How Murray Rothbard Single-Handedly Brought Down the Saigon Government with Malice Aforethought

A Hardy Weed

As the current US foreign policy adventure drags on, it seems as good a time as any to address a recurring charge brought against Murray Rothbard by sundry libertarians (sic), Randians, near-Neo-Conservatives, and other worthies. Strictly speaking, the complaint is not that Rothbard, alone and unaided, brought down the Saigon Government in 1975; even Rothbard’s enemies do not go quite that far. The complaint seems to be that Rothbard “cheered” when that government fell, proving that he was “pro-communist,” had a bad attitude about these things, was crazy and immoral, etc. 

To get a proper handle on this apparently controversial subject, it is best to begin with Rothbard’s writings on the deaths of states.

I. Deaths of States

Rothbard the “Pro-Communist”

In 1975, Murray Rothbard penned two essays on the fall of the Saigon government, a government largely invented, bankrolled, and sustained by the United States. This invention was part of the American project of incorporating Southeast Asia into a kind of US-directed “Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” [1] The US had of course objected, in the 1930s, to the Japanese version of such a project.

The two articles on the collapse of the Republic of South Vietnam have caused much angst among those conservatives and libertarians who never managed to question any important assumptions about the Cold War. This angst reverberates down the halls of time. Its echo, for some reason, is with us still. 

The first essay, “The Death of a State,” appeared in Rothbard’s newsletter, the Libertarian Forum in April 1975. It began on this note:

Thus, at the very outset, Rothbard says in effect, “Yes, another state will replace the one that fell, but the process itself may prove to be interesting and instructive.” The excitement – that which initially draws our interest – has to do with the complete implosion of a state. As for how such an Einsturz might happen, Rothbard writes that Étienne de La Boétie, David Hume, and Ludwig von Mises have long since given the explanation.

Simply put, “no matter how bloody or despotic any State may be, it rests for its existence in the long-run (and not-so-long run) on the consent of the majority of its subjects….” This consent may be “passive resignation, but the important thing is that it rests on the willingness of the masses to obey the orders and the commands of the State apparatus” up to the point, where we see “a sudden and infectious decision of the masses to say: Enough! We’ve had it; we quit.” [3]

So it was with ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam – “trained for decades by American commanders, armed to the teeth by the United States” – which, in the end, just quit. Rothbard noted that the South Vietnamese government “had no real roots in popular support…. Hence its supporters were mainly only the recipients of American largesse.” Further:

Rothbard concluded:

(I shall refrain from making a comparison with any current events, given the unpredictability involved – i.e., whether or not any current resistance is “backed by the great majority of the population.”)

Rothbard also observed that “it comes with ill grace indeed” for US spokesmen to lament the looming “bloodbath,” should the communists prevail. “Vietnamization” had been an abject failure, as had US interference in Cambodia. The Ford administration – clinging to the wreckage of the war in Indo-China, was “the true legatee of the Nixon administration,” but at least it had given up “the budding Cowboy police state at home.” [5]  

If Rothbard’s first essay provoked consternation in some libertarian circles, the second must have increased it.

Rothbard’s second salvo, also entitled “The Death of a State,” appeared in Reason Magazine, July 1975. He repeated his theme that state collapse in Indo-China was “exhilarating” and elaborated his interest in it as process. With every mathematically inclined political scientist and international relations scholar in the world (then and now) ransacking history for “case studies” to “test” their dreaded “robust” [6] hypotheses and propositions, we might well think that Rothbard could be allowed to look at events in the light of some generalizations drawn from political history (but apparently not).

Rothbard wrote:

Again, Rothbard notes that “in Vietnam and Cambodia, one State has been immediately displaced by another – not surprisingly, since the communist-led insurgents are scarcely anarchists or libertarians. But States exist everywhere; there is nothing remarkable in that. What is inspiring is to actually see the final and swift disintegration of a State.”

Those who want to quibble about the words “exhilarating,” “inspiring,” and “rejoicing” might want to answer whether or not the continuance of a state, at the price being then exacted by the RVN and US, could be so described.

Again, Rothbard observes that a state that forfeits “majority support” will fall: “In the end, the ARVN army simply laid down their arms and fled, ignoring the orders of their hierarchical chain of commanders, from the President down to the non-coms.”

