Mises Wire

Carlin and Mises on Imperialism

George Carlin in 1991:

We enjoy war. And one reason we enjoy it is that we’re good at it. You know why we’re good at it? Because we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old, and already we’ve had ten major wars. We average a major war every twenty years, so we’re good at it!

And it’s just as well we are, because we’re not very good at anything else. Can’t build a decent car anymore. Can’t make a TV set, a cell phone, or a VCR. Got no steel industry left. No textiles. Can’t educate our young people. Can’t get health care to our old people. But we can bomb the *** outta your country, all right. We can bomb the *** outta your country!

Especially if your country is full of brown people. Oh, we like that, don’t we? That’s our hobby now. But it’s also our new job in the world: bombing brown people. Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. You got some brown people in your country? Tell ‘em to watch the *** out, or we’ll goddamn bomb them! Well, who were the last white people you can remember that we bombed? In fact, can you remember any white people we ever bombed? The Germans! That’s it! Those are the only ones. And that was only because they were tryin’ to cut in on our action.

Carlin was on to something…

Ludwig von Mises in Nation, State, and Economy (1919)

These imperialistic doctrines are common to all peoples today. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans who marched off to fight imperialism are no less imperialistic than the Germans. Of course, their imperialism differed from the German variety before November 1918 in one important point. While the other nations brought their imperialistic efforts to bear only against the peoples of the tropics and subtropics and treated the peoples of the white race in conformity with the principles of modern democracy, the Germans, precisely because of their position in the polyglot territories in Europe, directed their imperialistic policy against European peoples also. The great colonial powers have held fast to the democratic-pacifistic nationality principle in Europe and America and have practiced imperialism only against the African and Asiatic peoples. They have therefore not come into conflict with the nationality principle of the white peoples, as has the German people, which even in Europe has sought to practice imperialism everywhere.

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