Then, then we're usually declaring war on something here at home.
Did you ever notice that about us?
We love to declare war on things here in America.
Anything we don't like about ourselves, we declare war on it.
We don't do anything about it, we just declare war on it.
It's the only metaphor, the only metaphor we have in our public discourse for solving problems, declaring war.
Alright, well George Carlin may be right about that.
America pretty much has been at war since the Constitution was ratified.
Certainly since the Jeffersonians got embroiled in war with Great Britain in 1812.
And so there's a long tradition of warfare, George Carlin is right.
But at the same time, there's a long tradition of good Americans who opposed these wars.
And opposed all various aspects of them and it's actually amazing to see the parallels between the wars we're living through right now and some of the wars in the past when examined through the lens of the speeches and writings of people who opposed those wars at the times.
That's what we have here in this compilation, edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, We Who Dared Say No to War, America anti-war writing from 1812 to now.
And all different ideologies and different emphasis on religion and different aspects.
People from all across what we would now call the left and right and those kinds of things.
And we're joined on the phone by Thomas E. Woods, the co-editor of this book.
And he is a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
He's also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and other books like that.
Welcome back to the show, Tom.
Scott, always a pleasure.
It's very good to have you here and I'm so impressed by this book.
This is just great and you must have had really a pretty wonderful time putting this thing together, am I right?
Yeah, we did, other than for the stuff dealing with the more recent writings.
Because then you have to deal with intellectual property and copyrights and who owns what.
But for the earlier stuff, it was definitely an absolute pleasure.
Because I really feel like there have been a couple of anthologies of anti-war writing in the past.
But this one really is different because we go after all the major wars.
We don't leave any out.
There are no politically correct wars that we stay away from.
They're all in there.
And secondly, we are ecumenical in the best sense of the word in that we've got – as long as you're not a fascist or a commie, then we're willing to put you in there.
So we've got Howard Zinn right next to Pat Buchanan.
It's an interesting – because we live in a quilt, an American quilt.
We've got all different points of view in our country.
And yet when they come together to say that whatever our other differences, we happen to be against mass murder justified by propaganda, I happen to think that's a good thing.
It's something that we should celebrate.
And so we gathered together.
The way we did it was we took every single American war, the major wars from 1812 down to Iraq.
And for each war, we got what we thought were the best or at least most interesting, provocative, forgotten anti-war writing and speeches and whatever and poetry.
We put it all together.
And so you get not only extremely stirring prose, but you also get great arguments against each of these wars.
And as you say, Scott, you start to notice parallels here.
You notice parallels between whatever the current war is, in this case the Iraq war, and all these previous wars.
I mean you see people making the same arguments against it that we're making against this war.
You see the propagandists making the same arguments that they make today.
You're unpatriotic because you're against the three dozen people in Washington who are prosecuting this war.
That makes you some kind of a traitor or something.
You're not in favor of our gang sufficiently.
So we got all that in here, but just listen to this.
I mean just listen to this one sentence.
We have been taught to ring our bells and illuminate our windows and let off fireworks as manifestation of our joy when we have heard of great ruin and devastation and misery and death inflicted by our troops upon a people who never injured us, who never fired a shot on our soil, and who were utterly incapable of acting on the offensive against us.
Well that sounds like it was written about three weeks ago.
It was written in 1849 by one of the people we put in this book against the Mexican war.
So in a way, Scott, you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Like should we be encouraged or depressed?
I mean you could be depressed by this in the sense that for hundreds of years people have struggled against the war machine.
People have struggled against the propaganda machine.
And they've by and large lost time after time.
The war machine gets what it wants.
But on the other hand, in a certain sense, you can be a source of encouragement that we're not alone.
That a lot of great people, people far, far greater than Bush and Cheney, over the centuries have fought the same valiant struggle that we fight.
And whether we win or lose, at least we can take consolation that we're in an honorable lineage and we're doing what's right.
I was reminded reading this of that South Park episode where Cartman goes back in time and it's the founding fathers debating whether to put the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights or not.
And they decide that yeah, we ought to have free speech.
And that way we can have war all the time.
But we can let half the people speak freely, speak out against it all the time.
That way we can keep our reputation as nice, peace-loving people who never want to be in war.
And yet we can still conquer whoever we want.
Yeah, it's pretty much like what we're faced with.
And you know what was fun about – and I'm not too crazy about the title, by the way, We Who Dared to Say No to War.
But nevertheless, that's water under the bridge.
But my co-editor on this, the guy I'm sure you enjoy having on your program, Murray Polner, who's just the total opposite of me on everything else.
He's very much on the left, but he's sort of on the skeptical of Obama left.
He's not just whatever hack the Democrats put up, I'll just sit back and accept.
He's a very, very good guy.
His son wrote a book denouncing Giuliani, so how could this be a bad guy?
He sounds pretty all right to me so far.
Yeah, so we got to know each other.
We both taught at the same institution in New York, and we liked each other's anti-war writing.
And we thought, hey, you know what?
