the British. Rather,
British efforts to get the Americans into the war had much support from the
U.S. government.
U.S. Foreign Policy and Great Britain
As
has already been stated, a majority of Americans became disillusioned with
their intervention into World War 1 and vowed not to make the same mistake
again. While not taking on a complete noninterventionist policy, the U.S.
government demobilized much of its armed forces, participated in small
interventions in South America, and generally traded with Europe. When
stirrings of war began around the mid-1930s, the U.S. Congress, understanding
the noninterventionist sentiments of the people at large, moved quickly to
prevent America from entering another European war.
As
a result, the Neutrality Act of 1935 was passed by Congress and signed by
President Roosevelt.[23]
This Act curtailed how American businessmen and individuals interacted with
nations at war. Upon the outbreak of a war, the President would be compelled to
proclaim that such a war existed. Then, upon such proclamation, it would become
illegal for Americans to export arms, ammo, or any other implements of war to
any place within the belligerent states.[24]
The President was also empowered to prohibit Americans from traveling on the
ships of the belligerent countries except at their own risks if he deemed it
necessary for the security and peace of the United States.
The
British openly sought the aid of the United States even before war began. It
should also be pointed out that despite the Rooseveltian rhetoric of keeping
American boys out of foreign wars, Roosevelt would soon begin seeking a way for
America to enter World War Two.[25]
During the king and queen’s visit to the United States in June of 1939, they
met with the Roosevelts at Hyde Park. On account of King George’s biographer,
in a private conversation with the King, Roosevelt pledged to the King full
American support for Great Britain.[26]
Roosevelt also pledged that the U.S. Navy would patrol the Atlantic and destroy
German U-boats. [27]
Tyler
Kent, a code clerk at the U.S. Embassy in London, had discovered coded-messages
between Roosevelt and Winston Churchill when he was merely First Lord of the
Admiralty. What is striking about this, which alarmed Kent, was that the code
that was being used in these messages were only used by the Embassy when
communication was going back and forth between the President, diplomats in
Washington, and the Embassy itself. Basically, Roosevelt was in secret
negotiations with another officer of the British government, who happened to be
Churchill before he became Prime Minister-a violation of standard protocol.[28]
Kent soon got in contact with Captain Archibald Ramsay, a Member of Parliament
who was not sympathetic to Churchill. Scotland Yard got word of such
conversations, and shortly after Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, he
ordered the arrest of Kent and Ramsay. Instead of pleading diplomatic immunity,
Roosevelt conspired with the British government and waived diplomatic immunity
for Kent. [29]
Tyler Kent was tried in a secret British court and found guilty of violating
the British Official Secrets Act of 1911 and imprisoned in Britain until after
World War Two. [30]
Captain Ramsay was also imprisoned, but was released in September of 1944.
Roosevelt soon embarked on numerous acts with
the intent of provoking and incident with Germany which would allow America to
enter the war on the side of the British. During September of 1940, the United
States and Great Britain made an exchange, which is now known as the “destroyer
deal”. In exchange for giving the British moth-balled U.S. destroyers, the
United States was granted the right to land in British possessions that would
be used as American bases. A few months later on December 17, Roosevelt held a
press conference to describe the next measure of American assistance to
Britain: the Lend-Lease Act.[31]
To articulate the policy of lending war materials to Britain, Roosevelt talked
about a man whose house was on fire, finding assistance in the form of his
neighbor who happened to have a garden hose. The neighbor with the garden hose
granted the neighbor whose house was on fire to use it. The neighbor does not
charge the first guy for the use of the hose, but he expected the hose to
remain in one piece. So Roosevelt’s premise for the policy of Lend-Lease was
this: we [the U.S. government] will lend you war materials; if you are lent war
materials and they remain intact, then you may return them after usage and you will
be fine; but if such war materials are damaged, then you must replace them.[32]
Unknown
at the time, Roosevelt assisted the British in hunting the German warship known
as the Bismark by sending a plan with
an American commander at the service of the British Admiralty.[33]
As noted earlier, Roosevelt had committed the U.S. Navy to the task of aiding
the British Navy in the war against German U-boats. On September 4, 1941, off
the coast of Iceland, the USS Greer
was attacked by a German U-boat.[34]
Roosevelt was quick to claim that the Greer
was attacked in international waters without provocation. But the truth is that
the Greer had provoked the attack by
chasing the German submarine, which fired upon the Greer with two torpedoes, after which the Greer responded by releasing depth charges. [35]
In another similar incident involving the USS Kearny, a German submarine fired upon this U.S. vessel only after
being fired upon by the Kearny. On
October 30, 1941, the USS Reuben James
was sunken by a German submarine.[36]
On
December 29, 1940, Roosevelt delivered an address which has now become known as
the “Arsenal of Democracy” speech.[37]
In this speech, Roosevelt defended the British Empire and its’ efforts to
resist the Germans and describes them as the “spearhead of resistance to world
conquest.”[38]
Roosevelt went further:
We have furnished
the British great material support and we will furnish far more in the future.
