Henry Clay’s “American System” Was Bad News for the American Economy *Then*, and Will Be Again [updated]

 

GUEST POST

This bizarre protectionist manifesto (above) was posted and now appears to have been scrubbed from the Daily Caller's website. No wonder.

The author—a former Senior Policy Advisor to JD Vance in the Senate—has recently been appointed as Trump's "Special Assistant for Domestic Policy." An archived link of his article gives a glimpse of what this "Special Assistant" and his bosses believe. In short, as Phil Magness and James Harrigan explain in this guest post, it's outright Neo-LaRouchie lunacy rooted in the mercantilist economic doctrines of 19th century arch-protectionist Henry Clay—and "American System" whose modern rehabilitators conveniently leave out the fact that every time it was tried in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Clay’s program unleashed a torrent of preventable policy disasters.”

In other words, it's protectionist junk all the way down that will lift no-one anywhere ....

Henry Clay’s “American System” Was Bad News for the American Economy Then, and Will Be Again

by Phil Magness & James Harrigan

Some ideas are so bad we are doomed to relive them with each successive generation. Until recently, economic central planning from the political right received far less attention than its well-known manifestations on the left. Think of all the repeated attempts to rehabilitate Marxism and socialism, despite their disastrous track record over the last century. Unfortunately, an emerging faction on the political right has decided to deploy economic planning of their own as an intended countermeasure against their progressive foes. For inspiration, they’ve resurrected a failed and long-forgotten idea from the 19th century: Henry Clay’s “American System.”

Clay’s program was first articulated in an 1824 speech, in which he proposed using the Constitution’s tax and regulatory powers to execute America’s first national foray into centralised economic planning. His basic idea was to enlist the might of the federal government to strategically develop certain sectors of the American economy by subsidising them with tax dollars, and penalizing their foreign competitors with high protective tariffs.

Clay maintained that import tariffs could be used to give American manufacturers a leg up over European goods, while also cultivating “infant industries” that he deemed to be in the young nation’s strategic interests. Topping off the package, Clay proposed a spending spree on federally subsidised “internal improvements,” such as roads and canals to facilitate internal commerce, and a strong central bank to facilitate the financing of large government programs through the issuance of sovereign debt. In total, the program amounted to a comprehensive attempt at economic planning around the mistaken belief that trade is a zero-sum game, and countries were locked in a continuous struggle to maximise their industrial outputs by subsidising themselves and taxing their perceived foreign competitors.

If all of this sounds vaguely familiar, it should. It’s part of the protectionist-tariff playbook we witnessed during the Trump presidency. Or maybe it’s better seen, as William Galston asserts, as representing “an effort to bring some ideological coherence to the impulses Donald Trump represents—nationalism, isolationism, social conservatism, and hostility to immigration.” Indeed, Robert Lighthizer, the former Trump cabinet official who is considered the architect of his international trade policy, recently called for the adoption of a “New American System” based on Clay’s 1824 proposal at a speech in Washington, D.C. Henry Clay’s scheme similarly assumed centre stage at a National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Florida, when historian Michael Lind depicted him as the true successor to the American founding, by way of Alexander Hamilton. Clay’s ideas have also found an institutional home at the American Compass, a think tank set up by Oren Cass, Mitt Romney’s former economic advisor. 

It would be difficult to overstate the rapid pace at which Clay’s ideas have surged out of obscurity and into political discussions on the right. Barely two decades ago, discussions of it were almost entirely relegated to the peripheral fringes of American politics. Today, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invokes Clay as a model for constructing a US industrial policy to counter the economic rise of China.

The fundamental problem with this line of reasoning is that it rests on bad economic history, overlaid with the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc.

The “new American System” advocates tell a version of US economic history that goes something like this: 

• In the early 19th century, the United States entered the world scene as an economic backwater facing insurmountable competition from the established industrial nations of Europe, and particularly Great Britain. 
• By the turn of the twentieth century, the United States had emerged as one of the world’s great industrial powers, even surpassing the Old World despite getting a later start. 
• The credit for this growth, they claim, goes to the “American System” policies that Clay championed: high protective tariffs, subsidized “internal improvements,” the gradual expansion of a powerful central bank, and all around economic planning.

Even the basic claims of this story are in error. however. As economist Douglas Irwin has shown, proponents of the theory that tariffs drove American economic growth “have tended to present statistics that overstate late nineteenth century US growth in comparison to other periods and countries.” After examining the empirical evidence, Irwin concludes, 

It is difficult to attribute much of a positive role for the tariff because import tariffs probably raised the price of imported capital goods, thereby discouraging capital accumulation.

He accordingly rules out the theory that trade protection, the main plank of Clay’s platform, caused the United States to become a world economic power.

But there are even-more-fundamental problems with the new “American System” theorists’ history. They get basic facts wrong about the nature of 19th century economic policy, while simultaneously obscuring or ignoring the many downsides of Clay’s program and its attempted implementation.

The Rise and Demise of the American System

Though once a popular political slogan, Clay’s American System fell into disrepute after a series of discrediting blows in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The first came in 1832, when President Andrew Jackson vetoed legislation to recharter the United States’ corruption-plagued central bank. The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 resuscitated this legacy, along with its tendency to engage in political manipulation of monetary policy, though the Bank War did manage to constrain the push for centralisation on that front for much of the 19th century.

Clay’s original tariff program endured a bit longer, finding legislative support at various points between 1824 and 1930. As the chart below shows, however, the 19th century was not an uninterrupted experiment in Clay-style protectionism. Clay only briefly got his way when a series of tariff measures between 1824 and 1828 jacked the average rate on dutiable goods to over 60 percent. The “Tariff of Abominations,” as the 1828 measure came to be known, sparked a political crisis that brought the country to the brink of disunion, after South Carolina attempted to nullify the high tax measure. As the graph shows, from 1833 until the Civil War, the United States charted a course of tariff liberalization, save for a brief interruption when Clay’s Whig Party attained power in 1842. In fact, in 1846 US Treasury Secretary Robert Walker orchestrated a major tariff liberalization to coincide with Great Britain’s famous repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws that same year.

The United States did not reimpose high tariffs in the Clay model with any degree of permanence until the second half of the nineteenth century. While this period did coincide with economic growth, the claim of a causal relationship ignores the fact that the American economic ascendance was already well underway, preceding those tariffs by several decades, and getting its start in a time of relative trade liberalisation on both sides of the Atlantic.

