Thank you. It's great to be here speaking about Murray Rothbard because Murray Rothbard was the person who influenced my thinking on political and economic questions more than anybody else ever since I first read man economy in state 50 years ago and I'm also delighted to be here at the Mises Institute because the Mises Institute and especially its founder Lou Rockwell have supported my work over many years. I want to talk today about Murray Rothbard and revisionism and want to ask the question why was Rothbard interested in revisionism? As you know Rothbard as a libertarian was of course very strongly opposed to war because in wars there are massive aggression, violation of people's rights and also war is a great promoter of the power of the state. You remember in Tom DiLorenzo talk yesterday he mentioned Randolph Boren's famous essay war is the health of the state and we know from Robert Higgs great work crisis and Leviathan and other works of his on how the state power is grown through war. So where does revisionism come in? Well in the wars that the US has been involved in there's sometimes this is true for other countries as well there has been an attempt to show that each war is not just a struggle between contending states for power but the wars of the US are somehow moral crusades that we're facing an evil power bent on world conquests that we have to oppose. So Rothbard as someone an opponent of war was naturally concerned to counter that but one thing in his attempts to counter this I think is crucial that he wasn't taking the point of view well we can just deduce that all such accounts are false that it's always false that one side or the US is it's always false to say that the US is engaged in a moral crusade what if it turned out to be true in particular cases this is not something we could just deduce a priori was false and this is where what he thought was that it was necessary for each war to do a detailed study of the historical evidence in each case we would have to look at the facts we couldn't just say well the state is always going to propagandize so we can just dismiss what they say we have to look at the evidence and this is where the revisionist movement came in when we talk about revisionism we want to know well what is it they were the revisionist historians were trying to revise and the movement came in after World War One they had in mind particularly to revise article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles which ended the first First World War and this said that all the blame for the responsibility for the World War One rested entirely with Germany and her allies so the revisionists were those who favored revising that and at the time when the World War One was going on there was a picture that the Germans particularly under the leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II were bent on the conquest of Europe and perhaps the world as well and there was need to for the United States to counter them there were all sorts of movies on the attacking the Kaiser in the Germans generally and in fact in the treaty I think it's article 235 there were calls to uh there was a call to try the Kaiser for war crimes uh this wasn't successful in fact the Kaiser Wilhelm lasted a very long time he didn't die till 1941 he was in exile in Holland but in the 1920 and 1921 there were three articles published in American Historical Review by Sidney Bradshaw Fay it was a professor at Harvard that challenged the Versailles war guilt thesis and Fay pointed out in one of the articles that there was a claim that in July 1914 right after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the previous month there'd been a crown council meeting at which the Kaiser along with the various people in the German foreign office and general staff had plotted war and he was able to show that that account rested on a misleading misleading report by the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire Ambassador Morgan thought so Fay's work attracted some attention and then the leading publicist of the movement was another historian Harry Elmer Barnes and he was not only a historian and sociologist a public figure and he he was he was a newspaper columnist he was an associate of H. L. Menken wrote very widely on journalism I remember when I was in high school I once asked Barnes this was in the we're having the 1964 election where it was Goldwater against Johnson and I asked him what he thought of the election he said as my old friend Henry Menken once said I think I'll sit this one out I can tell you one story about Barnes that Murray Rothbard told me Murray was in charge of a one-time editing a volume of essays in honor of Barnes and it later went to some other Arthur Goddard took over the editorship he also was one who helped Goddard help Mises on human action but in any event Barnes said that when contributors would send in essays if they had anything critical of Barnes Barnes would insert comments in the person's essay he would put in things like Professor Barnes would respond to this point in such and such a way and Murray said hey he wrote his own first shrift so Barnes became Murray Rothbard became friendly with Barnes and this he accepted Barnes's views on the origins of the war World War one what I want to go in the in my talk today is give Barron Rothbard's views on the origins of World War one American entry into the war and then World War two an American entry into that into World War two as well Rothbard didn't write all that much on war origins but he did talk about it so I know what his views were he accepted the view that Barnes uh promulgated in his 1926 book Genesis of the World War which was revised two years later in 1928 and according to Barnes the primary responsibility for the