Doug Casey on the Military

(Interviewed by Louis James, Editor, International Speculator)

L: I’m sitting with Doug Casey in his apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Above me, on the wall behind the sofa I’m sitting on, is a mural depicting the brutality of war. Every time you write about the military, Doug, we lose a large swath of subscribers. But I know it’s something you’ve given a great deal of thought to, and you’ve never been shy about broaching taboo subjects, so we might as well cull the herd now. Let’s talk about the boys in green…

Doug: Sure. Like most young males who grew up on a diet of John Wayne movies, I used to think that the military was great and romantic. As you know, my attitude has changed very much over the years. I’m actually very glad I went to a four-year military boarding high school when they were pretty tough places. That’s because I’d wanted to go to West Point, and going to a military school helped cure me of having any desire for four more years of spit-shining shoes, marching in formation like an automaton, and saying ”Yes, Sir!” to all kinds of unsavory people.

L: It’s a little-known fact that I once thought of doing Air Force ROTC. I wanted to fly F-18s and had pretty good qualifications for doing it. But I knew I’d have to hock my soul for the chance and just couldn’t make myself do it.

Doug: Well, at any point in life, a left turn instead of a right can result in an entirely different life.

L: That’s right. You could be a used-car salesman right now if you hadn’t crashed that Ferrari.

Doug: [Laughs] That’s true. And there was another point in my life when I was in Europe and was thinking that it might be fun to join the French Foreign Legion; I’d read Beau Geste. It was an idiotic idea that can only be entertained by someone who is 22 and at loose ends. Anyone could go to the recruiting depot in Marseille and sign up for all the military adventure they could want – I guess they still can. Although Americans have always been discouraged; they prefer people from desperate countries – people who won’t complain so much about a life, as Gibbon put it, characterized by violence and slavery.

But there is very little romance, and a lot of marching, discomfort, and minimum wage-type labor. I don’t think the Legion is much different from other militaries, except that conditions are tougher and the recruits are rougher. But they say the food is better. French influence.

L: And you get French citizenship if you do join.

Doug: Yes, you serve five years in the Foreign Legion and you gain French citizenship. That’s quite correct. I’ve met a number of legionaries over the years, and it seems that that organization draws individuals who tend to be either the roughest criminal types or rogue intellectuals. It’s a bit like the U.S. Army’s Special Forces… you don’t get your average Joe.

After WWII, they were all ex-Wehrmacht guys, then there was an influx of Eastern Europeans. It’s quite an interesting organization. But would it have been worth five years of my life? Not likely. I probably would have deserted or shot my officer long before then.

L: So, you don’t hate the military, per se.

Doug: No. But over the years of writing the newsletter, I found that my remarks repeatedly culled the herd, as you said, of people with overly conventional, collectivist, or statist views of it. This type of “My country right or wrong!” ”Support our troops!”  (no matter how many villages they level), and ”If you value your freedom, thank a soldier!” thinking is a sacred cow. It’s just one of many examples of what Will Rogers used to say: it’s not what people don’t know that’s the problem, but what they think they know that—

Doug and L: —just ain’t so.

Doug: [Laughs] So, to begin with, you’ve got three kinds of armies: slave, mercenary, and militia.

For many years, from WWII forward, the U.S. had a slave army. If you were of the right (or wrong) age and didn’t have the political connections to get out of it, you were conscripted – forced into involuntary servitude – typically for two years.

L: Wasn’t it our saint, Abraham Lincoln, abolisher of slavery, who instituted the first conscription in the United States?

Doug: Yes, he was. Jeff Hummel pointed this out in his book, Emancipating Slaves and Enslaving Free Men.

L: So, the U.S. Civil War started with volunteers and ended with conscripts, at least on the Union side, and WWII was largely fought with conscripts, but what about WWI? I remember reading about big 15-year-olds lying about their age so they could sign up and go kick the Kaiser’s butt.

Doug: There was a “Conscription Act of 1917,” enacted not long after the U.S. declared war. So, popular myths notwithstanding, it’s questionable how many young men really wanted to go off and kill or die in horrible conditions. But it’s interesting how war hysteria can build up in a society for absolutely no good reason at all. That was absolutely true of the War Between the States, the Spanish-American War, and WWI. There’s never been a good reason for Americans to go to war against anyone; the U.S. has never been invaded. And war has always been the biggest impetus for debasing the currency, raising taxes, taking on debt, vastly increasing the size of the state, and decreasing personal freedom.

L: “War is the health of the state.” But back to the types of armies. The U.S. had volunteer armies – militias – until Lincoln instituted the first conscription in the Civil War, then again during WWI and WWII. But Viet Nam changed American attitudes, and the draft ended in 1973.

Doug: Yes. Although a case can be made that it wasn’t necessary for America to enter WWII, it was different from WWI and other military adventures, like the Spanish-American war or Korea, because it wasn’t a ”sport” war. I don’t believe conscription was necessary, since many people felt a need to defend the country after the attack on Pearl Harbor sucked America into the war. Anyway, if the common citizen doesn’t see a need to defend a country, perhaps it shouldn’t be defended. Peer pressure and social opprobrium are what really hold societies together, not execution squads chasing those who don’t believe in a war.

The best example of what happens when you have a slave army, however, is Viet Nam. Young men were forced into it, they hated being there, and it’s no surprise that it became a complete disaster. There were widespread drug problems, problems with soldiers fragging officers and NCOs – the effort was just falling apart at the seams.