Friday, March 4, 2011

Taiwanese Independence: Market Anarchism

I came across this interesting blog post from 2006 by the son of a diplomat of the Republic of Taiwan, who is now apparently a market anarchist.
Market Anarchism, the Solution to the Dilemma of Taiwan Independence by Bevin Chu
Citizens of the Chinese Commonwealth would never pay another dime in taxes to any government, central, provincial, or local, because there would no longer be any government, central, provincial, or local. There would only be one unified nation consisting entirely of privately owned property, in which citizens would voluntarily contract with Private Defense Agencies for law enforcement services.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Christian Heresies: Leftism and Protestantism

While reading The Other War that Never Ends: A Survey of Some Recent Literature on World War I by Ralph Raico I came across this fascinating sounding book he reviews:


Richard Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation. (ISI Press)

This important new book was published by the ISI Press, which suggests that there are still some with Old Right tendencies in the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

The theme of the book is how the "forward-looking clergy [progressive Protestants] embraced the war as a chance to achieve their broadly defined social gospel objectives." Thus, the situation Gamble describes is, in a sense, the opposite of the one today, when it is the leaders of "fundamentalist" Protestantism that are among the worst warmongers. In both cases, however, the main contribution of the clergy has been to translate a political conflict into apocalyptic spiritual terms.

Gamble traces the susceptibility of Americans to this view back to colonial Puritan New England. During the later eighteenth century and the Revolutionary War the conception was fixed of the United States as the brand-new nation, casting off the burdens of the past, instituting a novus ordo seclorum, a New Order of the Ages. The Americans were the new Chosen People, destined to lead the world to an age of reason and universal virtue.

By the end of the nineteenth century, progressive Protestants, often influenced by the theory of evolution, were preaching the successive remaking of the church, of American society, and finally of the whole world. Rejecting old-line Calvinism, they rejected also the Augustinian distinction between the City of God and the City of Man. The City of Man was to be made into the City of God, here on earth, through a commitment to a redefined, socially-activist Christianity. As Shailer Mathews, dean of the University of Chicago divinity school, said: "As civilization develops, sin grows corporate. We sin socially by violating social rather than individualistic personal relations."

The progressive gospel was spread through the takeover of influential churches, the infiltration of prestigious seminaries and divinity schools (now offering courses in "Social Ethics" and "Christian Sociology"), the control of journals such as Christian Century, and, nationally, the creation of the forerunner of the National Council of Churches. At conferences sponsored by the progressive Christians, speakers included Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and, naturally, Woodrow Wilson. Wilson claimed that the role of Christian youth was to ignore divisive "dogma" and instead to concentrate on the goal of making "the United States a mighty Christian nation, and to christianize the world!"

The vision of the progressive clergy was internationalized, as they looked to America to lead the world in accordance with God's will for human society. "Isolationism" was a selfish doctrine that had to be overcome. Many of them supported the war with Spain from this point of view. Among the supporters was Julia Ward Howe, composer of the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," who addressed progressive meetings. She reported on her vision of all mankind "advancing with one in end in view, one foe to trample . . . All of evil was gone from the earth . . . Mankind was emancipated and ready to march forward in a new Era of human understanding . . . the Era of perfect love."

Once the war in Europe began, and after America entered, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was cited and sung incessantly by the Christian progressives. A favorite line, of course, was "As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free." The progressive Protestants saw World War I as a continuation of the great crusade for righteousness that was the American Civil War. As Gamble writes, "the fight for freedom had to be resumed, but this time it was to be carried to ends of the earth." Fittingly, there was a constant invocation of the hovering spirit of Abraham Lincoln.

The progressives quickly realized that President Woodrow Wilson was one of their own, flesh of their flesh. They eagerly took to his cant on the duty of national self-sacrifice and of America as the suffering servant. "A war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die," Wilson declared. The day was coming when the nations would realize that Old Glory was "the flag, not only of America, but of humanity." In 1915, addressing the Federal Council of Churches, Wilson proclaimed that America had been founded and had "its only object for existence" (sic) to lead humanity on the "high road" to universal justice.