There will be no "bottlenecks" in our determination to aid Great
Britain. No dictator, no combination of dictators, will weaken that determination
by threats of how they will construe that determination.[39]
Perhaps
a more egregious moment of the U.S. and British governments’ attempts to bring
America into the war came in the form of the Atlantic Charter. Reveal on August
14, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill set forth principles for the national
policies of their respective countries that they agreed to follow. Those
principles are as follows: 1) neither country sought territorial
aggrandizement; 2) A desire to see no territorial changes that go against the
wishes of the people; 3)A restoration of self- government to those who have
lost it; 4) Equal access to trade a raw materials to victors and vanquished for
economic prosperity; 5) Full collaboration in the economic field to improve
labor standards, economic progress and social security; 6) the final
destruction of the Nazis and the establishment of peace; 7) freedom of travel;
8) all nations must abandon the use of force. [40]
The
Atlantic Charter is interesting in the fact that the document basically calls
for the destruction of Nazi Germany. But the problem arises in this way: how
can the United States claim to be a neutral power when it is consulting war
objectives with a belligerent government? Roosevelt was in a sense violating
the spirit of the Neutrality laws and policies set forth by the U.S. Congress. But
most of the actions by both the U.S. and British governments violated the
spirit of neutrality in America.
The Covert Campaign
Another aspect of
the British campaign to bring America into the war is the covert operations of
the British government. In about 1940, the British government established the
British Security Coordination in New York, which was to be the center of
British covert operations in the United States.[41]
This operation headquartered in the Rockefeller Center. Perhaps the most
well-known individual of this topic is William Stevenson, a Canadian citizen
with the code name “Intrepid”. Stevenson
would later write an account of the activities of himself and his agents during
this time in the book A Man Called
Intrepid. Ian Fleming, an agent of Intrepid, popularized the activities of
this secret agency in the James Bond novels and movies. [42]
It should be noted that this secret operation was known to Roosevelt and had
his support, but Congress knew nothing of this. The book Desperate Deception: British Covert Operations in the United States,
1939-1944 by Thomas E. Mahl gives an extensive account of the covert
activities of the British government during this time period before the war.
In
April of 1940, Stevenson and President Roosevelt met and discussed plans to
coordinate operations between the FBI and the British secret intelligence.[43]
British Security Coordination also created false documents to aid Churchill and
Roosevelt in bringing America into war against Germany. Stevenson was
responsible for forging two documents with the purpose of bringing America and
Germany into war against one another. The first document provided by Stevenson
was a map of an allegedly secret plan by Hitler to invade South America, which
was used by Roosevelt in a radio address delivered on October 27, 1941. [44]
Stevenson also provided a false document into the hands of Hitler on December
3, 1941, which purported to be a secret plan by Roosevelt to make a preemptive
strike against Germany. [45]
The BSC even had an American citizen murdered because he established a legal
business relationship with Germany in the oil business. [46]
Intrepid also oversaw a concerted effort to destroy the political career of
Congressmen Hamilton Fish, who opposed Roosevelt’s foreign policy.
Conclusion: America Inherits the British
Empire
Prior
to the aftermath of World War Two, Great Britain was viewed as the
“indispensable nation” that was charged with policing the world. [47]Allied
victory in World War Two cost Britain dearly. Over 400,000 casualties, a
mountain of debt that brought bankruptcy, and the liquidation of the British
Empire were some of the results of British victory. Soviet Russia was made the
dominant power in Europe while Britain faced socialism at home and almost
complete dependence on the United States.[48]
Now
the West was again placed at risk of being dominated by Soviet Russia, but
America had risen from the ashes of war as the undisputed champion of freedom
in the Western world. America had overtaken the British as the “indispensable
nation”. It was during this time that
America pursued a foreign policy of interventionism and empire via military and
political dominance to the present day. America has taken on the role of world
policeman and empire that the British Empire once held. The U.S. basically
inherited the British Empire. Was this a good thing for America or has this
sown the seed of destruction just like it did the British?