One of the main reasons Henry Clay struggled to get his American System launched in his own lifetime (1777-1852) was the political corruption it always attracted. In practice, the American System’s rationalization of trade protectionism provided cover for rampant graft and favoritism. From the moment of its inception, politically connected special interests seized control of federal tariff legislation and reshaped it to their own benefit. They lobbied for punitive tax rates on their competitors and pork-laden handouts for themselves, even if it meant overtaxing commerce at the expense of revenue itself. At several points in the 19th century, protectionist tariffs pushed the US tax system into the upper half of the Laffer Curve, where rates became so onerous that they undermined the intake of federal tax revenue. This was by design, as protectionist tariffs use taxes as a weapon to deter foreign goods from even entering the country.

The American System and Slavery

Clay’s American System also struggled to disentangle its doctrines from the institution of slavery. Its underlying theory held that the American economy could be “harmonised” and internally integrated through national economic planning. That meant deploying “internal improvements” and the tariff schedule to bind northern industry and southern agriculture together in economic symbiosis. Clay’s doctrines amounted to an early experiment in import substitution: the strategy of using tariffs and other commercial restrictions to divert raw-material production away from international markets and into a heavily subsidised domestic industry. In practice, this meant intentionally shifting southern cotton production away from transatlantic markets and into the textile mills of New England. In order for the American System to function as intended, it would have to subsidise plantation agriculture as well as northern industry.

Some of the American System’s proponents, including Clay himself, eventually recognized that a full “harmonisation” of the US economy under the American System would entail significant public expenditures to develop southern agriculture, thereby politically entrenching slavery in perpetuity. Clay (who, despite being a slave-owner, had reservations about the institution) therefore devised what is often referred to as the “Whig formula” for addressing slavery through a scheme of federally compensated gradual emancipation.

To facilitate this program, Clay appended the American System doctrine with another plank. In addition to paying for “internal improvements,” federal land sale revenue would be allocated to “colonise” or resettle the African-American population of the United States in faraway tropical locations such as Liberia or Central America. As Clay explained in an 1847 speech, federally subsidised colonisation “obviated one of the greatest objections which was made to gradual emancipation,” that being the “continuance of the emancipated slaves among us.” Following Clay, American System theorists such as economists Mathew Carey and his son Henry C. Carey began to champion the black colonisation movement as a “solution” to the problems that slavery presented to their tariff and subsidy scheme. In order to make the system work without plantation slavery, they would simply export the freed slaves abroad.

Aside from a few experiments such as the founding of Liberia, such schemes proved impractical, and eventually succumbed to political obstacles during the American Civil War. Clay’s tariff system nonetheless gained a foothold on the eve of the war, as protectionist interests exploited the chaotic “secession winter” legislative session of 1860-61 to cram the pork-laden Morrill Tariff Act through Congress—dramatically hiking tariffs from (declining) average rate of below twenty percent, to a suffocating imposition of almost fifty percent!

A Civil War Diplomatic Disaster

Although the 1861Morrill Tariff succeeded in finally installing an American-System-style tariff regime for the next half-century, it quickly turned into a diplomatic disaster. The new law’s steep protectionist rates alienated the British government, which would otherwise have been a natural anti-slavery ally to the Union cause. At the outbreak of the war, British abolitionist and free-trader Richard Cobden wrote his friend Charles Sumner, the US Senator from Massachusetts, to plead the importance of free trade to the anti-slavery cause. “In your case we observe a mighty quarrel: on one side protectionists, on the other slave-owners.” Citing the Morrill Tariff supporters’ publicly expressed reluctance to move against slavery, Cobden predicted the measure would imperil his efforts to steer Britain to the aid of the North. As he rhetorically asked his fellow abolitionist Sumner, “Need you wonder at the confusion in John Bull’s poor head?”

As part of the fallout, the Lincoln administration entered the White House facing an irate diplomatic landscape. In part alienated by the tariff, Britain adopted a stance of neutrality toward the two American belligerents. After successive missteps further soured the Lincoln Administration’s relationship with London, abolitionists such as Cobden had to mobilise opinion on the British homefront against the Confederacy by reminding people of slavery’s central role in the war. The diplomatic row, which began with an ill-conceived and opportunistic tariff bill on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration, would plague US-UK relations for decades to come. Its wartime effect thrust the incoming administration into a needlessly hostile diplomatic situation, handicapping the Union’s war efforts from abroad.

As a domestic economic policy, the Morrill Tariff served a slew of special interests in the northeast by placing punitive taxes on their competitors. It did not finance the Union war effort (as is often incorrectly claimed by American System enthusiasts) as it was never intended for the purpose of raising revenue. The Morrill Tariff primarily aimed to deter commerce from abroad at the behest of domestic manufacturing, allowing them to capture increased prices on their own goods. As a war measure, it amounted to a self-inflicted wound by alienating Britain from the Union’s cause.

How Clay’s Tariffs Gave Us the Income Tax

After the Civil War, the tariff issue came to dominate American economic policy. Until 1909, the successors to Clay’s “American System” generally enjoyed the upper hand. That year, President William Howard Taft called for a routine revision to the federal tariff schedule that quickly devolved into a corrupt free-for-all of tariff favoritism and special-interest handouts.

Amidst the backlash against the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act’s special-interest free-for-all, a coalition of free trade Democrats and breakaway Republican “insurgents” in the US Senate turned to a radical solution. Realising that they would never break the monied interests of the protectionist lobby, they proposed restructuring the entire federal tax system by shifting it away from the corruption-prone tariff schedule. The result was the 16th Amendment, a flanking move that tried to substitute the protective tariff system with the federal income tax. The amendment, one legislator boasted at the time, would serve as a “club to beat down the tariff” by separating the federal tax system from the entrenched protectionist lobby.

For a fleeting moment, the strategy worked. In 1913, Congress cut import tariffs to their lowest point since the 1850s, and imposed a modest income tax to make up for the loss of revenue. The special-interest groups quickly reconstituted though, and in 1922 they succeeded in exploiting an economic downturn in the agriculture sector to make the case for renewed protectionism. Since the income tax already provided the lion’s share of tax revenue, lawmakers no longer had to worry themselves about jacking up tariff rates to prohibitive levels. As a result of this post-World War I resurrection of Clay’s “American System,” the United States ended up with the worst of both worlds: high tariffs to raise the prices on imported goods at the behest of their domestic competitors, and a new federal income tax to extract revenue from them at every opportunity.

When Americans complete their income tax filings today, few realise that the interminable frustrations of this annual ritual have their origins in a now-obscure tariff bill. It was the corrupt overreach of Clay’s “American System,” though, that ultimately bequeathed us with the modern IRS.

