This
article originally appeared as "Revisionism and Libertarianism"
in the February 1976 issue of
The Libertarian Forum, pp. 3–6.
What
has revisionism to do with libertarianism? Many libertarians see
no connection. Steeped in the theory of the non-aggression axiom,
and that the State has always been the major aggressor, these
libertarians see no need to concern themselves with the grubby
details of the misdeeds and interrelations between Germany, Russia,
Britain, the United States, and other particular states. If all
States are evil, why worry about the details?
The
first answer is that theory is not enough in dealing with the
concrete world of reality. If all States are evil, some are more
evil than others, some particular States have engaged in enormously
more aggression, both internally against their subjects, and externally
against the citizens of other States. The State of Monaco has
committed far less aggression than the State of Great Britain.
If
we libertarians are to understand the real world, and to try to
bring about the victory of liberty in that world, we must understand
the actual history of concrete, existent States. History provides
the indispensable data by which we can understand and deal with
our world, and by which we can assess the relative guilt, the
relative degrees of aggression committed by the various states.
Monaco, for example, is not one of our major problems in this
world, but we can only learn this from knowledge of history, and
not from a priori axioms. But of course to learn about
concrete reality takes work, not only a substantial amount of
reading, but also reading with the basic elements of revisionism
in mind. Work that investigates the complexities of history, and
that is not easily reducible to catch phrases and sloganeering.
Revisionism
is an historical discipline made necessary by the fact that all
States are governed by a ruling class that is a minority of the
population, and which subsists as a parasitic and exploitative
burden upon the rest of society. Since its rule is exploitative
and parasitic, the State must purchase the alliance of a group
of "Court Intellectuals," whose task is to bamboozle the public
into accepting and celebrating the rule of its particular State.
The Court Intellectuals have their work cut out for them. In exchange
for their continuing work of apologetics and bamboozlement, the
Court Intellectuals win their place as junior partners in the
power, prestige, and loot extracted by the State apparatus from
the deluded public.
The
noble task of Revisionism is to de-bamboozle: to penetrate the
fog of lies and deception of the State and its Court Intellectuals,
and to present to the public the true history of the motivation,
the nature, and the consequences of State activity. By working
past the fog of State deception to penetrate to the truth, to
the reality behind the false appearances, the Revisionist works
to delegitimate, to desanctify, the State in the eyes of the previously
deceived public. By doing so, the Revisionist, even if he is not
a libertarian personally, performs a vitally important libertarian
service.
Hence,
the Revisionist historian performs crucial libertarian tasks regardless
of his own personal ideology. Since the State cannot function,
cannot command majority support vital to its existence without
imposing a network of deception, Revisionist history becomes a
crucial part of the tasks of the libertarian movement. Crucial
especially because Revisionism goes beyond pure theory to expose
and reveal the specific lies and crimes of the State as it exists
in concrete reality.
Revisionism
can be "domestic"; thus, revisionist historians in recent years
have shown that the growth of the American State in the twentieth
century has come about, not in a "democratic" attempt to curb
Big Business "monopoly," but in the course of a conscious desire
by certain elements of Big Business to use the State to fasten
a cartelized and monopolized economy upon American society.
Revisionist
historians have further shown that the "welfare" State injures,
rather than benefits, the very groups that such a State allegedly
helps and succors. In short, that the Welfare State is designed
to aid the ruling coalition of certain Big Business groups and
technocratic, statist intellectuals, at the expense of the remainder
of society. If the knowledge of such historical truth became widespread,
it would be difficult indeed for modern Big Government to sustain
itself in operation.
While
historical Revisionism has performed important services on the
domestic front, its major thrust has dealt with war and foreign
policy. For over a century, war has been the major method by which
the State has fastened its rule upon a deluded public. There has
been much discussion over the years among libertarians and classical
liberals on why classical liberalism, so dominant in
the early and mid-nineteenth century in Western Europe and America,
failed ignominiously by the time of the advent of the twentieth
century. The major reason is now clear: the ability of the State
to wield patriotism as a weapon, to mobilize the masses of the
public behind the interventionist and war policies of the various
powerful States.
War
and foreign intervention are crucial methods by which a State
expands its power and exploitation, and also provide elements
of danger for one State at the hands of another. Yet the State every
State has been particularly successful in deluding its citizens
that it fights wars and intervenes in other countries
for their protection and benefit; when the reality is that war
provides a golden opportunity for the State to bamboozle its citizens
into gathering together to defend it and to advance its
interests and its power. Since war and foreign policy provide
the State with its easiest means of delusion and deception, Revisionist
exposure on the foreign affairs front is the most important avenue
of desanctification and delegitimation of the State apparatus
and of State aggression.
In
the Revisionist exposure of the truths about foreign affairs,
one particular myth, strongly held by most Americans and even
by most libertarians, has been of supreme importance: 'namely,
the myth propagated by the arch-statist and interventionist Woodrow
Wilson that "domestic dictatorships are always hellbent on foreign
war and aggression; while domestic democracies invariably conduct
a peaceful and non-aggressive foreign policy." While this
correlation between domestic dictatorship and foreign aggression
has a superficial plausibility, it is simply not true
on the factual, historical record.