Now Rothbard expressed another forbidden thought, noting that “the body blow that these events have delivered to U.S. imperialism” was a “cause for libertarian rejoicing.” It was a blow to the idea that “the United States has the moral duty, and the permanent power, to install, prop up, and rule governments and peoples throughout the world.” Given this blow, a rebirth of non-intervention seemed more than possible.

Hence the “rejoicing.”

After all, Americans “were sick and tired of our long and losing intervention in Vietnam” in a “continuation of the American policy of imperialism – the Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford policy – that was responsible for pushing Indochina into the arms of communism.” The US accomplished that feat by “bolstering and then replacing French imperialism; by propping up unpopular and corrupt dictatorial regimes in the name of ‘freedom’; by suppressing peasant property and returning it to the imperially-created feudal landlords,” and so on. Further, “it was precisely the idiotic CIA-directed right-wing coup against the popular neutralist Prince Norodom Sihanouk that has now led to the Communist regime there.”

Free Enterprise in South Vietnam

In passing, I wish to note an article that appeared in the Miami Herald on South Vietnamese inflation remedies in late 1971:

So, on the face of it, “harmful rumors” about coming devaluations would have been true, and from this we may conclude that the Saigon government, like any other despotic state, wanted to be able to tax the people via inflation, repress the inevitably rising prices by controls, and arrest and possibly kill anyone who mentioned it out loud.

In this regard, the Saigon sideshow was acting in the tradition of Chiang Kai-shek – Chinese despot and Cold War hero to the interventionist right wing (they weren’t called “the China Lobby” for nothing!). Under the economic “management” of Chiang and his close relatives, who made up the core of the Nationalist Government, prices in China rose by a factor of 2,167 between 1937 and 1945. As Joyce and Gabriel Kolko put it, “In the end, the soldiers would not or could not fight, and much of the government bureaucracy was forced into graft and corruption. Translated into social and political terms, Chiang mobilized vital potential support for the Communists and melted the possible resistance to them.” [9]

Between 1965 and 1970, the Saigon government managed to inflate by 604%. This was not quite up to Chiang’s standards, but it did erode the confidence of bureaucrats, soldiers, and pretty much everyone else. [10]         

State Building in South Vietnam     

The key, however, is that had the Saigon government really been “up to it,” it would have effectively turned itself into a rather totalitarian regime in pursuit, no doubt, of some rather fictitious liberty to be realized after it succeeded. But I jest, since the Saigonistas were no more about liberty than the communists were, in the end, about equality. But at the time, if I may be so rude as to mention it, a program of quasi-totalitarian state-building was precisely what high-toned US Cold War liberals, social engineers, and counterinsurgency experts were urging upon the scattered attention of the Saigon state. [11]

Consider what the soft, “winning hearts and minds” school of US counterinsurgency theorists had in mind for South Vietnam, as summarized by D. Michael Shafer: “rapid incorporation of the vulnerable inhabitants of the periphery into the center,” brought about by “physical control of territory and populace; penetration of authority throughout the country; and promotion of economic and social development.” And of course these goals entailed “relocation of people to defended villages” – that is, to the so-called strategic hamlets.

Further, in the eyes of US planners, it was necessary for South Vietnam to “address distributional, racial, and communal problems and remove corrupt or abusive officials.” Along with these reforms, should come general “increases in the quantity of government.” By carrying out their own social revolution, assisted by US advice and superabundant firepower, the Saigon crew would win the wavering people over, by really giving them “the benefits only promised by the insurgents.” [12] (This last point was an especially tall order to the extent that one of the “benefits” sought was precisely to be rid of the Saigon regime.)

The soft school erred, Shafer continues, in “assuming that leaders’ interests are the same as the national interest.” Don’t we all! Thus they overlooked “the possibility that for certain elites the aim of fighting is to defend power and privilege,” and consequently, the commitment of these elites to reform might be a bit limited. Under such circumstances, “increasing the government’s security may decrease that of the population,” driving them into the arms of the insurgents.

