Benjamin asked me to read to him from my book. I told him I didn’t think he’d like it. He asked me to please try anyway.

Rage:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles’ rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon —
The Greek warlord — and godlike Achilles.

Which of the immortals set these two
At each other’s throats?
Apollo,
Zeus’ son and Leto’s, offended
By the warlord. Agamemnon had dishonored
Chryses, Apollo’s priest, so the god
Struck the Greek camp with plague,
And the soldiers were dying of it.
Chryses
Had come to the Greek beachhead camp
Hauling a fortune for his daughter’s ransom.
Displaying Apollo’s sacral ribbons
On a golden staff, he made a formal plea
To the entire Greek army, but especially
The commanders, Atreus’ two sons:

"Sons of Atreus and Greek heroes all:
May the gods on Olympus grant you plunder
Of Priam’s city and a safe return home.
But give me my daughter back and accept
This ransom out of respect for Zeus’ son,
Lord Apollo, who deals death from afar."

A murmur rippled through the ranks:
"Respect the priest and take the ransom."
But Agamemnon was not pleased
And dismissed Chryses with a rough speech:

"Don’t let me ever catch you, old man, by these ships again,
Skulking around now or sneaking back later.
The god’s staff and ribbons won’t save you next time.
The girl is mine, and she’ll be an old woman in Argos
Before I let her go, working the loom in my house
And coming to my bed, far from her homeland.
Now clear out of here before you make me angry!"

The old man was afraid and did as he was told.
He walked in silence along the whispering surf line,
And when he had gone some distance the priest
Prayed to Lord Apollo, son of silken-haired Leto:

"Hear me, Silverbow, Protector of Chryses,
Lord of Holy Cilla, Master of Tenedos,
And Sminthian God of Plague!
If ever I’ve built a temple that pleased you
Or burnt fat thighbones of bulls and goats —
Grant me this prayer:
Let the Danaans pay for my tears with your arrows!"

Benjamin: Is the old man going where he’s not supposed to?

Me: No, he’s not going near Agamemnon’s ships. He’s going away from the ships. But he’s about to do something that will get his daughter back.

Benjamin: Why the man took his daughter?

Me: Um. Well. You see, in ancient times, when grownups would fight, they would fight much worse than kids fight. And sometimes they would take people prisoner, and take them home with them as slaves — to make them work for them in their homes. Do you understand?

Benjamin: No, papa.

Me: OK, well it’s very much like in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, where the Wicked Witch of the West destroys (or seems to destroy) the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, but takes Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion back to her castle, and makes Dorothy clean the castle kitchen for her.

Benjamin: So does the old man throw a bucket of water on him?

Me: Yes. Sort of. Only instead of water, he hits Agamemnon with plague…

During my sojourn in Israel, two things conspired to make me, quite fleetingly, a newspaper reader:

1. Someone — either the Jewish Agency or the kibbutz — provided all ulpanists with free copies of the Jerusalem Post;
2. Israel’s state-run radio and television stations went on strike for 52 days.

So for the only time in my life, I read more than the funny pages when handed a newspaper.

I remember three things from that brief tryst (or was it a forced marriage?):

1. The scandalous official visit to Israel of Italian porn-star-turned-politician Cicciolina;
2. Black Monday;
3. an editorial on why Israel should side with Iran against Iraq.

The gist of the editorial was that Arabs hated Jews more than non-Arab Muslims did, and not only was Iran non-Arab but the Iranians had a strong historical link with the Jews, and the recent anti-Semitic rhetoric from Iran was just bluff and posturing for the Muslim world.

I had no idea what it was talking about. I don’t think I had fully realized before reading that editorial that Iranians are not Arabs (!) and I had no idea what historical links it was referring to. I’m sure I didn’t know that "Iranians" and "Persians" referred to the same people, and if I had known, I didn’t have much clue who the Persians were in history and what their connection was to Judah, Jerusalem, or the Jews.

