"War is the health of the State," argued the early 20th century American radical anarchist Randolph Bourne. What he meant was that while war may be bloody costly to a country on the battlefield, the same war always boosts the size and power of government on the homefront. And such state-expansion, Bourne knew, would always come at the expense of human freedom.

      As Bourne put it:

      The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation.And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned.The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd.
      The final result of this process, according to Bourne, is that the State becomes "the inexorable arbiter and determinant of men's business and attitudes and opinions." Thus the health of the State is the death of Liberty. America now faces a greater threat to its freedoms than at any time in its history, as the War on Terror is the most terrifying occasion for Salvation by State yet imagined.
      Including the Civil War--the first modern or "total war" fought by Americans--America's "hot" wars have been short by historical standards. (The Vietnam War, from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to the fall of Saigon, being the longest at almost 11 years.) Yet they have been long in death, which is surely the greatest enemy of the pursuit of happiness.

      Total U.S. Service Deaths, from Civil War to Vietnam

      Battle Deaths
      Non-Battle Deaths
      Total

      Civil War
      214, 938
      283,394
      498,332

      Spanish American
      385
      2,061
      2,446

      First World War
      53,402
      63,114
      116,516

      Second World War
      291,557
      113,842
      405,399

      Korea
      33,686
      20,560
      54,246

      Vietnam
      47,410
      42,788
      90,198

      (Source: Department of Veterans Affairs)

