Bereishis Rabbah 93:4 (link):
נבהלו נחפזו ולא יכלו אחיו וגו’ רעדה אחזתם שם אלו השבטים אמרו מלכים מדיינים אלו עם אלו אנו מה איכפת לנו יאי למלך מדיין עם מלך.
From Dr. Hans Hoppe:
[After explaining the crucial distinction between kings and democratic politicians: While all states must be expected to have aggressive inclinations, the incentive structure faced by traditional kings on the one hand and modern presidents on the other is different enough to account for different kinds of war. Whereas kings viewed themselves as the private owner of the territory under their control, presidents consider themselves as temporary caretakers. The owner of a resource is concerned about the current income to be derived from the resource and the capital value embodied in it (as a reflection of expected future income). His interests are long-run, with a concern for the preservation and enhancement of the capital values embodied in “his” country. In contrast, the caretaker of a resource (viewed as public rather than private property) is concerned primarily about his current income and pays little or no attention to capital values.]
… monarchical wars tended to be “moderate” and “conservative” as compared to democratic warfare. Monarchical wars typically arose out of inheritance disputes brought on by a complex network of inter-dynastic marriages. They were characterized by tangible territorial objectives. They were not ideologically motivated quarrels. The public considered war the king’s private affair, to be financed and executed with his own money and military forces. Moreover, as conflicts between different ruling families, kings felt compelled to recognize a clear distinction between combatants and noncombatants and target their war efforts exclusively against each other and their family estates.
Thus military historian Michael Howard noted about 18th-century monarchical warfare: On the [European] continent commerce, travel, cultural and learned intercourse went on in wartime almost unhindered. The wars were the king’s wars. The role of the good citizen was to pay his taxes, and sound political economy dictated that he should be left alone to make the money out of which to pay those taxes. He was required to participate neither in the decision out of which wars arose nor to take part in them once they broke out, unless prompted by a spirit of youthful adventure. These matters were arcane regni, the concern of the sovereign alone. [War in European History, 73]
Similarly Ludwig von Mises observed about the wars of armies: In wars of armies, the army does the fighting while the citizens who are not members of the army pursue their normal lives. The citizens pay the costs of warfare; they pay for the maintenance and equipment of the army, but otherwise they remain outside of the war events. It may happen that the war actions raze their houses, devastate their land, and destroy their other property; but this, too, is part of the war costs which they have to bear. It may also happen that they are looted and incidentally killed by the warriors even by those of their “own” army. But these are events which are not inherent in warfare as such; they hinder rather than help the operations of the army leaders and are not tolerated if those in command have full control over their troops. The warring state which has formed, equipped, and maintained the army considers looting by the soldiers an offense; they were hired to fight, not to loot on their own. The state wants to keep civil life as usual because it wants to preserve the tax-paying ability of its citizens; conquered territories are regarded as its own domain. The system of the market economy is to be maintained during the war to serve the requirement of warfare. [Nationalökonomie, 725–26]
In contrast to the limited warfare of the ancien regime, the era of democratic warfare which began with the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, continued during the 19th century with the American War of Southern Independence, and reached its apex during the 20th century with World War I and World War II has been the era of total war. In blurring the distinction between the rulers and the ruled (“we all rule ourselves”), democracy strengthened the identification of the public with a particular state. Rather than dynastic property disputes which could be resolved through conquest and occupation, democratic wars became ideological battles: clashes of civilizations, which could only be resolved through cultural, linguistic, or religious domination, subjugation and, if necessary, extermination. It became increasingly difficult for members of the public to extricate themselves from personal involvement in war. Resistance against higher taxes to fund a war was considered treasonous. Because the democratic state, unlike a monarchy, was “owned” by all, conscription became the rule rather than the exception. And with mass armies of cheap and hence easily disposable conscripts fighting for national goals and ideals, backed by the economic resources of the entire nation, all distinctions between combatants and noncombatants fell by the wayside. Collateral damage was no longer an unintended side-effect but became an integral part of warfare.