[1]
David Gordon, “A Common Design: Propaganda and World War,” In The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic
Victories, ed. John V. Denson (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,
1998), 308.
[2] N.J.
Cull, Selling war: The British propaganda
campaign against American "neutrality" in World War II (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 5
[3]
Ibid, 6
[4]
Ibid, 7
[5]
Ibid, 7
[6]
Ibid, 8
[7]
Ibid, 10
[8]
Ibid, 11
[9]
Ibid, 13
[10]
Ibid, 26
[11]
Ibid, 27
[12]
Ibid, 27
[13]
Ibid, 27
[14]
Ibid, 28
[15]David
Gordon, “A Common Design: Propaganda and World War,” In The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories, ed. John V. Denson
(New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 308
[16]N.J.
Cull, Selling war: The British propaganda
campaign against American "neutrality" in World War II (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1995), 19
[17] David Gordon, “A Common Design: Propaganda and
World War,” In The Costs of War:
America’s Pyrrhic Victories, ed. John V. Denson (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 1998), 308
[18]
Ibid, 310
[19]
Ibid, 310
[20]
Ibid, 315
[21]
Ibid, 316
[22]
Ibid, 318
[23]U.S.
Statues at Large 49 (1935-1936): 1081-85 in Schmitz, D. F. (2007). The triumph
of internationalism: Franklin D. Roosevelt and a world in crisis, 1933-1941.
Washington, D.C: Potomac Books. Pg. 113
[24]
Ibid, 113
[25]
For more on this topic, see Charles Callan Tansill’s Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy 1933-1941,
“Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception” in Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the
Executive State and the Decline in Freedom, edited by John V. Denson. See
also Pearl Harbor: The Seeds and Fruits
of Infamy by Percy L. Greaves, Jr.
[26] John
V. Denson, “Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception”, In Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the
Executive State and the Decline in Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises
Institute,2001), 485.
[27]
Ibid, 485
[28]
Ibid, 485
[29]
Ibid, 486
[30]
Ibid, 486
[31]
Rosenman, Public Papers and Addresses of
Franklin D. Roosevelt, vol. 9, 604-60; in Schmitz, D. F. (2007). The
triumph of internationalism: Franklin D. Roosevelt and a world in crisis,
1933-1941. Washington, D.C: Potomac Books. Pg. 114
[32]
Ibid, 114
[33] John V. Denson, “Roosevelt and the First Shot:
A Study of Deceit and Deception”, In
Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline in
Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute,2001), 497
[34]
Ibid, 497
[35]
Ibid, 497
[36]
Ibid, 498
[37] Franklin
D. Roosevelt, “The Great Arsenal of Democracy”, American Rhetoric, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/fdrarsenalofdemocracy.html
(accessed November 19, 2012)
[38]
ibid
[39]
ibid
[40]
“Atlantic Charter” (1941), retrieved from http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/atlantic.asp
[41] William
Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War, (New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), xvii
[42]John
V. Denson, “Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception”, In Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the
Executive State and the Decline in Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL:
Ludwig von Mises Institute,2001), 486
[43]William
Stevenson, A Man Called Intrepid: The Secret War, (New York and London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), xxiii
[44]John
V. Denson, “Roosevelt and the First Shot: A Study of Deceit and Deception”, In
Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline in
Freedom, ed. John V. Denson (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute,2001), 487
[45]
Ibid, 487
[46]
Ibid, 487
[47] Patrick
Buchanan, Churchill, Hitler and the
Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost its’ Empire and the West Lost the World, (New
York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 2008), 414
[48]
Ibid, 415
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Machiavelli and State Power
By Lew Rockwell
This talk was delivered on September 15, 2012, at a seminar sponsored by the Columbia University Department of Italian in association with the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
As libertarianism has acquired a higher profile in American life over the past several years, the attacks on and caricatures of libertarians have grown almost as rapidly. Libertarians, we read, are antisocial, and prefer isolation over interaction with others. They are greedy, and are unmoved if the poor should starve. They are naive about our dangerous enemies, and refuse their patriotic duty to support the government’s wars.