Now the two worst enemies the Jews had before the Romans destroyed the Temple for the second and last time in 70 AD, were (1) the Babylonians who destroyed the Temple in 587 BC (and exiled the Jews from Judah), and (2) the Seleucids whose treatment of the Jews is written about symbolically in the Book of Daniel and less symbolically in 1 Maccabees.

Iran Rescues Jews from the Babylonians

Cyrus the Great, in founding the first Persian Empire, overthrew the Babylonians, released the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and even sponsored the building of the Second Temple. The Jews were so fond of Cyrus that the Book of Isaiah refers to him as God’s anointed (aka messiah aka christ).

Iran Rescues Jews from "the Grecians"

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, pp. 720f:

Persia

The Jewish victory at Beth-horon was sufficiently spectacular to raise the rebellion from a local tumult to an internationally observed matter. Clearly the prestige of the regime now required that a major effort be put into the suppression of the rebels.

Unfortunately for Antiochus it was easier to see the need than to do something about it. The same old problem arose — lack of money. Furthermore, the empire was fading at the other end, too. If Judas and his army of irregulars were shaking the west, in the east whole provinces were falling away.

The Parthian rulers, who had been subservient to the Seleucids even as late as the reign of Antiochus III, were little by little enlarging their independence. In 171 B.C., a vigorous king, Mithridates I, ascended the Parthian throne and the last vestige of dependence on the Seleucids disappeared. Indeed, Mithridates extended his power in all directions and was making himself a major factor in central Asia.

It may be that if Parthia had remained quiet, Antiochus could have handled the Jewish rebellion. As it was, he found himself pulled in both directions. His prestige abroad, already badly shaken by his humiliation in Egypt, demanded that he not allow the Jews to remain unpunished. On the other hand, if he could but bring the eastern provinces back into the fold, he could collect all the money he needed in the form of punitive tribute. With prestige pulling one way and money the other, he made the worst possible decision. He decided to divide his forces and embark on a two-front war…

As the Arabic proverb supposedly says, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."

So the Persians (aka Parthians aka Iranians) helped out the Jews of Judah twice, once against their Babylonian oppressors and once against their Greco-Syrian oppressors. That’s Big Enemy #1 and Big Enemy #2. What about Big Enemy #3, the Roman oppressors?

Well, no one came to the rescue when the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple, and no one could really help the Jews of Judah after that, because there weren’t really any Jews left in Judah. They were scattered to the neighboring empires, Rome and Rome’s only viable enemy … Persia!

Iran Rescues Jews from the Romans

Despite the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews faired relatively well in the Roman Empire — until the empire became officially Christian, at which point official suppression of the Jewish religion began. But while the Jews were hunkering down for more than a millennium of oppression in the Christian West, Judaism was flourishing in Persia.

Here’s Wikipedia on "The Parthian Period" of Jewish history:

The Parthian Empire was an enduring empire based on a loosely configured system of vassal kings. This lack of a rigidly centralized rule over the empire had its drawbacks, such as the rise of a Jewish bandit-state in Nehardea (see Anilai and Asinai). Yet, the tolerance of the Arsacid dynasty was as legendary as the first Persian dynasty, the Achaemenids. There is even an account that indicates the conversion of a small number of Parthian vassal kings of Adiabene to Judaism. These instances and others show not only the tolerance of Parthian kings, but is also a testament to the extent to which the Parthians saw themselves as the heir to the preceding empire of Cyrus the Great. The Parthians were very protective of the Jewish minority as reflected in old Jewish saying "When you see a Parthian charger chained to a tombstone in the Land of Israel, the hour of the Messiah will be near".

Today, on the front page of JPost.com, the website of the same newspaper in which I read that “pro-Iranian” editorial back in 1987, the third-most-prominent link in their nav bar (after Home and Headlines) is Iranian Threat. That’s before the links for Jewish World, Israel, Middle East, or even Elections ‘09.

I prefer reading history to reading the news.

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, pp. 1203f:

The Four Horsemen

One by one the seals of the book are broken and with each of the first four, a horse and rider appear:

Revelation 6:1.… when the Lamb opened one of the seals…

Revelation 6:2.… behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown…: and he went forth conquering…

Revelation 6:3. And when he had opened the second seal…

Revelation 6:4.… there went out another horse that was red: and power was given to him that sat thereon to take peace from the earth…

Revelation 6:5. And when he had opened the third seal, … lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand.

