The War System and Its Intellectual Myths

First published as “Harry Elmer Barnes as Revisionist of the Cold War” in Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader, Arthur Goddard, ed., Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles, 1968.

I. The War State and the Court Intellectuals

Americans like to think of themselves as a progressive people living in a progressive age. And yet the twentieth century – whatever its marvels – has been above all the century of total war. Despite the fact that technological advance has made total war increasingly absurd and grotesque in an era of nuclear warfare; despite the progress of preceding centuries in civilizing and limiting warfare, and in keeping civilians out of harm’s way; war to the death has returned in full flower. Herbert Spencer brilliantly realized that the advance of mankind from barbarism to civilization could be summed up as a shift from “military” to “industrial” society. Yet, in the twentieth century, we have starkly reverted to the military way; in so doing, we have repudiated the very humanism, the very principles of peace and freedom, upon which a modern industrial system ineluctably rests. This has truly been, in the words of Harry Elmer Barnes’ friend and revisionist colleague, F. J. P. Veale, an “advance to barbarism.”

The contemporary reversion to the savagery of a Genghis Khan – to a garrison state, to military conformity, to mass murder of civilians, to scorched earth and unconditional surrender, has been achieved through the quest for power and its perquisites by the ruling groups, the “power elites,” of the various States. These consist of the full-time members and rulers of the State apparati, as well as those groups in society (e.g., arms contractors, labor-union leaders) who benefit from the military and warfare systems. In particular, this reversion has been made possible by the reappearance on a large scale of the “Court Intellectual” – the intellectual who spins the apologia for the new dispensation in return for wealth, power, and prestige at the hands of the State and its allied “Establishment.” [i] There have been, after all, but two mutually exclusive roles that the intellectual can play and has played through history: either independent truth-seeker, or kept favorite of the Court. Certainly, the historical norm of the old and dead civilizations was Oriental despotism, in which serving as apologist and “intellectual bodyguard” of the ruling elite was the intellectual’s major function. But it was the glory of Western civilization before this century to develop a class of intellectuals truly independent of the power structure of the State. Now this, too, has been largely lost.

It is to the everlasting honor of Harry Elmer Barnes that when the records are in and the accounts are drawn, it will never be said of him that he was a Court Intellectual. Absolute fearlessness, absolute honesty, absolute independence have been his guiding stars. He has, therefore, been nothing if not “anti-Establishmentarian” in a world where such a quality has been so desperately needed. And his presence has been particularly vital precisely in leading the opposition to the great barbarity of our day – the war system and its manifold intellectual myths.

In the face of the two great wars of this century, and of the enormous pressures to fall into step behind them, Barnes has intrepidly led the revisionist movements in analyzing the causes, the nature, and the consequences of both wars. Revisionism, of course, means penetrating beneath the official propaganda myths spawned by war and the war-making state, and analyzing war independently of court pressures and court emoluments. But it also means more – and one of the problems in Revisionism has been the inability of many of its former followers to penetrate to its true nature and to understand its major implications.

II. The Two Schools of Revisionism

In drawing the lessons of the Revisionism of World Wars I and II, the Barnesians may be separated into two groups, which we may call the narrow Revisionists and the broad Revisionists. The narrow Revisionists, who form, unfortunately, the large majority, have reasoned somewhat as follows: The chief lesson of World War I is the injustice heaped upon Germany – first, in launching the war against her, and then in coercing a confession of sole guilt in the brutal and disastrous Treaty of Versailles. The same focus on an injured Germany then blends into the analysis of World War II, caused essentially by continually repeated obstructions by the Allies of any peaceful revision of a Versaillesdiktat which they themselves admitted to be gravely unjust to Germany.

What lesson, then, does the narrow Revisionist draw for the postwar period? Since his concentration is narrowly upon the wrongs suffered by Germany, his conclusion then follows that these wrongs must be put right as quickly as possible: which, in the current context, becomes a compulsory unification of West and East (or, for the Revisionist, Middle) Germany, on Western terms, and a return of the lands beyond the Oder-Neisse from Poland. In short, the narrow Revisionist ends, ironically, by yearning for the very sort of unilateral diktat and blind revanche which he so properly deplored when Germany suffered from their evils. Finally, in his current preoccupation with World War II and the German problem, the narrow Revisionist carries over the old anti-Comintern spirit, or what is now called “hard anti-Communism,” into an entirely different era. In joining, or even leading, the militant prosecution of the Cold War – and even on up to a hot war – the narrow Revisionist can feel that, as he gains unwonted respectability, he is turning the tables on the Establishment by continuing the foreign policy line of the “hardest” anti-Communists of them all (Germany of the Third Reich.) But, in so doing, the narrow Revisionists fail to see the irony: that they have now unwittingly joined the ranks of the Court Intellectuals of the present day.

The narrow Revisionist, through his overriding concern with the German tragedy, has therefore gotten himself enmeshed in a veritable tangle of contradictions. Beginning in a dedication to peace, he has become a virtual advocate of total war (against the Soviet Union); beginning as a champion of “neutrality” (before the two world wars), he has become a reviler of “neutralism” (since World War II); beginning as a keen critic of “collective security,” he now calls for American “liberation” of every country on the face of the globe that is or might possibly become Communist; beginning as an opponent of foreign wars, intervention, “globaloney,” imperialism, conscription, and the garrison state, he now advocates every one of these as part of the war against Communism; beginning as a keen, independent critic of the Establishment and of what President Eisenhower has called the “military-industrial complex,” he now cheerfully joins their various “strategy” institutes; beginning as an opponent of the two Great Crusades, he is the first to sound the trumpet for the third, Greatest, and unquestionably the Last. The very men who once assailed American intervention in conflicts overseas now consider it treasonable not to intervene in every corner of the world, no matter how barren or remote. The very men who used to say “why die for Danzig?” are prepared to die – and, more importantly, to kill – for far more preposterous causes. And the narrow Revisionist of today who truculently asks such questions as “Why did we lose China?” would, twenty-five years ago, have considered the very posing of such absurd queries as a joke in questionable taste.

