The Devil Theory of War Charles A. Beard 1936 Part 1 In 1936 Charles A. Beard published a short, hard book with a long title: The Devil Theory of War: An Inquiry into the Nature of History and the Possibility of Keeping Out of War. It ran only about 124 pages. It grew out of articles he had written for The New Republic. It was issued by the Vanguard Press in New York. It is not a military history of the First World War, and it is not a sermon about peace. It is an attack on a way of explaining catastrophe, and an attempt to teach Americans how they had walked, step by step, from a proclamation of neutrality in 1914 to a declaration of war in 1917. To read it for the first time, you have to know the moment in which it was written. The Great War had ended less than twenty years earlier. Millions were dead. Americans had been told that their entry would make the world safe for democracy. By 1936 that promise looked hollow. Europe was arming again. Japan was already at war in Asia. In Washington, the Senate’s Special Committee to Investigate the Munitions Industry, chaired by Gerald Nye, had been hauling bankers, arms makers, and officials into the open and putting loans, contracts, and correspondence on the record. Beard took that record as a chance for Americans to look at themselves. The subtitle says what he wanted the looking to be for: not guilt as a dead end, but an inquiry into whether a republic can learn enough about its own road into war to stay off the next one. Beard was not a lifelong pacifist delivering a sermon from outside the events. In 1917 he had wanted the United States in the war. He had called imperial Germany a danger to civilization. He later said he had never belonged to Woodrow Wilson’s “sweet neutrality” camp, and that he had been among those urging a declaration of war. The 1936 book is the work of a man who had accepted the moral story, lived through the result, and then turned on the story. That matters. He is not asking the reader to pretend the war had no aggressors. He is asking the reader to stop using aggressors as a way of never examining American choices. The book is, in that sense, a confession of method. A historian who once believed the moral drama is trying to show what that drama concealed. The devil theory is the explanation he wants destroyed. In ordinary language it is this: wars happen because wicked men make them. Find the evil ruler, the wicked nation, the monster who wanted the killing, and the mystery is solved. Everyone else was peace loving and minding his own business until the devil arrived. Beard’s version of the formula, as reviewers of the book recorded it, was blunt. People tell themselves that wicked men make war, political or economic men or both, and that if those wicked men could be stopped, the great body of peace loving citizens could go on with their peaceful pursuits. He calls that a theory of war. He treats it as mythology wearing the clothes of history. Under the mythology is a philosophy of evil that Beard thinks is too small for the thing it claims to explain. It assumes that catastrophe must be the work of a will. Someone wanted this. Someone chose the abyss on purpose. The scale of the disaster is then matched to the scale of the malice. A world war requires a world sized devil, because ordinary motives feel too modest to have produced so many dead. Beard’s objection is philosophical before it is political. Enormous effects do not require enormous intentions. They can be built from small, locally reasonable decisions whose joint result nobody had to desire. The will that matters may not be a will to war at all. It may be a will to profit, a will to be paid, a will not to look weak, a will to defend a right already claimed. War can be the place those wills arrive when they have been allowed to reinforce one another. archive.org/details/devilthe…

Part 5 There is a further hardness in the argument, and a first-time reader should not miss it. Beard does not think good intentions are a solvent. A banker need not want soldiers to die. A president need not want a war. A citizen need not want anything but work, payment, and safety for ships that carry his goods. Intention explains the step. It does not explain the road. Moral philosophy that stops at intention will always acquit the builders, because each builder can show a clean motive for his own brick. Beard’s standard is closer to consequence seen in time. What did this permissible act make more likely? What did it make costlier to undo? What right did it create that a later crisis could turn into a casus belli? Peace, on this account, is not a virtue possessed by people who dislike killing. It is a structure that keeps disliked killing from becoming the logical defense of interests already acquired. The date makes the lesson urgent. He is standing between two world wars. Before you are asked to do this again, he is saying, understand what happened the first time. Do not wait until finance is