All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And our next guest is Murray Polner.
He was the editor of present tense published by the American Jewish committee from 1973 through 1990.
He wrote rabbi, the American experience co-edited with Stefan Merkin, peace, justice, and Jews reclaiming our tradition as well as no victory parades, the return of the Vietnam veteran and with Jim O'Grady disarmed and dangerous a biography of Daniel and Philip Berrigan.
His most recent book is we who dared say no to war American anti-war writing from 1812 to now coauthored with the great Thomas Woods.
And he's got this article at the history news network.
That's been reprinted today at Lou Rockwell.com.
It's called the road to hell, a review of to end all wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 through 1918.
Welcome to the show, Murray.
How are you?
Thank you.
I'm fine.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Very interesting article.
And, uh, you know, I'm just, uh, so busy these days.
It's so hard for me to get books read.
I thought, well, good.
I'll just interview a guy.
He did a good book review and it'll be just like, I just read a great new book about world war one.
So tell me, uh, already you're a historian and expert.
What did you learn from this book to end all wars?
I was amazed with the brilliance of Adam Hochschild's new book to end all wars, which is subtitled a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 to 1918.
It even made the front page of the New York times Sunday book review with a group of Britons from that period, um, mostly suffragettes, but also a few males who had not been conscripted standing with a big sign peace.
And it just struck me.
And I read the book and I think it's one of the great books I've ever read in years.
Um, so what, so when I read it, I said, I have to write about it.
So I started writing about it for different publications in different ways.
And then I wrote about it for the history news network, which is sponsored by George Mason university.
I happened to be there trade, one of the trade book reviewers, history reviewers and Lou Rockwell.com picked it up.
And I'm very proud of that too.
Yeah, well, it's a very interesting essay here.
And, uh, you know, on top of that, uh, your recommendation just now sure makes it sound like one to run out and get again, it's, uh, to end all wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion by Adam Hochschild.
So, uh, what's so illuminating about this book?
What makes it different than the, you know, maybe what you'd expect.
Well, what makes it different is that they've been, the world war one was an extraordinary event in Western history, but it was more than Western history because it involved countries outside of Western Europe and central and Eastern Europe, but it was an extraordinary dividing line and most extraordinary, there was no such thing as world war two world war two should really be world war one a, because it was direct result of world war one, which caused the death of tens and tens of millions of people.
It was the use of scientific and industrial warfare.
It was a tax on civilians, uh, where normally, uh, in Western Europe and in central Europe, the wars did not deliberately target civilians.
If we know all the wars since then, and especially world war two and our current God knows two, three, four wars do.
Um, and as I said, the world was, the war was a slaughterhouse.
Uh, it consumed millions of soldiers and volunteers and reservists and draftees and so forth, but more than this.
Oh yeah.
And it was as the conservative secretary of war and the David Lloyd George British cabinet, he called it the prostitution of science for purposes of shared destruction.
Uh, he wrote this in the letter to the times of London, which was pro-war and refused to publish it.
So this is what struck me, but also what struck me, which makes this book very different because there's been lots of books on world war one, this battle and that battle, uh, I mean, we have some of these battles at the battle of Washington, 300,000 soldiers killed, uh, within a couple of days.
Um, it was a global war, but what's different in this book is that he deals with primarily Britain, but also a few French and a few Russians and a handful of Germans, but primarily British who refused to support the war.
Many of them call themselves conscientious objectors or pacifists.
And we learned from the book that 6,000 British men were jailed rather than fight a few as in world war two in our country was sentenced to death, but nobody was ever actually executed except for soldiers who, for one reason or another couldn't go on.
They didn't know anything about the shock resulting from more than it was, they didn't want to know.
And, uh, so you have all of these things and he mentions people like the sister of the British general who commanded British forces in France, who opposed the war and yet she loved and was always close to her brother.
She mentioned a suffragette family, the mother and one mother and one daughter, ardent supporters of the war, one, two daughters, ardent opponents of the war, and they refused to talk.
Um, she mentioned Bertrand Russell, who was probably the, he mentioned the best known of the opponent.
And what the British tried to do is what the United States tried to do in the Vietnam war, try to crack down on people who opposed the war.
Uh, just as we use this country used Edgar Hoover's, um, FBI, uh, which, as I say, Bertrand Russell also publicly opposed, uh, in the United States, several hundreds were jailed for not supporting the war, refusing to be drafted.
