All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and on the line is my friend David Beto.
He teaches history at the University of Alabama and he runs the blog Liberty Empower at the History News Network.
He's also a contributor to this book in my currently nicotine and THC stained fingers, ComeHomeAmerica.us, edited by Paul Bull, Bill Kaufman, George O'Neill Jr., and Kevin Zeese.
And it is part of this Come Home America project, the letter to the president and the congress signed by so many great people already.
And it's a great article, a great book, a compendium of different arguments basically pertaining to the American people getting our act together, putting aside this phony left-right divide and getting it together to end the American empire, which is, of course, the single greatest determining factor in how we live our lives here at home.
Isn't that right, David?
Welcome to the show.
Thanks for inviting me.
Yeah, that's right.
We're doing our best.
All right, now your chapter is called Classical Liberalism and the Anti-Imperialist League, the first left-right coalition.
I had two chapters.
Oh really?
I hadn't gotten to the second one yet.
Yeah, the other one was actually an article that you guys had reprinted, antiwar.com.
It was on Eugene Siller, who was the only member of the House to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
Oh yes, I see it here.
The Christian conservative who opposed the Vietnam War.
That's right, and I got some...
I had that as a local op-ed here in Tuscaloosa and got a couple negative responses from Christian conservatives.
Well, it must have been well done.
You got them right where it hurts.
I guess so.
It's just the concept is just too weird for them to wrap around, I guess, of an antiwar conservative.
All right, well, it looks like times are beginning to change on that, although I'm not so sure.
I'm not going to get my hopes up too high.
I think there's some reason to be optimistic.
This budget deal, which I think was awful, raising the debt limit and everything, but there's a silver lining to it, which could be very interesting.
I noticed this was picked up by some folks at antiwar.com, that in November, there's going to be a deadline.
Basically, they're going to set up this commission, which will come up with suggestions for revenue or spending cuts or whatever.
Of course, we know it's just slowing the increase in spending, but still, anyway.
But if they don't agree, then there will be fairly important cuts, at least relative to if they do agree, that will have to occur quite rapidly, and 50% of those will come from the military budget, and this would all come without a tax increase.
And you're already getting, as you probably know, a lot of people on the right being very worried about this.
And I think there are some people on the left who are saying, well, let this trigger happen.
We'd rather have 50% of the cuts come from the Pentagon than the alternative.
So I think you have an opportunity here for people on the left, antiwar people on the left and the right, and libertarians to come together and say, basically, yeah, let this thing, let the trigger go.
Right?
We'd rather have that.
And you're going to have a real choice for conservatives.
Would they rather have tax increases?
Or would they rather have, you know, some cuts in the military budget?
They'd rather have tax increases.
Well, it'll be very interesting to see that, won't it?
For those guys to actually come out, Hannity and the rest of them, for tax increases.
Well, you know, I saw this thing this morning, and I admit I hadn't read the whole thing.
I just saw the headline, David, but it said that John Boehner has really gained in popularity among the Tea Party conservatives.
Wait, the Speaker of the House that just sold them out is their hero.
All right, whatever, you know, they can probably get us into a nuclear war with Russia and gain in popularity, you know?
Well, Richard Vickery just had an email that I, you know, was sent out.
I'm on some list, basically, where he said, well, don't blame the people in Congress who voted for this deal.
You know, we can fight later.
You know, no recriminations.
But I think that this could be a real watershed, maybe.
You know, maybe I'm being too optimistic, this whole thing in November that's going to occur, because it's just going to lead to some dilemmas on both sides of the aisle, because people on the left are always saying, we need to tax the rich, we need a balanced approach.
At least some of them claim to be anti-war, all right?
Now they're going to have to choose.
And I'm looking forward to it.
Cool.
Well, and it's the same subject, really.
It's, you know, the people versus the ruling establishment.
And the ruling establishment has its priorities, inflationism and imperialism, and destroying the Bill of Rights and dancing, you know, in the light of its embers and all that.
But then there's the rest of us who would rather keep our Bill of Rights and who would rather not be bankrupted by the ruling elites in the way that they steal from us, mostly through, you know, their welfareism, bailouts and military industrial complex subsidies and all these kinds of things.
And there have been times, right, in American history, where people really were able to get past the, you know, whatever phony diversion, you know, between liberal liberalism and conservatism or whatever phony debates of the day, in order to get to the real us them questions, right?