Committed to sundry flawed assumptions rooted in the then universally loved modernization theory, the soft school ended with “a prescriptive bent for centralized, paternalistic government.” [13]  

Historian Bruce Miroff underscores the connection between modernization theory and counterinsurgency:

According to US planners (as depicted by Shafer), success in the war demanded “the ability to manage modernization.” The state had to make “hard decisions: to invest, not consume; rationalize administration; root out corruption; attack parochial political groupings, etc.” Further, the planners believed “that more government is better government. But this presupposes the very issues at question… that government and populace share the same goals that will be advanced by greater government capabilities at the grassroots level.” And, worse luck, “improving administrative capacity has often meant greater governmental ability to collect taxes, enforce skewed land tenure arrangements, raise conscripts, etc. In short, improved administrative capacity may mean better enforcement of the status quo.” [15]   

Of course, counterinsurgency theory was a general Western fad at the time, resting on a strong record of failure or dubious successes in Algeria, Malaya, Kenya, and elsewhere. The theorists called for “civic action” and “revolutionary war.” Here, the threatened state, or its allies, would use military forces to seize, transform, and carry out the popular revolution in an approved form. The neo-Jacobinism of the project hardly needs underlining. [16]    

Of course none of this actually worked all that well and the hearts-and-minds gang were soon out, replaced by the harder-nosed cost/benefit folk of the RAND Corporation type, who focused on how to coerce the Vietnamese laboratory rats into submission along the lines of rational actor models drawn from mathematized neoclassical economics, or behaviorist psychology. [17]

Noam Chomsky quotes one of these writers, Morton Halperin, as follows:

Any burglar or home invader could say as much. And one begins to wonder if states are not only “stationary bandits” but also stationary terrorists. This certainly wasn’t going to win any hearts and minds, but for the planners, if those “subjective factors” could not be dealt with “scientifically” and mathematically, they could not be considered at all. 

So what were the insurgents doing all this while? Eqbal Ahmad suggests that overall, they were behaving better than the Saigon bureaucrats and soldiers – not a difficult feat, apparently. He writes that support for the guerrillas rested on “moral alienation of the masses from the existing government.” Accordingly, the rebels had to “outadminister” more than “outfight” the government. Thus the guerrillas were working with the “human factor” so invisible to US planners. 

Ahmad notes that there are cases like Algeria in which the rebels “lost” militarily but won politically – and this goes straight to the problems of obedience and legitimacy [19] that interested Rothbard.

The National Liberation Front operated by creating parallel hierarchies that displaced official ones. Despite the assumptions of US officials, this was not a case of rule by terror, despite the occasional “conversion or killing of village officials.” Serious and disciplined guerrillas rejected wholesale terrorism and laid “stress on scrupulously ‘correct and just’ behavior toward civilians.” Their “use of terror, therefore, [was] sociologically and psychologically selective.” Thus, “[s]uccessful parallel hierarchies” were “generally based on extant local patterns and experiences….” [20]  

Here, the revolutionaries played to what Eric Wolf refers to as the “natural anarchism” of rebelling peasants – that is, the peasant’s instinctive wish to continue his way of life, but without tax collectors, bureaucrats, and feudal landlords. [21]   That NLF cadres built up an incipient state in the course of the struggle is consistent with the history of other 20^th-century peasant-based revolutions led by Marxists. The NLF had on their side the powerful cement of Vietnamese nationalism, another factor the Americans contrived to miss.

In response, Ahmad writes, the US unleashed total war, “punitive measures, and widespread, systematic use of torture.” He observes: “these wars are ‘limited’ only in their consequences for the intervening power. For the country and people under assault they are total.” [22]   

Let us once more consider what the US sought to do in South Vietnam, namely, to build a state able to “incorporate” the people via “physical control” and effective administration, while carrying on an ersatz, top-down social revolution and making a great forward leap into “centralized, paternalistic government,” with the burgeoning state undertaking “economic and social development”; making “hard decisions” about investment vs. consumption, rationalizing administration, rooting out corruption, and “attack[ing] parochial political groupings”; and serving as the vanguard of forced-draft “urbanization” by bombing the rural population into new living arrangements. [23] One theorist even suggested that the South Vietnamese state substitute itself for “intermediate structures” where those were, lamentably, missing. [24] I leave to one side the obvious problem that if the state supplies the intermediate structures, they no longer seem very intermediate and perhaps another word will be needed for them.

