From the vault: Murray N. Rothbard, “The Death of a State,” The Libertarian Forum 7, no. 4 (April 1975), in Rothbard, ed., The Complete Libertarian Forum: 1969–1984 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2012) and idem, “Viewpoint: The Death of a State,” Reason (July 1975).
Both versions are reprinted below.
Murray N. Rothbard, “The Death of a State,” The Libertarian Forum 7, no. 4 (April 1975), in Rothbard, ed., The Complete Libertarian Forum: 1969–1984 (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2012)
What we are seeing these last weeks in Indochina is, for libertarians, a particularly exhilirating experience: the death of a State. or rather two States: Cambodia and South Vietnam. The exhiliration stems from the fact that here is not just another coup d’etat, in which the State apparatus remains virtually intact and only a few oligarchs are shuffled at the top. Here is the total and sudden collapse – the smashing – of an entire State apparatus, its accelerating and rapid disintegration. Of course, the process does not now usher in any sort of libertarian Nirvana, since another bloody State is in the process of taking over. But the disintegration remains, and offers us many instructive lessons.
One lesson is an illustration of the profound truth set forth by David Hume and Ludwig von Mises: that 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, on the “voluntary servitude” (as La Boetie first phrased it) of the bulk of its victims. This mass acceptance need not be active enthusiasm; it can be passive resignation; but the important thing is that it rests on the willingness of the masses to obey the orders and commands of the State apparatus—to accept the dictates of the oligarchy, to pay its taxes, to fight in its wars. What happened in South Vietnam, in particular, was what often happens after a long harrowing period of losing war: a sudden and infectious decision of the masses to say: Enough’ We’ve had it: we quit. The supposedly mighty million-man South Vietnamese (ARVN) army, trained for decades by American commanders, armed to the teeth by the United States, praised as “little tigers” by the U. S. military, just quit and ran, leaving behind over $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer-financed arms. The best description of this momentous event has been portrayed, not by one of our famous heavy-thinking pundits, but by the supposedly “light” San Francisco columnist Arthur Hoppe. (Arthur Hoppe, “The Land That Never Was,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 7, 1975). Hoppe’s column is worth quoting at length:
All last week we watched the Republic of South Vietnam fall apart. One day The Republic of South Vietnam was a sovereign nation. It had an army of a million men. It had an air force, tanks, artillery and tons of ammunition. It had a president and a vast bureaucracy of tax collectors, prosecutors and policemen. It had its own diplomats, its own currency, its own flag.
It had a population of 20 million people who, whether they favored it or not, believed that there was such a thing as The Republic of South Vietnam. It had. then, all that is required for an area delineated on a map to be termed a sovereign nation.
And yet, virtually overnight, this sovereign nation all but ceased to exist.
What happened? . . . Why didn’t the soldiers of this sovereign nation fight? Yet no rational soldier fights because he wants to fight. He fights because he is told by his sergeant who is told by his captain who is told by his general who is told by his president, who is the embodiment of the sovereign nation, to fight.
He and his fellow soldiers fight because they believe in the power of their sovereign nation to require them to fight. And they flee when they no longer believe in that power. So the soldiers fled because they lost faith in their officers and the power of the sovereign nation they represented. And the people and the bureaucrats fled in bloodshed and terror because they lost faith in the army and the power of the sovereign nation to defend them.
So this loss of faith spread in an ever-expanding chain reaction until the sovereign nation of The Republic of South Vietnam all but ceased to exist ….
In the way it rapidly fell apart in horror last week, it seemed to demonstrate that sovereign nations exist on faith alone. They are created in the minds of men. They exist only in the minds of men. They have power over their citizens solely because their citizens believe they have power. And once that mystical, ephemeral faith that binds together the citizens of any sovereign nation is all but lost, that sovereign nation inevitably all but ceases to exist.
Precisely! And whatever we may say of the myriad supporters of the PRG and of the North Vietnamese regime, they certainly have the faith. An essential reason for the loss of faith by the South Vietnamese soldiery and population is that the government had no real roots in popular support. The Saigon regime has for generations been a puppet of some outside imperialist power: first of the French, and then of the United States. Hence its supporters were mainly only that relative handful that either worked for the Americans or were the recipients of American largesse. If it were not for the might of France, all of Vietnam would have—almost did—gone Communist in 1945, and if not for the increasingly massive intervention of the U. S., would have done so in 1954 or any of the years since.