      This chart does not include the millions of Americans injured and maimed since 1861 or, of course, the millions of enemy soldiers and civilians killed by American arms in sometimes vainglorious conflicts. Yet it is sobering enough.
      The modest death counts from such operations as Grenada and the Gulf War--and now, Operation Iraqi Freedom, although it's not over yet--suggest that America has discovered a way to wage war at relatively little cost--at least in American lives. But death, of course, is not the only ultimate enemy of one's personal autonomy. The power to wage war--to cause death--has unfailingly resulted in both a vast expansion in the government spending and state power and a suppression of civil liberties.
      Conscription, introduced during the Civil War, World War I, and in place during the hot and cold wars from 1940 to 1973, robbed millions of Americans of their freedom. During the Civil War, it resulted in widespread rioting, most notoriously in New York City, where Irish mobs set upon blacks, using them as scapegoats. This unhappy time is detailed in the climax of the Leonardo DiCaprio film, "Gangs of New York."
      The Civil War also occasioned the depredations of President Abraham Lincoln, who was not quite the Great Emancipator in real life as he is in popular memory. His presidency was occasioned by "shutting down newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, arresting congressmen [and] effectively declaring martial law for the duration," in the words of author James Bovard. Lincoln even issued a warrant to arrest Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney; it was not enforced, but according to historian Thomas DiLorenzo, author of The Real Lincoln, the Sixteenth President ordered the arrest of between 13,000 and 38,000 political opponents.
      During the First World War, President Wilson nationalized the railroads, and Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, criminalizing dissent. As Terry Teachout writes in his biography of H.L. Mencken:
      'Once lead this people into war, and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as tolerance,' Woodrow Wilson himself had warned, and he was right. In the United States.everything German was guilty until proved innocent.sauerkraut was renamed 'liberty cabbage,' the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms was summarily struck from orchestral programs, and people with Saxon-sounding surnames changed them or lived to regret it.
      Mencken himself, one of America's greatest writers, became unpublishable during this time, although happily, he lived long enough to make his anti-statist arguments at a time of waxing state power.
      Franklin Delano Roosevelt saw Wilson's national-security-minded intolerance--and raised it. During the Second World War, Japanese-Americans, mostly US citizens, were banned from the West Coast, and 110,000 were interned in concentration camps. (Does that word sound harsh? Very well, it sounds harsh. Camps such as Tule Lake and Manzanar were, indeed, concentration camps, although, of course, they were not death camps, such as those operated by the Nazis during the same period.) Four hundred million dollars of their property was stolen or lost.
      But it wasn't just the rights of Japanese-Americans that suffered during this time. FDR also unleashed J. Edgar Hoover's FBI against "America First"-type isolationists, and freely encouraged government wiretapping of suspected "seditionists"--despite a Supreme Court ruling against such snooping. Schoolchildren (mostly Jehovah's Witnesses) who refused to salute the flag were ruled eligible for expulsion. Following the First World War precedent, the U.S. Post Office suspended delivery of dozens of publications from across the political spectrum.
      As the Second World War ended, the Cold War began and a new crop of enemies were used as an excuse to engorge the government. Suspected current and former communists, often accused of no crimes, were forced to testify under oath before Congressional committees. Until his death in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover arrogated to himself almost unlimited power to investigate and harass "subversives." In the early 60s, Attorney General Robert Kennedy used Hoover as his personal snoop and illegally wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and any suspected mobster or labor leader he wanted imprisoned. In turn, Hoover used the information he accumulated about John F. Kennedy to blackmail his brother. Government lawlessness was only curbed in reaction to the disgrace and resignation of Richard Nixon-whose administration went so far as to attempt a burglary of the Democratic National Committee-and the end of the Vietnam War.
      Coincident with the Cold War was yet another conflict that justified even more state power: the emergence of the "War on Drugs," which resulted in the criminalization of many previously legal medications, the imprisonment of millions of Americans for victimless crimes, the futile expenditure of billions of dollars and an unending stream of government propaganda in every communications medium.
      For almost two decades after Vietnam, government suppression of liberty under the guise of war-readiness enjoyed little support from any quarter. (Except for the War on Drugs, which continued unabated all through this time, sweeping up millions of citizens indulging in their private pursuit of pleasure.)
      But the climate changed decisively upon the re-emergence of American domestic terrorism, even before September 11, 2001. In the 1997 trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, government prosecutors cited among the "virulent, violent" literature owned by McVeigh writings by Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Admittedly, Adams and Jefferson were revolutionaries, but surely they were as valid a part of the American tradition as John Mitchell or Janet Reno.
      Since September 11, proponents of the War on Terror have explicitly compared the struggle to the Cold War, albeit in even more apocalyptic terms. A "War on Evil," as David Frum, Richard Perle, Sean Hannity and others would have it, cannot, by definition, be won. But the War on Liberty is being waged, and maybe that can be "won" by the State.
      The passage of the USA PATRIOT Act (those capitals are not a critic's excitable excess, the words of the legislation, passed in 2001, are, in fact, an acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) has made federal wiretapping routine once again. E-mail is now subject to federal snoops under the government's latest--at least the latest that we know about--intelligence-gathering program, called, evocatively, Carnivore.
      Airline passengers are detained (and now fined) for such trivial items as attempting to carry nail trimmers on board, forced to remove their shoes, remain in their seats for 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport and are enjoined from "crowding" toilets. Identification is required before boarding airplanes (and even buses), and soon airline passengers may be required to surrender even more information than that.
      Talk of a mandatory National ID card is in the air, while plans to create national databases to track every monetary transaction and to collect citizen denunciations have been abandoned for now but may yet return. The president's press secretary admonishes reporters, "Be careful what you say"; Americans are warned regularly that they face the "highest level" of terrorist threat; antiwar protesters are accused of "treason" by the New York Sun and penned far from the president in "free-speech zones."
      One can argue the pros and cons of each of these government encroachments on our freedom. Maybe each and every encroachment is necessary during wartime, a majority of Americans will say. But if they were to step back, and see how liberty is endangered, they might conclude that maybe the war--especially against Iraq, with all its dubious premises--has come at too high a price.
      Meanwhile, the end of Big Government is definitely not over. Federal spending is rising at rates not seen since the Great Society in the 60s--which, of course, was the time, too, of the Vietnam War, thus proving Bourne's point. Bush's conservative--as opposed to libertarian--supporters argue this must be tolerated, as there is a war on. Everything Cold is Hot again, they might say. Thus they are recalling the argument of William F. Buckley, founder of National Review, who wrote in 1952:
      We have to accept Big Government for the duration-for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged.except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.
      The duration of the Cold War was just over 40 years. What will be the duration of the War on Terror? Twenty years? Forty? One hundred? If it becomes, as Bush intends, a "War on Evil," it will be eternal. As Bourne noted, "The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd." Civil libertarians have their work cut out for them, because so long as enthusiasm for foreign war goes strong, so, too, will enthusiasm for a war against our own freedom.


###


Contact: TG@ivote2004.com