From about 1965 on, American policymakers tried to substitute unrestrained US firepower for the “administrative failure” of the Saigon regime, so as to drive peasants into the “protection” of that regime, and where they could not provide support for the guerrillas. But an ineffective and unpopular regime cannot be bombed into strength and public esteem. So here it is: whichever side won, the people were going to get a stronger state than they were used to; absent the Americans, however, they would not be carpet-bombed. Let us leave to one side for a moment, the moral and subjective factors that seem to have been decisive. That done, even on the American theorists’ own argument, a peasant able to see past next week into some middle term might in fact “rationally calculate” that he would be better off under the NLF.

Between their methodologically narrow definition of rationality and their neoclassical inability to treat (and then distinguish degrees of) time-preference, the US counterinsurgency theorists were thoroughly at sea.

Rothbard v. Chomsky, 1977

It is probably worth mentioning the letters-to-the-editor exchanged between Rothbard and Noam Chomsky in Libertarian Review in December 1977. Rothbard had written a piece in the September issue in which he argued that democratic socialism was a chimera. Any serious attempt to realize socialism would necessarily lead in the direction of totalitarian rule. In a footnote, he chided Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman for their skepticism regarding some chilling statements attributed to Cambodian communist officials. [25]

Chomsky wrote an angry letter to Libertarian Review, saying that Rothbard had misrepresented his and Herman's position. Rothbard replied in kind, reiterating his point that socialism, if undertaken seriously, required violence, brutality and statism. [26] As a lifelong advocate of a laissez-faire market economy, Rothbard was not about to defend any form of socialism. This exchange of letters took place just when former opponents of US intervention in Southeast Asia, many of them socialists, were debating among themselves whether or not it was "moral" to criticize the successor states in Southeast Asia.

In Rothbard's view, if the bulk of a country's people opted for socialism in reaction to feudalism, mercantilism, and foreign domination, that did not give the US government the right to wage a savage imperialist war against them. In any case, Rothbard had long rejected the Cold Warriors' claim that all movements against the status quo, and against western powers that propped up existing regimes, were somehow parts of a centrally-directed campaign of communist aggression, and that therefore, US intervention anywhere and everywhere constituted a form of "defense."

Hence, Rothbard had no problem opposing the war and criticizing those who came to power in its aftermath, especially since, absent the war, the outcomes would have been substantially different.

Rothbard the Islamicist

Rothbard returned to the theme of falling states in a piece on the Shah of Iran in Reason Magazine in June 1979.  Libertarians, he wrote, are “determined opponents of the Leviathan State.” They also have faith “in the power of ideas to move mountains, to transform society. Even to overthrow an entrenched coercive despotism. And yet, libertarians have displayed curiously little interest in the process by which such social transformations can and do take place.”

Libertarians often treated ideas “as floating abstractions.” Hence they overlooked the need to build a movement of people to carry forward the idea of liberty. They would then fall into despair, thinking that nothing can be done.

The recent events in Iran demonstrated the power of ideas combined with interest:

The regime of Shah Pahlevi seemed to be irresistible. It had been in power for decades. The shah’s father had proclaimed himself monarch and had grabbed about half the land area of the country for his own personal use and ownership. From taxes and the proceeds of such ownership, Pahlevi built up a formidable military machine, fueled by enormous military, political, and psychological aid from the United States.

In addition, the shah’s “engine of internal terror” – sustained by torture – was quite “impressive.”

So why was the Shah now gone?

Well, the Shah had made a lot of enemies, and deserved most of them. Second, the opposition was able to organize around an ideology – in this case, Islamic republicanism. Rothbard writes: “Whether libertarians like the fact or not, religion has always proved to be one of the most animating and energizing ideas that mankind can adopt.” The Iranian opposition “started with no guns at all; it began only with a figure deeply venerated by the Muslim masses of Iran, a figure who had been exiled for many years for his opposition to the shah.”

A network of mullahs got the word out that the issue was “Islam versus the shah.” Once this point was reached, “the shah, for all his money and might, didn’t stand a chance.” In the end, “it was the masses versus the army, with its virtual monopoly of firepower.” As “in all successful revolutions… finally the army, too, becomes ‘subverted’ – it is either swept up in the revolutionary ideology, or the soldiers refuse to fire upon their own families or upon people very like themselves.” [27]

Injecting emotional and value-laden language once more, the ever-subversive Rothbard writes:

Making precisely the same point as in the two earlier essays, Rothbard asks his readers to “notice what I am not saying. I am not claiming that the Khomeini republic will be particularly libertarian.” This was not to be expected, nor was it the point of his essay. “Libertarian rejoicing has nothing at all to do with whatever State replaces the shah. It celebrates the fact that a powerful, dictatorial, seemingly impregnable State can be and has been overthrown by the force of an idea.” [28]

To put it another way, a state crosses an invisible line at the Predation Possibilities Frontier, and people quit obeying it.

