[Many Roads: Vietnam, China, and Other Military Disasters: Past, Present and Future by Fred Reed (Shotwell Publishing, 2026; 252 pp.)]
Those of you who are longtime readers of Lew Rockwell.com, and I hope that there are many of you, will recall one of its most insightful and funniest writers, Fred Reed. He wrote on all sorts of subjects, and I especially recall his posts about Darwinism.
In Many Roads, Reed has written one of the best criticisms I have read of America’s militantly aggressive foreign policy. What he tells us has the advantage of being based on personal experience. Reed fought in Vietnam and sustained severe injuries to his eyes that plague him to this day, but this has not stopped him from writing. He speaks Mandarin and his sympathy for the Chinese people adds value to his work.
What, then, is wrong with war? For one thing, it trains soldiers to ignore their conscience in battle, leading inevitably to war crimes:
The love of combat, or the love of a highly romanticized idea of combat, runs deep in the race. Go to a movie in the style of Star Wars and watch the audience as the hero’s starfighter twists, dodges, fires, and closes in on the villain. They will be on the edge of their seats, almost orgasmic. What proportion of movies, of video games, turn on war, gunfights, and the like? It is not hard to direct the instinctual combativeness into hatred of any desired foe. Tribalism is innate in humanity. But the hostility cannot be precisely focused. Typically, the soldier is young, not too bright, poorly educated, and not real sure what the war is about. You cannot train him to hate the enemy according to fine distinctions. They are all gooks, dinks, slopes, zipperheads, sand niggers, towel heads. That much used slogan of the Albigensian wars, “Kill them all, God will know his own,” becomes emotional bedrock to soldiers. And so, he comes to hate them all. Viets, Afghans, Iraqis, or Cambodians, Laos, whatever, are weird, alien, dirty, can’t talk English, sneaky, and you can just tell they don’t like Americans. Watch their eyes. They’re hiding something, aiding the enemy. They are animals, don’t deserve to live. And so, in every war you hear the plea, “Screw the rules of engagement. Turn us loose. We’ll end this fast.” And so, the atrocities come. Always. Inevitably. In every war. In ancient times they were not called atrocities, but just “war.” Conquering commanders would perhaps put the whole city to the sword or at least allow the soldiers a few days of raping and looting. Today we are more squeamish and avert our eyes. Read carefully the history of any country’s wars, certainly including America’s. Ghastly examples abound.
Sometimes people support our wars because the US is a democracy, in contrast to the authoritarian foes we are fighting. Reed meets this claim directly: democracy is in fact a very bad form of government:
An American conceit is that democracy is good and more democracy, better. Unfortunately, the truth is that more democracy means worse results. Placing governance in the hands of the empty-headed, dimwitted, and inattentive, these being the most numerous classes, inevitably leads to disaster. Further, democracy is a self-deepening evil: That is, it tends to worsen with time. Those who profit by the votes of the appallingly ignorant majority urge the enfranchisement of the yet dimmer, as for example those too feckless to have identification, the barely literate, pubescents of sixteen years, and acknowledged felons (as distinct from those felons as yet undetected in government). This is said chirpily to be “Inclusive,” and is, which is what is wrong with it. The dumber welcomes the yet dumber. Down and downer we go until, in all likelihood, fire hydrants and stray cats have the vote. Why is this good?
Reed suggests that the authoritarian government of China is better, in that it permits the country to be run by a technological elite. Though he is right to warn against an aggressive American foreign policy toward China, as they are strong and capable opponents, I think he should have pointed out that China is in fact not a free society, and that, the fact, if it is one, that America is no better and thus not in a position to condemn China does not change this. Of course, he is right that the faults of the Chinese regime should not be used in a propaganda campaign by the US government to whip up support for war; but this is irrelevant to the facts of the case.
Readers, though, should judge for themselves. Here is what Reed has to say:
Consider America as it must look to a citizen of, say Chongqing. It looks barbaric. The United States is neck deep in violent crime; China has almost none. This is not because of watchfulness by police, but because violent crime is not in the culture. You don’t need police to keep people from doing what they are not going to do anyway. In American cities, murder is so common as barely to be noticed by the newspapers: 700 a year in Chicago and several times as many shot, 300 in Baltimore, similar numbers in a couple of dozen other cities. America seethes in racial hatred; China, blessedly having only one race to amount to anything, does not. Many tens of thousands in America live in medieval squalor on the sidewalks or in the subways; not in China. China beat Covid and goes about its business (friends there tell me that things are back to normal). America. . .never mind. Does China mistreat its Uighurs? Yes, and might even if America were not trying to stir up rebellion there, as it is in Hong Kong. Not good at all. Is it worse than the US? Maybe. . . Much can be, and is, said against China, and a lot of it is true. But Americans are in no position to do the saying.
I best liked Reed’s discussion of what has motivated America’s recent wars. We have been manipulated by groups who are not motivated by American interests:
After Nine Eleven, the government, using the intel outfits, deliberately led most of the public to believe that Iraq was developing the dread WMD, and thus get the United States to attack for the benefit of the oil industry, Israel, and the imperial lobby. It was nonsense and Washington had to know it. At the time Iraq was probably the most watched real estate on the planet. The result was destruction of an innocent country and the bloody mess that is now the Middle East. Which, note, had nothing to do with the interests of the United States or the well-being of its people. All of America’s wars are for the benefit of others than Americans. Do you think you would be made better off by a war with Russia? China? Does the unending butchery in Afghanistan improve your life? Would you feel more secure if NATO—Washington’s puppet troupe—had bases in Montenegro? Wherever the hell that is?. . . And there is no way to rein in these lunatics. They send the military where they like, attack whoever they choose, and we read about it after it has been done. One could almost wish we had constitutional government. But I dream.
