LORD LOTHIAN, HITLER APPEASER AND MODEL FOR TODAY’S FEDERALISTS
Dateline 9th January 2006
(Comments by Rodney Atkinson in italics)
When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolph Hess, landed in Scotland during the Second World War top of his list of appeasers in Britain was Lord Lothian. Reading the following paper by Lord Lothian gives us the reasons why. He shared many of the Nazis attitudes to free nations (they were dangerous!) and he was therefore a supra-nationalist. He sought peace at any cost. He did not see war as the means of deliverance of free peoples from dictators. Lothian was the kind of man dictators could “do business with”. Like the Germans Lothian lauds “the State” and its absolute right to control. Here is the text of Lord Lothian’s 1935 Burge Memorial Lecture which is described by one of today’s leading eurofanatic federalists, Richard Laming a Director of “The Federal Union”, as “one of the essential texts in the history of federalism”. Lord Lothian’s speech, with my comments:
There has never been a time when there has been so widespread and determined an attack on the institution of war. There have been periods of relative peace in human history, when great empires made war impossible or unprofitable over vast stretches of the earth’s surface. (Grotesque notion – as if war were an institution like a government, parliament or society! and as if we could “abolish war”. This is the logic beloved of supra-nationalists – if nations go to war the solution is to abolish nations so there will be no war! Killing all the people would certainly lead to no more murder! The truth is of course that war is merely carried on by other means. China and the Soviet Union were in coarse terms not at war with the West from 1945 but in practice war took other forms – like sponsored wars, economic wars and in the case of Stalin war against his own people with thousands killed or starved! Mao tse tung murdered millions while China was “at peace”! Today as Lord Lothian’s beloved European federalism is in full swing, with the once free nations of Europe largely abolished, war has never been so intense. In shooting wars like those against Yugoslavia in which thousands died and over a million were driven out of their countries or in constitutional wars as national Parliaments have been emasculated or simply bypassed or in “political wars” which have simply driven people from the ballot box).
There have been centuries, like the last, when war was relatively rare, as compared with its frequency during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But never before, I think, has public opinion over a large part of the earth come to recognize both that war is incompatible with a civilized life and that it is an institution which ought to be and can be abolished. (This is nonsense. War has proved again and again to be the healthy and successful response of the liberal, the democrat, the oppressed – against fascists, communists and imperialists. Even the most heinous events of war – like the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs – could be proved to have saved hundreds of thousands of lives – although this is not to excuse the bombing of CIVILIAN Japanese targets).
On the other hand, most thinking people today realize that the great movement against war which grew up among the democracies during and after the World War of 1914-18 has failed so far to realize its promise, and that at this moment, at any rate, we are steadily drifting back towards a worse war than the last. (That is because it was not the war which killed millions but the CAUSES OF THE WAR. They were not tackled. Lessons, if learned at all, were forgotten and German imperialism raised its ugly head a mere 3 years after the end of the First World War – under the guise of the Coal and Steel Union.)
That drift is shown by the withdrawal of Germany and Japan and the continued abstention of the United States from the League of Nations, the failure of the Disarmament Conference, the recommencement of the race in armaments, the rise in international fear and diplomatic tension, and the absence of any counter-movement, save the adhesion of Russia to the League, to offset these melancholy events. (NO – these were not the problems, these were the symptoms. France pursued an excessive reparations policy against Germany, Germany sought to redress the results of the war it had lost, Japan was denied free trading opportunities, corporatist policies in the USA caused the Wall Street crash, the corrupt German “centre parties” – full of people like Lord Lothian! – conspired to destroy the German economy and divorce the voters from power through corporatist politics, printing so much money that they destroyed the German middle class – but subsidised big business. This led to the rise of both the Nazi and Communist parties. Hitler was not checked before he came to power and he was not checked when he marched into the Rhineland in 1935 etc etc. These were the evils – the spineless accommodation of corporatism and then fascism which then led to a just war.)
