Murray N. Rothbard/Rothbard’s Cold War Revisionism, continued

Rothbard’s Cold War Revisionism, continued

by Tim Starr

While I have criticized Rothbard’s take on the Cold War before, I have just recently come across this old article of Rothbard’s, written in reply to Dr. John Hospers when Hospers ran for President of the United States of America as the first candidate of the Libertarian Party:

Murray N. Rothbard, The Soviet Bogeyman, 1973

Needless to say, I side with Hospers against Rothbard. However, Rothbard makes so many blatantly false claims in it that I thought it worthwhile to go through them. Almost all of them were demonstrably false at the time Rothbard wrote the article. Some additional evidence of their falsehood has come out since then, which I will mention when relevant:

“Since the time of Lenin and his magnificent (from a libertarian, pro-peace point of view) conclusion of the “appeasement” Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918, the Soviet Union, vis-à-vis the other Great Powers, has consistently pursued a policy of what they have long termed “peaceful coexistence,”...”

Actually, Lenin sent his henchman Karl Radek to Germany to support the Spartacist Revolt in 1919 as well as subsequent attempts at violent revolution in Berlin and Munich. These were supported directly by the Russian communist party, operating out of the Russian embassies in Germany. Russia supplied the revolutionaries with weapons, propaganda leaflets, and moral support. The same thing happened with Bela Kun in Hungary, who also tried to export the revolution to Slovakia. You can read more about this here: “Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VIII”

After these failed, operational control of further efforts to export violent communist revolution was transferred from the Bolshevik Party to the Comintern, which remained in operation for decades. Bolshevik Russia also tried to invade Poland in the 1920s, only to be beaten by the forces of Marshal Pilsudski. Later on, Stalin tried to take over Spain by supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, before annexing the Baltics without opposition and unsuccessfully invading Finland in 1940 as part of the alliance between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany known as the “Hitler-Stalin Pact.”

Soviet Russia began sponsoring national liberation revolutions all around the world in the 1960s under Brezhnev, having successfully field-tested that strategy in Cuba. Then the Soviets repeated it in Indochina, breaking US containment of Communism. This led to the fall of about a dozen countries around the world to violent revolution - Laos, Cambodia, South Vietnam, East Timor, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, etc. The Soviets followed this up with sponsorship of terrorist and guerilla groups in many other countries around the world to try to do the same.

“The Soviet policy has always been the defensive one of hanging on to what they have and waiting for the supposedly inevitable Marxian revolutions in the other countries of the world.”

No, Soviet policy has almost always consisted of trying to start revolutions in the rest of the world and help them succeed, settling for terrorism and insurrection to destabilize regimes when outright victory eluded their grasp. The sole exception to this was Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” policy, which only lasted as long as Stalin needed it to distinguish himself from Trotsky until Trotsky was safely purged and exiled, soon after to be murdered by one of Stalin’s assassins. This policy had obviously been abandoned in practice, if not in theory, by the time of Stalin’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War. It was only maintained thereafter as an obvious Soviet lie.

“Russia (any Russia, not just Soviet Russia) was a grievous loser from the settlements imposed by World War I (Brest-Litovisk, Versailles). Any German, Russian, or Austrian regime would have been “revisionist” after the war, i.e., would have sought the restoration of the huge chunk of territory torn from them by the victorious powers.”

Yes, tyrannical regimes who’ve lost their power would like it back. So what? This is about as relevant as the desire of ex-slavemasters to get their slaves back after losing them in the American Civil War. The fact that tyrants have such evil motives does nothing to make it justifiable, permissible, or acceptable for them to act on them in furtherance of such goals. It just means that they’re engaged in a criminal conspiracy against people whom they’ve no right to rule.

Furthermore, there were losers in WWI who did NOT try to get back their lost territory by forcible reconquest afterwards, such as Austria and Turkey. Similarly, there are plenty of losers in other wars who do not try to reconquer their lost territory, such as Germany after WWII. Britain did not try to regain any of its lost American colonies after the War of 1812.

