Wars, conquest, mass killings, occupation, and plunder have plagued the world for all of recorded history. Primitive tribes fighting over waterholes and hunting grounds. Kings and princes claiming divine right to rule over all those they conquer and impose their violent will upon. Nation-states asserting rights and claims to lands and peoples based on racial, ethnic, linguistic, or cultural assertions of historical or mythical roots over various geographical areas. This is the history of mankind.
Over most of human history, periods of peace have been brief respites between renewed warfare between those possessing political power and the military capacities to initiate and fight them. Wars, conquests, death, and destruction have affected every part of the globe. Economist and historian Thomas Sowell explained in Conquests and Cultures (1999):
At one period of history or another, conquest has encompassed virtually all peoples, either as conquerors or as victims, and the consequences have been far-ranging as well…. Some conquests have been followed by systematic exterminations of the vanquished, as in Rome’s conquest of Carthage. Nor have such draconian policies been limited to major conquerors of historic dimension. The massacres of the Tutsi by the Hutu, and vice versa, in late twentieth century Africa and “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkan wars of the same era clearly show that it does not take a great power to create great human tragedies….
Spontaneous atrocities and deliberate systematic terror have long marked the path of the conqueror. The Mongol hordes who swept across vast reaches of Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East cultivated an image of ruthless barbarities, as calculated strategy to demoralize future victims…. Emperor Basil II of the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century ordered the blinding of 99 of every 100 Bulgarian captives, leaving each 100th man with only one eye to lead the others back home, so to provide graphic evidence of the emperor’s treatment of his enemies….
Twentieth-century conquests have been equally hideous. The Japanese conquest of the Chinese capital of Nanking in 1937 was followed by an orgy of rapes of thousands of women living there, the use of Chinese soldiers and civilians for bayonet practice, and a general wanton slaughter of civilians…. Their allies, the Nazis in Germany, set new lows for brutality and dehumanization, of which the Holocaust against the Jews was only the worst example.
Successes and failures in trying to restrain war
Mankind’s escape from war and violent conflict has been a difficult, discontinuous, and disheartening process. Over the ages, there have been attempts to reduce the frequency or the effects of war. For example, in the eleventh century, the ruin and destruction in parts of France were so severe due to wars between members of the nobility and their paid armies that a group of Catholic bishops declared the Truce of God in 1041, which attempted to forbid armed conflicts from Thursday to Monday. While it remained in force, it raised the cost of conflict, since the nobility had to pay a week of wages to soldiers who could only fight on their behalf two days out of the week.
In the fifteenth century, it became more common for kings and princes to employ professional soldiers, the advantage of which was that their costs of hire only lasted as long as the particular campaigns for which they were being paid. The incentives of both officers and ordinary soldiers hired was to minimize the likelihood of death or injury. As the British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) argued, “It became left to the conduct of men who neither loved whom they defended nor hated those whom they opposed. Every man came into the field impressed with the knowledge that, in a few days, he might be taking the pay of the power against which he was them employed.” Thus, wars became games of maneuver: advances and retreats, with almost bloodless victories and capitulations, in which the generals of opposing sides sometimes dined together before the next day’s combat. The residents of towns and villages would watch from surrounding hills the war games in the fields below them.
However, for a variety of reasons, greater savagery returned to war in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with such “rules of war” set aside. Towns were destroyed to the ground, populations were exterminated, and starvation was frequent in combat and surrounding areas. This was especially the case during the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which combined monarchical political ambitions with the religious fanaticism of the conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
But with the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the idea of rules of war once again returned. As F. J. P. Veale explained in Advance to Barbarism (1948), it was increasingly frowned upon to act without reason and forethought based on emotion and thoughtlessness. Irrational destruction or thoughtless taking of life seemed inconsistent with the modern “enlightened” understanding of the time. One of the reasons the British officers often so despised the American revolutionaries was that rather than come out in military formation and face their British counterparts like honorable men by the rules of set battles, the colonists would retreat into the forests and shoot the marching British Redcoats from hidden positions. For the British, the Americans were cowards who fought like savages.
The French Revolution and total war
The return to increased brutality and the new notion of “total war” emerged out of the French Revolution. Under the monarchies of Europe, wars were the personal affairs of kings and princes; anyone fighting out of either loyalty or for pay was doing so in the service of one man — he who wore the crown and claimed ownership and personal possession of all lands, livestock, and subjects under his royal authority. This changed with the French Revolution of July 1789 and then with the beheading of Lous XVI, the king of France, in January 1793. When a messenger arrived at the eastern frontier of France to inform the French military forces facing the armies of European monarchs opposing the Revolution that the king was dead, an officer asked, “Then who are we fighting for?” The reply was, “You are fighting for the nation, for the people.”