Thus, the narrow Revisionist, in the course of distorting the focus of his concerns, has ended by essentially abandoning Revisionism altogether. Precisely the opposite course has been taken by the broad Revisionist. While accepting the same starting-point, the broad Revisionist has always understood that the main problem has been war and peace, and that his main concern was not to weep over Germany, but to oppose a world-wide escalation of war. In particular, to oppose American intervention in wars, at the behest of the propaganda myth that these orgies of mass murder, to extirpate some diabolic Enemy, could be sanctified by grandiose rhetoric and would, each in its turn, usher in the Millennium. The broad Revisionists saw with horror that modem total wars mobilize the masses into a regimented fighting machine, trained to hate a supposedly nonhuman, diabolic Enemy against whom any and all measures are right and moral.

In the war mythology, the Enemy is never hesitant, never confused, never human, never fearful of us attacking him or of precipitating destructive war, and above all never ready to negotiate honestly to try to lessen tensions or to work out mutually satisfactory means of living in peace. The Enemy is always Luciferian, preternaturally cunning and evil, driven only and always by his predetermined goal to “conquer the world” at all costs, never honestly willing to make mutually satisfactory agreements. And yet this same superhuman Enemy, according to the myth, can be stopped from his ever-fermenting aggression in one and only one way: by force majeure, by the “hardest” of hard lines, by ever sterner ultimata delivered by the divinely appointed champion of the “democracies” or the “free world,” the good old U.S.A. And if, by some chance, the Enemy should then not really turn out to be a craven coward, and total war should break out, why then this only proves that war is the only answer and came none too soon. The lesson is then drawn that only extermination and unconditional surrender can suffice in dealing with the Enemy.

All this, of course, is a beautiful way of vindicating a “hard-line” policy against the Enemy regardless of what actually happens. Two particularly neat examples are the policy of Finland toward Russia in 1940, and of Poland toward Germany and Russia in 1939. The Finns (Poles) insisted up to the moment of outbreak of a war that could only be disastrous for them that the Russians (Germans) were only “bluffing,” and that a rigid, inflexible, hard-line, no-negotiation policy would force Russia (Germany) to back down and cease their demands. After adamantly proclaiming this view throughout, the ruling Finnish (Polish) hard-liners suddenly found that the reverse had happened, that the Enemy had not been “bluffing,” and that war had indeed broken out. Was their reaction an abject admission of error and a turn toward peace and negotiation? Certainly not; on the contrary, the hard-liners immediately proclaimed that no negotiations were now possible until every single Russian (German) soldier had been driven off every square inch of holy Finnish (Polish) soil. The rest is history; the difference in ultimate outcome is only due to Finland’s having the luck to find leaders willing to abandon a hard-line policy before it was too late.

To the broad Revisionist, then, peaceful revision and peaceful negotiation are not ideals solely applicable to Germany from 1914 to 1941. On the contrary, they are applicable to all times and places, and therefore to the postwar world as well. The broad Revisionist knows that the Enemy is not a science-fictional Thing from Outer Space, but a human being capable of reason, and therefore of concluding mutually satisfactory arrangements. He knows, furthermore, that there is never a single personified Enemy, but instead that mass murder and tyranny are the major enemies of man, and that global war is the great source of both. He knows also the fallacy of the pernicious Wilsonian myth that dictatorships are automatically war-bent and democracies automatically peace-loving. He knows only too well that democracies can be just as or more aggressive and imperialistic – the chief difference being that democratic governments must engage in more hypocritical and intense propaganda to drug and deceive the voters into joining the war drive. To the broad Revisionist the great lesson of the two World Wars is precisely to avoid as a very plague any further Great Crusade, and to maintain – if we value the lives and liberties of the American people – a steadfast policy of peaceful coexistence and abstinence from foreign meddling. Only such a policy can avoid the mass annihilation of America and perhaps of civilization itself, as well as the peacetime totalitarian trappings of a garrison Leviathan. This, to the broad Revisionist, is the true meaning and lesson of Revisionism; and it is a conclusion in almost diametric opposition to the views of his old narrow-Revisionist colleague.

How is it, then, that this highly important split among Revisionists has gone largely unrecognized? I think the reasons are threefold. For one thing, the largest proportion of Revisionists have taken the narrow path, and have joined the Cold-to-Hot War camp. Secondly, the gallant remnant of broad Revisionists have largely devoted themselves to World War II historiography, and have not done very much work on the Cold War, where Revisionism is so desperately needed. And finally, there is a natural tendency of old friends and colleagues on both sides to avoid a public split, and this tendency reinforces the desire of broad Revisionists to confine themselves to World War II concerns in which unity may be preserved. While study of World War II can, of course, never be called antiquarian, I must confess to a certain impatience with many of the broad Revisionists; for there can be no more important task in today’s world than making the broad lessons of Revisionism crystal-clear, and applying them to the vital problems of today – specifically to the Cold War. For this time, we cannot afford the “cultural lag” of historiographically facing the next war with only an analysis of the last. The next war must be prevented, for there will be no historians to argue over its lessons. And if this can only be done by bringing the inherent split in Revisionism squarely into the open – well, there are worse things that can, and will, happen in the world.