The next war, if it comes, will start with a far more rapid and overwhelming offensive attack, and that attack will be directed almost as much at the morale of the civilian population as at the armed forces themselves. Do not let us deceive ourselves about these things. The fury of the next war will be immeasurably greater than that of the last. In consequence of this return towards militarism, there is a fresh outcrop of expedients for avoiding or preventing war. Some people proclaim that war is murder and that they will go to jail or be shot as passive resisters rather than join in the organised killing of their fellow men. Others denounce the futility of war as a method of settling disputes, the inherent injustice of its decisions, the inevitable disaster it brings upon belligerents and neutrals, victors and vanquished alike. (Certainly this was the Nazi view in Germany! And they sought to reverse the 1918 settlement and by 1945 they had failed. They have since sought to reverse the 1918 and the 1945 settlements – and they have now largely succeeded! But those settlements, if we discount much of the reparations excess against which John Maynard Keynes warned, were far more just than the absence of war would have produced!)
One group pins its faith on strengthening collective security; another group preaches the virtues of the policy of virtuous isolation. There is a section which regards the armament makers as the real merchants of death and sees salvation in the nationalisation of the munition industry. The largest group still believes in the League of Nations, as the peace ballot shows, though recent events have done much to shake confidence in its ability to prevent war. (In this Lothian is right. The League was exactly the kind of corporatist, supranational farce produced by dim but well meaning “statesmen” which muddied the waters in the 1920s and 1930s, promoted procrastination as policy and aided the rise of the fascist leaders in Europe. It is of course just such arrogant self appointed supranational do-gooders who would rule in a federal world, reigning supreme so far from and so unaccountable to the people that wars would multiply, but would come in largely non military forms. But war would not be abolished. Indeed when the seething mass of resentment at the new hegemonists reached boiling point the resulting world wide revolution would make traditional wars look like tea parties).
But despite these efforts millions are beginning to feel that war is once more approaching and inevitable and to make preparations so that when it does come they will find themselves in the end at the top and not at the bottom of the blasted and mangled heap. War, of course, is not inevitable. If it comes it will be because humanity has failed to take the steps necessary to end it. (NO because they have failed to take measures to remove the causes of it in the 5, 10 or 20 years which preceded it.)
What is clear, however, is that the post-(First World War) war peace movement has failed, so far, to find the way to prevent war. (Well fancy that! I wonder how these brilliant friends of Lord Lothian, and people like them over the whole history of mankind have not stopped war!?) That is why I want today to probe ruthlessly to the real causes of war (No – his interest is in the institutions which go to war and his “peaceful” aim of abolishing them. He is not really interested in peace because he does not grasp the underlying reasons why war becomes the last resort. Or rather why a long existing war becomes, for the first time, physical! and to try to set out what I believe to be the only final remedy. (He uses language like Hitler and all the great dictators – the final solution! – and the “final” and therefore “absolutely” powerful institutions which will dictate to the world in its own interests of course! There is and never will be any final solution – only temporary solutions, because mankind is constantly changing and politicians are weak, ignorant and accommodating – until a real leader comes along to lead us in war against the disease which his predecessors have allowed to fester for so long!)
For fifteen years the peace movement has been largely engaged in what psychologists call wishful thinking. It has not penetrated to the fundamentals or faced up to the price which must be paid if war is to be ended. That is probably a more dangerous attitude than that of the hard-boiled realist, who is solely concerned to avoid war if he can and to win it if he cannot. If we are to make a success of a renewed attack on the institution of war we must think and act from more fundamental and eternal premises than we have yet done. (Yes indeed but the fundamentals are political, ethnic, democratic, economic and industrial. They cannot be solved by making political entities bigger, more imperialistic, more monopolistic and by abolishing the nation states which are the homogenous foundation of democracies).