“...the Soviets did very little about this hankering; certainly they made no move whatsoever to make war to get the territories back.”

Except for invading Poland, as I’ve already mentioned, then later annexing the Baltics and invading Finland. Since Rothbard provides excuses for those later, I’ll reserve further comments until then.

“The Hitler-Stalin pact, much reviled by the uncomprehending Western press, actually made excellent sense for both major “revisionist” post-Versailles powers, Germany and Russia. For the essence of that pact was the commonality of revisionist interests by both powers: from that pact, Germany got its lost territories back (plus an extra chunk of ethnically Polish Poland), and Russia peacefully re-acquired its old territories, with the exception of Finland.”

What “makes sense” to tyrannical power-lusters remains irrelevant. Rothbard diminishes the scale of the German invasion of Poland by calling it “an extra chunk” and calling it “ethnically Polish,” as if that land had previously belonged to Germany but just happened to have Poles living on it. Actually, it was roughly half of all Poland, almost all of which had never been part of Germany before. Danzig had been a German city, but the Polish Corridor between Germany and Danzig had always been Polish, never belonging to Germany before. Poland had been part of the Tsarist Empire before WWI, not Germany.

Rothbard also omits the Soviet invasion of Poland weeks after Germany’s, in which the Soviets mass-murdered people faster than Germany at the time. Russia invaded Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, forcibly imposing annexation referenda upon them which were obviously rigged. The Red Army never left the Baltics until the end of the Cold War a half-century later. This is how Soviet Russia “peacefully re-acquired its old territories,” as Rothbard says. Mass-murdering Poles faster than the Nazis is hardly peaceful. Rothbard simply airbrushed the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets out of history, just like Stalin airbrushed purged Party members out of official photographs.

Rothbard allows for the Soviet invasion of Finland as an “exception,” which he tried to justify in the article I debunked before, so no need to repeat all that now. However, this is a good time to bring up the point that the Bolshevik regime had never “owned” Finland before. Field Marshal Mannerheim, the architect of Finland’s defenses in the Winter War, had been an officer in the Tsarist Army, and remained loyal to the Tsar’s memory even after Finland gained its independence. Furthermore, Finland had never been part of Russia, it had been a separately-owned part of the Tsar’s feudal holdings.

“Hitler too, like our conservatives, thought he saw an imminent Russian Threat: and so he decided on what is now called a “preemptive strike.” But of course Hitler, like our American Conservatives, was deluded...”

Actually, there was always some evidence of preparations for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, and we now have a good deal more evidence about this such as in “Stalin’s Folly,” by Constantine Pleshakov, “Icebreaker,” by Victor Suvorov, and “Stalin’s Drive to the West,” by Richard Raack. After the Soviet invasion of Poland, Stalin was in the process of moving the Red Army into position for an offensive drive to the west. However, those preparations were far from complete by the time Hitler invaded Russia, thus making the threat nowhere near imminent enough to justify any German pre-emptive strike. But the plan was real and the preparations were about two years from completion when the German invasion began. Some of this evidence was available in books that had been published before Rothbard wrote this article, while the ones I’ve cited are from after the end of the Cold War when archival evidence from the former Soviet regimes became available to Western scholars. Stalin’s plan was to let Germany fight France, Britain, and anyone else foolish enough to join them, thereby exhausting themselves. Then, after Germany had “broken the ice,” Soviet Russia would sweep in to mop up whomever remained and take over.

“What of Stalin’s “expansion” into Eastern Europe? This expansion was scarcely aggression in any rational sense: it was purely the inevitable consequence of Russia’s rolling back and defeating the German aggressor and his Hungarian and Romanian allies.”