already entangled, until commerce has become commitment, until governments have taken positions from which retreat looks like humiliation, until the papers are full of atrocities, until Americans are dead, until the country has been split into patriots and traitors. By then the range of imaginable choices may already have collapsed. The time to stay out is before the road is built. This is a claim about political time. Freedom is widest at the beginning of a sequence, when the interests are still small and the language of honor has not yet been spent. It narrows as each defense of the last step makes the next step feel obligatory. A people that waits for the moral crisis in order to decide has usually decided already, and called the earlier decisions something else. That is also why he will not let neutrality remain a word. A proclamation does not survive the pressures a war generates unless the policy is built to survive them. People want peace, and they also want trade, profit, repayment, freedom of the seas, protected citizens, defended honor, and their own reading of international law respected. Beard forces the possibility that a nation may have to choose between remaining neutral and defending every interest it piled up while calling itself neutral. That choice is harder than condemning a devil, which is why he thinks Americans evade it. Moral explanations let everything done before the war disappear. The war becomes an invasion of innocence by evil. The philosophical cost of that disappearance is that the country cannot learn. Learning requires a subject that was present in the causes. A pure victim has nothing to reform except its vigilance against monsters. He does not end in despair. The inquiry in the subtitle is practical. Reviewers noted the direction he pointed: America tending its own garden, and neutrality rules strong enough to drag foreign loans into the open, before Congress, instead of letting them accumulate in private until they had become a public emergency. Whether such rules would hold in a crisis was not something he could prove. He treated them as education as much as machinery. The point of the education is consequence seen early. Economic interest becomes political interest. Political interest becomes strategy. Strategy becomes national honor. Honor becomes an order to kill. The change can be gradual enough that every step looks reasonable. That is why it is dangerous. There may be no day on which someone announces that the road has begun. The road is easy to see only afterward. Beard wants it recognized before. Knowledge, for him, is not a mood of disillusion. It is the only instrument a republic has that can interrupt a sequence while interruption is still cheap.

The Struggle Against the Historical Blackout Harry Elmer Barnes 1947 Part 1 Harry Elmer Barnes is not merely arguing that the history of the Second World War was written incorrectly. His accusation is far more serious. He argues that the normal process by which history is supposed to correct itself had been obstructed that after the greatest war mankind had yet experienced, Americans were being permitted to debate almost everything except the question that should have come first: How did this catastrophe actually begin, what did the governments involved actually intend, and does the documentary record support the story the public had been given while the war was being fought? Barnes calls the attempt to answer those questions Revisionism. The word is indispensable to understanding him because he uses it in its traditional historical meaning: the revision of historical conclusions when additional documents, diplomatic correspondence, private papers, diaries, government records and other evidence become available. History, in Barnes’s conception, cannot be frozen at the moment a war ends. The first history of a war is inevitably written while hatred is hottest, propaganda is still functioning, governments are defending their conduct and populations are grieving their dead. That is precisely the moment, he argues, when historical judgment is least capable of being final. For Barnes, the extraordinary danger begins when that temporary wartime account ceases to be regarded as temporary. A government fighting for its survival does not present its population with a detached seminar on the diplomatic mistakes of all belligerents. It tells its citizens why they are fighting. It identifies an enemy. It describes that enemy as responsible for the catastrophe. It presents its own cause as necessary. Barnes does not regard the existence of wartime propaganda as surprising. What horrifies him is the possibility that propaganda can survive the war, shed its appearance as propaganda, acquire scholarly footnotes and eventually be taught as history. He believed he had already watched this happen once. After the First World War, responsibility for the catastrophe of 1914 had initially been presented in stark moral terms. But as diplomatic