These caricatures and misconceptions can be put to rest by simply defining what libertarianism is. The libertarian idea is based on a fundamental moral principle: nonaggression. No one may initiate physical force against anyone else.
There is nothing antisocial about that. To the contrary, it is the denial of this principle that is antisocial, for it is peaceful interaction that lies at the heart of civilized society.
At first glance, hardly anyone can object to the nonaggression principle. Few people openly support acts of aggression against peaceful parties. But libertarians apply this principle across the board, to all actors, public and private. Our view goes well beyond merely suggesting that the State may not engage in gross violations of the moral law. We contend that the State may not perform any action that would be forbidden to an individual. Moral norms either exist or they do not.
Thus we cannot abide State kidnapping, just because they call it the draft. We cannot abide the incarceration of people who ingest the wrong substances, just because they call it the war on drugs. We cannot abide theft just because they call it taxation. And we cannot abide mass murder just because they call it foreign policy.
Murray Rothbard, who earned his Ph.D. from this very institution in 1956 and went on to become known as Mr. Libertarian, said that you could discover the libertarian position on any issue by imagining a criminal gang carrying out the action in question.
For example, people oppose monopoly because they fear the increase in prices, the decrease in product quality, and the centralization of power that accompany it.
The libertarian applies this concern for monopoly to the State itself. After all, private firms, which we are supposed to fear, can’t simply charge whatever they want for their goods or services. Consumers can simply switch from one supplier to another, or from a particular product to a close substitute. Firms cannot engage in quality deterioration without likewise losing customers, who can find competitors offering better products.
But the State may, by definition, charge the public whatever it likes for the so-called services it supplies. Its subjects must accept whatever level of quality the State should deign to provide. And there can never, by definition, be any competitor to the State, since the State is defined as the territorial monopolist of compulsion and coercion.
With its wars, its genocides, and its totalitarian atrocities, the State has proven itself by far the most lethal institution in history. Its lesser crimes include the debt crises it has caused, the self-perpetuating bureaucracies that feed off the productive population, and the squandering of resources – which might otherwise have improved the general standard of living through capital formation – on arbitrary and politically motivated projects.
Yet the State, despite its failures, is consistently given a benefit of the doubt that no one would extend to actors and firms in the private sector. For instance, educational outcomes remain dismal despite vastly increased expenditures and far lower class sizes than in the past. Had the private sector presided over such a disaster, we would never hear the end of all the denunciations of the malefactors of great wealth who are keeping our children ignorant. When the government sector performs so poorly, there is silence. Silence, that is, interrupted by demands that the State be given still more resources.
Years ago, when John Chubb of the Brookings Institution tried to uncover how many bureaucrats were employed in New York City’s public school system, it took six telephone calls to reach someone who knew the answer – and that person was not allowed to disclose the information. It took another half dozen calls to find someone who both knew the answer and could reveal it. The answer? Six thousand.
Chubb then called the Archdiocese of New York to find out how many bureaucrats were employed in the administration of the city’s Catholic schools, which educated one-sixth as many students. When the first person he called didn’t know the answer, he figured he was in for it again. But that person went on to say, "Wait, let me count." It was twenty-six.
Imagine if the situation were reversed, and the top-heavy school system had been the private one. There would be no end to the investigations, the media reports, the public outrage. But when the State is the guilty party, there is no interest in the story at all, and no one even hears about it.
Likewise, when the government courts force innocent parties to endure interminable delays and endless expense, there are no investigations or cries for justice. When the rich and famous are obviously favored by the system, people glumly accept it as a fact of life. Meanwhile, private arbitration companies are flourishing, quietly filling the gap left by the government’s awful system – and hardly anyone notices or cares, much less appreciates these improvements in our welfare.
The US government has carried out atrocities of an unspeakable kind, just in the past ten years, and justified them with propaganda claims that nobody around the world, apart from a gullible sector of the American population, took seriously. If K-Mart had somehow managed to do such a thing, everyone involved would have been roundly condemned, and the perpetrators would have been imprisoned, if not executed.
The government, on the other hand, persuades the people that they and the government are the same thing, that the government’s wars are their wars, that these conflicts involve us against them. People’s moral compasses become blurred as they begin to identify themselves and their own personal goodness, as they see it, with the wars in which "their" government is engaged.
