'Reds Are Natives': Frank Chodorov as Cold War Critic

by Dan Spielberg
by Dan Spielberg

I first heard of the wonderful radical libertarian essayist, philosopher and journalist Frank Chodorov (1887–1966) while reading William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives many years ago. That book revealed that Mr. Chodorov had been a personal friend and intellectual mentor of Buckley's, but that they parted ways on several important political issues in the 1950s. I was curious to read some of Chodorov's writing to see how his views diverged from Buckley's at the time, but this was in the pre-Internet days and I had very little luck finding any of his works in libraries or bookstores. However, in the past few years I have been able to read some of that material and it is clear that it was, in great measure, the issue of the Cold War that led to the split between the two men, with Buckley taking the hard-line anti-Communist position and Chodorov upholding the non-interventionist foreign policy of the Old Right. Not only that, but it is also interesting to realize that Chodorov was one of the most effective, and prescient, critics of the Cold War. As someone who had vigorously opposed American involvement in World War II, Chodorov's anti-war views did not change with the advent of the Cold War as did those of many formerly staunch opponents of foreign wars and interventions. Because the Cold War was a bipartisan affair, the wisdom of it is taken as a given and it is very difficult to find any criticism of it that does not regard specific tactics. Bringing into question the wisdom of pursuing the Cold War in the first place is, I believe, an important task in undermining our interventionist foreign policy, that is why I believe the work of Frank Chodorov deserves more attention despite the fact that he wrote so long ago.

Several of the essays contained in Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov, edited by Charles H. Hamilton, stand out as some of the greatest works of Cold War revisionism from the period when the Cold War was still new. "A Byzantine Empire of the West?" was published in Chodorov's broadsheet analysis in April of 1947 and was entered into the Congressional Record by Rep. Howard Buffett. In that essay he warns that the Cold War policy is going to make America the new Byzantine Empire, which would replace the British Empire as the world's dominant power. "If we were sure that empires are the product of natural forces, like societies or cabbages, it would be foolish to stand up against their coming," Chodorov wrote. "They are purely man-made. In spite of their acquired pomposity, they are in fact pretty mean, sordid and brittle affairs." He claimed that if "folks knew exactly what an empire is, and resolutely refused to have anything to do with the business, its advocates would have to turn to decent pursuits for a living. The need of popular support is proven by the cheerleading technique of imperialism. The current slogan 'Stop Communism!' is a case in point." He pointed out that grand moral justifications for war (e.g. "to make the world safe for democracy") are part of the "standard equipment in imperialism."

In "How to Curb the Commies," published in the May 1949 analysis, Chodorov makes the point that the best way to defend Americans against Communism is simply for the government to do what it is supposed to do, protect people's life and property from all aggressors. He believed that if the government did that, there would be no need for special laws outlawing Communist activities and ideas. He points to the City's handling of a strike by New York cab drivers in 1949 as an example, where there were no serious injuries or property damage due to effective police protection.

In "A Jeremiad" he warns, prophetically, that "when The War comes we will know about it, unmistakingly, by the peremptory suspension of all traditional and constitutional restraints on political power." Chodorov continues by pointing to the role that war will play in the bringing of totalitarianism to America. He writes that "when The War comes the individual will cease to exist as an individual. His body, his property and his mind will be merged into the mass battering ram. The regime of totalitarianism that our recent history has been pointing to will have arrived." He also makes it clear that the Cold War would transform America's economy into a system where "the traditional economic forms of wages and profits will be retained, but the fiscal machinery will be used to rid monetary returns of material meaning. Taxes will liquidate purchasing power. The fiction of borrowing will be maintained, but the 'lenders' will accept the bonds under duress...thus, through taxation and depreciation the danger of diverting production from war purposes to consumption will be avoided." He pointed out the irony that the war against Communism abroad would bring socialism here since "there can be no question that the economy will be put on a military footing, just as every man and woman able to contribute in any way to the fighting will be pressed into service. There will be no private life."

Other important essays dealing with the Cold War in this collection are "Isolationism," "A War to Communize America" and "Warfare Versus Welfare" but of all of them the most striking is "Reds Are Natives" in which he makes it clear what the Cold War policy really meant when it was all fleshed out: killing people. Written for the August 1954 issue of The Freeman magazine, which also had an article by William F. Buckley advocating the Cold War, it begins by pointing out that if the U. S. military had been sent to Vietnam in the '50s, as Richard Nixon had suggested, "its immediate objective would have been to kill Indochinese [Vietnamese], so as to intimidate those we did not kill. Of course the dead would have died because they were communists, and the intimidated would have been intimidated for the same reason. But regardless of their ideology, our chosen targets would have been natives." He makes the point that killing people cannot kill the ideas that those people hold, and that Communism is just an idea. The essence of it is that "the individual would be better off if he were deprived of the right to own property; since property must be owned, the method of communism is to vest all property right in those who wield political power, the state." He says it is that idea that Americans should try to fight and "let all natives live." This is exactly the philosophy that people like Ron Paul are talking about when they say that America should lead by example and by protecting liberty here at home, rather than trying to engage in bloody crusades abroad.

November 26, 2007

Dan Spielberg [send him mail] works in the real estate industry in Northern California.

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