Once the war was underway, the rhetoric of the progressives grew increasingly blood-thirsty. One contingent became "militant pacifists," that is, men whose aim was world peace, to be achieved if necessary by waging ongoing murderous war. As the butchery in Europe continued, they attacked the notion of "a premature peace," an end to hostilities that would permit the continued existence of iniquitous regimes. A statement signed by over 60 eminent churchmen, including Harry Emerson Fosdick, Billy Sunday, and the president of Princeton, scorned the idea of "a premature peace:" "The just God, who withheld not his own Son from the cross, would not look with favor upon a people who put their fear of pain and death . . . above the holy claims of righteousness and justice . . . "

On the day that national registration for the draft began, Wilson addressed a reunion of Confederate veterans. He told them that God had preserved the American union in the Civil War so that the United States might be "an instrument in [His] hands . . . to see that liberty is made secure for mankind." Sadly, here, as before and ever after, the grandsons and great-grandsons of the Confederate heroes who resisted the northern invasion of their country took the side of their former mortal enemies. In a kind of Stockholm syndrome, of identifying with the aggressor, they identified with the Union and disproportionately supported and fought and died in its wars. That strange anomaly continues to this day.

When the time came for Congress to consider war against Germany, the people's representatives repeated the rhetoric and imagery of the progressive Protestants. One congressman stated that, "Christ gave his life upon the cross that mankind might gain the Kingdom of Heaven, while tonight we shall solemnly decree the sublimest sacrifice ever made by a nation for the salvation of humanity, the institution of world-wide liberty and freedom."

In the Second World War there was a nice sentimental propaganda song, "The White Cliffs of Dover," which went something like this: 

    There'll be blue birds over,
    The white cliffs of Dover
    Tomorrow, just you wait and see.
    There'll be love and laughter,
    And peace ever after,
    Tomorrow, when the world is free.


The poor, deluded people ate that up, as they ate up the fantasies of the progressive Protestants during the Great War, as they swallow all the lies dished out to them to this day.

Of all people, H.G. Wells, the freethinker and prophet of evolution who got religion during the war, became a favorite of the progressive clergy. Wells, who coined the phrase, "the war to end war," wrote that "the kingdom of God on earth is not a metaphor, not a mere spiritual state, not a dream . . . it is the close and inevitable destiny of mankind." By the kingdom of God, it turned out, Wells meant his Fabian socialist utopia globalized, through total war against evil.

Incidentally, one of H.G. Wells's last books, published in 1944, is Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church. Wells had been in charge of British propaganda during the war. The first chapter is titled, "Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?" Rome, he argued, was not only the center of Fascism, but "the seat of a Pope . . . who has been an open ally of the Nazi-Fascist-Shinto Axis since his enthronement." "Why do we not bomb Rome? . . . A thorough bombing (à la Berlin) of the Italian capital seems not simply desirable but necessary." If the Allies had taken Wells's heartfelt advice, today tourists would be able to take photos of the ruins of St. Peter's just as they do of the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin. This is the way this Fabian humanitarian ended up—screaming to have the city of Rome razed to the ground.

The progressive Protestants intertwined their warmongering with their social gospel. William Faunce, president of Brown, gloated that "the old petty individualism and laissez-faire" were dead: "'Me' and ‘mine' will be small words in a new world which has learned to say the great word ‘our.'" The president of Union Theological Seminary warned that the churches had to abandon their "egoistic and other-worldly character," and "must cease to minister to selfishness by promising personal salvation"—blah, blah, blah.

I must confess that the one drawback of Gamble's excellent book is having to slog through the endless high-minded drivel of these progressive Christians.

German Free-Trade Liberalism

German liberalism of the free-trade 'Manchester' school produced some of the most advanced philosophers and political economists in the history of free-trade and libertarianism. The Austrian school itself is a product of advanced German liberalism and Continental and English political economy. The movement was, however, relatively weak and eventually was overthrown by social democrats (including Marxists) and social nationalists.