Rothbard the Bourgeois Counter-Revolutionary

Now let us fast-forward to Rothbard’s speech on “The Future of Austrian Economics,” given at the Mises Institute’s Summer University held at Stanford University in 1990. Briefly, in the course of a talk on the history and prospects of Austrian School economics, Rothbard took a few minutes to discuss the collapse of communism, and particularly, the moment when the subjects of the Rumanian communist ruler Ceausescu quit taking orders. It was the end of the regime.

Now, if the critics are to be believed, Rothbard “cheered” and welcomed the triumph of communism in Vietnam, and then (by the same logic) became a partisan of Islamic republicanism in 1979. In 1990, it follows, he must have reversed his “pro-communism” in order to celebrate the fall of Ceausescu, and this reversal must involve “cheering” and welcoming anti-Ceausescuism, bourgeois reaction, fascist revanchism, or God knows what.

An erratic fellow, this Rothbard.

There are people who could wander forty years in deserto looking for the common thread in Rothbard’s commentaries. They could save time, however, by taking seriously what Rothbard himself said was the common thread; for the simplest explanation is that Rothbard rightly saw that there was something to learn from state implosions, something of interest, maybe, to those who cared about liberty. Such a lesson might indeed bring a bit of cheer on a cloudy day.

II. The Mystery of Civil Obedience  

Still, one wonders, why Rothbard’s critics are so exercised by his comments on the fall of Saigon.

It may be that they are put out by his use of emotive language. Perhaps they would be happier had he done cold, social-scientific monographs on the subject. Doubtless they would be happier still, had he presented his analysis in the form of advice to state managers everywhere. “Look here, ye noble rulers and bureaucrats, true friends of All Mankind,” he might have said, “take care not to completely alienate your subjects, lest ye go the way of the government of South Vietnam – a great tragedy – and from such outcomes Heaven protect us all.”

Indeed, Rothbard might have affirmed the Cold War, embraced US policy as the standard of global right, and lamented the passing of “our” puppet state. Even the Randians might be quiet under such circumstances. To achieve such high-toned respectability, all Rothbard had to do was to ignore everything he believed and everything he had learned about US foreign policy.

The Blight of Anti-Communism

Well before 1975, Rothbard had concluded, among other things, that obsessive anticommunist hysteria was the key to the transformation of the American right wing from a “quasi-libertarian” political force in the 1930s and forties to a state-building war party from the early 1950s onward. As he wrote in 1968: “the major ideological instrument of the transformation was the blight of anti-communism, and the major carriers were Bill Buckley and National Review.” [29]

Rothbard’s analysis of anticommunism as a definite and distinct ideology was already clear in a memo written for the Volker Fund in 1962. The memo was a critique of a manuscript by Frank Meyer. The latter had written a rather standard Cold War meditation on world communism as an unchanging monolith. In Rothbard’s view, Meyer had missed the significance of the Soviet-Chinese split, and indeed, all other fissures within the socialist world. Instead, Meyer chose to treat communism “almost as if it were a ‘thing’ from Outer Space, a diabolic monolith dedicated solely and simply to world conquest of power.”

For Meyer, communists were scarcely acting human beings who “might be frightened for their own skins.” Consistent with such a view he had managed to read the now ongoing debates between Soviet spokesmen, on the one hand, and Chinese and Albanian spokesmen, on the other, as if nothing substantial were at stake. In Meyer’s mind, apparently, the Soviets were cloaking an offensive program of world conquest behind defensive rhetoric, while the Chinese and their adherents were doing without the rhetoric.

After a summary of recent Soviet-Chinese debates, Rothbard argued that the Soviet leadership were quite serious about defusing Cold War tensions and avoiding a disastrous war, or wars, fought with modern atomic weapons. This was entirely rational on their part: “Now all this is a straightforward, sensible, candid, and non-diabolic policy, pursued eagerly and consistently, especially since Russia adopted the Western disarmament proposals (which we then quickly withdrew) in May 1955.”