I mean, this anti-imperialist league, it, I guess you say in your chapter here in the Come Home America book, that they didn't really end the wars.
But then again, things would have been a lot worse without them.
They, the anti-imperialist league existed for what, 20, 25 years and, and had a profound effect on policy back then.
Yeah, it did.
I think you would have had, you know, annexation of the Philippines, possibly annexation of Cuba.
You know, they're often portrayed as a failure, but they came very close to winning some victories, right?
They came very close to, you know, in a couple key votes, and they were able to succeed to some extent.
Now, it wasn't a perfect group by any means, and they end up supporting World War I, the remnants of it, you know, but they were an example of a left-right coalition.
And you had a lot of these guys were pro-gold standard people, gold bugs, who had hated William Jennings Bryan in 1896, just despised the ground he walked on, and even some cases voted for McKinley.
Well, you know, three years later, you have this, you have this new war.
And a lot of them were so strongly anti-imperialist that they were willing to say, look, we'll work with these people.
We'll even perhaps support William Jennings Bryan, the guy we despise, the guy that we regard as the anti-Christ, because he's, he seems to be better than McKinley on foreign policy.
And people put aside their egos, and we're willing to say, look, we've got our pet causes, but we'll put them aside right now, so if we can unite behind a rather narrow call to oppose imperialism.
And we can only hope that that can happen again.
I keep hoping it will, where we just say, look, we all have our causes.
Let's put them aside for now.
And let's work together in this organization, which will be committed to a very specific agenda that we can all agree on.
Well, and back then, I mean, it was, it was that broad of a coalition, right?
As you portrayed in the book, you had Sam Gompers from the American Federation of Labor and Andrew Carnegie together in this thing.
Yeah, and Jane Addams, a future progressive.
Former President Cleveland.
Yeah, former President Cleveland.
You had a, it was very broad coalition in that sense.
I don't think there's any ever been anything quite like it.
Although I will say that the America First Committee was, to some extent, was able to do that as well.
Well, and people don't really hear too much about that other than they were probably Hitler's fifth column in America, right?
Yeah, I mean, I, that's just ridiculous.
I mean, if you look at, in fact, I can show you letters that I have, one of the key figures in that organization was John T. Flynn.
And anytime anti-Semites, Nazis, or fascists tried to infiltrate the organization, of course, they did, right?
Because they were against the war too, right?
In many cases, some of them were.
He was always on guard and very careful to try to screen out those people.
In fact, I have an angry letter that he wrote to Gerald L. K.
Smith, who was a leading anti-Semite who set up a America First political party.
This is at the end of the war.
And he invited, very politely invited Flynn to speak at a rally for this group.
And Flynn wrote back that, I want nothing to do with you and your kind of people have been our worst, you know, the worst obstacle we have faced in trying to fight the foreign policy.
Sorry, David, we'll put it right there.
Everybody, it's David Bateau, author of Black Maverick.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with David Bateau.
He's a professor of history at the University of Alabama.
He runs the blog Liberty and Power at the History News Network.
And he and his wife, Linda, are the authors of Black Maverick, T.R.M. Howard's fight for civil rights and economic power, which is an excellent biography.
I highly recommend.
And so we're talking about his chapter.
Well, one of his chapters in the ComeHomeAmerica.us book.
Now, obviously, .us is a what you call it for a URL there.
So go to ComeHomeAmerica.us, find out all about this project already.
I guess the centerpiece so far is this book, ComeHomeAmerica.us, which you can find at your local bookstore or favorite book buying website.
And also a letter to the president and to every member of Congress saying enough is enough.
And it is the letter is completely beyond left and right in every way.
And it's hardcore.
It doesn't say we would like to get out of Afghanistan sometime.
Please give us a timeline or something.
It says that's it out of everywhere.
Now we've had it and it's already signed.
I haven't looked at it lately, but last time I did, the signatories were many and impressive.
And you were all invited to participate in this project.
This is the new anti-imperialist league.
This is the best hope we have of reproducing what Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie and the boys did back then in the days of the Spanish-American War.
And also William Graham Sumner.
And I always like the opportunity to hear or say something about William Graham Sumner and his great piece, The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
Can you tell them about that a little bit, David?