The following are some essays and articles on German free-trade liberalism.
Authentic German Liberalism of the 19th Century by Ralph Raico
"In this essay, liberalism will be understood to mean the doctrine which holds that society — that is, the social order minus the state — more or less runs itself, within the bounds of assured individual rights. In the classical statement, these are the rights to life, liberty, and property.
This is closer to the French meaning of libéralisme, rather than the meaning that liberalism has acquired in the United States, Britain, Canada, even in Germany and other countries. In this respect, the French have remained true to the original and historical conception of liberalism. It is not by accident that the French term laissez-faire is used throughout the world as a synonym for the freely-functioning economy.

Understanding liberalism as grounded in the self-regulating capacity of society is even, I believe, methodologically necessary, in order to enable us, as Anthony de Jasay writes, to distinguish liberalism from the other ideologies.
" - the text
Eugen Richter and Late German Manchester Liberalism by Ralph Raico
"Richter fought the state-socialist program proposed by Bismarck, including the nationalization of the Prussian railroads and the establishment of state monopolies for tobacco and brandy, and, naturally, Bismarck's turn towards protectionism, towards rendering dearer the cost of necessities, by which the great Chancellor, landowner, and hater of the "Manchester money-bags" manifested his compassion for the poor.

A "passionate opponent of cartels," Richter considered the planned tariff wall "the ideal nurturing ground for the formation of new cartels." While Richter, together with other liberal leaders, such as Ludwig Bamberger, supported the introduction of the gold standard in the newly formed Empire, unlike them he opposed the centralization of the banking system through the creation of a Reichsbank; such a central bank, he felt, would tend to privilege "big capital and big industry." - the text
John Prince Smith and the German Free-Trade Movement by Ralph Raico
"The great evil for the workers lies in this, that the profit on capi­tal and capital accumulation are to such a great extent diminished by state expenditures on unproductive purposes—the capitalists would be able to give to the people who work for them much more to consume, if they did not have to support so many peace-time soldiers besides, whose consumption is not reimbursed through labor. If the Swiss militia system were introduced in all European states, in a short time capital would so increase, wages would so rise, that there would be no more question of want in the working class. Here lies the solution of the worker-question." - John Prince Smith, The Market
Pictures of the Socialistic Future by Eugen Richter
Discussed by Andy Duncan 
"From the outset, many questioned the practicality of the socialists’ solution. After you equalize incomes, who will take out the garbage? Yet almost no one questioned the socialists’ idealism. By 1961, however, the descendents of the radical wing of the Social Democratic Party had built the Berlin Wall—and were shooting anyone who tried to flee their “Workers’ Paradise.” A movement founded to liberate the worker turned its guns on the very people it vowed to save.
Who could have foreseen such a mythic transformation? Out of all the critics of socialism, one stands out as uniquely prescient: Eugen Richter (1838–1906). During the last decades of the nineteenth century, he was the leading libertarian in the German Reichstag, as well as the chief editor of the Freisinnige Zeitung. Seventy years before the Wall, Richter’s dystopian novel, Pictures of the Socialistic Future, boldly predicted that victorious German socialism would inspire a mass exodus—and that the socialists would respond by banning emigration, and punishing violators with deadly force." - Bryan Caplan, forward to the text
Wilhelm von Humboldt by Ralph Raico
"The true end of man — not that which capricious inclination prescribes for him, but that which is prescribed by eternally immutable reason — is the highest and most harmonious cultivation of his faculties into one whole. For this cultivation, freedom is the first and indispensible condition."- Humboldt

Thursday, February 17, 2011

An Anti-War Reader's Guide with Multimedia

"What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is. In a short sentence it may be summed up to be the combination and concentration of all the horrors, atrocities, crimes, and sufferings of which human nature on this globe is capable."
- John Bright, Peace (1853)
"...everything was submerged in verbiage. It was done with deliberate purpose. It insured the continuance of the controversies and led the questions unsettled, which was necessary in order to leave this country free to act and even act illegally when it entered the war."
- Robert Lansing, legal advisor to the State Department (1915-1920), War Memoirs

A reader's guide for anti-war and revisionist war history. As many of these works as I have been able to find free I have, the rest link to websites where they can be purchased, usually Amazon.