If the two of us can get along on a personal level, then why don't we sort of put this into action and put together a book that brings together people, regardless of where they're coming from, who just are against what the empire is up to.
And so far, the interesting thing is that the reviews it's gotten, other than Publishers Weekly, which loved it, gave it a starred review, it was great.
The reviews have all been from people on the left.
They've all been from people on the left.
So I'm almost slightly embarrassed.
Come on, libertarians, can somebody write a review, please?
Right, yeah, well.
Unfortunately, I just heard that, so I guess I have to now or something.
I'm still the same guy.
Yeah, no, this is great stuff.
And it certainly, you know, when you go back to the early part of the history of the country, where it's the slavery party and the fascist party or the mercantilist party versus each other, neither really represents what we would identify now as a left-wing or right-wing point of view, and neither is very, you know, they don't provoke much sympathy, really, on either side.
So it's kind of easier to take a detached point of view and listen to them bash the hell out of each other.
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
And, you know, it's funny that you go back to a war like the War of 1812, you know, and you think, you know, who even cares at this point about the War of 1812?
Nobody even knows what the War of 1812 was about, other than maybe if you really press them, they'll say, well, wasn't it something about they were kidnapping our sailors on the high seas and then pressing them into service, something like that.
That's all Americans know about it.
Yeah, I mean, that pretty much is it, which is a practice that, you know, is not exactly to be recommended, one concedes, but it's a practice that ended after the Napoleonic Wars ended anyway, and it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the pretty embarrassing War of 1812.
But it's interesting that if you read, one of the things we have in there is a speech by a congressman no one's ever heard of, Samuel Taggart, who, when you look at the argument he's making against the war, you can realize right off the bat what types of arguments the war party at that time was making because of the arguments Taggart has to make against them.
And he says that, you know, we're being told that if we invade Canada, the Canadians, who are these terribly oppressed people, they're just going to jump for joy when their American liberators show up.
But if they don't, then this is just a race of debased poltroons who will deserve whatever American troops shell out to them.
I mean, it pretty much sounds like the sort of old neocon line.
Oh, I mean, no, no, no, pardon me.
They're going to be tripping over all the flowers thrown at them.
Yeah, no, it doesn't sound like it by any vague approximation at all.
It sounds exactly like it.
I mean, to hear his refutation, it was one of those like your quote about the Mexican war, where you could literally just take that exact, you know, probably if you threw that quote in Google, you would find almost word for word people saying that about Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, it is.
Leave the quote marks off the Google search, you know.
It's amazing.
And then, of course, the other parallel you note is that in every war, the United States government was just standing there, and just suddenly, out of the blue, it just gets attacked.
I mean, he's just trying to stand there peacefully.
And, you know, when you try to make arguments like this, you get the usual blockheads saying that you hate America.
You hate America because you don't accept the rationale for war given by the crummy jerks who rule us.
And that means you hate, quote, America.
Well, I don't actually hate the actual America, the physical territory, the people who inhabit it by and large.
I am pretty ticked off at a certain small class of people in Washington, D.C.
And there was a time when even conservatives understood that there was a difference between these two things, that George Bush is not America, and it's unbelievably totalitarian to think he is.
And so you try to make these arguments, and you get all the hacks telling you, you know, you're supposed to believe all the propaganda that you're told and just shut up and accept it.
But when you go through and you look at all these wars, I mean, time after time after time, it's some absurd rationale that's given for the war, and there's always some phony pretext.
Oh, our ship was blown up, or our troops were fired on, whatever.
And then by the time the war has gone on for two years, then the truth starts to trickle out.
Oh, wait a minute, actually, we were actually kind of standing in disputed territory with Mexico when the shots were fired.
So it's actually kind of an ambiguous situation.
Or nobody really knows who blew up the main.
Obviously, the Spanish had no interest in doing that.
They didn't want to pick a fight with the U.S.
I mean, but it's always too late.
The war party gets what it wants.
It rams this stupid stuff through.
And students in classrooms, I can say from experience, will sit there, and they'll read about the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and they'll say, boy, people sure are gullible.
And then they'll drive home with their American flags on their cars, talking about the need to fight the Iraq War.
I mean, you're just left speechless.
Yeah, well, I can try to sympathize sort of with the people who figure that you just hate America, because by being honest and being a historian and a researcher and looking back at how all these things have happened, there really are no exceptions to this.
The Mexican War, the Civil War, the war against Spain, well, the pretext for Wilson's invasion of Mexico before he ever got us into World War I.
But then you have all the provocations for World War I, Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin.
I'm not sure about Korea, if they even bothered making up a good pretext for that one.
Weapons of mass destruction.
Yeah, when he gets genocidized in 1990.
I mean, it's been like this the whole time, Tom.
So really, it's not like you're saying, well, ever since Woodrow Wilson or ever since the end of World War II, there's been this deviation.
You're saying this is the American way.
This is what the Federal Republic was created to do, to wage war against people all the time.