In fact, for the libertarian, the government’s wars are not us versus them. The wars are a case of them versus them.
The other side of the Austro-libertarian coin is, of course, the Austrian School of economics.
The Austrian School has enjoyed a renaissance of sorts since the Panic of 2008, since so many economists who belong to this venerable tradition of thought predicted the crisis – in the face of official assurances to the contrary, in the media, among the political class, and from the Federal Reserve itself. Thanks to the Internet, it was impossible for official opinion to black out these dissident voices.
The Austrian School, which was born officially with Carl Menger’s 1871 book Principles of Economics, is sometimes conflated with other schools of thought loosely associated with the free market. But in its method, its price theory, its monopoly theory, its capital theory, its business-cycle theory, and in so much else, it is distinct from those other schools of thought, and often in direct opposition to them.
It is solidly realistic, and grounded in the individual actor and his decisions and preferences. It seeks to understand real-world prices, not the prices of a long-run equilibrium that can never exist except in the minds of economists.
It was the Austrians who solved problems that had vexed the classical economists, whose price theory could not account for why water, so necessary to life, commanded virtually a zero price on the market, while diamonds, a mere luxury, were so dear.
And it is the Austrians who predicted the Great Depression at a time when fashionable opinion claimed the business cycle had been tamed forever, who predicted the dot-com crash when Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was saying that perhaps booms didn’t necessarily have to be followed by busts any longer, and who, as I mentioned, predicted the most recent crisis when the regulators whom we are supposed to trust to keep the economy stable said there was no housing bubble and the fundamentals of that market were sound.
A common caricature holds that supporters of the free market believe the market yields a perfect social outcome, whatever that is supposed to mean. In a world of uncertainty and constant change, no system can yield a perfect result. No system can ensure that the whole structure of production instantaneously adjusts to precisely that allocation of capital goods that will yield the exact array of types and quantities of consumer goods that the public desires, while imposing the least cost in terms of opportunities foregone.
Our point is that no competing system can do a better job than the market. Only actors on the market can allocate resources in a non-arbitrary way, because only on the market can someone evaluate a course of action according to the economizing principle of profit and loss. This is what the Austrians call economic calculation.
This was the reason, economist Ludwig von Mises explained in 1920, that socialism could not work. Under socialism as traditionally understood, the State owned the means of production. Now if the State already owns all those things, then no buying and selling of them takes place. Without buying and selling, in turn, there is no process by which prices can arise. And without prices for capital goods, central planners cannot allocate resources rationally. They cannot know whether a particular production process should use ten units of plastic and nine units of lumber, or ten units of lumber and nine units of plastic (if we are indifferent between the two combinations from a technological point of view). Without market prices by which to compare incommensurable goods like lumber and plastic, they cannot know how urgently demanded each input is in alternative lines of production. Multiply this problem by the nearly infinite set of possible combinations of productive factors, and you see the impossible situation the central planning board faces.
Even the non-socialist State has a calculation problem. Since it operates without a profit-and-loss feedback mechanism, it has no way of knowing whether it has allocated resources in accordance with consumer preferences and in a least-cost manner. To the contrary, its decisions regarding what to produce and where, in what quantities and using which methods are completely blind from the point of view of social economizing. (By "social economizing" I mean the process by which we attain higher-valued ends with lower-valued means.)
Hence if we want to ensure that resources are not squandered or spent arbitrarily, we must keep them out of the hands of the State.
Strictly speaking, the Austrian School of economics has nothing to do with libertarianism. Economics, insisted economist Ludwig von Mises, is value-free. It describes rather than prescribes. It does not tell us what we ought to do. It merely explains the various phenomena we observe, from prices to interest rates, and supplies the cause-and-effect analysis that permits us to understand the consequences of coercive interference in the voluntary buying and selling decisions of individuals.
All the same, the knowledge the Austrian School imparts to us strongly implies that certain courses of action are more desirable from the standpoint of human welfare than others. Among other things, we learn from Austrian economics that the State’s allocation decisions cannot be socially economizing. We learn that the desires of consumers are best served by the free price system, which directs production decisions up and down the capital structure in accordance with society’s demands. And we learn that the State’s interference with money, the commodity that forms one-half of every non-barter exchange, gives rise to the devastation of the boom-bust business cycle.
