Welcome to Keith Knight. Don't tread on anyone in the Libertarian Institute. This article from 1995 is titled On the Importance of Revisionism for Our Time by Doctor Murian Rothbard, an economics professor from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Revisionism, as applied to World War 2 and its origins, as also for previous wars, has the general function of bringing historical truth to an America and a world that had been drugged by wartime lies and
propaganda. This in itself is a virtue, but some truths of history, of course, may be largely of antiquarian interest with little relevance to present day concerns. This is not true of World War 2 revisionism, which has much critical significance for
today's world. Anytime you watch the Piers Morgan Show, CNN, Fox News, any enemy of the US regime is compared to the National Socialist, German Workers Party, any leader, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, David Koresh, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Moammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad is always compared to Hitler. So the reason this is important is it's the analogy they constantly use to justify crimes in the present. Well, we're going after Hitler
just like we previously did. What can be wrong with going after Hitler? The least of the lessons that revisionism can teach has already been thoroughly learned, that Japan and Germany are not uniquely aggressor nations doomed from birth to menace the peace of the world. The larger lessons have unfortunately, yet to be
learned. the United States is again being subjected to that complex of fear and vaunting in the brilliant phrase of Garrett Garrett, which drove us and the Western world into two other disastrous wars in our century. Once again, the American public is being subjected to nearly unanimous barrage of war propaganda and war hysteria so that only the most searching and
rational can keep their heads. Once again we find there has emerged upon the scene and enemy a bad guy with the same old bad guy characteristics that we have heard of before. A diabolic monolithic enemy which generations ago when some sacred texts decided for some reason that remains obscure, that it was out to conquer the world.
This was the claim for the Spanish during the Spanish American War. This was the claim that Kaiser Wilhelm was going to take over the world, that Adolf Hitler was going to take over the world. Iran, Brooke just said that the Iranian mullahs are trying to take over the world. Now notice that if you watch closely, you can see this scam play out when it's less convenient to play this card. Here is President Trump talking just the other day.
Teen missiles, we shot at us the other day and they were very nice. They gave us warning. They said we're going to shoot them. Is 1:00 OK? It is fine. And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn't get hurt except for the Gunners. They call them the Gunners. And out of 14 high end missiles that were shot at the base in Qatar, all 14, as you know, were shot down by our equipment. So here we have the evil, diabolical Iranian regime who?
They're Twelvers and that's a reference to Islam. They just want the world to burn. They want to rule over the ashes. These people love death. They just want global destruction. They want to take us down. They want to nuke us. They want us all dead and just enslaved. Also, when they fired 14 missiles at us, they called us beforehand so there wouldn't be any casualties. The the propaganda is just so pathetic and it has to explain why the state wants to control
compulsory education. I mean you, you have to get a population completely stupid before selling him such nonsense, the article goes on. Since then, the enemy, darkly, secretly, diabolically, has plotted conspiratorially to conquer the world, building up a vast and mighty and overwhelming military machine, and also constructing a mighty, international and subversive 5th column which functions as an army of mere puppets, agents of the enemy's central
headquarters, ready to commit espionage, sabotage, or any other act of undermining other states. The enemy then is monolithic, ruled solely and strictly from the top by a few masters, and is dominated always by the single purpose of world conquest. The model to keep in mind is Doctor Fu Manchu here trotted forward as an international
bogeyman. It is funny how we are called conspiracy theorists when the establishment, as you could call it, is always saying, well, the elites are conspiring against us, the whites are conspiring against US. Men have built up a patriarchy just to oppress women. Islam's going to take over the world. The Germans tried to take over the world. The Japanese just wouldn't surrender. They wanted to take over the world, so we had to nuke them twice. Basically everyone in Iran wants
everyone in Israel dead. They don't really have lives where they have jobs and families and worry about other things. They're just obsessed with taking over the world. You see this clearly with Andrew Roberts and Niall Ferguson who keeps saying, well Germany tried to take over the world twice as the British Empire ruled over 460 million people and controlled 1/4 of the landmass of planet Earth. Watch out for the Germans. The enemy then says the war propaganda is guided by but one
purpose, conquest of the world. He never suffers from such human emotions as fear. Fear that we might attack him or believe that he is acting in self-defense or out of self respect and the desire to save face before himself as well as before others. Neither does he possess such
human qualities as reason. This is why whenever the corporate press shows you images of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Adolf Hitler, they'll show him talking in a video with no audio and the commentator is speaking over it. So you watch it and you go, God, he must be saying something crazy about how he wants to kill us.
