War and Peace

April 1964

"Peace on earth and good will to men" is one of humanity's older and more enduring aspirations. It accords with the sentiments of the great religious traditions, and it is in harmony with a substantial bundle of the drives which move the individual person. History, however, is not composed of aspi­rations alone, else it would be quite different from what it has, in fact, been. History, as it has actually been lived and recorded, provides ample justification for the pessimist who concludes that peace is only that short interval between battles when nations are recovering from the last war and preparing for the next. Things might not be this bad, in reality, but they are bad enough to draw forth our best and most earnest efforts to understand the causes of war, in the hope of finding, if not a cure, then at least an allevi­ation for militaristic ills.

Assigning causation in social matters is never easy; the varia­bles are too numerous. And in the matter of war there is an addi­tional difficulty; the disparity be­tween mankind's aspiration for peace and its chronic involvement in war signifies that war's causa­ tion is indirect. War, in other words, may be the unexpected by­ product of pursuing policies which appear to be anything but belli­cose, which are believed to be hu­manitarian through and through. Perhaps it is more correct to say that a war happens, than to say that a war is caused.

A war may happen because a nation wants something it cannot obtain with­out fighting a war to get it; or, a war may happen because a people who do want peace do not want - or do not know - the things that make for peace. A policy for the reorganization of society along some idealistic line may be adopted in ignorance of the fact that the policy actually contains the germs of war. Then, when the explosion occurs, there is only slight con­solation in the words, "We did not know it was loaded." 

The purpose of discussing and debating social philosophies, poli­cies, and issues is to explore the "load," to determine the direction in which the muzzle points, and at whom. If a society will not tolerate such an exchange - and ours will hardly tolerate it, so strong is "liberal" conformism - then that society may back into an era of perpetual crisis, as ours is doing.

Any man who peddles a pro­gram guaranteeing perpetual peace is a charlatan. There are few guaranteed results in human affairs, and this is not one of them. Human beings are imperfect in un­derstanding as well as in conduct, and a war may break out even un­der the best conceivable economic and political system. But if there is a social philosophy which, when put into practice, sets citizen against citizen, collects people into pressure groups and ranges these against each other, creates a rul­ing class and pits it against the nation, then this social philosophy has readied for desperate action the country which adopts it. And when domestic economic and polit­ical conditions are bent into such a posture, the friction between nations is aggravated and the oc­casions for such frictions multi­plied. When peoples embark on a course of this sort, war is that much more likely, to the point of being inevitable.

Modern war, in other words, does not start with the act of declaring war, or at the time of marching off to war, or when the first shot is fired; it starts much further back in time. The foun­tainhead of war is deeply em­bedded in a certain variety of domestic peacetime policy where it is all but hidden from view un­der that policy's humanitarian guise.

Pacifism Re-examined

The analysis of war offered in this paper is at odds with the cus­tomary approach, which seeks to scare people into a peace-loving frame of mind. Antiwar organizations and individual pacifists recite the horrors of war, assuming that if we become sufficiently aware of what might happen to us in a hot war we will mend our ways and change course. 

The typical antiwar case ex­pounded by pacifist organizations and individuals is based on the wrong psychology. When the moralist tries to persuade us to cut down on wine, women, and song, he is seeking to turn us away from pursuits most people find immensely attractive. The moral­ist who would argue the unat­tractiveness of these things would waste his breath, and he knows it ; so he tries to point out the harm which might accrue, in the long run, to the acting person himself and to those his actions affect. 

In other words, we paint a vivid pic­ture of the evil end results of yielding to present temptations. The appeal is to conscience to forego actions which sorely tempt. The expectation is that these temptations will, in consequence, lose horsepower and cease to exert their former power of attraction. But we have long known the aw­fulness of war, and wars have con­tinued to recur. They recur because war is a built-in feature of a philosophy of society which many people, most pacifists included, find attractive. Adopting the policy is something like stepping out of a tenth-story window; as soon as we make this choice, other forces take over and the final consequences are not within our volition to avoid.

Whose Will ls To Prevail?

The purpose of war, according to Clausewitz, is to impose your will on the enemy; or, at the very least, to prevent him from impos­ing his will on you. In a welfare state, or planned economy, the mass of men are to be guided, regulated, directed, and controlled by those wielding political power. On principle, the wills of a large segment of the nation are bent to conform to the master plan im­posed on them by those in power who believe themselves competent to plan the lives of others. When this occurs in a society as a per­manent peacetime policy, that so­ciety has taken the first steps of a course whose last step is war. The basic principles of the wel­fare state or socialism or the planned economy contain, inevit­ably, the germs of war.

Conscription for military serv­ice is but the more immediate application to military purposes of the control of individuals and property which is inherent in all collectivist economic planning. Some kindly collectivists do op­pose conscription, but they en­dorse its logical counterparts; conscription, in other words, fol­lows logically from the rest of their beliefs. These people profess aversion to the use of a lot of force on foreigners - which is war ; but they advocate the use of a little force on domestics in order to secure general conformity to The Plan. The catch is, that once you start doing the latter, there is no logical stopping place short of the former.

The great social drift or trend for the past hundred years or so has been in the direction of the centralized state. People in this country and elsewhere have thrust a more positive role upon govern­ment than was contemplated by the classical liberals of last cen­tury. Socialists have had a fully developed rationale for the polit­icalization of life ever since Marx, but as the drift gathered momentum, businessmen, teachers, preachers, writers, and people from all walks of life climbed aboard the bandwagon. The up­ shot of this great trend has been a vast extension of the powers of government and a proliferation of government services.

