Vol. 9.9, September 1976

A Monthly Newsletter

THE
Libertarian Forum

Joseph R. Peden, Publisher		Murray N. Rothbard, Editor
VOLUME IX NO. 9	SEPTEMBER, 1976	US-ISSN0047-4517

Education By Bribes And Coercion

by Auberon Herbert

Most libertarians are aware of the existence of a circle of American individualist anarchists who contributed to the famous newspaper Liberty, edited by Benjamin Tucker, in the late 19th century. Readers of James Martin’s Men Against The State (Ralph Myles Publishers, PO Box 1533, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80901 $2.50) are familiar with Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, Lysander Spooner, Victor Yarros, and the many other brilliant contributors to the philosophy of anarchism in its native American individualist form. Some of their writings have in recent years been republished, a few by Libertarian Forum. But few of us are aware of a circle of equally brilliant libertarians — they preferred to be called individualists or voluntarists rather than anarchists, a term ‘they associated rightly in its European context, with socialism and violence. These virtually unknown philosophers lived in late Victorian England were largely disciples of Mill and Spencer, but were men who were capable of taking their teachers’ ideas to their logical conclusion — the abolition of the coercive State. Perhaps the most important of the English voluntarists was Auberon Herbert (1838-1906) whose publication, The Free Life (1890-1901) fulfilled the same function among the English libertarians as Liberty did among their American colleagues.

Auberon Herbert was the scion of two of the most aristocratic families of England. His father was the Duke of Carnarvon, his mother the sister of the Duke of Norfolk, his wife the daughter of an earl. As a young man he began his career in the army, and in the 1860’s he travelled to Denmark and the United States to observe local wars, and witnessed the collapse of France at Sedan in 1870 and the violent days of the Commune in Paris. Originally entering politics as a conservative, he was elected to Parliament in 1870 as a Liberal, where his first speech was, characteristically against the bill establishing the English system of state education. By 1872 Herbert caused a commotion in the House by proclaiming himself a republican, and he retired from office in 1874.

Herbert had studied at Oxford after his military service, and taught history and jurisprudence for four years at St. John’s College, Oxford. His intellectual curiosity caused him to become an ardent disciple and lifelong friend of Herbert Spencer and a correspondent of J. S. Mill. By the 1880’s Herbert had come to believe that the principle of voluntarism was the only just basis of society. His own intellectual conversion was probably recorded in a fictionalized Socratic dialogue entitled: A Politician In Trouble About His Soul. This was serialized in the liberal Fortnightly Review, (1883-1884) and it was subsequently published by Benjamin Tucker in Liberty (1884, #48-50) in a revised version as A Politician In Sight Of Haven. To organize the propagation of his views he announced the formation of the Party of Individual Liberty and issued five pamphlets called the Anti-Force Papers to present his opinions on various subjects. The fifth Anti-Force Paper was an appeal to the English people to liberate themselves from the bondage of State directed education. It is our great pleasure to share this incisive work with our readers in this issue of Libertarian Forum.

For more than a century, the public education question has been largely confined to the criticisms of various “reformers”. But the basic issue — whether the State has any right at all to be involved in schooling has scarcely been discussed. Only recently, with the publication of the stimulating polemic by Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, has the general public turned its attention to the question of the very legitimacy of the school as an institution. But at least as important is the question of disestablishment of the schools, the abolition of state involvement in education. To our knowledge, no organization, no libertarians, have undertaken the radical task of seeking the absolute separation of School and State. Yet sooner or later this immense work must be begun. The libertarians of the 18th century disestablished the Church from the State; the libertarians of the 19th century smashed the State enforced enslavement of man by man; will the libertarians of the 20th century liberate education from the tyranny and perversion of the State?

As a contribution to the dialogue that must precede action, we commend to you the reading of Auberon Herbert’s essay, Education By Bribes And Coercion.

(J. R. P.)

THE PARTY OF INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY

An appeal to the English people against State education; against the driving of children to school by compulsion; against the persecution of parents; against officialdom in all its forms; against over-pressure, hurry and worry; against waste and extravagance; against a compulsory tax and a compulsory rate; against infallible wisdom and authority enthroned either at Whitehall or Victoria Embankment, or in any other part of town or province; and a plea for true voluntary work, apart from State funds and State direction, undertaken by the people in their own groups, according to their own wants and their own ideas, under their own control and supported by their own efforts and their own contributions.

Education By Bribes And Coercion

It is time that the English people-especially that part of it that lives in London-shook themselves free from certain time-old superstitions and saw things as they really are. What the State touches, that it destroys. Since the State has laid hands on education, it is fast becoming a curse instead of a blessing to them; an instrument of torture instead of a means of happiness and strength.

State education, State religion and State conscription are three children of the same evil family. They are three forms of bondage which nations in their worship of force have inflicted on themselves.

Let us look at the nature of one of these State-made things. See what education has grown into under the hands of a department. Two or three gentlemen sit at Whitehall and courageously undertake to think for a whole nation. From their central office they make rules and regulations, and spin codes like a new kind of industrious worm, spinning tape instead of silk. Under this system the whole nation is pressed into whatever mould happens to suit the fancies of these gentlemen; and in consequence, protected by the sleepy approval of Parliament, they have ousted the parents from all real control over the education of their children, and have taken possession of it into their own hands.

But the official gentlemen, spinning tape, are not the only people to blame. The parents themselves are equally to blame. Listening to the bad advice of the politicians they have let themselves be ousted. The politicians have said “We will make you a system, with buildings, offices, training-colleges, and school-houses, with managers, lawyers, surveyors and contractors, with superintendents and visitors, with every kind of official, big and little. There shall be taxes, there shall be rates, to pay for what we give you; and if you do not like paying any school-pence for your children, you shall not pay them. You shall dip your hands into your richer neighbor’s pocket for what you want; and we will tell your richer neighbor that to ask you to pay your own school-pence is an “abominable” thing, a “cruel” thing, an “unjust” thing. There is only one slight service in return that we need ask at your hands. Accept the system, as it is planned and arranged for you. Question nothing; doubt nothing; trouble not your own minds. Trust wholly to a paternal department in the first place; and to those of us who can get elected by your votes in the second place. Forget that your children belong to you and not to us, and banish all vain desires to keep any part of their control and management in your own incompetent hands.” It is ever in this way that the birth-rights of the people one after the other are sold.