Here, Rothbard leaves out such other countries as Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, etc., which can hardly be described as having been Nazi allies. However, the most significant omission remains Poland, which fought against the Nazis right from the start all the way through the war, as best it could. Stalin occupied these countries, promised to hold free elections in them, then proceeded to forcibly Sovietize them despite the fact that none of his puppet parties ever won any democratic elections. As with the Baltics, the Red Army never left any of these countries until the end of the Cold War. Nor is such foreign military occupation the inevitable result of overthrowing an enemy in war. For example, the Russians drove the French back all the way to Paris after Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, but France was not occupied by the Russians for the next half-century. France was left pretty much intact and independent after the Peace of Vienna. Soviet Russia actually did withdraw from Austria after WWII, on the condition that Austria be neutralized. This condition was met by the Western Allies and kept for the duration of the Cold War.

“...historians from such opposite ends of the political and ideological spectrum as Gar Alperovitz (in his great work, Atomic Diplomacy) and the late Harry Elmer Barnes, have shown that the very genocidal dropping of the A-bomb on an already vanquished Japan was done largely for the purpose of using atomic diplomacy as a counter in the American-launched Cold War.”

Thanks to Japanese military codes that were broken by the US during WWII and declassified after the Cold War, we know for certain beyond any shadow of a doubt that Truman dropped the Bomb on Japan for the sole purpose of ending the war. This has been documented in books like “Downfall” by Richard Frank, who wrote a short version of it that can be read here: “Why Truman Dropped the Bomb”

The best summary of all the current evidence on this that I know of can be found here: “Nuclear Power: The End of the War Against Japan”

In sum, Gar Alperovitz twisted, cherry-picked, and misinterpreted evidence in order to reach a conclusion unfavorable to the USA and favorable to the Soviets. His methods were exactly like those described by the former head of the Romanian KGB, Ion Mihai Pacepa, in his book “Disinformation,” about how the KGB designed propaganda to deceive and demoralize the West. Furthermore, Alperovitz was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and the IPS was a KGB front. By lauding Alperovitz’s work like this, Rothbard was credulously falling for and spreading KGB disinformation against the USA which has long since been definitively proven false. Rothbard ought to have known better at the time than to fall for this drivel.

Which brings us to Harry Elmer Barnes, one of Rothbard’s favorite historians. Barnes was part of the Wilsonian Progressive movement that hated American democracy and entered WWI with a view towards remaking the world in their own elitist, technocratic vision. Barnes was disillusioned by the fact that WWI didn’t turn out the way he wanted to, thus making him ripe for Germany’s attempt to enlist foreign historians to absolve themselves of their guilt for starting WWI. To this end, the German Foreign Ministry created its “War Guilt Department,” the “Kriegsschuldreferat,” complete with its own “independent” think-tank whose job it was to sanitize the diplomatic archives of the Second Reich to remove anything incriminating Germany for starting WWI. Once this was done, the think-tank invited American scholars like Barnes and Sidney Fay of Harvard to an all-expenses-paid sabbatical to research the question of who started WWI in their archives. The Bolsheviks helped out by publishing Tsarist Russia’s secret treaties with France from before WWI, thus making it look like France and Russia started the war, not Germany. Naturally, Barnes and Fay concluded in the books they published on the origins of WWI that Germany didn’t start it, with Barnes going so far as to say that it was really started by France and Russia. Germany paid for their books to be translated into German, published in Germany, and made them standard textbooks in the German public schools. Hitler praised Barnes’ “Origins of the World War” as one of the few “good” ones on the topic. It was also influential in America, too. I seem to recall that it was read by John F. Kennedy in college, thus influencing his view of how WWI started long before he became President of the USA.

Barnes went on to become ever-more sympathetic to Nazi Germany, ending up in the late 1960s arranging for the English translation and publication of the books of the infamous French Holocuast Denier Paul Rassinier, published by the Holocaust Denial publishing house Noontide Press, owned by the American neo-Nazi Willis Carto. Barnes then gave them glowing reviews in “The American Mercury,” which had once been founded by H.L. Mencken but had since been acquired by the aforementioned Carto. A Barnes protege, David Hoggan, wrote a defense of the German invasion of Poland called “The Enforced War,” first published in Germany and given awards by neo-Nazi groups there, then later in English. Hoggan actually worked with Rothbard and Gary North at the Volcker Fund in New York City in the 1960s, before coming out later as the anonymous author of “The Myth of the Six Million,” a book-length exercise in Holocaust Denial published by Carto’s Noontide Press. Hoggan claimed authorship when he sued for royalty payments, which came as a surprise to Carto since Carto had always assumed it to have been written by Barnes.