Revelation 6:6. And I heard a voice … say, A measure of wheat for a penny…

Revelation 6:7. And when he had opened the fourth seal, …

Revelation 6:8.…behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death…

These are the "four horsemen of the apocalypse" representing the variety of evils that were to descend upon the world (specifically upon the Roman Empire, which was viewed by its populace as synonymous with "the world") to mark the beginning of its dissolution and the coming of the Messianic era.

The white horse and its rider seems to represent foreign invasion. At least the bow is the virtual symbol of the Parthian raiders, who since the time of Julius Caesar had been the terror of the east. In the days of Herod the Great, they had occupied Jerusalem, and at no time thereafter were their forces very far to the east.

The red horse and its rider also seem to signify a form of war. It may well represent the bloody disorders of civil war and insurrection.

The black horse and its rider represent famine, for the price offered for a measure of wheat ("a penny") is far higher than normal and is so high in fact that the ordinary populace could not buy enough to live.

The pale horse and its rider are named as "Death," but this is not the kind of death in general that would follow war or famine. That is taken care of by the first three horses. Rather Death represents death by disease, as when we refer to the "Black Death," for instance.

In short, the four horsemen can be most briefly describe as War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence.

There are many who seek the meaning of the symbolism of Revelation in the events that have happened in the centuries since the book was written. To those, never did the four horsemen ride with such effect as in the days of World War I. Not only was there the bloodiest and most stupidly savage slaughter ever seen, on both western and eastern fronts, but there was a revolution in Russia that affects us even today, a famine in both Germany and Russia immediately after the war, and a world-wide influenza pandemic in 1918 that killed more people than the war did.

Never had War, Revolution, Famine, and Pestilence stalked ghastly over the world as in the years rom 1914 to 1920.

"The Revolt of Mattathias" (1 Macc. 2:24) by Gustave Doré

From Asimov’s Guide to the Bible, pp. 717–8, on the Maccabees*:

The spark that initiated the Jewish rebellion against the Seleucids was set off by an officer of Antiochus who came to Modin to enforce the new laws. He asked Mattathias, as a prominent Jewish leader, to set a good example and to carry through a sacrifice in the manner required by law. To Mattathias, this was idolatry and he refused.

However, there were other Jews who were not so insistent on the old ways. The Seleucid officer, in asking Mattathias to perform the sacrifice, pointed out that it was being done by the Jews generally:

1 Maccabees 2:18. …fulfil the king’s commandment, like … the men of Juda … and such as remain at Jerusalem…

In this, he was probably telling the truth. In aftertimes, a successful revolution is looked back upon as the rising of a united nation or group, but most of that is the patriotic gilding of memory, and it is not so. In all revolutions, those who ardently pursue the fight to the death are in the minority and there are usually at least as many who are ardently anti-revolutionary, plus an actual majority that is apathetic and will go where they are led (in either direction), if necessary, but who best prefer to be left alone.

Our own Revolutionary War was conducted by a minority of Rebels who faced not only the British, but Tories who were at least equal in numbers to themselves. And most colonists did not incline strongly to either side. And today the Civil Rights movement among Negroes has, as one of its problems, the apathy of most Negroes.

So it must have been that the Jews in the time of Antiochus were by no means all bitterly anti-Seleucid. Many were willing to conform; perhaps even eager, in their pro-Greek views, to do so. Thus, when Mattathias refused the sacrifice, someone else quickly stepped up to perform it, either out of conviction or, perhaps, out of the thought that unless someone did, the entire town would be massacred.

1 Maccabees 2:23. …there came one of the Jews in the sight of all to sacrifice on the altar … according to the king’s commandment.

At seeing this, Mattathias flew into a rage, slew the Jew and the Seleucid officer. That was the Lexington-and-Concord of the Jewish rebellion. Mattathias and his sons had to flee to the hills, and around them they began to collect other rebels.

