Commentary

0:00Comment is almost superfluous on three such papers as these. I certainly want to leave some time here because I believe Professor Salerno, for example, may have questions for Mr. Bielo and Gil Guillory's paper is very important because it continues what is a burgeoning Austrian project in looking at the private provision of what are generally considered public goods. So, for example, Ed Stringham has also done a number of very important papers on the topic of providing for judicial services and and other security services that are generally thought of as being things that only states can provide. This kind of thinking also applies in the foreign policy realm and we've seen Hans-Hermann Hoppe and a number of other scholars look at the private production of national defense. So that's a project that is extremely important and it's something that I think you'll continue to see much more of at future Austrian scholars conferences. Now I want to actually make a few remarks based on Professor Tulli's paper which I think it included the

0:57This is the name of a figure who is indeed, or was indeed, an international man of mystery, this Boris Zaharov. The name is familiar to me only because of an early 1980s British television program, which was called Riley, Ace of Spies. And it's actually a very interesting program about pre-World War II British imperialism. And it's a look at not only espionage, but also a lot of the industrial and economic considerations that were involved in the British sort of foreign policy of the day. and Boris Zaharov is a character who was featured in this program. And what occurred to me, I mean it's interesting because Riley Ace of Spies is a program that's on the one hand about pre-World War II British espionage and foreign policy, but because it was a program that was made in the early 1980s it is also very much infused with a Cold War kind of lens and kind of ideology.

1:47And so there's a great deal of emphasis on Russians throughout this television program and in fact the titular character who is based on a historical figure The Theory of Money and Credit

2:25So now anyone who points to the economic and other considerations, real politique considerations of U.S. foreign policy is now denounced as someone who is unpatriotic. The conservative thinker Russell Kirk, for example, he could only say in private basically that he thought the first Gulf War in 1991 was what he called a war for an oil can. He didn't dare say that in public because he of course would have been denounced for doing so. And in the lead up to the current Iraq war, you saw a number of libertarians and conservatives and people who are not on the left, who criticized the Iraq war, who said that it was unnecessary, or who pointed to, you know, economic interests that may have been contributing to the rush to war, who pointed to the ideological rule of neoconservatives implementing the conflict. They were denounced as so-called unpatriotic conservatives.

3:12This was done by the magazine National Review. Well, why is it that we can talk so honestly about the imperialism that took place in the in the early 20th century, but we can't talk honestly about U.S. motives today, and oftentimes we can't even talk honestly about U.S. motives during the Cold War. Well, it seems like it's still something that's a great deal of a puzzle, but I think part of the key to this is something that is known as American exceptionalism, and this is sort of an idea that burgeoned in the 1950s, and basically it arose as an outgrowth, a historiographic outgrowth of Cold War liberalism, This idea that the United States, in order to fight the Cold War against the Soviet Union, needed to have very pure motives, they needed to have motives based in pure principles of freedom that had nothing to do with oil politics or with, you know, strategic considerations, brute strategic considerations, etc.

4:00And I think that this creed of American exceptionalism, which sort of began as something that the mainstream historiographical left was interested in, or at least, you know, sort of mainstream consensus historians as they were called, has now migrated and has become sort of the primary historiographic obsession of the neoconservative right and in fact much of the mainstream right in this country. Paul Gottfried has a very interesting article in the forthcoming issue of the American Conservative, which you'll probably be able to find in bookstores next week, wherein he talks about this strange transition where a number of points of view that used to be associated with the so-called old right, Right, such as an economic analysis of whether it's the Constitution or US foreign policy. This was something that Harry Elmer Barnes and Charles Austin Beard and a number of other scholars who were very respected by what's now called the old right, they used to go into that.

4:52You had a number of early conservatives back in the 1940s and 1950s who criticized the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and who talked about why Japanese internment was wrong. In fact, the only vote in the US Senate against Japanese internment, which was of course a the policy of FDR and the California governor. What was the only vote in the US Senate against that policy was that of Robert A. Taft, the great old right senator. But Gottfried points out that what used to be considered conservative, sort of revisionist, or even realistic assessments of American history are now being denounced basically, especially by the right, especially by the mainstream Republican right, as unpatriotic. And in fact, the old liberal consensus history, The book, which used to be associated with Cold War liberalism, has come to take its place on the neoconservative right as the official orthodoxy of Republicans and neoconservatives.

5:45So, for example, you have recently had this book published by a fellow named Schweickart, and his book is called A Patriot's History of the United States, which is basically a sort of reformulation and more nationalistic take on the old consensus history that used to be associated with liberals in the 1950s. So the question is how do we get over this American exceptionalism and get to the point where we can have a discussion of U.S. foreign policy and indeed Western foreign policy in general during the Cold War years and during the present that matches the kind of frank assessment that we can get from Hunt Tooley and so many other great scholars about our past. Why is it that people can talk about the early 20th century without being denounced as unpatriotic for talking frankly about what our interests were or what the U.S. government's

6:57American War, at least. And also, more recently, you have people such as Andrew Bacevich, who is a professor at Boston University. His most recent book is called The End of American Exceptionalism. It's a very short book, which I don't think is quite as rigorous as it needs to be. But certainly, Bacevich's project of, you know, reconnecting with the old right historiography and reconnecting with William Appleman Williams' thought from the 1960s and 70s is very invaluable, and hopefully will help us get to a clear, you know, historical understanding of history, as opposed to the ideological and the biological understanding of history, which the Cold War consensus, historians and now today's neoconservative right have been foisting upon us.