Seldom will they say, you know, we really hate Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un. So we're going to go through their speeches together, just as if you had a person who died under mysterious circumstances and they had a spouse. You know, the spouse is most likely the one who did it. So you would want to interview them. You'd want to get their side of the story.
Even if you think they're an evil murderer who's just totally greedy, you still want to interview that person to get their side of the story, to know what incentives they face. No, there is only one other emotion that can sway him. Superior force will compel him to back down. All you have to do is look at who the previous allies of the
US regime have been. They had an open alliance with the Bolshevik regime, with Joseph Stalin after they committed many atrocities in many countries far before 1941, when the alliance was really set in stone. the US government had no problem inviting Nikita Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union, over to tour America for 10 days under Republican Dwight D Eisenhower in 1959. Nikita Khrushchev flew from California to Iowa to New York and shook hands with President Eisenhower.
Famously, Khrushchev and Kennedy exchange letters. These people still face incentives and can be negotiated with. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger shook hands with Chairman Mao. They're friends with Mohammed bin Solomon in Saudi Arabia. Not exactly a Jeffersonian democracy from from what I've
heard. This is because even though Fu Menchu, he is also like the bad guy in the movie Western, he will cower before the good guy if the good guy is strong, armed to the teeth, resolute of purpose, etcetera. Hence the complex of fear and vaunting, fear of the supposedly implacable and permanent plotting of the enemy, vaunting of the enormous military might of America and its meddling throughout the world to contain, rollback, etcetera, the enemy or to liberate the oppressed nations.
Yeah, you know, in Kuwait they were fighting to liberate the population so they could be ruled over. King Al Jaber again, it There's no consistency about supporting A democracy, much as Hillary Clinton loves to lie about it. They don't exactly have democracy in Bahrain or Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. Any of those inconvenient allies. Many people in Greater Israel who don't have the right to vote?
Not exactly a democracy either. Vladimir Solinsky not holding his March 31st elections of last year? Not exactly a democracy. Conscripting men to get their limbs blown off. It's like, well, even if it was, a democracy in conscripting someone to fight a war against their will is a far greater violation of human rights and liberty then denying them the right to vote once every five years between two lying politicians.
Now, revisionism teaches us that this entire myth, so prevalent then and even now about Hitler and about the Japanese, is a tissue of fallacies from beginning to end. Every plank in this nightmare evidence is either completely untrue or not entirely the truth. If people should learn this intellectual fraud about Hitler's Germany, then they will begin to ask questions and searching questions about the current World War Three version
of the same myth. Nothing would stop the current headlong flight to war faster or more surely 'cause people to begin to reason about foreign affairs once again. After a long orgy of emotion and cliche. President Harry Truman wrote his memoirs 1946 to 1952. The book is titled Years of Trial and Hope, Memoirs by Harry S Truman. This is the second volume. The first volume only goes over the 1945 year.
Here he is on page 399 explaining a discussion that he had with Douglas MacArthur. He Douglas MacArthur, describe the difference between the attitude towards death of Westerners and Orientals in the issues that were faced between the Philippines and the Koreans and the Japanese. Here's what MacArthur was saying about why we had to fight these people. We hate to die, only face danger out of a sense of duty and through moral issues. Whereas with Orientals, life begins with death.
They die quietly, folding their arms as a dove, folding his wings, relaxing and dying. Same exact nonsense that we hear about. The Iranians just love death. Al Qaeda just loves death. North Korea just wants to watch the world burn. Putin just wants to nuke us all. It's all completely fake, for the same myth is now based on the same old fallacies, and this is seen by the increasing use of the Cold Warriors have been making of the Munich myth.
The continually repeated charge that it was the appeasement of the aggressor at Munich that fed his aggression. Again, Fu Manchu or wild beast comparison. And that caused the aggressor drunk with his conquest to launch World War 2. Yeah, at the Munich Conference, the agreement was the National Socialist could take over the Sudetenland, 1/5 of Czechoslovakia. After the war, after 20 million deaths in Europe, the Bolsheviks occupied all of Czechoslovakia, not just the Sudetenland.
