05/26/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

All right you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This here's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
At a new time, again, old time, re-updated, back on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to three eastern time.
But now our first guest is the heroic Sheldon Richman, our good friend and vice president of the Future Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom, which is very easy to subscribe to.
Just go to fff.org slash subscribe and get all the best of the very best libertarian writers, the FFF writers, in their monthly journal, The Future of Freedom.
And check out fff.org today because it ain't just Sheldon.
They've gone ahead, Jacob Hornberger and Bart Frazier there, have gone ahead and posted an entire section of all World War II articles today, including one that Sheldon wrote back in 1991 called The Consequences of World War II.
Since it's Memorial Day, you know how Jacob is, man, he's a radical.
He wants to challenge the biggest, the greatest myths.
And so why complain about Vietnam that everybody hates?
Let's talk about World War II, what I consider to be, it seems to me, it has replaced George Washington and the cherry tree and even Abraham Lincoln, freeing the slaves and everything as the real foundational myth of what makes America America now.
And that is the giant crusade to destroy the Nazis and the imperial Japanese in World War II.
So Sheldon Richman, he's going to have a thing to say about that, I bet.
Welcome back to the show, Sheldon.
Thank you for joining us.
My pleasure.
So I guess I should just kind of give you the open floor, what you want to address in the order you want to address it here.
I mean, maybe I could suggest we could start with this is such an unquestioned topic, the greatness of the Second World War from the American side, because primarily because of the pure evil of our adversaries in that war, which is absolutely beyond dispute.
So you want to take it from there?
Well, you can see the appeal of something like World War II to the U.S. government or any government, because governments always need to justify themselves.
If people ever took a fresh look at what the state does to them, they'd start to question all the myths they grew up with.
I mean, what do you what do we need this thing, this monstrosity, this preposterous thing that takes up big chunks of our paychecks and orders us around and hits us with a million large and small regulations and so on and so on.
And so it's very helpful for the state to be able to say to people, look, we're the only thing that stands between you and the barbarians.
There's always barbarians at the gate.
And without us, you better be darn thankful for us, because without us, you'd be overrun and you'd be slaves or killed or worse.
So World War II functions beautifully for that.
You're right.
Vietnam is hard to hard to make a case for Vietnam, although I hear murmurings of nostalgia for Vietnam.
I guess there's a revision of the revision going on, that Vietnam was actually some kind of noble crusade.
But, you know, that didn't end well for the United States.
It is regarded as a loss.
Korea before that was, you know, at best, a stalemate with the country still divided and troops still, U.S. troops still there at the DMZ.
So World War II seems to work so nicely, if you don't look too close, of course.
You know, we save the world from Hitler.
We save the world from the evil Japanese.
And not only save the world, we save the United States.
And so it's going to be a value to the myth makers for a very long time to come, no matter how much we try to to pierce the myth and show what the truth was about that war.
But we keep trying anyway.
I guess we're I guess we're dogged and stubborn.
All right.
Well, so what's the truth then?
What's the Achilles heel in this theory?
Because, hey, man, somebody had to kill them Nazis, right?
Well, of course, you know, the things are always more complicated.
In fact, I mean, the very fact that some some very evil regimes fell as a result of that war just goes to show that even in that kind of war, there's all kinds of terrible things, including the origins.
I mean, it's pretty widely acknowledged that World War II grew out of World War I and was really just part two, right, of a larger war that had a 20 year or so hiatus, you know, after the armistice and in 1918, 17, 18.
And but that war, you know, doesn't have any kind of noble origins either.
That was a bunch of empires vying with each other and and people whose pride got in the way.
And once mobilization started, no one no one was willing to say, hey, this is crazy.
Let's just stop this nonsense.
I mean, in a way, nobody wanted that war, but it was like it was like a snowball just coming down a hill that eventually became, you know, a massive, massive avalanche.
It changed the world forever, but also delivered to us the Nazis, the fascists in Italy, the Bolsheviks and in Russia.
And and so you don't you wouldn't have World War II without World War I.
