Was chatting with a friend of mine about Rothbard, and he mentioned that Murray was a Ethical Relativist
And pointed out these statements as proof
Empirically, the MOST warlike, MOST interventionist, MOST imperial government throughout the twentieth century has been the United States" (Pg. 287, emphasis Rothbard’s).
He then pointed out this.
And in addition to saying that the United States has been more “interventionist” and “warlike” than Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Cambodia, Cuba, and Red China (et al), he tells us elsewhere that he cannot prove his own personal view that individual rights are correct over, for example, communist-collectivist views,
And finally this.
and furthermore, in his own words:
“So devoted was Stalin to peace that he failed to make adequate provision against the Nazi attack… Not only was there no Russian expansion whatever apart from the exigencies of defeating Germany, but the Soviet Union time and again leaned over backward to avoid any cold or hot war with the west” (Pg. 294).
So I am wondering what to make of this - I do agree that the USA has been quite Imperial and interventionist, but I finod it hard to believe that he could not prove that his individulaist views correct over Collectivist ones, And of course the idea of a peaceful stalin is a hard one to swallow.
But a link to the primary source so I can read the content in context would be helpful. I’m going to go ahead and say right now, quote 2 is complete bs… primairly because it’s not a quote at all, it’s a baseless assertion.
Your friend has also altered quotes, they are not direct ones at all. He has also lied, emphasis was not Rothbard’s.
If those quotes are 100% accurate, (which I doubt) then it was likely that Rothbard was specifically referring to Stalin’s relatively peaceful foreign policies, as opposed to his tyrannical and oppressive domestic ones. If this is the case, then Rothbard would be absolutely correct, as the Soviet Union was absolutely less imperialistic and warlike in its foreign policy than the US; with its deadly combination of democratically elected demagogues and a relatively free, unimpeded tax base, with which to draw upon for foreign conquest.
It doesn’t really make sense from a libertarian perspective to distinguish between ‘foreign’ and ‘non-foreign’; the government is always an external coercive institution.
Secondly; even if you accept this dichotomy, it stll wouldn’t follow. Stalin basically took over half of Europe and kept those satellite state-governments in place. It’s not hard to call something your own country, if you basically took it over.
It helps destroy the myth of limited government. When a free market is successful in enriching a democratic, limited state, the rulers have much more potential money (taxes) to spend. This vast wealth sets them at a comparative advantage to those nations who have adopted more socialist (unproductive) means of organization. There is a huge incentive for the leaders of the more capitalist countries, to wage war, because they know they can win. Of course, the forces of warfare and expanding empire lead to borrowing/printing money and spiraling debt, which in turn, leads to socialist policies.
America has basically had constant warfare of one form or another overseas, for the last 70 years. The US also has over 700 military bases in over 130 countries.
The USSR would never have been able to maintain either such extended warfare, nor such an empire, because their economy and citizens were in such an uproductive state. Can you imagine a modern day Cuba or North Korea waging an Iraq-like war? We should hope they do, as it would cause their nations to crumble in about a week. Anyways, Hoppe has discussed this historical phenomenon in a lecture ( cant remember which one of the top of my head)
Well, for the record, it is false that Stalin was looking to avoid war with Germany. The case may be true for 1941, but only because the Red Army was going through a severe re-organization which was bound to be completed by 1942. The Red Army of the 1930s was in large part created by Mikhail Tukhachevsky in early and mid-1930s (Tukhachevsky is oftentimes cited as the true father of modern mechanized warfare), and centered around large, bulky, awkward mechanized corps. Tukhachevsky, of course, was killed during Stalin’s purges, in 1937. In 1940, aware of the brilliant German campaign in France, the Red Army began a two-year reorganization, eliminating these bulky mechanized corps and aiming to create far more flexible mechanized units of a smaller size.
The Wehrmacht caught the Red Army in the middle of that re-organization period (of course, to a large degree, the German success in 1941 was also due to an inexperienced officer corps), leading to the destruction of the Red Army in the fall of 1941.
That Stalin was uninterested in war in 1941 should be obvious, but that he was persistently interested in peace with the Germans is false. That he was interested in creating a boundary between the Soviet Union and Germany was obvious since his occupation of parts of eastern Finland, as well as the occupation of the Baltic countries and of eastern Poland.
However, my point is a bit pedantic and shouldn’t subtract from Rothbard’s overall argument (that the United States has been highly imperialistic, and oftentimes more so than communist countries such as the Soviet Union and China). On the other hand, Rothbard’s history has been known to be a bit sketchy. For example, there were some good comments on Rothbard’s history of economic thought posted on this forum, somewhere.