Some day you will see that there is no man so truly disinherited, as the man who once takes a State-bribe. Now let us examine what kind of a system it is which the State has established. It is a system—arrogant as if invented by Supreme Wisdom—that dreads competition and endeavors to exclude all rivals; that respects no difference in your wants and your ideas; that treads free choice under its feet; that despises individual effort and individual conception; that has no patience with your infirmities; has no belief that the home possesses anything more sacred than its own pedantic rules; and treats millions of people as mere sheep in a flock, or oxen in a herd. It is a system built on those two most evil foundation-stones, coercion and State money; coercion to make the people tread in the paths, which by Supreme Wisdom are thought right for them; State-money to try to salve the hurt and gild the degradation of the people. Politicians love to speak of State-money as not being charity. There are many forms of charity, both good and bad. Of them all-State-money is the worst, for whilst it takes from others, it is ashamed to confess the fact and say “thank-you” openly, like an honest and well-mannered citizen.

Now let us look at some of the reasons why this State-system deserves hatred instead of gratitude. It is bad, just as all universal systems applied by officials to a whole nation are bad. It is bad

1. Because you cannot place hundred of thousands of persons under the same system, without repressing the differences that exist and ought to exist among them. Men and women, are not shilling pieces, so like in themselves that one should pass for another. In destroying these differences, you destroy all hope of progress; for progress is the child of difference. Compare the deadly uniformity of one official system with the life and movement that exist where there are many systems. Under one system it is most difficult to try experiments, for they disturb the smooth working of the vast machinery, and are unpleasant to the official mind. Where many systems exist, experiments try themselves, proving their own fitness, or unfitness, and resulting in continuous progress.

2. Because any universal system which rests on force and therefore is no longer exposed to competition, becomes stupid, brutal, and extravagant, in its methods.

3. Because any system which is built upon the foundation of public money, must have severe tests as regards the spending of this public money, and these tests react upon the system itself, making it rigid, mechanical and oppressive.

4. Because a universal system of education leads to an official class of schoolmasters, struggling with the State for their own interests. There is no class of men, which suffer more from being made into an official class. They specially require a constant flow of fresh and varied thought into their ranks.

5. Because any universal system, on account of all the prizes of influence, reputation and power that are attached to it, must always cause the most desperate political struggle as to who shall obtain the direction of it. It results in the formation of parties organized against each other, and in all the strategy, personal ambition, and unscrupulous promising, which are the persistent features of party organizations.

6. Because every universal system forces intolerance upon us all, making each man struggle to suppress forcibly the beliefs of his neighbour in his necessary effort to achieve success for his own.

7. Because what we call the religious question can never be separated from the higher subjects of education. A universal system either leads to a false truce between Catholic, Protestant, Theist, Agnostic, Atheist,—where we want active fighting and unfettered effort,—or to the suppression of some sects by other sects. Both denominational teaching and secular teaching are, if supported by State-force, equally unjust. That education should do its real work, the teacher must be free, whether he is Catholic, Protestant, Theist, Agnostic or Atheist. Otherwise he is but a one-armed and one-legged man, utterly unable to exert his full influence—a mere creature of ignoble compromise.

8. Because all universal systems lead to bureaucratic rule. Given an universal system of education, the central department must obtain the management. How can you decide the real education question at the hustings? Fancy one party advocating some special way of teaching arithmetic; another advocating some method of needlework; a third some special system of grammar, and yet these and their like, are the real education questions. You can only decide at the hustings questions that belong to the mere outside;—that are the husks of education. May schools give religious education? Shall it be gratuitous? Shall it be compulsory? Therefore if you build up a State system, you practically forbid the people to trouble their heads about the real education questions. The sure result is to produce an unthinking nation on the subject of one of its greatest interests. Why should any man at the present day think about education? He is powerless to give effect to any desire or conviction of his own. How can he move the immense machinery that he sees in front of him? Let him be content. It has become a departmental affair, wholly in the hands of the big clerks, and the little clerks; with some petty matters left for the elected members to wrangle over.

9. Because a state-system teaches the people the bad lesson of taking compulsorily from their richer neighbours purse for their own purposes. Let us all learn to help each other freely and by our own consent; But let no man,—rich or poor,—be ever made the mere instrument of another. Such a system degrades all concerned. It is not in this state-driven fashion that nations become inspired with life and energy and rise to the high levels of their existence. The soul of an administered nation is a poor dumb thing that just knows that it suffers but has hardly any other consciousness. See how our people suffer under the present oppressive system, and yet scarcely know in what the hurt consists. They have dim perceptions of pain and unrest, but they are in no real way responsible for the system, and therefore have no clear understanding of its workings. They do not see how their children are kept far too many hours in the school; how insufficient are the intervals given in one attendance that lasts three hours; how the children are hurried and driven through the standards; how by the system of money payments the master is obliged to overpress both himself and his pupils; how in consequence the education given is of a low mechanical order, feebly stirring the intelligence; how at the very beginning of life both body and mind are jaded; and how little those who direct the great education-machine are able or willing out of their office-windows to see the evils that exist. Nor do those who in their own persons are the most deeply interested, but whom by our system we have prevented from thinking and acting for themselves, perceive the cruelty and folly of setting up a system of official compulsion. In London, week after week, a pitiless persecution goes on. Like all official systems, the system is and must be worked with great harshness. It is easy to set ten thousand wheels to grind flesh and blood; it is not easy to grind without causing suffering. In all weather and under many difficulties parents lose a day’s work to attend the court to which they are summoned; homes are broken up; furniture sold; men thrown into prison; families dispersed, in some cases taking to a vagabond life in order to avoid the School-board officer. Occasionally some very arbitrary act finds its way into the public press, just for the moment startling those who happen to see, and who then forget it; as, to take any one of many instances, the case of a man, who was summoned notwithstanding the doctor’s certificate; which he had sent to the School board officer, and which the officer refused to return to him; occasionally some magistrate wisely stands between the pedantic zeal of the school-board officer and the wretched parent whom he is hunting down; but nothing checks the great machine, which like all other machines, goes relentlessly on, week by week, and month by month, without pause or rest, until the prosecutions are to be counted by tens of thousands, and the life of the poor is made considerably bitterer and harder than it was in the days when we had fewer politicians, philanthropists, educational pedants, and officials busy at their work of trying to spread education by fine and imprisonment. Truly we all are at this very hour faithful descendants of those zealous children of the Church who flogged and imprisoned and put on the rack their fellowmen in order to spread her doctrines and extend her empire.