So you have to look at the costs as well as the benefits. This Munich myth has been used as one of the leading arguments against any sort of rational negotiations with the communist nations and the stigmatizing of even the most harmless search for agreement as appeasement, such as the JCPOA, the Iranian nuclear deal. One good thing Barack Obama ever
did. It is for this reason that a JP Taylors magnificent origins of the Second World War received probably its most distorted and frenetic review in the pages of National Review. Yeah, there's something about war that has revolutionary capabilities to really mobilize the masses, get them all on the same page, drastically grow the power of the state that allows the state to get away with things when the population feels threatened that the state
otherwise would not be able to get away with. And basically all the wars are based on lies in order to get someone to risk getting their head blown off, to risk sending their children to die. You can't tell them a rational cost benefit analysis of what we think your child's life is worth this much. And if they die, we could have this person ruling over this geographical area. We could have Zelinsky ruling over the Don Bass instead of Yanukovych or or Putin would rule over instead.
So that that's what we're really dealing with the if your son dies, we might have a chance for Zelensky to rule over Donetsk and Luhansk instead of Vladimir Putin. It's like, well, doesn't seem like such a great trade, come to think of it. So they can never engage in an honest cost benefit analysis. They just have to scare the hell
out of you. It is about time that Americans learn that bad guys, Nazis or communist National Socialists or Communists, may not necessarily want or desire war or to be out to conquer the world. Their hope for conquest may be strictly ideological and not military at all. That bad guys may also fear the possibility of our use of our enormous military might and aggressive posture to attack
them. That both the bad guys and the good guys may have common interests which make negotiation possible, EG that neither wants to be annihilated by nuclear weapons. That no organization is a monolith, and that agents, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis are often simply ideological allies who can and do split with their supposed masters. And that finally, we may learn the most profound lesson of all, that the domestic policy of a government is often no index whatever of its foreign policy.
We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the delusion of Woodrow Wilson that democracies, if so facto, will never embark on war, and that dictatorships are always prone to engage in war, much as we may and do aboard the domestic programs of most dictators and certainly of the National Socialists and Communists. This has no necessary relation
to their foreign policies. Indeed, many dictatorships have been passive and static in history, and Contra wise, many democracies have led in promoting and waging war. Revisionism may once and for all be able to destroy this Wilsonian myth. There is only one real difference between the capacity of a democracy and a dictatorship to wage war. Democracies invariably engage much more widely in deceptive war propaganda to whip up and persuade the public, whereas monarchs don't necessarily have
this. It's also worth mentioning that when the state has the right to collect money coercively, when they have the right to print money at will with a central bank, when they have the right to conscript, when they have a legal double standard that allows them to murder people and get away with it, you know, they're not being held as on trial as any domestic citizen would if they did the same exact
thing. And they also control compulsive education, compulsory education ages 5 through 18 in a lot of democracies. So all of those things make wars far more likely than they otherwise would be. Just imagine if Barack Obama had to fund his Libyan operation through voluntary exchanges and we first had to make a product, sell it, use the proceeds to fund his operation in Libya.
I think he might come up with some reasons why Gaddafi is the least evil of all possibilities if he had to fund it himself or put really any effort. Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical morale. Can't to fool for the voters. Let me re read that.
Democracies that wage war need to produce much more propaganda to whip up their citizens and at the same time to camouflage their policies much more intensely in hypocritical morale. Can't to fool the voters. The lack of need for this on the part of dictatorships often makes their policies seem superficially to be more warlike, and this is one of the reasons why they have had a bad
press in this century. The task of revisionism has been to penetrate beneath these superficialities and appearances to the stark realities underneath. Realities would show certainly in this century for the US, Great Britain, France, the three great democracies, to be worse than any other three countries in fomenting and waging aggressive war. Realization of this truth would be of incalculable importance in the currency. Conservatives should not need to be reminded of the flimsiness of
the democratic myth. We are now familiar with the concept of totalitarian democracy, of the frequent propensity of the masses to tyrannize over minorities. If conservatives can see this truth in domestic affairs, why not in foreign? There are many other more specific but also important lessons that revisionism can teach us. The Cold War as well as World Wars 1 and 2 has been launched by the Western democracies so as to meddle in the affairs of Eastern Europe.