Here is the full quotation - page 338 of the 2006 Von Mises edition
But there are still other reasons for libertarians here to
focus upon the invasions and foreign interventions of the
United States. For empirically, taking the twentieth century as
a whole, the single most warlike, most interventionist, most
imperialist government has been the United States. Such a
statement is bound to shock Americans, subject as we have
been for decades to intense propaganda by the Establishment
on the invariable saintliness, peaceful intentions, and devotion
to justice of the American government in foreign affairs.
The expansionist impulse of the American State began to
take increasing hold in the late nineteenth century, leaping
boldly overseas with America’s war against Spain, dominating
Cuba, grabbing Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and brutally
suppressing a Filipino rebellion for independence. The
imperial expansion of the United States reached full flower in
World War I, when President Woodrow Wilson’s leap into the
fray prolonged the war and the mass slaughter, and unwittingly
bred the grisly devastation that led directly to the Bolshevik
triumph in Russia and the Nazi victory in Germany. It
was Wilson’s particular genius to supply a pietistic and
moralistic cloak for a new American policy of worldwide
For a New Liberty
338
intervention and domination, a policy of trying to mould
every country in the American image, suppressing radical or
Marxist regimes on the one hand and old-fashioned monarchist
governments on the other. It was Woodrow Wilson who
was to fix the broad features of American foreign policy for
the rest of this century. Almost every succeeding President has
considered himself a Wilsonian and followed his policies. It
was no accident that both Herbert Hoover and Franklin D.
Roosevelt—so long thought of as polar opposites—played
important roles in America’s first global crusade of World War
I, and that both men harked back to their experience in World
War I intervention and planning as the guideposts for their
future foreign and domestic policies. And it was one of
Richard Nixon’s first acts as President to place Woodrow Wilson’s
picture upon his desk.
In the name of “national self-determination” and “collective
security” against aggression, the American government
has consistently pursued a goal and a policy of world domination
and of the forcible suppression of any rebellion against
the status quo anywhere in the world. In the name of combatting
“aggression” everywhere—of being the world’s “policeman”—
it has itself become a great and continuing aggressor.
This is where the peaceful Stalin comes from - read from about page 365 on, in the 2006 edition.
Thus, fortuitously, from a mixture of theoretical and practical
grounds of their own, the Soviets arrived early at what
libertarians consider to be the only proper and principled foreign
policy. As time went on, furthermore, this policy was
reinforced by a “conservatism” that comes upon all movements
after they have acquired and retained power for any
length of time, in which the interests of keeping power over
one’s nation-state begins to take more and more precedence
over the initial ideal of world revolution. This increasing conservatism
under Stalin and his successors strengthened and
reinforced the nonaggressive, “peaceful coexistence” policy.
The Bolsheviks, indeed, began their success story by being
literally the only political party in Russia to clamor, from the
beginning of World War I, for an immediate Russian pullout
from the war. Indeed, they went further and courted enormous
unpopularity among the public by calling for the defeat
of “their own” government (“revolutionary defeatism”).
When Russia began to suffer enormous losses, accompanied
by massive military desertions from the front, and the war
became extremely unpopular, the Bolsheviks, guided by
Lenin, continued to be the only party to call for an immediate
end to the war—the other parties still vowing to fight the
Germans to the end. When the Bolsheviks took power, Lenin,
over the hysterical opposition of even the majority of the Bolshevik
central committee itself, insisted on concluding the
“appeasement” peace of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918. Here,
Lenin succeeded in taking Russia out of the war, even at the
price of granting to the victorious German army all the parts
of the Russian empire which it then occupied (including
White Russia and the Ukraine). Thus, Lenin and the Bolsheviks
began their reign by being not simply a peace party, but
virtually a “peace-at-any-price” party.
What evidence do you offer for this other than that Stalin “was interested in creating a boundary between the Soviet Union and Germany”?
The occupation of the Baltic countries and of eastern Poland (and the non-aggression pact). It’s clear that there was a conflict of interest between the two countries in regards to Eastern Europe and the Balkans, even if neither of them expected a major war between them in 1939 or 1940.
I don’t know much about the Russian Civil War, apart from what I’ve read of A People’s Tragedy, but how much of the Bolshevik peace with Germany had to do with ending the war so that Bolshevik forces could instead focus on consolidating power in Russia? Had the Bolsheviks known they could have pushed the Germans out of Western Russia (White Russia), I’m not so sure they would have called for peace as early as they did.