III. Barnes and Broad Revisionism

It should occasion no surprise that the great leader of Revisionism has understood and firmly adopted the broad view of its nature and implications. Harry Elmer Barnes, since its publication, has been greatly impressed by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and is unique in having penetrated to the real lesson that the book holds for the modern world. For it is particularly ironic that Nineteen Eighty-Four was seized upon by the Cold War Establishment as another stick with which to belabor Soviet Russia. Many conservatives extended the frightening vision of 1984 to socialism as well. But Barnes, almost alone, realized that the true forerunners of 1984 were not simply Russia or Britain but ourselves as well; for the monstrous and deadening dominion of 1984 society was being imposed upon all the world power-blocs through the excuse of perpetually cold and minor hot wars. Through ever-shifting coalitions, the rulers of the great countries were able to manipulate Enemies and stir up “emergencies” so as to befuddle the public into accepting the tyrannical regimes. Nineteen Eighty-Four was not simply a jeremiad against socialism, still less against the Communist wing of socialism; it was a prophetic attack on the collectivist despotism made possible everywhere by war, foreign intervention, and the garrison state.

The Orwell theme has been dominant in Barnes’ writings on the Cold War. In his most recent book on foreign affairs, Barnes wrote:

Barnes went on to detail the ways in which current history has become Court History, in Orwellian fashion, as well as the isolated opposition to this trend by such eminent historians as Herbert Butterfield and Howard K. Beale. He pointed to a corps of official historians working with the Armed Services and State Department; to the pernicious historiographical role of such as Admiral Professor Samuel Eliot Morison, and to the closing of ranks, in January, 1951, of almost nine hundred historians and social scientists, who declared their public endorsement of the Truman-Acheson Cold War policy. Barnes also trenchantly pointed out the role of the works of James Burnham in preparing “us ideologically for… military managerialism [for] ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ institutions, political techniques, and mental attitudes.” With true foresight, Barnes also noted the increasing role of the RAND Corporation as “one of the most conspicuous examples of the entry of historians and other social scientists into the ‘Ministry of Truth.’ [iii] Its basic ideology, “the diplomacy of violence,” is most thoroughly expounded in Arms and Influence (1966) by Professor Thomas C. Schelling, who was appointed Undersecretary of State for Administration in April, 1967.

On the other hand, Barnes praised the anti-Cold War writings of Lewis Mumford, who had returned to anti-intervention, and of Garet Garrett in The People’s Pottage. For his policy recommendations, Barnes recalled. “the traditional American foreign policy of benign neutrality, and the wise exhortations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay to avoid entangling alliances and to shun foreign quarrels,” and advocated a return to a “sane foreign policy, based on Continentalism, national interest, ideological coexistence, international urbanity, and rational co-operation in world affairs.” [iv]

Two of the essays in Perpetual War, both praised by Barnes, dealt in whole or in part with the Cold War. Professor William L. Neumann wrote critically of Truman’s foreign-aid program, including the Greek-Turkish loan, and Professor George A. Lundberg pointed in alarm to the far-flung global military commitments of the Truman Administration. Lundberg commented trenchantly:

Barnes prefaced his concluding essay in the volume with a stirring quotation on the war drive from the eminent conservative journalist, William R. Mathews: “After fighting two world wars within a generation to defend democracy and freedom, with no result other than to see those ideals recede throughout the world, we shall be blind if we do not understand that a third such war… will end in one of the great catastrophes of history.”

IV. Barnes’ Critique of the Cold War and the Age of Evasion

A fuller expression of Barnes’ viewpoint on the Cold War, however, was revealed in what had been scheduled to be another chapter of Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. Unfortunately available only in proof sheets, this unpublished chapter deserves to be considered at length. [vi] Barnes began his discussion by pointing out that postwar economic prosperity in America has been grounded on the artificiality of armament spending and a war economy. The economy, wrote Barnes, has been taken out of the hands of private business and the market and has been tragically politicalized: “Today, partisan political strategy overrides business independence and sagacity, and the manner in which we shall utilize our technology is keyed more to vote-getting and the associated military program than to producing goods and services and assuring human well-being.” In this program, the politicians “are aided and abetted by military leaders [who seek]… to put the Pentagon group in a position of greater prestige and power than was ever enjoyed by the Prussian military caste in Imperial Germany.” Also supporting this policy are the oil interests, for whom John Foster Dulles (Rockefeller) was the leading spokesman. They wished “to protect their far-flung interests and possessions.” Above all, “wars must be… made perpetual… so as to assure full employment and facilitate the propaganda of fear and terrorism upon which the maintenance of the régime depends.” Barnes concluded that it is futile to battle against the by-products of the war system, such as economic controls or depredations on civil liberties; instead, the core of the system itself must be challenged.

Barnes then went on to detail the prevalence of “‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ Trends” in American life. They included, first, the war economy – with Sumner Slichter and David Lawrence quoted on the cold-war-based nature of American “prosperity.” Secondly, they included the pervasive use of national defense against the enemy to justify “military outlays, propaganda programs, intimidation, witch-hunting forays, or oppression of the masses….” Indeed, semantically, the “War Department” had already been transformed into the “Department of Defense.”

Thirdly, Soviet Russia has suddenly become the Enemy, even though its character had not changed one iota since it had officially been proclaimed a noble ally in a global struggle for democracy. Barnes added that an Orwellian “hate campaign… is well under way against Soviet Russia, Communist China, and the ‘Reds’ generally.”