archives opened during the following decades, historians reconstructed an increasingly complicated chain of alliances, mobilizations, diplomatic decisions, miscalculations and rival ambitions. Barnes had been deeply involved in that earlier revisionist movement. To him, its lesson was obvious: the history believed during a war and the history reconstructed afterward from documents can be radically different things. Then came the Second World War. And Barnes believed something had changed. The same process of ruthless documentary reconsideration that had followed the First World War was, in his view, encountering extraordinary resistance after the Second. He saw scholars who questioned the established explanation attacked, publishers becoming unwilling to handle their work, important books struggling for attention, documentary access becoming unequal and historians enjoying privileged access to government records while other scholars remained outside. This is what Barnes means by the historical blackout. heritage-history.com/site/hc…

Part 5 Barnes regards this as catastrophic for historical integrity because scholarship depends upon precisely the opposite incentive. Historians must receive professional rewards for discovering inconvenient evidence, not for protecting convenient conclusions. His argument eventually reaches beyond universities and publishing into something almost psychological. Barnes invokes the nightmare represented by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: a society in which control over the past becomes a means of controlling political understanding in the present. Barnes is not claiming that America had literally become Orwell’s Oceania. He uses Orwell because Orwell dramatized the principle Barnes fears—the political power created when institutions acquire the ability to determine what society remembers. If yesterday can continually be rewritten to justify today, citizens lose the historical reference points by which they might judge their government. The implication is enormous. A people who do not know how the last war began can be led toward the next war using the same arguments. This is why Barnes connects revisionism with peace. For him, determining responsibility for past wars is not antiquarian scholarship. It is preventive medicine for civilization. If populations are repeatedly taught that wars arise because uniquely evil foreign leaders suddenly attack innocent democracies, they will never learn to recognize the diplomatic failures, alliances, economic pressures, arms races, secret commitments, propaganda campaigns and political calculations that can actually carry nations toward catastrophe. The mythology of the previous war therefore becomes, in Barnes’s argument, potentially the propaganda of the next. And this is where his title becomes much darker. The “blackout” does not merely conceal yesterday. It can determine tomorrow. If citizens are denied an honest understanding of how governments maneuvered them into previous conflicts, Barnes believes they remain vulnerable to being maneuvered again. If every attempt to reconsider a war is branded disloyal, governments acquire an extraordinary protection against historical accountability. Every war becomes morally unique. Every enemy becomes unprecedented. Every intervention becomes unavoidable. Every failure to intervene becomes appeasement. And the population never develops the historical memory necessary to recognize recurring patterns. Barnes therefore treats Revisionism almost as a civic obligation. The historian must reopen the file. Return to the diplomatic correspondence. Read the memorandum. Compare the private statement with the public speech. Examine what happened before the ultimatum. Ask what each government knew. Ask what each government wanted. Ask what alternatives existed. Ask who rejected them. Ask what the public was told. Ask what officials said privately. And above all, never allow the moral certainty produced by victory to substitute for documentary evidence. Victory proves who won a war. It does not, Barnes insists, grant the victor infallibility in explaining why the war began. That may be the most important proposition running through the entire work. The victorious powers possess an overwhelming advantage in constructing the first history of a conflict. Their governments survive. Their political leaders give speeches. Their archives are organized. Their journalists write the first accounts. Their universities continue functioning. Their publishers publish. Their interpretation naturally dominates the language through which the conflict is remembered. The defeated government’s interpretation, meanwhile, emerges from political collapse. Barnes believes the historian’s responsibility begins precisely where that imbalance begins. Not because the defeated side must therefore be correct. But because no side in a war is entitled to write the final judgment upon itself. That judgment belongs to evidence.