* These books are "deuterocanonical," meaning that they are part of the Old Testament for Catholics and Orthodox Christians, but not for Jews or Protestants. The King James Bible lists these books in the Apocrypha.

While I have not been consistently antiwar all my life, I’m certainly there now. (Thanks to Murray Rothbard via Wendy McElroy, several years ago.) And yet, as I strive to remedy the holes in my historical literacy, I find myself drawn into ancient and medieval engineering, which, of course, leads to military history. I don’t love the culture of that niche, but I sure do see the appeal of the niche itself.

If you’d like to see an example of what I’m talking about, I recommend this episode of Nova, which you can buy on DVD:

I enjoyed it so much, that I built my own trebuchet out of paperclips:

Yes, it can hurl mini marshmallows across the room, although this first trebuchet has terrible aim. Paperclip trebuchet #2 will be better.

You can build a trebuchet with a static counterweight, instead of a swinging counterweight like these suspended batteries, but the swinging counterweight turns out to be better. I suspect, however, that a counterweight that swings in two dimensions (e.g., a padlock) rather than in three would be better still. We’ll see. Another way to improve the effectiveness of a trebuchet is to put it on wheels. To understand the math and physics, watch the Nova episode.

Or, if you’re smarter and more educated than I am, you can explore all the web pages out there, such as “The Algorithmic Beauty of the Trebuchet” (www.AlgoBeautyTreb.com).

(I suspect this will eventually be a big part of Benjamin’s homeschooling.)

In my recent reading (and listening), whether the topic is Gilgamesh, the Trojan War, or the Crusades (or surveys such as Worlds at War), I keep coming across the clash-of-civilizations thesis of Samuel Huntington.

I haven’t read Huntington’s own account of his thesis, neither in his Foreign Affairs article nor in his (in)famous book, but I believe I get the gist: whereas Fukuyama and others contend that the end of the Cold War marked the "end of history" in a Hegelian sense (no more thesis or antithesis, just the synthesis of Western neoliberalism and social democracy),

Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future would be along cultural and religious lines. (Wikipedia)

The clash everyone is focused on, of course, is East versus West, where "East" means what we now call the Middle East, what we used to call the Near East, what the ancients called "Asia" back when Asia meant the eastern coast of the Mediterranean — although much of North Africa also counts as the East when we’re focused, as Samuel Huntington apparently is, on the Islamic world.

What I find interesting in both the Huntington thesis and the Fukuyama thesis is the agreement that the "age of ideology" is over. They would apparently agree with the definition that Ludwig von Mises gives for ideology in chapter 9 of Human Action, “The Role of Ideas”:

The concept of an ideology is narrower than that of a worldview. In speaking of ideology, we have in view only human action and social cooperation and disregard the problems of metaphysics, religious dogma, the natural sciences, and the technologies derived from them. Ideology is the totality of our doctrines concerning individual conduct and social relations. Both worldview and ideology go beyond the limits imposed upon a purely neutral and academic study of things as they are. They are not only scientific theories, but also doctrines about the ought, i.e., about the ultimate ends which man should aim at in his earthly concerns.

And at first glance, it looks like Mises might agree with Huntington:

Linguistic terms are unable to communicate what is said about the transcendent; one can never establish whether the hearer conceives them in the same way as the speaker. With regard to things beyond there can be no agreement. Religious wars are the most terrible wars because they are waged without any prospect of conciliation. (Human Action, c9 s2)

Or, as Robert Murphy puts it in his study guide to Human Action,

In contrast to truly religious wars, when it comes to secular (i.e., ideological) conflict there is hope for cooperation, because human society is the great means by which all people can better achieve their differing objectives.

But the clash-of-civilizations thesis (at least in its popular form) seems to be a case of enormous question begging: if you contend that the current conflict between Islam and the West (a) is real, i.e., is more than just a (neo)conservative contrivance, and (b) is a religious war, rather than a political conflict, then the conclusion does seem to follow almost inexorably: there is a fundamental and irreconcilable clash of civilizations to be “waged without any prospect of conciliation”; long-term peace is impossible because the conflict is in “regard to things beyond” and therefore “there can be no agreement.”