I mentioned Eugene V.
Deb is a great British American, uh, socialist and labor union leader of the railway union who was jailed by the Wilson administration because he was opposed to draft in the war.
And which Tom woods and I cover in our book, our last book on we who say no to war.
And he was not released.
Wilson refused to release them.
So after, like I said, the much maligned, uh, and I often think somewhat fairly maligned, unmaligned Warren Harding became the president and with some prodding from others, he finally pardoned Eugene Debs.
Um, and as I said, and not until 2006, uh, following a campaign organized by a citizens group, British citizens group called shot at dawn 2006, the British finally pardoned more than 300 soldiers who had been executed during world war one.
So this was what made it fascinating two things.
Uh, but more primarily having won a Pyrrhic victory, Germany signed this treaty, which the victorious allies insisted made them, um, solely responsible for the war.
Germany was probably primarily responsible for the war, but none of them were blameless, none of them, because this was a war of empires and they were all eager to grab more colonies in Asia and in Africa.
Um, and this virtually assured another war in the harsh terms.
Well, I mean, the way I remember the British empire expanded by a million square miles, I read that, I think in Pat Buchanan's, uh, Churchill, uh, revisionist history of world war two.
Oh, well, of course the French expanded, uh, and even the, you know, um, this was, they were out for, they were out for, um, this was a war that would have nothing to do with quote human rights, right?
There really were no good guys, right?
There were small groups of people, obviously defending themselves from these imperial powers, but none of the imperial powers.
You could say we're good guys and bad guys.
Like it's a lot easier for the narrative.
When you look at world war two with the Nazis and the imperial Japanese on one side and America on the other.
There are very few, even today, there are very few good guys and bad guys.
There are always good guys and bad guys.
I'm just speaking even just for narrative purposes, but I'm sorry, we'll have to hold it right there, Murray, and go out to this break, everybody.
It's Murray Polner.
His most recent book is co-edited with Tom Woods.
It's we who dared say no to war compendium of great anti-war speeches and writings throughout American history.
I highly recommend it.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Murray Polner.
He's the author of a bunch of books, including we who dared say no to war co-edited with Thomas E.
Woods, Jr.
It's a compendium of a great anti-war writings from 1812 through today.
Uh, in American history, all American stuff.
And, uh, he's got a piece today at lubrockwell.com ran previously at the history news network called the road to hell.
And it's a review of to end all wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 through 1918 by Adam Hothchild.
And, uh, Hothchild, uh, I don't know how to say it.
Yeah.
Okay.
It seems like the, oh, maybe I'm reading it, uh, a typo here with the S in the wrong place.
There you go.
I'm blaming the typo.
All right.
Anyway.
Uh, so you were saying in the, what makes this, this book so great is it really tells the story of, uh, the major players in, uh, in the wars, but also, uh, important anti-war figures of note, uh, mixed in there, which has got to be nice because I guess you can read about a lot of those people, but maybe not in the context of the larger war that they were descending from, huh?
Well, you know, what happens is, uh, and it's not, so it's just easier for Americans if they know their own or any people that know their history.
Americans generally know less history than many Europeans do of their own history, it seems to me.
But what they, they, it's easier to think about general this and president, this and chancellor, this and Kaiser, this and so forth, rather than the people who really were the brave people.
That is the soldiers who, and Hochschild is very sensitive about them.
In a sense, the soldiers who, whether they supported the war or didn't support the war, soldiers, many, many of all wars, uh, simply went because they thought it was their duty.
Uh, and then when they were there, uh, fought as best as they could or didn't fight as best as they could because of their loyalties to their comrades.
What we have here is the story of people who were brave enough to say no.
In the book that Tom Woods and I did, um, the, um, it was not simple.
Because it requires a great deal of courage to stand and say, I won't do this and I won't do that.
Uh, it's one thing when you find that the most prominent people in your country support a particular war in the book that, uh, to end all wars.
Uh, I don't know if the, uh, what, you know, many of them are fairly well known.
John Buchanan, who wrote Mysteries, Goldsworth, the writer Arthur Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes fame, fame.
Uh, and of course, Winston Churchill, who never saw a war he didn't love.
Uh, and Rudyard Kipling was featured in there.
