I’ve started reading some of the works of John Dahlberg, Lord Acton, sometimes given honorary titles such as “the historian of liberty.” Being largely cash-free, I downloaded pdf files of some of his works from Liberty Fund which has made available for free a good number of classic books on history, political theory, philosophy, science, and other topics — see The Online Library of Liberty. This foundation has done remarkable work since its founder, Pierre Goodrich, set out to make available works of liberty which had gone out of print, including some of the writings of the Founding Fathers of the United States or writings from that period, such as John Marshall’s biography of George Washington and the history of the American Revolution written by Mercy Otis Warren, a woman who was said to be a formidable intellect and was opposed to the development of a commercial republic and was hostile to the Constitution from an Anti-Federalist perspective.
For a couple of decades, I’ve been working to develop richer and more complex ways to speak of our moral, social, and political natures in this age when our human communities — not by coincidence — have grown richer and more complex as we’ve learned more about the richness and complexity of Creation. I’ve been led to a serious effort to learn some of the physics and mathematics I should have learned nearly 30 years ago in college and also an effort to read good literature and solid works of history. I’ll speak of one of my discoveries while reading serious histories which probe into the relationships between, say, kings of different countries or a king and a pope or an American president and the American citizenry. There are other sorts of histories, such as some of Michael Grant’s histories of the ancient world which give broad-brush overviews, but I’ll speak of those with what might be called a political edge, not an agenda, but an edge.
Acton’s writings certainly have an edge of this sort as do the writings of Jacques Barzun or those of John Lukacs or — though I’ve not yet read them — those of Mercy Otis Warren. I would imagine that Churchill’s historical writings have both an edge and an agenda. There are many good history books out there and not enough time to read them, especially with the competition in literature and science and philosophy.
Acton’s knowledge was most certainly not thin, nor is that of Barzun or Lukacs or Warren or a number of other good historians. History is a subject where references and bibliographies in one good book provide a good way to find other good, reliable works by the same or different authors. Physics and mathematics are in a similar position as is modern neurosciences.
With all of the above as background, I’ll state my main point: Acton most especially in my recent experience but good historians in general take viewpoints on political and diplomatic and military activities which are far closer to those of moderate conspiracy theorists than to those of public school textbook writers and writers of most popular history books. In my admittedly limited experience, even most of the seemingly more serious books on topics such as American wars and American presidents are naive and shallow in their attitudes towards the types of events considered by those moderate conspiracy theorists. I’ll say at this point that the ones I’m calling ‘moderate’ tend strongly to rely on verified facts, sometimes refusing — for reasons on credibility — to mention plausible but unverified facts in their more formal writings.
Lord Acton had said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and also had noted that powerful and centralized governments tend to attract men with the moral characters of gangsters. Gangsters would, of course, be willing to murder political leaders and others who endanger their wealth and power and some would even be willing to commit false-flag acts, even murdering a number of their fellow-citizens, to start a potentially profitable war. Selling weapons or weapons-manufacturing equipment to soon-to-be enemy countries is another activity of the stupider sort of gangster — see Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for the verification that the United States did sell Nazi Germany, circa 1936, the machinery to build modern weaponry though the French philosopher Jacques Maritain had written of this despicable set of actions in an essay written in the late 1930s and translated into English for publication in the United States in the early 1940s. American history is actually loaded with large-scale war-crimes, large-scale crimes against innocent civilians, treacherous abuse of American military personnel, and murders of politicians at various levels of government. That is, our history is loaded with crimes of the sorts committed by power-seekers for the past 5,000 years or more.