Smoot-Hawley and the Collapse of Clay’s Doctrine

The legislative progeny of Henry Clay’s doctrines finally came to a catastrophic head in 1930 when Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff. The measure passed in a desperate attempt to shield special interests from the 1929 stock market crash, although its legislative origin predated “Black Monday” – October 28, 1929 – by several months. The congressional record shows that Smoot-Hawley took its direct inspiration from Clay’s doctrines. The debate on the bill commenced in the House of Representatives earlier that May. Making the case for the protectionist side, Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY) declared that “the Republican Party has just one viewpoint, and that is to protect American labour and American industry, not through a competitive tariff but through a tariff that actually protects.” To reinforce his point, Fish quoted “a brief extract from a speech of Henry Clay in favor of a protective tariff…which has never been improved on and has constituted the Republican tariff doctrine for the past 70 years.” After quoting Clay’s American System speech from 1824, Fish offered his rationale for adopting a renewed protectionist policy in 1929. It reads like a talking point from Oren Cass’s American Compass today:

The prosperity of this Nation [claimed Fish] has been built up because the Republican Party has hewed to the line to protect American labor and American industry and to conserve the home markets from ruinous competition with the low-paid labour in foreign countries.;

In a prescient response, another representative challenged Fish by warning that a tariff hike could lead to economic turmoil, including triggering a harmful turn in already-uneasy unemployment numbers. If the tariff passed, was Fish ready to take “credit for the general condition of unemployment that now exists in the United States?” After dissembling over particular, contested tariff rates and the need to serve a multitude of special interest constituencies, Fish reiterated the philosophical justification for pushing ahead. He again invoked Henry Clay’s American System:

That principle was laid down by Henry Clay—the principle of protecting the home market. It is just the reverse of the English attitude. They export 90 percent and only absorb 10 percent of their products in their own home market: We consume in this country 90 percent of our home product and export 10 percent. The question is simply whether you prefer to conserve the home market and protect American wage earners or let the products of low-paid foreign labour destroy the home market for the American producer.

The stock market crash in October poured gasoline onto an already-burning fire as the Smoot-Hawley bill progressed through Congress. The pork-barrel free-for-all saw money changing hands between lobbyists and legislators on the floor of the committee rooms, as industry after industry attempted to purchase “protection” for itself from the unfolding economic recession. They thought they were weathering the storm by obtaining legislative favors. Instead, the cumulative hikes of Smoot-Hawley boosted tariff rates to a historic high of almost 60 percent on all dutiable goods entering the United States. The measure provoked a wave of retaliatory protectionism across the world. In just four short years, Smoot-Hawley had inadvertently triggered a global collapse in international commerce.

The effects may be seen in the famous “spiral” graph published by the League of Nations’ World Economic Survey in 1933. By pursuing the course advised under the “American System” doctrine, the United States directly helped to put the “Great” in “Great Depression.”

Repeating Old Mistakes

The National Conservative argument for the “American System” correctly observes that there were moments in United States history when the country largely adhered to Henry Clay’s suite of high protectionist tariffs, public works projects, and allegedly "strategic" industrial subsidies. They also choose to deemphasise, or may even remain ignorant of, the American System’s more ignominious legacies. You will seldom encounter, for example, a NatCon who seriously engages with the moral conundrum that slavery created for Clay’s import-substitution scheme before the Civil War. The American System’s colonisation plank is almost entirely absent from these discussions, and its propensity for attracting graft and corruption in its later iterations is almost always swept under the rug.

Instead, the version they present is an idealised form of seamlessly executed economic planning, albeit for “strategic” purposes in the “national interest” instead of the left’s usual litany of social justice causes. The inherent coordination problems of centralised economic planning do not simply melt away when it is directed at nationalist objectives instead of progressive, redistributive goals.

But there’s an even-more-fundamental problem with the American System narrative. Its modern rehabilitators conveniently leave out the fact that every time it was tried in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Clay’s program unleashed a torrent of preventable policy disasters.

In 1828, a protective tariff pushed the country to the brink of disunion while also demonstrating Clay’s own inability to extricate his program from the slave economy. In 1861, Clay’s economic philosophy triggered a diplomatic crisis with Britain that unwittingly alienated an anti-slavery ally from the Union cause. In 1909, the heirs of Clay’s economics became so thoroughly beholden to the corrupt dealings of the tariff lobby that a section of their own party revolted and ushered in the haphazardly designed federal income tax system that plagues us to this day. And in 1930, Clay’s political progeny steered the country directly into economic ruin by embracing an American-System-inspired tariff program as its main countermeasure to the unfolding Great Depression. While Clay’s latter-day advocates jump at every opportunity to credit him for late-19th-century American economic growth despite a weak empirical basis for the claim, they also conveniently omit the track record of real and tangible blunders that followed from a century of experiments in American System economic policy.

In the case of the Clay-inspired Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the resulting collapse in international trade proved so disastrous that it largely expunged the American System’s advocates from both political parties in the post-war 20th century. Starting with the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act in 1934, Congress embarked on a slow-but-steady retreat from protectionism that continued until the early 2000s. The passage of time has, unfortunately, dampened our memory of Smoot-Hawley’s self-inflicted wounds, to say nothing of Clay’s 19th-century failings. Now the National Conservatives deceive themselves into believing that they have rediscovered hidden knowledge from our economic past: knowledge that will allow them to beat the central planners of the left by putting their own spin on central planning from the right. In reality, they risk haplessly stumbling into the same mistakes that discredited Clay’s American System in the eyes of the last generation to experience its results.

America’s progressive left have always, either tacitly or by expression, bought into the impulses of economic planning. The shocking thing happening now is that we have conservative participation in the American System too, and why wouldn’t we? Tariffs are a dyed in the wool political winner for anyone who wants to push them onto the American people—even as they're a loser economically. Those people never seem all that interested in getting past the emotive costume of tariffs. “Let the other guy, the foreigner, pay the bill for a change.” That tariffs are coming back around to steal all kinds of American wealth never quite makes the evening news.

So elements of the right have jumped onto this centrally-planned economic train. And why wouldn’t they? There are illusions of easy political wins to be had. And that’s all you really need to know.

* * * *

Phil Magness is a Senior Fellow at the Independent Institute and the David J. Theroux Chair in Political Economy. He has served as Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, and as Academic Program Director at the Institute for Humane Studies and Adjunct Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Policy and Government at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. from George Mason University' s School of Public Policy.

He is the author of multiple books and essays including Social Science Quarterly (Summer 2019) “James M. Buchanan and the Political Economy of Desegregation,” Co-authored with Art Carden and Vincent Geloso; “The American System and the Political Economy of Black Colonization.” Journal of the History of Economic Thought, (June 2015); “Morrill and the Missing Industries: Strategic Lobbying Behavior and the Tariff of 1861.” Journal of the Early Republic, 29 (Summer 2009);  The 1619 Project: A Critique; and Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement.