“Once the state ceased to be regarded as ‘property’ of dynastic princes,” Michael Howard noted, and became instead the instrument of powerful forces dedicated to such abstract concepts as Liberty, or Nationality, or Revolution, which enabled large numbers of the population to see in that state the embodiment of some absolute Good for which no price was too high, no sacrifice too great to pay; then the ‘temperate and indecisive contests’ of the rococo age appeared as absurd anachronisms. [ibid. 75–76]
Similar observations have been made by the military historian and major-general J.F.C. Fuller: The influence of the spirit of nationality, that is of democracy, on war was profound, … [it] emotionalized war and, consequently, brutalized it; …. National armies fight nations, royal armies fight their like, the first obey a mob always demented, the second a king, generally sane. … All this developed out of the French Revolution, which also gave to the world conscription herd warfare, and the herd coupling with finance and commerce has begotten new realms of war. For when once the whole nation fights, then is the whole national credit available for the purpose of war. [War and Western Civilization, 26–27]
And William A. Orton thus summarized matters: Nineteenth-century wars were kept within bounds by the tradition, well recognized in international law, that civilian property and business were outside the sphere of combat. Civilian assets were not exposed to arbitrary distraint or permanent seizure, and apart from such territorial and financial stipulations as one state might impose on another, the economic and cultural life of the belligerents was generally allowed to continue pretty much as it had been.
Twentieth-century practice has changed all that. During both World Wars limitless lists of contraband coupled with unilateral declarations of maritime law put every sort of commerce in jeopardy, and made waste paper of all precedents. The close of the first war was marked by a determined and successful effort to impair the economic recovery of the principal losers, and to retain certain civilian properties. The second war has seen the extension of that policy to a point at which international law in war has ceased to exist. For years the Government of Germany, so far as its arms could reach, had based a policy of confiscation on a racial theory that had no standing in civil law, international law, nor Christian ethics; and when the war began, that violation of the comity of nations proved contagious. Anglo-American leadership, in both speech and action, launched a crusade that admitted of neither legal nor territorial limits to the exercise of coercion. The concept of neutrality was denounced in both theory and practice. Not only enemy assets and interests, but the assets and interests of any parties whatsoever, even in neutral countries, were exposed to every constraint the belligerent powers could make effective; and the assets and interests of neutral states and their civilians, lodged in belligerent territories or under belligerent control, were subjected to practically the same sort of coercion as those of enemy nationals. Thus “total war” became a sort of war that no civilian community could hope to escape; and “peace loving nations” will draw the obvious inference. [The Liberal Tradition: A Study of the Social and Spiritual Conditions of Freedom, 251–52]
Again quoting Hans Hoppe (he praises Cursedinaity, but any good there is leftover spoils from Judaism!):
…
“Feudal Law” reflected this “hierarchic-anarchic” social structure of the Middle Ages. All of law was essentially private law, i.e. law applying to persons and person-to-person interactions, all of litigation was between a personal defendant and a personal plaintiff, and punishment typically involved the payment of some specified material compensation by the offender to his victim or his lawful successor. However, this central characteristic of the Middle Ages as a historical model of a private law society did not mean that feudal law was some sort of unitary, coherent and consistent legal system. To the contrary, feudal law allowed for a great variety of locally and regionally different laws and customs, and the difference in the treatment of similar offences in different localities could be quite drastic. Yet at the same time, with the Catholic Church and the Scholastic teachings of the Natural Law, there was an over-arching institutional framework and moral reference system in place to serve as a morally unifying force, constraining and moderating the range of variation between the laws of different localities.