General Works on Warfare
Review by David Gordon
"...one can readily understand why unscrupulous political leaders actively seek war: they wish to increase their own power. But of course war, with all its appalling massacres and horrors, is very much against the interests of the great majority of the population. Here our problem arises: how do the political leaders manage to enlist the general population behind their murderous crusades? 
Denson finds the answer by appealing to a well-known fact. Most people, despite their aversion for war, are not pacifists. If they have been attacked, they will fight back; and, once battle is joined, matters usually get out of hand. This gives the political leaders their opportunity. They have only to provoke an enemy into an attack. By doing so, they will be able to rally their nation to "defend" against an assault they have themselves instigated. In one prime example of this tactic, Secretary of War Henry Stimson noted in his diary for November 25, 1941, "The question was how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves" - David Gordon, The Mises Review
Review by David Gordon
The contributors to this outstanding volume have grasped a simple but unfashionable truth: war is a great evil. It entails horrible suffering and death on a large scale and has served as the principal means for the rise of the tyrannical state. Why then, do wars take place? So far as the wars of the United States, the chief subject of the book, are concerned, the contributors place the main blame on intellectuals and power- hungry politicians, often in the service of "merchants of death."
Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government by Robert Higgs
"This seminal treatise in the history of ideas demonstrates what has come to be known as the Higgs thesis: that government grows in periods of crisis, for example, war and depression. He demonstrates this with a detailed look at twentieth century economic history.
Higgs's thesis is so compelling that it has become the dominant paradigm for understanding the so-called ratchet effect: government grows during crisis and then retrenches afterwards, but not to the same level as before.
This book is absolutely essential for anyone who seeks to understand the dynamics of government growth and the loss of liberty." - Mises Store description
Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Eecutive State and the Decline of Freedom edited by John V. Denson
Review by Herman Belz
"There cannot be too much of a correct theory," Ludwig von Mises wrote in Epistemological Problems of Economics. This provocative claim inspires the methodology of Austrian economics scholarship against the doleful and misguided teaching of modern social science historicism. Evidence of its bracing influence outside the sphere of technical economic science is apparent in the historical essays presented in this new Ludwig von Mises Institute publication Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John V. Denson." - Herman Belz, The Independent Review
Foreign Policy and the American Mind by Robert Nisbet
"It is only too clear that behind the tactical and strategical problems of our relations with the rest of the world–not to emphasize the occasional humiliations–lie some major difficulties of perspective." - Commentary Magazine
Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal by Ralph Raico
"Thus, in these pages, you will find descriptions and accounts of World War I, of the lead-up to formal US belligerence in World War II, and of Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman, among others, that bear little resemblance to what you were taught in school. Here you will encounter, perhaps for the first time, compelling evidence of how the British maneuvered US leaders and tricked the American people prior to the US declarations of war in 1917 and 1941. You will read about how the British undertook to starve the Germans — men, women, and children alike — not only during World War I, but for the greater part of a year after the armistice. You will be presented with descriptions of how the communists were deified and the German people demonized by historians and others who ought to have known better. You will see painted in truer shades a portrait of the epic confrontation between the great majority of Americans, who wished to keep their country at peace in 1939, 1940, and 1941, and the well-placed, unscrupulous minority who sought to plunge the United States into the European maelstrom." - from the Introduction, by Robert Higgs
Merchants of Death by H.C. Engelbrecht and F.C. Hanighen
"Here is the archetype of all post-World War I revisionism of a particular variety: the hunt for the people who made the big bucks off the killing machine. The Merchants of Death was, in many ways, the manifesto of a generation of people who swore there would not be and could not be another. 
But here is the kicker: it was co-authored by the founder of Human Events, the conservative weekly. So this is no left-wing screed against profiteering. It is a careful and subtle, but still passionate, attack on those who would use government to profit themselves at the expense of other people's lives and property." - Mises.Org description
The Myth of National Defense: Essays on the Theory and History of Security Production edited by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"More than 200 years after the Declaration of Independence, it seems appropriate to raise the question whether governments have in fact done what they were designed to do, or if experience or theory has provided us with grounds to consider other possibly more effective guards for our future security." - From the introduction to the book
A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State edited by Murray N. Rothbard and Ronald Radosh

Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War by Ludwig von Mises
"This work presents a detailed account of the rise of German aggressive nationalism, culminating in the onset of the Third Reich and its Führer. Mises stresses the role of state-granted monopolistic privileges through the organization of cartels. Because of high protective tariffs, these cartels could practice price discrimination by selling their products at much lower prices abroad than domestically."
...
"To support these and other measures, ideological weapons were necessary. Here the “socialists of the chair,” who dominated the economics and politics faculties of the Prussian university system, played a vital part. Their denigration of classical liberalism and economics paved the way for the statist measures which adherence to correct economics would have averted.
 
Mises elaborately shows the parallels between the teachings of those prominent in the Bismarckian era and the Wilhelmine Reich and the more blatant aggressive nationalism of Hitler and his followers. Mises is thus a “continuity” theorist as regards German history, stressing the similarities rather than the differences between the Nazis and predecessor regimes. His views closely resemble those of F. A. von Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, also published in 1944." - David Gordon, the Mises Bibliography
The Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace by Harry Elmer Barnes
"I charge that the articulate publicists of our country, by their semi-hysterical words in print and speech in which they champion extremes of diplomatic and military policy, are driving us rapidly into a war of unlimited and unattainable objectives which will bring on a gigantic catastrophe of ruin and revolution at home and abroad…." - from the text
A Vindication of Natural Society by Edmund Burke
A note by Murray N. Rothbard
"The first Accounts we have of Mankind are but so many Accounts of their Butcheries. All Empires have been cemented in Blood; and in those early Periods when the Race of Mankind began first to form themselves into Parties and Combinations, the first Effect of the Combination, and indeed the End for which it seems purposely formed, and best calculated, is their mutual Destruction. All ancient History is dark and uncertain. One thing however is clear. There were Conquerors, and Conquests, in those Days; and consequently, all that Devastation, by which they are formed, and all that Oppression by which they are maintained." - From the text
The War and the Intellectuals by Randolph Bourne
War is a Racket by Smedley Butler
"Originally printed in 1935, War Is a Racket is General Smedley Butler's frank speech describing his role as a soldier as nothing more than serving as a puppet for big-business interests. In addition to photos from the notorious 1932 anti-war book The Horror of It by Frederick A. Barber, this book includes two never-before-published anti-interventionist essays by General Butler. The introduction discusses why General Butler went against the corporate war machine and how he exposed a fascist coup d'etat plot against President Franklin Roosevelt. Widely appreciated and referenced by left- and right-wingers alike, this is an extraordinary argument against war - more relevant now than ever." - Amazon.com description
War is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne


Pre-World War
The Conquest of the United States by Spain by William Graham Sumner
"We know that, as time has gone on and we have grown numerous and rich, some of these things have proved impossible ideals, incompatible with a large and flourishing society, but it is by virtue of this conception of a commonwealth that the United States has stood for something unique and grand in the history of mankind and that its people have been happy. It is by virtue of these ideals that we have been “isolated,” isolated in a position which the other nations of the earth have observed in silent envy; and yet there are people who are boasting of their patriotism, because they say that we have taken our place now amongst the nations of the earth by virtue of this war. My patriotism is of the kind which is outraged by the notion that the United States never was a great nation until in a petty three months’ campaign it knocked to pieces a poor, decrepit, bankrupt old state like Spain. To hold such an opinion as that is to abandon all American standards, to put shame and scorn on all that our ancestors tried to build up here, and to go over to the standards of which Spain is a representative." - From the text
Lincoln Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe by Thomas DiLorenzo
Review by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
"Thomas DiLorenzo's The Real Lincoln (2002) was as much an event as it was a book. Here was a brutally frank treatment of a political figure we are all expected to treat with a quiet awe, and certainly not with the kind of serious and sustained scrutiny reserved for mere mortals. With every major aspect of the standard narrative that students are taught about Lincoln laughably and grotesquely false, this book was a shocking reminder of suppressed truths." - Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo
Review by David Gordon
"Why is The Real Lincoln so much superior to Harry Jaffa's A New Birth of Freedom? Jaffa offers a purely textual study: as if he were dealing with Aristotle or Dante, he considers every nuance he can discover or manufacture in Lincoln's speeches. Professor DiLorenzo follows an entirely different course. He compares Lincoln's words with what he actually did, and the result is a historical rather than a mythological figure." - David Gordon, The Despot Named Lincoln
World War I and II
Advance to Barbarism: The Development of Total Warfare From Serajevo to Hiroshima by F.J.P. Veale
"It is one of the greatest triumphs of modern emotional engineering that, in spite of the plain facts of the case which could never be disguised or even materially distorted, the British public, throughout the Blitz Period (1940-1941), remained convinced that the entire responsibility for their sufferings rested on the German leaders." - From the dust jacket