outbreak of the war rested not on Germany but on France and Russia and Barnes particularly pointed to the desire of the French president Raymond Poincaré to recover the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which had been surrendered to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and Poincaré in conjunction with the Alexander is Volsky who was the Russian ambassador to Paris the rush he had previously been Russian Foreign Minister the Russians were very anxious to gain control of the Straits of Constantinople which were under the control of course of the Ottoman Empire so according to Barnes the it was the France and Russia instigated the war in order to secure Alsace Lorraine for France and the control of the Straits for for Russia I should say this thesis wasn't accepted by Sidney Fay in his book Origins of the World War which also came out in 1928 he wasn't as strong a revisionist as Barnes but he said there was a more divided responsibility for the war and in the 1930 edition of his book he criticizes Barnes on this point but Barnes replied to him so but Rothbard was inclined to accept what that Barnes's view of the war now on on American entry into World War one here Rothbard largely followed the work great work of Charles Callant Tansel America goes to war which came out 1938 Tansel was probably the one of the two foremost American diplomatic historians of the 20 two or three foremost American diplomatic historians of the 20th century along with William L. Langer whom Gary North mentioned yesterday and Samuel Flagbeamus but in what Tansel stressed particularly was that America under Woodrow Wilson adopted a very unneutral policy from the beginning in which British violations of American neutrality such as the I guess someone doesn't approve of Tansel's thesis so the British violations of American neutrality were largely ignored but Wilson insisted a very strict interpretation of German violations American neutrality and in fact his unneutral policy led the Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan to resign and Tansel's work was based as always with him on exhaustive research into the archives and it became the generally accepted view that America had pursued this unneutral policy I should tell you one story about Tansel since I've given one about Barnes Tansel was a Texan he was very strongly had very strong views in favor of the south in the civil war and once by some odd work of events he was asked to give the annual Lincoln Day speech in Washington and he gave a very fierce denunciation of Lincoln and I think the controversy over speech was so great that he almost lost his his job I think at that time he was teaching it at at Fordham he later went to Georgetown but he almost lost his job so that Rothbard relied in his views on American entry into war principally on Tansel although he did emphasize more than Tansel did the influence of the Morgan banking interests Tansel thought Morgan banking interests were important but he didn't place much stress on it as Rothbard did now turning to world war two we have a situation where we really there was a very evil regime in power in Germany but one point Rothbard made I remember there was a speech in San Francisco in 1979 where he was emphasized this was you can't argue from saying that a totalitarian power is necessarily aggressive you can't say the more the totalitarian the government the more aggressive it is we could have contrains that for example Cambodia under Paul pot was extremely destructive and totalitarian but it wasn't aggressive in foreign relations so on world war two Rothbard was thought that Germany was not aiming at world the world war that broke out in September 3rd 1939 that Hitler was trying to reach a settlement with Poland he wanted to return of the free city of Donsik to Germany and a motor road across the Polish corridor but the Poles under the influence of especially on the foreign minister Josef Beck refused to negotiate so the court at Rothbard here followed the work of AJP Taylor origins of the second world war that came out 1961 in saying that the world war two would largely come about by improvisation it wasn't a deliberately planned event and another book that very strongly influenced him was one by the American economist Germany's economic preparations for war that came out 1959 which argued that Germany had not build up an extremely large armament contrary to the propaganda of Winston Churchill but in fact they were just aiming they just had enough armaments for very quick campaigns as in the ones against Poland so Rothbard did not accept the usual view which is the prevailing view today that Hitler was aiming deliberately aiming at a world war then on American entry into the war he again followed the views of another book by Charles Tansell which is a backdoor to war which came out in 1952 and what Tansell argued was that Roosevelt wanted to enter the European war that began as I say in September 1939 but he realized that the American people wouldn't support such a move because America had was favorite non-intervention in the European war following the bad experiences of World War one so to get into the war Roosevelt followed a deliberately provocative policy toward Japan knowing that if he did that was able to get the Japanese to attack the US then the Axis powers would come in on Japan's side that's indeed what happened so in conclusion Rothbard felt that by examining the historical evidence on World War one and World War two it was clear that the mythologies that had supported America participation both wars were not correct and in substantial we found that there was a support for his libertarian view that war is to be avoided at nearly all costs thank you


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