Hoggan’s victim-blaming argument that Poland was at fault for its invasion by Germany was very similar to Rothbard’s argument to that effect, raising the question of who got it from whom. More recently, Pat Buchanan has made pretty much the same argument in his book, “The Unnecessary War.” Rothbard was also witnessed at a European academic conference in the late 1970s saying that the Allies had made up the Holocaust as ex post facto propaganda to justify their war against Germany by the late founder of the Libertarian Alliance, Chris Tame. The wording was almost exactly the same as Barnes’ published views on the Holocaust.

Thus, in the persons of Barnes and Alperovitz, Rothbard credulously swallowed and parroted government propaganda produced by some of the worst totalitarian regimes in human history and their overt sympathizers, and tried to foist it upon the Libertarian movement as a message of freedom.

“As for the Cuban crisis of 1962, there is not a single piece of evidence of any Russian aim to drop missiles on the United States. In fact, the Soviets had plenty of their own missiles...”

At the time, Soviet missiles were Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles, IRBMS. The Soviets didn’t yet have any Inter-Continental Ballstic Missiles (ICBMs). They could only deliver nuclear warheads to Western Europe, not the USA. By transporting IRBMs to Cuba, the Soviets instantly transformed them into the functional equivalent of ICBMs, enabling the Soviets to directly nuke the USA for the first time ever. Castro urged the Soviets to launch a nuclear first strike on the USA, which would’ve gone much further than mere defense of the Soviet-sponsored Cuban Revolution (in violation of the Monroe Doctrine, which at other times Rothbardians hail as an instance of good anti-interventionist US foreign policy). Fortunately, the Russian military officers on the ground in Cuba realized that if they continued escalating things there might actually be a nuclear war between the US & USSR, and they de-escalated on their own initiative. Khruschev backed down, but then got sacked by the Politburo for his cowardice. Brezhnev then embarked upon a great military buildup, both conventional and nuclear, building a blue-water navy & sub fleet, as well as resuming sponsorship of national liberation revolutions around the world as in Indochina. Prior to that China had been in charge of spreading the revolution in Asia, but North Vietnam was soon reunited back with the Soviets as the main sponsor of Hanoi, with China being increasingly sidelined until China allied with the USA against the Soviets and went to war with Hanoi after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia drove out China’s client, the Khmer Rouge. Meanwhile, the Soviets used their nuclear deterrent to prevent the US from using its conventional forces to reverse any of the Soviet-sponsored revolutions, until Reagan broke the “rules” by doing so in Grenada in 1983. Coincidentally, 1983 was also the year in which the US and Soviets came closer to nuclear war than at any other time, because the Soviets misinterpreted America’s “Able Archer” war games as a cover story for preparation for a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, which the Soviets almost decided to pre-empt with a nuclear first strike of their own. This was in large part because the Soviets misunderstood Reagan as a warmonger, just as Rothbard misrepresented America as the aggressor in the Cold War. Thus, Rothbard contributed to the climate of Cold War paranoia about America that nearly led to Russia nuking the USA.

“...the only possible purpose of Khrushchev’s emplacement of missiles in Cuba was to safeguard Cuba against an American attack...”

Since Castro urged Khruschev to nuke America first from Cuba, that was hardly “the only possible purpose” of having Soviet nukes in Cuba.

“...far too much has been made of the importance of Mein Kampf in assessing Hitler’s policies. To say that someone’s actions can be fully explained by a tract, written in very different circumstances a decade or more earlier, is highly simplistic as historical method.”