Oh, yeah.
This is a wonderful piece.
I've assigned it.
And I subjected many, many, many thousands of students since I started teaching to reading that piece.
It was a speech that he gave in 1899 at Phi Alpha Kappa, I think.
I forget.
I think I've read somewhere that the audience sort of sat there in stunned silence, but that may not be an accurate memory.
But he basically starts this speech and saying, well, like all things in history, there are probably going to be good things and bad things about the recent war and everything.
Then he just starts to build and build and build.
And he said, this is a choice here.
Are we going to go down the road of Spain?
Apparently we are.
So in effect, he argued that Spain had won the Spanish-American War.
He said, well, we beat them on the battlefield, this decrepit empire.
It was like shooting fish in a barrel.
Very easy.
But in effect, they won because we are going to follow in the Spanish tradition of world empire.
And he predicted just spot on prediction that 20th century is to be the century of militarism, of higher taxes, of more debt to support this empire.
We are going to be putting down rebellions.
We're going to be violating civil liberties.
We're going to create what he called the plutocracy, or we're going to fatten them up, which is what Eisenhower essentially called the military-industrial complex.
He's got it right there.
He predicts you're going to get this group that will feed off empire.
And it's just a beautiful essay.
And it's written in this guy's, you know, his twilight years.
He's getting older.
And it's just a work of art.
And I think it's just wonderful.
So if you ever have a chance, you can find many copies of it on the web.
I'd recommend you read it.
Right.
Again, that's William Graham Sumner, the conquest of the United States by Spain.
And of course, Sumner was the leading defender of laissez-faire by far in the United States.
In fact, one of the leading economists, a founder of anthropology.
All right.
The terms like folkways.
And he was a distinguished Renaissance man.
And I don't know what it would be comparable to.
I guess it would be comparable to, you know, a Nobel Prize winning free market economist who's, you know, bestseller or whatever, you know, making this this kind of speech.
Well, and as you say in the chapter, you point out that part of his argument is that embracing this empire seems to come along with the narrative that we never were any good before.
There never was anything to be proud of in the American tradition until finally we were wealthy enough to afford this giant navy to go bomb people with and and how he really resented that, that it was like, hey, man, what about all that our ancestors have sought to build?
Was it really a world empire?
Was that what they were reaching for?
Or are we now betraying them by going down this path?
And he's a conservative.
He's saying, well, you know, the founders objected to standing armies.
They objected to grand diplomacy.
They objected to all these things.
Maybe they were a little impractical sometimes, but these were their principles.
And if we we claim to value the principles they stood for, you know, we're betraying them by going down this road.
So let's at least be honest about it, that we, you know, we're rejecting everything that we've stood for previously.
Well, and, you know, personally, anyway, I'd make the case that they are betraying all of mankind by going down that path.
The American entry into the First World War, which the American people could have stopped, could have refused to volunteer en masse, as Wilson called it when he drafted them.
If they had stayed out of that First World War, then there never would have been a Nazi Germany.
There never would have been a USSR.
The British, at least it would have been their own problem trying to take over the Middle East.
It wouldn't have been handed to him on a silver platter like this.
And the 20th century of totalitarianism and mass slaughter and the Second World War that came with 60 million dead and the Cold War after with all the millions killed there, all this madness would never even had to happen if people had only listened to the William Jennings Bryans.
And, you know, yeah, he was a terrible inflationist, but he could have never imagined the amount of inflation that would have had to take place in order to finance this world empire.
Since then, he would have been a gold bug, die hard, go ahead and crucify him on the cross of gold if you want, compared to everybody who came since, you know, starting with Wilson, who I think he was the secretary of state for for a while.
Right.
Well, Brian was heroic, especially on World War One.
He he made some strategic mistakes.
He kind of sold out the imperialists in a way he he he had a rationalization that he supported the peace treaty with Spain.
And that kind of undercut a lot of the opposition.
But on World War One, Brian just was heroic, standing alone in the Wilson administration against, you know, everyone else basically wanted to get into a war or wanted to provoke a war.
By the way, if you want to, you know, have a good guest on your show, Ralph Rako just did a wonderful book, a couple of wonderful books on dealing partly with World War One, but also American foreign policy.
And I've never seen a better sort of a better summary of of of the case against war and the case against Wilson.