Barnes particularly directed his fire at the increased invasion of civil liberties built upon the launching of the Cold War. He especially noted two Supreme Court decisions gravely invading personal freedom against search and seizure: Harris v. U. S. (1947) and U. S. v. Rabinowitz (1950), and he keenly pointed out that erstwhile ardently New Deal judges such as Sherman Minton and, in the next lower court, Learned Hand, were in the forefront of these despotic decisions. And perhaps worst of all was the Smith Act, which “repudiated the fundamental principles on which our nation was founded…. Though the Smith Act is now being used to suppress the vending of unpopular Communist opinions, it could readily be turned against the very conservative groups that have sponsored the law…” Barnes added that, when first enacted, the Smith Act had gleefully been used by Communists and “totalitarian liberals” against alleged “fascists.” On the growing repression of civil liberties, Barnes recommended recent books by Walter Gelthorn, Max Lowenthal, Carey McWilliams, and Francis Biddle.

Barnes proceeded to decry the widespread but largely mythical fear of armed Russian aggression against the West. He cited Garet Garrett’s alarm at this predominant fear, and noted that “even leading Russophobes like Eugene Lyons frankly admit that there is every reason to expect that Russia will not start a war.” Barnes pointed to the contradictions, or “doublethink,” in such testimony as General Gruenther’s in March, 1952. Gruenther had “argued vigorously that American billions must be spent in Europe for protection against Russia, but… conceded that he did not believe that the Russians will start a war, now or at any time.” Barnes concluded that “such material reveals… that the Cold War of today is even more phony and synthetic” than the war in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and added that this is confirmed by the continual official ridicule of Russian attempts to engage in peaceful negotiations.

For Orwellian intellectual trends, Barnes noted the prominence in the Cold War of such “totalitarian liberals” as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Senator Paul Douglas, Freedom House, The Committee on the Present Danger, and the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. As for previous examples of pervasive Orwellian semantics and “doublethink,” Barnes trenchantly noted such slogans as: “Double prices and we double national income.... Our great national debt is a blessing in disguise, because we owe it to ourselves.... Cold war is peace. A ‘free nation’ is any nation – whether liberal and democratic, socialist, fascist, or anti-Kremlin communist – which will join the anti-Russian crusade. Aiding socialist nations of Europe under the Marshall Plan is a bold stroke to promote free enterprise abroad.... Launching an atom bomb race will assure peace and security.”

The Korean War, with its prolonged minuet of attrition, appeared to Barnes as important evidence for Orwell’s prophecies. He noted acidly that “newsmen had been barred from the mass executions which featured the return of Syngman Rhee to his beloved native land so as to reinstate democracy there. Rhee, who... was repudiated in the popular elections months before the outbreak of the Korean war, and had maintained his tenure by totalitarian methods, has been widely proclaimed ‘the George Washington of Korea.’” [vii]

As to the origins of the Cold War, Barnes concluded that it was initiated by Truman and Churchill, largely for domestic political reasons, and since then has been used by each of the various governments to cement its rule over its subjects. At home, many classes became wedded to the Cold War: Democrats and Republicans, businessmen (oblivious of the “fact the cold ... war is... bringing on drastic and rigorous military state capitalism with all its elaborate state controls over industry…”), intellectuals, and labor (“enjoying its ‘cut’ in... the Cold War and the... armament program”). Yet, concluded Barnes, it is vital for the United States to “return to neutrality… combined [with] every possible effort to limit warfare, and to encourage better international understanding…” Instead of scoffing at every Russian proposal for “peace, trade, or the adjustment of disputes,” we should “at least... put Russia on the spot each time she makes a peace proposal and compel her to demonstrate its authenticity and good faith….”

Turning specifically to Communism, Barnes cut straight to the heart of the matter: military attack by the Soviet Union on the United States was most unlikely (unless “provoked as a measure of preventive war”), because “the Soviet program for communizing the world is not based on a plan of military conquest. It is founded upon propaganda, infiltration, and intrigue.” Such ideological revolutions have never yet been extirpated by military force. The true answer to Communism, then, is to strengthen American ideology and institutions: to maintain American freedom and prosperity. Engaging in Cold War regimentation, suppression of liberty, huge military budgets and crippling taxation, is to do just the reverse – to undermine the very American liberty that distinguishes us from Communism. Here Barnes quoted from the brilliant pamphlet of F. A. Harper, In Search of Peace:

At a time when anti-Communist (especially ex-Communist) “experts” were arrogantly pontificating on the Communist “monolith,” Harry Barnes was perceptively forecasting the split between Communist China and the Soviet Union. He warned that lining up the rest of the world “as a military threat to Communism... only binds the Communists together... only served to drive China into the arms of the Kremlin…” Furthermore, American postwar foreign policy has gravely alienated the undeveloped nations: “It has helped to align the great revolutionary trends in Asia and Africa with Russia, since the United States has assumed leadership of ... the status quo in the Old World.”

While the unpublished chapter of Perpetual War was Barnes’ most extensive discussion of the Cold War, the essentials of the chapter are ably condensed in pages 1324–1332 of the 1965 (Dover) edition of his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World. Brief statements can also be found in his “Historical Writing and Historical Science” [ix] and in his long brochure The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost.