James Harrigan is a former Senior Research Fellow at AIER. He is also co-host of the Words & Numbers podcast.
Dr. Harrigan was previously Dean of the American University of Iraq-Sulaimani, and later served as Director of Academic Programs at the Institute for Humane Studies and Strata, where he was also a Senior Research Fellow.
He has written extensively for the popular press, with articles appearing in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, U.S. News and World Report, and a host of other outlets. He is also co-author of Cooperation & Coercion. His current work focuses on the intersections between political economy, public policy, and political philosophy.

This article was previously post at the AIER blog, and is republished here under a Creative Commons 4.0 License.

UPDATE:

So you now have the information to correct the bizarre a-historical assertion just made (below) by the Moron In Chief. So as a quick pop-quiz question, explain in 20 words or less why he is so mistaken. [HINT: In relation to tariffs and the production of wealth, you should probably use words like "despite" rather than "caused by."]

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

"[T]he period of roughly five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln as President in November 1860, and his inauguration in March 1861 ... were the months in which, one after the other, the slaveholding states of the South voted to secede from the Union. ...
    "The most disconcerting feature ... are the many parallels between the America of then, and the New Zealand of now. ... 

"From a strictly ideological standpoint, it is the Decolonisers who match most closely the racially-obsessed identarian radicals who rampaged through the streets of the South in 1860-61, demanding secession and violently admonishing all those suspected of harbouring Northern sympathies. Likewise, it is the Indigenisers who preach a racially-bifurcated state in which the ethnic origin of the citizen is the most crucial determinant of his or her political rights and duties.
    "Certainly, in this country, the loudest clamour and the direst threats are directed at those who argue that New Zealand must remain a democratic state in which all citizens enjoy equal rights, irrespective of wealth, gender, or ethnic origin, and in which the property rights of all citizens are safeguarded by the Rule of Law.
    "These threats escalated alarmingly following the election of what soon became the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Government. ... The profoundly undemocratic nature of the fire-eaters’ opposition was illustrated by their vehement objections to the ACT Party’s policy of holding a binding referendum to entrench, or not, the 'principles' of the Treaty of Waitangi. Like the citizens of South Carolina, the first state to secede, the only votes they are willing to recognise are their own. ...

"Those New Zealanders who believe unquestioningly in the desirability of decolonisation and indigenisation argue passionately that they are part of the same great progressive tradition that inspired the American Abolitionists of 160 years ago. But are they?
    "Did the Black Abolitionist, and former slave, Frederick Douglass, embrace the racial essentialism of Moana Jackson? Or did he, rather, wage an unceasing struggle against those who insisted, to the point of unleashing a devastating civil war, that all human-beings are not created equal?
    "What is there that in any way advances the progressive cause about the casual repudiation of Dr Martin Luther King Jnr’s dream that: 'one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character'? ...

"Does denying human equality and rejecting the principles of colour-blind citizenship place you among the baddies? Yes, I’m afraid it does."

~ Chris Trotter from his post 'Are We The Baddies?'

Q: Was the American Civil War really about slavery?

Q: Was the American Civil War really about slavery?
A: Yes. Yes, it really was. The “states right” the secessionists truly cared about was slavery.

Q: So why the continuing controversy over the American Civil War?
A: Because, says Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, “many people don’t want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution.”

 

For more information on the Civil War, check out :

• The West Point History of the Civil War, an interactive e-book that brings the Civil War to life in a way that's never been done. Click here -> The West Point History of the Civil War
• The Articles of Secession of the slave states, each of whom cited in seceding their motivating cause: i.e., their “peculiar institution” of slavery”
• The Confederate Vice President’s ‘Cornerstone Speech,’ declaring the Confederacy’s causes of secession: “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. …Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery -- subordination to the superior race -- is his natural and normal condition. [Applause.]”
• The Lincoln-Douglas debates, wherein Lincoln sagely observed “a house divided against itself [by slavery] cannot stand.”

.

Monuments

Despite the ridiculously overblown claims of assorted idiots either quoting or  thoroughly misunderstanding George Orwell’s warning against the practice of historical airbrushing, there is nothing in the least “Orwellian” about removing monuments celebrating murderers or worse.

Germany boasts no public monuments to Hitler, Goering or Goebbels, and nor should it. It boasts no public monuments to Hitler, Goering or Goebbels, not because their memory has been Orwellianly erased, but because after the war fought to end Nazism the country was de-Nazified – as it should have been – rooting out the poisonous ideology to the most thorough extent possible.

Likewise in Japan, after a world  war fought to end its militant aggression, the country’s politics was thoroughly de-Shinto-ised and deodorised – Shinto being abolished as a state religion and its militant and ultra-nationalistic teachings, rites and monuments expunged.

So it was, or would have been, after the American Civil War too – a war fought, (as every rebel state’s declaration of their causes of secession made crystal clear at the time) to make the South safe for slavery just as long as their slave-owners desired. But too soon after that war against this inhumanity was won, the cause itself was lost and Jim Crow laws soon dragged in by the back door much that a war that killed 700,000 had thrown out the front.

So if it has taken one-hundred and fifty years to rouse the opprobrium necessary to remove statues erected to lionise peope who elected to go to war for the “right” to put other human beings in chains, then let’s raise a Halleh-fricking-lujah to that opprobrium, huh.

And stop mis-using Orwell to complain about it. Simply insist it be done within the law, instead of without.

.

Q: Why the continuing controversy over the American Civil War?

Q: Why the continuing controversy over the American Civil War?

A: Because, says Colonel Ty Seidule, Professor of History at the United States Military Academy at West Point, “many people don’t want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve a morally repugnant institution.”

That’s it right there.

What the Confederate flag stands for

For the most tragic of reasons, but it’s good that apologists for the antediluvian US Confederacy and the war it started are being publicly called out. And for those who aren’t sure what they stood for, as The Atlantic says, “The meaning of the Confederate flag is best discerned in the words of those who bore it.”

It was in South Carolina that the Civil War began, when the Confederacy fired on Fort Sumter. The state’s casus belli was neither vague nor hard to comprehend:

...A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction. This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

Nor was it difficult to understand in Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labour supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

Nor was it hard to understand in Louisiana, Alabama, or Texas. Nor from the speeches of planters like James Henry Hammond – “Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves” – or of the Confederate president or Vice-president, who declared at war’s start: “Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves.”

The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. … Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

So in the very words of those who bore it, that is what the Confederate flag stood for and stands for. It should be reviled no less than the swastika or the hammer-and-sickle, and for precisely the same reason.

[Hat tip Monica Beth]

Q: So why was the WWI battlefield so calamitous?