Rothbard added, that in an age of airpower, missiles, and hydrogen bombs, “the main threat, not only to Communists and to the Soviets but to all men everywhere, is total nuclear annihilation.”

In contrast with the Soviet position, the Chinese claimed that atomic bombs were “paper tigers” and that what counted in the world struggle for socialism was popular revolutionary will. Rothbard, naturally, did not hold back from making an obvious comparison: “If you see a strong resemblance between the Chinese view and analysis of the world, and that of Frank S. Meyer, you are correct.” On this view, everything the other side did or said was a trick, negotiations were futile, and we might as well launch a war to get it all over with. [30]

As a closed ideology, anticommunism was singularly unfit for dealing with changing realities in world politics. It was more than fit, however, for sustaining endless expansion of the US central state and for risking, and finding, wars. This syndrome – a diabolical universal enemy whose very existence demanded unceasing sacrifice to the US government in the name of freedom – had been a central concern for Rothbard since the mid-1950s, a concern he expressed in Faith and Freedom in April 1954 and in an unpublished “isolationist” manifesto written in 1959. [31]

Rothbard pursued his line of analysis on the relationship between state expansion, foreign policy, and war in such papers as “War, Peace, and the State” (1963) and “Anatomy of the State” (1965). [32] Here, too, I should at least mention Rothbard’s running critique of “conservatism” from 1957 onwards. [33]

Suffice it to say, that having studied the problem, Rothbard thought that prepackaged anticommunist ideology, both as a theory and explanation of the world, was a bit thin, by the time the US leadership managed to bog us down in Vietnam. Communism was bad, to be sure, and a mistaken choice in social organization. But imperial intervention, modern warfare, strategic (terror) bombing, and the like were also bad, even if conservative anticommunists contrived to not notice the fact.

Locked in its own closed, ideological universe, anticommunism became a huge obstacle to American thought and the primary justification for expansion of the central state. Under cover of the Cold War, the state advanced on all fronts, carrying forward policies once considered “leftist” (but such labels mean less and less these days). If anyone “won” the Cold War, it was state power that did so, plain and simple. [34]

Civil Obedience and Its Alternatives

As it happens, Rothbard was interested in the problem of civil obedience. Put simply, the problem is, Why do people who vastly outnumber state bureaucrats nonetheless obey them? His interest went back many years, and certainly before LBJ got waist-deep in the Big Muddy.

In July 1970, Rothbard responded to an essay by Leonard Read, who had, in Rothbard’s view, cut his links to any real libertarianism by taking the view that we must obey all existing laws, until we can get them repealed. [35] This was not the best line of attack on the problem of “civil obedience.” Reflecting on the same problem, eleven months later, he wrote: “there has never been a successful armed revolution against a democratic government; all toppled governments have been seen by the public to be outside themselves, either as dictatorships or monarchies (Cuba, China, Russia, 18^th Century France, 17^th Century England) or as imperial powers (the American Revolution, the Algerian Revolution).” [36]

And there is more. It was precisely in the 1970s, when the offending pieces on the fall of Saigon were written, that Rothbard was working in two areas especially relevant to state collapse.

Voluntary Servitude

In 1975, Rothbard wrote a lengthy preface to the Free Life Edition of Étienne de La Boétie’s Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. La Boétie was a young French lawyer, who wrote the essay during his days as a student at the University of Orléans, about 1550. Rothbard found La Boétie’s argument elegantly simple.

Unlike sundry Huguenot treatises of the 16^th century, “the very abstraction and universality of La Boétie’s thought led inexorably to radical and sweeping conclusions on the nature of tyranny, the liberty of the people, and what needed to be done to overthrow the former and secure the latter.” La Boétie built his essay “around a single axiom, a single percipient insight into the nature not only of tyranny, but implicitly of the State apparatus itself.” That insight was “that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular acceptance” because “general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure.” This brought up, “what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience.” [37]  

Conceived in Liberty

In the same period, Rothbard was also deeply involved in his multivolume history of colonial America, which culminated in the American Revolution. The series, projected as far back as 1962, was well under way. It had, naturally, given Rothbard much reason to reflect on the sociology of revolutions, the interplay between interest and ideology, [38] legitimacy, and the creation by American revolutionaries of parallel hierarchies and their use of partisan (or guerrilla) warfare.