And for what reason is this persecution? To get the children to school? As if persecution were the only instrument placed in our hands for carrying out a good work! By all means get them to school, but get them there by kindness, sympathy, persuasion, by the example of others, by the help which the friendly kindly-minded people are ever ready to give, where it is wanted, and where you leave them free to bring their help. Is not this one of the great works which fellow-men and fellow-women can do for each other, and are ready to do for each other, if you do not drive them away from such work by your official machinery. What sight would be nobler than to see one half of the nation persuading the other half to seek the advantages of education for their children; what sight viler than to see one half coercing the other half? And how, and from where, let me ask, did we get this precious right to persecute each other; to play the petty tyrant, the one over the other? We may choose to say in our wisdom that it is better for every child in the nation to be in one of these new fine buildings which we have put up with money collected by the tax gatherer’s machinery, than to help its mother, struggling with want, in her work, but who gave us authority to force this idea of ours, — be it a true or false idea, — upon others by the brotherly methods of fine and imprisonment? I deny this right of persecution; and I appeal to all those in the English nation, who have not yet fallen down before the State machine and worshipped it, to deny it and resist it. The cruelty of the method, the suffering it causes, the anger and bitterness that it is calling out, all point to the fact that the official pedants here, as always, are wrong, and that the right we claim to persecute others for the sake of your own ideas is a crime and a folly of which one day we shall be as much ashamed, as we now are of the whip, and the knife, and the branding-iron in which our equally enlightened forefathers so devoutly believed.

What is the true thing to be done? I answer “Break up this costly, this misdirected, this oppressive system. Let the parents resume their own control and management of their own children and of their education; understanding that they can only recover their lost rights by resolutely rejecting all the bribes that the State offers them. Rates, and taxes, gifts and grants from the State, by whatever name they are called, are always the instruments by which the management and control of the people’s interests pass into official hands. Let the parents open their eyes, and see that they need no rate, that they need no tax. If indeed their hearts desire fine buildings, State certificated teachers, armies of official inspectors, superintendents and visitors and every kind of degree of child-hunter, if they want infallible gentlemen sitting in Whitehall and infallible ladies and gentlemen sitting at the Victoria Embankment Theatre of all the Vanities, then they must be content to take gifts from Government, to depend upon taxes and rates, and to look on, whilst others—the political busy-bodies of the nation—jostle them aside and officiously manage the education of their children. But if they desire none of these things, if they are sick of this empty vain-glorious shew, and this pretentious and insolent officialism; if they are content to carry out in their own fashion, and according to their own wants and ideas, a far simpler but truer system, then let them combine in their own groups, and boldly undertake the work which never should have been taken out of their hands. They will soon find that neither rate nor tax are necessary. The combining faculties of the English people are great, and if left to themselves, neither harassed nor persecuted by officials, not made stupid by systems and codes, nor enervated by State-payments, there are few, if any, of the great wants of life that they could not fulfill with their own hands and brains; and in doing it make a great stride forward in civilization. It cannot too often be repeated that progress in civilization means the awakening of new desires, new thoughts, and feelings—the effort to give effect to these new feelings—the life, the movement, everywhere in society, as some for the first time struggle to help themselves, and some to help others, the new faculties of voluntary association, the new taking of each other’s hands, the unloosening in every direction of the great moral forces, that change not merely the external circumstances, but the inner beings of the man. Progress in civilization does not mean a people partly driven to fulfill a great duty like education by fine and imprisonment, partly bribed to do so by money taken from the pockets of the richer classes. This mingled bribery and coercion are merely one of the rank survivals of old and rotten forms of Government; they can find no place in that pure, simple, self-reliant democracy that we have yet, as our noble though difficult task, to found in this and in every other country.

I appeal then to the workmen of London and of every other part of the country, to take a higher view of this question and they have ever yet taken. Be masters of your own children, and don’t hand them over to any State machinery. Sanction no cruel persecution of the weaker and more ignorant. Leave all the good people of every church, sect, and opinion, to humanise and improve these fragments of society, instead of making their lives more wretched and their feelings more bitter by hunting them with your paid official bloodhounds. Look neither to tax nor rate; don’t accustom yourselves to depend upon the richer classes for what you want. If you do, then you are for ever at the mercy of the bribing politician. Money is not your first necessity, not even your second. If you want money, you have the right to see that the old revenues left to the use of the poor should be turned from their present uses and applied to education by which you can profit. Take them, if you think good. They are your right, which compulsory taxing of the richer classes to serve your own purpose is not. But take care that these revenues, when acquired, do not lead you astray from the great purpose and work in front of you. Your work is not to quarrel amongst yourselves over any public funds,—it would be better to cast them into the deeps of the sea—it is not to build up any one great system that shall pass out of your control; it is not to accept official views and to sacrifice your own individuality to these; but it is to understand your own power of combination, to unite in your group according to the views and convictions that are dearest to you, to put together bravely your slender resources, and to organize your own systems of education for your children, as your fathers and forefathers organized their religion. As you do this, you will gain in powers of self-help, of self-direction, of co-operation with your fellows, of knowledge of your own wants, of glorious power to fulfill them. Help, almost too much help, will come to you from outside sources, for the English were always a generous nation to help each other, until we began to weaken that generosity by our official systems and our ever increasing burdens of taxation. Of course the politician—who having to live by his trade, must ever magnify it—will tell you a nation can only be educated by means of the State and its machinery; will assure you that such a work of self-help should not be asked for at your hands. Leave him to whine as he will, he has his own trade to look after. Let him magnify it for the present to his heart’s content, preaching to you the sorry doctrine of his own importance, and your salvation by rates and taxes. The day will come when you will discover that you can do better without him than with him, that he has been only a fetter on your hands and a log to your feet in your struggle to better things, and then, like others worthier than himself, he will begin to look for a new and more useful occupation for his restless energies and ambitions. Meanwhile have confidence in yourselves. Have confidence in your own powers of association. Have confidence in the strength that will come to you when you once fairly plunge into the work. Have confidence in moral force as against all coercion, in free voluntary work as against all State-directed systems.