Hitler, you know, Hitler would have been a failed painter somewhere and who couldn't have killed probably a single person on his own, much less the number of people, you know, he was responsible for killing.
So so this is what war begets.
War begets other bad things, including bigger wars.
The war itself, World War II itself, you know, is not is nothing romantic.
I mean, Roosevelt cynically lied all through the period.
He was promising that American boys would not be sent off to a foreign war.
He was conniving to get into the war.
He was working with the British and the Dutch and the French to get Hitler to fire on American ships.
Hitler was smart enough not to do that.
And so they then decided they had to maneuver the Japanese into, as Secretary of War Stimson puts it in his own diary just a few about a week or so before Pearl Harbor, a little more than a week before Pearl Harbor.
He says, we we have to we have to figure out a way to maneuver Japan into firing the first shot.
I mean, there's no secret there.
I mean, even even the defenders of Roosevelt now say that, of course, he I mean, they've been saying it for some time.
They used to deny this.
Of course, he lied America into war.
And thank goodness he did.
I mean, that that's the position of the of the FDR idolaters now.
It's they they're thankful that he was dishonest because the American people were so stubbornly.
Well, and on that note, you're not just referring to Robert Stinnett, right?
You're referring to other other, you know, FDR loving historians who have had to concede that Stinnett is right.
But then they they take the same point Stinnett does that it had to be done.
Well, they may they may not take Stinnett's point that they broke in the military code and knew exactly when and where the when and where the attack at Pearl Harbor was going to be.
But the more general point that, of course, he had he had a maneuver to get the United States into war.
The American people were too small minded, too myopic, too interested in their own little petty lives.
That's the way they think of us to to see that, of course, the United States had to be involved in that war and to help and to not help but actually lead the remaking of the world.
And thank goodness for FDR.
That's that's what the FDR fans say.
And they they don't seem to think any any treachery was was, you know, too too large given his justification.
And so they praise him for this.
I mean, there's there's books still being written about this.
And, you know, there was a time when they used to deny that he was doing this, the FDR fans.
But they finally, you know, the evidence is just too overwhelming.
So they know that.
I'm sorry, Sheldon.
I don't know if you can hear the music.
You should be able to.
But we got to take this break real quick.
But everybody, we'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Sheldon Richmond from the Future Freedom Foundation.
He's the vice president there and the editor of their journal, the Future Freedom.
And they're doing a whole anti-World War II type of theme today at FFF.org for Memorial Day.
And we're right in the middle of talking about how FDR lied our grandparents into war back in 1941 when we were interrupted by the break.
So go ahead and pick it up and take it whichever way you want.
OK, so, you know, I think I've probably said enough about the deception.
Some people will still say, well, that was worth it.
The American people were too narrow minded to know that they needed to get involved in that war.
But let's, you know, let's look at the war itself.
The Allied side, led by the US, engaged in horrific bombing of civilians.
I mean, all the rules were gone.
I mean, certainly World War II was no picnic in that respect, but in World War I. But by World War II, I mean, all the rules were gone.
So the allies who, you know, supposedly had the moral, you know, the moral flag flying high, bombed civilians in Germany and Japan.
I mean, just slaughtering people.
Late in the war, they bombed Dresden, which was of no military significance and just horrific, you know, killed people, drove them out of their homes.
In Japan, I mean, even before the, you know, the infamous dropping of the A-bombs, there was the firebombing of Tokyo where people were simply just burned to death where the air, you know, the oxygen was sucked out of the air through firestorms and just, you know, people died the most horrible deaths.
And then, of course, there's the two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I mean, just horrible, horrible things.
And let's not forget that one of the allies of the US was Joseph Stalin, Soviet Union.
So how do you, how do you claim it's a moral crusade when one of your allies is Stalin, who's morally insignificant from Hitler?
What do you think about some of the arguments that if it hadn't have been for Len Lease, that the Nazis would have been able to sack Moscow, and then the Nazi regime would have ended up falling apart, freezing to death and, you know, couldn't have outlasted Hitler's life anyway.
And so maybe if they had just not helped Stalin in the first place, the war, you know, could have gone a completely different way.