The great power fact about Eastern Europe is that the smaller nations there are fated to be under the dominance, friendlier or otherwise, of Germany and or Russia. In World War One, the US and Britain went to war partly to help Russia expand into that part of Eastern Europe then dominated by Austro, Hungary and Germany. This act of meddling on our part, and the cost of untold lives both West and East, and of enormous increase in militarism,
statism and socialism at home. Led to a situation in which Eastern Europe which brought the US and Britain into World War 2 to keep Germany from dominating Eastern Europe. As soon as World War 2 was over, with its enormous consequent increase in statism, militarism and socialism in the US, the US and Britain felt they had to launch a Cold War to oust Russia from dominance over Eastern Europe, which it had obtained as a natural consequence of the joint defeat of Germany.
How much longer is the United States to play with the fate of the American people, or even the human race itself, for the sake of imposing a solution of our liking on Eastern Europe? And if we should wage a Holocaust to destroy communism, and there should doubtfully be any Americans remaining, how distinguishable from communism will the American system in
reality be? There have been two major facets to the Cold War trying to establish US and British hegemony over Eastern Europe and attempting to suppress nationalist revolutions that would take under undeveloped countries outside of the Western imperialist orbit. Here again, visionism of World War 2 has important lesson to
teach us today. For in World War One, England, backed by the United States, went to war against Germany to try to hobble an important commercial competitor which had started late in the imperialist game.
This is very true. A conversation between Lord Londonderry and Winston Churchill took place and I want to say May of 1935. This is in a book by Martin Gilbert titled Churchill a Life where Londonderry says to Churchill I should like to get out of your mind this terrible obsession, this anti German obsession to its Churchill response. You're wrong to think that I
have an anti German obsession. British policy for 400 years which has allowed us to keep our liberties and have our empire meant that we go to war with the strongest competitor in Europe. We find the biggest bully, whether it's the Spanish, whether it's the French Empire, whether it's the French monarchy, we gather a number of countries big enough to face the bully. So, yeah, this has much more to
do about competition. In the case of the US government, people like Robert O'Brien in the national Security advisor role, explicitly saying that. Look, even John J Mearsheimer, one of my reluctant heroes, is saying that while China's becoming a big competitor, they never attacked us. In fact, the US actually attacked China in 1999 by blowing up its embassy. But yeah, anytime there's a competitor, the psychopaths will try to use violence as opposed to improving themselves.
Much like a boyfriend who gets extremely jealous that his woman left him, or it's just insecure that she might leave, He will get extremely violent and would rather see her dead than with another man. They would rather the elites would rather exchange nuclear weapons and get millions of people dead before they had someone else even be close to competing with their high social status.
Before World Wars one and Two, Britain and France tried to preserve their imperialist domination as against the have not nations Germany and Japan. That came in late to the imperialist race. And now after World War 2, the United States has assumed the imperialist skeptor from the weakened hands of Britain and France.
Revisionism thus provides us with the insight that America has now become the world colossal of imperialism, propping up puppet and client states all over the undeveloped areas of the world and fiercely attempting to suppress nationalist revolutions that would take these countries out of the American imperial orbit. As Garrett Garrett also said, we have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and empire. Communism.
Having allied itself with the immensely popular movements of National Liberation against imperialism, the United States, in the hypocritical name of freedom, is now engaged in the logical conclusions of its Cold War policy, attempting to exterminate a whole nation in Vietnam to make very sure that they are rather dead than red, and to preserve American imperial rule. I misspoke earlier. I believe this item first appeared in the Journal of Individualist Thought in 1966. I said 1995.
I stand corrected. I apologize. All these lessons revisionism has to teach us. For revisionism, and the final analysis is based on truth and rationality. Truth and rationality are always the first victims in any war frenzy and they are therefore once again an extremely rare commodity on today's market. Revisionism brings to the artificial frenzy of daily events and day-to-day propaganda the cool but the last analysis, glorious light of historical truth.
Such truth is almost desperately needed in today's world. Thank you for watching Keith Knight, Don't Tread on Anyone, and the Libertarian Institute.