The Libertarian Alliance: BLOG

Just finished re-reading John Terraine’s excellent “To Win A War”. (Not currently listed on Amazon but keep trying.)

This came up as I have been trying to teach an intelligent teenager that WW1 was about far, far more than cruel mindless bewhiskered Toff-British-Generals sending millions of men to drown and die horribly in “the trenches”; that this aspect - when we inject the (now not taught) truth that the population broadly went along with the prosecution of the war - was a sad effect of it rather than just a political objective.

In the absence of misplaced and misdirected philanthropic impulses from the mid-1800s onwards - already by then becoming unnecessary since Capitalism was very busy making poverty history by showing the world what was being achieved by non-zero-sum wealth creation - a “Labour” political constituency, pandered to by the “Liberals” would not have been forced into being, ultimately giving rise to the Fabian dream of the socialist counter-renaissance-revolution which we all see has come about around us. (We were all asleep while they “marched through the Institutions”, and we, stupid lazy bastards that we were, let them do it, we did. We thought they were harmless long-haired hippie drug-addicts letting off the steam of youth.) Men would have continued voting for conservatism indefinitely, with less baleful results for the world.

Nobody blames the Victorians, motivated by normal Christian charity as is inevitable and right, for wanting to banish suffering, and being able to make a difference at last to the lives of all people here and everywhere, on account of the the riches of capitalism directed by what Churchill called (in another context) the Strong Arms of Science.

It was then a short step from “the State should ameliorate the lot of people in life” to “the State should teach that the State should ameliorate…..”, and then to “the State should teach that WW1 was a deliberate crime against the “people” by (implied) (Conservative-looking) Upper-Class Gits in peaked caps with moustaches“.  Now, (getting back to one of John Terraine’s main theses) the State does not teach about the massive and heated disagreements between the Allies about what ought to have been in the treaty of Versailles. Nothing about the difference between the French desire for massive econo-industrial vengeance plus occupation of territory, versus Haig’s view which was that - some reparations aside - this was an absolute military victory in the Field (read the book!) and that the German armies ought therefore to be treated as if this was so, before being let home.

The existence of Libertarian philosophy  would not be - both at once - such a necessary and such an insufficient condition for the survival of individual liberty in this world today, if plotiticians were now still willing to do what they are supposed to do. That is to say, articulate the views of their electors rather than those who have marched through our institutions (we do have only ourselves to blame here really)  for their own ends. Unfortunately even most liberal (i.e conservative) plotiticians have been infected on their way up through those very institutions. Even David Cameron, for example, pre-supposed not to be a socialist, seems to believe that the State has a role in rescuing “the Lost Generation”, and even - God forbid - in education. Apart from simply buldozing the mess his predecessors have left, lowering the shredded records and smashed hard disks (a sacrilegious act against a stupendously intricate thing, a Wonder of The World!!) into a hundred skips, and quitting the arena, I can’t see what it is.

Terraine’s political point in the book is that the Allies, in giving into mainly French demands for the wrong peace, and not caring about lessons learned from past treating with defeated enemies, laid the foundations for problems to come. Wars are bad for Libertarians as they allow States to accrete more powers, while people are under pressure and have concerns more pressing than hanging onto hard-won rights. It’s therefore easy for Enemy-Class school-teachers of history today, to represent WW1 as a pure exercise in malevolent futility by the “British Officer Class”, and it saddens me, and causes lots of hard work.