To sum up. Organise yourselves for liberty.

Destroy compulsion in every form and under every disguise.

Break up all connection between local education and the Whitehall Centre.

Change both tax and rate into voluntary payments. Give to no man the power of carrying out his own ideas at the expense of his neighbour. With voluntary tax and voluntary rate those who like best a central and uniform system can still help to maintain it; whilst those who believe in other systems, that express different convictions and different aspirations, can out of their means and their labour, allow experiments, that are yet untried, to struggle for existence.

For every man freedom of choice and freedom of action.

For none the degradation of using his neighbour, or being himself used, against his convictions.

Thinking About Revolution: Two Books Of Importance

In the August 1975 issue of the newsletter of the Society for Individual Liberty (SIL, Box 1147, Warminster, Pa. 18974), editor Don Ernsberger reviewed the means by which libertarians have been attempting to build “a free society”. Quickly passing over education, politics, tax resistance and escapism, he raised the interesting question of “the approach least often seriously studied, considered or undertaken-revolutionary violence”. While recognizing that the mere hint of revolutionary violence as a viable tactic would probably attract every psychopath in the vicinity to the movement, not to mention the paid provocateurs of the State, Ernsberger still raises a legitimate question: what tactics would be desirable or necessary if two possible situations came into existence – an outbreak of another Vietnam style intervention by the United States in Korea of the Middle East, or the outbreak within the country of urban guerrilla warfare, perhaps in the wake of economic collapse, or even prolonged unemployment? A third possibility, not raised but just as probable, would be the establishment of a presidential dictatorship through a suspension of civil liberties or massive evasion of the law as in the Nixon years, and earlier. Ernsberger concluded with the suggestion that in each situation outlined, “libertarian revolutionary action might be both rational, moral and practical”, and that more attention should be paid to this problem in libertarian periodicals and conferences.

Ernsberger is certainly correct in urging that libertarians give greater attention to the study of revolutionary theory, strategy and tactics. No tyrant ever has voluntarily restored freedom to his victims, and we are not likely to preserve those liberties we have without a conscious strategy of resistance to creeping or leaping statism. The events of the past decade amply demonstrate the tenuous character of constitutional liberty in American society in an age of rampant militarism, imperialism and corporate state capitalism.

Where does one start in planning a successful revolution or resistance to aggressive statism? Not, I think, by assessing one’s chances for dynamiting the local Society Security office or voting machine storage warehouse, which Ernsberger rather thoughtlessly implies. Certainly by now, after our experiences in Vietnam, we ought to understand the fundamental necessity of basing any revolutionary action on the objective of “winning the hearts and minds of people”. This was the central principle in the Chinese and Indo-Chinese revolutions, as it was in the American revolution two centuries ago. The failure of the Bolsheviks to adhere to this principle opened the way for the triumph of Stalinism and the tawdry tyranny of contemporary Soviet society. Any libertarian revolutionary actions must always be evaluated in the light of this same principle. Hopefully libertarians would understand the difference in affect in destroying Selective Service records and those of the millions of sick or elderly citizens dependent on the Social Security Administration for their survival. A careful analysis of the true enemy’s identity is crucial for any successful revolutionary movement.

Libertarians interested in thinking about the problem of planning successful revolution might begin by reading the newly published edition of a classic libertarian treatise, Etienne de la Boetie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire (published under the title The Politics of Obedience with an introduction by Murray N. Rothbard, Free Life Editions Inc., 41 Union Square, New York, N.Y. 10003. $2.95). Written in the sixteenth century by a perceptive French law student, it goes directly to the heart of the puzzling fact that men submit so passively to the tyranny of other men’s rule. La Boetie brilliantly analyzes the psychological foundations of the State and finds that tyrants rule because men consent to live in servitude. In effect, governments exist by the consent of the governed. If that seems platitudinous, it is not in La Boetie’s capable hand; rather he uses this insight to examine the fact and how it works; he then draws certain conclusions of radical significance. Liberation begins in the mind and will of the subject; self-liberation comes through the withdrawal of the subject’s consent to be ruled; the armaments of the tyrant are meaningless once his authority had dissolved in the hearts and minds of the people.

The richness of La Boetie’s historical analysis of the nature of tyranny and the characteristics of human behavior which nourish and sustain it will delight and impress the reader. Prof. Rothbard’s introduction, almost as long as the text itself, offers new light on La Boetie’s career and the significance of his work, and also explains the curious fact that the essay has been ignored or misinterpreted for centuries by almost everyone except anarchists.