Unser Weg. Wider den Putschismus. Paul Levi. 1921. Our Path: Against Putschism. Fifty-five pages in the Berlin edition published by A. Seehof, with Karl Radek’s older essay against an Austrian putsch bound in as an appendix. Levi included it so he could turn Radek’s own words against the men who had just done the same thing in Germany. Part 1 Paul Levi was not a Catholic conservative looking into Communism from outside. He was not Albert Váry counting the dead of Béla Kun’s Hungary, and he was not Hans Eisele looking at revolution and seeing the destruction of the Christian social order. Levi was a Communist. A lawyer. A Spartacist. He had worked beside Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and after their murders he had risen to the leadership of the Communist Party of Germany. When he sat down to write, that party claimed something like half a million members. Eight days later, he says, it was shaken to its foundations. That is what makes this little book different. A Communist is about to tell other Communists what they did to their own workers in the name of revolution. He will be thrown out of the party for saying it in public. We left Béla Kun in 1920 traveling east from Austrian internment toward Soviet Russia. His Hungarian Soviet Republic had survived 133 days. He had already written From Revolution to Revolution, not as an apology but as an argument about what Communists should learn from defeat. The Hungarian government was dead. Kun was not finished. In Moscow he entered the Communist International, the Comintern, built not merely to admire the Russian Revolution but to carry revolution beyond Russia. In early March 1921 he went west again. This time the destination was Germany. He arrived carrying what Levi and others called the theory of the offensive: a revolutionary party did not have to wait for a revolutionary situation. It could create one. That is the bridge between the books. These are not the same men marching from Bavaria to Hungary to Austria and then back into Germany. The movement had become international. Men crossed borders. Instructions crossed borders. Newspapers, money, theories and failures crossed borders. A defeat in one country became a lesson argued over in another. Kun had governed revolutionary Hungary, fled into Austria, returned to Soviet Russia, entered the Comintern, and now appeared in Germany while German Communists debated whether the time had come to move from agitation to action. Germany in 1921 was already wounded. The empire was gone. The war had killed and mutilated millions. The revolution of 1918–19 had removed the monarchy. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been murdered. Munich had already had its Soviet Republic, and the violence of its destruction. The Kapp Putsch had tried to overthrow the republic from the right. Armed workers had fought in the Ruhr. Freikorps, Communists, monarchists, Social Democrats, unemployed veterans and frightened civilians occupied the same unstable country. The weapons of the war had not vanished because an armistice had been signed. Into this came the March Action of 1921. The crisis broke in central Germany, around Mansfeld, Eisleben, Halle, Merseburg and the Leuna chemical works. On 16 March the Social Democratic security chief Otto Hörsing announced that police would occupy the Mansfeld mining district, to restore order, search for weapons and confront political violence. Communist organizations treated the occupation as a provocation. On 18 March Die Rote Fahne told every worker to defy the law and take arms where he could find them. The confrontation was no longer a dispute that might be negotiated. It was being described as another stage in the struggle between proletarian revolution and counterrevolution. Yet something was wrong from the beginning. The workers were not rising in the numbers the revolutionaries expected. That fact is the heart of Levi’s book. English edition marxists.org/archive/levi-pa…

Part 5 Government forces eventually overwhelmed the armed centers. The Leuna works fell on 29 March. The party withdrew its strike call on 1 April. The same day Hoelz’s last major group, by then something like five hundred men, was broken near Beesenstedt. Official reports counted eighteen dead on the insurgent side in that fight, nineteen prisoners, some of them wounded, and the loss of almost all their weapons. Hoelz escaped and was arrested in Berlin two weeks later. The state of emergency lasted into September. Then the factories reopened. The railway was repaired. The bodies were buried. And the movement that had called the action had to explain what had happened. This is where Paul Levi becomes indispensable. He does not write as a victorious conservative standing over defeated Communists. He writes as a revolutionary who believes his own movement has committed a political and moral crime against the people it claims to liberate. The pamphlet opens with an epigraph from Gerhart Hauptmann’s Florian Geyer. Do you even know what you have done? The best action, the noblest cause, a cause put once into your