On the World War One battlefield there was no room for pluck, for courage, for bravery – none of those values espoused in patriotic commemorations of the war.

There was room for mateship, sure, but with a life expectancy in most units for most of the war of only several weeks at best, this was not an unencumbered blessing.

World War One was the first fully industrial war, bringing with it “a new conception of men as mere units.”[1] Hints of the destructive power of industrialised warfare were clear enough in the carnage of the American Civil War fifty years before. They were clear enough in colonial wars, in which large swathes of native troops could be killed by small numbers with industrial arms. They were written in blood in the first year of war, in which one million men died to achieve none of the war aims of any power, and it became clear to all that whatever anybody might have thought before plunging the world into war, this was going to be a long, long, and very bloody stalemate.

But no-one in authority had wanted to learn the lesson. Not even now that the age of the machine gun had arrived.

Maxim MG08 (Maschinengewehr 08) - Machine Gun. Pic by MilitaryFactory.Com

“WITHOUT HIRAM MAXIM, MUCH of subsequent world history might have been very different. As Hillaire Belloc put it:

“Thank God that we have got
The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”^[2]

That was all very well in colonial wars, when the enemy had not, but the strategists among the Great Powers gave no thought to how war would change when all did have the instrument of death. Because good European and Australasian boys died just as well from the muzzle of a machine gun as natives did.

There were those who saw what was coming. One J.F.C. Fuller, for example, known two decades later as a leading theorist of armoured warfare, wrote a paper for the British Staff College

whose main contention was that tactics are based on weapon-power and not on the experience of military history, and that since in 1914 the quick-firing field gun and the machine gun were the two most recent weapons, our tactics should be based on them.[3]

He received a stern dressing down for his temerity.

Russian industrialist Ivan Bloch, for example (also known as Jean de Bloch) wrote hopefully that “‘There will be no war in the future, ‘for it has become impossible, now that it is clear that war means suicide’.”[4] Unfortunately, his warnings, while prescient, were not heard.

Using a wealth of research and a multitude of statistics, he argued that advances in technology, such as more accurate and rapidly firing guns or better explosives, were making it almost impossible for armies to attack well-defended positions. The combination of earth, shovels, and barbed wire allowed defenders to throw up strong defences from which they could lay out a devastating field of fire in the face of their attackers. ‘There will be nothing’, Bloch told [his publisher] Stead, ‘along the whole line of the horizon to show from whence the death-dealing missiles have sped.’ It would, he estimated, require the attacker to have an advantage of at least eight to one to get across the firing zone. Battles would bring massive casualties, ‘on so terrible a scale as to render it impossible to get troops to push the battle to a decisive issue’…. Indeed, in the wars of the future it was unlikely that there ever could be a clear victory. And while the battlefield was a killing ground , privation at home would lead to disorder and ultimately revolution. War, said Bloch, would be ‘a catastrophe which would destroy all existing political institutions’. Bloch did his best to reach decision-makers and the larger public…[5]

Unfortunately he was as unsuccessful as British journalist Norman Angell, who argued that in the modern age of trade  and industrial production, that the idea of achieving wealth by conquest was, as his best-selling book was titled,“The Great Illusion.”

“If the Statesmen of Europe could lay on one side the irrelevant considerations which cloud their minds,” he said, “they would see that the direct cost of acquisition by force must in these circumstances necessarily exceed in value the property acquired.”[6]

Angell threw down a challenge to the widely held view – the great illusion – that war paid. Perhaps conquest had made sense in the past when individual countries subsisted more on what they produced and needed each other less so that a victor could cart off the spoils of war and, for a time at least, enjoy them. Even then it weakened the nation, not least by killing off its best. France was still paying the price for its great triumphs under Louis XIV and Napoleon: ‘As the result of a century of militarism, France is compelled every few years to reduce the standard of physical fitness in order to keep up her military strength so that now even three-feet dwarfs are impressed.’  In the modern age war was futile because the winning power would gain nothing by it. In the economically interdependent world of the twentieth century , even powerful nations needed trading partners and a stable and prosperous world in which to find markets, resources, and places for investment. To plunder defeated enemies and reduce them to penury would only hurt the winners. If, on the other hand, the victor decided to encourage the defeated to prosper and grow, what would have been the point of a war in the first place? Say, Angell offered by way of example, that Germany were to take over Europe. Would Germany then set out to ransack its conquests? 
    ‘But that would be suicidal. Where would her big industrial population find their markets? If she set out
     to develop and enrich the component parts, these would become merely efficient competitors, and
    she need not have undertaken the costliest war of history to arrive at that result. This is the paradox,
     the futility of conquest – the great illusion which the history of our own Empire so well illustrates.’[7]

Angell’s book sold well. But it was not read by anyone making decisions on war.

The lessons of strategy in an industrial age were not learned by professional politicians and diplomats and their monarchs. And the lessons of tactics in the machine age were not learned by professional soldiers.

The former made the war possible. The latter delivered to the world a new kind of war on a wholly different battlefield: deadly stalemate midst the horrors of trench warfare.

Why were the lessons not learned?

When faced with the machine gun and the attendant necessity to rethink all the old orthodoxies about the primacy of the final infantry charge, such soldiers either did not understand the significance of the new weapon at all, or tried to ignore it, dimly aware that it spelled the end of their own conception of war.  It would be almost impossible to over-emphasise the myopic outlook amongst the military leaders of the nineteenth [and early[twentieth] century.
    For them, all the progress of the preceding years merely meant that the standard military weapons, the cannon and the musket, became slightly more efficient.  Ranges were longer, rates of fire quicker, muzzle velocities higher, but basically, for them, nothing had changed. The bayonet push and the cavalry charge were still the determining factors on the battlefield. Even in 1926, Field-Marshall Haig could assert that ‘aeroplanes and tanks … are only accessories to the man and the horse, and I feel sure that as time goes on you will find just as much use for the horse … as you have ever done in the past.’[8]

Field-Marshall Douglas Haig was the man who, as senior British commander from 1915 to the end of the war, sent  one-million British soldiers to their deaths – and whose “epic but costly offensives at the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) have become nearly synonymous with the carnage and futility of First World War battles."[9]

The machine gun, it should have been clear (especially by 1926) was a dire threat to all previous assumptions about the nature of war.  Yet the officer corps of all countries “clung on to their old beliefs in the centrality of man and the decisiveness of personal courage and individual endeavour” – those martial values still extolled at every cenotaph about the war that destroyed them utterly.[10]

In part, the myopia was a reaction to the age itself. “Machines had brought with them industrialisation and the destruction of the social order.” The generals could do little about that, but  they could ensure –or so they surmised—they would not “undermine the old certainties of the battlefield—the glorious charge and the opportunity for individual heroism.”