And here is Rothbard on the liberal revolution in New York – Leisler’s Rebellion – set off by local conditions at the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688) in England:

Of course this is not the end of the story: “Any libertarian revolution that takes power immediately confronts a grave inner contradiction: in the last analysis, liberty and power are incompatible.” And so, “[a]s soon as Jacob Leisler assumed supreme power, he, naturally, began to use it.” [40]

Another theme in Conceived in Liberty has to do with higher taxes, institutionalized militarism, and arbitrary rule to which colonial authorities resorted, for example, in aid of conquering French Canada – “an Anglo-Virginian attempt at a huge land grab.” [41] Does this mean then, that for purposes of discussing the mid-18^th century Rothbard was pro-French and pro-Catholic? It seems more likely that he was rather consistently critical of state leaders who fomented unnecessary wars; and if the states happened to have Brits or Americans in them, that was of no consequence to Rothbard.

In the fourth volume of Conceived in Liberty, Rothbard discusses the merits of guerrilla warfare as a strategy in the American Revolution. He writes:

But although Ethan Allen had already shown this in Vermont, the official leadership of the Revolution did their best to shy away from guerrilla warfare. [42] Note that Rothbard isn’t crying about how unfair it is that great powers have to face “asymmetrical” opponents who don’t play fair. He is more interested in how this form of struggle favors “any subjugated people.” The great power, after all, could have refrained from getting into the empire business.

Rothbard was interested in counterinsurgency, but from somewhat the other end of the telescope. Here he comments on Lord Dunmore’s campaign in Virginia:

Rothbard continues: “It was this sort of harassing force that Lord Dunmore established on the Virginia coast” [43] – but he could equally well be writing about Vietnam.

In passing, the question naturally arises, Why could Americans not “get” guerrilla warfare in Vietnam? Why, having won American independence at least partly on the strength of such tactics, [44] could US leaders not foresee what lay ahead in Vietnam? Part of the answer is the typical latter-day American reduction of everything to technique and technology. US counterinsurgency experts actually thought they could pull out the working parts of guerrilla war – light weaponry, speed, surprise, etc. – and repackage them as counter-revolutionary commando raids. Thus they could ignore the entire political and ideological context of the war, not to speak of other local knowledge bearing on where the Hell they were.

In short, Americans only understood guerrilla war back when they themselves were the insurgents; and after the fact, many of them preferred to remember the war as the victory of the Continental Army.

A second reason why Americans didn’t “get” guerrilla war in Vietnam stemmed from another misreading of American history: the myth that a third of the American population supported the revolution, a third supported George III, and a third were neutral. This claim rested on a misunderstood letter in which John Adams discussed Americans’ views on the French Revolution, quite another thing. In fact, the American Revolution enjoyed majority support. [45]

This legend strengthened US policymakers’ tendency to believe that all revolutions were the work of small minorities. The masses were inert and manipulable. Therefore, if US and South Vietnamese operatives could manipulate them better, all would be well.

For his part, Rothbard loathed state-building imperialist wars. He believed they were bad for their foreign victims, but also bad for the people whose state carried them out. On the other hand, he believed in the right of a people to resist outsiders’ invasion and occupation of their home. See, for example, his comments in 1969 on the case of Northern Ireland. [46]

Someone who opposes empire is not willy-nilly “pro-communist,” “pro-Islamic Republican,” or “pro-bourgeois reactionary,” depending on the ideas embraced by a succession of movements that resist the empire; he is someone who really does oppose empire.

III. Neo-, Pseudo-, and Post-Libertarianism

All the materials adduced above would seem to give Rothbard’s essays on the fall of Saigon (as well as on the toppling of the Shah) a bit of a context.

As already lightly hinted, Rothbard’s themes were, among others, state power, civil obedience, and war.  Unlike many of his critics, Rothbard was able to distinguish conceptually between the US state apparatus and America. Thus the charge of systematic “anti-Americanism” misses the mark by miles. True, Rothbard became angry at times that Americans could not be bothered to make the distinction, but even this complaint falls into the category of cultural critique, and if an American can’t critique American culture, who the Hell can?