A second work that ought to stimulate further libertarian study and discussion of revolutionary theory and tactics is by Paulo Freire, a distinguished Brazilian educator, most famous for his planning of a massive effort to eradicate illiteracy among the oppressed peasantry of northeastern Brazil, a project terminated by the military junta that ended democratic government in that country in 1964. Freire’s work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (The Seabury Press, 815 Second Avenue, New York 10017) begins with a general analysis of the nature of tyranny, and, with less elegance of style than the French humanist La Boetie, reaches the same conclusion: that servitude exists in the minds of the oppressed and that liberation is, first and foremost, a process of self-realization of the full dimension of one’s dignity as a human being, and then the withdrawal of one’s consent to another’s claim of authority. But while La Boetie attributes the initial submission of the oppressed to another’s tyranny to fear of the tyrant, and his subsequent servility to the domination over the mind of habit, Freire presents a much more sophisticated psychological analysis. According to Freire, there are two classes in a non-libertarian society: the oppressors and the oppressed. (It should be noted that Freire rejects the Marxian class analysis in favor of one similar to Oppenheimer’s notion of the rulers and the ruled). Both classes exist in a state of dehumanization; both suffer from a distortion of man’s essential human vocation of becoming more fully human. By this he seems to mean man perfecting his nature, perhaps reflecting a notion of man as possessing a definitive nature to which he aspires to conform as in natural law theory, or even a notion of man’s nature as evolutionary in character, as in the teachings of Teilhard de Chardin. Freire believes that dehumanization is the result of an unjust social order that engenders dehumanizing violence in the oppressor which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed. The historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well. The oppressed will not gain their liberation by chance, or by the benevolence of their oppressors; it will come only through the praxis of their quest for it, through their recognition of the necessity to struggle for it. As Freire so eloquently puts it:

“Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man: nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.”

What is it that keeps the oppressed from seeking freedom? La Boetie believed it to be fear of the tyrant and habit; Freire believes it to be fear of freedom itself. Even when the oppressed become conscious that without freedom they cannot live an authentic human life, they fear living outside a prescriptive order imposed by the oppressors. (This explains the common situation in which the rationality and morality of the anarchist position is granted, but anarchism itself is rejected as impractical). As Freire says:

“The oppressed are severely hindered in their effort to liberate themselves by several objective conditions within their psychological persona: they have a profound sense of inferiority vis-à-vis their oppressors which tends to make them emotionally dependent upon them; this in turn makes the oppressed prone to self destructive behavior, fatalism, hatred of self and their fellow oppressed, and even (generates) an admiration for the oppressors as superior creatures, yet hating them for what they are.”

Freire sees a kind of psychological dualism deeply rooted in the minds of the oppressed, so deeply that even when they gather enough courage to overthrow a concrete ruling regime, they tend to adopt the same consciousness as the deposed oppressors; hence, the rarity in history of a genuine sustained libertarian revolution, unmarred by a relapse into a new phase of statism.

How then can this depressing cycle of oppression be broken and a libertarian society not only be won but sustained? Freire believes that:

“The conflict (in the oppressed) lies in the choice between being wholly themselves or being divided; between ejecting the oppressor within or not ejecting him; between human solidarity or alienation; between following prescriptions or having choices; between being spectators or actors; between acting or having the illusion of acting through the action of the oppressors; between speaking out or being silent, castrated in their power to create and re-create, in their power to transform the world. This is the tragic dilemma of the oppressed which their education should take into account.”

Thus to Freire, liberation comes about through education — and the main burden of his argument in this book is to present his ideas on an effective pedagogy for the oppressed, as the title indicates. Merely perceiving the inner conflict in the consciousness of the oppressed and the reality of the objective condition in which they exist is not enough to transform them, to humanize them, to liberate them. The oppressed must act. Perception and action are distinct aspects of what Freire calls conscientization (conscientizacao in Portuguese)-learning to perceive social, political and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements with the historic reality. Significantly, Freire does not contemplate the use of violent action; violence is the method of the oppressor, not the oppressed, and task of the oppressed is not only to liberate themselves, but also to liberate their oppressors, i.e. to help them to become more human. Violence would negate this goal and also make the oppressed oppressors.

How can the oppressed break out of the psychologically anti-human tendency to use violence as a means of liberation? Freire believes that the way to do so is through critical and liberating dialogue. The correct method for a libertarian leadership to create a revolution is not, I repeat, not “to employ libertarian propaganda, nor seek to implant in the oppressed an idea of freedom, thus thinking to win their trust.” The correct method is dialogue in which the oppressed are not treated as objects, but rather engage in co-intentional education in which:

“teachers and students (leaders and people) co-intent on understanding reality through reflection and action are both subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming together to know it critically, but also in recreating that reality in the light of their new critical knowledge. Thus the oppressed are involved in their own struggle for liberation not as pseudo-participants, but as fully committed and creative analysts and actors”.

Freire devotes about a quarter of his text to the teacher-student or leader-people relationship, condemning the essentially narrative character of most teaching or propaganda. The pedagogy of the oppressor-oppressed social is called the “banking concept of education” by Freire. It is one in which knowledge is bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable on those they consider ignorant. The ignorant are supposed to receive the “pearls of wisdom” and deposit them in the storehouse of their minds. The oppressor utilizes this system of education the more easily to shape the consciousness of the oppressed into accepting their role as subjects of the oppressor’s authority and objects of his paternal manipulation. Against this model Freire proposes the problem-posing or dialogic model in which through dialogue, acts of reflection and cognition jointly experienced, both teacher and student, or leader and people, now critical co-investigators of objective reality — come to see the world and their own role in it, not as static reality, but as reality in process, in transformation. “Problem-posing education affirms men as beings in the process of becoming-as unfinished, uncompleted beings in and with a likewise unfinished reality.” It is essentially individualistic and human in method and result, and revolutionary in a libertarian sense.

In another chapter Freire takes up the peculiar qualities required of the revolutionary teacher or leader. A basic a priori requirement for dialogic relations is absolute faith in the capability of the oppressed to liberate themselves through dialogue. “Trust the People,” as Chairman Mao has put it. The second fundamental requirement is love of the human race, or commitment to other men and their liberation. A third is hope, confidence in ultimate success. Optimism in the long-term achievement of humanization is necessary to sustain both the leader and the people in their continuing dialogue. Finally the dialogue cannot exist without humility infusing both parties.

