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by Murray Rothbard

Revisionism as applied to World War II and its origins (as also for
previous wars) has the general function of bringing historical truth
to an American and a world public 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 II revisionism, which has much critical significance for today’s
world.

The least of the lessons that revisionism can teach has already been
thoroughly learned: that Germany and Japan 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 Garet Garrett’s) which drove us, and the
Western world, into two other disastrous wars in our century. Once
again, the American public is being subjected to a 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 that
there has emerged upon the scene an Enemy, a Bad Guy, with the same
old Bad Guy characteristics that we have heard of before; a diabolic,
monolithic Enemy, which, generations ago in some “sacred texts,”
decided (for reasons that remain obscure) that it was “out to conquer
the world.”

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” “fifth 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 master rulers, and is dominated always
by the single purpose of world conquest. The model to keep in mind is
Dr. Fu Manchu, here trotted forward as an international bogeyman.

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 belief that he
is acting in 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.

No, there is only one other emotion that can sway him: superior force
will compel him to “back down.” This is because, even though a Fu
Manchu, 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, etc. 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,” “roll back,” etc., the
Enemy, or to “liberate” the “oppressed nations.”

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 III 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 cliché.

For the same myth is now based on the same old fallacies. And this is
seen by the increasing use that 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, the Fu Manchu, or Wild Beast, comparison), and that caused the
“aggressor,” drunk with his conquests, to launch World War II. 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.” It is for this reason that A. J. P. Taylor’s
magnificent Origins of the Second World War received probably its most
distorted and frenetic review in the pages of National Review.

It is about time that Americans learn: that Bad Guys (Nazis or
Communists) may not necessarily want or desire war, or 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 Good Guys may have
common interests which make negotiation possible (e.g., that neither
wants to be annihilated by nuclear weapons); that no organization is a
“monolith,” and that “agents” 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 to its foreign policy.

We are still, in the last analysis, suffering from the delusion of
Woodrow Wilson: that “democracies” ipso facto will never embark on
war, and that “dictatorships” are always prone to engage in war. Much
as we may and do abhor the domestic programs of most dictators (and
certainly of the Nazis and Communists), this has no necessary relation
to their foreign policies: indeed, many dictatorships have been
passive and static in history, and, contrariwise, 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. 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 moral cant 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 which show, certainly in this century, the U.S., Great
Britain, and 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 on the
current scene.

Conservatives should not need to be reminded of the flimsiness of the
“democratic” myth; we are familiar now 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 I and
II, 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, friendly or otherwise, of Germany and/or Russia .

In World War I, the U.S. and Britain went to war partly to help Russia
expand into the part of Eastern Europe then dominated by
Austria-Hungary and Germany . This act of meddling on our part, at the
cost of untold lives, both West and East, and of an enormous increase
in militarism, statism, and socialism at home, led to a situation in
Eastern Europe which brought the U.S. and Britain into World War II,
to keep Germany from dominating Eastern Europe .

As soon as World War II was over (with its enormous consequent
increase in statism, militarism, and socialism in the U.S.), the U.S.
and Britain felt they had to launch a Cold War to oust Russia from the
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 own
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
U.S. and British hegemony over Eastern Europe , and attempting to
suppress nationalist revolutions that would take undeveloped countries
outside of the Western imperialist orbit. Here again, revisionism of
World War II has important lessons to teach us today. For in World War
I, 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. Before World Wars I and II, Britain and
France tried to preserve their imperialist domination as against the
“have-not” nations Germany and Japan that came late in the imperialist
race.

And now, after World War II, the United States has assumed the
imperialist scepter from the weakened hands of Britain and France .
Revisionism thus provides us with the insight that America has now
become the world colossus 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 Garet 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 [1966] engaged in the logical conclusion of its Cold War
policy: attempting to exterminate a whole nation in Viet Nam to make
very sure that they are rather dead than Red — and to preserve
American imperial rule.

All these lessons revisionism has to teach us. For revisionism, in 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 in the last analysis glorious
light of historical truth. Such truth is almost desperately needed in
today’s world.

********************

From The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1995 (Vol. 15, No. 3),
pages 35-37. This item first appeared in the Rampart Journal of
Individualist Thought, Spring 1966 (Vol. 2, No. 1).

Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) was a prominent libertarian scholar. A
tribute to him appeared in The Journal of Historical Review, May-June
1995.