A corollary lesson of the collapse, then, is the long-run impossibility for an imperialist-dominated regime to survive, when opposed by guerilla warfare backed by the great majority of the population. And this despite the enormous advantage in firepower and in modern weaponry that the imperialist power, and then its puppets, initially enjoy. Where did the guerrillas manage to get their arms from? Not mainly, as U. S. mythology so long proclaimed, from the Russians, or down the so-called “Ho Chi Minh Trail.” Where they got it was from losing and defecting puppet forces themselves. who served as a conduit for American arms. The ARVN’s leaving behind of over $1 billion of American arms for the benefit of the PRG and North· Vietnam is. only the most dramatic manifestation of this vital fact.
Imperialism, then, cannot win: and we have now learned this lesson after the Johnson-Nixon regimes managed to murder a million or more Vietnamese, North and South, along with over 50,000 American soldiers. All that blood and treasure just to postpone the inevitable!
But while the American public has apparently learned this cruel lesson, the egregious and absurd Ford Administration obviously has not. There they go. down with the ship, to the bitter end, mouthing the same tired old hooey: about “one more chance”, about the need for the U. S. to spend yet another $700 million to buy a few months’ time about the old discredited “domino theory”, about the necessity of the S. taxpayer to fight for freedom throughout the world” as Ford once again put it. For “Freedom” read a bloody fascist dictatorship (of the Thieu clique in Vietnam, the Lon Nol-Long Baret clique in Cambodia); for “one more chance” read another billion dollars to be poured down the same old rathole in which we’ve already poured countless billions. And then the final slice of baloney: the need to send in American troops once more, this time to “evacuate” those South Vietnamese—to whom we have a commitment” and who will suffer a “bloodbath” if we don’t rush in. Fortunately, praise the Lord!, Congress and the American people have apparently had enough themselves. Maybe they could be tricked into massive a!d and another war somewhere else; but in Vietnam? Again? The left-liberal Democrats are militantly opposed, and even the Republicans seem, at long last, to be sick of the whole affair and eager to stay out. Fortunately, the 1973 Congressional prohibition against military intervention by the U.S. stands like a bulwark against the Ford-Kissinger itch to get into the fray once more. If they want to fight, let Ford, Kissinger and company outfit a boat or plane themselves with their own money, and set sail. Let us see how far they get without the American soldiers and the American taxpayers as suckers to pay the price. And good riddance’ As for the wailing about the “bloodbath”, it comes with ill grace indeed from the very U. S. government which has caused rivers, oceans of innocent blood to be shed in Indochina. Enough!
And of course. through it all, the eternal leitmotif of U. S. imperialism is sounded once more by Ford and his crew: the attack on “isolationism.” Well. after several decades of bloody intervention everywhere, with nothing to show for it except murder, waste, militarism, and the continuing growth of indigenous Communist regimes, the collapse of interventionist imperialism should be evident to everyone. It is dawning increasingly on the American public, and even on the deluded liberals, that isolationism is precisely the only sane—much less libertarian—foreign policy for the United States. To paraphrase the late Harry Elmer Barnes, the chickens of the interventionists have come home to roost, and we are all absorbing the lesson. At the least the liberals are, and all that the conservatives need to get interred with the dodo bird is to continue their post-World War II enthusiasm for American global intervention. Knowing the mind-set of conservatives, that, of course, is probably exactly what they will do.
Fortunately, too, there has been in recent days a healthy backlash in the United States against the “baby hysteria”, which looks very much like a desperate, last-ditch ploy by the administration to get us involved in Vietnam by appealing to our humanitarian and sentimentalist instincts. Many knowledgeable Vietnamese-Americans have been pointing out that (a) the Communists are scarcely about to go around butchering babies. whatever their other faults; and (b) that there is grave grounds for suspicion that the American welfare agencies have been literally kidnapping many of the babies from the Vietnamese orphanages. Many of these babies are not really orphans at all, but parked there by parents for temporary safe-keeping, until the fighting is over. Apparently. the agencies have been deliberately stripping the babies of all papers and markings. and then spiriting them to the United States. so that their Vietnamese parents will never be able to recover them.