Not that the Nazis would have really had victory, they would have, it would have been a pyrrhic victory anyway, because ask Napoleon about occupying Russia, you know.
Not being a military expert, I'm not in a position to say, you know, whether that's true or not.
I mean, the Russians certainly are pretty dogged.
I mean, they've withstood other onslaughts in the past, Napoleon, for example.
And, you know, when it comes to defending their homeland, you know, the Russians are pretty determined in that department.
And so I don't know what would have happened, maybe they would have exhausted each other, and that could have been the end of it.
You know, I don't know.
The point is, the US can't claim that it was, you know, involved in a moral crusade if you're teaming up with Stalin, but it also can't claim it, given the way it fought the war.
It was just a horrible, horrible thing.
And, you know, what you need to do is, when there's an orgy of violence going on, you don't join it.
That just makes things worse.
So you stay out of it, you hope it keeps contained, stays contained and, you know, and you watch it from afar, if you're able to do that.
But Roosevelt and the people around him couldn't resist, they wanted, just like Wilson, they knew they had to be involved in the remaking of the world.
They intended to lead it, obviously, the US was to be the new world empire, Britain was exhausted, and they weren't going to pass up that opportunity.
There's no way.
This is what happens when you give mere mortals the kind of controls they have when they take the helm of a government.
Yeah, boy, and they sure were writing up all their postwar plans before and during the war, too.
They were looking ahead big time about how this is going to shape up.
Right.
The economy, I mean, the whole, I mean, the Roosevelt people wanted to have a new deal for the whole world, which included trade policy and all other kinds of things.
We see it with, you know, what they tried to do to the monetary system.
You had people like Keynes, you know, planning a new world order for money and banking and investment.
I mean, it was status through and through.
And so the initial instinct of the American people to stay out was was right.
And unfortunately, they got they got duped by the attack on Pearl Harbor because that was the end of the opposition.
Right.
The America First Committee disbanded after the attack at Pearl Harbor.
And pretty much everyone said, OK, I guess we have to go to war now.
But no, you didn't have to go to war.
It was still a war of choice.
It was still a war of choice.
Another major point would seem to be the the unconditional surrender to makes it where, you know, all the all the various German military and I think maybe even Nazi overtures it like, well, what if we just shot Hitler?
Would that be all right?
And we could maybe work something out.
They refuse to take any of those offers or even pursue, you know, any kind of course like that.
And the same with the Japanese, too.
Well, we had to nuke them because it would have cost X many made up number of American GIs to invade the place.
But based on the presumption that it is perfectly reasonable to demand absolutely unconditional surrender to these people, they, you know, must not resist in any way in order to, you know, to to get to the point where you're even talking about what had to be done to get that unconditional surrender, you know?
Well, that's right.
And that and you can see the previews of that in World War One, where they they branded Germany as uniquely guilty nation at the, you know, at the Versailles conference in the 3D that ended up coming out of the war.
And that, of course, set the stage that along with the starvation blockade from Britain against Germany that went on after the war for months after the war that set the stage for Hitler and a bunch of angry Germans who thought this will never happen to us again.
We will get even.
And and while that didn't end well for the Germans, some 20 some years later, 25 years later or so, it certainly caused a lot of grief in the meantime.
So this is what war leads to.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, I think that the average American opinion about this, much less, you know, inside Washington, D.C., where, you know, what they think about these kind of things really matters, is that the American century was great and that the fact that America inherited two thirds of the world at the end of the Second World War is wonderful for us and for the whole world, too.
And can you imagine if it had been anybody else who'd been the regional hegemon this whole time?
Come on, you know, Robert Kagan, right?
So how wrong is that, really?
Are you certain that, you know, the British should have continued ruling everything or whatever their game was?
Well, I don't think anybody would have continued ruling everything.
Britain was exhausted, broke.
You know, it was no position to rule things.
So, you know, I think there would have been a decentralization of power and there might have been regional nasties.
But, you know, that shouldn't have been any of our concern.
And what about the USSR and the unique evil of world communism?