After five years of relative quiescence on foreign affairs, Barnes returned to the attack, as he spelled out the meaning of Revisionism for a new generation of the peace-minded, in his “Revisionism and the Promotion of Peace” (Liberation, Summer, 1958). Again the Cold War continuation of foreign meddling and Orwellian statism was shown to be, in essence, a continuation of the interventionism of World War II. In addition, Barnes pointed to a very important fact: that the eagerness for Revisionism among conservatives in the early postwar years had withered, as these ex-“isolationists” signed up in the Cold War crusade.

In his 1958 article in Liberation, Barnes singled out for reference the Select Bibliography of Revisionist Books (Oxnard [Calif.] Press-Courier), of which he was the major compiler. This annotated bibliography commended the following revisionist works on the Cold War: Kenneth Ingram’s highly critical History of the Cold War (1955), C. Wright Mills’ acid analysis of the military-industrial complex in The Power Elite (1956), Arthur A. Ekirch’s brilliant work The Civilian and the Military (1956), and I. F. Stone’s The Hidden History of the Korean War (1952). The Ekirch volume is particularly interesting as an example of a revisionist outlook on all three great wars of the twentieth century.

The Liberation article stirred up a good deal of lively and intelligent discussion, here and abroad, and was reprinted to significant effect in the English Peace News. The following year, Barnes concluded his discussion in Liberation (“Revisionism Revisited,” Liberation, Summer, 1959.) Here he added another important point, linking Revisionism in World War II and in the Cold War. Barnes dismissed his own past criticism of the World War II unconditional surrender policy as valid but superficial; for he had learned from General Albert C. Wedemeyer’s book that the murder of Germans and Japanese was the overriding aim of World War II – virtually an Anglo-American scalping party. If maximum murder of the enemy is the sole aim of a war, then a call for unconditional surrender is only the logical conclusion of a conflict in which “there were no actual peace aims or programs…. The Allies won just exactly what they fought for – and all they fought for: an astronomical number of enemy scalps and incredible physical destruction of enemy property and homes…” Following out this line of thought, Barnes made his first frontal attack on the customary generalization made by Interventionists, Cold Warriors, and Revisionists, including himself, namely, that the Allies “won the War but lost the Peace.” Never having really fought for peace, despite that fictitious hoax, the Atlantic Charter, they could hardly have lost it in the victory that followed the war. Turning to the Cold War, Barnes then added:

One of Barnes’ most important contributions to Cold War Revisionism came in the spring of 1958, when he published what is still the best single article on what might be called “Hiroshima Revisionism” – the real reasons for dropping the A-bombs on Japan. [x] Barnes was here the only writer – and, remarkably, remains the only writer to this day – to make use of the highly significant MacArthur memorandum to F.D.R. of January 20, 1945. This forty-page memorandum explicitly set forth the terms of an authentic Japanese peace offer which were virtually identical with the final surrender terms that we accepted from the Japanese seven months later – at the cost of countless needlessly expended lives, Japanese and American alike. The proffered terms included: complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms; occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction; Japanese relinquishment of all territory gained during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea, and Formosa; regulation of Japanese industry to prohibit any production of war implements; release of all prisoners of war and surrender of any war criminals so designated by the United States.

This MacArthur memorandum, the details of which were later fully confirmed by the general, was leaked in strict confidence to Walter Trohan of the Chicago Tribune by Admiral William D. Leahy, chief of staff to the President, who was alarmed lest Roosevelt might fail to follow through on the Japanese proposal, which proved to be the case. As soon as the war with Japan was ended, Trohan was free to publish these revelations, which completely established the American knowledge of what were later to be fully acceptable Japanese peace terms. And yet, apart from Harry Barnes, no Hiroshima Revisionist to date has made use of them. [xi] They are equally indispensable to those who have presumed to write on the last year of the war between the United States and Japan and on Roosevelt’s conduct at the Yalta Conference, but they have been ignored by all such writers to the present time. Nothing has annoyed Barnes more than the timidity or dull-wittedness of those historians who call themselves Revisionists but have consistently and deliberately refused to make use of the MacArthur memorandum after Barnes had not only repeatedly called their attention to it but had also furnished several of them with copies and all the related documentation required fully to authenticate it.

Barnes also disclosed, for the first time, the personal testimony of Herbert Hoover that President Truman, by early May, 1945, informed him that he knew of the extensive Japanese peace offers and admitted then that further fighting with the Japanese was really unnecessary. But, Truman also disclosed to Hoover, he did not feel strong enough to challenge Secretary Stimson and the Pentagon. Yet neither of these confirmatory revelations have been picked up by Alperovitz and the other recent expositors of Hiroshima Revisionism. In his article, Barnes also supported the P. M. S. Blackett thesis, since adopted by Alperovitz, that the major reason for dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a sabre-rattling gesture to the Russians against whom we were already preparing the Cold War. Indeed, Barnes concludes that “many date the origins of the Cold War from the time he [Stalin] received news of the [atom] bombing shortly after the Potsdam Conference.”

In the summer of 1959, Barnes wrote a thoughtful article on America’s basic position today. [xii] He commented very cogently on the use of foreign scares and quarrels, in the current “age of evasion,” to evade meeting and solving fundamental domestic problems. To “globaloney” had now been added the “astrobaloney” of concentration upon outer space. Barnes was later on impressed by the very well-informed article of Philip Abelson, “Are the Tame Cats in Charge: Omens of Orwell,” in the Saturday Review, January 1, 1966, which indicated how the diversion of an increasing number of our best scientists to space age and nuclear war problems is linking up science with Orwellianism and the Cold War, thus giving us a military-industrial-scientific complex. [xiii]

Let us, Barnes warned, concentrate on such issues as the rule of law, racketeering, organized crime, intellectual freedom, etc., at home instead of vainly and quixotically trying to impose our institutions all over the world. In sum, “when we are unable to enforce the law in Little Rock without upsetting the nation, it is proposed that we enforce the law in Saigon, Bangkok, Rangoon, and Nairobi.” With the United States overrun with crime, both adult and juvenile, and the leaders of organized crime seemingly beyond the reach of law, we proclaim our goal to be extending the rule of law over the whole planet.