Yes, but are the premises correct? Do the terms "the West" and "Islam" describe anything useful in the world of foreign affairs? If they do, and if they are in conflict, is that conflict a religious war or is it over the more temporal, mundane issues of invasion, oppression, exploitation, and the cycle of resentment and vengeance that results from the belief in collective guilt?

Those who want to claim that the clash is religious can point to what the Islamists themselves say about the clash. But so can those who want to claim that US foreign policy is to blame. The whole question is complicated by the fact that the distinction between religion and ideology is one that Islamists (and Christian theonomists and many Orthodox Jews) would reject. The distinction itself is a largely secular one.

(Some Christians think they can find it in the famous "Render unto Caesar" passage in the New Testament (Matthew 22:21), while others contend that that’s a gross misreading. I can’t really address that, but I take seriously Ralph Raico’s point that Matthew 22:21 wasn’t enough to separate Church and State in the Byzantine Empire. Classical liberalism isn’t Christian in its origins so much as it’s Western Christian.)

I accept the Western distinction between ideology and religion, and I find Mises’s presentation of it especially helpful. But the distinction itself isn’t enough to answer the question as to whether or not there is a fundamental clash of civilizations more akin to ancient religious wars than to modern ideological conflicts. The claim that we’re in the middle of a new type of religious war would have to mean (it seems to me) either that Islam is hell bent on destroying the West, or vice versa. The Islam-as-aggressor thesis is probably easier for most Westerners to swallow. But the mission to spread freedom and democracy — if it’s more than a neocon cover for a naked power grab — is an attack on Islam, as many Muslims perceive it. Let’s not lose track, however, of a different distinction: between Wilsonian foreign policy and Western civilization. Some of us would argue, in fact, that aggressive foreign policy, no matter what the stated goals or intentions, is utterly decivilizing.

What about the idea that Islam is out to destroy the West? I don’t deny that it’s possible, but it seems to be the old Cold War thesis dressed up in head scarves. Yes, Communist theory demanded worldwide revolution. Yes, Islamic scripture demands the equivalent. But so does Catholicism, and yet the Church has settled into an antiwar position after all these centuries. Why not Islam? And just as the Soviet political class paid lip service to the universalist rhetoric of Marxism while pursuing its own self-interest (and just as the American political class does the same with talk of liberty and the public welfare), so, I’m guessing, must the Muslims in power (or those seeking power) speak to one standard while pursuing a different one. A quick perusal of the Islamic empires of history would seem to confirm this suspicion.

I’m not trying to argue for a vulgar-materialist analysis of history and foreign policy. I do understand, as Mises emphasized, that ideas drive history.

So how do we reconcile a belief in power politics with a belief in the historical and political importance of religion and ideology?

One answer lies in classical-liberal class-conflict theory. It’s not workers versus capitalists; it’s not East versus West; it’s always a question of us against our masters, the productive class versus the political class. War is not a conflict between nations or religions; it is a conflict between the people and their governments, with nationalism and religion used by the political class to cover its tracks. The relevance of ideas is precisely in the role they play in either obscuring or revealing this orthogonal clash between the powers of civilization and the powers of decivilization.

I recommend Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War, not necessarily for Pagden’s pro-Western antireligious thesis (at least, not in any particulars) but as an excellent historical and cultural review of what the book’s subtitle calls "the 2500-Year Struggle Between East and West" — where "East" is used in the ancient sense of western Asia (Troy, Phoenicia, Persia) and northeastern Africa (Egypt, Phoenician Carthage), and in the modern sense of Islam.

In a recent personal correspondence with my favorite conservative Rothbardian about Robert Spencer’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), my comrade wrote, "The fact that U.S. foreign policy is stupid and evil doesn’t make Islam any less illiberal."

I think that’s right, and I think that it’s a point that’s missed by many modern liberals, for whom all cultures and religions are equal and compatible a priori. If you don’t treat this supposed equality as axiomatic, its falseness is quickly evident.