Well, but the USSR ended up in control half of Europe as a result of the war and driving the Nazis back, the Stalin's army, the Red Army ended up, you know, occupying central eastern and central Europe.
So that happened anyway.
I mean, if the war was if the war initially began to free Poland, it wasn't exactly a rousing success.
No, I guess not.
Poland wasn't freed until 1989 and had a different ruler than the one that the allies went in to keep from being the ruler of Poland.
And then in the meantime, you get China, you get Mao and China.
I mean, you know, Brian Kaplan, the very good economist and social scientist at the George Mason has what he calls the practical case for for pacifism.
You have to assume that if you get into a war, the results are going to be bad.
Now, that doesn't mean you can't imagine a situation where the results aren't so bad.
Of course, meanwhile, in the meanwhile, the government is going to be coercing its own citizens, right, taxing them, conscripting them, doing other things, taking over the economy.
But now looking at the world situation, you still have to roll the dice and bet that the outcome will be bad.
So even if you look at people like to throw a World War Two at Kaplan, he says, wait a second, look what happened in just in China, right?
We went after Japan and China ends up with Mao.
And how many people died?
30 to 60 million, something like that.
I don't know what the latest figures are.
So you can hardly count that as a success.
You know, the Japanese regime was not a nice regime, of course.
But do we want to sit back and say, well, we sure did a good job and in destroying the Japanese regime and sort of forget the little footnote that the that Mao took over.
And millions, tens of millions of people died as a result.
And then same thing with with Stalin and and and half of Europe.
I mean, these are these are hardly, you know, winning marks for war or a recommendation that we should be looking for more wars to get into.
We can come to our current wars.
I mean, look, look how the U.S. left Iraq.
I mean, Iraq is a hellhole, sectarian violence, people dying every day.
And the government has put in the the Saddam, the Shiite Saddam.
And Americans think it was a great victory.
And they cheer on, you know, American vets who spent time in Iraq.
Right.
Well, and David Henderson, the great economist, says that, well, you know, you can connect all this back to as you connect to World War Two, back to World War One.
You can go straight line through under the excuse of cleaning up the consequences from the last conflict.
Well, we saved this.
We saved the Soviets from the Nazis.
But now we have to contain the Soviets and their friends, the Chinese communists, too.
And so, yeah.
And you talk about, you know, the war in Iraq.
That's all right.
Supported Saddam to contain the the blowback from Iran, which was to contain the blowback from Russia.
And, you know, you trace all the way through our war in Mali and Nigeria right now.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly right.
There's always we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.
There's always unintended consequences.
Maybe some other were intended, but there's always unintended consequences that that are regrettable that we should hate.
And then, you know, we have to go back to what we were saying earlier before we were on the air with the small or we always gets overwhelmed by the by the large.
Right.
We talk about nations and the world and this and that, these big abstractions.
But individual lives and families and communities are totally wrecked.
But anytime politicians can call people away from their lives and send them off to fight in a war and we should never forget that, that's what it comes down to.
People's lives being wrecked by a bunch of.
Well, and that's why government loves war so much.
And they do love it.
And they're they're apparatchiks.
They love it.
The national greatness.
You need something to believe in.
So we're going to give you a war to believe in, you know, to make us one.
That's all we have that makes us all Americans, because we're all the people who pay for their horrible genocides.
But that's a very old story that goes back to the beginning of the republic.
If you read Gordon Wood and other historians of that earliest period of after the revolution, the federalists thought war and the Madisonians thought as it came up to 1812, even though federalists opposed that war, they thought war was good because it created a national identity.
I mean, they were thinking like the neocons way back then in the early 19th century.
This is not new.
It's a very, very old story.
Yeah, that was the thinking before World War One as well.
Well, we're over time.
Thank you so much for your time, especially on a holiday like today and everything.
But it sure is great to have you, Sheldon.
Glad to do it, Scott.
Talk to you next time.
Appreciate it.
All right.
I mean, that is the heroic Sheldon Richman.
He's vice president over there at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF.org, and he's the editor of their journal, The Future of Freedom.
And we'll be right back.