Barnes pointed out the contradictions in both the conservative and the liberal supporters of the Cold War. On the one hand, the conservatives have abandoned the principle of neutrality to adopt an hysterical anti-Communism that sees dire threats in the most distant lands. Barnes adds relevantly that:

Furthermore, “prominent conservatives, who twenty years ago bravely led in the struggle against involving the United States in World War II, are now the most fanatical shock troops in the propaganda crusade which is likely to involve us in a third world war that will make... 1939–1945 seem only a mere skirmish.”

The liberals and progressives, for their part, are caught in dire contradictions of their own:

In the revised, 1962, edition of his History of Historical Writing, Barnes briefly criticizes Cold War historiography. The English Revisionist historian A. J. P. Taylor is quoted in a bitter, justly deserved, blast at Court historians. Writing in the Manchester Guardian, January 19, 1961, Taylor declared that: “The academic historians of the West may assert their scholarly independence even when they are employed by a government department; but they are as much ‘engaged’ as though they wore the handsome uniforms designed for German professors by Dr. Goebbels.” Barnes asserts that the Cold War is responsible for the lack of sufficiently objective history, after World War II, to permit the Russians to win a fair hearing. “The animus of the historians was quickly extended from Germany and Italy to Russia, China, and other Communist nations.” Furthermore, in his copious historiographical references, Barnes lists just one book on the Cold War, and that is the monumental work by D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins (2 vols., 1961). [xiv]

Barnes returned to a full discussion of the Cold War in the revised (1965) edition of his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, first published in 1937. While placing the blame for maintaining the dangerous Cold War on each of the Great Powers, Barnes notes a “more conciliatory attitude” by Khrushchev and the later successors to Stalin, as well as subsequent demands by some of the powers of Western Europe for a slackening to the Cold War. Hence, Barnes notes that:

Barnes keenly sees the political economy of the United States since the New Deal as “state capitalism,” the extreme examples of which have been Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany. Since World War II, this system has become “military state capitalism,” which the Cold War has “fixed... as a permanent pattern of economic life, for an unpredictable period.” The prosperity of the American economy now depends on military spending, even though the siphoning of resources for the Cold War obviously places a great burden on the civilian economy. Barnes attributes the 1959 recession largely to a preceding slight cutback in military aviation, a harbinger of what would happen should the United States try to abandon the military treadmill. [xvi]

Barnes finds an acceleration of the Orwellian trend in American life, and he cites C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite as providing “the best description of the progress made toward a Nineteen Eighty-Four social order in the United States.” He notes also the warning directed by President Eisenhower at the end of his term against the military-industrial complex consisting of the coalescing of power in “corporation executives, Pentagon chiefs and top defense executives, leading military technicians and scientists, and advertising moguls” all increasingly running our society. It was pointed out earlier that Barnes was greatly impressed by the facts presented by Philip Abelson in the Saturday Review, January 1, 1966, who warned in his article on “Are the Tame Cats in Charge: Omens of Orwell,” that the space age and nuclear war aspects of the Cold War are increasingly diverting a dangerously large sector of our best scientists to the service of the military-industrial complex, a very alarming symptom of growing Orwellian trends within the Cold War system. More recently, Barnes has been much impressed by another thoughtful article by a scientist, the authority on nuclear physics, Hans Trilling, in the Saturday Review for October 28, 1967, entitled “Can a Scientist be an Optimist?” for he contends with impressive evidence that Revisionism offers the only reasonable hope of ending the Cold War and preserving civilization.

Ominous Orwellian trends are also found in the deliberate whipping up by the government of the public’s fear of the enemy; indeed, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles frankly admitted that the American citizenry needed to be “artificially alarmed,” to avoid any possible relaxation of public fears. An especially menacing example of Orwellian “newspeak” is such a concept as “overkill,” under which America piles up enough nuclear weapons to destroy all human life many times over, and yet presses on with more weapons. “The most clearly Orwellian aspect of the matter is that the demonstration of and boasting about this ability to overkill was followed by the offering and approval of the most extensive budget in the whole history of the Cold War.” [xvii]

For this final chapter of the revised edition of his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World, Barnes’ suggested readings include additional books then available which were critical of the Cold War. In addition to Fleming and Ingram cited above, these include John Lukacs, A History of the Cold War (1961), Walter Millis and James Real, The Abolition of War (1963), Frederick L. Schuman, The Cold War (1962), and Seymour Melman, ed., Disarmament: Its Politics and Economics (1963). Looking over this list more recently, Barnes has observed that he might well have added N. A. Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy, 1945–1960 (1962); R. N. Stromberg, Collective Security and American Foreign Policy (1963); and W. A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962). The first two of these books were substantial historical works and among the first to offer mildly critical observations on our Cold War foreign policy. Williams’ book was a vigorous and probably the most influential criticism of this policy.

