Antiwar Propaganda: Introduction To Historical RevisionismThe following is an interview with James J. Martin as published in the January 1976 issue of Reason magazine. Introducing Revisionism: Next month's REASON will be a special issue on the subject of historical revisionism. The critical revision of "official" versions of the doings of states is an important adjunct to the overall battle for liberty. As a preview of next month's issue, and to introduce the subject to our readers, we are pleased to present an exclusive interview with one of America's leading revisionist historians, Dr. James J. Martin.
REASON: Dr. Martin, what is the relevance of revisionism (or revisionist history)? MARTIN: Revisionism could be of relevance to almost anybody who's interested in the record, who's interested in some kind of faithful reproduction of events. In other words, my interest in this is not necessarily activated by ideological considerations. It's more of a technical interest in getting the record straight. My concern in getting involved in historical matters of this sort is rather complex and is not motivated necessarily by doing good or bringing about a set of better social conditions or an improvement in the race or any long-range programs of that sort. My friend Harry Elmer Barnes was very much so motivated. But I was nowhere nearly as involved in his objectives as I was in his work. We often worked for totally different reasons at the same thing. I have no compulsions to save the world or save the human race, to guarantee the safety of the galaxy or any other enterprise of that sort. REASON: What are the main conclusions of World War II revisionism in respect to war guilt and the responsibility for the Second World War? MARTIN: Well, they're much like those of previous war and every other war that's ever been examined by revisionists. There's a tendency to disparage the notion of unique evil responsibility, in favor of the notion of divided guilt, so to speak, the involvement of all the participants, a parceling out of various factors which suggest that the thing is too complex to be interpreted in terms of a single easily defined cause. That is one of the basic things in any revisionist investigation--to unseat this notion that there is a simple, single-hypothesis operation involved. Revisionists invariably upset the established line with complications of various sorts, with all sorts of jagged facts which don't fit simple explanations. Invariably you make the Establishment, which profits from a single goal in terms of historical orthodoxy, very, very unhappy. REASON: Why has most historical revisionism, at least as far as American foreign policy is concerned, occurred years after the conflict in question has ended? MARTIN: It has to, in most cases, because it takes that long for access to the information to be productive. Invariably in cases of a conflict such as a war, the winners obviously write the first account. It sometimes takes a long while before the orthodoxy which the outcome of a war establishes can be broken down either by new facts appearing on the record or the tendency of subsequent generations to look at things from a different point of view and think about things in a different way. The largest part of revisionism can be traced simply to the passage of time. A new generation doesn't see the past in the eyes of the actual participants. They look at it from their own particular angle--and their needs and values and many other related factors are different. So they are not caught in the trap of the contemporaries and frequently can come up with a better explanation of why things were the way they were than can the contemporaries because of their blinders caused by the nature of the involvement to begin with. In some instances it may take centuries before there's a disturbance of the official position. The instance of the Italian humanist, Lorenzo Valla and the disclosure of the forgery of the Donation of Constantine is in many ways a revisionist classic. It was almost twelve centuries before this achievement took place. REASON: How do you explain, then, the extensive revisionist history that has been written concerning the Vietnam War? It appears to have come out almost contemporaneously with that conflict. MARTIN: This could be referred to as instant history. It's a product of a new journalistic approach to matters of this sort. It has been made operational because of the incredible revolution in the technology of communications. The invention of instantaneous electronic communications has made possible attention to detail and penetration of the scene to a degree that was never possible in the past. Even the attempt to promote official secrets and certain states of removing the public from access can't succeed indefinitely in blocking off the enormous number of electronic surveillance and snooping possibilities that exist in modern technology. I often wonder what Adolf Hitler would have done with television or even what Napoleon would have done with radio. It is worth considering sometimes!