When the collective nation replaced the single figure of the king, every citizen was seen as obligated to serve and sacrifice for “the common interest of the people as a whole.” It was reflected in the imposition of universal conscription of all the people of France in defense of the Revolution. Said the French revolutionary, Bertrand Barère (1755–1841), in 1794:
Some owe [France] their industry, others their fortune, some their advice, others their arms, all owe her their blood…. The young men will fight; the married men will forge arms, transport baggage and artillery, and provide subsistence; the women will work at the soldiers’ clothing, making tents, and become nurses in the hospitals for the wounded; the children will make lint out of linen; and the old men, again performing the mission they had among the ancients, will be carried to the public squares, there to enflame the courage of the young warriors and propagate the hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.
Barère added that such forced coercion of all for the national interest included the nationalization of the children of the country: “The principles that ought to guide parents are that children belong to the general family, to the Republic, before they belong to particular families. The spirit of private families must disappear when the great family calls. You are born for the Republic and not for the pride or despotism of families.”
Europe endured 25 years of war from 1792 to 1815, until the final defeat of Napoleon. It represented what was, in fact, the real First World War, given its reach and destruction. British historian Robert Mackenzie (1823–1881) explained in The 19th Century: A History (1882):
At the opening of the Nineteenth Century all Europe was occupied with war. The European people … were withdrawn from the occupations of peace, and maintained at enormous cost, expressly to harm their fellow men. The interests of people withered in the storm; the energies of all nations, the fruits of all industries were poured forth in the effort to destroy. From the utmost North to the shores of the Mediterranean, from the confines of Asia to the Atlantic, men toiled to burn each other’s cities, to waste each other’s fields, to destroy each other’s lives. In some lands there was heard the shout of victory, in some the wail of defeat. In all the lands the ruinous waste of war had produced bitter poverty; grief and fear were in every home…. [The war was] so prolonged that before the close men were fighting in the quarrel who had been unborn when it broke out.
Classical liberalism and individual rights and freedom
With the end to this First World War of 1792 to 1815, new ideas gained hold of people’s minds, ideas that had been germinating beneath the surface of war and destruction. These ideas were those of what we now call classical liberalism and economic liberty. New ideals and appeals for reform and change emerged. First among them, originating in both the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the original spirit of the French Revolution in its Declaration of Rights of 1789, was the idea of the natural rights of each and every individual to their life, liberty, and honestly acquired property. Government was to protect and not violate or oppress the rights of the individual under systems of limiting constitutions and unbiased and impartial rule of law.
Resulting from this founding philosophical and political principle came the call for the end to human slavery. All human beings were equal in their universal rights as individuals, regardless of where or who they were. Slavery was the most blatant instance of a violation of the rights and the dignity of the individual human being. Complementary to this was an end to any other inequalities before the law in the form of legal discrimination or bias against anyone due to his religion or ethnicity. One instance of this was the liberation over several decades of European Jews who had long suffered under legal restrictions and economic interventions that prevented Jews from open and impartial participation in social life. All individuals, in other words, should be recognized and protected in their civil liberties of freedom speech and religion and peaceful association, including giving testimony in courts of law even if they were not Christians giving oath on the Bible.
Fundamental to these campaigns for liberty was the case made by classical liberals and the classical economists for freedom of enterprise, commerce, and trade. It was exemplified in Adam Smith’s call for a “system of natural liberty” under which everyone would have the personal freedom to enter into any trade or occupation and peacefully compete for consumer business by offering new, better, and less expense goods and services in free
exchange with their neighbors across the street or around the world. The primary role of government, through domestic police, courts of law, and national defense, was to secure every citizen in their individual rights from the violence and fraud of others.
Restraining conflict and Francis Lieber’s rules of war
One other nineteenth-century classical-liberal campaign was for the end to wars and, when they did occur, to limit their destruction and harm to noncombatants. For instance, British economist James Mill (1773–1836), the father of John Stuart Mill, vehemently argued in his Commerce Defended (1808):
To what baneful quarter, then, are we to look for the cause of the stagnation and misery which appear so general in human affairs? War! is the answer. There is no other cause. This is the pestilential wind which blasts the prosperity of nations. This is the devouring fiend which eats up the precious treasure of national economy, the foundation of national improvement, and national happiness…. In every country, therefore, where industry is free, and where men are secure in the enjoyment of what they acquire, the greatest improvement which the government can possibly receive is a steady and enlightened aversion to war.