Needless to say, there were many imperfections that future historians, up to this day, would focus on and highlight so as to discredit the entire period. During the Middle Ages, under the influence of Catholic Church, the institution of slavery, which had been a dominant feature of Greek and Roman society, had been increasingly discredited and pushed back to near extinction, but it had not entirely disappeared. As well, the institution of serfdom, from a moral point of view “better” than slavery but still not without moral blemish, was still a widespread social phenomenon. Moreover, plenty of small-scale wars and feuds took place during the entire period. And as we are never allowed to forget: The punishments dished out in various law courts for various offences here or there, were sometimes (for modern sensibilities in any case) extreme, harsh and cruel. A murderer might be hung, or beheaded, quartered, burnt, boiled or drowned. A thief might have his finger or hand cut off, and a false witness his tongue torn out. An adulteress might be stoned, a rapist castrated, and a “witch” burnt.
It is these features in particular that we are told in standard history to associate with the Middle Ages so as to arouse our moral indignation and feel elated about our own enlightened present. Even if all true, however, any such exclusive concentration on these features as a distinctive characteristic of the Middle Ages is to miss the mark, or the wood for the trees. It takes accidents for nature and what is natural and normal. That is, it ignores, whether deliberately or not, the central characteristic of the entire period: the fact that it was a State-less social order with widely dispersed, hierarchically ordered and rivaling centers of authority. And it then conveniently closes the eyes to the fact that the “excesses” of the Middle Ages actually pale in comparison to those of the present democratic State order. For surely, slavery and serfdom have not disappeared in the democratic world. Rather, some increasingly rare ‘private’ slavery and serfdom have been replaced by a near-universal system of ‘public’ tax-slavery and serfdom. As well, wars have not disappeared, but only become of a larger scale. And as for excessive punishments and witch hunts, they have not gone away either. To the contrary, they have multiplied. Enemies of the State are tortured in the same old gruesome or even technically ‘refined’ ways.
Moreover, countless people who are not a murderer, a thief, a libeler, an adulterer or a rapist, i.e. people who live in complete accordance with the ten biblical commandments and once would have been left alone, are nonetheless routinely punished today, up to the level of lengthy incarceration or the loss of their entire property. Witches are no longer called that way, but with just one single authority in place, the “identification” of anyone as a “suspect of evil-doing” or a “trouble-maker” is greatly facilitated and the number of people so identified has accordingly multiplied; and while such suspects are no longer burnt at the stake, they are routinely punished by up to life-long economic deprivation, unemployment, poverty or even starvation. And while once, during the Middle Ages, the primary purpose of punishment was restitution, i.e. the offender had to compensate the victim, the primary purpose of punishment today is submission, i.e. the offender must compensate and satisfy not the victim but the State (thus victimizing the victim twice).
With this we can state a first conclusion. The present democratic social order may be the technologically most advanced civilization, but it most certainly is not the socially most advanced. As measured by biblical-libertarian standards of social perfection it falls far behind the Middle Ages. Indeed, as measured by those standards, the transition in European history from the anarchic medieval to the modern Statist world is nothing less than the transition from a God-pleasing to a God-less social order.
The bigger the state, the worse the wars:
Thus, according to Pinker, WW II with all its atrocities, for instance, had essentially nothing to do with the institution of States but was a historical fluke, owing to the evildoings of a single, deranged individual, Adolf Hitler. Indeed, unbelievably and seemingly without blushing (although that is admittedly difficult to tell from a written text) Pinker approvingly quotes historian John Keegan saying that “only one European really wanted war – Adolf Hitler.” (p.208)
Question: But how much evil can a single, deranged individual do without the institution of a centralized State? How much evil could Hitler have done within the framework of a State-less society such as the Middle Ages? Would he have become a great lord, a king, a bishop, or a Pope? Indeed, how much evil could he have done even within the framework of a thousand mini-States, such as Liechtenstein, Monaco or Singapore? Answer: Not much, and certainly nothing comparable to the evils associated with WW II. It holds not, then: ‘no Hitler, no Churchill, no Roosevelt or no Stalin, and then no war,’ as Pinker would have it, but rather: ‘no highly centralized State, and then no Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt or Stalin.’ Remove the State, and they may have become a Jack the Ripper, a Charles Ponzi or even harmless people, but not the mass-murdering monsters we know them to be. Institute the State, and you create, attract and breed monsters.
See the rest here…