The machine gun threated to do this. Its phenomenal power could render such charges quite futile. It negated all the old human virtues – pluck, fortitude, patriotism, honour—and made them as nothing in the face of a deadly stream of bullets, a quite unassailable mechanical barrier.  For the old-style gentleman officers such an impersonal yet utterly decisive baulk was unacceptable. So they tried to ignore it.[11]

To paraphrase Ayn Rand, you are free to evade reality; but the troops you command are not free to evade the consequences of reality.

Instead of advancing into glory as charged, their troops advanced instead into that quite unassailable meat grinder called the machine gun.

THE MACHINE GUN WAS was not fired like a hosepipe in the way seen in Hollywood movies. It was even worse than that. The machine guns themselves were set up in protective cover, and set up in partnership to form a series of interlocking cones firing along an advancing line of troops.

The result was a wall of lead into which young human bodies were forced to charge.

As long as ammunition was supplied and barrels kept cool, one well-arranged machine-gun battery could repel (and by repel we mean kill) an army of thousands.

And so they did. Nearly every day for nearly four-and-a-half years.

Francis Derwent Wood | David (Machine Gun Corps Memorial), 1925. Hyde Park Corner, London.
Pic by Jorge Enrique from Pinterest

THE “NEW CONCEPTION OF man as mere units before the might of the machine guns” had its counterpart in the new age of collectivism the war did so much to usher in – an age in which individuals were as mere units before the might of the state. “Perhaps, concludes author John Ellis,[12]

this new conception of man as mere units before the might of the machine gun was never better expressed than upon [sculptor] Derwent Woods memorial to the Machine Gun Corps [above]. It is a statue of ‘The Boy David’ and still stands at Hyde Park Corner. Its inscription reads:

        Saul hath slain his thousands
        But David his tens of thousands.

---

This post is part of NOT PC’s #CountdownToAnzacDay. Other posts in the series:

• Countdown to Anzac Day
• Q: But what were the ANZACs fighting *for*?
• Q: So why were Britain and NZ at war with Turkey at all?
• Q: So why was WWI so calamitous?
• Q: Who started the whole bloody mess?
• The Horsemen of non-apocalypse
• War and Peace

NOTES
[1] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 145
[2] Ibid, p. 18
[3] From Bond’s Staff College, p. 291. Ironically, Fuller was unable to attract any British interest in his theories of armoured warfare either; they were instead picked up and used by German generals in the Blitzkriegs of World War Two.
[4] From Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War, (Kindle Locations 5077-5078)
[5] Ibid
[6] From Norman Angell’s, The Great Illusion, Kindle version, loc. 4285, 1149.
[7] Quoted in Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace: How Europe abandoned peace for the First World War, (Kindle Locations 5108-5121)
[8] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 17.  Haig’s quote comes in his 1926 review of Basil Liddell-Hart’s book The Tanks, found in the 1959 edition at page 234
[9]  From the Canadian War Museum’s website "Canada and the First World War: Sir Douglas Haig"
[10] From John Ellis’s The Social History of the Machine Gun, p. 17
[11] Ibid, p.17
[12] Ibid, p.145

ERRATA: Casualty figure amended from two-million to one-million.

It’s NZ’s own Emancipation Proclamation!

America has its Emancipation Proclamation—justifiably famous for freeing around 4 million slaves in North America, and beginning the removal of the stain of slavery from American law.

Freeing the slaves was a necessary righting of a wrong that the gradual recognition of individual rights had made imperative.

New Zealand too has its own Emancipation Proclamation.

In 1840, a Treaty was signed in New Zealand that was as effective in freeing the slaves here as Lincoln’s later more famous document was over there.  And there were a lot of slaves to free.

It’s almost forgotten today, but when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed virtually every Maori in the country outside the tribal chiefs was a slave—and their life was cheap. There was a caste system in Maori tikanga, with the overwhelming majority, the slaves, enjoying no more rights than a dog.

Slavery was a harsh reality of the time. Conquered tribes were enslaved to their conquerors. Women were enslaved to their husbands. Tribal members were enslaved to their chieftains.

The life of a slave was entirely forfeit to their master and his chief. One chief blew out the brains of his slave for failing to light his pipe in time.  Another because her husband had “cast her off for a season.” Slaves were taken in conquest, and killed as easily. They were taken on long journeys purely as a source of food, eaten when they were no longer needed as porters. Any person lacking position was “a tutua--a fellow [or woman] not worth a spike nail.” Until 1840, folk not worth a spike nail had no rights. They were chattel.

The “glory” of traditional Maori society, notes John Robinson in his book Two Cultures Meet, was the domain of only a few.

Lincoln

Lincoln the Railsplitter, Norman Rockwell, 1965

I’ve been more than disappointed over the years by the attitude taken by too many libertarians to Abraham Lincoln. Too ready, especially, to accept shoddy revisionist scholarship peddled by neo-confederate cranks – leading to the tragic spectacle of so-called lovers of liberty denigrating  a president who defended rights, while they themselves defend the alleged “rights” of a slave state.

Worse:

In the face of widespread popular support for Lincoln (note, for example, the success of the 2012 Steven Spielberg film about him) and his perennially high reputation among academics, certain libertarians and conservatives have promoted the view that Lincoln was a totalitarian who paved the way for out-of-control government in the 20th century.Those critics are wrong. Contrary to their volumes of misinformation and smears—criticisms that are historically inaccurate and morally unjust—Lincoln, despite his flaws, was a heroic defender of liberty and of the essential principles of America’s founding.
    Getting Lincoln right matters. It matters that we know what motivated Lincoln—and what motivated his Confederate enemies. It matters that we [even in New Zealand] understand the core principles on which America was founded—and the ways in which Lincoln expanded the application of those principles. It matters that modern advocates of liberty properly understand and articulate Lincoln’s legacy—rather than leave his legacy to be distorted by anti-government libertarians (and their allies among conservatives), leviathan-supporting “progressives,” and racist neo-Confederates.

Given the shocking state of libertarian Lincoln scholarship then, I was very happy on receiving my latest copy of The Objective Standard to see the cover story is a thorough debunking of their claims against the president forced to confront head on the toxic mixture of freedom and slavery which the founders unfortunately bequeathed America. It is the best debunking of the claims against him I’ve read.

The author, Alexander Marriot, addresses and dismisses each of the major claims made by the likes of Thomas DiLorenzo, Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, Walter Williams, and sundry other folk who should know better, including claims…

“Free at last!” [updated]

Stephen Spielberg’s recent film on Lincoln dramatised the passing of his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—justifiably famous for freeing around 4 million slaves in North America, and beginning the removal of the stain of slavery from American law.

