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

A Century of War: Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt by John V. Denson

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

The Costs of War: America's Pyrrhic Victories edited by John V. Denson

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

War is the Health of the State: Its Meaning by Wendy McElroy

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

Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan
Review by Robert Higgs

"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

The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II by Thomas Fleming

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

Pearl Harbor after a Quarter of a Century by Harry Elmer Barnes

“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

Pearl Harbor: Seeds and Fruits of Infamy by Percy Greaves, Jr.

"...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 Stalin: Part 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