The saying “Truth is the first casualty of war” is said to have originated in ancient Greece with the writings of playwright Aeschylus. For thousands of years, it has been recognized that most wars are wars of conquest, plunder, and destruction. War is an opportunity for the state and the ruling classes to prosper and gain power. “War is the health of the state,” Randolph Bourne said in his famous essay of the same name. Has there ever been a truer statement?
For the citizens, on the other hand, war means death or crippling injury, taxes, debt, sacrifice, impoverishment, the slavery of conscription, and the loss of many freedoms. The soldiers themselves always pay the highest price in any war, as Ludwig von Mises observed in Human Action.
During the Nuremburg trials, the notorious Hermann Göring declared that to get the public to acquiesce to war, “all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism. . . . It works the same way in any country.” Indeed, it does.
It has been twenty-eight years since the Mises Institute published The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories. After nearly three more decades of endless wars worldwide, it is time to revisit this topic. We will do that at our Revisionist History of War Conference at the Mises Institute on May 15–17.
Truth is not only the first casualty of war, but also a casualty of writing the history of war. The state itself and all its war-profiteering appendages—the deep-state bureaucracy, the military-industrial complex, and the “intelligence community”—dominate the narrative of the history of war to make sure their war crimes are expunged. However, the state does not have a monopoly on writing history.
During our two-day conference, we will question and challenge much of the official history of war, and all the presentations (which will be live streamed and archived on mises.org and YouTube) will be published in a special conference volume.
Among the speakers will be retired Air Force Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski; Phil Tourney, a survivor of the 1967 attack on the USS Liberty and president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association; the courageous Ilana Mercer, who has relentlessly written about what the entire world is calling the genocide in Gaza; Ron Unz, author of Understanding World War II and many other writings; T. Hunt Tooley, a renowned World War I historian; Brion McClanahan, a brilliant historian of the War to Prevent Southern Independence; the great Scott Horton of Antiwar.com; Wanjiru Njoya, the Walter E. Williams Research Fellow at the Mises Institute; yours truly; and other Mises Institute scholars. We’ve also invited retired Colonel Douglas MacGregor to speak and are eagerly awaiting his reply.
All states are empires of lies about the state’s alleged benevolence, omniscience, and necessity, and about the supposed failings of individuals, communities, civil society, and especially free-market capitalism. But nowhere are the state’s lies more extreme, pervasive, and ridiculous than when it comes to its wars. That is why, as Randolph Bourne wrote in his World War I–era essay, “criticism of the State, objections to war, lukewarm opinions concerning the necessity and beauty of conscription, are subject to ferocious penalties, far exceeding [in] severity those affixed to actual pragmatic crimes.” All states become totalitarian states when it comes to dealing with critics of their wars.
We do not consent to this. Speaking truth to power about war is what is truly patriotic, not being bamboozled and silenced by the state and its phony histories concocted by what Murray Rothbard called “court historians.”
The papers presented at the conference will be published in an impressive hardback volume. The book will be reasonably priced and available in the Mises Store and on Amazon. We’ll also produce an ebook and an audiobook.
Please become our partner in this important project with your most generous donation. Donors who give $1,000 or more will be listed on the Patrons page at the front of the book.
Donors who give $5,000 or more will also be listed as Sponsors of our Revisionist History of War Conference.
Please call or email Kristy Holmes for more information. You can reach her at kristy@mises.org or (334) 321-2101.
Lew and I hope to see you in Auburn this May!
PS: Your generous contribution will go a long way in helping us counter the mountains of propaganda created by the military-industrial complex.