Power & Market

The Myth of Good and Bad Nations

The gang of neocons who control brain-dead “President” Joe Biden view international politics as a struggle between good and evil nations. Sometimes, it isn’t the people of the enemy nation who are viewed as evil but the demonic leader of the enemy country, who, if not Satan himself, is seen as a reasonably close approximation of him. Thus, today the evil Vladimir Putin is seen as engaged in a brutal conquest of Ukraine and the heroic Israelis are seen as engulfed in worldwide battle against anti-Semitism. Propagating these ideas helps the neocons in spending billions of dollars in aid to the favored nations and sending them weapons that threatens the thermonuclear destruction of the world.

In fact, international politics is a struggle between nations with conflicting interests, not a struggle between good and evil powers. Such conflicts are inevitable in a world of powerful states, in which the principles of the free market are flouted. As Ludwig von Mises has taught us, nations impede the free flow of goods in trade. This policy leads to wars, as nations struggle to obtain resources under their control, rather than buy these resources from suppliers. As Mises says in Omnipotent Government, (1944) “’Progressives’ and nationalists were . . .not themselves concerned with the maintenance of the international division of labor; they advocated government control of business which must necessarily lead toward protectionism and finally toward autarky.”(p.228)

The neocon efforts to demonize the enemy are nothing new, and in what follows, I’m going to discuss a number of examples to show how pervasive this pattern has been in involving America in unnecessary, destructive, and costly wars.

Let’s begin with the most salient case of all. For the neocons, it’s always Hitler. The Munich Conference of 1938 shows what happens when we fail to stand up against evil. The facts don’t bear out what they say. Hitler was indeed an evil dictator, but America had no valid reason to go to war against him. Hitler did not aim to attack the United States, and fighting against him helped Stalin, who killed more people than Hitler did, in taking control of Eastern Europe. 

Read the full article at LewRockwell.com.

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