Pagden does not, however, find Christianity superior to Islam in any intrinsic sense. His thesis in Worlds at War seems to be that Christianity was too weak and contained too many inner contradictions to provide the basis for a lasting theocracy, and that Christianity’s weakness was the basis of the West’s great strength. Our individualism, our traditions of tolerance, and our less-hampered markets (and therefore our industrial and technological superiority) are all the result of our secularism, Pagden contends. Three cheers for atheism. I’m a pro-Western atheist myself (as Murray Rothbard is reported to have said to Father Robert Sirico, "I don’t believe in God, but I believe that Mary was His mother."), and I agree with Pagden that the essential ingredient in the history of Western civilization was the separation of Church and State, but Pagden somehow manages to lay all the blame for illiberalism at the feet of monotheism. Not only does that implicitly let the State itself off the hook, but it fails to account for the importance of the checks and balances provided by the ongoing struggle between the two. In the Western contest between Church and State, the State has won, and the ever-weakening power of the Church has been accompanied by ever-growing power of the illiberal State.

Patrick Shaw-Stewart was an Oxford scholar who died in WWI. He wrote this during 3 days of R&R as he waited to be sent to fight at Gallipoli, which is across the Dardenelles (formerly known as the Hellespont) from the site of ancient Troy:

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn’s cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days’ peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o’er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

This paragraph from Human Action forces me to check my vulgar antimilitary reflexes and seek a subtler understanding of the nature of demand and the fallacy of manufactured demand:

The moralists’ and sermonizers’ critique of profits misses the point. It is not the fault of the entrepreneurs that the consumers — the people, the common man — prefer liquor to Bibles and detective stories to serious books, and that governments prefer guns to butter. The entrepreneur does not make greater profits in selling "bad" things than in selling "good" things. His profits are the greater the better he succeeds in providing the consumers with those things they ask for most intensely. People do not drink intoxicating beverages in order to make the "alcohol capital" happy, and they do not go to war in order to increase the profits of the "merchants of death." The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause. (c15, s9)

What did Mises make of President Eisenhower’s warning of a growing “military-industrial complex”? Did he dismiss the MIC as a left-wing bogey man? And what did Rothbard make of the statement, “The existence of the armaments industries is a consequence of the warlike spirit, not its cause”?

We Rothbardians tend to reject the standard left-wing claims about “manufactured demand” when they are hurled at private enterprise; do we fall into a similar fallacy when we imply a manufactured demand for military spending?

In one sense, no, it’s not parallel: you can get people to “support” all sorts of things when they’re not free to volunteer or withhold payment. Political polls on spending priorities falsely imply that how people choose to spend their dollars and how they want the government to spend “its” dollars is somehow the same thing.

Of course it’s not. My real-life expressed preferences, complete with internalized opportunity costs and the direct benefit of my spending decisions, are very concrete. They reveal my values based on what trade-offs I’ve actually made. My vocalized “preferences” for how tax dollars are spent is always abstract, and produces very little practical consequence for me either way.

So when the voting public howls for Osama’s head or Saddam’s head or for the head of whoever is the current bad guy, there’s definitely something manufactured about this “demand” — something orchestrated. People tend to lose their enthusiasm for war when they start to see the bill, so to speak. This suggests that their initial support for war would be similarly muted if they had to make the immediate choice of reaching into their wallets and paying for war or using that same money instead to buy beer or books, faster DSL or a bigger HDTV.

But there’s another sense in which I think I’ve been sloppy in attributing power to the malevolent MIC. I sometimes unthinkingly blame the arms dealers for the knee-jerk hawks themselves. When, in fact, the hawks are just knee jerks.

I think there’s a lot to be said for the political power of hiding the costs of policy. But this externalization of costs is really different from the manufacturing of demand. A more pacific people would not have fallen for the great neo-Con, no matter how much the books were cooked.

It is not the business of the entrepreneurs to make people substitute sound ideologies for unsound. It rests with the philosophers to change people’s ideas and ideals. The entrepreneur serves the consumers as they are today, however wicked and ignorant. (Ibid.)

