The Costs of War

America's Pyrrhic Victories

John Denson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351484442
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The greatest accomplishment of Western civilization is arguably the achievement of individual liberty through limits on the power of the state. In the war-torn twentieth century, we rarely hear that one of the main costs of armed conflict is long-term loss of liberty to winners and losers alike. Beyond the obvious and direct costs of dead and wounded soldiers, there is the lifetime struggle of veterans to live with their nightmares and their injuries; the hidden economic costs of inflation, debts, and taxes; and more generally the damages caused to our culture, our morality, and to civilization at large. The new edition is now available in paperback, with a number of new essays. It represents a large-scale collective effort to pierce the veils of myth and propaganda to reveal the true costs of war, above all, the cost to liberty.Central to this volume are the views of Ludwig von Mises on war and foreign policy. Mises argued that war, along with colonialism and imperialism, is the greatest enemy of freedom and prosperity, and that peace throughout the world cannot be achieved until the central governments of the major nations become limited in scope and power. In the spirit of these theorems by Mises, the contributors to this volume consider the costs of war generally and assess specific corrosive effects of major American wars since the Revolution. The first section includes chapters on the theoretical and institutional dimensions of the relationship between war and society, including conscription, infringements on freedom, the military as an engine of social change, war and literature, and the right of citizens to bear arms. The second group includes reconsiderations of Lincoln and Churchill, an analysis of the anti-interventionist idea in American politics, a discussion of the meaning of the "just war, " an assessment of how World War I changed the course of Western civilization, and finally two eyewitness accounts of the true horrors of actual combat by

1
War and American Freedom

John V. Denson

During the Persian Gulf War, President Bush announced that we were approaching the "New World Order." It is becoming clear that part of what is meant by this phrase is that the United States is to become a permanent garrison state and also the world policeman, under the cloak and command of the United Nations or NATO or some other regional alliance. If this New World Order is fully realized, the United States could be at war constantly without a declaration of war by Congress, and our sovereignty will be destroyed. The Constitution states that the president is commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but only Congress can declare war, which it has done only five times: against England in 1812, Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, and to launch America's late entries into World Wars I and II. On more than 200 occasions the president has sent armed forces to foreign lands without a congressional declaration of war.¹ Since 1945 over 100,000 U.S. military personnel have died in undeclared wars and over 400,000 have suffered battle injuries.² It can be argued that the founders probably did not intend for this constitutional restraint to apply to very short and limited police actions authorized by the president, but it obviously should have applied to the two major wars in Asia, Korea and Vietnam. President Lincoln, however, in the American Civil War, set the first prominent example of abuse of the presidential powers regarding wars.

The danger of ignoring the Constitution was strongly state6 by Senator Daniel Webster:

Miracles do not cluster. Hold on to the Constitution of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands—what has happened once in six thousand years may never happen again. Hold on to your Constitution, for if the American Constitution shall fail there will be anarchy throughout the world.³

The historian Charles Beard warned that becoming the world policeman would mean "perpetual war for perpetual peace"⁴ and, of course, this is the theme of George Orwell's prophetic novel 1984. We need to understand the "total" costs of war in order to appreciate the true dangers that war in general, and the New World Order in particular, pose to individual liberty.

Albert Jay Nock was a great individualist, a liberal in the classical sense, and one of my favorite writers. In his essay entitled "Isaiah's Job" he tells the story of the Biblical prophet Isaiah who was instructed not to try to convert the masses but instead to speak to the "Remnant"—defined as that small group of people who would understand and appreciate his message and would be there to put things back together when the time was right.⁵ Nock wrote to and for that Remnant, which he recognized as a small group that was working to preserve liberty in America. That Remnant has kept the torch of liberty lit since the chaos of World War I forced the philosophy of freedom off center stage and out of the theater. Collectivism, in various forms, took its place. The philosophy of freedom, which was based largely upon the lessons of history, was born in the 17th century and became dominant in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.⁶ It represented the political ideas of, or greatly influenced, most of the founders of the United States.

Today, we call this philosophy "classical liberalism," which historian Ralph Raico says is the "signature political philosophy of Western civilization."⁷ An important part of the Remnant has preserved much of this philosophy under various labels, including the Old Right, paleo-conservatism, and libertarianism. Non-interventionism in foreign policy has always been a cornerstone of classical liberalism and the philosophy of the Remnant.

Nock recognized that American citizens had far more to fear from the rapidly increasing powers of our own central government than from any threat of a foreign invasion. He further recognized that it is through the abuse of the war powers granted to the president that our freedom is primarily jeopardized. Indeed, since the end of World War II, some presidents and their representatives have claimed that the constitutional limitation providing that only Congress can declare war is archaic and no longer applies.