This, with the subsequent constitutional amendment outlawing slavery across the continent, was the culmination of an anti-slavery movement that swept the west in the nineteenth century, following on the heels of the movement for individual rights that swept the west in the eighteenth century.

Freeing the slaves was a necessary righting of a wrong that the gradual recognition of individual rights had made imperative.

Abolition began in the birthplace of individual rights, in Britain; the slave trade was abolished in the West Indies in 1807, and abolition exported across the British Empire, so that by 1835 the stain had been removed empire-wide.

And in 1840, a Treaty was signed in New Zealand that was as effective in freeing the slaves here as Lincoln’s later more famous document was over there.

And there were a lot of slaves to free.

It’s almost forgotten today, but when the Treaty of Waitangi was signed virtually every Maori in the country outside the tribal chiefs was a slave—and their life was cheap. There was a caste system in Maori tikanga, with the overwhelming majority, the slaves, enjoying no more rights than a dog.

The life of a slave was entirely forfeit to their master and his chief. One chief blew out the brains of his slave for failing to light his pipe in time.  Another because her husband had “cast her off for a season.” Slaves were taken in conquest, and killed as easily. They were taken on long journeys purely as a source of food, eaten when they were no longer needed as porters. Any person lacking position was “a tutua--a fellow [or woman] not worth a spike nail.” Until 1840, folk not worth a spike nail had no rights. They were chattel.

The “glory” of traditional Maori society, notes John Robinson in his book Two Cultures Meet, was the domain of only a few.

A history of this country must pay due regard to the experiences and fates of all Maori, including the dispossessed, the lower ranks, the slaves—and the women.  Then efforts can be made to improve the lives of all and longer focus on righting supposed wrongs to the few chiefs who benefited from tribalism.

For characters such as Jake Heke, whose tragedy is told in Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, the legacy of Maori society was not one of glory, but of slavery.

Jake asks his children, “Hey kids, Know what I inherited as a Maori? Jake asking our of the blue … Slaves … My family were slaves … My branch of the Heke line was descended from a slave … Five-hundred years of the slave curse bein’ on our heads.

On our heads, and also in their heads. Then and (for some) for ever more. Because the slave mind is a hard thing to shake off.

Californian columnist for The Free Radical Michael Vardoulis sent me a reflection from afar a while back on what Maori activists need to learn about independence and self-reliance from the likes of the late-career Malcolm X (right), who argued that if American blacks were ever to be truly free they needed to free themselves first—free themselves, like Jake had to, from their slave minds.

Says Michael:

Yes, Maori individuals have a lot fewer historical claim to bitterness than Afro Americans, or especially Native Americans and Hawaiians!  Whatever their legitimate complaints, at least New Zealanders never suffered the stain of slavery while the slaveholders proclaimed the protection for themselves of individual rights. 

Maoris are individuals whose ancestors were never enslaved -- not at least after the British arrived.

But Maori individuals need to shake off the great state fixation too many seem obsessed with.  There is a kind of philosophical 'judo' that Malcolm X represents, insofar as the pride of self-reliance he talked about is essential to survival as an individual, and it would apply to Maori as well.  His message of "why look to your former 'masters' for anything, nor to  the government that supported them”?  The only thing a (insert arbitrary racial identity here) individual should seek from the government which supported their former master is to be left the hell alone!"

   The lesson that needs to be tattooed on the soul was expressed perfectly by Isabel Paterson: "A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you've got" -- including, if you let them, your pride in your self-reliance.  Self-reliance does not come from sucking nanny's tit, or from the marshmallow embrace of collectivism -- it comes from standing on one's own feet and beginning to take responsibility for one's own future as an individual.

And then we have the conclusions one can draw universally on the issue of 'race' from what Rand wrote so perfectly: the only genuine solution to racism is a colour-blind government supporting the same rights for all individuals as individuals; equality before the law; anything *other* than that merely perpetuates the evil of racism, and (not incidentally) the careers of political figures who benefit from the perpetuation of the problem rather than achieving solutions.

Liberty HAS been stolen from many different arbitrary groups (though compared to what others have suffered over history, including many Europeans it's much harder to find in the case of post-1840 Maori) and in any case it's ultimately irrelevant to the much more important issue of regaining that liberty, which can only be achieved in a society where only the rights of the individual are upheld regardless of any arbitrary 'group' status either placed upon them or with which they choose to identify.

   Hell, the Brits stomped all over my mother's ancestors in Ireland, and the Turks all over my father's ancestors in Greece.  I don't go looking for handouts from Downing Street or Istanbul!  I just pursue a society in which the individual is protected from being interfered with, knowing as a result that no arbitrary group can be singled out either for persecution, or for restitution.  The people who stomped all over my ancestors are long dead and buried -- those alive now bear no guilt for what their great-great-great grandparents did to mine.

But, I fear I preach to the choir.  It's individuals of Maori, Afro-American or Native American backgrounds which need to 'get it'... as my mentor Richard Boddie (right), a former student of Malcolm X, is fond of saying, "People are deluded en masse and enlightened one at a time."

The lesson of Malcolm's own growth and change over his life helps to show that lesson is true -- and dangerous to those who would hope the lesson is never learned.

I think Michael makes some great points, don’ t you?.

The interested reader might appreciate in this context my earlier review of Spike Lee's film Malcolm X' that appeared in The Free Radical at the time of the film's release.  [NB: Some light editing of Michael's post has been done for sense and context.]

UPDATED: 

It has become somewhat fashionable of late to knock Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and to pillory Lincoln himself as some kind of neo-fascist. As Thomas Sowell says sadly, "today we see the spectacle of pygmies sniping at this giant"--examples of which you can find in the comments section below.

Sowell takes to task these assorted pygmies and their ahistorical criticisms:

People who indulge themselves in this kind of self-righteous carping act as if Lincoln was someone who could do whatever he damn well pleased, without regard to the law, the Congress, or the Supreme Court. They might as well criticize him for not discovering a cure for cancer.
    Fortunately, there is an excellent new [in 2005] book, titled "Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation" by Professor Allen C. Guelzo of Gettysburg College, that sets Lincoln in the context of the world in which he lived.
    Once you understand the constraints of that world, and how little room for maneuver Lincoln had, you realize what courage and brilliance it took for him to free the slaves.
    Just one fact should give pause to Lincoln's critics today: When Lincoln sat down to write the Emancipation Proclamation, the Supreme Court was still headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who had issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, saying a black man had no rights which a white man needed to respect...
    Professor Guelzo's book does more than give us some sense of realism about a major event in American history. Perhaps if we come to understand the complexities and constraints of Lincoln's turbulent times, we might not be so quick to seize opportunities to reduce other times -- including our own -- to cartoon-like simplicities that allow us to indulge in cheap self-righteousness when judging those who carry heavy responsibilities.