No one has to agree with Rothbard on these things, I suppose, and for all I care, everyone may re-fight the Vietnam War to his or her heart’s content; but no one can reasonably say that Rothbard’s three “Death of a State” essays flowed from any partisan commitment to communism or Islamic republicanism. In any case, it was not within Murray Rothbard’s power to bring down the Saigon regime. Had he turned his considerable talents to shoring up that same regime, perhaps writing press releases for USAID, he could not have saved it, either.

So the problem begins to withdraw to within its proper bounds. What the critics are really saying is, “This Rothbard fellow had the wrong attitude about the Saigon government, and a wrong attitude about that, shows that his entire system of thought is flawed.” But if someone really believed, with Rothbard, that US administrations had “managed to murder a million or more Vietnamese… along with over 50,000 American soldiers,” he or she might well take a dim view of the whole business, criticize it (however mildly), and actually be glad the damned thing was finally over.

Rothbard was not exactly alone in his reaction, and it is hard to see why he and millions of other Americans who had opposed the thing, should have put on sackcloth and ashes at the end of an exercise they had not planned, ordered, or wanted, an exercise they saw as unwise, futile, and criminal.

Rothbard’s consistency speaks for itself, even if that quality is unwelcome to certain latter-day neo- and post-libertarians. No doubt Rothbard could have cut a bold Cold War figure, churning out input/output analyses for the RAND Corporation, had he not rejected such work on both methodological and ethical grounds. This may be a cautionary tale for would-be “efficiency experts for the state.” And the tale remains true, even if these parties dream they are somehow serving the rather wonderfully hidden “classical liberal” and “commercial republican” spiritual essence of a particularly successful imperial state. [47]

The truth would seem to be this: liberal states, by allowing considerable economic freedom, sit atop more productive economies than do backward states. With lower taxes, they can still raise great revenues and assemble superior armed force. They then wield this armed force in projects that interest them as state apparatchiks, while the busy commercial classes pay little enough attention.

Accordingly, liberal states such as Britain and the United States are likely to succeed in imperialist competition, while clunky feudal-mercantilist or dirigiste states are not. This is the key to the much-mooted “democratic peace” imposture. Liberal democratic states get more revenue and win most of their wars. This tells us nothing about the merits of those wars, and little enough about reasons for those states’ foreign policies. (Hint: doing good may not top the list.)

Long ago, John Locke saw the point: “that Prince who shall be so wise and godlike as by established laws of liberty to secure protection and encouragement to the honest industry of Mankind against the oppression of power and narrowness of Party will quickly be too hard for his neighbours.”  Thomas Paine, too, saw it, when he wrote that, “the portion of liberty enjoyed in England, is just enough to enslave a country by, more productively than by despotism; and that as the real object of all despotism is revenue, a government so formed obtains more than it could do either by direct despotism, or in a full state of freedom; and is therefore, on the ground of interest, opposed to both.” And Hans-Hermann Hoppe has made the same point at greater length. [48]

It would be interesting to look at the ambiguities of Locke as an early semistatist modernizer, [49] mercantilist, participant in the slave trade, etc., but there is no room here, and anyway, Locke has plenty of latter-day followers in providing a liberal façade for state activities. They are legion who stand for “free-market” Social Bonapartism – the imposing of “freedom” and “spontaneous order” by US weaponry. That so many Chicagoites are on board the imperial train suggests that the Chicago School always functioned as the right wing of Cold War liberalism. [50]

This is heady brew and one can easily see why enlistments are up in John Stuart Mill’s Own Lancers and the Bentham Berets. Instead of cultivating our own garden – dull work at best – liberventionists have enlisted to “Smash Someone Else’s State,” or to repudiate someone else’s national debt. This creates a bit of a problem.

What can someone do, who sincerely believes that markets work better than states, that liberty is better than statism, or that life is better than death? Well, he or she can learn to separate America from the state, justifications from good intentions, morality from utility, American political realities from vanished 18^th-century essences, freemen from Founders, defense from empire, and so on. There is plenty of work to be done and, at the end of it, inquiring minds will be better able to judge whether or not Murray Rothbard was morally bound to praise, lionize, or at least remain silent about interventions, bad wars, and the collapse of various states.