Under Secretary of State Nicholas Katzenbach informed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in August 1967 that "the expression of declaring war is one that has become outmoded in the international arena."⁸

When the Senate considered and passed the National Commitments Resolution in 1969, a representative of the Nixon administration informed them that:

As Commander-in-Chief, the President has the sole authority to command our armed forces, whether they are inside or outside the United States. And although reasonable men may differ as to the circumstances in which he should do so, the President has the constitutional power to send U.S. military forces abroad without specific Congressional approval.⁹

We have now reached a point in our history where it is strongly asserted that the president of the United States claims the power to declare a crisis and then send troops wherever he pleases without Congressional authority or approval. Shakespeare dramatized this same point with Mark Antony in Julius Caesar where he states: "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war."¹⁰

Nock addressed the long-term aspects of the total costs of war: "I am coming to be much less interested in what war does to people at the time of war, and much more in what it does to them after it is over."¹¹ The starting point, however, for understanding the total costs of war is the well-known warning from U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, during the debate over whether or not America should enter World War I: "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty."¹² Another well-known truism was stated by the writer Randolph Bourne who opposed America's entry into World War I: "War is the health of the State,"¹³ meaning that the government must grow stronger and necessarily increase its powers and scope in order to engage in war. Alexis de Tocqueville, the astute observer of American democracy, stated the truth about the relationship between war and freedom succinctly: "All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it."¹⁴

History shows us that even the just war, fought to oppose a clear-and-present danger to life, liberty, and property, still causes a severe loss of freedom. Even in a just and successful war, the result is one step forward in the defense of freedom, and then two steps backward to increase and centralize governmental power in order to engage in the war. This net deficit must be made up after the war in order to have a net gain for freedom. Throughout history, we see taxes raised, governmental powers increased and centralized for purposes of war, and then, when peace arrives, there is no real relinquishment of those burdens on freedom. As one author states, "War is like that cave of bones and carcasses in mythology into which led many tracks, but out of it, none."¹⁵ On the other hand, we are told by official propagandists, or the "Court Historians," and many political leaders like the "Megaphone of Mars," Teddy Roosevelt, that wars are simply the instruments of progress and serve a similar purpose to that of a summer thunderstorm which clears and cools the air. Those who love freedom must never cease to challenge those ideas.

Ludwig von Mises opposed the unjust war, but he was no pacifist. He recognized that there are just wars, rightfully fought for the honorable purposes of protecting our families, our lives, our liberty, and our property. For instance, I think that there is a clear consensus that the American Revolution was a just war fought for the proper purposes.

Liberty is fragile and its defense cannot be left to the pacifist, the advocate of unilateral disarmament, or to the weak or faint of heart. But also, because liberty is so fragile, its true defender recognizes that war is its greatest enemy, and therefore the true patriot is often the courageous individual who opposes a particular war because he recognizes that it is unjust—that it would be fought for the wrong purposes or that the risk for the loss of liberty is greater than any benefit to be gained by the war.

None of this should be construed in any way as an attack upon the American soldier, or any soldier for that matter. One of the great injustices of the Vietnam War was the abuse heaped upon the returning veterans instead of criticism of the politicians who caused that war, America's only military defeat. While I consider World War I the greatest disaster of the 20th century, in no way do I condemn my father who fought in that war with the American forces in France, nor do I condemn Ludwig von Mises, who fought on the opposing side with Austria on the Russian front. These men remain two of my heroes and I admire their individual courage demonstrated in that war. We can "toast the soldier without honoring the war."

Likewise, this should not be understood as advocating "Isolationism," that pejorative term used by the Franklin Roosevelt administration to condemn its critics. In fact, one of the arguments made by Mises in advocating a non-interventionist foreign policy is that no nation is entirely self-sufficient; because of the division of labor and the scarcity of resources, we must have worldwide trade, and war is its greatest enemy. Thomas Paine gave a similar economic reason:

War can never be in the interest of a trading nation any more than quarrelling can be profitable to a man in business. But to make war with those who trade with us is like setting a bulldog upon a customer at the shop-door.¹⁶

Thomas Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, succinctly restated America's foreign policy as first outlined in President Washington's Farewell Address. Jefferson said, "Peace, commerce and honest friendship, with all nations—entangling alliances with none."¹⁷

Today in America, as we stand at the end of the 20th century, we can look back and see that it has been a century of constant assault on individual freedom. It has been a century of big government and collectivism, under various labels including communism, Nazism, fascism, socialism, the New Deal, and state capitalism; it is the war-and-welfare century. Now we have finally reached the end of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• 1. War and American Freedom
• 2. Classical Republicanism and the Right to Bear Arms
• 3. Defenders of the Republic: The Anti-Interventionist Tradition in American Politics
• 4. America's Two Just Wars: 1775 and 1861
• 5. Rethinking Lincoln
• 6. Did the South Have to Fight?
• 7. War, Reconstruction, and the End of the Old Republic
• 8. The Spanish–American War as Trial Run, or Empire as Its Own Justification
• 9. World War I: The Turning Point
• 10. World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals
• 11. A Common Design: Propaganda and World War
• 12. Rethinking Churchill
• 13. The Old Breed and the Costs of War
• 14. War and Leviathan in Twentieth-Century America: Conscription as the Keystone
• 15. The Military as an Engine of Social Change
• 16. His Country's Own Heart's-Blood: American Writers Confront War
• 17. The Culture of War
• 18. Is Modern Democracy Warlike?
• 19. War and the Money Machine: Concealing the Costs of War Beneath the Veil of Inflation
• 20. Time Preference, Government, and the Process of De-Civilization: From Monarchy to Democracy
• Appendices
• Recommended Reading
• About the Contributors
• Index