Perhaps those people that enjoyed this poorly-written smear of Lincoln should give Sowell's points, and Guelzo's book, some much needed thought.

PS: Here's a question for you: How many know who the chap is in the picture above next to Old Abe? Answers on a postcard please. [And if you don’t know the name of that hero and about the Dred Scott decision and its implications, then please do some reading before offering up your opinions.]

Slavery, secession, states’ “rights” and those who (still) defend them

Around seven-score and twelve years ago the Confederate slave states of the United States America seceded from the Union in a bid to protect their alleged right to own human beings as property, and brought about the first war of the industrial age.

The obscenity of slavery brought about a war on industrial scale that became the bloody pointer to the “Great War” and its charnel houses on the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Verdun—a war about which there is nothing to celebrate except its end—and attitudes that still taint America today.

The flag of the slave states, the Confederate ‘Stars and Bars’ Flag of War, is now largely just a symbol of the Bogan. Thank goodness. But astonishingly, there are today still otherwise learned folk about who defend the Confederacy on whose behalf troops took it into battle. Who defend the Secession. Who defend, explicitly, the state collectivism of so called “states' rights” and, implicitly, the barnyard collectivism of state-sanctioned racism.

Disgracefully, some call themselves lovers of liberty.  Unbelievably, many of them are happy to pretend the war was never about slavery. Bizarrely, many of them camp out at the Mises Institute (motto taken from Mises’ own, i.e.: “Never Give In to Evil, But Proceed Against it Ever More Strongly”) and help to poison both the name of a good man and the Institute’s otherwise excellent economic work.

Fortunately, a short and easy read by one Jonathan Blanks demolishes this posturing. If this issue is one you’ve ever followed, then I commend it to your attention:

•  Why “Libertarian” Defenses of the Confederacy and “States’ Rights” are Incoherent 
  – Jonathan Blanks, CATO Institute

‘The Hunted Slaves’ – Richard Ansdell

‘The Hunted Slaves 1861
Richard Ansdell (1815 – 1885)
Oil on canvas, 184 x 308cm

Painted in 1861, when the slave trade had been abolished, but slavery still existed—and war over slavery was breaking out in North America—it depicts two runaway slaves fighting off the pack of mastiffs sent to hunt them down.

As a metaphor for that global struggle in which they were enmeshed, it’s dead on.

More about the painting and its context here.

Cue Card Libertarianism - Pro-Liberty, not Anti-State

Libertarians are not anti-state, they are primarily pro-liberty -- we define ourselves by what we are for, not what we are against. In the current state of the world, that difference makes all the difference in the world.

Pro-liberty libertarians understand that freedom in the political context means freedom from physical coercion, and in order to protect themseves from physical coercion individuals have the right to self-defence, to the use of retaliatory force. In order to bring this use of force under objective control, and to bar the initiation of physical force, governments are a necessity -- agencies, that is, that hold a monopoly on physical force in a given area. The job then is to tie up governments to do just this job, which is the reason constitutions were invented.

In the words of Ayn Rand: "A government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control." To pro-liberty libertarians, this is the underlying purpose of governments, and the means by which liberty is assured. It is only by this means that the libertarian non-agression principle can be enforced, ie., that no person should initiate force aginst any other.

There are 'anti-government' and 'no-government libertarians' about however: they are more accurately called anarchists, or even anarcho-capitalists -- or as Ayn Rand used to accurately call them, "hippies of the right." Right on. You can find such types at sites such as AntiWar.Com, and LewRockwell.Com -- sites inhabited respectively by pacifists, who renounce the right to national self-defence altogether (it is national self-defence that causes all wars they will tell you), and by antediluvians (who frequently maintain that Abraham Lincoln was a Nazi and that the southern slave states should have won the Civil War).

Anarchism in either form is not pro-liberty; it does not bring force under objective control -- it cannot ensure the universality of the non-agression principle, or of any principle. Instead, at best, it simply sets up a market for competing forms of force.

Such a market can presently be seen in the suburbs and villages of Somalia and Lebanon.

There is one main area in which the difference between pro-liberty libertarians and anti-state anarchists is tragically apparent: Defence. Pro-liberty libertarians realise that to protect their citizens, governments must run credible defence forces that can protect against foreign invasion or interdiction. This is a legitimate role for governments: to uphold as Lindsay Perigo says, "the right to life, to liberty and the pursuit of one's enemies" when those enemies have designs on your life.

Anarchists however just wave their hands around and pretend this isn't necessary. Murray Rothbard for example, the godfather of modern anarcho-capitalism recognised that an anarchist society could not provide such a credible or unified force, and rather than dismissing as absurd his devotion to anarchy, he instead embraced the absurd by arguing it wasn't even necessary.

Rothbard's rationalistic devotion to his anti-state views led him to claim -- at the height of the Cold War -- first, that there were "no external threats to the US"; second, that what looked like a clear threat, the Soviet Union, was in fact "devoted to peace"; and third the real villain of the Cold War was in fact the United States, who was "more warlike than even Nazi Germany."

Not just bizarre, then, but disgraceful. This is the man who "rejoiced" at watching what he called “a particularly exhilarating experience: the death of a State, or rather two States: Cambodia and South Vietnam….” You might care to know, as Murray didn't, that between them the deaths of those two states led directly to the deaths of about five million human beings. As Tom Palmer says on this episode"it matters which state replaces which."

It sure does.

As I said at the outset, given the current state of the world and the many very real external threats to human beings from terrorists and Islamists, the difference between being pro-liberty and being anti-state has never held more implications for the future of liberty around the world, and for our civilisation that is based on that liberty.

The anti-state anarchist must of necessity deny the existence of any real threat, and instead simply blames The Warfare State (the repository of all evil) or America ("more warlike than even Nazi Germany") for all the evils that exist. The pro-liberty libertarian however understands that this is nonsensical; that for liberty and civilisation to exist and be maintained, it is right to hunt down the bloodsoaked enemies of liberty and freedom who say they love death and who wish to inflict it on us.

Given the current state of the world then, the difference between being pro-liberty and anti-state may just be the difference between liberty and death.

LINKS: Cue Card Libertarianism - Force - Not PC
Cue Card Libertarianism - Government - Not PC
Cue Card Libertarianism - Constitution - Not PC
Cue Card Libertarianism - Freedom - Not PC
Cue Card Libertarianism - Anarchy - Not PC
Apologetics for 'Death of a State' - Tom Palmer

RELATED: War, Cue Card Libertarianism, Libertarianism, Politics-World, Israel