It's absolutely right, and I mean, there's a domestic analog to all this, which is that, for example, with this economic crisis that's going on, the government, in the same way that it always claims that it was just an innocent bystander, and then suddenly, for no reason, Japan just decided to attack it, and that there was no context, no lead up to this.
It's just irrational people just have a hatred for all good things in the world, including America.
But there's a domestic analog, which is that if there's a financial crisis, the economy turns down, whatever, that's also never the government's fault.
That's also some private party.
It's greedy people.
If there's a shortage of something, it's not because of the government's price control.
It's because the farmers are hoarding whatever it is.
If there's inflation, that's because labor unions are insisting on higher wages, or greedy businessmen are charging higher prices.
It's never, ever, ever the government's fault.
In fact, our government has got the most pristine track record of any institution in the history of the world.
I mean, it's been attacked, it's had all these economic problems, and not one of them has ever been its fault.
I don't know why we don't have more confidence in it, Scott, you know, when you look at it.
Yeah, I know.
Well, and it is strange, too, though, that, well, especially when you read all these, you know, all this history and context in a row like this, it's amazing to think that people don't teach their kids, like, listen, don't let this happen to you.
One day there's going to be an attack, and as far as you know, it'll be out of the clear blue sky, but there'll be more to it than that.
Don't fall for it.
You know?
Yeah, I know it.
I know it.
I mean, you know, one of the contributors to our book in the Vietnam section, Bill Earhart, who is a poet and a writer, and he fought in Vietnam.
What we include in here, in addition to a couple of his poems, is his talk that he gave to a local high school, in which he said, look, I was Mr. Patriotism.
I believed everything I was told.
You know, we have to go fight in Vietnam, so okay, I'm going to go do it.
And, you know, I'm here to tell you that I was used in the most despicable way possible, and I can't tell you how to live your life or that you should be a conscientious objector if the situation ever arises, but this is what you're going to face if you're ever put in the situation that this government may put you in.
And so, I mean, I'm telling you, this is stuff that normally you have a book, and look, nobody makes much money on anthologies, so this is not just me shilling to get money.
I'm doing okay financially.
But this sort of book is the kind of thing that normally you think, well, it's a collection of writings.
You know, I'll refer to it, maybe put it on my shelf.
But what we wanted to do was put together a collection of writings that you could actually read cover to cover and not get bored.
Yeah, no, it really is good that way.
It's hard to put down.
It's very interesting stuff all the way through.
And you know what's another thing we did?
It's interesting.
If you look at the Cold War section, just by a weird coincidence, the Cold War section is almost all old right.
It's almost all conservative, libertarian people.
In fact, we looked at it and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, we've got to put some progressive in here to balance this off.
So we put Henry Wallace.
But basically we've got Robert Taft arguing in the Senate that the president has no right to involve the U.S. in the Korean War.
You've got Dwight Eisenhower, who was an old right, but he was a Republican, so nominally that's at least something.
His famous farewell speech warning Americans about the undue influence of the military-industrial complex.
So you see, this is not a term that Ron Paul or Counterpunch invented.
Dwight Eisenhower, the most moderate of moderates, warned Americans about that.
You've got Robert Lefebvre, who was a libertarian educator.
Bill Coffman, I'm sure you've spoken to, who's a great conservative.
Russell Kirk, the great, arguably the intellectual founder of American conservatism.
Well, and my favorite.
This is the one that I recommend to people if I have a chance to, and that's War, Peace and the State by Murray Rothbard.
Yeah, that's the best one, by Murray Rothbard.
That is a life-changing essay about what war really is all about and what it really is.
And put all the BS about it aside, but when you look at the state for what it is, I mean basically just a bunch of – just a criminal gang that happens to have a monopoly of force in a given area.
Well, then suddenly a lot of words suddenly have different meanings, like treason.
So if you want to secede from the country, you're guilty of treason.
Well, what that actually means is you no longer want the protection racket that these people are offering you.
In effect, you've got one mafia family fighting against another mafia family.
That's really what these wars are all about, and that insight helps you to engage in real, sensible moral evaluation.
Right, well, but one of the hardest things to overcome, and it may never happen, I don't know what it would really take.
I guess there was the Vietnam syndrome there for a while, but they beat that, and we're over that.
We've got the great clip of George Bush Sr. saying, we lit the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Now, we have as one of these articles, I forgot which one, I think it was from the Mexican War era.
And the guy talked about, yeah, but all the ribbons and trumpets and swords and fancy clothes and the trappings of glory and heroism, you know, this is what young men are made for.
This is kind of a major leg on the chair of our society or whatever.
It's a major part of who we are.
Yeah, that's true, and what types of deeds kids are taught to admire.
And I say this, again, as a guy who, I'm not a leftist.
I do feel like the people on the left in this book I have learned from, and I appreciate those people.
But I don't really identify with the left, and yet I am at least as and possibly much more anti-war than any of these folks.
And yet when we say things like this, Scott, we just assume that you're probably some kind of a commie.
But the commies are pretty unsound on war too.
I mean they're either waging war on their own people, or they'll support the war if the Kremlin tells them to support it.
So there's very little principle there.