A more recent expression of Barnes’ views on Revisionism can be found in a special Revisionism issue of the Rampart Journal, an issue that Barnes helped edit and organize. Barnes’ article, “Revisionism: A Key to Peace” provides a complete and up-to-date summary of his views on Revisionism in general, and World War II Revisionism in particular. [xviii] In the article, Barnes notes as an example of Cold War Orwellian thinking the inclusion within the “free nations” of the rankest totalitarian regimes, provided they line up on the side of the United States in world affairs. But Barnes also trenchantly points out that the neglect of World War II Revisionism since the war may be accounted for by the deadening intellectual conformity imposed by the Cold War system. In contrast to the courageous and independent thought pervading America during the 1920’s, Barnes writes, “After 1945, we ran into a period of intellectual conformity perhaps unsurpassed since the supreme power and unity of the Catholic Church at the height of the Middle Ages. Between the pressures exerted by the military aspects of the Orwellian cold-war system and those which were equally powerful in the civilian or commercial world, intellectual individuality and independence all but disappeared.” The Cold War has had an equal impact on the world of education:

In this article, Barnes pays his respects to the developing series of local hot wars that have now become a basic part of the cold-war system: the “series of lesser tactical or revolutionary ‘hot wars’ in Korea, South Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere, which are so needed to stoke the fires of our military state capitalist economy. Indeed, in Time of September 25, 1965, it was suggested in a lengthy and factual editorial that we might as well get adjusted to this situation of worldwide non-nuclear war as permanent until the final nuclear overkill comes along.” [xx]

According to Barnes, a very forceful presentation of the conception that the United States, and much of the world, is not only operating on a military economy but is based on a social order which is tied in thoroughly with a military frame of reference and pattern of life, appeared in the late autumn of 1967. It was entitled Report from Iron Mountain (Dial Press), and purported to be the report of a Special Study Group “On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace.” It is as yet an anonymous work only vouched for by a reputable journalist, Leonard C. Lewin, who suggests that it may have governmental inspiration and early sponsorship. A large, diversified and almost ideal group of experts are represented as the authors of the study. Whatever the authorship, and whether intended as a sober work or an informed satire, Barnes regards it as by far the most impressive statement of the domination of our society by the military-scientific-technological-industrial-economic-political complex that has thus far reached print. It is really Orwell, far better informed, brought down to date and applied to the United States and the world two decades after Orwell wrote.

Following the books of the early 1960’s there have been a number devoted to the history of our Cold War policy, many of them highly critical. Gar Alperowitz’s Atomic Diplomacy (1965) is a critical analysis of the exploitation of American atomic superiority to launch the Cold War. David Horowitz’s The Free World Colossus (1965) is the most forthright criticism of American Cold War operations since the publication of the Fleming book. Horowitz has also recently edited a symposium, entitled Containment and Revolution, which includes contributions covering most aspects of broad Revisionism. Ronald Radosh has dealt with an important phase of the impact of the Vietnam War on American academic life in his Teach-ins, USA: Reports, Opinions, Documents (1967) which indicates the type of material presented in describing and criticizing American intervention in Vietnam.

Barnes’ determined opposition to America’s war in Vietnam is expressed in a letter commending columnist Emmet J. Hughes for his articles in Newsweek critical of the war. [xxi] In the letter, Barnes stresses the historical filiation of the Vietnam war from Henry L. Stimson’s “nonsense” about “aggression” and “aggressors” down to Stimson’s worshipful disciple McGeorge Bundy, whose father “used to take him by the hand as a child on his visits to the great man.” Barnes notes that the basic leitmotif of war from Stimson through Bundy has “been overlooked in all the comments of the Vietnam scandal that I have seen.” He also points to the role of Dean Rusk as the Establishment representative of the “Eastern seaboard oil, mineral, and banking cartels which are consecrated to keeping us involved all over the world in the name of ‘protecting the free nations.’” He has stated that he believes that the Eastern Establishment is veritably Rusk’s “church,” and that he serves it with a truly religious devotion. His theology has been refurbished by Walt W. Rostow and Bundy. Barnes regards Rusk as an honest and sincere Cold War Fundamentalist. His “Sermon on the Mount” was delivered in his uncompromising press conference on October 12, 1967, which Walter Lippmann, in Barnes’ phrase, took apart in Newsweek of November 6th in a manner reminiscent of Darrow’s handling of Bryan in the Scopes Trial.

Barnes concludes the revised edition of his Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World on an understandably pessimistic note, considering the pervasiveness of war and the war mentality in the present-day world. He properly points out how liberals and many socialists, ideologically in the forefront of the opposition to war, have led or quickly capitulated to the war parade in all the great wars of the present century; indeed, in all the wars of America’s history except for the Mexican War landgrab. In the United States, indeed, World Wars I and II and the Korean War were pre-eminently liberal wars.

In the last year, Barnes has optimistically noted that, for the first time in this century, great numbers of liberals, especially of the younger generation, were reacting vehemently against an American war overseas, and even intensifying their opposition as the Vietnam war continues and deepens. Increasingly, the youthful members of the “New Left” are beginning to realize that the war liberalism of their elders has been, in Barnes’ trenchant phrase, “totalitarian liberalism.” As Barnes wrote in the title of a brochure written after World War II: The Chickens of the Interventionist Liberals Have Come Home to Roost, and, increasingly, the younger generation is actively rejecting, root and branch, the bitter legacy of the war society. Characteristic of this New Left approach to American foreign policy is Containment and Change (1967) by Carl Oglesby and Richard Shaull, which presents the futility of the Cold War policy in dealing with the revolutionary trends of the post-war era, and calls for a new alignment of such representatives of the Old Right as have retained their anti-interventionism with those of the New Left who have repudiated interventionism and the Cold War.

