***** "The Roots of War," _The Objectivist_ 1966 by Ayn Rand
It is said that nuclear weapons have made wars too horrible to contemplate. Yet every nation on earth feels, in helpless terror, that such a war might come.
The overwhelming majority of mankind -- the people who die on the battlefields or starve and perish among the ruins -- do not want war. They never wanted it. Yet wars have kept erupting throughout the centuries, like a long trail of blood underscoring mankind's history.
Men are afraid that war might come because they know, consciously or subconsciously, that they have never rejected the doctrine that causes wars, which has caused the wars of the past and can do it again -- the doctrine that it is right or practical or necessary for men to achieve their goals by means of physical force (by initiating the use of force against other men) and that some sort of "good" can justify it. It is the doctrine that force is a proper or unavoidable part of human existence and human societies.
Observe one of the ugliest characteristics of today's world: the mixture of frantic war preparations with hysterical peace propaganda, and the fact that both come from the same source from the same political philosophy. The bankrupt, yet still dominant, political philosophy of our age is statism.
Observe the nature of today's alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism to communism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed.
Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today's alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate -- in the name of love for humanity....
In a full dictatorship, statism's chronic "cold" civil war takes the form of bloody purges, when one gang deposes another as in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia. In a mixed economy, it takes the form of pressure-group warfare, each group fighting for legislation to extort its own advantages by force from all other groups....
Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by production....
Germany and Russia needed war; the United States did not and gained nothing. (In fact, the United States lost, economically, even though it won the war: it was left with an enormous national debt, augmented by the grotesquely futile policy of supporting former allies and enemies to this day.) Yet it is capitalism that today's peace-lovers oppose and statism that they advocate in the name of peace.
Laissez-faire capitalism is the only social system based on the recognition of individual rights and, therefore, the only system that bans force from social relationships. By the nature of its basic principles and interests, it is the only system fundamentally opposed to war.
Men who are free to produce, have no incentive to loot; they have nothing to gain from war and a great deal to lose. Ideologically, the principle of individual rights does not permit a man to seek his own livelihood at the point of a gun, inside or outside his country. Economically, wars cost money; in a free economy, where wealth is privately owned, the costs of war come out of the income of private citizens there is no overblown public treasury to hide that fact and a citizen cannot hope to recoup his own financial losses (such as taxes or business dislocations or property destruction) by winning the war. Thus his own economic interests are on the side of peace.
In a statist economy, where wealth is "publicly owned," a citizen has no economic interests to protect by preserving peace -- he is only a drop in the common bucket -- while war gives him (fallacious) hope of larger handouts from his masters. Ideologically, he is trained to regard men as sacrificial animals; he is one himself; he can have no concept of why foreigners should not be sacrificed on the same public altar for the benefit of the same state.
The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as "selfish" and conquest as "noble."...
The essence of capitalism's foreign policy is free trade i.e., the abolition of trade barriers, or protective tariffs, of special privileges -- the opening of the world's trade routes to free international exchange and competition among the private citizens of all countries dealing directly with one another. During the nineteenth century, it was free trade that liberated the world, undercutting and wrecking the remnants of feudalism and the statist tyranny of absolute monarchies.
As with Rome, the world accepted the British empire because it opened world channels of energy for commerce in general. Though repressive (status) government was still imposed to a considerable degree on Ireland with very bad results, on the whole England's invisible exports were law and free trade. Practically speaking, while England ruled the seas any man of any nation could go anywhere, taking his goods and money with him, in safety. (Isabel Patterson, The God of the Machine, Caldwell, Idaho: The Caxton Printers, 1964, p. 121.)...
The actual war profiteers of all mixed economies were and are of that type: men with political pull who acquire fortunes by government favor, during or after a war -- fortunes which they could not have acquired on a free market.
Remember that private citizens -- whether rich or poor, whether businessmen or workers -- have no power to start a war. That power is the executive prerogative of a government. Which type of government is more likely to plunge a country into war: a government with limited powers, bound by constitutional restrictions -- or an unlimited government, open to the pressure of any group with warlike interests or ideologies, a government able to command armies to march at the whim of a single chief executive?
Yet it is not limited government that today's peace-lovers are advocating.
(Needless to say, unilateral pacifism is merely an invitation to aggression. Just as an individual has the right of self-defense, so has a free country if attacked. But this does not give its government the right to draft men into military service which is the most blatantly statist violation of a man's right to his own life. There is no contradiction between the moral and the practical: a volunteer army is the most efficient army, as many military authorities have testified. A free country has never lacked volunteers when attacked by a foreign aggressor. But not many men would volunteer for such ventures as Korea or Vietnam. Without drafted armies, the foreign policies of statist or mixed economies would not be possible.)...
The rise of a spirit of nationalistic imperialism in the United States did not come from the right, but from the left, not from big-business interests, but from the collectivist reformers who influenced the policies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. For a history of these influences, see The Decline of American Liberalism by Arthur A Ekirch, Jr. (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1955.)
In such instances [writes Professor Ekirch] as the progressives' increasing acceptance of compulsory military training and of the white man's burden, there were obvious reminders of the paternalism of much of their economic reform legislation. Imperialism, according to a recent student of American foreign policy, was a revolt against many of the values of traditional liberalism. "The spirit of imperialism was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest, the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect." (Ibid., p. 189. The quotation on "the spirit of imperialism" comes from R.E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-interest in America's Foreign Relations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953, p. 47.)
In regard to Woodrow Wilson, Professor Ekirch writes:
Wilson no doubt would have preferred the growth of United States foreign trade to come about as a result of free international competition, but he found it easy with his ideas of moralism and duty to rationalize direct American intervention as a means of safeguarding the national interest. (Ibid., p. 199)
And: "He [Wilson] seemed to feel that the United States had a mission to spread its institutions which he conceived as liberal and democratic to the more benighted areas of the world." (Ibid.) It was not the advocates of capitalism who helped Wilson to whip up a reluctant, peace-loving nation into the hysteria of a military crusade -- it was the "liberal" magazine The New Republic. Its editor, Herbert Croly, used such arguments as: "The American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure."
Just as Wilson, a "liberal" reformer, led it into World War I, "to make the world safe for democracy" so Franklin D. Roosevelt, another "liberal" reformer, led it into World War II, in the name of the "Four Freedoms." In both cases, the "conservatives" and the big-business interests were overwhelmingly opposed to war but were silenced. In the case of World War II, they were smeared as "isolationists," "reactionaries," and "America-First'ers."
World War I led, not to "democracy," but to the creation of three dictatorships: Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany. World War II led, not to "Four Freedoms," but to the surrender of one-third of the world's population into communist slavery.
If peace were the goal of today's intellectuals, a failure of that magnitude -- and the evidence of unspeakable suffering on so large a scale -- would make them pause and check their statist premises. Instead, blind to everything but their hatred for capitalism, they are now asserting that "poverty breeds wars" (and justifying war by sympathizing with a "material greed" of that kind). But the question is: what breeds poverty? If you look at the world of today and if you look back at history, you will see the answer: the degree of a country's freedom is the degree of its prosperity....
If nuclear weapons are a dreadful threat and mankind cannot afford war any longer, then mankind cannot afford statism any longer. Let no man of good will take it upon his conscience to advocate the rule of force outside or inside his own country. Let all those who are actually concerned with peace those who do love man and do care about his survival realize that if war is ever to be outlawed, it is the use of force that has to be outlawed. *****
Lovers of _Empire_ by Hardt & Negri might eventually follow Ayn Rand's criticism of statism. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>