REASON: How do you view the historical treatment of the Jewish genocide question during World War II MARTIN: Well, genocide as we know it is a word invented in 1943 that deals with a presumably planned extermination of whole populations and it means, as far as I can read it, that if you don't plan exterminations of a group of people it's not genocide. We've had similar circumstances in the past. I don't imagine there will ever be any revisionist history of the Philistines--the entire species seems to have been wiped out according to the Old Testament stories. The genocide idea occurs over and over and over in the Old Testament wars, where entire populations are put to the sword upon the end of hostilities. There isn't any evidence of that in modern times. It has become a political charge which may or may not have validity, but the idea in Raphael Lemkin's definition of the word in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1943 emphasizes the planned nature of the extermination. One can argue that if an extermination occurred which wasn't planned then it can't be called genocide. So it's an extremely complex matter and very touchy and very emotional for most people involved. It's an easy charge to make today for almost any political reason involving the behavior of a group which is being limited or constrained by anybody anywhere. There are some ridiculous charges involving this word to the point where it's almost lost its meaning. REASON: Dr. Martin, do you believe (1) that the specific charge against the Nazis of having a mass extermination program of several million Jews is true and (2) that the Allied atrocities were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your study of the question? MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their lives in the War--we've seen a wide variety of statistical materials, some of which have been pulled out of thin air. As a consequence, it's hard to make any kind of estimate of this sort, whether ten more were killed on the one side or the other is not a particularly entrancing subject as far as I'm concerned. Whether allegations can be proven it remains to be seen. I don't believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up. I have been influenced over the years by the works of Paul Rassinier, and he still has to be reckoned with. His works have been ignored for a long time, and sooner or later somebody's going to have to do a decent job of coping with what he has presented. I think Rassinier's general case is sound at the moment and I haven't seen any strong evidence to upset his allegations or his assertions that there was no planned program for the extermination of European Jews. His other main case is that there were no gas chamber extermination programs. The fact that a great many people lost their lives is incontrovertible--that the German concentration camps weren't health centers is well known--but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than the Russian ones. There are many other distinctions that can be made in an evaluation of concentration camp literature and all the long related barrage of atrocity literature.
REASON: For a number of years Rassinier's works haven't been available in English. Are a lot of people afraid to see them come to light? MARTIN: I don't know who would suffer the most from exposure to Rassinier's objections to the standard line on the concentration camp literature; after all, he was in one or two of them for several months, long enough to get a good idea what it was like. Of course, there is a subordinate aspect of Rassinier's investigations: his charge that at least the German concentration camps were largely run from the inside by the German Communist Party, whose members were the first occupants of these camps and who managed to establish a cadre and control all the significant jobs in the crucial aspects of these camps. The work assignments, food, hospital care--almost every significant aspect in these areas were run by members of the KPD. And Rassinier was not the first person to point that out. One of our own official Army historians, Donald B. Robinson, revealed this as a long ago as 1946 with respect to at least two camps which the American Army took over at the end of the war. Who's likely to lose his job or his status for tackling this is another matter altogether. Probably it would be wise for members of the official, conventional, orthodox area to stay away from it. Barnes used to say that the ideal persons to tackle exposures of the excesses of the concentration camp literature producers would have to be either unemployed, retired, or terminally ill. REASON: Many libertarians believe that centralized, socialistic regimes, or more statist regimes such as Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, invariably induce and cause aggressive wars and that it is the duty of so-called free governments to intervene in order to stop these aggressions, and that revisionism as such is nothing more than whitewashing of totalitarianism. What are your thoughts on this? MARTIN: Well, the first thing is that I don't bother using the word aggression. I try to avoid it because I can't define it and if some wish to use this word the obligation is on them to tell us precisely what they mean by it. Committee of the League of Nations met for over 20 years trying to get to an agreement on the word aggression and never did and the committee of the United Nations has been doing the same thing for 30 years, and I don't believe they have come up with a satisfactory definition that will be acceptable to all the member states. So essentially you're left with a political dirty word which is applied to someone who is trying to change something. I'm not referring to a combat on a street where a hoodlum knocks you over the head and steals your purse. That's something far different from the language of statecraft, in which aggression almost always is charged against those who've found that the state of affairs that prevails is unsatisfactory, and lacking any other machinery for bringing about change, initiate some kind of action.