In one of his essays, Lord Acton notes that an honest study of history will lead to a depressing view of mankind and he believed that a more optimistic view can be derived only from a faith in God, a God who knows what He’s doing and whose purposes are served even by the plentiful crimes of the greedy and ambitious, abetted by the cowardly compliance of the self-blinded common folk. Both he and Barzun, and many another historian, speak of the need for students of history to develop a proper detachment. I’m not one of those who believe there is no progress showing in human history but any progress in our understanding of moral order, certainly any progress in our institutional and legal implementation of order, will always be subject to attack by the ambitious and greedy amongst us, those labeled ‘the exploiter class’ by Thomas Jefferson and labeled in similar terms by many since then and before then for that matter. We seem to be in a period when those attacks have resulted in great damage to a moral order already in bad shape because of the moral irresponsibility of those with a duty to maintain and enrich Western Civilization.
I’ve not discussed a large number of historians or of serious political actors who recorded their thoughts, but the point is clear and will bear up when you read much in the history-books aisles at your public library or your favorite bookstore: those who seek power and wealth are far too often willing to commit various sorts of crimes, small or large, to get what they want. The American government has been remarkably confident about releasing information about some of its crimes, usually many years afterward. It’s likely the politicians and bureaucrats know that Americans have short attention span and are always willing to accept today’s propaganda even when there is so much evidence of past criminal activity. For example, see Zapata Corporation for a discussion of a company involved in CIA conspiracies against Cuba. Zapata was, shall we say, closely connected to the powerful and wealthy Walker family and their cousin, George H.W. Bush. For a more extensive overview of this powerful family group and their suspicious activities, see the book Family of Secrets by Russ Baker (or: Russ Baker’s website). It must be said that these activities, even including possible involvement of a future President of the United States with the murder of President Kennedy, are little different from many acts committed in history by men who are honored by at least some.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I’ll also give a couple of other links about criminal activities of the United States government.
Operation Northwoods “was a series of false-flag proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962. The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cuba in order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.” In essence, these proposals amounted to small-scale events of the same sort which occurred on 2001/09/11. So much for claims of some that the United States government would never be willing to murder their own citizens in order to start a war.
Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 3 discussed the despicable treatment of some Russian soldiers who can be said to have betrayed the Soviet Union but also fought against the Nazis to help liberate Czechoslovakia. (The entire series of articles is worth reading.) The Wikipedia article, Operation Keelhaul, makes reference to the more general set of crimes against millions of refugees who were repatriated by way of deception or force to the Soviet Union with full knowledge on the part of the Western leaders that Stalin intended to either murder these refugees or use them as slave labor, mostly in Siberia. Roosevelt promised Stalin at Yalta to do this and Truman kept the promise partly because Stalin held American and British POWs from German POW-camps and wouldn’t release them until the refugees were given to him. As it turned out, he never released those POWs — they also died in Siberia. Julius Epstein, an investigative journalist-historian, published an authoritative book on this topic, Operation Keelhaul, in 1973 to mostly resounding silence on the part of the self-censoring and self-brainwashing residents of the modern West.
Russ Baker is one of a number of investigative journalists who set high enough standards that they can be labeled as ‘historians’ though it will be decades before we see the writing of authoritative histories on the events, criminal or otherwise, of our times. But, though time will give us better explanations and more facts, we have enough in the way of solid facts to be sure that our age is no different from other ages — we have not only criminals of the ordinary ‘mugger’ sort but also criminals of the ‘higher type’, presidents and prime ministers and generals and bankers and so forth. They have engaged in criminal conspiracies on a more or less continual basis, more frequently with the breakdown in moral order and the closely related breakdown in historical knowledge and literacy skills and thinking ability on the part of citizens, butchers and bakers and professors and priests and engineers.
I don’t think historians who study this age in future generations will be any more optimistic about the crimes of human beings than was Lord Acton in the second half of the 19th century. They will still be studying not only the noble acts and legitimate progress of the human race but also the crimes, high and low, of human beings including those in political or financial positions of power. Yet, our Western governments, our banks, our corporations, are greatly out of control by the standards of any but the dark ages of history. If we wish to avoid worse crimes, some against us the privileged citizens of the United States, we should start paying attention and start thinking more clearly about our leaders and their activities.