One of the abject failures now starkly revealed is the once-famous Nixon policy of “Vietnamization”. Remember that one? The Nixon theory was that we could withdraw American troops and planes, and leave a heavily armed and well-trained ARVN force to carry on: and we were assured of the success of this plan by the Pentagon until recent weeks. The howls about the North Vietnam and PRG “violation of the Paris agreements” come with peculiarly ill grace from an American-Saigon team which violated those agreements from the very beginning: egging the ARYN on to seize a large chunk of PRG territory at the precise time the cease-fire went into effect; refusing to carry out the agreement to allow Communist political parties to participate in free elections; leaving “civilian” advisers in Vietnam to carry on covert American intervention. The chickens of Vietnamization, too, are coming home to roost. As is the Nixionian intervention into Cambodia, which only prolonged and intensified the agony of the Phnom Penh regime, as the Cambodian ambassador has recently charged. Arid now, at the last minute. the pitiful goal of the U. S. to buy time so that the Communists will negotiate with Saigon and Phnom Penh. Why, after so many rebuffs. should the Communists negotiate now when they are at the point of victory? What boobs would they have to be to do so? And the even more pitiful covert requests by Washington to bring back Prince Norodom Sihanouk to try to cheat the Khmer Rouge out of their victory in Cambodia; and this after the U. S. engineered the right-wing coup!) against Sihanouk in the first place! What gall, and what stupidity.
And finally. the pitiful and egregious Ford is preparing yet another “stab in the back” myth for his 1976 campaign. All would have been well, supposedly, if only Congress had agreed to one more intervention. one more dose of massive aid, one more military adventure. Does he think that the American public is that dumb?
More and more, the Ford administration is shaping up as the true legatee of the Nixon administration. Aside from personal style, and with an important difference—the abandonment of the budding Cowboy police state at home, it’s Nixon-Ford or Ford-Nixon all the way. The interventionist-imperialist foreign policy is the same, a Kissinger-Rockefeller policy: the wild-spending. interventionist economic policy under the cloak of free-market rhetoric is the same as well. Retiring Ford-Kissinger-Rockefeller to the showers begins to loom as one of the happy events to anticipate in 1976.
Murray N. Rothbard, “Viewpoint: The Death of a State,” Reason (July 1975)
Viewpoint: The Death of a State
What has been happening so swiftly in Indochina can only be exhilarating to any libertarian: for what we have been seeing before our very eyes is nothing less than the death of a State—or rather two states, the Saigon regime in South Vietnam, and the Phnom Penh regime in Cambodia. The process by which these States have crumpled vindicates once again the insights of the theorists of mass guerrilla warfare, from libertarians such as Charles Lee in the late 18th century to the elaborations of modern Communist theoreticians such as Mao tse-Tung, Che Guevara, and, in Vietnam, General Vo Nguyen Giap. Namely, that, after a slow, patient protracted struggle, in which the guerrilla armies (backed by the populace) whittle and wear down the massively superior fire power of the State armies (generally backed by other, imperial governments), the final blow occurs in which the State dissolves and disintegrates with remarkable speed. It is of course true 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 to libertarians is to actually see the final and swift disintegration of a State.
As only the San Francisco columnist Arthur Hoppe has pointed out, this dissolution of States also confirms the insight of political theorists from Etienne de La Boetie to David Hume to Ludwig von Mises that, in the final analysis, all States, whether “democratic” or dictatorial, rest for their continued existence on the majority support of their subjects. Once that support is finally destroyed, the State—seemingly mighty and all-powerful only weeks before—disintegrates and dies. In the case of South Vietnam, the ARVN army was seemingly mighty and powerful—a million strong, equipped with literally billions of dollars worth of American arms, and aided over the years by hundreds of billions of dollars of American aid and support, and by a half-million man American army. None of this superior might and firepower could in the end prevail against the will and determination of the mass of Vietnamese (and Cambodians), bent against seemingly impossible odds to dislodge dictatorial governments which were the puppets and clients of Western imperialism (first of France, then the U.S.) In the end, the ARVN army simply laid down their arms and fled, ignoring the orders of their hierarchical chain of State commanders, from the President down to the non-coms. In the eyes of the ARVN soldiery, as well as of the masses, the South Vietnamese State was no longer credible, no longer believable. Therefore the rulers were ignored, and the State dissolved, as the once mighty and all-powerful rulers and heads of State became in a trice, panicky and powerless individuals forced to flee with millions in ill-gotten gains to the bosom of the “free world.”