II
What is war? And what do we really mean by peace? War is armed conflict between sovereign states or states claiming to be sovereign. It may be concerned to bring about political or economic reform, or to satisfy greed or ambition; it may arise from misunderstanding or the necessity of self-defence; or it may spring from accident or a chivalrous desire to help the weak. The occasion of war is irrelevant. War is the ultima ratio regum, the legislative instrument whereby issues between sovereign states, which will not yield to voluntary agreement, can alone be settled. War is a struggle of will between states or groups of states each using every possible resource, including mass destruction of human life, which is necessary to enable one side to enforce its will on the other. (More often to remove a tyranny. And if the laws of certain states are oppressive then we can encourage their voters to rebel and re-establish the just law of free peoples. But under Lothian’s world system there would be no free peoples to help enslaved peoples for they would all be defined out of their autonomy)
What is peace? Peace is not merely the negative condition in which war is not being waged. It is a positive thing. Peace is that state of society in which political, economic, and social issues are settled by constitutional means under the reign of law (whose law? Many Arab Governments chop off limbs, torture suspects, flog men and women. Hitler acted constitutionally under emergency laws passed by his elected predecessors and he was himself, as was Mussolini, elected. Hitler acted under the law of the Third Reich – which drew its power from the emergency laws passed by the Weimar Republic which were, under the Nazis, defended by many eminent judges! Communists say democratic law is “bourgois law” and operates in favour of one particular class and against the masses! The French and Italian Governments refuse to apply internationally agreed laws, they disobey EU laws and when they are fined they refuse to pay the fines! Is Lothian going to abolish all these beliefs so that there is no conflict and therefore no war? His mere attempt to do so would unleash the wars he rejects)
and violence or war between contending individuals, groups, parties, or nations, is prohibited and prevented. Peace, in the political sense of the word, does not just happen. It is the creation of a specific political institution. That institution is the state. (I can think of no more monopolistic, powerful, virtually unchallengeable institution than the State. The State has proved itself to be a dangerous abstraction used to tyrannise the people in the interests of those whom the State employs and subsidises! It is the power which rides like a parasite on the backs of the people, not representing them but having totally different interests from them.)
The raison d’être for the state is that it is the instrument which enables human beings to end war and bring about change and reform by constitutional and pacific means. (What utter bilge! It is the State which has always used the lives of the people to promote its own interests. It demands that the people fight its wars. It demands that in those wars innocent people die – for instance in bombing raids – but when the people themselves are under attack, for instance from murderers the State will not execute the killers of the innocent! When the State identifies alcohol and tobacco as dangerous it will not ban them because it makes so much money from the vices which the State itself taxes for its own profit!)
Never from the beginning of recorded history nor on any part of the earth’s surface has there been peace except within a state. The state may be a primitive tribal rulership in Africa or a vast Communist empire like Soviet Russia. It may be an advanced democratic republic like the United States, a totalitarian dictatorship like National Socialist Germany, or a placid constitutional monarchy like modern Sweden. But peace only appears when there is a government whose business it is to consider the interests and command the allegiance of every individual within the confines of its territory, and possessed of the power to make laws regulating society which the citizen is bound to obey and which, where obedience is withheld, it is able to enforce. Until the state appears there is only anarchy and violence and private or public war. (The exact opposite is the case. The State is warlike but the people, acting as free nations or free tribes have an interest in preserving their lives and prosperity, not the power of the State. They have an interest in free trade with others not, as the State has, in controlling trade for imperial ambition. It is when free individuals and free communities act spontaneously that they prosper and democratic forms emerge. It is when the State becomes all powerful and decides to control resources, tax highly and favour some over others that the people in general grow poorer and weaker – as the State grows bigger and richer. Providing defence and law and order is in the interests of all free men acting in concert – BUT THAT IS NOT THE STATE! Parliament, at its best, is the servant of the people. In a democracy the people are sovereign, NOT the State. It is when the State grasps that sovereignty for itself that disaster strikes and democracy dies. Allegiance is not to the State put to one’s fellow citizens. Even an absolute King knew this better than the modern State with its massive bureaucratic apparatus, and apparatchiks and patronage)
And no other institution has ever been devised as a substitute for the state, because the coming into being of the state is itself the ending of war and the substitution for war of the reign of law. The state, as an institution, is in fundamentals the same under all the different forms I have mentioned. The differences lie in the method whereby and the purposes for which the omnipotent power of the state is used (ALL omnipotent power is anti-democratic and leads to the grotesque totalitarian statements and generalisations made by people like Lord Lothian. Omnipotence of the State leads directly to the omnipotence and therefore unaccountability of those who run it).