I couldn't help being struck.
We included an excerpt from a guy, a 19th century figure no one's ever heard of, Elihu Burrett.
And he wrote a little thing just about what war does to people, and how interesting it is.
He says that you hear about the Irish potato famine, or let's say an earthquake somewhere.
And he says it's just amazing.
You get shiploads of corn and provisions are sent over to relieve all that suffering.
But when exactly the same suffering is inflicted by war upon some people, well, what do we see?
In fact, we get a total insensibility to human suffering.
For example, in the U.S., people are very generous if they hear that there's been a tsunami.
But, well, in Iraq you've got sick kids, starving kids, just a humanitarian disaster, and nobody cares at all.
I mean, just nothing.
Yeah, five million refugees, four and a half, something.
Yeah, and that's why Burrett says this is one of the worst consequences of war.
Not just the physical destruction, but the moral corruption that takes root in the human heart.
You know, when you can look at this type of suffering, if you even bother to look at it at all, and be utterly unmoved by it.
I mean, these are actual human beings.
And they might be slightly moved if, let's say, the 1980s Soviet Union had carried out this atrocity against these people.
Well, then, you know, these are terrible atrocities against wonderful freedom fighters, and we need to send them some help.
These are the same people they would have been if they'd been attacked by the Soviet Union, and it's like they're not even people.
And so he sees this in the 19th century.
We see it today.
You know, again, do you despair at this?
I mean, well, sometimes I fall into despair, but what can you do other than fight?
I mean, what can you do other than have anti-war radio and write books?
What else can you do?
I mean, you have to fight.
You can't just give up.
You have to just keep fighting.
Well, yeah, and I think it's about trying to figure out which are the right arguments.
I mean, I try to look back on my own life about how I got it through my head to not believe in these kinds of things.
I certainly remember being, you know, even maybe kind of accepting as a young kid going through the debate about, okay, well, so the way they're teaching me here, and I'm figuring it is, okay, murder's wrong and killing is wrong, but in a war like, say, for example, World War II, then killing people is great and heroic, and you can tell the difference because one of them is for your country and the other one's not.
Any kind of killing that ain't for your country is bad killing, but for your country is good killing.
And, you know, hey, that's apparently what all the adults seem to think, so I guess that's the way it is, and I accept that.
But then the question is, though, how do you form the argument correctly?
How do you get the word out to people that, you know, really, if you happen to live on the other side of water, it's really no different, the grief and the pain and the, you know, how bad it hurts if you get your leg blown off or how bad you feel if your mom gets a bomb dropped on her house or any of those things.
It's just like the unimaginable, really, Tom, of a plane flying over and dropping bombs in my neighborhood.
Yeah, no, and that's such an important point right there.
I mean, first of all, in terms of what the best arguments are, it usually varies from person to person.
You know, I mean, an argument that would work with somebody with left-wing sympathies might be different from one guy on the right.
But that's what we have to make them realize, that everybody's an individual, and it's not okay to drop high explosives on them.
Right, well, I mean, think of, imagine, and I'm not the first to make this argument by any means, but, you know, suppose instead of hiding out in Afghanistan, the same group of terrorists had been hiding out in Boston.
Now, would we have dealt with that situation differently?
You think we would have just bombed Boston?
Yeah, don't tempt them, but yeah, I know where you're going.
I know what I know.
But, you know, they would have figured out some way to ferret them out.
They would have figured out some way.
Well, one guy in the chat room is saying maybe we need to start having Afghan weddings at the White House, and they'll take care of this problem for us.
Yeah, no, I know it.
I know it.
But, you know, honestly, they just figure, well, look, these Afghans, they're not us.
So who cares?
I mean, they're treated like garbage or less than garbage.
They're just utterly, utterly disposable.
But think of it even just more simply.
If I've got a dispute with you and I know you're in Town X, nobody would consider it morally legitimate for me to just walk down the street of Town X just indiscriminately firing bullets, hoping one of them might hit you somewhere.
But yet this, in effect, is the governing principle of war.
Now, it is possible, I think, to justify some kind of – to justify self-defense.
But again, there are still moral rules that have to be observed.
I mean you can't defend yourself through going after whatever the offending country is and murdering every single inhabitant.
I mean you can't do that.
There are still moral rules.
But the point is that we take for granted, as you say, Scott, when we grow up that these moral rules that we're taught are suddenly suspended when our ruling class tells us that they're suspended.
And this is – I just don't see this as in any way acceptable.
What's interesting though in terms of what arguments work is that Ron Paul says that – I mean it's just in this personal conversation that – and in fact this was an argument that I wasn't even sure was really working for him in the debates.
When he would say, look, what would we think if, let's say, the Chinese built military bases on the Mexican border?
I mean we would view that as having aggressive intent, but we're over here, over there doing all this to other countries, and we're shocked that they take offense at it.
And so he was sort of using a kind of golden rule style argument, and I was wondering if that was really coming over well.
And he says that more than any other point he made in the debates, people have mentioned that to him as the argument that turned the light bulb on in their head.