Yeah, I've always wanted to talk with him.
And I hate Woodrow Wilson.
Well, Wilson is a little like McKinley.
Have you ever read Walter Karp's book, Politics of War?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, they're both similar in a way in that both these guys are very good at saying, well, you know, I want peace.
And, you know, we would we want to settle our problems with Spain.
And then, you know, Wilson saying we want to you know, we want peace.
Right.
And they would make these proposals that they knew the other side would never agree to because they'd stick something in there that was just impossible.
And they were very effective.
And frankly, a lot of historians, they were effective with historians who tend to leave it there.
David, we're out of time.
All right.
I've come home.
America dot us.
The blog is Liberty and Power.
Thanks very much for your time.
OK, thank you.
Bye.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to this here show.
Hey, I decided it wouldn't be a great idea if I kept David Bateau for another segment.
Of course I would.
For some reason, I thought my next guest was next, but no, he's not.
That's not for another hour.
So good.
So back to my buddy, David Bateau.
He's professor of your ranch, which is my favorite part of the show.
But wait, I'm sorry.
I had you on mute still.
What did you say?
We're going to miss 10 minutes of rants, which is my favorite part of the show.
Oh, well, we'll get back to that.
Don't you worry.
All right.
I wish you'd put I wish you'd archive some of those.
I have.
No, they're all at dissentradio.com/LRN.
All right.
You can get every bit of it.
And don't you worry, I have plenty of chips on my shoulder.
I can never three hours a day is not nearly enough to get through all I have to complain about.
David, you know that I'm that book I was thinking of was Ralph Rako's book, Great Wars and Great Leaders.
It's a paperback, pretty recent.
And you get it from the Von Mises Institute.
And it's really going to give you a sense of what's in this book.
It's just the best thing out there.
He's got a chapter on Harry Truman and Churchill debunking Churchill on John T. Flynn.
And then, of course, the one on World War One, the turning point, which sums up a lot of the recent literature.
He looks at a lot of the counter arguments, you know, from the mainstream historians.
And anyway, I'd highly recommend you get it and your readers get it and get Ralph Rako on.
Yeah.
You know, I've always wanted to interview him.
I guess I try every year to interview him about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And it never works.
I hadn't put in the phone call this time around.
Well, I can I can bug him.
Yeah.
Well, I certainly look forward to getting that and reading that book.
You know, it's funny.
You can only mourn the deaths of people who would have died before you were born anyway kind of thing so much.
But at the same time, you look back at the 20th century and how horrible it was.
And, you know, maybe this is the revisionist part.
I guess the way we learn it in school other than your class is, well, that's just the way it is.
That's the way it was, whatever.
But the part that I can't get over is that it didn't have to be that way at all.
It was all just such blundering and stupidity and evil and and lies and just and then hundreds of millions of dead people as a result is just absolutely insane to think, you know, that really just a couple of decisions this way or that, you know, if Colonel House had stayed in Texas instead of going to D.C. or something, it didn't have to be this way at all.
No, it didn't.
And, you know, we we tend to we look a lot at systems as libertarians, the you know, the the, you know, the political economy of taxation, public choice and all of that.
But you don't want to forget that there are real life individuals here.
And there are examples of people like Rover Cleveland, not a perfect guy, but a guy that resisted war, that resisted annexation of Hawaii, you know, made some mistakes, but he took some very courageous stands against war.
You can go back further and get not a perfect guy, but John Adams, who resisted going to war.
So individuals at the top or in the middle can make a big difference and you never want to let them off the hook.
Right.
Yeah.
Or underestimate their influence.
And this is something that I think is really important about libertarianism really as, you know, kind of a way of analyzing history focused on the individual, the way we are in terms of liberty and responsibility.
It leads to I think it's kind of mandatory that we go back and revisit history because it's always taught, you know, at least to the kids in social studies class or whatever.
It's you know, these are the winds of time a blowing in the page of history turning.
And these are just the things that happen.
It is the way it is, especially in America.
Well, we have this democracy, which means that everything that happened happened because elected leaders made it that way.
And the fact that they were elected means that's what the people wanted.
And so there's no point never questioning anything, you know, basically.
Of course, we know the people didn't want many of these things, right?
You poll after poll before World War Two, you know, World War One.
I don't know.
There are no polls taken.