As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn
"John T. Flynn's classic work from 1944 on how wartime planning brought fascism to America. Flynn was a prominent journalist and rare case of an American public intellectual who resisted the onslaught of both the warfare and welfare states during the period in which FDR ruled America. This study links the domestic policy of the New Deal with the drive for war and wartime central planning. He draws attention to the bitter irony that America was becoming precisely what we were fighting. His analysis of fascism is incisive and devastating." - Mises Store Description
Beyond Pearl Harbor: Essays on Some Historical Consequences of the Crisis in the Pacific in 1941 by James J. Martin
"James J. Martin's Beyond Pearl Harbor in a concise introduction to American entry into World War II and the disasterous results of U.S. provocation of the Japanese beginning in 1940. As usual, Martin's essays are written in a crisp style that should appeal to anyone of "residual common sense." - James E. Egolf, Amazon.com Review

"In Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War,” Patrick J. Buchanan seeks to demolish the Churchill myth, along with several related ones, which he does with surprising success. I say “surprising,” not because the myth itself was ever unassailable—excellent historians, including Ralph Raico, long ago pounded Churchill’s feet of clay into dust—but because Buchanan is known primarily as an ideological polemicist. Yet in this book he presents respectably balanced and well-documented arguments for his theses. If he is not himself a professional historian, he has absorbed the works of scores of well-reputed historians, and he carefully assesses a number of counterarguments against his position. Although Buchanan presents no previously unreported facts, he offers abundant evidence expressed in clear, forceful prose. All in all, he makes a persuasive case." - Robert Higgs, The Freeman
Churchill's War: Part I The Struggle for Power; Part II Triumph in Adversity by David Irving
"David Irving present a wealth of hitherto suppressed information, that shows a shockingly unfamiliar portrait of the great statesman, Churchill. Readers will discover a power-hungry leader who prolonged the war to advance his own career, and much more to astonish one and all." - Book description
The High Cost of Vengeance by Freda Utley
"The first critical book about the occupation of defeated Germany, much still unknown or forgotten information. Road to War;  Chapter 6  "The Nuremberg Judgments" was the first analysis of the trials and has been a major research source of critical data." - Fredautley.com
How Diplomats Make War by Francis Nielson, edited by Albert Jay Nock
"...the first truly revisionist account of the origins of World War I to appear in English. It was published only six weeks after he resigned from Parliament." - from the Mises.org description
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization by Nicholson Baker
Review by David Gordon
"The neoconservatives are already in hot pursuit of Human Smoke. In the March 2008 issue of Commentary, David Pryce-Jones called it a "mendacious book." From this review, one might have thought that Nicholson Baker had written a defense of the Third Reich and its Führer. Quite the contrary: no one who reads the book can suspect Baker of the slightest sympathy for Hitler, whose evil deeds receive copious coverage in the book. 
Where, then, lies Baker's offense? Rather than write a standard historical narrative, he presents on each page a separate fact, often taken from contemporary newspaper accounts. A number of these facts show Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in less than a favorable light, and this has proved too much not only for Pryce-Jones but for John Lukacs as well. For Lukacs and his ilk, Churchill is the Schwannritter of the 20th century, and inconvenient truths must not be permitted to jar unwary readers from the veneration properly his due." - David Gordon, The Mises Review
The Illusion of Victory: Americans in World World War 1 by Thomas Fleming
Review by David Gordon
"Thomas Fleming’s outstanding book poses a fundamental problem. Fleming shows that Woodrow Wilson led America into an unnecessary war. Wilson had not the remotest idea of what he wished to accomplish by involvement in World War I, but his ill-considered policies added massive American casualties to the horrendous totals racked up by the European powers. As if this were not enough, Wilson proved totally incompetent at the Paris Peace Conference." - David Gordon, The Mises Review
Memorandum on Resignation by John Viscount Morley
"John Viscount Morley resigns from Herbert H. Asquith’s cabinet, refusing to participate in the British drive for war on Germany led by Sir Edward Grey in August 1914. His subsequent Memorandum on Resignation gives the lie to Britain’s putative solicitude for Belgium’s welfare as motive for embroiling her own people in the conflicts of the continent." - from The Memory Hole
Review by David Gordon
Thomas Fleming has done a great deal to strengthen a standard revisionist contention about America's entry into World War II. Historians opposed to Roosevelt's interventionist diplomacy, such as Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Callan Tansill, have suggested the following argument: Roosevelt, gripped by strong hostility toward Germany, wished ardently to enter the war on the side of the British.
One Year After by Virgil Jordan
"WAR, which we profess to fear or hate, is only one expression of the growth of the power of the State over men’s life and work, which in recent years so many have come to accept, encourage or support as progressive and desirable. Economic warfare, class and labor conflict, inflation, bureaucratic despotism, all forms of compulsory collectivism, national and international “planning,” conspiracy and espionage, and the movement toward a world Superstate—all these and many other features of the economic and political panorama on the road ahead at home and abroad today are merely manifestations of the mania for unlimited government power which is evident everywhere in our time." - from the text