The Bolsheviks called for peace at any price because they expected any peace settlement to be temporary and of a short duration. Regimes all over Europe would be swept away by a Communist revolution so it did not matter what they signed now. As long as it meant their western flank was momentarily secure they would be happy.
Even so once they got a truce they basically had all they had wanted already and so stalled endlessly, avoiding to sign a formal peace settlement with the Germans. Finally Ludendorff lost patience with them and issued them an ultimatum. Since the Russian soldiers had simply left the front and went home as soon as the truce was proclaimed and the German army stood on the front unopposed they had no choice but to accept. Even so the first time the vote was to decline the ultimatum, because the conditions were so unfavorable. But it was accepted in the second voting after Lenin had threatened to resign as the head of the party if the vote was not for the treaty.
Rothbard’s writting could sometimes be a little over the top. It is a point I raised a while ago on here in regard to a few of his articles from the Rothard-Rockwell Report but it was not well received.
It is clear that the second quote is not entirely correct. There was some Soviet expansion that did not come about as a consequence of driving back the Germans. Namely the acquisitions in 1940 and the acquisitions from Japan. But it is also clear that Rothbard does not write what he does out of ignorance or desire to deceive. Since he actually writes in the paragraph above that one about Soviet annexations of 1940. So all he is guilty of here is some not sufficiently careful enough writting.
I would not sign under Rothbard’s exact words, but he is basically correct about Stalin. Stalin ruled the USSR from 1927 to 1953. An awful long time. How many wars did he launch in this time? He ruled over a decade without expanding his domain by an inch. Then in 1939 and 1940 enlarged the Soviet Union to include the Baltics, Bessarabia, West Belarus and Galicia only after they had been handed to him on a silver platter and doing so did not represent any amount of risk. (Also note none of them is a particularly juicy conquest.)
After the conclusion of the Second World War he stuck to the war time agreements even after they had been blatantly breached by the Anglo-Americans and offered only token aid to the Communists in the Korean War (contrast this with the conduct of the US). He kept Tito in line in regard to Trieste and his standoff with the Anglo-Americans there and refused to aid the Communists in the Greek Civil War (contrast this with the conduct of the US) in the slightest, since he had agreed with Churchill Greece would be outside the Soviet sphere.
There is nothing in his record to show him as an adventurist or a risk taker. On the contrary. This was a man who killed or imprisoned thousands upon thousands of his officers. He could not have believed that all of them were a threat to him. However he preffered to err on the safe side so to say, even if it meant crippling his military. Another nail in the coffin of the silly idea of Stalin as the conqueror enthusiast. Surely a ruler interested foremost in conquest would not be killing off his best officers? Actually the Red Army purge was still taking place in 1941 when the Germans invaded albeit at a reduced intensity.
How does that prove Stalin was interested in a war with Germany?
“Conflict of interest” doesn’t necessarily mean there has to be a war. There may be conflict of interest between Canada and Spain over certain fishing zones off the coast of Nova Scotia, but it doesn’t mean that the two are prepared to go to war over it. In any case, like I said, I don’t think either Hitler or Stalin expected to go to war even as late as early-1940 (well, it was probably in Hitler’s mind for some time), and Stalin probably did not explicitely plan to go to war in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, tensions between the two countries were fairly tense, especially over the Balkans and over other Soviet territorial claims in Eastern Europe (for example, the Germans were not happy with the Soviet occupation of the Baltic countries).
I think that even had Hitler not invaded the Soviet Union in mid-1941, war would have still erupted between the two sooner or later (assuming, of course, that war in the West did not evolve further than it already had).
Clear from what?
I’ve already provided examples twice. The German invasion of the Soviet Union is another example.
Another nail in the coffin of the silly idea of Stalin as the conqueror enthusiast.
I wasn’t challenging Rothbard’s general view of Stalin, rather simply commenting on Stalin’s intentions during the Second World War.
EDIT: Also, relevant to that time period, let’s not forget about Stalin’s substantial aid to Republican Spain (although, for the most part meant to overtake the CNT as the primary political influence in the Popular Front).
The first quote by Rothbard is absolutely 100% correct. Nazi Germany and Red China etc. seem to the ignorant observer to be valid counter-examples, but in fact their destruction and interventionism was mostly inward-focused - mass murder within their borders.
If we take Rothbard to mean that the US has been the most aggressive nation, externally, then that is clearly true. Take the period from 1900-1973 (when For A New Liberty was published, I think) and even then you will find that the US was more warlike than any other nation - think about the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
In the year 2010, the statement is even more true than when Rothbard wrote as we can include the hundreds of thousands dead from Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, plus the global military presence of the American empire, which daily wreaks havoc on the countries it occupies.