The director of executive action and legislation may be a single autocratic ruler, an aristocracy, the propertied bourgeoisie, the proletariat, or a majority of the representatives of the people voting by universal suffrage. It makes a great deal of difference to the practical conditions of life how those who wield the power of the state are appointed or elected, for the nature of the laws and the consideration they will give to the interests of the different classes of the community, will depend upon it. (“wielding power” is typically a politician’s or civil servant’s idea of politics but it expresses the exact opposite of the idea of democracy. Electing people to omnipotence contradicts the whole purpose of elections. In fact of course democracy is properly concerned with the freedoms of the people not the power of the State (which is politics). Those freedoms and the choices and spending and saving which are the day-to-day exercises of real democracy nearly always fall victim to the controls of the State!)
Civilization develops in proportion as a free public opinion replaces dictatorship as the controller of the powers of the state. But none of these things affect the principle of the state itself. (If they do not then the democratic structures are purely for show and are a deceit)
The state is the institution which ends anarchy and its consequence, war, by creating an organically united community, (communities are not united by State power. On the contrary they are created spontaneously by people and are often destroyed by the State as its taxes, subsidies, interventions and economic bungling divorce people from their communities. Good examples are the Jarrow March, and nationalisation of coal and steel) and sets up legislative, judicial, and executive organs whereby its citizens come to live under the reign of law and are prevented, collectively or individually, from attempting to make their own will prevail by fraud or violence.(This man has absolutely no understanding of the development of the British Common Law, of centuries of case law which has evolved to provide freedoms and protections for ordinary people and which was at its most democratic when that law restricted the power of the State (Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, Freedom of Religion etc).
The state itself does not eschew violence. On the contrary, it claims that it alone is entitled to use violence. It could not, indeed, exist without the use of violence. It habitually uses violence. Moreover, the violence it uses is irresistible violence. A great number of the laws it enacts and the changes which it brings about are inevitably objected to by individuals or sections of the community. They are often only obeyed by minorities because they know that disobedience involves fines, imprisonment, or death. (Laws are of course obeyed by the vast majority – but Lothian seems to relish this authority, this violence. He seems to welcome the “chaos” which he claims makes that violence necessary. But in fact peace and law and order arise far more from respect for others, common identity, a trust in one’s neighbour etc. Those who do not commit crimes are not fearful of the State – it is those who DO commit crimes who are fearful! And the State itself is guilty of enormous crimes – driving innocent people to despair, taxing entrepreneurs into oblivion, using the lives of its citizens to defend its own privileges, arbitrary power used to benefit its friends, special privileges for State employees etc etc)
Yet if the state did not enforce the law, and do so irresistibly, individuals and groups would inevitably begin to use violence or fraud to defend or promote their own rights or interests, and society itself would dissolve in anarchy. (In fact the greatest examples of fraud are practised by those who exploit the actions, and monopoly powers, of the State. State subsidies of industry usually lead to fraud. Farm subsidies lead to fraud. State subsidies to fishermen have decimated fish stocks. The exercise of State power usually leads to fraud by those who seek to buy “the right decision”. State civil servants do favours to corporations in return for jobs in their retirement. The State often breaks its own laws and when it is found guilty in the courts it changes the law. And all this is done at the expense of the people in general!)
