The only cure for the scourge of war
Separation of powers and the exclusive entrustment of the war prerogative in a legislative body independent of the executive
The lamp of experience is dispositive about ending war.
As Immanuel Kant observed, mankind is made of crooked timber. War, i.e., the legalization of first-degree murder, has been undiminished as mankind’s most brutal and barbaric evil since the beginning of time before nation-states were even born, e.g., the Greek-Trojan War fought over Helen of Troy.
Homo sapiens are hormonal, not reflective. Their hormonal gratifications in descending order of intensity are power, sex, money, fame, creature comforts, and hunger for certainty. Power dwarfs the other gratifications by many orders of magnitude.
The species is philosophically empty. It is terrified of confronting the question, “Why do I exist?” Self-esteem or self-identity is ferociously sought in juvenile quests to demonstrate superiority to others by exercising power over their lives, not by moral suasion or example, but by force of arms. Thus, Thucydides observed in History of the Peloponnesian War, the iron law of the universe is the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The Old Testament confirms that wisdom in spades. Read the Book of Joshua. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount was delivered on the most blood-stained territory in the world. The Holy Koran marked no improvement.
It instructs, "When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them" (Sura 9:5). "When you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads" (Sura 47:4). "Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites and deal rigorously with them. Hell shall be their home: an evil fate" (Sura 9:73). "The true believers fight for the cause of God, but the infidels fight for the devil. Fight then against the friends of Satan" (Sura 4:76). Who are these idolaters and unbelievers and infidels? Those who are not strict Muslims. "Muhammad is God's Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another" (Sura 48:29).
In all cultures, always and in all places, the armored knight is adulated, while the thinker is scorned as preoccupied with abstractions. Think of Shakespeare’s King Henry V before Agincourt. The greatest tourist attraction in Greece is Alexander the Great, not Socrates. The greatest tourist attractions in France are Napoleon and De Gaulle, not Voltaire or Rosseau. The United States sports 4,000 war memorials, but none for philosophers.
The war to end war, i.e., World War I, was the prelude to the gas chambers, atomic bombings, and unprecedented atrocities of World War II. As the United States exterminated Native American Indians, Civil War hero Phil Sheridan crowed, “The only good Indian I ever saw was dead.” But Indian tribes also endlessly fought among themselves, which made them easy pickings for any outsider. Cortez defeated Montezuma with the help of the Tlaxcalans, rivals of the Aztecs.
The oppressed become oppressors at the first opportunity. Think of the Roman Empire’s persecution of non-Christians after the conversion of Emperor Constantine. Pagans were killed on an industrial scale and the Sermon on the Mount honored in the breach rather than the observance.
James Madison knew the limitless depravity of the political mind more than all other philosophers combined. He had served in political bodies since age 25, and knew virtually every political decision is driven by a single focus, “What’s in it for me? Will it help or weaken my quest to attain or maintain power?” (Mitt Romney’s “Romney: A Reckoning” confirms Madison, as do volumes of sister political memoirs. There is nothing new under the sun).
Madison is the only person in the history of the world with a solution to mankind’s insatiable lust for war in a quest for self-esteem. (Unlike mankind’s other hormonal gratifications, the craving for power does not become jaded by repetition, which explains why a military genius like Napoleon would still march on Moscow in winter in perhaps the greatest blunder in military history).
In Federalist 47, Madison postulated that the species is uniformly debased. Virtue cannot be relied upon to arrest war or other human-made catastrophes. Men are not angels. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Institutions must be created to do the right thing for the wrong reasons. War power is the most urgent in need of domestication because of its unique lethality. In times of war, the law is silent. All that matters is proficiency in killing. Winners never need worry about war crimes prosecutions. Air Force General Curtis Lemay reflected that if the United States lost the war with Japan, he would have been prosecuted for war crimes for the horrific firebombing of Tokyo. Stalin was on the winning side in World War II and was thus able to charge the Nazis with the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish officers before the Nuremberg Tribunal perpetrated by the Red Army.
As the centerpiece of his separation of powers, Madison entrusted Congress with the exclusive prerogative over war in Article 1, section 8, clause 11 of the Constitution, permitting the President to respond immediately in self-defense to aggression that had already broken the peace. Madison lauded the congressional war power as the crown jewel of the Constitution. He explained that leaving the war power with the executive, which was the invariable practice throughout the world before the Constitution, would be a formula for constant, pointless, presidential wars that would destroy liberty and the march of the mind as the nation’s glory:
“In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”
Madison’s separation of powers kept us out of the Central and South American wars of independence against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. We refused to intervene in the Greek War for independence against the Ottoman Empire and Hungary’s plea for military assistance to fight the Russian Bear in 1849. The breakdown of separation began with the intellectually hollow doctrine of Manifest Destiny and the lies of President James K. Polk to dupe Congress into declaring a state of war existed with Mexico. (Polk evaded Congressman Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions which would have exposed the President’s duplicity).
By the Spanish-American War, the United States had struck a Faustian Bargain to exchange liberty and the rule of law for Empire under the fanatical banner of God’s new chosen people epitomized by Senator Albert Beveridge’s celebrated national narcissism.
The war power unconstitutionally migrated to the President more through congressional abdication than presidential usurpation. As Madison foresaw, pointless presidential wars proliferated: Mexico, Haiti, Panama, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Nicaragua. World War I was fueled by a presidential lie about the absence of munitions on the Lusitania and the miniscule American deaths from Germany’s submarine warfare. After World War II, the final wrecking ball was taken to separation of powers featuring unconstitutional presidential wars in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Bosnia, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and covert wars fought with Special Forces in over 170 nations.
The larger point is that perpetual war will be fixture of politics until and unless nations entrust the war prerogative exclusively to a legislative body with no incentive to exercise it. Madison’s brilliant handiwork has been destroyed by the ignorance and depravity of the American people. It has never been embraced elsewhere because the species covets raw power vastly more than liberty, and a Caesar is needed to operate an Empire. The Ottoman Empire presided over by a Sultan was at war every day during its six centuries long run.
Peace will simply be intermission before renewed warfare until separation of powers with the war prerogative exclusively in the legislative branch becomes global political orthodoxy. That probability is zero unless an exterior force changes the DNA of the species.
Well done Bruce Fein, for standing on freedom and justice for mankind, and end to persecutions of the weak by governments and their leaders, especially those that see themselves so powerful.
Anslem CHUKWUMA is a member of IPOB.
Outstanding piece of writing! Bruce, so many problems plaguing our country are a result of congress relinquishing its power to the executive branch. If only our constitution was being followed by all the politicians who make an oath on their bibles would actually live up to their oath.