They suddenly thought, wait a minute, yeah, this is just common sense, right?
Yeah, exactly.
He talked about what if they had their navy in the Gulf of Mexico?
Yeah.
I mean look at – we start a war against Iraq, call it a preemption because Saddam Hussein might one day get a weapon that he might one day give to a terrorist that then that terrorist might use against us.
So never mind actually building a base on the border.
We'd nuke them before it ever got anywhere near that point.
Yeah, yeah, I know it.
I know it.
And as I say, there was a time when you could have had a conversation like this.
You could have talked about serious things.
You could have actually viewed war as a serious moral question rather than as some ideological tool or as a patriotic duty that's not to be questioned.
I mean there were actually conservatives at one point that did think about things like this, whereas now we've got this totally anti-intellectual group of yahoos like – I'll just take one example.
I could take a zillion, but one of my favorite quotations because it's so refreshingly revealing about these people is from Jonah Goldberg who argued in terms of the Iraq war.
He said, look, we got attacked on September 11th, and so look, we had to attack somebody, and Iraq made the most sense.
And he said similarly that, look, every few years the United States has to take some crappy little country – those are his words – and throw it up against a wall to show the world that we mean business.
I mean this guy speaks for American conservatives.
I mean this is disgusting.
I mean he would have been thrown out of civilized society in earlier times.
Right, and in fact there he was quoting Michael Ledeen.
He called that the Ledeen doctrine.
Yeah, that's right.
Ledeen's another example one could use, but he's so easy.
Every word that comes out of his mouth is insane.
Yeah.
Well, you know, one thing that I kind of like about this too is that if anybody talked this way now, it would just sound pretentious.
But the way people talked back then, it was like a contest to use as many big words as you can and sound as smart as you possibly can.
And there's really some incredible writing, and it's interesting prose just to read back 19th century style stuff.
But I kind of like – well, some of the things that I would like to think would be instructive surprises to people, like Abraham Lincoln's opposition to the Mexican War.
It's pretty scathing, this speech.
Half insane mumblings of a fever dream.
Yeah, I mean a congressman – because of course he was a congressman at that time.
Congressmen don't speak that way even today.
I mean they still maintain a certain respect for the office of the presidency and blah, blah, blah.
Whereas you read here that in the 19th century they didn't care if they ripped the president's head off.
I mean they would actually tell it like it is, whereas even usually the harshest critics of the president are positively restrained and gentlemanly… … compared to how they used to be.
So I say bring back the old days.
Hey, talk to me about this congressman whose name I'm not going to try, who gave the speech on the House floor, War or Constitution, and was kidnapped by the military?
Yeah, it's Clement Vallandigham who was an Ohio congressman who – this was during the Civil War – who denounced Lincoln and argued that one thing after another that he was doing was a violation of the Constitution.
He's calling up troops without congressional consent.
He's shutting down newspapers.
He's throwing people in jail.
He's suspending habeas corpus.
This is not how a president should treat his own people.
This isn't normal.
And so Vallandigham repeatedly spoke out in favor of peace.
He gave this speech, a very lengthy speech that we're referring to as War or Constitution, just listing all the violations of the Constitution going on, talking about ways that reconciliation could be brought about.
And Vallandigham was in fact exiled from the United States as a result of that.
He was actually taken from his home in the middle of the night, and that was the end of that.
And that wasn't the only offense against democracy so-called, but there were elections that were interfered with, members of the Maryland legislature thrown in jail or whatever, just taken away so they couldn't vote to secede.
All this sort of stuff went on.
But in that section of the Civil War, in addition to Clement Vallandigham, we also have – who would sort of be viewed as an old-style constitutionalist.
We also have people who are sort of more – you might say more lefty, like Ezra Haywood, who was a big-time abolitionist who made the argument that two wrongs don't make a right, and that I believe in anti-slavery because I'm a humanitarian.
And as a humanitarian, I cannot carry out my goals through means that involve killing kids and starving old people and leaving devastation everywhere.
I refuse to believe that's the only way we can reach our goals.
We cannot, to quote St. Paul, do evil that good may come.
And to perish the thought that anything I have ever taught or believed could ever give comfort to this way of resolving our differences, and we have to try other means of doing this.
And this was a minority position among abolitionists, but one that was nevertheless vigorously held that there were alternatives to war.
And that every other country in the Western Hemisphere that ended slavery in the 19th century had pursued one of those alternatives.
So why is the United States just an inexplicably savage country, the only country on earth that couldn't be appealed to through humanitarian impulses?
I mean, these are at least arguments worth listening to.
They're not obviously stupid.
But yes, they are different from what your fourth-grade teacher taught you.
But you know, once in a while, you have to hang a question mark on what your fourth-grade teacher taught you.
That's part of growing up.
Well, and you know, it's funny because you discussed so quickly what happened to this congressman.
But to just stop it for a moment, and we are short on time, but to just sort of hit the pause button there, you had a congressman from Ohio who gave a speech detailing abuses of the Constitution by Abraham Lincoln.