One especially notable contribution to this campaign against the cruelty of war was made by the German-American Francis Lieber (1798–1872). Born in Berlin and barely 17, he fought in the Prussian Army against Napoleon in the Battle of Waterloo and was severely wounded on the field of battle. Immigrating to Boston in 1827, he became the first editor of the Encyclopedia Americana in 1829. He taught at the University of South Carolina in Columbia from 1836 to 1856, during which time he wrote several important works on individual liberty and civil government, in particular Manuel of Political Ethics (1838) and Civil Liberty and Self-Government (1853). He taught at Columbia University in New York City from 1856 to 1865, with the title of the first professor of political science in the United States. (See my article “Francis Lieber’s America and the Politics of Today,” Future of Freedom, November 2020.)
During the American Civil War, Lieber was asked by the Lincoln administration to prepare the first modern guidebook for the rules of war, Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (1863). War was a cruel and harsh business in which death and destruction was inescapable for the combating armies and for civilians in the arenas of conflict. But Lieber insisted that in modern civilization, even wars needed to be tamed by rules toward the enemy and civilians caught in the crossfires. Said Lieber:
Military necessity does not admit of cruelty, that is, the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight, nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of poison in any way, nor the wanton devastation of a district … and in general, military necessity does not include any act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult….
Commanders, whenever admissible, inform the enemy of their intention to bombard a place, so the non-combatants, especially the women and children, may be removed before the bombardment commences….
Public war is a state of armed hostility between sovereign nations or governments…. Nevertheless, as civilization has advanced during the last centuries, so has likewise steadily advanced, especially in war on land, the distinction between the private individual belonging to a hostile country and the hostile country itself, with its men in arms. The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will permit. Private citizens are no longer murdered, enslaved, or carried off to distant parts, and the inoffensive individual is as little disturbed in his private relations as the commander of the hostile troops can afford to grant in the overruling demands of a vigorous war….
In modern regular wars of the Europeans and their descendants in other portions of the globe, protection of the inoffensive citizen of the hostile country is the rule; privation and disturbance of private relations is the exception…. The law of war imposes many limitations and restrictions on principles of justice, faith, and honor….
Humane treatment even in the midst of war
In his Instructions for the rules of war, Lieber went on to state the ethics and rightfulness of respect for and nonviolation of schools, hospitals, churches, museums, universities, and other institutions of scientific pursuit. He also argued that if a free state was at war with a slave state, then the capture of any slaves should bring about their immediate entitlement “to the rights and privileges of a freeman.” In addition, “all destruction of property not commanded by an authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offence.”
After defining the meaning of a belligerent nation and its armed and uniformed military forces in terms of lawful combat and use of force in battle, Lieber also defined the rights of prisoners of war to be protected from cruelty, physical harm, torture, or theft of personal property of most sorts. They are to be fed and clothed and housed in a manner consistent with the circumstances but are not to be deprived of such as an act of revenge or cruelty.
Lieber also designated the meaning and the treatment for escapees, spies, abuses of flags of truce, and a wide variety of other circumstances and actions related to the conditions of war. This included not viewing as belligerent agents all medical doctors, pharmacists, nurses, and those doing charitable work in the fields of combat as long as they were not clearly serving the war ends of the opposing army in their conduct. What stands out is the attempt, guided by the liberal ideas and ideal of the individual separate from the state, and therefore the distinction between soldier and civilian, to minimize the hardships and tragedies of combat, given the inevitabilities of death and destruction once governments go to war with each other.
Underlying Lieber’s rules of war was, again, the liberal idea that the normal and desired condition of man is peace and mutually beneficial intercourse among those who for a time were at war with each other. As he expressed it, “Peace is [the] normal condition; war is the exception. The ultimate object of all modern war is the renewed state of peace.” Hence, the rules of war are seen as having two objectives: to diminish as much as possible the destructiveness and inhumanity of violent conflict and to limit the bitterness and anger in the wake of wars so men may return to the normal state of peaceful association and the mutual benefits of production and trade.
It is not surprising that Lieber was also the author of Essays on Property and Labor (1847) and Notes on the Fallacies of American Protectionism (1870), or that he wrote an introduction for an American translation of Frederic Bastiat’s Sophisms of the Protective Policy (1848). A liberal campaign for humanity even in war was a complement to a case for private enterprise, free competition, freedom of trade, and respect for honestly acquired and applied property and the liberty of human labor.