hands, treated like muck in a pigsty. Levi dates his text 3–4 April 1921, while the arrests were still being made. He tells the members that what he is handing them is medicine, not poison. He tells them the dead of central Germany, Hamburg, the Rhineland, Baden, Silesia and Berlin, and the thousands of prisoners, demand one sentence: never again. He believed the leadership had confused impatience with conditions. It had substituted a militant minority for a population that had not chosen insurrection. It had imagined that action could create consciousness, confrontation could create solidarity, and blood itself could create the mood required for revolution. Anyone who believes, in the Bakuninist style, that workers can be driven into action by dynamite or cudgels, he writes, has no place in a Communist party. Never again must Communists declare war on the workers. Never again must a struggle be created by police spy manoeuvres. The last line is an order to his own movement. Down with the putschists. That is why his account belongs immediately after Béla Kun’s From Revolution to Revolution. Kun had written from Austrian internment after Hungary: the revolution had been defeated, but the struggle continued. Months later he was in Germany with the theory of the offensive. Now Levi was looking at the consequences. The connection does not mean Kun commanded every gunman, ordered every bombing, directed Hoelz’s bands or caused every death. The uprising had German causes, German organizations, German militants and a local history. Hoelz was KAPD, not KPD. Hörsing’s police occupation of Mansfeld was a real act, not a Communist invention. Kun’s arrival does not make him the commander of every raid. Levi was making a case about the Communist leadership and the influence of Comintern representatives. He disclosed the outline of that history without naming every man. We should not turn his accusation into something larger than his evidence permits. But we should not make it smaller either. If the limit is not stated, a hostile reader can throw out the whole thing. If it is stated, the accusation that survives is the one he can actually prove. A minority party declared an uprising against the bourgeoisie and against four-fifths of the working class, and then tried to manufacture the mood the class had refused. The pamphlet came out on 12 April. On 15 April the party executive expelled him as a renegade and a slanderer. The next day Clara Zetkin, Ernst Däumig and other former leaders publicly stood by the facts and the quotations he had printed.

Forradalomról forradalomra Béla Kun 1920 Part 1 From Revolution to Revolution: The Tasks of the Communists in Hungary Forradalomról forradalomra. Béla Kun. 1920. From Revolution to Revolution: The Tasks of the Communists in Hungary. He did not put his own name on the cover. The first émigré edition appeared in Vienna in 1920 through the Communist Party of German-Austria, forty-six pages, under the name Balázs Kolozsváry. Kun wrote it while interned at Karlstein in Lower Austria, only months after the government he had helped lead was already dead. The subtitle is the point. The Hungarian Soviet Republic had fallen, its ministries were empty, its army was broken, its leaders scattered, and Béla Kun was already writing the tasks of the Communists in Hungary. Hans Eisele had closed his account on a question: what happens if they come back? This pamphlet is the answer written by the man people like Eisele were afraid would come back, and it is not a confession. Kun does not sit in Austria looking back at the dead and conclude that Communist dictatorship itself had been a terrible mistake. He does not renounce the revolution, apologize for it, or tell his surviving comrades that the project has failed morally. He studies why they lost. There is an enormous difference between believing that your revolution was wrong and believing that your revolution was defeated, and nearly everything that follows depends upon understanding that distinction. On August 1, 1919, the Hungarian Soviet Republic collapsed. The Red Army was coming apart under Romanian military pressure, the government resigned, and Kun and a group of leading figures left Hungary. Others remained. György Lukács stayed behind for a time to help preserve an underground Communist organization. Tibor Szamuely tried to escape across the Austrian frontier and did not survive the attempt. According to the account later given by Kun’s wife, Szamuely had shown her a small revolver hidden in a handkerchief and told her that if he could not get across the border he would kill himself rather than fall into the hands of the Whites. At the frontier, while a smuggler accompanying him was being searched, Szamuely shot himself. Contemporary accounts described the bullet entering below the ribs and reaching the heart. The man Eisele had described with such hatred did not live to write instructions for another revolution. Kun did. Austria accepted Kun and members of his circle but interned them, eventually holding Kun at Karlstein in Lower Austria. Local people protested