One of the books that is still on sale at Audible.com is Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

Some Austrian scholars are discussing it on one of the mailing lists, and I decided to move it from my wishlist to my shopping cart.

I can’t really review or recommend it, since I’ve only listened to about a quarter of it, so far, but I suspect I’ll be giving it a thumbs up.

Meanwhile, I mention it here because I’m overwhelmed by how much of it already vindicates

1. Murray Rothbard’s foreign-policy analysis from the 1950s onward, and

2. Robert Anton Wilson’s information-theory analysis from "Celine’s Laws," which you can read here on my website.

Jeffrey Tucker writes:

The phrase "Merchants of Death" takes center stage in the movie Iron Man, which is a spectacular exposé of a subject that dominates the American economic landscape but about which Americans have very little knowledge. The phrase and the movie deal with the odd juxtaposition of capitalism and war as found in the weapons industry. Here we have innovations and efficiency of the type we associate with the private commercial sector but serving ends that are the very opposite of capitalism. The industry serves war, not peace, depends on coercion, not human volition, and profits from destruction, not creation.…

The existence of such an industry scandalized Americans in the interwar period, and there was one treatise that led the way in helping to foment the outrage. In fact, it was a bestselling book in 1934 with the title Merchants of Death. This book is not a typical left-wing style attacks on commerce as the essence of war. In fact, it argues the opposite:

“The arms industry did not create the war system.
On the contrary, the war system created the arms industry.”

FULL ARTICLE

[This article by Murray N. Rothbard follows "The Road to Civil War," and is excerpted from the same unpublished report to the Volker Fund, 1961.]

The Civil War was one of the most momentous events in American history, not only for its inherent drama and destruction, but because of the fateful consequences for America that flowed from it.

We have said above that the War of 1812 had devastating consequences for the libertarian movement; indeed, it might be said that it took twenty years of devotion and hard work for the Jacksonian movement to undo the étatist consequences of that utter failure of a war. It is the measure of the statist consequences of the Civil War that America never recovered from it: never again was the libertarian movement to have a party of its own, or as close a chance at success. Hamiltonian neo-Federalism beyond the wildest dreams of even a J.Q. Adams had either been foisted permanently on America, or had been inaugurated, to be later fulfilled.

Let us trace the leading consequences of the War Against the South: there is, first, the enormous toll of death, injury, and destruction. There is the complete setting aside of the civilized "rules of war" that Western civilization had laboriously been erecting for centuries: instead, a total war against the civilian population was launched against the South. The symbol of this barbaric and savage oppression was, of course, Sherman’s march through Georgia and the rest of the South, the burning of Atlanta, etc. (For the military significance of this reversion to barbarism, see F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism). Another consequence, of course, was the ending of effective states’ rights, and of the perfectly logical and reasonable right of secession—or, for that matter, nullification. From now on, the Union was a strictly compulsory entity.

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[This article by Murray N. Rothbard is excerpted from a 30,000-word report to the Volker Fund, written in September 1961, giving a very detailed description of everything wrong with A History of the American Republic by George B. DeHuszar. The full memo will be included in the forthcoming collection Renaissance Man, edited by David Gordon.]

The road to Civil War must be divided into two parts:

1. the causes of the controversy over slavery leading to secession, and
2. the immediate causes of the war itself.

The reason for such split is that secession need not have led to Civil War, despite the assumption to the contrary by most historians.

The basic root of the controversy over slavery to secession, in my opinion, was the aggressive, expansionist aims of the Southern "slavocracy." Very few Northerners proposed to abolish slavery in the Southern states by aggressive war; the objection — and certainly a proper one — was to the attempt of the Southern slavocracy to extend the slave system to the Western territories. The apologia that the Southerners feared that eventually they might be outnumbered and that federal abolition might ensue is no excuse; it is the age-old alibi for "preventive war." Not only did the expansionist aim of the slavocracy to protect slavery by federal fiat in the territories as "property" aim to foist the immoral system of slavery on Western territories; it even violated the principles of states’ rights to which the South was supposedly devoted — and which would logically have led to a "popular sovereignty" doctrine.

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