Tom DiLorenzo has shown the contempt with which Hitler treated the concept of “states’ rights” and his complete sympathy for Lincoln’s centralizing war.

In Freedom and Federalism, the great Old Right journalist Felix Morley likewise quotes Hitler as saying that “a powerful national government may encroach considerably upon the liberty of individuals as well as of the different States, and assume the responsibility for it, without weakening the Empire Idea, if only every citizen recognizes such measures as means for making his nation greater.”

“In other words,” Morley comments, “the problem of empire-building is essentially mystical. It must somehow foster the impression that a man is great in the degree that his nation is great; that a German as such is superior to a Belgian as such; an Englishman, to an Irishman; an American, to a Mexican: merely because the first-named countries are in each case more powerful than their comparatives. And people who have no individual stature whatsoever are willing to accept this poisonous nonsense because it gives them a sense of importance without the trouble of any personal effort.”

And finally:“Empire-building is fundamentally an application of mob psychology to the sphere of world politics, and how well it works is seen by considering the emotional satisfaction many English long derived from referring to ‘the Empire on which the sun never sets.’ Some Americans now get the same sort of lift from the fact that the Stars and Stripes now floats over detachments of ‘our boys’ in forty foreign countries.”

(Kind of quaint to recall a time when it was only forty.)

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