This living room warrior who never served in the military, uh, got his son who was, uh, who, who was rejected initially by the British military, even though they needed everybody.
Uh, and he got him into the service.
He was 18 when he was killed in battle and suddenly his deeply, profoundly aggrieved father and mother.
He was the perennial flag waver, uh, composed this little epitaph to the war in which he said, if any question why we died, tell them our father's lies.
And, you know, and so forth.
And lots of books were written after the war.
Um, one of the reasons that when people counsel opposition to the war, um, in, in success, in other wars that followed, um, we're often hit with the notion that we were appeasers because we didn't understand Munich.
Well, you see, when one reads a book like this, one sees how in Britain, especially, but also in France, the tremendous loss of soldiers, virtually every family was hit by a lot.
I remember having a professor at college.
He had studied after the war in Germany and in France, but he was getting his doctorate and he said that he would see countless numbers.
There were in many communities.
There were very few men of a certain age.
They'd been killed.
But in other cases, when he'd see them, they would be without faces or arms or legs.
They had been so badly hurt in the war.
You know, I always remember, and I'm not a libertarian, especially I'm not anything, but I remember when Harry Brown, who ran for the presidency on the widely ignored libertarian ticket in 2000, at least for me, memorably said war is genocide.
Trying to remember if I can think of the quote, torture, cruelty, propaganda, dishonesty, and slavery.
War is the worst obscenity government can afflict upon its subject.
It makes, here it is, I got the quote, it makes every other political crime that we read about in the tabloid press and on TV, makes every other political crime, corruption, bribery, favoritism, vote buying, graft, dishonesty, seem petty.
And this is what they discovered.
And people wrote about it after, and when they talk about Munich, the British people saluted and cheered on Neville Chamberlain, who was no bargain, but they, because Chamberlain himself understood what the loss had meant to the British people, the losses had meant to the British people when their sons and husbands and grandsons and nephews and so forth were all killed or badly wounded in that horrible war.
And we in America, except for the civil war and a cover and world war in the 19th century, when we know that approximately 600,000 plus were killed on both sides, not to mention those who were wounded or who developed what we would call PTSD, PTSD, post-traumatic syndrome, that we talk about now, about the minimum of 58,000 killed in Vietnam.
And God knows every day, the New York Times publishes to its great credit, great credit, the list of young soldiers who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan just today, two or three in Iraq and two or three in Afghanistan.
So the wars go on and the politicians and people are distracted.
A well-known writer who's now dead that I knew once wrote an essay in which he called something like, entertainment is our business, and that's a paraphrase.
And this is what we are distracted by.
I remember listening, watching very interesting television show, which I think now is on DVD, and Robert McNamara who repented and he was reviewing 13 days, the riveting film about the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and he told the PBS audience, he believed, I was struck by that, the world had been closer to nuclear war than even depicted in the movie.
Personally, I remember standing at the Isaiah wall at the UN in Manhattan with a friend and we thought the world might be coming to an end and we were talking about our children at the time.
So all of this always has led me to believe that, I don't know, we who oppose war haven't got all the answers by any means.
But I would suggest that the generals and the politicians, mostly the politicians and the editorial writers and the op-ed screamers and the think tank subsidized shouters haven't got any answers themselves.
And one of the things that I and others have tried to do, apparently we hope would come to success one day, is Orson once wrote a piece called, Let's Look Right and Left Too.
And I said that libertarians, conservatives, liberals, radicals, all those get to know each other in terms of their anti-war counterparts.
One of the things that Tom and I did, we didn't agree on everything, but two things we agreed on when we decided to do that book, and that is we oppose vehemently war.
And secondly, we were also opposed to violations of our civil liberty.
All the rest we put aside.
And so all of these struck me as I read this, what I consider this extraordinary book to end all wars.
He also wrote a great book once called King Leopold's Ghost, a story of greed, terror and heroism in colonial Africa, King Leopold of Belgium.
Oh, yeah, I've heard of that one.
I'm sorry, we'll have to leave it there.
Maybe save that interview for another time, Murray, but I really appreciate your time on the show today.
It's been great.
Thank you, everybody.
That's Murray Polner.
The article is on LewRockwell.com today.
It's called The Road to Hell, a review of Adam Hoth's Childs to End All Wars, a story of loyalty and rebellion, 1914 through 18.