An able political scientist who has been very active and consistent in opposing the Cold War and supporting broad Revisionism is Neal D. Houghton of the University of Arizona, who has been engaged in this work for a decade. [xxii] He has written and lectured extensively and has organized impressive conferences of outstanding authorities to deal with the world situation. Houghton has been most concerned with demonstrating the comprehensively revolutionary character of the postwar era and the utter futility of imagining that Cold War strategy or frenzy can deal effectively with the problems of the most fluid and dynamic period in human history. The essentials of his position, set forth in numerous articles, will be brought together in a symposium he has edited and will appear in May, 1968. It is very appropriately entitled The Struggle Against History: American Foreign Policy in an Age of Revolution.

Another instructive example of opposition to the Cold War appeared in the books of the eminent critic and publicist, Edmund Wilson, who came out foursquare for broad Revisionism in his Patriotic Gore and The Cold War and the Income Tax. [xxiii] A significant breakthrough for Cold War Revisionism appeared recently in the august pages of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. There the young historian, Christopher Lasch, devastatingly riddled the Cold War apologetics of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and hailed William Appleman Williams as the outstanding Revisionist of the Cold War, contending that Williams’ anti-imperialist critique of American foreign policy is becoming increasingly vindicated. [xxiv]

V. Barnes and the Ideological Spectrum

In the light of Harry Elmer Barnes’ thoroughgoing Revisionism, where may he be said to fit in the ideological spectrum of foreign affairs? Albert Jay Nock once wrote of his wry amusement at being damned as a “radical” in the 1920’s, and then as a “reactionary” in the 1930’s even though his political philosophy had not changed one bit. Something similar has happened to Barnes. All his life he has remained the resolute and unbowed champion of peace and reason. For this he was considered a “left liberal” in the 1920’s and early 1930’s, and a “reactionary isolationist” in the late 1930’s and 1940’s. If it was largely the Left who became his allies in the former period, and the Right in the latter, this was because they kept veering and tacking, and not Barnes.

Barnes has had to endure mass desertions from principle by his friends and colleagues twice in his life. If he had but chosen, like them, to “flipflop” for war around 1940 – or at the least to keep silent – he would undoubtedly still be receiving all the honors and prestige that our society can bestow. Never again, undoubtedly, will Barnes’ books be reviewed on the coveted Page One of the New York Sunday Times Book Review. But Barnes knew well that there are things in this world more important than tinsel honors; for what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? It shall always be said of Harry Elmer Barnes that his soul was his own, that never did he crook the knee to Power; and that rare and precious spirit, that high courage, shall be honored whenever and wherever men prize and salute the best that man has within him.

By the end of the 1930’s, Barnes’ allies for peace and neutrality were mainly the Right wing, and this continued down to the early 1950’s. How many people now remember that it was not the Left, but the “extreme Right-wing” Republicans who opposed conscription, Greek-Turkish aid, NATO, and even the Korean War? In short, that the outstanding opponents of the Cold War were the men of the Right? The Korean War, for example, mobilized the ardent support of even long-time fellow-travelers on the Left (with such honorable exceptions as I. F. Stone) – in the sacred name of the UN and “collective security against aggression.” Only the “isolationists” of the Right stood fast in opposition. But soon this alignment changed sharply too, and the Right wing shifted en masse, and almost unwittingly, to an extreme Cold War stance.

It is obvious that no simple labels of “Right” or “Left” can be pinned on Barnes; indeed, recent realignments have rendered these categories misleading and obsolete – a veritable cultural lag. With many of the Left and most of the Right joined in the Cold War, a countermovement has recently begun. Emerging since about 1959, this movement holds out the prospect of a basic realignment for peace, a regrouping transcending completely the old “Right” and “Left” stereotypes. On the Left, there has emerged the broad and youthful anti-war movement of the New Left, while on the Right, sharp and basic criticisms of the war drive have been expressed by such able writers as the late Howard Buffett, William R. Mathews, Felix Morley, Ronald Hamowy, Robert LeFevre, and, to a more limited extent, by such public figures as Hamilton Fish, Marriner S. Eccles, and the late Bruce Barton.

Whenever a man stands up for peace, he will be accused by his more frenzied opponents of being a “dupe” or an “agent” of the dread Enemy. Throughout his life, Harry Elmer Barnes has undoubtedly been successively accused of being a tool of the Prussian General Staff, “pro-Hitler,” and now perhaps “pro-Communist” to boot. The absurdity of the latter charge may be seen in the following passage from his most recent chapter on Orwell and the Cold War:

It is most meet and proper that we honor Harry Elmer Barnes in this Festschrift. Throughout his life, whether surrounded by the leading lights of his day or battling alone, whether heaped with laurels or with abuse, Harry Barnes has fought uncompromisingly for truth and justice, for reason and peace. In a century of craven “other-direction,” he has always been his own man. If he cannot be fairly accused of being “pro-Nazi” or “pro-Communist,” “pro-German” or “pro-Russian,” perhaps some might charge that he has, throughout, been “anti-American,” for he has indeed had the great courage to oppose some of America’s most cherished foreign policies of the present century. But this is, perhaps, the greatest slander of them all. For Barnes knows, as did that noble spirit, Randolph Bourne, there are two Americas, and that the record of foreign affairs has been a continuing struggle between them. Himself a virtual martyr to America’s First Crusade, Bourne’s last immortal words were these:

We are here gathered together to honor Harry Elmer Barnes, a worthy embodiment of the better, and let us hope, the truer America.

Notes