But I mean, if you look at measures of public opinion, you find examples all of the time.
In fact, I think Anna Ward commented an article up about how there's a divergence between elite opinion and popular opinion on the Afghan war, the Iraq war.
And this has occurred throughout history, right?
Yeah, people, you know, the people to some extent might, you know, get inflamed and want war.
But really, I think mainly it's leaders who, who are responsible and the people generally don't, you know, are inclined to say, why do we want to get in another war?
Well, and you look at, you know, individual decisions.
And, you know, it's the first week of August here, you know, and you mentioned Ralph Raker, we might as well bring up his great article, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which if I remember right, you're the historian, correct me if I'm wrong, it was just Truman and Stimson inside the executive branch inside the National Security Council, or whatever they called it, then that wanted to do this.
Everybody else was opposed to including all the generals in the Pacific and everybody, right?
Yeah, I'm not an expert on it.
But in my memory is that George Marshall was against it, that MacArthur, that Eisenhower, you know, yeah, you know, Herbert Hoover, you know, at that point, a lot of the leading conservatives were against it.
So it wasn't like, oh, gee whiz, he had to do it.
And that there was just a no brainer.
There were people that were opposed to it.
And, you know, and this is a violation, let's assume that Truman saved American lives, which we know wasn't true.
But let's assume it's true.
This still violates all the canons, the ancient traditions of just war, of, you know, of all of the international agreements, and so forth.
You do not target civilians in a, you know, to kill them to terrorize the enemy, you know, civilians may die as collateral damage, okay, but you don't intentionally target them.
And the man is just left off the hook for doing that.
And if he was asked later, well, why didn't you do three cities, as they were still, you know, you're taking a couple of days to make up their minds or whatever at that point for the unconditional surrender.
And he said, Well, we thought about it, but all those children, so he had to admit that the women and children, the innocent civilian victims did count even in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he just decided screw them in the case of those two cities, but even by his own, you know, structuring of the argument, there's a limit to how many women and children you can kill, without, you know, going to hell for all of eternity.
There's some, there's a lot of truth in that, I think maybe he finally was feeling a little guilty, but also logistically, I, you know, I think that they could have probably gotten another bomb out there, you know, it would have taken a little time.
And then if you if you get, I mean, building more bombs, there weren't that many in the pipeline.
And so logistically, it might have been a difficult thing to do another one, at least do another one very quickly.
Well, and of course, this is all ironic.
This week, we're talking about this when there's this ethics training manual that's been released that they train the missile silo key turners on about how you know, the Bible says it's okay to nuke people.
And and here's a quote from Bernard von Braun saying it's good that the good Christian Americans are the ones holding all the nukes.
Well, speaking of that, if you want to get a right winger upset on this point out that Nagasaki was the heart of Japanese Christianity, these are people that had survived the persecutions of the 17th century, the 18th century, it had a the largest Christian community in Japan.
And that's what we those are the folks we wiped out, right?
They don't care.
Yeah, I think you're probably right about that.
But it makes them briefly uncomfortable.
Yeah, I mean, what is a small accomplishment?
Right?
If a Japanese man believes in Jesus, does that make him a little bit human?
How do you measure that?
Exactly.
These people, I suppose that, you know, it might I don't know.
Now there are friends now they always have been.
Hey, listen.
So real quick, again, I want to give you a chance this time to talk about come home America dot us Do you believe like I do that this is the center this is our chance to make a real new anti imperialist league will have a big banner of Mark Twain and will be all left right libertarian and everyone just the American people versus the war party.
Can we do it?
It's our best shot.
And I think it's going to need a lot of support.
And I think you know, maybe when this trigger is coming up, that could be an opportunity for another open letter.
I'm just thinking out loud saying let the trigger happen.
Let's get these 50% defense cuts.
Maybe we can get maybe we get another effort, get some publicity on that.
But anyway, it's going to take their they need funding, they need support.
And I think a blog is in the works.
And hopefully it's going to expand.
But it's the only game in town as far as I can see that's pushing this come home America dot us and we can be thankful for Ron Paul.
He's on TV every day saying it's okay to be a conservative Texas Christian and be anti war.
Don't worry.
So we have that going for us at least.
Thanks very much.
David Beto, everybody from liberty and power.
Okay, thank you.
Thank you.