“As the military episode that brought the United States into the second World War, the results of Pearl Harbor already indicate that this produced drastic and possibly ominous changes in the pattern of American relations to the rest of the world.  We voluntarily and arbitrarily assumed unprecedented burdens in feeding and financing a world badly disrupted by war.  The international policy of George Washington and the 'fathers' of the United States, based on non-intervention but not embracing isolation, was terminated for any predictable period.  President Truman continued the doctrine of the interventionist liberals of the latter part of the 1930’s, to the effect that the United States must be prepared to do battle with foreign countries whose basic ideology does not conform with that of the United States. . . . The United States sought to police the world and extend the rule of law on a planetary basis, which actually meant imposing the ideology of our eastern seaboard Establishment throughout the world, by force, if necessary, as in Vietnam.  By the twenty-fifth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, the United States was being informed by both official policy and influential editorials that we must get adjusted to the fact that we face permanent war . . . .” - Harry Elmer Barnes
"...published for the first time in 2010, blows the top off a 70-year cover-up, reporting for the first time on long-suppressed interviews, documents, and corroborated evidence.
The first section (the seeds) provides a detailed history of pre-war U.S.-Japan relations, thoroughly documenting the sources of rising tension. The second section (the fruits) shows that the attack on December 7, 1941 was neither unexpected nor unprovoked. Nor was it the reason that Franklin Roosevelt declared a war that resulted in massive human slaughter. Instead, in exhaustive detail, this book establishes that Pearl Harbor was permitted as a public relations measure to rally the public, shifting the blame from the White House, where it belonged, to the men on the ground who were unprepared for the attack." - Mises Store Description