REASON: What do you think of the current school of so-called Cold War revisionism? Such as William Appleman Williams, Kolko, Bernstein and so forth? MARTIN: Well, I've never been completely carried away by it. There is a story there which probably has already been told in too great a degree on the basis of a small amount of evidence that can be located, mainly as a consequence of the stalemate that followed the conclusion of the last big war. What they are doing is trying to construct a story involving
REASON: To play the devil's advocate, considering the fact that the Soviet Union has been invaded at least twice in history, and that Nazi Germany did use the East European satellites as supply bases against the Soviet Union, wouldn't the Soviet Union feel justified in taking over these areas as a security buffer? MARTIN: You're dealing with an immediate set of situations which may or may not be valid depending on how you want to look at it. If you stand back far enough, of course, you'll observe that the Germans and Russians have been battling over who's going to control Central and Eastern Europe for centuries. Periodically they get together and divide what's between them and things go along quite well for quite a while. From the end of the 18th century to 1914 the Russians and Germans got along quite well. I don't know how that kind of situation is going to be solved. The Russians are there and the Germans are there and that's it. They've got to put up with each other and it's a long-range problem which will stretch out as long as either of the two remain ethnic entities so to speak.
REASON: What is your view of history as a field of study? MARTIN: Well, essentially a history is a narrative--it's an attempt to get a grasp of the past and narrative is the fundamental of it. I don't believe that those who search for universal laws in history help you understand a great deal, although the attempt to blend in with it al whole bunch of scientific pretensions is still another aspect. To that extent I believe that most historians are going off in a totally different direction and probably are involved in some area of speculative philosophy more than they are with dealing with facts. I'm always sort of entranced with individuals who are searching for model patterns of behavior or laws of behavior or universals of some kind or another which presumably apply to the entire species. It's a kind of adventure that I've never had much taste for. It may in some ways reflect my rather proletarian attitude towards enterprise of that sort. There may be some validity to it. It may be simply a preoccupation of the academic community. REASON: On another subject, Dr. Martin, among libertarians there's a lot of debate on the subject of natural rights. There are people who believe in them and there are people who say that a natural right is like a natural airplane. Since you've done some study on it when you did your work on Benjamin Tucker and Lysander Spooner would you give us your comments on the idea of natural rights? MARTIN:Well, of course, Spooner believed there were such things and Tucker didn't. What I did with these people was not necessarily to find some kind of synthesis which indicated that they're all one happy little group--in fact they're a bunch of jagged, diverse people who rarely saw eye to eye with each other on anything. And I didn't come to any immediate conclusions on the subject myself from studying these men except to notice that each of them had a totally different background and different tradition. Spooner was an 18th century man and Tucker was a 19th century man. And they argued from different positions because they were born at different times and listened to arguments which enhanced the position they took. Spooner, born in the aftermath of the American Revolution, and in the generation of the founding of the United States, of course was in an intellectual environment which was immersed with talk about natural rights. Anyone familiar with the rhetoric of the American Revolution can't escape that, which in turn indicates dependence on an even
Tucker was a product of a far later time--two generations removed, really, in terms of biology--who was acquainted with a totally different attitude toward things and grew up mainly with European ideas, many of which looked on the ideas of natural rights as a sort of comforting fiction. A religious idea, really. Since it has no anatomical locus (nobody knows where your natural rights are like they know, for instance, where your pancreas is), it involves an ability to deal with intangible things of this sort. They amount to matters that really have no dimensions and I call them religious ideas--there's no challenging them. Someone who supports a religious idea involving the Trinity or Transsubstantiation or a number of other religious doctrines is irrefutable, there's no way of proving these things and there's no way of disproving them. If someone wishes to maintain that he has these intangible things called rights, well, what is one to say about it? You can't disprove it--but again there's no way of proving them either. My own approach is more Tuckerian than Spoonerian--I've been much more influenced by Tucker than Spooner on that point. Of course Tucker got very angry periodically in hearing these endless word games; they hair-splitting, philosophical vine-climbing discourses on natural rights. And one day he just blew up in print and said: nobody has any rights, or what is the same thing, everybody has all rights and then ended getting involved in the argument. He stopped wrangling over the question of what these things were. One can do a good job in demonstrating that what people call rights are social conventions which tend to be recognized as conveniences which make life more tolerable. Everybody looks around at each other and says, OK, you've got a right to stay alive and I've got a right to stay alive because we're going to mutually abstain from murdering each other. REASON: You have also talked about the Columbus complex of many libertarians. Would you care to elaborate on this? MARTIN: I don't believe it's a weakness of just libertarians--it's a weakness of people in general who tend to be overly conscious of their own time and themselves, which is a natural propensity. People like