Beginning his speech, in fact, by citing the First Amendment and the explicit protection in the Constitution that no congressman shall ever be accosted by the executive over anything he ever says in Congress.
Period.
It's right there in the Constitution like that.
And then he ends this thing, I mean, there's really, I just read it the other day, there's not a single treacherous statement in there.
But he was exiled from the United States.
This congressman was arrested by the military and exiled from the United States.
What, for the duration of the war?
Did he come back after?
Yeah, he was brought back.
I don't remember the exact time frame, but he did eventually come back.
He didn't live out the rest of his life in exile.
But all the same, as you say, Scott, when you look through his argument, I mean, every single point he makes is sound.
And every single point he makes is reasonable.
He's not saying anything absurd.
Or even if you are going to argue that speaking treason justifies exile, well, since when did just simply pointing to clauses in the Constitution constitute treason?
I mean, what kind of twisted situation have we got when that's the verdict?
Well, and you know, the one that will really shock you about the Civil War is reading Lysander Spooner.
Because this guy, you know, he could write for LewRockwell.com.
He comes out swinging.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Because, of course, Spooner is both in favor of secession and in favor of radical abolition.
He supported John Brown.
Slaves have the right to rise up, kill their masters, do what they need to do.
But his argument that, you know, he just didn't buy any of the pious arguments.
Oh, we're going to save the oppressed black man.
Give me a break.
How stupid do you think I am?
That that's what any of this has anything to do with, you know, and he gives a very, as you say, just a devastating treatment of all this.
That these rationales for this war are such lies and transparent cheats that I can't believe there's anybody who doesn't see through them.
And well, now let's talk about World War One, because this was a major turning point.
I mean, it's pretty clear that America really always has been an empire.
But since World War One, we've had really the days leading right up to it.
We've had this permanent system of central banking and war and inflation and deflation.
And for with the exception of one short period, permanent militarization of our society.
I mean, at least they used to have wars all the time, but at least they would more or less disband the army when it was over, you know.
And it really hasn't been that way since then.
And I wonder kind of whether you got the idea that the people who who wrote these essays that you that you put together here for your World War One section.
Really understood the kind of extreme change in our society that was going to be brought about by that war.
The centralization of power and what it would mean really to the society as a whole.
Did they see what a major turning point it was or this was just another war they were being lied into and trying to stop?
Yeah, good question.
I mean, Randolph Bourne, I think, sort of did.
I mean, the guy with whom we associate the phrase, war is the health of the state.
I think he did actually sense something going on.
Robert La Follette, the senator from Wisconsin.
Again, you get the sense that he recognizes that a watershed is taking place, but you don't.
It's not really clear.
It's easy for us in hindsight to look at this.
Some of these people may have thought that this is an unbelievable deviation from tradition.
And that maybe it'll be so horrific that no Americans would ever allow it ever to happen again.
But what's interesting to me is – or for example, Eugene Debs.
I mean, he sort of seems to view it as just another example of the ruling classes tricking the workers into fighting each other for no good reason basically.
But what surprises me is having written The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, which does not celebrate any American war.
And in fact, the World War I chapter just lists case after case after case of obvious American provocations leading up to the U.S. involvement in the war.
And I mean, all the ridiculous arguments advanced as to why we have to go to war with Germany, where they would cast a blind eye on what the British were up to, trying to starve the Germans.
You know, that will give them a slap on the wrist.
But the German submarine warfare, which was a horrific thing, but was in response to the fact they were being starved to death.
Well, that needs to be gone after exclusively.
It surprises me that Senator George Norris of Nebraska, whose speech we quote, and who is not cited as often as La Follette, but we've resurrected his speech.
He sees it all.
He points out time after time after time.
He said, we are not weighing the parties in this conflict in the balance correctly.
We're favoring one side at the expense of the other.
We've been doing this for years, and it's drawn us into the war.
And this is not good politics.
It's not good diplomacy.
And it's also not moral, because the British are engaged in pretty rotten things.
And all we're doing is focusing on the German offenses.
And he points all this stuff out.
I mean, almost all the stuff I have in my Politically Incorrect Guide, he's got right here in the speech.
He saw that it was all phony.
Yeah, it's amazing to imagine, somehow conjure, that Wilson is among the favorite by historians.
I always do the poll of who's the greatest president, and the historians always put Wilson up there.
You know?
What's his crazy view of American rights on the seas?
It's basically the argument that Americans, if they're traveling aboard merchant ships that are armed, and that are transporting munitions of war to one of the parties in the war, cannot be fired upon.
Well, how about a more sensible rule, which is the rule that the British adopted during the Russo-Japanese War, which is, if you're stupid enough to be traveling aboard a ship carrying weapons of war through the war zone, then you do so at your own risk.
We're not going to go to war to avenge your stupid death.
What a stupid principle this is.
No belligerent had ever tried to vindicate such a ludicrous principle.
And at the end of his speech, George Norris says that by going into the war, he says, we will make millions of our countrymen suffer.