The Pro-Red Orchestra in the USA, 1941 by James J. Martin
"As the German-Russian War Begins on June 22, 1941, in the 22nd month of World War Two, an event occurred as important in the history of the United States and its relations with the rest of the world as the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, a little less than six months later. This was the invasion by the German armies of Hitler's National Socialist Germany of the portions of Eastern Poland occupied by the armies and political machinery of Stalinist Communist Soviet Russia, and then on deeply into Russia itself.
Upon this act most of that portion of American opinion ranged to the left of center joined in the war psychologically and emotionally, and spent much of its energy from that point on in trying to induce general American sympathy with the cause now heavily weighted in the direction of the interests of Stalinist Communism and its global satellites and sympathetic forces and concerns. A vast sea of printer's ink and a galactic volume of radio babble engulfed the U.S.A. upon the outbreak of formal hostilities between Germany and Russia, most of which concerned whether or not this country should aid the forces of Josef Stalin against those of Adolf Hitler. Eight years of towering and unremitting anti-Hitler propaganda in the U.S.A. had resulted in reducing the pro-German elements in the land to a minority so small as to be, in modern parlance, "statistically irrelevant." - From the Book
Roosevelt and StalinPart I and Part II by Robert Nisbet
"Roosevelt’s pursuit of Stalin is well known after forty years of diaries, memoirs, letters, and biographies since the war. But  on the evidence of a rising mount of writing by scholars and journalists, it is seemingly not known well or not remembered well. More and more we find the Roosevelt courtship denied altogether, or dismissed a s trivia, or otherwise deprecated. This is negligence compounded with ideology. For however we choose to assess the courtship-as the work of idealism and Olympian vision, or a s appalling naivete and credulity, it is a significant episode in the war: one that had effect on Roosevelt’s relationship with Churchill, on actual war strategy and the politics of the peace settlement, and, not for a moment to be missed, on patterns of foreign policy opinion in the United States during the four decades following the war." - from the text 


The War of 1914-1918 by Harry Elmer Barnes
"Harry Elmer Barnes, wearing his revisionist historian hat, briskly retraces the steps taken to get at the facts of the First World War and in the process provides not only the context necessary for understanding the second World War, but the tools as well. From a 1940 book edited by Willard Waller, entitled, War in the twentieth Century, of which the late Keith Stimely said the following: "An able and authoritative symposium which treats of the social and cultural impact of war and states the logical lessons taught by the first world war and its aftermath. It was the impressive but ineffective 'swan song' of the interwar Revisionism." - from The Memory Hole

Post-World War II
Neo-Conned!: Just War Principles: A Condemnation of War in Iraq edited by O'Huallachain and Sharpe
Neo-Conned! Again: Hypocrisy, Lawlessness, and the Rape of Iraq edited by O'Huallachain and Sharpe
Review by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
"I have never recommended a book as strongly as I am recommending Neoconned and Neoconned Again, two new collections of essays that make just about every argument you can think of against the war in Iraq. Now if you're thinking that you've read enough about this subject already, or that such books just aren't your cup of tea, or that you have too much to read as it is, I urge you to abandon such thoughts right away. These books need to be purchased by everyone, right away, this minute, and need to be circulated just as far as possible." - Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Case Against This Monstrous War
Resurgence of the Warfare State: The Crisis Since 9/11 by Robert Higgs
Review by David Gordon
"Robert Higgs has a well-deserved reputation as an eminent economic historian, but in this collection of essays and interviews, he shows himself an adept moral philosopher as well. He subjects the "humanitarian" case for the Iraq War, unfortunately professed by some self-styled libertarians, to withering scrutiny. 
According to the argument Higgs rejects, the justification of the Iraq War does not rest on the supposed presence of WMD. Humanitarian considerations supported the overthrow of the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. True enough, the American invasion has killed innocent people. 
But their deaths have been accidental, and these must be weighed against those who would have suffered and died had Saddam’s government continued in power. 
Higgs rejects completely this sort of moral calculation. "In the present case, making such a judgment with anything approaching well-grounded assurance calls for powers that none of us possess." - David Gordon, The Mises Review
Audio and Video
Civil Liberties in War Time by David Beito
Despotism Loves Company: The Story of Roosevelt and Stalin by Yuri Maltsev
Military Decadence in Ancient Rome by Daniel McCarthy
Modern Democracy and War by Paul Gottfried
The Real Axis of Evil by David Gordon