Freire is extremely critical of those revolutionary leaders who, in their desire to obtain support of the people for revolutionary action, adopt the “banking concept of education” of planning the program content of the revolution from the top down. “They forget that their fundamental objective is to fight alongside the people for the recovery of the people’s stolen humanity, not “to win the people over” to their side. Such a phrase does not belong in the vocabulary of revolutionary leaders, but in that of the oppressors. Moreover, such an approach constitutes a “cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” Thus “winning the hearts and minds of the people” is to be understood in the sense that “the prospective leader must identify himself with the people’s aspirations, not compel them to adhere to his own.” As Mao has put it, “we must teach the masses clearly what we have received from them confusedly.” “The starting point for organizing the program content of education or political action must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people.”

I have just tapped the surface in this review of the incredible riches of this profound work. Fully half of the book deals with the methodology of dialogues in greater detail. But I wish to stress that this book is not useful just to those who by profession are teachers or propagandists of some kind: it is essential reading for anyone seriously committed to libertarianism as a philosophic approach to shaping social or personal reality. It is a handbook for true revolutionaries, rather than putschists. It is, along with that of La Boetie, required reading for anyone interested in the process by which liberty can be won and sustained. It ought to be subjected to the same dialogic method of study and critical analysis that it advocates. Hopefully, it will inspire some of the kinds of interest in libertarian revolutionary theory and tactics which Don Ernsberger called for us to develop.

(J. R. P.)

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“In all ages, whatever the form and name of government-be it monarchy, public or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the facade: Roman history, republican or imperial, is the history of a governing class. . . Liberty and the laws are high sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interests”.

Sir Ronald Syme, The Roman Revolution, Oxford 1939.

The First Two Years Of W. W. II

BY J. P. McCarthy*

A review of John Lukacs’ The Last European War (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1976), $15.00

On very few episodes in human history have moral judgements seemed so easy to be rendered as the Second World War. This was particularly so in the United States where, once the nation became a participant in the war, there existed universal support for the cause. The absolute or unconditional defeat of the enemy further enhanced the clear-cut crusade image. Consequently, a whole generation of Americans came to look upon the government that led the crusade as the paragon of virtues and decency and applauded any extension of that government’s mandate domestically or externally as further steps towards the attainment of universal righteousness. Because of this mental consequence of the Second World War any historical re-examination which can re-create the actual atmosphere and attitudes of the war period and not simply repeat the post-war self congratulations is to be applauded. Such revisionist history helps one to realize that there necessarily were great varieties of motives, moralities, and actions on all sides of so massive a human drama as the Second World War.

As valid and important as is revisionist history, one has to acknowledge that it is usually inspired by and prompted to serve an ideological cause. That is, it is an attempt to understand the past in order to prove a contemporary position. However, John Lukacs’ The Last European War, which covers the Second World War from its inception to the American entry, is a form of post-revisionist revisionism. He was not a participant in any of the controversies of the war period, nor is he an antagonist in: any contemporary ideological controversy. Consequently, his revisionism is not special pleading. At the same time his work remains revisionist in that he challenges both orthodox versions as well as some of the earlier revisionist views. His thorough scholarship and acquaintance with the personalities and events of the period would by itself make this a worthwhile book. His ability to combine that knowledge with remarkable insights that grant a new understanding of the events make his work the outstanding history of the early period of the war.

Very few ideological camps feel at home with Lukacs ever since his pioneering, revisionist History of the Cold War that he wrote in the early 1960’s. He personally is a conservative, but a conservative of a European and neo-liberal character. That is, he hails the bourgeois age and its domesticities-such as regard for family, security of possessions, and industriousness-and dreads mass politics, particularly when it calls for international crusades. The kind of American political figures with whom he would probably feel most at home are William Fulbright and Eugene McCarthy (at least in the Spring of 1968).

There are three prevailing schools of thought in America on the Second World War (that is, if one does not take into account that small group who actually hold that the right side lost the war). First, there is the orthodox establishment view of it as a struggle by Liberal Democracy-personified by F.D.R.-to destroy racist and reactionary Fascism and enable the world to move ahead towards international solidarity and the welfare State. Second, there is the right-wing revisionist view which holds that the United States ought have left the totalitarian powers Germany–and the Soviet Union–to slug it out and then, upon their mutual exhaustion, impose peace. Third, is left-wing revisionism which holds that the cynical capitalist powers, whose appeasement of Hitler as an anti-Communist ally had been short-changed by the shrewd Stalin-Hitler pact, later exploited the Soviet people as the main cannon fodder in the defeat of Hitlerism and then sought to monopolize for western capitalism all of the territory liberated from the Nazis.

An aspect of the orthodox view is a depreciation of Hitler’s talents and genius and the implication that he was his own worst enemy by taking on too much, especially in his decision to invade Russia in June 1941. Lukacs insists that Operation Barbarossa made a lot of sense from a military and diplomatic point of view. Hitler’s original pact with the Soviet Union had been an attempt to prompt the British to avoid fighting him over Poland. When that failed and when the possibility of invading Britain, which he never wanted to do, became increasingly remote, Hitler decided that the only way to bring the British to acquiesce in his claim for German ascendancy on the continent was to defeat the only other major independent power, Russia. Then the British and their still officially non-belligerent supporters, the Americans, would, in accord with realpolitik, acquiesce in the new German hegemony over the European continent.

There was a very great chance that he could have defeated the Russians. Indeed, the Russian regime was in such a state of disrepair, Lukacs suggests, that had Hitler let Stalin know in September of 1941 that he could be let off with the same terms as the French were in June of 1940 the Red dictator might have acquiesced. As it was, the population of Moscow throughout October were anticipating with much curiosity and fascination their imminent conquest by the Germans. The Russian Army was collapsing all around. Russian resistance and discipline were only restored when climatic elements halted the German march. At that point, Lukacs indicated, Hitler, in contrast to the usual image of him believing in the possibility of a German victory almost until 1945, became aware that the war could not be won and that the German strategy should be to fight on, as they were well able to, until their enemies would fall out among themselves and then a negotiated peace could be arrived at.