And the consequences of it may well be that millions of our brethren must shed their lifeblood.
Millions of broken-hearted women must weep.
Millions of children must suffer with cold.
And millions of babes must die from hunger.
And all because we want to preserve the commercial right of American citizens to deliver munitions of war to belligerent nations.
There's your glorious war to end all war.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, though, that actually the sinking of the Lusitania wasn't good enough.
They had to seize on the Zimmerman telegram, which was purportedly supposed to be, what, a promise by Germany to help Mexico invade and take back the Southwest from the United States?
Yeah.
I mean, what it said was that if the United States should declare war on Germany, then the Germans would consider some kind of alliance with Mexico by which Mexico could take back some of the stuff in the American Southwest that it had lost in the aftermath of the Mexican War.
But, okay, well, you might argue that's an obnoxious thing to say, but notice it's a conditional statement.
It's if the Americans go to war with us.
Well, and it's also- They just don't.
It's not a credible threat by the slightest bit.
I mean, you might as well say- Well, obviously not.
I mean, how are the Germans, you know, whose naval force is getting beaten up like mad by the British?
They can't even have a naval force.
How are they going to get over here and assist the Mexicans?
Yeah, I mean, it might as well be, you know, Pakistan threatened to help Mexico take back the Southwest, you know, last week.
Yeah, it's the sort of thing that a diplomat with any common sense just blows off, you know, and ignores.
It's like the Barbary pirates threatening, you know, actually declaring war on the U.S. in the early 19th century.
Well, obviously the Barbary pirates really can't come over to the U.S. and wage a war.
So, you know, we kind of know when people are just blowing smoke and whatever.
But, yeah, this is solemnly held up to the American population as a cause for war.
But what's really gratifying, though, is that at that time, the whole Empire Project hadn't really- Americans hadn't been sold on it.
And so, you know, they had to, during the war, launch the biggest propaganda campaign ever seen in American history to sell this war, with suppression of free speech and propagandists on the street corners, and Hollywood making propaganda films.
All this stuff had to be done, and the draft.
You didn't have to have a draft even for the Spanish-American War, before we had to have the draft.
All this stuff, La Follette said, is because they know the people don't support it.
They know the people are being dragged into this thing against their will.
Well, those were the days, Scott, when the American people were actually dragged into a war against their will, rather than waving tiny American flags the whole time.
Right, yeah, cheering for it.
You know, I was kind of puzzled the other day about, when was it exactly?
I never really did pinpoint.
When was it everybody took the American flags off of their cars?
Yeah, I don't know.
Everybody had them for a long time.
Some people never did.
You know, those are the scariest among them.
Yeah, I mean, there's still some around, but at least in Austin, it was everybody had one for a long time.
Of course, mine was upside down.
Other than that, though, I mean, everybody had one, but it sort of seemed like there was, you know, one month in the summer of 05 or something, where everybody pulled their car in the garage and kind of quietly peeled the sticker off and pretended like it wasn't them who helped shout us into this thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
I don't know, but of course, but they're keeping them in their closets, though, in case they need them in 2009, 2010, when we have to go get those bad Iranians.
Yeah.
All right, well, now, so let's end this thing where we started.
I'm keeping you over time here.
Sorry about that.
No, no.
With the kind of left-right alliance, basically what we have here, as established in the first quarter hour of the show today, is a left-right alliance for war inside the presidency and inside the Congress.
Yeah.
And there's just no doubt about it when looking at Barack Obama's appointments.
And at the same time, your book here ends, well, first of all, it's edited by you and Murray Polner, a little bit of a left-right alliance there, and you end with this great essay by John Basil Utley asking about the possibility of a left-right alliance against war.
And I guess I wonder whether you think that's been made easier or harder with the election of Barack Obama.
I kind of am hoping that everybody who loved him feels so betrayed already that they'll be willing to kind of, you know, I don't know.
Yeah, well, I think the intellectuals among them would probably feel betrayed.
The average American doesn't know any of these names anyway.
They don't know who any of these people are.
They all think Hillary Clinton is a, quote, liberal, you know.
But in fact, you know, obviously she was all in favor of the Iraq war.
She's a foreign policy hawk.
But most people don't know that.
But, yeah, I think the intellectuals, in fact, there's that great compilation, maybe you were reading from it, that appeared on Alternet, and I don't remember the guy's name.
Yeah, Jeremy Scahill.
Yeah, and at the end he said that, you know, I intend to be the same journalist I was during the Bush administration, during the Obama administration.
I'm not just going to suddenly be a cheerleader.
And, I mean, if we see that type of sentiment, that's a wonderful thing.
And the thing is, my experience is that those of us, I still think of myself as being on the right.
And, look, I think war is the most important moral issue of the day.
And if somebody is just dead wrong on a lot of other things but is right on this, well, I can overlook a lot, and I'm willing to be friendly, and I'm happy to cheer and promote that person's work.
And sometimes it's reciprocated.
In the case of Murray Polner, who's a great, I mean, just a great guy, genuinely open-minded, best sense of the word.
And then other people, too.