….peace, in the political sense of the word, that is, the ending of war, can only be established by bringing the whole world under the reign of law, through the creation of a world state, and that until we succeed in creating a federal commonwealth of nations, which need not, at the start, embrace the whole earth, we shall not have laid even the foundation for the ending of the institution of war upon earth. (A “federal commonwealth of nations” assumes a central sovereignty to which that commonwealth is federated. Such a holistic world power has been the goal of most dictators and empires, some more benevolent than others but all of whose attempts have been resisted by free peoples. Moreover there has been a good body of international legal principle established during the 20th century which, despite its worthy aims, did not prevent war. Indeed it was those countries which most supported those legal principles in theory which often were the greatest miscreants in practice.)
The basic cause of war is that there is no authority to decide international problems from the point of view of the world community as a whole, and that in international negotiation considerations of reason, justice, and goodwill are constantly and inevitably thrust on one side by considerations of security….. (There have been such authorities for many decades but they have not prevented war, nor have they been allowed by “the international community” to act objectively and omnisciently. A classic example was the war against Yugoslavia where on at least 7 points of international law the German, British and American governments – without any recourse to the United Nations – acted illegally. When they were indicted by the Yugoslav Government before the International Court in The Hague they simply refused to turn up. On the other hand those powers did set up a kangaroo court in The Hague, a classic example of victors justice, and effectively kidnapped the elected leader of the Yugoslavs and put him on trial. If that is the response to supranational legal principles by a few countries today, how much more arrogantly would a world federal government feel it could act!?)
, by the supreme and overriding necessity in a world of anarchy that nations must think in terms of what will happen to them in the event of the outbreak of war. Let me apply this argument to the two omnibus explanations of war – capitalism and nationalism.
The main cause of unemployment in the world today is that the international division of labour, the adjustment between world supply and demand, which under a system of free enterprise is brought about by the effect of price in the market, has been interrupted by the action of the sovereign states, in going to war – a political act – in creating tariffs and other barriers in the name of self-sufficiency, (True- but would the political decision making machine of “world federal government”, grotesquely huge, bureaucratic and democratically impenetrable as it must be, really be less open to manipulation by the most powerful corporations, national groups or lobbying interest groups than the more atomistic system of democratic nationhood? Of course not, the whole “behind the scenes” vote buying and horse trading would be far more open to the worst elements – in complete contradiction to any objective rule of law.)
Some of you, no doubt, have thought that my argument that the federation of nations is the only foundation for the ending of war and the establishment of the reign of peace was academic. I believe, on the other hand, that while public opinion today may be far from thinking in these terms, events are driving the issue to the front with tremendous speed. It is inconceivable to me that we can continue much longer as an anarchy of twenty-six states in Europe and over sixty states in the world, each raising its tariffs to the clouds against one another…………(In fact 70 years later there are now some 180 free nations in the world and there have rarely been fewer wars than in the first years of the 21st century. Apart from the grotesque European Union (whose existence is built on Lothian’s theories and where 25 nation states, 25 constitutions, 25 national parliaments and 12 currencies have been destroyed and where thousands have died in war during the 1990s and unemployment is at its highest levels since the 1930s) the rest of the world has enjoyed record economic growth just as it developed nation states capable of self governemnt by parliamentary means! In fact time has shown that “anarchy” as Lothian called it has succeeded where federal unions – like the Soviet and European unions – have failed. Indeed the greatest conflicts have occurred between ethnic minorities deliberately stirred into anatagonism by European federalists in order to break up those nation states where the inter ethnic solidarity was both theoretically and practically more pronounced than between eg the nationalisms of France and Germany who broke them up in the name of a putative “Europe”!)
CONCLUSION: The democratic principle of homogenous peoples voting and acting freely within nation states is matched by a similar process of competition between free nations on the international level. Any absolute system, single set of beliefs, ex cathedra impositions and centralised decisions will in the end remove the possibility of opposition. In doing so even the most benevolent world system would rapidly lose its self definition (for it is only by the credible presentation of alternatives that we can define ourselves) and thereafter descend into the chaos and authoritarianism and “need for security” which lead to the wars supranationalists like Lothian claim to be able to prevent.