REASON: In some quarters the opinion is often expressed that only two viable alternatives exist to oppose the creeping centralization that we find today. One of those alternatives is to man the barricades and to conduct active revolutionary activity against the established order. The other is to join in this political process either through the Libertarian Party or through some other organized political activities. What is your view as to these two alternatives, and your view as to whether the alternatives should be limited to just two? MARTIN: Well, there's never just two ways to do anything. There are as many ways as there are people and I would not necessarily become involved in either of the two you mention--I'm for what I call the unassociated, anonymous individual going the way which he prefers by himself. He doesn't have to join
REASON: Would you regard "active violation of the law" to be a viable alternative in opposing the state? MARTIN: It can be. It depends on the price you pay for it. And how it's done. Obviously a great many laws are violated all the time by people who don't publicize their behavior. I wouldn't necessarily go out on the street corner and bare my breast to the muskets of any established order just to demonstrate that I'm willing to defy their edicts. I'm for minimum compliance with anything that's been established as the correct behavior and I'm willing to let it go that far. We see thousand of violations of traffic laws and other minor legislation. The people involved probably aren't conscious of it or think about it as a program they have worked out in advance, but that happens to be what is going on. As far as publicizing such behavior, there again I run into a barrier on grounds of unworkability. I don't believe in preparing a manual so that someone can pursue me--what I call gratuitous self-exposure. Most of these things involve such private matters that I don't believe there's any profit in investigating them, at least with people who are circumspect to recognize this and believe that their behavior is their own business. REASON: What first sparked your interest in individualist anarchism? Was it a person or a book? MARTIN: Well, it's hard to pinpoint any particular catastrophic event that started it. I probably recognized my sympathy with ideas of that sort because it's simply a part of me, the way I've always been. I suppose I've been an unorganizable, stubborn and isolated crank all my life, and discovering there's a literary tradition behind it is of course a great event. But I can't think of anything specific other than a long period of exposure to these people, one by one. REASON: One more question. Your ideas on the libertarian temperament are somewhat unorthodox among libertarians. Would you care to state what they are? MARTIN: Well, I don't think they're original with me. But my attitude that seems to disturb the majority of people is my insistence on the biological and genetic basis for the substance of philosophic and ethical views and that's not something I invented, it was something I was exposed to years ago in the writings of the woman radical named Voltairine de Cleyre. She wrote to this effect around the turn of the century--a very much neglected and overlooked lady revolutionist and thinker of great importance in this country. I'm amazed that nobody's discovered her recently. Voltairine de Cleyre advanced the notion that at bottom, if you kept going down to the bottom, in an attempt to search out the reason for the existence of this or that individual attitude toward ethical, philosophical, and related questions, you got back down to a biological basis--what she called temperament--which was not capable of being understood or measured by any kind of rational approach; and that it was a genetic factor.
Now it would be pleasant for me to adopt a contradictory position and believe that by the expenditure of a lot of money and a great deal of exposure to literature and much eloquent talk we would suddenly convert all the totalitarians and authoritarians of the world into libertarians. And I would suggest that before that happens, as Krushchev said, you will probably hear shrimps whistle. The process of conversion is futile. Therefore, I'm satisfied that the ranks of the libertarians will always be small, that they will probably be in about the same ratio to the total population as they are now, and I'm satisfied to contemplate that situation without developing suicidal tendencies or becoming morose, depressed or anything else. It happens to be a fact of life and I'm ready to put up with that and I will change that view when I have some evidence for it. In my own lifetime I haven't seen one scrap of evidence to the contrary. REASON: Thank you very much, Dr. Martin. ✳ ✳ ✳ |