Another cause for libertarian rejoicing was the body blow that these events have delivered to U.S. imperialism, and to the notion that the United States has the moral duty, and the permanent power, to install, prop up, and rule governments and peoples throughout the world. We are being forced into a policy of “neo-isolationism,” unfortunately not through the adoption of moral principle, but through the concrete realization that imperialism is no longer realistically viable.
Unfortunately and pathetically, the Ford-Kissinger Administration, backed by the American conservative movement, proved down to the very last moment that, like the Bourbons of the past, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. As the results of their own disastrous policies crumbled around their ears, all they could do was to repeat, once more, the tired old hack fallacies of the past: the call for “one more chance” at massive foreign aid—$722 million to follow over $1 billion of abandoned arms down the Vietnamese rathole; to denounce “neoisolationism”; to call once more for the American “responsibility” to “spread freedom throughout the world” (the Thieu and Lon Nol statist dictatorships being prime examples of “freedom”); to howl about a forthcoming “bloodbath” (this from a government that murdered millions of innocent Vietnamese peasants, conducted the greatest bombing offensive in world history, and led over 50,000 drafted American soldiers to their deaths!) and to cook up a fraudulent “stab-in-the-back myth” to pin the blame for the Indochinese collapse not on themselves but on the antiwar movement and the Democratic Congress. And so on and on. But this time none of it worked. The American people were sick and tired of our long and losing intervention in Vietnam, and the Ford Administration could only ring the last futile changes on the old malarkey while their policy became a total shambles.
It was, in fact, the American policy of imperialism—the Truman-Eisenhower-Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon-Ford policy—that was responsible for pushing Indochina into the arms of Communism. 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; by systematically extirpating neutralist forces; by making anything American hated throughout Indo-China, the U.S. imperialists only succeeded, at the end, in polarizing Indo-China in such a way as to make a Communist triumph inevitable. The height of the absurdity was the hubris of the Pentagon in inducing the ARVN to seize Communist-held territory under cover of the Paris agreements, and then to allow General “Big” Minh to come in and replace Thieu only at the literal last moment—after the U.S. itself had ousted Minh from power a decade ago as being insufficiently hawkish against the Communists! At the end, Big Minh was only in power long enough to order a surrender.
Only in Laos did the United States permit a neutralist-coalition regime to take hold, and even there it did this so late in the day as to probably insure an ultimate failure and a slipping into Communist control. In Cambodia, 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. A return to an isolationist foreign policy is not merely the only moral as well as realistic policy for the United States; it is probably the only one that might have a chance of avoiding an eventual Communist triumph throughout the Third World. But if we don’t learn this lesson, and if we allow ourselves to fall for a stab-in-the-back myth, we will only insure the long-run triumph of Communism in the Third World, after an enormous expenditure of American lives and treasure, and after a gigantic bloodbath of innocent people in all the countries that we are supposedly trying to “save.”
Murray Rothbard is professor of economics at the Polytechnic Institute of New York. Dr. Rothbard’s viewpoint appears in this column every third month, alternating with the viewpoints of Tibor Machan and David Brudnoy.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline “Viewpoint: The Death of a State.”
Alessandro Fusillo
Andreas Tögel
David Dürr
Doug French
Fernando Chiocca
Greg Morin
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Jay Baykal
Juan Fernando Carpio
Ken Yamarashi
León Isidoro
Martin Cabrera
Oscar Grau
Peter Wong
PFS
Saifedean Ammous
Sean Gabb
Sean Ring
Stephan Kinsella
Stéphane Geyres
Thomas Jacob
Tom DiLorenzo
Follow Us!