Francis Lieber’s Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field became the inspiration for and the outlines of what later in the nineteenth century became the Hague Conventions on the rules of war, the treatment of prisoners, and the respect for the rights and property of non-combatants, along with restrictions on the means and methods of war on the battlefield. This included his argument for international arbitration of governmental disputes in place of war: “International arbitration, freely resorted to by powerful governments, conscious of their complete independence and self-sustaining sovereignty, is one of the foremost characteristics of advancing civilization — of the substitution of reason, fairness, and submission to justice, for defying power or revengeful irritation,” said Lieber.
The failure of the liberal campaign to end war
The classical-liberal campaign for peace through the ending and mitigating of the effects of war were, unfortunately, not fulfilled in the second half of the nineteenth century. Wars in Europe still occurred, though, admittedly, they were usually short in duration and minimally destructive. What was a dangerous harbinger of things to come were the growing armaments races among the “great powers” of Europe, with every new technological innovation requiring new military expenditures on more and improved instruments of death and destruction. Classical liberals in the latter part of the nineteenth century lamented the costs and warlike spirit behind the expansion of the tools of war. They also criticized their use in the rush for imperialist conquests, especially in Africa.
Tragically, the twentieth century saw the end of the classical-liberal dream and hope of a peaceful world. The First World War (1914–1918) cost the lives of at least 20 million combatants and civilians and the use of poison gases on the Western front by both sides in the conflict. The illiberal ideologies of the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s resulted in totalitarian systems of planning, the drive for national self-sufficiency through protectionism, and the belief that national prosperity was winnable through war. This culminated, of course, in the Second World War (1939–1945), with an estimated loss of 50 million lives around the globe.
If the horrors of war were not already enough, the American dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 demonstrated the potential of destroying entire national populations in a matter of minutes, with those not immediately killed facing the agonies of radiation poisoning. The world almost crossed this threshold during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, which, fortunately, the United States and the Soviet Union stepped back from.
Now in the twenty-first century, the breakdown of the liberal ideas and partial practices of the rules of war continues. In the new era of drone wars, killing becomes a reality video game, whether practiced by the United States in various corners of the world under the name of “unfortunate collateral damage,” in defense of the American empire, or in the targeting of civilian homes, schools, hospitals and infrastructure to undermine and weaken whole populations, as used by Russia in its war against Ukraine. The humane treatment of prisoners of war and noncombatants disappeared in the blackhole of America’s Guantanamo detention camps during the Afghan war and in the humiliation and torture of captured soldiers inside the prison walls of Abu Ghraib in Iraq. (See my article, “The Dangerous Pursuit of Empire: Russia, China, and the United States,” Future of Freedom, July 2023.)
The liberal ideal of a free and peaceful world without war
Peace, prosperity, and freedom can only be maintained and restored with a return to those ideas and ideals of nineteenth-century classical liberalism — ideas and ideals of individual rights and liberty, respect for private property, and unhampered voluntary and peaceful association of people within countries and across borders around the world. As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973) explained 70 years ago in Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War (1944):
Within a world of free trade and [limited] democracy there are no incentives for war and conquest. In such a world it is of no concern whether a nation’s sovereignty stretches over a larger or a smaller territory. Its citizens cannot derive any advantage from the annexation of a province….
In this liberal world, or liberal part of the world, there is private property in the means of production. The working of the market is not hampered by government interference. There are no trade barriers; men can live and work where they want. Frontiers are drawn on the maps, but they do not hinder the migration of men and the shipping of commodities. Natives do not have rights that are denied to aliens. Governments and their servants restrict their activities to the protection of life, health, and property against fraudulent or violent aggression. They do not discriminate against foreigners. The courts are independent and effectively protect everybody against the encroachments of officialdom. Everyone is permitted to say, to write, and to print what he likes. Education is not subject to government interference. Governments are like night-watchmen who the citizens have entrusted with the task of handling the police power….
In such a world it makes no difference where the frontiers of a country are drawn. Nobody has a material interest in enlarging the territory of the state in which he lives; nobody suffers loss if a part of this area is separated from the state. It is also immaterial whether all parts of the state’s territory are in direct geographical connection, or whether they are separated by a piece of land belonging to another state. It is of no economic consequence whether the country has a frontage on the ocean or not. It such a world the people of every village or district could decide by plebiscite to which they wanted to belong. There would be no more wars because there would be no incentive for aggression. War would not pay. Armies and navies would be superfluous. Policemen would suffice for the fight against crime. In such a world the state is not a metaphysical entity but simply the producer of security and peace…. The citizen’s sleep is not disturbed, bombs do not destroy his home, and if somebody knocks at his door late at night it is certainly neither the Gestapo nor the [KGB].
This is the world that all friends of freedom, peace, and prosperity should view as their ideal and their goal, toward which all their efforts should be ultimately directed.
This article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of Future of Freedom.