True. However, Hitler wrote a Second Book which wasn’t published during his lifetime, but was discovered by the American historian Gerhard Weinberg after the war and has since been published. In it, Hitler makes clear his plans for an eventual final military confrontation with America that was to happen in the 1980s, after Germany had secured the necessary resources for the job in all that east European lebensraum he planned to conquer. This timeline seems to have been adopted by the Soviets after WWII, as KGB defectors told us the Soviets planned to attack the USA in the 1980s as well.

Furthermore, A.J.P. Taylor, whom Rothbard also cites favorably on the origins of WWII, deliberately excluded all evidence from the Nuremburg Tribunals from consideration for his book on the topic. This intentional omission of public and well-established evidence from a book which purported to tell the truth about whether Hitler intended to start WWII is an instance of negligent professional malpractice for a professional academic historian like Taylor. It is the exact opposite of what Revisionist historians claim they do: Revise history in light of new facts that have been brought to light. Instead, Taylor refused to let any newly-exposed facts interfere with his prejudices about who started WWII. [ indeed, “according to Kathleen Burk’s biography of Taylor, he did not read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf until after writing the book.” and Taylor himself, in his autobiography: “At that time no original sources were available: no cabinet minutes or papers, no Chiefs of Staff records, only more or less formal documents from the Foreign Office with very occasional minutes. This extraordinary paucity, as it seems now, makes my book a period piece of limited value.” Wikipedia: The Origins of the Second World War see also: The Second World War - Ed. ]

“The announced intentions of all the Marxist-Leninist theoreticians, from Lenin down to the present, are notably different: they call repeatedly and consistently for a policy of peaceful coexistence by Communist countries with the “capitalist” powers.”

And, of course, tyrants who hold millions of their subjects in terror, having mass-murdered a good deal of them, would never lie to the rest of the world about their intentions. When such rulers say belligerent things, appeaseniks like Rothbard tell us they don’t really mean them and are just engaging in rhetorical speeches for the benefit of their domestic audiences. When these rulers say pacifistic things, these same people tell us that’s what the rulers really mean. In fact, judging by Soviet practice, the opposite rule of interpretation applies: When such tyrants talk peace, they’re lying.

“...given the black record of American aggression in the Cold War and elsewhere...”

The worst American Cold War ally killed far fewer people than the best Soviet Cold War ally. American “aggression” in the Cold War largely consisted of stopping Soviet revolutions, overthrowing Soviet puppets, going to war against Soviet proxies, imposing sanctions upon the Soviet bloc, and supporting allies who were resisting Soviet expansionism. Almost every dictator the US allied with during the Cold War for the sake of expediency was dumped around the time the Cold War ended, and a democratic regime took its place, especially in the countries where the USA had the most influence.

“...we intervened with troops and weapons to try to crush the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918-20.”

No, we didn’t. The US military mission to Russia during WWI was for the sole purpose of trying to keep up the fight against Germany, not overthrowing the Bolsheviks. The foreign military force that had the most ability to stop the Bolshevik Revolution was the Czech legion, which was trapped in Russia after the Tsar’s downfall, but all it wanted to do was go home. British agent Sidney Reilly tried to launch his own coup d’État against the Bolsheviks, but that sadly failed, as did British support for the Whites in the Russian Civil War.

“The Russians, indeed, have been anxious to conclude a joint disarmament agreement with the U.S., and have ever since they accepted the American proposal to that effect on May 10, 1955: a proposal which the U.S. itself promptly repudiated and has balked at ever since.”

The Soviets never abided by the terms of any arms-limitation treaty they signed. The built far more ICBMs than they were allowed to. When germ warfare and chemical warfare was banned, the Soviets seized upon such weapons as giving them a strategic advantage over the USA and proceeded to develop the most advanced and largest stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons in human history. Yeltsin admitted to these after the Cold War, but their destruction in compliance with the relevant treaties has yet to be adequately documented. The Soviets also helped various clients develop biological and chemical weapons, including Saddam Hussein of Iraq, Qadaffi of Libya, and Assad of Syria. The Soviets used chemical weapons in Afghanistan and Yemen, and even since the demise of the Soviet Union Russia has helped Syria use sarin and chlorine gas against rebel forces in the Syrian civil war.