Austro-libertarianism, then, in the spirit of Rothbard, takes the libertarian nonaggression principle and supplements it with the Austrian School’s descriptions of the free and unhampered market economy. The result is an elegant and compelling way of understanding the world, which in turn conveys the moral and material urgency of establishing a free society.
Now the seminar today asks us to consider questions of power and the State from an Austro-libertarian perspective, but also in light of Nicolo Machiavelli, the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century historian, political theorist, and counselor to princes. Most people know of Machiavelli for the views expressed in his short manual The Prince, and not for his longer and perhaps more substantial works, including his Discourses on Livy and his history of Florence. I have drawn largely but not exclusively from The Prince for my brief remarks today.
The Roman moralists of antiquity, and the Renaissance humanists who followed them, had urged that rulers had to possess a particular set of moral virtues. These were, first, the four cardinal virtues – cardinal from the Latin meaning "hinge"; hence all other virtues hinge on these – of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. Now all men were called to cultivate these virtues, but princes in particular were called to still others beyond these, such as princely magnanimity and liberality. These themes are developed in Cicero’s De Officiis, or On Duties, and in Seneca’s On Clemency and On Benefits.
The humanists anticipated the thesis Machiavelli would one day bring forth, namely that there ought to be a division between morality on the one hand and whatever happens to be expedient for the prince on the other. They answered it by cautioning that even if princely wickedness is not punished in this life, divine retribution in the next life would be fearsome and certain.
What made Machiavelli stand out so starkly was his radical departure from this traditional view of the prince’s moral obligations. As the great Machiavelli scholar Quentin Skinner points out, "When we turn to The Prince we find this aspect of humanist morality suddenly and violently overturned."
The prince, says Machiavelli, must always "be prepared to act immorally when this becomes necessary." And "in order to maintain his power," he will – not just sometimes but often – be forced "to act treacherously, ruthlessly, and inhumanely."
Most people will never interact with the prince themselves, hence Machiavelli’s note to the prince that "everyone can see what you appear to be" but "few have direct experience of what you really are." "A skillful deceiver," he continued, "always finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived." We can surmise from this what kind of person the prince would have to be.
It is customary to object at this point that Machiavelli counseled that the prince pursue virtue when possible, and that he should not pursue evil for its own sake. Machiavelli does indeed make such an argument in chapter 15 of The Prince. But on the other hand, Machiavelli says that conduct considered virtuous by traditional morality and the general run of mankind merely "seems virtuous," and that apparently wicked behavior that maintains one’s power only seems vicious.
Skinner poses, and answers, the historian’s natural question when faced with these moral claims:
But what of the Christian objection that this is a foolish as well as a wicked position to adopt, since it forgets the day of judgment on which all injustices will finally be punished? About this Machiavelli says nothing at all. His silence is eloquent, indeed epoch-making; it echoed around Christian Europe, at first eliciting a stunned silence in return, and then a howl of execration that has never finally died away.
This principle, in turn, is what the collectivist State now appeals to in order to justify its own deviations from what people would otherwise consider moral and good. F.A. Hayek wrote, "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule; there is literally nothing which the consistent collectivist must not be prepared to do if it serves ‘the good of the whole,’ because the 'good of the whole' is to him the only criterion of what ought to be done." Collectivist ethics, he added, "knows no other limit than that set by expediency – the suitability of the particular act for the end in view."
Almost everyone now accepts, at least implicitly, the claim that a different set of moral rules applies to the State, or that to one degree or another the State is above morality as traditionally understood. Even if they would not use some of the verbal formulations of Machiavelli, at some level they believe it is unreasonable to expect the State or its functionaries to behave the way the rest of us do. The State may preserve itself by methods that no private business, or household, or organization, or individual would be allowed to employ for their own preservation. We accept this as normal.
This is merely a more general statement of the phenomenon I described earlier, whereby few people even bat an eye when the State engages in behavior that would be considered a moral enormity if carried out by any other person or entity.
Now it will be objected that the coercive apparatus of the State is so important to the right ordering of society that we cannot insist too strongly on libertarian purity when evaluating its behavior. Sometimes the State just has to do what it has to do.
Every so-called service the State provides has in the past been provided non-coercively. We are simply not encouraged to learn this history, and the framework we unknowingly adopt from our earliest days in school makes our imaginations too narrow to conceive of it.
Machiavelli launched one revolution, on behalf of the State. Ours is the revolution against it, and in favor of peace, freedom, and prosperity.
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