I mean, there are some people in counterpunch who are open to this.
But I find it's not so much of a two-way street.
I find the left oftentimes is much too sectarian.
And, look, the fact is the war party is bipartisan.
The war party is a left-right coalition.
So at some point you have to give up the fact that, yes, some people on the right have views that you don't like, and some people on the left have views I don't like.
But, you know, the empire is not coming down.
And it may not come down even if we do come together, but it certainly won't if we're going to sit here and nitpick each other to death when this awful empire that's destroying our economy and making people miserable around the world is still persisting.
Well, and, you know, here's the thing, too.
It seems to me, as far as philosophy, even in the most general sense of, you know, just the average sort of left-leaning person or the average sort of right-leaning person, I mean, ultimately, liberalism is about liberty.
I mean, sometimes people get confused and put, you know, state-mandated equality first and this kind of thing.
But, hell, liberty is right there in the root word, and it really is, you know, in many ways based on the respect for the individual and human rights and people's right to live their life how they want and be whoever they want and that kind of thing.
And ultimately, what's to conserve?
But the classical liberalism inherited from our Declaration of Independence and the original American Revolution, probably the last justified war in this country, which, you know, established the proof of the rights of man.
And so, you know, come on, guys.
We have a hell of a lot to agree on, it seems like, probably more so than the Max Boots and Hillary Clintons of the world.
Yeah, it's true.
It's true.
And, you know, when I saw that Max Boots thing, I don't mean to be totally self-referential here, but Max Boots went after me a few years ago because he didn't like my politically incorrect guide to American history because it wasn't a neocon book.
And he went after me very hard, and I was told by several people, well, you know, that conservative Max Boots certainly showed you.
Here he is saying now that only the most churlish on left and right can be unhappy with the character of our nation's emerging leadership.
Look, normal people don't talk like that.
And certainly somebody who's supposed to be a conservative, whose view I'm supposed to give a damn about, don't talk like that.
And yet this is the guy who's standing in judgment of my book, and I'm supposed to apologize and bow down before him.
I mean, unbelievable.
Yeah, well, what was his criticism?
You badmouth the FDR or something?
Well, it was that, you know, I argued the president can't just send troops anywhere.
He gave the usual neocon line that, yes, he can.
He's done it hundreds of times in American history.
It was the usual BS.
He even defended American intervention into World War I, which makes him, like, I don't know, like one of the 11 people in the world who still support that position.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, World War I, that was a real great...
I mean, everybody could agree that was a debacle.
I mean, right?
Yeah, well...
You would think.
And, you know, this is really where I'm at right now, is wondering just how Bush is going to measure up to Woodrow Wilson in terms of long-term consequences.
Because as much as I despise the man, we really don't know how bad this is going to be.
It very well may be that 100 years from now it's clear that, yeah, it was the Bush era when it got off to the bad start and that clash of civilizations that did not have to be came to total war.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, it's tempting to make historical judgments right now in that, I mean, it seems to me that the fact that Obama feels compelled to just stack his administration with neocons is an important legacy of the Bush years.
So it's going to be with us for quite some time.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't mean to sound like, you know, well, really even that knowledgeable about this kind of thing in the first place, but it does seem to me that whereas the Vietnamese kind of have that Buddhist attitude, like, yeah, that was a real bummer when we had that war and everything, but let's, you know, try to be friends kind of attitude, you know, at least the conventional wisdom about Arab culture, if not Muslim culture, is, you know, a thousand years for revenge.
And your great-great-great-great-great-grandfather's sin is not going to be forgiven here.
We picked a fight with a million people like this, you know, over things that they had nothing to do with?
Yeah, yeah, I know it.
Scott, you know, talking to you, and by the way, when we're on the program here, it's like you and I are just having a regular phone conversation.
I mean, this is exactly what I'd say to you if we were just having a regular phone conversation.
I mean, it just, when I hear things like this, it just frustrates me that there are more people who kind of get it on the economy and kind of get it on some issues are so bad.
They won't accept government propaganda on the economy, but you tell them about what the Arabs are up to, and, well, well, they can't take notes feverishly enough.
What is there not to see about this, you know?
I mean, what is so hard about this?
I mean, they have gotten us into such potential trouble that, as you say, could persist for longer than, you know, our attention span-deprived society can possibly imagine.
And all for what?
Just to give us an opportunity to blow a trillion bucks?
Right, yeah, to start.
Yeah, I mean, look, just spend it on some crap, you know?
I mean, don't do this.
All right, well, here comes my best attempt at doing the capitalist salesman thing for you here.
It's not going to sound very good, but I do mean this, that this would be a great Christmas gift for the peacenik in your life.
We who dared say no to war, and you will read it cover to cover.
It is really good.
A couple of hundred years of great Americans opposing the warfare state.
It's edited by Murray Polner and Thomas E. Woods, senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, also author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
Thanks for your time on the show today, Tom.
Really appreciate it.
Thanks again for having me, Scott.
All right, folks, we'll be right back.
Sandside War Radio on chaos.