The other alleged over-extension of Hitler was his support for the Japanese in their war on the United States. Lukacs argues that Hitler did not declare war on the United States out of a blind and imprudent sense of loyalty to his Japanese ally (who, for their part, had shrewdly signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union). Rather, Hitler had all along urged the Japanese to war on the Americans with the hope that it would keep the Americans hamstrung from any European operations. Admittedly he should have urged the Japanese to expand northward towards Russia. He also miscalculated American strategy. However, some Americans, such as Douglas MacArthur, wanted to do just what Hitler hoped they would, that is, give first priority to fighting Japan.

One of the most intriguing and thoughtful sections of Lukacs’ book is his analysis of the “balance of power” implications of the origins, duration, and conclusion of the Second World War. Hitler, he asserts, although a fanatic ideologist, wanted a traditional foreign policy goal, that is, a new balance of power with German dominance of the continent (admittedly “a kind of near-absolute domination, and not some kind of Bismarckian preponderance”) to which he believed the British and ultimately the Americans would acquiesce. The master realpolitician, Stalin, most anxious for Hitler’s friendship, would accept that new balance of power including German dominance of Europe in return for the safety of the Russian state. Stalin hoped that Hitler’s dominance of Europe would allow Russian neutrality. If Russia had to be drawn into war he preferred an alliance with Hitler than with Britain. It was the traditionally realpolitical British and their supporters, the Americans, who rejected a modus vivendi solution. They were determined to get rid of Hitler rather then accept a new balance of power because “they felt that the very nature of Hitler’s regime stood in the way of any kind of a reasonable balance of power.” Convinced that the Anglo-American alliance with the Russians from mid-1941 on would have to eventually break apart, Hitler failed to understand that Britain and the United States would prefer Russian domination over half of Europe than German domination of all or most of it.

Lukacs is particularly contemptuous of the Left which he holds had become eclipsed as a political force in the early 1930’s as the major mass movements that “came out of the Depression were Fascist or Nationalist Socialist, rather than Communist.” The failure of the Left was in accord with the persistent inaccuracy of Marx’s political prophecies. The twentieth century has seen more of the dissolution of class differences than class warfare, more intensification of national consciousness than its lessening, and a “Marxist” revolution in Russia that was, unlike the French Revolution of 1789, more a by-product of another war and a localized event than the vanguard of the future. During the thirties in the advanced and industrialized West, the logical focus for the emerging classless society, the Marxist and Leftist leadership, seemed increasingly old and/or beset by desertions to the Right (Laval, MacDonald, Mussolini), while its mass following, especially in Central Europe, were most susceptible to the appeals of Nazism. As for the one established Marxist regime, the Soviet Union, not only was it at that stage an abysmal failure and a tyranny, but its leader, Stalin, was himself really more of a Nationalist Socialist than a Marxist, being contemptuous of the Western Leftists but having “a healthy respect for the men and forces of the Right.”

The European political struggles and the later military clashes of the late 1930’s and early 1940’s should, Lukacs acutely argues, be seen as a struggle between two Rights rather than Left and Right because the opponents of Hitler appealed to the sames impulses-duty, loyalty, tradition, patriotism-that Hitler and the collaborationist Right did. The most unyielding, although not always successful, enemies of domestic Nationalist Socialist movements or collaborationist tendencies were the conservative dictators, regents, and monarchs of Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Similarly, clerical and aristocratic forces were the strongest counterpoles to collaboration in Austria, Italy, and Spain. The Poles fought Hitler to the end – and beyond – unlike the democratic Czechs who collapsed before his threats.

Since the book deals with the period in which the Third Reich seemed in fact the wave of the future, Lukacs deals with the generally ignored (or deliberately forgotten) tendency of most people – particularly among the conquered – to accept the apparently inevitable. Part of the reason was the viability of National Socialism (as opposed to the exclusive German form, Nazism). National Socialism, that is the “conjunction of nationalism with socialism . . . may have been the principal political configuration of a century,” just as during the Nineteenth Century, “the principal political ideas in the Western world were a mixture of conservatism and liberalism.” What better label than National Socialist, Lukacs asks, could be applied to such different men as Castro, Mao, Peron, Nasser, Tito, and in a broader sense–“many of the leaders of the democracies of the second half of the twentieth century.”

Sympathy for or acceptance of Hitler by non-Germans sprang, Lukacs notes, from a variety of causes ranging from Nationalist Socialist ideological solidarity (naturally unreciprocated by Hitler who preferred opportunist thugs to fanatics as supporters in satellite countries) to Germanophilia. Another important facet of Hitler’s appeal was his anticommunism, a pre-occupation of certain conservatives and many Catholic churchmen which allowed them to excuse Hitler’s gross violations of their standards. Continental Anglophobia was another important factor. The Anglophobia of the Germans was a kind of inferiority complex, according to Lukacs. But he also sees it as a blatant assertion of the Germanic idealistic rejection of the positivism of the nineteenth century. Along the same lines Vichy apologists identified France’s democratic-liberal decadence with the Anglo-French alliance.

Lukacs devotes a whole chapter to the relations between nations, that is, the popular attitudes of nationalities towards each other – one of the many things of which the New York man in the street has been conscious long before most academicians. These attitudes manifested themselves in such things as mass spectator sports, and Hitler was particularly attuned to registering and evoking these impulses. Naturally the attitudes of nationalities towards each other often changed because of the war. Lukacs reasserts what had always been a pet peeve of Hilaire Belloc – that the English had suffered from a Germanophilia that was filled with racist implications, dating from Victorian times, and manifest in the ideas of Carlyle and the policies of Joseph and Neville Chamberlain. The war ended this, but the war also enabled the intellectual left and the press to whip up in the British an irrational Russophilia (a parallel to this was the mood in Hollywood during the war years).