There
have been many domestic dictatorships that have turned inward
upon themselves and have therefore been pacific in foreign relations
(e.g., Japan before its compulsory "opening up" in the mid-nineteenth
century by the U.S.'s Commodore Perry); and all too many domestic
"democracies" that have conducted a warlike and aggressive foreign
policy (e.g., Britain and the United States.) The existence of
democratic voting, far from being a barrier against foreign aggression,
simply means that the State must conduct its propaganda more intensively
and more cleverly, in order to bamboozle the voters. Unfortunately,
the State and its Court Intellectuals have been all too equal
to this task.
In
the history of foreign affairs, then, a priori history
simply does not work; there is nothing to be done but engage in
a detailed and concrete historical inquiry into the detailed wars
and aggressions of particular States, keeping in mind that the
record of the foreign policy of "democracies" needs even more
debamboozlement than the foreign conduct of dictatorships. There
is no way to deduce relative degrees of guilt for war
and imperialism from libertarian axioms or from the simple degree
of internal dictatorship in any particular country. The degree
of guilt for war or imperialism is a purely evidentiary question,
and there is no escape from the task of looking hard at the evidence.
The
result of such a cool-eyed empirical look at the evidence, at
the history of particular States in the modern world, is bound
to be a shock for Americans raised on the foreign affairs mythology
propounded by the Court Intellectuals of the media and of our
educational system. Namely, that the major aggressor, the major
imperialist and warmonger, in the nineteenth and down through
the first half of the twentieth century, was Great Britain; and,
further, that the United States signed on, during World War I,
as a junior partner of the British Empire, only to replace it
as the major imperial and warmongering power after World War II.
The
Wilsonian ideology is simply a pernicious myth, especially as
applied to Britain and the United States in the twentieth century,
and libertarians must simply gird themselves to unlearn that myth,
and to bring themselves into tune with historical truth. Since
libertarians have managed to unlearn many of the domestic
myths promulgated by the American State, one hopes that they can
find it in their hearts to unlearn the pervasive foreign policy
myth as well. Only then will classical liberalism, let alone full
libertarianism, be able to achieve a full Renaissance in the Western
world, and especially within America.
The
greatest deception of the American (and the British) State, then,
is its allegedly defensive and pacifistic foreign policy. When
Revisionists maintain, therefore, that the major guilt for war
and imperialism in the twentieth century belongs to the United
States and to Great Britain, they are not necessarily
maintaining that the various enemies of the United States have
been domestically and internally less dictatorial or
aggressive than the United States government.
Certainly,
libertarian revisionists do not maintain this thesis.
No libertarian would claim that the internal polity of
the Soviet Union, Communist China, Nazi Germany, or even Kaiser
Wilhelm's Germany was less despotic than that of Britain or the
United States. Quite the contrary. But what libertarian, as well
as other Revisionists, do maintain is that the U.S. and
Great Britain were, as a matter of empirical fact, the major aggressors
and warmongers in each of these particular wars and conflicts.
Such truths may be unpalatable to a priori "historians,"
but they are facts of reality nevertheless.
Furthermore,
as indicated above, it is precisely the use of war and war mythology
that has led to the acceleration of domestic statism
in the U. S. and in Great Britain in this century. In fact, every
significant advance of American statism has come about in the
course of one of its allegedly "defensive" wars. The Civil War
crushed states' rights and brought about an inflationary and statist
banking system, a regime of high tariffs and subsidies to railroads,
and income and federal excise taxation; World War I ushered in
the modern planning and "New Deal" Welfare-Warfare State in America;
and World War II and the Cold War completed that task and led
to the current Big Government Leviathan that we suffer under today.
It
is highly relevant and vital to the understanding of the burgeoning
American State that each of these consequences were not unfortunate
accidents brought about by foreign "aggressors," but the result
of a conscious and deliberate aggressive and warmongering policy
indulged in by the American State.
Revisionism
therefore reveals to us in all its starkness that the State Enemy
in the United States is purely at home and not abroad. Foreign
States have served merely as scapegoats for the aggrandizement
of American State power at home and abroad, over domestic citizens
and foreign peoples. The Enemy is not a foreign bogey, but here
in our midst. Only full understanding of this truth by libertarians
and other Americans can enable us to identify the problems we
face and to proceed to insure the victory of liberty. Before we
can overcome our enemies, we must know who they are.
To
defend its depredations, the American State has been able, with
the help of its Court Intellectuals, to employ a powerful propaganda
weapon to silence its opponents and to further delude its public.
Namely, to label the critics of its imperialist and war policies
conscious or unconscious agents or sympathizers with the domestic
policies of its various State enemies.
And
so, throughout this century, Revisionists, even libertarian Revisionists,
have been continually accused of being tools or sympathizers of
the Kaiser, of the Nazis, or of the Communists sometimes all at
once or seriatim. In this post-Wilsonian age, even a
priori libertarians have been duped into tarring Revisionist
libertarians with the same smear brush.
Even
the imbecility of thinking for one moment that a libertarian
can really be a Nazi or a Communist has not deterred the bamboozled
libertarians from smearing and denigrating their more clear-sighted
colleagues. What is needed above all is to cast off the post-Wilsonian
mythology and a priori history of twentieth century American
propaganda, and to realize that the (American) Emperor really
has no clothes. The penetrating truths of Revisionism are needed
to de-bamboozle libertarians along with other Americans.