the presence of Hungarian revolutionaries among them. The reversal was extraordinary. A man who only weeks earlier had stood near the center of state power in Budapest now had no ministry, no Red Army, no revolutionary tribunals, no Soviet Republic and no capital from which to issue orders. Yet behind those Austrian walls he began reconstructing the revolution on paper. The government had been destroyed. The revolutionary argument had not. His opening leaves almost no ambiguity about how he understood what had happened. The dictatorship of the proletariat in Hungary had fallen, but Kun placed that defeat inside something much larger: an international struggle between revolution and counterrevolution. The brief Social Democratic government that followed the Soviet regime had, in his telling, restored private ownership of the means of production, the old bureaucracy, the army, the gendarmerie, the police, titles, ranks and the legal security of private property. What another Hungarian might have experienced as the restoration of ordinary civil society, Kun described as the restoration of bourgeois class power. dn790006.ca.archive.org/0/it…

Part 5 Some hated the old system and still hated what replaced it. Some wanted land reform and did not want collectivization. Some wanted political change and did not want dictatorship. Some were workers and did not want food shortages or political terror. Some were Catholics, Protestants or Jews who did not want the revolutionary state deciding what religion could mean inside school and public life. And this is where the question “Who were these Communists?” has to be answered carefully, because the answer is more unsettling than saying they were simply foreigners. Many of the leading revolutionaries were Hungarians. Béla Kun was Hungarian. György Lukács was Hungarian. Tibor Szamuely was Hungarian. Some had been radicalized through war, captivity, Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution. Others came out of Hungarian socialism, radical intellectual circles or the collapse of the old political order. Several highly visible leaders came from Jewish families, a fact that contemporary anti-Communist writers such as Eisele emphasized relentlessly, but ancestry does not explain Communist ideology and Hungarian Jews as a whole were neither Communists nor collectively responsible for the Soviet regime. Many of the revolutionaries themselves were secular, atheistic or hostile to organized religion generally. What does explain more is the world that produced them. Four years of industrial slaughter had taught an entire generation that human lives could be consumed by the tens of thousands for political purposes. Empires collapsed. Armies dissolved. Governments vanished. Prisoners of war encountered revolutionary Russia. Men who had grown up under one moral and political order emerged from the war believing that the whole structure had been fraudulent and deserved destruction. Some concluded that violence was not merely permissible but necessary because the old society would never surrender voluntarily. The frightening lesson is not that monsters arrived from another species. It is that ordinary societies under catastrophic pressure can produce people who become convinced that they possess the historical right to remake everyone else’s life, and that resistance proves the resister belongs to the enemy class. That process also helps explain what happened to the people on the other side. Fear can radicalize the victim as surely as ideology radicalizes the revolutionary. A man whose priest has been arrested, whose field has been requisitioned, whose brother has been held as a hostage, whose neighbor has been hanged, whose savings are collapsing and whose children are being educated under a government he believes despises his religion does not experience politics as an academic debate. He begins looking for explanations. He looks for names. He looks for networks. He looks for the people he believes caused what happened. Sometimes he identifies real perpetrators. Sometimes he expands guilt far beyond them. That is one of the most important things to understand about this period: real revolutionary violence could generate real fear, and real fear could then be turned into collective suspicion against people who had never participated in that violence at all. Kun does not emerge from the collapse and say that revolutionary dictatorship itself was the fundamental error. He looks instead at defeat, at the restoration of private ownership and old institutions, at Communist organization, at tactics, and at what revolutionaries should learn. The government is dead, but the project is already producing instructions. In Vienna, other figures associated with the fallen Hungarian regime were politically active while Kun remained confined. His pamphlet appeared in Hungarian and in German as Von Revolution zu Revolution. A revolution that no longer possessed a government could survive through people, presses, exile organizations, political networks and, most importantly, the conviction that defeat was temporary.