Lukacs is most original in his discussion of the central criminality of Nazism-its genocidal anti-Semitism. He asserts that the universal liberal dogma “that Nazism was much more criminal than Communism, will stand only because of the Jewish issue.” If Hitler and company had not murdered the Jews a kind of pro-German apologia could easily have developed and have pointed out that the German people were much better off under Hitler than the Russians were under the Communists, that many of the Eastern Europeans suffered less under German occupation than they did under the Russians, and that in the early stages of the war there was an extraordinary degree of personal and political freedom within the Third Reich (For instance, full wartime mobilization was not proclaimed in Germany until 1942-three years after it had been in England!).

Hitler’s principal conviction throughout his life was his Judeophobia, that is, “To solve the Jewish problem.” His biological racism, to which he was inconsistent in view of his courting alliances with the Arabs and the Japanese, was secondary to his rigid and consistent Judeophobia. But while his Judeophobia was always central to him, the severity of his “solution” evolved in intensity. His earlier preference was expulsion rather than extermination of the Jews of Europe – a policy having many localized precedents in European history and with which many political leaders in Eastern and Southern Europe were agreeable. Indeed, if Churchill and Roosevelt had agreed in late 1941 to suspend the war and provide ships to transport the Jews out of Europe, Hitler, Lukacs insists, would have immediately agreed.

A central date suggesting a probable change in intensity of his anti-Semitic policy was January 30, 1939. In a speech responding to the increasing American encouragement of anti-Hitler figures and forces in Europe, Hitler, convinced of extraordinary Jewish influence on President Roosevelt, warned international Jewry that should they succeed in provoking a world war in opposition to German policy–that is, secure American intervention–the result would be “the annihilation of the Jewish race throughout Europe.” Accordingly, the policy towards the Jews in territories under Hitler’s control up to 1939 was one of encouraging and/or forcing emigration. Then, from 1939 to January 1942, emigration remained the official policy, although the Jews in Poland were being concentrated into ghettoes and a half million Jews were being murdered by the Germans elsewhere in Eastern Europe, frequently with the help of Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Rumanians (whose National Socialist Iron Guard movement possibly exceeded the SS in the intensity of their anti-Semitic barbarity). In January of 1942, coinciding with the total mobilization of the Reich, annihilation became the official and definite Third Reich policy towards the Jews. With the American entry into the war–a development which heartened millions of Jews throughout the world-Hitler’s solution of ridding Europe of Jews by sending them to America had become academic. Consequently, the logic of his perverse phobia required the dire “final solution”-a decision which once taken no longer attracted his interest or supervision.

The weakness of the book is paradoxically its wealth of information and insights. In other words, it is too much to digest. Each page could develop a theme for a monograph and, as a result, there tends to be an awkward type of organization. Footnotes, usually of paragraph length, which are at the bottom of pages rather than at the end of chapters or the book, distract the reader but in an intriguing way.

An interesting theme of the book which could lend itself to enormous study is the often ambiguous and frequently collaborationist attitude of religion with the horrors of the Third Reich. At the same time, Lukacs notes, religion was a major stimulant animating resistance movements and provided meaning for thoughtful people shocked by “not only the disasters of the war but also the disasters of the mass mind.” Out of the war would come a generation of Europeans “freeing their minds from allegiance to the state without, at the same time, becoming anti-religious.”

On the subject of religion and the Third Reich, Lukacs is critical of “saintly and sincere” Pius XII. Acknowledging that the Pontiff had no illusions about Hitler, Lukacs feels he allowed both his fear that a German defeat would be followed by a Communist victory all over Europe and his excessive caution in anticipating what Hitler might do to the German Catholics to impede his exercising true spiritual leadership by outrightly condemning Hitlerism. Another note, intriguing to Roman Catholics in particular, that Lukacs makes is that Cardinals Ottaviani and Tisserant were the most determined Vatican opponents of the Third Reich In addition Lukacs gives an embarrassing quotation, dated August 2, 1940, from the futurist Jesuit, Teilhard de Chardin: “The world is bound to belong to its most active elements. . .Just now, the Germans deserve to win because, however bad or mixed is their spirit, they have more spirit than the rest of the world.”

Lukacs steps on other toes as well. He lumps Neville Chamberlain, Petain, and Robert A. Taft together as being so paralyzed by a fear of the Communist threat, despite its non-existence in their own nations, that they lacked realistic judgement in international affairs. On the other hand, he notes Roosevelt’s embarrassed inability to reply to the parallel Hitler drew in 1940 between the Third Reich’s European policy and the Monroe Doctrine. Lukacs also points out the anxiety shared by a few sensitive Europeans, like Bemanos and De Gaulle, as early as 1941 about a future American hegemony, particularly if it was propelled by the universalist ideology represented by the Roosevelts and proclaimed by the William Allen Whites and the Harold Ickes.

A review of The Last European War can be summed up only with the colorful conclusion of so many columns of a late New York ethnic journalist: FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

*Dr. McCarthy teaches modern European history at Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York City.

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“Rome’s unquestionable greatness and her amazing achievements in the first one or two centuries of the Christian era must not make us overlook the fact that the imperial tradition is the most questionable part of our Greco-Roman heritage, different from its highest, truly humanistic ideals, and it is at the same time the part which is most difficult to reconcile with our Christian heritage”.

Oscar Halecki, The Millennium of Europe, Notre Dame 1963.

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“Brigands of the world, they (the Romans) have exhausted the land by their indiscriminate plunder, and now they ransack the sea. The wealth of an enemy excites their cupidity, his poverty their lust for power. East and West have failed to glut their maw. They are unique in being as violently tempted to attack the poor as the wealthy. Robbery, butchery, rapine, the liars call Empire; they create a desert and call it peace”.

Tacitus, Agricola.

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