This costs money, so the trend has been ac­companied by a skyrocketing growth in the budgets of all na­ tions until, in our own country, the national budget alone is today in the neighborhood of 100 billion dollars annually, out of a net na­tional income of roughly 425 bil­lion. The latter figure represents the monetary equivalent of the goods produced annually by our labor force, which numbers about 69 million persons and has avail­able to it the capital and the know­ how resulting from the productive efforts of preceding generations.

The goods and services produced in a capitalist society are distrib­uted in varying amounts, to each man who participates according to the value his fellows attach to his own contribution of goods and services - assuming a free market, willing exchange, and no political privileges. Government, society's police power, has all the while been exercising its constabulary func­ tion in order to protect citizens against invasions of their rights, that is to say, against such acts as assault, theft, fraud, slander, foreign attack, and the like. The cost of these policing functions is 3 to 5 per cent of the gross pay­roll. All of which corresponds roughly to the classical liberal im­age of society in its economic and political sectors.

The New "Liberal" Image

But now comes the new image. The police power, government, is no longer to play a modest policing role ; it is to undertake vast national programs in response to the demands of this pressure group or that, and this requires money. The people who produce 425 billion dollars turn 100 billion of it over to the national government, and Washington acquires new powers commensurate with its increased wealth. A vast bureauc­racy is assembled, and the intel­lectuals -- who had been telling us that life has no purpose -- now have grandiose national goals to propagandize for.

It is in the nature of a government to create the means of its own support, and every dollar government spends generates a vested interest in a continuance of the spending. No government could spend a hundred billion dollars a year without benefiting certain industries, some of which would not otherwise be in busi­ ness at all. Even so, it is not easy for those in power to devise spending programs which will get rid of a lot of money fast in ways which do not affront the mores and arouse popular resistance. Pyramid building takes a lot of money, but the darn things last so long!

And so all governments who are trying to get rid of astronomical sums of money finally settle on "military spending." Military hardware is ideal for the purposes of the planners. It accords with the mores; it costs a lot of money and whatever is not conspicuously consumed in smoke obsolesces overnight -- a bottomless drain for "surplus" government money. And tragically, the same forces which are at work in each nation to swell the military budget also operate in the relations between nations to provide occasions for using it.

The first step is to deprive the people who produce goods and services, and earn an income thereby, of the right to make pri­vate decisions as to how their own incomes shall be spent. Instead, we collectivize these millions of decisions and turn the bundle over to politicians with a virtual carte blanche: "You spend this the way you think best." Step two is the completely ineffectual one of telling the politicians to whom we have given control that we aren't very happy with the way they exercise it. The horse has already been stolen, and it's too late to lock the barn!

Government Wars on Citizens

To the extent that a society limits its government to policing functions which curb the individuals who engage in aggressive and criminal actions, and conducts its economic affairs on the basis of free and willing exchange, to that extent domestic peace prevails. When a society departs from this norm, its governing class begins, in effect, to make war upon the rest of the nation. A situation is created wherein everyone is victimized by everyone else under the fiction of each living at the expense of all. Power differentials in society are increased and aggra­ vated, popular discontent mounts, and the ruling group seeks for a device to restore "unity." War is, of course, the time-honored national unifier. Similar forces are at work in all modern nations, pos­ing similar problems for all.

Peaceful Competition and Trade

The classical liberal picture envisioned peaceful competition : the free market at home and free trade with foreign nations. Domestic tensions were thus well within the competence of the local constabulary to handle, and the nationals of foreign countries were potential buyers of our goods whose trade we solicited on the premise that the customer is al­ ways right. The ideal was prosperity at home and peace abroad. Human nature distorts the prac­tice of every social ideal ; but at least this dispensation was peaceful in theory. It has been replaced by one that is destructive even in theory, if not in intention, and in practice has been accompanied during this century by a steeply mounting curve of actual warfare.

Pitirim Sorokin, the eminent sociologist, conducted a study of western civilization's involvement in war during the past 2,500 years and concluded that "we live in an age unique for the unrestrained use of brute force in international relations."

The welfare state or planned economy creates domestic tensions in every nation, and because The Plan won't operate at home unless foreign trade is controlled -which causes international tensions to mount - brinkmanship is the inevitable consequence. As far back as 1936, H.L. Mencken described the relationship between these several factors: "So long as a gang of unconscionable criminals, by inserting themselves into public office, can acquire eminent do­main over the lives and property of all other citizens, we'll see exploitation and injustice at home, and homicidal adventures abroad."

Nobody, to repeat, wants the shooting war. But almost everyone, the neoliberal and pacifist most of all, wants the things which poise us perpetually, and as a matter of policy, on the brink of war. The war-making    potential of modern governments is due to the command they have assumed over the persons and resources of their respective nations.

If a govern­ ment did not control these vast resources, its power to make war would be reduced to manageable proportions. The first step toward war is the acceptance by almost all men everywhere, of the false assumption that political committees are competent to run people's lives. The first steps to peace are in the direction of a voluntary society in which each person is free to direct his own energy so long as he allows the same right to others. There is no utopia in this direction, but in striving for a voluntary society we may at least avoid such debacles as now plague our world.